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Course title:
Anthropology of Contemporary Chinese Societies
Dates:
24 November to 4 December 2014
Venue:
Center for Chinese Studies,
Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic
Lecturers:
Mr Stuart Thompson
Dr Fang-long Shih
Taiwan Research Programme
London School of Economics and Political Science
United Kingdom
Course Description
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This course is served in the same spirit as a taster menu at an expensive restaurant. Our intention is
not to inundate you with bytes of information about contemporary Chinese societies. But, equally,
we do not want to serve up a reductionist and therefore over-simplified and potentially stereotyping
menu. Instead, we hope to provide something which equates in some ways to the novelist Yu Hua’s
evocative “China in Ten Words.” Through our “China in ten bite-size pieces”, we aim to stimulate
your appetite for further sampling and exploring some key questions about contemporary Chinese
societies.
Each topic will be approached as a triangulation of three aspects: an appraisal of the historical
situation, context and legacy, together with an examination and interrogation of the contemporary
state of affairs in both Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China. The scope of the precontemporary
portrayal will vary depending on the topic, and will not necessarily hinge around ‘the
1949 barrier’. The triangulation will tend toward being equilateral with respect to the weighting
given to the three ‘sides’ (historical, Taiwan, PRC), but will not necessarily treat each in equal
measure for all topics.
Our approach is deliberately comparative in at least three ways. Most deliberately, we hope to
generate comparisons between China in the past and its contemporary configurations – what has
continued and what has changed? Secondly there is material for making comparisons between the
PRC and Taiwan. Thirdly, though more implicitly, there will be the opportunity for you to compare
contemporary Chinese societies with other post-socialist societies, including the Czech Republic.
As a discipline, anthropology’s particular strength is its capacity to ‘get inside another culture’.
Fieldwork is anthropology’s iconic approach, generating knowledge of a society or culture through
‘being there’, conversing in their language, trying to experience the world from their point of view.
The practice of fieldwork, and the writing up of the results of fieldwork, are both referred to as
‘ethnography’. Anthropological knowledge is, in this sense, peculiarly ‘grounded’. But ‘writing
culture’ is, ultimately, a kind of writing. As such, we need to be aware of ‘the poetics and politics of
ethnography’ (Clifford & Marcus) and that as a form of cultural translation it involves a dialogic
process. In other words, writing (about) Chinese culture is not a neutral and objective approach, but
always partial in both senses of that English word. What is seen, what is paid attention to, how it is
viewed and analysed, is partially a product of the preconceptions and paradigms of the researcher.
People have different reasons for being interested in contemporary Chinese societies and, indeed,
for following this course. You will be alert or attuned to different ‘readings’ depending on whether,
for instance, you see China as a land of business opportunity, or as significantly different from your
own society so that you can learn about the diversity of the human condition. A ‘theory’ is a ‘way of
seeing’. As a dialogic process, anthropology should be reflexively and critically aware of its
theoretical perspectives. Students and researchers should be duly wary of imposing key (Western)
sociological concepts or categorizations onto Chinese contexts without due scrutiny of their
applicability.
For this course, we urge you to recognize, hold in critical abeyance and then re-consider the views
you have and the theories you hold about Chinese culture and society. Allow those views to be
challenged. Rather than stick with familiar fare, use the opportunity of this taster course to sample
and savour a more complex and satiating cuisine.
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Course Assessment
Students are expected to prepare themselves adequately for participation in the seminar sessions
which accompany each lecture. A record will be kept of attendance and the overall calibre of each
student’s input in the seminars.
Each student will be required to write an essay of between 1,750 and 2,250 words on an issue
related to the course. The tutors will suggest a number of essay titles, but we want to encourage
students to devise a title of their own. If a student devises his or her own title, then it needs to be
approved by the tutors. The deadline for submission of the essays will be 17.00 hours on Monday
2nd
February 2015.
Course Outline
Lecture 1: Food Forethought: Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies from a food perspective
Lecture 2: Family Resemblances
Lecture 3: Gender and Generational Issues
Lecture 4: Education Matters
Lecture 5: Place-making, Language and Imagined Communities
Lecture 6: Inequality, Mobility and Globalization
Lecture 7: Consumerism, Media and Cinema
Lecture 8: Civil Society and Protest
Lecture 9: Selective Tradition, the Past and Collective Memory
Final Session: students make short presentations on their prospective essays, with follow-up
discussion from the tutors and other students
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Lecture 1: Food Forethought: Chinese Studies and Taiwan Studies from a food
perspective
Time: Monday 24 November 2014, 14:10–17:25
Venue: M12
Readings
Chang Kwang-chih 1977 ‘Introduction’ to Food in Chinese Culture: Anthropological and Historical
Perspectives, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp.1-21
Anderson, Eugene N. 1988 ‘Food in Society’, in his The Food of China, New Haven: Yale University
Press, Chap.12, pp.199-213
Thompson, Stuart E. 2006 ‘On (not) eating the dead: a reader’s digest of a ‘Chinese’ funerary
taboo’, in Kevin Latham, Stuart Thompson & Jakob Klein (eds.) Consuming China: Approaches to
Cultural Change in Contemporary China, London: Routledge, pp.121-149
Jing, Jun 2000 ‘Introduction: Food, Children, and Social Change in Contemporary China’, in his (ed.)
Feeding China’s Little Emperors: Food, Children, and Social Change, Stanford: Stanford University
Press, pp.1-26
Liu, Lucia Huwy-min 2011 ‘Substance, Masculinity, and Class: Betel Nut Consumption and
Embarrassing Modernity in Taiwan’, in Marc Moskowitz (ed.) Popular Culture in Taiwan: Charismatic
Modernity, London: Routledge, pp.131-148
Lecture 2: Family Resemblances
Time: Tuesday 25 November 2014, 15:50–19:05
Venue: C15
Readings
Gates, Hill 1996 ‘Patricorporations: the State and the Household’, in her China’s Motor: A Thousand
Years of Petty Capitalism, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, pp.103-120
Stockman, Norman 2000 ‘Chinese Family: Continuity and Change’ in his Understanding Chinese
Society, Cambridge: Polity Press, Chap.5, pp.94-119
Jacka, Tamara, Andrew B. Kipnis & Sally Sargeson 2013 ‘Families, Kinship and Relatedness’ in their
(eds.) Contemporary China: Society and Social Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Thornton, Arlin & Lin Hui-Shang 1994 ‘Continuity and Change’ in their Social Change and the Family
in Taiwan, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Chap.15, pp.396-411
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Lecture 3: Gender and Generational Issues
Time: Wednesday 26 November 2014, 14:10–17:25
Venue: U34
Readings
Friedman, Sara L. 2010 ‘Women, Marriage and the State in Contemporary China’, in Elizabeth J.
Perry and Mark Selden (eds.) Chinese Society: Change, Conflict and Resistance, London: Routledge,
3rd
ed., pp.148-170
Yan, Yunxiang 2009 ‘Practicing Kinship, Remaking the Individual’ in his The Individualization of
Chinese Society, London: LSE Monographs on Social Anthropology, pp.85-107
Farris, Catherine S.P. 2004 ‘Women’s Liberation Under “East Asian Modernity” in China and
Taiwan: Historical, Cultural, and Comparative Perspectives’ in Catherine S. Ferris, Murray A.
Rubinstein & Anru Lee (eds.) Women in the New Taiwan: Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in
a Changing Society, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, pp.325-375
Shih, Fang-Long 2010 'Chinese “Bad Death” Practices in Taiwan: Maidens and Modernity',
Mortality, 15 (2): 122–137.
Lecture 4: Education Matters
Time: Thursday 27 November 2014, 9:10–12:25
Venue: K22
Readings
Kipnis, Andrew 2006 ‘Suzhi: a keyword approach’, China Quarterly 186, pp 295-313
Fong, Vanessa L. 2011 Paradise redefined: transnational Chinese students and the quest for flexible
citizenship in the developed world Stanford: Stanford University Press, Chap.1
Shaw, Thomas A. 1996 ‘Taiwanese Schools against Themselves: school culture versus the
subjectivity of youth’, in Bradley A. Levinson, Douglas E. Foley & Dorothy C. Holland (eds.) The
Cultural Production of the Educated Person, New York: State University of New York Press, pp.187-
207
Chun, Allen 2005 ‘The Moral Cultivation of Citizenship in a Taiwan Middle School, c.1990’, in
Veronique Benei (ed.) Manufacturing Citizenship: Education, and Nationalism in Europe, South Asia
and China, London: Routledge, Chap.2
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Lecture 5: Place-making, Language and Imagined Communities
Time: Thursday 27 November 2014, 14:10–17:25
Venue: U35
Readings
Chen, Ping 2007 ‘China’, in Andrew Simpson (ed.) Language & National Identity in Asia, Oxford:
Oxford University Press, pp.141-167
Kipnis, Andrew 2012 ‘Constructing commonality: standardization and modernization in Chinese
nation-building’, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.71 (3), pp.731-755
Weller, Robert 1996 ‘Matricidal Magistrates and Gambling Gods: Weak States and Strong Spirits in
China’, in Meir Shahar and Robert Weller (eds.) Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China, Honolulu:
University of Hawai’i Press, pp.250-268
Shih, Fang-Long 2007 ‘Generation of a New Space: A Maiden Temple in the Chinese Religious
Culture of Taiwan’, Culture and Religion, 8 (1): 89–104.
Lecture 6: Inequality, Mobility and Globalization
Time: Monday 1 December 2014, 14:10–17:25
Venue: M12
Readings
Rubinstein, Murray A. 1999 ‘Taiwan’s Socioeconomic Modernization, 1971-1996’ in his (ed.)
Taiwan: A New History, Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, pp.366-402
Goodman, David S.G. 2014 ‘Introduction: Understanding Class in Contemporary China’, in his Class
in Contemporary China, Cambridge: Polity, pp.1-33
Whyte, Martin King 2010 ‘The paradoxes of rural-urban inequality in contemporary Chin’ in his (ed.)
One Country, Two Societies: Rural-Urban Inequality in Contemporary China, Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, pp.1-21
Sutton, Donald 1996 ‘Transmission in Popular Religion: The Jiajiang Festival Troupe of Southern
Taiwan’, in Meir Shahar and Robert Weller (eds.) Unruly Gods: Divinity and Society in China,
Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, pp.212-249
Shih, Fang-long Forthcoming ‘From Politics to Culture: Taiwanization Discourses and the Techno
Nazha Performance,’ in Jan Knoerich (ed.) Cross-Strait Relations in an Era of Technological Change:
Security, Economic and Cultural Dimensions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
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Lecture 7: Consumerism, Media and Cinema
Time: Tuesday 2 December 2014, 15:50–19:05
Venue: C15
Readings
Croll, Elisabeth J. 2006 ‘Conjuring goods, identities and cultures’, in Kevin Latham, Stuart
Thompson & Jakob Klein (eds.) Consuming China: Approaches to Cultural Change in Contemporary
China, London: Routledge, pp.22-41
Herold, David Kurt 2011 ‘Introduction: Noise, Spectacle, Politics: carnival in Chinese cyberspace’, in
his & Peter Marolt (eds.) Online Society in China: creating, celebrating, and instrumentalising the
online carnival New York: Routledge, pp.1-20
Yip, June 2004 ‘Remembering and Forgetting, Part II: Hou Hsiao-hsien’s Taiwan Trilogy’ in her
Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary, London: Duke
University Press , Chap. 4, pp.85-130
Berry, Chris 2009 ‘Re-writing cinema: markets, languages, cultures in Taiwan’, in Fang-long Shih,
Stuart Thompson & Paul-Francois Tremlett (eds.) Re-Writing Culture in Taiwan, London: Routledge,
pp.140-153
Lecture 8: Civil Society and Protest
Time: Wednesday 3 December 2014, 14:10–17:25
Venue: U34
Readings
Hilton, Isabel 2013 ‘The return of Chinese civil society’ in Sam Geall (ed.) China and the
Environment: The Green Revolution, London: Zed Books, pp.1-14
Perry, Elizabeth J. 2008 ‘Permanent Rebellion? Continuities and Discontinuities in Chinese Protest’
in Kevin O’Brien (ed.) Popular Protest in China Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press
Shih, Fang-Long 2012 ‘Generating Power in Taiwan: Nuclear, Political, and Religious Power’, Culture
and Religion, 13 (3): 309–327
Lupke, Christopher 2012 ‘Documenting Environmental Protest: Taiwan’s Gongliao Fourth Nuclear
Power Plant and the Cultural Politics of Dialogic Artifice’, in Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tze-lan Sang (eds.)
Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries, London: Routledge,
pp.155-182
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Lecture 9: Selective Tradition, the Past and Collective Memory
Time: Thursday 4 December 2014, 9:10–12:25
Venue: K22
Readings
Anagnost, Ann 1997 ‘Making History Speak’ in her National Past-times. Narrative, Representation,
and Power in Modern China, Durham: Duke University Press, Chap 1, pp.17-44
Gao, Mobo 2008 ‘Constructing History: memories, values, and identities’, in his The Battle for
China’s Past: Mao & the Cultural Revolution, London: Pluto Press, pp.31-47
Shih, Fang-Long 2011 'Memory, Partial Truth and Reconciliation without Justice: The White Terror
Luku Incident in Taiwan', Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, 3: 140–151
Lin, Sylvia Li-chun 2012 ‘Recreating the White Terror on the Screen’, in Sylvia Li-chun Lin and Tzelan
Sang (eds.) Documenting Taiwan on Film: Issues and Methods in New Documentaries, London:
Routledge, pp.38-59
Final Session: Student Presentations and Discussions
Time: Thursday 4 December 2014, 14:10–17:25
Venue: U35
Each student will give a short presentation (5 minutes maximum) in which they sketch or try
out ideas for their prospective essays. Each presentation will be followed by feedback from
tutors and their fellow students (also for a maximum of 5 minutes).