Rather than taking a purely economistic approach, recent ethnographies of rural China display a notable emphasis on social and cultural forms of village life (Jing 1996, Judd 1994, Kipnis 1997, Liu 2000, Y. Yan 1996 and 2003). However some ethnographies tend to portray villages as discrete and almost immune to the ongoing urban-rural
interactions and negotiations of urban, rural, and global spaces that have produced an irreversible impact on rural life, especially on families. By occupying an outside
standpoint, these ethnographies cast the village as a discrete entity within a linear history and without a role in the network of increasing urban-rural interactions. Furthermore, conditioned by their subject-position completely outside of – and in many respects ignorant of – village people’s own understandings of their daily lives, they fail to provide a persuasive account of local people’s everyday practice. 41
A couple of recent ethnographies of rural China focus on social networks materialized in gift exchange and other forms of guanxi production (Y. Yan 1996 and Kipnis 1997). In The Flow of Gifts, Yunxiang Yan says his book is “a systematic study” of gift exchange
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The standpoint outside, as Clifford indicates, allows the ethnographer “to see without being seen, to read without interruption” (Clifford 1988, 12). This form of objectifying “a given reality” places the
ethnographer in an assumed impartial stance. For the ethnographers I discuss here in particular, their description adopts an authoritative voice through which the villagers are silenced (there is only a stir-fry of villagers’ words accompanied by the ethnographers’ self-righteous interpretations; we don’t get much concrete representation of villagers’ lived experiences). As a matter of fact, this assumed impartial stance has been naturalized in traditional ethnography, and by those authors, and thus must be interrogated anew.
and network cultivation in a north China village that “involves gift giving in daily life” (1996: 20). However Yan presents gift exchange in China as “a total social institution” and makes a generalization of “Chinese culture” by emphasizing its cultural uniqueness, especially as regards the coexistence of expressivity and instrumentality in gift giving (Y. Yan 1996, esp. Chapter Three and Nine). Although Yan does not ignore social changes since 1949, referring, for example, to “recycling tradition”42 in lieu of “revitalization of tradition”, his Scottian approach to a “moral economy” directs him to take the category of “local moral worlds” out of context with his focus on what is “axiomatic” (1996, esp. pp. 15-19 and 226-227). In other words, by maintaining the commonly-held dichotomy between the state and peasants, he enmeshes Xiajia villagers’ gift-exchange practices within the state social-political transformation process. Thus he reduces the teeming cultural life to an aspect of the field of regulatory application of the State, inseparable from and subject to state power. Moreover, the social networks described by Yan are mainly among villagers, with little reference to on-going urban-rural exchanges and networks.
Also conducting his research in a northern village, Kipnis in Producing Guanxi takes care to link peasant status to the government hukou (household registration) system (1997, Ch.7). He focuses on the practices of guanxi and “generation (or materialization) of ganqing [emotion]” to describe “the mechanisms by which social actions like giving a gift work” (Kipnis 2002: 25) while trying to “debunk three related essentialisms – historical, causal, and psychological – upon which structural-functional approaches rely” (Kipnis 1997: 120). Kipnis explicitly writes against “an economism that privileges
42
As Yan has acknowledged, this phrase is from Helen Siu’s “recycling rituals”, which she used to describe the “cultural fragments recycled” in the practices of popular rituals in post-Mao era in Nanxi Village in south China. See Siu 1989.
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material motives in guanxi” and suggests “Fengjia [village] residents see the formation of relationships simultaneously as means and ends” (1997: 23, 8). This however, as Yan Yunxiang has pointed out, displays a certain assumption of “a static, immutable, and unique Chinese mode of dealing with emotions” (Y. Yan 2003: 83).
Importantly, Kipnis makes his own subject-position in the research visible, stating that his study is based on government-arranged research and showing his strategies within the context of the field experience (1997: Introduction). At the same time,
however, this disclosure becomes an excuse for Kipnis’s failure to provide a vivid picture of the daily life lived by Fengjia villagers. Instead, what a reader can get out of this research is more the ethnographer’s explanation and generalization than what is happening (in his presence) on the ground.
There have long been ethnographic studies trying to explore family life and kinship systems in rural China. The recent ones include Judd’s Gender and Power in Rural North China (1994) and Yan Yunxiang’s Private Life under Socialism (2003). Ellen Judd does not linger on the meta-category of peasant (nongmin) but tries to trace “the practical roles of women (and men) in several dimensions of rural life” (2). In terms of the interplay between gender and power, she rightly points out that state power is not articulated outside and above rural communities but is diffusely present and productive within everyday social relations (1994: 252).
In her attempt to depict the changes of everyday life in the context of the rural reform program, however, she takes households “as economic actors in the Chinese countryside” (14) and both the Chinese family and Chinese tradition (“three obediences” for women, for example) as a pre-given background against which women act (esp. Ch.7). This to a
great degree assumes the culture as an ahistorical thing. Yan Yunxiang has pointed out that Judd’s research fails to question “the corporate nature” of the Chinese family, in that she “regards the Chinese family primarily as an economic group and a social institution organized according to rational corporate principles” (Y. Yan 2003: 219).
Yan’s newly published ethnographic research, Private Life under Socialism, is based on his previous research on gift exchange in the same village, but he carries his
description further with “a private life approach” and an effort to depict “the increasing importance of emotionality and sentimentality in family life” (Y. Yan 2003: 223). Nevertheless, he upholds a psychological approach to “the [same] local moral world” which he took for granted in his previous book. In his introduction to this research on “private life,” for example, Yan calls for an “experience-near, individual-centered ethnography,” “a detailed narrative of everyday life” which, according to him, views private life as “a moral process … in a local moral world” (2003: 10). The narrative is called for because these things are greatly taken for granted. In his study, nevertheless, not only Chineseness but the individual and, further, the body are taken as given. It is not surprising then, to see that Yan’s research focuses on “a detailed narrative” of everyday life other than articulated and practiced everyday life.
Given the research discussed above, most of which shares a common emphasis on forms of village sociality instead of the economistic approach favored by earlier
sociological studies that represent nongmin, they nevertheless tend to portray villages as discrete and almost immune to the ongoing urban-rural interactions and negotiations of urban and rural spaces which, with little doubt, have produced an ineluctable impact on life lived in rural areas. Zhang Li’s research on migrant laborers in Beijing stands out as
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an exception, concerning itself with the floating population, a sub-category of nongmin. In Strangers in the City, Zhang “using the politics of migrant community-making as an aperture”, tries to explore “the culturally specific re-articulation of power, spatial politics, and changing state-society dynamics in late-socialist China” (2001: 5).43 Remaining vigilant about such conceptions as state, citizen, floating population, cun (village), hukou (household registration) and suzhi (population quality), Zhang explores important social changes in the post-Mao era through a detailed ethnographic account of the construction, destruction, and eventual reconstruction of the largest migrant community in Beijing. She at the same time does not homogenize these “strangers in the city” under the category of floating population. Rather she offers a nuanced understanding of the lines drawn around different groups of migrant laborers in Beijing from different regions and origins across China. Nevertheless,Zhang’s study still shows residual economism, and a deletion of the politics of these migrant communities (such as gangs and bosses in the community) and politics between the city and the migrant enclaves.
Rural studies in and about China, thus, appear to have been trapped between an economism (including the rational peasant model) and a romanticism which seeks (sometimes fruitlessly) for specific peasant consciousness or culture. To a certain extent, these studies tend to dehistoricize rural realities and also to depoliticize the rural
populations. “The peasants” as they appear in most accounts are still an essence, a foundation of Chinese history that resists change.
Meanwhile, they also fail to capture the current historical moment in China, which is marked by an increasing disparity between images of the generic nongmin and the
43
Zhang proposes the term “late socialism” in this book, to “resist the assumption that current societal transformations in China will necessarily lead to the demise of the socialist regime”. I sympathize with this point.
concrete socio-historical conditions that contain heterogeneously producing bodies. As a matter of fact, “the body” has never existed in a singular form. The boundaries and characteristics of bodies “materialize in social interaction” (Haraway 1990). Recent studies of embodiment in anthropology have suggested to me a new way of
understanding changing forms of life in central China. In what follows, I am going to introduce my own research methodology and writing strategy.