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- Convenor:
-
Brian Harmon
(Shandong University)
- Location:
- 202
- Start time:
- 16 May, 2014 at
Time zone: Asia/Tokyo
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
This panel presents ethnographic evidence of local agency and knowledge emerging in complex relation to normative State-backed hierarchies of knowledge, value, sexuality and law in Russia and China.
Long Abstract:
In this panel, we propose to conceptualize anthropology's encounters with a multiplicity of State and customary regimes of knowledge across Eurasia. With local people selectively challenging and manipulating the modernist State's hegemony as a purveyor of authoritative knowledge, anthropology's engagement with these (neo) traditional, non-Western registers of culture acquires a special significance. In this light, this panel engages several ethnographers with research agendas in social spaces formally governed by two States with long traditions in the normative categorization of difference and personal agency: Russia and China.
The following contributions are informed by a mutual interest in how contestations over value, law, and personhood between State and customary agents produce new regimes of knowledge. Furthermore, they explore the permutations of various anthropologies, as they intertwine with new realms - from legal or public anthropology's focus on agency within institutional contexts to ethnographies of sexuality and commodity value creation. Topics will address: Perceptions of public sociality and moral order in Jinan, China (Harmon); Gay persons' negotiations with social normativities about marriage and family in Beijing (Tan); Local knowledge and hierarchies of social value among tea cultivators in Fujian Province, China (Shu); Shamanic (religious) interventions into social tensions ungovernable by the State in Asiatic Russia (Zorbas). The contributions thus aspire to consolidating anthropology's future orientations as a political and epistemological discourse at the interstices of contemporary statecraft and society in Eurasia.
Accepted papers:
Session 1Paper short abstract:
This paper examines segmented sociality in urban China's public spaces, particularly the 'popular' mode defined against the 'state' mode. Strangers in Jinan, China avoid explicit social recognition of others, as well as responsibility for ordering space.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on ethnographic study of sidewalks, streets, and squares in the city of Jinan, my paper proposes that urban China's public sociality is radically segmented between state and popular modes. The latter is based on the household. Urban residents symbolically cede 'outside' space to the state, avoiding both social recognition of others' citizenship and moral responsibility over other's behavior. Paradoxically, having so ceded responsibility for spatial order to (usually absent) authorities, urban residents appropriate space with great flexibility. Only groups structured on household lines make forceful, clearly bounded spatial claims. For most ordinary residents, public infrastructure is a gift provisionally at their disposal but subject to the will of the giving state. With neither property in one's own body nor in the space one occupies, individuals in Jinan encounter one another with great evasiveness, even in dense physical-sensory overlap, which produces highly sensitive reactivity and cooperation that is nonetheless socially unmarked. With social and symbolic recognition reduced to a minimum, however, spatial uses defined only as self-interested leave few etiquette resources for the explicit negotiations required when friction occurs.
Paper short abstract:
This paper examines the ways Chinese marginalized tea producers deal with their situation. It showcases that local tea producers comply with the reified taste in a struggle for bargaining power which ends up deeply embedding them in the de facto global hierarchy of value.
Paper long abstract:
The Chinese tea product from different planting areas is politically and culturally classified in terms of taste by the state, elite tea growing regions, tea merchants and consumers in urban cities. The village I investigated is located in a mountainous area in southern China and has developed tea agribusiness since the early 2000. It is marginalized in the tea development plans established by the local government at different levels (town, county and provincial level). Tea merchants are efficient and fundamental channels for villagers to access to the fluctuating market. Furthermore, tea merchants well know the knowledge of tasting and valuing a cup of tea and thus possess the initiative in the tea negotiations. In contrast, villagers lack such "tasting knowledge" as they describe, therefore they are eager to learn from the merchants. Based on the ethnographic research, I suggest that for villagers in these newly developed and marginalized areas, given limited political and economic resources, they want to achieve much more bargaining power through learning to find out tricks in tea negotiations, correctly making a cup of tea in everyday drinking practice and evaluate the tea product in terms of its flavor, smell, shape and color. However, their inferior status in the Chinese hierarchical tea system makes it's hard to realize their expectations.
Paper short abstract:
In China, even gay men are expected to marry, and their wives are popularly called "tongqi". Given China's 1.3 billion population, that is plenty of mental suffering. By examining how gay men relieve this immense pressure, I hope to trigger a public conversation about it and resolve it someday.
Paper long abstract:
In China, everybody is expected to marry. As a prerequisite to the social legitimization of any children produced through the union, marriage satisfies the Confucianism-driven demand to extend the patriline, and transforms individuals into socially responsible adults. Even gay men cannot evade this cultural imperative, and their wives are called "tongqi" in popular discourses. If even just a tiny one percent of China's 1.3 billion population professes only same-sex desires, that would still be 13 million people (or 6.5 million men and 6.5 million women) facing either loveless marital unions, or severe material consequences brought by a failure to marry. That is plenty of unwarranted mental suffering that could have been avoided if only the Chinese face fewer demands to marry and procreate.
In this presentation, I first briefly locate homosexuality in China's history, before ethnographically examining the various strategies that Chinese gay men use to relieve the immense pressure to marry and have children. I cannot possibly solve the problem with this paper alone, but I hope to trigger a public conversation about it to resolve it someday.
Paper short abstract:
The paper offers ethnographic documentation of shamanic practices challenging the constitutional legitimization of religion in Tuva Republic, Siberia.
Paper long abstract:
Keywords: religious legitimacy, shamanic violence and retaliation, unintended consequences of cultural revival, conflicts, anthropology of law, Siberia.
This paper considers rituals of shamanic retaliation in relation to the official regulations concerning religious revival and practice in post-Soviet Tuva, Russia. In Tuva, an Autonomous Republic bordering with Mongolia, the once repressed heritages of Buddhism, Shamanism and the Orthodox Church are now accorded the legal status of 'traditional [in effect, State] religions'; at the same time, religious customs are central to a revival of traditional culture since the early 1990s. The paper sets about to document an inconspicuous - yet socially pervasive - strand of religious revival, that is, shamanic services of occult killing and retaliation for people who perceive themselves as cursed by their enemies. Drawing on counter cursing rites at an Association of Shamans, as well as on evidence of shamans hired to murder with curses, the paper identifies a paradox which permeates the legal scaffolding of the constitutionally approved Shamanic religion in Tuva. While shamanism is accorded the status of a doctrinal religion by State law, the shamans of this study are central to governing a social field of violence which is ungovernable by State law. This discrepancy between official and popular conceptualizations, uses and abuses of shamanism raises several crucial implications regarding the reification of religious knowledge and its unintended consequences: is the divide between politics and religion in Asiatic Russia as absolute as it is reflected in the legal scripts?
Paper short abstract:
Confucian culture and spirituality in the management of enterprise: case study about Qufu Confucius Family Liquor Co., Ltd
Paper long abstract:
The management of enterprise often goes with the cultural elements beyond the scope of simple commodities. The case of Qufu Confucius Family Liquor Co., Ltd .offers a pattern utilizing the factors on the Confucian Culture to extend the area of public space. This paper gives a picture about it in the perspective of representation and practice, especially on its building of the museum of liquor, the showing of the ritual of preservation, and participation to the ritual of Kongzi worship in China and Korea.