Finished version of presentation to AnthroCamp writing workshop, at National Tsing Hua University, using John Van Maanen's Tales of the Field and Clifford Geertz' Works and Lives to frame readings of Fei Xiaotong, Peasant Life in China, Huang Shumin, The Spiral Road, and Liu Shaohua, Passage to Manhood

1. Reading Ethnography
John McCreery (jlm@wordworks.jp)
Anthropology Writing Camp, NTHU 7/4/2017

2. —John Roberts, Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University
September 1966
“The whole point of being a graduate student is to
stop being a student.”

3. –Joi Ito, Director, MIT Media Lab
“Teaching is what others do to me. Learning is what
I do for myself.”

4. –John McCreery, NTHU, February 2017
“I am not here to teach you (不要叫你). I am hear to
learn with you (一起學才好).”

5. This Presentation
• Not a finished argument
• A bricolage, an assemblage constructed of materials
close to hand
• A provocation, an invitation to think about your research
• Reality >> Representation>>What’s it all about?
• Not only what you discover but how to write about it
and who you are writing for

6. Three Important Books

7. Alike
• All by Chinese anthropologists based on fieldwork in
China
• What Malinowski wrote of Peasant Life in China can be
said of all three.
• The book… does not remain satisfied with the mere
reconstruction of the static past. It grapples fully and
deliberately with that most elusive and difficult phase of
modern life : the transformation of traditional culture

8. Different Times, Places,
Historical Moments
• Yangtze Delta, August-July 1936, collapse of global demand for
Chinese silk, ROC government, impending start of Second Sino-
Japanese War.
• A village in Fujian, near Xiamen, 1984-1985, 1996, the Great
Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution, followed by post-Mao
opening to capitalism. Once poor villagers become rich
capitalists.
• The Nuosu, a branch of the Yi minority, in Western Sichuan,
2002-2009. Heroin and AIDS epidemics. Migration to and from
cities. Growing individualization. Drugs, thievery, jail become a
rite of passage. The community remains poor. The Nuosu remain
stigmatized.

9. Fei Xiaotong
• Male, born in 1910, twenty-six at time of fieldwork.
• Fluent in the local dialect, familiar with local customs.
• “My sister, whose devotion to the rehabilitation of the
livelihood of the villagers has actually inspired me to take
up this investigation, had introduced me to the village and
financed my work.”
• On excellent terms with village officials. Access was not a
problem.

10. Huang Shumin
• An established scholar with a tenured position at an
American university, a visiting professor at Xiamen
University. Spent half of each week in village.
• Grew up in Taiwan. Fluent in Mandarin and Hokkien.
• Frustrated and annoyed as fieldwork began but
established rapport thanks to a malicious attack on Party
Secretary Ye’s father’s tomb. Quickly established good
working relationships with Ye and other villagers.

11. Liu Shaohua
• Our most “anthropological” (stranger in a strange land)
fieldwork. A young woman raised in Taiwan works with a
minority people in western China.
• Dissertation fieldwork for PhD in in Sociomedical Sciences
and Anthropology
• Not a native speaker of Nuosu. Credits father’s Hunanese for
rapidly becoming fluent in Sichuanese. Uses local assistants/
interpreters
• Experiences deep pain, suffering, loss. Achieves rapport
through personal involvement in extraordinary events.

12. Three Examples of
“Writing Culture”
• Systematic and thorough descriptive analysis (Fei)
• Biography as ethnography. Use of life history to illuminate
social change (Huang)
• A complex, multilayered combination of personal
encounters, multiple life histories, and local and global
trends (Liu)

13. Three Tables of
Contents

14. Peasant Life in China
I. Introduction
II. The Field
III. The Chia
IV. Property and
Inheritance
V. Kinship Extensions
VI. Household and Village
VII. Livelihood
VIII. Occupational
Differentiation
Chapter III THE CHIA
1.Chia as Expanded Family
2. Continuity of “Incense and
Fire”
3. Population Control
4. Parents and Children
5. Education
6. Marriage
7.The Daughter-in-law in the
Chia
8. Cross-cousin Marriage and
Siaosiv
IX. Calendar of Work
X. Agriculture
XI. Land Tenure
XII. The Silk Industry
XIII. Sheep Raising and
Trade Ventures
XIV. Marketing
XV. Finance
XVI. Agrarian Problems
in China
Lists of Topics, All Nouns

15. The Spiral Road
Introduction
The Chinese Peasantry in Historical
Context
About This Book
The Significance of the Book
1 Prologue
Reflections on My Coming
Lin Village: First Impressions
Getting Acquainted
2 Family History
A Walk to the Tomb
The Importance of Geomancy
3 The Liberation
The Land Reform
School Years
4 Hunger, Hunger
The Great Leap Forward
Becoming a Political Activist
5 Joining the Act
The Four Cleanups
The Campaign
6 Return Home
A Peasant’s Story
Cultural Revolution
Ye’s Marriage and Family
7 Security Head
Ye Settles a Dispute
Internal Conflicts in the Village
More Village Crimes
8 Prosperous Years
The Strategy of Prosperity
Back-Door Connections
9 The Breakup
Ritual Celebration
Ritual Celebration: Analysis
Family Division
Dismantling the Collective
10 Village Cadres
Family Planning Campaign
Implementing the Policy
Ye’s Analysis
Ye as Mediator
Ye’s Programs
11 Village Change in the 1990s
Village Population
Social Problems Associated with
Increased Population
Village Security Force
Theft in the Village
12 Wither Lin Village?
Line Village’s Recent Change
Ye’s Female Companion
Village Party Election
The Revival of the Lin Lineage
Casting the Ballots
Ye’s Analysis of the Election and
Arrangement for Wang
Events, Frequent Use of Verbs, A Story Unfolds

16. Passage to Manhood
Bringing Peripheries to the Center
1 The Meandering Road to Modernity
2 Manhood, Migration, and Heroin
3 Multivocal Drug Control
4 Contentious Individuality on the Rise
5 Failed State AIDS Intervention
6 AIDS and Its Global Stigmatization
Titles of Linked Essays

17. Why do these books
impress us?
• Aristotle’s Rhetoric suggests three possible reasons
• Argument (facts and logic)
• Rhetoric (metaphor, simile, other tropes)
• Character (the personality and reputation of the author)
• When we talk about “reading ethnography,” we ask how
rhetoric and representation of character influence our
reception of argument.

18. Our First Guide

19. Four Key Elements
In Tales of the Field, John van Maanen writes that discussions
of ethnography must consider
(1) the assumed relationship between culture and behavior (the
observed);
(2) the experiences of the fieldworker (the observer);
(3) the representational style selected to join the observer and
observed (the tale); and
(4) the role of the reader engaged in the active reconstruction of
the tale (the audience).

20. Culture and Behavior
• In all of these books, culture is only one factor influencing
behavior
• Others include
• Local conditions
• External conditions
• (Plus, in Huang and Liu) Individual choices

21. Local Conditions
• Dense population, limited land, no possibility of adding
new fields (Fei)
• Proximity to city that turns poor soil into valuable real
estate (Huang)
• Mountainous, thinly populated, isolated terrain (Liu)

22. External Conditions
• Global silk market, Japanese imperialism (Fei)
• Maoist era policies, then opening to capitalism (Huang)
• Radical social transformations, hard times followed by
growing wealth
• Maoist era policies, then opening to capitalism (Liu)
• Capsuling of local society, followed by drugs, AIDS,
individualism, and continued poverty

23. Individual Choices
• Not a factor (Fei)
• Political and economic choices (Huang)
• Mixed motives, some traditional, some modern.
• Primarily PS Ye’s strategies and tactics
• Life choices affected by modernization (Liu)
• Mixed motives, some traditional, some modern
• Factors that motivate individual young men to migrate to cities,
where they engage in theft and drug-dealing to pay for drugs.

24. Fieldworker Experiences
• Something new to consider
• Two cases of rapport achieved through unexpected events
• Vandalism of PS Ye’s father’s tomb (Huang)
• Anthropologist as witness, not personally affected
• Ghosts and bandits (Liu)
• Anthropologist as protagonist, personally deeply
affected

25. Tale Types
• Realistic Tales
• Confessional Tales
• Impressionistic Tales

26. Realistic Tales
• Experiential Authority
• Typical Forms
• The Native’s Point of View
• Interpretive Omnipotence
A Curious
Combination
Eyewitness plus
Expertise
Things/Routines
Taken for Granted

27. Experiential Authority
(How is it written?)
• Absence of the author from most segments of
the finished text
• Focus on argument (facts and logic)

28. Experiential Authority
(Fei Xiaotong)
“This is a descriptive account of the system of consumption,
production, distribution and exchange of wealth among
Chinese peasants as observed in a village, Kaihsienkung,
south of Lake Tai, in Eastern China.
“It aims at showing the relation of this economic system to a
specific geographical setting and to the social structure of the
community. The village under investigation, like most Chinese
villages, is undergoing a tremendous process of Change. This
account, therefore, will show the forces and problems in a
changing village economy.”
From Peasant Life in China, “Introduction” (p.30)

29. Typical Forms
• Documentary style focused on “minute, mundane details of
everyday life.”
• Thus, for example,
“The villagers as a group possess certain cultural
peculiarities. One of my informants mentioned three
outstanding items to me : (i) that the villagers tend to
palatalize the words such as gon, jeu, etc., in speech, (2)
their women do not work on the farm, and (3) their women
always wear skirts even in the hot summer.”
From Peasant Life in China, “The Field,” p. 73

30. The Native’s Point of View
• Indicated by use of quotation or local terminology
• For example,
“The importance of the posterity is conceived in religious
and ethical terms. The local term for the continuity of
descent is ‘continuity of incense and fire’; this means a
continuity of ancestor worship.”
From Peasant Life in China, “The Chia” (p.85)

31. Interpretive Omnipotence
• Are we justified in assuming an omnipotent
interpreter from clear, systematic presentation
of facts?
• Do any of our authors actually make this
claim?

32. Confessional Tales
• Personalized Authority
• The Fieldworker’s Point of View
• Naturalness

33. Personalized Authority
Van Maanen writes,
• “The persuasiveness of the fieldworker's account replaces the
combination of native point of view (buttressed by quotations) and
interpretive omnipotence (buttressed by theory) in the realistic
account.”
• “The traditional authority claimed for fieldwork by its early promoters
and justified by them on the basis of their establishing ethnography
as a human and behavioral science….has worn thin.”
• “Some confessional tales are written explicitly to question the very
basis of ethnographic authority and to transform ethnography,
insofar as possible, into a more philosophical, artistic,
phenomenological, or political craft.”

34. Personalized Authority
McCreery reflects
• The confessional mode can make the
author seem more modest, thus more
honest.
• Used effectively it can indicate clearly
where evidence is strong or weak or never
collected, clarifying the scope and power of
theoretical propositions.

35. Naturalness
Van Maanen writes,
• “Fieldwork confessions nearly always end up
supporting whatever realist writing the author may have
done and displayed elsewhere.”
• “The implied story line of many a confessional tale is
that of a fieldworker and a culture finding each other
and, despite some initial spats and misunderstandings,
in the end, making a match.

36. Example 1
“It was almost unthinkable that my perception of Party
Secretary Ye of Lin Village could change so dramatically
within such a short time. It was even more unthinkable that
my initial hostility toward him would dissolve so quickly
and completely that I could later sit in front of my
typewriter to record his life history.”
From “Prologue” to The Spiral Road (p.11)

37. Example 2
“I REMEMBER VIVIDLY the sense of calm and comfort that
settled over me as I made my way alone, cradling a hen in
my left arm and a bag of rice in my right, along the
mountain basin path in darkness. The hen was submissive;
its low clucking consolingly answered my weeping. I had
just returned from visiting a friend who had fallen seriously
ill from AIDS. He had been bedridden for a week, and
struggled to sit up when I arrived...”
From “Preface” to Passage to Manhood

38. Impressionistic Tales
• Van Maanen writes, “The label .... is drawn from art historians
who regard impressionist painting as a novel representational
form emerging in the West during the late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries….What a painter sees, given an
apparent position in time and space, is what the viewer sees.”
• NOT ANTI-SCIENCE: Van Maanen quotes James Clifford,
"To recognize the poetic dimension of ethnography does
not require one gives up facts and accurate accounting for
the supposed freeplay of poetry. Poetry is not limited to
romantic or modernist subjectivism; it can be historical,
precise, objective."

39. Impressionistic Tales
• The tale is told from the fieldworker’s first-person
perspective.
• Evidence is fragmentary and encountered as a stream of
consciousness.
• No comprehensive analysis interferes with the reader’s
conclusions.

40. Tale Types Compared
Van Maarten writes,
• “Both confessional and realist accounts often suggest the
not-so-gentle irony that members (or at least most of
them) know their culture less well than the fieldworker.
The impressionist tale immerses the reader in the moment
and invites them to draw their own conclusions.”
• I think, however, of Mikhail Bakhtin’s observation that all
cultural understanding requires dialogue. Why? Because
both observer and observed have blind spots and are
ignorant of things that only the other can see.

41. Positioning the Author
Realistic Tales
Confessional Tales
Impressionistic Tales

42. None of our three books
is an impressionistic tale!

43. Conclusions So Far
• Fei Xiaotong’s Peasant Life in China is a realistic tale.
• Huang Shumin’s The Spiral Road is what we might call a confessional/realistic tale.
• It is also a rare example of ethnography in which fieldworker and informant interact as equals.
• Party Secretary Ye is a fully developed character and a presence throughout the book.
• The author’s confessions support realistic claims, whose implications are spelled out as the
story unfolds.
• Liu Shaohua’s Passage to Manhood is also a confessional/realistic tale.
• Besides the opening paragraphs of the Preface, Liu’s encounters with ghosts and bandits
have an impressionistic flavor. But the reader is not left to draw her own conclusions.
• The book includes six life-histories, but these individuals have only supporting roles. They are
quoted to support the realistic analysis and do not become fully developed characters in the
way that Party Secretary Ye does in The Spiral Road.

44. Three Audience Types
Collegial
Readers
Social Science
Readers
General
Readers

45. General Readers
Van Maanen writes,
• “The issue of good and bad writing is pertinent here
because often the ethnographers with large audiences are
seen by their colleagues to have moved on to something
that is not quite ethnography.”
• “Two other features are worthy of note. First, the
ethnography must be relatively free of jargon (although a
little is necessary to help establish genre typification and
authorial expertise); and second, it must present materials
a well-read but ethnographically unsophisticated
audience would regard as interesting.”

46. Social Science Readers
Van Maanen writes,
• “Readers from outside fieldwork traditions look to
ethnographers for the information they supply on the
group studied.”
• “Ordinarily, social scientists take only the raw empirical
material of an ethnography and ignore the arguments
that surround and give meaning to the facts.”

47. Collegial Readers
Van Maanen writes,
• “Beyond jargon, the fellow-fieldworker crowd is
concerned with matters of technique, definition,
coverage and scope, levels of generalization, and the
informing analytic apparatus and claims that surround
and comprise ethnography.”
• We are trying to be this kind of reader.

48. Our Books/Reader Types
General Readers
Social Science
Readers
Collegial Readers
Peasant Life in
China
The Spiral Road
Passage to
Manhood

49. Peasant Life in China
• When published it was written, like most early
ethnography, for an educated general readership
• Now primarily of interest to social scientists (also
historians) looking for data
• No longer of collegial interest to anthropologists who see
its approach as old-fashioned

50. The Spiral Road
• “Most students, who probably read the book as a
required text, indicate that reading the life history of Party
Secretary (P.S.) Ye presents a clear and intimate picture of
the growth, turbulence, and transformation of a person, of
a village, and of China as a nation. The weaving of all of
these complex events into Ye's life narrative gives the
students an immediacy that generally does not come
from ordinary college texts.” (From Preface to Second
Edition)
• A remarkable instance of research in which there is real
dialogue between the researcher and his interlocutor.

51. Passage to Manhood
• A more complex and difficult text
• From Review by Sandra Teresa Hyde in Medical
Anthropology Quarterly
Overall, this is a study written with remarkable care,
emotional savvy, and public health intelligence. It is
valuable reading for advanced students and specialists in
medical anthropology and public health, especially those
in interested in the local consequences of global public
health interventions, Chinese minority studies, and the
theorization of gender, globalization, and modernity.

52. What Kind of
Anthropology is This?

53. Our New Guide

54. Four Anthropologies
• Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques
• Sir E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic
Among the Azande
• Bronislaw Malinowski, A Diary in the Strict Sense of the
Term
• Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword

55. Claude Lévi-Strauss
• Autobiographical,
impressionistic
• Deeply philosophical with
scientific ambition
• Rousseau, Durkheim, Lévi-
Strauss
• Searching for human
universals
• A chemical table of the mind

56. E. E. Evans-Pritchard
• The White Man’s question
• How can they?
• How can otherwise level-
headed people believe in
witchcraft, oracles, magic?
• Different kinds of beliefs
answer different questions

57. Bronislaw Malinowski
• Famously advocated “The
Native Point of View”
• Diary demonstrates that
empathetic understanding is
no easy matter
• A betrayal of the field, say
many

58. Ruth Benedict
• Us vs Them
• Why they are so different
• NOTE: Not how can they be?
• No assumption of Western
superiority

59. Once More
• All three of the books discussed today are by Chinese
anthropologists based on fieldwork in China
• What Malinowski wrote of Peasant Life in China applies to
all three.
• The book… does not remain satisfied with the mere
reconstruction of the static past. It grapples fully and
deliberately with that most elusive and difficult phase of
modern life : the transformation of traditional culture

60. Could this be the future as
well as the past of China’s
contribution to anthropology?

61. If so, you will write it

62. Thank You
謝謝同學們