On March 27, 2022, Qunxue College and the Meiyuan Classics Reading Group jointly held an online reading salon to jointly study the book "Two-Faced Man" by Professor Tan of the School of Ethnology and Sociology of Yunnan University. This book goes straight into the inner mechanism of Chinese culture, recognizes the continuing context in the fractured changes of the times, and draws on the formal description of the "History" to form a magnificent field painting scroll spanning more than 60 years. Teacher Tan led the readers to put aside the stereotype of the countryside and walk into Cheng Village in Lingnan to feel its unique humanistic style and the spirit of the times that it reflected. Teacher Yuan Changgeng from Southern University of Science and Technology will bring wonderful comments.
This article is a summary of Sharon's speech, compiled by Ge Dingchao.
"Two-Faced Man" Reading Salon Minutes
Text | GurdingChao
Tan:
For their own work, the author does not necessarily understand it more deeply than each reader, but it is relatively clearer about the specific background and consideration of the writing, which is what will be shared today. First, let's take a look at the overview of Cheng Village. On the left is the old street of the rural bazaar, and on the right is the largest ancestral hall in the village. I came here by chance in November 2007, and the next year I came here again because I wanted to do a survey of Sun Yat-sen University's postdoctoral outbound work report.
My undergraduate was a major in political education, and many of the courses at that time covered a wide range of philosophical content. At the master's level, he majored in political science theory at Central China Normal University in Wuhan, focusing mainly on grassroots politics in the countryside, because inspired by Fei Xiaotong's "Native China", he gradually turned to sociology and anthropology in the process of study. In his doctoral dissertation, he wanted to study the changes in social structure and cultural characteristics, and started a dialogue with the research of the fei xiaotong and Liang Shuming eras.
In his later paper, Mr. Fei mentioned the need to expand the traditional boundaries of sociology and conduct more research on social mentality. Compared with social structure, social relations and other issues, it is more difficult to find the entry point in the study of social mentality, and it is also more difficult to present it, which brings no small challenge to related academic activities.
I learned in ethnographic writing that without the presence of the investigator, many of the words and actions of the subject would be difficult to have a chance to express. The interaction between the two sides produces an "increment" of practice, not just the excavation of existing empirical material, which is important for capturing and experiencing the lives of others. The involvement of the investigator is indispensable, and we should objectively acknowledge the existence of this role.
In Cheng Village, I often interview under the banyan tree, and the character in the picture below is pseudonymized cheng nanshan in the book, I used to live in his house, and there are many interesting details in their daily lives, such as he would take a nap at noon, while his wife and daughter would watch TV while weaving bamboo products, mainly containers used by Cantonese people to make pastries. Hearing a lot of English in the process of watching imported Hong Kong TV dramas, his daughter made a comment and lamented that she seemed to be even less up to date. It is not difficult to find that the accumulation of field material is a slow process, and a lot of valuable content is produced in inadvertent moments.
In the book, it is written that Cheng Shouyi's son, a business owner, once expressed disappointment in his life, and such moments of true affection are difficult to appear in ordinary survey interviews. At that time, the situation was close to the Lunar New Year, he invited me to drink, under the catalysis of wine to confess the true mood, and some of the values he showed also touched me. Many of the details of ethnography are interacted in such specific contexts. Much of the content was also generated in a mutual greeting chat outside of the formal interview after the two parties got acquainted.
The details that settle down over these long periods of time are not significant in the survey notes, but they are particularly important. In many works of anthropological study of chinese peasants, he criticizes the problems of peasant conservatism, short-sightedness, obsession with things, self-centeredness, lack of public morality and faith. When the investigation reaches a certain level, it will be found that farmers such as Cheng Shouyi are aware and reflective about their own situation, and have their own clear or vague positions.
I have been shuttling between the Department of Anthropology of Sun Yat-sen University and the South China Rural Research Center for a long time, and there were many discussions in the Department of Anthropology, the Department of Philosophy, and the Department of History. In these interdisciplinary exchanges, I realized that anthropology and history have a lot of mutual references in theory and method, but there are also certain differences, such as one tending to examine historical materials and one tending to interview people in the field. Many of the concepts of postmodern philosophy need to be used sparingly in the writing of ethnography, clarifying the theoretical context of these concepts and organically combining them with empirical material to logically establish connections.
Whether it's a political-economic game or a physical discipline in the sense of Foucault going into the details, what we care about affects what we see when collecting field material. There is a certain distance between our preconceived concepts and reality. Dumont, who wrote The Order, argues that the concept of "social stratification" does not apply to understanding the Caste System in India, and that narratives of domination and rebellion are often replaced in reality by the insidiousness of the weak.
Faced with an anthropological crisis in methodology, Geertz proposed interpretive anthropology. This also leaves some questions, such as explaining how barriers between systems are crossed. I believe that the other should be given more opportunities for dialogue on an equal footing with the interpreter. These questions involve philosophical concepts such as intersubjectivity and interactive subjectivity, which can be extended to the teachings of Descartes and Kant.
Kant's philosophy had a profound influence on disciplines such as anthropology, and later philosophers responded to him in many ways. For example, Nietzsche studied a large number of poems and plays, criticized Kant's judgment of the boundaries of human rational activity, Husserl reintroduced human subjectivity into the discussion of existence, Heidegger revealed the living conditions of human beings living towards death, and so on. In his later years, Heidegger hoped to draw wisdom from non-Western philosophies to adjust existentialist philosophy, and was quite interested in the ideas of Lao Tzu and others. He had two important students, Gadamer and Levinas.
Gadamer developed the tradition of hermeneutics, arguing that the existence of subjects and their "judgment" depended first and foremost on a "sense of commonality" with other subjects. He once mentioned that in view of something that has been said, it is understood to mean that the language by which the circulating thing tells us, the story told to us by the circulating thing. An antagonistic relationship is given here. The zone between the strangeness and familiarity of the thing that circulates to us is the middle ground between the withered object of historical significance and the subordination of a certain tradition. The true place of hermeneutics lies within this middle ground.
Gadamer's thought gives anthropology special advice that we cannot truly be "others" when we do the field, thus describing our own experience. Entering a different cultural environment to change the original prejudice does not mean that the original world is negated, but more like a traveler, he will return to his homeland with new experiences, even if the body is still wandering, the existence of his hometown can not be forgotten. Gadamer and Levinas's interpretation of their homeland is closely related to Heidegger's "poetic dwelling" and still has a deep existential imprint.
In the face of capitalist ideology, Marcuse exposes the one-dimensional living situation of people, pinning their hopes for changing the status quo on marginalized groups. Through examples such as the rapid iteration of popular clothing, Baudrillard critiques "mimesis" and "emulation". They, along with Foucault, Lacan, Roti, Derrida, and others, react to the repression of modernity. These philosophical reflections on anthropology also have their own reflections.
Sarins's The Island of History tells the parallel structure of two groups with vastly different worldviews. From today's field perspective, the situation in the Book that took place in the Hawaiian Islands is constantly playing out in our daily lives. Scholars such as Eduardo V. Castro, Philippe Descola, Martin Holbraad, Michael Scott, and Latour have long been committed to moving forward the anthropological ontology that arose at the end of the last century, advocating the search for the material in non-Western cultures to correct Western conceptual systems.
Some scholars in China have proposed a three-fold narrative of subjective ethnography, which is different from Malinowski's "Eye of God"-like description and Geertz's interpretation of the life of others with himself as the main body, and the narrative is composed of three levels: locals, anthropologists, and readers. Many postmodern concepts are used in such theoretical elaborations, such as "reciprocal mirror" and "pairing", but they may not go beyond the discussion of anthropological ontology, and more philosophical clues since Kant and Heidegger need to be sorted out.
I think that anthropological ethnography should be "done" and not just "written", close to the feelings of the subjects themselves, let others live, show their explanatory systems, and carry out a multiverse parallel interactive subjectivity interpretation, and cannot arbitrarily merge different texts for purification.
Many anthropologists portray groups such as peasants as too one-sided, obscuring the qualities of their other aspects, and attributing the problems they may have to the inadequacy of "self-cultivation" and ignoring the influence of the political and economic factors behind them.
If these materials are written as structural text, they may cut through many aspects of the experience and may cause the reader to have too many ambiguities in understanding. So I later made a lot of deletions to the structural text in the outbound report. It was important to recall the reading experience of the Chronicle of History that it might be too lengthy to record this long and tortuous history in the manner of the Annals school, and Sima Qian chose to construct a more systematic historical context with the stories of typical characters. Therefore, in a monograph with a large space for play, I paid tribute to the writing of historical records, and connected the history of the transformation of a village society and the change of mentality through the most representative figures in the life course and values of Cheng Village. This book has received a lot of positive feedback after it was written, and it may be republished in the Chinese Sociology Classics Library of Sanlian Publishing House.
Yuan Changgeng:
Teacher Tan's introduction starts from the text and expands the connotation of the text. "Two-Faced Man" provides us with a detailed literature review of rural research, and enlightens us to find that there may be no small blind spots in the past narrative of the countryside, and there are serious limitations in the concept-first approach to research. Teacher Tan's optimism about the future of anthropology has infected us, and there are still many undertakings waiting for us to complete in the future.
Teacher Tan is still doing long-term field work. I happened to be just starting out as a teacher when I read The Two-Faced Man, and I reviewed it again this spring. The people and traditions of the local society described in Mr. Tan's book are very familiar to me in anthropological studies and research since I have been undergraduate. Sociology and anthropology are not strong disciplines in China, and the academic context of the past hundred years since Mr. Fei Xiaotong is the most concentrated and prominent achievement of our discipline. Mr. Tan's writings inspired me to pursue the ideal of classical village ethnographic research.
During his phD studies in Hong Kong, it was found that the common problem faced by doctors of anthropology was that the topic selection or research scheme had often been practiced by the predecessors. But these repetitive objects may not have exhausted the possibilities of academic exploration, and our understanding of things we have become accustomed to may not have reached the end. For example, under some hot events, it has been exposed that our imagination of rural society is often very one-sided, and it is easy for us to regard the countryside as having a clear geographical boundary, and blood and clan play a strong role in it, which is an "enclave" that isolates the achievements of "enlightened" modern civilization, and labels the rural population as "blind", "short-sighted" and "selfish".
Through the writings of scholars such as Professor Tan and Shao Jing, who taught at Nanjing University, we can find a process of mutual confirmation of human-land relations, in which the peasants are self-aware of their fragile situation under the impact of modern civilization, and this perception affects their choice of future social action. The phenomenon that Teacher Tan saw in rural South China is in its infancy, and it has begun to bear fruit today. Many contradictions are coexisting in a village and a person, and this multi-faceted reality is difficult for the academic imagination to reach.
An important academic motivation for the sages such as Fei Xiaotong and Lin Yaohua to enter anthropology and sociology a hundred years ago was that they felt the lack of empirical materials on society in classical Chinese scholarship. Under the social crisis of the time, the voluminous "words of the saints" had a limited effect on the "practical application" of reality. They want to form an organic knowledge production process through social investigation, writing, and policy discussion.
In some ways, we may be back in the way we were a hundred years ago. It is worth reflecting on how much of our judgment of peasants and grassroots society is based on familiar empirical materials. We are a country with great diversity and rapid development, but in contrast to our great power identity, the Chinese state of existence presented by knowledge production, mass media and entertainment is very single. For example, in urban tv dramas, the life scenes are highly homogeneous, and the protagonists seem not to have to consider the concern for people's real existence, but only to consume all their vitality in emotional struggles.
This book can be said to be a turning point in Mr. Tan's academic career, and from the beginning of the book, he has distanced himself from the rural research traditions at home and abroad that he once learned in the process of education. The volume of the book is huge, the ethnographic part of the first part of it is solid and thick, and the breadth and depth of the dialogue between the existing achievements in rural studies is very amazing for a scholar with a teaching position. These conversations explain the challenging question that many of our current conceptual systems and even problem-aware problems in rural research may not hold. What is important is that we first get close to the original appearance of rural society, clarify its operation logic, and the law of people's survival and the meaning of life in the countryside.
In Mr. Tan's work, he has left many important clues, which point to the direction that our rural research should be approached today, such as the desire problem of rural people, the imagination of the future, and the feelings about local governance. Overseas Chinese sociological rural studies have made important pioneering efforts in these aspects. An important reason why rural studies have not yet exhausted their possibilities is that our existing survey results are mainly concentrated in the mid-1990s to the beginning of the new century. After that, new challenges and possibilities are rarely taken care of in today's academic research. The research institutions I have observed often pursue "short, flat, and fast" and lack the depth that anthropology should have.
Professor Tan summarized the crystallization of the rural research field at that time, which is of great significance for the academic community to understand and reflect on China. "Two-Faced Man" has its light, penetrating side and heavy side, which is particularly striking in the contemporary context. Its unique academic approach reveals a possibility for rural China—philosophical empirical research and reflection, more actively facing the rural world, using local languages and conceptual systems to understand the process of deduction of their spiritual world.
Ge Dingchao:
Our previous reading is full of many theoretical preconceptions and value judgments in the countryside, and it is easy to fall into the "verification fallacy" when studying and thinking. Mr. Tan's sharing broke our impression of many intolerance in rural areas, and also made us realize that effective academic activities should sincerely face empirical materials and constantly reflexively re-examine the disciplinary paradigm. Being an anthropologist in a rocking chair like Fraser, the author of "Golden Branch", has its rationality in the initial stage of the creation of the discipline, and now it is more necessary to exert the ontological value of anthropology, personally walk into the fields that are covered by too much imagination, and constantly reflect and improve the existing theories.
Question 1: How do you understand "practice increments" in fieldwork?
Tan: Whether fieldwork is an objective description of reality or anthropologists have two different ways of understanding local subjective feelings: traditional and postmodern. Juche ethnography argues that the triple narrative is sufficiently complete, and I think this may obscure some of the reality, because without the intervention of foreign field investigators, it is difficult for villagers to have the opportunity to introduce things like the rituals of daily life. The relationship between the investigator and the respondent is not in the laboratory, and the interaction of multiple subjects generates new value.
Question 2: What is the teacher's view on the issue of rural revitalization? And whether there will be an incident similar to the wave of home appliances going to the countryside around 2008.
Tan: Due to the limitations of the theme, "Two-Faced Man" does not directly discuss the topic of rural revitalization. In fact, the main ideas about rural revitalization that are common now have been put forward twenty years ago, and the profound changes in the countryside in the past two decades have not fully entered the relevant theoretical discussions. Ideas in different directions, including small-scale farmers' operations, large-scale production, finance or farmers' cooperation, have their own dilemmas, such as large-scale production requires a rural family to contract a large area of arable land to achieve sufficient benefits, and a large number of rural people who are squeezed out are difficult to be absorbed by enough secondary and tertiary industrial jobs. In the face of increasing technological requirements, smallholder farming, which relies on older workers, may affect the modernization of agriculture. Even if we get rid of the stereotype of peasants who are "good at dividing and not being good at peace", the cooperative operation of agriculture is still facing problems such as low output value, and it is difficult to form effective cooperation like the clan-based cooperation since the Song Dynasty and the current "hometown and industry" in the field of industry and commerce.
In the work of targeted poverty alleviation, it can be seen that efforts to help farmers solve various external forces such as capital, technology, and market can often achieve good results. Therefore, the model of linking small farmers with the assistance of the people's office and modern agriculture based on the mass line may be worth looking forward to and advocating. To some extent, home appliances going to the countryside means that rural consumption of urban excess capacity, in contrast, "Internet +" may bring farmers more opportunities and a stronger subject status.
Question Three: What is the unique value of anthropology in the face of problems such as urban-rural relations, which are different from disciplines such as economics and urban planning.
Tan: Anthropology is relatively more willing to listen to the voice of farmers themselves. Economics, of course, has done a good job, but sometimes it may lack meticulous and in-depth preliminary investigation, regard farmers as the object of the program, and may even focus on the appreciation of urban industrial and commercial capital as the main purpose.
In addition, with the in-depth understanding of kinship issues that anthropology focuses on, and more rigorous consideration of social investigation methods, it can also play a positive role in daily work life.
Yuan Changgeng: This question can also be understood as "what is the role of anthropology", and an important role of anthropology is to help us re-correct our understanding of the problem. From the past experience of all parties, it can be seen that external resources often fail to identify the core problems when they enter, and many indicators may be misplaced with reality. For example, in terms of data, the ethnic minorities in Yunnan do not go to the hospital to give birth, which is easily analyzed by international institutions as a group of resistance to modern medicine. However, after field investigation, it was found that in fact they trusted modern medicine, but in the concept of childbirth, they did not regard childbirth as a "condition" that needed to be treated in the hospital, and they had traditional habits and experience guarantees for childbirth.
Sometimes, we do not necessarily lack the resources and path to action, but we lack the meaning and problem orientation of action. Anthropology can do something about it.
Question Four: What kind of perception do teachers have for the new generation of rural population, and what kind of intergenerational changes exist in their concepts and actions.
Tan: With the popularization of education and online media, the new generation of rural populations in the past decade or so has become more channels for understanding the outside world. The yearning for modern urban life is a universal motivator and should be given the opportunity to integrate into the city. Favorable conditions such as student loans have also become more abundant in the past.
There is also a lot of work to be done. If we rely solely on the distribution of Internet content, it is easy to turn the countryside into the dumping target of spiritual consumer goods. The work of social workers and social benevolent people is very necessary, especially in addition to external help, it can also create a lot of things that give play to the main value of the new generation of rural population. For example, there is a teacher I respect, once organized two social workers to organize left-behind children to help them do a drama in the summer, before the start of the school to the village blind date report performance, the results are very good, the children are not staring at the TV or mobile phone every day, nor do they go to the wild swimming and other dangerous behaviors. The actions of various groups determine what kind of rural relations we will take in the future.
Question Five: How to look at the problem of modernity
Yuan Changgeng: Modernity faced a lot of controversy in western theoretical circles at the end of the 1990s, and there may not be a holistic and universal solution to the unfolding process of Western modernity. But modernity also has a certain explanatory effect, such as the living state of modern people does have its characteristics that distinguish it from the existential sense of traditional society.
Anthropology has its own special insights in the study of modernity, such as when discussing whether the peasant is rational, anthropologists will first think about what rationality is, why rationality is important, why it is called rationality in accounting for costs and benefits, but resistance to risk and reverence for the gods are not called rationality. We can involve the political and economic position of the place of modernity in the globalization system, some kind of change in the survival value of life, etc., but these are only a framework. From an ethnographic point of view, we will see that there is a certain distance between Weber's judgment of the classics of modernity and the complexity of human agency in real life.
In "Two-Faced Man", Teacher Tan repeatedly reminds us not to see modernity as a single-track process of uniform development. The peasants, in their participation in the extension of modernity, have their own effect on them, and the contradictory attributes of their bodies are subject to discussion in anthropology after the turn of ethics. Man does not live under a single criterion of value judgment, which is constantly formed in action, and we all generate our own ethical life in the relations of the world.
Question Six: What are the in-depth views or book recommendations on the issue of "human alienation"?
Tan: Yan Yunxiang's "The Flow of Gifts" can provide a valuable reference. I can understand it as the reorganization of people's communication networks, which is an unavoidable choice for the "multiple continuous games" of acquaintance society. In addition, the fulfillment of this "moral obligation" has a subtle relationship with the rise and fall of wealth levels, and in the context of rapidly increasing social stratification, there are many times serious asymmetries in the motivation and ability of "gift-giving". In this regard, many rural researchers in central China have done a lot of research, and Xiao Lou's "Summer Village Society" is also very enlightening.
The underlying view in "Two-Faced Man" is that this society can only have hope when the vast majority of people have hope. The role of the call at the value level is limited, and the value of individual recognition is possible to change when the social governance in which all parties participate has improved.
Xu Jinjing:
Our salon today is the first event of the "City and The Countryside" series in the first half of the year, and after the previous salon systematically read books on "Urban History and Urban Studies" such as "The Death and Life of American Great Cities" and five urban literary works such as "Midnight" and "Camel Xiangzi", we return to the crucial original proposition, that is, the problem of city and country. Teacher Tan's "Two-Faced Man" uses the jichuan method to show the humanistic style of the countryside from a bottom-up social history perspective. Six years ago, as one of the first readers of the book, I was struck by Tan's independent form of establishing field materials as a framework and extending theories and interpreting them independently. In addition, it can be said that literature is the highest academic to some extent, and I believe that even for readers without professional backgrounds, they can at least find their own feelings and resonance from the first part of Mr. Tan's book.
At the end of the salon, the students, teachers, and book lovers in the conference room turned on their cameras and microphones to express their gratitude to the two teachers, and the event was successfully concluded in the eyes of many curiosities and visions for the future.