Debating Morals and the Discourse of Social Change in the Anthropology of Modern China

Debating Morals and the Discourse of Social Change in the Anthropology of Modern China Matthew Z. Noellert Yunxiang Yan , Private Life under Socialism: Love, Intimacy, and Family Change in a Chinese Village 1949-1999. Stanford University Press. 2003. 320 pp. Ellen Oxfeld , Drink Water, but Remember the Source: Moral Discourse in a Chinese Village. Berkeley: University of California Press. 2010. 312 pp. While the majority of the world views contemporary China as the single most formidable economic force on the planet, threatening to define a new age, anthropologists of China are taking a characteristically contrary approach by studying the deeply personal and emotional social worlds of various Chinese communities. Departing from the previous generation of anthropologists who in the 1960s and 1970s focused on the rural Chinese family as a corporate entity and the last bastion of traditional Chinese culture, the current generation, appearing on the scene in the late 1980s, has focused on the rapidly-changing social relationships and family [End Page 757] values that have accompanied China's supercharged modern economic development. While most anthropologists take for granted the dominant discourse of Chinese society's rapid transformation in the past 60 years, the main debate revolves around the role of Chinese culture in both shaping and being shaped by these extreme economic and political changes. The two ethnographies under review here represent what I see as the two sides of this debate: Yunxiang Yan focuses on how the economic and political turbulence of the People's Republic (1949-present) has changed local culture in a Northeast Chinese village, whereas Ellen Oxfeld looks at the salience of traditional values in a Southeast Chinese village as they respond and adapt to new socioeconomic institutions and relationships. From the beginning, this debate has been steeped in Western categories of socialism, capitalism, and the respective social values that accompany these economic systems, although recently at least one scholar has predicted that the increasing global power of China threatens to upset the Western theoretical hegemony that continues to dictate the discourse of "other" societies (Pieke 2009:1). This is in part due to the continued dominance of American-trained anthropologists in China, as well as the traditional place of China in the modern world as an anomaly of both non-West but also non-colonial, a society both traditional yet highly developed. Yan, born in north China and raised during the Cultural Revolution, nevertheless received his Ph.D. in 1993 from Harvard University and began by studying social networks and gift exchange in the Chinese countryside. This western training comes through in his overriding view of the rise of the selfish individual, an egotistic morality, and the retreat into private life that accompanies the alienation of individuals in modern societies. Ellen Oxfeld, American, likewise obtained her Ph.D. from Harvard (about ten years before Yan), and originally studied overseas Chinese communities in India and Canada, before these connections brought her back to their ancestral home in China Proper. Her original interest in Chinese history has, perhaps, kept her more focused on the continuities of a traditional Chinese past under the pressures of modern developments. Here I don't mean to draw any overly deterministic conclusions, but I believe this background to be increasingly meaningful as China continues to be one of the most politically charged subjects in the western academe. At the same time, both Yan and Oxfeld, carrying out the main part of their fieldwork in rural villages in the early 1990s, position their studies [End Page 758] within the dominant tradition of anthropology of the family in rural China. Yan directly challenges the entrenched theory of the Chinese family as a corporate enterprise in which the economic self-interest of the domestic group is the driving force of development, a theory held in common by some of the most prominent scholars in the field, beginning with Fei Xiaotong. 1 He points to the importance of the individual as a powerful agent in the formation of the domestic group. Oxfeld, on the other hand, takes a more neutral position, citing some of the same literature as Yan (including Yan's studies) as background to highlight the extent of changes in family structures...