My ethnography seeks a better understanding of “rural” realities in today’s mobile Chinese society, with a focus on the dimension of practice by bringing together questions concerning embodiment, space, and everyday life, so as to go beyond the economistic meta-narrative of “peasant” studies, while remaining committed to a broadly materialist anthropology.
A research starting from heterogeneity implies recognition of the interplay of power relationships at different levels. Embodiment, i.e. “embodied, historical life,” connotes “the contingency of bodies and the materiality of discourse” (Farquhar 2002: 5, 7). Embodiment is a term that covers concrete experiences of living the world. It can go beyond Cartesian mind/body dichotomies while remaining a materialist approach to the mindful body, as Scheper-Hughes and Lock once called it (1987). In terms of my research in general, I pay attention to people’s ways of walking, talking, and moving around; their dispositions in lived space (house, land, market, public space); and practices relative to each other including relations of villagers to local officials and patients to doctors.
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The approach I adopt takes embodiment as “not just structural but temporal, not just an objective presence but a moment in a process that is thoroughly social and historical” (Farquhar 2004). In a sense, the active subjectivities of rural corporeality – i.e. particular forms of eating, dressing, dwelling, talking, working, remembering the past and planning for the future – can be interrogated anew through studies of embodiment. Taking this approach, I understand bodies not as discrete biological organisms but “formations of everyday life (temporal, dispersed, shifting)” (Farquhar 2002: 8). Thus the practice of everyday life is a key domain of my investigation.
In a way, the anthropology of everyday life is a return to “culture as a whole way of life” (E. B. Tylor 1871). This concept of culture, advanced in 1871, encourages
anthropologists and other scholars to bridge diverse fields of anthropology, including all its mental and material elements. This notion of culture can resist reductionist and judgmental descriptions of rural life. To attend to material life allows our vision of rural realities to expand beyond rational-economistic accounts of peasants, and to historicize the local beyond the question of “moral worlds” (Yan 1993; 2003).
And everyday life, as Ben Highmore articulates, “is not simply the name that is given to a reality readily available for scrutiny; it is also the name for aspects of life that lie hidden. To invoke an ordinary culture from below is to make the invisible visible, and as such has clear social and political resonances” (2002: 1-2, emphasis mine). Indeed, one cannot take for granted that everyday life simply lies out there, presenting itself for anthropologists to give a “thick description” of it in the interest of increasing the archive of cultural diversity. Any study of cultural heterogeneity must take seriously the power inequalities of the real world, many of which are not made explicit. “Cultures” do not
enjoy equal levels of privilege, autonomy, or security, and a sense of inequality is often lived in taken-for-granted ways (Asad 1988; Marcus 1998).
Williams defines hegemony in part as a situation in which “one sense of reality [is] diffused throughout society” thus making alternative senses of reality implausible at best (Williams 1961, cited in Taussig 1987: 288). And few concepts are more hegemonic in contemporary China than the idea of the nongmin. Thus, people in the village won’t deny that they are nongmin, either in terms of their formal classification (the household
registration system for example) or in their experiences. Nevertheless everyday life is lived with many contradictions, and hegemonization is an ongoing process of negotiation and generates an infinite play of differences (Laclau 1990). As Taussig has perceived, despite the monotone of hegemonic forms, “a sense of reality [is] deliberately vague, implicit, and open-ended – sense as in sense impression, sense as in common-sensical implicit social knowledge” (1987: 288). And implicit social knowledge, according to him, is “an essentially inarticulable and imageric nondiscursive knowing of social
relationality” (367). This insight complicates the task of understanding everyday reality, which “is always going to exceed the ability to register it” (Highmore 2002: 3).
To make the invisible visible, therefore, requires that everyday life be taken as the lived space of social relationships, cultural politics and historical formations of (other) interests and desires that are neither determined nor captured by the systems to which the living, experiencing bodies seem to be subordinated.44 For example, local officials’ re- interpretation of “building a new socialist countryside” and villagers’ refusals of poplar planting assignments, as well as many expressions of local cultures, have more to do with
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their localized specific life situation than with the more abstract demands of vertical bureaucratic systems.
To approach the lived space of realities in the everyday, the notion of habitus developed by Bourdieu is especially helpful. The habitus, according to Bourdieu, “is an infinite capacity for generating products – thoughts, perceptions, expressions and actions – whose limits are set by the historically and socially situated conditions of its
production” (1990: 55). The examination of habitus, then, does not imply a return to an ahistorical individuality. In relation to my research, the concept of habitus prevents me from overly emphasizing heterogeneous embodiments in that it takes for granted the social and historical contingency of collective dispositions. The collective memory and embodiment of Maoist-era social experience among the villagers will thus be one important domain for me to engage with. As Farquhar goes further to point out, habitus helps “to achieve both specificity and commonality [and] avoid any claim of universality or to trace the life of any singular or abstract ‘body’” (2002: 9). With habitus taken seriously, it can be argued that the body is by no means “untouched by human history” – it is not “naturally” universal. It is on the contrary “a site of cultural-historical
intersections and formation of everyday practice” (Farquhar 2002: 8, 25).
Body has never existed in a singular form, and bodies “as objects of knowledge are material-semiotic generative nodes [whose] boundaries materialize in social interaction; ‘objects’ like bodies do not pre-exist as such” (Haraway 1990: 208). To paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born a peasant or urbanite, but is made one. However, practical boundaries between bodies are central to institutions discourses. Peasants become peasants in many ways, as do urbanites. A mere refusal to assume the abstract
body is not enough; my research takes a close look at how the abstract peasant body has been and is being made, at the level of daily conversations and practices of different social actors. One such topic in my ethnography is suzhi, or population quality. As Anagnost observes,
[Suzhi] is a highly multivocal concept; one that can mean different things in different contexts: in population policy, in eugenics discourse and law, and in discriminating or articulating specific subgroupings or social interests
(intellectuals vs. students, Han vs. non-Han ethnic minorities, core vs. periphery) within the larger mass. In all of the above domains, a difference is defined within the Chinese people themselves, between ‘backward’ and ‘advanced’, ‘civilized’ and ‘uncivilized’, that translates directly into notions of value. (1995: 25) Surely notions of value are not fixed either; they depend on who is talking, under what circumstances, for what purpose, and out of what concerns (Barbara H. Smith 1981). However the hegemonic discourses of economic development, which operate at different levels of socioeconomic privilege, have made suzhi an evaluation of heterogeneous human capacities in the narrow terms of their potential for development (H. Yan 2003a). As Anagnost argues, suzhi “is premised on value as something that must be added to the body, rather than inherent in the body’s capacity for labor” (cited in H. Yan 2003a: 507). Then, how do the discourses on peasants, with their many value judgments, delimit the boundaries between the peasant body and the urban body, how do urbanites and peasants position themselves through such discourses, and how have those concepts affected people’s perceptions of their bodies and lives?45
45 In another discussion, Yan Hairong describes the “inert and meaningless” life in rural young women’s narratives, and warns that their inert experience “should not be taken as a natural, given fact but as a product of the discourse of modernity itself, which has redefined the meaning of ‘peasant’ and rural life in both material and ideological aspects” (2003b: 11).
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To answer these questions, my dissertation particularly deals with three premises that figure importantly in discourses on peasants: rural villages are dirty (in terms of hygiene and environment), “peasants” are like a sheet of loose sand (unable to organize
themselves), and “peasants” have little wenhua/culture46 (thus requiring a political- cultural intervention). Accordingly, my ethnography explores three aspects of Shang villagers’ everyday life through an examination of space, embodiment, daily practices and social relations.
This ethnography shows clearly how the stigma of peasant-hood works to generate forms of life and structures of feeling for Shang villagers themselves. In this sense it resists the social science approaches that unknowingly collude with a continuing production of stigmatized peasant identities in China and elsewhere. Anthropology of embodiment has suggested to me a promising approach for going beyond dualistic tendencies; it can both enrich the thick description of “culture” and can be an empirically rich way of “writing against culture” (Cf. Clifford & Marcus 1986, Geertz 1983, 1988, Fox 1991, Behar & Gordon 1995, etc.). Instead of “writing against culture,” an
anthropology of embodiment on the ground takes culture as “a whole way of life” and perceives “culture” at work in history through the “play of differences [from the cultural dominant]” (Spivak 1999).