Organizer: Xin Lu, University of California, Berkeley
Chair: Susan Brownell, University of Missouri, St. Louis
Discussant: Stevan Harrell, University of Washington
In this panel, we propose to take a close look at the changing conditions of fieldwork in China in recent years. Not until the late 1970s was it possible for outside scholars to conduct field research in the mainland. In the case of writing Chinese culture, the political has hardly ever been separable from the cultural. Mayfair Yang, an ethnographer in the 1980s, described the atmosphere at the time as a "culture of fear," where individuals were said to be under constant surveillance by the state. What were the specific historical conditions that constrained ethnographic representations of post-Mao society? Has the situation changed in the 1990s? If so, how? We will bring together a group of scholars whose gender, nationalities, academic training, and field sites and methods differ. In particular, we wish to address three questions. First, how do these different kinds of scholars view and make use of their fieldwork experiences in writing-for instance, how do they represent their informants (often local officials)? Second, how do these experiences shape their choices of research themes and styles of writing? Third, how can we see fieldwork and writing, central to a series of changing practices in post-reform China, as a mirror of the shifting political conditions under which cultural knowledge is produced? We believe that a critical inspection of such experiences is urgently needed for the understanding of post-Mao society and of a discipline that claims to contribute to such understanding.
Host and Hostage: Fieldwork in an Uncommon Place
Xin Liu, University of California, Berkeley
An experience of a shared cultural space, an intimate encounter between the ethnographer and the subjects of his/her research, is still largely taken as a precondition for anthropological knowledge. How does an ethnographer enter another social world? How may perceptions of and relations between the observer and the observed change in the course of fieldwork, both within and outside the ethnographer's immediate circle of contacts? How do such intimate encounters and shifting relationships affect the ethnographer's understanding of the society under research? This paper sets out to explore these questions with reference to post-Mao Chinese society. To reflect upon my own field experience in the early 1990s, I look at how local identities and selves in northern rural Shaanxi were reprocessed in the context of economic reforms. My ethnographic adventure started with an effort to try to find a field site without following an official path, but I realized later that it was inevitable to get involved in the battles among different social groups in the field, competing for authority and influence. For instance, friendship with my host family gradually turned sour. The idea of host and the exercise of hospitality were central to a set of everyday practices, which mirrors the changing conditions of the post-Mao society. It is through these experiences, when it was sometimes difficult not to feel like a hostage of their partial hospitality, that an understanding of the wider social transformation is made possible.
The Politics of the Fragment: Writing Ethnography in Post-Mao China
Ralph A. Litzinger, Duke University
In the mid-1980s Euro-American scholars began to undertake extensive field studies of ethnic minorities in China. This situation was enabled by the reform state's rehabilitation of ethnology (minzuxue), the organization of international research associations, and the movement of scholars, party officials, and other dignitaries across national borders. This paper explores fieldwork among Yao intellectuals in the 1980s and early 1990s, initially set up when Yao from China first visited diasporic Yao (refugees from the Vietnam War) in the neighborhoods of Seattle. This was a time of intensive cultural dialogue, when Yao in China began to undertake "on-site" investigations into the remains of Yao culture after the Maoist reign. I address the specific conditions that enabled my own research among the Yao in the People's Republic, and ask how one can begin to write the ethnography of Yao auto-ethnology. James Clifford has remarked that the ethnographic label suggests a characteristic attitude of participant-observation among the artifacts of a defamiliarized cultural reality. For Yao engaged in the ethnology of their own cultural traditions, the recovery of culture took place among the artifacts of a familiar cultural reality. But what was the nature of this "familiar" cultural world? How was it mediated by memories of pre-revolutionary social orders? How was it related to the post-Mao national fetishization of things ethnic? Finally, what does it tell us about the Euro-American critique of modernist ethnography?
Elusive Xiajia Village in the Post-Mao Era
Yunxiang Yan, University of California, Los Angeles
Perhaps the most salient feature of post-Mao society in China is the fast pace of change: its landscape, people, and social structure are all in a dynamic process of becoming; so is the fieldsite of our research. In this paper, I will describe how Xiajia village in Heilongjiang Province, where I lived as an ordinary farmer from 1971 to 1978, had become an unfamiliar place to me when I returned to conduct my doctorate research in 1989. Unlike most anthropologists who need to familiarize themselves with strange fieldsites and people whom they did not know before, I found myself a stranger in the community where I grew up and I have undergone a process of re-familiarizing myself with what I assumed I had known. Such an experience continued during my subsequent field projects in 1991, 1993 and 1994, because the Xiajia society has further diversified, and its people have quickly changed their ideas, behavior and positions in response to the changes in the outside world. I will also discuss which facets of Xiajia village I might have presented in my ethnographic accounts, and beyond the Xiajia case, how the shifting ground of the fieldsite in the post-Mao era may influence our representation of contemporary Chinese society and culture.
Embodiment, Detachment, and an American's Experience of Chinese Discipline
Susan Brownell, University of Missouri, St. Louis
When I represented Beijing City in the 1986 Chinese National College Games, I shared in the regimes of body and thought discipline required of my Chinese teammates. Yet, despite the call for more first-person reflexivity and less third-person authority in ethnographic writing in the 1980s, much of this experience was omitted from my subsequent book, for lack of a conceptual framework for discussing it. Ironically, the reason I had chosen to research sports in the first place was that, having been an athlete, I trusted the "body knowledge" of daily practice more than abstract verbal knowledge, and I felt that embodied practice would be the best way to "know" China. Although I gained a certain kind of understanding through this method, the deepest understanding I attained may have been the self-understanding that comes from being pushed to the limits of one's own tolerance. However, I still want to argue that the ethnographer should strive to do embodied fieldwork, by which I mean that she should put herself in a position to sense the bodily experiences of her Chinese collaborators. This focus is particularly important as the old Communist regimes of discipline fall away and are partly replaced by the disciplines of the market. My research in 1995-96 on fashion models and health clubs may have felt less alien than my experiences a decade earlier, but ultimately the feeling of being constrained by disciplinary regimes had not changed.