Perspectives on Chinese Studies
Introduction
I include with these comments an earlier statement prepared for a similar
workshop held last year in October at NYU. The organizers, including Angela Zito and
Tani Barlow, requested a statement on each participant's research, followed by a
discussion of the implications of that research for Asian Studies as a whole. So I
apologize for the personal nature of the enclosed statement. Nonetheless, it does provide
some context for my comments today, and you may want to look at it before reading
these remarks. I should note that all the participants at the NYU workshop, coming so
closely after the terrible events of Sept 11, were in a state of shock. The discussion
focused on ways to prevent Sept. 11 turning into a call to arms under the banner of a
clash of civilizations. One of the most productive responses people thought up was the
holding of a conference on everyday life in post-socialist societies - where the daily
struggles, hopes, and disillusionments of farmers, miners, workers, and intellectuals
could be explored in ways that would bring out the common humanity of peoples of
several different civilizations. I still think that that is a valuable idea. Anything that can
be done under current circumstances to challenge the premises of American
exceptionalism and unilateralism is worthwhile.
A turning point
Chinese Studies is at a turning point. The tremendous outpouring of academic
production coming out of China and Taiwan has definitively ended the era of the
generalist in Chinese studies. But this onslaught of materials -both primary and secondary
- presents a challenge. Rather than sink into narrow specializations and/or drown under
the weight of raw data, Chinese studies needs to transform itself. No longer can the
generalist pretend to master all (or enough) of the details of Chinese civilization to
produce a unified representation of complex totality. But neither can Chinese studies any
longer hide behind such representations, speaking only within closed ranks to fellow
specialists, and refusing to engage with developments in other areas of the humanities.
Chinese studies needs to participate on an equal ground with other fields, even if that
means abandoning the protection of regional studies for the more daunting task of
engaging with debates in anthropology, gender studies, environmental studies, medical
history, global history, film theory, post-colonial and even post-modernist studies. Over
the past twenty years, scholars in China and Taiwan have made an impressive effort to
translate, study and absorb major works of Western sinology. But the trend now is to go
beyond sinological studies to more fundamental sources of theoretical models, to the
challenging works of Giddens, Foucault, and even Derrida.
Sinologists may find
themselves left behind, as Chinese scholars enter global debates on the nature of
modernity, the impacts of globalization, the commodification of culture, the relationship
between empire and writing, and the reconceptualization of Chinese history. Of course
there will be a great deal of second-rate imitation and mis-applications of the seminal
ideas of these contemporary thinkers. That has already happened in the Western academy,
and so it will come as no surprise in Asia. But more fundamentally, we are witnessing
the rise of Asian intellectuals who are engaging these theorists on an equal ground,
proposing new understandings of vital issues of cultural understanding and interaction in
a rapidly changing environment.
Chinese studies may strike a defensive posture, and wallow in newly discovered
materials, sulking over its lack of invitations to broader thematic conferences in the
humanities. Or we will have to take up the challenge, and incorporate training in current
theoretical approaches into our already overburdened sinological training programs. But
it is not enough to relegate this theoretical retooling to graduate training. The important
thing is to bring out new concepts from our own research that have a contribution to
make to humanistic studies in general. Not just to document a different civilization, but
to generate new concepts and discover new problematics which have wider implications
and open up new perspectives on other areas of study.
Comparative approaches to regional history
Since my own research has focused mostly on regional history, I would like to
make a few methodological comments on this topic. The greatest challenge is to think
difference differently. To think difference all the way through, as a positive force.
Rather than studying each regional culture of China as a variation on a given model, or as
a process leading to and culminating in integration within a given standard form, we
might seek to grasp the underlying problematics of each unique, regional culture, as it is
expressed in a constantly expanding multiplicity of elements. Chinese studies has to
break out of the constraints of imperial logic, or, if it seeks to explore these constraints, it
should do so critically. Imperial logic dictates that local culture is merely a variation of
the same, a struggle to impose the identical, or near enough, onto the divergent. It is far
more challenging to think difference all the way through the transformations of local
cultures, even if this results in a thousand Chinas swarming over the neatly drawn borders
of our increasingly state of the art maps.
Looking back over fifty years of Chinese historical studies in the West, we can
see the research being driven by the sources. Early post-war studies of the '60s focused
on national level archives, including lists of degree holders, and the structure of court
politics (following the documentary trail). As provincial level materials (memorials from
field administrators, provincial archives) began to be studied, emphasis in the '70s shifted
to identifying players at the provincial and regional levels (Strangers at the Gate,
Rebellion and its Enemies). With the opening up of district level archives, the emphasis
shifted downwards again in the '80s and '90s to the concrete workings of the subadministration of the local magistrates, through intensive study of legal records. Urban
archives and collections of epigraphy were also exploited in an explosion of Shanghai
studies and in the exhaustive account of the temples of Beijing by Prof. Naquin. The use
of epigraphy in Prof. Naquin's work, however, is indicative of another downward shift to
the local neighborhood organizations that sponsored certain aspects of religious ritual in
the Beijing temples. Similarly, the ability to conduct fieldwork in villages of China
beginning in the late '80s and '90s has led to a new focus on local cultural history of
geographically differentiated regions of China. Ultimately, this kind of research makes it
possible to conceive of writing Chinese social history from the ground up - from the
perspective of Chinese villagers, rather than from the perspective of the state.
This initial research has already led to several important sets of publications
(summarized in Daniel Overmyer, ed., Ethnography in China Today: A Critical
Assessment of Methods and Results, Taipei, Yuan-Liou Publishing Co., 2002). We are
now in a position to begin studying different regional histories comparatively, in order to
bring out their differences and similarities. We must also continue discussions of the
methodologies employed in this research, in order to ensure that it has the impact on the
field that it deserves. The invaluable descriptions of specific rituals in the Studies in
Chinese Ritual, Theatre, and Folklore should be followed up with more extensive
research into the regional cultures that these ritual-events embody. For each region
studied, we need to have an explanation of why certain sites were chosen, and others
excluded. We need to have an overall account of the historical development of lineage
formations, temple networks, ritual traditions, government institutions, and economic
forces at each stage in the history of these regions - how did these institutions, networks,
and forces function in the Song, in the Ming, and in the Qing? To get at these questions,
we need to explain and evaluate our sources very carefully - how reliable are accounts in
genealogies of early origins of particular lineages? Who is reporting which legends? To
what degree have their accounts been edited? One notes a growing awareness of these
issues in the Traditional Hakka Studies Series edited by John Lagerwey. A particularly
fine volume in that series which carefully evaluates historical sources alongside
descriptions of specific village rituals is Liu Jinfeng's volume on the Gannan region.
Innovative local histories of the Pearl River delta of Guangdong, are under
preparation by David Faure and his associates. Similar efforts are underway in Sichuan,
Guangxi, Northeast China, Huizhou, Suzhou, Chaozhou and Putian.
New research
projects are getting underway in North China and in Zhejiang. Conditions will soon be in
place for productive conferences on comparative regional history. In order for this work
to be done, we will have to modify or transform G. W. Skinner's central-place theory of
economically determined sub-regions of China. A new, comparative cultural ecology
will have to be developed for the regions under study, combining environmental studies
with an historical understanding of local cultural institutions and forces. Differences of
scale, culturally specific senses of place, local networks and ritual alliances, will have to
be incorporated into this new paradigm.
This research will be complemented by research in electronic databases providing
comprehensive coverage of massive collections such as the Siku quanshu (I found over
3120 hits in 1789 different juan for Putian, and 5763 hits in 3596 juan for Xinghua). GIS
technologies will also play a major role in isolating significant spatial patterns of cult
networks, lineages, irrigations systems, and their interactions.
Possible roles for the CCK Foundation
What are some potential roles for the CCK Foundation in relation to the topics I
have discussed? First of all, I would like to acknowledge the tremendous contribution the
CCK Foundation has made over the past twelve years to Chinese studies. Some sixty
professorships have been established in North American universities. A great deal of
innovative research has been supported. The North American committee of the CCK,
under the leadership of Prof. Hsu Cho-yun, has worked very hard to develop, support and
help guide Chinese studies in North America, without falling prey to political pressures
or faddish scholarship. I also greatly appreciate the efforts of the CCK Foundation, as
seen in these workshops, to open the table to critical discussions on the future direction of
Chinese studies, and their potential role in these developments.
The CCK Foundation may wish to consider ways to support the development of
various electronic research tools and databases with broad implications for Chinese
studies such as those mentioned above.
This might involve establishing training
workshops, demonstrations at various institutions or at the AAS meetings, funding for
standardizing various visual, GIS, and textual databases, etc.
The CCK may also want to consider creating a new category of team grants
employing interdisciplinary approaches. This model is used by the Social Science and
Humanities Council of Canada, and by other granting agencies. Such teams of scholars
could study different regions (or cities) of China, combining historical, anthropological,
religious studies, environmental studies, performance studies, and gender studies
approaches. Team research results could later be presented in conferences to which
outside participants (including specialists from non-Chinese studies fields) would be
invited. These conferences could generate a series of published volumes. There should
be a continuous debate on alternative methodologies and objectives of regional studies
included in these research projects and conferences, in order to ensure that they do not
descend into mere local anachronism.
At the other end of the scale from regional studies, the CCK might also consider
sponsoring conferences on broad comparative themes that move beyond the boundaries
of area studies. Everyday life in post-socialist countries, the failure of modernity, the
crisis of sovereignty in 20th and 21st century China, the rise of societies of control under
capitalism, post-cinema and the life? of the digital - these are just a few topics, which
would welcome outside theorists from a variety of fields into a dialogue with Chinese
studies specialists.
Position paper for NYU Workshop on Asian Studies
Ken Dean, East Asian Studies, McGill University
There have been three aspects to my research that relate to the themes of this
workshop. First, I have gathered, edited and started publishing over 3000 stone
inscriptions on the history of religion in Fujian in collaboration with Prof. Zheng
Zhenman, Chair of the Dept. of History of Xiamen University. Second, the two of us
have conducted a survey of cultural and religious features in 1200 villages along the
Mulan irrigation system in 16 townships of the Putian plains, while gathering a wide
array of local historical sources on this region. Third, I have been studying and
documenting the renewal of Daoist ritual and popular religious practices in Southeast
China over the past twenty years. On the basis of this research, I have been slowly
working towards a philosophy of ritual.
When I began doing research in Fujian in 1984, I stayed for 4 years, and have been
going back every year since. I thought that I would soon be followed to every corner of
China by every other graduate student in Chinese studies in North America, Australia,
and Europe. To my surprise, there has been only a limited trickle of students doing
"fieldwork" in China or Taiwan over the past fifteen years. Michel Strickmann
("History, Anthropology, and Chinese Religion”, HJAS v. 40, 1980) had insisted on the
need to combine a background in Chinese classical and modern language, including a
firm grounding in Chinese literary and classical texts, with historical understanding of
particular regional histories and religious traditions, together with engaged fieldwork
with people involved in Chinese religious behavior of all kinds. He was all too aware of
the propensity of certain sinologists to separate, reify, and exalt an idealized vision of
"traditional China", all the while maintaining utter contempt for contemporary Chinese
culture. He referred to this tendency as "ornamental studies", mocking the then common
nomenclature of oriental studies. But he was equally scathing in his critique of
anthropologists who lacked adequate linguistic tools (i.e., classical Chinese) to read the
Daoist scriptures being used at the center of the communal rituals they claimed to be
studying. Nor did he hesitate to denounce historians and religious studies specialists who
clung to the received view that China was a fundamentally Confucian land, with
degenerate Daoists and corrupt Buddhist bonzes simply muddying the waters. He pointed
out the extreme importance of fieldwork, or more simply put, contact with everyday life
in Chinese communities, both to open the mind to other dimensions and possibilities of
Chinese culture, and also as an avenue to uncover unknown sources and practices. This
is not to say that fieldwork can or should provide some kind of authenticity or authority.
Research in China may lead, with good luck, to long term collaboration and friendship
with innovative and brilliant scholars. Long term fieldwork on ritual and religion requires
close involvement with particular communities. Fieldwork should expand one’s
conceptions, leading one out of one’s habitual frameworks, away from any sense of
mastery over materials, to an awareness of their complexity and one’s own limitations.
Strickmann sent me to study with Kristofer Schipper, who exemplified the
interdisciplinary approach Strickmann had recommended. Having spent 8 years in
Taiwan, where he was ordained as a Daoist ritual specialist, Schipper had a profoundly
different perspective on the structures of Chinese local society than those put forward in
the United States by sociologists and anthropologists who had accepted the Confucian
model of Chinese society and grafted a Parsonian social structural model onto it (on this
point see the critique of the "Culture and post-war American Historiography of China" by
Judith Farquhar and James Hevia, positions 1.2, 1993). Schipper had discovered a
continuity of practice linking discrete regional ritual traditions of Daoist liturgy to early
sources (3rd -6th century) in the Daoist Canon. He further discovered that the locally
based Daoist ritual specialists were unaware of the existence or the contents of the Daoist
Canon. This situation was unlike that of the majority of Buddhist monks or Confucian
literati in relation to their respective classical canons. This discovery led to the
understanding that there were many vertical lines of transmission of ritual practices and
manuscripts flowing through the cities, towns, and villages of China, Taiwan, and the
communities of Overseas Chinese around Southeast Asia and the rest of the world. But to
some critics, Schipper’s writings represented the tendency to equate personal experience
in the field with a subjective knowledge figured as a heightened authenticity (see review
of The Taoist Body (Berkeley, 1993) in JAS). Nevertheless, Schipper’s insights led to a
profound questioning if not a reversal of previous paradigms. Still, the issue is not to find
a different, supposedly more accurate representation of the unity of Chinese culture, but
instead to conceptualize the actual workings of “pre-modern” forms such as Daoist ritual
under conditions of uneven development.
Research by James Hayes, David Faure and others in the villages of the New
Territories confirmed the presence and importance of a wide variety of textual sources
such as almanacs, lineage genealogies, land contracts, documents of medical practitioners,
geomancers, and prognosticators, handbooks of the Confucian masters of ceremony
(lisheng), formularies of local scribes, liturgies of local Daoist, Buddhist, sectarian and
spirit-medium associations, scripts of local theatrical traditions, etc. Very little is known
about the dimensions, flows, and cross-currents, not to mention the historical and current
uses, of these lines of transmission of the vast "archive" of popular cultural printed books,
manuscripts, and embodied cultural practices. Little theoretical work has been done on
how these practices function under current conditions of catastrophic change.
Recently, I have been involved in a project on regional ritual and drama led by
Professor Wang Ch'iu-kui which has resulted in the publication of 80 volumes of reports
on ritual performances, including relevant manuscripts, from 15 provinces of China
(Minsu quyi congshu). Prof. Wang is also editing 15 to 20 volumes of the complete
manuscript collections of Daoist ritual specialists from various parts of China (volumes
are already available for Zhejiang, western Fujian, and Sichuan). John Lagerwey, now
teaching at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, has edited and published over a
dozen volumes of essay length accounts of lineage, communal ritual, and temple alliances
from the Hakka regions of Minxi and Gannan. And the Chinese Central Academy of Arts
is still bringing out its province by province ten part encyclopedia of popular art forms
including regional theater, performing arts, folksong, regional music, dance, legends and
folktales, etc. There has also been an outpouring of publications of stone inscriptions,
beginning with Chen Yuan's massive volume entitled Daojia jinshilue (Daoist Epigraphy)
Beijing , Wenwu, 1988, and volumes on socio-economic inscriptions from Beijing,
Shanghai, Suzhou and Foshan, and leading in recent years to the publication of 101
volumes of the Beijing Library rubbings and other regional collections, and a county by
county stelae publication project on Taiwan. To this I plan to add my series of
publications entitled Epigraphical Materials on the History of Religion in Fujian. One
volume on the Xinghua region was published in 1995 (Fuzhou, Fujian Renmin
chubanshe). Three more volumes on the Quanzhou region will come out in 2003,
followed by another three volumes on the Zhangzhou region in a year or two. While I do
not want to recommend endless data gathering projects as the future of Chinese studies, it
is nevertheless clear that much remains to be done, and more remains to be thought.
Conducting this research has entailed riding motorcycles around the countryside of
Fujian for months on end. Gathering local inscriptions depends on the support of local
cultural officials and even more on the enthusiasm of local villagers. Studying the
inscriptions in their immediate context enables one to ask about local interpretations and
understandings, and to gain insights into local knowledge and organization. Obscure
characters often have local interpretations, and one can learn a great deal by moving from
the names and modes of giving in listed contributions on local stelae to local modes of
self-organization. Searching for stelae brings one into contact with local geography,
temples, ancestral halls - in short, an entire physical and cultural topography. The
materials gathered from the stelae, and from other locally held manuscript sources such
as lineage genealogies, local gazetteers, and collected writings of local literati, enable one
to enlarge the available documentation on the growth of local cultures. These sources
provide a ground view perspective on the state and its institutions, as well as giving
evidence of a long term tendency towards local autonomy and self-organization over
from the late Ming through to the present day.
The collecting of stelae and other local documents led me to conduct a more systematic
survey of religious practices and social organizations in a geographically defined region,
the irrigated Putian plain. The very simple methodological principle here is that if one
surveys features of all villages and towns in a physically distinct area, a multitude of
traits and cultural potentialities will emerge. While this may lack the depth of a village
study, the likelihood is that more potentialities will emerge from a survey of a thousand
villages and their interactions than in the in depth study of any particular
village. Moreover, the starting point of the analysis is a recognition that any one
individual or any village can be part of a multitude of different spatial (social, economic,
cultural) planes and networks. The understanding that the construction of vectorized
space is a cultural and bodily practice is explored briefly in the draft paper I circulated
prior to the workshop. I argued that such spatial and temporal complexity reveals the
continuing power of a wide variety of communal "pre-modern" ritual practices that are
employed in the current negotiation of modernity in the Putian plain. In that paper I also
listed some of the principle findings of the survey:
In 610 villages of the Putian irrigated plain, on average, the population was
found to be around 1200 people, though some villages have six thousand or
more residents. There are over 100 different surname groups in these 600
villages, and the average village had 3.4 surnames, but some villages had 14
or more surnames. 27% of the villages were single surname villages. There
were 1639 temples in the 600 villages, an average of 2.7 per village, though
some villages had up to 18 temples. 36% of villages had only one
temple. The 1639 temples housed 6960 god statues. These represented over
1200 different deities. Each temple had an average of 4.3 gods, but some
temples had as many as 31 deities. All of these temples organize ritualevents at the Lantern Festival, and on the birthdates of their gods. In some
areas ritual-events take place within walking distance 250 days of the year.
These ritual-events are embedded in historically complex processes of the
construction of spatial nodes, multiple networks, and infinite planes of
inscription. These ritual events inscribe of lines of varying speeds on these
spatial planes. They capture, deform, and transduce of lines of force
transversing the spaces they create, whether these be forces of state or
lineage or cult territorialization, or capitalist, technological, or cultural
forces of deterritorialization. In other words, these singular ritual-events
and the changing spaces they produce and mobilize have been involved in a
constantly changing confrontation with capital and different state and social
formations for centuries. Elsewhere I have referred to the temple networks
of Putian as a second government - providing services to the locale but also
collecting funds and mobilizing populations.
This sector of local
governance and relative local autonomy has evolved slowly since the mid-
Ming, and has shown an ability to respond to the retreat of the state from
control over everyday life in contemporary China. The history of this
gradual establishment of the institutions, techniques, and practices of local
autonomy is an important chapter in the socio-cultural development of
China with many implications for the future.
I am still only beginning my analysis of the multiple planes and cultural features in
the irrigated Putian region. I have been gathering local historical materials, beginning
with inscriptions, lineage genealogies, and liturgical manuscripts, to provide a
background to the current geo-cultural patterns. These historical researches, combined
with my growing involvement in and understanding of ritual events in this region, have
led to the elaboration of a concept I call the "syncretic field of Chinese religion", which
challenges both the form and content of earlier social-science/Confucian models of
Chinese society. Edward Davis has recently explicated this concept by comparing it to
earlier notions such as "civil society" and "cultural nexus" in his Society and the
Supernatural in Song China (U. of Hawaii Press, 2001 -see Conclusions). I discuss this
concept in Lord of the Three in One: The Spread of a Cult in Southeast China (Princeton,
1998, ch. 1 and conclusions).
What I attempted to do with the concept of the “syncretic field” was to trace an
abstract diagram of a shifting force field of potentiality stretched between polar attractors
of Confucian Sheng (hierarchical, ordering, centering power) and Ling (immediate,
localized, unpredictable spiritual efficacy), marked by complex, hybrid forms of religious
ritual and collective experimentation. The syncretic field is not intended to represent a
static binary opposition. Instead, one can conceive of the syncretic field as taking on very
particular configurations and actualizations as it changes shape and dimensions over
time. Different phases will show a distinct pattern of distribution of nodes of attraction
(official temples and shrines, academies and shrines to literati, Buddhist ritual, ancestral
rites, Daoist rituals, popular cults) in different relations to one another and to different
groups in different regions. At the individual level, one might examine the pull of polar
attractors of bianshen (self-transformation into a variety of deities as practiced by Daoist
ritual specialists) and fushen (spirit possession in which a medium’s body is inhabited by
forces beyond his or her control). Any conceptualization of the current morphings of the
syncretic field - those dephasings that emerge at the level of individuation - would have
to take into account CCP claims to enlightenment, rationality, and reflexivity (counteralienation) - in relation to earlier polar attractors. The modern nation-state institutions
and discourses (socialist as well as modernizing and capitalist) continue to generate great
gaps and discontinuities in which local autonomous forms of collective desire and
cultural experimentation, employing "pre-modern" temporal, spatial, and communal
modalities, continue to flourish. More work needs to be done on the synaesthetic
dimensions and channeling of affect in ritual events, in order to better link the study of
these events with the historical modifications of the syncretic field. My hope is that
concepts such as “syncretic field” can have applications outside of Chinese studies.
Asian Studies? I concur with Harry Haratoonian and Miyoshi Masao that Asian
Studies has not lived up to its claims to interdisciplinarity, and that instead it has fallen
into a defensive posture, often upholding reified, essentialistic visions of "traditional
Chinese culture". Asian Studies has sadly missed an opportunity to learn from the
transgressive potential of cultural studies, without remaining aware of cultural studies
limitations and conservative potential. Asian Studies should realize that its mission is no
longer to present an interdisciplinary picture of a unified cultural whole, but rather that it
should work in collaboration with Asian scholars with their own vital contributions to
build an interdisciplinary approach that would question the category of culture itself, and
explore “culture” as an open-ended set of practices, from local to national, global to
cosmic. This form of collective, collaborative inquiry would be limited neither by
discipline nor by region.
The first step, it seems to me, is to learn from the experience of Japanese studies,
which has achieved a more profound self-critique than Chinese studies. I am thinking of
the historical and critical work of Naoki Sakai, Harootunian, Tom Lamarre, and others.
Rather than turning into the next generation of conservative leadership, even if armed
with more sophisticated tools of cultural analysis, the people involved in innovative
research in Chinese studies could take inspiration from those studies which
fundamentally challenge the notion of (Asian) area studies, the West and the Rest, and
which raise profound questions about the subjective technologies of language learning
and socio-political institutions of "translation." This includes the Marxist and sub-altern
studies in Indian historiography and other critical interventions from Southeast Asia. We
also might consider encouraging a broader engagement with the leading philosophic and
critical literature of both the West and Asian and other global intellectuals. There is a
shocking insularity to Chinese studies in the West. Perhaps more than in other kinds of
area studies, the putative unity of Chinese culture and the enormity of its textual tradition
are the greatest obstacles to innovative and critical thinking. Any claim to cultural unity
in China is a hegemonic political claim. We can never escape the limitations of area
studies until this conception is exposed and critiqued in all its manifestations, including in
some of our own best efforts.