It's widely recognized that researches of cultural anthropology play an important role of cultural critique. As an ethnography of mundane life in a Chinese rural village, the book Hygiene, Sociality, and Culture in Contemporary Rural China: The Uncanny New Willage, by Lili Lai, does remedy our limited understanding of hygiene and other aspects of contemporary village life in China. In this work, hygiene is pulled out of its usual realm of science and medicine, retuned to the daily life of villagers, and then rethought of. The author argues that knowledge and practices of hygiene are local and contextual, rather than universal.
