Living with Separation in China: Anthropological Accounts

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Living with Separation in China

Separation – for example the process of leaving behind, temporarily or permanently, individuals to whom we are attached – is something experienced by humans in all societies. Major life-cycle rituals, such as initiations, weddings and funerals, also universally feature separation as a central motif. In the case of China, the rituals and practices associated with separation – and with its corollary, reunion – are especially elaborate. They are crucial elements within the Chinese cultural tradition. Chinese idioms and practices of separation and reunion are relevant to the experiences of ordinary people in many social domains, ranging from gender and kinship to religion and the politics of ethnic identity. The contributors focus on a number of distinct yet closely interrelated case studies including: • • • • •

separation laments sung by women at marriages and funerals popular stories about gods who must leave their families in order to achieve ‘recognition’ attempts of the ghostly dead to make connection with the living dislocations from ancestral lands caused by dam-building projects the role of pilgrimage in the construction of identity among Chinese Muslims.

In addressing – through these case studies – the central theme of separation, this book also provides a good general introduction to many of the classic debates within anthropological and historical analyses of China. It will, therefore, prove an interesting and useful resource to students of Asian studies and anthropology as well as the general reader with an interest in the Chinese cultural tradition. Charles Stafford is Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Roads of Chinese Childhood (1995) and Separation and Reunion in Modern China (2000).

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Living with Separation in China Anthropological accounts

Edited by Charles Stafford

First published 2003 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group Selection and editorial matter © 2003 Charles Stafford; individual chapters © the contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Living with separation in China: anthropological accounts/ Edited by Charles Stafford. p. cm. Include bibliographical references and index. 1. China – Social life and customs. 2. Separation (Psychology) – China. 3. Reunions – China. I. Stafford, Charles. DS721.L6778 2003 302.3′4′0951 – dc21 2002154339

ISBN 0-203-61345-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-34274-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–30571–3 (Print Edition)

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In memory of Raymond Firth 1901–2002

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Contents

1

Notes on the contributors Preface

ix xi

Introduction: the separation constraint in China

1

CHARLES STAFFORD

2

Singing of separation, lamenting loss: Hakka women’s expressions of separation and reunion

27

ELIZABETH LOMINSKA JOHNSON

3

Separations, autonomy and recognition in the production of gender differences: reflections from considerations of myths and laments

53

P. STEVEN SANGREN

4

An unsafe distance

85

STEPHAN FEUCHTWANG

5

Dams and dreams: a return-to-homeland movement in northwest China

113

JING JUN

6

The ‘glorious returns’ of Chinese pilgrims to Mecca

130

MARIS GILLETTE

7

Exiles and reunion: nostalgia among overseas Hmong (Miao)

157

NICHOLAS TAPP

8

Linguistic and social patterns of separation and reunion

176

RAYMOND FIRTH

Index

189

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Contributors

Stephan Feuchtwang is Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, London School of Economics. He is the author of Popular Chinese Religion: The Imperial Metaphor (Curzon 2001) and co-author with Wang Mingming of Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China (Routledge 2001). Raymond Firth was Professor of Anthropology at the London School of Economics from 1944 until his retirement in 1968. He was the author of many books, including We the Tikopia (Allen & Unwin 1936), Malay Fishermen (Routledge 1946), Tikopia Songs (Cambridge University Press 1991) and Religion: A Humanist Interpretation (Routledge 1996). Maris Gillette is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Haverford College. She is the author of Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims (Stanford University Press 2000). Elizabeth Lominska Johnson is Curator of Ethnology, Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia. She is the author of a number of articles, including ‘Grieving for the Dead, Grieving for the Living: Funeral Laments of Hakka Women’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China (California University Press 1988). Jing Jun is a Professor in the Department of Sociology, Tsinghua University, Beijing. He is the author of The Temple of Memories: History, Power and Morality in a Chinese Village (Stanford University Press 1996) and editor of Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change (Stanford University Press 2000). P. Steven Sangren is Professor of Anthropology at Cornell University. He is the author of Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of Alienation in Social Reproduction (LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology/Continuum 2000). Charles Stafford is Reader in Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is the author of The Roads of Chinese

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Contributors Childhood (Cambridge University Press 1995) and Separation and Reunion in Modern China (Cambridge University Press 2000).

Nicholas Tapp is a Senior Fellow in the Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. He is the author of The Hmong of China: Context, Agency and the Imaginary (Brill 2001).

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Preface

The essays in this volume were first presented at an informal workshop on ‘The Anthropology of Separation and Reunion in China’, which was held at the London School of Economics and Political Science in May 1999. The event was funded by the Suntory and Toyota International Centres for Economics and Related Disciplines (STICERD), a research unit based at the LSE. In addition to the contributions that are included in this volume, presentations were made by Myron Cohen, Lin Mei-rong, David Parkin, Frank Pieke and Stuart Thompson. A number of other people attended the workshop and made important contributions to our discussions, including Susanne Brandtstetter, Francesca Bray, Harriet Evans, James Laidlaw and Yen Yueh-ping. I’d like to thank Harriet Evans, Peter Loizos and an anonymous reader for their detailed and constructive comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Needless to say, it was an honour – as well as a pleasure – to have Raymond Firth there with us in May 1999; his essay on linguistic aspects of separation brings this volume to a close. Almost three years after the workshop, in February 2002, Raymond died at the age of 100. His presence in the Anthropology Department’s Seligman Library – the venue for our workshop, and also for the ‘Friday morning seminars’ over which Raymond famously presided for many years – will be very greatly missed. Charles Stafford London, September 2002

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1

Introduction The separation constraint in China Charles Stafford

The essays in this volume, which draw primarily on anthropological material from rural China and Taiwan, address a very wide range of phenomena: bridal laments, globalization, mythical narratives, dam-building projects, ghost stories, visits to Mecca and poetry. What brings these things together – in ways that are both intriguing and anthropologically significant – is a focus on the theme of separation. By this is meant both separation from persons (for instance, leaving behind one’s natal family in order to marry) and separation from places (for instance, leaving behind one’s local community in order to make a pilgrimage). Needless to say, experiences of these kinds are not unique to China and Taiwan. Indeed, separation – like death – is arguably a universal existential constraint, a given with which all humans everywhere must deal. It may even seem obvious and unremarkable that physical separation from those with whom we are socially engaged – whether momentary or permanent, intended or accidental, routine or problematic – should be a feature of life in all human societies. But the implications of this ‘obvious’ fact are far from trivial, not least because literal physical presence and absence are often directly linked to other, less literal, forms of relational closeness and distance. Sometimes it happens that the simple act of going away has important consequences (Stafford 2000a: 1–29; Myers 1988).

The psychology and anthropology of separation It thus seems worthwhile, before turning to material specifically from China and Taiwan, to make a few brief comments about the theme of separation in general. At first glance, many of the problems posed by the existence of what I call the separation constraint – that is, by the fact that humans simply cannot be with everyone they know, all the time – may appear to be psychological rather than anthropological. And it is, of course, in psychoanalysis and developmental psychology that studies of human attachment and separation have been most fully developed. Attachment theorists, most famously John Bowlby, have argued not only that separation experiences play an important part in human emotional development, but more significantly

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that universally instinctive patterns of attachment behaviour – including powerful reactions against unwanted separations during infancy – crucially determine human emotional development.1 This theory starts from the fact that infants are highly dependent on their carers; we therefore possess highly evolved attachment instincts that help to protect us against abandonment. According to Bowlby, both the instincts and the imprint of early separation experiences remain with us throughout life. This helps explain the intense emotions felt by adults when, for example, they become romantically obsessed, or when the people they love and depend upon die – in short, when they confront the possibility or the reality of abandonment. Bowlby’s universalist formulations – which were initially Freudian in inspiration, but later fell outside the mainstream of psychoanalytic theory – have been controversial. However, and perhaps inevitably, all psychoanalytic models have centrally addressed closely related issues surrounding the autonomy and dependence of the self. (For a synthetic overview, with specific reference to object-relations theory, see Greenberg and Mitchell 1983.) And although many theorists have preferred not to take attachment and separation quite so literally as Bowlby, there is little doubt that separation experiences – played out against a background of emotional and practical needs for relationships with others – are of profound psychological significance. For it is partly through experiencing and mastering (however tentatively) the complexities of attachment and separation during infancy – and then repeatedly throughout life – that humans develop a sense of the contours of the self. Clearly, foundational psychological processes of these kinds could not help but have social consequences of anthropological interest; and separation has duly entered the anthropological literature in a variety of ways. Indeed, just as the theme of separation is huge, so too is the ethnography potentially relevant to it. Here, in the course of a few paragraphs, I simply want to draw attention to several obviously pertinent strands. It will help to note, at the outset, that this work – studies of child psychology, of rites of passage, of human displacement, etc. – may be encompassed more generally within the ‘anthropology of relatedness’, i.e. the anthropological study of ways in which human kin and non-kin relationships are constituted and transformed over time. To begin at the most obvious point, anthropologists working within the framework of ‘cultural psychology’ have evaluated Bowlbian attachment theory in light of cross-cultural variations in the treatment of infants, and in the roles of their primary care-givers.2 Two conclusions from this research are especially worth noting. First – as might be expected – the ethnography shows that infant separations are experienced in a great variety of ways in different cultures. Even if Bowlby’s universalist theory is broadly correct, the implications of it will vary considerably in different times and places. Second, this research suggests – through linking childcare to wider

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patterns of communal dependence and belonging – that psychological issues surrounding infant attachments are highly relevant to some of the classic themes of social anthropology. These include fundamental debates on the development and reaffirmation of social ties. In short, attachment theory can be anthropologized. One obvious way of doing so has been to relate it to discussions of separation rituals (in this volume, see the essays by Johnson and Sangren on marriage rituals, by Johnson and Feuchtwang on death rituals, and by Gillette on pilgrimage). Van Gennep of course long ago highlighted the remarkable salience, if not universality, of separation processes in rites of passage.3 Although such rites are strikingly diverse, their psychological impact and consequent social efficacy – their ability to bind people to particular social orders – may derive, in large part, from their adherence to a simple yet powerful format. This is a sequence of separation and ‘liminality’ followed by eventual, but delayed, return. This format, for its part, arguably draws on the universal experiences and instinctive emotions outlined in Bowlby’s attachment theory, and manipulates these to crucial social effect.4 The possibility that this is so deserves careful consideration, not least because it brings together two ambitious theoretical frameworks (those of Bowlby and van Gennep), which have been hugely influential in their respective disciplines. Both frameworks have the human experience of separation at their core. A third anthropological literature in which the theme of separation, and its psychological effects, is obviously salient is that which focuses on nonritual human ‘displacements’ of various kinds. This literature – the product of a great deal of research in recent years – includes studies of migrants and refugees, for example, of those who are exceptionally and unhappily displaced from their homes under difficult circumstances. But it also includes studies that take displacement as the condition par excellence of modernity, a defining feature of life in the era of globalization.5 Here I will simply point out that human displacements that are of completely different kinds may nevertheless raise similar sets of issues. In any context of human displacement, the psychological aspects of attachment surely have at least the potential to play a crucial role. This role, furthermore, is clearly not restricted to individual emotional histories. Highly emotive narratives of separation – for instance, of forced displacements from ancestral lands – are often key elements in the collective memorialization and politicization of the past (see the essays in this volume by Feuchtwang, Jing and Tapp). In reflecting on these three strands of research, perhaps it will seem obvious that the condition of separation – whether from people or from places, whether desired or not – should help to provoke crises of identity, and that it should raise complex issues surrounding communal attachment and belonging. Such issues are, of course, central to many contemporary anthropological discussions of relatedness. It is also arguably true that anthropological analyses of human social life have, for a very long time indeed, been focused at least implicitly on the problems posed by the separation

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constraint. When anthropologists have described ways in which human relatedness is achieved, e.g. through gift-giving and/or commensality, the condition of our inherent separateness – and the inevitability of separations – has surely always been part of the agenda (see Gillette’s discussion of giftgiving, below; see Yan 1996). The hard work of maintaining connections with others is partly the hard work of overcoming, through cultural practice – and even if only haltingly and temporarily – the inevitability of physical and/or social distance. Often, as in rites of passage, the individual and collective aspects of attachment and separation become inextricably linked to powerful effect. This perspective – which has significant implications for anthropology – has been made explicit in a brief, but important, article on emotions by Fred Myers (1988). His argument, in short, is that human emotional life is everywhere structured around the conflicting demands of autonomy and dependence. Drawing on Bowlby’s attachment theory, Myers points out that human beings often require, or desire, the presence of others (e.g. during infancy). And yet we often strive, throughout life, precisely to distance ourselves – and sometimes very literally – from those on whom we depend. This oscillation between the acceptance and rejection of relatedness/ dependency – which plays itself out in culturally specific environments – creates an existential framework within which the ‘simple’ facts of being with, or of being separated from, others comes to have crucial emotional, practical and social consequences. This, in turn, helps to explain why matters such as leave-taking etiquette, rites of separation, and the threat of forced displacement are matters of near-universal – and not simply Chinese – concern.

A few brief examples from China But let me now turn to the Chinese case. My attention was first drawn to the subject matter of this volume by a paradox related to moments of leavetaking and departure observed during fieldwork in China and Taiwan.6 On the one hand, I sometimes felt – a personal evaluation, of course – that the people I met there paid rather too much attention to such moments, often making a fuss over the ‘sending-off’ (song) of visitors with whom they weren’t, so far as I could tell, especially close. On the other hand, I sometimes felt that people paid too little attention to such moments, to the point of apparently ignoring altogether the comings and goings of those with whom they seemed very close indeed. So while a ‘joyous farewell party’ (huansonghui) with its ‘heart-felt speeches’ for an outside guest might be carried to stunning lengths, one’s own beloved relatives might be allowed to depart in near or total silence. What could such leave-taking behaviour mean? As I began to think about this paradox – which isn’t, in the end, such a difficult one to make anthropological sense of – it occured to me that both the existential problem of ‘separation’ (li, fen, san), and its resolution through occasions of joyous ‘greeting’ ( jie, ying) and ‘reunion’ (tuanyuan), were very

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common themes in Chinese culture. I’ve argued elsewhere that processes of human and spiritual ‘separation and reunion’ (lihe), broadly defined, are very highly elaborated in rural China and Taiwan, and that such processes are consistently a matter of heightened concern (Stafford 2000a). Far from being restricted to the business of ‘joyously greeting’ (huanying) and ‘joyously sending off’ (huansong) guests, this concern is manifested across a remarkably wide range of important practices, rituals and attitudes. It is explicitly and repeatedly addressed not only in Chinese etiquette, but also in Chinese kinship, religion, politics, architecture and literature. This systematic emphasis, in turn, reflects a coherent underlying way of thinking about human and spiritual relationships – which are always viewed in terms of flux and spatial dislocation, and which are always seen to be built up, or constituted, through repeated processes of ‘parting’ and ‘return’. In other words, human and spiritual relationships cannot, in China, be conceived outside of the separation constraint. But perhaps this will seem too abstract, so let me give a few brief examples, relating in turn to ancestors, to gods, and to the living. First, the ancestors. The high point of the Chinese ceremonial calendar is, of course, the festival that marks the ‘crossing’ into each lunar new year ( guonian). The pivotal moment of this festival, in turn, is the celebration on new year’s eve (chuxi) of a reunion with the ancestral dead (Stafford 2000a: 30–54, 70–86).7 In many rural communities the dead are invited to depart from their graves and to ‘come back’ (huilai ) to the homes of their descendants – literally ‘entering’ ( jinlai) them via newly decorated gates and doors (men)8 – in order to join their families in eating a new year’s eve ‘reunion meal’ (tuanyuanfan). (In rural north China, the chuxi meal normally centres on dumplings, jiaozi, the prototypical food of reunion.) Let me stress again that this is the pivotal moment of China’s most important festival; and that it explicitly represents the temporary overcoming of the separation between living and dead. On arrival the ancestors receive a noisy ‘greeting’ ( jie); and then on departure – which inevitably comes – they receive an elaborate ‘sending-off’ (song). These two events, greeting and sending-off, frame the principal days of the new year festival period. In fact, the pattern of reciprocal visits with ancestors, marked by the etiquette of arrival and leave-taking, is something that patterns the entire Chinese ceremonial calendar, defining many of its key moments (see Aijmer 1991). In sum, relations with the ancestral dead are actively realized through an ongoing cycle of reunions followed by separations. That this perspective – which underlines, if you like, the mobility of spirits – is explicitly held by ordinary people is illustrated in material that Sigrun Hardardottir has recently collected during fieldwork in Yunnan.9 She observed the ancestral sending-off that takes place at the end of the Ghost Festival – during which the gates of hell are opened, and when the dead (including both ancestors and ghosts) are free to walk upon the earth. As

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the festival draws to a close, these spirits must once again be ‘sent on their way’ (songhuiqu), as Hardardottir, with reference to her ‘adoptive family’ in the field, describes: As we stand by the roadside in the dark with the rain coming down we send off the ancestors . . . We take one ancestor at a time, or one married couple at a time. There are three distinct piles of offerings in my household. Three paper bags have been filled with paper clothes, and paper money. We pull each person’s things out, being careful not to mix the contents of the different bags. One pile is for [my grandmother’s husband], and [my grandmother’s parents-in-law]. This is the heap of the patrilineal group. The second heap is for my grandmother’s own [natal] family – i.e. her older sister as well as her own parents. The third heap is for my aunt’s [natal family], for her mother and her grandparents. Behind the three heaps there is a row of burning incense. My grandmother chants the names of the dead, telling them who she is, and wishing them well. ‘I am Wang Jian Guo’s mother – I’m giving you clothes to wear, money to spend, tea and alcohol to drink, and food to eat. I’m sending you off! Walk slowly!’ Leave-taking rituals of this kind help to express the fact of practical, emotional and ritual inclusion, i.e. they show that a complex link to the ancestors is being sustained in spite of death, separation and loss.10 It should also be emphasized that the business of greeting ( jie) and sending off (song) ancestors in this and similar ways is not simply a minor detail of more complicated ceremonials. On the contrary, a very large proportion of what ‘should be done’ for the ancestors throughout the year relates precisely to the fact that they arrive and depart. And what of relations with deities? Briefly, just as the ancestral dead are credited with mobility, so it is with the ‘bright spirits’ (shenming) worshipped in Chinese popular religion (Stafford 2000a: 70–86). It is not the case that they are everywhere at all times, and on the contrary they often come and go with alacrity. They do not sit still. So any community of worshippers that hopes to establish close relations with a particular god must first actually ‘invite’ (qing) this spirit to ‘arrive’ (lai ) or ‘descend’ (dao) into a specific locality, temple, home, image and/or spirit-medium’s body. A surprisingly high proportion of the activity in Chinese popular religion is explicitly directed towards this important end: towards the enticement and ‘welcoming’ ( jieshen) of spiritual arrivals through offering up incantations, providing entertainments (operas, puppet-shows, etc.), transferring payments in spirit money, and setting out attractive food and incense (xiang). Having arrived and consumed such offerings, a deity will at some point inevitably decide to depart – thus setting in motion an entire elaborate mechanism for ‘sending off’ (songshen). Greeting ( jie) and sending off (song) gods before and after their

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‘journeys’ ( you) is not merely epiphenomenal to more substantial ritual activity. It is, in itself, a crucial marker of the seriousness with which a particular deity’s attentions are taken by his or her worshippers. This fact is played out in an especially interesting way during pilgrimages, the ‘advancing of incense’ ( jinxiang). On such occasions, statues of gods are typically removed from their home temples and taken on journeys to other temples (sometimes far away) that are seen to be older and/or more ‘efficacious’ (ling). This is one of the most common collective activities in Chinese popular religion, a key element in the very conceptualization of the gods and of their divine power. Without such pilgrimages – which are accompanied by elaborate processes of ‘sending off’ and ‘greeting’ – it is thought that the localized power of gods, their ability to provide protection and prosperity to their home communities, will gradually fade away. But the pilgrimage itself – in which the god, to put it simply, goes away and then returns – is something that the local community must itself provide; and their ritual efforts are seen, in part, to be constitutive of divine power itself (see Sangren 2000). In sum – as with relations between ancestors and descendants – the link between gods and the communities that worship them is importantly realized through the cyclical patterns of separation and reunion manifested in pilgrimage. Finally: what of relations among the living? Perhaps not surprisingly – and as will be seen in the chapters that follow – Chinese life-cycle rituals (notably weddings and funerals) are saturated with the symbolism of separation. But the emphasis is also seen elsewhere. As noted at the beginning of this section, careful attention is given to the etiquette of leave-taking. Guests are often ‘detained’ (liu) through various complicated strategies before being ‘sent on their way’, songxing. The exact language with which friends and acquaintances finally ‘bid farewell’ (bieci, gaobie) is also often a matter of special interest (see the essay by Firth, below). Well-known passages from classic Tang dynasty poems – the authors of which were famously obsessed with separation – are frequently cited on such occasions.11 However, moments of parting between those who are especially close, e.g. between children and their parents, may sometimes actually be dealt with in silence, without elaborate public processes of ‘sending off’. This is arguably so for two interconnected reasons. First, because it is felt inappropriate, in most contexts, to express the familial emotions of separation, no matter how deeply felt, in public. (Although note that when such emotions are openly expressed – as in the bridal and funeral laments to be discussed in later chapters – their intensity becomes apparent.) And second, because separation within families is held, in certain senses, to be impossible. That is, mere physical departure should not be allowed to threaten the underlying, and fundamental, unity of kin. Friendships, by contrast, are inherently more fragile, and the unity of friends may sometimes need to be publicly declared (see Stafford 2000a: 55–69).

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In both cases, i.e. with both family and friends, ‘unity’ itself is significantly constituted through occasions of reunion; and in China reunion events are virtually always marked by commensality, the sharing of food.12 (As noted above, anthropologists have often examined the role of commensality in the constitution of relatedness.) Let me return to the example of the lunar new year festival. This is a time for reunions among the living, including those who must go home (often from far away) in order to welcome – and to eat with – the ancestors on new year’s eve. In the days immediately following the ancestral reunion meal on chuxi, people continue to ‘gather together’ (tuanyuan) around tables in a wide range of configurations – normally first with patrilineal kin, then with affines, friends, neighbours and colleagues – for complicated cycles of new year reunion banquets. In the part of northeast China where I carried out fieldwork, this process is called chuanmenr, literally ‘stringing together doors’ – by implication ‘stringing together families’. During each of these meals, which echo the prototypical ancestral feast, collective solidarity and mutual support are repeatedly stressed. Of course, reunion banquets of this kind, far from being restricted to the new year festival, are a central feature of important social occasions throughout the year (e.g. during weddings). And while each meal is obviously meant to celebrate solidarity of an enduring kind, it is often in fact explicitly pointed out that such occasions are fleeting. As the saying has it: ‘Every banquet must end’ (tianxia meiyou wusan de yanxi). In other words, each moment of reunion commensality ends with the act of leave-taking and ‘dispersal’ (san). At certain rare or ‘hard-to-achieve’ (nande) reunion events, the poignancy of the impending separation is made to seem especially intense. But in the end, separation is surely intrinsic to the human condition – the very stuff of which it is made. For in China, as I’ve already suggested, human and spiritual relationships are fundamentally conceived in terms of flux and spatial dislocation: they are seen to be built up through repeated processes of ‘parting’ and ‘return’. Separation is thus inevitable, and often even desirable; and the key rituals and practices of Chinese social life – relating to ancestors, to gods, and to connections among the living – deal centrally, almost obsessively, with its manifestations.

The social implications of separation anxiety Now to return briefly to universalist psychology. Even assuming that Bowlby’s attachment theory is broadly correct, anthropologists would of course expect the relevant emotional processes to find expression in culturally specific environments. So it is that the emotional development of Chinese children is deeply informed by patterns of childcare and family life that are, in some respects, unique to China – not to mention those that are unique to their native places and to their own families. If these children do indeed come to master separations, as John Bowlby would predict, the separations they master are of very particular kinds. They also begin, early in life, to observe

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and participate in the many Chinese rituals and practices that relate directly to ‘separation and reunion’ (lihe) – including, for instance, ancestral greetings ( jie) and sendings-off (song) during the new year festival period. They will undoubtedly have occasion to eat some of the foods that symbolize and celebrate ‘reunion’ and ‘safe return’, perhaps during a raucous ‘reunion banquet’ (tuanyuanfan). They may be present when a god dramatically arrives (dao) and is welcomed ( jie) at the altar of a spirit medium. At home or in school, they may be exposed to classical separation poetry, which speaks eloquently of attachment and loss. They may help to send off their grandfather’s soul on its journey to the other world (songzang). Or they may participate in a wedding – in which the sending-off of a bride from her natal home (songqin), and her transfer to a new family and community, is a complex and drawn-out affair. Might experiences of these kinds derive part of their emotional power by calling forth instinctive responses to separation? This would of course be exceedingly difficult to prove. But it is certainly the case in China that the numerous, and often observably emotional, rites of separation and reunion – including those of familial and ancestral unity, of collective commensality, and of ecstatic spiritual arrival and departure – crucially help to define the contours of self, of family and locality. In other words, they gradually – through a slow and cumulative process over a period of years – help give participants, including young children, a sense of themselves as individual subjects in a patterned collective history, a sense of where and with whom they belong. From this vantage point we can begin to see how the universal separation constraint, when given extensive cultural elaboration, might have important social and political effects, and not only psychological ones. In other words, through the separation constraint we can begin to trace a connection between two seemingly different things: on the one hand, the intimate details of family life and of personal emotional trajectories; and, on the other hand, much grander narratives and experiences of attachment to family, community and nation.

Family dynamics in the context of separation This volume begins with an essay that provides a strikingly clear, indeed almost prototypical, account of the separation constraint. Elizabeth Johnson focuses on the laments that were formerly sung by Hakka13 women in the context of two classic rites of passage: weddings and funerals. As van Gennep has led us to expect, such rites, which mark dramatic changes in social status, are built around the conceit of spatial dislocation – they conflate spatial and social ‘movements’. This is obviously the case with traditional Chinese weddings, which serve to literally distance women from their natal homes, forever cutting them off – at least in the archetypal scenario – from routine contact with parents and siblings (Freedman 1979: 290). It has often been remarked that this long-anticipated ‘journey’ places daughters in a

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deeply unenviable position: given virilocal residence, they are always, from birth, destined to leave. But as Johnson’s material shows, the laments sung by women on such occasions provided at least one ‘counterpoint’ to this seeming inevitability. Here bitterness about the impending loss of lineage sisters, or about repeated neglect at the hands of their parents, might be openly and forcefully expressed. In some laments being sent off in marriage – a final instance, as it were, of parental neglect – was even explicitly compared by women to death (see also Blake 1978; Martin 1988). Meanwhile the dead, like brides, must be ‘sent off’ (songzang); and Chinese funerals – another occasion on which Hakka women formerly sang laments – also follow an explicitly journey-like structure. This is partly necessary in order to institute a certain separation from the dead (see Thompson 1988). Without proper distance, the ancestors may become a burden on the living. In some circumstances they are positively dangerous, provoking trouble in a world that they should have left behind. One lament cited by Johnson makes this ‘necessary distance’, especially from the vulnerable young, poignantly explicit: I wish you could have lived two more years So you could rest in prosperity But you are dead now. As for the grandchildren you raised, you can come and look at them But please don’t touch them. Funerals nevertheless do clearly express the ongoing nature of reciprocal ties between the living and dead (see my comments above about ancestral ‘sending-off’ in Yunnan). Perhaps more to the point, they help transform the sorrow and potential misfortune of death-separations into a (highly desirable) source of familial protection and fertility. This is in part by enabling, precisely, a form of repeated reunion with departed ancestors. As Johnson observes: funeral rites make possible the journey of the soul from one state of existence to another. They separate it from this world and settle it in the shadow world, but also facilitate the anticipated communications and exchanges between the soul and its family members in this world. People assured me repeatedly that one of their concerns was that the soul not become lost, and that it should be able to find its way back to its former earthly home, to its grave, and to its tablet in the home or ancestral hall. In short, the dead are expected to return. What, then, about daughters? Both wedding and funeral laments speak of separation and loss, and especially the loss to women of their parents

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and siblings through marriage and death. These are well-known cultural themes in China, the emotions of which are repeatedly taken up, for example, in classical and modern drama and literature.14 And yet we also know, from material gathered in different times and places, that the separation of Chinese women from their natal families has often, in fact, been far from absolute. As Johnson observes, even within the strict confines of classic patrilineal ideology, affinal ties were accepted as an integral and honourable part of social life, and daughters were reunited with their own kin (see Judd 1989). She also makes the important point that such reunions must surely be seen as something altogether new. Daughters were irrevocably transformed by their marital ‘sending-off’ (songqin), and when they ‘returned to the door’ (huimen) – i.e. when they came home – they certainly did so as new persons. Needless to say, such practices of separation, and the meanings attached to them, cannot be viewed ahistorically. In the communities in modern rural China and Taiwan where I have conducted fieldwork, most married women have extremely strong and enduring ties to their natal families. In many cases, they live close to their parents and siblings and have contact virtually every day. Meanwhile, most unmarried daughters in these communities – far from being neglected in advance of their marriage-separations – are treated with tremendous love and affection. This situation – which seems to run counter to the standard view of traditional Chinese kinship – may be a reflection of many factors, including relatively recent changes to the status of women in general, and the status of daughters in particular (see Johnson’s discussion of changes to marriage and ritual in the Hong Kong region). It may also reflect regional or local tendencies not to stress patriarchy or lineage formation, as such, and therefore not to constantly treat women as ‘outsiders’. In any case, it clearly draws our attention to possible disjunctures between the seemingly enduring ideologies of Chinese kinship – including the ideology of the ‘valueless daughter’ who is ultimately sent away – and its various lived realities. P. Steven Sangren has reformulated this issue in an especially thoughtprovoking form. In his essay, he asks how the image of soon-to-be-separated daughters might actually intensify the attachment of women to patriarchal ideologies. How is that women become crucial producers of a system in which they are formally construed as irrelevant outsiders? Here Sangren analyses two of the myths associated with Chinese gods, asking what they say about the demands made on daughters and sons. For as he notes, while classic Chinese patriliny obliges daughters to leave their families, it simultaneously obliges sons to do the opposite: i.e. to not separate themselves from their parents, and instead to remain ‘permanently’ within the family fold. Sangren suggests that these contrasting demands might well ‘provoke complementary and, to some degree, reciprocal desires’:

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Charles Stafford Chafing under the constraints of patriarchal authority and their privileged but unchosen role in establishing patrilineal continuity, (at least some) Chinese sons come to desire autonomy and freedom – in Stafford’s terms, a separation – precisely because the family system binds sons so closely. Conversely, because the Chinese family system enjoins a daughter to marry out – another, in this case obligatory, separation – daughters come to desire that which the system denies them – in other words, inclusion (in Stafford’s terms, reunion) or recognition.

Sangren develops a highly ambitious argument concerning the social and psychological implications of these facts, and here I will only highlight one of his key themes. This is, in brief, that Chinese expectations regarding the obligatory separation of daughters, and the obligatory non-separation of sons, may come to be seen as provocative ‘obstacles’. These obstacles, in turn, have fundamental implications for cultural production and reproduction in China, not least with regard to the development – the provocation, one might say – of distinctively gendered subjectivities. In the case of sons, separation and subsequent autonomy are made to seem impossible; whereas for daughters separation and subsequent isolation are made to seem inescapable. Overcoming these obstacles through the defiance of expectations often appears to be a desirable goal. At the very least it is represented as an intriguing possibility, the implications of which are endlessly worked out in cultural form. The well-known myths of Miaoshan and Nezha – both of which relate to widely worshipped Chinese deities – provide a fascinating, and highly complex, illustration of this tendency. In brief, the story of Nezha (a god conceived as ‘a tricksterish superboy’) centres around his repeated attempts to definitively cut himself off from his parents, finally killing himself and returning his flesh and bones to them. He later tries to kill his father, surely the ultimate demand for separation. By contrast, the story of Miaoshan (a princess who is later recognized to be Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy) centres around her refusal to marry. For this unfilial act – this refusalof-separation – her father has her killed. Both of these separation myths end, however, with reunion. Nezha eventually ‘recognizes’ his father, and unites with him in a virtuous cause. Miaoshan, for her part, eventually returns to earth, where she is ‘recognized’ by her father and ascends with him to Heaven, having first saved him from illness and death. Sangren suggests that such mythic narratives may be ‘read both as indicative of the problems associated with [Chinese] family life and as fantasies of resolution or transcendence of these same problems’. So while their stories seem wildly exceptional, both Nezha and Miaoshan enact responses to patterns of separation within families with which most men and women could surely identify. One important point that emerges from Sangren’s analysis relates to the status of men. He observes that the potential costs for them of classic Chinese

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patriliny – in which sons may be subordinated, for much of their lives, to their fathers – are arguably higher than is commonly recognized. That is, while women’s subordination is more or less taken for granted within the ideology of Chinese kinship (and within anthropological analyses of it), the lack of autonomy experienced by men, as perpetual sons, has generated much less comment and analysis. Of course, most sons eventually become fathers and household heads, and by virtue of ‘not separating’ they are ultimately placed, or at least appear to be placed, in control of the entire system. This may well help to explain their early acquiescence. However, as Sangren observes, they often seem to desire something else: autonomy. In many cases they seem only to be kept on board as filial sons – and this is a crucial point – through the considerable efforts of their mothers. But why should these mothers bother? What seems hard to account for in Chinese patriliny is the (in many cases enthusiastic) participation of women in it – their accommodation to a system in which they will never become household heads, and in which their fundamental contributions to family life are repeatedly devalued. Here Sangren’s analysis of the production of desire – in relation to the separation constraint – is especially illuminating. For in spite of the fact that Chinese patriliny does not officially recognize women’s agency, it arguably provokes in women (as in men) the very desires that lead to its own reproduction. Obliged to separate from their natal homes, daughters arguably desire, and perhaps even more so than their brothers, to ‘become good sons’ – to be hyper-filial. (With regard to this ambition, Miaoshan, Hua Mulan and other mythical daughters provide excellent role models.) And once they have married, women as mothers arguably displace this strong filial impulse (in my terms, their desire not to separate) on to their own sons. In other words – as Margery Wolf pointed out long ago (1968, 1972) – married women help bind sons closely to the patrilineal family, ameliorating the desire of sons for escape or autonomy from their fathers (see also Stafford 2000a: 110–26, 2000b). Sangren thus rejects the view that certain practices that might be read as a kind of ‘resistance’ to the dominant patrilineal ideology (bridal laments, myths about marriage-refusal etc.), should be so interpreted. On the contrary, they express desires that are intrinsic to the continued existence of this ideology: ‘the seeds of endogenous resistance originate in the Chinese family system itself; and, thus, they are internal to culture considered as a process of social production and reproduction.’ This conclusion is all the more striking if it is accepted that the separation ‘obstacle’ that provokes this notional resistance is itself often more notional than real. That is, the foregone conclusion that ‘daughters separate’, while sons do not, has highly significant effects – even for those women, perhaps the great majority, who will never experience the classic scenario of permanent departure from their natal homes.

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The politics of separation from the dead At first glance, Stephan Feuchtwang’s essay – which examines the ‘creation of pasts’ – seems to move us on to very different matters, including highly contentious ones related to Taiwanese history and politics. However, the themes prominent in Johnson’s discussion of laments and Sangren’s discussion of myths – including psychological responses to separation – are again central to Feuchtwang’s concerns. He begins by noting the partial convergence of approaches to death and to the making of history. Both may ‘involve forgetting and then retrieving something, a spirit, a ghost, what has gone, as if it were a memory and can be told as a story’. Of course, histories that have been collectively ‘forgotten’, denied public recognition, have sometimes in fact been forcibly repressed. This means that attempts to retrieve repressed pasts from which we are collectively separated – an issue Feuchtwang discusses with reference to Freud’s theory of mourning and loss – may, in turn, have political implications. Feuchtwang examines this possibility through examining the case of a local leader in Taiwan. This man wrote, for public consumption, a eulogyin-waiting about his own eventful life. However, Gao Bineng’s carefully crafted narrative – printed for public distribution, and sung out loud to his admirers at his ninetieth birthday celebrations – has lately been disrupted by uncomfortable questions about the past. These centre on his role in attempts by the ruling Guomindang (GMD), in the 1950s, to stamp out opposition activities in the Taiwanese township which he then led. Gao may, in brief, have been complicit in the identification, and ultimately in the deaths, of a number of people. This is exactly the kind of violent local history, well known but silenced, that typically becomes a whispered discourse about ghosts in rural China and Taiwan. For it is the isolated, unremembered, and violently killed dead who tend, as ghosts, to take vengeance on the living – or who at least cry out for recognition and remembrance (see R. Watson 1994). Feuchtwang observes that Chinese ghost stories may evoke two kinds of tragedies: the tragedy for the dead of being completely forgotten (of failing to be included in the remembered past), but also the tragedy for the living of being incapable of forgetting – i.e. of being endlessly haunted in the present by ‘repressed and fantastic’ pasts. This can be formulated as a problem of separation. As Feuchtwang points out, a proper funeral (i.e. a proper ‘sendingoff’ for the dead) and other acts of memorialization are, in part, attempts to ‘draw a line’ on that which has taken place. What Feuchtwang captures well is the complexity – and the profound uncertainty – of such attempts (see Johnson’s discussion of returning ancestors who are asked ‘not to touch the children’). We arguably need distance in order to remember, or ‘historicize’, the dead with any clarity. But at times this need appears to be matched by that of the dead for non-separation, for inclusion in our memories. To use Sangren’s terminology, they appear to demand ‘recognition’.

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In recent years, many repressed histories have erupted into public consciousness in Taiwan – and not just in Gao’s township. Local monuments to the forgotten dead of the anti-GMD resistance have been built, the past openly discussed. But as Feuchtwang stresses, the process of memorializing what was ‘forgotten’ from that era is far from straightforward. At the time of the killings, the families of the dead were not allowed to properly mourn them. (This means, among other things, that they could neither ‘send off’ those killed through proper burial, nor publicly ‘reunite’ with them on festive occasions.) In any case, he points out, many such families were long ago obliged to leave their local communities. So exactly for whom are the dead now allowed to return? What does it mean when they are ‘remembered’ today, often by people who they themselves did not know, and in the form of public memorials? The transformation of familial tragedies into elements in a collective historical narrative is very complex indeed. In this case, the collective narrative in question is that of a Taiwanese resistance to a ‘mainlander’ government, one imposed through force. The forcefully separated dead are martyrs to this cause. Here death-separations – and failures to safely reincorporate the dead in the cyclical reunions of familial and communal life – take on explicitly political dimensions. This possibility, the potential politicization of the separation constraint, also forms the subject matter of the essay by Jing Jun. In Feuchtwang’s discussion, the surviving relatives of the ‘separated dead’ in Taiwan found themselves separated and displaced, exiled from their homes and their ancestors for political reasons. Jing’s essay similarly focuses on the displacement of the living, in this case due to the construction of dams and reservoirs. As he observes, such projects have displaced roughly ten million people in China since 1949. Depending on the particular form of resettlement imposed, families may lose not only their homes but also their cultivated fields, their ancestral tombs, and more generally access to everything that is implied by belonging to a ‘native place’. Not surprisingly, the reaction to this range of separations is often a profound desire to return, to achieve reunion with what has been left behind. As Jing describes, people may wish to return to the economic environments (normally more favourable) in which they previously worked; they may wish to reinsert themselves in a familiar and ‘comfortable’ social landscape; and they may wish to reunite with left-behind kin. The state must therefore deal with these desires, and with the substantial problem of ‘backtracking populations’ – huiliu renkou, literally those who ‘flow back’. For the people caught up in displacements, Jing suggests, the ‘emotional attachment to their ancestral land’ is normally a fundamental issue at stake. And this emotional attachment is ultimately grounded in the ancestral cult: ‘A defining character of village life in China is the belief in the symbiotic relationship between ancestors, descendants and those yet to be born.’ The land worked by one’s elders and ancestors – work being seen as a prime

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marker of relatedness between generations – is not easily left behind.15 For this reason, people who are displaced often try to relocate the bones of their immediate ancestors for ‘proper reburial on safer and higher ground nearby’ – a move that allows, at least in theory, for ongoing worship. However, what people do not normally do is to take the bones of the dead far away from the places where they (the dead) had formerly lived and worked. And this is a crucial point. For as Jing observes, to leave the bones of the dead in or near their native place leaves open a possibility: that of reactivating, in the future, the ‘symbiotic relationship between the dead, the living and those yet to be born – in the territories that are regarded by the displaced farmers as their ancestral land’. In fact, as Jing notes, some of those displaced by dam-building projects have initially volunteered, and apparently with some enthusiasm, for the move. But when they have seen for themselves how truly dreadful the conditions are in their resettlement sites, enthusiasm has often turned to bitter resentment. Jing describes the case of farmers from Shaanxi, displaced in great numbers (voluntarily and involuntarily) in the 1950s and 1960s to Ningxia and Gansu, who were then compelled by harsh conditions – most tragically during China’s post-war years of famine – to try to return home. Such attempts were made over a period of many years. Then, in the 1980s – prompted by China’s second land reform, and by a general easing in political restrictions – a ‘return-to-homeland movement’ started to gain momentum. The farmers, hardened by the experience of separation, went back to Shaanxi in great numbers and began to struggle for the return of their land. Some of it had not, in the event, been covered with water, but instead had been taken over for use by others, including the military. It was at this point, i.e. in the context of a ‘return-to-homeland’ struggle, that the emotionally charged idioms of separation and reunion came fully into play. Jing describes one rally which was significantly held during the qingming (‘tomb sweeping’) festival in 1982, on an occasion when Chinese families are meant precisely to ‘reunite’ with the ancestors at their tombs. During the rally the state was denounced for allowing the destruction and pillaging of the tombs. In speeches and slogans the farmers declared that they would henceforth ‘rather become ghosts in the reservoir area’ than live somewhere else, separated from their ancestors and native lands. Jing goes on to explain why this movement, which based itself around a moral crusade, created considerable dilemmas for the state – the legitimacy of which rested, in part, on its moral authority. Indeed, the weight that the ‘ancestral argument’ continues to carry in post-revolutionary China is very striking. Of course, it should be noted again that at least some of these people had volunteered, at the outset, to go away – and there is much evidence to suggest that the presumed Chinese ‘attachment to place’ is a rather variable thing.16 The point, therefore, is not that such attachments are primordial and unchangeable, but rather that they can be made to seem so. Having left where they once belonged (and where they ideally should

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have remained in order to be near their ancestors), the displaced Shaanxi farmers drew directly on the highly emotive Chinese idioms of separation and reunion in order to assert an absolute right of return.

Separation and collective identities Jing Jun outlines what might be called a ‘negative case’ of a collective narrative constructed around the theme of separation. Here displacement from one’s ancestral land (in this instance under coercion) is seen as a denial of one’s most fundamental identity. Maris Gillette, by way of contrast, outlines what might be called a ‘positive case’, in which separations and reunions – those implied by pilgrimage – are treated as ‘glorious’ matters. The process of going away and then ‘returning’ ( gui) is, in this instance, crucial to the framing of both individual and collective identities. Gillette’s informants are Chinese Muslims (in official parlance ‘Hui’ or ‘Huizu’) from urban Xi’an; and the pilgrimage upon which they embark – the journey to Mecca – is of course far removed from what most people would associate with the Chinese cultural tradition. In recent years, thanks to improving standards of living and increased tolerance of religious activity, increasing numbers of Chinese Muslims have been able to undertake the hajj. It might seem inevitable that such pilgrimages would reinforce Muslim identity, simultaneously serving to distance Muslims from China’s dominant Han population. But the reality is much more complex. Far from being a totally separate and neatly defined community, as Gillette explains, the Chinese-speaking Hui of Xi’an specifically view themselves as products of both Arab and Chinese descent. In respect of many beliefs and norms they may, in fact, be viewed as typically Chinese: The ethnographic data available suggests that, in terms of their family system (including their ideology of patrilineal descent), behavioural norms, traditional knowledge, and most aspects of their ritual life, Hui are ‘Chinese’ or ‘Confucian’. If we followed James L. Watson’s argument that prior to the formation of the modern Chinese nation state ‘being Chinese’ meant adhering to certain standardized ritual practices and having knowledge of a shared oral tradition . . . then we might well classify the Hui as ‘Chinese’.17 Given this background, what does the pilgrimage to Mecca – this classic rite of passage – come to mean? The most explicit differences between ‘Han Chinese’ and ‘Hui’ populations within China do, in fact, rest on Islamic observance, of which the hajj is clearly a definitive instance. However, as Gillette points out, the actual experience of pilgrimage to Mecca – in its contemporary form – often seems to enhance and strengthen distinctively Chinese identities as much as distinctively Muslim ones. In simplest terms this is because pilgrims normally travel and stay within ‘national’

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delegations, speaking only Chinese, and having little or no contact with pilgrims from elsewhere. As studies of the hajj (and indeed of many pilgrimages elsewhere) have shown, one result of such experiences is ‘a heightened awareness of belonging to a specific national community and increased feelings of nationalism’. This is certainly not to say that the hajj will not also contribute, very substantially, to the achievement of distinctive ‘Hui’ identities. As one of the five fundamental duties of a good Muslim, the journey to Mecca is seen by pilgrims as a life-defining ‘return home’, a key element in their self-fashioning. Such pilgrimages, which typically come late in life, are also seen as a form of symbolic death, one that transforms pilgrims into new and ‘complete’ Muslim persons. Interestingly, however, the subsequent ‘glorious return’ (ronggui) of the pilgrims to Xi’an – something explicitly conceptualized by them and others as a form of ‘rebirth’ – is subject to homecoming celebrations and practices of the kind associated closely with the Chinese tradition. This is true, for example, of the gift-giving that accompanies not only the return of the pilgrims but also every stage of the pilgrimage process. Journeys to and from Mecca are already an extremely expensive undertaking, and a remarkable one-third of the total cost may be taken up in buying gifts for distribution among friends and relatives back in Xi’an. The pilgrims themselves are also given gifts, in very substantial quantities, both when they are ‘sent off’ (song) at departure and when they are ‘greeted’ ( jie) upon return. As Gillette observes, the ‘monumental’ gifts given to returning pilgrims – who are held to have been profoundly transformed by their journey – may be seen as a way of re-attaching them to their old communities. By introducing the question of gift exchange, Maris Gillette once again directs our attention to very basic issues about the nature of separation. As anthropological analyses of exchange and reciprocity have long shown, gifts – material objects in the world, transferable between persons – may be viewed as a means of effectively overcoming social and spatial distance. That is, they may help establish ‘connections’ between persons, which are not easily disturbed by periods of displacement and separation. To give a gift to a departing pilgrim is, in some significant sense, to participate in his or her journey; and to receive a gift from a returning pilgrim is, in some significant sense, to have ‘been there’ with them the whole time. In which case, what exactly does a pilgrimage-separation mean? On the one hand, the fact of literally going away is clearly of considerable significance; and yet a ‘separation’ of this kind is somehow always contingent: travelling pilgrims are still bound to home. In the case described by Gillette, they are literally ‘tied down’ with gifts. Ethnographies of gift exchange thus help to blur and problematize the apparent literalness of the separation constraint. Nick Tapp’s essay on the Hmong, which raises the issue of global displacements, can be said to take this de-literalization even further. He notes, among

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other things, the use of technology to sustain the attachment of displaced persons to ‘familiar’ places and ways of living – even when these ways of living may no longer exist. Tapp observes that the contemporary identity of the Hmong on the Chinese mainland is a complex and changing fusion of seemingly ‘Hmong’ and ‘Chinese’ attributes. Those who identify themselves as Hmong (in common with those who identify themselves as Hui) have been strongly influenced by the politicization of ethnic and cultural identities in modern China. In recent years, there has been a ‘Hmong cultural revival’ of sorts – one which is often conceptualized as a recovery from the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, when much ‘traditional life’ was seen to have come to a halt. However, this Hmong revival, as Tapp observes, draws rather heavily on the dominant Han Chinese culture, and unexpectedly incorporates both the writing down of genealogies and the construction of ancestral halls. Whereas precisely the absence of both of these activities was formerly taken as emblematic of Hmong identity by contrast with Han. In Tapp’s chapter we encounter a complex interplay between various types of ‘inauthenticity’. On the one hand, the Chinese state has made a number of attempts – which on the surface seem hopelessly flawed and futile – to set out once and for all the definitive parameters of various ethnic groups. These include the Hmong, who are ‘only one of three quite distinct cultural and linguistic groups classified together by the Chinese as “Miao” ’. In short, they’re making a category that doesn’t appear to exist ‘authentically’. On the other hand, we encounter the (seemingly also futile) attempts of dispersed Hmong populations to retrieve what they have lost. The perspective in Tapp’s essay is global, and he points out that Hmong originally from China and South-East Asia are now scattered all over the world. ( Just as this global displacement may be seen as a new version of the long-standing existential problem of separation, emerging technologies – importantly including the Internet – may be seen as a means of overcoming it.) Dispersed Hmong sometimes seek to return to an authentic Hmong homeland or identity that no longer exists at its source. This isn’t to say that genuinely joyous homecomings and reunions don’t take place (Tapp cites examples of these). But it is not always so. For example, at meetings between overseas Hmong and Miao representatives in China: Hmong from the US have been amazed to find that the Miao they were introduced to knew no Hmong and clearly had no knowledge of Hmong traditions or culture (they were either Sinicized Hmong or non-Hmong of other Miao groups). They spoke entirely unknown languages and had utterly different backgrounds. As Tapp notes, the effects of such encounters are difficult to trace, not least because of the precisely global nature of the phenomenon that he seeks

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to outline here. But nostalgic fantasies of ‘return’ and ‘reunion’ appear to remain powerful ones for displaced Hmong, and they may become a focus for newly emerging identifications – for new senses of ‘attachment’ within a global Hmong community. At this point – on the question of collective identities and global displacements – it might be noted that the chapters in this volume by Johnson, Feuchtwang, Tapp and Gillette deal respectively with Hakka, Taiwanese, Hui and Hmong material. This means that the issues under consideration can scarcely be defined or conceptualized, in any simple or straightforward way, as simply ‘Chinese’ or ‘Han’. Indeed, Hakka, Taiwanese, Hui, Hmong and, yes, ‘Chinese’ experiences of the separation constraint (in the context of marriages, funerals, pilgrimages, and global displacements) may strike us, on many levels, as generically human. This should not be a great surprise. For as I’ve suggested from the outset, although idioms related to separation and reunion seem especially important in the Chinese cultural tradition, it is surely true that the separation constraint – and the underlying issues of human autonomy and dependency that are evoked by moments of ‘parting’ and ‘return’ – are matters of concern in all human societies. For this reason, we conclude with a brief, but highly suggestive, essay by Raymond Firth. Firth’s contribution helps frame the volume by returning to some of the universalist concerns of this introduction. Rather than exploring one ethnographic example in detail, he surveys an important general theme: the linguistic aspects of separation behaviour across a range of cultures (see also Firth 1972). Among other things, he discusses the salience of separation as a problem to be addressed in world (including Chinese) literature, and provides a number of thought-provoking examples of this genre. The extent to which the separation constraint has been repeatedly addressed by poets, playwrights and novelists around the world is, indeed, very striking; and I’ve suggested elsewhere that ‘separation and reunion’ (lihe) is explicitly the organizing theme of the greatest Chinese novel, Cao Xue-qin’s Hong Lou Meng (see Stafford 2000a: 144–55). In addition to discussing high literature, Firth also addresses the formal and informal spoken language of separation. He points out that in most human societies processes of greeting and leave-taking will be accompanied by standardized verbal expressions – whether of joy or sorrow or indifference. The Tikopians, for example: ‘may celebrate the arrival of a friend or relative from abroad after a long absence with cries of “E, aue!” – oh, alas! A song of lament may also be sung.’ But here Firth makes an extremely important point with regard to ethnography of this kind. As he notes, the rituals and utterances associated with experiences of separation and reunion (however ‘true’ to spontaneous human emotions, such as sadness or joy) are often, of course, less than spontaneous. They are subject to a range of ‘conditioning variables’, and frequently incorporate notions of status and hierarchy. Firth notes, for example, the different greeting and

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leave-taking etiquette that is associated with affines and consanguines in Tikopia social life. He also points out the gendered nature of the language of separation. Not surprisingly, similar issues of status, hierarchy and gender arise in Chinese contexts of separation and reunion. For instance, Hakka women’s marriage and funeral laments, described in Elizabeth Johnson’s essay, give powerful expression to gender inequalities. As Sangren suggests, the classic conundrums of separation in Chinese family life may in fact play a crucial role in reproducing such inequalities. In this and other contexts, both the words and the practices associated with separation and reunion – whether found in seemingly minor procedures for greeting and leave-taking, in major life cycle rituals, or in grand national literatures – may help to articulate and reinforce elements in a normative order. Finally, another important theme that emerges in Firth’s discussion is the classic difficulty, for fieldworking anthropologists, of deducing mental or emotional states from outward behaviour or language. He reminds us that ‘Language may conceal, not express mental attitudes.’ As Firth observes, this is no less true of the language of separation, which may – as in some Chinese cases I have observed – either over-state or under-state the genuine emotions that attach to particular separation experiences.

Conclusion Having outlined what the volume contains, it may be useful to stress at this stage what it does not contain, and to acknowledge that we have, in some senses, been defeated by the hugeness of our topic. Most of the essays herein deal with separation as ‘departure’ – e.g. through marriage, death, leavetaking, etc. However, as Harriet Evans has pointed out to us, this leaves to the side a great many issues, which are, especially from the psychoanalytic perspective alluded to earlier, very crucial indeed for an understanding of separation in human emotional and social life. We don’t explicitly focus on separation as the erection or observation of barriers, or on physical distancing from persons and places – acts that may, for example, be engaged in as a mode of self-protection. Nor, in our discussions of kinship, do we allude much to the recent history of China – in which familial separation has sometimes been the result of legal, educational and economic policies. In short, a great deal has been left out. However, as this introductory overview will have hopefully shown, the essays in this volume do have a great many themes in common, and when read together we very much hope that readers will find them both illuminating and thought-provoking. By way of summing up, I’ll therefore highlight again four key issues – all central to any general understanding of the human separation constraint – which will re-emerge in the more detailed ethnographic descriptions and analyses to follow.

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First, although the volume begins with ostensibly individual separations – specifically the departure of daughters from their natal families, and the bitterness this provokes – it soon becomes clear that separation and reunion can be powerful collective experiences as well, and often in very concrete senses. For just as one’s personal emotional history can be framed (at least in the Chinese case) around repeated cycles of separation and reunion, so it is with collective narratives – which may draw, and sometimes to very good effect, on the powerful and deeply familiar tropes of parting and return. Second, although the volume begins with movement away from persons – again, specifically away from parents and siblings due to marriage – it soon becomes clear that many highly problematic separations relate to dislocation from places. Not surprisingly, the loss of one’s ‘native place’ merges, in a great many instances, with the loss of the people who are left behind (and vice versa). This undoubtedly helps to explain the seeming ease with which the separation constraint comes to be politicized. Third, we see throughout the essays a conceptual overlap between separations that involve the living and those that involve the dead. Hakka marriage-separations are sometimes equated with death, while Hui pilgrimages to Mecca are equated with both death and rebirth. Very real political movements (e.g. in Taiwan and Shaanxi) are framed around the moral obligation to return to – by definition to commemorate through ‘reunion’ – the neglected spirits of the dead. Finally, the essays in the volume shift between (and perhaps ultimately break down the distinction between) a conception of separation as something quite literal – as involving physical acts of departure and separation – and a conception of it as something more abstract. In other words, although crises of separation sometimes present themselves to experience in a surprisingly literal form (e.g. when an important person stands up and walks out of the room), the social and psychological implications of such ‘simple’ facts are much more complex to trace. One thing that emerges from the volume as a whole, or so I hope, is an appreciation of the great diversity of ways in which the separation constraint, in all its complexity, may be articulated and experienced both within the Chinese tradition, and beyond it.

Glossary

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Notes 1 The classic texts are Bowlby 1969, 1973 and 1980. For an overview of Bowlby’s work, and criticisms of it, see Holmes 1993. An update of psychological research on attachment and separation may be found in Goldberg 2000. Stafford 2000a: 1–29 discusses this research from an anthropological perspective. 2 See Whiting 1980 and 1990, Spiro 1982, LeVine 1990, Hewlett 1992. 3 See Van Gennep 1960, V. Turner 1977, T. Turner 1977. 4 See Herdt 1990; see Spiro 1982. 5 For two thought-provoking discussions of migration and displacement, see Parkin 1999 and Turton 1996; for accounts of displacement in the context of modernity see e.g. Appadurai 1996, Basch et al. 1994, Ong 1999. 6 I have conducted fieldwork in southeastern Taiwan (1987–9, 2001), northeastern China (1992–3, 1996), and southwestern China (2000–1). See Stafford 1995,

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7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16

17

Charles Stafford 2000a for details and full acknowledgements. My initial research on Chinese ‘separations and reunions’ in 1992–3 coincided with my period as a Chiang Ching-kuo Research and Teaching Fellow in the Faculty of Oriental Studies, Cambridge University. For an original and thought-provoking perspective on the Chinese lunar new year – one which takes account of both official and heterodox interpretations – see Feuchtwang 2001: 27–62. This is a highly significant detail. Doors and gates – the spaces through which people and spirits must pass in the process of arriving and departing – are often elaborately decorated in China (e.g. with auspicious duilian poetry during the new year festival). This arguably helps draw attention to moments of human and spiritual arrival/departure (see Stafford 2000a: 87–98). Sigrun Hardardottir is currently a PhD candidate in anthropology at the LSE; the following extracts are taken from draft chapters of her dissertation by permission. In fact, during the Ghost Festival, this inclusion is extended ‘universally’ – to all the dead who have been neglected and cut off, i.e. separated from the warmth of human feeling. For extended discussions of the role of ghosts in Chinese popular religion see Weller 1987 and Jordan 1985. For accounts of Chinese funerary practices, and more generally of the ongoing reciprocity between living and dead, see J. L. Watson 1988 and Thompson 1988. Cf. Stafford 2000a: 144–55. Cf. Stafford 2000a: 99–109. For discussions of the highly complex issues surrounding Hakka identity and ethnicity see Constable 1996. Perhaps the most famous example being Cao Xue-qin’s Hong Lou Meng. For a discussion of this classic tale of separation, see Stafford 2000a: 145–9. For example, on the ‘territorial bond’ in south China see Faure and Siu 1995. Mary Erbaugh has pointed out that although native place ties have been of considerable importance to many in China, this cannot necessarily be said for the Hakka, who often would simply ‘dig up the ancestors’ bones and carry them in jars to each new settlement’ (1996: 207). More generally, as Hill Gates observes: ‘The Chinese that many Westerners think of as home-bound, stuck in greatgreat-grandfather’s mud, must have been rare. People in vast numbers were constantly on the move’ (1996: 63). See J. L. Watson 1992.

References Aijmer, G. (1991) ‘Chong-yang and the Ceremonial Calendar in Central China’, in H. Baker and S. Feuchtwang (eds), An Old State in New Settings: Studies in the Social Anthropology of China in Memory of Maurice Freedman, Oxford: JASO Occasional Papers No. 8, pp. 178–96 Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Basch, L., N. Schiller and C. Blanc (1994) Nations Unbound: Transnational Projects, Postcolonial Predicaments and Deterritorialized Nation-states, Amsterdam: Gordon and Breach Publishers Blake, F. (1978) ‘Death and Abuse in Marriage Laments: The Curse of Chinese Brides’, Asian Folklore Studies 37 (1): 13–33 Bowlby, J. (1969) Attachment and Loss. Vol. 1. Attachment, New York: Basic Books Bowlby, J. (1973) Attachment and Loss. Vol. 2. Separation, Anxiety and Anger, New York: Basic Books

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Bowlby, J. (1980) Attachment and Loss. Vol. 3. Loss, Sadness and Depression, New York: Basic Books Constable, N. (ed.) (1996) Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad, Seattle: University of Washington Press Erbaugh, M. (1996) ‘The Hakka Paradox in the People’s Republic of China’, in N. Constable (ed.), Guest People: Hakka Identity in China and Abroad, Seattle: University of Washington Press, pp. 196–231 Faure, D. and H. Siu (eds) (1995) Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China, Stanford: Stanford University Press Feuchtwang, S. (2001) Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press Firth, R. (1972) ‘Verbal and Bodily Rituals of Greeting and Parting’, in J. S. LaFontaine (ed.), The Interpretation of Rituals: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards, London: Tavistock Publications, pp. 1–38 Freedman, M. (1979) The Study of Chinese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press Gates, H. (1996) China’s Motor: A Thousand Years of Petty Capitalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press Goldberg, S. (2000) Attachment and Development, London: Arnold Greenberg, J. R. and S. A. Mitchell (1983) Object Relations in Psychoanalytic Theory, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Herdt, G. (1990) ‘Sambia Nosebleeding Rites and Male Proximity to Women’, in J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder and G. Herdt (eds), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 366–400 Hewlett, B. S. (1992) ‘The Parent-Infant Relationship and Social-emotional Development among Aka Pygmies’, in J. L. Roopnarine and D. B. Carter (eds), ParentChild Socialization in Diverse Cultures, Annual Advances in Applied Developmental Psychology Volume 5. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, pp. 223–43. Holmes, J. (1993) John Bowlby and Attachment Theory, London and New York: Routledge Jordan, D. K. (1985) Gods, Ghosts and Ancestors: Folk Religion in a Taiwanese Village (second edition), Taipei: Caves Books (first edition published in 1972 by the University of California Press, Berkeley) Judd, E. R. (1989) ‘Niangjia: Chinese Women and their Natal Families’, Journal of Asian Studies 48 (3): 525–44 LeVine, R. A. (1990) ‘Infant Environments in Psychoanalysis: A Cross-cultural View’, in J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder and G. Herdt (eds), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 454–74 Martin, E. (1988) ‘Gender and Ideological Differences in Representations of Life and Death’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 164–79 Myers, F. R. (1988) ‘The Logic and Meaning of Anger among Pintupi Aborigines’, Man 23 (4): 589–610 Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham: Duke University Press Parkin, D. (1999) ‘Mementoes as Transitional Objects in Human Displacement’, Journal of Material Culture 4 (3): 303–20 Sangren, P. S. (2000) Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of Alienation in Social Reproduction, London: Athlone, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 72

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Spiro, M. (1982) Oedipus in the Trobriands, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press Stafford, C. (2000a) Separation and Reunion in Modern China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Stafford, C. (2000b) ‘Chinese Patriliny and the Cycles of yang and laiwang’, in J. Carsten (ed.), Cultures of Relatedness, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 37–54 Thompson, S. (1988) ‘Death, Food and Fertility’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 71–108 Turner, T. (1977) ‘Transformation, Hierarchy and Transcendance: A Reformulation of Van Gennep’s Model of the Structure of Rites de Passage’, in S. F. Moore and B. G. Myerhoff (eds), Secular Rituals, Assen: Van Gorcum, pp. 53–70 Turner, V. (1977) The Ritual Process, Ithaca: Cornell University Press (first published 1967) Turton, D. (1996) ‘Migrants and Refugees: A Mursi Case Study’, in T. Allen (ed.), In Search of Cool Ground: War, Flight and Homecoming in Northeast Africa, London: James Currey, pp. 96–110 Van Gennep, A. (1960) The Rites of Passage, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul (first published 1909) Watson, J. L. (1988) ‘The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–19 Watson, J. L. (1992) ‘The Renegotiation of Chinese Cultural Identity in the PostMao Era’, in J. Wasserstrom and E. Perry (eds), Popular Protest and Political Culture in Modern China, Boulder: Westview Press, pp. 67–84 Watson, R. S. (1994) ‘Making Secret Histories: Memory and Mourning in PostMao China’, in R. S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, Sante Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 65–85 Weller, R. (1987) Unities and Diversities in Chinese Religion, Houndmills: Macmillan Whiting, J. (1980) ‘Environmental Constraints on Infant Care Practices’, in R. M. Munroe, R. L. Munrow and B. B. Whiting (eds), Handbook of Cross-cultural Human Development, New York: Garland Whiting, J. (1990) ‘Adolescent Rituals and Identity Conflicts’, in J. W. Stigler, R. A. Schweder and G. Herdt (eds), Cultural Psychology: Essays on Comparative Human Development, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 357–65 Wolf, M. (1968) The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Wolf, M. (1972) Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, Stanford: Stanford University Press Yan, Y. (1996) The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village, Stanford: Stanford University Press

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2

Singing of separation, lamenting loss Hakka women’s expressions of separation and reunion Elizabeth Lominska Johnson

As an anthropologist living in Hong Kong, I was repeatedly reminded of the fact that separations and reunions are highly significant social events in Chinese culture. Children I knew in the late 1960s, and others I know now, learned as babies that all relatives must be greeted respectfully with appropriate kinship terms. They also quickly learned that their greetings would be warmly praised by delighted family members. Adults know that guests must be met upon arrival, greeted and offered hospitality, and escorted towards their destination when they leave. In the Cantonese opera performances I have seen with Chinese friends in Hong Kong and Canada, these behaviours are enacted with heightened intensity, further reinforcing their importance. Entrances and exits are announced with percussion beats prolonged for emphasis, and extended far beyond the apparent limits of the stage as the players circle and turn, creating images of doors, steps and curtains through mime. Their gestures build anticipation as they move towards the person they are meeting, and emphasize their mutual distress when they must leave. In relations between men and women, opera moves beyond the constraints of proper social life by enacting the powerful emotions underlying the separations of lovers, and their reunions. Leave-takings are made heart-rending by the tears the players shed behind the graceful motions of their long ‘water-sleeves’, which are then drawn out between them during the bitter moment of separation. Their reunions are equally prolonged, dramatized and stylized. After the many wrenching separations and heart-warming reunions, virtually every opera must end with a reconciliation or triumphant success that reunites the players in a brilliant final moment on stage. In opera, heightened emotion, and emotions that normally must be repressed, are expressed through singing and beautifully exaggerated gesture and costume. Until recently, ordinary women in at least one region of south China also used song to express emotions too powerful for words, or emotions that were normally forbidden public expression (see also Anderson 1975; R. S. Watson 1996; Blake 1978). As in opera, the songs and especially the laments of women in the Hong Kong region used music to move the

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meanings they conveyed from those of ordinary daily life to experiences of heightened emotion, making them memorable and significant. For the Hakka women I knew, their songs, called ‘mountain songs’ (saan go),1 were frequently concerned with the pain of separation from loved ones, and the possibility of reunion. Their laments, sung by brides before leaving their natal homes and by women mourning deceased family members, conveyed the unspeakable pain of the separations that occurred when a woman left her natal family and lineage sisters (tohng ga je) upon marriage and, in a parallel way made explicit through the laments, the separations resulting from death. Those separated by marriage or by death, I would argue, could not be reunited. They could meet, and could communicate, but both the woman who had married and the person who had died had undergone transformations, effected by ritual ( J. L. Watson 1988a: 4), that moved them into different realms than those they had left behind, and that made true reunion impossible. The separations lamented by women, and any subsequent reunions, were of a different order than those that had preceded these transformations.

The end of a tradition When I first arrived in the New Territories of Hong Kong in the late 1960s, these traditions were virtually at an end in the village of Kwan Mun Hau, where I lived.2 On two occasions during those early years I was present at funerals, and was profoundly affected by the sight and sound of elderly women lamenting alone near the coffin or the not yet encoffined body. Women around me were moved to tears at the sound. Marriage laments had already disappeared at about the time of the Second World War, and mountain songs disappeared from daily life not long afterwards. As the district industrialized, women lost their opportunities to sing while working together outdoors. They no longer went out in groups to cut grass for fuel or to carry loads in return for wages. Brides had few opportunities to learn laments, and felt less need to lament the fact that they were marrying. They were no longer forced into blind marriages. Strictly patrilineal values were compromised under Western influence, and as daughters were given opportunities for education and then undertook remunerative employment they came to be increasingly valued by their parents. Married women’s ties to their natal families are now much stronger, reinforced by frequent and virtually unrestricted visiting, and the exchange of assistance and financial support. The loss of funeral laments is more complex, because of the ritual function they almost certainly served, but as women lost their other forms of musical expression they no longer had opportunities to learn funeral laments. Furthermore, their community context has disappeared. Until the late 1970s funerals were conducted within the village, with the active participation of lineage members and their wives. They are now held in funeral homes, where professionals are paid to perform many of the functions once carried

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out by relatives. These include washing, dressing and laying out the body and providing it with the ritual objects needed for its journey to the next life. Village people also helped and to some extent instructed the mourners, and provided hospitality to guests. In the more distant past, but within living memory, lineage men carried the body out of the village and in solemn procession through the town, and then up the mountain to the gravesite.3 Almost all my images of mountain songs and laments are aural, conveyed to me by women who remembered them because they had heard and sung them, and by men who remembered hearing them. Most could remember only the general meaning and emotional impact of what they had heard, and perhaps a few lines or phrases. An outstanding exception was the late Mrs Yau Chan Shek-ying, a woman of great intelligence, with a remarkable memory. It was she who communicated this tradition to me, coming to our home regularly to sing, and then to explain what she had sung. For reasons I never have fully understood, she was willing to sing funeral laments in the home we rented from her family in their village, despite the fact that anything associated with a funeral normally is considered unlucky and even dangerous out of context. Some of these laments were ones that she had heard, while others were ones she had composed herself. I can only think that for her the risk incurred in singing them out of context was outweighed by her desire to share the profound meanings they carried and, in the case of those she had composed, to have the experience again of releasing her own bitter feelings.4 She also expressed longing for the earlier years of her life, when young women’s feelings of injustice and discrimination could be expressed through songs and laments, and hard work was made lighter because it was done by young women working and singing together. Chan Shek-ying remembered funeral laments and fragments of wedding laments that she had heard when she was still in her teens, more than forty years earlier, and mountain songs that were already old when they were taught to her by women of her mother-in-law’s generation. Like laments passed down by rural Greek women, they were ‘valuable learning tools and prized aesthetic possessions’.5 For me, hearing the songs and laments in this way meant that they were not only far removed from their original contexts, but also that they had to go through a lengthy process of translation and explanation.6 The poetic and musical qualities of the songs and laments, as well as their images and allusions, are lost or made clumsy by rendering them in written English. Although some are only remembered fragments, the process of extracting from the longer ones, as I have done in this chapter, destroys their integrity. I can only hope that in translating and interpreting the songs, laments and explanations entrusted to me I have not seriously misrepresented their meanings or intent, which have already been distorted by hearing them outside the living context in which they originally had been sung.7 These concerns are at least partially outweighed by the value of these songs and laments, however imperfectly rendered, in giving us a window into women’s

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constructed memories of a distinctive way of life that is now gone (Cruikshank 1990: 14). They also provide insights into those aspects of life that women found most deeply meaningful and could express only through song. We have some knowledge of what was particularly important to men through their writings that have survived (Hayes 1983: 112–26, 192–6), but women’s fragile oral traditions can be preserved only through recording and interpreting, imperfect though this process may be. These songs and laments were powerful, their impact heightened because they were women’s only legitimate means of vocal expression in public contexts. Even now, within the village it is considered improper for women to speak in public situations. The only other means they have to publicly express grievances is what might be called a tirade, now rare, in which an older woman delivers a stream of criticism to an invisible but not unhearing audience. Mountain songs and laments were also powerful because they were conveyed through singing. Music has the power to move people, especially when combined with deeply meaningful words, drawing them together in shared emotion. It may even have the creative power to link this world with the supernatural, as an essential feature of ritual (Yung et al. 1996: 5). In some ways the laments were harmonious with the rituals, expressing conventional good wishes and contributing to the efficacy of the rites. When sung by creative singers they gained another dimension, however, that made them especially meaningful. They could add an element of tension, of dissonance, to the ritual context. Laments offered a vehicle for individual selfexpression through which a woman could make public her private grievances. She could sing about how she had suffered at the hands of others and through the cruelty of fate. In a society characterized by public restraint, laments allowed women the possibility of expressing to others their feelings about their personal suffering, much of which resulted from the nature of their lives as women (Martin 1988: 164–79; Johnson 1988: 135–63). Laments thus became expressions of the unorthodox as well as the orthodox,8 the unofficial as well as the official, the distinctively female as well as the male, features that Bell Yung and others have creatively called ‘harmony and counterpoint’ (Yung 1996: 13–34, R. S. Watson 1996: 107–29). Even the mountain songs, sung in the course of daily life, often expressed unorthodox and otherwise forbidden sentiments that could not be spoken publicly, those of romantic love and sexual desire. Through its formal constraints but individual content, sung music offered both ‘restraining and liberating features’ (Yung et al. 1996: 6). Both the mountain songs and the laments allowed creative singers the opportunity to express individual and even egocentric feelings of desire, longing, grief, resentment and suffering at the hands of others (see Sangren, this volume). Talented women could use culturally acceptable sung forms, contained within particular social and ritual frames and formal musical structures, to express the otherwise inexpressible and to deeply impress those who heard them. The containment of these expressions meant that they did not create disorder within the order of social life and ritual (Thompson 1988: 107).

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Women, in their subjugated but somewhat ambiguous status within their husbands’ families and lineages, were able to comment on their suffering in a way that was denied to men ( Johnson 1988).

Musical forms Discussing these expressions in English is difficult because of our inappropriate terminology. Of the various musical forms I encountered, only the mountain songs would not fall into our category of ‘ritual music’ or Yung’s category: ‘Chinese ritual sound’ (Yung 1996: 14ff.) I never heard the general Chinese term for music ( yam ngohk) used for any local Hakka musical forms, and the verb ‘to sing’ (cheung) is used only for mountain songs. The verbs ‘to weep’ (haam) or ‘to call’ (giu) are used for lamenting. How might Kwan Mun Hau people classify their forms of what we would call ‘music’? An important part of their musical world, which they saw but in which they did not participate, was Cantonese opera, called daaih hei or yuht kehk. Such performances were, and remain, essential features of festivals in honour of gods (Ward 1979: 18–39). Percussion playing (da loh cha) by lineage men was and, when the skills have been retained, still remains an essential feature of all festivals acknowledged at the village level, as well as life crisis ceremonies ( J. L. Watson 1988a: 3–19). Men learned these skills, as well as unicorn dancing (mouh keih leuhn) from local masters whom they paid for this instruction. The rhythms played for specific occasions are considered to have meanings, such as ‘produce sons’ (tim ding). The occasions could be heightened by a professional playing the oboe-trumpet sona (cheui dek), a skill that local men did not have the means to acquire. Chanting ritual texts or formally inviting and greeting ancestors in Hakka are skills held by very few local men. The sung forms include mountain songs and laments. Before the Second World War, professional singers occasionally visited the villages, sometimes accompanying themselves on simple bamboo instruments, creating evenings of mountain songs that were long remembered. Among local people, mountain songs were sometimes sung by women among themselves, but were normally sung in dialogue between a man and a woman. These dialogues were often competitive, pitting the skills of one singer against the other. As with the laments, singers mastered the form and sometimes learned complete songs from others, but those with ability then went on to improvise, particularly in competitive dialogue.9 While the more formal songs apparently were always developed around themes of love, the more competitive ones, called (liuh), meaning ‘to flirt’ or ‘to tease’ were often more explicitly sexual, rude and derogatory. Chan Shek-ying said that women could respond in kind by singing a rude rebuttal to a man who was not local, but risked being the subject of gossip if they responded to a local man. People used various terms for laments and lamenting, including ‘to weep for a broken fate’ (haam laahn mehng), which was used only for funeral laments,

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‘to weep’ (haam), and ‘to call for the loved one’ ( giu oi), an appropriate term because most lines ended with a sobbing call to ‘loved one’ (mother or mother-in-law) or with an appropriate kinship term. Brides lamented during the days of seclusion preceding their weddings, and during the rituals that marked the stages of separation from their natal homes. They learned laments from women married into their villages, and those few young women who were literate might be assisted and taught by men, who could write out laments for them to learn. The village teacher might also teach laments to those who couldn’t read. A literate woman now in her seventies, married into Kwan Mun Hau from Sha Tin, was helped to learn laments in this way.10 Young women with special ability were able to improvise beyond the standard lines, adapting the laments to their situations and politely addressing individual village people, both men and women, who had gathered to listen. The woman from Sha Tin said that because her family was wealthy and had four houses, many village people came during the evenings before her wedding and sat in rows to hear her lamenting upstairs.11 Only adult women making major marriages lamented before their weddings. Women being taken as secondary wives were married with a minimum of ceremony. Those taken to their future husbands’ households as child brides (saang poh jai ) were too young to have learned to lament, and it would have been inappropriate for them to do so at the time when the marriage was formalized because by then they were already resident in their husbands’ homes. Widows and runaway wives who remarried did so without ceremony. Women learned how to sing funeral laments by listening to others, rather than by being formally taught. Some obligatory stanzas were standard expressions of good wishes and bereavement, but creativity was especially valued.12 Skilled singers could include sung commentary on the particular social relationships focused on the deceased, making their laments individual expressions both of grief and of grievances.13 Other women who were especially creative might answer them spontaneously in the same way, offering comfort to counteract their grief (deui haam), or rebutting (bok) them if they felt their grievances were unjustified or unfair (see Appendix, song number 10). Women expressed many kinds of grievances and painful experiences in their laments, including the death of children, neglect by their husbands, discrimination by their mothers-in-law, and neglect by members of their natal families. According to Chan Shek-ying, they also sometimes used them to accuse family members of inappropriate or shameful behaviour. For example, a woman might include these lines in a lament for her motherin-law, if she had favoured her older daughter-in-law, who was stronger and could work harder than the singer: In the past, poh poh, you only loved your older daughter-in-law. You only regarded me as a blade of grass.

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Women could lament from the moment of death, when the lamenting may have been relatively formless wailing, through the time when the body remained present, and then on through the period of mourning until it was formally ended. There were certain points in the rites when lamenting was expected, such as the moment when the body was formally laid out on the house floor, or when water was bought to wash the face of the corpse. I saw a woman lamenting while kneeling next to the body of her lineage aunt while it was still laid out on the floor of the house, lifting the cover from the face of the deceased as she lamented. On another occasion an elderly woman, the neglected first wife of the deceased, came several times to stand near his coffin and lament. Both wedding and funeral laments were strictly the domain of women. Men would hear them, and might be moved to tears by them, but in these ritual contexts they remained silent unless they were officiants. What was it in the nature of women and their social experience that gave them the possibility of this ritual role?

Marriage as separation and loss One of the important themes of all these sung forms is that of separation and reunion. This is most profound in the laments, because the separations that they marked and commented on were of a different order from those of ordinary life. I would argue that they were, in fact, transformations: that the women who went through the rites of marriage and the deceased who went through the rites of death emerged transformed, different beings from those who had entered the rituals. Brides were removed forever from the households in which they had grown up, and emerged from their weddings as members of other households, lineages and villages.14 Reunions with members of their natal households were possible, expected, and deeply important to them, but after marriage they called those households their ‘outside’ or ‘foreign’ households (ngoih ga). Married women returned to their natal households as guests, not as family members, and until recently could make only formal visits on special occasions. Some of the marriage laments make explicit the analogy of marriage with death, a crossing into another realm.15 The fact that they had had this death-like experience may have qualified women to lament at funerals, because death rituals functioned to facilitate the soul’s movement from something potentially lost in this world, the world of light ( yeuhng gan) to a being settled in the shadow world ( yam gan). Reunions between that transformed being and those family members who remained were and are also possible and desirable, but they are of a different order, with formalities and restrictions different from those of this life. In my title I referred to the wedding and funeral laments as ‘lamenting loss’ because the separations of marriage and death are qualitatively different from those of this life. They constitute loss because the relationships as they had been are gone forever. In the remainder of this

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chapter I will try to show how laments comment on and even form a part of these transformative processes. First, though, we should briefly consider the mountain songs. Those that were spontaneously sung in a teasing or flirting mode (liuh) seem to have been highly competitive, an exchange of derogatory comments between a man and a woman, or sexual invitations and comments answered with insults (see Appendix, songs 1–4). These were very funny, and particularly satisfying to those who could outwit their competitors. Chan Shek-ying sang other mountain songs, however, that were neither competitive nor funny. They were concerned with separation and, in two cases, with the fear that hopedfor reunions would not take place. One concerned a wife who was dying. Her husband, who had been working elsewhere, was called back to her bedside, where she sang that he should not spend money to save her, and then died (Appendix, song 5). This and two others were said by Chan Shek-ying to have been very old, and two appear to have originated in the period when many Tsuen Wan men were forced by poverty to emigrate to distant places.16 The fear expressed by the women in these mountain songs is that their husbands, while separated from them, would become involved with other women and not return to them (see Appendix, songs 7–8). These songs are very moving in their expression of fear of permanent separation, but they remain firmly rooted in the activities and concerns of ordinary human life. Marriage laments were sung only during the time when the bride was removed from the activities of daily life, that liminal period of about a week when she was secluded within her parents’ house to weave patterned bands,17 to be prepared for her wedding, and to lament. She was accompanied during this time by her lineage sisters, because she was about to leave them. In her laments, she expressed her closeness to them:18 When we were small, we were very good friends. When we were small I played with you. Whenever I ate I shared my food with you. She might compare her fate to that of her unmarried sisters: I am very close to my sisters. I hold a stick of sugar cane and divide it. I want to break it. I am very close to my sisters. I hold a piece of malt candy I will divide it equally. At night I sleep in the same bed with younger sister. I will become a bride. You will go back to sleep with your parents. She even made the analogy between her marriage and death:19

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Every evening we could use each other’s shoes. We could exchange our clothes. Tonight I am going to see the King of Hell. Tonight you will see your father and mother. She was bathed and dressed in ceremonial clothes. During the hair-combing ceremony, she might sing: From the time I was small I never wore a set of new clothes. Today I am wearing a full set of new clothes. I am like grass being dried in the sun to die. If her father had died, she might lament as she worshipped his tablet: I was raised by my father but now he can’t see my wedding. I wear a black skirt with white on my head. I was raised by my father but now have no father to see my wedding. For the first and only time in her life she was taken to the ancestral hall to worship her ancestors, and then to worship her close ancestors at home. Lines from wedding laments compare her, a red flower, with her brother:20 The white flower worships 100 times, The red flower worships once. They describe her going to the hall: One small road to the ancestor’s hall, I use both hands to push the door open. I don’t know where the tablet is. Tonight my ancestors are 100 years old. As she lamented, she cursed the matchmaker who had arranged her marriage. The finality of marriage is communicated by the fact that in my experience older women commonly referred to their marriages as the time when they were sold, as in the common expression ‘when I was sold to this village’. The matchmaker was seen as the intermediary in this financial transaction. Chan Shek-ying said that after cursing the matchmaker she had to say good words to release her from the curse. I did not have good relatives, 1000 angles.21 New grass shoes that I bought are worn out. I did not have good relatives, 1000 angles. This willow leaf is going to buy her coffin.

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The bride was fed well, and given food to carry on her journey to her new home. She poured tea, lamenting, to bid respectful farewell to her parents. Her mother might lament in response at this time.22 When the men from her husband’s village arrived with the sedan chair to take her away23 her lineage sisters often fought with them, but they were subsequently subdued and the bride was made to cross the threshold of her home to get into the waiting sedan chair. As the men arrived, she might curse them, singing: Carry younger brother in front of the door. He scoops some sand in front of the door To allow those people from Hell to place their flags. Lineage sisters who had married out might return for the wedding banquet that was held after the bride’s departure, and they could also lament, singing about the happiness or unhappiness of their own married lives. Enclosed in her sedan chair, the bride made the journey into the unknown alone, except perhaps for the presence in the procession of an older lineage woman who would instruct her. During this period of transition she was said to have ‘killing breaths’ (saat hei), as does an unburied corpse ( J. L. Watson 1988b: 112), making her dangerous to small children and to households where there were newborn infants. Even officials were said to have given way to any bridal procession they encountered along the road. Upon arrival at her husband’s family’s home she was made to go through a series of rites of assimilation. The most significant of these was her presentation, with her new husband, to the founding lineage ancestor in the ancestral hall. This was, and still is, done through the rite of ‘instructing the son’ or, alternatively, ‘reporting’ ( gaau jih). It was this ceremony that transformed her into a member of that family and lineage. She then poured tea for her husband’s relatives in her new home, while being taught how to address them. The next morning she was expected to rise early and serve her elders, reflecting her position as a subservient daughter-in-law. The formal visits that first allowed her to see her ngoih ga have changed over the years. In earlier times, older female relatives came in a visit called ‘presenting tea’ (sung chah), in which they brought special gifts of food, were provided hospitality by the bride’s new family, and presented with special foods to take back. One month after marriage, the bride herself might then make the visit called ‘returning to the door’ (wuih muhn) or ‘to act as a guest’ ( jouh haak). During the first year, when she took gifts to her natal family, the occasion was called ‘new carrying on a pole’ (san daam). Subsequently, at festivals or when her ngoih ga held special ceremonies, she could return as long as her mother-in-law gave permission. She would dress in her best clothes on these occasions and carry gifts of special foods provided by her mother-inlaw, returning with reciprocal gifts from her natal family. While she was there, her mother would prepare special meals for her. Other, more routine visits, were not encouraged, and were often made impossible by distance.24

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The various female members of women’s extended ngoih ga also paid formal visits when she gave birth, bringing special foods for her and clothing for the baby. She would visit them, or they her, if one or the other was ill. When she died, her husband’s family was obliged to give formal notification to her ngoih ga, and to meet them deferentially when they came. It was her natal family’s responsibility to make the bamboo rods held by the mourners. A woman’s ties to her ngoih ga were a source of great emotional support, and these visits were of deep significance to her. If members of her ngoih ga did not pay sufficient attention to her, a woman might express this grievance in her laments at the deaths of family members. According to Chan Shek-ying, being visited by them when she was ill was especially important. In her own lament for the death of her older brother, she criticized her relatives for not visiting her when she was in hospital, and her deceased brother for not treating her as a true relative. Upon the death of her mother or other senior female relatives, the most supportive members of her ngoih ga, her laments for them were especially tragic (see Appendix, song number 9). During festivals and special occasions when I came my mother was here. During festivals, my mother would come out to receive me. During festivals if I come, I will only see my mother’s tablet. On one such occasion Chan Shek-ying not only expressed her sense of loss, but also her resentment because the family of her father’s older sister (daaih gu) did not inform her until the final ceremony of that woman’s mourning period. Her relationship with her daaih gu had been especially meaningful, because she herself had been married out as a small daughter-in-law when she was only twelve years old, and she had lost contact with her ngoih ga for some years. In the lament she refers to herself as that woman’s granddaughter: Daaih gu had only me, one grandchild, who went to visit my daaih gu Now my daaih gu has died so there is no more relationship with her family. I had no parents when I was small. I could not imagine that I could find daaih gu. We were able to communicate for 10 or 8 years. Now the relationship on the road to Sha Tin has been broken. It was no use for daaih gu to maintain the family. Today my daaih gu died worthlessly. There was only one daaih gu and one grandchild. The accursed grandchild will be ignored; no one will care for her. With the deaths of those women, relationships with her ngoih ga were likely to become more distant, and visits less frequent, especially if she felt badly treated by those relatives who remained.

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Funerals as transformative rites of separation In a parallel with wedding ceremonies, funeral rites make possible the journey of the soul from one state of existence to another. They separate it from this world and settle it in the shadow world, but also facilitate the anticipated communications and exchanges between the soul and its family members in this world. People assured me repeatedly that one of their concerns was that the soul not become lost, and that it should be able to find its way back to its former earthly home, to its grave, and to its tablet in the home or ancestral hall.25 Now that deaths usually take place in hospitals people are especially concerned that the soul may wander lost. It is the role of the hired priests (nam moh louh) to perform the rites that will give the soul a safe passage and settle it in the shadow world, giving it a kind of ‘rebirth’ in another realm, the society of ancestors (Thompson 1988: 80). When funerals were conducted in Kwan Mun Hau village, a ceremony called ‘sending fire’ (sung fo) was held on the first three days after the death. Three women (two, if the deceased was a man) carrying lighted lanterns went from the village to the gravesite, to ‘brighten the place’ for the soul and to help to lead it back home. If the bones of the deceased or his tablet are moved at any time, care is also taken to inform him so that his soul will not wander in search of them and, of course, so that the living can continue to communicate with him through his tomb or tablet. As with the return visits of married women, all future communications and exchanges are qualitatively different than those between people in this world, and are conducted with formality. They include the presentation of offerings to the deceased, accompanied by formal spoken or chanted communications. Precautions are taken to ensure that the soul does not move inappropriately into this world (Thompson 1988: 75, 82–3; J. L. Watson 1988a: 9). Women’s funeral laments, which call to the deceased at the end of virtually every line, draw attention to the fact that the person is now gone. A daughter-in-law might lament: Every evening when I open the door, my son could not call his grandmother. Your grandson and baby now do not have grandmother and could not call her. At dinner I put away your bowl. In the morning I put out one less pair of chopsticks. Laments help to begin this process of separation while also introducing the possibility of future communication. These are lines from the lament of a daughter-in-law: Now my mother you will be very comfortable. You will sleep comfortably in the underworld. Don’t worry about the things of this world any more.

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Your sons and grandsons will have a prosperous future. Now your grandsons will gradually become more mature. They are your grandsons. I wish you could have lived two more years So you could rest in prosperity But you are dead now. As for the grandchildren you raised, you can come and look at them But please don’t touch them. People expect that the soul will return to its former home on the third night after death, and look for signs that this has happened. I was told that this return visit is welcomed, showing that he or she was emotionally attached to that home. Because of the transformation the person has undergone, the soul is asked not to touch vulnerable children, however. In the past, children’s illnesses that resisted cure were attributed to this touch, and women from the family then had to communicate with the deceased through a spirit medium to ask that the spirit desist, or to find out what need he or she was communicating in this way. A lament that might be sung during the water-buying rite served to demonstrate the difference between the deceased’s past and present existence, and advised her on how to conduct herself on her journey: Every morning you washed your face in the centre of the room. Today I am going to the head of the lake to buy water to wash your face. When your face has been washed clean you will see the King of Hell. Tell him the truth about how you died and where you are from, Give him the record of your life. After you have told your history you will have nothing to regret. You have many descendants and so you should feel satisfied. When your grandchild wakes up he does not see grandmother in her room washing her face any more. At night during supper he doesn’t see the bowl she used. Wish your grandchildren peace and good fortune. Many village people have come to pay their respects. Wish them good fortune and peace.26 They believed that the soul journeyed to the edge of the yellow river where it met dogs that it fed with the cakes that had been placed on a stick in the corpse’s hand. When it crossed the bridge over the yellow river it was then in the shadow world, reunited with those who had predeceased it. People conceived of the soul’s journey as taking it to the yellow river on the third day. There it washed its hands, and realized that it was dead because they smelled bad. After the soul had crossed the bridge over the yellow river it would enter the shadow world and meet the souls of its relatives who had died. A daughter-in-law might lament:

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Elizabeth Lominska Johnson You are now at peace. In the underworld you have your husband and son. You are now in the underworld. You need not bother about any affairs. You can give up the affairs of this world. You need not worry about them. Please don’t touch your grandchildren with your hands, just look at them. When you come at night, please come silently, When you go at night, please go silently.

After the coffin had been taken in procession from the village, people had to purify themselves from the ‘killing breaths’ of the corpse by stepping over fire, and fire was used at the end of mourning to send offerings and to purify the mourners and their house. Reunions with the deceased can take place at those festivals and ceremonies when offerings are made at the tablet in the ancestral hall, or at the grave or tomb. These must, again, be preceded and ended with formalities that are conducted by men. At the spring and fall tomb worship I have heard men invite ancestors to come to join us and enjoy the food we had brought, and then give them reports on family affairs. In one formal chant of invitation the ancestor, who ‘can stand very tall and see far away’ was, again, asked to look at us but not touch us. On these occasions, women may assist with the preparations and participate in the worship,27 but do not speak. At some time after the death, if concerns arise because of problems in the family, or when the family wants to communicate something to the deceased, women can visit a spirit medium, usually called mahn maih poh, through whom deceased family members can communicate with the living. The living can ask for advice, ascertain whether offerings have been received, or ask the deceased to desist from demands he or she has been making (Potter 1974: 207–31). People said that as the years pass the ancestors become harder to contact, and their communications less clear and finally impossible to understand.

Essential complementarity According to Chan Shek-ying and others, until perhaps sixty years ago daughters’ laments were considered essential to the funeral rites of parents, complementary to the work of the priests. They were efficacious, essential to the settling of the soul. People who did not have daughters tried to establish a relationship ( yihng) with a young woman who would lament upon their deaths. Several women had asked Chan Shek-ying to do this on their behalf. If this form of adoption had not been carried out, relatives might have to make such an arrangement after the death of the person without daughters, compensating the young woman handsomely with fields, cows or dowry items. Such a woman might lament as follows:

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When she was alive I did not lament her. Mother did not see me lament as a daughter. Now my mother has died. I was carrying grass down the mountain. At the side of the road my brother asked me to be her daughter and lament, So I came to lament. This lament was in harmony with the funeral rites, helping them to accomplish their purpose of settling the soul in its known and appropriate domains, safely separate from this life but always available to be contacted by those who were still alive. Both men and women were necessary to accomplish this, the male priests and silently mourning sons, and the daughter who could demonstrate through her presence and her lamenting that the deceased had had a complete and balanced life. Deep analysis of death rituals and entombments reveals many expressions of this complementarity: the necessary presence and contributions of affines as well as agnates, the metaphors of both flesh and bone expressed through offerings, and the femaleness of the containers for the yang bones of ancestors (Thompson 1988: 92–108). In all the sung forms we have been considering, there is contrast or even opposition between the roles of men and women, but this is underlain with the Chinese assumption of complementarity, the necessity for both kinds of beings, both perspectives. Opposition between men and women was clearly expressed in the coarsest of the mountain songs, but underlying it, of course, were raw attraction and longing. The more formal mountain songs gave voice to the pain of separation between husband and wife, which could not otherwise be expressed, and the fear that this separation might be permanent. In the wedding laments, men were condemned as the groom’s representatives who came to take the bride from her natal home, but the matchmaker, a woman, was also criticized. In her funeral laments, a woman could criticize anyone who had wronged her. Such a person, man or woman, was by definition senior to her: her mother-in-law, her husband, an older brother. The laments were in part protests against powerlessness, which in Chinese society was created by a relatively young woman’s position within the kinship system. Other woman, her equals, could take issue with her sung criticisms by retaliating in kind. Through her laments a woman also expressed love and longing for those from whom she had been separated by marriage or death. In the laments I heard, these were almost always women: her mother, an aunt, her lineage sisters. Her polite mourning for her mother-in-law lacked these deep feelings. While contained within the boundaries of marriage and funeral rituals, women could give voice to emotions that could not otherwise be expressed. In both the wedding and funeral laments, women’s voices provided both harmony and counterpoint. Their voices gave support to the

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orthodox rites through their auspicious phrases and good wishes, but at the same time they were expressions of the individual feelings of pain that were brought out by the profound nature of the experiences of marriage and death. Men did not have this possibility.28 Throughout their lives they remained at the core of their families, lineages and villages. From this position of centrality and propriety they could only express publicly those sentiments that were orthodox, filial and loyal, regardless of what their true feelings might have been. It was they who could communicate good wishes through the commonly understood codes beaten on gongs and cymbals, and who could chant or speak the standard phrases that invoked the ancestors in their hall and in their tombs. Women were different. As women, as yin beings, they were responsible for communicating through spirit mediums with the souls of deceased family members in the underworld, communications that were concerned with the social and physical conditions of this life and the next. When they were brides, it was made clear to them that they were superfluous to their natal families, and about to be separated from all that they had ever known. Having been through this separation, having been lost to their natal families, married-in women became disparate additions to their husbands’ kin groups. They belonged to these families and lineages during this life and the next, but still had something of the perspective and status of outsiders. It was perhaps this ambiguity that gave them the right to express the otherwise inexpressible through their laments, and their own experience of transformation through marriage that empowered them to lament the transformation, the permanent separation, of death.

Appendix: words of mountain songs and laments 1

Mountain song (liuh)

man: We saw you cutting grass and becoming tired. You need to cut grass and also carry it. I saw you working hard, So it is even worth it for me to die for you. woman: How dare you flirt with us in daytime? You are a skeleton, you go to Hell. If you go to my house you will become a skeleton.

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2

Mountain song (liuh)

woman: You can’t sing, you death-like person. You can’t farm, constantly irrigating ditches. When a dog gives birth to puppies in your home Your mother asks people to call you to eat the afterbirth. 3

Mountain song (liuh) made up by women when a driver refused to give them a ride Driver, brother driver I hope your car will fall into the river Or better, fall into the edge of the sea. Falling into the clear river, he can’t stand with four steps, like a monkey.

4

Fragment of mountain song (liuh) sung by a man to a Kowloon woman who couldn’t return home by boat because of adverse winds Kowloon woman, you can’t return home. Come spend the night at my house, I have beds and covers.

5

An old mountain song

husband: If a bamboo container is burned it makes a noise bik bak. You became ill and you frightened me. I got the message in the morning and returned in the afternoon. It should require three days but I returned in one. wife: In the first month when I went to carry water. My skirt got wet and I became sick. Now that you have returned come near to my bed and I will tell you something. Now I will return the ring to you. husband: You continue wearing the ring. I will go to 14th street and send a doctor to cure you.

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wife: Don’t cure me, You would waste money and gain nothing. You go to 14th street and choose a beautiful woman. She will probably be better than I. husband: You need to be seen by a doctor. The money I spent I could earn again. There is no use for me to go to 14th street. You could give me help at any time. I could not ask for help from others as conveniently as from you. wife: Older brother, I will die. husband: Little sister, please don’t die. Our little beggars [children] will not be cared for. Who will give me tea and serve me when I return? wife: I don’t have any little beggars. I don’t have any bowls, you throw those down and break them. [she dies] 6

Mountain song

man: For a long time a big wind has blown from the south, younger sister. Today the wind blew from the south but changed to the east. We have not met each other for a long time. Today we meet each other. woman: [???]*

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man: A red flower dropped down into the garden. Where do you come from, younger sister? Where do you live? Can you give me your name and address so we can meet in the future? woman: You don’t know me, older brother. I live in Kowloon, on Third Street. The number of my house is 100. I am the one with the short legs and bad personality. man: One flower grows along the road, younger sister. The flower is beautiful and the leaves are green. Where do you come from? Can you give me your name so we can meet in future? woman: [???]

7

From an old mountain song

woman: I hold a gold cup in two hands, asking when you will return. I go along the upper road and there are many white flowers [prostitutes], many, my husband. I walk along the lower road and there are many stones. Husband, you are now leaving; when will you return? You should not pick up the wild flowers along the road, Within the house there is already a plum blossom. 8

An old mountain song

woman: Put away the hemp weaving, put away the stool Waiting for my husband to come home. He went with you but did not come back with you.

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man: Little sister, don’t be angry. Your husband has a relationship with a Vietnamese woman. It is very serious. During daytime they act as travelling companions, At night they act as a couple. woman: Worship heaven, worship earth so that whenever that Vietnamese woman becomes pregnant the babies will die So that my husband can earn money more easily and return. 9

A funeral lament Today I have come, I have lost my mother. When I came in the past my mother paid attention to me. Today I have lost my mother; I am miserable. Having a bad fate, I was married to a poor household. Today I have come, I have lost my mother. I came and I saw my mother’s tablet. I had my mother to look after me. I came to my natal home and was loved and caressed. Today I have come and have no mother to love and caress me. I have lost my mother and I am miserable. My mother listened to others and married out this struggling girl with a cursed fate. I am so poor that I have carried loads until my shoulders look like rough granite. If I had been married better I would not be so wretched now. My feet are full of holes like a rice-drying basket. When I came for special occasions and festivals my mother came to greet and caress me. Today I have lost my mother, who came to greet and caress this person with an accursed fate.

10 Lament: competitive dialogue between the deceased’s daughter and daughter-in-law daughter: My sister has no good fortune. My sister has come here for less than a year and already my father has died.

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My sister, I don’t know whether you don’t have good fortune or whether my father didn’t have good fortune. My family took this daughter-in-law to enjoy the fortune of the family. daughter-in-law: I didn’t come to cheat your father. The matchmaker came and talked, and he saw me before accepting me. Your father had a naturally short life. How can you complain about me? daughter: As long as my father had not taken a daughter-in-law my father had no troubles at all. He had no headaches or any problems. He experienced none of these problems. 11 Marriage laments from Sai Kung, quoted by Fred Blake (Blake 1978: 21–2) Had father been lucky, I’d have been born a son; This morning father would’ve hired many people To fetch a red flower [maiden]. But father and mother had no luck; A daughter was reared So this morning father prepares, His daughter is dead! The tips of my poor fingers strive To sever the old ties; To sever the old – And to seize the new; But to seize new ties Is to cross the yellow river; Crossing the yellow river My heart is not yet dead; But once across the yellow river, My feelings will be extinguished.

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Glossary

Notes * [???] indicates this text is unavailable. 1 All Chinese terms are rendered in Cantonese using the Yale system of romanization. 2 My research has been done intermittently from the late 1960s until the present in the village of Kwan Mun Hau in Tsuen Wan, a former New Territories subdistrict that was made up of more than twenty small and impoverished Hakka villages. Each village (or group of adjacent villages) is comprised of one or more small lineages. Industrial development began there in the 1930s and intensified from the 1950s, with an enormous influx of immigrants from various regions of China. Industrial and other occupations replaced the farming, fishing and

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3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10

11

12

small businesses that had been the foundations of its marginal economy. Tsuen Wan is now a post-industrial city with a population of approximately 800,000. The original villages remain as distinct communities, however (Hayes 1993). My research there was sponsored by The Population Council, The Joint Centre on Modern East Asia, and the UBC Museum of Anthropology. Ms Miriam Yau Yuk-kuen and Mr Paul Yau Siu-kwong have regularly provided valuable advice, and I have received significant assistance from Mr Yau, Ms Jennifer Woon Chi-yee, and Mr Wong Sheung-yan. I would also like to thank my husband, Graham Johnson, and my older son, Derek Johnson, for their valuable comments on this chapter. For a detailed description of such a funeral, see ‘Observations at a Village Funeral’ (Hase 1994: 129–63. In contrast, James Watson describes the extreme fear of death pollution that pervades a large Cantonese lineage village (Watson 1988b: 112–15). These differing attitudes appear to reflect sub-cultural differences within the New Territories. She also frequently inserted an ambiguous phrase, yahndeih wah, at the end of lines. This could be translated ‘as others say’. Could this have been a distancing mechanism? Caraveli states that the Greek women she knew prefaced their laments with such statements as ‘Then I told him . . .’ before singing laments out of context for her to record. When actually lamenting, they were in an almost trance-like state of ‘pain’ (Caraveli 1986: 173, 188). Caraveli 1986: 170. Chan Shek-ying often sang in Hakka, although sometimes she translated the songs and laments into Cantonese for my benefit. She then explained them at length to me in Cantonese, while also translating them from Hakka, which I do not understand. My assistant, Jennifer Woon Chi-yee, also rendered the Hakka text in Chinese characters as best she could. This work was done primarily in 1976 and 1984. An advantage of hearing them out of context is that they could be repeated and painstakingly explained, whereas in context they would have been incomprehensible to anyone except fluent speakers of Hakka. In rural Greece, in contrast, laments occupy a female sphere that is unorthodox in terms of the wider society, ‘separate and often antithetical to institutional religion . . .’ (Caraveli 1986: 171). According to Caraveli, Greek women’s laments are also formulaic, but allow improvisation within the bounds of each particular regional tradition (1986: 185). Similarly, the laments heard and recorded by Fred Blake in a Sai Kung village were recorded in a handwritten book kept by women (Blake 1978: 13–33). In contrast to the situation described by Rubie Watson (R. S. Watson 1996), maiden houses where young women could live during the years before they were married and learn laments and other skills did not exist in these Hakka villages. She said that in Sha Tin it was easier for young women to lament because they could incorporate lines from their local song that named and described places in their village alliance. Patrick Hase has written about this song in an unpublished manuscript, ‘The Song of the Kau Yeuk: Bamboo Clapper Songs from Nineteenth Century Sha Tin’. According to Bell Yung, the ability to create music within a limited set of possible forms, the ‘theme with variations’, is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese music, resulting in ‘the . . . paradox of giving the performer limited musical resources yet allowing him or her room to exercise musical creativity’ (Yung 1966: 30–1). Similarly, Chan Sau-yan explains the value of creativity in Cantonese opera, in which it may be used to enhance a player’s reputation and give him or her competitive advantage if it is used to undermine the performance of others (Chan 1991).

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13 Rural Greek women also lamented not only out of grief, but also to express grievances, according to Caraveli (1986: 169, 171, 181). 14 One might also argue that women’s somewhat marginal positions within their own and their husband’s families, lineages and villages also made it possible for them to lament publicly during funerals and to express the otherwise inexpressible. They were never core members of either group and, after marriage, were the only residents who were of disparate origins. Rubie Watson argues that Cantonese women’s status remained marginal (R. S. Watson 1996: 110), but Kwan Mun Hau people assured me that women became members of the lineage upon marriage, and that women were considered to be lineage ancestors. 15 This relationship between the profound separations characterizing marriage and death is also found in Greece. According to Danforth, ‘it is not at all surprising that the same songs are sung at funerals and weddings, that these two rites of passage exhibit many other important similarities, or that the metaphor of death as marriage figures for prominently in Greek folk songs’ (Danforth 1982: 75). 16 The local district temple includes among its tablets one dated 1897 that acknowledges more than 500 donations of funds from Tsuen Wan natives who at that time were widely scattered around the world (Hayes 1993: 11). 17 These were used to decorate the women’s otherwise plain hats, headcloths and aprons, as well as certain ceremonial objects ( Johnson 1976). The bride gave large numbers of them to her female relatives during her wedding. 18 Rubie Watson (R. S. Watson 1996: 107, 115) emphasizes the deep significance of this separation for those Cantonese brides who had spent some years in maiden houses. While ties with lineage sisters were also important to Hakka women, Chan Shek-ying also spoke of the strong ties she developed with the married-in women of various ages in Kwan Mun Hau. 19 This theme is very strong in the bridal laments studied by Fred Blake (Blake 1978: 21–2). See Appendix, song 11, for examples. 20 For some time I found the woman’s reference to herself as a red flower and her brother as a white flower to be puzzling, given that red is an auspicious colour. Stuart Thompson’s analysis of colour symbolism in death ritual helps to explain this apparent inversion (Thompson 1988: 92–108). 21 The meaning of this phrase is unclear. ‘Willow leaf’ refers to the matchmaker’s mouth. 22 The fact that a mother could lament her daughter’s departure upon marriage supports Sangren’s discussion (this volume) of parents’ possible sense of loss as their daughter leaves. This is reinforced by women’s assertions, both in conversation and through laments, that mothers warmly welcomed their married-out daughters when they returned to their natal homes for visits. 23 Now the groom goes to fetch his bride, but in earlier years a Hakka bride was escorted to his home by men from his village with their gongs, cymbals and dancing unicorn. 24 In this Hakka context, it was possible for a woman to have two ngoih ga. If her husband had been married to a wife who had then died, the woman occupied the position of daughter to that woman’s family. This relationship entailed similar obligations and exchanges. It was called a ‘grafting a foot’ relationship (bok geuk). 25 In this region, Hakka ancestral halls have a single tablet, representing the founding ancestor and his wife, and also the souls of all his descendants and their wives who have been through the ceremony of seuhng toi. This ceremony is held at the end of the mourning period if the deceased has no surviving senior family members. If he or she does, the ceremony is included with that held for senior family members when they die. People said that when the soul is installed in the hall tablet it is comfortable in the company of the other ancestors, and at peace.

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26 This lament is partly Chan Shek-ying’s explanation, not literally line by line. She explained that telling how she died meant that she should make clear that she died of illness and had not committed suicide. 27 In the pre-war period, women did not participate at all in hall worship, and contributed to tomb worship only by carrying the offerings. 28 Sangren, in this volume, raises the provocative question that some Chinese men may have desired autonomy – separation from the constraints of the family.

References Anderson, E. (1975) ‘Songs of the Hong Kong Boat People’, Chinoperl News 5: 8–66 Blake, C. F. (1978) ‘Death and Abuse in Marriage Laments: The Curse of Chinese Brides’, Asian Folklore Studies 37 (1): 13–33 Caraveli, A. (1986) ‘The Bitter Wounding: The Lament as Social Protest in Rural Greece’, in J. Dubisch (ed.), Gender and Power in Rural Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 169–94 Chan S. (1991) Improvisation in a Ritual Context: The Music of Cantonese Opera, Hong Kong: Chinese University Press Cruikshank, J. (1990) Life Lived Like a Story, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press Danforth, L. M. (1982) The Death Rituals of Rural Greece, Princeton: Princeton University Press Hase, P. (1994) ‘Observations at a Village Funeral’, in D. Faure, J. Hayes and A. Birch (eds), From Village to City: Studies in the Traditional Roots of Hong Kong Society, Hong Kong: Centre of Asian Studies, University of Hong Kong, pp. 129–63 Hayes, J. (1983) ‘The Tsuen Wan Sub-district from Written Genealogies’ and ‘The Transmission of Custom through Written Guides’, in J. Hayes, The Rural Communities of Hong Kong: Studies and Themes, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, pp. 112–26, 192–6 Hayes, J. (1993) Tsuen Wan: Growth of a ‘New Town’ and its People, Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, p. 11 Johnson, E. L. (1976) ‘ “Patterned Bands” in the New Territories of Hong Kong’, Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 16: 81–91 Johnson, E. L. (1988) ‘Grieving for the Dead, Grieving for the Living: Funeral Laments of Hakka Women’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 135–63 Martin, E. (1988) ‘Gender and Ideological Differences in Representations of Life and Death’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 164–79 Potter, J. (1974) ‘Cantonese Shamanism’, in M. Freedman (ed.), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 207–32 Thompson, S. (1988) ‘Death, Food, and Fertility’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 71–108 Ward, B. (1979) ‘Not Merely Players: Drama, Art, and Ritual in Traditional China’, Man 14: 18–39 Watson, J. L. (1988a) ‘The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–19, 109–34

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Watson, J. L. (1988b) ‘Funeral Specialists in Cantonese Society: Pollution, Performance, and Social Hierarchy’, in J. L. Wilson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 109–34 Watson, R. S. (1996) ‘Chinese Bridal Laments: The Claims of a Dutiful Daughter’, in B. Yung, E. S. Rawski and R. S. Watson (eds), Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 107–29 Yung, B. (1996) ‘The Nature of Chinese Ritual Sound’, in B. Yung, E. S. Rawski and R. S. Watson (eds), Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 13–34 Yung, B., E. S. Rawski and R. S. Watson (1996) ‘Introduction’, in B. Yung, E. S. Rawski and R. S. Watson (eds), Harmony and Counterpoint: Ritual Music in Chinese Context, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 1–12

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3

Separations, autonomy and recognition in the production of gender differences Reflections from considerations of myths and laments P. Steven Sangren

Introduction In his recent work, Charles Stafford has drawn our attention to how separations and reunions amount to a recurring cultural theme bordering upon obsession in China (Stafford 2000). Against cultural anthropology’s more conventional emphasis on cultural particularities, Stafford also has argued that universal existential issues – realized, of course, in culturally particular ways – are at play in Chinese separations and reunions. It is this issue of the interplay of the culturally particular and universals of experience and desire that I hope to explore further here. With this objective in mind, I shall suggest that the rhythm of alternating reunions and departures that Stafford sees as central to Chinese experience and sensibility can be construed as intrinsic to the processes of individual and collective production and reproduction. Moreover, the singularities of how individual and collective production are related can be viewed as defining what ‘culture’ is. In particular, I shall focus on those separations and reunions associated with differently situated individuals’ experiences of a crucial socializing institution – the family – and how such experiences figure in defining gender differences and desires. This chapter draws upon research on stories of Chinese gods not initially conceived with the topic of separations and reunions in mind.1 Among other issues, desires for autonomy and for recognition animate some of these narratives.2 Autonomy for Chinese sons, at least as long as their fathers’ authority remains active, is associated with a separation from one’s parents, especially from one’s father;3 in the cases of Chinese daughters, separation from one’s natal family at marriage raises issues of gaining recognition. In other words, autonomy and recognition are important vectors in one’s emotional relations with others, especially one’s parents, and they become especially salient at the key separations and reunions that punctuate individuals’ life courses.4

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Because authority and power are issues both in the nature of filial relations and in conceptions of divinity, it should not surprise us to find parental imagery salient in notions of the gods; Chinese divinities are no exception.5 Chinese gods are generally regarded as deified historical personages; indeed, crucial among the reasons they are thought to have become gods are their activities while alive. The obvious linkage of the nature of these activities to Chinese notions of divinity and supernatural power has generated substantial academic attention. I shall not review the range of interpretation here; much of it has been of a historical and philological sort, some (broadly speaking) Durkheimian. Indeed, the number and variety of Chinese divinities and the stories associated with them seem to many to defy any overarching logic or consistency. Although I believe that there is pattern and logic discernible in the Chinese pantheon (again, for reasons that I shall not rehearse here), there is no gainsaying its baroque diversity. Within this diversity, stories of gods’ earthly incarnations in which vexed family relations play an important role are especially intriguing. My argument here is premised on the conviction that such stories provide an important vantage on the sentiments and ethos of Chinese family life. There are, of course, complex and controversial issues associated with how one interprets the meaning of a text such as a mythic narrative. Setting such issues aside for the present, I propose that some stories can be read both as indicative of the problems associated with family life and as fantasies of resolution or transcendence of these same problems. In other words, mythic narratives can help us to understand both Chinese family processes and their affective resonances. In employing the phrase ‘differently situated individuals’, I mean to draw attention to the very different interests, sentiments, resources and objectives that characterize the activities of Chinese sons, daughters, mothers, fathers and so on in family life. This framing has two objectives: first, I wish to make clear that Chinese culture encompasses very different vantages; second, I wish to set the stage for subsequent argument to the effect that these different vantages are best comprehended as generated within an encompassing culture of family life. In this same vein, I take ‘the family’ to be the primary arena of production of Chinese ‘cultural subjects’.6 The domestic cycle, in other words, is a process of production and reproduction of sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, on the one hand, and of families themselves, on the other. By the ‘Chinese family’, I have in mind, of course, an ideal type – a type defined by patrilineal descent, equal inheritance among sons, and by virilocal residence – in short, a family characterized by what Wolf and Huang term ‘major marriage’, in which a bride takes up residence with her husband’s natal family as a young adult (Wolf and Huang 1980). It is by no means the case that all (or, perhaps, even most) Chinese families conform to this ideal type, and significant issues related to explaining variations and departures from this ideal type have generated much of the cultural anthropological

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literature on Chinese society (including, notably, Wolf and Huang’s study). I do not wish to downplay such issues or linked ones such as questions of historical change or geographical and class-based variation, but again my purposes here lie elsewhere. I believe that most scholars would agree that the ideal-typical family pattern has had sufficient purchase on the Chinese imagination as well as sociologically significant impact on the realities of social experience to justify my employing it as a reference point for analysis. My thesis, in brief, is that patrilineal-virilocal family processes provoke complementary and, to some degree, reciprocal desires in Chinese sons and in Chinese daughters.7 The Chinese family system, I shall argue, poses characteristic obstructions that play an important role in producing emotional responses, very differently configured, for both sons and daughters. Chafing under the constraints of patriarchal authority and their privileged but unchosen role in establishing patrilineal continuity, (at least some) Chinese sons come to desire autonomy and freedom – in Stafford’s terms, a separation – precisely because the family system binds sons so closely. Conversely, because the Chinese family system enjoins a daughter to marry out – another, in this case obligatory, separation – daughters come to desire that which the system denies them – in other words, inclusion (in Stafford’s terms, reunion) or recognition. These desires manifest in stories. I shall discuss briefly only two here – the story of Nezha from the Ming epic Fengshen Yanyi (‘Investiture of the Gods’)8 and the story of the Princess Miaoshan. The Nezha story centres on a son’s desire to establish his autonomy from his father; Miaoshan is about a daughter’s defiant rejection of her father’s wish that she marry. Both stories reach at least a proximate resolution when rebellious child and father are reunited. My readings of these stories suggest how fantasies and desires defined in terms of the crucial separations and reunions that characterize Chinese domestic processes can account in large measure for particularly Chinese genderings of experience. I believe that autonomy and recognition are universally implicated in the development of intimate social relations, but that the social organization of Chinese domestic processes substantially distinguishes sons’ and daughters’ experiences of these relations. Daughters are destined to separate by marrying out of their natal families; from the vantage of their natal families, they are like ‘spilled water’. In contrast, sons cannot escape; they are not only the means to patrilineal continuity, they are its embodied realization. Yet some sons and daughters, as the testimony of our stories makes clear, come to desire what the family system denies them. In both instances, what is desired can be viewed as a certain kind of autonomy. By ‘autonomy’ I have in mind what might also be termed ‘agency’ – that is, recognition that one is the subject or owner of one’s own desires and not merely the instrument or object of an other’s. But because experience limits the autonomy of sons and daughters in different ways, the nature of desiredriven fantasy differs correspondingly.

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But allow me to proceed a bit more methodically in making this case. In what follows, I begin by making explicit some assumptions regarding desire and the psychology of socialization considered as a productive process. This synopsis sets the stage for a brief consideration of how recognition and autonomy figure in our two key mythic narratives. I shall suggest that separations can be associated not only with experiences of loss and alienation, but also with fantasies of autonomy and escape. These fantasies are still part and parcel of Chinese cultural experience, but are more problematic than the institutionally and expressively more celebrated reunions. I conclude that recognition and autonomy, associated with the separations and reunions that characterize individuals’ lives and the domestic cycle, register at the level of desire the cultural particularities of the processes of production of both ‘particularly situated individuals’ (including gender identity or a ‘gendering of experience’) and the family. But I also argue that, in abstract terms, these processes are universal to human experience. A correlative argument with important implications for how we conceive ‘culture’ centres on the question as to whether one can discern in the materials I survey a distinguishable ‘female’ ideology that opposes or resists a dominant or ‘official’ male ideology.

Socialization: the production of ‘cultural subjects’ I noted above that a laudable dimension of Stafford’s analyses of separations and reunions in China is the consideration he gives to the universals attending to kindred experiences, particularly those associated with childhood socialization. Stafford suggests that separations and reunions define some of our earliest and most telling experiences, citing Freud’s much remarked analysis of his infant grandson’s game of fort/da as related to the child’s experience of his mother’s appearances and departures (Freud 1920: 14). The child’s delight in the game (consisting of hiding and retrieving a spool attached to a string), Stafford suggests, corresponds to an ability to control an analogue for these appearances and departures. I agree with Stafford and (at least in this instance) with Freud.9 Moreover, these appearances and departures are usefully viewed as modelling the broader experience of socialization. We cannot altogether control these appearances and departures, but we would like to be able to do so. Both experiences of departures and reunions and experiences of the sentiments or desires they provoke – including a variant or manifestation of a ‘will to power’ – figure importantly in socialization. The infant’s play gives form to a fantasy of omnipotence akin to fantasies apparent in the myths we shall consider. But it also connects desire to power; the infant learns that power is desirable not only as the means to pleasure, but as an end, even pleasure, in itself. By ‘socialization’ I mean the ongoing dialectical processes that link the individual to her or his social relations. These processes are ‘dialectical’ in

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the sense that individuals are both products and producers both of themselves and of the relevant encompassing social relationships in which they find themselves. In these terms, socialization is not just a process that happens to us, but one in which we are active participants or producers.10 By the same token, socialization is not limited to the experiences of infancy and early childhood; as youths and adults, people are acquiring new roles and adapting to changes in the nature and constitution of their most salient social relationships – acting, again, as both authors and products of their own activities and the circumstances that frame them. In sum, socialization is itself a productive process of a complex but, anthropologically, fundamental sort – complex because its products are people (including their desires) and collective institutions, while at the same time these ‘products’ also become the agents of further production. I employ the term ‘social reproduction’ – production of production – to indicate this dialectical complexity. Socialization viewed in this way is anthropologically fundamental because the particularities and variations among the forms or patterns linking individual and collective productive processes define what I take to be anthropology’s object of inquiry – that is, ‘culture’. Stafford’s willingness to consider the universal existential dimensions of our topic is especially laudable because mainstream cultural anthropology – particularly in its ‘interpretivist’ variants – has left us a great deal to say about cultural particularities, but far too little about our shared humanity. I am convinced, however, that comprehending what is particular about Chinese experience – in the present context, experiences of separations and reunions – requires taking into account some logical-cum-existential imperatives of social production that are universal in nature. What I have in mind are processes that, generally speaking, have occupied psychoanalytic theory and philosophy much more than they have anthropology.11 In brief, I assume that the production of ‘cultural subjects’ begins with the infant’s initial engagements with the world, most saliently with her or his immediate social world – in most cases, the family. This ongoing process includes, of course, the socialization of various roles (kinship, gender, etc.), but goes deeper and can be construed to constitute what I term a ‘mode of production of desire’. My choice of terminology here intends to encompass desire within a broadly Marxian framing – in a word, to accommodate Freud to Marx.12 It is important to extend traditional Marxist notions of production because production does not just take place; people’s activities are motivated, goal directed – in other words, desire-driven. To fail to include desire in social analysis focusing on productive processes risks excluding individual agency or assuming that individual desire lies somehow outside or beyond the realm of culture.13 Although these assumptions accord the particularities of culture (conceived, as the reader will recall, as the organization of productive processes) the primary role in the production of socialized individuals or cultural subjects, they do not constitute a radically cultural-constructionist view. Instead,

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I assume desire to be a product of the dialectically complex engagement between the individual and the resistance constituted by her or his world – a world that emphatically includes social relationships.14 As anthropologists we cannot in disciplinary good conscience fail to resist the elision of the culturally particular in many psychological treatments. Yet, human subjects are not altogether intelligible as tabulae rasae upon which culture ‘inscribes’, ‘socializes’ or ‘interpellates’ its independent story, nor are we merely the neurotic after-effects of the absurdities allegedly dictated by the illogical logic of representation.15 Culture gives form to particular social worlds, which, in turn, give form to the individual’s adaptations to it, including desires. We meet the world, both as infants and in our ongoing activities, as authentic agents, even if the nature of our agency and desire bears the strong mark of experience. This ‘mark’ takes the form of both the cognitive schemas (in Piagetian terms) that form our ways of dealing with the world and the sense of lack (in Lacanian terms) that characterizes desire and contributes to motivation (Lacan 1977; Piaget 1962). I believe that anthropology requires a more forthright engagement with the issue of how this accommodation of individual development, including desire, with the exigencies of culture occurs.16 In other words, can we identify human existential or developmental universals or constraints that might help us specify more fully exactly what culture is?17 We might begin by looking for a synthetic accommodation precisely between developmental and psychoanalytic vantages. It is noteworthy that neither developmental nor psychoanalytic approaches altogether escape some assumptions with respect to what appears in both as a kind of primal egocentrism18 as the fount of both desire and developing consciousness and cognitive capacity. For example, in Piaget’s distinction between assimilation and accommodation, the motor of cognitive development is, paradoxically, inertia. In encountering the world, the infant (and, one might reasonably extrapolate, the adult) attempts to assimilate experience by employing the cognitive schemas at its disposal. Unless obliged to change, the infant remains the same. It is only when the world (including its own internal physiological processes) resists this primal egocentrism or inertia that she or he is forced to accommodate to worldly realities in an effort to restore equilibrium. The result of this accommodation can, in turn, provoke development or change in the ‘schemas’. For Lacan, arguably, the discovery that one can be an object to oneself (the ‘mirror stage’) can also be construed to put into motion a never-ending existential crisis that boils down to the desire to return to a state of omnipotent undifferentiation (Lacan 1977).19 Desire is born of separation from a state of undifferentiatedness. A Nietzschean ‘will to power’ can be construed in these terms: to have ‘things’ as one wishes them to be instantaneously and without effort is a fantasy with which all can identify. But it is a fantasy born of the experience that ‘things’ do not submit. There must be ‘things’ separable from oneself to provoke such experience. In other words, desire

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does not exist until it is obstructed. Crucially, among those ‘things’ that do not submit are other people, because, of course, others are endowed with desires of their own. In short, human life and experience entail an ongoing accommodation between one’s egocentric will to power and desire to have things one’s way, on the one hand, and the fact that having things one’s way often ultimately requires recognizing others’ desires, on the other. To take primal egocentrism (perhaps there is a better term) as a universal existential imperative raises vast philosophical and empirical issues that I cannot hope to address here. But for the sake of subsequent argument, allow me to sum up by putting my assumptions in more prosaic terms: ‘desire’ is a product of culturally specific productive processes in which differently situated individuals confront correlatively distinguishable social realities. The experiences constituted by these culturally specific obstructions to egocentric power or control provoke the development of corresponding desires and fantasies.

Autonomy and recognition in two Chinese myths The crux of my argument is thus that Chinese family life constitutes obstructions and possibilities for its sons that differ radically from those it presents its daughters. These obstructions and possibilities, in turn, provoke differing desires and fantasies and encourage the development of differing tactics associated with very different resources. There is nothing surprising in these assertions, but subsequent discussion will show that following from them are some less than conventional implications for our understanding of gender and family process. My discussion in this section is premised on the notion that Chinese mythic narratives constitute a form of expressive fantasy in which the desires and frustrations born of family life come clearly into focus. My case centres on the story of Nezha, a figure best known from the Ming dynasty epic, Fengshen Yanyi. Occasionally referred to as a ‘Chinese Oedipus’, Nezha is a tricksterish superboy of divine origin (Ho 1988). His story is remarkable for its undiluted expression of antagonism towards his father. Because I have written extensively on this story elsewhere, I shall summarize it briefly here. Nezha is divinely conceived. After an uncannily lengthy pregnancy, his mother is visited in a dream by the Daoist immortal, Taiyi Zhenren. Thereafter, she gives birth to a monstrous ball of flesh. Her husband, Li Jing (a general in the army of the evil emperor Zhou, last of the Shang dynasty), cuts the fleshball open with his sword, and a perfectly formed little boy emerges. Possessed of supernatural power, the child mischievously challenges and defeats a series of supernatural and demonic figures – most notably the dragon king of the sea. Li Jing is unable to discipline his son, and Nezha’s victims threaten to petition heaven for his crimes and bring punishment not only upon Nezha, but also upon Li Jing. To prevent harm to his parents and placate his enemies, Nezha sacrifices his own life by

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returning his flesh and bones to them, thereby severing the already vexed filial bond with his father. Nezha’s spirit, however, lives on, and – with the aid of his fairy godfather, Taiyi, and his mother – a scheme is devised to restore his body. Secretly, and against the will of her husband, Nezha’s mother erects a temple at which Nezha’s image can be worshipped. However, Li Jing discovers the temple and destroys its images. Nezha’s spirit flies to Li Jing’s cave, where his mentor magically restores his body, possessed of even greater powers than before, from parts of a lotus flower. In a rage, Nezha then flies off to exact revenge upon Li Jing. For the purposes of the present analysis, the story comes to a crisis when Nezha is forced by Taiyi’s colleague, Randeng Daoren, to quell his bloodlust and to recognize his earthly father, Li Jing. Nezha’s recognition of his father is enforced by a magical pagoda that his father can use to burn his son into submission should he become dangerous or defiant. Reunited, father and son join the virtuous cause of Jiang Ziya against the evil emperor Zhou Wang. In a different way, the issue of recognition figures importantly in another famous Chinese myth, the story of the princess Miaoshan. Glen Dudbridge has written extensively of the history of the legend’s developments and variations, suggesting as well a parallel to Shakespeare’s King Lear (Dudbridge 1978).20 In brief, Miaoshan is a princess who, in order to pursue a life of Buddhist cultivation, defies her father’s desire that she marry. She becomes a nun, but in a rage her father has her killed.21 She sojourns in purgatory where her true identity as the goddess Guanyin is revealed. After winning release for the tortured souls there, she returns to earth where she saves her father who is dying from a terrible disease. The denouement, especially for our purposes, comes when her father recognizes her. Reunited, the father and daughter ascend to heaven together. Recognition in modern English can mean to perceive someone’s identity (as in, ‘I recognized the thief among those in the police line-up’) or to acknowledge a particular form of autonomy or subjectivity (as in, ‘The United States was late to recognize the People’s Republic of China’). Chinese terms can be similarly multi-vocal on this point.22 Miaoshan’s father only recognizes her identity when she reveals herself after saving his life whereas Nezha is forced to recognize Li Jing as his father.23 However, note that Miaoshan’s recognition also entails her father’s submitting to her point of view, an implied recognition not only of her autonomy but of the rightness of her actions. Moreover, this recognition makes of Miaoshan the producer of her father’s immortality, a role that might normally be taken to be the ritual definition as well as the filial obligation of the Chinese son. Note that in the case of the Miaoshan legend, it is the father who is forced to recognize the child, whereas in the case of the Nezha story, it is the child who is forced to recognize the father. I take this difference to indicate that Nezha’s refusal to recognize his father is an assertion of autonomy whereas Miaoshan seems to acquire full-fledged autonomy by gaining her father’s

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recognition. In other words, in the son’s case, full autonomy seems to require a separation from the father; in the daughter’s case, it requires recognition from him, in the context of a reunion. But in both cases, autonomy is ephemeral. Nezha is forced to submit and thus surrender his autonomy; Miaoshan and her father must ascend to heaven. One might conclude that recognition figures in the production of subjectivity and desire in two valences: first, egocentrism confronts its narcissistic limits because the world (in the form of the desires of others) forces the egocentric subject to recognize these limits; second, agency is won only when subjects obtain the recognition of their own desires and being from others. In the stories of Miaoshan and Nezha we thus have paradigmatic expressions of both of these valences. As subsequent discussion should make clear, however, despite the fact that it is the career of a son that registers the first most clearly and that of a daughter that registers the second, both valences are important to all individuals. My thinking in this regard has benefited substantially from ethnographic analyses of exchange and social relations that emphasize the fragile balance between establishing control over others through exchange and obligation, on the one hand, and maintaining autonomy of action or agency, on the other (Munn 1986; Myers 1986; Weiner 1976). A striking feature of Myers’, Weiner’s and Munn’s treatments is the degree to which each identifies a particular concern with this balance (and, sometimes, tension) as a defining quality of the society described. My point, of course, is that the concern over regulating individual egocentric desire in the interest of social relations is a universal one. Recognition of one’s autonomy or agency in social interaction is located precisely at the point at which power is most at issue. The power to influence others requires others’ recognition of one’s autonomy or active agency (Crapanzano 1992: 89); but others’ reciprocal desires demand recognition of their own autonomy, thereby limiting one’s own. In other words, to enhance agency or power, one must limit one’s own egocentric impulses (impulses that would ignore others’ reciprocal desires) in the interest of preserving the effective agency that lies at the core of desire. To survive in a socially constituted world, egocentrism must accommodate the desires of others. But the nature and balance of such accommodation is always in question, animating the micropolitics of social relations, and given form by such culturally specific institutions as, for example, the Chinese family.

Chinese modalities of desire Summing up the foregoing discussion, I believe that recognition arises as a recurrent issue in mythic narratives because it encapsulates the accommodation that individual desire must make to social circumstance. In the cases of Nezha and Miaoshan, the issue of recognition registers the reciprocal frustrations for Chinese sons and daughters produced by the structure of

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Chinese family processes. Patrilineal kinship and the ritual production of an ideologized form of subjectivity in ancestor worship define women in general, and daughters in particular, as not only unimportant, but, in effect, as nonexistent as authentic agents or subjects. In other words, patriliny as ideology does not recognize female agency. This is an assertion that would require a great deal more justification than I can provide here, so I must refer the reader elsewhere (Bloch and Parry 1982; Jay 1992). Of course, the fact that an abstraction like what I am terming ‘patriliny’ defines daughters’ desires out of consideration – that is, that there is no ideological model for a femalefocused subjectivity equivalent to that defined for sons – does not mean that daughters have no agency or desires.24 Neither does it mean that Chinese people – men and women – do not recognize the existence of women’s desires and social power in practical life. It does, however, create special problems for women with respect to locating their desires with reference to the institutionalizations of patriliny. For reasons more complex than I can indicate here, Chinese ancestor worship can itself be construed as an institutionalized fantasy of egocentric omnipotence or self-productivity. But it is a fantasy that systematically co-opts, in order to deny (or denies, in order to co-opt), women’s productive agency. Conversely, filial piety defines a son’s agency to be an extension of his father’s. His autonomy as an independent agent, with desires of his own, is (as noted above) latent. It is only when his father becomes an ancestor, no longer possessing effective desires and agency of his own, that the son can assert himself fully as owner of his own intentions. Given such circumstances, while his father lives, it makes sense that a son’s autonomy rests, in part, on refusing recognition of the father as father (that is, as a father defined in patrilineal ideology as overwhelming his sons’ autonomy). This circumstance no doubt accounts for the formality that tends to characterize father–son relations, increasingly so as sons mature. It also accounts for Nezha’s refusal to recognize Li Jing as father. Of course, just as the denigration of women’s subjectivity or agency must accommodate the reality of their desire and productivity in practical life, so, too, must patrilineal society (as opposed to ideology) compromise with the desires of Chinese sons. It would not do to too thoroughly subordinate and, thus, alienate, those who are destined to become the producers of one’s own fantasized immortality. In sum, it is widely argued and largely conceded that Chinese women are motivated by desires and develop effective strategies that receive little recognition in patriliny’s ‘official’ institutions.25 In the concrete activities of domestic life, women are the most active real producers of the very system that – at least in the ideological abstractions that frame Chinese family institutions as ‘patrilineal’ – denies their productivity.26 Moreover, this nexus – what I term a patrilineal mode of production – helps underwrite a form of exploitation and alienation, in both ideological and material senses, of surplus values. In brief, Chinese women produce Chinese sons

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(both biologically and as socialized ‘cultural subjects’), but the patrilineal mode of production is premised on the notion that sons, as ritual sacrificers, are the producers of orderly social life (encompassing women’s activities). Real relations between producer and product are inverted, products represented as producers, producers represented as products (Sangren 2000a: chapter 7). As Angela Zito has argued, Chinese ancestor worship defines authentic agency or power as the prerogative of the son-sacrificer (Zito 1987).27 We could call this form of cultural subjectivity ‘male’, but such a characterization would not adequately capture the fact that agency is not so much a quality of biological or procreative maleness as it is of ‘sonness’ – obviously a socially and culturally constituted role. That is to say, through what Zito terms ‘filial action’, sons (including the ‘Son of Heaven’ or Emperor) are defined as producing social order, both domestic and imperial. Women are excluded from this Chinese fantasy of patrilineal omnipotence less because they are female than because they are not sons. One way to interpret the Miaoshan story is that what she seems most of all to desire is to be treated as a son by, in effect, recreating herself as a son.28 I cannot justify this suggestion with straightforward testimony from the tale itself, which casts Miaoshan’s refusal to marry in terms of her desire to avoid the pollution associated with women’s procreative and (I would argue) social roles. But if we accept the widely argued notion that female pollution beliefs are strongly associated with patrilineal denial of female productive power or agency (Bloch and Parry 1982; Jay 1992) – a crucial element of which is the fact that women are defined as pre- or asocial outsiders – then it is not a great leap to construe Miaoshan’s desire to avoid the pollution associated with her gender as resistance (hence, her refusal to marry) to the Chinese family system’s lack of recognition of its daughters’ fully human agency.29 However, this resistance is not directed to the Chinese patrilineal fantasy as a whole because it is inspired by a desire to occupy or imagine a place for a daughter in the terms defined by the system. This interpretation is supported by the fact that at the tale’s denouement Miaoshan seems satisfied, having gained her father’s recognition and, to a degree, refigured herself as a son. Taking a somewhat different tack, Dudbridge views the tale as an attempt to reconcile the demands of filial submission to one’s father with the conflicting Buddhist emphasis on purity, which defines marriage and sexual reproduction as defiling (Dudbridge 1978). But if one can agree that there exists a unity at the level of the family system as a whole that encompasses this contradiction, Dudbridge’s interpretation is reconcilable with mine. In other words, ‘filial piety’ as defined in Chinese patrilineal terms plays a crucial role in generating the denigration of female procreative powers that Miaoshan seeks to transcend (Sangren 1997). In these terms, then, the story of Miaoshan allegorically captures the structure of the patrilineal production of daughters’ desires that this chapter attempts to outline. The desire

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to transcend what the system defines as demeaning is produced by this very fact – i.e. that the system denies women’s productivity by demeaning their procreative powers. Yet granting that Chinese patrilineal ideology imagines effective agency as a defining attribute of son-sacrificers, what is one then to make of my contention that such a system provokes resistance among sons, its apparent beneficiaries, towards patriarchal authority? The crux of the matter is that in ritual contexts – a form of patrilineal fantasy of omnipotent self-productivity – son-sacrificers are the producers of an imagined cosmos that includes themselves as cosmological producers (Zito 1987). But note that this claim to produce worldly order (in the case of ‘The Son of Heaven’) or domestic harmony and fertility (in the case of the paterfamilias) constitutes a legitimization of the son-sacrificer’s exercise of patriarchal authority with respect to his subordinates – including, importantly, his own sons. While his father lives, the prerogatives associated with the role of son-sacrificer remain the father’s, whose own sons’ agency and autonomy are latent or deferred – in other words, unrecognized.30 A son becomes an authentic agent in the ideology of patriliny only when death separates the father by converting him into an ancestor. In the context of feminist ethnography, this point deserves particular emphasis because it draws attention to the fact that Chinese patriarchy embodies generational as well as gender-based inequalities. Of course, everyone understands that sons stand to ascend to the ideologically privileged position of son-sacrificer/patriarch – and thus to gain officially recognized autonomy of action – at some future point. Obvious, but less emphasized, however, is that this autonomy depends on his father’s ascendance to the status of ancestor. By the same token, everyone understands that daughters’ autonomy will never receive official recognition in these terms. Take note, for instance, of the aphorism that a woman is subordinate to her father as a child, to her husband as an adult, and to her son in old age. Equally understood is that this absence of recognition does not extinguish women’s desires or their agency in practical terms. But knowledge of women’s desires in practical terms does not constitute recognition of their legitimacy. My point is that patriliny throws up obstacles to sons as well as to daughters, but that ethnographic cognizance of resistances provoked by these obstacles has focused almost exclusively on daughters. This oversight has persisted in spite of the ideology of filial piety that endlessly emphasizes the imperative that sons subordinate their desires to those of their fathers. But as I have argued, this prescriptive demand does not extinguish sons’ desires for autonomy any more than absence of recognition extinguishes daughters’. The fact that male resistances are much less remarked either in the practical cognizance of natives31 or in the ethnographic analyses of observers is no doubt a consequence of the fact that sons’ subordination to their fathers in practical life is ideologically conflated with the privileged position of son-sacrificers as patriarchs. In other words, because boys stand to gain power and authority when they achieve patrilineally defined

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maturity, the system is assumed to align not only with their interests, but also with their intentions and desires. But this circumstance should not lead us to overlook the fact that patriliny entails psychic costs to men as well as to women, a fact that complicates interpreting patrilineal ideology as incorporating a ‘male’ view. I wish to emphasize that the desires provoked by the different obstacles constituted by the Chinese family system for sons and daughters should not be construed as somehow outside of or opposed to Chinese culture, although they clearly inspire resentment of and resistance to the Chinese family order. In other words, the seeds of endogenous resistance originate in the Chinese family system itself; and, thus, they are internal to culture considered as a process of social production and reproduction. This is a point that I shall elaborate below in discussing male and female views of patriliny. To return to the collection’s main themes, if we frame the dynamics of social life in terms of separations and reunions, it is clear that there are some separations and reunions over which we have more control than we do over others. Some of the most crucial – for Chinese sons and daughters, those that most define their respective social existences – are precisely those over which people exercise the least control.32 For daughters, in particular, there is the tragically unavoidable fact that they are born, in a sense, in order to separate. That this role is tragic is emphasized as much in Chinese expressive culture and religion33 as it is in the ethnographic treatments of anthropologists like Fei Hsiao-t’ung (Fei 1939) and Margery Wolf (Wolf 1968, 1972). Part of what makes this separation tragic is that it is, in principle, like death, both irreversible and unavoidable. Indeed, this equation between marriage and death erupts explicitly in various laments, literature and other expressive forms.34 In principle (although not always in fact), daughters have no control in all of this; marriage out, life as an outsider, is (at least, a young) woman’s ‘fate’.35 What sons – at least, filial ones – cannot control is their destiny precisely to fail to separate. The filial son should identify extremely closely with his father. The form of this identification is, of course, filial subordination. Although in philosophical terms, Confucian filial subordination can be construed as a pathway to self-cultivation and, thus, autonomy (Tu 1985), in institutional practice the result has in fact usually been patriarchal subordination. In ritual practice, what Zito terms ‘filial action’ converts filial subordination to a transcendent father figure (the ancestor) into a paradigmatic enactment of the son-sacrificer’s agency or (in our terms) autonomy. But ritually defined filial action of the son-sacrificer becomes the practical limitation of his own sons’ autonomy in extra-ritual life.36

Laments, separations and ‘female ideology’ I have argued that the fact that Chinese sons and daughters confront different obstructions or frustrations accounts for differences in the form of their

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desires. In other words, experience differentiates. This argument bears some affinity to one advanced by Emily Martin for the existence of distinct, even contradictory, ‘male’ and ‘female’ ideologies manifested in a variety of Chinese genres, including rituals, popular religious literature, mythic narrative, laments and funerary practices. Inspired by feminist writing, particularly that of Nancy Hartsock (Hartsock 1983), Martin argues that ‘men’s experience inverts that of women, who, because of their deep involvement in the concrete processes of birth, child rearing, and housework, experience life as concrete, bodily, natural, real, and changing’ (Martin 1988: 175). Moreover, because of the different relationship men and women have to their bodies, the different involvement they have in the biological events of birth and death, and the different kinds of work they do, each gender has evolved a separate view of what life and death mean and how they interrelate. (Martin 1988: 168)37 I have already hinted at my thinking on this issue. I wish to distinguish my argument from Martin’s more explicitly, however, because (as the foregoing makes clear) although I believe that men and women come to view some things in characteristically different ways, I believe that the notion that these differences constitute distinguishable male and female ideologies is problematic.38 Moreover, the foregoing analysis’s framing in terms of desire allows us to account for a loose end in Martin’s argument with respect to the fact that ‘At some times and places, Chinese women seem to have taken dominant male ideology at face value’ (Martin 1988: 177). Martin does not seek to explain why in some contexts women would seek to resist or dispute the ‘male’ ideology, while in others they would accept it. My view is that one can make more sense of Chinese social life and culture if one conceives them holistically – that is, as a system of production and reproduction (including the production of desires) that encompasses gender differences – than as divided into contrasting male and female ideologies. In short, consideration of Martin’s argument might help to clarify some of the points I am attempting to make and, eventually, add another set of considerations to the theme of separations and reunions and, more broadly, to the configuration of gender in Chinese culture. Martin disputes Bloch and Parry’s important thesis with respect to how patrilineal societies share a penchant to hierarchize (by recognizing and failing to recognize) male and female contributions to production and social life (Bloch and Parry 1982). In brief, Bloch and Parry argue that patrilineal societies tend to characterize male production of social life (‘fertility’) as subsuming a denigrated female contribution to natural reproduction (‘sexuality’).39 This argument parallels Ortner’s widely discussed and disputed claim that an association of women with nature and men with cultural

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production is universal (Ortner 1974). Because much of my argument here and elsewhere both draws upon and validates Bloch and Parry’s general thesis, it is important to recognize Martin’s challenge. Martin argues that although Bloch and Parry’s characterizations may accurately describe a ‘male’ point of view, they overlook important differences in the ways women view things. A similar critique might be directed towards my analysis – in other words, that what I have been characterizing as the ‘Chinese family system’ or ‘patriliny’ embodies a ‘male’ point of view or ideology, and thus fails to consider adequately female perspectives. In this section I emphasize that patriliny encompasses and produces both male and female views; that some of the evidence for female resistance to the ‘male’ view is better understood as a product of patrilineal family institutions than as opposed to them; and, ultimately, that Chinese experience does not separate neatly into ‘male’ and ‘female’ ‘ideologies’.40 I suggested at the outset that the Chinese family system conceived in terms of production and reproduction can be viewed as giving culturally particular form to a universal desire for omnipotent autonomy or selfproductivity. This desire is universal not only in a cross-cultural, but also in a cross-gender sense. To think of patriliny as a particular institutionalized variant of a universal desire or fantasy, then, suggests that gender differentiation occurs in a logical sense at the real-world level of confrontation between what I have termed ‘differently situated’ individuals’ desires and practical institutional effects – the obstacles to desires’ realization – in terms of the differential distribution of real as opposed to fantasized (for our purposes, ideologically construed) power, authority and autonomy. Patriliny as ideology thus involves fantasy; and in the Chinese case, it involves a fantasy that is not exclusively or straightforwardly the product of an exclusively ‘male’ view of practical life. As Martin and many others note, women’s desires do not align with the practical consequences of patrilineal ideology in its institutional ramifications, but (perhaps less obviously) neither do men’s; the foregoing analysis of the Nezha story demonstrates this latter point. I argued that the Chinese family system provokes desires and endogeneous resistances in both men and women. But by the same token, patriliny itself can be viewed as an institutionalized fantasy of omnipotent self-productivity, one that defines effective agency from the reference point of an ego- or subject-position roughly equivalent to that of a son-sacrificer. In this respect, the Chinese family system can be considered to privilege ‘maleness’. However, I have argued that one should not conclude that ‘the system’ is equivalent to a ‘male’ point of view solely because the implied ‘subject’ imagined at the patrilineal system’s centre is a son-sacrificer. In other words, given that the system provokes resentments and resistances in both sons and daughters, it makes little sense to view the system as corresponding to any of its (again, differently located) constituent actors’ views

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in any straightforward sense. Both men and women participate in social production, including the production of an ideology that diminishes or refuses to recognize the full extent of women’s contributions. Women (and girls) identify in many circumstances with the male-subject-focused fantasy of omnipotence constituted by the nexus of ancestor-worship and filial piety. One often remarked instance of such identification is the intense involvement of many Chinese women with their sons’ careers and interests.41 Moreover, pollution beliefs denigrating to women seem to be accepted by most women; elder women are often the primary transmitters of such beliefs.42 In other words, there is a good deal of evidence that women believe as much in what Martin ascribes to a ‘male’ view as do men. None of this is to say that women are not oppressed by patrilineal institutions. Neither do I intend to suggest that the consequences of the ‘system’ for daughters and, more generally, women are diminished merely by noting that ‘sons’, too, experience frustrations. My point is rather that ‘the system’ itself is not best conceived as a men’s ideology or as expressing a male point of view. By the same token, my brief discussion of the Miaoshan story suggests that it portrays a daughter as desiring precisely the form of omnipotence defined in patrilineal fantasy to be available only to sons. In these terms, one might reframe my discussion of the Nezha and Miaoshan stories by saying that experience makes daughters desire what sons are supposed to want, but end up resenting or (in extreme cases) rejecting. In other words, some Chinese daughters may buy into the patrilineal fantasy glorifying filial sonship more than do many sons. Despite the glorification of the son, Chinese sons’ youths are characterized by subordination to the father. This subordination can be especially acute precisely because demanding fathers’ high expectations of their sons manifest in authoritarian ways; a patriarch expects his sons to achieve as a projection of his own charisma, on the one hand, and expects his sons to demonstrate their filial devotion, on the other. Moreover, as noted above, the relationship is further complicated by the fact that a son’s achievement of full majority implies his father’s transcendental shift to ancestral status – in other words, separation. The tempering of ideological glorification of the status of filial son rendered by such experiences is, of course, denied to daughters. Never having been treated like real-world sons, daughters may, in other words, come to have a more idealized notion of what a son’s lot might be. In psychoanalytic terms, from a daughter’s point of view, the Chinese son’s ideologized ‘subject position’ is the equivalent of the abstract ‘phallus’ – that is, the son appears to be that which significant others (e.g. her mother and father) most desire. Psychoanalytic theory also suggests that desire to be one’s (usually cross-gendered) parent’s desired object lies at the core of the Oedipus complex. The fact that ethnographic studies and native stereotypes frequently emphasize what might otherwise appear an odd circumstance lends support

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to this suggestion: daughters, destined to separate from their natal families and expected to transfer their allegiances to other patrilines, are often more filial and self-sacrificing towards their parents than are their brothers.43 We could call this behaviour ‘resistance’ to the ‘male’ ideology, but it is an odd sort of resistance that hinges on a desire to be a better child (implicitly, a better son) to one’s parents than are one’s brothers. The notion that perhaps by extravagant self-sacrifice a daughter might overcome the injustice of her parents’ (and patriliny’s) refusal to recognize her is almost a cliché. (A cliché to which even Western audiences can respond; note the success of the Disney version of Mulan.) In my view, the Miaoshan story manifests precisely such sentiments. Martin emphasizes a different aspect of the Miaoshan legend, seeing in its anti-marriage sentiments an example of female resistance to male ideology, on the one hand, and in its affirmation that childbirth and female sexuality are polluting an instance in which the ‘male’ view of the system is reinforced, on the other. But note that in this case women’s resistance to the ‘male’ ideology is intelligible only insofar as it is inspired by an equally ‘male’ denigration of women’s reproductive powers. At the very least, such a circumstance would seem to call into question the status and locus of both ‘male’ and ‘female’ ideologies. Alternatively, I suggest that the rationale for Miaoshan’s resistance to marriage hinges on a tension or contradiction between the ideological premises of a patrilineal system that defines full subjectivity and agency in terms of a son’s filial action, on the one hand, and the practical behavioural consequences of this system’s institutionalization in family processes that obstruct, frustrate and deny women recognition of their contributions to collective life, especially the collective life of their families, on the other. An additional interpretive problem revolves around the assumption that a female protagonist in a mythic narrative represents a ‘female’ point of view. Even though the protagonist of the Miaoshan tales is female, it is very probable that the author(s) were male (Dudbridge suggests Buddhist monks). Moreover, the popularity of the legend and its historical development suggest its evolution in a collective milieu, meaningful to both men and women. In sum, as Martin argues, women both accept and resist patriliny, but it is not simply the case that: ‘at some times and places, Chinese women seem to have taken dominant male ideology at face value’ (1988: 177). Rather, even some resistances to the consequences of the system for women are only intelligible as generated within the ‘system’ itself. (Or, to put the point in more provocative terms, by desires of the same sort as those that manifest as ‘the system’.) Daughters desire to be recognized (especially by their parents) as agents in the terms defined by patrilineal ideology, despite and because patrilineal institutions deny them such recognition. The distinction I am attempting to draw between Martin’s view and my own is thus a subtle one with respect to interpretation of the data.

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I reiterate that I do not dispute the fact that men and women develop different views of things as a result of different life experiences. But unlike Martin, I do not believe that the ethnographic evidence supports the notion that the Chinese family system including its ideological and ritual aspects is usefully characterized as a ‘male’ view to be contrasted with a countercultural female ideology. As Pollitt in her critique of ‘difference feminism’ puts it, ‘The truth is, there is only one culture, and it shapes each sex in distinct but mutually dependent ways in order to reproduce itself’ (Pollitt 1992: 806). Consequently, what may appear as subtle distinctions in the context of interpretation of ethnographic evidence have very significant consequences with respect to anthropological understanding of what culture is and how it operates. To elaborate upon this point, let us return to separations and reunions via some of the data Martin marshals for her argument. In particular, some of Martin’s most telling evidence concerns a daughter’s separation from her natal family at marriage – a juncture that also figures pivotally in my own analysis and in the focus of this volume as a whole. My point will be that resistance to marriage is better understood as resistance to enforced separation from one’s natal family than as resistance to a ‘male’ view or ideology with respect to understandings of life and death, as Martin argues. Citing research undertaken on marriage laments by Blake (Blake 1978) and on funerary laments by Johnson ( Johnson 1988), Martin argues that laments constitute evidence for the existence of a female ideology. Female ideology, according to Martin, holistically appreciates the cyclical nature of life and death; in contrast, male ideology arrests change by attempting to imagine death as a regeneration of life (in, for example, the beliefs associated with ancestor worship). Martin views the female ideology as, in the last analysis, more life-affirming (despite its equation of marriage with death) than the ‘male’ which, by valorizing a stable eternal patrilineal structure, denies life by denying change.44 For the purposes of Martin’s argument, marriage laments are significant because they show that where the male view sees life in marriage (marriage as means for continuation of the patriline), the female view sees death, which is explicitly equated with marriage in marriage laments. (And, conversely, in funerary practices, the ‘male’ view attempts to view death as (a regeneration of) life.) The testimony of the laments themselves, however, suggests a different interpretation to me. As Blake notes with respect to the similarity between women’s funerary and marriage laments, what is most striking in both is a sense of loss at separation (Blake 1978).45 The key separation in both cases is from one’s loved ones, especially one’s natal family – most poignantly, one’s mother. Marriage is like death because both marriage and death force separations. Martin argues that the ‘denigration of separation’ evident in laments (along with a celebration of cyclic change) contrasts with a ‘constant effort to separate opposites, to maintain and make oppositions steadfast, and desire for

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attainment of eternally unchanging social status’ on the male side (Martin 1988: 173). There is evidence, however, that might complicate such an interpretation. For example, in some cases marriage laments can be interpreted as pro forma; that is, daughters are expected to lament their departures as an expression of filial love for their parents. Moreover, some daughters look upon their marriages with complex and ambiguous feelings that include anticipation and excitement as well as regret (Blake 1978: 30). In other words, women (even brides) may see more than death in marriage. However, I would not overly emphasize this point. I agree with Johnson’s observation that The bridal laments suggest a fundamental difference. A man’s life is characterized by continuity in his social relations. Marriage for him means the addition of a woman to his family and his bed. To a woman, marriage, until recently, meant a profound break with all that she knew, a break comparable to death as an entrance into the unknown. ( Johnson 1988: 154) More importantly, I believe that it is not only women who view marriage as a separation akin to death. One of the factors that complicates interpretation of funerary laments is that only women of a younger generation are accorded what in Chinese culture is the rather unique privilege of venting their grief and anger by lamenting the passing of elders. It is important to keep in mind that just as there are women on the ‘male’ side of any marriage (very importantly, the bride’s mother-in-law), so too are there men on the ‘female’ side (e.g. the bride’s father and brothers). But we do not have testimony on the part of parents for their senses of loss with respect to the deaths of children or for losses of their daughters at marriage comparable to daughters’ laments. At the risk of redundancy, allow me to clarify this point. Laments are reasonably viewed as venting not only young women’s grief for their losses but also their anger at those blamed for their unhappiness (including not only go-betweens and the families of their fiancés, but also their own parents). But such testimony does not constitute a view of women’s experience as a whole. Such experience also includes their identifications with their children (including sons), rivalry with other women (sisters-in-law, mothers-in-law and daughters-in-law), and (as the laments themselves show) a sense of betrayal by, as well as longing for, their parents. With respect to women’s tragic lot and the reasons daughters are apparently so devalued, Stafford takes issue with conventional wisdom, making an important point relevant here. Both ethnographers and natives have tended to assume that daughters are devalued because they are destined to leave; consequently, resources spent on daughters are wasted. Stafford suggests that this notion, although not incorrect, must be balanced against the pain parents feel in anticipation of a daughter’s eventual and inevitable

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loss (Stafford 2000).46 The poignancy of the situation is heightened by the possibility that parents’ anticipation of this loss can provoke a kind of defensive reaction that might, in some parents, heighten their love for their daughters (as Stafford suggests), or, in others, cause them to protect themselves by keeping their daughters at an emotional distance. One can easily understand either reaction, and I believe that both are at play, sometimes in the sentiments of the same parent.47 The loss associated with marriage, in other words, is felt deeply not only by daughters, but also by some parents, including fathers. It is a loss that is experienced dramatically upon a daughter’s marriage, of course, but also one that colours the daughter-parent relations complexly in anticipation. Such an interpretation is consistent with the testimony of laments. Although framed solely from a daughter/bride’s point of view, one might suppose that separation’s trauma is also deeply felt by the bride’s parents. It is difficult to support such a conjecture because of a systematic reticence bordering on implicit proscription of public expression of such sentiments.48 Indeed, the opportunity afforded to younger women to vent their frustrations publicly in marriage and funerary laments is unusual if not unique in Chinese culture.49 But note this passage from a lament cited by Blake: Had father been lucky, I’d have been born a son; This morning father would’ve hired many people To fetch a red flower [maiden]. But father and mother had no luck; A daughter was reared So this morning father prepares, His daughter is dead! (Blake 1978: 21) This passage suggests obliquely that not only daughters, but also parents (fathers, in particular) suffer grievously the separation associated with marriage. It also suggests, on the one hand, that girls envied their brothers the fact that boys need not suffer this separation and, on the other, that daughters recognized that the ‘lucky’ father would have a son and would also thereby avoid the trauma of loss. Further complicating interpreting laments as encapsulating a women’s view or ideology is the jealousy that erupts between daughters and daughters-in-law over the respect and love for the mother (-in-law). Johnson’s data show that daughters sometimes bitterly accuse their sisters-in-law of failing to love the mother (-in-law) ( Johnson 1988: 156). Some daughters clearly envy what the daughter-in-law possesses but does not cherish, life or union with the daughter’s natal family. In other words, although separation is lamented by daughters and mothers, it is desired by daughters-in-law. Autonomy for daughters is diminished by the separation imposed by major marriage because it is a separation not chosen and one that subordinates

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them to their husbands and mothers-in-law. But for daughters-in-law, family division (another separation) is desirable because their subordination is thereby diminished.

Conclusions One might summarize the preceding by saying that a daughter’s lot in patrilineal/virilocal Chinese society constitutes an embarrassment or an affront to the pretensions of patrilineal ideology. A daughter’s career, in other words, models life and death, union/separation, in a way that patrilineal ideology (in ancestor worship and the father-son relationship) seems designed to deny (Bloch and Parry 1982; Jay 1992). Just as daughters marry out (and ‘die’ to their natal families), so, too, do sons die – ceasing to be son-sacrificers by becoming ancestors immortalized (but also immobilized) by their own sons’ sacrifices. By ‘embarrassment’ or ‘affront’ I mean that the core conceit of patrilineal ideology – a conceit that amounts to an egocentric fantasy of eternal and self-productive (hence, radically autonomous) existence through ancestor worship – is revealed as such by daughters’ exclusion (because they are not sons) from participation. Women as brides and wives are essential to the reproduction of the patriline, but they are outsiders whose contributions to reproduction can be ideologically and ritually minimized in the alienating manoeuvres of which Jay (1992) and Bloch and Parry (1982) write.50 This alienation is achieved, in part, by assimilating married-in women to the status of patrilineal ancestors.51 But daughters are children – hence, products – of the same patrilineal enterprise that produces sons. Their exile/abandonment via marriage thus poses difficulties for patrilineal ideology. Whereas mothers may be assimilated to the status of patrilineal ancestors in their sons’ lines, from the point of view of their natal lines daughters are lost not only for the remainder of their lives, but conceptually speaking, forever. In short, women who marry out are tenuously assimilable into their husbands’ and (more importantly) sons’ patrilines, but from the point of view of their natal families daughters constitute what amounts to an unassimilable presence. This presence is a reminder of death in two senses. As the marriage laments make explicit, just as daughters are destined to marry out, to separate, and never to return,52 so too is everyone destined to die. But more profoundly, just as the daughter constitutes a kind of unassimilable remainder53 in Chinese patriliny’s phantasmagoric attempts to imagine a place for all souls in its cosmic orderings, so too does death remain – in the last analysis – unassimilable. The fact that daughters cannot avoid marriage out (enabling other patrilines to reproduce) is thus equivalent to the fact that men cannot avoid death (enabling their sons to become the privileged patriarchal subjects). But neither of these facts extinguishes the desire that things be otherwise. Patrilineal ancestor worship gives form to the desire to erase or control death; myths, laments and identification

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with the careers of their own sons express daughters’ desires to gain the recognition denied them in their natal families. I have had much to say about how Chinese family processes obstruct and, thus, produce desires – the differently directed endogenous resistances of Chinese sons and daughters. But perhaps I have discussed too little why and how, in spite of frustrations, the family system succeeds (to the degree that it does)54 in engendering filial behaviours whose aggregate effects are to reproduce the system that spawns these same frustrations. In the case of sons, the answer is relatively straightforward; a son will someday replace his father as patriarch. Subordination in the present carries with it the promise of future empowerment. In the case of young mothers, as has been widely noted, ambition or hope typically is vicarious; mothers come to foster close emotional ties to sons, realizing that eventually sons will themselves become powerful. Sons are willingly drawn into such alliances because of their own difficulties confronting paternal authority. The strategies recommended by the system that obstructs and frustrates sons and daughters, in other words, come together in mother-son alliances and have the unintended effect of reproducing the same system that engenders them. A daughter may not become a son herself, but she can mother a son in whom to place her hopes; a son may resent the subordination he experiences in dealing with an authoritarian father, but with his mother’s support he will acquire authority as he matures. That the effect in both cases is to co-opt resistance should not surprise us, for that is the nature of social reproduction. Were things otherwise, social forms would not reproduce themselves. And, arguably, perhaps things these days are otherwise. One might hypothesize that the distribution of power and authority in Chinese domestic life has changed sufficiently to render the foregoing description passé, even as a statistical approximation. A considerable sociological literature on the impact of government policies (the ‘one-child’ programme in the People’s Republic, for example), economic transformations (e.g. increasing women’s access to extra-domestic employment), and education suggests both that much has changed and is changing and that the general ethos of Chinese family life is surprisingly resilient. I do not intend to assess the magnitude of departures from what I have presented here as a model or an ideal-typical analysis. What this analysis might contribute to such assessments, however, is the suggestion that one include consideration of how changes in such factors as demographic composition and the distribution of economic and political power in the family might mediate the production of desires. To return to the wider implications of this discussion, the evidence is consistent with the point that I attempt to make: to make sense both of cultural and of gender differences in the forms of desire, one must begin from assumptions of a universal sort about the processes of desire’s production. Everywhere society enjoins individuals to accommodate to the social world in which they find themselves. Accommodation shapes the form of desires,

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in part by provoking fantasies of a world in which such accommodation were unnecessary or avoidable. I have attempted to suggest how Chinese family processes – especially crucial departures and unions – shape in characteristic ways the experiences and desires associated with being a Chinese son or a Chinese daughter. The analysis also suggests that socialization is never altogether complete, at least in the sense that accommodation to the exigencies of one’s circumstances does not extinguish the kernel of egocentrism or narcissism in whose interest accommodation must take place. In other words, against constructivist or relativist orthodoxies, I am suggesting that understanding of how cultures produce or construct our senses of personhood (including gender identity) must accommodate this universal dimension of our common humanity at the level of desire. I characterize this assertion as unorthodox because it resists the widely influential notion that human agency or ‘subjectivity’ is a delusion or effect of (at least in post-structuralist epistemology) representative, discursive or signifying practices. Yet it retains an anthropologically constructivist dimension in insisting that, although desire, intention, subjectivity, personhood, individuality and similar categories index phenomena that are authentic and universal (and we are not ethnocentric to believe that they are), cultures conceived as productive processes very significantly account for the forms such abstractions assume in institutional reality and individual experience. How else might we account for the fact that despite the obvious cultural differences that separate us from the experiences of being a Chinese son or daughter, we can respond to stories like those of Nezha and Miaoshan with at least some measure of empathy, a measure that I believe is increased when we append to it some understanding of the characteristic processes of Chinese family life?

Glossary

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Notes 1 To spare the reader the tedium of repetitive references to this work, I note that several papers (Sangren 1996, 1999), a lecture series (Sangren 1996), and a book (Sangren 2000a) employ analysis of mythic narratives to develop a variety of theoretical arguments that bear on issues discussed here. 2 A desire for recognition also appears frequently as a complaint in funerary and marriage laments discussed below ( Johnson 1988). 3 One important separation is, of course, the father’s death. The fact that full autonomy of sons is achieved only when the father dies complicates anthropological understanding of filial piety in ways that have to date been little explored. One of the reasons for this disciplinary reticence is, of course, a corresponding reticence (one might even suppose, repression) in Chinese culture. 4 Blake’s interpretation of marriage laments in the context of an analysis of marriage as a rite of passage could be generalized here; separations and reunions characterize the classic van Gennep tripartite structure of rites of passage (Blake 1978). In other words, rites of passage both mark key separations and reunions from the point of view of individuals’ life courses and employ separations and reunions in graphic ways in the grammatical structure of their rituals (Turner 1977). 5 Chinese gods are most commonly likened to celestial officials or emperors, whose general demeanor is, in turn, explicitly patriarchal. However, mother goddesses are also very prominent in popular religion (Sangren 1983). 6 A term I borrow from Turner (Turner 1985). 7 I also believe, although the notion raises yet another issue that I shall not have space to explore here, that the patrilineal-virilocal family system can itself be viewed, in part, as an institutionalization of the desires it provokes. 8 I discuss Fengshen Yanyi in several previous papers and publications (Sangren 1997; Sangren 1998 (26–29 March)). The edition I read was published in Taiwan (Xu 1986). 9 Derrida similarly discerns a ‘will to power’ in the infant’s game (Derrida 1998). 10 Citing Piaget’s seminal work, Toren is critical of employments of ‘socialization’ that divest individuals of agency in their own self-production, implying that infants and children are passive products in such processes (Toren 1999). Although I wholeheartedly agree with Toren, both on this point and in the richly dialectical framework she advocates, I retain ‘socialization’ here in the spirit of Turner’s Marxian development of the category (Turner 1979a, 1979b). 11 I should note here an influential and widespread critique of psychoanalysis to the effect that it misconstrues what are in fact historically Western preoccupations as universal ones. One can discern the beginnings of such a critique in Mauss’s essay relativizing the notion of the person (Mauss 1985), and in the same tradition Foucault’s works (especially (Foucault 1978)) have been extremely influential. A recent book by Suzanne R. Kirschner encapsulates this trend (Kirschner 1996). Kirschner argues that psychoanalysis unwittingly continues a ‘narrative’ of JudeoChristian heritage of human separation/fall and reunion/salvation, secularizing an originally religious concern. Among the common elements of such narratives, Kirschner identifies ‘images of sexual ecstasy, of marital union, of falling away from and then reuniting with the parent of the opposite sex’ (p. 29). Whereas psychoanalysis imagines such images to project universal individuating processes in culturally specific forms, Kirschner argues, in fact culturally specific notions of personhood are represented as though universal. This inversion of an underlying premise of psychoanalytic interpretation thus contradicts the case I am making here. Kirschner’s argument is diminished by the fact that, although it claims that the narratives it describes are specific to Western tradition, it does not in fact examine any non-Western traditions nor does it account for the social processes

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12

13

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that might provide an explanation for how and why a particular narrative is transmitted. (In this regard, the analysis is intellectualist, looking for a ‘genealogy’ in the realm of representations and ideas rather than in continuities of social processes that might account for alleged continuities in the domain of representations and thought.) More importantly, although Kirschner disavows relativism, claiming a ‘realist’ orientation (as opposed to an ‘objectivist’ one), she begs altogether the question as to what universals might exist in the human condition – a crucial question that motivates psychoanalysis and ought to motivate anthropology. In this respect, Kirschner’s analysis exemplifies what seems to be orthodox constructivist thinking in the ‘human sciences’. This chapter challenges some of her assumptions insofar as elements similar to the narrative for which she claims historical specificity to the West clearly arise in an important, non-Western tradition. Johnson and Price-William’s cross-cultural survey of Oedipus-like stories provides at least some empirical argument in favour of universals at some level of abstraction ( Johnson and Price-Williams 1996). I shall not rehearse other attempts to accommodate Freud to Marx (or vice versa), notably those of the ‘Frankfurt School’ and of Deleuze and Guatarri (Deleuze and Guattari 1983), except to note that their objectives, being less anthropological and comparative than philosophical and political, ramify to very different formulations than what I am suggesting here. By the same token, Marx’s notion that needs are socially produced, although indicative, does not address the complexity of desire and its internal contradictions. In this regard, Zˇizˇek’s (Zˇizˇek 1989) synthesis is suggestive, but broadly speaking amounts to an assimilation of Marx within an encompassing Lacanian framing. The individualist shortcomings of neoclassical economics as well as those of biological essentialism are widely lamented in these terms. I am suggesting here that less obviously some forms of Marxian analysis as well as post-structuralist thinking, by reducing the individual to an effect of encompassing social processes or properties of language, may have much the same effect. For some pertinent observations, see Anderson (Anderson 1983). In broad terms, this characterization aligns with Freud’s distinction between ‘reality’ (the world) and ‘pleasure principles’ (desire). As subsequent discussion should make clear, however, my argument does not intend to support Freud’s theory of instincts or his topography of psychic processes (e.g. ego, id, superego). I have in mind, of course, both such constructionist views as those most prominently exemplified in the writings of Clifford Geertz (Geertz 1973b) and such post-structuralist views as those of Foucault (Foucault 1978) and Lacan (Lacan 1977). For more developed arguments that advocate the significance of a return to psychoanalytic theory see Crapanzano (1992). Geertz’s influential views on culture can be taken as indicative of a broader ambiguity on this issue (Geertz 1973a). On the one hand, Geertz defines culture in terms of the answers it provides individuals for universal existential questions. On the other hand, Geertz argues that there is no such thing as culture in the abstract, that there are only cultures. In other words, human individuals are uniquely products of their respective cultures. Both notions are reasonable enough, but Geertz’s relativist emphasis on cultural particularity overwhelms consideration of the universals (including, but not limited to, the existential problems Geertz notes). In the end, Geertz’s emphasis on culture’s constitutive force pays short shrift to individual agency. My point is not that individual agency must be added to culture in order to correct an imbalance in our thinking about social life, but rather that culture itself must be more fully located precisely at the interface between the individual and society. This objective motivates my emphasis on viewing culture as productive processes including the production of desire.

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18 My usage here follows Piaget’s: ‘In a state of radical egocentrism there is complete lack of differentiation between ego [culture, ideology] and the external world [social production, reproduction], and consequently a state of non-consciousness of the ego, or projection of internal impressions into the forms provided by the external world, which is the same thing’ (Piaget 1962: 199). In practice, egocentrism may resemble narcissism. 19 This is admittedly an idiosyncratic summation. Lacan is notoriously elusive, as evidenced by the wide spectrum of use and interpretation of his work (Anderson 1983; Crapanzano 1992; Mitchell 1983; Rose 1983; Smith 1988; Zˇizˇek 1989). 20 The ‘kernel story’ identifiable among these variations, according to Dudbridge, is a ‘tale about a father displeased with his youngest daughter because of her determined refusal to marry, but who, when he has tried to destroy her and thinks himself rid of her, relies on her heroic assistance to relieve his suffering, and finally admits she is in the right’ (Dudbridge 1978). 21 In some versions, although the nuns are killed, Miaoshan escapes. These episodes and Miaoshan’s sojourn in hell belong to what Dudbridge identifies as the second stage of the tale’s development (Dudbridge 1978: 82). 22 The word ren can mean ‘to recognize; to understand’ or ‘to admit; to acknowledge’. Compound forms can mean to admit a mistake or to acknowledge guilt (rencuo; renzui ). Chengren can mean to confess or to grant explicit recognition. 23 ‘Ren Li Jing wei fu’. The issue of Miaoshan’s recognition is most explicit in the account of a sixteenth-century Spanish Augustianian, Miguel de Loarca, cited by Dudbridge. In this version, Miaoshan ventures from her mountain retreat to heal her father, who does not recognize her at first. Having been healed by her sacrifice of her limbs, her father not only recognizes his saviour as his daughter, but also bows down to worship her (Dudbridge 1978: 8). Recognition plays a role in many of the Chinese textual variants cited by Dudbridge, sometimes complicated by the mediating role of a mountain-dwelling monk, who serves as a messenger between Miaoshan and her ailing father. In these instances, Miaoshan’s father does not know at first that his saviour is his daughter. In all cases, however, Miaoshan’s father is forced to admit his wrongdoing and to recognize Miaoshan’s virtue. 24 But by the same token (as I reiterate below), the fact that agency/subjectivity is defined in terms of sons’ filial action does not mean that this definition describes the real desires or being of Chinese sons. 25 One could cite many studies and arguments, but Margery Wolf’s work stands out for making this point most forcefully (Wolf 1968, 1972). 26 Stafford similarly observes that ‘The contribution of women to the reproduction of Chinese patriarchy and patriliny – via the cycle of yang – is perhaps “erased”, or unremarked, in certain formal terms’, arguing further that, ‘it is perfectly well known to everyone who has lived in a Chinese family, and in many contexts it is ascribed an enormous value’ (Stafford 1998 (15–28 June): 26). My view is that, although women’s productive contribution is contingently recognized in some contexts, the practical effects of its erasure in formal ideology (for example, in legitimating exploitative relations) should not be underestimated (Sangren 2000b). 27 ‘Sacrifice’ here should not be taken too literally. Although sacrifice of animals constitutes an important part of many rituals, there are also many ritual occasions in which offerings consist of rice, fruit and wine. The important ritual role is perhaps better rendered ‘son-offerer’, but because the term is awkward I employ ‘son-sacrificer’ with the foregoing caveat in mind. 28 Common in marriage and funerary laments addressed to parents by daughters is a regret that they (the daughters) could not have been born sons (Blake 1978; Johnson 1988).

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29 Martin (as discussed below) vigorously disputes Bloch and Parry, employing some of the same ethnographic materials I discuss here (the Miaoshan story, marriage and funerary laments) (Martin 1988). 30 This deferral glosses over the disturbing fact that a son’s full maturity is consequent upon his father’s death, a fact that obviously amplifies the potential for Oedipal tension in the relationship. See Freedman’s discussion (Freedman 1966: 146–52). Freedman acknowledges these tensions, citing Fortes’ work on ancestor worship in African societies (Fortes 1959, 1961), but Freedman believes that a combination of equal inheritance among sons (as opposed to primogeniture) and a gradual transference of authority from fathers to sons generally mitigated Oedipal tensions in China. 31 Perhaps fear of sons’ unfilial behaviour manifest in documents like household rules included in genealogies could be construed as a form of recognition of sons’ resistances (Furth 1990). 32 Blake notes that an important element of the sense of betrayal daughters express in marriage laments is that they have been ‘sold’ by their parents ‘through no choice of [their] own’ (Blake 1978: 32). 33 For example, in popular religious literature (baojuan), laments (Blake 1978; Johnson 1988) and stories like that of Miaoshan (Dudbridge 1978). 34 Stafford argues persuasively that separation deserves more attention as a universal constraint (Stafford 2000: 5). 35 The way back ‘in’ is, so to speak, through a woman’s relations with her children, especially sons. But note how identification with her sons may be seen to align women’s desires and interests with those of the patrlineal system, not against it (see also Martin 1988). 36 It is worth emphasizing that, understood in these terms, desire is not essentially sexual (as Freud assumed); rather, sexual desire may be viewed as a type or manifestation of desire in more general terms. Particularly significant for my argument is the disarticulation of sex from gender with respect to desire. Although desire is very differently figured for Chinese sons and daughters, these differences seem to me to be only distantly linkable to sexuality. I do not intend to imply that sexuality is unimportant, but rather to question the degree to which sexuality is primary in the constitution of Chinese gender identity. 37 Pollitt distinguishes between ‘difference feminism’ and ‘equality feminism’, arguing that difference feminism posits that women possess (either as a consequence of the bio-psychological endowments or experiences born of mothering) essential qualities superior to those of men. In contrast, equality feminism insists that such qualities are not essential, but rather the product of the encompassing cultures of gender (Pollitt 1992). Many elements of Martin’s argument manifest characteristics of difference feminism (see also her influential book, The Woman in the Body (Martin 1987)). 38 Martin sorts a number of interesting and clearly relevant Chinese customs into those that express what she characterizes as women’s views and those that exemplify men’s views. In several cases, this procedure strikes me as problematic, however, because participants include both men and women, and the interpretations of the customs’ meanings (as expressing men’s or women’s ideologies) are supplied by the anthropologist. For example, among the ethnographia that Martin considers is the fact that Cantonese women bind babies to their backs with a green cloth previously worn at the funeral of a deceased ancestor. Martin disputes Watson’s (Watson 1982) and especially Bloch and Parry’s (Bloch and Parry 1982) interpretation of this custom as an instance of patrilineal assertion of the superior fertility of male-cum-social productivity over female sexuality, arguing instead that ‘women themselves may be saying something else – such as that the flesh of the corpse is like the flesh of the baby . . . both emerged from the body of a woman, and it is this that is woman’s

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39 40

41

42 43

44

45 46

P. Steven Sangren contribution to the cycle and flow of existence’ (Martin 1988: 173). In this instance, Martin attributes her own interpretation to Chinese women; moreover, the custom is an element in a public ritual, so there seems no clear warrant to assume that because women wear the cloths therefore the cloths express solely women’s sentiments. I believe that there are good reasons to suppose that insofar as an ideology can be viewed as institutionally embodied (e.g. in rituals), Chinese ethnography lends more support to Bloch and Parry’s interpretation than to Martin’s (Sangren 1987: 173–6, 1997: 132–53). However, to justify this assertion would take us far afield here. This hierarchization entails both ideological and material alienation and corresponding exploitation (Sangren 2000a: chapter 7). An additional relevant point is that many of the strategies women characteristically develop to cope with the circumstances that confront them have as unintended effects the reproduction of the system that frustrates them. I have developed this point in another paper and shall not rehearse the argument here (Sangren 2000a: chapter 7). Martin herself notes that many older women ‘are often enthusiastic spokeswomen for what [she] defines as “male” views’ (Martin 1988: 168). By the same token, many of the qualities Martin attributes to the ‘female’ ideology (including its holism and emphasis on change) might strike many readers as similar to Daoistic thinking – certainly not limited to women. Mothers, aunts and grandmothers often instruct girls not to step over their brothers in horseplay, for example. For example, in her study of young working women, Salaff notes that daughters’ filial behaviour seems to be motivated by a desire to prove filial loyalty to the natal family beyond what either the formal expectations of patriliny or selfinterest would seem to dictate (Salaff 1981: 95). Martin acknowledges that individual men and women have access to both male and female views. Yet, it remains ambiguous how this caveat is reconcilable with her main point that ‘because of the different relationship men and women have to their bodies, the different involvement they have in the biological events of birth and death, and the different kinds of work they do, each gender has evolved a separate view of what life and death mean and how they interrelate’ (Martin 1988: 168). ‘“Mourning laments” (sang-ko) and “marriage laments” (hun-ko) [are similar] in the sense that both are different species of the same genus, “weeping songs” (k’u-ko), which mourn the departure of a loved one’ (Blake 1978: 14). Kleeman documents an interesting story associated with the cult of Wenchang that supports the notion that daughters’ situations, despite their structural irrelevance with respect to patriliny, trouble their fathers: ‘This episode [no. 53 from the Book of Transformations] begins with a general comment on the mores of the Shu [Sichuan] region. Because of an overabundance of females, girls are not valued. The primary focus of the story seems to be to encourage the people of Shu to regard female children more highly, and to this end a model family is presented, in which the parents dote on their daughter and are extremely distraught when she disappears’. The father makes long pilgrimage to northern Sichuan to beg of the god ‘for one last meeting with his beloved daughter’ (p. 232). Subsequently, ‘He redeems her from bondage, he and his wife are healed of their ailments, and the evil Zan Yuan [the daughter’s abductor] receives a painful punishment that results in his confession and eventual death.’ (Kleeman 1994, pp. 231–3) The story, like that of Miaoshan, ends with the daughter’s reunion with her parents (her father is emphasized) and the healing of parents’ physical wounds. One obvious interpretation is that abduction here is similar to marriage. The story is a fantasy that imagines such separation to be repairable.

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47 Moreover, one can equally imagine the reaction of daughters to these circumstances: daughters (like Miaoshan and Mulan) might be expected to strive to overcome emotional distance. 48 Men were particularly discouraged from public expression, being expected to uphold the ideals of patriliny and filial piety. We do, perhaps, gain some sense of their attachments, however, in the testimony of love for self-sacrificing mothers evident in the ‘Twenty-Four Exemplars of Filial Piety’ ( Jordan 1986) and in the writings of Qing literati (Hsiung 1994, 1996). 49 In addition to lamenting separations, bridal laments sometime included chastisements of parents for betrayal of their daughter’s love and loyalty, and explicitly called for recognition of the rejected daughter’s good deeds (Blake 1978). 50 I do not intend to suggest that this diminishment of, for example, mothers’ contributions to the production of sons is easily accomplished. Indeed, one finds considerable testimony in ritual and popular culture to the fundamental importance of mothers’ love – a form of recognition of their contributions to their children. Yet the ideology of ancestor worship is one that converts women as mothers into patrilineal ancestors, and can be construed in some cases to coopt women’s productivity as derivative of men’s. See Seaman’s useful discussions (Seaman 1981, 1992). 51 In many parts of China, including the area in Taiwan where I conducted my most extensive fieldwork, women’s names are included on their husband’s ancestor tablets. In principle, such identification with a patriline is the only way a woman’s spirit can become an ancestor, accounting for such practices as ‘ghost marriage’ – a practice whereby the spirit of an unmarried woman is married to a living man and assigned ‘descendants’ (usually one or more of the ‘husband’s’ children) to worship her spirit’s tablet as a member of her husband’s patriline. 52 Married-out daughters in many locales attempt to maintain close ties with their natal families, especially mothers. However, an indication of the degree of obligatory identification with their husbands’ and sons’ patrilines is the fact that they characteristically refer to their own natal families as affines. 53 Note that among the most frequent categories of ghosts who return to afflict their surviving relatives are those of unmarried daughters who cannot be worshipped as ancestors. The well-known custom of ‘ghost marriage’ is designed, of course, to assign such spirits a place in a patrilineally defined afterlife – to assimilate them in some proximate way. 54 A brief note in anticipation of a common objection to framing analysis in terms of social reproduction is warranted here. To argue that the patterns of social life (or social production) must be comprehended in terms of reproduction need not imply that nothing changes, as some critics seem to assume, but only that to the degree that pattern is perceivable, it can be explained only insofar as it is transmitted – reproduced – over time. Alternatively put, ‘pattern’ in social life (including ‘culture’) is itself an effect or aspect of productive-cum-reproductive processes.

References Anderson, P. (1983) In the Tracks of Historical Materialism, New York: Verso Blake, F. (1978) ‘Death and Abuse in Marriage Laments: The Curse of Chinese Brides’, Asian Folklore Studies 37(1): 13–33 Bloch, M. and J. Parry (1982) ‘Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life’, in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–44

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Crapanzano, V. (1981) ‘The Self, the Third, and Desire’, in B. Lee (ed.), Psychosocial Theories of the Self, New York: Plenum, pp. 179–206 (Reprinted in V. Crapanzano (1992) Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 71–90) Crapanzano, V. (1992) Hermes’ Dilemma and Hamlet’s Desire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Deleuze, G. and F. Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (translated by R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. Lane), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Derrida, J. (1998) Resistances of Psychoanalysis (translated by P. Kamuf, P. Brault and M. Naas), Stanford: Stanford University Press Dudbridge, G. (1978) The Legend of Miao-shan, London: Ithaca Press Fei, H. (1939) Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley, London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. Fortes, M. (1959) Oedipus and Job in West African Religion, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Fortes, M. (1961) ‘Pietas in Ancestor Worship’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 91 (2): 166–91 Foucault, M. (1978) The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction, New York: Pantheon Freedman, M. (1966) Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung, London: The Athlone Press, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 33 Freud, S. (1920) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Volume XVIII, London: Hogarth Furth, C. (1990) ‘The Patriarch’s Legacy: Household Instructions and the Transmission of Orthodox Values’, in Liu Kwang Ching (ed.), Orthodoxy in Late Imperial China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 187–207 Geertz, C. (1973a) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books Geertz, C. (1973b) ‘Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali’, in C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays, New York: Basic Books, pp. 360–411 Hartsock, N. (1983) ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing the Ground for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in S. Harding and M. B. Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality, Boston: D. Reidel Ho, K. (1988) ‘Nezha: Figure de l’enfant rebelle?’, Études Chinoises VII (2): 6–26 Hsiung, P. (1994) ‘Constructed Emotions: The Bond Between Mothers and Sons in Late Imperial China’, Late Imperial China 15: 87–117 Hsiung, P. (1996) ‘Sons and Mothers: Demographic Realities and the Chinese Culture of Hsiao’, paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Honolulu Jay, N. (1992) Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion, and Paternity, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Johnson, A. W. and D. Price-Williams (1996) Oedipus Ubiquitous, Stanford: Stanford University Press Johnson, E. (1988) ‘Grieving for the Dead, Grieving for the Living: Funeral Laments of Hakka Women’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 135–63 Jordan, D. K. (1986) ‘Folk Filial Piety in Taiwan: The Twenty-four Filial Exmplars’, in W. H. Slote (ed.), The Psycho-Cultural Dynamics of the Confucian Family: Past and Present, Seoul: International Cultural Society of Korea, pp. 47–112

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Kirschner, S. (1996) The Religious and Romantic Origins of Psychoanalysis, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Kleeman, T. (1994) A God’s Own Tale: The Book of Transformations of Wenchang, the Divine Lord of Zitong, Albany: State University of New York Press Lacan, J. (1977) Écrits: A Selection (translated by A. Sheridan), New York: Norton Martin, E. (1987) The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, New York: Beacon Martin, E. (1988) ‘Gender and Ideological Differences in Representations of Life and Death’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 164–79 Mauss, M. (1985) ‘A Category of the Human Mind: The Notion of Person; The Notion of Self’, in S. Collins and S. Lukes (eds), The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–25 Mitchell, J. (1983) ‘Introduction – I’, in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, New York: Norton, pp. 1–26 Munn, N. (1986) The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim (Papua New Guinea) Society, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Myers, F. (1986) Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among Western Desert Aborigines, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press Ortner, S. (1974) ‘Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?’, in M. Z. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Woman, Culture, and Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 67–88 Piaget, J. (1962) Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, New York: Norton Pollitt, K. (1992) ‘Marooned on Gilligan’s Island: Are Women Morally Superior to Men?’, The Nation (December 28): 799–807 Rose, J. (1983) ‘Introduction – II’, in J. Mitchell and J. Rose (eds), Feminine Sexuality: Jacques Lacan and the École Freudienne, New York: Norton, pp. 27–57 Salaff, J. W. (1981) Working Daughters of Hong Kong: Filial Piety or Power in the Family?, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sangren, P. S. (1983) ‘Female Gender in Chinese Religious Symbols: Kuan Yin, Ma Tsu, and “The Eternal Mother” ’, Signs 9 (1): 4–25 Sangren, P. S. (1987) History and Magical Power in a Chinese Community, Stanford: Stanford University Press Sangren, P. S. (1996) ‘Myths, Gods, and Family Relations’, in M. Shahar and R. Weller (eds), Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, pp. 150–83 Sangren, P. S. (1997) Myth, Gender, and Subjectivity, Hsin-chu, Taiwan: Program for Research of Intellectual-Cultural History, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Tsing Hua University Sangren, P. S. (1998) ‘Fate and Transcendence in the Rhetoric of Myth and Ritual’, paper presented for panel on ‘Heaven’s Will and Life’s Lot: Inquiries into the Concept and Practice of Ming in Chinese Culture’ at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC (26–29 March) Sangren, P. S. (1999) ‘Spirit Possession, Family Issues, and the Production of Myth’, paper presented for conference on ‘Religious Traditions and Social Practices’, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Nangang, Taiwan (5–6 March) Sangren, P. S. (2000a) Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of Alienation in Social Reproduction, London: Athlone, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 72

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Sangren, P. S. (2000b) ‘Women’s Production: Gender and Exploitation in Patrilineal Mode’, in P. S. Sangren, Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of Alienation in Social Reproduction, London: Athlone, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 72, pp. 153–85 Seaman, G. (1981) ‘The Sexual Politics of Karmic Retribution’, in E. M. Ahern and H. Gates (eds), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 381–96 Seaman, G. (1992) ‘Winds, Waters, Seeds, and Souls: Folk Concepts of Physiology and Etiology in Chinese Geomancy’, in C. Leslie and A. Young (eds), Paths to Asian Medical Knowledge, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 74–97 Smith, P. (1988) Discerning the Subject, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press Stafford, C. (1998) ‘A Chinese Marriage Made in Hell’, paper presented at the International Conference on Cross-Cultural Anthropology in Honor of the OneHundredth Anniversary of Beijing University, Beijing, China (15–28 June) Stafford, C. (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Toren, C. (1999) ‘Introduction: Mind, Materiality, and History’, in Mind, Materiality, and History: Explorations in Fijian Ethnography, London: Routledge, pp. 1–21 Tu, W. (1985) Confucian Thought: Selfhood As Creative Transformation, Albany: State University of New York Press Turner, T. S. (1977) ‘Transformation, Hierarchy and Transcendence: A Reformulation of Van Gennep’s Model of the Structure of Rites de Passage’, in S. F. Moore and B. G. Myerhoff (eds), Secular Ritual, Assen: Van Gorcum, pp. 53–70 Turner, T. S. (1979a) ‘Kinship, Household, and Community Structure among the Kayapo’, in D. Maybury-Lewis (ed.), Dialectical Societies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 179–217 Turner, T. S. (1979b) ‘The Ge and Bororo Societies as Dialectical Systems: A General Model’, in D. Maybury-Lewis (ed.), Dialectical Societies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 147–78 Turner, T. S. (1985) ‘Animal Symbolism, Totemism, and the Structure of Myth’, in G. Urton (ed.), Natural Mythologies: Animal Symbols and Metaphors in South America, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, pp. 49–107 Watson, J. L. (1982) ‘Of Flesh and Bones: The Management of Death Pollution in Cantonese Society’, in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–86 Weiner, A. B. (1976) Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives in Trobriand Exchange, Austin: University of Texas Press Wolf, A. P. and C. S. Huang (1980) Marriage and Adoption in China, 1845–1945, Stanford: Stanford University Press Wolf, M. (1968) The House of Lim: A Study of a Chinese Farm Family, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts Wolf, M. (1972) Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, Stanford: Stanford University Press Xu, Z. (attributed to) (1986) Fengshen Bang (Fengshen Yanyi), Tainan, Taiwan: Lida Chubanshe Zito, A. (1987) ‘City Gods, Filiality, and Hegemony in Late Imperial China’, Modern China 13 (3): 333–70 Zˇizˇek, S. (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology, New York: Verso

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4

An unsafe distance Stephan Feuchtwang

Among the psychological and anthropological approaches outlined in the introduction, this chapter will concentrate on the recalling of loss. The subject I want to address is absurdly large: the creation of the past. But then so is ‘separation and reunion’. The two are related since the making of a past is to reunite what have been separated temporally and to recall what has been lost. Large as these topics are, they can be brought into focus by concentrating on two crucial processes: death rituals and historiography. Death ritual and historiography both involve forgetting and then retrieving something, a spirit, a ghost, what has gone, as if it were a memory and can be told as a story. My main argument will be that stories of ghosts are stories of unbidden retrieval of memory, covering loss that is taboo, too shameful, and too repressed to be told. I shall try to approach the acute and ambivalent feelings involved in this through a mixture of psychoanalytic and anthropological accounts of rituals of mourning. But I will start with an historical revision that intruded into the composition of a man’s past as he was separating himself from secular life.

Eulogy, history and politics In 1996, Gao Bineng celebrated his ninetieth birthday. He was still a powerful man, and had been politically the most powerful in Shiding, a township in northern Taiwan. Late in his life he had written and had printed for distribution a poem of twenty-one, six-character couplets, the Song of Life’s Vicissitudes (Rensheng Yuxi – Yuxi literally means ‘wandering performance or sport’). It is a song without anecdote or event, placing his life in cosmic time. From its beginning the song calls upon heavenly law (tianli ) and the karma ( yeyin) which have determined his life in the flesh. Its last couplet tells of his desired release: ‘When I am a spirit [shen] I would want to complete buddhahood and be a free soul [ziyou ling], My returning soul [hui hun] on earth protecting my sons and grandsons’. He anticipates the two desired triumphs of transcendence and regeneration. At the big celebration of his birthday in September 1996 he sang this short poem to a large audience of family and admirers as part of a long

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speech he gave about his vigorous life.1 The rest of the speech covered moments of pride in a life of public office in which he had done his best for local people. In various genres of speech, song, and a longer verse autobiography Gao Bineng had for a long time been building his self-presentation. In effect, he had been rehearsing its terms as a prelude to his own eulogy.2 The last twenty years, which included his management of Shiding’s temple, its reconstruction and the great rite of its consecration, could be seen as a withdrawal from politics, a long interlude gradually separating him from a political past. But his self-composition trailing a good past had been seriously disturbed since at least 1994 by journalists and historians coming to interview him about the largest military incident of Nationalist (Guomindang) rule in Taiwan after the February 28 1947 massacre in Taipei and other cities. The date ‘Feb 28’ (2/28) is now the name given to this incident.3 But in Taiwan nothing could be published about 2/28 until the end of garrison rule in 1987. The Taiwanese and Nationalist President, Li Denghui, who presided over the loosening of his Party’s grip on the media and political organization from 1988 and continued as elected president from 1996 to 2000, set up a commission to investigate 2/28 in 1991. Its report, released in 1992, estimates the number slaughtered was 20,000. February 28 has become a Taiwanese day of mourning, and a monument commemorating the victims was opened with full state ceremony on 2/28/1994. But it was defaced by someone angry at the insufficiency of recognition given to the victims and to the movement for independence to which they are martyrs. Here is a shrine for the unknown dead, politicized, and the subject of historical investigation and state recognition, like other shrines for the unknown dead of the ‘Great War’ in Europe, or the named dead of the Vietnam War in Washington, DC. They are common to secular states and to their conventions of commemoration and recognition, dependent on historical narratives, themselves subject to revision. The next largest incident of this kind, whose recalling much later disrupted Gao Bineng’s self-presentation, took place at the turn of the year from December 1952 to January 1953 in Shiding township. It too could not be spoken or written about for more than forty years and was in the archive only as military and criminal documentation, consigned to secrecy. As with the 2/28 massacre, the reopening of the case forty years later was made possible politically by the decision to end military rule and single-party politics. Its rescue and the release of its secrets is the work of historians, reporters and members of the main opposition party, the DPP (Democratic Progressive Party, Minjin Dang), including the only DPP representative in the Shiding township assembly, Lin Zhongxin.4 The murky period of Gao Bineng’s life that returned to disrupt his retirement was the period in which alternative histories of Taiwan were being fought out. It concerned the forces of the civil war in China, Nationalists and Communists. Taiwan had been insulated from the civil war on the mainland

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by the fact that it was a Japanese colony from 1895. For instance, its very small Communist party was a branch of the Japanese Communist party according to the direction of Comintern until it was dissolved in 1932.5 In 1945, after the surrender of Japanese armies, Taiwan was reunited with the mainland and came under its Nationalist (Guomindang) government. The few Communists in Taiwan were now considered part of the mainland Chinese Communist Party. Their number grew with the disaffection from and opposition to the corrupt and brutal Nationalist government. Resistance to Guomindang (GMD) rule, and in particular the outbreak of civil war between forces of the GMD and of mainly Communist-led resistance to them occurred on the island just as it did on the mainland, but with far fewer arms and less definite Communist involvement. Between 1949 and 1952, in the years following its retreat to the island, the mainland GMD government and army, defeated on the mainland by the Chinese Communist Party, wiped out the remnants of strongholds held by anti-GMD forces. These and the following years became known as a period of ‘white terror’ (baise kongbu) when any political dissidence from GMD rule was deemed ‘Communist’ and violently suppressed. Having started as a whispered description, in opposition to the perpetrating government, ‘white terror’ is now openly used and there is contention over what are its dates and whose tragedies are to be included in it. Acceptance of a period and its name is an important preliminary to retrieving it and the personal stories implicated in it from confusion and secrecy. It gains for them a shared tragedy just as on the mainland the categorization of the whole decade 1966–76 as the Wen’ge (Cultural Revolution) has done for the huge number of people who claim to be its victims (Watson 1994: chapter 4). There are court records of the trials of people held to be leaders of nine ‘Communist’ bases between 1950 and 1953 (Zhang and Gao 1998: 11). The biggest trial was of the leaders and participants in the base, that largely came under Gao Bineng’s jurisdiction as head of the township of Shiding. Records and interviews indicate that between 1948 and 1950, some political activists, most of whom had professed an admiration for Communism and a very few of whom had joined the Communist Party, turned from organizing a political study group in Taipei city to organizing villagers in a rural base. The base they chose was in the mountainous area called Luku, on the border between Shiding and Xizhe townships, which was the home of at least one of them. On 28 December 1952, the hamlets were encircled by some ten thousand troops. They detained all the villagers over the age of 10, demanding identity documents of them and of anyone entering the area. All those identified by military and police intelligence agents who had infiltrated the organization were charged with the crime of assisting Communists. According to surviving witnesses one or more were shot on the spot, and the detained were kept hungry, cramped and tied together, forced to fold into each other

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in a squatting position for several days, beaten into admitting they were Communist or to identifying those who had been their organizers. As the head of Shiding township, Gao Bineng was involved. Two of his own administrative staff who would soon be accused of being conspirators in the base area, were with him in the Shiding office overseeing the counting of votes for the Taipei county assembly elections. But they left before Gao Bineng had heard what was happening. Then he was told by General Gu Zhengwen at the head of the secret security police (Bao’an Silingbu, Baomiju) operation to come to the small temple grounds where the villagers were detained and authorize with his official stamp the release of people who had been found innocent. Gao Bineng tells his version of events to put himself in the best possible light, saying he did what he could to get the innocent released.6 But one of his rivals, who described Gao and himself as the only two men in Shiding politics, tells a different story.7 This rival, Fang Hotian was working in the security police in the city but had been sent to his native area, near Luku, to detect army deserters hiding there. Like Gao, Fang had gone around those detained and guaranteed the innocence of the people he recognized so that they would be let go. Both Fang and Gao hold local loyalty, not loyalty to self or to the Guomindang as the highest political virtue. But Fang Hotian accuses Gao Bineng of not doing enough to protect the villagers under his care. Beyond that, he infers that Gao must have done something clever to save his own skin, in which he succeeded despite the fact that through his deputies he must have known of the base area. Such opinions were openly voiced in Shiding, turning Gao Bineng into a less than generally respected figure. In total those killed, imprisoned or labelled political criminal made up most of the adult population of the cordoned-off hamlets.8 In the 1990s they haunted Gao Bineng because a new politics had changed the historical verdicts of the white terror. Younger men, like Lin Zhongxin, are moved by the Luku victims. They find in their fate, as many more do in the victims of the 1947 massacre, an emblematic story of grievance and desire for recognition. They are sympathetic objects for the passions of those Taiwanese who feel with justice that their language and the place of their ancestors on the island had no political recognition in the Nationalist politics for repossessing the mainland and making Taiwan a bastion of their version of a unified China. An indication of the success of DPP legislators in reopening the history of the Luku incident and the claims of its survivors, was the appearance in August 1998 newspapers of reports of the launch of a book about it.9 The bulk of the book is interviews, including one with Gao Bineng. Tables of the names and sentences of those tried precede the interviews. The historian, Zhang Yanxian, writes an introduction to the tables and interviews. He was curator of the national historical museum and head of the national history office in one of the institutes of the central research academy. He

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had begun his researches into the Luku incident in 1991, four years after the ending of garrison command and the formal recognition of opposition parties. The chief of Taipei county, which includes Luku, is reported to have promised that a plaque expressing sorrow and condolence and a memorial would be put up by the county government in Luku for the peasants and miners who had suffered, and that research would continue. The incident would be put into school texts, as a lesson to prevent such a thing happening again. In addition he recommended that the county government should help survivors claim compensation and regain justice. Between September 1997 and May 2000 three television documentaries on the incident were shown.10 Among other revelations, Luku men who had been labelled political criminals and in the worst cases had ‘traitor’ stamped on their identity cards said they had had to move elsewhere in search of work. The first television programme ended with a strong plea for including the incident in the white terror and thereby entitling the victims to compensation. In fact the promises made by the DPP head of Taipei county have been kept. Historian Zhang has published a second book of interviews. The survivors and relatives of the incident have the right to claim compensation. And a memorial has been built. The memorial is not a grave. It is a new kind of commemoration, just as the larger memorial to the victims of the Feb 28 1947 massacre is. It also has an odd and haunting effect. Much of the present population of Luku is recent, people who moved into the half-abandoned hamlets. The memorial reminds them and the many tourists who come to this picturesque mountain area of the dislocated inhabitants of the houses they now inhabit. Pictures recapitulating the incident often feature images of the Guangming temple as the identifying icon of the place because it was where the base organizers had meetings and where the troops then detained the villagers. It had included a depository of bones of previous strangers, for a Buddhist monk to care for their salvation. The ossuary is still there. But what is shown in the photographs is a completely new and enlarged Guangming temple built by donations from a population most of which is not related to the population of the 1940s. The original temple was a vegetarian hall, called the Luku zhaitang. The new temple is far larger, its name is new, and it is a branch of one of the large Buddhist foundations that have grown to great prominence in Taiwan since the late 1980s. Even the name of the area has been changed from Luku to Guangming in official administration. Like the strangers whose bones are kept in the Guangming ossuary most if not all those who were executed or shot have not had proper burials. The son of one of the executed told his television interviewer how he was ordered to collect the battered body of his father, shot after three years of imprisonment. He sewed up the bullet wounds, to make the body whole again, but did not have the means to transport the body back to Luku for burial. Merit-making rituals were completely beyond his means. Instead his father was cremated

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near the prison. In other words, the dead victims of the Luku incident are among the incompletely mourned dead. They are in limbo, ghosts ( guishen) who have not been commemorated properly as ancestors and transcendent souls in the way Gao Bineng knew he would be. The survivors and the descendants of both victims and survivors have a sense of grievance, which they are taking up in claims for compensation. The Luku memorial was inaugurated on 29 December 2000, anniversary of the beginning of the encirclement campaign of 1952. It is just down the hill from the Guangming Buddhist temple. The area around it is within walking distance or a short drive from what is now a northern suburb of Taipei city. The most direct route to it is up a winding mountain road that passes teahouses on the slopes of tea plantations. The monument is at the angle of the junction of this winding road with a larger road that runs along the contour of the hill in which it is set. That road is a bus route taken by weekend trippers. In October 2001 I was there with my Taiwanese co-researcher, Shi Fanglong, on a less crowded weekday. While we were looking at the monument a group of three walkers aged between 60 and 70 appeared. They had come up the winding road to visit the monument, which they had seen on TV and in newspapers. They told us they were curious because while they had known about 2/28 as children, they had not heard about the Luku incident. In their idiom, spoken in Taiwanese, the wronged souls have become ‘good brothers’, the euphemism for orphan, hungry souls. As one of them said: ‘Because it was not fair, the good brothers seek revenge and haunt bad Nationalist Party members’ and named one such. ‘Now is their time. Now the Nationalist Party has lost power, because of Li Denghui. At the time of old Chiang Kai-shek people were too scared to speak about it. Now they can and they can seek justice.’ ‘The soldiers just shot them and pushed them over. They had no proper burial. So they are good brothers.’ These ‘good brothers’ are wronged souls who have become vengeful ghosts. The omission of proper burial and treatment of the dead as ancestors of a family or of proper care for those who might otherwise have produced a family line takes us into another means and another reckoning of perpetuity, in which the memory of a wrong is transmitted. Most if not all those who were executed or shot will not have had proper burials and are ‘ghosts’. Two uses of the word ‘ghost’ ( gui) cropped up in the television interviews with victims. Wang Wenshan had been in a troop of youngsters trained to bear arms, though there were precious few actual guns. We were the ‘band of little ghosts’ (xiao gui dui ), he said, a benign usage like little rascals but with a connotation of banditry, and therefore with a strong sense of being on the margins. On leaving prison he was hounded by police. Another ex-prisoner described what this was like. He said that police officers would casually come up to greet him and every few days asked him to produce his household record and identity card. Police would follow them around, he said, ‘like hungry ghosts’. In this usage, perpetrators and victims are caught together in a dangerous transition zone of ghost stories, the dislocated and the marginalized.

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Hungry ghosts are abandoned because they have no descendants to feed them. There are rites for a charitable feeding of orphan souls, but they are despatched back into their limbo at the end of the rites. On the contrary by selecting, by naming and thus individuating them, as Professor Zhang has done, they can be saved either by rituals of merit-making that take them through the courts of purgatory, or by a book and a commemoration that recover them for a history. This is the zone of a lost or repressed archive and its stories, which is now being recovered and its stories recalled. The politics of recalling them give a slant to each retelling. One documentary concentrates on the suffering of the villagers and their entitlement to compensation, another on the politics of social justice which join the protagonists of the Luku base with others inclined towards socialism and therefore suppressed by the Guomindang. The first is most easily absorbed into DPP campaigns, the second far less. Historical recall is selective and judgemental, just as the recalling of ghosts is selective. Both evoke courts of recognition and of justice. Courts of compensation and the book, journalism and politics of recognition have interfered with Gao Bineng’s own, more local audience and ceremonial of recognition. But it did not interrupt his preparations because the audience at his birthday remained loyal to him. Elsewhere, and among others, his political past remains, disputed, judged in different ways. Let me now move from the reproduction and transcendence of Gao Bineng and follow the example of the unfortunate Luku dead in limbo, to expand the theme of recalling the lost with stories of hungry ghosts and grievance.

A ghost story Looking into the first pages of my 1966 field diary to prepare for this chapter I came across a story that I had not remembered and had never used. They describe a conversation with teachers at the school in Shiding. These teachers at the primary school were my first adult contacts, and among them the most important to me was Wu Guocun who knew some English and could practise it with me. The conversation turned to the question of belief in spirits. ‘They all seem to believe in the existence of spirits’, I noted. But then immediately commented that ‘Wu does not know. He says there must be something for there to be so many stories.’ As I wrote (using the transliterations current at the time), to show what he meant Wu ‘told me the following story: In Suli, Yunlin hsien, near Peikang (Wu’s native place) a man went to work on his bike and sometimes felt the weight of someone riding on his pillion but could never see anybody. Separately and without telling him, his wife would sometimes see a young woman riding on the pillion as he arrived home. His wife was taken ill. When she recovered, her voice had

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Stephan Feuchtwang changed and she wept a lot. He asked her why she wept. She said that she was a woman whom he and some other men had murdered for the jewellery she was wearing on the boat returning from Fukien where they had gone to work. This story was reported in the newspaper and the woman [wife] is still alive. Wu’s mother who ‘is a Buddhist’ had visited her, though the woman didn’t like to speak of it.

I would put teacher Wu into the tradition of the literati in China, which maintains at the same time scepticism plus agnostic acceptance of the possible activity of ‘ghosts’ ( gui or guishen).11 But the newspaper story was of course told in another politics and through other media than those of imperial China. The story Wu told me had in fact been through several contexts of interpretation. Originating with the man on the bicycle and his sick wife, it passed eventually to a newspaper, to teacher Wu’s mother and through teacher Wu to me. Each time it would have become something else. For the newspaper it was a strange story, in a fairly long Chinese tradition of strange stories, curiosities from remote places, sports of nature, and tales of the supernatural, written in their disappointment or retreat from official life by literati to earn a living.12 It has precedents in stories of female spirits who seduce men. But I have not yet found a parallel story of a female avenging ghost possessing the wife of her murderer.13 In any case, even if there is one, the bicycle pillion and exact location makes it into a midtwentieth-century Taiwanese news legend. For the sick wife, it might have been a diagnosis for a curing ritual of exorcism. For teacher Wu’s Buddhist mother it could have been a story requiring her compassion and prayer for the salvation of all three, the avenging ghost, the possessed woman and her husband. For teacher Wu it simply raised the possible existence of ghosts. Through them all, what remains is a story of a wronged woman whose spirit possesses the wife of the wrongdoer. The rest of this chapter will draw out the implications of juxtaposing the two uses of ‘ghosts’, the ghosts of Luku’s secret history and its public recognition in history and documentary, and the unbidden return of the avenging ghost.

The avenging ghost as paradigm of a forgotten and potentially disruptive past We can think of the past as a recalling of lost objects (things or people), of what was but is no longer. The past is made by drawing a line. The line separates objects, placing some behind in an accessible past and some in front, present. It may be drawn by an institution such as mourning ritual, or by historical writing. Whatever else the line tells, it says that things or persons are lost, in the sense that they are no longer, but that they are recalled.14 On the other hand, stories and rituals of ghosts, as we shall see, enact a drama of unbidden retrieval. They seem to tell us about a past silenced by

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the line drawn on it, a line of taboo or repression. I use the psychoanalytically loaded word ‘repression’ advisedly, because I want to introduce the processes of grieving as a motivating force for recall and construction of lost stories, transmitted as grievance. The process of recall and reconstruction is a recovery over what has been lost or repressed. Physical and pychic experiences always leave traces. But, as Laplanche and Pontalis (1973: 248) point out, for Freud memory-traces are not engrams corresponding to sensory impressions, rather they are in a relation to other traces, repressed or recalled. Current sensory activity of perception evokes an association of traces, charged with emotions according to the path of association. Traces are combined in object-choices. The latter are internalized objects of attachment and identification invested with more or less acutely ambivalent combinations of emotions. In external reality, such an object may be a person or ‘some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on’ (Freud 1917: 243). Loss of places smaller than a country, such as Luku as a place of birth, can be included. But they are combined with other traces of experience into an internal object, and there they are selectively repressed according to the conflict of the emotions with which they are charged. Not only the losers but also those who can imagine the loss may internalize and repress what they can imagine and thereafter be haunted by the lost object, when they read a ghost story or see the memorial in Luku. Discussing the loss of such an object, Freud (1917: 256–7) distinguishes between thing-traces that are unconscious and word-cathexes that are preconscious and conscious, and loaded with feeling. The work of mourning is a work of recalling a lost object. It is a testing against the reality of current experience that reminds me of the loss, a piecemeal working through the attachments to each trace associated with and recalling the lost object. The loss may have come about through death or through rejection of my emotional attachment. For instance, loss of the country to which I am devoted could be by an official attack or by forced migration. Mourning is the pain of contrast experienced in the aliveness of the emotions and the external objects to which they are attached in perceptions which are at the same time reminders of the absence of the object in reality. It continues with a gradual reattachment of those emotions to other objects and the turning of the lost object into a treasured and remembered past. In the case of acute ambivalence, an idealization of the lost object and a denigration of self take place, which is open and repetitively stated. When rage against the object, its departure or removal and hatred for the idealized object is most strong and most strongly disavowed in favour of an idealized love, mourning becomes compulsive and continues. Freud describes this as ‘melancholia’, and uses for it the analogy of an open wound (1917: 253), a trauma (257). One reason for this analogy is that the pain involved is both physical and psychic. Another reason is that it is like a scar, an external but attached part of the organism. Melancholia is such

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acute ambivalence of feelings that it compels a split. Things carried out by one part of the self are experienced at the same time as an attack on the self. Melancholia is a paranoid anxiety or fixation on the lost object, split off from the other self that feels blamed for causing its loss. The expenditure of emotional energy in melancholia goes beyond the pain of mourning. The wound is the openness of the self to its fantasies of being attacked, rejected or humiliated. They are lived as real experiences, as things not as words, and acted out by constant self-denigration. In a manic phase these emotional energies are turned outwards, in manic attachments and hatreds; in the depressed stage they are turned onto the self, but either way regresses to primary narcissism, which is the self-love necessary for both physical and psychic survival. All energies are devoted to the battle between loss and preservation. These are, I believe, the energies of grievance. Perhaps for didactic reasons, Freud draws a line between normal mourning and its pathological continuation, unfinishable mourning. The point where mourning is completed seems to be an ideal for therapeutic purposes, the turning of a disabling pathology into a normal pathology. But melancholia need not be disabling. It can be energizing in its compulsion. Its split emotions may be invoked in displaced ways, by acts, which draw upon experience that is not itself retold, or by stories that are repeated because they evoke but do not retell a memory. I count histories, stories and rituals of ghosts among the last. They do not correspond to any particular psychic process, but they are a means of sorting or evoking forbidden or dangerous and melancholy projections and introjections. Stories of ghosts are a permissive sanction for what is repressed and fantastic. They are a way of transmitting and collecting melancholia, and therefore they are potent figures for the transmission of grievance, or of grief passed through generations and seeking completion in some court of recognition. So let us describe a past as a body of potential recall across which lines of actual recall and repression are drawn. These lines create a dynamic of unbidden return as well as a bidden past. People do their recalling by whatever means are suggested to and created out of the contexts in which they remember. Among such means, stories of ghosts stand out as tales of an unbidden return to life. They seem to be a permissive sanction for what is repressed and fantastic. History involves two kinds of potential, the archive of remains and the utterly lost. Historians’ writing assigns both to a narrative past, using the first to reconstruct the second.15 Graves, ancestral cults and memorials on the other hand assign individuated and named significance to a dead person. Local temples and their festivals are yet another way of consigning things to a past and making a past significant. They celebrate a named god and provide altars for the performance of small or large rites of offering and territorial purification that acknowledge the anonymous dead upon which that place was constructed, be they previous inhabitants or the martyrs who

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died in establishing the place.16 By any of these means pasts can be reassessed or resuscitated from archives of documents, from mortuary remains, from kept or from uncovered objects, or from witnesses whose voices have not been recorded as in the case of the Luku documentaries. By ‘archive’ I mean whatever can be called upon for a narrative, a commemoration, or a new myth or legend. It is a resource. But it is also an activity, a setting down of material, an authoritative storing and inscription. To archive is to have the capacity and the material resources to establish a store of knowledge and information. It is to have an authority of foundation, which can be in rivalry with another such authority. Because it is selective, it is destructive of a previous or another order, as in the replacing or redefining of a canon, or school, or religion, or the historical resource of a nation. It implies a powerful authority, such as a state. But it is also a process that can be described at once psychically and socially. Psychically, it is a reworking and an impression on previous memory. Yet it is that by which memory is lived; censoring, repressing, but also directing and sorting lived memory. An erased archive is a lost resource for recall, psychic and collective. Such a loss can haunt an existing archive and lead to a reconstruction, just as the new politics of Taiwanese identity has resuscitated the documents and biographies of the Luku case.17 Prior to both historiography and myth, including ghost stories, is the disposal of the dead. Death ritual is an archiving process and the separations involved in it will be my remaining topic. To take it up, let me sum up the conceptual setting I have been suggesting: ghosts are mythic figures of unbidden return. They point to a pair of tragedies. One is the tragedy of being utterly forgotten, the other is the tragedy of not being confined to the setting of a past. The second tragedy is represented not only by the murdered and robbed boat passenger, but also by the victims of the military operation in Luku, whose past had been neglected. Both tragedies bear emotional charges of loss that has not acquired a recognizing recall. In short, stories of avenging ghosts set up two alternatives: forgotten pasts and pasts that return to haunt and possess, and the second of these is a demand for a third past which is that of due recognition or bidden recall. Historiography is just such a process of bidden recall and of recognition, which can uncover and authorize a lost or forgotten archive or reconstruct an utterly lost one. Mourning and commemoration are also processes of recognition. Indeed as rituals they are performances of completed communication with lost objects. In a more elaborated context I have put forward a theory of religious ritual that it addresses a postulated subject. Religious ritual represents it by an extravagant completion of that address, performing both the petition and the response, even while it brings response into question and in many instances defers it. Its syntax expects response, and ritually completes it. (Feuchtwang 2001: 159)

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Among religious rituals, death rituals organize mourning into a completed communication with a ghost, singling it out from the potential anonymity of being lost and forgotten. They separate good death from the bad death of anonymity. Good death is to bad death as mourning is to melancholy, which is the haunting grief of a shameful destruction or the grievance of an incommunicable and unrecallable loss. The rite of exorcism which could have been recommended as a cure for the wife of the murderer possessed by his forgotten or repressed victim, is also a religious rite, a self-completing communication with the avenging ghost through commanding deities. It first acknowledges and then expels the ghost through petition and response from a deity with powers to command, kill and expel.18 In an exorcizing cure, violence is answered with violence. Similarly, but in the opposite direction, acquiring recognition and justice often includes revenge, in which perpetrators become new ghosts, victims of rebounding violence. I shall now argue that Chinese death rituals suggest the primacy of bad death.

Mass death and individuation Among the tragedies of unrecalled pasts in China the deaths of conscript labourers at the frontier have a mythic place in the story of the virtuous wife who finds her husband’s bones buried in the stones of the Great Wall which he was conscripted to build.19 It is a story of individuation. A grieving wife’s lament causes the wall to break, revealing her husband’s bones. Her grieving not only singles out her husband’s bones, it is also life-restoring. She cuts or bites off a finger and the blood dripping from it identifies his bones and joins them together. As she carries his skeleton in her arms to begin her journey home, her tears dripping on to the bones begin to bring the flesh back too. But an old man (or in another version a goddess) persuades her to carry the skeleton on her back, where it returns to a bundle of bones. Bitterly she buries the bones and the old man or goddess, identified as the local earth god or as his wife, stands guard over the grave.20 The story of Meng Jiangnu, the grieving widow at the Great Wall, has in Taiwan become an explanation for conventional burial, for the properly drawn line on a past. It is common to erect a stone to the grave guardian at the side of a tomb. An old man who told the story to Emily Ahern Martin ended it by saying ‘We pick up the bones in order to let the dead live again.’ But it is the life of an ancestor whose bones ‘will’ as he said, ‘last and be remembered for 10,000 years’ (Ahern 1973: 204), and definitely not the life of flesh. Preserved flesh is uncanny and dangerous. Mortuary rituals repeatedly separate bones from flesh, ancestral past from present and living descendants, mourners from their neighbours, yin from yang. I will return to this separation. I want first to draw attention to the process of individuation. It is a process long established by Hertz (1960 [1907]), and his theory that death rituals perform a passage from a threat

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to mental and social cohesion into a triumph of social reconstitution. According to this idea, individuation is retrieval of a social person to the community which gave that person significance, but now as an ideal presence rather than a real memory or object of thought and feeling. The process is one of exclusion and return, which has stripped the individual of its living imperfection. Biological death is turned into social regeneration. But Hertz’s bland attribution of everything to a conscience collective gets in the way of something that the story of the grieving widow also tells us. In his zeal to stress social conformity, Hertz writes that where death is socially insignificant it ‘will go almost unnoticed’ (1960: 76). But that ‘almost’ covers everything the widow’s story and stories of avenging ghosts dramatize, the fate of the forgotten who can come back to haunt. This haunting by the insignificant is the state from which individuation is a rescue. What is more, the forgotten and insignificant are called from limbo anonymously in a rite of general release (pudu). It is a rite performed in a number of different contexts, one of which is during merit-making rituals for the commemorated dead.21 All performances of this rite renew and redraw a locality, calling the uncommemorated dead who could be haunting that locality into it, and expelling them again at the end. General release (pudu or pushi) is known in sinified Sanskrit as yulan pen ‘the rite of the bowls’. The scene when this rite is first revealed comes at the climax of a story that is enacted at funerals. It comes in the story of the filial monk Mulian who sets out to find his mother in hell. He finds her in a hell where she is nailed down with forty-nine spikes. Mulian cannot release her, and the Buddha intervenes by smashing down the walls of her hell-prison, releasing its prisoners for higher rebirth. But Mulian’s mother is reborn as a hungry ghost endowed with a ravenous appetite that she can never satisfy due to her needle-thin neck. In fact, Mulian tries to send her a food offering through the normal vehicle of the ancestral altar, but the food bursts into flame just as it reaches her mouth. To rescue her from this fate, the Buddha intervenes again. He instructs Mulian to provide a grand feast of ‘yu-lan bowls’ [alms bowls full of food] on the fifteenth day of the seventh month, just as monks emerge from their summer retreat. The Buddha prescribes this same method of ancestral salvation for other filial sons to follow in future generations, and the story ends with Ch’ing-ti’s (Mulian’s mother’s) ascent to the heavens.22 Buddhist or Daoist priests, in the rite of general release, feed the hungry ghosts. Buddhist monks or nuns look after the bones or ashes of the unburied dead. To the widow at the Great Wall we must therefore add Mulian as a figure that individuates and saves the dead for recall and commemoration.

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But where the widow tries to go further and bring her husband back to life, Mulian rescues his mother not back into life but for ancestral bliss or reincarnation. Mulian’s rescue is enacted in the death ritual often known as chaodu. In that enactment, his is the master story within which a number of other rescue figures and their stories are told. Chaodu, a drama of rescue, sets off the fate and the anonymity of the unrescued in the rite of pudu and their drama of charitable but provisional visibility.23 The widow at the Wall is herself enacted in this episodic theatre-ritual (Schipper 1989: 143). As Schipper writes: ‘there seems no end of journeys to the Underworld’ (1989: 136). He considers each story of rescue to have been an accretion, to make the established rite more comprehensible and attractive to its audience of mourners and their neighbours. They are all enacted in that part of the funeral ritual that is most theatrical, least canonical, and most participatory. It comes after the segment in which scriptures are read and their reading notified by a sacrificial burning of memorials for the addition of merit to the deceased, during which the mourners have been led only in listening and obeisance. In this theatrical segment the mourners themselves are led to take part in the siege and the smashing down of the walls of hell, or in helping Mulian with his load of scriptures and his mother’s soul. They laugh at bawdy jokes told by the ritual experts at the expense of the virtuous characters, including Mulian himself, and at their evocations of fierce and foolish guardians of the gates and bumbling officials of the offices of the purgatorial courts (Dean 1989: 62–3, Schipper 1989: 145).24 In fact the theatre of rescue mixes terror with mockery, the possibility of being caught and tortured by monsters with the trickery and the acrobatics needed to avoid them or to reduce them to size. Chaodu is the singular summoning and salvation of a soul from limbo and purgatory, core of the liturgy of merit-making which in turn is part of the rituals which transform a death into a named grave, an ancestral tablet and a spirit in the paradise of ancestral bliss – as the ritual experts themselves said in death rituals I have observed. By contrast, general release, pudu, ends with the ghosts back in wastelands and border regions, the same places where the ashes of the offerings sacrificed for the individuated soul are also left. A commemorated soul is a reminder of the uncommemorated. Death rites are themselves rites of forgetting in order to remember again. Forgetting is fraught with the danger of return. Personal, ambivalent memories, however they are worked through in actuality, are to be discarded in these rites, which sanction an archival process that reduces personal life in order to retrieve an idealized icon who is an ancestor and a saved soul. But the loss is potent and dangerous, and it may not be complete. Burial without merit-making rituals, as with the Luku victims, leaves the soul unrescued for rebirth or paradise. The very poor do not have such rituals performed for them. They are not rescued, but they are recalled as a reminder of a fate that could have befallen those saved by merit that is ritually made for them.

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Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (1982) elaborated the triumph over death performed in death rituals as a separation of flesh, which entails timebound contingency, putrescence and polluting sexuality from bones that embody a transcendent (ideological, and idealized) authority and its regeneration. The rituals at once play up the polluting flesh, acknowledging its necessity for regeneration in order ideologically to deny it. In the same way and in the same gesture of ambiguous separation, Bloch and Parry point out, the rituals deny the ‘bad’ death of lonely and malignant ghosts. ‘The “good” regenerative death can only be constructed in antithesis to an image of “bad” death, which it therefore implies. It requires and must even emphasise what it denies and cannot obliterate that on which it feeds’ (1982: 18). This is a remarkable formulation, emphasizing the dynamic of disavowal in the separation performed by death rituals and by the ideology of social regeneration.25 According to Bloch and Parry what is performed in death rituals is not simply a duality. It is a disavowal. They show that the sequence of repeated separations of flesh from bone acknowledges the necessity of the flesh and the female, but only in order to end mourning by a re-entry into the world of flesh as a triumph over it, regenerating descent line and hierarchical (male) authority.26 Gao Bineng’s poem was just such an idealized and ideological statement of triumph over flesh. But it will be apparent from my account of his story that my point of focus is not so much on re-entry, as on the act of separation from the avoided fate, and on a possible disruption by that which is disavowed, not the triumph over it. The separation effected by death rituals is not just an act of passage. It is an act of consignment into a past, a moment of archival authority. The tomb and the ancestral tablet are added to the archive. The construction of a good death creates a past. It does this by a disavowal of the female principle of crossing over, of joining what is separated. It is a disavowal, because it is first admitted, indeed it is required for intercession. But then the figures of good intercession are for release into ancestral bliss and not back to life, and they are male, whereas the widow, who wants her husband back with flesh on his bones, is denied. In terms of the psychoanalytic concept of mourning as a process which turns a living object into a contained past, we can distinguish a live memory with its mix of feelings of affection, resentment, fear, annoyance and so on, from an idealized object. Mourning rituals turn the live memory into an idealized object: an object of transcendent bliss or an ancestor of regenerative fertility. The widow at the Wall reminds us of the live memory, memory with flesh so to speak.

Bad death and good Compared with the widow at the Wall, Mulian is an exemplary figure but he is still strikingly anomalous. He stands between good and bad death, between the icon of the remembered and the anonymity of the perennially

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forgotten. In contrast to the patrilineal life of remembered and preserved bones, he is celibate, without descendants and is saving a sinful mother. His father appears only in the first scenes of his story, already elevated to heaven after a life of virtue. Nevertheless Mulian is played and commented upon by his ritual actors as an example of filial duty. His story and the story of the virtuous widow by their very prominence indicate the rarity of good fortune and of a good death – dying of old age, at the end of an allotted span and with descendants. They tell of rituals that have powers necessary to transform a bad into a good death. A good death was the subject of discussion one day in the winter of 1967 in the corridor outside the doctor’s surgery in Shiding, a place of gossip. A couple of days before, an old man who lived in one of the hamlets in the hills above the streets of Shiding had said to the doctor that he wanted to die. Yet the doctor could diagnose no illness. Now, on this day, we were informed that very early in the morning while it was still dark, the old man had dressed into warm clothes and said to his wife that it was time. He had then walked into the central, south-facing room of his house, placed a chair facing outwards, sat in it and expired. In effect he had himself carried out what normally has to be done to a corpse after death. He had placed himself where he would be put into his coffin, where he would lie with his feet towards the door, his head near the altar shelf at the back of the room. This was a good death. But most deaths are not, and they need retrieval into goodness by ritual. Dying anywhere else than at home or at a time before one’s span is torment to the person who dies and a danger to whomever lives or passes nearby. It was common in anger to curse someone, ‘may you die in mid journey’ (Taiwanese: pua lo si ). A natural death (ziran siwang) is one in which a person dies at an appropriate time, in an appropriate place, and in a natural condition. Most poignantly the death of a child, or of a woman without children, is hardly commemorated at all, but receives a minor and shameful burial.27 They are epitomes of forgotten and powerfully haunting losses. On the other hand, if the death of an adult is out of time or simply a death with a bodily impairment, or just out of the home, then special remedial rites must be performed.28 Among them I want to point out some of the most ordinary acts, which accompany encoffinment and do not rely on ritual experts. The deceased is not yet an ancestor. S/he is a soul (linghun) with an amoral power to harm or to benefit. Left outside the home, the soul is a trapped but powerful force. The first thing to do is to return the body to its home, to introduce it through a back entrance and to place it in its coffin, feet towards the main door. Clothing would then be removed and placed on a stool next to it, the body washed and reclothed in white, a temporary tablet and incense burner and a soul flag made with the name of the dead person on them. An oil lamp is lit at the side of the coffin. If the family is wealthy enough to afford both the skills of a paper and bamboo artist and the service

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of merit-making rituals, a puppet representing the person to be taken through merit-making and rescue rituals and a dwelling representing the final life of bliss are commissioned. The whole family is plunged into a state of mourning and marked off from its neighbours and from its own altar shelf for ancestors and gods, which is veiled. They are engulfed in an affair of misfortune that must be separated from affairs of happiness or good fortune. They enter a limbo between life and death. The removal of clothes and re-dressing of the body are a metonym for the removal and cleansing of the soul for an eternal time out of the present. The doctor repeated to me a Qing dynasty rhyme about the old clothes which the eternal clothing replaces and which shows that removal can be from a self-consciously historical present: Thau m ti: Buan a thi: Kha m ta Buan a te

The head doesn’t wear it It’s a Manchu heaven. The feet don’t wear them It’s a Manchu earth.

Many different symbolic statements are made to the effect that the passage of the soul beyond the present is irreversible, but at the same time they admit the possibility of reversal, if something is done wrong. They are symbolic statements by the living, dramatizing the fate of the soul as if from its position. The oil lamp literally marks its point of view, the place to which the soul is called back to its body and home only to be reminded that it must depart from both. It is sometimes placed in a lantern frame inscribed ‘platform for viewing home’ (wang xiang tai ). A ritual of communication is performed between living and dead, primarily the soul but also the gods and demonic officers into whose jurisdiction it is imagined to pass. An intentionality is imputed to the soul, that it wants to return to life and flesh.29 On the base of the coffin the sign of the Northern Dipper had been chalked. The soul flag had been planted into a tub of rice representing the same Dipper and the astrological location of the span of its life. In ceremonies of good fortune a tub of rice along with a measure, scissors, looking glass and oil lamp are the ritual means for repairing a threatened life span, but in this case the rice tub is to do the opposite and extinguish it. Other, less complex statements were made. Sometimes a boiled egg was placed in the coffin or into the temporary incense burner for the soul of the deceased. ‘When this egg hatches you may rejoin your descendants’ one person expounded. Or a stone is placed under the head of the corpse, to say with the same wary solicitude ‘when this stone melts you may come back’.30 Death rituals effect a double separation. One is the separation of the dead from the living. The other is a separation of the remembered from the forgotten, for every rescue is from the fate of limbo – of joining the mass of the forgotten – as well as from the debts of sin. Avenging ghosts demonstrate not just bad deaths but also their return from this borderland.

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Sites of bad death and volatile pasts In the temporal and spatial imagery of the separation zone envisaged in death rites, the murdered stranger is in torment, on the borders and wastelands at the edges of the locations of the remembered. She is nobody’s responsibility, in a time and spatial zone which migrants and vagrants inhabit. But she does not remain in that zone. It is against such returns as hers on to the pillion and into the wife that pudu are performed. Between pudu, offerings are placed at bridges, by streams, and on path-sides to propitiate wandering but trapped and vengeful ghosts. Found bones are housed in small wayside shrines, anonymous sites that complement and contrast with graves marked by tombstones inscribed with names. Temples to the god of the Eastern Peak, to the more Buddhist Di Zang Wang and to other demoncontrolling deities such as Da Zhongye are the more urban housing of the forgotten. These are the sites of negative archives, which complement the positive archive of tombs and ancestral tablets. When the construction of a road brings up skeletons, when the tide leaves bones on a beach, when a racketeer (liumang) is murdered by a rival gang, when a girl dies without bearing children, shrines are built for their remains and propitiators make offerings at them. When those offerings result in a turn of fortune for the better, the anonymity of the bones gives way to a title that can serve as a name. The shrine becomes individuated, the archive becomes more positive. Reassessment and recognition add new stories and new versions to the stories already told about the bones. But they remain in the ambivalent state of being feared but exploited as sites where luck can be changed. From the perspective of social order and hierarchy, a memorial site of the bad dead is unruly and open, whereas a tomb and tablet is strictly ruled and well-confined.31 Political history enters into this volatility and ambivalence when the bones are identified as those of armed men killed in communal warfare, or of unknown men who died at the hands of Japanese occupying forces (Harrell 1974: 199–201). To those who identify with them, they are martyrs, the unknown soldiers of one’s own side, recalled and treasured even though their deaths were violent and therefore bad. The separation that consigns them to the past is then a commemorative day for offerings, besides such times as offerings are made to exploit their ambivalent and disorderly power. That unsafe distance, the zone of dangerous crossing from bad deaths is the greatest source of new stories, of gods and demon controllers, of spiritmedia of all kinds. They conjure up on one hand an imagery of purgatorial courts and exorcistic armies with hierarchical positions and titles. On the other hand, there is a more monstrous and astrological imagery of terrifying monsters (mosin+a in Taiwanese, moshen in Mandarin) without human identifiers, out of place and dangerous. Between them are the mass of potentially powerful, disorderly and hungry souls (e-gui ) of the trapped and forgotten between flesh and its transcendence.

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We are now beyond memory, or rather the lived recalling of memory of a person, and therefore beyond mourning and into the projections of the desires and loyalties of the living upon the most receptive sites of the dead. They are not simply fantasies. Transmitted recall of battles, migrations, losses at sea, of times of great infant mortality, of racketeers, and of childless young women have some basis of fact or plausibility in the historical events of the bad deaths located by these sites of offerings. The dialogue with the imaginary intentions of the dead conducted in mourning ritual accompanies not just the internalizing of loss. It is also a reminder of one’s own lost objects and of continued life, one’s own fear of a bad death, of insignificance and one’s own efforts to assure the three r’s of continuation and extension: reproduction, remembrance, and recognition. This is what a ghost story and mourning can recall on a personal scale. In stories ghosts are usually singular. In their collective state they touch on history. The basic condition of ghosts and of mourning is massive, though located, trapped where they died or attached to their killers as in the case of the pillion rider. But placed in a temporal zone between those of secular life and its transcendence, they are myth. History, on the other hand, is a narrative sequence of events among the living over a number of generations akin to the temporality of reproduction but not confined to any one line except that of a dynasty or, in modern nations, that of a people. History is the secular time of the flesh. Ghosts are those who are incompletely separated from it but also ignored by it. They tell of the dangerous return of those until now forgotten, neglected by historians, the return of the anonymous mass of the aggrieved to righteousness, in which they acquire a collective name through the catalytic power of a person who is an anomaly – an emperor-shaman, a reformed bandit, a maiden. Their recognition is also collective, a temple. Ghosts are beyond memory and mourning. Their retrieval into individuated memorial does not give them ancestorhood, but deification and a title.

Conclusion The agencies of state recognition and history in the creation of a past are obviously quite different from the creation of a past by ghost and death rituals and from the stories accompanying and enacted in them. But there are notable parallels. The historian enters into an imaginary communication with the intentions of the forgotten whom s/he is recalling, particularly when descendants of the neglected dead, as in the case of Luku, are only one generation away and are accompanied by the stigmatized prisoners who were not executed. Together they voice a demand for recognition, compensation and justice to which the historian responds by recording the names of those who were executed and by taking part in documentaries whose main grip on their audience is portrayal of the suffering of

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the aggrieved. Like those who seek response from the power of ghosts, the historian gains from the new archive s/he sets down. From the recognition it bestows s/he in turn gains an authority and a position in a revised history and its new politics.32 There is a parallel scepticism. Historian Zhang is a professional historian and therefore properly sceptical about the reconstructions of the circumstances of the Taipei and Luku bases and the stories recalled by witnesses, which he considers and creates as factual possibilities. Similarly, teacher Wu is sceptical but says there must be something there in the story of the ghost on the pillion. People passing the shrines to the forgotten dead are similarly sceptical and at the same time pay propitiatory obeisance as a precaution. Both, the participants in mortuary rituals or in propitiations of orphan souls and the historians of neglected grievance, have to reckon with the truth that most memory is erased and most people are forgotten. They place different charges on that dreaded prospect. Ghost and death rituals dramatize and remind us of loss by acts of propitiation and of rescue, in which the utterly forgotten are remembered as ghosts. For the stories and rituals the units of remembrance are familial and local, of places created and recreated by temple festivals and pudu itself. They reach from the very personal and local circumstance immediately to the cosmic and eternal, via stories such as the widow at the Great Wall. Historical rescue from oblivion, on the other hand, addresses much larger units of remembrance, and the past that it creates is related to the present in a chronological, not an atemporal time. The people who were victims of the Luku military operation are commemorated. Their names are entered into Zhang Yanxian’s books. Their existence has been rescued from oblivion to and by large agencies of recognition, parties and publics in a new politics and a revised history of Taiwan. Such crucial differences make death rituals and historiography parallel, not identical with each other. Besides the intention of the imagined soul, death rituals conjure further loci of intentionality in their juxtapositions of trapped and transcendent times: agencies of recognition are summoned to mind by performances and pictures of transcendent courts and celestial deities in an archaic imagery. Even more dramatically, the unsafe prospect of the return of vitality, trapped in its limbo but tied to secular time, has its own agency enacted in death and ghost ritual. It is imagined to act on its own, just as unbidden returns of memory do. It demands solace and requires recognition to be set into a past by descendants, by propitiators or by historians and a new government. I will end with the thought that every nation is built on this zone of mass bad death, after a civil war or a war of liberation, as the murky civil war period in Taiwan is deposited into two or more archives for different narratives of Taiwan as a state.33 Chinese rituals of mourning and stories of ghosts suggest a mythic frame for imagining such a zone.

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Glossary

Notes 1 His life had certainly been fleshly and remained so in his vigorous old age. He began the speech by teasing the men present: ‘You men, what are you, a little over forty? You look so low. Your wives sitting beside you, they look unsatisfied. What’s gone wrong? Didn’t you give them enough pleasure last night? Perhaps you were out, gambling. Perhaps you didn’t drink enough? You should do as I have done, drink as much as I like, exercise, and forget the unpleasant things in your life.’ It was the speech of a man who had often used a rough tongue to get his way. I am indebted for the record of this speech and for a great deal else to Wang Mingming, who added his own fieldwork to my revisiting Shiding. A fuller account of the story of Gao Bineng can be found in Feuchtwang and Wang (2001). 2 Writing eulogies for others is a skill learned and cultivated by men in authority. Gao Bineng must have been invited to read them at the funerals of the parents of many chief mourners in his political network. Then in 1983 he was elected to be head of Shiding’s mediation committee, a job that entails helping to arrange funerals and to compose eulogies. Eulogies tell stories that are not legends so much as idealized histories, but the distinction is not sharp. By idealization I mean their moral punctuation with the virtues of filial duty and regard for others, and in Gao Bineng’s case some of the apparatus of Buddhist eschatology and Daoist meditation which he had acquired in the last twenty years of his life. 3 But the incident escalated. Killings on that day by GMD government troops were not the worst. The shooting of protesters against the corruption of the

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4

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police and monopolies of the Nationalist (GMD) government were followed by the even worse street shootings, round-up and execution of Taiwanese reformers and independence activists which took place after a lull of ten days in March. Eyewitness accounts were first published in English by George Kerr in 1966. He took me and a Taiwanese friend, Yu Chien, around the sites of the incident and had copied for me his folder of the court record of the trial of people arrested in the incident and copies of articles which had by then been published about it, including interviews with Gao Bineng. Lamley 1999 (fn. 153) On another day, Gao Bineng appealed to Gu Zhengwen on behalf of the Luku villagers to let them go to farm their fields. Gu told him this would only be possible after he had secured the arrest of the two senior administrative staff who had been counting votes with him. When Gao Bineng agreed to try to persuade them, through their families, to give themselves up for the sake of the Luku farmers, Gu warned him to keep them away from the military command, his rivals, so that he could guarantee their lives and of course gain the credit for their capture (Gao 1997). He told it to me and Yu Chien in an interview on 24 April 1995. The exact numbers are still not settled. Gao (1997: 48) cites the security police report of 22 executions in 1955 and 1956 after trial, adds to these a much more emotive report of an inquiry (undated) calculating that 85 were killed and over 400 arrested, and a 1995 interview in which Gu Zhengwen said that more than 200 were arrested and over 400 more turned themselves in. Zhang (1998: tables 2–5, pp. 30–7) counts 165 victims, of which 1 was shot, 35 executed, and 97 imprisoned for sentences between one and fifteen years. I have relied on one full report of the launch, which must have been one of many, but is remarkable for the newspaper in which it appeared, the China Times (Zhongguo Shibao 13 August 1998). This is a Guomindang daily and so very far from supporting the DPP. I was told that it usually took a conservative line even against its own leader at the time, President Li Denghui. Many thanks to Shi Fanglong for supplying me with a copy. Its report mentions that Professor Zhang’s research and publication was financed by the Taipei County Cultural Centre, with the authorization of the elected county chief, Su Zhenchang, but Su’s membership of the DPP is not mentioned. It also reports that security police general Gu Zhengwen had in 1994 admitted that many people had been wrongly arrested and that nothing like an armed military base had been discovered. The report ends by describing an emotive scene. Ten white-haired women survivors of the incident had been invited to the book launch. They then went with Professor Zhang and county head Su to the place where they had been imprisoned and re-enacted how they had been forced to squat on the ground, jammed up against each other, to wait, reliving their memory of the terror of being liquidated. A concluding sentence adds a curious but telling note. ‘Since the incident one part of the Luku area, called Baiyun li, has changed profoundly and become a strong base for the Guomindang.’ Many thanks to Yu Chien and Shih Fanglong for enabling me to see them and to interview their makers and Professor Zhang , who appears in the first, on 2 and 3 July 2000. From the classical histories starting with the third century BCE Zuo Zhuan and including the thirteen dynastic histories up to and including the Ming, i.e. to the seventeenth century, Cohen (1979) extracts several stories linking the death and illness of perpetrators of unjust killings to the action of the ghosts of their victims. He notes their combination of scepticism and what he calls ‘belief’ in ghosts. There may well be a morality of just reward or punishment in Wu’s

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story, as Cohen points out there were for the stories of avenging ghosts included in dynastic histories. But it is either absent or hidden in teacher Wu’s telling, possibly because it was for him just a strange story showing there must be something. The classic is Liaozhai zhiyi, printed in 1740 and translated by Herbert Giles in 1908 as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio. It is not among the types of story found by Eberhard (1970) in a survey he conducted the next year, 1967, in Taipei. All of us are aware that at any one time most of what has happened to us is not available to us as memory. We are often aware of memory loss, and can apprehend the contingency of death. Historians for their part know the wiping out of most traces, even within what they have selected to be the significant or important past. But they try as archaeologists to reconstruct. They supply detail by speculation and imagination to what is lost. And we all know how, as in Taiwan, a new politics can suppress one historical narrative to revive another, previously forgotten, one. So we know from daily experience, reading and political life what it is to lose and to regain a past, to have a history and for that history to be revised and a new one to emerge. One can continue the comparison: unlike ghost stories, historians’ narrations are characterized by the circumstantial detail that dates, names, locates and intertextualizes through explicit references. While myths, legends and ghost stories (and fiction and poetry and song) are at liberty to describe what was lost, historians have to acknowledge that what was lost is gone and can at best be speculatively reconstructed. People can of course remain sceptical about the ghost or the myth, just as historians must about their reconstructions. But myths constitute a metaphorical past, in which the present participates by analogy, whereas history is what the historian thinks happened in the past and is reconstructed from a present knowledge. News media come somewhere between the pasts which witnesses recall, and the pasts of history and of the conventions of entertainment which include myth, legend and ghost stories. Fiction can be crudely lumped together with myth and legend in this catalogue of pasts. Poetry transgresses all of these. I have extended my enquiry into these crossovers in Feuchtwang (2003). See Feuchtwang (2001: chapters 4 and 5) and also Rubie Watson (1994: chapter 4) on annual festivals as minor jiao, and the major jiao of reinaugurating a temple as acts of purification of the ghosts that haunt a place. Writing of archive as a process and an act, Jacques Derrida (1996) makes a point of how it links the external with the internal, the performative with the psychic, authority with agency, without reducing them to each other. Archive, as Derrida says, is a prosthesis of memory. It is memory’s externality and its appropriation. Its creation is at the same time the overwriting of the experience trace and the preservation of memory as record. Archive is at once an order – a consignment – a commemoration and a collection. A distinguishing feature of history from commemoration, ritual, myth and legend is its relation to an archive. The latter are juxtaposed to whatever co-exists as archive. But historiography, archeology and journalism are active participants in archival – drawing from, reading, and organising, as well as simply becoming part. History and archaeology produce and interpret archives – texts, recorded memories, documents, documented revelations, stone inscriptions, mortuary remains, middens – and treat commemorations, rituals, myths and legends themselves as archival material. Ethnography participates in this historiographic condition, creating an archive, including field diaries, organising it into an argument, narration, citation, and adding itself to the archive.

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18 Thanks to Charles Stafford for reminding me from his own observation that purification rituals in Taiwan involve killing ghosts (as for the second time) as well as putting them back in their marginal place and keeping them there. 19 The story of the virtuous wife, Meng Jiangnu, finding her husband’s bones has been found to pre-date the Great Wall, but became famous as a story of the great sorrow caused by the mass deaths of conscripts to build it (Waldron 1990: 196–201). 20 Three published versions of these stories from Taiwan may be found in Ahern (1973: 203–4), Schipper (1977: 661–2) and Feuchtwang (2001: 100–1). 21 Another is the Buddhist addition to the Daoist festival of the middle primordial (zhongyuan) of the year, popularly known as the ghost festival and held in the seventh lunar month. In the seventh month the forgotten are literally beckoned with lanterns, to be fed and washed. Pudu is also performed towards the end of the greatest rite of collective participation during the inauguration or refurbishing of a temple and its territory. 22 This summary comes from Stephen Teisler (1988: 7), who draws it from medieval Chinese texts, but I was given the same description of hungry ghosts with thin necks in Taiwan in 1967 and as Johnson (1989b: 3) points out the long, episodic story of Mulian’s descent was performed on stage and at death rituals all over China in this century. Mulian’s shamanic journey is a story which caught the imagination of Chinese from the fifth century onwards as a play and as a transformation tale (bianwen), turning the story of a disciple of the Buddha into a popular Chinese tale and into a Chinese Buddhist canonic Sutra for Offering Bowls to Repay Kindness. 23 The many other rescue figures include the founder of the Tang dynasty and the second Tang emperor who welcomed the pilgrim Xuanzong, carrying Buddhist scriptures to China. In the rite of sending off a soul performed in merit-making remembrance by Buddhists or Daoists two figures, the Golden Youth and the Jade Maiden, are mentioned and often portrayed as large puppets on either side of the puppet representing the deceased in front of the house to be her or his dwelling in Paradise. In Shiding the Golden Youth was more than once identified to me by participants as an emperor-shaman who first breached the walls of hell. On the basis of ritual experts, their texts and liturgies in the southern Fujian culture region, Schipper (1989: 136) and Dean (1989) have pointed to the enactments of rescues from purgatory being repeated several times in the same performance of a funeral. They include acquisition of a writ of pardon by the Daoist heavenly master Zhang and its passage down to the soul to be redeemed. The passage is sometimes achieved by means of sending possessed young men to destroy the fortress. In any case dramatic rites enact the siege of hell, breaking down gates, and crossing a bridge over the river of forgetting. To Mulian on his mission of mercy, a companion is frequently added who is a reforming bandit-king Lei Yusheng, being disciplined and trained in Buddhist virtue by the Goddess of Mercy, and who himself enacts several other intercessors in what Dean thinks is a parody of spirit-possession. The rescued soul is then bathed and presented to the Jade emperor, source of the writ of pardon. 24 These acts of ritual theatre are led by Buddhists in northern Taiwan and by Daoists in southern, and when a Daoist acts Mulian he puts on Buddhist robes (Dean 1989: 62). In other words, they are, as Dean points out, conserved across doctrinal differences (1989: 68). 25 These are claims towards generalization, of widespread themes of death rituals, but they are not universal. Bloch and Parry suggest two variables to account for exceptions. In the non-hierarchical society of hunters and gatherers there is no need for this separation and denial (1982: 27). Both bones and flesh die. The other main variable besides hierarchy/non-hierarchy having a key effect

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on separation of flesh from bones is stress on endogamy or on exogamy. Endogamy entails less denial of affines and therefore of flesh, even while playing up and triumphing over the threat of pollution (1982: 20 and 24). Thompson (1988: 107) suggests an additional qualification, that duality between bones and flesh will be most sharply maintained in lineage-dominated settlements, least in mixed surname settlements. In a later work, Bloch generalized the idea of a triumphant conquest of vitality into a general theory of ritual as rebounding violence (Prey Into Hunter (1992)). Male children can be commemorated by the children of their male siblings. The death of a maiden can be purified by marriage with a living man, a ghost marriage, or can be acknowledged by the demonic power (ling) of response at the place where the bones are buried and eventually promoted into ‘saintly mothers’ (sheng ma). One such in Shiding has become renowned for its responsiveness. Having started as a small wayside shrine it has become a temple and the maiden a deity whose stories recall those of the two most powerful salvation deities. One such is Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy whose Chinese myth is that of the princess Miaoshan who refused to marry, defying her father and incurring his hatred but returning from death to life and feeding her mortally sick father her own flesh to cure and bring him back from death. The other is Mazu, the rescuer of seafarers, also a maiden who stuck to her vow of chastity. But most remain forgotten. For the clear distinction between good and bad death as summarized here, I am indebted to Shi Fanglong and part of her PhD dissertation on maiden death in Taiwan. She refers to the more detailed textual basis for this distinction in Li Fengmao (1994). But I have relied on personally heard accounts and from direct observation in Shiding. The details of death rituals as they were performed in Shiding at this time are described in Feuchtwang (1975: chapter 10). There I provide a full account of the complete set of rites, including encoffinment, eulogy, burial procession, and the rituals of release. There are many other accounts from other parts of the same cultural region, which concentrate on one or other of these, often in more detail (Ahern (1973 and 1974), Martin (1988), Seaman (1988), Thompson (1988), Dean, Schipper and Ch’iu in Johnson (1989a)), but none which deal with all the segments. I will leave out of this account the burial procession and feast, eulogy, and the offerings by affines and matrilateral kin, which are the most important segments of death rites for establishing the social standing of the chief mourner. I have selected what I think are salient features of the passage of mourning, not the detail of social reproduction. I am most grateful to Maurice Bloch for pointing out when I presented a version of this chapter at the LSE on 7 July 2000 that ghost stories and death rituals locate imagined intentionalities and enter into a dialogue with them. I add that ritual dialogue is a repeated act of the completion of communication. Another figure like the widow at the Great Wall stands for the danger of retention of fleshly memories. Only siblings and junior generations present themselves as mourners. Mourning is an act of respect to the deceased. Anyone still alive in the senior generation is left out of mourning ritual formally, because they will eventually be an ancestor to the deceased. They will be owed his respect and not the other way around. But most remarkable is the fact that a spouse is also barred from mourning rites. Given the fact that wives are usually younger than their husbands, the remaining spouse is more likely to be the wife, and his junior. Yet she, who has the most intimately familiar memories, likely to be full of ambivalence, including both resentment and relief, remains behind the scenes and under no obligation to disguise or to channel them in formal mourning. At the opposite extreme is her and his child. The most senior direct male descendent is ritually identified with the deceased by carrying the soul flag through

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the rites of release from oblivion and torment. He stands for the regeneration of life and ‘triumph over death’ (Hertz 1960: 86). By the end of the death rites, a good death has been achieved by bringing together descendants, wife-givers and wife-takers – all the social relations of human reproduction. The most honoured guests read eulogies. They are senior associates or friends of the chief mourner. Neighbours come to feast and be entertained by the ritual theatre of rescue – the size and splendour of the show, and the number and standing of the mourners demonstrating whatever social capacity the mourners have. They have done what was necessary to prevent the return of the remembered dead. The mourners, led by the senior son return to life. But his mother is like a living ghost during the rituals, although revered as the head of the family. Her own funeral will be an occasion for her son to come even closer to Mulian’s filial duty. But she is a hidden presence during the mourning of her husband. The legend of Meng Jiangnu, the widow at the Wall, seems to me to parallel the anomalous position of the wife in mourning, except that her resentment is aimed not at her husband but at the earth god or goddess. While the chief mourner leads an elaborate separation, the widow at the Wall wishes her husband to rejoin her, not to be separated. Mulian and the other stories of rescue also depend on the possibility of return from the dead to the living. One last story of return from the land of the dead offers a neat and revealing complement to the story of Meng Jiangnu. It was told me by a woman in Shiding as the story of the messenger who carries the writ of pardon for the deceased’s release, and it reverses the roles of Meng Jiangnu and her husband. It is a story with which a surviving husband can identify. A man was on military service for ten years. When he returned he found that during his prolonged absence his wife, Shi Liang, had wasted away and died. In sorrow, he decided to kill himself. But in purgatory he met Shi Liang who told him she had been taken by the king of hell as a wife, and that from the king’s records she knew that her mortal husband’s lifespan was not complete. Take this bowl of Yin-Yang water and drink it, she said to him, so that you can return to the world of Yang, the living world. He did. Because he was the only man besides the emperor himself who had found a means of returning, the emperor made him the messenger of release for souls in purgatory, yet another in the cast of intercessors, but in this case a soul resuscitated by the soul of his virtuous wife. His is a rare tale of return to the flesh that is safe. 31 The care over inscribing names on tombstones, in addition to genealogies, is possibly a defining characteristic of Chinese mourning ritual. Thanks to Chris Fuller and Martha Mundy for pointing out that Hindu and Muslim tombs do not bear names and their world of spirits is not, as in China, imagined as the ghosts of the dead. Saints (Muslim or Christian) are the equivalent to Chinese gods. But it may be that the peculiarity of Chinese popular religion is that all the gods who are imagined to have responsive power (ling) are human, ghosts of particularly powerful and exceptional men and women who had lived. The return or recall of the dead might also therefore be peculiarly prominent in Chinese imagination and ritual. 32 For suggesting the analogy between these acquisitions of power, from ghosts and from the repressed archive, thanks to PhD student Yang Shuyuan at the LSE seminar, on 7 July 2000. 33 The more open, less repressive Taiwanese state from 1987 onwards rules with less strict ideological control and far less strenuous political repression than the previous state and its white terror. It will have produced fewer secret or silenced archives of interpersonal transmission and far fewer closely guarded documents. But of course every state through its schools approves a history of its subjects, and therefore what is recognized and what receives less authoritative

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recognition. As Rubie Watson and Caroline Humphrey in their essays in Watson (1994) point out, evocative and implicit retranscription of official ceremonies and commemorations, and occasionally self-organized rituals of mourning, can be a fragmented means of transmitting and commemorating stories repressed by regimes with far stricter controls, waiting to be allowed a fuller expression in a changed regime. The more open and disputable histories and politics of Taiwan allow recognition on a more generous scale, but the passions of dispute over what must be given central authority still contain complementary dangers of marginalization. It cannot be otherwise.

References Ahern, E. (1973) The Cult of the Dead in a Chinese Village, Stanford: Stanford University Press Ahern, E. (1974) ‘Affines and the Rituals of Kinship’, in A. P. Wolf (ed.), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 279–307 Bloch, M. (1992) Prey into Hunter: The Politics of Religious Experience, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Bloch, M. and J. Parry (1982) ‘Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life’, in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–44 Cohen, A. P. (1979) ‘Avenging Ghosts and Moral Judgement in Ancient Chinese Historiography: Three Examples from the Shih-chi’, in S. Allen and A. P. Cohen (eds), Legend, Lore and Religion in China: Essays in Honor of Wolfram Eberhard on His Seventieth Birthday, San Francisco: Chinese Materials Center, pp. 97–108 Dean, K. (1989) ‘Lei Yu-sheng (‘Thunder is Noisy’) and Mu-lien in the Theatrical and Funerary Traditions of Fukien’, in D. Johnson (ed.), Ritual Opera, Operatic Ritual: ‘Mu-lien Rescues his Mother’ in Chinese Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California, Publications of the Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1, pp. 46–104 Derrida, J. (1996) Archive Fever, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press Eberhard, W. (1970) Studies in Taiwanese Folktales, Taipei: The Orient Cultural Service. Asian Folklore and Social Life Monographs Vol. 1 Feuchtwang, S. (1975) ‘The Social Bases of Religion and Religious Change in a Market Town’, PhD dissertation, University of London Feuchtwang, S. (2001) Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor, Richmond, Surrey: Curzon Press Feuchtwang, S. (2003) ‘The Transmission of Loss and the Demand for Recognition’, in S. Radstone (ed.), Frontiers of Memory, London: Routledge Feuchtwang, S. and M. Wang (2001) Grassroots Charisma: Four Local Leaders in China, London and New York: Routledge Freud, S. (1917) ‘Mourning and Melancholia’, Standard Edition Vol. XIV (1957), London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis Gao, S. (1997) ‘Luku Shijian, Lao Xiangzhangde Jianzheng’ (The Luku Incident, the Old Township Chief’s Testimony), Beixian Wenhua (Taipei county cultural centre quarterly) No. 51, pp. 48–54 Harrell, C. S. (1974) ‘When a Ghost Becomes a God’, in A. P. Wolf (ed.), Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 193–206 Hertz, R. (1960 [1907]) Death and the Right Hand, translated by R. Needham and C. Needham, London: Cohen and West

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Johnson, D. (ed.) (1989a) Ritual Opera, Operatic Ritual: ‘Mu-lien Rescues his Mother’ in Chinese Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California, Publications of the Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1 Johnson, D. (1989b) ‘Actions Speak Louder than Words: The Cultural Significance of Chinese Ritual Opera’, in D. Johnson (ed.), Ritual Opera, Operatic Ritual: ‘Mulien Rescues his Mother’ in Chinese Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California, Publications of the Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1, pp. 1–45 Kerr, G. H. (1966) Formosa Betrayed, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode Lamley, H. J. (1999) ‘Taiwan under Japanese Rule, 1895–1945: The Vicissitudes of Colonialism’, in M. Rubinstein (ed.), Taiwan: A New History, Armonk and London: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 201–60 Laplanche J. and J.-B. Pontalis (1973) The Language of Psycho-Analysis, London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis. Li, F. (1994) ‘Cong Chengrenzhidao Dao Chengshenzhidao’ (The Transition from Person to God), in Dongfang Zong jiao Qikan (Oriental Religious Studies) 4, Taipei, pp. 183–210 Martin, E. (1988) ‘Gender and Ideological Differences in Representations of Life and Death’, in J. Watson and E. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, London and Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 164–79 Schipper, K. (1977) ‘Neighbourhood Cult Associations in Traditional Tainan’, in G. W. Skinner (ed.), The City in Late Imperial China, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 651–76 Schipper, K. (1989) ‘Mu-lien Plays in Taoist Liturgical Context’, in D. Johnson (ed.), Ritual Opera, Operatic Ritual: ‘Mu-lien Rescues his Mother’ in Chinese Popular Culture, Berkeley: University of California, Publications of the Chinese Popular Culture Project, 1, pp. 126–54 Seaman, G. (1981) ‘The Sexual Politics of Karmic Retribution’, in E. Martin and M. Gates (eds), The Anthropology of Taiwanese Society, Stanford: Stanford University Press, pp. 381–96 Teiser, S. F. (1988) The Ghost Festival in Medieval China, Princeton: Princeton University Press Thompson, S. (1998) ‘Death, Food and Fertility’, in J. Watson and E. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, London and Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 71–108 Waldron, A. (1990) The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Watson, R. S. (ed.) (1994) Memory, History, and Opposition under State Socialism, Sante Fe: School of American Research Press Zhang, Y. and S. Gao (1998) Luku Shijie Yanjiu Diaocha (A Research Investigation of the Luku Incident), Taipei: Taipei xianli wenhua zhongxin

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5

Dams and dreams A return-to-homeland movement in northwest China Jing Jun

China is both blessed and cursed by its rivers, especially the Yangtze River in the south and the Yellow River in the north. These mighty cascades of water produce great agricultural bounty but they also can cause devastating floods. So when the art of hydraulic engineering was developed in ancient China, it was taken for granted that river management – shui zheng in Chinese – was a special function of the imperial government. An emperor’s Mandate of Heaven would be brought into question if a large river changed its course to destroy everything in path. Thousands of farmers would be on their knees thanking the river god when a severe flood spared the riverbanks. Popular belief had it that evil in this world was the cause of the river dragon’s wrath. Morality tales were passed down from one generation to the next on how human righteousness could tame the river dragon’s horrific temper. A fundamental difference in China’s river management before the 1950s and thereafter is the construction of large-scale hydroelectric dams. When the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in 1949, the country had no more than 40 small hydroelectric dams. As the Great Leap Forward was underway in 1958, central authorities launched a nationwide campaign to build dams on the country’s major rivers and their tributaries. By 1985, the state-organized drives for electricity, irrigation and flood control succeeded in building 70,000 hydroelectric dams. Of these, nearly 330 were large-scale dams. At present, the world’s largest hydroelectric dam to date is being built at the Three Gorges of the Yangtze River. Building dams requires building reservoirs, and reservoirs lead to the displacement of people living in river valleys. By official reckoning, 80,000 reservoirs were built in the PRC from the 1950s to the 1980s, and these man-made lakes displaced more than ten million people. Identified in government documents as ‘reservoir resettlers’ (shuiku yimin), the absolute majority of these people were rural residents, strictly defined by their household registration in the Chinese countryside.

Issues of separation and reunion In my research on five dams in China, I find population resettlement to have the following socioeconomic consequences. In most cases, the resettlers

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were displaced from environmentally viable river basins to bleak ecosystems. The officially designated resettlement sites offered mostly wasteland to reclaim for cultivation but the difficulty to do so proved far greater than government planners had anticipated. In state-financed hydroelectric projects, the resettlement policy was and remains mandatory. The state has the power of eminent domains over all land and considered the construction of hydroelectric stations as a key to industrialization. Until the early 1980s, the government’s resettlement policy was rarely implemented with adequate compensation. The double burden of insufficient compensation and resettlement on wretched land made the displaced farmers poorer than before and worse off than those who did not have to move. In 1986, 70 per cent, or more than seven million, of China’s ‘reservoir resettlers’ were identified by the central government as ‘living in extreme poverty’ ( jidu pinkun). It is no exaggeration to say that China’s hydropower industry, now contributing up to 20 per cent of the country’s electricity supply, is built upon an enormous human cost in the Chinese countryside. To be specific with regard to the question why reservoir resettlement proved to be so disruptive in the Chinese case, one must recognize that China’s construction of dams and reservoirs has relied on three basic resettlement methods. The first is jiujin houkao, or ‘moving backward within the vicinity’. It requires individuals and families to abandon their original residence by moving from the riverbanks to uphill lands. In the process, the resettlers may lose the farmland they have cultivated. The second is chahua yimin, or ‘implanted resettlement’. It entails the insertion of the affected people into unaffected communities nearby. In this case, the resettled people are deprived of both their former residential sites and cultivated fields. The third is wai qian, or ‘outward relocation’. It refers to moving families and sometimes entire communities out of the territory of a given township or county. This form of resettlement results in the transfer of administrative authority over the displaced people to another local government. Although the official resettlement policy has aimed to avoid splitting up families, other forms of separation are almost inevitable and typified by one of the following types of disconnection: 1) the loss of people’s original residential sites to inundation; 2) the transfer of families to alien communities; 3) the sheer distance created by resettlement between the displaced people’s native places and their resettlement sites; and 4) the severing of social and kinship networks between those who don’t have to move and those who are relocated. One of the major problems for Chinese officials in charge of the areas where big dams and reservoirs have been built is that some of the displaced people would try to return either to their native places even though the sites of their former residence are now under water or to their original villages if they are only partially flooded. Chinese officials identify these returnees as huiliu renkou, or ‘backtracking populations’. As a national policy, these

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people are not allowed to resume residence in their home towns, and the stipulation against doing so is manifested in the denial of granting household registration cards to those who managed to return. The reasons to account for the ‘backtracking populations’ are complex, and they often have to do with the desire of the displaced farmers for reunion in the following senses of the word. First, reunion with one’s relatives who did not have to move away motivates some of the displaced people trying to return to their native places. Second, the wish to live and work in a viable and familiar ecological environment is another factor that motivates the displaced people’s return to their home towns. Third, the displaced people’s sense of social alienation at the resettlement sites, hardened by their experience of struggling to be accepted by host communities, reinforces nostalgia for and emotional attachment to their ancestral land. Last but not least important, the emotional attachment to ancestral land, one may argue, is grounded in religion. This is because a defining character of village life in China is the belief in the symbiotic relationship between ancestors, descendants and those yet to be born. The belief is centred on the deep-rooted notion that the dead ancestors have the power to protect and enrich their descendants. The latter, however, must return the favour by worshipping the dead properly and trying to perpetuate the family line. A typical expression of this belief during the construction of dams and reservoirs is the attempt on the part of the affected families to relocate the bones of their immediate ancestors, usually within three or four generations, for proper reburial on safer and higher ground nearby. Rarely, if ever, have the displaced people taken the remains of their ancestors to places faraway from where the dead had once lived. The ancestral graves kept in the displaced people’s native places help define these places as their homeland ( jiaxiang). The association of family graves with the notion of homeland allows the possibility of resuming the symbiotic relationship between the dead, the living and those yet to be born. Even when the graves are destroyed for one reason or another that would certainly be taken as an offence, the territories where ancestral remains had been buried, however, continue to be regarded and cherished by the displaced farmers and their families as an important part of their homeland, which means that these territories now serve as a physical and at the same time symbolic marker of personal identity, family history, and sentiments of collective memory.

Resettlement studies in China The earliest effort by social scientists in China to study the relocation programmes of the country’s water projects was made in 1988–9 by the Institute for Sociological Research at Beijing University and through a study of four resettled villages in northwest China. Eight people, including myself, participated in this study, concentrating on a staircase of three hydroelectric

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dams in Gansu province and the environmental impact of these dams on the livelihood of 49,000 villagers who were forced to move up to the hilly flanks along the upper-middle reaches of the Yellow River (see Chen 1989; Jing 1989: 41–7; Jing 1997: 65–92; Wang Bo and Ye 1989; Wang Weimin 1989; Yu and Feng 1989). In a separate study, a sociologist also working at Beijing University – Professor Cai Wenmei – looked into the socioeconomic impact of the Xin’anjiang Dam in Zhejiang province upon the displaced rural populations in the neighbouring province of Anhui. Cai’s concern was with the question of how national politics led to a hasty policy change and the use of force for population resettlement in the Xin’anjiang case (Cai 1996: 167–84). Ding Qigan, a sociologist also affiliated with Beijing University, undertook a study of resettlement associated with the Three Gorges Dam. Ding’s research relied on questionnaires and one of his key findings was that the villagers he studied were little informed of the longterm social and economic impacts of the dam project upon their lives (Ding 1998: 70–89). In addition, Sun Liping, a professor of sociology at Beijing University, led a team of graduate students in 1997 to study the Xiaojiang Dam in Sichuan province. The released study of the Xiaojiang case that came to my attention deals with a local petition movement to seek new compensation for resettlement (see Jin 1998). As for population resettlement in connection with the now infamous Sanmenxia Dam, located at the middle reaches of the Yellow River, it has been investigated by Leng Meng (a freelance writer), Shang Wei (also a freelance writer), and Luo Qimin and Liu Hongbin (a civil engineer and a government official). Being the first hydroelectric dam ever built on the Yellow River, the Sanmenxia project was fraught with controversies from the beginning of feasibility studies. My discussion that follows will explore the Sanmenxia case at length. The information to be introduced is based on the three aforementioned Sanmenxia studies (Leng 1996: 60–92; Shang 1998: 143–59). My interpretation of the Sanmenxia material will focus on one of these studies (i.e. Leng 1996), while I will incorporate the findings of my own research on three dams in Gansu province, a dam in Hunan province, and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. My research on these dams spanned from 1989 to 2001.

The first dam of the Yellow River The Sanmenxia Dam was undertaken as a Sino-Soviet joint venture at the stage of designing and feasibility studies. It was the first large-scale project under a central plan in 1955 to build forty-six dams on the Yellow River. Centre planners hoped that these dams would eliminate floods, extend irrigation to 65 per cent of the entire Yellow River valley, and produce 110 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity a year – ten times the nation’s total power output in 1954. Although the Sanmenxia Dam, 96 metres high and

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840 metres wide, is found at the Sanmenxia area in the province of Henan, the bulk of its huge reservoir, covering a total of 3,500 square kilometres, is in the province of Shaanxi. Started in the late 1950s, completed in the early 1960s, and revamped in the mid-1970s to fix the problem of accumulated silt in its reservoir, this dam caused the displacement of 410,000 people. Initially, the government adopted a soft-handed approach to resettlement by asking for volunteers. More than 5,000 young men and women enthusiastically responded. According to Leng Meng’s account, only 154 volunteer slots were given to the Yang village in a county called Dali, but 1,087 local villagers applied to go first. In the words of a village woman at that time: ‘I have no doubt that the place chosen by the government is better than this place of ours because we know the government has never lied to us since the Liberation in 1949’ (Leng 1996: 64). A former volunteer for resettlement recalled years later that he was on one of the fifteen buses heading to a resettlement site that took the group five days to reach: ‘Throughout the trip, the government arranged everything to our advantage. We ate and drank well, got plenty of sleep, and overall were well treated’ (Leng 1996: 66). To their surprise, however, the first groups of volunteers arrived at the resettlement site only to find that it was on the border of a desert where the weeds there were half as tall as a fully grown man and elsewhere nothing grew at all: the land was totally barren. Quickly, some of the volunteers became disillusioned, went back to Shaanxi, and told other villagers what this and other resettlement sites were like. As a result of the bad news, few villagers were willing to leave again, forcing the government to adopt a mandatory resettlement policy. In village after village, the government used forcible means to evict the people listed for resettlement. Village cadres were sacked when they resisted. Using thick ropes tied to horses and mules, militiamen demolished residential buildings. But the government promised that the bad conditions in the resettlement sites would be improved as soon as the country accumulated enough money and resources after completing the Sanmenxia Dam. In the end, 300,000 Shaanxi villagers were moved to Gansu province and the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region in northwest China. The economic and social conditions at the resettlement sites in the far northwest were so abject that the very survival of the resettlers was soon threatened. One of the largest groups of villagers from Shaanxi was sent to a county in Ningxia. This was a group of Han Chinese while the local residents were predominantly Hui, that is, Chinese-speaking Muslims. Although the Hui villages and the Han resettlement sites were separate, competition to ensure water supply from a nearby river for irrigation quickly led to feuds. When the people of a Hui village blocked and diverted the water from upstream, the Han Shaanxi farmers living downstream saw their painfully reclaimed land drying up. Pitched battles against the Hui not only failed to win the Shaanxi farmers

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any irrigation water but also evolved into fights over drinking water. In one incident, a Hui villager took away the ropes for drawing water from a well that was used by a Hui community and by some of the Shaanxi farmers too. In retaliation, a few Shaanxi farmers slaughtered a pig on the well’s platform. This deliberate act of pollution and religious offence provoked a fight in which a Hui villager pulled out a knife and cut off a Shaanxi farmer’s ear. Ethnic feuds like this, coupled by harsh living conditions, made it impossible for the Shaanxi to stay in Ningxia. At the peak of a massive famine in 1961 – it was caused by the Great Leap Forward (1958–60) and definitely worsened by the environmentally bleak nature of the resettlement sites – the Shaanxi farmers began to flee. Some of them left for state-run farms in Xinjiang in the far northwest. Many became beggars slowly making their way back to Shaanxi to rejoin relatives and friends who had stayed behind. Landless and impoverished, these farmers led a precarious way of life even after they rejoined their relatives in Shaanxi. No official statistics are available to estimate how many people died in the famine at the resettlement sites or on their way back to Shaanxi. But personal accounts of the famine’s devastating impact are available. A man described to Leng Meng the scene of elderly people stooping at a street corner at a famine-stricken resettlement site: When their faces began to swell, they would die within a few days. By early spring, the elderly people who used to leave their cold shelters to stoop at the street corner so as to be warmed by the winter’s sun were all dead. (Leng 1996: 71) Among the famine’s survivors, many lost their relatives to starvation or never saw them again when their families broke up and went to different places to find food. Those survivors who finally reached Shaanxi did so by walking through one village after another, begging for food and shelter. Thousands and thousands of these Shaanxi people found odd jobs that they did for many years until they saved some money to resume their homebound journey. In interviews many years later, some survivors said that they made the difficult homebound trek by stealing, cheating and fighting for food or shelter. Their hardened experience of mere survival at the resettlement sites and on their return-to-homeland trek would become a key factor in their determined struggle for farmland after they returned to Shaanxi.

The return-to-homeland movement A larger number of the displaced people began returning to Shaanxi in the early 1980s, despite obstacles including police blockades set up expressly to impede their homebound journey. By 1989, about 150,000 of the displaced

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farmers had returned to the Shaanxi in a spontaneous return-to-homeland movement, triggered by two major events. The first was China’s rural reforms that intensified the displaced people’s sense of having been wronged by the state. As the agricultural responsibility system converted the management of land from the collective to the family unit, thereby greatly stimulated the incentives of rural residents to work harder in order to become prosperous, the Shaanxi farmers who were still living in Ningxia or had moved to other places during the famine I have mentioned earlier quickly realized that although they were mired in poverty they might have become prosperous too – if they had not been evicted from their homeland (see All-China Hydropower Engineering Society 1990). The second was the Chinese government’s discovery of a technical mistake that had to be fixed by lowering the Sanmenxia reservoir’s water storage level so as to avoid flooding Xian, northwest China’s largest city (Smil 1984: 45–7; Shang 1998: 143–59). Consequently, a long stretch of land along the reservoir was not submerged after all. But this land was quickly occupied by military- and state-run farms, which refused to allow the returned farmers to reclaim their land. As the displaced Shaanxi farmers returned in even larger numbers and set up many simple huts along the reservoir, sixty-seven squatter villages were established, formed by rows and rows of provisional dwellings. Living conditions were poor in these villages but at least starvation was no longer a life-threatening crisis. The shortage of food as a result of having little land to farm was dealt with, in part, by relying on government agencies in charge of poverty relief. In addition, many of the returnees coped with the food shortage by stealing crops from the state and military farms. In the struggle for land, petition letters were filed and sent to the central government. Among authority figures in Beijing who read these letters, Sun Yue – a senior official at the State Council – was particularly sympathetic to the returned farmers. On an inspection tour, Sun Yue scolded and made passionate appeals to local officials to do whatever they could to help the returned villagers restart their lives (Leng 1996: 67). To these villagers, Sun Yue represented the ultimate authority of the central government and his sympathy for them furthered their determination to get back their land, by violent means if necessary. Although no one was killed in the many land disputes that turned into utter violence, blood was shed as some of the returned farmers fought, with fists and sometimes shovels, against state-run farm workers. Milder forms of popular protest featured road blockades, sabotage and forced entry by the returnees into the canteens of the state farms to demand food.

Qingming Festival and ancestral graves One of the earlier protests against the state and military farms took place in 1982, during the traditional tomb-sweeping Qingming Festival. On that

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day, Liu Huairong, a charismatic villager who emerged in the struggle for land as one of its proverbial ‘four great commanders’ (sida siling), marched with 3,000 villagers into the county seat of Weinan to demonstrate. From there, the demonstrators went to the township of Huayintan near the reservoir. They carried a white banner with these large black characters written on it: ‘Return to Homeland, Sacrifice to Ancestors’. At Huayintan, Liu Huairong delivered an emotional speech. Standing on a stage and speaking with tears, he denounced the state and military farms: ‘They have destroyed our ancestral tombs. They have occupied our farmland. They have stolen all our treasures.’ Throughout Liu’s speech, ‘slogans were shouted and thousands of hands were raised’. According to Leng Meng (1996: 72), three of the slogans were these: ‘We shall return to our old native land’ ( fanhui laojia yuan); ‘We would rather become ghosts in the reservoir area’ (ningzuo kuqu gui ); ‘We will never forget the bitterness of resettlement’ (buwang yimin ku). Liu Huairong made a special point by declaring that the state-run and military-controlled farms had stolen valuable objects buried in the ancestral graves of the evicted villagers. This accusation was emotionally charged, for it cast the state and military farms in the sinister image of grave robbers. It was through many demonstrations like the one organized by Liu Huairong, coupled by violent clashes and petition drives to involve the central government’s intervention, that in 1985 the State Council allowed the Shaanxi villagers to reclaim 300,000 mu, or about 60 per cent, of the land held by the state and military farms. Throughout this well-organized struggle for land, the ‘four great commanders’ of the returned Shaanxi farmers insisted that the state was responsible for their suffering and therefore it must help them end that suffering. According to them, the state and military farms had no right to occupy a territory that was their homeland, even though by law all land belongs to the government. In other words, the returned villagers had no legal justification against the state-run and military farms. What the leading protesters of the returned Shaanxi farmers managed to do effectively was the making of a moral argument for solidifying their actions of defiance. A key component of this argument was that the ancestors of the returned farmers died and were buried in the reservoir area, and therefore the living descendants of the dead had the moral rights to reclaim the exposed land along the Sanmenxia reservoir and restart their lives in their native places. We will come back to the issue of such moral rights after exploring the broader social, economic and political background of this return-to-homeland movement.

Sanmenxia and China’s second land reform As Daniel Kelliher (1992), Kate Zhou (1996) and Yang Dali (1996) have forcefully argued, the official termination of the people’s commune system was in effect a response to the intense pressures from below where rural communities in many regions were already secretly moving away from

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collective farming. The state surveyed literally thousands of variants of this trend and chose what it was prepared to accept. The final decision to switch to family farming was based on the criterion of higher productivity. While the state stopped short of providing full private ownership of farmland, central decisions were made by 1984 to reassure rural residents that they would have security of land tenure up to 15 years or more, and some autonomy in inheriting, renting and transferring their land holdings. Other significant policy changes, also in reaction to initiatives at the grassroots level, were the removal of restrictions on private enterprises, the freedom to sell agricultural produce at local market places, and the eventual contracting out of management rights to individuals for turning collectively owned rural enterprises into profitable businesses (see also Huang 1989; Judd 1994; Perry and Wong 1985). These policy changes, characterized by some scholars as China’s ‘second land reform’ (Greenhalgh 1990: 105; quoted by Whyte 1995: 1,015), have provided major institutional mechanisms for the flourishing of personal prosperity and entrepreneurialism. Decollectivization was connected to other return-to-homeland movements elsewhere in China, not just the one in the Sanmenxia area. Two important factors provoked such movements. On one side, the resettled people were excited about the loosening of state controls over a private domain of village life – the family. The relaxed political controls over rural areas also made it possible for relatively large-scale protests to take place. On the other side, the displaced farmers found it difficult to benefit from the economic freedom afforded by decollectivization, because they were still living under the burden of so many unresolved problems of resettlement. In the Sanmenxia case, these problems were intensely manifested in the struggle of the Shaanxi villagers to win back their land from state and military farms. The shared belief that they had made too big a sacrifice for China’s industrialization was hardened by what they perceived as the government’s slowness in reciprocating the valuable contributions they had made for national development. Similarly, the displaced farmers felt that they were kept far behind those rural residents who did not lose their land and were now enjoying prosperity. This feeling prevailed not just in the Sanmenxia area. It also led to protests at the beginning of the 1980s in almost every rural county where the government had built a major dam or reservoir. In dealing with these protests, Chinese central authorities showed a remarkable degree of tolerance. The central government’s principal means of handling the protesters was to provide them with poverty-relief assistance, including emergency supplies of food and clothes, building materials, low-interest loans, and free supplies of irrigation and other farming equipment. Partly because of these protests and partly because of its need to build more dams by borrowing from the World Bank (which has guidelines regarding the procedures of population resettlement), the Chinese government recognized reservoir resettlers to be among those rural poor who were most deserving of poverty relief. This explains why the Ministry of Water

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Resources and Electric Power invested, in 1986, a total of 1,900 million yuan in a rehabilitation programme, to send aid to five million people in forty-six resettlement sites (World Bank 1994: 2–3). In that year, as said earlier, seven million, or about more than 70 per cent, of China’s ‘reservoir relocatees’ were suffering from what the government defined as ‘extreme poverty’, meaning that they had little to eat, not much to wear and hardly any decent housing for shelter.

Sanmenxia and other similar cases It is hard to say whether the consequences of government policy were harsher, more traumatic, more deeply felt by the people affected by the Sanmenxia project than elsewhere in China. After all, more than ten million people were directly affected by the construction of dams and reservoirs during the period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s. Mainly farmers, these people were similarly wrenched out of a way of life. Relocated to places where they found themselves marginalized, they were deprived of the basic means of making a livelihood, suffering from the unbearable stress of being separated from the life around them. It is equally hard to say whether the Sanmenxia case is unique in political terms. Historically, when Chinese farmers were unable to use legitimate channels to express grievances, they sometimes resorted to illegitimate activities and even rebellions. Partly because of a 1982 government decision to increase the rate of compensation for resettlement needed for the construction of new hydroelectric projects and partly because of pentup grievances in so many areas, an upsurge of popular protests unfolded among the displaced farmers in almost all major resettlement areas in China. As in the Sanmenxia case, some of these protests evolved into persistent petition drives and well-organized collective actions, motivated and sustained by the cumulative effect of discontent. A common complaint being voiced by farmers participating in these protests was about their loss of a self-sufficient way of life and the difficulty to regain it. An equally bitter complaint was about the lack of government aid for the displaced people now living in ecologically harsh environments of officially designated resettlement sites. This outburst of anger took the form of writing letters of complaints to central authorities, using big-character posters to publicize demands for retribution in front of local government buildings, withholding goods and property from authorities, staging public demonstrations, and sometimes resorting to violence against local officials. What makes the Sanmenxia case unique is of course the long duration of the local protests and the return-tohomeland movement. Started as early as the 1970s, the movement persisted in spite of suppression by local officials. The movement caused emergency meetings to be held by provincial authorities, forced the central government to intervene, and targeted large military- and state-run agro-businesses. The popular protests and determined petition drives in China resettlement areas in the 1980s eventually caught the attention of some young

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scholars in Beijing. In 1988–9, Beijing University launched a study in northwest China on the social and economic consequences of reservoir resettlement. In the decade that followed, a series of similar studies were conducted. Some of the scholars undertaking such studies cautiously, and needless to say, bravely documented and analysed the economic, environmental, political and social facets of the protests I have mentioned above (see esp. Jin 1998; Cai 1996). In these studies, however, the ethical and religious dimensions underpinning the popular protests in question were not given special attention, a problem that I hope to address in the following pages.

Religion, ethics and a morally indebted government Leng Meng’s record of the Sanmenxia case contains only a few references to religion, and it offers no systematic analysis on the question of whether religiously based ethical concepts played a role in the return-to-homeland movement. Having said so, I must point out that Leng Meng was not a social scientist. His record, however, constitutes a vivid descriptive account of human dramas. Some of the recorded incidents should be interpreted by considering a number of religious and ethical concepts that have had a long lifespan in Chinese culture. To be more specific, I am referring to three issues associated with the Sanmenxia case: 1) the polarization of propriety and legality; 2) the association of the concept of sacrifice and the idea of reciprocity; and 3) the perceived relationship between humans and ghosts as well as the living and the dead. The polarization of propriety and legality that I have in mind is the apparent sense of righteousness on the part of the Shaanxi farmers to resort to collective actions that ranged from peaceful demonstration to sabotage and outright violence so as to assert what they believed to be their basic rights. But what they regarded to be morally and culturally appropriate actions were in fact contradictory to the way by which the Chinese state authorities interpreted the right to demonstrate. Being the legal documents relevant to the Sanmenxia case, the 1975, 1978 and 1982 Chinese constitutions indeed acknowledged the right of Chinese citizens to demonstrate, but they could only legitimately engage in demonstrations if the Party led them and if they upheld the so-called ‘four basic principles’ (one of which is the rule of the Chinese Communist Party). Violent demonstrations were of course outlawed. And yet in dealing with the eruption of large-scale demonstrations in the Shaanxi case, including a blockade of the provincial government building, the central government did not adopt a heavy-handed policy. It adopted an appeasement policy instead, and it even sent Sun Yue, a senior official of the State Council, from Beijing to Shaanxi. Sun was not only sympathetic to the local farmers but also stood on their side and scolded provincial officials for failing to help the returned farmers. After Sun’s team of central inspectors spent forty days in Shaanxi, the decision from Beijing was to return a considerable proportion of the land being held by the military

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and state farms to the people who had once farmed this land. Phrased differently, the central government chose to neglect the illegality of the Shaanxi protests which involved violence and unapproved demonstrations. To understand the central government’s choice of appeasement over suppression, we need to examine the cultural repertoire of this particular protest-filled return-to-homeland movement and how the movement’s leaders used this cultural repertoire to justify their actions. One of the most noticeable facets of the movement’s cultural underpinnings as recorded by Leng Meng was that of the Qingming Festival demonstration in 1982. In a July evening of the previous year, according to Leng Meng, a force of 80 state farm workers attacked a group of squatters made of resettlers trying to reclaim their land. Armed with clubs and shovels, the workers drove into the squatters’ camp with bulldozers and German shepherds. They beat up the squatters, destroyed their possessions, cut down the trees planted by the squatters, and flattened their huts. Taken aback by the sudden attack, the squatters fled. Although local officials later made the farm from which the workers came pay a total of 50,000 yuan in compensation to the squatters, this incident planted the seed of the Qingming Festival demonstration in the following year. The major force leading the charge on this occasion consisted of 3,000 resettlers, mostly men, representing 50,000 farmers who had been sent to live in salty and alkalinized areas of Pucheng and Dali counties. Their leader was Liu Huairong, whom I have mentioned before. Liu was in his sixties at the time. Being a farmer throughout his life, he was deeply aware of the cultural importance of the Qingming Festival, and he decided that this festival would be an ideal time to stage another protest against the state farms. He was not wrong in his judgment, as droves of farmers responded to his call to occupy the administrative centre of Weinan county. We should remember that Liu and his followers carried a white banner on which the following large characters were written black ink: ‘Return to Homeland, Sacrifice to Ancestors’. And during a public rally, three slogans were shouted: ‘We shall return to our old native land’ ( fanhui laojia yuan). ‘We would rather become ghosts in the reservoir area’ (ningzuo kuqu gui ). ‘We will never forget the bitterness of resettlement’ (buwang yimin ku). One should also remember that in the emotional speech that Liu gave on a stage he accused the state and military farms for stealing treasures from the ancestral graves of the evicted farmers before destroying these graves. This deliberate act to cast the state and military farms in the sinister image of tomb robbers should be understood together with Liu’s use of the Qingming Festival to stage the demonstration, his order to display a banner that honoured the dead, and his references to ghosts. In Chinese popular religion, it is believed that when people die their souls continue to exist, either as ancestral spirits or as ghosts. What makes the difference is whether or not the dead are properly cared for by the living. If they are adults who have children and receive proper funerals as well as burials, they can become protective ancestors. But if they die a violent death

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far from home, or their funerals or graves are neglected, they can become wandering ghosts. These ghosts are hungry and tend to frighten or even injure people to draw attention to their needs (see e.g. Overmyer 1985: 93–4; also see the essay by Feuchtwang in this volume). Furthermore, ancestral graves are ultimate sites of fengshui, or the powerful ‘wind and water’ that bring material fortunes or glory to the descendants if these sites are properly maintained and if regular sacrifices are offered to the dead ancestors. But we also should realize that when Liu Huairong and his followers used references to graves, ancestors and ghosts they put a new spin on their meaning. The slogan saying that they would rather become ghosts in their homeland instead of going back to the government-designated sites of resettlement as human beings was meant as a metaphor of death to articulate and consolidate their will to fight for their land even at the cost of becoming wandering ghosts. How effective and useful were such religiously informed appeals for justice? To answer this question, we need to examine another religiously based ethical concept, namely the notion of sacrifice. Under enormous pressures from the grassroots to rectify its ill-conceived resettlement policies, the Chinese government relied in the 1980s and early 1990s on poverty-relief work to deal with grievances in the country’s reservoir resettlement areas. As local officials in one major reservoir resettlement area after another filed urgent reports to the central government about the outbreak of protests, the central government was made aware that its legitimacy was at stake in so many regions that are pivotal to the country’s hydropower industry. More important perhaps, state authorities were fronted with a drastic reversal of a significant claim that the ruling Communist Party had used repeatedly to justify its political domination. It is well known that after the PRC was founded in 1949, modern Chinese history was radically rewritten and constantly manipulated to steer the public’s gratitude towards the Communist Party. In the process, the history of modern China until 1949 became nothing but a horrendous cycle of domestic disasters, and this discourse of history served to justify the Party’s teachings about the inevitable advent of scientific socialism in largely agrarian society. Alongside this kind of historicization, there emerged a parallel discourse on the indebtedness of the masses to the Party for liberating them from the humiliations inflicted by foreign imperialists. These paired discourses of China’s modern history underscored the importance of the public’s loyalty as ‘a form of repayment to the Party’ (Ci 1994: 62). Even when the excesses of Maoism have become widely known, the post-Mao regime continues to insist on ‘reserving for itself the role of chief chef of memory’ (Schwarcz 1994: 55), and this is partly done by reinforcing the Party’s image as chief architect of ‘key state projects for the sake of people’s happiness’, to use the Party’s own jargon. In the Sanmenxia case, the return-to-homeland movement and the subsequent struggle for farmland directly challenged the official propaganda

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about the public’s indebtedness. A forceful argument was made time and again in this movement about the state’s indebtedness. In public demonstrations and in petition drives to lodge complaints with higher authorities, this argument was articulated on the ground that the displaced villagers sacrificed their family graveyards, personal property, communal land and a livable environment when the state demanded them to do so and even used forcible means to evict those who tried to resist. Moreover, the protesters pointed out at meetings with both local and central officials that the state had once promised but did little yet to provide the displaced villagers with adequate economic aid. Deliberately framed in terms of the state’s moral responsibilities for the displaced people’s economic conditions, these complaints were meant to carry a persuasive effect upon a political regime that came to power through an agrarian revolution and has since promised the rural poor a basic livelihood and gradually a life of abundance. To avoid romanticizing the protesting villagers in the Sanmenxia case under our discussion, it should be pointed that they hardly regarded themselves as dissidents or political activists trying to change an authoritarian regime. What they tried to do was to exercise what they felt to be their moral rights to hold the state accountable for the violations of their socioeconomic rights. This attempt had much greater implications than it would appear at first look. For in trying to make the state keep its own word, the protesters were using their moral rights to seek their right to subsistence. And in articulating their moral rights for the sake of securing the right to the subsistence, the protesters engaged in the exercise of what we would consider as basic political and civil rights. These included the right to denounce ill-conceived government policies, the right to lodge complaints with the highest authorities, and even the right to organize public protests. An ultimate justification for these actions was the sense of moral entitlement among the displaced villagers that was encapsulated by the Chinese word for ‘sacrifice’. In the Sanmenxia case and other instances of protest associated with resettlement, ‘sacrifice’, or xisheng in Chinese, appeared frequently in written petitions and at negotiation meetings with government officials. Clearly, this word has a religious origin, and in Chinese culture it has been used, first and foremost, in reference to the ritual offering of slaughtered animals in the ceremonial act to worship deities and ancestors. Infused with the traditional idea of reciprocity between people and deities, descendants and ancestors, the ritual sacrifice is meant to entertain the worshipped in exchange for their protection of the worshippers (see e.g. Watson and Rawski 1988; Chang 1983). In the Chinese Communist revolution, this word – ‘sacrifice’ – was borrowed to inspire participants to relinquish their personal ambitions and even their body and soul to the revolutionary cause. But even in the Communist revolution, its participants were not treated as if their sacrifice would get nothing in return. As exemplified by Mao Zedong’s 1939 eulogy in memory of Norman Bethune, a Canadian surgeon who died of blood poisoning after saving hundreds of wounded Communist soldiers, the

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revolutionary fighters were repeatedly promised and assured by the Communist Party that if they died for the revolution they would be forever remembered and that their children would be entitled to a good life when the revolution succeeded. So sacrifice in both the traditional and revolutionary senses of the word entails the obligation to reciprocate. This perceived obligation applies to state–society relations in China today. And it involves the question of how ‘social’ justice should be rendered by a political regime that has depended so much on the contributions of money, manpower and resources by millions of rural people. Here, it should be noted that one of the important characteristics of Chinese social philosophy is its conspicuous lack of a term that we can readily translate as ‘social justice’. On the other hand, the entire progression of China’s social philosophy from its very beginning has been marked by an overriding concern about good society under the rule of a benevolent government. The public expectation was that the government’s upright and virtuous qualities would create a perfect social and political order, or ‘great harmony’ as Confucius once put it. It is thus no surprise that the late nineteenth-century translation of the word ‘justice’ was rendered as zhengyi, that is, ‘uprightness and virtuousness’. The more recent Chinese translation of the term ‘social justice’ as shehui zhengyi merely follows this earlier rendition of ‘justice’ by adding to it the Chinese word for ‘society’. Ordinary Chinese may not be familiar with the origin of this term. But its moral connotation is not alien to them. Furthermore, the government’s duty to exercise social justice is both expected and taken for granted by society at large (Lee 1996: 121–3). In retrospect, the protest movement in the Sanmenxia case served to judge the state’s moral rectitude according to popular notions of propriety, sacrifice, reciprocity and obligation. The evocation of these ideas was meant to remind the state of its moral failings. By sharing personal grievances in public protests, the participants were able to voice their view that the state had accumulated a heavy load of debts. In economic terms, this argument about debt and the obligation of repayment was linked with the attempts of the Shaanxi farmers to regain their land as their first step for community reconstruction after years of separation from their homeland. A public record of the Sanmenxia case is important because it provides a valuable glimpse into certain dimensions of human experience that are universal. For one thing, we know that communities can become unravelled to such a degree that the people in them lose much of their sense of selfworth, sometimes even their will to survive. For another, we know that life can cease to have any meaning when a people’s collective vision of the future and their shared hope of maintaining some measure of control over their circumstances are subjected to fundamental change beyond their ability to cope. In this sense, the Sanmenxia case as recorded by Leng Meng serves as a poignant example, on the one hand, of how disruptive an ill-conceived public project can be. On the other hand, it illustrates how a people who

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have been badly wounded and abused are able to find ways to turn their traumatic experience into strength, into collective actions aimed at seeking their basic rights and human dignity. In other words, this particular case of community break-up and community reconstruction shows how we as humans may try to go through a great length and many tribulations to search for the meaning of life.

Glossary

References All-China Hydropower Engineering Society (1990) ‘An Investigation Report on Sanmenxia Reservoir Resettlement and Rural Compensation Rates’ (Sanmenxia yimin shuiku nongcun yimin buchang biaozhun diaocha baogao) Cai, W. (1996) ‘A Review of Xin’anjiang Resettlement’, in Dai Qing and Xue Weijia (eds), Whose Yangtze Is It Anyway? (Shuide Chang jiang), Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, pp. 167–84 Chang, K. C. (1983) Art, Myth and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Chen, S. (1989) ‘An Investigation Report on a Community of Reservoir Resettlers in Wei Village, Gansu Province’ (Gansu weicun yimin shequ diaoca baogao) (manuscript held at Department of Sociology, Beijing University) Ci, J. (1994) Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism, Stanford: Stanford University Press Ding, Q. (1998) ‘What are the Three Gorges Resettlers Thinking?’, in Dai Qing (ed.), The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 70–89 Greenhalgh, S. (1990) ‘Land Reform and Family Entrepreneurialism in East Asia’, in G. McNicoll and M. Cain (eds), Rural Development and Population: Institutions and Policies, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 89–117

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Huang, S. (1989) The Spiral Road: Change in a Chinese Village through the Eyes of a Communist Party Leader, Boulder: Westview Jin, J. (1998) The Logic of Elites and the Logic of Victims ( Jingying luoji yu zaimin luoji) (manuscript held at Department of Sociology, Beijing University) Jing, J. (1989) ‘A Sociological Perspective on Reservoir Resettlement’, Rural Economy and Society (Nongcun jingji yu shehui ) 5 (11): 41–7 Jing, J. (1997) ‘Population Resettlement: Past Lessons for the Three Gorges Dam Project’, The China Journal 38 ( July): pp. 65–92 Judd, E. (1994) Gender and Power in Rural China, Stanford: Stanford University Press Kelliher, D. (1992) Peasant Power in China, New Haven: Yale University Press Lee, T. (1996) ‘Social Justice in Traditional China: Ideal and Practice in Sung China (960–1278) as a Case’, in W. Schweidler (ed.), Human Rights and Public Spirit, Sankt Agustin, Germany: Academia Verlag, pp. 118–27 Leng, M. (1996) ‘The Massive Population Resettlement on the Yellow River’ (Huanghe dayimin), Chinese Writers (Zhongguo zuojia) 2: 60–92 Overmyer, D. (1985) Religions of China, New York: HarperCollins Perry, E. and C. Wong (1985) The Political Economy of Reform in Post-Mao China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Schwarcz, V. (1994) ‘Strangers No More: Personal Memory in the Interstices of Public Commemoration’, in R. S. Watson (ed.), Memory, History and Opposition under State Socialism, Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, pp. 45–64 Shang, W. (1998) ‘A Lamentation for the Yellow River: The Three Gate Gorge Dam’, in Dai Qing (ed.), The River Dragon Has Come: The Three Gorges Dam and the Fate of China’s Yangtze River and Its People, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 143–59 Smil, V. (1984) The Bad Earth: Environmental Degradation in China, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe Wang, B. and L. Ye (1989) ‘An Investigation Report on a Community of Reservoir Resettlers in Xinyuan Village, Gansu Province’ (Gansu xinyuancun yimin shequ diaocha) (manuscript held at Sociology Department of Beijing University) Wang, W. (1989) ‘Research in Reservoir Resettlement at the Upper Reaches of the Yellow River’ (Huanghe shanyu shuiku yimin yanjiu), paper presented at the Second Conference on the Development of the Remote and Minority Nationality Regions, Xian, April 4–7 (paper held at Institute of Sociology, Beijing University) Watson, J. L. and E. S. Rawski (eds) (1988) Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press Whyte, M. (1995) ‘The Social Roots of China’s Economic Development’, China Quarterly 114: 999–1,019 World Bank (1994) ‘China: Xiaolangdi Resettlement Project’, report no. 12527–CHA Yang, D. (1996) Calamity and Reform in China: State, Rural Society and Institutional Change Since the Great Leap Forward, Stanford: Stanford University Press Yu, C. and X. Feng (1989) ‘An Investigation Report of the Fifth and Tenth Production Teams of Xiayuancun in the Sanyuan Township of Yongjing County’ (Yongjingxian Sanyuanxiang Xiayuancun wushe shishe shequ diaocha baogao), paper presented at the Second Conference on the Development of the Remote and Minority Nationality Regions, Xian, April 4–7 (paper held at Institute of Sociology, Beijing University) Zhou, K. (1996) How Peasants Changed China: Power of the People, Boulder: Westview

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6

The ‘glorious returns’ of Chinese pilgrims to Mecca Maris Gillette

On a sunny afternoon in late May of 1994, I rode my bicycle into the eastern part of Xi’an’s Muslim district (or Huiminfang) and happened across a major ritual event. Crowds of local residents stood waiting on streets bedecked with large banners and flags proclaiming the ‘glorious return’ of pilgrims from Mecca (hazhi ronggui ). A number of houses had handmade paper signs posted along their entrances, on which were written couplets praising the greatness of God and celebrating the ‘glorious return’. At one end of ‘Gate to Western China’ Street (Xihuamen), a group of students from the Miao Miao Kindergarten clustered around a microphone. The children were dressed in special costume, with the girls wearing long pink veils and the boys green fezzes. Several colourfully decorated tables were set up in the streets. On them I saw cans and bottles of soda, cups of ‘eight treasure’ tea (babao gaiwan cha), platters of watermelon slices, peaches, strawberries, and trays of what residents referred to as ‘traditional’ (as opposed to ‘Western’) pastries (gaodian). Some tables bore other objects: a big Ming dynasty-style urn with a red paper list of names taped to it, a large photographic poster of the Meccan holy sites with a similar label, vases filled with artificial flowers and plastic fruits. Resting against a few tables were enormous plaques (bian) made of dark polished wood and inscribed in large characters with phrases such as ‘having fulfilled the [five] obligations [of a Muslim], you return in glory’ ( gongman ronggui ), or ‘the person who has completed the five duties [of a Muslim]’ (wugong wanren), with a list of names in smaller characters below.1 The objects, I later learned, were gifts for pilgrims, and the lists recorded the names of those who were giving the gifts. I parked my bicycle and joined the waiting crowd. Not long afterwards several cars pulled up and a pilgrim (or hajji) emerged. Although surrounded by men and women, he was easy to spot, for he was the only person wearing what many local residents referred to as ‘Arabic’ clothing: a knee-length white tunic with white trousers and a turban. After everyone accompanying the pilgrim got out of the cars, they, the pilgrim, and some of the bystanders briefly prayed together. Then the hajji moved towards the tables set up by the roadside, pausing at each one to drink a little, exchange a few words

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with the men and women waiting there, and pray with them. In the meantime a few other pilgrims, both men and women, arrived. Gradually all made their way to the place where the children of the Miao Miao Kindergarten were standing, and listened to their performance of welcome and congratulations in Arabic and Chinese. Then the pilgrims and their groups of well-wishers divided into several groups, heading off to the mosques to which they belonged. I followed the first hajji to the nearby Small Leatheryard Street Mosque (Xiaopiyuan Qingzhensi ). Inside the mosque’s courtyard a small reception awaited the pilgrim. After stopping to pray, the hajji sat down and was greeted by various members of the mosque community, including its religious specialists (or ahong). A friend I ran into told me that he and the other pilgrims would later make their way home to be received by kin and neighbours and treated to a sumptuous meal. This chance discovery of a ritual marking the return of pilgrims from Mecca inspired me to learn more about who went on the pilgrimage (or hajj), how pilgrims were treated and ritually demarcated, and how residents of the Xi’an Muslim district thought and felt about making the pilgrimage. In this chapter I investigate some of the history, symbols and social practices related to Chinese pilgrimages to Mecca, focusing on the separation(s) and reunion(s) experienced by Xi’an hajjis and the communities to which they belong. Anthropologists have studied non-Muslim and Muslim pilgrimages from a number of perspectives, investigating their spatial and temporal implications (e.g. Yamba 1992), their effects on social hierarchies (Turner 1974; Sangren 1991; Sangren 1993), their historical transformations and place in the modern world (McDonnell 1990; Metcalf 1990), and their role in the production of subjectivity (Metcalf 1990). Rarely, however, have anthropologists studied pilgrimage as a genre of separation and reunion (see Stafford, this volume, and 2000: introduction). In his introduction to this volume, Stafford proposes that separations are formative not only in the development of an individual’s sense of self but also in the articulation of collective identities from family to nation. He suggests that we view social practices such as pilgrimages as separations in order to explore the relationship between the shaping of individuals and the shaping of social groups, and he encourages us to make connections between social processes of departure and return and their personal and psychic aspects. In this chapter I consider how the social processes for managing separation and reunion may be analogous to individual ones by comparing some of the rhetorical and practical measures that Xi’an Muslims adopt before and after the hajj with some of Freud’s ideas about the individual’s strategies for coping with separation (in Beyond the Pleasure Principle). I suggest that we regard the social practices of gift-giving accompanying the pilgrimage as collective strategies to regulate, order and make sense of the pilgrim’s departure and return within her social group.

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Research and background I conducted ethnographic research for this study between 1994 and 1999, gathering the bulk of my information during the eighteen months that I lived in Xi’an in 1994 and 1995, and continuing to collect data during four summer field trips. The descriptions and much of the information presented here come from two consecutive years of witnessing preparations for the hajj and the ritualized departures and reunions of pilgrims in the Muslim district, as well as the personal accounts of pilgrims and the reports and descriptions given by their relatives, friends and neighbours.2 I also viewed videotapes of the pilgrimage and examined the photographs of several Xi’an pilgrims. The neighbourhood that I am calling ‘the Xi’an Muslim district’ is not the only Muslim residential area in Xi’an, nor is it the city’s only Muslim commercial space. It is, however, the oldest continuously inhabited Muslim residential and commercial site in Xi’an, and the only Muslim area that has a local moniker. Xi’an urbanites call this particular place the ‘Hui people quarter’ (Huiminfang), or simply, ‘the quarter’ ( fangshang). It is located in the city centre, just west of the Bell Tower and adjacent to the Drum Tower, and is approximately one square mile in size. Residents say that ‘Hui people’ have lived in this district since the Tang dynasty (usually CE 618–907), a claim that is contradicted by historical evidence that places the Tang imperial palace on this site. City officials report, however, that Muslims have lived in the Muslim district since the tenth century (for more information see Gillette 2000: chapter 2). According to government statistics from the early 1990s, 30,000 Chinese Muslims, or more accurately, those whom the government classifies as ‘members of the Hui nationality’ (Huizu), lived in the municipal zone containing the quarter (Wu 1992: 99). Most residents of the quarter reported that they were descended from Muslim traders, including Arabs, Persians and Central Asians, who travelled to Xi’an on the Silk Road beginning in the seventh century CE. Similar genealogical claims for the ‘Hui nationality’ can be found in much of the scholarly work published in China on the Hui (see e.g. HZJS 1978; see also Lipman 1997: xxiii-xxiv). A common local aphorism illustrates how most residents understood who they were: they have ‘Hui people grandfathers [father’s father] and Han people grandmothers [father’s mother]’ (Huimin baba, Hanmin nainai ).3 This saying suggests that residents perceive themselves as related to ‘Han people’ (Hanmin), a term usually glossed as ‘Chinese’, but through what is for Han and Hui alike the (formally) less significant link of matrifiliation. Patrilineally, and primarily, they are ‘Hui people’ (Huimin). Before we conclude that the residents of the Muslim district are ‘nonChinese’ – a conclusion that has bearing on how, where and why the pilgrimage to Mecca is a separation and a return for Xi’an Hui – we might examine the term ‘Hui’ a little more. Residents tended to refer to themselves as ‘Hui’ in one of two ways: they called themselves ‘Hui people’

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(Huimin), and, more rarely, they called themselves ‘members of the Hui nationality’ (Huizu). These distinctions may appear minor, but they mark vastly different conceptualizations of who the Hui are, and hint at the complicated history and multiple semantic shifts that undergirded the term ‘Hui’ and its usages in the late 1990s. In pre-twentieth-century China, ‘Hui’ roughly meant ‘Muslim’. All Muslims were known as ‘Hui’, and other modifiers were added to characterize the sort of Muslim being discussed (Lipman 1997: 216). Many of the modifiers marked linguistic differences, for example, ‘Mongolian Hui’ or ‘Salar Hui’. Although cultural and phenotypic differences were at times associated with some of these labels, the historical evidence indicates that during the imperial period these categories were permeable. This was related in part to the imperial state’s tendency to group all Muslims together, on the one hand, and official concern (verging on hysteria during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) with religious factionalism on the other, which caused the government to differentiate Hui according to factional affiliations rather than linguistic, cultural or physiognomic groupings. Unfortunately, Qing officials rarely grasped the nature of Hui factionalism, and their efforts to control northwest China (where the majority of Muslims lived) tended to exacerbate local violence, often with disastrous consequences (see Lipman 1997 for further discussion). During the twentieth century, however, first the Nationalist and then the Communist governments used ‘Hui’ as a racial designation – and here I mean ‘race’ in the sense of das Volk or a ‘people’, as was current during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. This (essentializing) concept of the Hui as a ‘people’ embraced genealogy, physiognomy, and cultural and linguistic attributes, as did the pernicious Western notion of ‘race’ that influenced the elites and officials who developed such ideas as a component of their efforts to build a modern Chinese citizenry. Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the modern Chinese nation state, made ‘Hui’ one of the five categories of ‘people’ (minzu) that composed the Chinese ‘people’ or ‘nationality’ (Zhonghua minzu); when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) came to power it split the category ‘Hui’ into ten separate peoples or ‘nationalities’, as minzu is usually translated. Most of these fixed identity labels for Muslims were based on what government officials perceived as groups with a traditional ‘homeland’ and/or language (see Dreyer 1976; Eberhard 1982), although of course pretwentieth-century conceptions of culture and difference also came into play. Those Muslims who neither spoke a language other than that of their place of residence (which, with very few exceptions, was dialectal Chinese) nor had a ‘homeland’ were placed in what Jonathan N. Lipman has termed the ‘default category’: they became members of the ‘Hui nationality’ (Lipman 1997: xxiii).4 A key element of the Chinese Communist Party’s ‘nationality’ policies has been the separation of ‘religion’ (zong jiao) from ‘nationality’. Like ‘nationality’ (and ‘class background’, and other post-1949 official identifications), what counted as ‘religion’ in the People’s Republic was determined by

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administrative fiat. The party recognized five religions in China, one of which was Islam, and relegated all other cosmological ideas and practices to the category ‘superstition’ (mixin). Religion, the government mandated, was a matter of personal belief; it was not, officially, a factor influencing nationality affiliation, nor was it an enduring or primarily a collective identity.5 The party’s stress on religion as individual belief may seem puzzling and ironic, given that the government’s decisions helped institutionalize and perpetuate the five ‘official’ religions. This emphasis makes better sense when we consider it in the context of the government’s desire to weaken the bonds between family members (which were ‘religious’ as well as economic and sentimental), detach individuals from non-state associations, and promote ties between the person and the state. Recategorizing religious observance as an individual practice, denying the religious foundations of group identities (such as ‘nationality’), putting officially tolerated religious institutions securely under government control, and defining most popular religious practices as ‘superstition’ facilitated the party’s efforts to forge a new identity of citizen for denizens of China and build a ‘modern’ Chinese nation state. The PRC government has successfully persuaded residents of the Muslim district and other Chinese to accept minzu as a meaningful category of collective identity, and to regard ‘nationality’ membership as a matter of descent. The bundle of benefits that the state has provided to the members of ‘minority nationalities’ (shaoshu minzu) since 1949 has helped promote this outcome (see Gladney 1991: 161–2, 219–20, and Gillette 2000: chapter 2 for examples of these perquisites; see also Gladney 1990). Even so, as of the late 1990s, the category ‘Hui nationality’ (Huizu) had not displaced ‘Hui people’ (Huimin) as a social classification, and residents of the Muslim district continued to link being Muslim to being Hui. I almost always heard residents identify themselves as ‘Hui people’ (Huimin), not as ‘members of the Hui nationality’ (Huizu). Thus, when residents spoke of their grandfathers as ‘Hui people’, they were identifying their forefathers as Muslims. They were not making exclusive national, regional, linguistic, racial or cultural claims. When they described themselves as Huimin, they were indicating that they too were Muslims – Muslims with ‘Han people’ grandmothers. What ‘Han’ means and how it relates to ‘Chinese’ are topics that have received a great deal of scholarly attention in the past decades (see e.g. Brown 1996; Harrell 1995; Tu 1994 and 1993). We need not address these questions at length here, if only because our ethnographic data will help us address them. For the moment it is enough to note that the contemporary meaning of ‘Han’ has, as a result of the CCP’s nationality policies, become just as essentialized as ‘Hui’, and that ‘Han’ does not map neatly on to our term ‘Chinese’. If in turn we discover that our notion of ‘Chinese’ cannot contain Muslims, then perhaps we have arrived at a moment for scrutinizing our own usage. Many Western scholars have noted that most, if not all, cultural differences that exist between ‘Hui’ and ‘Han’ relate to

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Islamic observance (see Lipman 1987; Gladney 1991: 21–6; Gillette 2000: chapter 1; Aubin 1991). The ethnographic data available suggests that, in terms of their family system (including their ideology of patrilineal descent), behavioural norms, traditional knowledge, and most aspects of their ritual life, Hui are ‘Chinese’ or ‘Confucian’. If we followed James L. Watson’s argument that prior to the formation of the modern Chinese nation state ‘being Chinese’ meant adhering to certain standardized ritual practices and having knowledge of a shared oral tradition ( J. Watson 1993, 1991, 1988), then we might well classify the Hui as ‘Chinese’. The differences that exist between Hui ritual structures and those that Watson outlines derive from the dictates of Islamic observance, and these differences seem hardly more important than the many regional variations in ritual and other practices that we find across China. Further, if we compare Hui to Protestant or Catholic Chinese, whose ‘Chineseness’ is less frequently questioned and who also have religiously-dictated variation from ‘traditional’ Chinese rituals, then we might wonder even more why the Hui are not thought of as Chinese. With these reflections on Hui identity in mind, we will be able to perceive the multiple separations and reunions that the pilgrimage entails for residents of the Muslim district.

History and practice of the pilgrimage in the Xi’an Muslim district According to residents and local officials, prior to the early 1980s very few Chinese Muslims from Xi’an made the hajj. Travel to Mecca was difficult and time-consuming, and the dangers that the pilgrim confronted when travelling by sea and by land made it quite likely that he would never return (see also McDonnell 1990: 114). ‘He’ is the accurate pronoun to use for Xi’an and Chinese pilgrims for most of the twentieth century: all of the people whom residents remembered as having visited Mecca before 1982 were male (see Lipman 1997 for the fullest historical account in English of Chinese pilgrims; see Tie and Li 1994 for a comprehensive history in Chinese). Those pilgrims who completed the hajj before the late twentieth century are credited, both by Xi’an Muslims and by scholars of the Hui, with bringing new ideas and practices back to the quarter (see Gillette 2000: chapter 3; for a general account of how pilgrims affected Chinese Islam, see Lipman 1997: 58–72, 85–9, 187–211). Returning pilgrims were publicly acclaimed in their neighbourhood. For example, residents remembered two local men who had made the pilgrimage during the first four decades of the twentieth century. At least one of these men was honoured by the construction of a stone archway (pailou) in the mosque to which he belonged. On the arch was inscribed ‘the person who has completed the five obligations [of a Muslim]’ (wugong wanren). The wording of this phrase implies that by completing the five duties the man had become a wanren, a ‘complete’ or ‘perfect’ person. The size, weight,

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expense and location of this public monument testify to the importance of his achievement, and suggest that his ‘completeness’ reflected glory upon the entire congregation, who, in the common idiom, could ‘share his light’ (zhanguang).6 Locals who knew of these early pilgrims said that during the first two decades of the twentieth century the journey to Mecca took two years. During the 1930s and 1940s, mechanized modes of travel decreased the time to six months. Some residents told me about one local man who had made the pilgrimage in the 1930s. Said to be an official, this man had travelled by car to Nanjing and the Nationalist government had funded his pilgrimage (see Tie and Li 1994: 81–6 for further information on travel to Mecca, the national figures for Chinese pilgrims, and the involvement of the Nationalist government prior to 1949). The next Xi’an men that residents remembered as having journeyed to Mecca were sent by the government of the People’s Republic. Both were religious specialists (ahong) who held positions in the new administrative body that the CCP had established to govern Islam (the Islamic Association). Both men made the pilgrimage between 1950 and 1958. During 1958, the party-state implemented ‘religious reforms’ (zong jiao gaige) to decrease the economic and political power of all religious institutions in China. This campaign decreased and changed the nature of public expressions of religious devotion and affected the hajj. For the next twenty-four years only one of the Muslim district’s mosques was allowed to remain open for religious practice; the others were taken over by state factories and work units, made into entertainment halls ( yuletang), or used as storage spaces and rubbish heaps. Ahong were subject to struggle sessions, physical abuse and labour reform, and several died. As one woman poetically described this difficult period, ‘in those days, the Qur’an was far away’ (nashihou, gulanjing yuan). A number of residents told me that no one from Xi’an made the hajj between 1958 and 1982. However, during the Feast of Sacrifice (the holy day that marks the end of the pilgrimage) in 1994, one of the Muslim district’s ten mosques formally commemorated a 92-year-old adherent who that year was making the pilgrimage for the second time. According to the ahong who made the announcement, this man’s first trip had been in 1967. While I have been unable to gather any further information about this man, the political climate characteristic of the Maoist period makes it likely that he was sent as a government delegate, as were the religious specialists who visited Mecca during the 1950s. The local account of this twice-glorious hajji contradicts the information provided in a recent study of the pilgrimage in China, in which the authors claim that all contacts between Chinese Muslims and the Middle East ceased between 1965 and 1978 (Tie and Li 1994: 232). According to their records, the pilgrimage did not resume until the government arranged an official delegation of pilgrims in 1979 (Tie and Li 1994: 240). The opportunities for Xi’an Hui to make the pilgrimage improved dramatically with Deng Xiaoping’s economic and social reforms, which caused

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standards of living to increase and allowed religious practices to emerge. Privatization, the opening of a (limited) free market, and official encouragement of consumerism enabled many residents of the Muslim district to quit their factory and work-unit jobs and become private entrepreneurs.7 The money that they made from their private businesses far outstripped the salaries they had earned in their state-sponsored jobs. For example, whereas in 1994 the average clerical worker in Xi’an earned between 250 and 300 yuan per month, the average net income of a small restaurant in the quarter that was run by a family of seven was 15,000 yuan per month. Xi’an Muslims devoted a sizable proportion of these new higher incomes to religious expression. Increased religious tolerance became state policy shortly after Deng Xiaoping became China’s paramount leader. Under Deng’s guidance, the CCP permitted ‘normal religious activities’ to occur in ‘authorized religious sites’. The state returned much of the property that had been confiscated from religious institutions to its previous owners (or appropriate heirs), and permitted the pilgrimage to resume. In Xi’an, residents of the Muslim district first turned to rebuilding and reopening their mosques (and finding and (re)educating men to serve as religious specialists). One local mosque received government funds for repairing the damage done during the ‘religious reforms’ and Cultural Revolution, but the reconstruction (and in one case, construction) of the district’s nine other mosques was accomplished entirely through private donations. Most of this work was finished by 1994. From that time forward, more and more residents turned a portion of their extra income to making the pilgrimage (see Table 1). Xi’an Muslims remembered 1982 as the first year that the government allowed private individuals to make the hajj (see also Tie and Li 1994: 245–6). Persons wishing to make the trip had to apply, and the application process took a year or more. Residents had to ‘queue up’ (paidui), for the government instituted provincial-level quotas to limit the maximum number of private citizens who could make the hajj in any given year. Several Hui told me that some would-be pilgrims died during the long application process. Relatively few Xi’an Hui made the pilgrimage during the 1980s (see also Tie and Li 1994: 245–7). During the early 1990s, however, the number of locals wanting to make the hajj exceeded the government’s quota so dramatically that in 1995, the vice-director of the Shaanxi Bureau of Religious and Table 1 Pilgrims from Xi’an, 1994–78 Year

Number

1994 1995 1996 1997

59 62 74 88

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Nationality Affairs and the head of the Shaanxi Islamic Association (both Hui from the Muslim district) persuaded higher-level officials to increase the number of pilgrims from Shaanxi Province from the forty previously allotted to more than sixty. This increase still was not high enough to enable all those residents who wished to make the pilgrimage that year to go. A noteworthy aspect of Xi’an pilgrimage patterns during the Deng and post-Deng era was the high rate of attendance by women: in 1994, onethird of the pilgrims were women (21 out of 61), and in 1996, nearly two-thirds (43 out of a total of 74) were women (see also McDonnell 1990: 115). The increasing rates of female pilgrimage in Xi’an echoes McDonnell’s findings for Malaysia during the late twentieth century, and may point to widespread transformations in gendered pilgrimage patterns. Certainly the gender ratio of late 1990s Xi’an was a dramatic reversal of the pattern of a hundred years earlier. Changes in women’s participation in production were partly responsible for this shift. During the Maoist era, the PRC government’s policies for ‘women’s liberation’, designed to bring women into the workforce, gave most Chinese women an independent source of income (wages). I think these policies significantly affected ordinary people’s expectations about remunerating women for their labour and about appropriate roles for women to assume in public. Very few women in the 1990s Muslim district worked in state-run or collective enterprises, although most older women had once done so; most women worked in family businesses. However, this work was radically different from similar kinds of women’s labour during the 1890s in that 1990s women received wages from the enterprise ‘owner’ (usually the senior adult male in the family). This was true for both unmarried and married women. The practice of paying a married woman (who was not saving money for a dowry) for her work was an especially dramatic change. Xi’an Muslim women’s participation in production did not only give them access to the financial resources that could pay for a woman’s hajj (elite women in the 1890s might well have had access to the money for the pilgrimage), it also created an environment in which women were expected to be part of public life and were perceived, at least some of the time, as independent actors.9 Between 1994 and 1999, Xi’an Hui reported that the pilgrimage took from six to eight weeks. Residents first travelled together by train to Beijing, where they joined all the other Muslims from the People’s Republic who were making the hajj that year. The national Ministry of Religion (Guowuyuan zong jiaoju) managed the travel arrangements for PRC pilgrims. This bureau required that all pilgrims take a week-long political and ideological course in Beijing immediately before departure. Those travelling from Xi’an had already received some official instruction: the provincial Bureau of Religious and Nationality Affairs and the Islamic Association held an advisory meeting for all pilgrims shortly before leaving Xi’an. After completing their ‘studies’ in Beijing, the pilgrims flew to the United Arab Emirates and travelled on to Mecca. The journey included not only the hajj proper, which

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meant going to Mecca and performing a series of ritual tasks at the designated time, but also a visit to Medina to see the Prophet’s tomb (which is not a religious obligation). Prior to the Saudi Arabian government’s official recognition of the People’s Republic in the early 1990s, PRC pilgrims had flown to Pakistan and made the pilgrimage under the auspices of the Pakistani government (see also Tie and Li 1994: 240–6). By 1994, however, they travelled as a national group representing the People’s Republic of China, and after arriving in Mecca stayed together in tents under the PRC flag. The group was accompanied by an official translator. The pilgrims I knew said that the only people they conversed with during the hajj were other citizens of the People’s Republic. For residents of Xi’an, at least, this was partly due to language barriers, as very few spoke any languages other than Chinese (including Arabic), but it was also due to the manner in which the Chinese and Saudi Arabian governments arranged the trip. Since the 1970s, all pilgrims travel and stay in Mecca in national delegations (see Tie and Li 1994: 236–7; McDonnell 1990). One Xi’an hajji told me that he had been startled when he saw a group of tents in Mecca marked with the flag of the Republic of China. Although these were Muslims with whom he could communicate, he did not try to meet the Taiwanese pilgrims. Some scholars have noted that one outcome of travelling in national delegations to Mecca is a heightened awareness of belonging to a specific national community and increased feelings of nationalism (e.g. McDonnell 1990: 122). Xi’an pilgrims’ descriptions indicate that the PRC national delegation is subdivided. Muslims from the same province are organized into groups (tuan) with a designated head (tuanzhang), usually an older religious specialist. Thus, all Muslims from Shaanxi travel as Shaanxi Huimin, as residents put it. This suggests that the pilgrimage promotes province-level identifications. Dialectal differences would also promote regional clustering. A question for further research would be the extent to which the pilgrimage affects the relations between Muslim citizens classified as members of different Muslim ‘nationalities’ (e.g. Hui, Uighur, Salar, Dong’an, etc.), some of whom are regionally located (for example, most Salar live in Qinghai) and others of whom are not (the Hui are probably the most widely dispersed Muslim nationality). In short, while PRC citizens travel together as part of the national delegation, which may promote pan-Chinese Muslim solidarity, their linguistic differences, organization into provincial groups, and the emphasis on the distinctive differences of the Muslim nationalities at home may reify their differences. Perhaps the national sentiment that the pilgrimage generates for PRC citizens is mediated by these other affiliations, with the result that individuals develop a differentiated sense of how they belong to the Chinese nation (see also Sangren’s work on Taiwanese Ma Zu pilgrimages (1993)). Local pilgrims and other residents said that the minimum cost of making the pilgrimage during the mid-1990s was 30,000 yuan (ten times the size

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of a clerical worker’s annual salary). Of this sum, 20,000 yuan was required for travel costs and registration fees, and 10,000 yuan was for procuring presents for relatives and friends back in the quarter. With only one exception, all the pilgrims and not-yet pilgrims that I spoke with regarded spending 10,000 yuan on presents as absolutely mandatory. Common gifts that hajjis procured included Arabic robes, veils, hats and vests, videos of the pilgrimage, prayer mats, wristwatches, toys, dates – which as one pilgrim put it were ‘the only thing that Saudi Arabia produces besides oil’ – and gold jewelry, since gold was ‘cheaper’ in Saudi Arabia than China (or so residents claimed). The gifts were material reminders of the recipient’s importance to the giver; so perhaps the value of the good received (as locally assessed) mattered among those receiving gifts. I never heard any complaints from residents about the gifts they received from Mecca, which may bear witness to the pilgrims’ adept assessment of appropriate gifts to present. Most important, I think, was that a Saudi gift confirmed that the recipient had not been forgotten during the physical separation of giver and recipient. Such a gift testified that the recipient had participated in the pilgrimage by being present in the mind of the pilgrim, and so, by extension, in Mecca. The gift allowed the recipient to possess a piece of the pilgrimage, and perhaps through this, absorb a little of the pilgrim’s glory or ‘share the light’ (zhanguang). Her Saudi Arabian gift allowed her to become one step closer to the Prophet and God, even though she had not become a ‘complete’ person (wanren) herself. One middle-aged resident who lived on Big Leatheryard Street (Dapiyuan) told me that she knew of a way for pilgrims to avoid taking so much money for gifts: not to tell anyone that you were making the pilgrimage. This woman said that one of her neighbours went on the hajj (in 1994) and told no one about it. The neighbour bought herself two complete ‘Arab’ outfits, including veil, robe and trousers, but, according to my informant, not one single present for anyone else. My informant explained that if you kept your pilgrimage plans secret, then no one would give you presents (song) before you went, and so you were not obligated to give them presents (song) when you returned. Her tone and conversation indicated some disapproval of this ‘solution’, although I sensed a faint admiration for the hajja’s daring in breaking established social practice. This woman’s explanation of gift-giving surrounding the pilgrimage probably misrepresents (some of) the sentiment behind these exchanges. Yet her mechanistic formula – you give me a present before I go, I give you a present when I return – also conveys the strength of locals’ expectations: those who gave presents to pilgrims had only to wait and the ‘favour’ would be returned. Residents who made the pilgrimage – or at least, those who were public about their plans – received substantial quantities of gifts from kin, friends and the members of the mosque with which they were affiliated. Some gifts were given before the pilgrim’s departure as part of her ‘sendoff’. The word for ‘sending off’ (or ‘seeing out’) a person, song, is the same as the word used for giving, or ‘sending’, a present. Perhaps one connection

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between the two concepts lies in a similar movement: something (object, person) attached to a person (the one doing the ‘sending off’ and/or the ‘giving’) is moving away (separating) from her. In the days leading up to a pilgrim’s departure, relatives and friends gave her gifts of food, tea and other small tokens of affection, such as traditional Chinese medicine. In many cases, the gifts were goods that the pilgrim could use on the road, indicating that the givers intended the pilgrim to take the gifts with her. The hajja who brought these gifts with her on pilgrimage metaphorically brought with her the givers and a small piece of the Muslim district. Relatives, friends and the members of the pilgrim’s mosque also ‘sent off’ the pilgrim by gathering at her home, the mosque, the place in the Muslim district from which she departed in a car, and (usually a smaller group) the Xi’an train station, to bid her farewell as she was leaving.10 By remaining with the pilgrim until the precise instant of her departure, the people sending her off promoted their continuing ‘union’ with her, reinscribing their relationship (and the pilgrim’s mental images of them) as she left.11 Both kinds of song, then, combated the physical separation of pilgrim from her community via physical and ideational means. When the hajja ‘returned in glory’, part of what made her return glorious was that some of her relatives would travel to meet her ( jie) in Beijing, and the mosque she attended would send a delegation to receive her at the Xi’an train station. Back in the Muslim district, residents prepared the receptions described in the opening vignette. The tables of food, drink and (other) gifts on the street were known as ‘roadside happiness’ (lu xi). This term echoes some of the ways that weddings and funerals are spoken of, as for example when they are called ‘red and white happiness affairs’ (hongbai xishi). The banquet for a wedding is called an ‘eating happiness banquet’ (chi xiyan), and attending a wedding can be called ‘eating happiness sweets’ (chi xitang). Some of the ‘happiness’ may reside in how all of these rites join what has been separated, for example, a bride and a groom (or perhaps more accurately, a wife and daughter-in-law to her husband and his family), a (deceased) person and her ancestors, or a pilgrim and her family and friends, in her place of origin (see the chapters by Feuchtwang and Johnson in this volume for more detailed studies of the separations and reunions at death and marriage). The hajja’s ‘glorious return’ is also marked and made glorious by giftgiving in two directions. The pilgrim made her ‘return’ gifts to those who had given her presents before she left, and locals also presented her with new gifts. The gifts given to a pilgrim upon her ‘glorious return’ tended to be bigger and heavier than those given prior to her departure, including, for example, large Chinese-style ceramic vases (the ones I have seen are vaguely reminiscent of Ming dynasty urns), large posters (often of beautiful, anonymous scenery), long cloth banners (usually red, the colour of happiness), and large, heavy wooden plaques (bian). As noted, these were usually collective presents, adorned with the names of givers. Like the commemorative

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stone arch for the early twentieth-century hajji, they suggest the givers’ participation in the pilgrim’s glory (again, zhanguang) and the public honour associated with being attached to a hajji. The mosque to which the pilgrim belonged also prepared her a gift, usually a large wooden plaque (bian) that was presented at the mosque’s reception for the pilgrims. Residents hung these plaques over the entrances to their houses. To give an indication of how mosques as institutions dealt with the pilgrimage, in 1994 six members of the Small Mosque made the pilgrimage. The mosque management committee spent 2,060 yuan to make each of them a plaque, 350 yuan on food for their reception, and 374.50 yuan on other fees related to their journey (including, presumably, renting cars to see them to and from the train station). The money came from members’ donations and fees earned from the mosque’s public showers and rental properties. The mosque management committee posted this information on a sign at the entrance to the Small Mosque compound shortly after the pilgrims’ return. Celebrations for the pilgrims did not end on the day of their physical return to the district. The pilgrim’s family hosted another celebration one month later, to which they invited relatives, friends, neighbours and fellow members of the pilgrim’s mosque, including its religious specialists (ahong). This celebration was called guo nietie and included a recitation of the Qur’an followed by a group meal. Nietie is a Chinese transliteration of an Arabic word (nïyah) that means ‘wish’ or ‘aspiration’. Many local practices involving charity (including making donations to the mosque) were called nietie, and all celebrations that included a Qur’anic recitation (or in some cases, a sermon by an ahong) and a group meal were called guo nietie. According to one local Hui scholar, himself a resident of the Muslim district, guo nietie, which occurred during weddings, funerals, engagements, circumcisions, ceremonies to mark the birth of a child or the opening of a new business, the Prophet’s birthday and other holidays, were always performed to solicit God’s mercy on behalf of the dead, and so were both charity and the expression of an aspiration. The timing of a pilgrim’s guo nietie specifically invokes the guo nietie for an infant’s ‘social birth’, held when a child reaches a ‘full month’ (manyue) of life, and the guo nietie that families hosted one month after the funeral of a relative. Pilgrims made their ‘return’ gifts after they came back, not apparently as part of a formal ritual event. Some pilgrims also made an ‘extra’ gift (or a nietie) to the mosque. It is my suspicion that pilgrims who made these extra gifts – a minority of hajji – did so near the time of their guo nietie celebration, one month after their return. I saw only two types of presents: commemorative arches that were erected in the mosque courtyard, and large wooden plaques (bian) inscribed with the hajji’s name and phrases such as ‘our religion worships that which is in the west [Mecca]’ ( jiao chong xi yu). The commemorative plaques were hung over the entrance to the mosque hall or the entrances to other buildings in the mosque complex. The plaques and the large stone arches were visible to anyone who entered the mosque

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complex. Both plaques and arches subtly indexed the hajji’s journey. The arches resembled a doorway or gate, and the plaques were placed above entrances, thus marking the pilgrim’s departure and return.12

Representing the pilgrimage For Muslims, Mecca is the spiritual heartland where Islam’s most holy sites are located and Muhammad lived. It is the only place that is doctrinally mandated for Muslims to visit, provided their finances and health are sufficient to allow them to make the trip. All Muslims face in the direction of Mecca when they pray (which in China means facing west), thus embodying Mecca’s importance in worship. Images of Mecca are common in Muslim iconography; in the quarter, friezes, wooden sculptures, photographs, posters and drawings of Mecca were used to decorate mosques, businesses and private homes. The pilgrimage reinforces Muslims’ special relationship to Mecca through performance: a pilgrim must call out ‘I am here’ as she enters Mecca (Metcalf 1990: 93). It is as if the sacred site expects and awaits the arrival of all those who believe. Barbara Metcalf, in a recent study of South Asian (Indian) pilgrims, writes ‘Travel to Mecca is travel of a very particular kind. To go to Mecca is to go home’ (1990: 100). Mecca’s centrality to worship and devotional expression makes this true for all Muslims, but the pilgrimage has special overtones for Muslims in the diaspora, particularly those who live as minorities in non-Muslim states. For these Muslims, ‘coming home’ to Mecca enables a kind of belonging that is absent in their secular homes. When diasporic Muslims enter Mecca, they find, perhaps for the first and only time in their lives, that they are members of the majority, indeed, part of a ‘universal brotherhood’ (umma) that is, momentarily, truly universal. Rather than being marked as ‘different’ from the majority population, diasporic Muslims are marked as ‘the same’ as all Muslims on pilgrimage, in belief, practice and appearance (all Muslims are required to wear uniform white garb while on pilgrimage; these clothes mark gender differences but no others).13 The hajj, perhaps more than any other single Muslim ritual, builds a powerful sense of unity and community among all Muslims, even as some differences (gender, nation) are delineated (see also Sangren 1993). Xi’an Hui identified Mecca as ‘home’ for genealogical as well as religious reasons. As we have seen, Xi’an Hui explicitly claim to descend from patrilineal ‘grandfathers’ that include Arabs. As one resident put it, ‘we are a little Arab’ (women you yidianr Alaboren). According to their family system (which is Confucian), the Arabian peninsula is an ‘old home’ (laojia), an ancestral ‘origin’. Jing’s explanation (this volume) for the returning Shaanxi Chinese also applies to Hui ‘returning’ to Mecca: the presence of Hui ancestral graves in the Arabian peninsula sacralizes Mecca as a kinship home and a place where Xi’an Hui belong. Thus, for Xi’an pilgrims the journey to Mecca is both a religious and a kinship homecoming.

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At the same time, the hajj is also a separation from living and dead kin, the familiar setting for religious observance, and home in the Muslim district. Leaving the quarter was particularly momentous for female pilgrims, since most Xi’an Muslim women spent all of their time in the neighbourhood. Staying at home was a characteristic practice of both younger and older women in the quarter; for example, when a 25-year-old friend visited me at the foreign students’ dormitory at Xi’an’s Northwest University about a year and a half after we had first met, she told me that it was the first time she had ever left the Muslim district. Male hajji were more likely than females to have travelled outside the quarter before the pilgrimage, but travel outside Xi’an was still uncommon for Hui men, especially those above the age of fifty. Most experiences of the pilgrimage were unfamiliar to Xi’an Hui, but the disjunction between returning to a homeland and being away from home may have been most striking in Mecca. PRC Muslims differed from their Meccan hosts linguistically, culturally, racially, and in the technologies of daily life. These differences were a main topic of conversation after pilgrims returned to Xi’an, where non-pilgrims, including me, were always eager to hear about what Mecca and the pilgrimage were like. Xi’an hajjis did not feel at home in Mecca in ordinary ways. The weather was much hotter than they had previously experienced and they had to live in tents. Some pilgrims were discomfited by the constant use of air-conditioning in Mecca, which they feared would make them ill (according to Chinese ideas about health). The food was also unfamiliar. Since food was central to how Xi’an Hui represented and understood themselves, the strangeness of the cuisine was alienating, even if it was ‘edible’ by Islamic standards (for more on Hui and food, see Gillette 2000: chapters 4 and 5, Gladney 1991, and Pillsbury 1975). A elderly religious specialist who made the pilgrimage tried to find a way to bridge the culinary gap during a conversation with me; after mentioning all the strange fruits and vegetables in Mecca (and the six-lane highways, and the dark-skinned people), he said stoutly, ‘but they [ Meccans] eat noodles, just like us’. The language that residents used for the pilgrimage pointed to the Muslim district and China as ‘home’. To make the hajj was to chaojin, a phrase that also means to travel to the imperial court. To come back from Mecca was to ‘return in glory’ (ronggui ). The phrase ronggui (‘glorious return’), which applied to hajjis coming back to Xi’an, means a triumphant homecoming, and also refers to the triumphant homecoming of an official retiring from the imperial court. Gui, the word for ‘return’, implies a return to an originating place, and signifies reunion. Another kind of gui for residents of the Muslim district occurred at death. The phrase quan ti gui zhen, which can roughly be translated as ‘the entire body returns to truth’ (but can also mean that the entire community of Muslims return to God), was emblazoned on curtains hung over the doorway to the room where a corpse was kept before burial (usually in the deceased’s home). One meaning of this phrase is that

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the corpse ‘returns’ to its origin.14 To give another (non-Muslim) example of gui, the Chinese term for Hong Kong’s ‘return’ to the mainland on 1 July 1997 was huigui, two words both signifying ‘return’.15 Many residents commented that pilgrims must prepare for the hajj as if they would be ‘unable to return’ or ‘unable to come back’ (hui bu lai ). The word ‘return’ or ‘come back’ in this sentence, hui, is the same word used in such phrases as hui jia, ‘return home’ – and in Chinese to go home is always to ‘return’ – and hui lai, ‘come back’ or ‘return’ (and for Hong Kong’s huigui ). Hui, like gui, carries strong overtones of ‘coming back’ to an origin. When residents spoke of pilgrims being ‘unable to return’, hui bu lai, they meant because of death. Death (gui zhen, a return to truth) would prevent a hajji from returning home (huijia). Many Hui told me that a person preparing to go on the hajj should prepare as if she were getting ready to die. Before leaving, residents said, pilgrims should settle all their debts, get all their affairs in order, and make provisions for the family members that they would leave behind. This included ensuring that dependent kin had sufficient money to survive should the pilgrim die on the journey. There were compelling physical reasons to link the pilgrimage with death. For most diasporic Muslims, travel to the Middle East was extremely difficult and hazardous before the mid-twentieth century (when transportation, sanitation and medicine improved) and many pilgrims did die on the trip (see Tie and Li 1994; McDonnell 1990). Extreme heat and crowded conditions in Mecca during the pilgrimage continued to cause deaths throughout the twentieth century. In 1994, two Xi’an pilgrims were trampled to death in a stampede that occurred during one part of the pilgrimage ritual (the ‘stoning of the devil’). They and the other 268 fatalities caused by the incident were buried in Mecca. So were those pilgrims who died from heat-related causes and other illnesses. As one Xi’an hajji reported, there were funerals everyday during the pilgrimage. How residents of the quarter managed the deaths of the two Xi’an pilgrims in 1994 reveals the trickiness of their relationship to Mecca as a ‘home’ and place to ‘return’. After the surviving pilgrims had returned to the Muslim district, the two pilgrims who did not were ‘buried’, sans corpses, in the local Muslim cemetery. One of the returning pilgrims, a religious specialist, explained that it was an honour to be buried in Mecca, something that all Muslims desired. Yet the bereaved families needed to have a funeral in Xi’an too. ‘Otherwise the business is unfinished’ (shi mei wan), said the wife of the ahong who headed the mosque to which one of the deceased belonged. By way of explanation she pointed out that the pilgrims’ kin, literally their ‘people of home’ ( jia li ren), were all in Xi’an. The pilgrims’ deaths in Mecca reveals a tension inherent in the pilgrimage for residents of the Muslim district. From a religious point of view, dying in Mecca is dying at the source, and so a doubly meaningful and complete ‘return to truth’ ( gui zhen). And yet, when a pilgrim died and achieved union with God while in the Muslim place of origin, she left something incomplete (‘unfinished business’)

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in Xi’an. She ‘returned’ without returning home. Ideally, it appears, a pilgrim should make a triumphant homecoming (rong gui) before returning to God ( gui zhen). An association between death and the hajj was strengthened for Xi’an Hui by the garb that Islamic law requires all pilgrims to wear. All pilgrims dress in clothing fashioned of strips of white cloth (with some differences for men and women). Like other Chinese, Xi’an Hui linked the colour white to death and mourning. Corpses – like pilgrims – were wrapped in strips of white cloth in preparation for the journey from their home to the Hui cemetery. The bereaved also wore white: people who were more distantly related to the deceased wore white hats, while close kin ‘wore filial clothing’ (dai xiao) consisting of white robes and head coverings, as is customary among most Chinese. The views that Xi’an Muslims articulated about pilgrims and when it was proper for a person to make the hajj also connect the pilgrimage to death. As we have seen, a person who had completed the hajj had fulfilled the five duties of a Muslim and become a wanren, a ‘perfect’ or ‘complete’ person. One consequence of becoming ‘complete’ was the expectation that you would be perfectly observant. Locals said that pilgrims must never miss an act of worship. They must pray five times daily at the designated hour, rather than making up missed worship later, as some of the more devout residents did (many others did not attempt to meet this requirement). As one religious specialist put it, a hajja’s religious knowledge and practice must be excellent ( jiaomen shang jing). Xi’an Hui frankly confessed that living up to this standard was difficult. They believed that only an older hajja would find it possible to be so exemplary, for she would die sooner and so would have fewer years in which she needed to struggle to be perfectly devout. For a young person to make the pilgrimage was ‘meaningless’ (mei yisi) and ‘like tourism’ (xiang lüyou yiyang), because a young person would be unable to achieve perfect religious observance for the rest of her life. The residents I spoke with all believed that it was most appropriate for ‘older’ men and women to make the pilgrimage, that is, people who were over fifty years of age. This was because to make the pilgrimage was to become a ‘complete’ person, and to become complete was to become ready for death. Ideally, a resident of the Muslim district should make the final ‘return’ (death) when she was old, religious, and at home among her kin. These ideas affected which residents of the quarter went on the pilgrimage. While some younger Xi’an Hui did make the hajj during the 1990s, the majority were older than fifty. For example, of the seventy-four Xi’an Hui who went to Mecca in 1996, fifty people were over age sixty (including a number in their seventies and eighties), two were in their twenties, and the remainder were between thirty and fifty (according to the ahong who was designated as the ‘leader’ (tuanzhang) that year, there were no pilgrims between the ages of fifty and sixty).

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Residents of the Muslim district also saw the pilgrimage as a birth. For example, one woman described the returning pilgrim as like ‘an embryo’ (tai er). Her newness or birth was made visible by the new and unfamiliar ‘Arabic’ clothes she wore during her ‘glorious return’, a style of dress that contrasted sharply with local dress. The new title given to pilgrims also marked a new birth: whatever or whoever the pilgrim was when she left, upon her return she was a hazhi (the local transliteration of hajji or hajja), and entitled to be addressed as such. The celebration held for pilgrims one month after their return, which parallels the ‘social birth’ ceremonies held for one-month-old infants, recapitulates birth. That both of these guo nietie resemble the ceremony held to mourn the dead one month after burial suggests an ideological unity between the processes of birth, pilgrimage and death.16 The joys of (re)union and the sadness of departure saturate the pilgrim’s journey, wherever she is. Birth and death are frameworks that Xi’an Hui use to make sense of the pilgrim’s departure, return and transformation. Birth and death familiarize and contextualize the pilgrimage as part of the life cycle. The play of these representations lends support to Stafford’s argument that separations and returns are an essential part of being a person. Separations and reunions such as those at birth, death and the pilgrimage are integral to the growth of a person. A Xi’an Hui must undergo such separations and reunions if she is to become ‘complete’.

Gift exchanges at separations and reunions The gift exchanges that occur around the pilgrimage are practices that become more understandable in the larger context of gift-giving in the Muslim district. Residents use gifts to shape and maintain social relations among kin, between neighbours, and between families and religious institutions (particularly the mosque). The gifts that residents exchange vary in size, frequency and formal importance – from the cup of tea given to neighbours who drop in for a visit, to the more expensive goods exchanged at major life-cycle transitions such as social birth (manyue), circumcision, engagement, marriage, the birth of the first child and death, and at events such as the opening of a new business or the completion of a house – but in every case gifts reinforce and reinvigorate relationships. Yan (1996) and Yang (1994) have investigated gift exchanges in rural and urban Chinese society during the post-Mao period. Both of these scholars cite an oft-quoted proverb to illustrate how villagers and urbanites understand gift-giving. The proverb is li shang wang lai, which, as Yan points out, can be interpreted in several ways. In all its interpretations, however, li shang wang lai conveys the idea that the exchange of gifts (li) facilitates the social interactions and relations (wang lai) necessary to a harmonious social order (also li ) (Yan 1996: 124). The proverb defines giving and receiving as proper and as properly reciprocal. Good gift exchange and good social relations are ongoing back-and-forth interactions. Ideally,

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important social relations and exchanges both persist after death (see e.g. Stafford 2000: chapter 3). Residents of the Muslim district knew the phrase li shang wang lai and took it as a representation of good social relations. Some of the specific events at which they gave gifts differed from those at which non-Muslim Chinese did, and there were occasions, such as Lunar New Year, during which non-Muslim Chinese exchanged gifts and residents of the quarter did not. The objects that Chinese Muslims exchanged could also differ from those given by non-Muslims; it is hard to imagine, for example, a Han Chinese giving another Han Chinese a videotape of the pilgrimage. Yet the patterns and ethics of gift-giving and reciprocity in the Muslim district would be familiar and comfortable to most Chinese. Even the precept that reciprocity continues after death plays a part in Xi’an Hui mourning practices, despite the differences between Islamic and popular Chinese religious observances; we can see resemblances, for example, between the Hui nietie practices and Feuchtwang’s characterization of relationships between dead and living among non-Muslims. Gift exchanges and their implications have been foci of anthropological attention at least since the publication of Malinowski’s study of the kula (1984 [1922]) and Mauss’s wide-ranging comparative analysis of gift-giving (1990 [1950]). Both Malinowski and Mauss show that objects mediate relationships between people, for example, by promoting the continuity of the relationships, in the case of the kula, and reconfiguring social status, in the case of potlatch. We learn from these studies, and through the work of many subsequent scholars, how individuals and groups use gifts to create and discharge obligations, define dominant and subservient positions, delimit the boundaries of social networks, and foster the durability of relationships (see, e.g. Bourdieu 1977: 4–9; Weiner 1976). I would like to consider the way in which gifts are part of an ideally compulsory back-and-forth exchange in the Muslim district in relation to Freud’s reflections on how individuals sometimes substitute objects for persons to manage separations in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud 1989 [1920]: 599–601). Freud describes the game of a very small child (actually his grandson) in which the little boy would throw objects away from him while uttering the word ‘gone’. Freud thought that the boy developed this game as a way of managing his emotional responses to his mother’s comings and goings, which the boy could not prevent, cause to happen, or predict. He proposed several ways in which the game might operate as a strategy for dealing with the mother’s departures. The game allowed the boy to attain a kind of psychological mastery over his separation from (and, we might speculate, his reunion with) his mother because it moved the boy from a passive to an active role. He became in charge of the act of separation by controlling his separation and reunion with the object – or, perhaps more importantly, the object’s separation and reunion with him. The game provided the boy with a ‘safe’ (inconsequential) outlet to express his anger

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and frustration at his mother’s departure, for example by throwing the toy away from him, and to inflict vengeance upon a substitute for her, for example by making the object ‘gone’. Freud hypothesizes that the mastery that the boy achieved may have transformed the unpleasurable experience of separation into a pleasurable one, and allowed him to better comply with his mother’s uncontrollable departures and returns (Freud writes the boy was obedient and did not fuss when his mother left).17 We can view the gift exchanges that occur at the departures of pilgrims as similar to ‘fort-da,’ the game of ‘gone’ and ‘there’ played by Freud’s grandson. The gift exchanges surrounding the pilgrimage (in conjunction with the ritualized send-offs and greetings) may be considered as socially accepted attempts to ‘master’ or control the pilgrim’s departure and return. Gifts facilitate the social management of the pilgrimage by iterating the set of relationships in which the pilgrim and those left behind participate, at a moment when a journey changes those relationships through the absence of the pilgrim from the neighbourhood and her transformation into a hajja.18 The ‘game’ of gift-giving ‘compels’ the pilgrim’s return, promotes the continuity of her social relations, repositions her in the neighbourhood, and reconsolidates her identity as both a hajja and a person who is ‘one of us’. In principle, the gifts that a pilgrim receives when she is about to leave on the pilgrimage ‘compel’ her to return to the Muslim district. This relates to the expectation of reciprocity embedded in the gift. By giving a gift, the giver, who remains behind, obliges the pilgrim to make a return gift. In order to make a return gift, the pilgrim must herself return to Xi’an. There are, obviously, other methods for ‘returning’ a gift, for example through the post, so perhaps I am overly simplistic in describing the ‘compulsion’ this way. Still, the normal practice of gift-giving in Xi’an entails personally returning a gift, not using an intermediary. In fact, as Yan describes, to fail to return a gift in person is tantamount to making a statement of separation, giving a sign that a once-good social relationship has become more troubled (see e.g. Yan 1996: 133–6 for a telling example). So one kind of mastery that this part of the ‘game’ of gift-giving promotes is the ability to compel the pilgrim to return. When she does return, the pilgrim has obligations to discharge: she must make return gifts to all those who gave her presents before she left. This places her in a low position relative to the givers, even while she is enjoying a ‘glorious return’ as a high-status hajja. According to Yan (1996), in China it is better to receive than to give. Persons of high status receive gifts because they have the power to reward or make a return to the givers; givers make gifts in deference and gratitude to a superior, to consolidate good relations with a superior as rainy-day insurance, or with an immediate instrumental goal in mind. We can see this happening with the pilgrims: they are highstatus as they prepare to leave, for they are about to visit Mecca and begin the process of becoming ‘complete’, and they receive gifts. Pilgrims are also high-status when they return in glory, and they receive other presents then,

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ones that allow the givers (whose names are listed) to ‘share in the light’ (zhanguang). However, the pilgrims’ glory is constrained by what they owe. A pilgrim has not risen so high as to transcend completely her local community. We can see the reversal of the hierarchy of high and low status, or its reciprocation, in the ‘return’ gifts that the pilgrim makes. These gifts convey that others can have higher status than the pilgrim. They work to resituate her in her proper place within her social network and remind her of where she belongs. What the givers intend the pilgrim to do with her pre-hajj gifts, which is to take them on pilgrimage with her, allows another way of mastering the separations caused by pilgrimage. These gifts symbolize the pilgrim’s relationships in the Muslim district, and, especially if she takes them with her, they remind her that she is part of a set of relationships in Xi’an. The objects insure that the givers, who stay at home, are not forgotten while the pilgrim is separated from the givers. Their material presence promotes the continuity of the givers’ relations with the pilgrim. In this sense the gifts ‘control’ the pilgrim’s separation by preventing it from being a rupture of her relationships. The gifts that the pilgrim receives when she returns from Mecca iterate the continuity of hajja-community relations while testifying to their development and alluding to future change. These post-hajj gifts insert the pilgrim into the neighbourhood. They mark and celebrate her ‘completion’, and their monumentality, size, permanence and weight suggest an effort to ‘ground’ the newly created pilgrim in the Muslim district. We could see these gifts as symbols of the hajja’s belonging in Xi’an, firm statements that this ‘perfect’ person is ‘one of us’. The complexities of the pilgrim’s ‘return’ to Mecca, and how making the pilgrimage affects who she is by articulating her memberships in local, regional, national, universal, religious and secular groups, makes it likely that locals might wish to affix her relatively destabilized and open identity upon her return. The heavy plaques and urns and the large posters lend weight to her identification as a Xi’an ‘Hui person’ whose home is in the Muslim district. We also find that her ‘glorious return’ as a ‘complete person’ is a preparation for her final departure through death. This future separation is one from which she will never return home (hui jia) – not, at least, to her current home – but she will ‘return to truth’ ( gui zhen), (re)uniting with ‘the one true God’ (zhen zhu) and his Prophet in whose steps she so recently walked. Ideally, the community’s claim on this perfect person and her ‘true’ identity must be firmly established before she dies. Her ‘return to truth’ should occur with her proper identity as a Muslim, a kinswoman, and a resident of the quarter clearly stated, for her own sake and for that of the community who will continue to have relations with her (through nietie) after her death (see Gillette 2000: chapter 4 for more about how Xi’an Hui work to affix the deceased’s identity at death).

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Glorious returns The pilgrimage to Mecca contains many glorious returns for Xi’an Hui. At first glance we are struck by the obvious return, the public welcome and ‘roadside happiness’ for the hajja back in the Muslim district. Surely this is a significant return, for it is in Xi’an, China, that the hajja’s successful completion of her five obligations can be witnessed. Only in the Muslim district can the ‘glory’ of her achievement be fully recognized, appreciated and shared. Yet further enquiry allows us to see that the pilgrimage contains many other returns. The hajj is a return to a spiritual and ancestral home – requiring a separation from a lived, familiar home – that allows for the hajja’s personal transformation. It is a set of ‘return’ gifts that constitute proper social relations and are part of how one society manages separations and reunions. It is the penultimate return of a lifetime of separations and reunions through which the hajja became a person and ‘complete’. This ‘return in glory’ is a hajja’s preparation for her ‘return to truth’ in death, through which she achieves her final (re)union with her Muslim ancestors, Chinese and Arab, and with the ‘one true God’ (zhen zhu) that is ultimately her origin and end.

Glossary

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Notes 1 The five duties (wu gong) of a Muslim are: to profess the Islamic declaration of faith (‘There is no God but God and Muhammad is his prophet’), to worship five times daily, to fast during the month of Ramadan, to tithe a portion of one’s income to the mosque, and to make the pilgrimage. 2 I saw more rituals for pilgrims from the eastern than from the western side of the Muslim district. Residents divide their neighbourhood into an eastern (dongtou) and a western (xitou) half, and many assert that the residents of the two halves differ in their levels of education, civility and ‘culture’. These stereotypes are very important collective representations and merit further attention.

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3 Baba in standard Mandarin means ‘father’, but many residents of the Muslim district used this term for father’s father. One Hui scholar claimed this usage derived from the Persian word for father’s father. Most scholars of the Hui accept that the dialectal Chinese spoken by Hui contains variants of Arab, Persian and Central Asian loan words. See Gladney 1991 for an English-language glossary of common Hui loan words; see Bai and Ma 1987 for a study of the Xi’an Hui dialect. 4 This condensed account cannot do justice to the scholarly discussions of the Hui nationality and the ‘nationality paradigm’ current in the People’s Republic of China (let alone to the debates on ‘race’ in anthropology). For more information on the Hui nationality, see Lipman 1987 and 1997, Gladney 1991, Gillette 2000 and Aubin 1991. For a history of the evolutionary, racial and nationalist ideas underlying the Chinese Communist Party’s use of the concept ‘nationality’, see Duara 1995 and Dikotter 1992. For an analysis of the Soviet ‘nationalities’ policies on which the Chinese Communist Party based its own ‘nationality’ labelling and regulations, see Brubaker 1996. Boas (1911) remains the foundational statement for anthropologists on ‘race’, but some anthropologists (e.g. Harrison 2000) have argued that the discipline has failed to move forward on Boas’s anti-racist agenda because anthropologists have erroneously assumed that proving ‘race’ to be a collective representation was enough to eradicate racism. 5 MacInnis (1989) remains the most comprehensive collection of official documents concerning religion; many of these documents discuss the relationship between religion and nationality and address the officially ‘individual’ nature of religious participation. 6 Yan uses a Taoist tale about the fortuitous ascent of a chicken and a dog into heaven to explain the aphorism zhanguang or ‘sharing the light’ with someone. In brief, when a man’s virtue enabled him to ascend into heaven in a beam of light, his (perhaps envious) neighbours discovered that his chicken and dog had flown up with him. See Yan 1996: 128–31 for this and other zhanguang stories. 7 Of course, all ‘free markets’ are restricted by governments to some extent. Limits on market activity have decreased almost continuously in China since 1979, with a dramatic expansion of the free market after 1992. Yan (2000) has argued that 1992 saw the beginnings of ‘consumerism’ in China; he and other social theorists have linked this to the state’s efforts to rechannel political energies. See Yan 2000, Wang 1998, Dai 1999 and Ci 1994. 8 Most of the years between 1994 and 1997 one or two Hui from other parts of Shaanxi also made the haj j. Thus, in 1994, a total of 61 people travelled from Shaanxi, 59 of whom were from Xi’an. 9 For some preliminary reflections on gender and religion in the Xi’an Muslim district, see Gillette 2000: chapter 7, and Gillette n.d. 10 Although residents may have preferred layers of departures from home, street, mosque, district and city, physical necessity also played a role. Many of the streets in the quarter were too small for cars. This meant that pilgrims (and groups of residents leaving for other occasions, such as visits to the Muslim cemetery, trips to other Hui communities, visits to Hu Dengzhou’s grave, etc.) gathered at a meeting point on one of the larger streets, for example, at the end of Xihuamen, as described above. The narrowness of the streets sometimes affected bridal parties as well. 11 More precise information on who accompanies the pilgrim through these moments of leave-taking could be productively compared with other departures, such as a bride’s departure from her natal home upon marriage, a corpse’s departure from the home, mosque and district en route to the Muslim cemetery, and a religious specialist’s departure to teach or study in a distant Muslim community (including study abroad).

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12 Many thanks to Charles Stafford for this observation. For a discussion of Chinese thresholds (men) and separation, see Stafford 2000: chapter 4. 13 Of course there are variations within this sameness. Leaving aside phenotypic differences, a noticeable one for Xi’an Muslims is language. The Qur’anic Arabic that most Xi’an Hui can recite but which they do not understand as a language (with very few exceptions) is not the pronunciation found in Cairo – and the Arabic pronunciation of Cairo differs from that of Mecca, etc. 14 The zhen of this phrase is part of the word zhenzhu, the ‘one true lord’, and of qingzhen, ‘pure and true’, the phrase that Hui use to identify the food that Muslims make and themselves. See Gladney 1991 and Gillette 2000 for more on qingzhen. The phrase quan ti gui zhen resonates with Daoist notions of ‘returning to the one/origin/way’. 15 For comparison, English-speakers in Hong Kong (where I was employed in 1997) called the 1 July event the ‘handover’. Instead of talking about Hong Kong ‘returning’ to China, English-speakers spoke of Hong Kong ‘being handed over’ to China. 16 The implications of the guo nietie held for the deceased one month after burial deserve further scrutiny. Perhaps this ceremony is linked to non-Muslim Chinese ideas about what happens to the parts of the soul after death. Both Muslim and non-Muslim Chinese engage in mourning rites at regular intervals after death. Xi’an Hui guo nietie on the third, fifth, seventh and ninth days after burial, one month, forty days, and then on the annual ‘death date’ (actually the burial date) anniversary, according to the lunar calendar. Among non-Muslim Chinese, we find specified rites of mourning that are linked to the soul’s journey in death. 17 Freud compares this game to the repetition-compulsion of neurotics and trauma survivors. He then ‘goes beyond the pleasure principle’, which his theory of ‘mastery’ still fits into, to speculate about a more basic drive – a drive to return to an original state, which ultimately is an inorganic one – that might explain repetitions that do not bring pleasure, and perhaps all repetitions, at least in part. 18 Metcalf writes that any travel, including the haj j, is likely to cause the sensitive individual to reassess who they are, but notes that the structured nature of the pilgrimage makes it different from most other journeys (1990: 89). It is difficult to assess how a self-reassessment and the social aspects of becoming a haj ji operate together; one might imagine that the two levels of transformation have a kind of recursive or ‘feedback’ effect. It is worth remembering that both kinds of transformations can come into play, both may have social implications, and both may have psychological ramifications.

References Aubin, F. (1991) ‘A glimpse of Chinese Islam’, Journal of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs 12 (2): 335–45 Auge, M. (1998 [1994]) A Sense for the Other, Stanford: Stanford University Press Bai, J. and B. Ma (1987) ‘The Dialect of Xi’an Hui (Xi’an Huizu Fangyan)’, Xi’an Wenshi Ziliao, vol. 12, Xi’an: Historical Research Division of the Xi’an Municipal People’s Government, pp. 143–56 Boas, F. (1911) The Mind of Primitive Man, New York: Macmillan Bourdieu, P. (1977) Outline of a Theory of Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Brown, M. (ed.) (1996) Negotiating Ethnicities in China and Taiwan, Berkeley: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California Brubaker, R. (1996) Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Ci, J. (1994) Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution: From Utopianism to Hedonism, Stanford: Stanford University Press Dai, J. (1999) ‘Invisible Writing: The Politics of Chinese Mass Culture in the 1990s’, Modern Chinese Literature and Culture 11 (1): 31–57 Dikotter, F. (1992) The Discourse of Race in Modern China, Stanford: Stanford University Press Dreyer, J. (1976) China’s Forty Millions, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Duara, P. (1995) Rescuing History from the Nation, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Eberhard, W. (1982) China’s Minorities: Yesterday and Today, Belmont: Wadsworth Publishing Freud, S. (1989 [1920]) ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’, in P. Gay (ed.), The Freud Reader, New York: W.W. Norton, pp. 594–626 Gillette, M. (2000) Between Mecca and Beijing: Modernization and Consumption among Urban Chinese Muslims, Stanford: Stanford University Press Gillette, M. (n.d.) ‘“Whose Story is This?”: Narrative and Nation in Two Hui Women’s Stories’, paper presented at conference on ‘Unpopular Culture’, Harvard University ( June 2000) Gladney, D. (1990) ‘The Ethnogenesis of the Uighur’, Central Asian Survey 9(1): 1–28 Gladney, D. (1991) Muslim Chinese: Ethnic Nationalism in the People’s Republic, Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University Harrell, S. (ed.) (1995) Cultural Encounters on China’s Ethnic Frontiers, Seattle: University of Washington Press Harrison, F. (2000) ‘Subverting the Cultural Logics of Marked and Unmarked Racisms in the Global Era’, paper presented at the Ethnohistory workshop, University of Pennsylvania (October) HZJS (1978) Huizu Jianshi (A Simple History of the Hui Nationality), Yinchuan: Ningxia Renmin Chubanshe Lipman, J. (1987) ‘Hui-Hui: An Ethnohistory of the Chinese-speaking Muslims’, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies 11 (1 and 2): 112–30 Lipman, J. (1997) Familiar Strangers: A Muslim History in China, Seattle: University of Washington Press MacInnis, D. (1989) Religion in China Today: Policy and Practice, New York: Orbis Books Malinowski, B. (1984 [1922]) Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Prospect Heights: Waveland Press Mauss, M. (1990 [1950]) The Gift, New York: W.W. Norton McDonnell, M. B. (1990) ‘Patterns of Muslim Pilgrimage from Malaysia, 1885–1985’, in D. Eikelman and J. Piscatori (eds), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 111–30 Metcalf, B. D. (1990) ‘The Pilgrimage Remembered: South Asian Accounts of the Haj j ’, in D. Eikelman and J. Piscatori (eds), Muslim Travellers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 85–107 Pillsbury, B. (1975) ‘Pig and Policy: Maintenance of Boundaries between Han and Muslim Chinese’, in B. E. Griessman (ed.), Minorities: A Text With Readings in Intergroup Relations, Hinsdale: Dryden Press, pp. 136–45 Sangren, P. S. (1991) ‘Dialectics of Alienation: Individuals and Collectivities in Chinese Religion’, Man (n.s.) 26: 67–86 [also in P. S. Sangren, Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of Alienation in Social Reproduction, London: Athlone, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 72, pp. 69–95]

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Sangren, P. S. (1993) ‘Power and transcendence in the Ma Tsu Pilgrimages of Taiwan’, American Ethnologist 20 (3): 564–82 [also in P. S. Sangren, Chinese Sociologics: An Anthropological Account of the Role of Alienation in Social Reproduction, London: Athlone, London School of Economics Monographs on Social Anthropology, vol. 72, pp. 96–118] Stafford, C. (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Stone, A. R. (1995) The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Tie, W. and X. Li (eds) (1994) Zhongguo Musilin Chaojin Jishi (A Record of the Pilgrimage among Chinese Muslims), Yinchuan: Ningxia People’s Publishing House Tu, W. (ed.) (1993) The Living Tree: The Changing Meaning of Being Chinese Today, Stanford: Stanford University Press Tu, W. (ed.) (1994) China in Transformation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Turner, V. (1974) Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, Ithaca: Cornell University Press Wang, H. (1998) ‘Contemporary Chinese Thought and the Question of Modernity’, Social text vol. 55, no. 16 Watson, J. L (1982) ‘Of Flesh and Bones: The Management of Death Pollution in Cantonese Society’, in M. Bloch and J. Parry (eds), Death and the Regeneration of Life, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 155–86 Watson, J. L. (1988) ‘The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance’, in J. L. Watson and E. S. Rawski (eds), Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 3–19 Watson, J. L. (1991) ‘The Renegotiation of Chinese Cultural Identity in the PostMao era’, in K. Lieberthal et al. (eds), Perspectives on China: Four Anniversaries, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 364–86 Watson, J. L. (1993) ‘Rites or Beliefs? The Construction of a Unified Culture in Late Imperial China’, in L. Dittmer and S. Kim (eds), China’s Quest for National Identity, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp. 80–103 Weiner, A. (1976) Women of Value, Men of Renown: New Perspectives on Trobriand Exchange, Austin: University of Texas Press Wu, Z. (1992) ‘Execute Well Nationalities and Religious Work, Serve the Goals of Economic Development and Stability’ [in Chinese], government papers of the Lianhu District Nationalities and Religious Affairs Office, Jan–Dec 1992, pp. 99–116 Yamba, C. B. (1992) ‘Going There and Getting There: The Future as a Legitimating Charter for Life in the Present’, in S. Wallman (ed.), Contemporary Futures: Perspectives for Social Anthropology, London: Routledge, pp. 109–23 Yan, Y. (1996) The Flow of Gifts: Reciprocity and Social Networks in a Chinese Village, Stanford: Stanford University Press Yan, Y. (2000) ‘The Politics of Consumerism in Chinese Society’, in T. White (ed.), China Briefing: The Continuing Transformation, Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, pp. 159–93 Yang, M. (1994) Gifts, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China, Ithaca: Cornell University Press

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7

Exiles and reunion Nostalgia among overseas Hmong (Miao) Nicholas Tapp

I John Mitchell (1998) has built on Anthony Cohen’s work (1982, 1985, 1986) on the symbolic construction of communities in terms of current interests in processes of dislocation and emplacement, describing how a displaced urban Maltese community made use of nostalgia as a ‘strategic resource’ to construct, or reconstruct, their community (Mitchell 1998). Nostalgia as attachment to place, for the lost past or even for ‘imagined pasts never experienced’, was examined by Lowenthal (1985) as an aspect of, or reaction to, modernism, and seen by Jameson (1985) and Baudrillard (1994) as a condition of the postmodern. Susan Stewart (1993) talked of ‘the narrative process of nostalgic reconstruction which denies the present in order to lend the past an authenticity of being’. I’d like to suggest that we see nostalgia as invariably connected to separations and the attempt to reconstruct a lost object of desire. In hopes that it may relate to recent research on the overseas Chinese (Pan 1999; Benson and Pieke 1999; Ong and Nonini 1997; Ong 1999), I’d like here to introduce nostalgia as a theme that may illuminate our perceptions of separation and reunion in the Chinese context. The mechanics of my fieldwork in Sichuan illustrated what became for me a major research preoccupation. In general the Chinese government has been wary of overseas associations involving ethnic minority members, on account of continued unrest in Tibet and Xinjiang, but my fieldwork with the Hmong people of Sichuan took place as part of an ongoing process of reciprocity between the Anthropology Department at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, and the official Minority Affairs Research Institute in Sichuan. There a senior Hmong cadre was seeking to re-establish contact with his older brother who had fled with the Guomindang to Burma in 1947 and was eventually resettled from Thailand to Taiwan, where he became rich through working in the Post Office. They had two younger brothers who had stayed in their home village as farmers and we were able to live with them for the time we were there. In Sichuan I found a kind of local cultural revival involving taping Hmong songs, manufacturing and displaying Hmong costumes and collecting folk tales for translation into Chinese. What the relation was

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between this kind of local cultural revival, which was adopting some very un-Hmong, Han Chinese-like, forms, like writing down genealogies and constructing ancestral halls,1 and the investments that the returning Taiwanese brother was now pouring into local infrastructure and pockets remains I think problematic, except that there was some relationship. At times I was told that people were trying to make up for the ravages of the ‘Cultural Revolution’, when so much traditional lore was lost. Yet this was also a resignification of traditional cultural practices, inasmuch as it involved emulations of a dominant Han Chinese culture.2 I only saw one end of this process of reunion; the effects of the reunion of the brothers from Taiwan and China on local culture and economy, or symptoms that might be seen as effects of that reunion. Yet it was much talked about in the area, and the eldest brother’s first visit back to his home xiang had been a terrific affair, with garlanded banquets and festive processions all over the county he was to invest in.3 Villagers often spoke of his generosity, with a kind of awed wistful irony at the strange turn of historical events. I never saw the Taiwanese end of this, but it would of course have been appropriate to have been able to travel to Taiwan and meet the brother’s Chinese wife and the children he had given Hmong generational names to, to enquire into the reasons for his nostalgia and how contacts between him and his brothers had been reinstigated at a time when China was just beginning to encourage these sorts of overseas investment. Partly the purpose of this chapter is to emphasize the need for these kind of multi-sited studies involving non-Han minorities in China. The oldest brother had even written a popular book in Taiwan about his childhood in Sichuan, showing that the kind of nostalgia for the xiang that Lynn Pan (1990) attributes to the overseas Chinese,4 and which may together with more instrumental motivations (Ong 1999) be inevitably associated with the facts of migration and diaspora, is also experienced by Hmong and other minorities in China.

II The Hmong of this part of Sichuan (Gongxian county) have had settled (stockaded) villages, and permanent forms of hill agriculture, for at least four hundred years, since the wars of 1574 against the vanished Bo peoples who have left their coffins hanging from high mountains to attract visitors to the region and inspire legends of lost ethnicities.5 But the Hmong are in fact only one of three quite distinct cultural and linguistic groups classified together by the Chinese as ‘Miao’ (the two others being the Hmu of Guizhou and the Kho Xiong of Xiangxi, Hunan). The languages are related, but no closer than say Spanish and Portuguese, and cultural practices and traditions entirely different.6 I do need to emphasize this so we can appreciate the extraordinary nature of some of the global reunions that have recently taken place. Like other Miao groups, Hmong have traditionally not enjoyed

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the benefits of settled agriculture; they have mostly been pioneer shifting cultivators, moving villages every 15–25 years sometimes for distances of hundreds of miles. They have not, in other words, been the kind of ‘rooted’ peoples anthropologists have recently been criticized for paying too much attention to (Olwig and Hastrup 1997). The Hmong in parts of Guangxi and Yunnan have remained shifting cultivators until very recently. In north Laos and Vietnam the Hmong, who have slowly migrated into South-East Asia from southern China over the past two centuries, are still largely shifting cultivators of dry rice, maize and opium poppy, while in north Thailand they were so until about the 1980s. As montagnards in Indo-China the Hmong became crucial guerilla fighters in the Vietnam War and the related ‘secret war’ in Laos, largely taking the part of the Viet Minh in north Vietnam and being instrumental at the battle of Dien Bien Phu, but largely taking the part of the CIA-assisted royalist and neutralist parties in Laos. After 1975, over 100,000 of the Hmong from Laos, whose grandparents or great-grandparents had perhaps left villages in southern China a half-century before, were resettled in refugee camps along the Thai border, from where an enormous ‘diaspora’ has taken place, to the US and Canada, France and French Guyana, Argentina, Suriname, Australia and New Zealand. The huge casualties that took place among the Hmong during the IndoChina wars (as many as a third of the 300,000 Hmong of Laos are estimated to have died7) have led to an overwhelming sense of loss and bereavement among these refugees, and this has been compounded by the arbitrary programme of repatriation overseas. Aged parents have been left behind in the Thai refugee camps while their children moved to the US; lovers and siblings have been divided by countries and continents; first or second wives have been separated from their husbands or children. The memorial services I’ve attended in Thai villages and refugee camps for deceased relatives (or relatives presumed to be deceased) are unforgettably tragic, and moving in their lamentations for a lost past. At one funeral ritual on the Lao border for seven young men presumed dead in the fighting in Laos, only the ricewinnowing trays that, draped with cloth, normally represent the dead at memorial services some years after the actual funeral, could be used because, as one mourner told me, ‘we cannot know if they are dead or alive’. What I’d like to do in this chapter is not just trace some of the effects this sense of personal deprivation and loss has had on recent re-encounters involving the Hmong as a global community and China, but also show how in some ways a sense of nostalgia may be deeply instituted in Hmong cultural practice, and perhaps related to their traditional life as shifting cultivators.

III I should like to characterize Hmong culture as a whole as deeply nostalgic, if such a thing were theoretically possible.8 In the Song of Opening the

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Way, which must be sung at death, the soul of the deceased is led back past the origins of people and grains, sickness and death, to the village of ancestors, the ‘Mother and Father’, from which it must be reborn. There is a deep melancholy and poignancy to the Song, and outside China the village of ancestors is usually thought of as located in China, referred to as the lands of tuam tshoj teb or the ‘Great Dynasties’ (somewhat like overseas Chinese usage).9 The Hmong of South-East Asia moreover have stories of (and rituals commemorating) their flight out of China, pursued by the avenging Chinese, across a mighty river in which, they believe, their ‘books’ (writing) were lost. Stories are told of how the Hmong once had an emperor and a state of their own, but were geomantically tricked out of them by the Han Chinese. Some refugee Hmong have now located this state in Mongolia, others in Sichuan. These negative definitions of Hmong social identity in terms of an original radical loss of power and knowledge, attributed to the Han Chinese, form part of a general nostalgic momentum that impels much Hmong cultural production. For example, a theory of ‘deteriorating knowledge’ (Tapp 1989) explains why shamanic rituals sometimes fail, because every generation keeps back a little of its knowledge for itself, so that over time there is an inevitable attrition of knowledge, capability and skills. And it is generally assumed that Hmong cultural tradition must have been better preserved in their original Chinese homelands, and the seeker after such knowledge is constantly referred to China (we return to this). And then there are often-repeated stories of an Orphan hero, which seem to display essential themes of separation, loss and betrayal, bereavement and despair; the envy which Kleinian analysis linked to separation from the Mother, at the same time as the greedy desire to be reunited with her,10 which may have been displaced on to a historic image of the Han Chinese.11 Periodic messianic revolts of the Hmong are led by a prophet whose revelation of a writing system for Hmong legitimates him as the forerunner of the new Emperor (Huab Tais).12 A unifying writing for the unwritten Hmong language is associated with the recovery of the lost Hmong kingdom in an interweaving of themes of power with themes of knowledge (Tapp 1989). In this sense, then, a kind of nostalgia may be instituted in traditional Hmong cultural forms, and closely linked with utopian aspirations towards the future in which the unity, power and strength of the Hmong as a whole people is desired.13 As Stewart (1993: 23) remarked, nostalgia ‘wears a distinctly utopian face’. To the instituted longing for an ancestral homeland in China has now been added the traumatic yearning of refugees for a more recent past in Indo-China. In 1983 the University of Minnesota organized a Hmong Studies Conference, which I attended.14 Papers ranged from accounts of how shamanism was practised in the US to problems of secondary migration, sudden unexpected nocturnal sleeping death syndrome (SUNDS), the history of the Miao in China, and acquiring English as a second language. Lineage organization had been retained in the States and elsewhere, with

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local descent groups serving as a basis for credit associations and cooperatives. The Hmong made use of telephone directories to locate clan relatives to stay with in cities they visited,15 and some attributed the mass secondary migrations of Hmong that took place in the US to their traditional life as shifting cultivators.16 At a Hmong Studies Conference in France last year, a senior French researcher claimed that the Hmong in the US were ‘still tribal’; they had always been used to taking their social fabric with them, he said, and reconstituting it wherever they were.17 If this were truly so, then the nostalgia of shifting cultivators may be for a locality of a less territorialized and bounded kind than that recollected by permanent cultivators, as Myers (1976) showed for aboriginal hunters and gatherers, or indeed for an imagined or constructed locality effectively and reflexively constituted by that longing that is associated with it. There may be much of ‘pseudomemory’ here, even if the nostalgia and the sense of bereavement that leads to nostalgia is real enough, since many of the Lao refugees had never known a traditional life as shifting cultivators after decades of internal disruption within Laos, and nostalgia for the imagined past is suffered by those who had never even known Laos, as I shall show. And moreover, some of this nostalgia involves a life in China that is at best a collective memory. We know that locality may encompass ‘imagined places no longer in existence’, as Lovell (1998) remarks, and refer more to a narrative of shared activities (Myers 1976), and that nostalgia may evoke precisely such vanished places and shared senses of collectivity, as Mitchell (1998) shows for the urban Maltese, or as Bahloul (1996) showed for the Algerian-Jewish community in France.18 Notions of collective social memory indeed assume the recollection of places and events that may never have been experienced in the present, as for the younger generation of Hmong in the US, or the yearning for a pastoral life in Laos, which many refugees may never have actually known.19 The nostalgia for ‘imagined pasts never experienced’ Lowenthal (1985: xix) spoke of, however, raises the possibility of a nostalgia for an unreal past that never did exist, and localities encompassing places that never existed.

IV At the same time as many of the younger generation of Hmong refuse to speak Hmong, convert to Christianity, and do their utmost to be recognized as Hmong-Americans, an extreme form of almost nationalist nostalgia does seem to have permeated the cultural life and productions of the exiled Hmong community. Perhaps the first signs of this were the embroidered ‘story-cloths’ that began to appear in the refugee camps after 1975, and for which the Hmong in the States have become quite famous, showing details of their traditional life in Laos (quite unlike traditional embroidery, which is abstract). These are cultural commodities produced for a general

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public market and audience, and perhaps the production of Miao costumes and publications in Sichuan can similarly be seen as directed at a wider Chinese public audience and market.20 Over the past twenty years, individuals and groups among the dispersed Hmong population have attempted to reconstitute an expanded sense of cultural community through the use of modern communications and transport. The Hmong, like the Tamils and some other globally dispersed communities,21 have now partly reconstituted themselves as a global community through the use of the Internet, where a plethora of Hmong websites, in both Hmong and English, emerged through the 1990s. There have been at least three Hmong studies journals online, companies selling Hmong CDs and videos, pages on Hmong culture and history, job and conference announcements, Hmong chatlines and ‘Hmong – Frequently Asked Questions’ sites, an Agony Aunts column (‘Dear Mai . . .’), embroidery patterns and creative essays by students, pages for the Hmong rock band Paradise, and so on.22 It would be an important task for future research to examine the history of these Internet representations and to see which groups achieved representation at the expense of which, as Penny Harvey has been doing in Manchester,23 since the dominant voices are male and the majority seem to be closely connected with the right-wing tendency of Hmong associated with ‘General’ Vang Pao, who assisted the US war effort in Laos and still supports the rebel insurgents who seek to establish a Hmong state within Laos. To give one example of the sense of loss and separation, and the need to repair this, I am concerned with, which is affecting China and other Asian states, and how it affects people who have never even known a life in Asia, as expressed in these Internet representations, I would like to cite the words of one Hmong college student in full. There is a draft ‘Hmong Flag’ advertised on the Internet, with comments invited. Against a gules background, there is a golden globe, with above it a (six-pointed) golden mullet. In the first and second quarters are two golden, four-armed images of Indra; in the third and fourth, two golden images of Indra.24 To the dexter side, an argent thunderbolt is placed; above it a golden arrow, and beneath it an azure arrow, fly to the west. One comment on the Internet runs as follows: My name is Mathew Moua and I am a freshman at CSU, Sacramento. I know my opinion may not mean anything, but it is said that opinions were welcomed. To me, if this is the Hmong flag, the statues in the four corners means that we Hmong will spread and be all over the world. All over the four corners of the universe. Also it stands for the Gods that we worship or some of us worship. The star stands for a great leader that will guide us to our destiny. The destiny of the Hmong people who are nomands [sic] and need to find themselves in a world that seems to reject them. Further the sun stands for the symbol of us Hmong. The star symbolizes the strength of us. Like the sun that shines with such beauty and power so do us Hmong. We have survived the worst of all.

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The pain and suffering of war to find ourselves again fighting for our lives in a land that rejects us and puts us down, but in the end we will survive. Like the sun that shines everyday we shall shine oneday. The arrow stands for each individual. It stands for the path that they decided to take and the religion that they accept. It stands for the path of good or bad that each of us Hmong will have to choose, because of all the frustration and pressure that set on us. We will have to choose one day if not already. Further it is a symbol of our religion. In today’s society there are many religions and we have to accept one or another. There are the old ways of the Hmong people, but that religion is losing its toll on the younger community. So the Hmong of today have to choose if they wish to hold the old religion or go forth into Christian hood or other religion. The flag seems to be the future and what it holds for us Hmong. Us Hmong don’t have a land, a nation, or a world. All we have is each other. So for us to fight on for the future we have to have a symbol of light and strength. A symbol of HOPE for the people. This is my opinion of the Hmong Flag. Remember I am only a freshman in college, but I am a thinker. Many people may think that I am not smart, but I have a mind that thinks. My opinion does matter even if everyone says it doesn’t. Us Hmong will be the truth of the world, and will survive all cause. The only thing that will kill us is ourselves and the children that are supposed to be our future. ‘Mathew Moua’, Thu, 8 October 1998.25 These views are not unrepresentative of the younger generation of Hmong overseas, although certainly there is also concern about Hmong teenagers not caring about the value of Hmong culture and traditions. Nor is this merely a matter of American identity politics, but something, I think, that reaches deeper, to a utopian nostalgic striving that has a cultural origin. In common with some other diasporic communities (and it would be most interesting to cross-culturally compare them from this point of view), Hmong elites in the US have turned to the Internet in a major way as a means, I think, of reaching out beyond the divisions and separations of locality and space, to forge (as they see it) a new-found unity that has hitherto only been dreamed of in utopian messianic movements and legends of the past.

V Nostalgia for the past has taken concrete form since the 1980s with return visits of overseas Hmong to their home families and villages in Laos, Thailand and Vietnam. During the time of the Hmong new year in Laos in 1994 almost every Hmong house we visited was overfull with Hmong guests from America and France. The lunar new year is the major Hmong calendrical ceremony, and provides an occasion both for the reassertion of local descent group identities through the honouring of ancestral and shamanic spirits, and for reaching out beyond the divisive system of patriclans to a wider

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Hmong community as villagers visit other villages to take part in their festivities. A special tour company specializing in these now globalized visits of overseas ethnic minorities has been established in the capital, Vientiane. In northern Vietnam such visits were also taking place in 1995, although less extensively and far less publically owing to a serious and long-lasting, Christian-influenced Hmong messianic movement in Vietnam, which it is generally believed is American-supported. And many French, American and Australian Hmong go to northern Thailand for the new year or on other occasions for their experience of authentic Hmong village life, where they may find close or distant relatives and be partly accepted into the local Hmong descent systems. Certainly these elite Hmong must have a very different, more relativist, conception of what it is to be Hmong, and the value of customary Hmong social practices, from that of those villager Hmong who have always been resident in Thailand. One of these visitors told me how he felt it improper not to wear a suit when invited to a Hmong village. Much concern has been caused by the courting of young Hmong girls in Thailand by wealthy Hmong from the US, who then return to their families in the States without the marriages often hoped for through these liaisons (see Symonds 1996). These kinds of separation, after reunions, are felt to be un-Hmong, untraditional and immoral. We emphasize here the ‘returns’ of American Hmong to Chinese ‘homelands’, since these display the most striking disparities and contrasts of expectation and identity, which also characterize returns to Laos and Thailand. A perhaps deeper, more culturally inscribed nostalgia has also brought the Hmong back to China. A number of official and unofficial visits have been made since 1987, originally with the intention of seeking Chinese assistance for a Hmong state to be established in northern Laos. As Cheung (1996) notes, popular visits of the Hmong to China started from 1988 with the cultural tours led by Dr Yangdao, the famous exiled Hmong leader from Laos, a French citizen now living in the US, who represents a liberal tendency opposed to that of the militaristic Vang Pao camp. Formal meetings since 1989 have been arranged in Guiyang and Kaili (Guizhou) and Jishou (Hunan) at which overseas Hmong have been ceremonially welcomed by representatives of the Miao in China. If one believes the essentialist formulations generally accepted by Hmong brought up outside China, that Hmong customs and tradition must somehow have been better preserved near their original point of radiation in China (Nostalgia-memory rather than Nostalgia-desire, to use Bellelli’s and Amatulli’s (1997) terms), a visit to China is bound to be a disillusioning experience, as I found when first visiting the Hmong in China after working in Thailand. The enormous social changes that have taken place in China over the last hundred years have involved most Hmong there just as they have other Chinese citizens. Contrary to the most frequently encountered Hmong point of view, the old diffusionist adage about change occurring fastest near the point of origin is amply proved by comparison with China.

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So that at some of these meetings Hmong from the US have been amazed to find that the Miao they were introduced to knew no Hmong and clearly had no knowledge of Hmong traditions or culture (they were either Sinicized Hmong or non-Hmong of other Miao groups).26 They spoke entirely unknown languages and had utterly different backgrounds.27 The encounters between American Hmong and Chinese Miao have led to some dramatic shifts of social identity, some of which Louisa Schein (1998a) has noted. For example, some of the Miao of China, who have made return visits to the States, have begun referring to themselves as Hmong even though they are not. Let us review the text of a handout made by Hua Laohu, the well-known Miao writer and composer from Hunan, at the 1995 International Symposium on Hmong People held in St. Paul, Minnesota (which he had been prevented from attending in person), quoted by Louisa Schein (1998a: 172–3, my emphases): Ladies and gentlemen, it has been common knowledge that the Hmong is a great, ancient, world spread nation with brilliant culture and a long history. It is a brave, industrious, and transnational people with outstanding wisdom . . . [S]hould we Hmong people remain behind and stay poor? No, we should, under the leadership of our government, rouse up ourselves again to catch up with the mainstream nations of the countries in which we live. We should give full play to our spirit of hardworking and walk to the wealthy road together with our brother nations . . . I think no matter what country we live in, we should obey the law of the country and submit to the administration of the government. We Hmong should not only strengthen our internal unity, but also get along well well with other nations, help each other and make joint efforts to maintain the social stability of the country we live in . . . I will never change my mind, that is: the approximately 10 million Hmong people around the world should walk hand in hand, strengthen unity and contribute to the promotion of cooperation and development of culture, education, science, technology, economy and trade between the Hmong worldwide. Schein does not emphasize this,28 but Hua Laohu is a ‘Xiangxi’ Miao; that is, he is not Hmong, nor a Hmong-speaker, although he here refers to himself as such. We can see here something of the fabrication of social relations Herzfeld spoke of, the formation of an imagined community which (like all communities) is predicated on absence and the intermittence of faceto-face relations.29 A kind of what I should like to call ‘utopic nostalgia’ may be crucial to the identities of all (imagined) communities, not just that of the nation state (Anderson 1983). The explicit motivation and rationale for the symposium, as perceived in China, was to strengthen international trading initiatives, as was the case with the previous (1994) meeting held in

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Jishou, Hunan; the ‘International Miao (Hmong) Culture Symposium and Economic and Trade Cooperative Conference’, which Mary Rack describes, was locally perceived as entirely an attempt to attract foreign investment into the area (it failed).30 Perhaps this was the result of a kind of category error on the part of the Chinese government; the mistaking of a ‘victim diaspora’ for a ‘trading’ or ‘labour diaspora’ (Cohen 1997). Official China, too, is now concerned with the attempt to construct localities with specific distinguishing characteristics, the presentation of local cultures as financial catchment areas. Before the 1994 Conference there had been an academic meeting in Guizhou organized by the Guizhou Miao Studies Association in 1993 (the Fourth Miao Studies Conference) to which American Hmong were invited, but as Schein (1998a) points out not one attended owing to lack of Chinese funding for overseas visitors. The reason for this failure to attract funding was in fact that at the Third Conference of the Guizhou Miao Studies Association in 1991 (where the confusion, as Chinese had to be used to communicate between the several hundreds of Miao participants including some from Taiwan speaking unintelligible languges and dialects, is well described by Cheung (1996)), a member of the American Hmong delegation had produced a new ‘unifying system’ for all the Miao languages, closely modelled on the pahaw messianic system associated with the rebel nationalist Hmong movement in Laos and Vietnam.31 A unifying writing system had also been suggested at the Second Conference of the Guizhou Association for Miao Studies by a Chinese Hmong in 1989 (Cheung 1996).32 This points to the very strong desire among elite groups of Miao in China themselves for a unification and solidarity among their peoples.33 What has happened is that despite the initial disappointment of the overseas Hmong in failing to find the traditions of their forebears in China – a failure of nostalgia, if you like – nostalgia has ‘utopianized’. Overseas Hmong have embraced their non-Hmong, Miao cousins as errant Hmong, while this has coalesced with the material and nationalistic aspirations of some non-Hmong Miao elites in China. And so a fiction is produced, of a pan-Miao (called ‘pan-Hmong’) identity, which brings tangible material results in its wake.34 From the official Chinese viewpoint, the rhetorical need to construct local sites that may attract ‘nostalgically’ motivated investments from overseas must be carefully balanced against the dangers of such transnational solidarity. The ‘localizing’ discourse of Chinese representations of minorities, which only encourage transnational contacts for trading or business purposes, is effectively challenged by transnational contacts of this kind. Other odd shifts of identity have also taken place as a result of these encounters between American Hmong and Chinese Miao. For example there has been a recognition, among those American Hmong who have returned from China and those who have heard their stories (or seen them on video), that the term ‘Miao’, although rejected by all Hmong outside China as derogatory, might be applied to them in some contexts in China,

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and that there are other groups in China who are similar to the Hmong and somehow related to them but who are, nevertheless, not Hmong. Despite the more realistic appreciations of the complexities surrounding the cultural and ethnic position of the Hmong in China, which returning American Hmong visitors must have brought back with them through their encounters with non-Hmong Miao, such realizations have not lessened the appetite for Chinese nostalgia among the majority of Hmong in the United States. A market has now emerged in the US for videos about Hmong life in China, which sell widely, together with a range of martial arts and tragic romantic videos made in Hmong.35 Images in these videos vary from formal recordings of official meetings in Jishou and Kaili, to staged celebratory events at which carefully dressed and made up Miao women greet the visiting dignitaries to their villages with libations and song, and typical south Chinese villages, which may also be Hmong, or Miao, and in which ancestral roots can be imagined. Here the utopic, or nostalgic, longing for the lost and absent, which is of course the national sovereignty of the Hmong, has overcome the temporary disappointment of meeting Chinese Miao who know nothing about the Hmong, to contribute to the formation of what Werbner (1996: 97) calls a ‘communal diasporic voluntary public culture’. And in the production and sale of such nostalgic, homely images of China and reunions of the long estranged, there is a tacit alliance between Miao cadres in China and well-funded or politically motivated Hmong Americans to propagate a particular image of Hmong relations with China, in which the images of impoverished Miao villagers in China are manipulated in ways they may not control, and from which they may reap no material benefit.36 Together with this appetite for videos and images of an imagined past life in the foothills of southern China has gone a craze for buying Miao costumes from China,37 and some small factories have sprung up in areas of Guizhou and Guangxi mass-manufacturing these costumes for sale abroad and for use at festive occasions, such as at the Hmong new year in Wisconsin. And another form of cultural exportation has taken place in the increasingly frequent visits of provincial and regional Miao performing troupes to Australia, the US, France and elsewhere to take part in international folk festivals and on other occasions, as well as travelling exhibitions of Miao costume and jewellery from China to overseas museums.38 There is a strange and ironic matching of overseas cosmopolitan nostalgia with local utopian desires for material prosperity in the international marriages that have been arranged between Hmong overseas and Hmong in Thailand, Laos and China, again pointing to the bonding of imagination with memory that takes place in the construction of a symbolic community (Cohen 1985) centred on a particular location although not bounded by it, and the fabrication of social relations across vast distances and political boundaries. Southern China, it seems, is becoming a kind of ‘cultural site’ for tens of thousands of displaced Hmong,39 in the sense that it is being imaginatively appropriated by those who feel exiled from it, and who have in a sense directly suffered the ‘sovereign ban’ (Agamben 1998).

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VI What has happened in the United States and elsewhere overseas, then, has been a kind of doubling40 or even triplication of nostalgia; first for a (barely) remembered past in traditional Laos, and then for a past that nobody has ever known, in a place nobody had ever visited – a near mythic time in the foothills of southern China, and beyond that, an original loss of sovereign power attributed to the Chinese; a profundity of pastoral nostalgia marked by a series of traumatic historic disjunctures – the usurping of the sovereign territory by the Han, the expulsion of the Hmong out of China, and finally their recent diaspora overseas. I would argue that what is most deeply motivating the processes of economic and social transformation we have noted is an overpowering sense of loss for a vanished past and object of desire among some of the Hmong exiles in the US and elsewhere; a nostalgia that, we have seen, is culturally rooted and has been intensified by the trauma of the refugee diaspora.41 This nostalgia in its culturally inscribed form may have much to do with the experience of being shifting cultivators scattered in ‘borderlands’ between peoples with more settled forms of agriculture and a more prosperous way of life. There is a general regret for the losses of war and the global dispersion of the Hmong as a community that has taken place, and for the forced flight (as it is seen) out of China. But there is also a deep inherent regret that the Hmong are a scattered and divided community, at all, owing as it is often seen to the divisions of patrilineages and the exigencies of shifting cultivation. A time of unity and prosperity is constantly looked back to, past the trauma in which this was lost – whether it was the original loss of nationhood and sovereignty, or the banning from a Chinese homeland, or the recent flight and dispersion out of Asia altogether. These recollections might be compared to a psychoanalytical retroaction, the creation of a past that is liveable with, the constitution of an individual identity through a narrative process, a ‘backward-looking hope’ (Bowie 1991: 182).42 I see the psychic processes of nostalgic cultural sentiment, a function of purely physical processes of separation, displacement and dislocation, as culturally inscribed and primary and instrumental in this formation of a new kind of para-national43 community built around the idea of a common ‘Hmong-ness’ that largely ignores national boundaries in the creation of a community through symbolic means. There is, in this effulgent reflorescence of a renewed sense of Hmong community, a kind of reaching out, an attempt to reforge a new global community, an attempt at reunion to overcome the separations and divisions of the past, expressed in Hmong representations on the Internet and World Wide Web, and also expressed in the material reunions that have taken place between the American Hmong and the Chinese Miao. The latter ‘reunions’ are also based on virtual, or imaginary worlds, in an important sense, since mostly Hmong are returning to a home they never knew,

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and forging bonds of reunion with people from whom they had never been separated (except in a very distant historical sense).44 Yet the new bonds being formed in this way, and the old ones being reconstituted across vast spatial distances, are real enough, and are having a significant impact on those borderlands and interstices where cultural and national frontiers do, or do not, coincide. These emergent, symbolic, virtual constructions of nostalgia and a nostalgic community are realized in material form through the physical visits of relatives to their homes in Laos and Thailand, and in visits and exchanges, which will repay much further investigation, in China. They are realized in the videos about Hmong life in China now marketed on the Internet for transnational Hmong, in the ‘Miao’ costumes (never mind they may not be Hmong) ordered for weddings and new year festivals in Australia, Canada and the US, and in the visits overseas of performing troupes of Miao actors and musicians.45 Pressing questions for further research are the extent to which these sorts of material exchanges and investment, and ‘sitings’ or ‘re-sitings’ of culture (Olwig and Hastrup 1997), are transforming ethnic minority localities in China, and the extent to which segments of the Hmong population in the US and overseas subscribe to these videos and costumes and general fascination with a Miao life in China.46 If we can see these material transformations as motivated and powered by a more fundamental nostalgia than that of the postmodern (among those of course who are able to afford it, but affecting also those who are not), then an examination of these kinds of minority encounters in depth should be important in contributing to a new ‘sociology of aspiration’ (Butler 1993) of the kind that is needed in China.47 It is difficult to tell the extent to which traditional sentimental attachments to the xiang, or the Baudrillardian nostalgia for the lost real, have been instrumental in transforming the local Chinese economy in the case of the overseas Chinese, but it is even more difficult to assess this in ethnic minority areas, which are under-researched and where overseas contacts are normally discouraged.48 Whatever theoretical perspective we adopt on these materials, however, a culturally grounded account of the type I have suggested does appear to be necessary.49 I know, to some extent, what kind of a reunion takes place when a Taiwanese Hmong brother revisits his village in China after a period of separation for forty years, and what rejoicing and tears there are when American Hmong revisit their cousins in Laos and Thailand. But what kind of a reunion is it that takes place when a Hmong from the US visits a country he has never seen but which his family may have left a century ago, to meet ‘Miao’ brethren who do not speak the same language? These sorts of processes I think merit urgent research and further reflection. We need to understand how a ‘part community’ (Bhabha 1996) may be seeking to represent a wholeness felt to have been lost, with reference to a particular vision of the past and future, through constructing locations in ‘imagined

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worlds’ (Appadurai 1990). Paerregard (1997) shows how life in a native Andean village is indeed changed by the complex interplay of nostalgic, rational, moral and ethnic images with which different groups of returning migrants reconstruct their imagined place of origin. Souvannavong (1999) compares the motivations of segments of the exiled Lao elite in France who have chosen to return permanently to their homes. Analyses of this nature have, I think, considerable utility for particular minority places and cultures within China.50

Notes 1 I am not being accidentally essentialist here; the absence of writing and ancestral halls are often taken as emblematic of a Hmong identity by contrast with the Han. 2 Fieldwork on the Hmong in Sichuan, Yunnan and Guizhou took place for eight months in 1989–91 with the assistance of the British Academy. 3 I provide full details of this in Tapp (2001). 4 See also Skinner (1957) and Crissman (1967) for early accounts of overseas Chinese investments. 5 Tapp (1996). 6 The relations of the Miao languages have been compared to those which the Romance languages have with each other, or those of the Slavic languages. See Enwall (1995). 7 Yang Dao (1982). 8 By instituted nostalgia I do not mean what Herzfeld (1997; 2001) calls ‘structural nostalgia’, which he associates with the appeal to a former state characterized by social relations of balance and reciprocity and compares to anthropological myths. 9 Within China it is usually thought of as north. 10 In terms of the Hmong patrilineal descent system, however, it is usually the loss of the father that is stressed in Orphan stories. See also Feuchtwang, this volume, on Freud’s analysis of melancholia. 11 The original identity of the Hmong and Han is pointed to in a series of tales that describe them as originally brothers who worshipped at the same paternal grave, but at different times of the year, so that in time they lost touch with each other and spoke different tongues. 12 The latest of these, started in a Lao resettlement centre in 1964, was led by a prophet named Yaj Soob Lwj who invented or discovered an alphabetic form of script for Hmong. Fonts for this are now available on the Internet. This is one of the very few historical examples of an entire alphabetic script being invented by an unlettered individual (Smalley 1996). 13 Csordas (1994) shows the close relation between imagination and memory in the formation of autobiographical identity in his account of the North American ‘healing memories’. 14 See Hendricks et al. (1986). 15 Tapp (1982). 16 For example, some 20,000 Hmong moved to Central Valley in California between 1981 and 1983. See Fink (1986). 17 First International Conference on The Hmong/Miao of Asia Today, Centre des Archives d’Outre-Mer, Aix-en-Provence, 11–13 September 1998. See Tapp, Anthropology Today (14) 6: 23, December 1998. 18 See Lovell (1998).

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19 Halbwachs (1930); Connerton (1989); Fentress and Wickham (1992). Bloch (1998: 119–20) addresses this issue in the entrancing example of children ‘recalling’ their family history. He also emphasizes the interelationships between what cognitive psychologists have called ‘autobiographical’ as distinct from ‘semantic’ or collective memories (114–26), as indeed have some social psychologists (see Rime and Christophe 1997). 20 This is unlike the exotic Miao images produced from China which, like Hmonglanguage Internet, implicates a purely internal audience. I have gone into more detail on these productions in a related paper, ‘The Consuming or the Consumed? Virtual Hmong in China’, presented at the London China Seminar, 18 February 1999, forthcoming in Consuming China, Stuart Thompson and Kevin Latham (eds) (Curzon Press). 21 See for example Werbner (1996) on British Pakistanis. 22 In the paper cited in note 20, I have provisionally divided these materials into three main types: the didactic announcement of a public Hmong identity and interests, propositional informational content on the Hmong for the researcher, and internal pages concerned with business or moral discussion. 23 Penny Harvey and Sarah Greene, ‘Social Context of Virtual Manchester’, paper on ESRC-funded research project presented at the Department Seminar, Department of Anthropology, LSE, 19 February 1989. 24 I think this is Indra. The image is reminiscent of those used in the southern Thai puppet theatre of the Ramakien, the South-East Asian version of the Ramayana, and may also be associated with the messianic tale of Sinsay, which Hmong from Laos would know. 25 My emphases. Apart from ‘nomands’ which I retain for interest, I have spellchecked the remainder of this. 26 Outside China, ‘Miao’ or ‘Meo’ is a pejorative term, which the Hmong have largely got rid of and still resent. 27 More details of this are in my British Association for Chinese Studies Annual Conference paper, 6 September 1999, ‘Engendering the Miao: Belonging and Marginalisation’, SOAS, London. 28 Nor does she do so in her (1993) thesis, in a similar example of a speech by a Guizhou Miao. 29 I owe this perception to Charles Stafford’s paper (this volume). It must be a fact that community is from the start an imagined one, where absences are more frequent than presences. 30 Mary Rack, ‘Images of Minorities, Memories of Bandits: Negotiating Local Identities in Lowland West Hunan’. Unpub. PhD thesis, Department of Social Anthropology, University of Edinburgh (1999). 31 For an account of this system and its emergence, see Smalley et al. (1990). Enwall (1995) gives an account of all Miao writing systems in China. 32 At the founding of this series of Miao Studies Conferences in Guizhou, in 1987, the only foreigners present were a Japanese researcher and myself. Schein (1996: 95) describes how the similar visits to a Miao festival, which took place at the first formal meeting of the Miao Studies Assocation (Guizhou, 1988), satisfied ‘a kind of nostalgic yearning for essentialized versions of their forgotten culture’ by Miao intellectuals. 33 Enwall (1995) describes the difficulties of linguists at the conference on Miao language and writing in Guiyang in 1956 in persuading Miao that a unified writing system for all the Miao languages was an impossibility. 34 This analysis is correct inasmuch as it concerns encounters between overseas Hmong and non-Hmong Miao in China. Some overseas Hmong, however, have

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35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47

48 49

50

been able to visit genuine Hmong villages and the re-encounters in these cases, for example families divided by war along the Vietnam border, are so emotive as to go beyond words and tears. See also Schein (1998b). See also my paper on consumption in Thompson and Latham (eds), cited in note 20. Often these Miao costumes are not Hmong. But this is not recognized by the American Hmong. See also Schein (1998a). See Olwig and Hastrup (1997). Schein (1997). This is not so much to apply psychological explanations to social phenomena as to use the same terms (such as ‘narrative’) used to describe processes of personal identity formation for more general processes of identity formation. Or Stewart’s (1993) ‘future-past’. Emergent Hmong global nationalism is importantly not ‘trans’-national, but globally national. The Hmong borderlands between Laos and Vietnam, Thailand and China have always been ‘transnational’. It would be interesting to examine the Internet representations of overseas Chinese communities to see what they may tell us about factionalism, unity, the sense of community, and the mechanics of separation, nostalgia and reunion. Louisa Schein has drawn attention to these phenomena. An ethnographic audience analysis of a kind that has not so far been undertaken is demanded. Stewart (1993: 23) talks of ‘the nostalgic’s utopia . . . where authenticity suffuses both word and world’. But she speaks from a postmodern perspective, and I am uncomfortable even with the linking of the nostalgic with the modern. I try to discuss this unease more clearly in a paper given at the Anthropology Association of China’s recent international conference on ‘Human Existence and Development in the 21st. Century’, Xiamen, 18–22 July 2000: ‘In Defence of the Archaic’. The materials considered in this chapter refer largely to work in progress and to research projected for the future. In an article forthcoming in the Bulletin of the Institute of Anthropology (Kaogu renleixue kan), National Taiwan University (‘Engendering the “Miao”: Belonging and the Marginal’), I criticize more directly the association of nostalgia with the modern or postmodern, arguing for a less strict periodization in the Chinese context, where a hedonistic romantic ethos may predate classical times. If time-space has been compressed through the stretching of social relations to deal with those not physically present, and through the tremendous acceleration in the circulation of people and objects, as has been argued (Harvey 1989; Giddens 1991; Lash and Urry 1994), then we do need a sociology of social and cultural flows as much as a ‘phenomenology of locality’ (Lovell 1998).

References Agamben, G. (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford: Stanford University Press Anderson, B. (1983) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London: Verso Editions Appadurai, A. (1990) ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, in M. Featherstone (ed.), Global Culture: Nationalism, Globalization, Modernity, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 295–311

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Bahloul, J. (1996) The Architecture of Memory: A Jewish-Muslim Household in Colonial Algeria, 1937–1962, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press Baudrillard, J. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press Bellelli, G. and M. Amatulli (1997) ‘Nostalgia, Immigration, and Collective Memory’, in J. Pennebaker et al. (eds), Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 209–20 Benson, G. and F. Pieke (eds) (1999) The Chinese in Europe, New York: St. Martins Press Bhabha, H. (1996) ‘Cultures In-Between’, in S. Hall and P. du Gay (eds), Questions of Cultural Identity, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications, pp. 53–60 Bloch, M. (1998) How We Think They Think, Boulder: Westview Press Bowie, M. (1991) Lacan, London: Fontana Press Butler, J. (1993) Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’, New York and London: Routledge Cheung, Siu-Woo (1996) Subject and Representation: Identity Politics in Southeast Guizhou, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Washington (Seattle) Cohen, A. P. (ed.) (1982) Belonging: Identity and Social Organisation in British Rural Cultures, Manchester: Manchester University Press Cohen, A. P. (1985) The Symbolic Construction of Community, London and New York: Routledge Cohen, A. P. (ed.) (1986) Symbolising Boundaries: Identity and Diversity in British Cultures, Manchester: Manchester University Press Cohen, R. (1997) Global Diasporas: An Introduction, Seattle: University of Washington Press Connerton, P. (1989) How Societies Remember, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press Crissman, L. (1967) ‘The Segmentary Structure of Overseas Chinese Communities’, Man (n.s.) 2 (2): 185–204 Csordas, T. (ed.) (1994) Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, Cambridge Studies in Medical Anthropology, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press Enwall, J. (1995) A Myth Becomes Reality: History and Development of the Miao Written Language, Stockholm East Asian Monographs no. 5, Stockholm: Institute of Oriental Languages, Stockholm University Fentress, J. and C. Wickham (1992) Social Memory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell Fink, J. (1986) ‘Secondary Migration to California’s Central Valley’, in G. Hendricks, B. T. Downing and A. S. Deinard (eds), The Hmong in Transition, New York: Center for Migration Studies of New York Inc. and The Southeast Asian Refugee Studies Project of the University of Minnesota, pp. 184–7 Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, Cambridge: Polity Press Halbwachs, M. (1930) La Memoire Collective, Paris Harvey, D. (1989) The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change, Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Basil Blackwell Hendricks, G., B. T. Downing and A. S. Deinard (1986) The Hmong in Transition, New York: Center for Migration Studies of New York Inc. and The Southeast Asian Refugee Studies Project of the University of Minnesota

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Herzfeld, M. (1997) Cultural Intimacy: Social Poetics in the Nation-State, New York, London: Routledge Herzfeld, M. (2001) The Hmong of China: Context, Agency, and the Imaginary, Leiden: Brill Jameson, F. (1985) ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’, in H. Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture, London and Concord, MA: Pluto Press, pp. 111–25 Lash, S. and J. Urry (1994) Economics of Signs and Space, London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage Publications Lovell, N. (ed.) (1998) Locality and Belonging, London and New York: Routledge Lowenthal, D. (1985) The Past is a Foreign Country, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne: Cambridge University Press Mitchell, J. P. (1998) ‘Nostalgic Constructions of Community: Memory and Social Identity in Urban Malta’, Ethnos 63 (1): 81–102 Myers, F. (1976) ‘“To Have and to Hold”: A Study of Persistence and Change in Pintupi Social Life’, unpublished PhD thesis, Bryn Mawr College Olwig, K. F. and K. Hastrup (eds) (1997) Siting Culture: The shifting Anthropological Object, London and New York: Routledge Ong, A. (1999) Flexible Citizenship: the Cultural Logics of Transnationality, Durham and London: Duke University Press Ong, A. and D. Nonini (eds) (1997) Ungrounded Empires: The Cultural Politics of Modern Chinese Transnationalism, New York and London: Routledge Paerregard, K. (1997) ‘Imagining a Place in the Andes: In the Borderland of Lived, Invented, and Analyzed Culture’, in K. F. Olwig and K. Hastrup (eds), Siting Culture: The Shifting Anthropological Object, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 39–59 Pan, L. (1990) Sons of the Yellow Emperor: A History of the Chinese Diaspora, Boston: Little, Brown Pan, L. (ed.) (1999) The Encyclopaedia of the Overseas Chinese, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press Rack, M. (1999) ‘Images of Minorities, Memories of Bandits: Negotiating Local Identities in Lowland West Hunan’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh Rime, B. and V. Christophe (1997) ‘How Individual Emotional Episodes Feed Collective Memory’, in J. Pennebaker et al. (eds), Collective Memory of Political Events: Social Psychological Perspectives, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, pp. 131–46 Schein, L. (1993) ‘Popular Culture and the Production of Difference: The Miao and China’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of California (Berkeley) Schein, L. (1996) ‘Multiple Alterities: The Contouring of Gender in Miao and Chinese Nationalism’, in B. Williams (ed.), Women out of Place, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 79–102 Schein, L. (1997) ‘Gender and Internal Orientalism in China’, Modern China 23 (1): 69–98 Schein, L. (1998a) ‘Importing Miao Brethren to Hmong America: A Not-So-Stateless Transformation’, in Pheng Cheah and B. Robbins (eds), Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation, Cultural Politics Vol. 14, Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 163–88 Schein, L. (1998b) ‘Forged Transnationality and Oppositional Cosmopolitanism’, in M. P. Smith and L. E. Guarnizo (eds), Transnationalism From Below, Comparative Urban and Community Research Vol. 6, New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, pp. 291–313

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Skinner, G. W. (1957) Chinese Society in Thailand, Ithaca: Cornell University Press Smalley, W., C. K. Vang and G. N. Yang (1996) Mother of Writing: The Origin and Development of a Hmong Messianic Script, Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press Souvannavong, Si-ambhaivan Sisombat (1999) ‘Elites in Exile: The Emergence of a Transnational Lao Culture’, in G. Evans (ed.), Laos: Culture and Society, Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, pp. 100–25 Stewart, S. (1993 [1984]) On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection, Durham: Duke University Press Symonds, P. (1996) ‘Empowerment and Participation: Prevention in the AIDS Era’, paper presented at the Sixth International Conference on Thai Studies, University of Chiang Mai, 14–17 October Tapp, N. (1982) ‘The Relevance of Telephone Directories to a Lineage-Based Society’, Journal of the Siam Society 70 (1): 114–27 Tapp, N. (1989) Sovereignty and Rebellion: The White Hmong of Northern Thailand, Oxford, New York, Singapore: Oxford University Press Tapp, N. (1996) ‘The Kings Who Could Fly Without Their Heads: “Local” Culture in China and the Case of the Hmong’, in Tao Tao Liu and D. Faure (eds), Unity and Diversity: Local Cultures and Identities in China, Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, pp. 83–98 Tapp, N. (2001) The Hmong of China: Context, Agency and the Imaginary, Leiden: Brill Werbner, P. (1996) ‘The Fusion of Identities: Political Passion and the Poetics of Cultural Performance among British Pakistanis’, in D. Parkin et al. (eds), The Politics of Cultural Performance, Providence: Berghahn Books, pp. 81–100 Yang Dao (1982) ‘Why did the Hmong leave Laos?’, in B. Downing and D. Olney (eds), The Hmong in the West: Observations and Reports, Minneapolis: Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota, pp. 3–18

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8

Linguistic and social patterns of separation and reunion Raymond Firth

In processes of separation and reunion, language is an important, often central, factor. Of course, separation and reunion are themselves very general terms, with many shades of meaning and near synonyms. Apartness and togetherness are basic ideas in human thought, relevant to a great many contexts. To concepts of disjunction, dissociation, exclusion, isolation, dispersion, detachment, bisection, severance, divorce and the like are opposed notions of junction, combination, concurrence, assemblage, coherence, binding, marriage, and whole sets of technical processes of riveting and coupling. Separation and reunion have many aspects, behavioural and mental, varying through bodily contact, linguistic utterance, to intellectual and emotional interest. Bodily contact or movement itself has many significant variations. Handshaking, hand-clasping in front of the body, hugging with both arms, nodding, bowing, kneeling, kowtowing, kissing on cheek or lips are all very meaningful in some cultures.1 The context of the situation is of obvious importance. The parting and reunion of kin can differ greatly from those of a fishing boat crew, of office workers, or of political leaders of different countries. Different again is the process of mass separation as a result of war or relocation of a rural population upon the building of a river dam. Separation and reunion are affected then by many variables. Among those of a linguistic kind are expressive variables, verbal forms which accompany, symbolize or recall the actions of parting and meeting again. These can be observed and are relatively simple to characterize. Much less easy to define are conditioning variables, part of the linguistic framework of social categories relevant to the conduct of separation and reunion.

Some literary examples All human societies provide examples of the parting and meeting phenomena in verbal form, and where this is a written culture, in literary form also. The evidence I cite here is highly selective, but may help to suggest a wider examination of the field. My two first instances, wide apart in conceptualization, show recollection of separation in poetic form. From Goethe’s

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Wilkommen und Abschied – Welcome and Farewell – I take a few lines (Fiedler 1920, no. 102): Doch ach, schon mit der Morgensonne Verengt der Abschied mir das Herz; In deinen Küssen welche Wonne! In deinem Auge welcher Schmerz! Which I render as: Then oh, with the morning sun The farewell scene contracts my heart In your kisses what rapture! In your eye what pain! The next instance is a very different order. It consists of passages from The Kasidah, a long poem composed in English in pseudo-oriental style by Sir Richard Burton, unacknowledged, but under a pen-name of his, Haji Abdu El-Yezdi. In contrast to Goethe’s intensely personal, private experience of parting, real or purported, Burton is concerned with very general questions, at an abstract level. Why meet we on the bridge of Time to ’change one greeting and to part? . . . We meet to part; yet asks my sprite, Part we to meet? Ah! is it so? Man’s fancy-made Omniscience knows, who made Omniscience nought can know. Why must we meet, why must we part, why must we bear this yoke of MUST, Without our leave or askt or given, by tyrant Fate on victim thrust? . . . The light of morn has grown to noon, has paled with eve, and now farewell Go, vanish from my life as dies the tinkling of the Camel’s bell. (Burton 1914: 11–12) Goethe suggests a direct passionate experience, Burton (in less mellifluous verse) a more remote, vague, wistful semi-philosophistical reflection on separation and reunion as necessities in life’s career. Notably, both types of expression are recollected and formalized for aesthetic effect. So, parting and meeting are significant not only as personal events in themselves, but are taken by the poets – and by others – as symbolic of features of human

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existence. The role of language here is to convert a particular event, a personal experience or incidence of thought, into an instance of a general order. Separation and reunion then can be taken to be not only empirical events; they can also be envisaged as general concepts, which can be used in speculation upon the meaning of life. The two examples given above have been composed in a European tradition, if in very different styles. I have very little knowledge of Chinese and Japanese literature, and that only in translation. But for comparative purposes I adduce a few examples of the parting-meeting situation. Here is a poem composed more than two thousand years before Goethe and Burton by the Chinese poet and administrator Chu Yuan. He was a minister of the king of Chu in the period of the Warring States, but fell from favour and ultimately was forced to leave his home. In exile he wrote his bitter laments. A few lines illustrate his distress (Chu 1953: 44): I leave the City sad at Heart Forced from Home today to part We leave the Capital behind and know not where the Stream may wind United Oars the Water cleave; To see the King no more I grieve By Forest Glades I sigh again And as I gaze Tears fall like Rain. East moves the Boat, I dream of West Far from the country I love best.2 Japanese literature too has many examples of the record of real or imagined separation and reunions. Take only the early eleventh century Tale of Genji, by the gifted lady Murasaki Shikibu (translated by Arthur Waley). The book, primarily concerned with the highly sophisticated and aesthetically oriented life of the imperial court, with its innumerable intrigues, has a great amount of coming and going, often formally expressed. When Genji, son of a former emperor, having lost favour at court, prepares to go into exile, he visits the father of his dead wife, a minister of high rank, in whose house his own little son is living. Amid the mourning his dead wife’s mother sent a message by the little prince’s nurse, asking him not to leave the house till the boy was awake (and could see him go). Genji answered with the poem ‘To a shore I go where the tapering smoke of salt-kilns shall remind me of the smoke that loitered by her pyre’. He wrote no letter to go with the poem but turning to the nurse he said: ‘It is sad at all times to leave one’s friends at dawn. How much the more for one such as I, who goes never to return!’ ‘Indeed’, she answered, ‘Farewell is a monster among words . . .’ In classical Japan (as in China) poetry was a form of expression at moments of greeting and parting. In preparing for his departure, Genji paid a round of visits to ladies whom he had known. One had been an intimate of his

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father the former Emperor. On the way to her he saw a small house among a clump of trees and recollected that it was the home of a lady with whom he had previously had a brief affair. Just when he was about to drive away, a cuckoo flew by. He stopped and composed a poem – ‘Hark to the cuckoo’s song! Who could not but revisit the hedge-row of this house where once he sung before?’ – then gave it to an attendant to deliver to the lady. Pretending not to recognize him, since so long had passed since last they met, she replied with the poem ‘That to my garden Cuckoo has returned, his song proclaims. But how, pray, should I see him, caged behind the summer rain?’ So Genji went away, thinking of her with admiration of her former dancer’s grace. In the formality and complexity of these separations and reunions it is clear that, as the author points out, such women of character and position had no false pride and saw that it was worthwhile to take what they could get, without ill will concerning the past or concern for the future. But even in such an accepting society there were ladies who felt resentment at the infrequency of the visits of lovers, and no longer felt disposed to receive them or welcome the prospect of reunion (Murasaki 1935: 226–32).

Some conditioning variables Charles Stafford has drawn our attention to separation and reunion as part of the general problem of human relations, and invited us to consider them as universals (Stafford 2000). In illustration of his theme, I have given comparative examples from diverse cultures. But within this universal frame cultural differences, including those of a linguistic order, are manifest. I refer first to what I have called conditioning variables, verbal categories which represent deep-seated structures of social relationships which seem meaningful in affecting modes of greeting and parting. I take contrasting examples from English and Tikopia, with a brief analogy from a Chinese source, in the field of kinship and associated relations. Notable is the difference between the Tikopia attitude to affines and our own English attitude. In both societies relatives by marriage are often looked upon in an ambivalent way – with affection or at least with liking, yet with some degree of distrust, rather negatively. The most marked instance of this is the English mother-in-law, subject of many jokes. But whereas the English attitude is devoid of rules (except those of common politeness) the Tikopia have laid down explicit norms of behaviour in clear categorization. For them consanguineous kin are classed as tautau laui and affines as tautau pariki. With the former, literally in ‘good relationship’, ordinary contact is easy and unrestrained, both in speech and in action. Outstanding among tautau laui is the mother’s brother. Between maternal uncle and nephew or niece there is great freedom and mutual help, in a manner which is one of the basic assumptions of Tikopia social life. By contrast all affines, tautau pariki are literally in ‘bad relationship’, that is, they must be viewed with constraint.

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They must be treated with respect, their personal names should not be used, improper language should be avoided in their presence, bodily contact should be avoided. This is particularly so for the senior generation. Between brothers-in-law relations are less formal, and there is a code of mutual assistance in material affairs, but the general rules still apply. In the ordinary routines of coming and going in daily life the parting and meeting again of the different kinds of kin and affines may not show marked contrast; but in the departure of someone overseas or reunion after long-term separation the behaviour of affines tends to be much more restrained than that of consanguineous kin. In Chinese society too kinship differences have been very important as conditioning variables in affecting separation and reunion. More than sixty years ago I drew attention to the richness of kinship behaviour described in the eighteenth-century Chinese novel then entitled Dream of the Red Chamber in English translation by Wang Chi-Chen, and believed to be a part autobiography of its author Cao Xue-qin. The frequent separations and reunions of Bao-yu, the central figure, with his various kin of the large Jia family, differ greatly in mode and emotional content according to their kinship position, including that of the Matriarch who commands immense respect. Marked off from such daily domestic events is the reception after a long separation of a daughter of the house who has become an Imperial Concubine. Most elaborate preparations were made for the meeting, and the personal family welcome was enmeshed in a network of formality, including verbal expressions, such as prayer. This example, like so many others, also demonstrates the significance of relative status, apart from kinship, in determining the mode of separation and reunion behaviour.3 Gender discrimination as expressed in language may be also an important conditioning factor in the treatment of separation and reunion. Personal pronouns are of interest here. English separates gender in third personal pronouns, distinguishing males from females and also having a neutral grammatical gender – he, she, it. But French, though it has a dual usage for persons, classifies objects grammatically only as masculine of feminine. (So in English a boat is of neutral gender, it, often known colloquially or affectionately as feminine she, in French le bateau is masculine.) But in Tikopia while sex differences are clearly recognized in language, no gender at all is expressed in personal pronouns: male and female persons, and objects, are all characterized as ia. Gender discrimination is common in many areas of European languages. Now an interesting thing is the degree to which gender notions enter into separation and reunion behaviour. Clearly, many of the formal, conventional or ritual acts in parting and reunion differ according to the gender of either party. Women tend to greet other women in a different way from their greeting to men, or when men greet one another. Traditionally, in some European high society, a gentleman might kiss a lady’s hand – or murmur the words as he bent over it – but a lady would not behave so to

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a gentleman. Yet in Tikopia a woman might kiss an elder kinsman’s wrist, but not vice versa. In European languages the speech formalities of address tend to be also gender markers – e.g. Sir/Madam, and most personal names. But curiously, the actual words equivalent to farewell or welcome rarely seem to be gender-distinguished. It is so in English. And I gather that in Portuguese, where ‘thank you’ is obrigada to a woman and obrigado to a man, the words for ‘farewell’, adios, and welcome bemvindo, are the same to a woman as to a man. I would like to know if any language uses different forms of farewell and welcome for males and females. Why, if there is so much gender discrimination in the ordinary language of address, is it lacking in the actual terms of separation or reunion salutation? (And is Portuguese unique in recognizing gender in words of thanks, and if so, why?) Among the factors involved in speaking about separation and reunion are notions of plurality, presenting different linguistic frames. Whereas English, German, French have only one first person plural – We, Wir, Nous – Tikopia, like other Polynesian languages discriminates between dual and plural, and inclusive and exclusive forms in regard to the person addressed. Taua is ‘we two, thou and I’; tatou is ‘we several, you (all) and I’; maua, ‘he/she and I’; matou, ‘they and I’. It may be far-fetched to hold that linguistic patterns in regard to gender may represent different thought patterns in behaviour of separation and reunion. But it is not hard to see that inclusive and exclusive usages in first person plural pronouns correspond to different thought patterns in greeting and parting behaviour. In English ‘We are going now’ is ambiguous;4 in Tikopia the expression is much more precise, as to number and person(s) addressed. So much for conditioning variables.

The language of separation and reunion The actual language of separation and reunion is complicated, with two obviously distinct spheres. One sphere consists of the words or phrases overtly spoken in address or salutation on parting from or receiving back a person – e.g. ‘Goodbye’, ‘Welcome back’. The other sphere is that in which separation and reunion are spoken about, either as real events or as fictions – as in a letter of farewell or a description of a leave-taking in a novel. Verbal and written usage may differ in degree of formality, from the colloquial ‘Be seeing you’, or ‘Glad to see you’ to the highly ceremonious terminology of reception of a royal personage. Written language likewise has its degrees of formality, from the outpourings of separated lovers to the variety of greetings and partings of Shakespearean drama. The range of linguistic expressions in separation and reunion suggests a variety of intellectual and emotional attitudes. Here the problem of interpretation is important. I turn to poetry again, almost at random, to illustrate this. First, I give a translation of a Tikopia song which was composed about three-quarters of a century ago (Firth 1991: 175)

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My bond-friend said to me, that we two Should be parting on the ocean And gave to me a gift of affection of a young man When he returned to live in the land The two of us went walking about Clasping our two hands intertwined. This song expresses in broad terms the sorrow and the pleasure of separation and reunion of two people between whom there is a bond of affection. Analogies can probably be found in most other languages, especially when the affection is of the intense kind shown by lovers. But a simple inference from language to emotional commitment would be superficial. In this case, as I knew from other evidence, the situation described had been a real one; the voyager had gone off for a year to a mission school at a time when travel abroad for Tikopia was very rare, and on his return he and the composer walked around with clasped hands in the customary manner of young bachelor friends. But the situation could have been simulated: the song was composed as a dance-song, and might have been quite imaginary. Or the situation might have actually occurred, but the song have been composed rather dutifully, as the kind of linguistic expression deemed appropriate by custom for a friend. The complexity of a situation of parting and re-meeting is illustrated by a poem by Robert Graves. Most of his love poems, addressed to real or imaginary women, lay emphasis on togetherness of lovers. But this poem, perhaps based on a real incident, is of different order. It is entitled ‘The Hung Wu Vase’ (Graves 1996: 387): With women like Marie no holds are barred. Where do they get the gall? How can they do it? She stormed out, slamming the hall door so hard That a vase on the gilt shelf above – you knew it, Loot from the Summer Palace at Peking And worth the entire contents of my flat – Toppled and fell . . . I poured myself straight gin, Downing it at a gulp. ‘So that was that.’ The bell once more . . . Marie walked calmly in, Observed broken red porcelain on the mat, Looked up, looked down again with condescension, Then, gliding past me to retrieve a glove (Her poor excuse for this improper call) Muttered: ‘And one thing I forgot to mention: Your Hung Wu vase was phoney like your love!’ How can they do it? Where do they get the gall?

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At first sight, interpreting the linguistic images presented by this poem is not difficult. An angry woman sweeps out and in again, doing intentional damage in both physical and mental ways. But what did she really mean by her actions and words? Were they meant as revenge, or only to stimulate a more genuine rapprochement by her lover? And what did she feel? He seems not to have welcomed her return, but did he desire the separation? One thing seems clear: whether the poem describes a real situation or not it marks the significance of the variety of forms of return after parting. Mere physical reappearance after absence may not be a reunion in any positive sense. Re-entry may lead to simple re-encounter, but not involve any warm emotional charge commonly indicated by the term reunion. (This poem also alludes to another kind of trauma – that occasioned by separation from beloved objects without hope of reunion.)

Problems of interpretation: emotions and status I am very conscious here of a matter of interpretation. Visible and audible acts can be fairly easily observed, recorded and interpreted. But recognition of cognitive and emotional states in separation and reunion is much more difficult. It is a matter of inference from bodily or linguistic behaviour, by analogy with other instances. Here the anthropologist’s own preconceived ideas may be significant in the interpretation. This is perhaps especially so in the linguistic field. Language may conceal, not express mental attitudes. Polite speech courtesies may imply real respect and positive emotional commitment. Or they may hide dislike, rejection, contempt. Greeting or parting expressions of goodwill may be assumed for operational purposes in society – and may even be understood as such by both parties. The need for care in transposing the meaning of overt behaviour at one level into an intellectual and emotional attitude at another level is illustrated by weeping and the language associated with it. Tears and expressions of sorrow are common in some kinds of parting. But they may also accompany scenes of reunion. Tikopia may celebrate the arrival of a friend of relative from abroad after a long absence with cries of ‘E, aue!’ – oh, alas! A song of lament may also be sung. There is joy, but there is also some reminiscence of times past, of the pain of absence, and some recognition of changes that have taken place in the parties. Such occurrences take place in many cultures, I suspect. So on his return from captivity the T’ang Chinese poet Tu Fu describes his wife ‘weeping like the well sobbing underground’, while his son ‘sees his father, turns his back to weep’ (Cooper 1973: 184 ).5 About twenty-five years ago I made some examination of the rituals of greeting and parting in which I considered the variety of speech forms in ordinary use, especially in English. I showed that many of these speech forms were adapted to and demonstrated social status. For example, seniors tend to take the initiative in greeting speech, and special speech forms tend to be used according to the rank of the person addressed (Firth 1972).

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What is notable is how the focus of attention in the verbal phraseology of separation/reunion situations varies in different cultures. It would seem likely that in most societies a distinction is made between the implications of short-term and long-term separation. In the domestic or work routine of everyday life the salutations of parting and re-uniting tend to be of a cursory, informal nature, often omitted altogether. Separations envisaged as being for a long period usually involve more demonstrative, more formal salutations, which may be much stronger expressions of ‘real’ feeling. These expressions may refer to the anxiety for the safety of the departing person – an anxiety which seems to be a general feature of human association. This anxiety may be relieved or given compensation by expression of wish for safety, hope for comfort or favourable conditions of travel. A glance at dictionaries of European languages reveals the pervasiveness of such expressions of goodwill. The English ‘farewell’ and ‘goodbye’ are equivalent to the Dutch vaarwel and the German lebewohl – live well – with more colloquial alternatives, as in English ‘Have a good trip’ or ‘Take care’. Correspondingly, the English ‘Welcome’ is paralleled by the Dutch Welkom and the German Willkommen and the Italian benvenuto. These express general good wishes. But in some languages the emphasis is on seeing the departing person again. The French au revoir, the Polish do widzenia express farewell in these terms, as does the Italian a rivederci. These expressions relate to human attitudes. But in some languages spiritual protection is also invoked. In the Romance language field of Europe, French has adieu, Spanish and Portuguese have adios, and Italian has the rather familiar addio. The English ‘goodbye’ is rather more ambiguous. According to the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, goodbye is a sixteenth-century contraction of the expression ‘God be with you’, though it does allow that it may perhaps have been affected by analogy with the time-of-day salutations of the order of ‘Good morning’, etc. But as a purely personal suggestion I have an idea that it may be a contraction for ‘good abide’ – stay well – a salutation by those departing to those staying behind, in parallel to statements of ‘farewell’. It is possible that it may have changed its meaning by generalization since the sixteenth century. But this is a matter for historians and etymologists to decide. A marked feature of salutations in some cultures is the incorporation of the relative position of the parties going, remaining or coming. In Malay an emphasis in greeting and parting forms of address is on safety, security, peace, as in selamatpagi – a peaceful morning, equivalent to ‘good morning’. But in separation those about to go say selamat tinggal to those staying behind, while those staying behind say selamat jalan to those about to go, thus distinguishing remaining from travelling. An alternative farewell to those departing is selamat sampai, may you arrive safely/peacefully. In line with this emphasis on type of movement is the greeting to those who arrive – selamat datang – greetings to (you who have) come. This is an oblique reference to the risk of travel.6

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Some languages dispense altogether with expressions of goodwill in parting and reunion. In Tikopia, conversations can go like this: Kuou ka poi, ‘I am going’. Poi rei, ‘Go then!’ And on return the welcome is A! Ke ku au! ‘Oh, so you’ve come.’ Such terse descriptive phrases are not rude; they are simple statements of the situation. Maori language has somewhat similar salutations. A common greeting on passing an acquaintance in the street is kia ora – ‘May (you) be in health’, with an allusion to spiritual as well as physical well-being. But an equally usual greeting is of the form tena koe/tena korua /tena koutou: ‘There you are!’ – with the pronoun distinguishing one, two or more persons. The conventionality of this statement of the obvious can cover a real warmth and pleasure at the meeting.

The language of separation through death Since separation is often painful, euphemisms are often employed in speaking of it. This is particularly so in reference to death. English synonyms for death as the final separation are many. But it is significant that the notion of death seems to be regarded not as a relapse into a state of passivity or immobility, or inanimation, but as a positive action of withdrawal from the company of the living. To a varying degree in different cultures, this attribution of departure of the dead is associated more or less consciously with the concept of a soul which has activity. So in Tikopia as in English a dying person is regarded as ‘going’. A relative may ask Ko pa ku poi? – ‘Has father gone (yet)?’ The meaning depends entirely upon context – outside in the body or to the next world in the spirit. So also in a funeral oration over a man of rank: Ke ku mavae i tau reo ariki – ‘You have parted from your role as spokesman for chiefs’. The implication is that he has not merely stopped his function but gone away. The death of a young person may be marked by a dance performance by young men and girls, his peers with whom he enjoyed life earlier, a mako fakamavae – a dance of parting, to say goodbye, as the English interpretation of a memorial service would be. In the actions of recognition of separation and reunion, some conventional, formal words are usually spoken. But even when formalism may have replaced sentiment it still has a function in recognizing the individuality and dignity of the person addressed, and also the significance of an establishment of a social relationship. In one sense, the exact form of the flow of words does not matter; what is important is that something is said. But there are occasions when words are thought to be inappropriate. Words are a form of noise, and if noise is regarded as disturbing the social situation, then words are out of place. This applies, in some cultures, to the final act of separation, death. Apart from funeral or memorial addresses and condolences expressed to spouse or near kin, in most Euro-American societies a certain degree of silence in the immediate vicinity of the corpse is deemed appropriate. Little may be said, voices may be lowered and in general loud

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noises are avoided. (This seems to have been so especially in Victorian England.) Silence then becomes almost a positive mode of action. A Tikopia death scene is in strong contrast to this. Solemnity of demeanour is common and a smile rather then a laugh is regarded as seemly. But conversation around the corpse is frequent and carried out in normal tones, and there is much formal and informal wailing. The death of a person of rank may even be celebrated not only by the normal wailing and songs but also by beating of thatch roofs or tree trunks, or in modern conditions, by gunfire. Noise rather than silence is the mode of recognition of the final separation. (A European analogy is the Irish wake.)

Conclusion To recapitulate. This chapter has been concerned with three kinds of linguistic material. One is the kind of linguistic arrangement, as in gender and personal pronouns, that expresses particular categories of people engaged in acts of separation or reunion, and which may well affect the style of their performance. Another kind is the set of words or phrases, often highly conventionalized, actually used as address or salutation in situations of parting or reuniting. A third kind of linguistic material gives examples of the verbal forms in which separation and reunion are described in speech or writing, in anticipation, retrospect or imagination. As Stafford has anticipated, many cultural similarities as well as differences seem to be present in all this material. I have not attempted any formal classification of the acts or situations of separation and reunion. Presumably such an attempt would take into consideration a range of variables such as purpose of the separation, its voluntariness in different degrees, its scale in terms of people and resources involved, the amount of formalism, convention or ritualization, the relation of verbal to non-verbal expression, the time factors of duration of separation and expectation of return. By contrast to the fairly easily observable bodily indices of salutation are the more speculative inferences about the more private, complicated emotional states, at times obscure even to the parties themselves. But what I think is of basic importance in the interpretation and classification of these situations is the relative status of the parties concerned.

Notes 1

2

Notable is the western Polynesian greeting of nose-pressing, as in the Maori hongi and the Tikopia songi ( fesongi to indicate mutuality). Greetings may embody historical or ethnic elements, such as the ‘Manchu salute’ of touching hand and knee to the ground in eighteenth-century China (see Cao 1973: vol. 1, pp. 110 and 162; vol. 2, p. 546). To any Western reader of the translation of this poem, analogies across cultural boundaries are likely to arise at once. From a linguistic point of view, however, problems of the style of translation, and equation between languages also arise.

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3

4

5

6

Rhymed verse seems appropriate to translation of Chinese poetry. Accuracy in rendering meaning is indicated by the fact that one at least of the translators is Chinese, thus creating a linguistic bridge between cultures. The reading of this poem today, then, even in translation, reinforces a concept of language as power. The written word can endure, perhaps especially in a ritualized poetic form, and can move emotions many centuries after its author has disappeared. The nature of Chinese traditional verse, with its elaborate rules, for parallelism, rhyme and tone contrast is discussed in relation to English translation, inter alia, by Cooper (1973: 44–101) and Robinson (Wang 1973: 21–3). A more elaborate account of this visit is given in the more scholarly version of this tale by David Hawkes (Cao 1973: vol. 1, pp. 353–74). Curiously, Hawkes mentions as an earlier translation only that by Wu Shichang published by Clarendon Press in 1961; that by Wang Chi-chen (see References) was published by Routledge before 1936. A parallel confusion caused by a single term for ‘We’ occurs in The Story of the Stone (Cao 1977: vol. 2, p. 111). A maid uses ‘We’ to refer to herself and another maid whom she is addressing, whereas the latter thinks she is referring to the speaker herself and her master. A nostalgic reaction may also be triggered off by the unexpectedness of the reunion. In The Story of the Stone the meeting of two sisters after years of separation provoked mixed sentiments. ‘The sudden reunion of the two sisters was, it goes without saying, an affecting one in which joy and sorrow mingled’ (Cao 1973: vol. 1, pp. 121). In contrast is the exuberant poem by Po Chü-i on ‘Rejoicing at the Arrival of Ch’en Hsiung’, an event celebrated by the drinking of wine – ‘At ease and leisure – all day we talked, crowding and jostling the feelings of many years’ (Waley 1918: 118). Compare Arabic salam, Hebrew shalom, meaning peace. As adopted into English in the seventeenth century in the form salaam the word is generally taken to mean a form of obeisance of oriental type.

References Burton, R. F. (1914) The Kasidah (by Haji Abdu El-Yezdi), London: Hutchinson Cao, X. (1973, 1977) The Story of the Stone, translated by D. Hawkes, vol. 1. ‘The Golden Days’; vol. 2. ‘The Crab-Flower Club’, Harmondsworth: Penguin Chu, Y. (1953) Li Sao and Other Poems of Chu Yuan, translated by Y. Yang and G. Yang, Peking: Foreign Languages Press Cooper, A. (1973) Li Po and Tu Fu, Harmondsworth: Penguin Fiedler, H. G. (1920) Das Oxforder Buch Deutscher Dictung, Oxford: Oxford University Press Firth, R. (1972) ‘Verbal and Bodily Rituals of Greeting and Parting’, in J. S. LaFontaine (ed.), The Interpretation of Rituals: Essays in Honour of A. I. Richards, London: Tavistock, pp. 1–38 Firth, R. (1991) Tikopia Songs: Poetic and Musical Art of a Polynesian People of the Solomon Islands (with Mervyn McLean), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Graves, R. (1966) Collected Poems, New York: Doubleday Hawkes, D. See Cao, above Murasaki, S. (1935) The Tale of Genji, translated by A. Waley, London: Allen & Unwin Stafford, C. (2000) Separation and Reunion in Modern China, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Waley, A. (1918) A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, London: Constable

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Waley, A. (1935) See Murasaki, above Wang, C. (n.d.) Dream of the Red Chamber, by H. Tsao and Ka Ngoh (translated and adapted), London: Routledge Wang, W. (1973) Poems of Wang Wei, translated and with an introduction by G. W. Robinson, Harmondsworth: Penguin

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Index

affines 179–80 ancestors 5–6, 15–17, 35, 40, 115, 119–20, 123–8, 160 archive 95 attachment theory 1–4, 8–9 ‘backtracking populations’ 114–15 Blake, F. 70–3, 76 n. 4 Bloch, M. 66–7, 99 Bowlby, J. 1–4, 8–9, 23 n. 1 Burton, R. 177 chaodu 98 childcare 2–3 Chu Yuan 178 commensality see food cultural psychology 2–3 cultural revival 157–8 Cultural Revolution 19, 87 dams 15, 113–28 daughters 9–13, 27–42, 53–6, 59–65, 67–8, 73–5 death 1, 3, 6, 9–11, 14–17, 27–42, 70–3, 89–90, 95–6, 96–104, 124–5, 145–7, 159, 185 see also ancestors, funerals deities 6–7, 12, 53–6 Deng Xiaoping 137 Derrida, J. 107 desire 57–9, 61–5, 73–5 diaspora 18–20, 158–9 displacement 3, 15–17, 18–20, 113–28, 157–70 doors 8, 11

Dream of the Red Chamber see Hong Lou Meng Dudbridge, G. 60, 63, 69 efficacy of gods 7 emotions 1–4, 7–9, 15–17, 21, 27–8, 183–5 ethics 123 ethnicity 117–18, 132–5, 153 n. 4 Evans, H. 21 exorcism 96 February 28 (2/28) incident 86 Fengshen Yanyi 55, 59 Feuchtwang, S. 14–15 Firth, R. 20–1 food 5, 8, 36, 130, 141, 144 Freud, S. 2, 14, 56–7, 77 n. 14, 93–4, 131, 148–9, 154 n. 17 friendship 7–8, 181–2 funeral laments 9–11, 27–42, 46–7, 70–3 funerals 9–11, 14–17, 27–33, 38–40, 89–91, 96, 99–101, 159 Geertz, C. 77 n. 17 gender 12, 53–75, 180–1 ‘general release’ ritual 97–102 Ghost Festival 5–6 ghosts 14–17, 24 n. 10, 90–2, 92–104 gifts 4, 18, 130, 140–3, 147–50 Gillette, M. 17–18 globalization 3 gods see deities Goethe 176–7

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‘good brothers’ 90 Graves, R. 182 Great Leap Forward 113 greeting 4–8, 18, 20, 27, 141 see also reunion Guanyin 12, 60 guo nietie 142 Hakka 9–11, 21, 27–52 Hajj 17–18, 130–51 Hardardottir, S. 5 Hertz, R. 96–7 history 14–15, 85–104 Hmong 18–20, 157–70 Hong Kong 27–8 Hong Lou Meng 20, 180 Hui see Muslims identity 17–20, 132–5, 157–75 infant care 2–3 Internet 19, 162–3 Japan 178–9 Jing, J. 15–17 Johnson, E. L. 9–11, 14, 21, 70–3 kinship 9–13, 27–52, 53–75, 179–80 Kirschner, S. 76 n. 11 Lacan, J. 58 laments see funeral laments, wedding laments land 15–17, 115, 120–2 language 20–1, 176–86 leave-taking see sending-off Li Denghui 86, 90 life-cycle rituals 7–8, 9–11 see also rites of passage lineage sisters 34–8 literature 20–1, 176–9 locality 161 loss 85, 93 lunar new year 5, 8, 24 n. 7, 148, 163–4 Malinowski, B. 148 Mauss, M. 148 marriage 3, 9–13, 33–7 see also weddings marriage laments see wedding laments

Martin, E. 66–71, 79 n. 38, 80 n. 41, 80 n. 44, 96 Marx, K. 57 Mecca 130–1, 135, 138–40, 143–6 melancholia 93–4 memorialization 3, 14–15, 86, 89–90 memory 103, 115 Meng Jiangnu 96, 109–10 n. 30 Miao 158, 160, 164–70 Miaoshan 12–13, 55, 60–1, 63, 69, 75 migration 3, 158 modernity 3 mothers 13 mountain songs 28, 31, 34, 42–6 mourning 14–15, 85, 93–6, 99 Mulian 97–8, 99–100, 109 n. 30 music 27–42 Muslims 17–18, 117–18, 130–51 Myers, F. 4, 161 myths 11–13, 53–84 Nezha 12–13, 55, 59–61, 75 nostalgia 157–8, 159–61, 163, 168 obstacles 12–13, 55, 64, 74 opera 27, 31 Ortner, S. 66–7 Parkin, D. 23 n. 5 Parry, J. 66–7, 99 past 3, 14–15, 85, 94 Piaget, J. 58, 78 n. 18 pilgrimage 3, 7, 17–18, 130–51 poetry 7, 20–1, 176–9 poverty 114, 122 psychoanalysis 1–4, 57–8, 68, 93–6, 160 psychology 1–4, 8–9 pudu ritual see general release qingming festival 16, 119–20, 124 recognition 11–14, 53–75 relatedness, anthropology of 2–4 repression 92–6 reservoirs 15, 113–28 resettlement 113–28 resistance 13

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return-to-homeland movement 16, 118–20, 124 reunion 4–8, 11, 12, 15–20, 33, 115, 130–51, 158, 183 rites of passage 3–4 see also life-cycle rituals rivers 113 sacrifice 125–8 Sangren, P. S. 11–13, 14, 21 Sanmenxia Dam 116–18, 122–3 Saudi Arabia 139 Schein, L. 165 Schipper, K. 98 sending-off 4–8, 20–1, 27, 179–83 separation constraint 1–22 silence 185–6 socialization 56–9, 74–5 songs see music sons 11–13, 31, 53–6, 59–65, 67–8, 73–5 Stafford, C. 12, 53, 55–7, 71–2, 78 n. 26, 131, 179 story-cloths 161–2

Taiwan 14–15, 85–104, 157–8 Tale of Genji 178–9 Tapp, N. 18–20 Thompson, S. 20 n. 20 Tikopia 20–1, 179–86 Toren, C. 76 n. 10 Tu Fu 183 Turton, D. 23 n. 5 universals 1–4, 8–9, 20, 53, 55, 57 Van Gennep, A. 3, 9 videos 167 Watson, J. L. 17, 135 wedding laments 9–11, 27–42, 47, 70–3 weddings 9–11, 27–33, 141 ‘white terror’ 87–9 Wolf, M. 13 Yan, Y. 147, 149 Yung, B. 30, 49 n. 12 Zito, A. 63, 65