Organizer: Wing-kai To, Carleton College
Chair and Discussant: Paul Katz, National Central University, Taiwan
In recent years studies of modern China have begun to question the master narratives of sinicization, nationalism, and modernization. Instead of privileging the hegemony of the nation-state or different modes of resistance, the papers in this panel argue that there is a symbiotic relationship between state culture and the expression of local identities in modern China. Focusing on Guangdong and Hong Kong, we argue that local inhabitants have actively engaged in a process of incorporating religious and ritual cultures into the written tradition and reconstruct the cultural meaning of national and regional identity during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Wing-kai To's paper examines the construction of a "folk" religious tradition in modern Guangdong. Arguing against the theme of "a modernist discourse against popular religion," he shows that the proliferation of temple records and folklore studies have contributed to the legitimation of local legends and ritual practices. Wing-hoi Chan's paper deals with the interaction between oral and written traditions in folk culture, and he focuses on the thorny question of women's bridal and funerary songs. He provides textual and ethnographic evidence regarding the issue of representation of "women's voice" in ritual songs. May-bo Ching's paper examines the interplay of state and local identities in the representation of modern Guangdong culture. Focusing on the 1940 Guangdong Cultural Artifacts exhibition, she argues that the construction of Guangdong culture has embodied the complex negotiation between provincial identity, ethnic meaning, and state orthodoxy.
Travel, Literacy, and Folklore: The Invention of Religious Cultures in Modern
Guangdong
Wing-kai To, Carleton College
Recent studies have shed much light on the relationship between religious cultures and the expression of Chineseness. Historians and anthropologists have argued that shared socioethical beliefs (orthodoxy) and ritual performances (orthopraxy) have contributed to the development of Chinese identity. They have further suggested that the trend is reversed in modern times. The quest of a modern national identity in twentieth century China has suppressed traditional culture and undermined the legitimacy of state leadership in local society.
The critique of tradition by modern intellectuals and the nation state notwithstanding, I would suggest that commercialization and the growth of literacy have facilitated rather than hindered the development of folk cultures. In this paper, I shall examine the significance of temple gazetteers, local anecdotes, and folklore studies in the construction of a "folk" religious tradition in modern Guangdong. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the writing and circulation of religious texts, as well as the increased mobility of people, facilitated the growth of pilgrimage to regional temples and the performance of local rituals. The culture of travel, a growth of literacy, and an interest in folklore have all played major roles in the incorporation of oral cultures into the written tradition. In addition, this growing interest in local cultures of modern Guangdong was also facilitated by the stereotypes of ethnicity and the rhetoric of Cantonese and Hakka superiority. The narratives of nationalism and modernization thus necessitate an analysis of local cultures and identities in the case of Guangdong.
Writing Women's Words: Language and Politics in Cantonese Bridal and Funerary
Songs
Wing-hoi Chan, Yale University
In late imperial China, women participated in a literary culture but had very restricted access to literacy. What does this entail for women's voice in formalized cultural practices? If ethnographies have tended to privilege such practices, what is the further implication for the ethnographic representation of women?
It has been suggested that in south China there was a women's perspective, supposedly suppressed from everyday speech and expressed in songs sung by women as brides and mourners. Existing studies have drawn heavily from the Cantonese in Dongguan county and especially the nearby New Territories of Hong Kong.
Based on field and archive research, this paper argues that in this area a strong sense of the superiority of the written word, coupled with a highly developed ballad tradition, had greatly restricted women's ability to compose their own ritual songs. The lyrics were often written by men. A unique women's perspective may still be identified in a style of songs considered less sophisticated. But they tended to be excluded from the collection of texts. Since the songs that were recorded tend to be in a language not fully understood by women who sang them, unreliable transcription and interpretation of the texts put words into women's mouths for the second and third time. The efforts to write women's words suppress women's unique perspective. It also confirms some very problematic elements of a male-centered strand in the ethnographic literature on South China.
Guangdong Culture in China, or Chinese Culture in Guangdong: The Interplay of
State and Local Identities in Modern China
May-bo Ching, University of Oxford
This title is not a matter of playing with words. It is a statement seriously suggested by a Cantonese scholar in 1940 for summarizing the characteristics of Guangdong culture. This scholar was at that time deeply involved in the organization of the "Guangdong Cultural Artifacts Exhibition," which was essentially a war-time propaganda initiated by a group of provincial intellectuals and politicians who were temporarily seeking refuge in Hong Kong. Started by looking at this exhibition, this paper attempts to show how the idea of a Guangdong culture was articulated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
Rather than describing what a Guangdong culture was, I shall examine the construction of a history that substantiates a claim of a provincial identity. Towards the conclusion, this paper re-considers the problem of applying Western concepts of "culture" and "regional identity" to the Chinese historical context. I would argue that the relationship between state or national culture and regional culture was in fact a paradoxical one: the more deviant Guangdong was from the national authority and culture, the more eagerly Guangdong politicians and intellectuals claimed an orthodox position in Chinese culture for their province. "Local" or "regional" culture was constructed by the Guangdong educated elite from the standpoint of "Chinese culture." "Regional particularism" was hardly an appropriate term for the understanding of local society in modern China.