Organizer and Chair: Wen hsin Yeh, University of California, Berkeley
This panel proposal is the result of a discussion that took place at the most recent meeting of the China and Inner Asia Council at the AAS Annual Meeting in Boston this past March. The discussion revealed, on the part of Council members, a wildly shared perception about a series of recent shifts in basic approaches and major assumptions in our study of China in many periods across several fields. The goal of this double session round table is both to identify those shifts and to reflect upon their consequences for disciplinary studies on China in anthropology, history (modern and pre modern), literature, and political science. As the organizer of this back to back round table, I consulted widely with colleagues in these various fields, and strove to choose some of the most interesting and thoughtful scholars whose work is informed by these changes, while also selecting discussants best qualified to evaluate their ramifications.
There are six sets of presentations, each consisting of one presenter and one discussant, that will be clustered under two sessions each containing three topics (see also Session 124). When pairing presenters and discussants, I have tried to bring together scholars whose research interests overlap, yet whose basic approaches suggest distinct differences. Pamela Crossley and Helen Siu, for example, both work on issues that bear upon the relationship between the center and the periphery in the Chinese political order. While Crossley analyzes the place of Inner Asia in the Qing empire, Siu examines the rise of the Pearl River Delta and the future of Socialist China in the Deng Era. Both scholars deal with issues of region, ethnicity, culture, and the processes of political integration and disintegration. Although Crossley is a historian and Siu an anthropologist, a dialogue between the two promises to stimulate reflections on inter connected issues across disciplinary boundaries and time frames
Other pairings reflect the results of similar considerations. Briefly, Rubie Watson's work has dealt with a broad range of issues concerning lineages, kinship, community, women, culture, and identity in southern Chinese villages. G. William Skinner's work has been unmatched in scope and influence in many fields of Chinese studies. Watson's recent work takes us into reflexive aspects of cultural anthropology, which inevitably invites reconsiderations of some of our operating assumptions, including the ones we have learned from Skinner. Gail Hershatter and Elizabeth Perry both deal with divisions within modern Shanghai's urban population. Hershatter's work highlights issues of gender and sex, while Perry focuses attention on workers, politics, and sub ethnicity. Peter Bol's recent book on Sung elites combines approaches of social and cultural history. Ebrey's work deals with related issues, yet from a perspective that stresses the "inner" as opposed to the "outer" quarters in the divisions observed by Sung Neo Confucianists. All six scholars deal with issues that concern culture and society in a broad sense, and their presentations will be clustered under session I, "Culture and Identity."
David Strand's current work deals with Sun Yat sen and highlights the social contexts of political history. Roderick MacFarquhar's work has taught us much about Mao, especially during the Cultural Revolution, and highlights the institutional as well as the ideological aspects of political history. Jing Wang's recent work deals with urban popular culture in Beijing in the 1980s and '90s from the perspective of consumers and consumption. Perry Link's earlier work has dealt with comparable aspects in Shanghai's urban culture in the 1920s, and in recent years has become a leading scholar on contemporary Beijing culture from the perspectives of its politics of dissent. Together with Crossley and Siu, all six scholars deal with issues that have to do with political dynamics and the social expressions of power. Their presentations will be clustered under session II, "Power and Authority."
Each of the presenters has agreed to prepare a brief essay that identifies the most significant issues or trends emerging in his or her field of study that promise to reshape our understanding. The essay will also offer reflections on how the new perspectives represent a departure from (or critique of) past scholarship. Each of the discussants will comment on the prepared remarks and will offer reflections on related issues broadly conceived. The papers will be made available in advance to all round table participants. All presenters and discussants will each have 15 minutes for verbal presentation during the round table.
All of the participants proposed below have affirmed their willingness to engage in this discussion, and we believe that this double session round table will attract a relatively broad audience. The following is a list of topics arranged by session. A brief description or abstract by each of the presenters is attached.
Rubie Watson, Harvard University
Discussant: G. William Skinner, University of California, Davis
During the previous decade or so in cultural anthropology, the balance between ethnography and theory has changed as has the nature of the ethnographic or fieldwork enterprise itself. In many cases, fieldwork (by which I mean the use of participant observation as a primary method of collecting information while living long term among the people whom one is studying) has been significantly transformed or has dropped out altogether. In many studies, information has been gathered by means of formal interviews and brief, disconnected or unlocated encounters. Often, anthropologists and their informants bear a striking resemblance to each other; as anthropologists "study up," their "informants" (now variously described as friends, collaborators, colleagues) are likely to be well educated and well placed, urban, people who are accustomed to "speaking for" others. In short, anthropologists are increasingly fascinated by people like themselves-by intellectuals and the products of intellectuals.
There is much to applaud in these changes; and, even if there were not, many are inevitable. Romantic attachments to the exotic are no longer as prominent as they once were and of course there is the potential for putting elitist agendas and ideologies on the dissecting table. It is important for anthropologists to join their colleagues in literature, history, and philosophy as scholars seek to study the "representors" as well as their representations. However, these trends are not without problems, and it is with some of these problems that this paper is concerned. In my view one of the dangers of privileging studies of "ourselves" is that we may come to believe that we are all there is.
The decline of a fully engaged form of located fieldwork and a corresponding preoccupation with the "texts" (or representations) that professional intellectuals produce receives support from many quarters. First, there is the view that an anthropologist's "reading" of Tiananmen Square, Disneyland, television melodramas, or the newly emerging nationalist histories of Croatian propagandists are as interesting, or perhaps even more interesting, than the views of a Chinese pilgrim, a Midwestern tourist, an Eygptian television viewer, or a Croatian factory worker. The decoupling of ethnography and theory has been produced by, and has produced, a sense that we all are subject to the homogenizing influences of modernity. From this perspective, differences exist but they are superficial; everyone must bow to the inevitable process by which the local is globalized in the maul of a consumer centric world culture.
A rejection of fieldwork also helps defuse a set of fundamental epistemological and political conundrums: how do we (anthropologists) really know, understand, or have the right to interpret what informants say, think, feel, mean? These various political, personal, and epistemological crises have created anxieties that often manifest themselves in an unwillingness to speak about those who are vastly different in status, class, gender, and culture from "their" anthropologist. Many anthropologists refuse to take up the specialist's (the "I was there") mantle that once so confidently covered the ethnographer's nakedness. Some would say that the rejection of fieldwork means that anthropologists have lost their nerve; others that they have rightly come to realize their limitations.
In this brief paper issues of Hong Kong identity provide the framework within which relations between ethnography and theory-fieldwork and text-are discussed. Two disputes centering on environmental geomancy issues and women's inheritance rights locate the discussion. During the early l990s various groups in Hong Kong, including rural business leaders, village politicians, women's advocates, Colonial officials, Beijing cadres, and urban activists have sought to tailor an identity for "the people" of the New Territories (i.e., those who were present when the British assumed control in 1898 and their descendants). At times the verbal battles have been fierce. Much is at stake: redefinitions of family and lineage, development projects, environmental (and some would argue spiritual) welfare, political power, and most importantly "life after 1997." In this paper I explore whether it is possible for the anxiety ridden anthropologist of the l990s to discuss, analyze, represent, speak about these competing claims and the people who make them as well as those who are the subjects of those claims? Whether anthropology's identity crises and Hong Kong's identity crises are mutually informing must remain an open question at this point.
Gail Hershatter, University of California, Santa Cruz
Discussant: Elizabeth Perry, University of California, Berkeley
This essay explores moments of intense public debate about the nature and meaning of sexuality in twentieth century China, drawing on examples from the republican, socialist, and contemporary periods. Paying particular attention to the entwinement of sexuality with discussion about the desired shape of Chinese modernity, the essay asks: what can serious attention to sexuality as a historically figured set of practices tell us about the larger recent history of China?
Peter Bol, Harvard University
Discussant: Patricia Ebrey, University of Illinois
My talk will discuss several major ways in which the study of the Chinese elite in later imperial China differs from the past. First, against the more traditional concern with enduring values, shared belief systems, and historical continuities today there are those who stress discontinuity, change and contradiction. Second, against those who have seen the writing of intellectuals as expressive of shared values and representative of China, today there are those who see intellectuals as figures attempting to assert their own authority vis-à-vis dominant social and political interests. Intellectual texts are thus profitably seen in contrast to dominant social and political trends rather than representative of Chinese society. Third, we are less likely to see an intellectual movement such as Neo Confucianism as a stage in the history of Confucianism than as a social movement within the literati/gentry elite of Sung Yung Ming China. Fourth, in contrast to those who see traditional intellectuals as cut off from the normal processes of society we are more likely to see them as illustrative of contemporary modes of cultural construction in a broad sense. Fifth, the traditional scholarly divisions between history, thought, and literature cannot be sustained if we intend to give an accurate account of and propose explanations for the intellectual and social transformations that took place among the elite.
This is a fairly abstract way of saying that I want to talk about how the study of the literati (from the 8th century on) as a social group and as the major source of intellectuals has changed since I began learning about China in the late 1960s. The themes I shall develop concern the ways in which we need to see the literati as a political, social, and cultural group which is actively involving in maintaining the political, social, and intellectual systems of the later imperial order but also actively involved in transforming those systems. I shall also try to show that we end up with a more interesting and (even!) truer picture of later imperial China when we attend to the breakdown of political consensus, intellectual debate, and social tension than when we keep trying to find things that are "representative." I think Pat Ebrey's work and mine both illustrate this.
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