Anthropology of Cultural Transformation I: Togetherness and Separation 1032677996, 9781032677996

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Anthropology of Cultural Transformation I

As the first of a two-volume set on the anthropology of cultural transformation, this book discusses the manifestations of cultural transformation in the modern world and explores the re-establishment of cultural consciousness. Anthropology in the 21st century is confronted with a worldview of cultural transformation based on communication, collision, and interaction among cultures around the globe. This two-volume set aims to reorient the role and function of anthropology by focusing on the reconstruction of knowledge and cultural consciousness in order to better imagine and realize the synergetic interaction between different cultures and civilizations. In this first volume, the author provides an overview of the key issues and stances of anthropology in the face of cultural transformation. The book examines the trend of social and cultural transformation in the modern world and in China. It analyzes how the technology of separation brought about by modernity shapes family function and education. As a promising solution to this predicament, the book elucidates the importance of cultural consciousness in resisting disasters and social syndromes. The title will appeal to anthropologists, students, and general readers interested in anthropology, sociology, and ethnography. Xudong Zhao is the director of the Institute of Anthropology at Renmin University of China (RUC) and a professor at the College of Sociology and Population, RUC. His research interests include the theories of anthropology and cultural studies, political and legal anthropology, and rural research in China.

China Perspectives

The China Perspectives series focuses on translating and publishing works by leading Chinese scholars, writing about both global topics and China-related themes. It covers Humanities & Social Sciences, Education, Media and Psychology, as well as many interdisciplinary themes. This is the first time any of these books have been published in English for international readers. The series aims to put forward a Chinese perspective, give insights into cutting-edge academic thinking in China, and inspire researchers globally. To submit proposals, please contact the Taylor & Francis Publisher for China Publishing Programme, Lian Sun ([email protected]). Titles in anthropology currently include: Cosmopolitanism from the Grassroots A New Chinese Migrant Community Ping Song Anthropology of Cultural Transformation I Togetherness and Separation Xudong Zhao Anthropology of Cultural Transformation II Chinese Consciousness and Ethnography Writing Xudong Zhao

For more information, please visit https://www.routledge.com/China-Perspectives/book-series/CPH

Anthropology of Cultural Transformation I Togetherness and Separation

Xudong Zhao

The publication of this book is supported by the fund for building world-class universities (disciplines) of Renmin University of China. First published in English 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 Xudong Zhao The right of Xudong Zhao to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised 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. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. English version by permission of China Renmin University Press. 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 Names: Zhao, Xudong, 1965- author. Title: Anthropology of cultural transformation / Xudong Zhao. Description: New York: Routledge, [2024] | Series: China perspectives | Includes index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2023041334 (print) | LCCN 2023041335 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032677996 (v. 1; hardback) | ISBN 9781032678993 (v. 1; paperback) | ISBN 9781032678030 (v. 2; hardback) | ISBN 9781032679013 (v. 2; paperback) | ISBN 9781032678016 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032679020 (paperback) | ISBN 9781032678986 (v. 1; ebook) | ISBN 9781032679006 (v. 2; ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Social evolution. | Anthropology–China. | Ethnology–China. | Social change–China. | Culture. Classification: LCC GN360 .Z43 2024 (print) | LCC GN360 (ebook) | DDC 303.4–dc23/eng/20231025 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041334 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041335 ISBN: 978-1-032-67799-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-67899-3 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-67898-6 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781032678986 Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Dedicated to Prof. Fei Xiantong, a torchbearer from whom I have learned plenty

Contents

List of figure and table Introduction

viii 1

1

Rupture of circling

21

2

From cultural transformation to social transformation

38

3

Escape from separation technology

61

4

Family, education, and separation technology

90

5

Conception of matter in the post-cultural consciousness era

104

6

Pristine condition, the modern world, and the era after cultural consciousness

126

7

Disaster, art works, and irony

144

8

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome

158

Index189



List of figure and table

Figure 5.1  Integration and separation from the development of tools to technology 113

Table 3.1  Transformation of the patterns of power domination



69

Introduction

The 21st century inevitably promises profound cultural transformations! A new transformation of cultural values and their manifestations is quietly taking place and building up in the face of the increasingly clear collision and interaction of various cultures in the world, the spread of cultural information driven by the growingly popular new media and the ever-changing ways of communication among people, and the diversity and heterogeneity of cultural expressions resulting from the new materiality of the media, the individual autonomy of media mastery, and the sociality of the communications media. Without a conscious grasp of this transformation, we will not be able to make it truly and clearly felt by the people to develop into a kind of cultural consciousness. Anthropology, which regards itself as cultural studies, is facing a world vision of cultural transformation that no one can resist! Meanwhile, it can be said with certainty that anthropology per se is rapidly evolving into a presence specially concerned with worldwide cultural transformation, and thus anthropology turns into a discipline on cultural transformation! I.1 Anthropology vis-à-vis cultural transformation Anthropology, as a branch of learning addressing contemporary issues, will see its own aspects inevitably change with the changes in contemporary social reality. As an academic discipline, anthropology has always been focusing on the studies of the culture of the whole of humanity and its development. The culture, amidst the course of human development, has gone through myriad changes and transformations, including not only gradual and slow evolutions, but also radical and seismic revolutions. For modern people, the world they are situated in is indubitably a world in transition, which inevitably entails a shift in the focus of anthropological research to the issue of transition. With the entry of various new technologies, concepts, and values into ordinary households, China and its cultural transformation are also changing with the changes over time. In other words, the anthropology of our time is unquestionably undergoing momentous changes incurred by cultural transformation. Anthropology used to be more often engaged in anthropocentric field research. Obviously, anthropology cannot be divorced from a special concern with humans. However, humans are not just people in society, but also people DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-1

2 Introduction inventing, creating, and using artifacts as part of culture, whose role is vividly reflected in the supply of today’s technologies, industrial products, and basic necessities. Facing the transition of cultural forms, it is imperative for anthropology today to adjust its core research targets, shifting from concerns of humans as typified by ideas to concerns of person as thought by things, that is, stressing the dimension of the real existence of things and humans instead of a one-sided emphasis on conceptualized humans, and to take “person as thought by things” as beings. Anthropology in the past attempted to make up for various losses after the rise of Western modernity in a constant retrieval of primitiveness, while anthropologists described all kinds of lost existence in Western culture in slow-paced and somewhat romantic visits to the other in wild and uncivilized regions in the eyes of Westerners. Such time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive intellectual and physical efforts have inadvertently provided texts enabling Westerners to contemplate and compare the diversified cultural existences beyond the West. Hence the formation of a kind of Orientalism based on Western meaning and perspective.1 All anthropologists’ words, pictures, and expeditions seem to have inadvertently provided Westerners with convincing materials to consolidate the image of the world beyond the West, where we can see the unvarying self-replication of social life year after year in small, timeless places, including the islands of New Guinea, tribes in sub-Saharan Africa, jungles in the Amazon of South America, and even rural China. In such places, time seems to be frozen in the world outside the West while being constantly shaped by it. Since the wheels of time crushed the world beyond the West, what is truly unavoidable over there is a new consciousness of the sense of time. Anthropologists leave their familiar culture to grasp the time “over there,”2 so that the places over there no longer constitute a self-circulating world, but a unit of cultural existence sharing commonality and present in the same world as the West. Time, on this basis, distinguishes between advanced and backward, and the laggards, bound to be beaten by the advanced ones, must make efforts to catch up. In the case of China, for example, it did not gain the initiative to develop until it was subjected to such beatings by the advanced.3 As a result, existence in the world was enshrined with a Western “white myth” in the sense of geographical discovery,4 which held that all the other parts of the world beyond the West could be conquered, with the powerful tool of this conquest being the priority of defining the concept of time. Scaled, abstract, accumulable, and standardized clock time has become the new coordinate of the world order. In this vein, different ethnic groups in the world no longer embody relatively different existences in the sense of time, but homogeneous existences with linear time clues under the abstract concept of time disengaged from scenes. How many people still do not know what 8:30 means today? But a hundred years ago, far fewer people knew the meaning of this number than do so today. At that time, maybe some people who worked regularly in metropolises would know the meaning of the time indicated on a clock, which meant that they needed to start their day’s work in some factory.

Introduction  3 In the wake of the colonization of the world beyond the West based on the metaphor of geographical discovery, anthropology acquired its own independent domain of research, that is, the residents, lands, and produce of the colonies attached to the Western world, as well as the local cultures defined by later anthropologists. These are the cultural solidification of people's lives in distant places by early ethnographic writing, a process supported by writing and reading, skills unique to humans. This temporality was often fixed in a certain year, a certain month, or even a certain day when an anthropologist visited the location. However, in the 21st century, which is witnessing the connectivity of people with people, people with things, and people with the whole world, the so-called information revolution has arrived as predicted by futurists, and a new culture is gradually taking shape which is patterned by value choices about ensuing technological revolutions and consequent pursuit of change. Anthropology, in this sense, is facing a cultural transformation. Obviously, today’s world is no longer a purely capital-driven overseas trade market for the West or Europe and America, nor does it follow a “front shop and back factory” model in which the East becomes a link in the product processing chain of Western consumer society. The whole world has been turned into a network that connects people, money, and things instantaneously without a center, but with different connecting points, presenting a globalized state of existence, where one can instantly see the whole world with the virtual presence of the network. Anthropologists will undoubtedly still resort to field research, but this field is obviously no longer the pristine life of Trobriand Islanders in the Western Pacific described by Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, or the life of the Nuer on the Nile narrated in Evans Pritchard’s book.5 Under the wave of globalization, everything is flattened and obstacles to information communication reduced.6 In the fields anthropologists once visited, hotels may have mushroomed, where people of different colors flock and then depart in a hurry. Museums may be found there which house notes and letters showing anthropologists’ lives, as well as pictures, images, and objects recording local people’s early life, presenting to the world the history of local people. These things, however, are not what the locals themselves want to display, but are exhibited to meet the demand of tourists from all over the world, a demand shaping the new cultural landscape of the locals. Tourists praise these cultural relics with a so-called polite tone reserved for the civilized so as to express their appreciation and tolerance for the culture of the people there. Unfortunately, the real objects they appreciate are nothing but some cultural ruins for excavation by archaeologists. Classical anthropology at this point has virtually lost its once unique space for research and appreciation. All visitors have become classical anthropologists, and all classical anthropologists have instantly turned into visitors and recorders of other cultures. Anthropologists have instantly turned from participating in and observing a simple society to directly facing the presence of a complex world. However, within just over a decade, the existence of the Internet can keep people informed about what has happened in this world and where it is actually happening no matter where they are. People are using the fastest transmission technology in the world to

4 Introduction spread pictures of their place to the whole world through the words, pictures, audio, and videos once monopolized by anthropologists. At this time, no one is absent, yet no one is truly present. This is a swap between the virtual and the real; this is also the dialectics of the virtual and the real in the cultural sense, which brings anthropologists to face up to a new research situation where they must admit that not only anthropologists are writing ethnography, but the thoughts, opinions, and comments written by Internet-informed visitors to a strange place may also become living material for a new ethnography. How to face, understand, and analyze these materials will pose a tremendous challenge for future anthropological fieldworkers. Anthropologists with cultural confidence in the past still have confidence in cultural understanding today, albeit this culture is undergoing rapid changes. Anthropology in the future will obviously be able to locate one or several sources or bases of cultural confidence for human society around the world, and this kind of cultural confidence leads to the culture’s own awareness of change amidst momentous changes around the world. Therefore, once-confident cultures may swing or change because of the emergence of new life forms, whereas once-unconfident cultural patterns may become determined and consolidated in the process of a certain cultural transformation, thereby guiding the life of most people. In this respect, the anthropological method of tracing human cultural clues based on field research enables people to obtain a lasting power of action and show the behavioral logic of this action. While anthropology is unquestionably experiencing a worldwide cultural transformation, it is also creating new modes of understanding different cultures, and the two cannot really be integrated. I.2 From social transformation to cultural transformation Generally speaking, facing such a world pattern of cultural transformation, anthropology in China needs to be readjusted and adapted. In other words, the situation of this transition has rendered anthropology's own situation quite different from its inception at the beginning of the 20th century and the pattern of world culture it faced. In this sense, today’s anthropologists are bound to take on a mission of cultural consciousness and cultural reconstruction different from that of previous times. The root of this cultural consciousness and cultural reconstruction lies in how to reposition anthropology and anthropologists guided by this anthropology in the whole human knowledge system by consciously relying on the subjectivity of knowledge construction in the process of a worldwide cultural transformation. Faced with the existence of more and more diverse world cultures and the holistic consciousness of human existence as a Community of a Shared Future for Mankind, anthropology must strive to find a more appropriate orientation and application for itself in a new cultural context, which is not only a worldwide orientation and application of the discipline, but also the orientation and application of its own culture based on a cultural consciousness. Undoubtedly, anthropologists, who used to face one primitive culture alone, have been enabled by their unique perspective of cultural understanding to play an increasingly important role in breaking all kinds of social, cultural, and

Introduction  5 psychological boundaries in today’s global cultural turbulence, integration, and change. Meanwhile, anthropologists’ attitude of tolerance and appreciation for various cultures and their differences is constantly offering more and more holistic and refined solutions to the conflicts among people and between people and society. For example, the advocacy of the concept of the Belt and Road Initiative in the cultural sense has potential in the practical sense of generating mutually beneficial exchanges by turning conflict into peace.7 Human culture, as a matter of fact, acts as a bridge for smooth communication among different peoples, societies, and cultures. In a world of brand new cultural transformation powered by the new technological revolution, we need to find a new formula for a new cultural adhesive to achieve constructive matching and development of various elements such as modern technologies, societies, and cultures. Some elements of this new formula will obviously be found in the minds of different anthropologists whose lifelong pursuit of learning and accumulation of scholarship have equipped them with unique observation perspectives in understanding cultures. As anthropological researchers, we should, based on our attention to various forms of cultural transformation, reunite these differences, divergences, and perspectives of their respective expressions into a joint force so that anthropologists and anthological researchers can pool their academic strength as a whole, exerting actual social effects or impact. The development of anthropology in China since 2000 has no doubt been showing a trend of diversification and constant interdisciplinary integration, with each discipline maintaining its own characteristics. Fields of study, from social transformation to cultural transformation, from classical ethnography to applied anthropology, from area studies to cross-civilization communication, and a new vision of anthropology focusing on “being together,”8 all seem to prophesy not only a broader domain for anthropology in China, but also a wider audience of world anthropologists for anthropological research in China, which will become an integral part of world anthropology instead of a field of experiments informed by Western theories. In this sense, there is a huge space for anthropology in China to grow. The reform and opening up initiated in the late 1970s has seen anthropology in China grow more and more concerned with the structural operation and change of Chinese society itself, and with the Chinese consciousness of various new cultural productions and cultural expressions of their diversity. The impact of the new technological revolution, including communication technologies, on people’s outlook on life, the self-transformation of local culture powered by the extensive promotion of the concept of “intangible cultural heritage,” or the reinterpretation and reconstruction of existing cultural traditions by the emerging tourism industry all mean that a cultural transformation based on the change of values has been gradually taking place in the Chinese society, which not only challenges the existing cultural concept, but also strengthens people’s efforts to pursue new cultural values. Obviously, a kind of “digital existence” with radical social life changes is no longer an illusion, but a real cultural practice. In other words, “computing is no longer just about computers, but it determines our existence.”9

6 Introduction In this respect, social transformation may tell us where social problems lie and which aspects should be improved in the future; cultural transformation will tell us clearly how people construct a new value, lifestyle, and cultural form amidst rapid changes. This new culture may no longer be elite-dominated like that in the first half of the 20th century, but a culture in which ordinary people can participate. Just as everyone who owns a mobile phone is a social media being today, every consumer of new social media technologies who sends out Weibo or WeChat messages, pictures, and sounds through smart phones or computers is no longer a passive recipient of this new cultural movement, but a truly active inventor. Here, Chinese culture, whether to restore a tradition or deliberately to be unconventional, will be incorporated into the overall process of cultural transformation. In other words, what may look somewhat like Chinese culture has actually been potentially and aptly replaced by other cultural elements. Some life forms that do not look like Chinese culture also naturally exist in the land of China. Different cultures are spliced, blended, and transformed with the help of the Internet platform. In the urban living space, various alternative lifestyles have begun to become new cultural expressions that attract many young people to participate in them. Many young people are happy to live in the city and appreciate the noise and bustle of multiculturalism. Over a long period of time in China’s academic tradition, anthropological research once led anthropologists to the countryside and ethnic areas without hesitation, whereas anthropologists today are attempting to go overseas and write their own ethnographic texts based on some classical ethnographic writing tradition from the West. Nevertheless, although the tradition of classic ethnography is still the basic and standardized way for academic schools to train their graduate students, yet in a frontier field of anthropological research, ethnography of interdisciplinary, cross-regional, cross-border, and cross-cultural anthropological experience has been emerging in the anthropology discipline in China. Researchers have begun to look back on the applied research of anthropology that was once looked down upon. In the medical field, anthropologists are active in the front line; in disaster-stricken scenes of all kinds, anthropologists can also be found participating in research; anthropologists are still playing their unique role in the cultural study of newly developed roads. In addition, anthropologists in China are increasingly going abroad, not to travel or visit schools, but to conduct field study of anthropology to truly understand local heterogenous cultures in an attempt to achieve the original aspiration of anthropology to culturally understand the other by observing, examining, and recording the world outside China based on China’s consciousness. In the field of world ethnography, every scholar seems to be enthusiastically engaged in their own research, whether it be overseas or cross-border research. Collisions of new academic ideas between anthropology and other disciplines are taking place through interdisciplinary communication, that is, interaction between anthropology and history, politics, law, ethnology, sociology, psychology, and religion, in the form of various interdisciplinary discussions and workshops with anthropology as the suffix. During such exchanges, people address and value anthropology as a unique perspective which not only plays an irreplaceable role in

Introduction  7 the fields of application development, folk social management, and the production or creativity of various emerging cultures, but also can infiltrate into various disciplines as a tool in the sense of methodology, resulting in interdisciplinary applied academic research. In this sense, anthropology is undoubtedly an applied field of study, which, by way of application, addresses a real world undergoing constant changes. Obviously, anthropological research involves more meticulous research on specific points, thus anthropologists are destined to become excellent regional or area study experts. Therefore, they may become a research authority of a village, or a local ethnic group, or a certain mountain and river basin. In short, every anthropologist used to position himself/herself as a researcher of a certain time and space. But this situation is changing today. With the increasing convenience of transportation and communication, the intensification of worldwide population mobility, and the diversification of people’s lifestyles and choices, it is hardly possible to frame a population’s life and their culture with a simplified concept of demographic geography such as a certain place or area. People are more and more interested in the trajectories of interaction among different civilizations, which may be of historical significance or be social and cultural facts in our present life. Obviously, the history of human beings and the concept of civilization are closely related to each other, while the interaction of civilizations constitutes the foundation on which civilizations can not only communicate with each other, but also be sustained. No civilization can endure without the help of benign interaction with other civilizations. In today’s era of frequent interaction among many civilizations in the world, we need to have a clear cultural consciousness, to actively integrate into this tradition of civilization interaction, and to bring our own civilization, whether ancient or new, to a phoenix-like nirvana under new conditions. Today, more and more anthropologists in China have begun to turn their attention to the study of civilizations, and to construct the processes and patterns of interaction among different civilizations with the help of many interactive forms of civilization elements such as art, artifacts, folk customs, and beliefs10 which will further enrich the understanding of human life by world anthropology. Such understanding is undoubtedly positive rather than negative, cooperative rather than divisive, friendly rather than resentful, pluralistic and multipolar rather than unitary and polarized, and tends to be pro-nature while emphasizing humanism. In short, all these will surely become part of the cultural values necessary for human beings to live together on the Earth in the future, constituting a kind of self-awareness of the Community of Shared Future for Mankind, which is precisely the original purpose of anthropology. I.3 “Anthropology of Being Together” Anthropology, while involving rational description, is gradually realizing the discipline’s ignorance of human emotions and specific cognitive processes. The gradual development and in-depth exploration of research on these aspects will lead to further investigation of the practices of cultural expression about human experience,

8 Introduction which will boost the development of an “Anthropology of Being Together” in the sense of community, that is, being aware of each other’s existence and willing to help each other. Anthropology of Being Together is not only the return to a subjective consciousness of Chinese native anthropology, but also an action strategy to build an academic community. Consensus in Chinese anthropology is being built through various gatherings in which various opinions are accommodated and recreated in a new consciousness of an academic community. Despite the presence of a powerful and unstoppable modern technology of separation constantly separating human beings from each other, today’s anthropologists in China are meticulously studying cultures not perceived by people, but can make people united, looking for a way to reshape society and culture. In this sense, anthropology, while integrating into other disciplines, is also creating its own new posture toward tolerant understanding instead of self-closure, which benefits many disciplines that attempt to understand human beings. However, anthropology per se is apparently still taking a maverick path, which happens to be a kind of illuminating communication in the real academic sense, that is, a way of communication that can benefit from mutual interaction for mutual growth. For human beings, an undeniable premise is that our world is a world of constant differentiation and fission. We can trace from the huge planets that exist independently in the universe the existence of such invisible elements of life as biological genes, not to mention the existence of other invisible particles that have been thoroughly studied by natural scientists. This is basically a self-evident fact for individuals with cognitive ability, the British sociologist Anthony Giddens has made this very clear and there is no need for any further doubt.11 Anthropology created by Westerners against such a background must initially aim to look beyond a confident, unequivocal, and indisputable self in the sense of Cartesianism to identify those actual existences relative to these features, that is, the existence of the other in general. Therefore, a distant other relative to the West has naturally turned into a paragon to prove the existence of the other. Anthropology has thus acquired a new label, that is, the study of the other. The discipline does not or need not pay attention to the self because this self is beyond doubt. Anthropology focuses on the existence of the other relative to this independent self. This other abounds in attributes totally opposite to the perfect attributes of the Western self, and the attributes of the other are artificially ascribed to the early stage of human development to prove that this is the immature stage in the development of human rationality, which does not exist in the Western world, but outside it. Anthropology therefore assumes a unique position in the history of disciplines in that it conducts in situ research on the other of the Western self, an irreplaceable disciplinary position in the study of different cultures. I.4 Responsibility and cultural tolerance Generally speaking, anthropology is a field of learning related to human life and its cultural patterns, aiming to offer a deep cultural understanding of different types and different patterns of the lives of people. In this sense, anthropology should be

Introduction  9 truly concerned with people and their society and culture. Instead of providing a specious explanation to human life through some abstract intermediary, anthropology should directly address the actual traces of human life and presents the transformation of a researcher, that is, an anthropologist, from “strangeness” to “familiarity” after contact with strangers’ culture with the most external expression of the mind. In this process, anthropologists also insist on presenting their own values and visions, looking forward to the ideal life of human beings, toward integration rather than separation. Therefore, behind the authenticity and seriousness of their writing, anthropologists tend to show more concern about the value of a certain cultural choice, which makes us really notice or feel a kind of presence of anthropologists. The scene of presence is the fieldwork that anthropologists have been pursuing for a long time, which actually constitutes the deep sense of responsibility of anthropology in the attitude of cultural choice, and bears the cultural tolerance of various human social and cultural differences, rather than suppressing or even eliminating or completely eradicating these differences in one form or another. The human suffering imposed by the latter can hardly be remedied by some kind of repentance. Tolerance of differences offers exactly the best explanation of the spirit of tolerance. In other words, tolerance is absolutely not just philanthropic pity for the weak, but accommodation and acceptance of the diversity of the world. If tolerance for the weak is philanthropist-like pity or unidimensional pity, then the socalled tolerance may eventually destroy the weak. From a practical perspective, the elimination of the weak is unlikely to occur, because weak people are found in any society before different kinds of strong people. But tolerance, especially tolerance in the cultural sense, is an attitude that anthropologists should adopt. Therefore, for the entire Community of a Shared Future for Mankind, anthropology should not impress people as being distant and insensitive, but should take its own attitude, representing an ideal pursuit for the future direction of mankind.12 Among today’s anthropologists in China, the awareness of the presentation and protection of diversity in the spirit of tolerance is being constantly enhanced. Based on this sense of social and cultural responsibility, a sense of tolerance for the diversity within one’s own culture is also being heightened. With the popularization of various cultures around the world thanks to Internet technology and the rapid spread and circulation of social media in people’s daily lives, our culture is quietly going through a series of major changes, changes obviously beyond definition by former anthropological concepts describing slow cultural change. A fundamental change is guiding cultural change to cultural transformation, that is, a basic change in cultural form, although we still have no ideas about the mode this transformed form will be fixed in a certain period of time to become a new cultural form of the Chinese era. Therefore, as far as culture per se is concerned, this process of change can definitely be called a cultural transformation instead of cultural change in a general sense. Thus, anthropology can also be called anthropology of cultural transformation. This is a rapid transformation that all people in the cultural context, including anthropologists, can personally experience, consisting of a series of major

10 Introduction changes concerning life concepts and values from slow to fast, from static to moving, from collective to individual, from aggregation to separation, from production to consumption, from local society to global community, from limited reading to unlimited free writing and expression, from cultural self-awareness of a few to cultural consciousness of the public, consciously applying cultural creativity to their own life arrangements. Our original state of natural existence seems to be radically subverted. Just imagine: if some people gradually change to choose and rely on a certain reproductive technology to have babies, that is, rely on such technologies as in vitro fertilization technology, would our original natural birth be a truly natural reproduction, or would it be reproduction after people’s consumption of reproductive technology? This point has become clearer today. In other words, our society is getting farther and farther away from nature while drawing closer and closer to technological inventions and artificial intelligence. The tension of cultural convergence makes cultural diversity a way of life that a small number of people have to work hard to maintain. In this sense, culture is no longer just a simple local way of life; more importantly, culture has become a public resource for all mankind that some people familiar with this way are asked by an external voice to take good care of, a task they cannot shirk in any way, not allowing for the least deviation or formal change. The “intangible cultural heritage inheritors” have suddenly been turned from masters of their previous cultures to subsidized guardians hired by an invisible employer from a distant place to guard their own belongings. Perhaps the metaphorical capital conversion between culture and money has been shrewdly realized by some petty maintenance fees, thus the master has suddenly become a hired caretaker of a culture, losing his or her identity as a free inheritor of the culture, and thus losing his or her real ability to create and transform culture.13 Today’s anthropologists in China have started a meticulous study of the life history of these “inheritors of intangible cultural heritage” in order to see what kind of unforgettable changes have taken place in this process for culture at the bottom under the impact of various extreme external conditions. During this observation, this life history is not only a presentation of history itself, but also a trace of a pristine mind being domesticated by external forces. For the anthropologist, to disclose this phenomenon is not only his or her own responsibility, but also an obligation from his or her tolerant mind, that is, we should pay attention to how the reinvention of a series of lifestyles that originally existed in the lives of the weak, including self-creation and many possibilities, has, because of such external forces, changed its direction and even been completely distorted. On the one hand, while hailing economic development, we should bear in mind an incredible polarization between the rich and the poor in our real society, which has become a bottleneck for our further development in the future. If the bottleneck of such a social structure remains, we will hardly realize development in the real sense. As today’s anthropologists in China are turning their attention to real life, their research accommodates all kinds of poverty problems caused by the new social development and related diseases, medical care, and education problems. Anthropologists have found a new field of social life in this space where they can

Introduction  11 really apply their theories. More and more of them have begun to focus on new social groups, including migrant workers and ethnic minorities who migrate to cities. Cities have really become the focus of anthropological research today, as more and more people will definitely live in urban space for a long time in the future to seek career development and cultural identity. Meanwhile, anthropologists in China are increasingly involved in the discussion of public spaces. They are looking for various fields of public concern in their relatively familiar spaces. While they see problems similar to and overlapping with those seen by sociologists in other fields, they are trying to give a different cultural explanation. These problems include urban demolition for reconstruction, villages inside a city, compulsory land acquisition, farmers losing their land in the process of urbanization within a country, food safety in line with international standards, water pollution, environmental damage and various related extreme consequences of disaster anthropology, as well as the acquisition of ethnic autonomy power with ethnic areas as the core and overall social justice, and of course, many other problems in those areas also caused by urbanization and their resolution. From this point of view, today’s world is beset with endless problems, but anthropologists seem to have really found their own direction to re-work, or they are all accumulating their thick-description understanding of this great oriental country that is undergoing cultural transformation through various practical studies. At the same time, people are also trying to depart from the existing participatory observation mode with micro case studies as the core and classic method, and beginning to track some new research clues in the hope of identifying some brand new research fields and topics in China. In this sense, China is no longer regarded as a place for the discovery and accumulation of existing paradigms of village research, nor is it just the self-replication and self-justification of some ethnography, but it is transformed into an online or even broader ethnography, or the development of a clue ethnography.14 In this sense, the concept of civilized China has returned to the discussion space of academic discourse. Comparing China with the West and other civilizations, and even China with the whole world, we realize that its role is no longer as a testing ground for Western theories, which tend to be trivial and subtle. Instead, China has started to have a real equal dialogue with different civilizations in the whole world in a civilized manner, a dialogue that saw its inception in the 1990s, and its official start now. More importantly, anthropological observation makes it easier to get in touch with the present life world. With personal observation, various new phenomena come to our eyes, and with this kind of observation with a sense of presence, the real consciousness of modern and contemporary Chinese problems begins to emerge and gather. Who can deny today that few Western anthropological theories written in anthropological textbooks are really suitable for explaining the rapidly changing reality in Chinese society, although the interpretable correlation between them cannot be ruled out? Everyone seems to be looking for a new interpretative framework that goes beyond the existing interpretation tradition to adapt to many complicated realities in China, instead of deliberately catering to some conclusive Western theory. This kind of consciousness of localization is very different from

12 Introduction many propositions of localization of social sciences in China launched and actively promoted by China in the 1980s. It is even more different from the Chinese movement of sociology advocated by Yenching University led by Prof. Wu Wenzao under the external force in the 1930s and influenced by the School of Sociology of the University of Chicago, in which the consciousness of localization led the study of sociology in China to turn to the study of rural sociology.15 The consciousness of localization can be described as an appeal or yearning for the theoretical development of internal autonomy based on researchers’ own complete Western academic training, with its core lying in efforts to construct a self-righteous explanation that is more reasonable and more in line with the interpretation of local society and culture than that of the West through many plausible explanations of researchers’ own investigation data and experience. Obviously, these efforts have started to pay off, as an academic community of anthropologists is gradually being built through Western training in anthropology and the digestion of Western anthropological knowledge by local scholars. People are more and more likely to launch a truly barrier-free exchange of ideas on a platform of free communication. On the interpretative system and conceptual extraction, anthropology in China today is moving toward a smoother expression that goes deep into the reality of China’s life and the fertile soil of current cultural logic, that is, an appropriate Chinese expression is gradually departing from the half-baked import, introduction, and follow-up of anthropology, and such a departure from the West is enabling Chinese anthropology to undergo improvement and creativity in the real sense. I.5 An ideal anthropology Today’s scientific research tells us that mankind and the universe originated from an accidental encounter in an irreplicable moment of life and death. Therefore, it is impossible to maintain the eternity of an individual’s life. Life may have a clear but unknown beginning, but no end that is well known but not clear to people. Everyone who is clear-minded knows that there is an end of “being-towardsdeath,” but this will not lead everyone to sit still waiting for the arrival of death. People not only attempt to trace the beginning of human beings, but also set various ideal states for their uncertain future, trying to live in pursuit of such ideal states. Hence the cultural ideal of people living and struggling “together.” In this sense, the ideal is not only a firm belief that links people together, but also an infinite force empowering people to act. Undoubtedly, the existence of this ideal culture is closely linked with a sense of community, but not with the concept of society, for a very simple reason. Society per se is based on a kind of “division,” which refers to the differentiation between individuals in society, while culture, as an ideal existence, is based on harmony and identity. In society, everyone has his or her own ideal, but this will not hinder the formation of a common ideal based on common values, which depends on the cohesion embodied by faith through culture. In this sense, rebuilding society may be far less important than rebuilding culture, because in view of its origin, society is

Introduction  13 often based on the continuous differentiation of its constituent elements. Of course, this differentiation does not mean the absence of order. More often, a highly differentiated society seems to have a better social order. Generally speaking, the Western world can be described as a society of individualism based on complete differentiation, and its social order can also be maintained for a long time. On the contrary, a society without any differentiation is beset with numerous problems in social order and people’s lack of motivation to act. However, this does not mean that division or differentiation represents the ideal that society should follow. On the contrary, what society relies on is not division, but a common ideal, which may amount to an order in the cultural sense that transcends the general social order. It brings not only order, but also people’s peace of mind and harmony among social factors, which is the symbol of collective existence in Durkheim’s society. If society is based on mutual trust and reciprocity, then human nature prior to the rise of society must be based on mutual suspicion. Even without reading Hobbes’ Leviathan, we seem to be clear that the situation is generally like this, at least as far as the most primitive human life is concerned. In addition, we can see clues and infer them from the offensive behaviors arising from mutual distrust among ordinary animals. However, people with intelligence have resolutely broken away from this animal humanity in favor of social humanity. It can be said that without this choice of social humanity and persistence in it, the sense of security of human existence cannot be truly guaranteed. Due to the fact that no one’s life is completely selfsufficient, people choose to cooperate rather than conflict with each other, and as an ideal state of social construction, people have learned to humble themselves to deal with strangers who were originally hostile, giving up what they have in order to make up for what their opponents do not have. However, during this process, the giver also unexpectedly gains from this friendly relationship as he or she receives what he or she does not have because the other party reciprocates politely. Thus the reciprocal relationship is firmly established, which constitutes an important ideological and cultural source for the establishment of the social community. People do not stop there, but consciously strengthen this reciprocal relationship to make it a part of their daily concepts. Therefore, the reciprocal relationship is promoted to an ideal state, which is later called the culture of courtesy. Its real meaning is that the reciprocal relationship has become a noble ideal pursued by everyone in society despite their great differences. A community of mankind that shapes and practices common consciousness has emerged as a result. As members of the same community, people choose their own values and unite their strength of solidarity, which will be thoroughly manifested through the periodic ritual activities of the community. Therefore, the community is presented as a social unity, rather than specifically reflecting the pluralistic differentiation of society. Obviously, the society itself cannot present the kind of unity formed by the power of culture, as social scenes are suffused with differences, diversity, vividness, and complexity recognizable by the naked eye. But such scenes are not culture itself. Culture must demonstrate its meaning with the help of symbols or signs. Arguably, every society features some form of culture, so

14 Introduction any society will inevitably have the symbolic representation of unity with the help of culture, which is just the culture we want to capture, whose meaning tends to be subconscious, calling for anthropologists’ explanation. Mankind is probably the species that can most truly appreciate the existence of natural unity among all beings in the world. On the one hand, a human lives in a complicated and diverse world just like an atom; on the other hand, he or she will make an orderly operation in a certain direction, and finally collide with a large number of other atoms to produce enormous energy. However, a human is different from an atom, as he or she will clearly realize the limit of his or her existence and how much energy he or she can consume, which is also the limit of the human body. Obviously, people must know their final destination. It is this kind of consciousness that renders a cultural foundation on which people can establish a common consciousness, that is, they hope to find the best possible way to escape the cycle of life and death through cooperation and unity. When scientists who explore the mysteries of the universe tell us that God or a certain god cannot be found in the vast universe, this does not mean that the vacant position of the concept of God and gods can always remain vacant, but the vacancy will inevitably be occupied by new representations created by cultural concepts in society. At this point, people must find a “fortune teller” for their irresistible fate, and they are ready to listen to a seemingly reasonable and wonderful explanation given by the “fortune teller”: This is the meaning and value of culture. In this sense, anthropologists today must think about the situation for the existence of human beings as a whole at a high cultural level. Anthropology should be a branch of knowledge related to the whole of mankind, not just a provider of constraining field methods. Undoubtedly, in the face of today’s world cultural transformation, anthropology should become a learning with commitment, courage, and concerns for others. In this sense, culture is the ideal in people’s life, a community of integration, and a god long absent in people’s hearts, that is, the being together of people and people, people and nature, and people and everything else. Therefore, to imagine and seek a beautiful state of eternal existence for mankind requires anthropologists to trace and present the process in which this state arises, so that we can truly understand today’s culture and its significance. It can be said that such a claim and cultural value are forcing anthropology in China to explore and pursue an ideal anthropology. I.6 In the world and interconnectivity Anthropology in China can no longer be truly covered by such a narrow definition as an affiliated branch of learning under a certain primary discipline. It is increasingly displaying its unique influence in terms of the scale of professionals and the influence of anthropological methodology on sociology, ethnology, history, law, and even economics. We can even say that anthropology is inspiring people to create a kind of textual writing with differences and diversity. Obviously, the emergence of such a situation is closely related to the local practice of anthropology in China and its position in the world.

Introduction  15 From the 1980s to the 1990s, anthropology in China mainly focused on importing and introducing Western anthropology, especially its development after World War II. Chinese anthropologists back then spared no effort in the introduction and research in this field, producing fruitful results. The translation and actual writing of research papers were inseparable from references to Western theories and ethnographic methods. As a result, in the Chinese academic community, we became more and more familiar with world-renowned anthropologists such as Malinowski, Evans-Prichard, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, and Sahlins despite their difficult-to-pronounce names. Moreover, for Chinese scholars, this list may go on endlessly with names familiar to us, even though all the people on the list are in the West, far away. These achievements were obviously an inevitable product of the era when China was just slightly opened up to the world after a long period of isolation. By the 21st century, however, we began to rediscover our own anthropological tradition. Although originally from the West, this tradition was closely linked with the subjective Chinese consciousness from the very beginning. We began to re-study and explore the existing traditions, including the community study of sociology in Yenching University, and re-noticed that the works of Fei Xiaotong, Lin Yaohua, Li Anzhai, Yang Chengzhi, Tian Rukang, and others were absolutely indispensable for today’s anthropology, and the anthropologists from the 1930s and 1940s were about to become history. A new generation of anthropologists who grew up half a century later began to put these characters back in their proper disciplinary position very consciously. Obviously, we no longer take a distant vision to simply admire Western anthropology. Instead, we have begun to examine our own anthropological traditions and discoveries with a close focus. Anthropologists in China will probably not deny such efforts through which we have found opportunities to reconnect at the rupture of an anthropological tradition that once existed. Indeed, these opportunities presented themselves in the past, but we missed them again and again due to some historical and political accidents. Today, we still need to re-discuss the disciplinary construction of anthropology and revisit the differences and connections between anthropology and other disciplines with everyone we meet.16 Obviously, the background of such knowledge shows, on the one hand, that anthropology, as the most basic discipline among all social sciences, plays a role in connecting different disciplines which are becoming increasingly narrow and specialized, and that role has been neglected; on the other hand, anthropology used to leave a one-sided impression of being physical anthropology or archaeology over a long time, never entering other disciplines in the anthropological sense of culture and society, never “selling” or proclaiming its unique and true ideas and understanding of people, culture, and social life, and instead was confined to the field evidence that it deemed self-contained. But all such shortcomings were obviously swept away in the development of anthropology in China during the first decade of the 21st century. Researchers look for their own breakthrough points and try to not only add field research methods to anthropology, but also use field research methods to enter many domains covered by other human activities, including economy, law, politics, religion, medical care,

16 Introduction history, literature, art, disasters, development, and even scientific research itself. All these fields have allowed anthropology to locate a new platform to express itself with the help of Internet technology. Various forms of extremely sporadic but lively writing of WeChat ethnography allow people to access new media with different cultural expressions. People not only understand what anthropology is by reading the long ethnographies written by anthropologists, but also are influenced by the anthropological concepts and methods presented through the illustrated and short ethnographic texts of WeChat official accounts posted by friends in WeChat Moments. In this sense, anthropology per se is also facing a brand new change in the mode of “writing culture.” Instant inspiration or insight into life and culture from fieldwork has become a real virtual reality that anthropologists in different places can share with each other. Anthropology has become more “contagious” in the public sense because of the popularity of the Internet and smart phone technology, and the knowledge that it has accumulated and created also spreads very quickly. Meanwhile, anthropology’s own vision is also being expanded beyond all times. The study of overseas anthropology in China has turned from a quiet beginning to a direction attracting more and more researchers’ efforts. The concept of the “Tibetan-Yi Corridor,” initiated by Fei Xiaotong, has not only been further expanded, but also extended to a unique “Corridor Concern” in the anthropology of China.17 While attempts were being made to further develop the study of ethnic corridors with the concept of “Road Study,” the Belt and Road Initiative has become a strategic guiding direction for the future development of China. Anthropologists thus found a new relevance, that is, the inseparable relevance between anthropology and the Belt and Road Initiative. This new macro-civilization road study beyond the concern of local ethnography is bound to provide extremely appropriate and strong support for the future development of anthropology in China, guiding anthropology to look at itself and the whole world from a new perspective. Chinese anthropology has really entered the world, instead of drifting out of it. Perhaps this effort has just begun, but it is showing a booming trend. In recent years, the annual meeting of the China Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, the annual meeting of the Overseas Cultural Research Anthropology, and the Anthropology High-level Forum have all conducted some brand new explorations on the theme of the Belt and Road Initiative, pooling the research wisdom of the academic community. With social complexity intensifying in the modern world, the anthropological perspective has increasingly entered the public domain. With the large-scale and frequent cross-border movement of populations, anthropology has begun to be more concerned with the problem of immigration. With the occurrence of worldwide risks and disasters, anthropology has paid more and more attention to the people who have suffered from various disasters and their actual lives, concerned with how they survived the disasters and what kind of cultural expression they had. With the increasing pollution of food by industrial production, the impact of biological transgenic technology, and various types of environmental pollution, anthropology has entered the field of food safety, and thus food problems are understood from

Introduction  17 a cultural perspective different from the general technical understanding of food safety. Poverty and development have always been covered by anthropological research, but poverty alleviation and development and targeted poverty alleviation in new situations have become another focus of anthropology. In addition, the artistic reconstruction of villages, intangible cultural heritage, rural tourism, and cultural protection of ancient villages have increasingly enriched the discipline of anthropology. Anthropology is therefore launching a fundamental shift in itself, that is, from the presentation of static primitive cultures to the self-presentation and capture of various new cultural forms. Obviously, anthropology’s own characteristic of cultural communication will become more and more salient in our era that is witnessing the development and popularization of the Internet. More and more of us will no longer be bound by the land, and we also need to understand the cultural differences and conflicts we may encounter during our journey enabled by modern technology. For example, on a plane from Beijing to Dubai and then to Africa, this experience has actually begun to happen. But anthropologists need to be there and advocate their ideas. It should be borne in mind that all cultural differences, whether you like them or not, cannot be eliminated by force. We need a basic cultural understanding to achieve strong cultural integration at cultural ruptures with the help of cohesive and flexible power. This is not only a new mission for anthropologists, but also the only way to solve all international disputes in the future. I.7 Toward a new anthropology Anthropology in 2016 was full of vitality, with an authentic concern with the social reality of China and China’s new cultural situation in the world. This anthropology is building its own academic path based on Chinese consciousness. The Belt and Road Initiative, urbanization, cross-border migration of populations, coordinated development of urban and rural areas, ethnomedicine, WeChat ethnography, and artistic ethnography, among others, can all be covered by the word “new,” from which new problems, new concepts, new ideas, and new methods can be identified, such as the problem of new urban immigrants and urbanization in ethnic areas from the perspective of cultural anthropology. In addition, there is also a study on the writing of historical ethnography across villages, of mountain and sea civilizations, river civilizations, farming civilizations, and agricultural technology heritage. The new expansion of online and offline ethnography methods in time and space under the influence of Internet technology makes a virtual but real picture of modern Chinese people’s new life recognizable by more and more people. In this sense, Chinese anthropology has embarked on the research track of a new anthropology with worldwide significance, which, concerned with cultural transformation, minorities, the Internet, and anything new in the world of life, is also good at grasping the rhythm of the times. Perhaps a more important question is how to enable every human being to maintain a decent cultural life in a world where the Internet is being popularized. This is no longer a controversial prediction or insight, but an unavoidable realistic prospect facing everyone.

18 Introduction At the same, while still remembering the unique development history of this discipline in China, we are trying to open up a brand new Chinese era of anthropology by looking back at the past. A commemoration of anthropology crossing time and space took place in Jiangcun on the occasion commemorating the 80th anniversary of Fei Xiaotong’s investigation of Jiangcun. Scholars from all over the world gathered in Jiangcun, south of the Yangtze River, with a research record of 80 years, commemorating Mr. Fei’s pioneering contribution to anthropology in China and reflecting on the true significance of village research in anthropology. Undoubtedly, anthropology, with its unique field research methods and the presentation of detailed ethnographic reports, is drawing the attention of more and more researchers from different disciplines, who apply them to their own research fields, including politics, history, industry and commerce, art, medical care, law, and development, among others. These fields are constantly expanding new research areas through the addition of anthropological perspectives, developing self-strengthening branches or interdisciplinary anthropology disciplines. The 35 branches under the most authoritative China Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences and the branch committees under application suffice to illustrate the prosperity of subdiscipline research under anthropology in response to the actual situation in China. More importantly, Chinese anthropology is also opening its own door in all directions, not only to field study, but also to different fields of society and culture. Cultural transformation is still a process that is taking place all over the world. Overseas ethnographic research in the direction of going out of China does not conflict with the direction of going into and trying to re-understand China’s anthropological research. How can anthropology really address all kinds of cultural changes, shifts, and transformations under the new world order will be the reality that anthropologists will face together in the future. Just as the problem of climate change has become a new politics in the world, anthropologists themselves are also facing a new context with a world pattern similar to climate change, which bestows on anthropologists a sense of responsibility and commitment for participating in the world and studying the immediate reality. These conditions are leading anthropology in China to the fields of application. Only with the applied research of anthropology and only when anthropology is applied can anthropology really live in the present and ever renew itself. While the world culture is guided by an increasingly convergent centripetal force, a centrifugal force of cultural diversity is also constantly replicating, strengthening, and constructing itself. The centripetal force gives rise to the voice of globalization, while the centrifugal force comes from the consciousness and highlighting of cultural sovereignty with cultural relativity, and the consciousness of boundary and heritage worldwide. The pattern of unity with diversity is an inclusive cultural landscape proposed for the history of China. This concept, since Fei Xiaotong’s initial proposal in 1988, has endured for nearly 30 years, during which China has undergone changes, and so has the cultural composition of the world. Obviously, we need to rethink what the new pattern of unity with diversity in China and even the world would look like, and what kind of ideal model it should actually follow.

Introduction  19 Today, it appears that the pattern of cultural composition is unity with diversity, which can be applied to the understanding of ethnic relations in China and the new construction of political and cultural order in the world. Obviously, we are facing a complicated world in which the integrated human ideal and diversified society and cultural reality coexist without conflict. No fixed principle or rigid thinking can really cope with such a complicated situation. We need a new, dynamic, creative and practical mindset. Today’s anthropology is no longer the kind of area study that clearly demarcates the relationship between others and us. We need to really go deep into it and think out of the box to see the world we face together and the diversity of world cultures. It is based on the superego imagination of a Community of Shared Future for Mankind. Meanwhile, we need to understand the true and thorough cultural consciousness and individual consciousness of every nation, every group, every community, and even every individual today. And all kinds of social media technologies that can easily appear at any time and place make this consciousness more lifeoriented, aesthetic, virtual, and objective. In this sense, anthropology in China has encountered a new reality that calls for more thinking and insight than any previous era. It may be virtual, but it is real. It may be the relationship between the self and the other that have tension and conflict with each other. But with the help of a kind of in situ field investigation from the grassroots level, this kind of regional, local, and fluid relational conflict and fracture can work toward the integration and bridging of human intelligence so as to build a beautiful, harmonious future world which is the real direction and responsibility of anthropologists in China and even the world, and which is also the contribution they can offer to the world. The culture of the future will be one that stresses innovation. With the help of the existing multicultural elements, a big platter of culture is formed. Every culture is no longer in the original sense of “Peach Blossom Spring” of self-isolation, and selfprotection. Instead, it has gradually transformed into a real blended culture of “each having something of the other.” At the same time, there is a trend of sharing culture instead of monopolizing it. Cultural barriers caused by mountains, lakes, and oceans in the sense of geographical space are disappearing day by day. People cross-cultural boundaries as if just taking a trip. What could have taken a year or several years for many adventurers, anthropologists, ethnologists, paleontologists, or museum specialists to complete can be accomplished in a day or a few days. More and more different kinds of frequent trips across cultural boundaries mean the perception of culture is no longer limited to what is provided by anthropologists or ethnologists alone, and new ideas and methods of anthropological cultural research have mushroomed, and their research topics are no longer limited to tribes, clans, families, kinship systems, and social organizations in the traditional sense, as the Internet, AIDS, cross-border ethnic groups, virtual ethnography, cultural heritage, daily life performances, and other diverse research topics have brought vitality to anthropology in China. Anthropology in China used to call for its independent status, and the thematic discussion in this area was held in more than one place more than once. However, anthropology did not have its own circle in the past, which inadvertently gives this group its own cohesion, and the field research and theoretical thinking pioneered by anthropologists keep opening up their own spaces, which would be spaces for

20 Introduction infinite development. Anthropology will lose no time in entering into other disciplines and thinking about the construction of its own discipline system of Chinese anthropology from the in-depth exploration of problems in other disciplines, which undoubtedly offers a new prospect of benign development, openness, and interdisciplinary expansion of Chinese anthropology. Notes 1 Edward Said. Orientalism, trans. Wang Yugen. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1999. 2 Johannes Fabian. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983. 3 A kind of self-consciousness and improvement was started in the late Qing dynasty to address this situation. A letter from Dr. Sun Yat-Sen to Li Hongzhang reads: “The state has been striving to promote technologies for prosperity. We are sparing no efforts in making progress with each passing day, and are to be soon expected to be on a par with Europe. What Westerners used to bully us, ships, trains, telecommunications, and fire weapons, are all available to us. Other new things will follow soon” (Sun Yat-Sen, Letter to Li Hongzhang, from A Selected Collection of Sun Yat-Sen’s Works, Vol. I. Beijing: People’s Press, 1963, 7.) 4 Peter Fitzpatrick. The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge, 1992. 5 Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. London: George Routledge & Sons, 1922; Evans Pritchard. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940. 6 Thomas L. Friedman. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 7 Zhao Xudong. The Logic of Mutual Benefit and the Development of the “New Silk Road”: Transformation of Anthropology Methodology Triggered by the Concept of the “Belt and Road”. Exploration and Free Views, 2006 (11): 11–19. 8 Zhao Xudong. Being Together: A New Vision of Anthropology of Cultural Transformation. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 24–35. 9 Nicholas Negroponte. Being Digital, trans. Hu Yong and Fan Haiyan. Haikou: Hainan Press, 1997: 15. 10 Zhao Xudong. From Civilization-Barbarism Distinction to Harmonious Communication: Mission of Chinese Anthropology Under the Interaction of Three Civilizations. Northwestern Journal of Ethnology, 2015 (2): 44–61. 11 About this point, refer to Zhao Xudong. Structure and Reproduction: Giddens’ Social Theory. Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2017: 14–16. 12 Zhao Xudong. The Expression of Culture: Perspective of Anthropology. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2009: 471–473. 13 There are numerous such examples. The cases the author has interviewed can be found in Zhao Xudong. Drastic Measures for Rural Culture: Impression of Gaomi. Chinese Social Science Today, October 22, 2009: 7. 14 Zhao Xudong. “Clue Ethnography: New Paradigm of Ethnographic Narrative”. Ethnological Studies, 2015 (1): 47–57. 15 Li Yiting and Zhao Xudong. Studies of Chinese Rural Society in an Era: Re-analysis of Graduation Theses of the Department of Yenching University from 1922 to 1955. Wu Yi, ed. Review of Rural China, Vol. 3. Jinan: Shandong People’s Press, 2008: 261–306. 16 For discussions in this respect, please refer to Xu Jieshun, Li Xiaoming, and Wei Xiaopeng. Dream of Anthropology. Beijing: Intellectual Property Publishing House, 2016. 17 Hao Xudong and Shan Huiling. An Introduction to Corridor Studies in China: From the National “Tibetan-Yi Corridor” to the World’s “Belt and Road”. Thinking, 2017 (2): 1–11.

1

Rupture of circling

Most of the societies that anthropology has studied can be categorized as “circling societies,” that is, the elements that make up such societies are constantly circling according to a rhythm. However, the modern world has stirred up a disruptive change, that is, we have to face a state of life with such uncertainties as risk, fragmentation, discontinuity, and uncontrollability. Therefore, people not only live in constant fear of a coming crisis, but are also set in a diverse, branching society that is not cyclable, while the resistance to this society constitutes the basis for our possible return to the circling society. It is undeniable that today’s world is experiencing various forms of rapid transformations under the stimulation of new things, including the Internet. If the industrialization emerging in Europe more than 200 years ago was a revolution, which exerted the first round of impact on all the traditional rural societies based on farming in the world, then the changes entailed by the Internet technology that has been developing for less than 30 years may represent another round of revolutionary impact. Under the impact of two rounds of reform in about 300 years, what will happen to the Chinese society known as rural society and its core value forms? In what sense will this change further affect the current cultural composition? These will be problems that researchers of China and its cultural consciousness must face, that is, cultural transformation has become an important background to understand today’s changes of social structure in the realistic context, rather than an ideal pattern to be developed. 1.1 Circling society of oneness In face of the great transformation of today’s world, it is necessary to give a clearer explanation of these changes or transformations with the help of concepts and theories. Moreover, this explanation must involve typology, reflecting a historical rupture, that is, the fundamental difference between the past and the present. Moreover, this explanation must be based on the original characteristics or core structure of the rural society before the advent of modern society for cultural comparative discussion. As far as our current understanding is concerned, the core characteristic of such a society can be summarized by the concept of “circling society,” that is, its core lies in the existence of a cycle and periodicity between the internal and external elements of its social composition, while many changes in DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-2

22  Rupture of circling today’s society are no more than branches or uncertainties that constantly extend forward and outward after this cycle is continuously suppressed by various revolutionary changes.1 Two obvious threads in the development of human society can be found. One thread extends almost horizontally, which will continue to extend as time goes on, but will be broken by various artificial life rhythms, thus forming different and diverse living spaces in society, which can be described as being cyclic, gradually forming their own life cycle with cyclic intervals and continuity in time following the rhythm of natural objects, such as the sun or the moon, mountains or rivers, or the rhythm of animals and plants. Meanwhile, various components of this society can be and are required to maintain a continuous circle, with their respective positions often relatively fixed, such as the circle between people and land in an agricultural society or the circle between people and nature in a nomadic society. Such societies can be collectively called “circling society.” The core characteristics of such a society are the repeatability of people’s behavior, the constancy of ideas, and the stability of relations. Most religions in society are established for this constant cycle of repetition, constancy, and stability. From hunter-gathering to agricultural settlement, such social types are possible with certain continuity, therefore reflecting the characteristic of a community, that is, the cultural pursuit of circling. In other words, such a thread of human development will maintain the rhythm of continuous extension because the circle of various social elements is not broken. This continuous circle extension can be attached to more exquisite civilization in form, but its interior, whether it be the divine kingship or the daily life of the common people, has no fundamental change in the overall characteristics of its circle. In such a constantly circling society, the consciousness of people as individuals is not so strong, or is even extremely weak; people are integrated into the society, unable to be detached from it, but are kept moving forward by the almost natural life rhythm of society. Until the end of one’s life in this circle, the power of personal will or personal choice is negligible. That is, one cannot completely adjust the rhythm according to one’s own wishes, one’s thought must match the rhythm of society and follow this rhythm.2 Anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski studied the “Kula ring” trade of Trobriand Islanders in the western Pacific Ocean, which best illustrated the characteristics of circling society. There, year after year, the red necklace soulava was passed clockwise and the white armband mwali was passed counterclockwise. They were circulated this way among different villages. This gift exchange beyond village boundaries presented the core connotation of the Kula ring of Trobriand people’s goods transaction, which has been defined by anthropologists as a ritual exchange. What is really embodied is a deep-seated circle in the sense of social elements, “receiving items and having them for a short time and then sending them out again.” No Kula items will stay in the hands of a certain person for a long time. What’s more, once entering the Kula, people will become permanent “members,” maintaining a lifelong Kula exchange partnership.3 This is a stable and predictable behavior of periodic interaction. Such a society also represents a paradigm of the so-called circling society.

Rupture of circling  23 The circulation of various materials in the world is regarded as a natural thing in traditional society. That is to say, their existence and disappearance are not regarded as a reversal of the running track driven by some artificial external force. Just like the sun rises and sets as usual every day, the rhythm of people’s life in such a society also follows the rhythm of the sun or the moon. In the long course of human evolution, something must have changed profoundly. But for a relatively long time, such a society has not produced profound changes, just as people can hardly feel the movement of the Earth even though it keeps rotating all the time in the universe. What people can really feel is the cyclical sunrise and sunset. Only in this way do people feel that they are living in a safe and orderly state everywhere. Whatever happens, in such a natural circling society, which can be regarded as more dependent on the operation of nature, people always have enough confidence. Even if the society may occasionally deviate from or go beyond the track of the daily cycle, it is always possible to return to the existing circular path in the end, which may be regarded as a natural process. And it is also an inevitable process of celestial movement beyond people’s control. Therefore, in ancient China, worship of Heaven could not be overstated. It is said that the Emperor of Zhou first won the support of all people and was elected leader because of his ability to observe astronomical phenomena. Moreover, during the over 2,000 years of imperial rule since the First Emperor of Qin, the ruler had never failed to set up an institution in charge of astronomical knowledge, albeit with varying names, and all the astronomical knowledge was monopolized by the imperial power, never really transferred to ordinary officials and people, because it was by virtue of the existence of this institution that the imperial power strengthened its legitimacy in ancient China. The orderly circling of the sun, the moon, and stars and the regular seasonal cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter gave people a sense of security in their daily life. Thus, the political order was legitimized. However, in the practice of alternative medical treatments to cure people’s diseases by the power of wizards, one of the most prominent concepts is that treatment is not only aimed at treating patients’ diseases, but at seeking a kind of restoration of order in society, or at the continuation of an interrupted circle. That is, diseases are regarded as caused by imbalances in the cyclical natural order or interpersonal relationships. The meaning of treatment can be explained more as restoring the circling of a normal life order. In other words, diseases, diverse as they are, all represent a social crisis disrupting the cycle inside or outside the society. All kinds of rituals adopted to cure illnesses aim to cure individual physical diseases by restoring a cycle of order and relationship. Perhaps the best embodiment of this cycle of consciousness is the custom of the Monpa people’s wizard dance. The Monpa people kill animals as sacrifices to remove ghosts that hinder people’s circling in society. Diseases are thus dispelled through a series of rituals such as identifying ghosts, offering sacrifices to ghosts, and getting rid of ghosts. A wizard invited by a family with a sick member must first hold a bowl of clear water, then he adds rice grains and observes their positions to see what ghost is at work and to determine whether to kill a chicken or pig. After that, the chicken or pig is placed in front of the patient, which means that the patient is sacrificed to

24  Rupture of circling the ghost. The viscera and meat of the animal are cooked and then placed on the banana leaf, with a hand-cranked prayer wheel, several beads, a long knife, and clothes beside them. The wizard prays and scatters some rice around to attract ghosts. The family then sprays dust on the wizard to repel the ghost from the house. Then the wizard takes some food to the patient and puts a spider, wrapped in advance, behind the patient’s ear, which means that the patient’s soul snatched by the ghost has come back to the patient. This is the successful conclusion of the ghost dispelling ceremony. Obviously, in such a society, through the ghost-exorcising ritual, the recoverable circular order of society and individuals is realized. The prerequisite for this kind of society to be circular is that people at least believe that people and ghosts are linked by diseases. The people, ghosts and diseases forms a triangular structure, the core feature of which is to realize the cycle of normal bodily order by balancing some constituent elements instead of eradicating them. That is, people get sick because of ghost possession, which is often a state of imbalance and inability to circulate. Wizards, on the other hand, eliminate people’s physical diseases by eliminating powerful ghosts. The balance between them is realized by the intermediary of a wizards. The story of mingguan shoushi (命官授时, officials ordered to time) recorded at the beginning of the “Classic of Rao” in The Book of History, in the eyes of Henri Maspero, a French sinologist, is more like four wizards taking orders from the emperor and rushing to the four poles of the world, thus enabling the sun to stop at the winter solstice and the summer solstice, return to its former track, and to move on at the vernal equinox and autumnal equinox to complete its journey.4 Another more important duty of these wizards is to prevent some abnormal and non-circular eclipses. In “Punitive Expedition of Yin” in The Book of History, it was recorded that these wizards were ordered by the emperor to go on a punitive expedition due to their failure to fulfill the task of preventing eclipses.5 As far as a normalized interaction among individuals and groups is concerned, the Kula ring contributed by Malinowski, engaged in anthropological field studies in the western Pacific Islands, apparently paid special attention to this circle in traditional society. The most Chinese expression of this circle is tong (通, communication), that is, there is no real boundary among people, between people and things, and among things. The character tong in wan wu xiang tong (万物相通, everything is connected) connects these unrelated things at least at the conceptual level. Thus, the problem of totems finds a new interpretation. The beliefs in totem beasts and totem clans have a homologous relationship,6 which is undoubtedly an explanation that two different things can be connected. In such a society, personal consciousness can only be truly manifested through the so-called collective social life. That is, there is a connection between the individual and the collective. Except for that, individual creation is not recognized, let alone encouraged. All creations are recognized for their contribution to the unity of this circling society rather than emphasizing the uniquely outstanding state of branching. Such a society depends on the inertia of the society itself, which renders the same inertia to individual behaviors. The so-called “start to work at sunrise and go back to rest at sunset” (日出而作, 日落而息) do not need individual consciousness to express

Rupture of circling  25 the uniqueness of self-existence. What may eventually emerge is a self-contained and self-circling society, in which “the emperor’s power has nothing to do with me.”7 1.2 Branching society of diversity The other thread of human development is fundamentally different from the abovementioned integrated self-circling society with monotony and commonality. In a certain sense, it is a social form that requires the society itself to constantly upgrade and move forward in both vertical and horizontal directions through continuous progress, and to constantly branch out like a leafy tree in the vertical and horizontal directions through the universalized ability of colonization. This kind of society per se has a rhythm of life, but this rhythm is obviously related to every self-contained individual, such as birth, growth, maturity, and aging, rather than being only concerned with the whole society, meaningless to individuals. Although everyone may still seem to live rhythmically as they go out to work early and come back home late every day, in their personal consciousness, in their dreams, or in their future planning, they deem that the present is different from the past and the future is different from the present. Seeking novelty and difference, and being ubiquitously subject to such grander concepts as progress and change of fate are the overall features of the so-called branching society. In this sense, social life, whether individual or collective, is being drawn by various types of development indicators, among which individual motivation for self-oriented achievement has become the core driver of people’s life and work. At the same time, the driving force of social-oriented achievement is gradually weakening.8 Therefore, a person’s social self is artificially divided into two halves, one being the so-called true self, which becomes very small, fragile, and lazy, while the other half is great, strong, hardworking, and never lazy, which is an ideal or even a dream self. In order to compete with this ideal self, people can give up all the values of social supremacy. Undoubtedly, however, these two selves, although co-existing in an individual, are in a competitive relationship instead of a cooperative and friendly relationship. Constantly denying and surpassing oneself and others has become the motto of success in such a society. The desire to compete is obviously created by society and instilled into the mindset of every individual. In this respect, psychoanalyst Karen Horney has alerted us to the fact that the so-called modern neurotic personality, in the final analysis, is closely related to cultural scenes. As she has observed, if a girl with no desire to compete lives in the primitive Pueblo Indian culture, she has nothing abnormal in her behavior. The situation would be the same if she lived in a small village in southern Italy or Mexico. The implication is that her competitive desire for individual achievement can only be found in the modern world, because in the worlds outside it, it is generally believed that it is unnecessary to obtain or spend more money except to satisfy direct and absolutely necessary desires. In ancient Greece, the attitude of working hard beyond one’s personal needs was even deemed despicable.9 Obviously, the foundation of a branching society is undoubtedly based on people’s pursuit of various desires beyond direct

26  Rupture of circling personal needs, which reflects the difference or pluralism of different individuals, thus resulting in a diversified society. If any anxiety is found in a traditional society, it often comes from worrying about whether the day-to-day circle can last, so that people can really survive in the society. In later societies, personal and social anxiety concerns how we can live better than yesterday, or how we can live better than before, or how we can live better than others. In other words, getting better and better is no longer a selfexpectation or social desire, but a real pressure and practice in life. The circling society is durable and sustainable because it insists on circling, while the branching society is likely to have too many complications because of the overgrowth of branches. However, in reality, due to its own inability to circle and sustain forever, the society is constantly facing crises, with the scarcity of various resources being the potential source of endless social crises. In the face of all kinds of scarcity in society, everyone in society must plan various action and life strategies to deal with it, and complications can be described as ubiquitous in such a society. This is a life situation shrouded in uncertainty. A patient reading of Ulrich Beck’s book Risk Society can give us a general understanding of this point.10 However, modern society is not just a crisis-prone risk society, but more importantly, it is a society which we should constantly strive to develop and rectify by overcoming various possible crises. With the help of various new technologies, we control the whole of life more meticulously, but this process is accompanied by unpredictable new risks. The difficulty of preventing risks is still an established reality in our current society. If we look back at the human-caused disasters resulting from risks in a certain year, we find that the anxiety arising from such an awareness of imminent risks can arise anytime. In other words, the efforts to improve society by developing and rectifying at any time cannot prevent the advent of various risks, resulting in a vicious circle. That is to say, the invention of one kind of development and rectification can only promote the invention of another kind of development and rectification, and no one can escape from the strange circle of development with an undetermined program.11 That is why we call such a social form a branching society, from which various branches stem. Such a society is closely linked with the present world. Living in such a society, individuals may have a split personality, the attributes of which will be integrated into all aspects of social arrangements through a self-internalizing mechanism. A person needs to play multiple roles and undertake completely different tasks at the same time to achieve his or her different life goals that can make him or her live better and can only be realized by his or her own efforts. In this society, everyone is defined as a purely individual existence, and everyone seems to have three heads and six arms, able to grow outward like branches. This social metaphor of society branching out gives it many characteristics of a split society, but it is not like the Nuer society in Africa, which inadvertently realizes the integration of structural balance through unstable fission.12 A branching society cannot be completely integrated, but can only be intermittently integrated into the social state of continuous re-integration. In other words, such a society can only be required to branch out luxuriantly to form an integral landscape. With the extension of time,

Rupture of circling  27 branches will continue to stretch out to develop a new integral landscape, which also cannot sustain for a long time. It can be said that such a society and its civilization are based on an isolated individual consciousness. In such a society, as the French anthropologist Louis Dumont has pointed out, the individual is placed above the society. In other words, in such a society individuals are endowed with an independent existence and value beyond society. Furthermore, although an individual is an individual existence, it has self-awareness as an independent individual, and its interior is often constantly divided, that is, there is an internal structure of one individual and multiple selves. These egos are obviously contradictory and mutually exclusive, often staying in a state of mutual opposition, and these egos are formed by the mixture of instinctive desires of biological individuals and desires or demands constructed and imposed by society. In order to render it an order and satisfy all kinds of desires step by step, it is necessary for social individuals existing in the whole to constantly try to sort out a sequential order, and then seek a balance in it. Modern society, due to its own uncertainty, displays a divisive feature, that is, it relies on the continuous division of ideas in society to fall into an ever-changing state. More accurately, these changes are a kind of transformation, because the foundation of society is not based on the concept of the circling of things, but on the concept of frequent occurrence of events and constant branching out. Therefore, dependence on the constant change and transformation of all aspects of society becomes the mainstream form of this social development. This transformation is often fundamental and brand new, just like new branches replacing or surpassing old branches. Although the new comes from the old, their form is quite different, reflecting the transformation between two radically different forms, and on the whole the society manifests a state of pluralistic co-existence, which can be reflected through all aspects of the society. Therefore, many aspects of economic, political, social, and cultural transformation can be found in such a society.13 Such a society, in form, is like the reproduction of individual cells, with its number becoming larger and larger, its distribution wider and wider, but its types more and more unified. Because in such a society, it seems that all people are acting at the same pace, and meanwhile everyone wants their own pace to be different from others besides themselves and also different from other people in society. As a result, everyone becomes an isolated small unit in social accounting, instead of being part of an extended family or even a family in the traditional sense. Individuals, not society as a whole, have to face the whole world. This work, once undertaken by communities in the circling society, can be regarded as one of the basic characteristics of the circling society, which features a rhizome structure, with an ever-extending root system to form clumps of rhizomes, gradually forming self-contained autonomous communities. It is the existence of such communities that gives rise to a culture of collectivism with values recognized by everyone in the community and shared by the collective. The core or premise of such values is precisely to emphasize the removal of individualization, and stress a common expression of values above individual desire. This precisely represents the basis for the endurance of the culture of the circling society.

28  Rupture of circling In this sense, individual desires and collective values reflect each other. It is not that individual freedom is absent from such a society, but such freedom actually does not go beyond the restriction of natural ecological values, and ideologically, both individuals and collectives do their best to coordinate their values and ideology instead of splitting them apart. Despite the possibility of horrible scenes like Hobbes’ conception of “war between all people and all people” in the imaginative “primitive” society14, it is by no means a war between human beings in the sense of social division, but a war or conflict in the sense of seeking mutual integration, because primitive people may not have any plans to separate themselves from this society as individuals. In this sense, the purpose of war may be to avenge or struggle for interests, but it inadvertently enhances the unity of a society. The basis of this unconscious social consequence lies in the participation of everyone and their inseparability, and everyone’s willingness to be integrated into this community. Compared with modern wars, the inseparability of this circling society is more prominent. In modern warfare, people are separated from a specific life scene, and the so-called enemy is also another part of people separated from a hostile society. They have to put themselves into confrontation with others as enemies in the capacity of soldiers or army men. The war here often becomes a metaphor of mental illness, like a split personality, that is, an originally integrated society is completely split into at least two parts, one part being a group specializing in warfare, the other part being a group specializing in watching war, that is, watching war through various image representations and transmission media. With the continuous development of convenient and rapid media via modern technology, such a split personality seems to become more obvious. As a result, some people are fighting in the front line, while most people watch the war through various electronic screens in their comfortable homes. This visual culture of watching has become a part of people’s daily life, but at the same time it is far away from the real war and life itself. War is far away, but it seems to happen every day. The war news broadcast every day reminds us or hints to us that maybe this is no longer news, but the target we must watch day after day and year after year. Douglas Kellner, an American philosopher, has offered a wonderful analysis of how the media influenced the course of the Gulf War, demonstrating how truth and the illusion are mixed together in modern wars.15 Therefore, although wars happen in the world every day, they are all on TV or on the Internet and seem to have nothing to do with us. We are detached from the space of the events by modern communication technology, but we cannot help but realize their existence, always worrying about their outcomes. With the rise of pressure comes anxiety, and this pressure will definitely come from a virtual existence in a virtual space, but this virtual existence will actually have an impact on our lives. A modern human who must face the whole world independently only has to think about it and face it directly. There is no other choice. Once the branching society with split characteristics is generally recognized by the world and becomes the mainstream and even dominant ideology, it will not only bring some fundamental changes to people’s ideas, but also change their

Rupture of circling  29 lifestyle and overall social arrangements accordingly. This is the power source of cultural transformation in modern society. Such a society is premised on the condition that it should achieve a kind of creation through self-denial, like cell division. Particularly in today’s world, social order is arranged on the basis of individual talents and qualities, with individual creativity receiving unprecedented attention and development. People’s social motivation is enhanced by their eager creative activities to change their own destiny. That is to say, progressive values stressing thinking out of box and innovation have become the ideal and pursuit of every social community. In this sense, there is no direct correlation between the production of new knowledge and the actual needs of life. However, it is only through the creation of new knowledge or the invention of new technology that social renewal is achieved. Perhaps in such a society, for individuals, no status or position cannot be replaced by some technology, and such replacement technologies can be described as endless and varied. In other words, the potential and unspoken influence on such a society is that everyone no longer has the identity, position, and ability to keep their youthful appearance forever. Mobile Internet is arguably the most widely spread and used new technology at present. At first, this new technology was invented and used only to facilitate people’s communication of information, but its subsequent development exceeded people’s real desires in these aspects, replacing people’s daily social life at a speed beyond ordinary people’s imagination, and gradually forcing people to change their original habits and ways of thinking in these aspects.16 The foundation for realizing the above-mentioned convenient communication is related to the existence of necessary materials. The first prerequisite is the worldwide popularization of electricity. Few sociologists or anthropologists study the relationship between the development of modern electric power and human society and culture. Undoubtedly, however, this convenient and clean means of energy utilization created in modern times has become a daily necessity for most people in the world, which has fundamentally changed the traditional life rhythm of the original natural circle. Besides this key electrical energy, the second material existence premise is the Internet, and people from all corners of the world are connected with each other through Internet technology. The Internet crystalizes the most simple and natural desire of human beings, that is, everyone is eager to keep in touch with their relatives, friends and colleagues. But this kind of contact without meeting is conditioned. At first, the invention of the telephone made people appreciate the convenience of communication. Later, the Internet had to satisfy the desire of the broad masses of people to communicate with each other at lower prices and with more convenience. But in this process, human beings may be losing the opportunity to have real face-to-face interaction, which is replaced by virtual interaction between strangers beyond the acquaintance circle. The last premise of materiality is the global manufacturing, circulation, and popularization of technical products. The method and technology of mass-production in a certain place and then transporting products worldwide developed during the industrialization period have enabled as many people as possible to own a certain product in a short time.

30  Rupture of circling The invention of computers that can digitize everyone’s information, the subsequent mass-production of personal computers, coupled with the cheap global sales of personal computers in a short period of time, and the rapid growth of logistics systems, as a whole, have made unique contributions to the globalization of various regional or local technical products. The above three materials differ from previous civilizations as follows: the transformation or revolution of the civilization of the traditional world, such as the agricultural revolution or even part of the industrial revolution, may rely on the creation of a civilization with a more stable material foundation, which enables people to live continuously and stably, and build a relatively stable adaptive lifestyle in the process; while the increasingly popular revolution in the Internet world attempts to transform an already colorful material world into a virtual world as much as possible, and any actual existence will become a virtual existence and construction through the operations of “surfing the Internet” and “clicking.” On the one hand, individuals can live in isolation or in a corner without feeling lonely; on the other hand, they can live a virtual and real free life without face-to-face communication. Although the Internet is not creating a concrete and tangible society, it is undoubtedly creating a society which may be more real than reality itself. In the past, “a community of a shared future” was only a slogan-style ideal existence, but today it has become a virtual real existence in the sense of the Internet.17 When Americans connected four computers to form a network called ARPAnet in the 1960s, people did not think that while it could connect people in the world with each other, it could also isolate them from each other. It is true that people can learn about world events without leaving home, but in fact everyone is becoming more and more lonely. In China, September 14, 1987 is a memorable day, when the Beijing Institute of Computer Application Technology sent the first e-mail from China to the archives of Karlsruhe University in English, the content of which was “Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner in the world.” This aspiration to cross the Great Wall has obviously been realized today. At that time, people might not have imagined that the development of the Internet in China would reach such a grand scale of more than 600 million netizens.18 Similarly, people did not expect that the existence and popularity of the Internet would not only leave people more and more dependent on virtual connections to survive, but more importantly, would also render people more isolated. For example, people do not need to visit bookstores, but have books to read, they do not have to go shopping, but have clothes, they have money to spend without going to banks, and they can receive a good education without going to school. Such needs can be met conveniently, instantly, and entirely in the space of the Internet. 1.3 Rupture of circling and circling of ruptures Undoubtedly, with the spread of modernity dominated by the Western world, a fundamental rupture has arisen between the society that keeps circling and the society that keeps branching out. The emergence of this kind of rupture may have a very complicated thread of historical evolution, which we can keep tracing. But

Rupture of circling  31 one thing that we are clear about today is the continuous enhancement of individual self-consciousness based on the growth of individual consciousness. Before discussing the source of this self-consciousness, it is imperative for us to examine the way of individual existence and its cultural expression in a self-circling society. Arguably, one thing is relatively clear: that kinship in the social sense, developed by blood and marriage in a society with closed self-circling, can be more prominent in terms of social ties than in other societies. Kinship has become a dominant concept in the circling society. In that case, what does kinship based on consanguinity and marriage mean for the continuity of a circle? Claude LéviStrauss, a structuralist anthropologist, once attempted to explain it with the concept “exchange,” that is, an exogamy system of social groups based on incest taboos. In exogamy, women become objects of exchange. That is, if tribe A has a woman and a man, and tribe B also has a woman and a man, then ideally women become the objects of exchange. This can not only satisfy the exogamy system required by the expansion of social relations, but also ensure that no offspring is born of incest. This form of exchange is, of course, the most basic marriage exchange. However, if there is more than one man in tribe A or B, it will not be completely satisfied by exchanging with the tribe with only one woman, so tribe A or B will inevitably look for a third party for exchange. In the same vein, the third tribe might go to a fourth tribe for exchange and gradually form a marriage circle that exchanges or marries women in an area. This circle must be a relatively closed society, and a balance of exchange can be found among tribes in the long term.19 This circle is often the boundary of a social identity, within which other social activities are carried out, such as daily reciprocal exchange, New Year celebrations, various religious sacrificial activities, and even mutual aid organizations. If a person tries to or is forced to leave a certain circle for some reason, for example, if he leaves the countryside to enroll in a university or find a job, he is no longer in this exchange circle and is virtually excluded, thus turning from an insider to an outsider of a village. Although he may keep coming back to visit relatives because they are still in the village, he is actually no longer included in the communication circles of various kinds in this village. In other words, once people in a village leave this circle of daily communication completely, they can no longer return to it. This feeling of being “unable to return” may be a profound and abrupt change under the impact of modern society, causing a rupture in a circling society, which is known as the rupture of social circling. However, in a closed society that implements general exchange, despite differences in family private property or classes between people, they are always closely related to each other. Separation is regarded as an abnormal state of society, which people will try their best to avoid in mind and behavior. In the traditional society, people are often immersed in sorrow and regret at each other’s parting, which can be discerned from the profusion of China’s ancient literary works on the theme of parting.20 In such a society, an individual’s scope of action must also be within the range of women who can and are willing to go in exchange, and generally will not go beyond this range. At the same time, this practice ensures the emergence of a society without strangeness based on community consciousness, which is what Fei Xiaotong called “Acquaintance

32  Rupture of circling Society” in his book From the Soil: the Foundations of Chinese Society. At the same time, all life is bound to complete the circling and extension from ancestors to descendants in this circle.21 We can take the life of an imaginary man as an example to illustrate the process of this circle. Suppose the man’s name is Shunsheng (literally meaning “smoothly born”), because he was born very smoothly and is a boy. Suppose that Shunsheng is surnamed Li, and is the eldest son of the Li family. The “Hundred-Day Banquet” after his birth is an important ceremony to be attended by the whole village. Everyone who comes to the banquet should bring a gift to show his or her blessing to this family for having a descendant. The family will hold a banquet so grand that at all the villagers can attend. This move is not only about eating, but also means that this family can become a winner in the future through the exchange of marriage, that is, it has won a person who can inherit the Li family’s blood and glory in this community. Because of this self-evident reason, it is necessary for the winner’s family to hold a sumptuous banquet to generously repay all those who have blessed them. It is this generous concession that gives people an opportunity to connect and integrate more closely, and at the same time all the unexpressed meanings can be actually expressed through this banquet, creating a harmonious and warm atmosphere. As time flies, the child Shunsheng keeps growing up. After the adult ceremony, he may marry a woman from a neighboring village just like his father did, making her a member of Li’s big family, while sisters in his father’s extended family will naturally be married to those from other villages at the age of marriage, becoming daughters-in-law of other people. Every family will have such a balance of gains and losses in the sense of social circle. In this way, the original home where girls were born and had a sense of belonging becomes their maiden home, while the home where they live after marriage is called in-law family. In this way, their social relationship suddenly changes from the blood relationship in the original maiden home to the in-law relationship in the in-law family. That is, they acquire a new social relationship through marriage. Theoretically, unless there is some interruption in fertility or parenting or there is something wrong with the outward marriage, this relationship can be continuously extended in the vertical and horizontal directions, forming the continuation of the lineage axis of blood relatives and the lineage axis of in-laws. In such a society, the continuation of blood relatives and in-laws is regarded as the most important social value, which is vividly described by a metaphor of the continuation of incense burning. Obviously, incense burning is closely related to ancestor worship, and once it is interrupted, it means that the family line has not continued. Similarly, if fertility or marriage are interrupted, the life of society will not really last. In the cultural sense, a new family triangle composed of father, mother, and children will be produced anew after the birth of children, so parents will thus symbolically complete the mission of family reproduction. Not only have their genes been passed down in the biological sense, but also the skills of social production and life have been naturally passed down in the process of having children. The aging of parents in the family means maturity and waning in the family. People will use the character shou (寿, longevity) to bless their parents. In Shuo Wen Jie

Rupture of circling  33 Zi (“Explanation and Study of Principles of Composition of Characters”), shou means “living long.” Behind this blessing is also a wish for this family to last for a long time. When parents leave this world, that is, leave or disappear in the physical sense, it does not mean that they leave or disappear in the mental, spiritual, or cultural sense. Through a kind of life-and-death transformation and communication between the yin world (the world of the dead) and the yang world (the world of the living) in the cosmical sense imposed by society, the souls of dead parents will return to their families through annual sacrifices, which are held just like serving the living parents or ancestors. In this way, the deceased still live in this society composed of families. This is the circle of human life and death in a circling society, where events of separation do not escape from the circle of this rural society based on kinship and blood relationship. Moreover, this kind of sacrifice forms the sacrificial circle because of its religious nature. In a circling society, the marriage circle and the sacrificial circle often overlap. Fei Xiaotong used the concept of “rural society” to define the nature of such a society. This rural social relationship refers to an inseverable tie between people and the land, that is, people’s food and clothing depend on all kinds of things grown from the land, and the transmission and continuity of society itself is realized through the circle of social life. At the material level, the human body returns to the soil through the funeral ceremony, forming a natural circle between the physical body of social and material life and the land under the consciousness of “rest in peace under the earth.” On the other hand, spiritual existence completes the circle between individuals and society through ancestor worship ceremonies. For the living, the only thing they need to know is how to perform routine and periodic ritual worship according to a set of standardized ritual procedures.22 In such a society, human death is not the final verdict, let alone the end of life. The human spirit lives on in the world of the living through social activities such as memory and commemoration. Therefore, in such a society, a person’s death is not a kind of sorrow or misfortune, but the beginning of courtesy waiting for sacrifice. In this way, there is an inseparable circle from “coming” to “going” in the culture of life and death in the rural society, and the existence of individuals, society, and culture will depend on this circle to maintain normal operation. Perhaps, nothing is more reassuring than this circular consciousness, and nothing can make people face death more calmly. For people who live in such a society, death is just a necessary trip to another world, or just another existence in another society. As a saying goes, “losing one’s head is just to have a bowl-like scar, as after 20 years, we will have a brave man again.” This is by no means a cultural concept of hypocritical treatment of death fabricated by the circling society, but a reflection of natural understanding presented by the circular consciousness in the individual in the traditional society. This may also contribute to the legal culture in our society, which does not take the death of a person as the final judgment, but puts more stress on how to make people feel ashamed and lose face at the social level, thus forcing them to constantly reform themselves and abide by the law in the social environment. For the social ideology that regards death as the beginning of life, it is impossible to establish a real social order simply by resorting to the threat of

34  Rupture of circling death, because there are many social factors besides living for oneself that are driving people to seek a glorious death. This is also the moral of the story of Zhuge Liang’s “Seven Captures of Meng Huo” in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, that is, conquer and control in the cultural sense. In other words, the real way to control people is to convince them, not just to resort to the threat of death, because for a person who regards death as a necessary link in a certain circle in society, death must be confronted and surpassed, and fear of death is not a characteristic of rural society. This outlook on death in rural society apparently differs from the view in the Western society regarding death as the end of everything. In the West, death is the end point of everything, and it is decided in the “final judgement” whether a person will go to heaven after death and realize eternal life. The rural society, represented by China, takes death as the beginning of all things, from which the society regains vitality, and the individual returns to the society through the circulation of the society itself, and thus is endowed with a position that may be more respectable than before, so the individual obtains another kind of immortality in the secular activities of the secular world. This is the eternal life in the world of experience or this world. Everyone who lives in this society will expect eternal life in the family atmosphere. They do not need to prefabricate a supernatural existence. What they can do is to transform into a supernatural existence, that is, they hope to obtain “immortality” in the cultural sense. In brief, all the institutional arrangements and personal practices in a circling society inadvertently strengthen the awareness of the circle between humans and nature, thus forming a circling society and culture. Undoubtedly, this kind of culture is being increasingly polluted by the civilization dominated by the desire and expansion of the modern world, thus losing its autonomy in self-circulation. Many of its links are dismantled, grow separately, and extend continuously into various branches in certain directions, gradually forming a sprawling society, which we call a branching society. The branching society is closely linked with many characteristics such as risk, rupture, loss of control, disorder, and crisis, which not only disrupts people’s circle of life, but also renders it always in a fractured state of a fragmented life circle. In the modern world where people’s individual desires gain more legitimacy, everyone has to confront the whole world directly. With self-independence, people have been struggling painfully, that is, trying to break free from the shackles of various social doctrines and become liberated individuals with their own rights, which is obviously not a smooth process. Self-struggle, especially unconscious struggle, has always been the core theme of discourse and narration in the modern context. People must first struggle against themselves to develop a constantly balanced self; then they have to fight against the society in which they live, thus forming a self with an independent personality in society; finally, people must fight against culture in order to make a deep transformation in mentality, which may finally emerge as a transformation of cultural concepts, thus driving a cultural transformation in the true sense of value. The French sociologist Michel Maffesoli’s words merit our attention here:

Rupture of circling  35 At the end of this century, our society is full of a unique tension: unlike the proletariat or other classes in the past, the masses (or people) are no longer a group formed by common beliefs or concepts, people no longer have a clear center or focus, and they are no longer players of a history that is advancing and developing.23 If the nomadic hunter-gatherer society is characterized by cluster development, the form of cluster society, in a sense, covers the development of nomadic society, or nomadic society is just the intermediate stage in the development of cluster society to rural society with roots. The extension of settled agriculture in the rooted soil represents the close ties of this society, which embody the continuity of social circling. This point has been broken little by little by the flourishing development of modern society with modern characteristics. No one and nothing can stay in their original positions and perform a circular movement, as if a terrible earthquake strikes, moving everything out of place and unrestorable. In panic, people are constantly creating all kinds of new lifestyles away from the previous circle, in attempts to seek a stable life that can be repeated and sustained like a circling society, but in vain. In a branching society with a broken circle, everything seems to be developing, and demanding this development; everything is being created, and demanding this kind of creation. However, everything seems to be a kind of restoration and reconstruction, rendering the society constantly in a state of “judgment under uncertainty,”24 as termed by social psychologists, which constitutes the core feature of what I call “branching society.” If modern society is equivalent to a branching society because it is in a state of “uncertainty,” then this branching society has indeed promoted the rapid growth of pluralism, diversity, and various ideologies in its later stage of development, thus breaking the pattern of pluralistic existence naturally separated in a circling society. With the efforts to constantly gain new ideas, creativity, and progress and seek various new ways to solve problems in social life, a society with its own internal diversification or branching has emerged and become the dominant social form. This kind of society is undoubtedly surpassing rural societies based on the growth of individual needs and the acquisition of social legitimacy. Through the regrouping of new people and the constant transformation of their identities, branches without special rules may turn into cluster groups again, or a new social group like a bird’s nest cleverly built among branches to provide shelter from the wind and rain. These kinds of social sub-groups may really prevent the separation of social branches in the future, and actually return to various forms of circular life, such as returning to the quiet farming life, returning to the leisurely tribal life, and returning to the primitive cave life in the state of nature. In other words, all kinds of regression consciousness in the branching society are the denial of its own development track, and also the hope of the future human destiny community. In this sense, China is following the general trend of global development, not outside it. Although the so-called vision of “globalized China” is far away,25 it is still a leading point of view, from which we can more clearly see our proper position in the world.

36  Rupture of circling In short, we use various forms of empathy experience to realize the conscious return of social existence to the rejected irrationality, and then the truly emotional social experience gradually forgotten by the modern world will be accepted and returned to people’s lives. The circling society with strong homogeneity and unity once made us merge with nature one-on-one without choice; in late modern times, with the help of knowledge innovation and new technological revolution, the branches of society created various separations from our living world, which undoubtedly led to the cultural transformation of the whole world. However, how to truly return to the state of “sentient and righteous social existence” rather than “judgment under uncertainty” that people should have requires anthropologists to conduct cultural comparisons to show more different lifestyles, but also to think more about the modern significance of the so-called “primitive” society they were familiar with, and use this thinking to build the whole human community and solve problems that are difficult for human beings. Notes 1 Zhao Xudong. Branching Society and Cultural Transformation of Rural Society. Folklore Studies, 2015 (4): 13–20. 2 Zhao Xudong. Branching Society and Chinese Situation of Cultural Transformation. China Ethnology, 2015 16(2): 1–18. 3 Bronislaw Malinowski. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Long Grove, IL: Waveland Press, 1984: 82–83. 4 Joseph Needham. Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 4: Astronomy: Book 1. Beijing: Science Press, 1975: 42–43. 5 Joseph Needham. Science and Civilisation in China, Vol. 4: Astronomy: Book 1. Beijing: Science Press, 1975: 44. 6 Bronislaw Malinowski. Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays, trans. Li Anzhai. Beijing: China Folk Literature and Art Press, 1986: 59. 7 This poem was quoted by Shen Deqian in the opening chapter of Gu Shi Yuan (“Anthology of Ancient Poetry Before the Tang Dynasty”) that he compiled, called “Ji Rang Ge” (“Playing the Clay Shoe”): “In the era of Emperor Yao, peace reigned on the land under Heaven, and the people live in content and happiness. An old man sang while playing the clay shoe” (Shen Deqian, Gu Shi Yuan: Vol. I. Beijing: China Book Company, 1963: 1). 8 Zhao Xudong. Chinese Social-oriented Self. Studies of Social Psychology, 1994 (3): 11–18. 9 Karen Danielsen Horney. The Neurotic Personality of Our Time, trans. Feng Chuan, checked by Chen Weizheng. Guiyang: Guizhou People’s Press, 1988: 2. 10 Ulrich Beck. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. He Bowen. Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2004. 11 Zhao Xudong and Zhu Tianpu. Reflecting on Developmentalism: Based on the Analysis of China’s Urban and Rural Structure transformation. Journal of North Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Company), 2015 (1): 5–11. 12 Evans Pritchard. The Nuer: A Description of the Modes of Livelihood and Political Institutions of a Nilotic People (revised translation), trans. Zhu Jianfang. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2014. 13 Zhao Xudong. From Social Transformation to Cultural Transformation: Characteristics of Contemporary Chinese Society and Its Transformation. Journal of Sun Yat-Sen University (Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 111–124. 14 Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, trans. Li Sifu and Li Ting, checked by Yang Changyu. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985.

Rupture of circling  37 15 Douglas Kellner. The Persian Gulf TV War. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992: 4. 16 A noteworthy event is that on March 9, 2016, at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seoul, Lee Sedol, a Korean Go player, played against the Google artificial intelligence program AlphaGo for the first time. The game lasted three hours, and Sedol was finally defeated, causing a heated discussion on the Internet, as people thought it incredible. But in fact, this was another kind of demonstration that the comprehensive colonization of human life by intelligent machines might have just begun. 17 On December 16, 2015, at the Second World Internet Conference held in Wuzhen, Zhejiang Province, Chinese President Xi Jinping delivered a keynote speech which clearly put forward the concept of “Community of Shared Future.” 18 According to the 35th Statistical Report on Internet Development in China issued by the China Internet Network Information Center, by December 2014 the number of netizens in China had reached 649 million, and the Internet penetration rate was 47.9%. 19 Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, ed. Rodney Needham. London: Eyre & Spottiswood, 1969. 20 Charles Stafford. Separation and Reunion in Modern China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 21 Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Shanghai: Observation Press, 1948: 38–44. 22 James L. Watson. The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance, in James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, Eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988: 1. 23 Marco Diani. The Immaterial Society: Design, Culture, and Technology in the Postmodern World, trans. Teng Shouyao. Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Press, 1998: 222– 223. 24 Prof. Zhou Yongming from the Center for Anthropological Research of Chongqing University has especially proposed this concept in an article published in Chinese Anthropology, a journal of this center. 25 James L. Watson, The Structure of Chinese Funerary Rites: Elementary Forms, Ritual Sequence, and the Primacy of Performance, in James L. Watson and Evelyn S. Rawski, Eds., Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988: 1.

2

From cultural transformation to social transformation

In the light of social transformation, a new understanding and thinking about the transformation of cultural forms has emerged. The popularity of new media has changed the temporal and spatial significance of the original cultural order. The cultural restructuring of cyberspace brings about the reconstruction of meaning in real life. The development of Chinese consciousness guided by the concept of cultural consciousness has become a driving force for cultural transformation in China. Cultural transformation is first of all a change in attitude toward nature, that is, from fearless exploration and utilization of nature to thinking about the value and significance of human existence on the planet Earth with a sense of awe toward nature. Therefore, cultural transformation inevitably affects people’s minds or mentality. 2.1 From social transformation to social progress and its predicaments The study of social change and transformation became the basis for a sense of legitimacy when Western sociology demarcated its research boundaries at its inception, which indirectly influenced the growth of sociology in China, especially the character of sociology, which was gradually restored with the social and economic transformation in China in the late 1970s,1 accompanied by a debate in the whole society about the future direction of Chinese culture.2 This debate, in fact, came to an abrupt end before it was truly developed. With the emergence of many contradictions in China’s social transformation, which cannot be truly resolved at the practical and social levels, people began to ask questions on the levels of concepts and meanings, thus bringing the problem of culture into focus in people’s attention again. Driven by the earlier extremely powerful discourse on economic transformation, discussions of culture and its future direction were initially sidelined. At the beginning of the 21st century, however, the gradual development of social progress led to a new round of social transformation.3 With the gradual implementation of social progress planning from urban to rural areas, problems ranging from illegal land occupation to neighborhood disputes, and even extreme cases of petitioning,4 were unexpected consequences of China’s social progress in the new era, and the presence of such problems unavoidably orients our academic thinking. These challenges have never been completely solved by the theory and research DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-3

From cultural to social transformation  39 paradigm of sociology, which positions itself as a discipline criticizing modern society. Meanwhile, social problems are compelling anthropologists who have a say in cultural issues to look for new development space for anthropology and new knowledge growth points for cultural research from the standpoint of anthropological cultural comparison and cultural tolerance. With the occurrence and practice of social transformation, new thinking about the understanding and practice of cultural transformation and about the innovative concept of cultural transformation emerged.5 A corresponding new discipline came into being, anthropology of cultural transformation, developed in response to China’s real-life context and the new common Chinese consciousness with temporal and spatial presence and expressions. The theoretical basis of this discipline lies in the particularity and relativity of the development and evolution of human culture, which naturally gives rise to cultural diversity. At the same time, numerous discussions about social changes in general social theory will inevitably lay a foundation for developing the epistemology of cultural transformation theory. As we gradually enter the realm of micro-study (i.e. field study) of Western anthropology, and pay more and more attention to many details in social and cultural matters, we should also note a possible trap in Western epistemology, that is, it may inadvertently entangle us in the details of social reality itself, unable to detach ourselves from such details to become independent judges to exercise our own judgment and form opinions on the future direction of an ancient culture and its present overview. For this kind of culture, we are both members and inside observers. In this sense, what we may really need is a kind of cultural consciousness, and only such a cultural consciousness can give us the necessary cultural confidence. The time when we first accepted the Western concept of sociology seemed to not have left many opportunities for us to deeply reflect on the applicability of this concept to the Chinese society. We almost completely ignored Yan Fu’s efforts in translating the English word “sociology” into qunxue (群学), but instead hastily borrowed the term shehui (社会) from Japanese to translate the discipline of sociology into shehuixue (社会学).6 In this kind of borrowed translation, perhaps we forgot to ponder: can shehui, which can represent the meaning of society in Japanese culture, truly represent Chinese society, which far exceeds Japanese society as a whole in terms of both its length of history and scope, that is, whether the concept borrowed in this way can cover the connotations of the discipline. The results show that this kind of borrowed translation cannot reflect the profound meaning of the term shehui that has been understood and gradually formed in the Chinese context for thousands of years.7 However, in any case, the borrowed translation of the word shehui through a third country, Japan, has led to a special social consequence, that is, our sociologists have attempted to replicate in China the post-industrialization social transformation in the West – the rapid transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial society in the hope of changing the “abominable” situation whereby China lacked the same lifestyle as the West. Obviously, this kind of effort never really been completed, because we have never thought deeply about the question “What is Chinese society?”

40  From cultural to social transformation For Chinese people, shehui has always been an outside world where they do not feel at home, especially as in contrast to the family with which they live. Thus, shehui obviously differs from “society” as envisaged by Westerners, with the meaning of public sphere. Arguably, shehui lies outside the real life of Chinese people. To highlight this externality, a special term for the space of shehui has been coined, jianghu (江湖), to denominate places where more strangers exist in contrast with the general family life environment. Arguably, in the traditional concept, jianghu is a gathering place for all kinds of people who have left their families and official circles.8 People do not care about the necessary boundaries between public and private in that world, but are only concerned with the benefits they can gain in it. Fei Xiaotong once adeptly used the term chaxu geju (差序格局, differentiated pattern) to define such a self-centered social structure that is different from Western individualism.9 The benefits people gain from it are not their own possession, but are often divided equally among families and even family members, or shared by everyone. This is what Huang Guangguo, a social psychologist, called the law of kinship in social relations.10 The implication is that an individual struggling in shehui thinks more about his or her own family which he or she can trust completely and which is the first layer and the most important core layer a person tries to maintain. Besides, there was a space in traditional society occupied by officials but more often controlled by imperial power. That space can hardly be called the “public sphere” in today’s sense. In the traditional era of imperial power, that space basically belonged exclusively to the emperor, who ruled the empire from top to bottom, and his vassals were just a group of officials routinely taking care of the empire for the emperor.11 They were generally called scholar-officials, many of whom approached the imperial power step by step through erudite learning. They were not to do what they wanted to do, but to learn to observe the words and deeds in this space and follow the instructions of the upper-level officials. Of course, the final decision had to reside with the supreme power, the emperor. If some matter or official provoked the emperor, it would be such a grave offense that one might be beheaded for it, never to be forgiven by this space. Therefore, the risk of being an official in the official circles of the traditional society was obviously not much less than that of wandering in jianghu. Despite this danger, people were still eager to become officials. One reason was the great benefits they might reap, and the other was that they could protect their clans and families during their tenure. These two reasons ensured that their willingness to be officials surpassed their fear of risks. In jianghu, there was a set of rules to emphasize the close ties between strangers, the so-called code of brotherhood. Without this rule as a guarantee, it would be impossible to firmly establish any relationship between strangers. Therefore, in the space of jianghu, there was no real strict difference between right and wrong. Loyalty to the code of brotherhood became the basic principle for the sustainable existence of this space. In contrast to it were official circles occupied by officials. The official culture particularly emphasized belief in orthodoxy. All unorthodoxy should be regarded as heresy and excluded from official circles. Of course, the most orthodox representative was the emperor, who was regarded or shaped as

From cultural to social transformation  41 the son of heaven, and was therefore naturally orthodox. Meanwhile, officials of different grades established the orthodox position of Confucianism by reference to the orthodox classics edited by the outstanding Confucian scholars and the imperial examinations of different grades. Therefore, another meaning of “scholar” was a person about to become an official. Even if a scholar did not become an official, as a xiucai or juren scholar able to read and write, he would be highly respected. The salaried officials formed a relatively self-enclosed circle of interest by respecting Confucius. This circle was also a space for cultural sharing, where the composition and appreciation of poems, calligraphy, and painting became symbols and media for communication. Moreover, the right to interpret written words was firmly in the hands of these people who stood out in imperial examinations and became officials. As a tool of communication, writing played the role of expressing meaning that people could communicate without being present together. This practice greatly broadened the network of officials proficient in writing, as anyone familiar with this kind of written language might join in the communication. In other words, official circles were a world built by words. One’s identity, status, and benefits might be promoted because of consummate mastery of this writing skill, for example, being able to write beautiful calligraphy, writing fluent and touching articles, or simply writing a memorial that attracted the attention of the emperor and obtained his reply. These were the basic skills that people in official circles or about to join the circles frequently had to hone.12 In this realm, the way to become an official was to show obedience to the orthodox authorities in attitude and etiquette and to master profound and varied word games. In the above analysis, it seems that we cannot locate a space called shehui to form a real correspondence with “society” in the sense of Western sociology. In addition to the “family” or “clan” cemented by kinship, there was either the jianghu, where people of all kinds mixed together, or the “official circles” occupied by officials or scholars and controlled by ideology with words as the core. Under the framework of such a traditional structure, the social transformation of Chinese culture might not be just the so-called transformation from an agricultural society to an industrial society and even an information society, but more importantly, how to reconstruct a new social order in these three spaces that are not independent from each other. Obviously, we cannot deny that we have industrialization and urbanization in the Western sense, but all kinds of incredible problems arise from our society one after another. All kinds of phenomena seem to bring the concept of “social progress” to the fore. But the biggest problems are “where the society is” and “where the society starts to build.” No consensus can be reached on these most fundamental problems. If the society is found not only at home but also in the official circles and in jianghu, then where should we exert our efforts in the social progress that we have invested huge amounts of human, monetary and material resources? After all, the strategy of “going among the people” proposed by some scholars is probably just to re-engage with those jianghu spaces that have been forgotten by the state. If so, can jianghu replace “society” in the true sense? This may be a question

42  From cultural to social transformation the school of social progress should address seriously. Without this thinking as a premise, the so-called social transformation would but be a blind transformation, knowing not where to go in the future. 2.2 Cultural traps and cultural consciousness Culture is a logic of action from which it seems no one can escape, because this kind of logic is unconscious for each specific person, that is, behavior occurs unconsciously and produces some effect. In this sense, culture is a reasonable explanation we seek for our own behavior. But at the same time, it has a certain deceptive effect, as it is not only an invisible trap for people living in it, but also a natural trap for other cultures that coexist with it. If not careful, people can fall into it, unable to pull themselves out. Especially for people living in this culture, this falling effect will really happen. Because this trap is set in a long-term unconscious historical process, we call it a cultural trap. Only when we look back and when actual contact between cultures occurs can we really see and feel the traps set by our respective cultures for ourselves and the many differences in their deceptive forms. For the sake of cultural comparison, we will identify some characteristics of Eastern and Western civilizations to examine such cultural traps. Only after we clearly understand these different forms of cultural traps can we really face the cultural transformation occurring in the present world and understand what it means. Although Western culture as a paragon has attracted the attention of many cultural comparatists and has been used as a benchmark to judge other cultures, the connotation of a culture is often so multifaceted that it cannot be really grasped by one comparison, and with the passage of time the perspective of this comparison will also change. Therefore, after we pay attention to the new dimension of transformation under cultural unconsciousness, we should also think about the forms of the trap of Western culture from the perspective of the genesis of culture and its unintentional consequences. Without this kind of review, the concept of our cultural transformation will remain relatively vague. In many historical narratives, Western civilization, which originated in the Aegean Sea of Greece, was premised on maritime trade. Meticulous preparation of personnel and materials and accurate calculation of the marine environment before sailing led to the extraordinary development of Western mathematics and navigation technologies. Consequently, cultural logic with a focus on analyzing things as a whole formed a long-term cultural development strategy with planning ability in the culture created by this civilization, while the development of laws and norms became the most important pillar to support the implementation of this cultural strategy. In real life, the character of this culture gradually emerged as careful calculation in the organization of actions, which should be implemented step by step according to a plan. At the same time, driven by the survival strategy under the pressure of the living environment, this culture was bound to take pragmatism and benefits for everyone as its ultimate value. Obviously, the crew members on a stormy ship bear one or several responsibilities. Those who are incompetent are obviously not needed on a ship seeking efficiency. They are either not qualified to

From cultural to social transformation  43 travel on board at all, or even if they are on board, they will eventually be abandoned by this ship. Those surviving are bound to be the contributors and beneficiaries gained from a voyage. In this sense, the purpose of organization between each crew member is to gain more benefits, but there is no need for a strict hierarchy between people as they are both creators and sharers of wealth. Such a living situation has created a cultural type in which all value estimates are based on practicality and results. The possible pitfalls of such a culture are that it reduces all the creation of civilization under this cultural concept to a practical and beneficial dimension, and even though its initial purpose does not emphasize practicality and interests but stresses a noble original intention, such as for the well-being of mankind, it will eventually return to the basic value dimension of practicality and interests. Western industrialization absolutely did not intend to destroy the environment on a large scale and in depth. Following the development of Western industrialization, many outside the West cheered on the industrialization model developed by the Western world, which proves how deep a trap such a culture set for itself and other cultures. However, after the industrialization in the West matured and those outside the West were engaged in industrialization, environmental protection and green development under the concept of post-industrial society became a new ideology, first in Western society and then spreading all over the globe. Today, which of these issues is not closely tied with modern Western civilization? The invention of a new concept, in turn, just like a sinner finding a grand-sounding excuse, makes all people believe that the past is not worth mentioning, but we can completely trust the present reason and it is worthwhile to make new efforts. In this sense, the shrewd sinner once again fools the stupid innocent, and the cultural trap once again exposes its hidden lethality. No one can deny that our development today has fallen into the trap set by Western culture again and again. No matter how high-minded the explanation, the implication is still the depth of the trap of Western culture, and in the end it will reflect the collective unconsciousness accumulated from the initial marine civilization, that is, the practical logic that thinks according to the preset steps with a stress on the completion of a voyage.13 Obviously, if we did not deliberately get rid of such a cultural design and its hidden cultural trap, cultural transformation worldwide would be meaningless, because sooner or later we would fall, as a “different culture,” into the preset trap of the Western culture as the other culture. For now at least, it seems that our own cultural development, in its subjective consciousness, has not really noticed the presence of this cultural trap. Our unconsciousness about this culture is related to the trap of our own culture. A culture that attaches great importance to the role of the land and develops itself through attachment to the land14 will put more emphasis on the construction of a holistic spatial order. The ideologies of past dynasties all stressed that jiangshan (territory) must be subject to stable institutional arrangement, so that social turmoil would not arise from chaos resulting from people’s unrest for lack of an attachment.15 Its higher requirement is that, in terms of man and the external environment, it does not specifically emphasize the conquest of the external environment, but stresses how to respect the environment and realize an ideal state of

44  From cultural to social transformation so-called harmony between man and nature. In this way, the natural operation of tian (heaven) would not exert a practical impact on the lives of people attached to the land. Such a culture is arguably also pragmatic in the final analysis, but this pragmatic culture is fundamentally different from the pursuit of action value under the practical rationality the West strives to build in formal logic to achieve the established goals step by step. This culture should be called an intuitive association culture, an imagination based on the relationship between natural beings. Based on the firmness of the land, this culture has given birth to fantasies about natural forces. Therefore, this kind of culture is endowed with not only the elements of practicality of growing food from the soil for survival, but also romanticism, mysteries, and the resort to poetry to express such romantic feelings. Such romanticism, mixed with worship of the land, has become even more fascinating.16 Therefore, this kind of culture is forced to reconcile these two completely different cultural elements, rendering it difficult to develop its own cultural logic by mathematical deduction. However, if we follow the track of its own development, the variability of the dual factors becomes its core feature, reflected in the abstract elements of the opposition between yin and yang.17 The Book of Changes is obviously a description and integration of the changing trajectories of the two opposing elements, rural and romantic, whereas The Analects, dwelling on the rural elements, is concerned with the disintegration of rural order caused by the collapse of propriety in the institutional sense. The Book of Poetry, edited by Confucius himself, represents a romanticism of this culture that close to aloofness from the world, with liberation from cultural constraints and freer expression of feelings, closer to the wanton indulgence of land and natural objects growing from it. Here, it can be imagined that the crops grown from the land are closer to the expression of a rural order, that is, constraints in time and space are required to produce sufficient food from the practical point of view, while the abundance of food is the foundation of the construction of social order.18 As a saying goes, “when the granaries are full, the people follow appropriate rules of conduct.” But the driving force for this culture to continue itself may lie in its constant romantic attachment to nature. Therefore, the trap this culture unconsciously sets for itself is also crystal clear, that is, it tends to have everyone find their own place in a closed domain unwilling to open up, relying on the ideological control techniques of time, place, and people: there are producers and consumers, exploiters and the exploited, creators and appreciators of culture. These adeptly constitute the social ties based on geography and blood, with the concept of “differentiated pattern” proposed by Fei Xiaotong being the most important social contact criterion in the culture.19 The concept of harmony between man and nature, which matured and became deeply rooted in the Han Dynasty (202 BCE.–220 CE), renders nature not only the object of people’s appreciation, but also their ultimate destination. Artificial or external forces are not as attractive as “nature.” In this culture, leisurely life and hard work constitute a kind of landscape painting with sharp contrast. However, people do not discern anything incomprehensible about this. The concept of culture is firmly in the hands of scholars through the records via

From cultural to social transformation  45 words and books. Ordinary people are just cultural practitioners, not consciously immersed in this culture, not feeling particularly uncomfortable with such an external culture. They have grown up gradually, nurtured in such a cultural atmosphere. Therefore, the cultural imprint cannot be washed away directly by so-called “brainwashing” in the modern sense, while the cultural trap is implicated in this closed concept, because once an opportunity arises, the door in this closed high wall will be opened, and the original set of cultural rules will lose its unique effect. A whole set of cultural reconstruction plans will flood the society that is opening up.20 The vibration will reshape the original cultural values of this society after disintegration, but its difficulty is incomparable to that of ordinary economic reconstruction because the trade game of transferring wealth can be played between two people; as long as both parties are satisfied, the transaction can be completed and profits and benefits can be realized. However, for the reconstruction of culture, it is necessary to reach some common understanding and values among all people in a society, to form an identity, and to make them feel that it is worth working hard for such understanding and identity, even if they may forfeit personal interests. In this sense, cultural reconstruction under cultural transformation must be an extremely long process of development instead of an overnight undertaking. Today’s China obviously stands at the beginning of such a long process of deep cultural transformation, gradually presenting some new features of its own culture. 2.3 The implications of the current cultural transformation in China For China, cultural transformation, first of all, means a holistic change in the concept of the world, that is, a change in the role of positioning itself as the backward in the process of catching up with the advanced, and a change from others influencing us to us influencing others. In this transformation, the concept of the world (tianxia), which used to exert an influence in Chinese culture, may be endowed with a new meaning. The core of this concept is an inclusive indifference not confined by narrow territorial and ethnic boundaries. This concept of tianxia (天下, all under heaven), which once played a role in eliminating differences, cannot reflect its true value connotation because it is constantly influenced by the concept of difference and the consciousness of classification of people. Perhaps with China’s ancient Great Wall of Qin and the earlier differentiation of yi (minorities) and xia (Han Nationality),21 the concept of tianxia was unable to play its role, hindered by artificial obstacles in the sense of historical time and regional space. Today, with the development of the Internet, the boundaries in the sense of time and space are gradually removed. Borderless interaction and the advent of the era of mass consumption compel us rethink the relationship between the concept of tianxia and the current world pattern. Without this kind of active thinking about the concept of tianxia, we may always be confined to the logic of globalization and actions defined by the Western world, unable to escape from them. If the rules of the game are not in the hands of the game makers, the game can only be relegated to a kind of manipulation because there is only one way to play it, and there will be no truly

46  From cultural to social transformation equal competition in which both parties have common consciousness of the rules. This may be the real value of revisiting the concept of tianxia today. Secondly, current cultural transformation in China also means a change in values. Concepts that once dominated social life have undergone major changes with the rise of some new materiality and changes in lifestyle. For example, with more and more people relying on the Internet and new digital media, we really need to re-examine what changes have taken place in people’s outlook and mentality during this process. Such new materiality is stimulating extensive communication and interaction between information and new knowledge, which makes it impossible for this era to return to a natural state of quietude. Therefore, we have to listen to all kinds of background noises caused by the information explosion. Encyclopedia Britannica, boasting a long history, stopped being printed in 2012, which indicates that the speed of printing failed to keep up with the growth of new knowledge. Newly printed books have become carriers of outdated knowledge. Updating web pages over time has become a new metaphor for knowledge production. At the same time, our perceptive system has undergone a series of adaptive changes, and it seems that we can maintain a state of perception, but not attention. There is too much information, which is constantly impinging on our visual nerves as symbols, but fails to enter the field of our rational thinking. The responses to these messages are all emotional and situational, and the competition may concern who has pressed a key on a computer keyboard first. As cultural carriers, books are digitized and dematerialized, with their own material forms gradually dissolved and replaced. When people gradually change from getting books from their own bookshelves or libraries to accessing books directly from computer hard disks or online digital libraries by typing on a keyboard, they may lose their original belief in the sanctity of the contents of books. In this sense, the contents of a book are just instant expressions and information that can be used for oneself, like a database. Any theme or point of view which seems to have some truth or is not tenable may soon be dismissed as useless by netizens who read a post. Traditional myth construction has also become a victim in the strategy of network deconstruction, and the authority of writing has come to an end in this sense, with only the remains of “bibliographies” occasionally cited as targets and eventually to be eliminated altogether. When people do not need these books, they do not have to move their bodies to put them back on bookshelves or return them to a library, but dump them straight into the virtual garbage bin specially set up in a computer, to make them disappear for the time being. In fact, this leads to a new way of externalizing our cultural expression. That is, we will arrange more cultural matters in cyberspace to be presented in the form of digital media, which transcend the original existence in the temporal and spatial significance to form a sense of presence despite being absent and a sense of time despite not being in the moment.22 Our memory no longer has to rely mostly on tangible external objects such as libraries, archives, and museums. Instead, the external manifestation of the material form of human collective memory is moved into virtual cyberspace and preserved in digital forms, which speeds up the retrieval of social memory. People no longer rely on their own memories, but on the retrieval

From cultural to social transformation  47 speed of memories stored on networks and the amount of information in databases. In such a situation, the pace of life will become extremely tense because these memories are constantly activated. Idle life becomes a part of this tense pace of life, no longer truly independent as strictly opposed to work, like head and tail of a coin. It is difficult to have a state of life that conforms to dialectical logic, like leisure at work or work in leisure. The distinction between leisure and work forms a circular causal relationship, that is, work is for leisure, while leisure is for better work. Thirdly, the current cultural transformation in China is also manifested in the change of subjective consciousness directly incurred by the change of social connection modes. This is a cultural transformation from the ties of social relations to an emphasis on the expression of individual values and rights. With the virtualization of personal contact with the outside world, which is constantly strengthened by virtual cyberspace, individuals can completely realize a kind of instant communication and contact without meeting each other face to face. The concept of acquaintance society in the sense of traditional community has accordingly been virtualized. The most important social function of this virtualization can be reflected in the two dimensions of time and space. In terms of the temporal dimension, the common consciousness of time has been strengthened in the virtual space. With the popularization of digital clocks accurate to the second, this consciousness has been implanted into the rhythmic arrangement of people’s daily life, while the external reference systems such as the sun, the moon, and stars have gradually withdrawn from people’s daily life and been replaced by abstract clock time. People living in this time reference system will be more interested in what happened to themselves and society at a certain point, but not really interested in arranging production and leisure activities according to external nature and society. Therefore, time becomes a commodity to be spent, from which one can benefit, instead of a sign for dividing the sacred and secular and for distinguishing various special stages in life. In the spatial dimension, this change is also obvious. Virtual space, reflected in personal lifestyle, is people’s invisible dependence on virtual networks, thus forming a socalled network society.23 People can use this convenience to lock themselves up, thus forming a relatively independent space. At the same time, people are also connected with each other in a bigger and wider world with the help of network channels. Chinese people’s inherent concept of tianxia (all under heaven) without boundaries and differentiation can be revived, which may far exceed the new concept of “globalization” in response to this worldwide change. In this sense, everyone becomes an online visitor observing the world with detachment, and everyone is also an online commentator who can express their own views freely. In this sense, cyberspace separates people from each other in the real world, while connecting individuals in another virtual space more widely. This is the dialectics of connection in today’s society in the world, that is, constantly transforming, changing, and differentiating in time and space, while directing, solidifying, and integrating in another new time and space. This is the core logic of today’s world cultural transformation, which is based on the invention, creation,

48  From cultural to social transformation and application of various media and new materials. Just like people’s dependence on natural materials in traditional times, when the natural ecology laid a foundation for them to settle down and live, today’s artificial ecology under the new material conditions provides the material basis for people to build ties with each other, which may be not only a real material existence, but also a virtual material existence. In short, the artificial ecology is arguably a material with real significance, exerting a lasting influence on people and their lives. 2.4 Cultural transformation and cultural variability Compared with the 1980s, when sociology in China was restored and rebuilt, Fei Xiaotong, as a leading figure in this process, paid more attention to the overall reflection and review of sociology and anthropology in the 1990s. He seemed to have made a critical review of all his existing works, and these criticisms and reflections are reflected in his masterpiece Exploring and Expanding the Traditional Limits of Sociology, published in 2003.24 These criticisms and reflections can be traced back to the concept of “cultural consciousness” proposed by Fei Xiaotong at the Second Advanced Seminar on Social and Cultural Anthropology held by the Peking University Institute of Sociology and Anthropology in 1997. This concept is based on Fei Xiaotong’s awareness of the advent of a worldwide cultural transformation, as evidenced by the following passage from his works: I think that cultural transformation is a common challenge facing mankind at present, because modern industrial civilization has embarked on the road of self-destruction, and we have exhausted the resources on the earth. Not only have forests been subject to damages hardly restorable, but also coals and oil providing energy are being depleted. A major cultural transformation is bound to take place in the post-industrial period. Whether human beings can continue to survive is a real problem.25 Although it was a response to the questions of two students in the seminar, this view was the result of Fei Xiaotong’s academic observation and thinking over a long time. This thought could be traced back to his translation of Malinowski’s A Scientific Theory of Culture. It was a deep reflection on what culture was while listening to Malinowski’s talk and translating the English work written by Malinowski word by word. This kind of reflection originally arose from Malinowski’s dissatisfaction with Western civilization, while Fei Xiaotong’s description of people’s life in his own country, which he inadvertently wrote down, was once regarded by this distant other as enviable. Dissatisfied with his own work, Malinowski summarized Western anthropology as “ancient, curious and unrealistic.” For Malinowski, anthropology is but “a romantic escape from our over-standardized culture,” which vividly revealed a kind of boredom with the culture in which he lives.26 Fei Xiaotong must have vaguely realized his own position from these self-critical expressions, and this position must be to seek a way out from the source of culture. In early 1997, Fei Xiaotong delivered a speech as a listener at a briefing on

From cultural to social transformation  49 key disciplines for the president of Peking University. In this speech, his concept of cultural transformation was clearly stated: Over 60-plus years of experience, I have deeply realized that we live in Chinese culture with a long history, but still lack systematic knowledge about Chinese culture itself. Our social life is still in the state of “following it” and has not yet reached the boundary of “understanding it.” At the same time, our life itself has entered a period of worldwide cultural transformation, which inevitably leads people into confusion. In fact, this is not only the case of Chinese people, but also the common crisis of the world facing the 21st century. People living in a multi-cultural world have not been able to find a common order of peaceful coexistence.27 Fei Xiaotong’s heartfelt words were an elderly scholar’s real expectation for his extraordinary interlocutor. Obviously, in this speech addressing the president of Peking University Fei Xiaotong, on the one hand, urgently hoped that this university could earnestly assume the responsibility of pioneering a new academic atmosphere in this new era of cultural transformation, on the other hand, warned everyone more urgently that “a worldwide cultural transformation” was inevitable today, which could be deemed as taking place under a kind of coercion from the great changes in the world lifestyle brought by the industrialized civilization in the West and the global consequences from such changes. In this speech, Fei Xiaotong delivered a comprehensive introduction to the concept of cultural transformation while clarifying that this transformation was truly of worldwide significance. As Fei Xiaotong reiterated in his later years, the cultural transformation occurred worldwide, caused by the dilemma of the relationship between man and nature in Western civilization and the inability to tackle it. This should not be regarded as alarmist talk. The whole 20th century and the previous centuries were dominated by Western ideas and material civilization, resulting in the excessive spread of “culture marked by time or money” in Europe.28 At the same time, deep-rooted Western colonialism spread such a culture and its value to the whole world. When the whole world becomes Westerners’ target for conquering, the native cultures of the world will gradually disappear because of this infiltration. Observed from a distance, these “places” have either been completely reduced to colonies of the Western world or become production bases of global commodities, polluted by Western industrialization. Among the most basic reasons for this colonization and pollution are ideological subservience and recognition and acceptance at the lowest level. In this process of submission and acceptance, the awareness of one’s own culture is lost; cultural values that can be self-controlled and created are constantly subverted. One’s own culture has actually been constructed by the other in the temporal distance created by Western social sciences and dismembered into a performance of an alien culture. Behind the vivid local actors are the lines prepared by Western writers, which are only read out loudly through the mouths of excellent local actors.

50  From cultural to social transformation This situation, just the opposite of the cultural consciousness described by Fei Xiaotong, is similar to a puppet show of a culture without subjective consciousness. The emergence of a network society that virtually connects everyone will increasingly affect people’s thoughts and life. In the information age, where everyone can have his or her own voice heard with the help of the virtual but absolutely real world, there is obviously an irresistible trend to strengthen subjective consciousness. Although inhumane colonial rule has been abolished in most parts of the world, the anti-colonial movement and colonial mentality in the world outside the West seem to be contradictory but still coexist. Although today’s Western scholars have clearly realized that culture is not as simple as they originally thought, they have defined culture as a kind of capital while rescuing it from the simplified dimensions of religion and nation, in the hope of realizing global cultural interaction with the help of such an adventure of interaction between different cultural capitals.29 But in my opinion, the original intent of this issue is still the wishful thinking of Western scholars, and the awareness of local people seems to be completely vague, or replaced by numerous intermediaries in the process. In this sense, the core of the anti-colonial worldwide cultural transformation is to spare no effort to recall, copy, and re-invent the culture that one has forgotten. In recent years, the vigorous application of intangible cultural heritage among the people and also from modern nation-states has more or less explained this top-down effort,30 which also shows that the concept of “cultural consciousness” under the pretext of collective memory and writing of culture has entered the world outside the West and has been realized in the overall framework of a new round of national construction. Today, to review Fei Xiaotong’s concept of cultural consciousness, it is necessary for us to understand culture from the perspective of cultural variability. Therefore, culture does not just consist of static material heritages that remain in museums, but is closely related to everyone; consequently, its changes are closely related to people’s needs and desires. One of the undeniable facts is that we are in a world of diverse human needs and desires, which are closely related to the changes in communication media on which our lives depend. It would obviously be impossible for us to conceive the modern world outside such needs and desires. Compared with the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and even the Iron Age, which once dominated people’s lives, today we live in the age of network, which can connect all people in the world, regardless of race, color, and culture. The distinction between culture and matter has become more and more blurred because of the popularity of the Internet. The dialectic between the virtual and the real is not only a concern of classical philosophers, but is also common in people’s lives. State power has also shifted from controlling material resources to controlling cyberspace with virtuality, which is also a change in the form of political governance. In this sense, the network has not only the function of communication, but also the function of politics. In other words, if we control the Internet today, we actually control society, and then control the people in that society. Therefore, we cannot understand culture itself outside the network. This also constitutes an important foundation for cultural transformation in the world today.

From cultural to social transformation  51 On the one hand, with the existence of the Internet, people are becoming less sensitive to cultural differences, and different cultures, as representations that can be presented through the Internet, can be shared by people with different cultural backgrounds beyond the limitations of time and space. At the same time, the strangeness of cultures is gradually disappearing, and people can integrate through reciprocity between cultures, thus creating some new cultures. Cultural reorganization in the sense of cyberspace brings about the reconstruction of meaning in real life, which is realized through people’s virtual roaming in the network and real travel in reality. The cultural expression of the network is mutually constructed because of the material presentation of tourism culture, which also highlights the dialectical relationship between people and the culture existing in the real society, that is, the virtual imitation of cultural truth and the real expression of virtual culture. This dialectical relationship constitutes a core feature of today’s cultural transformation. At the same time, this dialectical relationship once again reflects the inherent variability rather than static characteristics of culture itself. 2.5 Cultural consciousness, Chinese consciousness, and cultural transformation The construction of Chinese consciousness guided by the concept of cultural consciousness has now become a driving force for the cultural transformation in China. Fei Xiaotong proposed the concept of “cultural consciousness” at the end of the 20th century, a concept that must have been put forward in response to the changes of the times, because these changes made it impossible for cultures outside the Western world to continue to survive in their traditional ways. The reduction of forest area, the occupation of farmland by industrialization projects, and the degradation, continuous fragmentation, and monopoly of large areas of grassland made it very difficult for hunting, farming, and nomadic lifestyles to continue. At this time, the practical and urgent question of “giving priority to people or culture” was raised again, compelling anthropologists to address it. At this point, Fei Xiaotong continued his teacher Malinowski’s view in A Scientific Theory of Culture, which emphasized that culture existed for human needs,31 therefore Fei responded by saying that people should be prioritized over culture. However, Fei did not ignore the value of culture, stressing that we should attach importance to culture at a higher level. This higher-level cultural emphasis is rooted in the awareness of one’s own culture, and on this basis a global vision of culture is developed, which is founded on the “refinement of good things” of local culture.32 The refinement of this culture is real cultural consciousness. Moreover, in the author’s view, this will be a change of cultural concept based on the construction of cultural subjectivity, that is, a change from the spread of culture from high to low, and even the conquest and destruction of lower cultures by higher cultures, to real communication among different cultures on an equal footing. This situation is unimaginable in the era of domination by the existing white culture and English culture, and in the era of hegemony of Western discourse in the sense of Orientalism. Today, with cultural transformation in the sense of time and space all

52  From cultural to social transformation over the world, collective cultural consciousness based on individual consciousness will inevitably be constantly improved, whether this transformation is proactive or passive. Obviously, while rising rapidly in the world, China is no longer a dispensable variable in the world economic landscape.33 Correspondingly, Chinese culture has become one of the most important soft powers enabling the world to understand China, influencing how those outside China understand China and its people. In contrast to the cultural situation of this world and its reference patterns, we have little idea about our own culture even though we are situated in it. If great changes have taken place in China’s society in the past century, the most important change has been to ignore, misinterpret, and even remove the element of culture, especially those cultural representations that have remained in our lives after thousands of years of inheritance, including Chinese characters, symbols, and a whole set of cultural practices. After the enlightenment of the new culture at the beginning of the 20th century, some of these heritages eventually disappeared in our daily life. The cultural reconstruction on the cultural ruins did not start until many years after this disappearance. It is not until today that we have started to gradually launch cultural reconstruction in terms of cultural consciousness. The cultural logic therein is paradoxical: the culture we once had weighed us down so heavily that we suddenly felt a nameless burden and threw it away as if it was a worn-out shoe. When we went forward after discarding the cultural burden, we soon discovered that we were so weak that the absence of our cultural burden gave rise to a heaviness of body and mind. Perhaps cultural consciousness is precisely in such a situation of cultural paradox: in our cultural forgetting, we are gradually recovering our cultural memory. But culture by its nature is very strange. Ordinary people immersed in culture share a silent culture whereby they do not know what culture is. When we ask them to describe their culture, they seem to be unable to really express what it is until we as outsiders forcefully attach a cultural concept to their expression. Because they eat, it seems as if their culture is on the tip of their tongue; because they live, it seems as if their culture is embodied in buildings; because they slash and burn, it seems as if their culture is part of nature. Defining culture in so many dimensions makes the definition of culture vague and untenable. What is culture, after all? Faced with such a simple question, people are suddenly at a loss. It seems that only those outside a certain culture can define it clearly. But how much real experience do they have of that culture? Even if they do have some experience, how can this experience be expressed and defined by language alone? This irreconcilable cultural definition does not give culture a better environment, but because of such a definition, more and more replicas and knockoffs that look like a certain culture emerge one after another. The large-scale production of modern industries and the so-called new cultural products left behind by this production are either discarded in garbage bins like kitchen waste, or turned into waste that cannot be treated and piled up together, labeled as outdated, and no longer noted. Of course, more often than not, culture is regarded like a box of fast food for lunch after the rise of the so-called concept of cultural autonomy, merely satisfying

From cultural to social transformation  53 hunger for a while without leaving any aftertaste or reverie. The life of an ascetic monk arouses pity among onlookers. But who can really appreciate the exclusive happiness in the heart of an ascetic monk except for himself? In this era of collective carnival, in the secularized society sprawling from Western consumer society,34 culture has become a consumer product, no longer a necessity in people’s lives. In Western society, capital has entered the cultural field, therefore the living culture has been moved into large and small museums. Should we follow suit? Even if we can follow this practice, what can we put in an empty museum built at huge cost? In this regard, we actually lack real self-knowledge. As for the deep meaning of Chinese culture and the meaning of the future, few people spend time exploring it. Today, it is obviously necessary to have a more ambitious plan to explore, guided by Chinese ideology, the elements of Chinese culture, and its expression of diversified changes in all aspects. Without the knowledge of this reserve, our cultural creation, performance, and display can only be ostentatious shows. Therefore, the essence of cultural consciousness is a vying of cultural comparison, that is, an understanding of one’s own cultural characteristics formed on the basis comparison of cultural values. And this is precisely the starting point of anthropologists’ research. Only in this comparison can we identify the characteristics of their respective cultural development in the existing cultural types. These characteristics should be the basic indicators for the continuation of this culture. In his later years, Fei Xiaotong compared the differences between Eastern and Western cultures. He generalized Western culture from the characteristic of the opposition between nature and culture, that is, the culture featuring the separation of nature and man, as in obvious contrast with our traditional culture celebrating the unity of nature and man.35 I remember when I visited New Asia College of the Chinese University of Hong Kong in December 2011, I saw a building on the top of the mountain near the sea which was specially designed to reflect the concept of harmony between man and nature in Chinese culture highly respected by Mr. Qian Mu, founder of the college. That building so adeptly integrates the blue sky, the sea, and the Earth through a pool of clear water that people standing there cannot really feel the difference between heaven and Earth, but can only appreciate the coexistence and unity among heaven, Earth, and people. However, according to a professor at the university who accompanied me, the designer, originally a teacher in the university’s Department of Architecture, could not escape the fate of being dismissed in the end despite his brilliant design, probably because his thoughts could not be accommodated in the so-called strict scientific evaluation standard system of the university. Science emphasizes the so-called spirit of man’s exploration of nature, so man and nature are shaped as opposites, incompatible and incommunicable. This is also the basis of the later structuralist anthropology, that is, man-made things are regarded as cultural and orderly, while nature is regarded as the opposite of culture and as a disorderly world to be transformed.36 American anthropology’s emphasis on the concept of culture is almost based on this sense. This tendency is more obvious especially in the understanding of kinship following structuralism.37 In the thinking

54  From cultural to social transformation of American anthropologists, every part of society should be cultural, while the rest belongs to nature as opposed to the culture in which people live. In this vein, it is natural for people to explore nature relentlessly, which inspires a modern transformed world. However, can the Earth where human beings live together support such a reckless transformation? Global climate change, financial crises, and wars of various scales around the world attempting to stop violence with violence have all demonstrated that this unrestricted and fearless exploration of nature is obviously unsustainable. The trap of Orientalism in the West clearly pointed out by Edward Said is a typical illustration of objectifying and naturalizing different cultures at the cultural level; while the so-called upside-down Orientalism transplants this natural objectified thinking to the world outside the West.38 What ensues is not only the loss of cultural subjectivity in the world outside the West, but more importantly, the fact that a set of cultural concepts that used to play a role cannot find their fitting position in the real scene. With our full acceptance of the concept of the separation of nature and man in Western culture, the concept of self has shrunk into a self surrounded and served by society in the Westernized sense. The original “self-restraint” to “restore social norms” is gone. In fact, cultural transformation is reinventing the subjectivity of a culture in this sense, and reinterpreting the inherent cultural value retained in one’s own culture in the dimension of value revaluation. 2.6 Media, new materiality, and cultural creativity The cultural and creative industry, as a new term, has become especially popular since the start of the 21st century. Obviously, it is vitally linked to the current cultural transformation of Chinese society, and this correlation is closely related to the virtualization of the material media as vehicles of culture. Therefore, culture is no longer solidified and unchangeable, nor is it only changeable by cultural revolution. Prior to this, culture was firmly in the hands of so-called literati. In the traditional society of China, culture was naturally in the hands of Confucian intellectuals. At least, the core skills for expressing culture were firmly in the hands of elite scholar-officials, while the culture of the folk was more about modifying and alienating this exquisite culture regarded as the supreme.39 The New Culture Movement in China in 1919 was a true cultural revolution, which not only thoroughly questioned traditional Chinese culture and heritage, but also replaced the original classical Chinese writing with so-called vernacular writing, thus popularizing cultural expression skills once monopolized by the elite. With the introduction of the Western scientific spirit, the original knowledge system no longer retained its soil for free growth, but more importantly, the scientific concept based on skepticism rendered classic doctrines things of the past not worth mentioning that should be abolished. The so-called authority had to be supplemented with the word “new” before it could be regarded as a credible source of knowledge, and there would always be something newer than the new. Under this banner, some people assiduously sought revolutionary ideas, while others were

From cultural to social transformation  55 engrossed in things unconventional and unorthodox. The concept of culture by then was no longer the inheritance of a lifestyle, but more closely linked to the innovation of knowledge. Nowadays, the development of new media technology has further increased people’s possibilities of constantly modifying cultural content, and as a result, today people naturally think that culture is to be constantly renovated and changed. Obviously, the concept of cultural and creative industries has gained the legitimacy of its discourse against the backdrop of such epistemology. In this sense, culture is no longer the exclusive domain of a few people, but the competition among popular cultures oriented to public tastes, aiming not to elevate culture, but to make more people satisfied with various similar marketing practices. In this sense, as some conventional scholars worry, culture is not progressive, but may be retrogressive,40 a concern which looks reasonable in the light of today’s situation. Meanwhile, the current popularity of new media has brought about a fundamental change in the meaning of time and space in the original cultural order. A retrospective view of modern culture will find that its most prominent aspect lies in the establishment of various antagonistic relations, very similar to the expression of structuralism in today’s culture. Among them, the most crucial and wellknown point is to emphasize the opposition between man and nature. Due to such an opposition, man is no longer a part of nature, but a hero to discover, use, and even conquer nature. In addition, there are conceptual opposites between tradition and modernity, between backwardness and advancement, between work and leisure, between public and private, and between state and society. Since Hobbes’ work Leviathan, these opposites have been clearly expressed, based on a kind of legitimacy through demonstration. The world thereafter, with no exception, has been constantly building its own social and cultural systems based on this antagonistic relationship structure with the global spread of powerful Western discourses. The mass media growing up amidst these discourses is just an important part of this construction, and they have been constantly changing our understanding of the world through words and images, shaping our modern way of life. The most obvious trend is that our time and space are divided, based on which the public and private domains have their own growth processes. The media of mass communication are controlled by the government or capital-supported public institutions. These public products, considered to reflect public opinions, are constantly spreading in society to gradually form the boundary between public and private. These traditional media can not only create the meaning of private life, but also convey the value of public life and influence everyone in every family. The prime-time program arrangement formed through public opinion surveys is also affecting the arrangements of time and space that were originally people’s privacy. Books, newspapers, magazines, and television have become channels for people to enjoy themselves in private family space after work. However, with the constant emergence of Internet-based new media and the acceleration of their upgrading, the opposition between public and private in modern society is gradually disappearing. People can receive and view information in any space, whether private or public, through various electronic networks, while sending

56  From cultural to social transformation messages to targets of private relationships or public media at the same time. This undoubtedly reflects a new change of the times, that is, the disappearance of a clear opposition of social space and time. The public and the private sphere elaborated by the discourse of modernity are also facing the situation of falling apart because of this reality. Therefore, working time can be completely transformed into a kind of leisure time, and the working environment can be suddenly turned into a space in a sense similar to the family atmosphere because of the existence of the network. The traditional division of time and space has become a physical presence, but does not constitute an element of people’s concern, as they may pay no attention to it. In the transformation of this relationship, virtual existence is gradually infiltrating into people’s real-life space. People may suddenly come to the realization that they seem to be more familiar with the virtual world and feel more real there, but feel strange, at a loss, and unable to find their place in the real world. In theory, information, news, and even private concerns may no longer need to be examined and monitored by the state and public institutions, but can be directly spread to the Internet by individuals. In this so-called “social e-commerce” background, all the differences and opposites have become some insignificant network news, with the difference being nothing more than the difference between today and tomorrow, between this time and that time. Everyone seems to have found a true feeling of being oneself. People can find what they really want to read and watch in any place and at any time, instead of relying on newspapers or televisions to arrange reading and watching content in a specific time and space. Everything is “placed” on the Internet, not in books and periodicals or television. The decline of paper media and television is obviously a general trend in the development of the modern media world, and with the emergence and maturity of new media, this trend will become unstoppable. As a result, Hobbes’ nightmare may reappear. Although it is unlikely that chaos will arise in which everyone does things in their own way, it cannot be denied that people can make their ideas spread socially with the help of new media as they wish. One person’s newspaper, one person’s publishing house, and one person’s TV station are completely feasible in theory in today’s so-called era of new media. With this transformation, social distinction no longer depends on the distinction between the state and society, nor does it depend on all kinds of opposites and differences that play a role in the modern era. People seek constantly changing, continuous moments to transform themselves into the public sphere, and the public sphere into their own private sphere. Such a cultural transformation, first of all, is reflected in the change of attitude toward the natural world, that is, from people’s fearless exploration and utilization to thinking about the value and significance of human existence on this planet with awe of nature, and reaching a new basic consensus on some basic concepts. Without this guarantee, cultural transformation will be empty and meaningless. In this sense, culture undoubtedly exists to serve people’s needs. With the changes in people’s needs, cultural transformation will be inevitable, and any cultural retrogression will hold no practical significance.

From cultural to social transformation  57 Meanwhile, cultural transformation is bound to work on people’s minds, in terms of their state of mind. When self-awareness becomes a value measure for more and more people to express themselves, how to communicate between minds and how to form empathy among different people, like social ecology, constitute a state of mind, which is about how a person perceives the world, and at the same time, about how different ways of perception converge to form a perception of the existence of the external world. What is addressed here is still the basic problem of anthropology, that is, the problem of “one” and “many,” that is, mankind as a whole, will be more and more aware of the similarity between themselves and others and of the consistency of human nature. Given this premise, cultural convergence will inevitably become a trend that no force can totally resist. But the opposite trend of diversification is similarly salient. With the entry of more and more knowledge into people’s daily life, the availability of life choices makes a diversified life an important basis for people to judge the rationality and value of their own and others’ actions, so that a person does not have to follow stiff rules to live a life that most other people live, which, first of all, requires a radical change in the concept of life values. In this sense, returning to anthropology about humans per se may be the path for mankind to take in the future. Notes 1 Li Peilin. Introduction: Sociology and Chinese Experience, in Li Peilin, Li Qiang, and Ma Rong, Eds., Sociology and Chinese Society. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2008: 17–20. 2 Fei Xiaotong. On Anthropology and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2004. 3 Lu Xueyi. On Social Construction. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2012: 11–27. 4 Zhao Xudong and Zhao Lun. Watch Out for “Subaltern Injustice”: On the Petition System. Exploration and Free Views, 2021 (3): 26–31. 5 Sun Liping. Social Transformation: A New Topic of Development Sociology. Sociological Studies, 2005 (1): 1–24. 6 Li Peilin. Emergence of Chinese Sociology, in Li Peilin, Li Qiang, and Ma Rong, Eds., Sociology and Chinese Society. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2008: 29–30. 7 社会 in Chinese, when the two characters are used together, initially probably referred to temple fairs at the village level, because in South China, village temples are also called 社, and annual gatherings of such temples are also called shehui (社会). Such a record can be found in Local History of Yanzhou Fu, compiled during the Wanli era of the Ming dynasty: “Changgang Temple: 25 li northwest of the county seat, where Chen Hou was worshiped as god. Local people were very careful about offering sacrifices. At the Shangyuan Festival and the anniversary of the god, there would be shehui gatherings (revised by Lv Changqi and compiled by Yu Bingran. Local History of Yanzhou Fu. Beijing: Bibliography Publishing House, 1991: 116). The punctuation and italics were added by the author. 8 Qiao Jian. People in Jianghu: A Brief Discussion on the Function of the Concept of Competition Ground in the Study of Chinese Stratagem Behaviors, in Qiao Jian and Pan Naigu, Eds., Chinese Concepts and Behaviors: Proceedings of the Fourth International Symposium on Modernization and Chinese Culture. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House.

58  From cultural to social transformation 9 Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Shanghai: Observation Press, 1948: 23–25. 10 Huang Guangguo. Chinese Games of Power. Taipei: Chuliu Book Company, 1988: 14–15. 11 Ogata Isamu. “Jia” and Guojia in Ancient China, trans. Zhang Hequan. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 2010: 182–188. 12 In fact, the concept of taking a scholar to be an official with elegant calligraphy was also deeply rooted in civil society. While many people encouraged their children to study hard, the quality of handwriting was an extremely important concern, and elegance was the first principle. The father of Xia Ji’an, a writer in the Republic of China, was a genuine Shanghai businessman, who praised his son’s recent handwriting for its elegance and beauty in his letters to his family, and said that his son was thus likely to be appreciated by the officials of the current dynasty and enter an official career in future. Xia’s father said: “What pleases me most is that your calligraphy is becoming more and more elegant and upright. Your writing should stand upright and then you are to achieve great success in the future …. When your calligraphical skills become consummate, you will definitely win the favor of the nobles in the future, and maybe you will have a high official position someday. I wish you keep working hard” (Xia Ji’an. Diary of Xia Ji’an. Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press, 1998: 15). 13 Masao Miyoshi’s analysis of the operation of global transnational capital in the postcolonial era unequivocally tells us the existence of this deep cultural trap. Eighty-five percent of the world’s land was once ruled by Western colonists, and now colonialism has been replaced by new post-colonial pluralism. However, as one of the two sides of Western rule, post-colonialism has not instituted any change in the dominant structure of the formerly colonized land. Masao Miyoshi’s observation suffices to prove that this structure has not changed: “Decolonization neither effected emancipation and equality nor provided new wealth or peace. Instead, suffering and misery continued nearly everywhere in an altered form, at the hands of different agencies. Old compradors took over, and it was far from rare that they went on to protect their old masters’ interest in exchange for compensation” (Masao Miyoshi. A World without Borders? From Colonialism to Transnationalism and the Decline of the Nation-State, in Wang Hui and Chen Yangu, Eds., Culture and Publicity. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1998: 486). 14 The ancient word 社 refers to an ancient sacrifice associated with land. At least since the pre-Qin period, 社has had a very close cultural connection with land and agriculture (Wei Jianzhen. A Study of Temple Sacrifice to the God of Land in Pre-Qin Dynasty. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2008: 269). 15 Philip Alden Kuhn studied an epidemic of social panic in the heyday of Emperor Qianlong’s reign in the Qing dynasty. Obviously, no stable social order came after the affluence of life. The prosperity of society and the flow of population made people develop their imagination in the dimension of lasciviousness (Philip Alden Kuhn. Soulstealers: The Chinese Sorcery Scare of 1768, trans. Chen Jian and Liu Chang. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2012: 284–288). 16 Chinese ’people’s attachment to the land is best expressed in “Sheji” of Baihutong, “People can’t stand without land, nor can they eat without grain.” At the same time, from a very early age, Zhou Li, which was written about the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, mentioned the worship of the god of land, which was called the sacrifice of sheji, and was specially managed by a major official called Zongbo. Sacrificing to the god of land had to be very cheerful and grand, with special people beating drums and skilled dancers dancing all kinds of dances. The Book of Poetry records a large number of scenes of this kind of song and dance sacrifice (Wu Ze. A New Textual Research on Siming of Zhou Li: Reading Wang Guowei’s Miscellaneous Notes on East Mountain, in Zhu Dongrun, Li Junmin, and Luo Zhufeng, Eds., Series on Chinese Literature and History: The First Series. Shanghai: Shanghai Ancient Books Publishing House, 1985: 5).

From cultural to social transformation  59 17 Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Primitive Classification, trans. Rodney Needham. London: Cohen & West, 1963. 18 Claude Lévi-Strauss. The Elementary Structures of Kinship, Ed. Rodney Needham, trans. James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1969: 35. 19 Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Shanghai: Observation Press, 1948: 22–30. 20 Zhao Xudong. Circular Development of Closure and Openness: A Theoretical Framework for Understanding Rural China and Its Transformation. Open Times, 2011 (12): 99–112. 21 Owen Lattimore understood the spatial significance of the Great Wall more from the ecological differences between nomadic and farming modes of production, and clearly differentiated the two modes of production inside and outside the Great Wall, which influenced the formation of Chinese consciousness (Owen Lattimore. Inner Asian Frontiers of China, trans. Tang Xiaofeng. Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2005: 15–18). 22 Xin Xiaolei. New Media Era: What Is Affecting Content Creation. China Media Weekly, China Book Business Report, April 6, 2012: 15. 23 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, trans. Xia Zhujiu, Wang Zhihong, et al. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2003: 567–578. 24 David Parkin. Is There a New Materiality in Contemporary Anthropology in Britain?, in Zhao Xudong, trans., 21st Century: Cultural Consciousness and Intercultural Dialogue. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2001: 257–272. 25 Fei Xiaotong. On Expanding the Traditional Boundaries of Sociology. Journal of Peking University, 2003 (3): 16. 26 Fei Xiaotong. Reflection, Dialogue and Cultural Consciousness, in Complete Works of Fei Xiaotong, Vol. 16. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House, 2009: 16. 27 Fei Xiaotong. Reflection, Pioneering a New Academic Workstyle, in Complete Works of Fei Xiaotong, Vol. 16. Hohhot: Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House, 2009: 4. Emphasis added. 28 Li Bogeng. A History of European Culture, Vol. II, trans. Zhao Fusan. Hong Kong: Ming Pao Press, 2003: 310–317. 29 Joseph E. Daugherty. Cultural Capital for Global Adventure, in Xue Xiaoyuan and Cao Rongxiang, Eds., Globalization and Cultural Capital. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2005: 127–145. 30 Gao Bingzhong. Intangible Cultural Heritage: The Formation of an Integrated Academic Concept, in Gao Bingzhong, Ed., The Culture and Politics of Daily Life: Witnessing the Growth of Citizenship. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2012: 193–200. 31 Fei Xiaotong. Reflection, Dialogue and Cultural Consciousness, in Fei Xiaotong, Ed., On Anthropology and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2004: 183. 32 Fei Xiaotong. Some Confession on “Cultural Consciousness”, in Fei Xiaotong, Ed., On Anthropology and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2004: 197. 33 Konrad Seitz. China: Eine Weltmacht kehrt zurück, trans. Xu Wenmin and Li Kaning. Beijing: International Cultural Publishing Group, 2007: 296–304. 34 Charles Taylor. A Secular Age. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007: 45. 35 Fei Xiaotong. Man-Nature Relationship in Cultural Theory Revisited, in Fei Xiaotong, Ed., On Anthropology and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2004: 225–234. 36 David M. Schneider. American Kinship: A Cultural Account. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968: 118.

60  From cultural to social transformation 37 Zhao Xudong. Expression of Culture: Perspective of Anthropology. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2009: 48. 38 Zhao Xudong. On the Edge of the Indigenous and Foreign Lands: Self, Culture and the Other in Anthropological Researches. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011: 83–107. 39 Stephan Feuchtwang. Popular Religion in China: The Imperial Metaphor, trans. Zhao Xudong. Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2008: 71–104. 40 Xia Zhiqing. People’s Literature. Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press, 1998: 193.

3

Escape from separation technology

With the changes in the power control mode, a fundamental change is also occurring in the cultural mode, which means the emergence of a transformational anthropology related to various cultures. This is a kind of cultural endogenous anthropology with cultural self-examination as the standard of judgment, based on an in-depth investigation of the gradual recovery and reconstruction of cultures cut off by modern Western rationality. The change of culture calls for people to realize that man is no longer a creation from the mode of functional rational reproduction, but a dynamic self-generating mechanism, which leaves sufficient space for passion and combines it perfectly with rationality. That is to bid farewell to simplistic reflection, face up to diverse cultural expressions, and reject groundless criticism and ridicule while appreciating and cultivating cultural sentiment. Culture is the glue that promotes social cohesion. Lack of change of culture can only lead to the “fossilization” of culture itself. As the ling (pneuma) of society, culture is mostly hidden. Culture would hardly become culture if it did not take this form. 3.1 The pneuma of society and cultural transformation The world is quietly undergoing a tremendous change, which is bound to be a morphological change, and therefore can be called a transformation. This kind of transformation grows stronger with the surge of each wave. First of all, it deeply affects our thinking and relevant actions on our spiritual level. This kind of influence gradually spreads from economy to politics, from politics to society, from society to culture, and all aspects of our lives will undergo some fundamental changes. Such transformation also forces us to make conscious choices about extremely urgent changes in social reality. Moreover, the kind of life fixed by choices may itself become the beginning of the next round of new choices, thus rendering daily life a state of uncertainty.1 As a result, the sense of presence and certainty of space-time location have disappeared, as people’s communication in different spaces at the same time has become possible and inevitable with the development of electronic communication technology. Similarly, exhibitions in the same space about different times have become a way for us to examine the past and history today. In fact, we have inadvertently fixed our lives in a museum, always expecting that the present will be more advanced than the past, and the future more advanced than the present. The DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-4

62  Escape from separation technology track of its genealogy is a metaphor for a museum’s genealogy. At the same time, this is also a value that we have fixed through certain choices today, which has changed the risk of volatility and uncertainty has replaced the uniqueness and certainty of our spatio-temporal. Meanwhile, the sites of the anthropologist’s fieldwork, which used to be fixed at specific times and spaces, have changed into constantly changing field sites in this sense, which may be spread over many places, on the Internet, in history, or in the virtual overseas world. In short, such sites are not fixed points of specific times and spaces. This forces us not only to make an extremely static description like anthropologists before us, but also to note a series of dynamic changes and their trends before this static state, and endeavor to explore the cultural power that makes people and things act this way. As anthropologists, we thus become not only historians, but also sociologists, and more than these roles, thoughtful philosophers, and we must also be artists with keen sensitivity. Facing today’s volatile world, we naturally become people with multiple faces. Today, as people have begun to take culture as marking the overall characteristics of this era, we will gradually find that the true meaning of culture may be lost in our constant definition and misappropriation of culture. But this does not mean that we modern people have an inevitable neglect or forgetfulness of culture. Conversely, it is precisely because we overemphasize culture per se and constantly search for the culture that we think has been “lost” and make it a part of our consciousness that we have arrived at an inappropriate understanding of culture. On many occasions, we may not know that culture is actually a fluid thing that cannot be defined clearly. If you like, you can completely understand a culture as you understand the concept of ling (灵, pneuma),2 that is, the dynamics of culture itself cannot really be accurately captured by people, and once captured, it will suddenly lose its dynamic like a fish out of water, and ling is equivalent to the “unfathomable” or the “ineffable” in this sense. At the same time, this kind of ling can also be regarded as a kind of social spirit, which will show its dynamism in a society composed of people. In fact, whether ling exists or not does not matter in a society without people or among people without society. In this sense, ling serves the society composed of people. Without society, all our understanding of culture would be actually empty and abstract, and it would be impossible to have a proper atmosphere for the survival of culture as ling. Although many anthropologists in the West, like L. A. White, are more willing to equate culture with a kind of spiritual science, it is obviously a kind of definition of the mind with an inclination toward excessive functionalism or mechanism. As White has claimed: Mind is minding, the reacting of an organism as a whole, as a coherent unit (as distinguished from the reacting of parts of the organism with reference to other parts). Mind is a function of the body. The “organ” of the mind is the entire organism functioning as a unit. Mind is to body as cutting is to a knife.3

Escape from separation technology  63 This tendency to view culture from the perspective of functionalism will naturally solidify the spirit into an existence like a thing, and examine culture from the mechanism of the thing itself, resulting in an unexpected consequence, which is to restore spiritual things to existence as materials. Hence, culture was defined by White from the dimension of things themselves, that is, “the traditional customs, institutions, tools, philosophies, languages, etc., which we call, collectively, culture.”4 Later, White added: “Cultural phenomena are super-, or supra-, psychological determinants of human behavior.”5 The science of culture, which tries to draw mental activities closer to materials, and then to the object of natural science, finds itself falling into a trap of materialism. Therefore, it cannot really reflect the independent value of culture, but leads us to find the meaning of culture itself from the material point of view, and in turn, artificially arrange a cultural meaning from the composition of the material itself. Not only does culture determine our behavior, as White has argued, but also behavior in turn hinders the generation of cultural significance, like the mechanical ties between things. However, culture is such a flexible concept that it cannot be restrained by machinery. It would not be a stretch to say that it is mental. However, if we return to the Chinese context, we will find that it should be translated as ling rather than anything else. In the context of the Chinese language, the meaning of the character ling (灵) is closely linked with a kind of variability and the effect produced by it. Therefore, it must play the role of a so-called “intermediary” or “agency” in Western social theory. In Ci Hai, an authoritative dictionary, the meanings of the character 灵 are mostly related to the role of an intermediary.6 For example, at first, in the Chu society during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, ling was used to refer specifically to a witch who could “dance to the gods.” For example, in “East Emperor Taiyi” of “Nine Songs of Chu,” “ling (witch) dances in beautiful clothes, and the hall is full of fragrance.” Ling is also used to refer specifically to the appearance of a “god.” For example, in “Lady Xiang” of “Nine Songs of Chu,” “so many lings come that they look like clouds”; in “Rhapsody on God of Luo,” “then the Luo goddess was touched, pacing up and down, back and forth.” In terms of value, ling is mostly associated with good things. Although ling is also used in lingwei (灵位, memorial tablet), the concept that the dead are venerated in Chinese culture also renders a reverent meaning to this word. In addition, other words such as linghuo (灵活, flexibility) and lingqiao (灵巧, dexterity) are also positive in meaning. And the most important word is lingyan (灵验, efficacy), in which ling reflects a reaction, that is, something latent comes out for some reason, which is the most direct expression of ancient people’s methods and ideas for predicting future life. Sima Qian even wrote “Biography of the Fortune Tellers” for people engaged in divination activities in his Records of the Grand Historian, which shows the important role of such people in the social life of ancient China. From these ancient cultural explanations of ling, we can see that the meaning of the character 灵 is also closely related to the emergence or disappearance of something beyond the ordinary visible things. For individuals, it is a proof of human existence and a sign of human presence. As far as the thing itself is concerned, it is

64  Escape from separation technology an anthropomorphism of the thing, and the realization of the analogy that the thing has human life. As far as society is concerned, it is a medium through which many elements of society can be linked together, and it is a pivotal organ through which society can play its role.7 In this sense, we can call the “ling of society” a kind of culture, and the basis for culture to play its role lies in its ability to connect scattered individuals or minds beyond society. This is a kind of social ling with strong dynamic function with a flexible scope, transmittable between different individuals and spreading among different people, thus reaching a common consciousness. In this sense, culture, as the ling of society, has the function of bridging differences and connecting scattered individuals. We define culture as a kind of social ling here, with its core meaning being that amidst variation, scattered forces in society are unified and coagulated. Without this trait, culture would lose its value of existence. In a certain sense, society refers to all ordinary beings. For that reason, Yan Fu directly translated the term “sociology” just introduced from the West into qunxue (群学, study of groups of people). In a certain sense, this translation is closer to the idea of Chinese society. Indeed, for Chinese society and even society in general, society is often the aggregation of a group of people originally dispersed. If the special arrangements of people’s organization were discarded, people in the natural state would gather together like herds of sheep. But the uniqueness of a group of people lies in the fact that they create kinds of tacit symbols and communication media linking differences, so that a common mind can be highlighted, guiding this group of people in society to act according to a set track. Everyone is like a puppet, pulled by a string that seems to be external, but plays a role through people themselves. There may be many such strings in society, but they are all pulled by a certain power. As mentioned above, we usually call the power ling, which often implies that we, as individuals with limited cognitive ability, cannot fully grasp it. In this sense, culture is equivalent to the concept of ling, that is, the society itself needs to be driven by cultural elements rather than by others. Culture has become a vital force that allows the society as an organic body to function properly, and it is the manipulator of puppet actions. This is like rationality hidden in the mind, which deeply manipulates our behavior. We can hardly imagine what the situation of a completely irrational person would be like. For a society, the larger its scale and the stronger its power, the more developed and intelligent its “mind” should be, so that the range of people it can influence should be broader and more orderly. Perhaps it is an undeniable fact that the dispersed entities of society are linked with each other thanks to culture acting as the ling of society. In this sense, social transformation is no longer a simple transformation of society itself, but a transformation of culture as ling. The basis of this transformation must be hidden in the transformation of many concepts in daily life of society. The behaviors of humans as Homo sapiens must not be aimless, but must be self-expressions. Even though such expressions are not what people want, they are real expressions. At the same time, ideas that can be expressed are combined into a unique culture, which cannot

Escape from separation technology  65 be separated from a specific scene of life and times. All our analysis obviously needs to start with the change of this specific concept for an investigation of cultural transformation. Anthropology about cultural transformation today obviously cannot be completely divorced from culture, individuals, and society, as these three elements are interrelated to present a holistic world vision. Without any of the three, not only would the vision of the world be incomplete, but also the cultural transformation could not be presented in its true sense. Among these three, as a holistic world, the vision of China is increasingly prominent,8 based on the different degrees of changes that have taken place in these three elements, which are also interrelated with each other. In this sense, the microscopic vision of anthropology in China will inevitably be focused on field research in these three dimensions, but before that, a macroscopic bird’s eye view is surely very important. In other words, we need to have an overall macro grasp of the situation of China’s cultural transformation in the world today before we can have a clearer orientation in micro-exploration.9 3.2 Visible culture and invisible violence In today’s world, change in the power control mode has led to a fundamental change in the form of culture, which was undoubtedly profound and extensive for Chinese society in the past, and at the same time extremely thorough. But overall, the change goes on unconsciously. As soon as its existence is felt, it has already happened and is continuing its process, for which we can hardly identify the real starting point from the development track, or see its self-termination or being terminated. There is no high-sounding ideological enlightenment here, or at least on the level of human consciousness this enlightenment is unnecessary, and everything is manifested in the experience of social results. Therefore, today’s change differs from the early cultural transformation based on enlightenment like the May 4th Movement. If there is an enlightenment here, it is only a self-enlightenment of hindsight, a hindsight that traces the cause from the result. The cause for such a “hindsight” situation is definitely not people themselves, but the way of exerting power packaged by culture. It is ubiquitous, but cannot be truly felt; or one is in this situation and cannot break away from it. In short, in the overall transformation of culture, the most prominent aspect is a thorough self-transformation in the way power is exercised from content to form. Undoubtedly, man is, first of all, a walking animal, and another important condition is man’s own consciousness, that is, consciousness or awareness generated from the human brain, which guides our direction of action. But what no one can deny here is that our so-called self-consciousness cannot be completely grasped by ourselves. Consciousness will not only be influenced by many external factors, but can also in turn exert a certain impact on the external world. In this sense, people live in a social frame of reference, the core of which is the real existence of the other. In this frame of reference, the relationship between an individual and others is completely determined by culture.

66  Escape from separation technology In this sense, it is necessary for us to bring violence (as a variable) back into the category of culture, which is a typical part of culture closer to content in the spectrum from content to form. It is conceivable that over a very long time in the history of human evolution, power was exercised with naked violence. But later, violence gradually disappeared. Especially in today’s civil society, violence is becoming rarer and rarer. Despite the presence of war in the world, it is less and less experienced by us, but replaced by war scenes on TV. In the process from violence’s rise to its disappearance, the concept of cultural embellishment is also precocious, but it is not disappearing gradually, but becoming more prominent, profoundly influencing our future life. This was first recognized by Antonio Gramsci, who invented the concept of “cultural hegemony” to describe its influence. The core meaning of “cultural hegemony” is that it gradually replaces the direct violent domination by indirect domination with the soft power of cultural forms with embellishment functions, and thereby people unconsciously obey or follow a teaching or discourse.10 In the process of using culture to replace violence, people have created the most decorative cultural expression, written language, which was invented a long time ago and could be regarded as a kind of self-denial of the natural state of human beings’ own animal existence, while constituting the first step for people to be truly separated from each other. Words and symbols are endowed with a symbolic power to replace real people. The extreme form of this power is the development of narrative, which is influencing our lives today. As a literary critic has keenly observed, “Narrative becomes gorgeous violence, and its success marks the death of things.”11 Michel Foucault, when commenting on the paintings of the Belgian painter René Magritte (1898–1967), pointed out that words and various instructions replace our grasp of the real world, so much so that we care more about the pipe on the canvas than touching the real pipe. Similarly, “we cannot see the instructor’s finger, but its ubiquity plays a dominant role, and he is clearly making a voice, ‘This is a pipe.’”12 However, this denial itself also leads to the creation of people’s own culture, that is, people create their own culture to cover up cruel and naked violence. But this is by no means a once-and-for-all thing, as the distance to the violent end is not long and there are not many obstacles. Those who resort to violence due to conflict of ideas, such as the widespread terrorism in the world, are obviously a proof of the persistence of this original violent tendency in people. The creation of culture is a means of overcoming this kind of violence, but it must be non-violent in itself, at least in form. Or more precisely, culture is a transformation, denial, and disguise of violence, an extreme form of power. The natural state of violence is admitted by all, and perhaps no one is more clear and straightforward than Hobbes about this point. However, Hobbes’ solution, or the solution proposed by the whole Western world for this purpose, is a direct substitute for violence, that is, society requires everyone to give up their power to exercise violence and jointly entrust an institution that everyone is convinced to exercise power for them, and with this institution violence can be directly and legally exerted.13 The transfer of power to exercise violence has played a vital role in the establishment and construction of the modern state. This may mean a transformation

Escape from separation technology  67 of the concept of state, that is, the obvious transformation from theocracy to secular politics in the Western world. This transformation has not only brought about ideological enlightenment, but more importantly, the establishment of a secular political system, which emphasizes the political participation of ordinary people and the domination of nationalism transcending individualism, with its goal being to let people in all corners of the state participate in the construction of national unity. In this sense, the construction of a modern state is bound to be a construction of national unity, and one of the goals of this construction is to eliminate all kinds of differences was included and covered in the past traditional national era. The socalled existing differences between urban and rural areas, between ethnic groups, between center and margin, between men and women, and even between all people have become the real targets of modern state-building. These differences have been broken one by one under the high-precision sight that has been continuously developed, reduced to simplification and standardization. Eliminating all kinds of differences within a state or society has therefore become one of the most legitimate reasons for modern states to display their forms of violence. Therefore, the undifferentiated and uniform structure of modern states has been their goal from the beginning. After abolishing or banning the possession of power with particularity and superiority in societies such as those dominated by theocracy, kingship, imperial power, and gentry power, it is replaced by a more abstract substitute called civil rights, from which any substantive difference can be hardly identified, laying a foundation for today’s so-called social transformation. That is, ordinary people can participate in a common social construction without discrimination. This transformation has gone on over several hundred years in the Western world, and only about one hundred years in China, since the Revolution of 1911. This transformation, or more clearly political transformation, is still being pursued by people today. However, in the world outside the West, this transformation has encountered various obstacles, making it increasingly difficult to be truly completed. This not only results from stubbornness about preserving one’s own differences, but also from resistance to and non-cooperation with the logic of rational identity without cultural differences on the grounds of culture, as well as a suspicion and abandonment of the consistency and integrity pursued by Western philosophy for unitary transcendental rationality since ancient Greece. That is, people have realized that it is impossible to truly master a vibrant experience by rational pursuit.14 In this sense, culture has protected the existence of differences. As a result, all differences have preserved themselves thanks to the concept of culture. In his later academic life, Fei Xiaotong talked more about the concepts of culture and cultural consciousness than the idea of cultural reflection prevalent in the late 1980s,15 because only by revisiting the almost forgotten concept of culture would people have a clear consciousness of culture, and would human differences and the socalled pluralistic existence of culture really be possible.16 It seems that no other power could truly resist the uniform construction of modernity and the extinction of differences.

68  Escape from separation technology 3.3 Power transfer and cultural transformation In contrast with the political transformation of nation-states in the Western world, the world outside the West is inevitably going through a deep cultural transformation. This cultural transformation is even more urgent and necessary in the nonWestern world, which has lagged behind a long way under the impact of the West. Meanwhile, this is forcing the cultures of the world outside the West to change from static and unconscious cultures once defined by the Western view of the Other to dynamic and conscious cultures. This kind of effort has indeed made the nonWestern world take the first step on the road to gradually break away from the shackles of the hegemony of Western discourse, even though it may lose its direction. Who am I? Where am I going? Is there any convenient path to follow? Such questions have become the initial questions in transformation based on culture. There is often more than one answer to these questions. Here, a long-term and adventurous cultural transformation is really beginning. This cultural transformation, at the same time, also means the inevitable emergence of a transformational anthropology associated with various cultures.17 This is a kind of cultural endogenous anthropology based on the cultural experience of the self, and its foundation lies in the in-depth investigation of the gradual restoration and reconstruction of cultures that have been cut off by modern Western rationality. In this sense, as Sherry B. Ortner has observed, culture is undergoing a new public and mobile change, so social transformation is closely linked with the production of culture and the making of meaning; therefore, social transformation is bound to be a cultural transformation.18 Futurist Alvin Toffler has regarded violence, money, and knowledge as the foundation of modern power. More importantly, he has also clearly pointed out that modern power is gradually shifting toward knowledge.19 In my opinion, this discovery is extremely important, in that without such a power shift, cultural transformation would not have really taken place. Although news reports are still flooded by people’s direct violent behaviors, violence is becoming more and more hidden after all, while money or capital are replacing violence more and more widely. This replacement depends on the creation of knowledge, such as the creation of all kinds of legal knowledge. As a result, more people have shifted from stark, violent control with fists and sticks to legal rules and litigation procedures. Thus violence has become more concealed by culture. The struggle for human rights in China’s current grassroots society is arguably a concrete manifestation that legal knowledge and consciousness have begun to take root in people’s minds.20 In this sense, all kinds of knowledge and information are rapidly entering people’s lives and beginning to deeply affect them. People inadvertently start to be led by this knowledge, while they are also unconsciously controlled by it. The headquarters of a large search engine website may be located next door to someone’s residence, and this person can see the brightly lit headquarters building of that company every day when he leaves home. This place originally had nothing to do with this person’s life, as it was just the office building of an enterprise in space. But every day, whenever one turns on the computer and goes online to

Escape from separation technology  69 search for a certain piece of information, one cannot help but have a very close connection with this electronic company. To put it bluntly, people who do not work in this company are actually working for it and enjoying it. The number of times we click on the website becomes an accurate work record and turns into part of the enterprise’s own symbolic and actual accumulation of capital. In this job, we do not get paid for work ourselves, but we do get information or knowledge; and this company really does not pay us, but gets the click-through rate brought by our hard work day and night. This is a huge virtual exchange network in which we do not see each other, but every one of us today will be involved and motivated to work for it unless we simply ignore the network that affects our life and thinking. Therefore, so-called cultural transformation is arguably a great change in the relationship of power control, that is, from direct domination of power to indirect domination, from military conquest to symbolic domination, from spiritual control to indulgence in material consumption, from control of others in the collective to real-time monitoring of individuals with real names. We can roughly sum up 15 kinds of changes in the form of power domination (see Table 3.1) which affect current cultural patterns and possible future trends. It may be helpful to explain the trend of the transformation of each power in Table 3.1 as an aid to understanding. The first is the change of the dominant relationship from direct to indirect, which is closely related to the virtualization and invisibility of power. When we break away from the control by nature, we are actually getting rid of the natural expression of power. The image of slave owners holding whips before humble slaves has become more and more disgusting, more and more distant from human society. People have begun to accept and get used to controlling or being controlled in a harmonious relationship. There is no denying that the concept of dominion is deeply embedded in the Western understanding of nature. In the Renaissance era, Table 3.1 Transformation of the patterns of power domination Serial no.

Power

Status A

Status B

 1  2  3  4  5  6  7  8  9 10 11 12 13 14 15

Domination Conquer Control Institution Exclusion Culture Discourse Ethnic group Relationship History Authority Violence Technology Life Faith

Direct Force Spiritual Collective Other Specific Meaning Settled Close Unitary Lasting Visible Visual Natural Practice

Indirect Symbol Material Individual Self Virtual Game Migrant Dispersed Pluralistic Temporary Hidden Abstract Medical Knowledge

70  Escape from separation technology there was a need for people to explore and study nature in a changing world.21 This understanding actually set nature and culture against each other a priori, whereby control of chaotic nature by the cultural order created by people was regarded as natural. And with the emergence of Protestantism, the idea gradually taking shape was that individuals should take responsibility and be allowed to understand and control nature themselves.22 In other cultures, however, this sort of thinking does not really exist. At this point, conquest has also become dominion without the display of force, turning into symbolic rule23 not clearly perceived by people. It is around us, but it is nowhere to be found, like a ghost. In this sense, culture has become a kind of practice in which a kind of power of domination combined with local cultural characteristics has been strengthened. For the development of capitalist economy, people are not concerned about its economic structure, but how it closely combines with various elements of local social clubs to generate a new culture, which is a new development of capitalism24 and can also be said to be a new development of the concept of conquest. This is a change with the help of imaging technology. At this point, we cannot resist the stimulation of new and different images. At the same time, a kind of social control, in turn, has begun to change its focus from our spiritual world to the material life itself that we actually consume. In fact, it is difficult for us to distinguish between spirit and matter so clearly today. When you sit on the sofa watching a TV series from episode to episode, it is difficult for you to tell whether the TV program is material or spiritual. It may be both, and it is impossible to distinguish them clearly, while the power to control is precisely the content and form of presentation of this semi-spiritual and semi-material TV program. An institution used to be the most concrete expression of power, which could restrain as many people as possible to certain courses through its rules. Therefore, the expression of power by means of an institution was collective at the beginning. With the internalization of rules, however, the institution begins to play a more and more significant role at the individual level to influence their behavior. Perhaps the most obvious example is the behavior correction technology in psychotherapy, which makes people go through an institutional identity transformation and let their own lives be guided by the institution. Power has a function of exclusion and social differentiation, with which you can distinguish yourself from others. Today, however, this internal division of power has become more trivial and invisible, and people will not feel any inappropriateness or inadaptability for this exclusion. This is obviously more directly related to the transformation of culture from concrete to virtual. So-called concrete culture is a kind of visible culture, reflected in people’s basic necessities. However, this kind of culture has begun to move away from people’s life scenes to gradually turn into a kind of storage and display of knowledge, and thus more and more virtualized. This kind of virtualization has been strengthened by the rapid development and comprehensive popularization of post-industrial digital technology. Paper media are gradually disappearing, which is accompanied by the super-local global connections formed in virtual

Escape from separation technology  71 cyberspace. The concept of the “global village” proposed by Marshall McLuhan,25 a mass media sociologist, in the 1950s has become an irresistible cultural fact by now. At the same time, mastery of this virtual knowledge makes the distinction among people in society more delicate and imperceptible. Therefore, the globalization of culture in the macro sense and the localization of culture in the micro sense are equally robust,26 but virtual abstract culture is attracting more and more people in the world. This trend of cultural virtualization is obviously deeply influenced by the replacement of traditional mass media by electronic media. In this process, imagination is highlighted as a core component of so-called modern subjectivity.27 Instead of a virtual public sphere in the sense of Habermas’ public sphere, a platform for the presentation of private cultural subjectivity has been increasingly rooted in people’s minds.28 In this process, discourse begins to break away from the scenes of people’s daily talks and gradually enters a more abstract public sphere. While still maintaining the variability of discourse itself, it has been transformed into a convenient way to deny existing norms. The new space of electronic media makes the generation of discourse and the understanding of its meaning more convenient and uncertain, and a model of multi-language analysis is also entering the field of sociological analysis. Understanding the logic of words in this context involves not the generation of one meaning, but pluralistic meanings in different scenarios, which is more prominent in today’s world.29 Just as Yan Fu’s translation used to be a special discourse system potentially leading the cultural transformation in modern China,30 new discourses are constantly being generated now, which may not be exclusively reserved to the group of intellectuals good at writing, but open to any ordinary literate people, who can participate in the creation of this diverse discourse system. The idiom guo se tian xiang (国色天香, national beauty and heavenly fragrance, describing peonies) is an expression of existing social norms, and its meaning can be determined. However, when the signboard of a street restaurant reads guo se tian xiang (锅色天香, pot’s color and heavenly fragrance), the original meaning is a denial in the sense of diet, which is also an imitation creation and an inspirational source for new meaning. This kind of “knockoff” meaning creation can be found everywhere in the world. The “knockoff” version of the logic is not only the logic of the present society, but also the logic of today’s discourse generation. We deny through imitation and create through denying, and the tool we use is the unchanging discourse logic itself. With the convenience of expressive tools, language with a fixed structure is being replaced by flexible coinages. Meanwhile, the concept of ethnic group is the same. It has always been associated with the power of a modern state, and is inevitably associated with the modern concepts of ethnicity and nation. This is a modern invention, and an aggressive concept inevitably derived from the European world’s mastery of global economic control at the end of the 18th century. As Jack Goody has put it, the so-called “alien people” or “foreign people” bluntly means “minorities”. The whole set of Western knowledge about nationalities is used to illustrate the correctness of such a relationship.31 From the shaping of individual souls to the invention of collective spirit or representation, this process embodies a modernity, that is, the control and

72  Escape from separation technology transcendence of scattered and chaotic groups in the natural state. Finding a common thing and believing in it, and then controlling the behavior of a group by it, can be regarded as a basic feature of power relations in today’s ethnic relations. As a result, ethnic groups live together to maintain a relatively holistic domination. This is a kind of cultural expression of the national process under national integration, as described by general ethnologists.32 However, with the invention of all kinds of convenient roads and transportation facilities in modern society, the settled life of ethnic groups is constantly being disrupted, while a mobile life is gradually replacing settled life, in which process the appearance of ethnic identity is also undergoing certain changes. Because of enhanced mobility, the relationship among people within an ethnic group is also changing from the original close face-to-face relationship to a long-distance loose contact based on electronic media. Direct ethnic control has disappeared, and virtual ethnic group questions and self-created “imaginary enemies” have become the basis of thinking and belief in ethnic knowledge construction. However, the biased understanding and knowledge accumulation of ethnic issues make the national identity that was originally constructed even more confusing, and people are at a loss and have a sense of vacillation, which in turn reconstructs the culture of an ethnic group. In this process, the power relationship structure within the ethnic group is also quietly changing. With the increasing popularity of written language and the individualization of media, that is, the development and popularization of social media technology, the narrative of history has also begun to change from one historical narrative to diversified historical narratives, that is, many aspects of history or the world are no longer regarded as a linear evolution.33 This obviously differs from what Wilhelm Dilthey has noted when commenting on Max Scheler’s methodology (Dilthey did not regard “the world of ancestors” as “the hometown of spirit and soul,” but turned it into “an object of history”). In Hans-Georg Gadamer’s view, “life relations” have all been removed from these so that there is a sense of distance between them and their own history: “This distance turns history into an object.”34 The logic of negation of history based on doubt makes history an object that people examine and eventually abandon, instead of integrating reality into history and making history last forever, like ancient people. Today, the era has gone forever when the Western sense of time was imposed on other places for no reason, or when “world history needed Europe to provide a simple way of measuring time and space.”35 Everyone’s life history is becoming an object to be expressed that enters into multiple narratives, playing its unique role as a special means of self-healing. In the metaphor of the fox and the hedgehog by Isaiah Berlin (1909–1997), we have begun to change from the hedgehog cognition, knowing only one big thing, to living in a complicated and diverse environment like a fox, and to enjoy such complexity and diversity as much as possible.36 This is very much like a taxi driver. He may not remember or record how many passengers he picks up every day and what they look like, but he does know that he has picked up a lot of people, and he gets to know many people in the process and experiences many things. In this sense, the persistence of authority is also changing because of the challenge of the diversity of scenarios and narratives. Today, no permanent authority

Escape from separation technology  73 runs through people all the time. Aging itself is a signal of the loss of authority, and the constant change of power status makes this authority no longer specifically secured on a certain person. With the continuous creation of new knowledge, the old authority in society will easily be replaced by experts who master new knowledge, technology, and information. Therefore, the concept of lasting authority is obviously out of date today, replaced by the temporality, fluidity, and uncertainty of authority and its attachment to individuals. As a result, a competitive law of the jungle has begun to exert its real influence in modern society. But unlike the primitive form of power, it must be non-violent. And violence is no longer present in this competition. The struggle for power is reflected as a kind of non-struggle. It seems that everyone has their own position, but this position must be fluid and changing. Therefore, there is indeed a kind of competition in the non-struggle. Perhaps bus seats offer a microcosm or metaphor of our current society. In a civilized society, there may not be a physical struggle between people standing and people sitting on a bus, but the struggle must be buried in people’s minds without leaving traces. Only when someone sitting stands up from a seat and gets off the bus will we see that the seat has become the object of competition. But it must also be non-violent. The tacit understanding or action logic of “first come, first served” makes someone standing nearby most likely to get the seat. Therefore, there will be no violent conflict among the passengers. Yet violence is really hidden in the minds of passengers who failing to find a seat, and it can never be seen directly, but is deeply suppressed in their inner world. Technology serves as a tool to control people that is recognized by society. In the beginning, people actually manipulated and invented technology, but in the end, it turns out that the technology invented manipulates and arranges people’s various activities, so much so that we are dependent on it. This is a kind of dialectics of technology in modern society, which can also be described as an unpredictable consequence of the fetishization of technology, resulting in the fact that people are subject to technology itself, and technology is becoming so complicated that people cannot understand it directly. For example, water conservancy technology must be salient and easy to understand at first; but in today’s large-scale hydropower stations, the technology of water control and utilization has been transformed into a very abstract set of knowledge which has been developed into a special industry of society. Biotechnology related to life is even more abstract. At the same time, medical technology is increasingly invading our daily medical practice and deeply affecting our cognition of health. As Gadamer has observed, the treatment that once served our body has turned into a kind of control over our body. More importantly, this medical technology, which is good at treating individuals, has undoubtedly been applied to social and political governance.37 Today, what can compare with the deep concern of medical technology for people themselves? But from another angle, what aspect in our society is not different from the relationship between doctors and patients? As far as life itself is concerned, our life is carried by our body as an organism which once existed in a natural state, with the function of the body growing naturally according to the environment. However, with the changes in modern people’s

74  Escape from separation technology views of the body, the combination of power from the outside to the inside and from the inside to the outside makes the body an object that the ghost of society wants to control directly, and it is also an object that the spirit of the self wants to control deliberately. Therefore, the body is no longer regarded as part of nature, but a part that strives to be separated from nature. This highlights a dialectics of life, that is, the body and soul that were originally integrated have been intentionally separated from each other, with one used to control the other; the embodiment of ideas, in turn, actually affects the expression of the soul itself. Finally, there is the question of faith. Despite the deep connection between faith and religion, faith is not necessarily the same as religion. Faith used to be a kind of practical activity, that is, expressing one’s inner belief with the help of rituals or daily actions. If we have faith in tea, this faith will be embodied in our behavior of drinking tea. As for what tea is and how to grow and make it, this is not something a tea believer should or must know, and most of the time there is these no need to know. Tea drinkers may just put brewing tea into practice, and often knowledge about tea cannot promote faith in tea. How many tea experts are really keen on drinking tea? How many people enthused about tea drinking are experts in tea? However, today, this kind of practical faith itself is also undergoing a change, which is characterized by the fact that we know more about faith than about the practice of faith. We know the contents of faith, and we can even talk about it with fervor and assurance, but we may not really practice it, that is, we know it, but we do not really faithfully put it into practice. In other words, we are entering an era when there are far more experts studying a certain faith than practitioners of it. To sum up, our understanding of power is actually more about taking power as all the ways to exert power in society, and culture is just one of the more concealed ways. The mode of the exercise of the transformation of power reflects a transformation, ending up in the means of culture exerting power, with visible and invisible characteristics. As far as the form of culture is concerned, it is visible as the existence of difference. But its content is invisible, using one to cover the other, which is actually a unique cultural embellishment, to be detected after some analysis. Therefore, what is really visible is a change in cultural form, but what is invisible may be the concept behind it, which contains a choice of value. In the dimension from nature to culture, the farther away human beings are from the state of nature, the more developed the dimension of culture will become and the better it will play its practical role. 3.4 Rationality, nature, and separation technology It is unequivocable that there would be no culture without nature. Nature is culture in our eyes, while culture is conceptualized nature. The current cultural transformation means a fundamental transformation of the means of exerting power. In this sense, anthropology must break away from fixed cultural concepts and rigid description, and move toward concern for and understanding of this change or transformation.

Escape from separation technology  75 Cultural transformation is bound to appear with the emergence of modern society, or it may lag behind, inevitably appearing after people feel and encounter more and more pain and conflicts in modern society. This is due to the substitution of almighty God by unitary rationality, that is, human rationality. Obviously, this is closely related to the Western Enlightenment, and it is also related to Immanuel Kant’s powerful slogan, “dare to know,” as Marshall Sahlins has observed.38 The concept of modern rationality, as Max Weber has observed, attempts to explain the whole world of human life. Obviously, however, this explanation, before its completion, has already left human society and culture in a disastrous state, forcing people to live in a rational cage in the future.39 Around the same time, all human civilizations, following the decline of Western civilization without a sense of direction, were thrown into a state of a loss.40 Starting to control the whole world with modern reason, man found himself firmly controlled by it. He completely handed over irrationality to the demon who subdued it and plunged it into the abyss of a vibrant life in the future.41 The world of life has thus become absolutely orderly, uniform, and spotless. In such an absolute world, this string of reason that tightens people’s thoughts can hardly be maintained for a long time. Once the string is relaxed, all the evils that have plagued human beings will suddenly surface. What seems incredible today is that in the United States, a country that witnesses the culmination of the development of civilization, we have seen the persistence of terrorism; also in the United States, a financial crisis broke out on Wall Street in Manhattan, New York, which swept the world from 2008 onwards. In Japan, where science and technology are highly developed, the earthquake in 2011 caused the Fukushima nuclear accident. In China, some incredible extreme cases are causing more and more panic in society and government, and touching the moral conscience of people. Today’s people, on the one hand, like patients, have begun to really care about their own diseases; on the other hand, they do not know how to treat those diseases with truly valuable and meaningful healing methods. Effective healing methods in the past, that is, many ways to help people’s minds self-adjust, with the enlightenment by modern thought, have been removed from the close connection with people and mercilessly thrown into the uninhabited, desolate desert. When a person is really sick, he does not know that these diseases are caused by this simple abandonment of traditional methods. People once naively thought that health meant the absence of disease, and that so as long as there was a hospital, there would be security. But obviously, one of the most common truths is that the absence of disease does not mean health, let alone happiness, just as the Ayurveda in traditional Indian medicine maintains: “The so-called health is not only to stay away from illness and hardship, but also to further achieve the happiness and enrichment of body, spirit and soul.”42 In this sense, there is a substantial division between civilization and culture. Today, culture has become a life-saving straw that many people want to grasp. People hope that the well-off society in the future will be a cultured society instead of anything else. People are still making a last-ditch attempt to protect their own culture, and trying to turn the over-civilized wild horses with no sense of direction

76  Escape from separation technology back to their normal courses. But we should make it clear that the difficulty of this attempt lies in the culture itself. Obviously, today’s cultures are not comparable to yesterday’s, with each different culture gradually infiltrated by Western rational concepts, having almost the same background. It is not easy for human beings to gradually wash away these over-rich background colors to paint a fresh and new color. At this point, we need to pick up the brush again and paint in our own unique way, but that obviously requires not only confidence, but also courage. As far as culture itself is concerned, as mentioned above, it is in a state of transition or transformation, that is, it has been directly converted from a certain natural state. In this respect, nature gives us an extremely open space, but we do not know how today’s nature can directly transform into a new culture. However, we should know, grasp, and understand the process of this transformation. We should look at people in nature and people in culture by applying a holistic concept of people. There are both connections and differences between them. In this sense, nature is no longer an independent existence, but is increasingly transforming into a part of culture. Today, it first becomes a kind of discourse before it turns into a kind of dominance. Climate change may be a natural narrative,43 while the environmental protection movement is only becoming more and more ritualized.44 Animal protection has been turned into another kind of discourse. In fact, the predictions of nature are constantly broken by the variability and uncertainty of reality. Modernity creates the technology that separates people from each other, which permeates all aspects of our lives, and leads us to the separation of self and self, with its whole foundation being the alienation of human beings mentioned by Karl Marx.45 Its forms, however, are richer than the era when Marx lived. In the 18th century, René Descartes’ French rationalist philosophy created an object “me” in “I think,” which endowed a special meaning to the world around the existence of the subject of thinking. In the book Discourse on Method, Descartes took great pains to talk about the so-called separation between the human mind on the one hand and the body on the other, convinced that “there is a real difference between mind and body.”46 Therefore, as the beginning of human thinking about separation, nature, economy, politics, and even culture are the objects of thinking, not the opposite. Therefore, “me” is no longer the externalized existence in traditional culture that seeks externalization of self. In ancient times, people were more thinking that “I am therefore I think,” while today people hold the opposite cognitive logic. Despite all the differences, the foundation of modern logic lies in the separation between our own rationality and emotion. If we believe Kant’s thought-provoking idea, “dare to know,” we try to explain everything in the world with human reason. Guided by this concept, Westerners abandoned God as an integrated existence, and Nietzsche’s remark that “God is dead” announced the end of this transcendental integrated existence. Westerners tried to distance the “City of God”, and let secular Caesar govern this human society, which marked the beginning of the separation of man and God. Westerners have almost completely transformed their society, culture, and individuals under the Enlightenment concept like light, believing that the position vacated by God can and must be filled by a rational person. As a result, politics has changed into Leviathan, which is evenly distributed in our

Escape from separation technology  77 lives; the economy has turned into an “invisible hand,” which regards the market as an invisible god, but does extract wealth from our pockets arbitrarily and conveniently; society has turned into an iron cage, where some people can get in but cannot get out, while others outside try to get in, but in vain; meanwhile, society is also a prison in the sense of Foucault’s “Panopticism,”47 with no one free from the surveillance of this prison; individuals become extremely enlarged, dominated by themselves, looking extremely tough, but unable to resist even the slightest setback. After pursuing the illusory peak experience of self-realization, only a kind of emptiness is left to individuals, for whom lasting satisfaction becomes a technological pursuit. Anthropologists are no longer listeners and believers, but become authors, or more specifically, ethnographers, who attempt to overlook the existence of human differences from a panoramic perspective of God, but the differences are linked. Ethnographers tend to regard an ethnic group as representing all human beings, and use such characterization tools as words and even pictures to completely present this panoramic social model for individuals. As a result, the invisible society and culture become visible, and parts and pieces become whole and logic. Therefore, we live in the narrative of writers, not in real life itself. We used to believe that the non-rational means the irrational, but this is not entirely the case in reality. William James once specifically pointed out that consciousness is just a never-ending stream of consciousness like a river, while another American, John Dewey, emphasized that our thinking is just a kind of belief or faith, reflective echoes between moments, and therefore there is no current judgment, as correctness may be just an accident, while incorrectness is just a normal state.48 3.5 Philosophical and cultural transformation of “being together” An undeniable premise for people is that our world is a world of natural division. We can trace from independent planets in the universe to invisible elements of life such as genes, not to mention the existence of the same invisible particles that have been thoroughly studied by natural scientists. For individuals with cognitive ability, this is basically a self-evident fact. But the first thing to be clarified here is that the logic of the development of human society exists contrary to this natural form of existence, or they take almost completely different paths of development. Arguably it would be impossible for us to find a vacuum society outside nature, as we can only find society in nature. Because, just as gravity attracts all the scattered substances on the Earth, society itself has a similar force to unite some scattered individuals in it. In this sense, the so-called sociology of human society is a methodological inquiry to study how to combine the scattered individual existence, and anthropology must consider the diversity of these methods attempting to turn dispersion to cohesion and the comparison of their differences. And such an assignment has only one goal, that is, to discover and draw the spectrum of social evolution that makes people interact together, because, at least according to the current ethnographic data, there is no isolated, insular world like Robinson’s in Daniel Defoe’s novel. Obviously, the

78  Escape from separation technology social existence of more than two people has become the normal state of human social existence, and the difference lies only in the number of people. Before Émile Durkheim’s sociology, the social concept in the European world was a philosophy of distinction. Regardless of the philosophical tradition of rationalism or empiricism, the separation between experiences was the same as the separation between man and God in previous European philosophy. Everything that belonged to God was God’s, and everything that belong to Caesar was Caesar’s. Everything seemed to be quite distinct from each other. This distinction is most clearly expressed by the French philosopher Descartes, whose dualistic philosophy can be called a philosophy of separation in another sense, because the key to this philosophy is toward a separation, that is, the separation of mind and body, the separation of things and me, and even the separation of man and nature.49 All these separations are based on people’s rational self-awareness or enlightenment. This awareness highlights an extremely clear self-image. This “me” is no longer a part of the whole person, but is isolated to be the master of the body, of all things and of nature. With such a rational consciousness, people find a kind of existence of the other, which is an externalized other relative to the internalized self. It is an existence of the other that cannot be found outside the existence of the absolutely clear, comprehended, and unquestionable. The other has become a synonym for the unclear, the incomprehensible, and the absolutely doubtable, because the other is plagued by ignorance, backwardness, and impurity. What the rational self really wants to do is to identify the ignorant, the backward, and the impure in some exquisite way and separate them, thus making them become a part of rational understanding. At the same time, this has also become the mindset of the Western world to construct its own modern legal myth, forming a “white myth” with a salient Western consciousness.50 In this sense, it may be comparable to China’s Neo-Confucianism of the Song (960–1279) and Ming (1368–1644) dynasties. Although Neo-Confucianism did not face Western rationalism in its development, Indian Buddhism was criticized then and creatively integrated into China’s traditional concept of inseparability of people from people, things from things, and people from nature. Buddhism introduced into China did not accept the influence of more pure Indian philosophy, but was fully integrated with the cultivation efforts of Zen with the help of local philosophical concepts, and developed such concepts as Cheng Hao’s “natural principles,” Zhu Xi’s “relationship between heaven and man,” Lu Jiuyuan’s idea that “the universe is my mind, my mind is the universe,” and Wang Shouren’s idea that “the mind is heaven, and the mind is the master of all things in the universe,”51 which influenced the way of thinking of later Neo-Confucianists, that is, the unity of heaven and man, integration of heaven and man, and agreement between knowledge and action. Just as Li Yiyuan has analyzed, this is a world view of interdependence and harmony among natural systems (heaven), individual systems (people), and interpersonal relationships (society), that is, achieving states of “Centrality” and “Harmony.”52 Obviously, this cultural comparison can lead to the realization that anthropology was created by Westerners against the backdrops of searching for the existence

Escape from separation technology  79 of characteristics outside the self and relative to the self characterized by confidence, clarity, and indisputability. The distant other naturally became an excellent place to prove the existence of this other, and anthropology as a result obtained a new label as a discipline for studying “the other.” It did not pay attention to the self, because it was beyond doubt, but focused its attention to the other as opposite to the self, which was full of attributes completely opposite to the perfect attributes of the self, and therefore artificially assigned these attributes on the early stage of human development, so as to prove that this was the immature stage of human rationality, which was not in the Western world, but outside it.53 Hence, anthropology established its own position in the history of disciplines. The human self can be subdivided into two kinds. One is the self-centered pursuit of the self, which is a clear conscious self. Everything is judged by this self, including human knowledge, feelings, and will, as well as human truth, goodness, and beauty. Based on the unremitting pursuit of certainty, accuracy, and clarity, it attempts to achieve mutual agreement through the “inconsistency” between the self and object as termed by Hegel, thus realizing the integration between subject and object.54 Therefore, this is a cultural logic in which the world is examined and owned with the self as the standard. In this sense, it seems that anthropologists can discover something through field research, but this discovery is ultimately to see a world from the dimension of self-pursuit. Participatory observation under the gaze of an anthropologist is a kind of journey from one’s own circle to the other’s world. His discovery is just a fusion of subject-object into subject-self, which is accomplished by a negative logic, that is, the duality of subject and object that was once fused is differentiated and then merged, from which the so-called ethnographic knowledge appears and accumulates. The other kind of self is a meaningful self only when it is related to the abovementioned self with “egoism,” that is, it is centered on the other, not based on subjective judgment, and even fundamentally abandons one’s self-pursuit, as a result of which the objective existence of the other is just highlighted. This occupies a very prominent position in the enlightening thinking of Zen Buddhism popular in the East. This kind of self, with its visual perception of gaze and observation, is not to discover a new knowledge, but to realize the singular existence of the ego, so that the diversity and objectivity of everything can exist and develop as it is. Therefore, the purpose of looking outward is not subject-object fusion, but not focusing on a certain center, which is actually a self-concept of giving up the self. Because once we pursue it persistently, we will make a judgment based on it. This judgment comes down to nothing more than a representation or an illusion projected in our minds at this time, not sufficient as a basis for the pursuit of certainty. In this sense, ethnography centering on the other should be an ethnography that gives up the self. The ethnography centering on the other is also destined to lay an excellent seed for the cultivation of anthropology’s own rebellious character, which will sprout and grow sturdily when the time is ripe. This kind of rebellion is a rebellion against the self-existence, and it is a distrust and suspicion gradually arising about the self that is full of confidence and cannot be easily doubted. The

80  Escape from separation technology protection and self-confidence of this absolute self carefully demonstrated and designed by Descartes has been disintegrated since anthropologists went into the land of the other defined by the Western self to carry out meticulous field research. Confidence in the self, which aims at pursuing modernity, and doubts about others are reversed. As a result, reflective thinking is no longer outward but inward, and the study of the culture of the other has turned into a criticism of one’s own culture. This kind of criticism is a reaction to various separation tendencies, aiming at reuniting the separated and fragmented existence, or restoring or resetting the scattered holistic culture. From this, there has arisen an anthropological turn, that is, from pure concern about local knowledge to more scenarios dominated by irrational passion or emotion. This is therefore a philosophy of “being together” rather than a philosophy of separation, with the perspective turned to scenes and ways that can bring people and people, people and things, and people and nature together. Rituals, parties, and the circulation of articles have contributed to beneficial connections among a wider range of scattered regional cultures. All these have become new directions of explanation for anthropology. This is a shift from analysis to synthesis, from criticism to appreciation, and from reflection to expression. All these changes have only one purpose, that is, to truly present the integrity of people and the world. This is the original aspiration of anthropological research, and naturally also its purpose and future.55 Arguably, we human beings chose civilization in a serendipitous moment, and the civilized Homo sapiens serendipitously chose reason as the engine for the continuous evolution of civilization. But this engine is making Homo sapiens more and more self-divided, becoming not only a “patient,” but also a patient unable to find a truly effective panacea, because the rational basis determines Homo sapiens’ use of the concept of “health” when defining civilization, which is supposed to be a kind of “health without disease.”56 But as mentioned above, health is not just the absence of disease. In the philosopher Gadamer’s view, the so-called health is purely an enigma between nature and art, because a person as a whole is unique to mankind. In this sense, any knowledge is constrained by conditions and background, and so is medical knowledge. Maybe a set of health standards, applied to a specific person, cannot tell whether the person is healthy or not.57 The doctor’s role is becoming increasingly prominent. The pain that makes a person uncomfortable is unmistakable to this person, but it seems that the disease cannot be detected accurately by others or with the help of medical equipment. The doctor’s inquiry often produces practical results with this kind of exploration as a result of the interaction between a natural body and the doctor’s healing experience. However, today’s science and medical treatment based on rationality may partially solve the problem of diseases, so that they can be diagnosed, classified, and then eliminated, but this cannot solve the so-called health problems of people’s self-perception as a whole. According to common sense, it seems that the crux of a disease is where pain is found. But what is puzzling is that even if the symptoms disappear, some people still cannot feel healthy, while others obviously can. Whether this is the natural recovery of the body or the

Escape from separation technology  81 effect of the doctor’s role is a mystery not only to Gadamer, but also to ordinary people. The culture based on separation really segregates the space we live in: we live in our own house and live our own life; we write our own words in our office; we discover our own knowledge in our own field. But in the end, we will find that we are constantly repeating a stupid logic like blind men feeling an elephant, ending up as one-dimensional people in the sense of Herbert Marcuse. Our relationship with others has gradually become either restricting or being restricted, determining others or being determined by others. It is difficult for us to have the real freedom to share with others, because all of our lives are separated from others through personal calculations, including our own time, space, property, honor, and status. In this sense, our original culture of mutual integration has actually become a culture of continuous creation of separation. All the on-going cultural transformations are actually based on a culture of separation created by modernity. This culture of separation, because it is excessively focused on and concerned about human rationality, makes our human existence incomplete and flawed. The consequence of this is that we live in reality, but we cannot really approach reality; we are in society, but we cannot fully integrate into it; we are emotional animals, but in the end, we find that we do not know where the emotion is and how to express it properly. All these, arguably, belong to the bitter fruit caused by a modern culture of separation, which is in sharp contrast with the intertwining of relations in the traditional society. Therefore, we need a change, so that the human self is no longer a creation of a rational reproduction model based on the theory of work and energy, but a dynamic, self-generating mechanism, which leaves ample space for passion and perfectly combining passion with reason. In this sense, we need a clear watchword, that is, to bid farewell to simplistic reflection, face up to diverse cultural expressions, and to reject groundless criticism and ridicule. This transformed culture may be a truly integrated culture, featuring the being together of people and people, people and things, and people and nature. Behind it, a deep purpose of anthropologists to study gifts is demonstrated, because Marcel Mauss has told us that gifts, different from commodities, closely bind people and people, people and things, and people and nature, while the invention of commodities has led in the opposite direction.58 Gifts are forerunners of a philosophy of being together, where Marcel Mauss has emphasized a kind of “gifts and the obligation to returning gifts,” completely presented in a kind of a real “Potlatch” with “holistic presentation.”59 The Potlatch is precisely the most typical cultural expression of this philosophy, which, together with the philosophy of being together, opposes human alienation. The practice of the Potlatch is not unfathomable, but more often a shallow expression. Based on people’s pursuit of the concept of happiness or the common good today,60 the Potlatch is a manifestation of people’s deep sociality, giving all the people the opportunity to participate and appreciate the joy of real life. That is, it represents a personal integration, which serves rather than resists, appreciates rather than criticizes, enjoys rather than grieves, is positive rather than negative, upholds peace rather than war, and consumes rather than amasses. The

82  Escape from separation technology proposal of these post-modern slogans obviously offers their special enlightenment to the direction of today’s cultural transformation. Post-modern culture is gradually moving toward an integrated existence, which may be called the return to humanities. And “Being Together” has become a very appealing proposition. Once forgotten or abandoned by modern people,61 it is truly realized and grasped by everyone now. At the same time, network technology makes it possible to realize the ideal of “being together” anytime and anywhere. We can say: we are separated, but we are together, we can enjoy the happiness of being ourselves while appreciating the collective exultation and appeal of everyone being together. Durkheim’s sociology exerts a more practical influence today than in the past.62 And as Mauss has reminded us, the so-called ancient society, which anthropology once made great efforts to study, must not be broken or separated from each other in social life, but various elements in society were linked together, forming “total social facts,” as summarized by Mauss. The “total” here is a kind of total presence. All aspects of social institutions have their immediate expressions, including religion, law, morality, and economy, and they are presented to everyone in an aesthetic way, blending and linking with each other to become a morphological type.63 For this reason, all of us can be together. From time, space, smell, sound to taste, all these bring a culture and emotion of “being together” to the fore, and anthropologists have begun to address collective life scenes that bring people together from a cultural perspective. In civil society, love has begun to gradually walk beyond the narrow path of individual affection to turn into a broader public charity. Deposits have left private accounts to be turned into public welfare amidst a kind of envy and appreciation by other people. Wealth has begun to turn from being flaunted to being shared by the world. However, all these are just an intermediate stage of the axial direction in which everyone is “together,” and the road of being together is bound to be open forever with no end. Separation absolutely does not represent the mainstream of today’s cultural transformation. An intuitive observation of daily life finds that no one has told us how to get together, but we have learned to get together, that is, eat together, drink together, sing together, dance together, study together, discuss together, work together, and so on. There are countless occasions of “being together,” which make us feel a kind of pleasure culture of being together. In fact, people do not have the hateful imagination of people when they are alone. Confucius has cautioned that “a gentleman should be self-disciplined when alone,” while Mencius’ question, “Who is happier, happy being alone and sharing happiness with others?”, has developed Confucius’ insight in this dimension, which is the earliest warning and declaration in the cultural sense for those who cannot experience the happiness of being together. Today, in an era when culture is increasingly better perceived by people, culture will inevitably move toward conscious subjectivity, which will exert an influence on all aspects of society and make it change in form to be smoother and freer. Obviously, culture has never been an obstacle to social development, let alone a heavy burden that makes people miserable, unless we blindly equate culture with the existence of rigid things.

Escape from separation technology  83 At the same time, culture must re-assume its responsibility of social healing. It can be safely said that at any time, culture is a transforming force, which will decorate people’s naked existence to be happily accepted by other people and society. We really cannot resist the special effects of works of art in healing the sufferings of people and society, but this effect would be greatly compromised when works of art are more directly related to the market and money. Perhaps ordinary people seldom care about so-called transformation,64 especially about cultural transformation. Culture will play a role in whatever can bring happiness to people, and this role is unconscious. Once it is clearly perceived by us, we cannot really appreciate the meaning of culture. Just like the situation between two lovers, the best state may be that one party can feel love, but cannot express it, otherwise the love affair will become a boring love game with knowledge rules. In this sense, anthropologists used to talk about culture, but they talked about culture for the sake of talking about culture, while the actual role of culture was played without saying anything. We will always find that the culture described by anthropologists is one thing, while the actual cultural operation may be another matter, and no complete identity can be found between them. In this sense, the anthropologist is obviously playing with an out-and-out word game in the hope that he is a unique author, that is, reflecting a narcissism in that “he has gone to that distant place himself,” but he is not the only one who has actually been there, which will inevitably become a cognitive dilemma always encountered by anthropologists in their own knowledge construction. In this sense, we need to make it clear again that culture is an experience, a practice at the same time, and an experience in a practice, but it is by no means as simple and straightforward as the textual narrative of anthropology. Obviously, a current situation facing anthropologists is that today’s cultural transformation must address the problem of separation among society, population and culture. “Being together” is a slogan of group cohesion, but it also requires practice to get some definite experience. The concept of “people being together” is realized by rituals, gatherings, reunion, friendship, charity, sharing, celebration, and even bustling. This kind of being together is obviously a togetherness despite difference, a togetherness of diversity with harmony instead of categorized togetherness, reflective togetherness, or aimless critical togetherness. Just imagine, what kind of social consequences would come after a group of people put on the same type of clothes? This would definitely imply an indelible structural social separation, resulting in a structural opposition between this group and a group wearing clothes of another color. In today’s sense, space no longer prevents us from getting together, but has become a choice for individuals in different places and cultures, and so is time. The belief in sacred mountains in West China not only draws local residents, but also attracts more believers and tourists from all over the world. Because of their attachment to the mountains and their choice, they gather together from all directions. At this point, gathering becomes an end in itself, and the belief in sacred mountains is just a reason for gathering. Mount Qomolangma Park on the snowy plateau can attract nearly 100,000 people a year. It is a special force that brings together people from all over the world. After consuming our energy and passion, we get a

84  Escape from separation technology real physical and mental satisfaction, and society also calms down because of this satisfaction. Similarly, the collective representation of Eskimos getting together in winter obviously does not mean that winter is the only time for people to get together. We can choose the time we think is more appropriate to have a gathering, and all we have to do is to arrange our own trip. We do not care much whether the gathering will take place in winter or in summer. 3.6 Culture and reenchantment Today, we have a consciousness of culture, and we unconsciously get an experience in the process of pursuing it, but we cannot see the track and direction of cultural transformation. We are actually building an ideal road where there is no road, and therefore it takes on various forms and spreads all over the world of human settlements. Therefore, we will put forward a high-profile rejection of criticism, because any criticism, including cultural criticism, means that it intentionally leads us to or pushes us onto a certain path. This coincides with the new enlightenment spirit of sociology, which requires not only “disenchantment,” but also “reenchantment.”65 This is not only the result of thorough secularization, but also the inevitable state after the denial of a critical attitude. However, for a diversified society made up of people, there are always a great variety of roads to take. It must not be mankind’s initial choice for all people to take one same road, not in the past, and even more unlikely now. Culture has definitely never been fixed without any change. Once we become aware of the existence of a culture, the change will be accelerated by this awareness. In this sense, anthropologists may be among the first social actors to become aware of culture. Because of its special sensitivity to cultural elements, anthropology must constantly take note of the change of culture itself from time to time. This change, in more senses, is a transformation, because it often refers to the change in the form of a cultural existence. Consequently, transformational anthropology emerges, which faces the real life of the current social scenes and addresses real problems closely related to the life of people carrying forward a culture. At least for today’s people, the most critical cultural symptom may be that something is wrong with the practice of a person’s concept in social arrangements. Such practice results in people’s alienation from life and the increase of real separation, and this separation mechanism based on people’s rational understanding makes the foundation of social existence, that is, the trust relationship among people, more and more abstract, making life unpredictable. With the gradual rise of social complexity, the social differentiation mechanism has also started, and the diversified separation modes make the rifted society the main tone of the current world imagination. However, cultural creation, which runs contrary to this social differentiation system, is playing an adhesive role, turning dispersion into aggregation, opposition into mutual agreement, and pluralistic differentiation into integration. This transformation is by no means a compulsion, but an influence, and it really plays its role via people’s hearts. It is a creation of new gravity starting from people’s hearts, just like a magnet, around which scattered

Escape from separation technology  85 and irreconcilable iron filings can gather in an instant. The magnet is the most appropriate metaphor for cultural functions. Culture can be created in this sense, and it is created at different levels of society, with interaction between different levels. More importantly, in any society, culture must be created. The character biao (表) in Chinese can best embody the concretization and practice of this creation. Words such as biaoda (表达, expression), biaoxian (表现, manifestation), biaoyan (表演, performance), biaolu (表露, show), and biaoshi (表示, indication) all reflect the process of creation and revision of a culture. Culture is an adhesive to promote social cohesion, an idea also found in the wisdom of the ancient Greeks. Plato talked about the significance of wine party and chorus to people in Les Lois. These activities not only enable people to know what to love and hate, but also let them learn how to form a union. Therefore, in the eyes of the Athenians, a well-educated person should be “good at dancing and singing.”66 Behind this requirement is a kind of culture, which brings together people who are scattered. At the same time, it should be clear that the function of culture is bound to change with the change of the times. Without change, culture would be “fossilized,” that is, it would no longer be a dynamic force playing a role in people’s daily life, extending its function and showing its vitality. Therefore, culture cannot be reduced to economy, politics or religion, etc. Culture is itself, not anything else. It is neither the so-called “original ecology” to be drawn layer by layer through retrospective review, nor the cultural heritage that puts all kinds of cultures into new concepts to be carried forward. Culture can transcend the limits of time and space to assume its own independent dynamics. Culture can be immersed in people’s lives through various hidden forms, and with the concerted efforts of the down-up and up-down processes, it directly affects the style of our current life. As the ling (pneuma) of society, culture is mostly veiled, and we generally do not feel the existence of a certain culture, but it is precisely because of this that we are immersed in our culture. Culture would hardly be what it is if had it not existed in this way. Notes 1 Zhao Xudong. From Social Transformation to Cultural Transformation: Characteristics of Contemporary Chinese Society and Its Transformation. Journal of Sun Yat-Sen University (Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 111–124. 2 Zhao Xudong. Pneuma, Enlightenment, and Reason: Two Approaches to Knowledge Creation. Ideological Front, 2013 (7): 10–21. 3 Leslie White. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization, trans. Shen Yuan, Huang Keke, and Huang Lingyi. Jinan: Shandong People’s Publishing House, 1988: 53. It is noteworthy that White seems to think that he has found some corroboration of his definition of the mind from Fan Zhen, an atheist philosopher in ancient China. In note 2 to the above quotation, Fan Zhen’s remarks in Shen Mie Lun (神灭论, Theory of Spiritual Perishability) are quoted from a quotation in Hu Shi’s paper in Living Philosophies: “The body is the material basis of the spirit, and the spirit is only the functioning of the body. The spirit is to the body what sharpness is to a sharp knife. We have never known the existence of sharpness after destruction of the knife. How can we admit the survival of the spirit when the body is gone?”

86  Escape from separation technology 4 Leslie White. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization, trans. Shen Yuan, Huang Keke, and Huang Lingyi, Jinan: Shandong People’s Publishing House, 1988: 72 (emphasis in original). 5 Leslie White. The Science of Culture: A Study of Man and Civilization, trans. Shen Yuan, Huang Keke, and Huang Lingyi, Jinan: Shandong People’s Publishing House, 1988: 72. (emphasis added). 6 Cihai Editorial Committee. Cihai. Shanghai: Shanghai Cishu Publishing House, 1980: 1,066. 7 The concept of ling here can be compared with the concept of reason based on Hegel’s philosophy. In Marcuse’s reinterpretation of Hegel’s philosophy, we noticed the continuity and difference between inanimate objects and people with subjective life view. The reason of a stone lies in everything that reacts to it, which seems to change it, but the stone does not know it; next to the stone is the plant, which has its own life, but still does not know it. It has its own subject, but the plant cannot comprehend it, that is, it cannot reason its own potentialities into being, that is, although it has the subject of life, it cannot realize itself. Man alone has the power of self-realization, the power to be a self-determining subject in all processes of becoming, for man alone has an understanding of potentialities and a knowledge of “notions.” His very existence is the process of actualizing his potentialities, of molding his life according to the notions of reason. This is based on the freedom of rational knowledge, which creates a subjective understanding that rationality can grasp knowledge, which neither stones nor plants have (Herbert Marcuse. Reason and Revolution, trans. Cheng Zhimin et al. Shanghai: Shanghai Century Publishing Group, 2007: 23–24). 8 Zhao Xudong. Chinese Consciousness and Three Worlds of Anthropological Studies. Open Times. 2011 (11): 105–125. 9 Zhao Xudong. From Social Transformation to Cultural Transformation: Characteristics of Contemporary Chinese Society and Its Transformation. Journal of Sun Yat-Sen University (Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 111–124. 10 Antonio Gramsci. Letters from Prison: Antonio Gramsci. New York: Harper Colophon, 1975: 235. Quoted from George Ritzer and Douglas Goodman. Sociological Theory, sixth edn. Boston, MA: McGraw Hill, 2003: 270. 11 Li Jingze. Preface: Enchanting Tranquil Snow on Mountains, in Ma Lihua, Ed., Records of Ma Lihua’s Travel across Tibet: Red Mountains in East Tibet. Beijing: China Tibetology Press, 2007: 6. 12 Michel Foucault. This Is Not a Pipe, trans. Xing Kechao. Guilin: Lijiang Publishing House, 2012: 30. 13 Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, trans. Li Sifu and Li Ting, checked by Yang Changyu. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985: 133. 14 Cheng Zhongying. Developmental Trend of Modern Western Philosophy, in Compilation Committee of Lectures of International Academy of Chinese Culture. Comparative Studies of Chinese and Foreign Cultures. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1988: 288. 15 Fei Xiaotong. Fei Xiaotong in 2003: Posthumous Manuscripts of the Scholar of the Century. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 2005: 165–201. 16 Zhao Xudong. Between Cultural Opposition and Cultural Consciousness. Exploration and Free Views, 2007 (3): 16–19. 17 Zhao Xudong. Being Together: A New Vision of Anthropology of Cultural Transformation. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 24–35. 18 Sherry B. Ortner. Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 19 Alvin Toffler. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century, trans. Liu Jiang, Chen Fangming, Zhang Yijun, et al. Beijing: Party School of the CPC Central Committee Press, 1991: 50–52.

Escape from separation technology  87 20 Zhao Xudong and Zhao Lun. People Suffering from Injustice and the Rule of Law in Rural China. The 21st Century: Hong Kong, 2012 (12): 68–77. 21 Allen George Debus. Man and Nature in the Renaissance, trans. Lu Jianhua and Liu Yuan, checked by Wu Zhong. Hangzhou: Zhejiang People’s Publishing House, 1998: 47. 22 Carol P. MacCormack. Nature, Culture and Gender: A Critique, in Carol P. MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, Eds., Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980: 6. 23 Pierre Bourdieu. Ce que parler veut dire: L’économie des échanges linguistiques, trans. Chu Sizhen and Liu Hui. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2005: 24 Huang Yinggui. Observation, Theory and Practice of Anthropology. Taipei: San Min Book Company, 2008: 282. 25 Fadwa El Guindi. Visual Anthropology: Essential Method and Theory. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2004: 11. 26 Ergun Özbudun and E. Fuat Keyman. Cultural Globalization in Turkey: Actors, Discourses, Strategies, in Peter L. Berger, Samuel P. Huntington, Eds., Many Globalizations: Cultural Diversity in the Contemporary World, trans. Tang Jingyi, Lin Zhenxi, and Ke Xiong. Beijing: Xinhua Publishing House, 2004: 275. 27 Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 3. 28 Jodi Dean. Cybersalons and Civil Society: Rethinking the Public Sphere in Transnational Technoculture. Public Culture, 2001 (2): 243–265. 29 Xie Lizhong. Towards a Pluralistic Discourse Analysis: The Implications of Postmodern Theory for Sociology. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2009: 279. 30 Han Jianghong. Yan Fu’s Discourse System and Cultural Transformation in Modern China. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2006: 225–231. 31 Jack Goody. The Theft of History, trans. Zhang Zhengping. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2009: 7. 32 Xu Jieshun and Xu Guilan. Development of Borderland: Reflections from the Perspective of the Major Trend of Development of Ethnic Relations in China, in Song Min, Ed., Proceedings of the China Forum on Borderland Development: 2010: Development Ideas. Beijing: Minzu University of China Press, 2012: 316. 33 He Chuanqi. Oriental Revival: Three Ways of Modernization. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2003: 192–194. 34 Hans-Georg Gadamer. Truth and Method, trans. Wang Caiyong. Shenyang: Liaoning People’s Publishing House, 1987: 67. 35 Jack Goody. The Theft of History, trans. Zhang Zhengping. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2009: 348. 36 Zhao Xudong. The Hedgehog and the Fox. Dushu, 1996 (2): 63–65. 37 Hans-Georg Gadamer. The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996: 618. 38 Marshall Sahlins. What Is Anthropological Enlightenment? Some Lessons of the 20th Century, trans. Zhao Xudong, in Ma Rong and Zhou Xing, Eds., The 20th Century: Cultural Consciousness and Transcultural Dialogues. Beijing: Peking University Press, 1002: 88–119. 39 Max Weber. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Revised), trans. Yu Xiao, Chen Weigang, et al. Shanxi: Shanxi Normal University General Publishing House, 2006: 106. 40 Jared Diamond. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. New York: Viking, 2005: 486–526. 41 In 1943, a philosopher named Zhang Junmai pointed out the limitation of rationality or reason in Western thought in the preface to a book titled Ideas and Society written by a philosopher named Zhang Dongsun, tried to supplement and balance it with the ori-

88  Escape from separation technology ental “virtue” and put forward the concept of “moral rationalism.” This statement was an early understanding of the predicament of Western reason and a Chinese attempt to amend this shortcoming. A few sentences can be quoted here: “Some say reason is related to rationality. Reason is useful, but it can also be harmful. For example, science as a product of reason can not only produce medicine saving people and convenient transportation but also weapons that may kill people. Therefore, with reason, mankind will never be free from disputes. I think modern European culture originated from the age of enlightenment and rationality, when ideas and knowledge were valued. The topic centering on whether knowledge is reliable is named rationality and is actually reason …. Western theories and scientific methods investigate the immensity of the universe and the microworld of electronics, attempting to explaining all that has not been experienced by mankind. This is what oriental people averse to intelligence cannot be emulate (Mencius dislikes intelligence for the strained interpretations and farfetched analogies). Virtues as termed in the East should be examined under the lens of Western intelligence; and intelligence in the West should be nourished by the sweet dews of Eastern virtues. If the strengths of both the West and the East are integrated, a future new culture will emerge and the philosophy of this new culture would be no other than what I call virtuous intelligence, or moral rationality” (Preface of Zhang Junmai, in Zhang Dongsun. Ideas and Society. Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press, 1988). 42 Liao Yuqun. Ayurveda: Traditional Indian Medicine. Shenyang: Liaoning Education Press, 2002: 20. 43 Zhao Xudong. Replace Nightmare with Dreams: A Way for Overcoming the “Giddens Paradox”. Chinese Social Sciences Today, July 20, 2010: 11. 44 Bronislaw Szerszynski. Ecological Rites: Ritual Action in Environmental Protest Events. Theory, Culture & Society: Explorations in Critical Social Science, 2002 (3): 51–70. 45 Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Liu Pikun. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1979: 44–45. 46 René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Pang Jingren. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1986: 95. 47 Michel Foucault. Panopticism, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Liu Beicheng and Yang Yuanying. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1999: 219– 256. 48 John Dewey. How We Think: A Restatement of the Relation of Reflective Thinking to the Educative Process. New York: D. C. Heath, 1933: 17. 49 Cartesian separation of mind and body is based on such a logic as he has stated: “We understand all objects as separable, because in fact we can never understand half a soul, but we can understand even half a smallest object, so objects and spirits are not only different in nature, but even opposite in some cases” (René Descartes. Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, trans. Pang Jingren. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1986: 11). 50 Peter Fitzpatrick. The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge, 1992: 87–91. 51 Tang Yijie. An Examination of Several Problems in Cultural Development of Contemporary China from the Perspective of Introduction of Buddhism from India to China, in Compilation Committee of Lectures of International Academy of Chinese Culture. Comparative Studies of Chinese and Foreign Cultures. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1988: 46. 52 Li Yiyuan. Selected Works of Li Yiyuan. Shanghai: Shanghai Education Press, 2002: 262–266. 53 Zhao Xudong. On the Edge of the Indigenous and Foreign Lands: Self, Culture and the Other in Anthropological Researches. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011: 265–270. 54 Zhang Shiying. Chinese and Western Cultures and the Self. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 2011: 19.

Escape from separation technology  89 55 Zhao Xudong. Being Together: A New Vision of Anthropology of Cultural Transformation. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 24–35. 56 Anthony Giddens and Philip W. Sutton. Sociology, seventh edn. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013: 440. 57 Hans-Georg Gadamer. The Enigma of Health: The Art of Healing in a Scientific Age, trans. Jason Gaiger and Nicholas Walker. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996: 107. 58 Zhao Xudong. Gifts and Commodities: A Case Study of Collective Occupation of Rural Land in China. Journal of Anhui Normal University (Humanities and Social Sciences), 2007 (5): 395–404. 59 Marcel Mauss. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West, 1970: 68. 60 Richard Layard. Happiness: Lessons from New Science. New York: Penguin Press, 2005: 234. 61 Michel Maffesoli. The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy, trans. Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist. New York: State University of New York, 1993: 3. 62 Émile Durkheim. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields. New York: The Free Press, 1995: 445. 63 Marcel Mauss. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West, 1970: 1. 64 Even though Ivan Szelenyi, a sociologist at Yale University, expects social transformation at the level of ordinary people, obviously, just like Sun Liping’s research he has commented on, Sun Liping has correctly seen the unconscious practice results of such transformation (Ivan Szelenyi. A Theory of Transitions, trans. Lu Peng, in Guo Yuhua. Tsinghua Sociology Review: Ethnography in Face of Social Transition. Beijing: China Social Sciences Academic Press, 2012: 12). 65 Cheng Boqing. Out of Modernity: Towards Reorientation of Contemporary Sociological Theory. Beijing: Social Sciences Academic Press, 2005: 261. 66 Luc Brisson. Platon les loi, trans. Tan Lizhu. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2006: 108.

4

Family, education, and separation technology

The core of a family used to be shaped by the ideology of union. With the emphasis on personal independence and uniqueness in modern social education, the trend of separation between individuals and their families is also rising. On the one hand, it is reflected in the transformation of family life and housewives’ role by the emergence of new things in society; on the other hand, it is also reflected in the cultivation of individual self-awareness and the increasing disintegration of family life that ensues. This situation results from many factors, not just one or several factors in education or the family. 4.1 Education, individuality, and the decline of the parental role Today’s increasingly popular separation technology is creating a great variety of individualized lives in society, and in this sense, culture is also gradually changing because of the changes in the environment around us. This is deeply reflected in the field of education that influences the social and cultural composition. The influence on people, in particular, is shown by the transformation of their initiative, thus giving rise to new social relations and values, which are projected on the cultural expression of family structure, making it change in identity. In other words, a culture associated with education and family is quietly transforming, that is, gradually and fundamentally deviating. First of all, with its continuous growth, the concept of individualization has become a common one in daily life. For example, in our living mode, a very obvious spatial separation is found between parents and children in today’s urban life and even rural life. For children’s education, a matter of top priority, the “study” is no longer an exclusive space reserved for “scholars,” “scholar-officials,” “literary academics,” and “intellectuals” with a certain social status in the original social sense, but a private space that children are forced to enter from a very young age. Parents hope that this specially designed independent space can be used to cultivate independent individuals or entities who can adapt to modern life. However, with the popularization of network and wireless communication technology, children, unwilling to be isolated in these new units, quickly open the door to keep in touch with the outside world in their private space by mastering network and communication technology. So there are two doors here: one a real door, tightly closed, and also closed to the whole family, the other a virtual door in cyberspace, which exists DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-5

Family, education, and separation technology  91 through the expansion of Internet technology and is open to the whole world outside the family because of the openness of the network itself. In this sense, even the family has been transformed into a part of this tremendous open network system. In this process, the transformation of the mother’s role in the family is the most obvious. The tolerant and accepting role of the mother constructed by the existing culture has been transformed by the new training goals for children, with the gentle and protective image of the mother being replaced by the imperative rejection and suppression of patriarchy. Modern kitchen utensils, such as washing machines, refrigerators, electric cookers, gas cookers, range hoods, microwave ovens, induction cookers, and dishwashers, have become popular in families. In China, with “home appliances going to the countryside” after the popularization of such appliances in cities, it will not take long for rural housewives to leave the kitchen.1 In the process of this transformation, the mother’s position as “housewife” in the family is gradually lost with the introduction of new technology, and her new position is established by trial through self-negation. At the same time, this kind of negation is also arguably a transformation of role identity, that is, transformation from the original role of “housewife” to the role of seeking new social status, continuously realizing and strengthening this role identity through growing children. The action strategy is complete negation, that is, not recognizing the authority of parents’ respective roles in the family, but drawing on various modes of disintegration to encourage their children not to follow the same path as their parents. This kind of negation is particularly effective through the mother’s neglect, disapproval, and even rejection of the father’s role. Meanwhile, in this process, the father himself is alienated from the so-called “man of house” role in this family, and tries to obtain more material resources from the outside world to support the normal operation of the family. At least for a farmer’s or a worker’s family, the mother often talks about the following: “Do not be like your father. He can’t earn much money no matter how hard he works!”, or “Child, you should do great things. Do not follow your parents’ footsteps!” Japan’s modernization probably experienced the negative transformation of parents’ roles in the family earlier than China did. Chizuko Ueno, a female sociologist in Japan, is very keenly aware that in Japanese society, “because of the unusually fast pace of modernization, children are considered to be promising only when they become somebody unlike their parents, which is a special phenomenon occurring under the pressure of modernization.”2 This logic of denying the existence of parental roles is obviously not a normal logic of family-centered society, but a logic of cultural transformation that apparently disrupts family identity and reconstructs social hierarchy and identity recognition. Under the guidance of such negative rather than appreciative words, the individual self of children in the family and its continuous improvement in society become extremely important. It seems that parents’ respective positions and functions in the family can be abandoned without any misgivings in the process. In a propaganda slogan about learning from Lei Feng on the streets of Beijing in the spring of 2014, we saw a kind of self-awareness of this era presented in the dominant discourse. The slogan clearly read, “Learn from Lei Feng, help others, and improve yourself.” It was probably impossible for the last part of the sentence (in italics) to be found

92  Family, education, and separation technology in the 1960s when Chairman Mao proposed “learning from Comrade Lei Feng,” because at that time, any clear sign of self-awareness would be suppressed by dogmatism. Today, this self-awareness has become extremely strong and prominent, that is, people today do not dedicate themselves completely to society, but wish to gain something from their work, which is what “improve yourself” is really about. In the process of struggling to cultivate and realize the ideal of “self-improvement” with the efforts of the whole family and even the whole society, some observable substantive changes have taken place in the role of the family and the identity of family members, especially the identity of the mother. This is arguably an unprecedentedly seismic change. Traditional society has always emphasized the importance of the concept of “family” and its ideological stability, which can be reflected in Admonitions for the Yan Clan and even “Six Imperial Edits” of Emperor Taizu of Ming. This upper-level concept of family guided by elitism is based on the community of rural society, that is, the socalled village convenance and refers to China’s traditional society. This tradition was equally effective in the following Qing dynasty, with successive emperors attaching importance to family ethics and village convenances.3 However, with the changes in all kinds of new technology today, especially with the rapid development of many separation technologies, our family concept is also changing. At the same time, the concept of education is changing its own development track with the development and self-creation of technologies. 4.2 Separation technology and substitution of family functions The core of technology or civilization in a general sense is to separate people from the world closely related to them through the invention of some utensils. In my opinion, this technology or civilization is actually a separation technology or civilization.4 A simple example is that once people start thinking about building a house, they will be separated from trees, forests, rivers, and mountains in nature. The philosophical concept of “harmony between man and nature” reflected in buildings is nothing more than a symbolic or formal wish to make people who have lost contact with nature have an artificial union with nature, which is arguably a state or artistic conception of substantial separation and an experiential combination, with the latter being very important to people. Perhaps people have been distancing themselves from things in nature and others in society since their mastery of tools. But people have sensibility, and with this sensibility they do not feel the actual separation, which may be the most important basis for them to experience happiness in life. However, with the rapid growth of various kinds of separation technology, the complexity and practicality of technology make it difficult to take into account this sensitivity of people; as a result, technology begins to develop in isolation from the connections between people, between people and nature, and between people and objects that people are happy to experience. The technology by now is more closely linked with modern high technology. The operating principles of such technology may not be really understood by people other than experts. The principles of such technological systems are beyond ordinary people’s mastery in

Family, education, and separation technology  93 their lives, such as the banking systems, automobile operating systems, and aviation flight systems that we rely on today. Separation technology is almost ubiquitous for the substitution of objects and functions in our daily life. In a traditional family, life without the mother might be unimaginable. The image created by the term “being both father and mother” has always been associated with a miserable family life, especially used to describe an abnormal family bereft of the mother. This point could not be better illustrated by the typical story of the “White-Haired Girl” (“Bai Mao Nü”), which influenced a generation, because in normal family, the status of the mother is irreplaceable. Besides feeding her offspring, housework like cooking and washing clothes is essential to maintaining a family. The mother is an important source of cohesion and trust in the family, because the production of food is closely related to the role of the mother,5 while men in families cannot complete these tasks alone in many cases. However, the core of today’s separation technology is to draw such housewives out of the living space where they have final say and control, and replace them with new technical facilities. The household appliances for the above-mentioned household matters are all substitutes for the original function of women in these jobs. The rice cooker, which has been popularized nowadays, not only helps us to make delicious rice whenever we like, but also meets the demand for eating hot rice at any time of the day, and has the function of stir-frying. This means that without a woman at home, meals can still be made smoothly by relying on machines. In this sense, the emergence of single-parent families and the existence of such a family form as a “happy thing” are becoming very normal, which is obviously closely related to the loss of women’s function in maintaining a family. But apparently, for example, although with the separation technology such as the washing machine housewives no longer have to wash clothes by hand, their weekly washing time has not really been reduced; rather, with the introduction of the convenient washing machine into households, the frequency of washing has increased, and at the same time, people’s concept of cleanliness has been constantly enhanced, so the time women spend controlling washing machines has increased instead of decreased. The laundry work that was originally done at a fixed time or could be outsourced or even shared is not only given to the housewife, but also becomes another burden that can be handled anytime and anywhere, which in turn affects the housewife’s daily routine, and arbitrarily disrupts her original pace of life. In the United States, reputed to be the most modern society, “the title of ‘housewives’ of American middle-class wives is just an empty name, but in fact they are just workers specializing in housework without domestic servants.”6 The housewife we can see today may be watching TV series or listening to pop music, with an eye on the operation of the washing machine, and waiting to turn off the electric stove. Always busy and bustling, she is but a hostess for various electrical appliances. The mother in the modern family has stepped out of the kitchen by purchasing electrical appliances, but this has been achieved at a high price, that is, she has shifted all her physical and mental efforts to the education of her children. Family education and even social education, which were originally recognized naturally or

94  Family, education, and separation technology jointly, have been continuously promoted through the concept of human progress and enlightenment, and have been separated from the space of family and society to become a practice of specialized education in special school spaces. However, in the process of independent growth, this kind of education system is also unconsciously changing its direction, that is, this system is vigorously promoting separation among people, based on the one hand on the modern concept of cultivating individual personality, and on the other hand on the selection of qualified talents needed by society. Through various graded examination systems, distinction of identity is marked. In this sense, a kind of “alienation” that deviates from education per se has emerged and been gradually escalated, resulting in a social consequence that what children learn becomes less important than how learning can make them surpass others quickly and efficiently. Originally a by-product of learning, it has become the purpose of learning itself, and through a modern market logic of legitimacy similar to the dogma of modern fundamentalism,7 it further strengthens the legitimacy of the action strategy of the educated in this field. As a result, the family, especially the nuclear family developed since the start of modern times, is no longer the basic social unit, but is undergoing a deep transformation due to the invasion of various separation technologies into the family sector. From the legal point of view, this process is accompanied by the concept of private property rights gradually going deep into people’s hearts. From this, a paradox surrounding family life began to form and emerge, that is, legal marriage, based on commonality originally guaranteed by modern law, has begun to move toward separation or divorce caused by the fact that this commonality cannot be built or is even destroyed in de facto marriage. The provisions of the new Chinese Marriage Law on the registration of property before marriage also imply that this kind of separation in the family has been recognized by a state law. Although the joint ownership of property after marriage is also protected by law, as some cases show, it is actually difficult to differentiate the ownership in real life. The author’s investigation in Licun, Hebei Province clearly illustrates this point,8 and a case from Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, which was published on the Internet on August 23, 2011, may well illustrate the practical complexity of property separation. The written application for legal assistance read as follows: I met a woman on a blind date in 2010 and we got engaged in just a few months. Her parents said that they would not accept any betrothal gift but asked me to give them more so that they would feel more honored. As a result, I gave them more than one million yuan, of which more than 200,000 yuan was taken. The next day, we got the marriage registration certificate and left hometown. But in the following day the woman demanded divorce because she thought that we were incompatible and that she married me under her parents’ pressure. After that, she refused to live with me as husband and wife. She did not do laundry or cook, but quarreled with me every day. After more than 20 days, she went back to her parents’ house and hid herself there. Her parents promised to pay me back my betrothal money, but later they were only willing to pay me back half, giving various excuses to

Family, education, and separation technology  95 slander me, saying that I was impotent and committed domestic violence, and that they were kind enough to return me half of the betrothal money. Isn’t this a marital fraud? Enraged, I decided to go to court. Here, I would like to ask whether the betrothal money is premarital property and whether I can get it back through a lawsuit, now that the new Marriage Law has been promulgated, which provides that the premarital property of both men and women should belong to themselves.9 Obviously, the issue of the return or disposal of betrothal gifts is the most difficult to handle in divorce cases. We also see that the lawyers answering this person’s questions held different views. Some clearly replied that betrothal gifts should be considered “pre-marital property” or “personal property before marriage.” Others answered from the perspective of legal evidence. For example, a lawyer replied: It is recommended to entrust a lawyer to handle the case. How to reach an agreement, how to obtain evidence and how to file a lawsuit are very professional issues, which require certain professional knowledge and skills. If necessary, please contact me directly. Another lawyer said more directly: “Do you have any evidence to prove that you have given 200,000 yuan? If what you said above can be proven to be true, you can sue for the return of your money.” Obviously, this inquiry showed the lawyer’s lack of knowledge about folk customs. As a matter of fact, it is very difficult to find evidence on this question. Another lawyer’s answer was as follows: This case can be analyzed in two situations. First, if you have been married at a registry and held a wedding ceremony according to the custom, it is deemed that you have lived together. According to Article 10 of Judicial Interpretation II of the Marriage Law, if a party requests the return of the betrothal gifts paid according to the custom, the people’s court shall support it under any of the following circumstances: (1) The two parties have not gone through the marriage registration formalities; (2) The two parties have gone through the formalities of marriage registration, but they have not lived together. Based on the above regulations, you can ask the other party to return it. In the second case, if you are married at a registry and have lived together, it is difficult for the court to support you (please pay attention to the definition of “living together” in law). I have the judgments of Taizhou Intermediate People’s Court to support the above analysis. Good luck!10 It appeared impossible to make a fair judgment in this case since the procedure is so complicated. The final result could only be that each of the two parties stuck to their own opinions, failing to reach an agreement. In this paradox and entanglement between law and reality, against the current family background, what we more often see is the disintegration or ineffectiveness of family life in daily life. For example, with the production, transportation, and

96  Family, education, and separation technology consumption of various convenience foods around the world, there is an increasing tendency for individualized life, with the subjectivity of “family taste” replaced by commodities supplied by diversified providers in society. Family feasts have started to be held beyond the family space and enter public but semi-private fields, such as private rooms in restaurants, karaoke rooms, separate rooms or suites in hotels, etc. At the same time, irregular family banquets have become more ritualized, with meal preparation gradually separated from housewives and outsourced to the various forms of restaurants booming in society. As a result, it is no longer necessary for a wife or mother to be present to hold a family banquet. The wife or mother may be absent or leave the party early if called by her work, and the husband or father will take care of the children for dinner, or he will entertain his relatives or guests for dinner alone. Today, this has become more common. In this sense, the role of the wife as the hostess becomes a foil, not a necessity, and the private room of a restaurant may become a temporary place for a family to gather as a substitute for the kitchen and dining room space of the family. Thus the concept of family has entered a “flash” period, that is, when the members of a family agree to have a dinner together, they will book a private room in a restaurant via the Internet or mobile phones, and then contact each other through mobile phones to determine the time for dining. After that, different members of the same family may come from different places in a city or even many cities (or even villages), and after an hour of dining, each may go their separate ways. For example, a mother may take her children to a weekend tutorial class, a father may interview a client at the weekend, or write an article in a hurry. In this sense, the “flash memory” of family life has become an undeniable fact, especially in urban space, and relatively convenient and quickly accessible means of transportation are making this “flash memory” a fact of life that a family has to accept. I was deeply impressed with an elderly couple I met during my trip from Beijing Capital Airport to Osaka, Japan, who helped each other to board the plane and sat next to me. I asked them why they were visiting Japan. They said that one of their daughters studied in the United States and stayed there to work after graduation. Since her annual holiday was very short, she invited them to travel somewhere in the world every year to do her filial duty. This year she had invited them to Osaka. The daughter booked the plane tickets for them in the United States, so that the old couple did not have to worry about anything. They just had to step out of their home to take a taxi to the airport, and then they would meet their daughter somewhere in the world they had agreed. The old man sighed: Our daughter is so busy at work that she cannot spare time to go home. In this way, she cannot eat the delicious meals cooked by her mother. We can still walk now, but once we cannot move, it will be difficult to see our daughter at home. In this sense, we can make an inference about the future: with the erosion of family life by various separation technologies, the family may no longer be a space for everyone to get together and share risks, but may be the last stop for the elderly

Family, education, and separation technology  97 before they leave this world alone. Even before they leave this world, for physical reasons, such as Alzheimer’s disease, some families have been unwilling to assume the risk of taking care of such elderly people, and thus resolutely abandon them. The nursing homes emerging in society may be a social force that makes such abandonment reasonable and legal, while causing the loss of moral constraint. If such nursing homes are not built, young family members will be overwhelmed by the burden of supporting the elderly because of the young people pursuing more in social life, inevitably neglecting some family responsibilities. The ancient legend of “hiding the elderly over 60” is no fiction today, but now it is clear that old people are “hidden” in old-age care institutions outside families. It is even common for a family to abandon children with serious diseases. This is not a problem of people, but more importantly, it results from the change of family structure. The power of the family is not strong enough to address all kinds of unexpected family risks. 4.3 Family separation and role transformation From the above analysis, we can develop our thinking on problems in the field of education. All kinds of educational functions originally undertaken by the family are first transferred out because of the deconstruction and actual loss of the parental role in the family. Socialization of education is not family-oriented, let alone communityoriented, that is, educational achievements are no longer closely linked with the “distinguished family” of blood connections or with the “famous clan” of geographical connections, which has become a core feature of today’s educational culture. In a word, it can be concluded that what all education is actually doing today is to make the educated successfully leave or even completely abandon their families. In other words, based on such a change in educational culture, every educated individual in society will have such a potential, that is, with a set of skills or knowledge, he or she can live independently from the family where he or she was born. This independence does not necessarily follow the emergence of a new family. More and more “single aristocrats” flaunting themselves and the value given by the social avant-garde make possible a trend for individuals to leave their families and develop in isolation. Therefore, a look at the distance of a person’s education space today will find that the radius of an individual’s education far exceeds the radius on which family life depends, that is, in pursuit of education, people tend to move far away from where their family is located. Today, with the progress of network technology, transportation, communication systems, and convenient food storage and supply, people can leave their families and realize the step-by-step separation from their families along a trajectory from rural to urban, and from urban to foreign countries. Therefore, people may leave their hometowns, villages, mountains, counties, small cities, and their own countries from a very young age, and the direction in which they are heading may be far away from their families. The whole education system provides a driving force in this direction. People leave their families in order to educate their children, in which process their family identity also undergoes various twists and turns.

98  Family, education, and separation technology The core of the concept of “school estate” found in every city nowadays is to build a family with an abnormal life outside the normal family life space for the very purpose of educating children to move away from their families through some institutionalized and non-institutionalized educational organizations. Modern network technology, rapid and efficient rail transit, and the popularization of air transportation clearly allow people to examine the influence of so-called separation technology on education. This kind of separation is obviously not the separation of ideas in consciousness, but a kind of separation practice completed in the subconscious with the help of new technologies. The basis of this separation lies in the gradual replacement of various roles in family life. Everyone in the original family is no longer fully a family member, but an independent individual with strong selfawareness. He or she can take care of him- or herself without the help of others by means of various technologies. Apparently, if everything can be purchased from a supermarket, a person with enough money does not need to maintain very close contact with their family to survive. At the same time, with the popularization of computer network and communication technology, this so-called natural sense of family dependence has been irresistibly disintegrated. Although long-distance video chats on the Internet have strengthened the frequency and convenience of contact between family members, the opportunities for people to meet each other face to face have tended to decrease, which also deeply changes the role of mothers, that is, mothers are leaving their role as real-time caregivers for their children. In other words, computers or smart phones that can be connected to the Internet have substantially replaced the role of the mother in a family and changed their original role. From Freud’s psychoanalytic point of view, the Oedipus complex of being attached to one’s mother and hating one’s father plays a special role in people’s subconsciousness. But this complex may undergo a functional transformation in the face of the informationbased social scenes today. Handheld computers and smart phones, as the most fashionable modern “toys” integrating entertainment and life services, are rapidly replacing the role of mothers to become the objects of people’s attachment, so much so that the role of real mothers may disintegrate and be replaced by this lively “toy,” because the mother’s original functions of being attached have been replaced by new technology and various goods in supermarkets and even various services that can replace her in society. Convenience foods replace the function of a mother to provide food, hourly paid workers replace the function of a mother to tidy a room and keep it clean, washing machines replace the function of a mother to wash clothes with both hands, and various models and brands of clothes replace the function of a mother to sew clothes for her family to keep out the cold. Along this thread, you will find that it is increasingly difficult to construct and maintain the role of a traditional mother. Meanwhile, we see another trend of replacement, that is, the mother replaces the father’s role, while the father’s original role is being marginalized, even being squeezed out of family life. This is actually a change in the role and function of family members. The children originally on the margin do not become the center of a family through natural growth. Slogan-like views such as “all for children” and

Family, education, and separation technology  99 “do not lose at the starting line” are constantly elevating the importance of children in a family, and early childhood education that extends to the embryonic period through social institutions highlights children as the core of a family. The original parental role is gradually retreating or being replaced by some newly invented separation technology, and both parents are marginalized together. Just think about the popularization of in vitro fertilization reproductive technology, and we can feel the double loss of parental roles. The mother’s original role of unconditionally accepting and protecting her children has turned into a father’s role of reprimanding and restraining them, so as to urge them to move toward a fixed direction of growth. This transformation has led to a new Oedipus complex transformation, that is, because the separation technologies such as computers and mobile phones are becoming common objects of attachment for the new generation of children, and the maternal role is increasingly being infiltrated by the oppressive paternal role, if these objects that attract children can be called “machines” for short, then the Oedipus complex of “loving mother and hating father” in the Freudian sense will inevitably be transformed into a complex of “loving machines and hating mother” or “loving machines and hating father.” Here, the roles of father and mother have been homogenized, with no functional difference between them. This view is by no means alarmist, as many extreme examples can be found on the Internet about a child hurting his or her mother or father because of addiction to the Internet, which are undeniably a mapping of the complex of “loving machines and hating mother” or “loving machines and hating father.”11 4.4 Educational anthropology and anthropology of cultural transformation Given that educational anthropology claims to study educational behaviors in different cultures, in the face of cultural transformation around the world, we must add the dimension of cultural criticism to the dimension of cultural relativism of anthropology. Only with this kind of criticism can we have a real sense of cultural consciousness. Without cultural criticism, it would be difficult to realize cultural consciousness. However, such cultural criticism is no longer cultural study in the traditional sense, but one of the many cultural forms taking place around us right now, which invisibly guides the whole of our lives. It manifests itself by means of implements or manmade objects, which is the self-growth of separation technology in modern society and its domination of our lives. Technology is undoubtedly the basis of making something. From the simplest technology of grinding stone tools to today’s extremely complex and abstract microelectronics technology, there may be only one purpose: to make some changes in people’s life and channel it toward a good life. But there is a structural transformation between a “cold” society and a “hot” society, as termed by structural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss.12 It can be said that the technology of grinding stone tools, as a part of “cold” society, can exist in a relatively closed society for several or even more than ten centuries without any change. The hoes in today’s farmers’ hands seem to be no different from those in the Iron Age 3,000

100  Family, education, and separation technology years ago. This not-so-fast-changing technology was integrated into people’s daily life to become an inseparable part of life. However, all kinds of applied objects made with microelectronics technology are obviously the manifestations of a fastchanging “hot” society, which has a tension inside to push them to quickly transmit outside the closed society. Without this transmission, its existence would be meaningless, because other newly emerging knowledge and technologies will soon annihilate the knowledge and technology that cannot be transmitted. In fact, these “hot” technologies will not be truly integrated into people’s lives for a long time. More often, technology enters life and separates it, and then leaves life itself, followed by newer technologies entering our lives to fill the gap of this separation. This is the core meaning of “technological progress,” which is more often closely related to the thorough transformation of our lives. For example, TV technology enables us to understand the changes in the world more clearly, while today’s network technology can not only completely replace the functions of traditional TV, but also enables us to dynamically and randomly understand the changes in the world and update our knowledge. However, we are getting farther and farther away from the family itself and the real world around us because of the penetration of such technologies into the family. All the news takes place on the TV screen, but the real society we live in gives us an icy look, as if nothing has happened, and we really cannot see what has happened. In this sense, we must revisit the current culture and its fundamental transformation,13 which is undoubtedly caused by the continuous expansion of the technical space into the living space.14 We do not need to believe in the myth of the nuclear family, nor should we believe that the expanded family still exists in our culture. As long as we believe that our feelings are real, the family model will undergo various changes because of the collision with various technologies. Perhaps three decades ago, no clear concept of the gay family could be found in China. Today, it is a way of existence that many people acquiesce in or have to acknowledge.15 A pet dog was being led by an old woman in the community, who kept calling the dog “son” and really cared for it as if it were her own son. If you asked her, she would say, “I live alone and feel very bored, and my sons are all abroad. This dog is a member of the family.” She might even add that if the dog died before her, she would definitely prepare a funeral for it. The relationship between the old lady and this non-human “son-dog” may be regarded as a new family model in the eyes of today’s animal lovers. Obviously, today, this type of family also exists and should not be excluded from family classification. Indeed, education plays the role of a separation technology to separate family members today. The high expectations the family and society pin on their children have really promoted the status of the children in the family. However, modern education has prevented these children from returning to the family where they were born and grew up. In addition, they cannot really return to their families because they have mastered the new technical knowledge provided by schools or society. At the same time, all kinds of utensils in family space are constantly replaced by new separation technology, which also leads to the transformation of the family space. Each family becomes more and more individualized under the

Family, education, and separation technology  101 support of a complete social market service system, and each room in a living unit becomes an isolated and complete living space. Others, including family members, can only be other isolated individuals, with no deep and lasting connection between them. Especially when a family crisis comes, the probability of each person coping with risks alone is far greater than that of a family handling them collectively, because all the skills cultivated in education are actually fundamentally training all kinds of children how to learn to be independent, how to have knowledge, how to get rid of the fetters of family earlier, and how to occupy the number one position in society, that is, not to lose at the starting line. Education means success, occupying the commanding heights, and a war, which has become a self-evident action strategy among today’s students. I was deeply impressed by a masters student. When she was preparing to apply for a PhD program at Peking University, she specially prepared a reference data set, which she named “Peking University Application Strategy” in a serious way. Of course, she was finally admitted to Peking University. But I often think, does such a mindset meet the initial purpose of education? Obviously, the answer is no. In this sense, it is difficult for education to truly connect with the concept of education in history to generate a linear and traceable development trajectory. Today, education has undergone a fundamental cultural transformation based on social transformation or a cultural distortion that is not going on smoothly. As a result, it seems that people have to deny the family they come from in order to truly surpass it. Of course, according to this cognitive logic, the parental role in the family must be surpassed, and surpassing parents is regarded as a way to gain social and family glory. Therefore, people can have all kinds of certificates and achievements from prenatal education to doctoral training, and even post-doctoral experience, but it is difficult to return to their family world and maintain truly normal communication with their families. In order to gain and surpass knowledge, it seems that people can make a choice without thinking to completely abandon the whole of their life as well as family life. People will no longer concentrate their emotions on their own family space, but will turn this emotional knowledge into a social contribution inspired by society. Some people have begun to care about the miserable and poor old people posted on Weibo and WeChat even more than the parents who have brought them up and need to be cared for. Some people tend to use the constructive concept of “citizen” shaped by the media and social authorities to show their social care and love winning social approval, but they are reluctant to give even one-tenth of this love to their parents who live alone. Some people may stay away from their families for the purpose of studying, advanced learning, and doing business, but will refuse to give up their pursuit when a family member is sick or even seriously ill. Many such cases can be enumerated to expand the parallel structure. This is no rhetoric of litterateurs, but the social facts really happening around us. It seems that absolutely no proper and fair evaluation of this phenomenon has been undertaken. All of the above phenomena, in my opinion, are closely related to the invention of separation technology and its constant application in our lives. Our culture will inevitably change with the development of these technologies, and with

102  Family, education, and separation technology the creativity of culture, some new cultural forms will be transformed, so that the meaning of people’s lives can be rediscovered, or people can have a kind of awakening rediscovery. What educational anthropologists should really do is to lead fellow researchers to make constant progress toward this discovery. Notes 1 In the movement of “Household Electric Appliances Going to the Countryside” nationwide in 2009, it was said that 34 million household electric appliances were sold to the rural areas in that very year. It was reported that according to a rough estimation, the penetration of color TV sets in Chinese rural areas in 2007 was only equivalent to the level in urban areas in 1996, while the penetration of washing machines was only around the urban level in 1985, and air conditioner penetration was equivalent to the urban level in 1995. However, promoted by the preferential policies of the government, the urban–rural gap would be narrowed by over ten years (www​.chinanews​.com​/cj​/cj cyzh/ news/2009/1225/2039697​.sht​ml). 2 Chizuko Ueno. Formation and End of Modern Families, trans. Wu Yongmei. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2004: 189. 3 It has become commonly accepted that the Ming dynasty attached great importance to education, so there is no need to say too much on the subject. The “Record of Emperor Taizu Gao of the Ming Dynasty” (Volume 26) states: “when the world is established, those who are in need of food and clothing, and those who are in need of education.” In the thirtieth year of the Hongwu reign (1397), the “Six Commandments of the Holy Communion” was specially issued, with the core content of “filial piety to parents, respect for elders, harmony in the village, teaching children and grandchildren, ensuring their health, and not doing anything wrong.” In the Qing dynasty, since the ninth year of the Shunzhi reign (1652), the “Six Commandments of the Holy Communion” was issued, which was passed through Kangxi’s “Sixteen Commandments of the Holy Communion” and Yongzheng’s “Guangxun of the Holy Communion.” In the seventeenth year of the Guangxu reign (1891), as many as 32 such edicts related to family ethics were issued. The concept of filial piety, which emphasizes the dominant position of the family, has not changed at all. 4 Zhao Xudong. Together: A New Perspective of Cultural Transformation Anthropology. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2013 (3): 24–35. 5 Zhao Xudong and Wang Shasha. Trust in Food – Dietary Concepts and Their Changes in Chinese Society. Xinhua Digest, 2013 (12): 22–24. 6 Chizuko Ueno. Formation and End of Modern Families, trans. Wu Yongmei. Beijing: Commercial Press, 2004: 164. 7 Stuart Sim. Fundamentalist World: The New Dark Age of Dogma. Cambridge: Icon Books, 2004: 223. 8 Zhao Xudong. Power and Justice: Dispute Settlement and Authority Pluralism in Rural Society. Tianjin: Tianjin Ancient Books Publishing House, 2003: 87–106. 9 Law Time, August 23, 2011. www​.lawtime​.cn​/ask​/question​_2082966​.html. 10 Law Time, August 23, 2011. www​.lawtime​.cn​/ask​/question​_2082966​.html. 11 There are many cases like this, and they are described in numerous locations on the Internet in various forms, so I will randomly cite the following examples that occurred in 2013. A second-year junior high school boy in Hong Kong continued to play games before an exam. His mother scolded him and forcibly turned off his computer in the middle of the night. The boy was very dissatisfied and wrestled with his mother, injuring her. The family asked the boy to apologize, but he was very arrogant and refused to apologize. The family had no choice but to report the incident to the police (https://www.ali213​.net​/news​/html​/2013​-1​/64594​.html). In another example, a

Family, education, and separation technology  103 mother in Tanzhou Town, Guangdong Province saw her 28-year-old son doing nothing every day and indulging in online games, so she tried to kill herself by drinking pesticide. Her son seemed to have nothing to do with her, and a neighbor called the police in an attempt to save the mother’s life (https://www​.163​.com​/game​/article​ /99NK490O00314K8H​.html). Cases of disputes with fathers over playing games have also been frequently reported. For example, an 18-year-old man surnamed Wang in Jishui County, Jiangxi Province chased his father with a knife to stop him playing games, and then the local police were called, who came to stop him hurting his father, and overpowered him (http://game​.163​.com​/13​/0909​/20​/98BTVC130034K8H​.html). 12 Zhao Xudong. Local and Exotic: Self, Culture, and Others in Anthropological Research. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011: 48. 13 Zhao Xudong. From Social Transformation to Cultural Transformation – Characteristics and Transformation of Contemporary Chinese Society. Journal of Sun Yat-sen University (Social Sciences Edition), 2013 (3): 111–124. 14 Zhao Xudong. Together: A New Perspective of Cultural Transformation Anthropology. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences Edition), 2013 (3): 24–35. 15 Fu Xiaoxing. Space, Culture and Performance – Anthropological Observation of Gay Men Groups in a City of Northeast China. Beijing: Guangming Daily Press, 2012: 139– 166.

5

Conception of matter in the postcultural consciousness era

As we are becoming clearly aware of the existence of cultural consciousness, we are suddenly confronted with the material world in the post-cultural consciousness era. The world is constantly being manipulated by separation technology, which has been increasingly penetrating into our lives. The modern world is closely linked with not only the concept of rationality, but also the production of technology and the separation of the life world, which deprives a harmonious and common life of its space. People are separated into independent entities by technology, which is realized by virtual space. This constitutes a real situation faced by the conception of matter in the post-cultural consciousness era. 5.1 Technology and modern world As we gradually come to understand that anthropology is no longer just a description and explanation of other cultures relative to the Western culture as a whole, anthropologists need to rethink their disciplinary orientation, and on this basis, understand the processes and value of the generation and transformation of their own culture and all other cultures, especially the cultural transformation of the modern world under the impact of an increasingly salient new conception of matter, that is, new media technology. Without such a selfawareness of the new conception of matter in the new world, anthropology can only accumulate experience through boundless regional experience, and will fail to grasp that these accumulated experiences take the form of a smoothly flowing river, and it is extremely difficult for latecomers who want to cross this river to have a smooth passage. Such a metaphor of a river is instructive for today’s anthropologists to understand themselves and create knowledge for the future. Anthropology at its inception was not oriented to the care of others, as would be agreed by any anthropologists with a little knowledge of the history of Western anthropology. Early anthropology was more concerned with human beings as a whole, therefore anthropology, by nature, can be regarded as a branch of learning in search of human consciousness. In its understanding of human social and cultural life as a whole, it consciously starts by seeking satisfactory interpretations. At the same time, this point may be unique to human beings with the ability of selfreflection, and it would be difficult for other species to have such a consciousness. DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-6

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  105 On the contrary, it should be said that dependence on the outside world is the basic survival mode of animals other than people, that is, obedience and adaptation to the outside world, and then seeking some necessary biological evolution or evolution. In a certain sense, people first have this kind of consciousness before they really begin to form a referential relationship with the existence of the outside world on the level of consciousness. From this, we begin to see the world very clearly, and know that there is a world that we can recall in our minds, waiting for us to know and understand. This world is our life world. We live in it and are shaped by it. Our own words and deeds are, in turn, also shaping this world. Perhaps in a relatively closed society, this process of shaping is very slow, and the limited information determines the stability of the existing social structure, which makes social transformation extremely difficult. People stick to their social roles, and seldom change throughout their life. The main structure of the society will maintain its stability supported by these unchanging roles. However, the most important feature of the modern world is its own openness. With the social contract of democratic politics, there is an integration between the upper structure and the lower structure of society. With the expanding trade system across regional communities, a society with its own boundary keeps expanding its influence with the expansion of trade. The isolation of the traditional society from the outside world is disintegrating, with the inside and the outside mutually embedded. The rapid development of interpersonal communication technology in modern times has made it easier to produce, save, and transmit information, and at the same time, information has become more and more widely accessible to individuals. As a result, the homogenization of information, knowledge, and lifestyle between individuals, between individuals and society, and the relationship between different societies is constantly being strengthened. An individualized lifestyle isolated from society is becoming possible thanks to the development of communication technology, thus relegating face-to-face communication to second place. As a result, the modern world is undergoing extremely efficient integration under the concept of globalization. Whether it be resources or information, or even labor, all social beings that were originally regional have begun to spread, distribute, and reproduce around the world under the encouragement of a whirlwind of globalization. Today, it is easier to see clearly the coming of post-industrial society predicted by Daniel Bell in the 1970s.1 Obviously, there is a tendency to unify the diversity of civilizations in the world, and the concept of “cosmopolitanism” is no longer just a topic discussed by some theorists in workshops.2 With the rapid development of the Internet in recent years and its increasing popularity in developing countries, the concept of “globalization” is more and more unequivocally impinging on the practices of people’s daily life. Facing this development in modern world, anthropology today calls for a percipient grasp of the direction for the development of the whole world and many civilizations themselves. Therefore, the traditional paradigms focusing on many oppositions, such as “distinction between civilization and barbarism,” are examined and abandoned one by one. Such abandonment is also a kind of self-renewal in a certain sense, in order to deal with a changing, uncertain, and unsettling real world. After the changes in world history in the one and a half centuries since

106  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era the Industrial Revolution, we can easily observe an obvious trend of consistent, coherent, and linear development. This visibility of the development of the modern world can be easily felt in the changes of the life world under the impact of the increasingly refined and popularized separation technology. The changes in values and the conception of matter resulting from these changes have formed the core of detailed discussion in this book. Anthropology has regarded witchcraft and technology as opposite poles for a long time, and it seems that there is a logic in this that can be clearly grasped by us, that is, one of them develops, and the other will inevitably decline. But in fact, the development of witchcraft and technology have always followed their own paths, and handled and solved various problems they faced in their own ways. The proper understanding of the relationship between witchcraft and technology should be that they have different and unique dominance in different spatial fields.3 Just as anthropologists never ignore the role of witchcraft in society, believing that it will continue to affect human society, today, when technology affects our living world more and more deeply and changes our personal self-composition, we need to reexamine the development of technology itself that grew up with civilization and its influence on human society. With such an emphasis, technology will not become a new “other” in anthropologists’ eyes, but will be truly and comprehensively recognized by them. In this sense, there is no fundamental difference between technology and witchcraft. Although the existence of technology is well known and reflected upon, with the development of digital technology and bio-genetic technology, we are increasingly unclear about how technology is “magically” playing its role, as it is becoming more and more abstract, far beyond the scope of understanding in our daily life. We may know strings of technical names, but we are more and more at sea about the real meaning behind these names. Just imagine, a “primitive man” not familiar with the principle of a cash dispenser, who would be utterly surprised to see a person put a bank card into the machine and money come out. In his mind, this would be as full of magical charm as the witchcraft he is familiar with. In this sense, just as primitive people pay more attention to the results of witchcraft than to witchcraft itself, our understanding of various mysterious technologies may be scant today, and even less in the future. 5.2 Separation technology and the life world It will be interesting to examine the relationship between the invention of technology, and human society and culture, from the perspective of the history of technology. This historical process was not only closely related to the invention of material objects, but more importantly, once a certain technology and device are invented and enter people’s daily life, they will directly but unconsciously exert a deep impact on human behavior patterns. This kind of impact is absolutely different from that of ordinary witchcraft, in that witchcraft tries to control people by way of a world conceived by human imagination. Once this world is conceived, people are inseparably linked with it. For example, after the emergence of the

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  107 concept of ghosts, people were controlled by them, while the existence of ghosts was enlivened through the performance of wizards, so people had to worship them and obey their instructions. From the perspective of social function, year after year of exorcism and worship simply served to strengthen the concept that people and ghosts could not be separated. But the case of technology is quite different. Its core is not only to fully control people, but also to separate human society in the process of this control. As a result, human society is divided into independent individuals, and what technology really cares about is the individual. To put it bluntly, modern technology serves to control individuals separated by technology in all directions. For people, so-called technology, especially modern technology, is just a separation technology, because the carrier of technology, or its manifestation, is a real, materialized form. Thanks to the existence of this materialized form, people have begun to have the chance to possess and manipulate technology. By mastering technology, people actually possess it, so the role originally assumed by others or nature is superseded because of the invention and application of this technology, and it is managed and used by those who have mastered it. The process of transferring technology from others actually means the beginning of a kind of technological separation, that is, whoever has mastered technology will be separated from the role replaced by this technology and originally played by others in society. The technology of the mobile phone, extremely popular in the world today, provides the most obvious example. Since the invention of the mobile phone and its entry into our daily life, we have started the process of applying separation technology to social life in the true sense, that is, our conversation object has been transformed into someone’s mobile phone, not a specific person who communicates face-to-face with us. All the information is transmitted instantly through signal simulation, and the mobile phone replaces others who listen to us, so that we can communicate and exchange information with others in a separated space, but the essence of this communication is still a direct social consequence of modern separation technology. In fact, technology is meaningless to the isolated existence of a certain individual. The existence of technology must be social first, as technology is being constantly invented under the premise of ensuring the more effective operation of society. As you can imagine, for Robinson Crusoe, who is marooned on a desert island alone, any technology is actually of no value. It is really hard for us to imagine that hungry Robinson would want to invent genetically modified food to improve his life. He would just want to have good weather and survive like an animal in nature. But with the emergence of a society where people coexist, the situation is very different. Obviously, in this process, a set of cultural logic begins to manifest itself, that is, we first have a social concept before we gradually develop various technologies on this basis to facilitate the benign operation of society. In other words, we should believe that first a human society emerges, then various technologies are created by this society, and then, with the acquisition of these technologies, direct face-to-face cooperation with primitive meaning among people gradually decreases.

108  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era For example, we can imagine that people in the primitive state, like Robinson on a desert island, have no fixed residence, take shelter from the wind and rain here and there, and go gathering food and hunting everywhere. People’s separation from the natural state has started since the initial technology of building houses was invented, whether it be stilt houses, rammed earth buildings, or magnificent marble buildings. Moreover, human intelligence always attempts to make this separation more refined, so the growth of technology is closely related to the growth of civilization. No society can build its own system of civilization development without the invention of technology. Therefore, the development of this technology examined on the scale of civilization progress may be imagined as a spiral development. It starts with a very big bend and develops very slowly. However, this development will approach a linear high-speed development once people begin to have a clear conception of the form of the future world and believe in it, and gradually realize it through efficient technology. The separation between people at this point would reach a tremendous level, and of course, the exquisiteness of mutual separation would also naturally reach a great level. Today, the lifestyle of living in a single apartment is certainly not the same as that of the first people. This can be understood by a look at the long houses built by Eskimos in winter with the changes of seasons. Today, there are such over-homogenized high-rise residential buildings in cities around the world that they seem to be produced by printers, which can be used to illustrate the stereotyping and extremes of this high-speed linear development. Today, when we travel to various places, especially in cities advertised as world metropolises, it is rare to see any place where buildings are not nearly of the same style. And those classical revival buildings that emerge one after another to satisfy nostalgia can at most be regarded as an unconscious resistance to such homogeneous buildings without distinction, unable to become the mainstream of architecture in the present world because, with the development of modern building technology, people have accepted and actually constructed closed and separated spaces by reinforced concrete technology, and an inter-structural relationship with the growth of independent and self-sufficient individuality trained since childhood. Obviously, the apartment buildings ubiquitous today are not an accidental technological invention, but an inevitable product when a society accepts the values of individual supremacy. As you can imagine, in a society that emphasizes family integrity and upholds a patriarchal clan system, the concept of apartment buildings and the corresponding separation technology could not be invented. Even if such a concept and technology emerged, they would be vehemently rejected by this clan community, unable to substantially enter the field of social architectural practices. Therefore, it is obviously impossible to invent a separation technology in a society without the concept of separation, whereas in a society where a clear concept of separation dominates, separation technology will not only emerge as the times require, but also be popularized in social life. Therefore, the concept of separation technology mentioned here must be relative to the world in which people live. This world is created by people, and adapted by people, for the purpose of developing a space where life can continue indefinitely.

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  109 At the same time, it is also a living space that integrates diversity and uncertainty and is normalized by people. People are just a part of the world with the ability to act and communicate. This life world must be premised on the integration of human beings. So-called “chaos” is the best portrayal of its existence, that is, all social components in society are intertwined. Because of the dependence on blood and geographical connections in life, people cannot really be separated from each other; because of the dependence on the ecological environment, there is no way to really separate people from nature; because of dependence on the memory of ancestors, there is no real separation between the living and the dead. This nonseparation constitutes a traditional life world, where the technology of separation cannot play its role. So-called “primitive society,” different from the modern world, is a world of chaos at the primal beginning. The form of that world seems to be closer to Rousseau’s conception of “primitive communism” (原始共产主义), and it should be clarified that 共产 (commune) here may not be the best translation, and the more accurate interpretation may be “common possessions that cannot be separated from each other.” That kind of society is by no means the state of “war of all against all” described by Hobbes. War is only a selfish consciousness of possession in human nature, and people take powerful actions to realize the possession most quickly. Just as Rousseau noted, when the first man, having fenced in a piece of land, said, “This is mine,”4 wars for private possessions started to occur frequently in human society. Before that, wars were just a display of separation technology, which obviously could not form the foundation of a society, let alone build a “primitive culture” and develop into assumptions or myths.5 5.3 Integration tools and separation technology However, the evolution of species on the time axis prior to cultural evolution was inevitable; otherwise we would not be able to explain the existence and transformation of various cultural types due to the passage of time. But it should be understood that this change only occurred because of accidental choice, and could not really be distinguished from the causal relationship between earlier and later events. The so-called differences at the cultural level in the world may only be differences at the level of phenomena, and people cannot really judge the hierarchical relationship between these differences in terms of value and even morality. Even if such a judgment may be made, the fictional component will often outshine the real component. It can even be said that all the classifications and judgments of different cultural levels that violate this premise may, without exception, imply the transformation of the relationship between knowledge and power in the sense of Michel Foucault’s genealogy.6 This is something we should always note and try to avoid when analyzing cultural problems. But I will not deny the judgment that fracture and discontinuity must be social facts that have happened. Laozi’s conception of the world of hundun (混沌, primal beginning) is based on the cut-through of humans’ “seven orifices” as a metaphor, which indicates that rupture and discontinuity began in a certain period of

110  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era human social development. Undoubtedly, this kind of rupture and discontinuity is closely related to the emergence of human consciousness. Indeed, on the one hand, ancient legends have a mythical significance; on the other hand, they also present a strong metaphorical meaning, implying changes in the life world for people, which is closely related to people’s conscious awareness of their own bodies at first. People not only have a body, but also add “soul” to the body to render it self-conscious. Therefore, in the study of human society, the evolution of human body composition has become a fascinating research topic closely related to the existence of materiality. We can make the following pre-judgment: there must be some physical and material changes around this body before the rest of the changes can occur. An examination of the map of the distribution of ethnic groups in the world can reveal a great variety of costumes among ethnic groups ranging from the Bushman, who is almost naked, to the Eskimo, who is all covered up except for nostrils and eyes. These clothing styles are not chosen simply because they want them this way, but because of the great differences in their environments. People’s adaptation to nature leads to their dependence on the environment to survive. Today, not only do Bushmen wear modern clothes, but Eskimos in the Arctic have learned to use electricity to keep warm. At least the clothes they wear indoors are far fewer than their ancestors exposed to the cold environment, and even their bodies are changing with the changes in their living environment. The ecological environment on which people depend may not have varied much, but what really changes are the objects on which people depend. In other words, people today rely less and less on the pure natural environment in which they live, and more and more on the artificial environment specially created by themselves, where they seek constant security in social life. This is called “modernity.” At least for ethnic groups that once totally depended on natural ecology, the uncertainty of climate change made it difficult for them to have a real sense of security in their lives. This is clearly reflected in the changes in their costumes. In today’s world, more women are wearing denim shorts in the hot season. This is not only an abandonment of the traditional clothing used to cover sensitive parts of the body, but also an understanding of the function of the clothing from one’s own feelings. To make oneself cooler by the choice of individualistic wear can be construed as the awakening of individual consciousness of modern people. But behind such an individualistic explanation, what is more important or more culturally meaningful is that people may be trying to show their incompatibility with society itself. Wearing skimpy clothes does not make individuals feel that they may fall into the trap of harm by the evil desires of others, but feel that they are consumed by passers-by as a kind of “displayed beauty” with self-appreciation. Today’s girls, no longer relying on the shaping of the external environment, begin to concentrate on trimming their body shape. They do not have to be afraid of falling into danger because of social insecurity, so they tend to follow their individualistic taste in shaping their body shape and adapt it to the aesthetic interests of the public. It is in the mutual construction of the performance similar to the speech system and the appreciation of the audience that denim shorts are grasped and solidified

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  111 by a fashionable concept, becoming a popular summer costume widely recognized by fashionable women and constantly spread through imitation. According to this analysis, the logic of the social body may imply a kind of entanglement like that of psychologist William James when discussing emotional problems. He observed that when we see a bear, we are scared because we run away, not run away because of fear.7 It seems that we can also create a similar logic thereby, that is, people wear shorts not because of the hot weather, but it is because people wear shorts that they really feel the heat of the weather. The basis of this change in the objects that people depend on is technology itself, especially modern technology with strong abilities of separation. Otherwise, no fundamental changes would occur in the state of the life world that relies on the organic integration of nature, tools, and people in traditional technology. Linguists used to study the differentiation of social goods from the perspective of language coinage, which also shed some light on understanding the classification of goods in today’s world. For example, Luo Changpei noticed in his early years that in the society near Kunming called Qiuzi (now of the Yi nationality), linen, clothes, and quilts were all called by the same term without differentiation, and these three types of objects were the same in social life, that is, linen as a material became an article of clothing when draped over the body, and turned into a quilt when used to cover the body at night.8 This is obviously a linguistic phenomenon that only a society without much differentiation can exhibit. But with the deep penetration of technology into people’s lives, separation technology is surely manifested in the differentiation of daily language. Today, paper is classified into several dozen types. For example, tissue paper is classified into toilet paper and the sort of paper used to cover tables. Although the application of specific separation technology cannot be discerned behind such a classification, it is obvious that the application of the concept of civilization and cleanliness in the civilized practice of various cleaning technologies provides the conceptual basis for separating the general classifications of paper. Modern technology is arguably a kind of technology realizing separation for modern people’s life itself, that is, the separation technology I mention here, which separates people from people, people from nature, and finally people from themselves. The former two separations have become commonplace in our living world today, and the latter one has been deeply realized through the invasion of biotechnology into our bodies. Obviously, modern medicine, which does not pay much attention to personal feelings and emotions, practices a technology of separating body and mind in a certain sense. In fact, for people, these changes are based on the fact that people consciously invent and use tools, which are not only powerful helpers enabling individuals with limitations to extend the scope of their abilities, but also most important ways for people to consciously separate themselves from the surrounding world. Obviously, the separation between humans and the world around them really began from the day when humans began to tie branches and thatch together to build a primitive stilt house that could temporarily shelter them from the wind and rain. But this does not mean that as long as humans invented tools, they would be completely separated from the world around them. In fact, separation is dependent on a certain type of

112  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era technology, which is found at an obvious rupture trace between two successive stages. Simply put, there is generally a distinction between tools that connect man and nature and technology that separates them. Therefore, as far as human society is concerned, technologies before the emergence of modern separation technology are essentially just tools to organically link and integrate humans and nature. Their value lies in helping people to rely more conveniently and efficiently on nature to survive, but their existence is by no means premised on replacing nature, but on enabling people to approach nature with tools in a more integrated manner. The plowshare in farming civilization, for example, relies on manpower and directly contacts the land, but in agricultural society, manpower and the power of the plowshare as a tool and natural land cannot be separated and are each indispensable. Only in agricultural society can the concept that “the water and soil of one land give special characteristics to its inhabitants” be verified, because only in such a society will there be a very close relationship between people and land forms. The so-called loess civilization, black soil civilization, and red soil civilization today are really established only in such societies where people and land cannot be separated. Fei Xiaotong made this very clear at the beginning of his book Rural China. When referring to the characteristics of traditional China, Fei borrowed the symbolic image of the inseparability of people and land, that is, xiangtu bense (rural colors, literally the original colors of rural land). As Fei notes: From the grassroots level, the Chinese society is rural. I make this conclusion, because I considered that a layer of society not exactly the same as the local grass-roots layer has grown from this grass-roots layer, and over the last hundred years, a very special society has emerged on the line of contact between the East and the West. We say that xiangxiaren (乡下人, country people) are tuqi (土气, rustic), almost somewhat contemptuously, but the character tu is well used. The basic meaning of tu refers to soil. Rural people cannot live without soil, because farming is the most common way to make a living in the countryside. The largest number of people on this land earn a livelihood by working hard in the fields.9 However, obviously, as Fei Xiaotong has pointed out, this rural society, where people and soil cannot be separated, has produced a very special society on the “East–West contact line” over the past century, that is, a modern agricultural society created by the modern world. Its core feature is to make people really leave the rural land with the help of the development of agricultural technology. A look at large-scale modern agricultural tools can most vividly illustrate this point. For example, seeders currently in use, as tools invented by people, separate people from the land. Obviously, a person sitting in the driver’s cab of a seeder does not need to touch the land directly, and power for the seeder does not need to be provided by manpower, but just by the pressing of a switch. The person in the cab of the seeder is obviously not fundamentally different from employees in high-rise buildings who operate computers. Compared with the traditional plowshare, the

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  113 seeder is a separation technology, and the relationship between the seeder and the plowshare becomes a disruptive relationship in the sense of the opposite development of technology and tools. In addition, more and more transgenic technology is applied in agricultural production, leading to the lack of direct connection between the application of technology and farmers’ own work. Theoretically speaking, the climate and the soil, whatever they become, are external ecological factors without significant impact compared to seeds under the impact of transgenic technology. In this sense, people engaged in agricultural production have left the land and it is no longer possible for them to return to it. It is also interesting to think of another example. In the Li village in North China that I have investigated, the well platform is the center of life in villagers’ memory. In the past, people from other villages would also communicate with villagers on the well platform. But later, as tap water pipes entered every household, making family life more convenient, the gathering place of villagers was no longer centered on the well platform, and women no longer chatted with each other on the platform in search of a daughter-in-law. These things have become private affairs of each household, rather than village business that everyone knew. With today’s Internet access, the traditional way of matchmaking on the well platform has long since disappeared, while online dating and online matchmaking have entered the homes of ordinary people. In the investigation of the history of civilization, if we want to confirm an evolution route with an arrow in the tumultuous and complicated history changeable like clouds and rain, it would be relatively easy to draw a thick line in the scattered distribution of historical sites (see Figure 5.1). This line means the evolution from the end of tools integrating humans and nature to the end of the modern separation technology, which separates people from the external natural world. This evolution process must have been gradually developed following the path from simplicity to complexity, from concreteness to abstraction, and from integration to separation. Moreover, if we draw a straight line between the two ends of tools and technology, as shown in Figure 5.1, the result is that the closer we are to the end of tools, the stronger the integration characteristics of the life world would be, while the separation characteristics would be weaker. On the contrary, near the end of technology, with the development of abstraction, rupture and complexity, the characteristics of separability gradually culminate. Perhaps, in this sense, it becomes easier and more straightforward to understand the difference between the separation technology and the integrated tools as well as the rapture before and after. Rupture Integration Tools

Separation Technology

Figure 5.1  Integration and separation from the development of tools to technology

114  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era 5.4 Field of separation technology With the development of the modern world, especially due to the development of digital technology penetrating into our life practice, the current technical form actually moves more toward the end of separation technology than the end of integration tools. At the front end, the core significance of the “technical content” of a new technology lies in the fact that it makes more commonsense knowledge easily understood by ordinary people gradually fade out of people’s field of vision, while allowing too much complex and abstract knowledge, which cannot really be understood according to common sense, to become more and more integrated into people’s daily life through a so-called “high-tech” transformation. But when people accept these technologies in real life, they do not really understand or have to understand the knowledge behind these technologies. What you really need to know, or what you need to learn and grasp, is nothing but instructions for use of articles or devices clearly written in various languages. On this basis, like workers on Ford’s production line, everyone can perform repeated mechanical actions like button operation with great accuracy. Many people who live in this world of separation technology will think that once they control the keyboard, they will surely control the object or world they want to control. But the actual result is not the case, or perhaps on the contrary, this control has brought more uncontrollable things, and then requires more advanced technology to control the unpredictable life world. In this process, the individual and collective expressions of human beings would be fatalistically cast aside. For example, in the field of text production, people will rely more and more on digital printers, which may be the most typical application of separation technology in this era. In the past, a manuscript or an image was copied in batches by printing. Printing, since its invention, has become a technology that can copy texts continuously based on information exchange, and it is actually a mechanical copy tool that ordinary people can understand. However, the digital printer, which has become extremely popular today, is not an ordinary tool. This magical machine can print copies of our text one by one even though we ordinary people have no idea how the digital printer converts our type into words in our personal computers. Somehow, like the operation of witchcraft, we only need to press the keyboard controlled by a computer, execute the concise tips given by the program that is running, such as copying, pasting, and providing a print preview, and finally simply click the print button to have the document printed by the printer. Of course, the technology of the digital printer ensures that people do not need to make an overall printing plan in advance, and it is “people-friendly” in that we can print whenever and wherever we want, and print as much as we want. People do not need to do many things in person. All they have to do is just press the print button, and the materials they need will be printed out accurately by the printer. In this sense, a digital printer means the substitution and symbolic death of printing workers. Of course, this process will be very longwinded. The difference between a digital printer and general mechanical printing is that the plate-making of printing will become redundant.

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  115 In the era when mechanical printing was dominant, first-class book collectors would always try their best to find the version that was first published and first printed, because the text and pictures of this version were clearer and more accurate considering the wear and tear of mechanical plate-making. Today, however, even though the print run and impression are still listed on the copyright page of books, these no longer have the real function of identifying earlier and later editions, because all a digital printer requires is that there is enough toner in the printer cartridge and enough paper in the feeder. As long as there is enough toner, printed text materials, even with hundreds of millions of copies, will be exactly the same in theory, and there will be no differences between different editions. This may be the fundamental difference between the digital reproduction era and the mechanical reproduction era. Additionally, in today’s era when digital technology is extremely popular, the cultural logic of this world is somewhat like the logic of digital printers rather than the logic of mechanical printing. It is not that different editions are similar but somehow different, but that they are absolutely the same. Arguably, the logic of printing is still based on the characteristics of clear hierarchy, differences between earlier and later editions, and a sense of history that reflects the differences between earlier and later editions. Moreover, in the era of mechanical printing, people and printed matter could be integrated with each other without separation. In the era of mechanical printing, books and their contents were really present with the readers, otherwise the books could not be read. In this vein, the concepts of study and even libraries were material cultural concepts in the era of mechanical printing, that is, they were really part of our lives. Though today’s virtual study or network library stored in computers has a real impact on our lives, it cannot really become an organic part of our lives. Because with the popularity of personal computers and the Internet, while the world is becoming flatter and flatter,10 the study and library are gradually being squeezed out of our real-life scenes by digital virtual life. Today, the study and library have become outdated concepts, belonging only to the past, and not to the future. Moreover, readers can read anytime and anywhere a book that does not belong to them, which does not exist specifically in the study, but on the virtual network. In other words, people who live on the Internet can access their own so-called “study” or “library” by turning on their personal computers and with the help of their eyes. But whether a book belonging to a certain person exists becomes less and less important. This is a change in material life that today’s scholars are bound to face: we build reality in the virtual world, but also enrich the virtual space in the real world. Therefore, the separation technology mentioned above consists of, to put it bluntly, all kinds of efforts and creations with which people make themselves separate as individuals by virtue of self-consciousness and by means of various separation methods. The separation technology not only enhances the self-awareness of individuals and groups of people, but also enhances mutual independence rather than dependence among individuals. Of course, this independence, in turn, depends on the existence of the separation technology invented by it and integrated into the details of life and the sustainable play of its functions. In this sense, if the

116  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era “figurations” of “civilizing process” extended from the past to the future in the sense of Norbert Elias really exist11 for the history of the invention of the separation technology, it would be certain that people constantly develop various forms of tools mostly implying the trend of separation, and integrate them into their daily life practice to develop a keynote. At the same time, human beings are always trapped by the separation ability of tools and technology, constantly wishing to return to the original point before separation. Obviously, from Karl Marx to Max Weber and then to Émile Durkheim, the classical social theorists, without exception, all analyzed and traced such separation and its return. Marx’s “alienated labor” and communism, Weber’s “Iron Cage” society and sociology of understanding, and Durkheim’s division of labor and collective effervescence, these opposing concepts, on the one hand, reveal the one-dimensional irretrievability of the separation technology in the modern world; on the other hand, they express the desire for people and their living world to maintain a state of blending and coexistence. If the wisdom based on life practice creates a interdependent and integrated world,12 the extreme development of instrumental rationality in the modern world means that all aspects of people’s lives are completely replaced by various abstract technologies. This kind of substitution is also a complete separation that cannot allow people to return to the original state of knowledge, that is, people are separated from each other by mastering and using the knowledge created by people, and the technology transformed from such knowledge further strengthens the degree of separation between people, further increases the means of separation, and its arrow points toward separation, so there is no possibility of returning to the integration of people and nature. Today, electronics and biotechnology, which have become conventional fields of knowledge exploration, are all controlled by separation technology, aiming to create more separation from a complete organism. Any organ, tissue, or even cell defined as unsuitable for a certain body will be cut out, removed, and transplanted under the premise of this biologically meaningful separation technology. The core value of modern life science, which has gradually marched into the cellular level inside the human body, has completely escaped from the track of natural circulation that originally integrated tools with people’s life world. It replaces the field where the separation technology played its role through constantly updated biotechnology. When the technology of genomic sequencing is mature, the value of our life will actually be determined not only by personal and life experiences, but also by the results of these genetic screening technologies. For ordinary people, if a person feels uncomfortable with his nose, it does not necessarily mean that he is suffering from nasopharyngeal carcinoma. However, when scientists draw the genome-wide landscape of nasopharyngeal carcinoma in the world’s top magazines through genome sequencing and gene imaging techniques, such as the scientific research recently published by the cancer research team of the National University of Singapore,13 who can really have the courage to reject various kinds of surgical resection of the nasal cavity? Or, if an individual’s body, through the annual routine physical examination, is found to have some characteristics probably related to a malignant disease, what can he do? He has no choice but to follow the doctor’s advice to go through

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  117 various treatments. In this sense, it is also impossible for an individual to make a completely independent decision to protect his own body from the impact of any suggestion given according to the survey results. However, the precision of various medical instruments and the extremely convenient access to instruments, coupled with the gradual accumulation of surgical experience driven by modern science and technology and the regularization of various hard and dangerous operations, make the accuracy of judging people’s health more closely related to the level of development of these technologies, and people are ultimately unable to protect any organ of the body from being affected by the impact of the doctor’s negative judgment. As for a small lesion, such as a mole or a stain that has been there since one’s birth, whether it will really develop into a malignant and fatal tumor or another incurable disease in the future is actually only a probability problem at most. However, due to the development of this kind of surgical technology, boosted by the concept of better securing people’s health and various separation technologies, organs or tissues that originally belong to a certain body can only leave a person’s body in the end. Obviously, before the invention of these technologies, the human body as a whole could not be truly separated from its various organs. Today, with the development and maturity of organ transplantation technology, this separation is just a routine result of a routine operation. In the field of daily life, with the intrusion of separation technology into the originally integrated social life, this integration has become unsustainable. Obviously, this is first caused by the widespread use of automatic control technology in pursuit of family life in society. When these external technologies enter the field of family life, they change the form of the family, which no longer consists of an integrated family life, but a separate one, which has become more and more dominant in modern social life. As a result, family members work, chat, and dine together less and less, and the functions that originally belonged to normal family life have been replaced by new communication technology and the invention of electronic equipment. Modern industrialized factories and the mode of company operation are making it more and more impossible and unnecessary for families to work together. People go away from their family to seek employment. The family is a place where they can return repeatedly, but it is no longer a basic economic accounting unit of society. Although from an ethical point of view people have to maintain a stable family life, the mechanism of social division of work makes it possible for a person to live without relying on his or her family. On the contrary, the maintenance of the family really needs the supply of various resources outside the family, otherwise the family can hardly be maintained. Family chatting is squeezed by the increasingly busy work outside the family. At the same time, with the development of electronic communication technology, this kind of chatting has not disappeared, but it has become an indirect rather than direct face-toface conversation between family members. Moreover, the content of chatting has been compressed repeatedly to become matter-of-fact information provision and reception with narrow contents, whereas contents beyond information, especially emotional communication, are becoming more and more difficult to realize in the family, and instead are turning into the service contents of many psychological and

118  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era social workers. It should also be pointed out that for Asian society, rice cookers may be the most “cruel” substitutes for housewives, and this process is not clearly understood by the parties concerned. Obviously, in today’s world, the function of the family dinner will not be particularly enhanced because of the invention and application of new technologies that make cooking easy, such as electric rice cookers. On the contrary, family dinners are becoming rarer today for the simple reason that family functions have been replaced by social bodies such as restaurants and canteens. The rice cooker was obviously a revolutionary substitute for the traditional stove at its invention. The traditional stove is also an instrumental invention of human beings, but it is close to the integration end of tools, as shown in Figure 5.1, and far from the separation end of technology. The core of this integration feature is people’s sense of presence in this moment, that is, the traditional stove requires that people attend to the stove itself and work around it. For early humans, fire, which was domesticated by humans to enable the cooking of food at home, could not be controlled at will before the invention of modern electronic control systems, and its continuous existence required the constant care of people. Without such care as a prerequisite, the stove invented by people could not play its real role. Therefore, in traditional society, the images of people, fire, stoves, and diligent work were closely linked. The fact that a family had to live around the stove demonstrated the importance of the stove, and it was more important to ensure that the fire in the stove chamber was not extinguished. The fire going out would be no different from an imminent disaster afflicting the family, because the function of the stove in people’s daily life world was based on the care of fire by the respected members in the family. In this sense, the stove became a powerful collective symbol of the existence and continuation of a family, and people used the stove to indirectly indicate the existence and continuation of the family. However, once people did not rely on the care of an open flame in a hearth to obtain the continuous supply of energy, but turned to rely on energy supply from power plants, household stoves have disappeared and been replaced by rice cookers. This has not only overthrown the tradition of family life around the stove, but also keeps people far away from the stove in the process of removing the stove, which symbolizes the existence and prosperity of a family, and there is no possibility of returning to the stove. From the cultural point of view, after such an overthrow, people in a family may no longer start the meaningful construction of a humanistic life world around the stove, but instead make more efforts to separate themselves from the life world to become completely independent individuals. The reason why such a concept of family separation can be deeply rooted in people’s minds is obviously based on the thorough secularization of the ideal concept, that is, the removal of various rules and regulations binding people’s lives, or social “shackles” in Rousseau’s term, in exchange for the ideal concept of equality and freedom for all. Only when such ideas emerge and are stereotyped, deeply rooted in people’s spiritual life, and institutionalized in the real life world can the power of secularization completely replace the pursuit of sacred life in classical times.

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  119 5.5 Sacredness and secularization Perhaps this point can be illustrated by examining the evolutionary history of dining habits. The sacred custom of the communal meal must have originated from ancient society, and has gradually changed or evolved into a completely secular eating style closely related to hunger or physiological needs, as chosen by individuals in today’s world. Prayer before meals is obviously not a cumbersome ceremony, but an ancient way of dining that embodies the coexistence of God and humans. Today’s secularized catering is no longer the collective carnival featuring the coexistence of God and humans in the classical era, but has turned into the satisfaction of taste buds full of individual expression, and of the biological demand of eating. Nothing else is demonstrated besides these meanings. However, if we have the opportunity to read any ethnographic works describing the world outside the West, we will find that the carnival of collective entertainment and all-night drinking and eating together are the most spectacular scenes to represent and reflect the collective existence of this group of people. No one would question whether these foods are gifts from God. On the contrary, everyone feels the importance of collective carnival and the sacredness of this precious moment to individuals because of a kind of bliss endowed by God. Although everyone in this scene would clearly realize later how their daily hard work and sweat contributed to the provision of ample food, this secular work was not worth mentioning in the ancient world. Obviously, given the existence of a sacred consciousness, this consciousness of secular labor would inevitably retreat to a secondary position. Because the existence of sacredness is often closely related to such adjectives as pure, lofty, incomparable, and unique, without such attributes it would be extremely difficult to arouse the sense of sacredness. The pursuit of this sacredness is also a way for people to define why they exist, that is, to insist on a definition by the scarcity of human traits and emphasize the sanctity of morality behind them, rather than emphasizing the scarcity of material needs, even though the scarcity of materials in real life might necessitate the creation of the sanctity of human existence. This kind of sacredness must be what everyone yearns for and tries to obtain, used by everyone to mark the trajectory of their life. Moreover, the existence of this sacredness is not a question of how much, but a question of all or nothing. As far as sacredness is concerned, it is either pure or filthy, either noble or humble, and it seldom exists ambiguously. Secularity, on the contrary, allows for many possibilities in between two extremes. For example, some people are rich and some are poor, but between them there are many states difficult to distinguish; mutual jealousy and hatred would also arise from comparison between these different states. Another point of importance lies in the uniqueness and extraordinariness of sacredness itself, which determines that it cannot be completely equated with hard work. In other words, there is no exchange between the two, and sacredness can only be an accidental visit on the basis of such quotidian labors. For a specific individual, the visit of sacredness is bound to be a kind of luck, which embodies the glory of sacredness expressed through someone’s body. Therefore, for ordinary

120  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era people, the acquisition of sacredness can only be a desire, and society emphasizes its own social way, especially its moral dimension, through the cultural shaping that this person craves. What people who abide by this way desire, in turn, is just the lucky visitation of sacredness, hoping that it can always visit themselves as mortals. For example, in any society, all kinds of bowing and praying to God are ritual behaviors developed under such a concept. In his analysis of Protestant ethics, Max Weber acutely noticed that the desire for this sacredness inadvertently enhances people’s motivation for hard work, which is a possible but not inevitable connection for a society, and it is this accidental but not inevitable connection that forms the basis for people’s willingness to opt for a firm pursuit of sacredness in their daily lives. People are crazy in the pursuit of sacredness, and in turn, the craziness will make people feel that it is really possible to approach the sacredness of God. Obviously, for ordinary people in society, it is difficult to really see with the naked eye immortal people, but this is the goal that every mortal is striving for. To this end, people can even give up the pursuit and possession of wealth itself without hesitation. Obviously, for a society, without such consciousness, charity in today’s world could not really appear, as the unspeakable practical rationality behind charity is just a subconscious pursuit of this sacredness for possible eternal life. Therefore, it is precisely driven by inability, but special desire that people construct a sense of commonality with which people realize each other’s existence. Without the construction and awareness of such commonality, aggregation of people based on community consciousness would be not only impossible, but also meaningless. An inevitable result of the secularity of the modern world is the increase of interaction, and people realize frequent interaction under a concept of equality. One of the purposes of such frequent interaction is to reflect and highlight the value of personal existence. This point has been included in the collective concept since the Enlightenment concept deeply rooted in the hearts of the people and the modern world gradually took shape, that is, as Louis Dumont observes, “Modern consciousness first gives value to individuals.”14 At this point, the individual not only exists, but also needs subjective expression to prove the value of his or her existence as an independent individual; all social arrangements, in turn, are carried out in various ways on the main axis of individual action to promote the smooth realization of an individualized value. The right to private property, in fact, is just a model that gradually forms and serves the pre-established individualistic concept after the emergence of the modern world. At the same time, the institutions and actions in society are maturing with the growth of this concept of individual priority, and dominate a society that exists as a whole value. 5.6 Conception of matter in the era of post-cultural consciousness It seems that all of the above can be classified and analyzed under the concept of the “separation technology” proposed in this book. Today’s world sees not only a dichotomy between tools and technology, but also a trend of shifting from one end

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  121 of tools for social integration to the other end of technologies for social separation, resulting in the cultural transformation of a new relationship dominated by power, that is, the all-round rule of separation technologies over handicraft tools. Whether in social stratification or value shaping, the superiority of technology has found the fullest cultural expression by far. The progress of science and technology has been placed at the highest level of human social development, so that the supreme sacred morality has been driven off the altar, replaced by inventors, owners, and disseminators of modern technology. Consequently, many aspects of our life world have been fundamentally changed due to the erosion of a certain separation technology, which provides the material premise of cultural transformation. However, as far as people’s social life is concerned, the introduction of these separation technologies has not actually eliminated the pain of individuals, and mastering these separation technologies has not given people a full sense of satisfaction and happiness. Isolated karaoke rooms represent all the symbolic meanings of modern life, that is, the self-expression and catharsis of one person or a few people have replaced the collective delight and carnival of watching a performance on stage together. The music player enjoyed alone is also a modern invention of really modern people, having replaced the unique performance prepared by the gorgeous opera house for an audience on site. In real life, the crowds of revelers and consumers surging along during rhythmical festivals are gradually disappearing today, replaced by individuals hiding in a private space and enjoying home delivery services. What is reflected behind all these phenomena is that the social healing function of people gathering together has been completely ignored and abandoned by people. With the popularization of separation technology, people have less and less social participation in real scenes. The direct consequence is that people stay at home and maintain a virtual connection with the outside world through the flat, virtual form of the network. The interaction of the original real world has turned into a virtual expression of opinions, information transmission, and voice given by an absent person. Obviously, in today’s world, people can spend more time together virtually, but they are extremely isolated from each other. Therefore, people will “go their own way” even in the presence of real people, and they may even keep close contact with the virtual world without stepping into the real world. Recent research on Japanese otaku tells us that all these things are happening, which indirectly reflect people’s real life and thinking in such situations. A very obvious feature has gradually emerged in such a space. The original production and consumption in society have been completely blurred in order and spatial arrangement; that is, in this world, people are consuming, but they need to take the initiative to do something to produce something. Look at the membership cards of major supermarkets, and you will understand this point. If you are a member, you must do something, such as spending a certain amount or paying a certain amount of membership fees, which may not meet your real consumption needs, but your production, an accessory to consumption, and a preparation for consumption. Because of this by-product, because of this preparatory activity, you do something beyond your desire for consumption. That superfluous behavior is not consumption, but production, that is, production for merchants. You become

122  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era forced to consume, which is a veritable production, that is, making yourself consume through your own production. But because of such consumer production, you have gained an extra identity exclusive to yourself, that is, the so-called “membership” qualification. Therefore, you “stand out” from the so-called ordinary consumer group to become an individual with different action ability from others, as shaped by this society that emphasizes separation technology. Of course, you are also valued and gain a new status as a VIP, which means “you virtually become yourself,” which has become a subconscious goal of modern people. The “culture” studied by anthropologists, once closely linked with the words “collective” or “model,” is therefore impressed with a templatized character, thus inseparable from the “nation” of the modern nation-state. “Cultural consciousness,” in its existing sense, refers to the emergence of collective or templatized consciousness or self-consciousness of the nation as a whole. Obviously, in the history of the modern world, this extreme form of consciousness will inevitably be transformed into a nationalist cultural consciousness, which will in turn become a cohesive force, enabling scattered individuals to be united into a joint force, thus avoiding being oppressed by other nationalities because of mutual separation. In this sense, the cultural consciousness of nationalism is also a cohesive power, which once played and is still playing a role in enabling scattered individuals within an ethnic group to have a centripetal return, thus producing a new culture of national identity with extremely strong cohesiveness. Unless forced to scatter around the world like Jews, most nationalities or ethnic groups will usually settle in a particular region because of a certain common cultural element, forming a regional ethnic culture. However, it is obvious that the increasing development of separation technology in the modern world makes this naturally formed collective or templatized cultural consciousness more and more impossible. While looking for and emphasizing the identity and expression of the individual self, at the same time people are gradually forgetting the self of collective culture that has been constantly instilled and practiced. Although some new mechanisms of cultural creation are helping people to recall this collective self, such as the shaping and exhibition of various cultural heritages as traditional inventions, yet in the modern world, where everyone begins to prioritize individual value over social value, the remembering and shaping of this collective and templatized self has become far from the secular feelings of people in the real world. In contrast with the above situation, a kind of self-separation technology in society is gradually replacing the collective or ethnic gathering and growth in the sense of cultural models, resulting in an extremely individual rather than collective cultural consciousness, especially in the 21st century, when new media technologies are widely used. New media are also closely related to this kind of consciousness, called zi meiti (自媒体, self-media, i.e. social media) in Chinese, that is, a platform for individuals to control the production and release of information. To these existences is attached a new value concept, which emphasizes the growth of an individual’s all-round ability. Meanwhile, culture in society is undergoing a transformation,15 which puts special stress on the perfection and realization of self-worth in the social scene, that is, the occurrence of a social transformation

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  123 at the same time. After this transformation, everything in society is redesigned and rearranged around the individual’s value. This kind of individual cultural consciousness subtly transforms the society into an individual, self-oriented social structure through various individual, social and cultural practices such as education from childhood to adulthood, cultivation of taste and self-appreciation ability, self-enjoyment, and thoughtful and meticulous nourishment of personal health. Meanwhile, this consciousness also breaks collective culture, and with the help of foreign, new, strong cultural elements without local roots, converts them into the composition of personal qualities in the modern sense. They look like clothes patched up, which appear gorgeous, but are actually a big montage of cultural fragments with no substantive meaning. But each individual is deeply aware of their significance and tirelessly enjoys it. Individuals with cultural consciousness are currently trying to seek the elements of any form of individual culture from diverse cultural sources that completely transcend the boundaries of time and space so as to form and enrich an extremely strong individual with self-identity and cultural consciousness, and then adapt to the increasing popularity of separation technology in real life space and various new social arrangements caused by it. It can be imagined that the design of urban subway gates is not only the victory of machine control over people, but also makes people’s temperament become peaceful outside and restless inside. You must take out a subway card in a proper way and wait for its inspection by an inhuman machine. After the inspection is successful, you must pass through the gates very quickly, otherwise you will be punished by being closed out. In the extremely short time set by the machine, one person must pass through, which is not only the basis of the number of people passing through the file record, but also one of the basic functional guarantees of the machine. However, in the long-term runningin process, there is a tacit understanding between man and machine, people pass quickly, the machine closes the gate on time, new communication between people and things is realized between opening and closing, and various new rules appear and effectively dominate people’s behavior. The above aspects may arguably reflect the existence of the post-cultural consciousness developing in the present world, which is obviously premised on the inevitable placement of personal or pure individual feelings in a very superior position. That is, individual consciousness has superiority, and accepts many new separation technologies by welcoming them with open arms. Meanwhile, with the help of the new mechanism of cultural expression of various new media, people live in the media, and thus create a brand-new so-called post-cultural conscious conception of matter. In fact, this conception of matter must be constantly extended in the two dimensions of “reality” and “virtuality.” The “reality” here is the “reality” based on the invention and application of various new developments, such as the wide application of mobile phones, networks, rice cookers, microwave ovens, high-speed rail, and wind turbines in our lives; whereas so-called “virtuality” is a kind of “virtuality” caused by the sense of loss when the world is facing the gradual disappearance of various cultural forms. This kind of “virtuality” is not completely empty, but is filled with various vague concepts, such as original ecology, green

124  Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era food, carbon sinks, nostalgia, and otaku. In turn, this new view of developments with two sides is exactly what anthropologists really want to observe and study at present, because the world culture is undergoing a substantial and profound transformation in both real and imaginary dimensions. With the development of rapid communication technology today, the homogenization of world culture is also quietly taking place, which also indicates the transformation of culture. Obviously, we have no way to avoid this transformation, but we must find out what the possible cultural consequences of this transformation will be and what the differences between different cultural regions are. Without this understanding, any cultural understanding and cultural consciousness under the existing research paradigm of “the other’s culture” must be a far cry from today’s social reality, because, from the Enlightenment in the West to the emergence, rapid popularization and even domination of the Internet world, it will be individuals with the capacity to act, rather than a group endowed with collective meaning and symbols, that will truly eventually be awakened. While cultural knowledge about the group is accumulating with the help of the anthropologist’s lens, knowledge and self-awareness about the individual are also accumulating, obviously influencing the structure of a person’s self-identity. A community’s cultural knowledge will no longer be a simple, homogeneous collective culture, but feature colorful and diverse expressions and differences. Today, we cannot simply define a community’s cultural characteristics with such over-generalized terms as “Nuer people” or “Nuer people’s religion,” but we need to show the internal differences of this community and the influence of the diversity of the external world. This changes the objects of our observation from macro to micro. Although anthropologists have never lacked micro-observation, there is a substantial difference between today’s and yesterday’s micro-observation. But in any case, we must be clear that today’s micro-observation is that we cannot simply focus on one point and observe it, but need to trace the thread of various events, which requires a shift in the ethnographic vision from focusing to tracing so as to truly find the ins and outs of the events as well as the complicated and uncertain relationships between the extremely subtle elements. Exquisitely presenting this complexity means presenting culture itself, which is a kind of culture after the acquisition of cultural consciousness. Without such prior effort, our understanding would only be stereotyped. Therefore, this kind of understanding of the complexity and uncertainty of the modern world may be what we have to deal with in understanding the other after all of us assume cultural consciousness. At the same time, such an understanding also represents an epistemological change that anthropologists have to effect in the face of today’s world after cultural consciousness, and it will also become our new source for creating anthropological knowledge. Given that we cannot deny that culture is constantly changing, we certainly will not deny the formation of today’s new cultural situation after we have an awareness of culture. Without this cultural outlook, the understanding of the new culture would be imperfect. Therefore, today’s anthropological knowledge not only faces a crisis of its original paradigm resulting from the disintegration of its objects; but is also open to the possibility of seeing some new research paradigm arise and develop fully.

Matter in the post-cultural consciousness era  125 Notes 1 Daniel Bell. The Coming of Post-Industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting, trans. Gao Xian, Wang Hongzhou, and Wei Zhangling, checked by Gao Xian. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1984: 129–137. 2 Zhao Xudong. Cosmopolitanism, Sihai Yijia and Tianxia Datong. Du Shu, 2003 (12): 24–30. 3 John Beattie. On Understanding Ritual, in Bryan Wilson, Ed., Rationality. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1970: 249. 4 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. On the Origin of Inequality, trans. Li Changshan. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1962: 111. 5 The hypothesis of the development of the civilization of Yanoman in the Amazon Rainforest in the thick description of Napoleon A. Chagnon is unconsciously related to this topic. Of course, criticisms about Chagnon are mostly triggered by this hypothesis. See Chagnon’s ethnography and his latest biography: Napoleon A. Chagnon. Yanomam: The Fierce People. Fort Worth, TX: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1983. Napoleon A. Chagnon. Noble Savages: My Life Among Two Dangerous Tribes – the Yanomam and the Anthropologists. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2013. 6 Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Liu Beicheng and Yang Yuanying. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1999. 7 Duane P. Schultz. Modern Psychology: A History, trans. Yang Lineng, Chen Darou, Li Hansong, et al., checked by Chen Zechuan and Shen Dechan. Beijing: People’s Education Press, 1981: 148. 8 Luo Changpei. Language and Culture (Annotated), annotated by Hu Shuangbao. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2009: 14. 9 Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Shanghai: Observation Press, 1948: 1. Emphasis added. 10 Thomas L. Friedman. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008: 29–31. 11 Norbert Elias. The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations. New York: Pantheon, 1978: 131. 12 Zhao Xudong. Anthropology and Cultural Transformation: Escape from Separation Technology and Return to the Philosophy of “Being Together”. Journal of Guangxi Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2014 (2): 32–48. 13 See the following website for the report of this research: http://genome​.cn​/portal​.php​ ?Mod​=view​&aid​=516. 14 Louis Dumont. Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2003: 207. 15 Zhao Xudong. From Social Transformation to Cultural Transformation: Characteristics of Contemporary Chinese Society and Its Transformation. Journal of Sun Yat-Sen University (Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 111–124.

6

Pristine condition, the modern world, and the era after cultural consciousness

The problem of the pristine condition yuanshengtai (原生态) has re-entered anthropologists’ reflective vision since anthropology changed from being concerned with ecology to being concerned with mentality. In the modern world of individual consciousness, we should take note of many new characteristics emerging after the awakening of cultural consciousness, which lead us to think about the world. A future without return was once a theme of anthropological cultural presentation. Today, it is necessary to re-examine the unique value of this world view from the perspective of cultural diversity. In this sense, the pristine condition can only be a concept constantly sought after, rather than a realistic objective existence, because it has been lost. 6.1 From ecology to mentality The cultural conservatism deep-rooted in anthropology makes it shy away from practical problems and prefer to devote itself to history or textual research. Besides seeking a kind of narcissism in learning, it also hopes for a comfortable and stable role in research without being attacked by reality. However, the urgency of self-development in today’s real world compels an unprecedented development of individual consciousness, which cannot be evaded. In the face of the disappearance of the “pristine” environment that is more and more likely to endanger everyone in the development of the modern world, or because of people’s unremitting pursuit of this lost past despite being unable to trace its origin, the modern world as a whole has gained a kind of cultural consciousness, which makes culture, a concept well known and frequently used by anthropologists, once again become a tool that can be temporarily used to express a kind of anxiety and even fear that everyone may share in their inner world. In this sense, it seems that apart from culture in the conceptual sense, we cannot make the ecology itself display its original shape, nor can we bring people’s mentality closer to a pristine condition. In 1992, the sociologist Fei Xiaotong published an article in the tenth issue of Du Shu (Reading) journal, titled “Kong Lin Pian Si” (“Thoughts Collected from Confucian Forest”), which was based on his speech on the tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Department of Sociology in Peking University on June 21 that year. In this article, Prof. Fei noted a force in today’s world that was emerging more and more prominently, drawing people’s attention from the ecology of the DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-7

The era after cultural consciousness  127 surrounding environment to individual mentality. Although for Prof. Fei the key word “mentality” was not as widespread as the term “cultural consciousness” in the later period, it is obvious that these two terms share the same origin. Regarding the changes in the contemporary world, Prof. Fei made the following remarks: Since the Gulf War, people have noticed the fact that the war has caused environmental pollution and realized the relationship between man and the earth. This is an ecological problem. Whether the Earth can still feed so many people has now become a problem compelling everyone’s attention. This is the ecological relationship between people and land, but it will eventually lead to the relationship among people, as reflected in how people get along with each other and how countries get along with each other. This is the primary question, which has not been well studied yet, and it seems that human beings have not been fully alerted to this issue.1 As an old man of the century, in his late eighties, the vicissitudes of the century Prof. Fei had experienced made him personally feel some fundamental changes taking place in the world. These changes were closely related to people. At the same time, the issue of how people should get along with each other has become more urgent today than in the past. Generally speaking, the words of the elderly are either tautologies resulting from ageing or inspirations from their wisdom in life. I think Prof. Fei’s remarks must belong to the latter category. If so, it seems that we cannot simply read Prof. Fei’s articles as a pastime. In fact, it is more important for us to understand the far-reaching enlightenment behind these words. This kind of reading is particularly important in the face of the rapid development of today’s world. In my personal reading experience, perhaps we can trace many of Fei Xiaotong’s later discussions about cultural consciousness back to his earliest discussion about mentality. Prof. Fei turned from the discussion of the relationship between people and land that he was familiar with to the discussion of the relationship among people that he was equally familiar with but did not consciously pay attention to, firmly convinced that relationships among people might be the root of all the problems in the world nowadays. In other words, the problem of mentality is on a higher plane compared with the problem of ecology. That is, how to use and manage resources reasonably is an easier question than how to get along better with people, as it is difficult to establish whether people get along well with each other, and relationships among people are not bound to improve with the enrichment of material resources. Therefore, the problem of ecology solves the problem of how everyone can coexist, while the problem of mentality addresses the problem of how everyone can live together better and with dignity. In Prof. Fei’s later years, on the one hand, material life in China was gradually enriched after more than a decade of reform and opening up; on the other hand, various instabilities between countries, nations, and regions were arising around the world, especially regional wars breaking out endlessly in the process of competing for oil resources vital to the modern world. Even today, this situation, instead of

128  The era after cultural consciousness changing fundamentally, is getting worse. These two aspects of human life in the real world are objective reality for everyone in China. To readdress the problems that Prof. Fei considered in those years, it is necessary to quote a passage written by the professor at the time to compare with the reality today, so as to appreciate his forward-looking perspective when he proposed this kind of mentality relationship: Our era witnesses the multiplication of conflicts. Behind the Gulf War are religious and ethnic conflicts; ethnic strife is taking place in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, resulting in persistent armed clashes. These are current historical facts, which, in my opinion, not only represent ecological imbalances, but also expose serious psychological contradictions. I have been thinking again and again in the Confucian Forest that mankind appears to be calling for Confucianism of the new era. The new Confucius must be someone who knows not only his own nation, but also other nations and religions. He should understand the relationships between nations, religions and countries from a higher level of mentality. At present, ethnic and religious conflicts leading to great chaos fully reflect situations of mental disorder. We need a new consciousness. Considering that people with different cultures, histories and mentalities in the world must coexist peacefully in the future on this earth, we have no choice but to find a way to coexist for people, who can no longer persist in an “every-man-for-himself” attitude.2 In fact, in light of this quotation, we can clearly understand that the concept of cultural consciousness was obviously not proposed casually, but against the backdrop of Prof. Fei’s realization that the study of humans had begun to “enter the level of mentality from the ecological level.”3 The new consciousness required by the study of humans on the level of mentality is in the cultural sense, that is, how people who are interrelated should coexist and prosper together. Today, the concept of “pristine condition,” deeply rooted in people’s minds and attracting the attention of many disciplines, seems to emphasize the so-called ecological level of Prof. Fei on the surface, but in fact, it should be clear that the concept of “pristine condition,” which has naturally emerged and gradually become popular since the rapid development of Chinese society, refers not only to ecology itself, but also to the lost ecological environment that enables people to live together in harmony. In fact, its deeper meaning may be the genuinely existing (so-called “pristine” refers to the original state of existence) ecology that we can never retrieve. It is a part of the “nostalgia” lingering in our hearts today. Therefore, it is actually an ecology that everyone imagines and constantly builds, rather than a real existence. In this sense, the pristine condition can be said to be an imaginary state of natural existence, a haven where people wish to escape to from reality, like the semi-illusory Peach Blossom Spring described by Tao Yuanming, an ancient Chinese poet. In this sense, the pristine condition refers not only to the mentality itself, but also to the imagination of the relationship between humans and nature reflected in people’s mentality today and the constant construction on this basis. Except for such conditions, there is no unique, concrete, and pristine condition in the real world. All descriptions

The era after cultural consciousness  129 based on the rhetoric of the pristine condition attempt to give people a concrete grasp of all its possible forms, but what people can do is only to approximate the pristine condition, not to reach the pristine condition per se. This is an indelible difference between conception and reality, and it also serves as a driving force for the constant pursuit of the future. 6.2 A future with no return Underlying today’s concept of the pristine condition is the most pressing problem found in practice. Just as when people are most thirsty, the first thing that occurs to their mind may be a spring, then when the ecology becomes most parched, the first thing that comes to their mind is the pristine condition that was refreshingly cool. In the face of the gradual destruction of various ecological environments today, if people are used as metaphors, today’s ecology, more than any time in the past, makes people feel extremely “hungry and thirsty.” Therefore, each of us, deep in our heart, will involuntarily call for the “pristine condition,” form a concept or image about the pristine condition, and then conceive it as a real destination of human life. In the sense of social evolution, what the ancient world pursued was a future that could return continuously, that is, time was not based on the metaphor of a straight line, but on one of a spiral. In other words, everything fading far away would eventually have a destination, often realized through some transformation. Perhaps the question of life and death could best express such a concept of time. Ancient people did not think that the death of a person meant the destruction of body and spirit. Instead, the body was thought to turn into nutrients for the soil after being buried in it, therefore the destination of human body was considered to be in the soil. It was not the same case with the spirit. Ancient people firmly believed that the human soul would never perish, because it would leave the rotting body to enter and be reincarnated into another living organism. Therefore, the immortality of the soul was a belief of ancient people and primitive people, and the constant circulation and transformation of the soul was regarded as a fundamental element in the constant extension and transmission of the human civilization. But obviously, since Charles Darwin’s proposal of the theory of irreversible biological evolution, which influenced modern people’s outlook, an irreversible world has gradually grown into a social reality. When we put aside over-elaborate formalities of culture and abandon all kinds of theories about the existence of souls to march towards the future that is constantly extending but has no way back, a circular view of history and time with a returning future will end. The core of Darwin’s theory of irreversible biological evolution emphasizes “fortuitous variation,” that is, so-called tychastic evolution. However, according to Charles Sanders Peirce, an American pragmatic philosopher, Darwin seems to have failed to explain the “evolution of minds,” but the evolution of minds, which is of great significance to human beings, depends on love and well-intentioned actions, rather than tragic natural selection. Therefore, Peirce termed it “agapastic evolution.” In this vein, Darwin’s concept of “natural selection” or “survival of

130  The era after cultural consciousness the fittest” is definitely not a reasonable proof of the dominant position of human society in Peirce’s view. Pierce wrote the following sentence in 1892: “Darwin inscribes on the title page of his book, ‘it is a struggle for survival’. But he should have added his motto: every individual for himself and the Devil take the hindmost!”4 Obviously, Pierce was among the earliest to criticize Darwin’s theory of evolution. In fact, “lagging behind leaves one vulnerable to attack,” which used to be and still may be the motto for development in China, is obviously an expression of Chinese consciousness of this Darwinian concept of “natural selection” and “survival of the fittest.” However, after more than three decades of rapid development, we began to look for ways to slow down. The renewed thirst for the pristine condition, which has been tragically lost amidst rapid development, seems to be a disguised call for a return to “backwardness,” and it seems that the pristine condition can only be included in “backwardness.” This almost paradoxical and dizzying reality of social development alerts us to re-question the value of Darwin’s theory in social development. Today, it seems as if only by staying away from Darwin’s theory of biological evolution can we have some glimpse of hope in the future. In other words, the social development theory of natural selection cannot fully explain the impulse of human beings to pursue the meaning of life, nor is it the most reasonable explanation for the dominant position of human society. If we continue to develop along a road that has no return, the enthusiasm for homesickness that we have been feeling more and more will be even stronger. Of course, a sense of loss caused by being unable to get it will be continuously enhanced. In other words, if we cannot find a way for mankind to return, the sustainability of development will become impossible, and its consequences for mankind itself will inevitably be a “future without return.” 6.3 Pristine condition and modern world Undoubtedly, the modern world is a concept which bestows on us an epistemological distinction between tradition and modernity. A negative logic underlies this distinction, that is, everything that is not modern or cannot be classified as modern shares a common name: tradition. Moreover, compared with modern times, the existence of tradition must imply something negative. In the eyes of modernists, the traditional is equivalent to the old, and then to the disposable. If it is a building, no matter what form it takes, it should be demolished in the eyes of a modernist, and at most may be allowed retain its external appearance, but should have its interior completely transformed.5 What it embodies is a kind of modern “No Admittance” demolition logic to deceive the public. This is the thinking of modernists who define tradition, that is, to delimit the object itself, so that it is no longer a natural part of daily life, but a part of people’s observation at the rational level. Just like landscape painting, nature is framed in its sense with a so-called boundary, and then nature is presented or expressed by imitating nature. This nature thus becomes an isolated “nature” as

The era after cultural consciousness  131 well as a nature scrutinized by tourists. In this sense, tradition becomes a kind of natural existence extracted through the gaze of the inspectors, whose originally rich meaning is thus framed. As part of the phenomenal world, this kind of natural existence once attempted to be grasped by modern reason, only leading to a consequence similar to people’s inseparable revolving around nature prior to the Copernican revolution (for example, people naively and firmly believed that the sun revolved around the Earth). However, the modern world has turned this consciousness from bottom to top in Copernicus’ hands, that is, the naturally existing Earth is no longer regarded as the center of the world, just as the phenomenal world is no longer regarded as the center of people’s life world. At the level of human consciousness, Kant’s “critique of pure reason” initiated a great turn for modern people’s thinking from the outside to the inside, that is, Kant attempted to place reason at the core of human affairs, while nature was regarded as an object that people perceived at the level of concept rather than the level of natural existence per se. As nature became an objectified concept, the concept of the pristine condition emerged. That is, as it is difficult to really maintain and preserve the natural ecology, it is replaced by the tracing of the pristine condition, the original ecological environment before the imaginary “lost” modern ecology at the conceptual level. But it is not an existence at the phenomenal level at all, but a self-definition at the conceptual level, and a pure conceptual imagination and construction of an ideal ecological environment. In this sense, perhaps nothing is more visionary than the existence of the pure concept of the pristine condition. In fact, it can be said that the concept of the pristine condition per se cannot solve the “thing-in-itself” (noumenon) problem of what the natural existence behind the pristine condition is. The concept of the pristine condition is discussed more often in the sense of the destination of the human spirit and soul. Today, however, the existence of nature is deviating from the spirit of the pursuit of the pristine condition, and instead becoming an object that people need to know, use, and transform because it has been separated by various separation technologies again and again in all kinds of connections in our lives. This is an outlook on nature based on the premise that man and nature are separated from rather than integrated with each other. Because of this premise, ecology as nature is departing so far away from people that they look for a nature that originally belonged to human beings but was unfortunately lost. That nature has been given a new name: the pristine condition. This is as ghastly as what the poet Heinrich Heine called putting a soul in a machine made by a human being when he talked about the relationship between soul and body in German philosophy. Because the soul always follows the body wherever it goes, the body cannot have a moment’s peace.6 The foundation of this logic is like artificial nature, in that people give nature a “body,” but forget to or cannot give it a “soul,” leaving the soul to wander around, which consequently brings a kind of natural terror. Of course, the reverse understanding seems to be the same. After being shaped, the concept of the pristine condition, as a ghost, strongly demands a body to be attached to. But obviously, there will be more challenges today than in the past in

132  The era after cultural consciousness realizing a harmonious symbiosis between the soul as spirit and the body as matter. Such a situation is closely related to the dual consciousness of individuals and cultures in today’s world. 6.4 Individual consciousness and cultural consciousness As Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist, has observed, late modern society experienced a deep transformation in political life, that is, it gradually changed from “emancipation politics” to “life politics.” In the words of Theodore Rozak, Giddens has pointed out the rise of this new life politics, that is, we live in an era when the search for personal identity and the private experience of personal destination have become a major subversive political force.7 In other words, Giddens deems that the spiritual outlook of self-growth presents a main social transformation in the whole of late modernity, with its focus on the individual, made to happen through the budding institutionalized reflection, and the alienation of social relations brought by abstract systems and the mutual penetration between locale and globalization”8. Today, with the reflection of individuals, that is, an individual consciousness or awareness growing day by day, society has changed its own structural arrangement because of this consciousness or awareness. The consciousness of a group and even a community is gradually replaced by the awareness of individual self-existence. Culturally, it has also moved from a group or collective (national) cultural consciousness to the individual’s own consciousness of lifestyle choice and independent expression in society. When individuals escape from a collective responsibility, society seems to strengthen the possibility of escape to a certain extent, and one of the ways to realize this strengthening is the invention, production, and application of various modern separation technologies. After treating the individual as a separable computing unit in society, our society will become a downright individualized society, witnessing the gradual growth of a corresponding individualized culture. Obviously, this is not a kind of free individual growth, but a type of modern growth arranged by society reflected in individuals. The core difference between the two kinds of growth is that the growth of individuality in a free state is an attempt to break away from a society through one’s own efforts; while arranged individuality involves cramming a whole person into a restricted space. Everyone is separated from each other despite being together, and face-to-face communication is minimized, but actually everyone is clearly aware of each other’s presence and feelings. The individualized world is materialized through the individualized manufacture of various things, which is first reflected in the completely accurate and efficient individualized services of the financial service industry system in the modern world, with the digitization of products and network interconnections being prerequisites for the smooth realization of this social function. More importantly, the confirmation of information based on individuals and the uniqueness of individual existence required to achieve this step have been affirmed and emphasized by

The era after cultural consciousness  133 society. In other words, a person is not only an entity in society, but also unique in attributes, and as a representation of existence in society, his or her existence must be unique. As a result, former duplications of names or another person or several people being in charge of one’s property, which leads to chaos, are no longer possible. As a result, the original diversified existences in society are reduced to a bank card, especially a popular credit card guaranteed by personal information. One’s independent and safe private property rights are guaranteed by a person’s signature or password. In this sense, credit cards have become the basis for separating society and transforming it into an individualized society. In this sense, the mass production and popularization of credit cards, as well as a safe and reliable banking system to prevent mistakes, are ensuring the formation of an individualized world that everyone seems to be aware of. Credit cards, which can be said to represent a highly effective separation technology in today’s world, are used in daily life and are even gradually replacing all possible channels of face-to-face exchange and communication. Dennis Smith, the biographer of Zygmunt Bauman, one of the representatives of the individualization theory, once used a “myth of the cage-dwellers” to explain Bauman’s individualization concept. In Smith’s view, modernity is a city, and its happy residents are not confined to caves, but are placed in cages designed by ergonomic methods.9 This myth may go on developing, that is, some people may walk out of the cage, but into a free and uncertain world. Dwellers leaving the cage desperately lose their precious life guide, and therefore face a tragic fate of losing their way back.10 Obviously, according to Smith’s mythological logic, cage-dwellers have a guide on how to live a good life in cages. However, a close look at cage-dwellers in today’s world will find that they have no such life guide, but may only have a genuine awareness, that is, to act according to a well-planned life path in society. This path is a tangible material existence, most saliently characterized by the application of science and technology. In this way, it seems that the meaning of life will also be produced in action. As a result, people will take many meaningless actions today, believing that meaning will naturally arise from such meaningless actions. Obviously, the real meaning that can be eventually obtained from it is just the meaning of a meaningless action. In other words, people can have freedom of action, or in the modern world, people’s actions have always been free, just like clouds floating in the sky. However, the social frame is there for certain, becoming more and more like an accurate clock, so that people who were originally free or liberated from the shackles of society have no freedom at all.11 In this sense, freedom per se is an ideology, and what people can awaken to is only this ideology about freedom. Except for that, there is no other awakening. But obviously, this awakening is a kind of self-emancipation for a specific individual. Therefore, an individual cannot be thrown away casually, let alone be arbitrarily declared nonexistent. In the pre-modern era, these practices might be commonplace. Therefore, in today’s world, no more coercive moral norms can be imposed on individuals, but moral norms still exist, just becoming fragmented rules for everyone to make their own independent choices.

134  The era after cultural consciousness 6.5 After cultural consciousness If cultural consciousness refers to how people get along with each other rather than just an empty definition of what culture is, the question of how different cultures will understand each other arises. Therefore, we should not only look at the results of cultural contact, but also study how cultural contact can be made possible. Culture is becoming increasingly individualized today, that is, culture is becoming readily accessible at the individual level. In the wake of this phenomenon, we will know clearly the new forms of cultural existence in this transformation and what are the new material bases for the generation of these new forms. That is to say, we will be concerned with the emergence of a new cultural transformation and the new material cultural expression behind it. Without this new concern, anthropology would naturally be of no value in today’s world. Anthropology, as a former cultural hegemon, has lost its inherent field because those cultures that we once had or defined as having little contact with us are about to disappear. Today, anthropology must, with an egalitarian attitude, be concerned with the cultures of different ethnic groups who once lived in different regions of the world with those superior anthropologists. These cultures are increasingly being mastered by every individual today, and similarly, every individual, with their own behaviors, is constantly producing a different kind of culture. Perhaps no time is more suitable for cultural investigation than the current era, and no time has seen more frequent and intensive contact between cultures than this era. Moreover, if there is a kind of cultural consciousness, never has there been any time in which it was easier to observe the actual phenomenon of cultural consciousness than today’s era. If culture used to be monopolized by only a few people in society, who exercised a kind of domination over culture, then today, although culture is still in the hands of some people who produce and consume culture, the door of culture has undoubtedly been opened to everyone as there is no alternative. This is an era of cultural carnival, when people gain a sense of consciousness by owning culture, and with this sense, they obtain the necessary rights as dignified beings in society. In this sense, cultural consciousness per se becomes a kind of action consciousness, that is, concern about the new generation of anthropological theory is relegated to the second place, field study becomes an action journey to practice an attitude, while the questioning and systematization of so-called local knowledge loses its place as the paramount pursuit. But it is becoming more and more important and urgent today to learn how to put oneself in the position of others and to tolerate lifestyles and cultural concepts different from those of ordinary people, people living in an over-standardized culture. Obviously, we understand the pristine condition in this sense, that is, our living world is being colonized by various new technologies and new ideas, and the original relationships are also being changed as a result. The uniqueness of any culture becomes weak and vulnerable in the face of such colonization, because such colonization claims that the final beneficiaries are all ordinary beings. However, in the process of this new colonization, culture has lost its genuine meaning, uprooted

The era after cultural consciousness  135 from the suitable soil for its growth, and placed in position like specimens for tourists to gaze on. The application of intangible cultural heritage in full swing now functions explicitly to protect culture, but its implicit destructive power over culture is arguably unprecedented, because such a practice embodies ignorance and contempt for culture in the framework of international cultural hegemony. “Cultural war” is stirred up under the guise of “cultural protection,” or there is competition for resources for so-called “cultural identity.” This framework of cultural hegemony presupposes an imaginary enemy, that is, that there are one or more cultural destroyers. This foreign cultural hegemony under the pretext of international recognition does not believe in the growth and transformative ability of culture itself at all, and only relies on preferences and arbitrary definition of culture to blindly use the logic of money to conduct cultural transactions that the so-called cultural elites enjoy. As a result, a large number of people who deem themselves researchers of anthropology, folklore, and ethnology have refashioned themselves from exclusive collectors and narrators of folk culture to roles like owners of cultural companies, hysterically rushing to protect something that is culture in their eyes, and then give money to a certain owner of this culture to buy it for this protection. But the buyers do not know that culture can never be measured or defined as private property rights. As villages that have begun to wilt under the tide of worldwide social transformation are assigned the word “ancient” for no reason from the perspective of outsiders, everyone takes it for granted that every brick, tile, blade of grass, and tree in this village can no longer be altered as one likes. These outsiders act as if they were the masters of culture, but they are not. Nevertheless, they take actions this way. Then, they dress themselves up like philanthropists who help the poor in modern TV dramas. People originally living in the same era as these “philanthropists” are said to be real ancient remains, or even “fossils” solidified in their original forms. The protectors then protect these people and their living villages as cultural relics logically rather than essentially, providing them with daily necessities and protecting their lifestyle. But the real problem is that these villagers actually want to live their own life, not the so-called life of intangible cultural heritage that is rigid and not what they really want. The cadres of the Cultural Bureau have worked extremely hard to protect ancient villages. As the actual executors of this farce, all they can think about is how to keep those wooden houses in a unified posture like soldiers obeying orders. But what the local people want to live in may be a new type of reinforced concrete house, or what they think of as an ideal house, which will not only bring honor in their village, but also be economical in real life. The contradiction between official uniformity and the diverse choices of the people is undoubtedly irreconcilable. The cultural romanticism of folklore lovers and collectors pretending to be spokespersons for intangible cultural heritage, in particular, has brewed cups of bitter wine that make local people feel miserable. In this process, local people lose their autonomy, as their lives are disturbed. They can only accept and solidify a culture they are familiar with, but cannot make any changes. The word “inherit” in “inheritor” is both a noun and a command, ignoring and suffocating

136  The era after cultural consciousness any cultural creation. In the eyes of these folklore lovers and collectors, it is a merit to preserve all that is present. But in terms of the development path of culture itself, how can such a practice be called a merit? Such a practice amounts to nothing but a model of collusion between modern state forces and various experts and scholars. Therefore, the more important cultural consciousness today is a consciousness of relationship. Without a clear cognition of relationship, all seemingly reasonable actions and cognitions may mark the beginning of the deepest destruction of culture. The premise for the consciousness of this relationship is a reasonable social arrangement, which closely depends on those who are in control of a certain culture. Obviously, culture was first mastered by a few people in the upper class, that is, a group of people called aristocrats. That time may be called the era of aristocratic culture. Aristocrats monopolized culture, and used the meaning of culture to influence people outside the aristocracy, thereby making them obey. In that era, culture had a very clear boundary, which no one dared to overstep. The next era would be an era of elite culture transcending the boundaries of aristocratic culture. In this era, aristocratic culture, though still persisting, was obviously at the end of the road, showing signs of decline everywhere. Confucius’ maintenance of rites and music and the trampling on the boundaries of rites and music during the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period undoubtedly represented the positive and negative manifestations of the collapse of the boundary of aristocratic culture. What arose instead was the era of elite culture. Confucius from this era was a key figure in the cultural history of China, because although he was superficially a guardian and propagator of aristocratic culture, his true identity was as a cultural elite in today’s sense. Confucius did not take creating a certain culture as the first priority, but emphasized “restraining oneself and restoring rites” to maintain the existing aristocratic culture. At the same time, Confucius truly began to educate people outside the aristocracy and the elite class with the help of this culture. The so-called principle of “making no social distinction in teaching” was intended to attract more people, but not all of them, into the social elite class, and to rule the people who could not turn into elites. This kind of elite culture has occupied a very long period in history with the help of the social function of education, and still exists today, playing its role in creating social elites. However, another culture has also been developing vigorously since the late 20th century, and is gradually rising in society now, with a trend of gradually replacing elite culture leaping into the mainstream of society. This is mass culture, and this era is the era of mass culture, when aristocrats with strict cultural boundaries and elites who are trying to expand their cultural boundaries are gradually withdrawing from the big stage of social dominance, replaced by all the people in society. That is, everyone in society has the opportunity to create and express their own culture in various ways. No one is outside culture, nor will anyone be excluded and abandoned by this culture. You can join in and acquire culture in any way you like. Revelry and mutual recognition are the obvious characteristics of this culture, while get-togethers, hustle and bustle, and self-entertainment reflect its core characteristics.

The era after cultural consciousness  137 And if we are in the era of mass culture in which everyone can participate, the consciousness of relationship will differ from that in the eras of aristocrats and elites. In the era of mass culture, the relationship among people has become independent, while the dependence and group consciousness among them has become impossible. The impact of various separation technologies growing more and more popular in society will make it easier to realize the existence of such individual independence. At the same time, the new channels through which mass culture can be expressed are more popularized and attractive. Television in the past and online media today are the material carriers for the emergence and popularity of mass culture. It would be impossible for mass culture to emerge without the development of such communication and transmission technologies. The background of mass culture, in turn, is gestating and promoting the birth of new material media, such as satellites, optical cables, and smart phones, which carry the instant spread of mass culture. We need to re-examine the new forms of relations among people, between people and things, and among things under the premise that new material carriers are appearing and are widely used in society. Obviously, without this kind of investigation, relying solely on the analytical frameworks accumulated in the past aristocratic and elite cultural eras, we may be inspired by certain historical knowledge, but cannot properly address today’s social reality. Moreover, those frameworks abstract in time and space cannot be aptly applied to mass society today. 6.6 Living conditions after cultural consciousness Obviously, cultural consciousness is bound to be closely related to the form and transformation of the modern world. The world we face today must have been transformed from this modern world. We may define the modern world in many ways, but it may be a useful classification to take a comprehensive look at some characteristics engendered by the modern world from the results, that is, to see the particularity of the modern world through a comparison with traditional society. Even so, classifications may vary, so it is necessary for us to limit this definition, that is, we can make an investigation from the perspective of culture to see what characteristics the culture of the modern world has in its growth, dissemination, and dominance for us to grasp. First of all, from the growth of culture, the developmental characteristics of a linear society are relatively salient. Compared with the traditional world, the idea that the arrow of time is progressing in one direction seems to be deeply rooted in people’s minds, which has become an important part of people’s outlook on the world today. This is obviously based on Darwin’s theory of biological evolution and the idea that social forms should be constantly updated. In this sense, culture has become a linear development of constant progress, while other ideas are therefore denied, with no more normal room for growth. Second, culture presents the coverage of homogeneous space in communication. Despite ubiquitous differences in the world, the homogeneous space is developing more rapidly. The differences we can observe almost stop at the phenomenal level, while the coverage of the homogeneous space we feel is essential. Highways

138  The era after cultural consciousness extending in all directions prevent us from noticing the significance of small paths. The uniformity of style and service in different hotels makes it impossible for us to really appreciate the difference of life in different places. All kinds of foods soaked in gourmet powders deprive us of the ability to distinguish differences by our taste buds. We may feel that we have eaten different things, but we get the same taste. Ubiquitous international chains of fast food restaurants have rendered our tastes consistent since childhood. These examples all illustrate that the only feeling left by the modern world is that life around the world tends to be consistent and that people may live the same life in different places at the same time, from the material level to the spiritual level. Moreover, rationally, we are also rejecting all kinds of different ideas, including important different ideas on life and death, which seem to be unusually intolerable in the face of modern rationality. We are unconditionally accepting all kinds of standardized procedures until we direct all our lives onto the track of standardization, which no one disagrees with. Even if there is dissent about such a trend, it cannot become the mainstream of society, but an oddity rejected constantly in this society. With the full development of this standardization in people’s daily life, and with the full development and application of technology to control people, culture as a dominant force is controlling people’s behavior more secretly, and the dominance of culture exerts its influence as usual in various disguises. The imprint of culture emphasized by the School of Culture and Personality has become more fluid and uncertain. People are constrained by culture, but what they really feel is not the impact of culture itself, but the impact of other things after various transformations, among which are the production, consumption, and reproduction of objects that are extremely obvious in the modern world, which deeply affect our behavior choice and cognitive orientation. Well-designed subway gates that are repeatedly used by the public tell us the due rhythm in life; the credit card in our hands reminds us of the way of wealth possession; gene technology constantly teaches us that physical diseases can be controlled by biotechnology; the popularity of electric cookers implies that hot rice can be cooked even without a specific person undertaking the task in traditional family life. In addition, the application of surgical technology in clinical medicine today is almost omnipotent, and even such difficult cosmetic surgery as “face swaps,” not even conceived of in the past, has become common today, with cosmetic surgery even rising to be a worldwide industry. Anyone willing to spend a certain amount of money can change his or her appearance. One’s appearance is no longer destined, but is associated with whether one can afford surgery in the world price system. After the era of cultural consciousness, one of the most impressive features is the various new characteristics of the era. If part of the meaning of cultural consciousness refers to the awareness of one’s own old culture, then the era after cultural consciousness is obviously linked with all kinds of “newness.” New materials, new concepts, new relationships, and even new lifestyles – ubiquitous newness making people feel restless arises with each passing day. Just as Thomas L. Friedman, the author of Hot, Flat and Crowded, has observed, some new characteristics created by the newness of the modern world can be represented by the words “hot”, “flat,”

The era after cultural consciousness  139 and “crowded.” The so-called “hot” specifically refers to climate warming and greenhouse gas emissions associated with this change and its effects. The so-called “flat” refers to the development of computers and the popularity of the Internet all over the world, which has not only connected all parts of the world with each other, but also enabled people in different spaces to work together in real time. Living in a world of information overload, people do not know what to refer to or what to follow. The so-called “crowded,” on the one hand, refers to the sharp increase in the world population, amounting to 6.7 billion so far, and expected to reach 9 billion by the middle of the 21st century, and on the other hand, refers to the ensuing urbanization driven by industrialization, gathering a large number of people inside cities rather than outside them. With the city attracting more and more people, crowdedness has become a dominant image in the minds of city-dwellers.12 The modern world constantly infected by “newness” is no longer a “cold” society that maintains traditional lifestyles, but a complex and uncertain “hot” world, where people are agitated to constantly create new ideas. We cannot examine the present world from the logic of single-factor determinism, for it is becoming more and more complicated due to many factors. Meanwhile, it is also a “world that cannot be reset.” It becomes more and more difficult to reset what we have removed with the help of a certain idea to their originally arranged places in this world. In this sense, the so-called pristine condition is just a kind of pursuit of concept, seeking experiential satisfaction by constantly looking for something similar. In fact, the promise of the modern world is always brilliant, that is, a glamorous future, premised on everyone following the established track so that this future can be realized. But it seems that most of such promises have not been fulfilled, and we have not achieved the greatest satisfaction in our spiritual and material existence because of the improvement of some living conditions. We do have plenty of food today, but we suffer from anorexia; we do have comfortable cars and can travel to distant places, but we are thus burdened with the weight of heavy smog; we do have comfortable housing, but the state of everyone being crowded together is a precursor to autism, in which the mind cannot really communicate; it is true that we do not fight with our neighbors nowadays, but we feel worried that we are watched by others everywhere. Also, today everyone seems to feel a kind of hunger and thirst in the soul and discomfort in life. As mentioned above, all kinds of things seem to be out of their place, but they cannot be restored. This is the sense of psychological loss resulting from ecological loss, which can trigger nostalgia. In the face of such a new cultural era, it is imperative for us to seek a new cultural consciousness that crosses boundaries between ethnic groups and regions. Culture is therefore a kind of common ownership or “being together,” stressing the harmony of relations rather than separation. After the socialization of new media today, we are facing a lifestyle choice and cultural transformation. The prerequisite for such a choice and transformation is a change in social philosophy, that is, in the social value system people begin to put individual value more and more above social collective value. In the era stressing individuals’ total dedication to the collective, the “Lei Feng spirit” emerged and was shaped in our culture, which represented an outright selfless dedication to society. However, in a recent new slogan

140  The era after cultural consciousness commemorating Lei Feng’s spirit, an individualized message has appeared and been recognized by official propaganda, that is, “Learn from Lei Feng, contribute to others and improve yourself.” The last part of this slogan obviously consists of words only found in today’s era of emphasizing individuality, and it is directly presented in an official propaganda slogan. The era after cultural consciousness must be a new era, challenging all aspects of our lives and forcing each of us to respond positively to this challenge. In fact, cultural consciousness gives us at least two kinds of awareness: one is the awareness of return, and the other is the awareness of constant doubt and trial and error. The most prominent illustration of the former awareness is the legend of Peach Blossom Spring that Chinese people like to tell, while the latter is best characterized by Western modernity and embodied in the work The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, a great painter in the Renaissance. For today’s people, the former awareness may bring us joy and hope of life due to escapism and contingency, which sends us in dedicated pursuit of a brighter future. The latter awareness may amount to despair from constant doubting and constant erring in life in order to seek an order of certainty like a pendulum. The reminder from the mouth of Jesus, “one of you will betray me,” is actually a presupposition of epistemology, which rejects the contingency and uncertainty in the life world and embodies the existence of truth through a spirit of doubt. However, after 500 years of reincarnation, the world seems to be gradually revealing its genuine appearance of confusion, complexity, and uncertainty. In this sense, the former awareness is closer to the present spirit of the times than the latter. Anthropology thus needs more understanding and practical efforts in the former consciousness. 6.7 A new era of anthropology The concept of pristine condition has deprived anthropologists, cultural hegemons who once took the “primitive state” as their fiefdom, of their territory, because it seems that today everyone thinks that the “primitive state” no longer exists, and that “primitive culture” is nowhere to be found. But ironically, people in the present world really seem to need a primitive culture as a vision for their future destination, having started a journey in search of the primitive state and primitive culture at all costs. In this sense, conversely, there is nothing more suitable for people to discuss anthropology and culture than today’s era. In fact, anyone can be an anthropologist today, as long as you take a trip and make an observation of the world outside yourself. But no one can be an anthropologist if they are still addicted to the imagination of the other and the isolation of a culture, failing to have a deep understanding of their co-existence and interaction with the other. Moreover, from the background of the emergence of Western anthropology, it was a history of continuous colonization abroad, which brought about the growth of knowledge about the other. The “pristine condition” in our minds today has ceased to exist since the modern Western world came into contact with other worlds, because this kind of colonization has never emphasized interaction without mutual influence, but is a conquest of other inferior civilizations in the world by a civilization defined as superior.

The era after cultural consciousness  141 Therefore, it seems that various disciplines that have adhered to the scientific spirit of the West and contributed to colonization since modern times have created complete knowledge in detailed observation, but such knowledge has later proved to be implicated in Oriental imagination, so the knowledge community constructed must be an imaginary community. There was a time when this civilization, which dominated world civilization, straightforwardly looked at the world formed by humans from the perspective of biological evolution, as if the future and destination of human beings was an evolution towards advanced modernity or modernization. Since the end of the 20th century, however, all this has started to go through a conceptual overturn. As Friedman has pointed out, people have started to feel the world becoming “hot” and “crowded.” In other words, something may be wrong with the world made up of people, and it seems that our understanding of the world can no longer be completely obtained based on the “original impression” constantly constructed by classical anthropology. On the contrary, the realistic sense of urgency compels our energy and courage to understand what is happening now, which is an inevitable choice for anthropologists in the face of a worldwide cultural transformation. Therefore, for anthropologists today, although what they see is still a colorful world, the meaning of this world obviously cannot be modified by such words as “primitive” for no reason. In other words, the change of reality and the new world pattern have forced anthropologists once sheltered by the Western colonial discourse to embark on self-reflection, which can guide us not to seek a primitive state relative to modernity, but to reveal and present an arcadia like the Peach Blossom Spring, where we can escape in the future. In the face of an urgent reality, we have lost the repeated “thick description” misunderstood and vulgarized by anthropologists after Clifford Geertz, and instead we should let local knowledge bloom, so that folk wisdom can freely express and regenerate itself. We no longer simply emphasize the relativity of culture, but redefine different cultures in the sense of human existence, in order to consider their respective values and the meaning of existence in this context. We no longer have the kind of consciousness that only describes the collective cultural model, but should look anew at the self-expressive form of cultural consciousness after the real individual consciousness brought about by the cultural transformation in the sense of cultural cohesion. The core of anthropology lies in the theme of human beings. In the homogeneous world increasingly covered by various separation technologies, the meaning of human beings has also been disrupted. It seems that the only discipline that considers the wholeness of human beings as the first priority is anthropology. Anthropology has been concerned about the origin of humans since the beginning, but this problem is still an unsolved mystery, even more complicated than the original question. This attracts many scholars from different fields to participate in the research, and anthropology is no exception. But at the same time, anthropology seems to pay more attention to people’s fate. For a person, birth and death constitute the two ends of life, with birth as the beginning and death as the return. In many cultures, there is such a concept of a life cycle. While the future view behind the modern world completely ignores the point of “the return of death,” and regards

142  The era after cultural consciousness humans as “one-dimensional,” the problem of human destination is written off. Therefore, people have no place to return, but just look forward and face the future, forever evading attainment. Only when one becomes sick, decadent, and unable to move does one seriously look for the place that had passed away, but this search seems to no longer be possible. In this sense, anthropologists present a world view of “a future with a return” in various cultures, and the boundaries that people set for their future in that world view ensure that people can have a place to return. If this is not the case and people only seek development without boundaries, everything would seem to end in a bleak future. In the above sense, the pristine condition can only consist of many clues that enable “people to return” and help people find the way home, rather than a concrete “genuine and objective” existence. They can give us inspiration from life and guide our meaningful real life. Today’s concept of the pristine condition should produce a harmonious environment of multi-cultural co-existence in human settlements, thus establishing a relatively harmonious relationship among people, things, and nature. These may be the reality that Chinese anthropology and even world anthropology should face today. In the summer of 2014, I visited Kaili City, the government seat of Qiandongnan Miao and Dong Autonomous Prefecture. There was a huge building complex called Future City next to the hotel where I stayed. Looking through the window of the hotel, especially in the dark night, I saw the sprawl of unoccupied high-rises, which reminded me of the information I had learned from locals: it was said that even if every family bought one more apartment, many apartments in Kaili City would still remain unsold. Urged by a feeling of melancholy, I made the judgment that this “Future City” seemed to have no future! Of course, the reason is very simple. Obviously, people’s desires cannot expand at will without any restrictions. In other words, faced with such buildings, we can ask a very practical question: do all buildings really have a sustainable future? Think about it: can the ecological environment here support such an “advanced” community? Obviously, so many reinforced concrete structures indicate that “Future City” has no future, and so many dark apartment buildings at night also indicate that “Future City” has no real future. But in another sense, it may have its own future, where everything rushes towards an uncertain world in the future in one direction, along one path, on one standard, and at one speed. The result is imaginable. Giddens once named this world “Runaway World”;13 though it is frightening, it is necessary for anthropologists to resist running on this road. Running resistance is not necessarily an act of resistance, but it is the real power accumulated by human consciousness after the emergence of cultural consciousness. Notes 1 Fei Xiaotong. On Culture and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Qunyan Press, 2005: 112–113. Emphasis added. 2 Fei Xiaotong. On Culture and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Qunyan Press, 2005: 114–115. Emphasis added.

The era after cultural consciousness  143 3 Fei Xiaotong. On Culture and Cultural Consciousness. Beijing: Qunyan Press, 2005: 115. 4 Joseph Brent. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life (revised version), trans. Shao Qiangjin. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2008: 82. 5 Zhao Xudong. Dismantling Beijing: Memory and Forgetting. Social Sciences, 2006 (1): 115–125. 6 Heinrich Heine. Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, trans. Hai An. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1975: 99–100. 7 Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, trans. Zhao Xudong and Fang Wen. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1998: 246. Emphasis added. 8 Anthony Giddens. Modernity and Self-identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age, trans. Zhao Xudong and Fang Wen. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1998: 246. 9 Dennis Smith. Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity, trans. Xiao Shao. Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2002: 19. 10 Dennis Smith. Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity, trans. Xiao Shao. Nanjing: Jiangsu People’s Publishing House, 2002: 20. 11 On April 21, 1965, Karl Popper delivered a lecture titled “Of Clouds and Clocks: An Approach to the Problem of Rationality and the Freedom of Man” at the University of Washington in Washington State, in which he employed the two images, clouds and clocks, to represent freedom and rationality respectively. His initial statement reads as follows: “My clouds are intended to represent systems which, like gases, are highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable. I shall assume that we have before us a schema or arrangement in which a very disturbed or disorderly cloud is placed on the left. On the other extreme of our arrangement, on its right, we may place a very reliable pendulum clock, a precision clock, intended to represent physical systems which are regular, orderly, and highly predictable in their behavior” (Karl Popper. Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, trans. Shu Weiguang, Zhuo Rufei, Zhou Baiqiao, et al. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 1987: 218–219). 12 Thomas L. Friedman. Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution and How It Can Renew America. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2008: 2,733. 13 Clifford Geertz. The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic Books, 1973: 330.

7

Disaster, art works, and irony

The Wenchuan earthquake brought two cultural symbols, Zhu Jianqiang (Strong Pig) and Zhu Gangqiang (Cast-Iron Pig), into our lives, which also influenced artists’ creation. The two ordinary pigs therefore shook off their status as humble livestock and entered human social life through this approach of naming, which is a cultural expression of human self-existence realized by art. Here, culture is equal to art, and art is also equal to culture. In this respect, a behavior artist played the role of a semi-anthropologist, while the other half of the job was to be completed by an anthropologist with self-knowledge. People are obviously not artists who escape and resist. This will inevitably endow art with a power similar to authority, thereby denying the humbleness and weakness of human existence and seeking an active life in the face of hardship and disaster. Therefore, “the weapon of the weak” is actually no other than “the art of the weak.” 7.1 Disaster, the naming of Strong Pig, and museum collection At 2:28 p.m. on May 12, 2008, a massive earthquake with a magnitude exceeding 8 occurred in Wenchuan County, Sichuan Province in Southwest China. The attention of the whole world was drawn to China and the vast land of Wenchuan. In those unsettling days, almost all the news was focused on the name of Wenchuan, a county town originally unknown to many people in China. Since then, people have remembered this important town in the southwest leading to the Kangba Tibetan area because of the sudden onset of the earthquake. The earthquake relief efforts seem to have influenced the whole country, with no person or institution being aloof from the disaster. No bystander could stay indifferent to various sorts of news, message, hearsay, and rumors about the disaster-stricken area, as well as changing casualty numbers. Many people were deeply emotionally involved, shocked by all kinds of tragic casualties in the news reports with pictures, and even visited disaster relief sites. Volunteers from all over the country organized themselves to help the victims of the quake. The year 2008 was marked as “the First Year of Volunteers in China” among the people, that is, the volunteer spirit of China was truly sparked in this year. In short, 2008 was not an ordinary year for China. Besides the earthquake, the Beijing Olympic Games drew worldwide attention, and the stock market and property market were in an extreme depression. People’s overall mood was also in a state of wavering panic. DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-8

Disaster, art works, and irony  145 However, on June 17, 2008, the 36th day after the earthquake, a piece of news initially spreading on the Internet and then reported by China Central Television suddenly broke the dreariness and depression of quotidian life caused by the earthquake. People’s mood seemed to make a 180-degree turn at this moment. The protagonist of this news was the famous Zhu Jianqiang (Strong Pig), that is, a pig miraculously surviving 36 days after the earthquake. People could not bear to see the pig stabbed by a butcher like other pigs and then eaten by people. Netizens posted countless posts calling on everyone to keep this extraordinary pig alive.1 They named it Zhu Jianqiang, and planned to send it to a museum for “retirement.” Moreover, according to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) soldiers at a flying academy in Chengdu Military Region who rescued it, the pig actually subsisted magically on some charcoal, which further reflected the strong will behind the vitality of this legendary pig. Later, the Jianchuan Museum in Dayi County, Sichuan Province, which collected the pig, also collected pieces of the remaining charcoal found at the scene together with a signed military uniform of the PLA soldiers who bravely rescued Strong Pig and displayed them with a text tag in the museum. Obviously, the name of this white boar, Strong Pig, has spread all over China and even the Chinese community all over the world with the help of various communication channels such as the Internet, TV and newspapers. At a time when people were deeply grieved by the sudden losses of tens of thousands of people during the earthquake, and angered by the sluggish property market and stock market, they had a roller-coaster-like change in mood or emotion thanks to the invention and spread of the name Strong Pig in the folk society and the fabrication of stories with symbolic significance. In people’s monotonous leisure life after the earthquake relief efforts, besides playing popular mahjong and card games, an intriguing topic of conversation that could excite them in an instant seemed to have been created. In another sense, the disaster seemed to have given new impetus to all Chinese people for self-creation. While the state allocated 4 trillion yuan of high-profile investment to earthquake relief, civil society also became active, giving rise to a power of self-inspiration for the whole society. At this time, Strong Pig became not only a household name, but also a widely spread source of people’s creative and inspirational arts and crafts through the Internet. Mr. Fan Jianchuan, the curator of Jianchuan Museum famous for his keen collection of earthquake cultural relics in Sichuan, even visited the place where Strong Pig was discovered, that is, the home of Wan Xingming, a villager in Tuanshan Village, Longmenshan Town, Pengzhou City, Chengdu, and bought this huge white boar named Strong Pig for a price of 3,008 yuan in addition to a sum of 10,000 yuan as an assistance fund for the farmer’s resumption of production and life. Besides the name of Strong Pig given by netizens, the curator gave it the nickname “36 Baby” (36 Wa’er). A corner of the Jianchuan Museum was specially set aside for the pig2 to be displayed to visitors. In this sense, Strong Pig changed its identity from a very ordinary pig to a “famous pig.” Inspirational songs3 and jokes4 related to the name Strong Pig, letters to Strong Pig, and children’s literature works5 featuring Strong Pig also emerged one after another. It seemed that all of a sudden, the real concern of netizens was no longer

146  Disaster, art works, and irony the life of the people in the disaster-stricken area, but the pig named by netizens. People seemed to gain a driver because of the appearance of this pig. A special online blog was even set up for the pig,6 and many interesting inspirational or selfdeprecating stories with Strong Pig as the protagonist were compiled. And many people became addicted to such stories, thinking about how this pig should live every day. Finally, amidst the cheers for Strong Pig, the pig won the championship among the top ten animals that touched China in 2008.7 In this sense, through the naming by ordinary people and the unexpected collection by a folk museum, an unknown pig made an extraordinary and gorgeous turn from an animal constantly despised in daily life to Strong Pig, venerated by thousands of people. 7.2 Zhang Huan as an artist and Cast-Iron Pig as a work of art On the 13th day after the discovery of Strong Pig, that is, on the 49th day after the earthquake, or during the “seventh seven-day” memorial time observed by people, another piece of news first published on the Internet and then widely spread through various forms of social media touched the hearts of people all over China. Although it was not as striking as the news of the rescue of Strong Pig, it moved the hearts of all Chinese people just like the aftershock of the Wenchuan earthquake. The news was about another white boar, which was found and successfully rescued on June 29, 2008, 49 days after the Wenchuan earthquake. Zhang Huan, an artist then based in Shanghai, visited the home of Liu Xinming, the owner of the pig, in Yingxiu, Wenchuan, and bought the pig from the owner for more than 3,000 yuan for the pig along with tens of thousands of yuan for house repairs. It was said that the artist had regretted losing the earlier opportunity to buy Strong Pig. This time, with great expectations for this second rescued pig, he was determined to obtain it. After the payment, Liu Xinming, the original owner of the pig, happily escorted it all the way to Zhang Huan’s studio in Shanghai. Probably because this newly discovered pig had been buried for a long time, and because it appeared after the naming of Strong Pig, it was dubbed Zhu Gangqiang (Cast-Iron Pig), also gaining “overnight fame” on the Internet. Just as Lin Xuda, a scholar in Taiwan Province, China, pointed out, “‘Cast-Iron Pig’ has absurdly changed from a suffering animal to a well-known dazzling star.”8 Perhaps according to the naming custom in China, the two white boars could be regarded as “pig brothers” from the same family. They had their own names, just like brothers in China’s traditional genealogy, sharing the same character qiang, indicating that they were peers. They were set apart from ordinary pigs, not only because they each assumed a human name, but more importantly, they acquired a symbolic ability to transcend the cycle of life and death. They would never be sent to a slaughterhouse after gaining a certain weight or after a certain period of time and eaten by people after a sequence of slaughter, dissection, and transportation procedures like ordinary pigs. These two miraculous pigs could, thanks to their reputation, enjoy a kind of special health treatment through meticulous care of their bodies, which was usually only reserved for humans. That is, they did not have to wait for the misfortune of being slaughtered, dismembered, and eaten.

Disaster, art works, and irony  147 The Jian and Gang pigs could also shook off their humble livestock status and entered people’s social life through being named by people, not only accompanying people, but also interacting with them and even being treated as superior beings. This pair of “pig brothers” therefore led their own unique social life by really living among people and influencing their lives and consciousness, comparable to another animal living in the Chinese society, the giant panda, also found in the dense forests of Southwest China. In China, the social life of the panda has taken on a strong official significance, as it is taken special care of in a special thermally insulated room at the zoo named and invested by the state, and has become a symbol of the modern state. That is, because of the uniqueness of the sovereign boundaries of the state, the symbol indicating its existence should also be unique in the world. However, this symbol of the unique modern nation-state is totally different in terms of social life from the fictional symbolic animal the Dragon, which dominated the world conceptually without real boundaries in the traditional Chinese age of empires. It can be said that the image of the Dragon represents Chinese people’s imagination of the whole world and the universe in the traditional age. It is by no means just a symbol used to represent China’s existence as a country or a place in a corner of the modern world. It reflects its non-locality through having an unknown source or purely timeless creation, and its uniqueness beyond all living things through the ambiguity of its symbol, that is, its representativeness relative to the whole world. In this sense, the Dragon’s spatiotemporal scope is beyond the limited spatiotemporal scope represented by the modern image of the panda. In contrast to the social life of the panda, a “national treasure” animal, the social life of Strong Pig and Cast-Iron Pig stemmed entirely from the people, reflecting the people and living among them. They became famous thanks to the widely used Internet, and they were named by the people and collected by a private institution. All these are illustrations of the social life that people work hard to maintain to achieve their own cultural identity at the bottom of the social hierarchy. In this sense, this kind of life is hardly a kind of “weapon of the weak” in the sense of James Scott,9 because what people want to express is not any deliberate opposition to the state, nor is it a patterned art of escaping from various state constraints through training in escape skills and the accumulation of various alternative experiences. It is precisely because of this universal, ironic expression of human life among the people, and by means of the “strong” or “cast-iron” will endowed in pigs, originally assumed to be the humblest animals in human life, that the real predicament of human existence is truly reflected, that is, the fragility of the humble human life as a whole, and the powerful reversal of the inherent shortcomings of human nature that may result from social and moral incentives. This is just like the joy felt by millions of marginal individuals who have succeeded after climbing up the social ladder by their own efforts. Obviously, this is not an art of antagonistic escape only addressing the state, but a cultural expression of the reflection or consciousness of the value of the existence of human beings with the help of art. Here, culture is equal to art, and vice versa, except that art is nothing more than a concrete and subtle model similar to culture, and culture is nothing

148  Disaster, art works, and irony more than an unconscious existence of art. Between art and culture, artists not only exist, but also create works of art by extracting, deleting, isolating, awakening, and rearranging many elements of culture, society, and personal life, giving a very natural connection to culture and art. In this sense, a work of art by itself assumes an anthropological ethnographic significance. In fact, a work of art condenses a kind of ineffable life from the entire life in society, which is particularly prominent in the works of modern Chinese artists. These works also thoroughly present the real images of the Chinese society and people’s lives in this society at the artistic level by manipulating people’s sensitivities, especially those of the most ordinary people lacking the self-consciousness to reflect on their own existence, thus attracting more such people to view them. Every ordinary person in society finds a so-called “self” of a marginalized individual. This is the value of modern performance art or installation art, and it is also where it can connect and resonate with the society and culture of ordinary people. In this regard, Zhang Huan, a Chinese artist born in 1965, is a typical example, famous for his performance art. In 1994, in a lowly and dank public toilet of 12 square meters in the East Village of Beijing, Zhang Huan put on a performance art show which became well known in world art circles. Zhang sat up straight in the public toilet, covered with honey and liquid from a fish belly, which attracted countless flies to land on his naked body. He photographed this image and exhibited it in a magnificent exhibition hall for people to see. The disgust or nausea caused by the picture is self-evident. At the same time, however, the inner voice and the deepest sense of oppression in the life of marginalized individuals at the bottom of the social strata were fully revealed through such a loathsome human posture and surrounding environment.10 Perhaps the artist has quietly incorporated the astonishing cultural shock pursued by classical ethnography into his work. But as a work of art, this ethnographic work has undoubtedly allowed us to see a kind of self-existence and identity up close. Humble individuals in life suddenly had a spiritual resonance in front of this photograph, and thus the artist’s ethnographic work realized its value in this sense. As Zhang Huan himself has repeatedly stated, the reason for his purchase of Cast-Iron Pig was that he thought the fate of this pig surviving such a catastrophe seemed to be closely related to the indomitable strong will of the marginalized individuals in society that he wanted to deliberately portray. Obviously, as a worldrenowned behavior artist, Zhang wanted to use this pig, which had its symbolic meaning constantly strengthened, as another protagonist in his performance art works. He became a producer of stories about Strong Pig and Cast-Iron Pig, and the most powerful creator of their artistic images, and spread these images widely in the world cultural space outside China. At the beginning of September 2009, more than one year after the Wenchuan earthquake, Zhang Huan conducted an art experiment across national and cultural boundaries to arouse and recreate the cultural concept on this Cast-Iron Pig, hailed as stronger than Strong Pig rescued earlier. He planned to hold an exhibition in London, England, and the venue chosen was the White Cube Gallery, famous for

Disaster, art works, and irony  149 being unconventional. However, due to the difficulty of animal quarantine at that time and foot-and-mouth disease breaking out among pigs in the United Kingdom around 2007, the idea of inviting Cast-Iron Pig to visit the UK failed to materialize. Though frustrated, Zhang Huan managed to find a sow in the UK and named her Oxford Flower. Then he wove a story of the online love and transnational marriage of the two pigs. There was even such a plot in the story: Oxford Flower had an illegitimate daughter before she met Cast-Iron Pig, but the daughter was later abandoned by her father. Behind the story, there was a fear of cultural contact, that is, Oxford Flower, who grew up in British culture, was worried that Cast-Iron Pig, deeply influenced by traditional Chinese culture, would fret about the fact that she was not “chaste.” Obviously, Cast-Iron Pig did not have the brain to think about chastity, or the significance of chastity in the culture where it grew up had long been erased. In short, as China’s Cast-Iron Pig, it “completely” accepted its British wife Oxford Flower in a foreign country. As a result, Oxford Flower officially took the place of her husband in China as Wife of Cast-Iron Pig to stage various public performances in White Cube Gallery. On manmade indoor lawns and gardens with foreign houses as the background, the image of Oxford Flower was ubiquitous. At the same time, on the big screen of the exhibition hall, viewers could see the life scenes of Cast-Iron Pig filmed all day long by Zhang Huan with 24-hour video equipment in his Shanghai studio. In addition, Zhang Huan painted with incense ashes, which he was good at. He completed many incense ash paintings with CastIron Pig as the main character, and held an exhibition themed Death, Rebirth and Fraternity in the basement of White Cube Gallery, which showed the strong character of Cast-Iron Pig and his fearlessness before death. One wall in the exhibition showed a skull painted with incense ashes, while on the opposite wall was a portrait of Cast-Iron Pig also painted with incense ashes. In the contrast of this space, the confrontation between life and death was obvious to viewers at a glance. By then, the fame of the “pig brothers” was no longer confined to China. Led by artist Zhang Huan’s unique concept, they had become famous overseas, making the world truly understand the spiritual and cultural significance of the magical animals “invented” by the people in the aftermath of the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008. After that, the social life narrative of the “pig brothers” became an inspirational symbol with international significance. Thus, the disaster caused by the earthquake was sublimated into people’s search for meaning in their own lives. With the shaping of this overall strong or cast-iron image, thinking about the living situation of the whole Chinese society and its cultural significance was provoked in an instant. No one failed to take this opportunity to reflect; no one failed to feel a sense of self-expression from it; no one would miss the moment when the status of a person and that of a pig were reversed, to satirize the strong effect of narrative and make a spiritual carnival bursting out from the bottom of their heart. This was a spiritual stimulant for Chinese people back then. Whether students failing an exam, investors losing money in the stock market, or petty bureaucrats at all levels constantly frustrated in their officialdom, everyone seemed to be infected with a “cathartic” madness with a communal significance of “being together.”11 The art that was originally virtual was transformed into a

150  Disaster, art works, and irony mapping and true expression of the current social life through its special cultural activation effect, which was truly felt by participants and onlookers. In this sense, the extraordinary life consciousness of marginalized individuals was displayed and expressed. People also found the courage to live and live on “strongly,” as if “castiron” despite their life consciousness of being humble. 7.3 Two narratives about the social life of pigs in anthropology Finally, it can be noted that at least in terms of anthropology and ethnography, our understanding of pigs’ social life has actually undergone two types of narrative changes. One narrative is that anthropologists attempt to place pigs as a whole into the world where people live, so that they assume a meaning of cultural interpretation and are thus endowed with a social life, that is, through the culture written by anthropologists, pigs acquire a cultural expression in the sense of cultural consciousness. In 1942, Prof. Fei Xiaotong lived in the countryside of Kunming, Yunnan Province, where he wrote a short essay with an informal title, “On Raising Pigs and Eating Pork,” which describes the externality of pigs’ life in the eyes of an intellectual as an outsider. That is, because of such outsiders’ revulsion about pigs’ unsanitariness, they dislike pigs from the bottom of their heart. Obviously, for ordinary outsiders, pigs are not regarded as an inherent part of human life. However, Fei Xiaotong, as an anthropologist, suddenly realized the importance of this problem at that time, as it dawned on him that for an agricultural society, the existence of pigs was the most reasonable choice in the life of farmers in China, because pigs do not compete with people for land, the leftovers from people’s daily diet can be delicacies for pigs, and there is no need to set aside a large expanse of grassland for grazing as in the cases of raising cattle, horses, and sheep. Raising pigs was an extremely reasonable choice invented by people in agricultural society. People who raise pigs can without much effort have a supply of protein, which cannot be sufficiently offered by agricultural produce alone.12 This can be described as an understanding based on functional analysis, an understanding which also tries to give social facts a meaningful expression. The core of this expression lies in its attempt to present a mirror image of authenticity, that is, it is intended to reflect the true existence of a world with the help of the cultural authenticity noticed and written about by anthropologists as participating observers. For example, in this article by Prof. Fei Xiaotong, we also see a new meaning of flies in the rural society of Kunming. Perhaps for city dwellers, flies are unlikely to be regarded as clean creatures, whereas for farmers in the countryside, the image or representation of flies flying everywhere is a sign of a bumper year. As a result, farmers would insist that “the absence of flies would mean a famine year.”13 Undoubtedly, in this respect, the production of various forms of texts by anthropologists seems to prove or strengthen such a one-to-one correspondence between social facts and cultural representations on the basis of functional analysis. We can see that many ethnographies are written to emphasize the integrated social function of pigs in relation to the real life world. In this sense, pigs only

Disaster, art works, and irony  151 exist as a part of an integral society, but anthropologists have not yet constructed a cultural understanding centered on “pigs” in this type of narrative. They are not the “pigs” of human beings, but the objects of their thinking. This distinctive demarcation between people and livestock will never naturally give birth to a mindset transformation from the perspective of pigs. Anthropologists attempt such a transformation, but not every anthropologist can realize it. In other words, anthropologists following the first narrative type care about the life of pigs, and their purpose or starting point is their realization that pigs actually participate in social life and the construction of cultural significance. In the view of social and cultural holism, it is impossible to exclude the existence of pigs as nonhumans, otherwise the social world would be incomplete. A resulting expression pattern has thus changed such that all local people may like pigs for production, life, and even ecological reasons, but those who dislike pigs must be outsiders with a prejudice, naturally including anthropologists themselves. Anthropologists will finally acquire a real sense of cultural consciousness through a kind of selfreflection about anthropological fieldwork, and the cultural significance of local people will be logically expounded, explained, and expressed. However, if the holistic theory of anthropology has achieved an inclusive and holistic understanding of the local culture, how can this understanding truly realize the understanding and absorption of intolerance in this culture? In other words, how can we face the abuse, curses, and disdain about these or other humble animals in real life? Are people venting their dissatisfaction with pigs, or attacking others represented by pigs? Where is the boundary? Obviously, it is impossible for pigs to have the same thoughts and feelings as people. People regard pigs as a transformation of thinking, which actually implies a certain type of people in society. In this sense, things reflect people’s concern, which can be positive and constructive, or negative and destructive. In short, for cultural expressions, people and the world of things other than people are mobilized and used by people. Only in the world of things can people truly express their meaning of existence. This actually involves another transformation of the social life of pigs, that is, the logic of cultural expression transformed by chance or through some uncertainty from the interaction of internality and externality. Sadly, pigs, as domestic animals, are not only raised in large quantities by human beings and consumed in large quantities in daily life, but also exist as indispensable sacrifices in human ritual life. Sacrificing a pig or a part of a pig’s body to gods and ancestors is found in many cultures. Pigs are therefore closely related to our ritual behavior and our interaction with the surrounding environment. Accordingly, many ethnographers are ready to talk about their concern about pigs in their discussion of the issue of rituals. Then, as a certain behavior pattern, is a ritual purely an act in a closed environment in society, or is it an act with some practical influence on the external world or the surrounding environment? Anthropologists of religion have a strong opinion that the function of ritual is only to make people have repressive relief amidst the uncontrollable natural environment by “doing something,” in order to reduce their own anxiety, fear, and insecurity caused by such uncertainty. Sociologist George C. Homans describes this point as follows:

152  Disaster, art works, and irony Ritual actions cannot have a practical effect on the outside world--that’s why we call them rituals. But making such a statement does not mean that rituals have no function. Their function is not to connect the outside world with society, but to connect with the internal composition of society. They give members confidence, relieve their anxiety, and make their social organizations disciplined.14 But this is actually like the pig-raising behavior of New Guineans noticed by anthropologist Roy A. Rappaport in his book Pigs for the Ancestors. Besides offering sacrifices to ancestors, this behavior is also closely related to the surrounding ecological environment. Therefore, he gave an explanation different from Homans’: “In some cases, the ritual action really created a ‘practical result for the outside world,’” or “in some cases, the ‘function’ of the ritual is to connect the outside world with society.”15 In other terms, rituals are actually closely linked with people’s actions, and then closely connected with the open outside world. So people’s every move will inevitably lead to certain environmental change. For example, a ritual may require cutting down a tree, and after the performance of the ritual, the environment is affected. If many people attend a festive banquet every year, they need to cultivate more fields, prepare more food, hunt more wild animals, and pick more wild vegetables, which would change the environment.16 In other words, a pig exists in both natural and social terms. It can grow naturally, but it cannot survive naturally, as its life is controlled by people. When necessary, pigs are brought into society, physically regarded as the source of people’s meat or protein in their bodies, and mentally regarded as targets for people to vent their resentment. However, if a pig goes beyond the dialectic between nature and society, and breaks away from the cycle of “being meat on somebody’s chopping block” to become an immortal pig, then it takes on another function in people’s social life, that is, people may feel a great honor for the existence of such a pig. Strong Pig and Cast-Iron Pig stand as examples of such pigs beyond this secular cycle, which will no longer die under a butcher’s knife, but will live with people till the end of their lives. As far as the case of the “pig brothers” gaining overnight fame is concerned, a disaster caused by an earthquake affected the external world itself through the ritual transformation of meaning. The naming of the pigs, the production of works of art, and the exhibition of ritual interaction, all such actions transformed the life inside the pigs, usually regarded as livestock by people, into a statement of social life with a wider scope. Chinese people concerned with this event, with the help of the Internet, various new social media, and many forms of performance art, not only realized the spiritual catharsis of their inner world, but more importantly, they could realize the “humble” and “powerful” collective carnival with reciprocal irony in human existence. Because of the legendary or miraculous survival of Strong Pig and Cast-Iron Pig beyond the limit of life, people would unconsciously expect the appearance of an opposite emotional state, that is, an escape from the real situation, by manipulating some involuntary ritual behaviors in desolation, sadness, and fear, no matter whether such behaviors appear in the form of overcoming disasters, creating

Disaster, art works, and irony  153 works of art, or ironic and self-deprecating exaggeration. What they really wished to grasp was symbolic novelty produced from society through ritual manipulation, instead of the social fact that really happened. Because as far as a social fact was concerned, pigs, no matter how many days after the earthquake they were successfully rescued by people, were still a member of the group of pigs with an extremely humble status in people’s eyes, not to be transformed into a member of the human society from the general classification of people and animals. But on the other hand, surviving 36 or 49 days after the earthquake really came as an extraordinary miracle for humans. It was the symbolic meaning of “strong pig” or “cast-iron pig” rather than the social fact of a pig being buried in a pigsty for 36 days or 49 days and still surviving that was really captured by people from their subconscious and quickly sublimated into a symbolic “contagious” message reflecting the reverse identity of people’s own vulnerability,17 thus forming a kind of cultural expression or allegorical narrative of an imaginative community of the “weak” transformed to the “strong” and even the “cast-iron.” In this sense, anthropology may have paid more attention to the narrative of holism in the past, emphasizing the analysis of the social function of pigs with a closed behavior system and paying attention to the one-to-one correspondence and mutual reflection between the description of social facts and the existence of social life. But anthropology can also pay attention to another narrative, that is, seeing the interaction and communication between people and things, people and the whole world in a broader sense from the excavation of the meaning of cultural expressions of social facts themselves. This cannot be covered by the static ethnography of places in the traditional sense, but needs to be realized by tracing the clues formed by many human behaviors, with efforts redoubled in the direction of a so-called “clue ethnography” with dynamic characteristics.18 7.4 Irony and politicization of art The earthquake caused a disaster, which in turn led to an anti-social sentiment, leaving people in utter depression. However, as actors with cognitive ability,19 people created or invented symbolic images to resist this disaster for themselves and for the society in which they lived, and spread such images as quickly and widely as possible. People took this opportunity to encourage each other, thus realizing a sublimation of self-value. This can be described as a collective motivation for people in society to create the overall image of the “pig brothers.” But here we actually cannot see the shadow of a real anthropologist, let alone the cultural writing or observation of this ironic or even absurd scene by an anthropologist. Busy investigating and evaluating the disaster effect in the field, they may have completely forgotten that such a huge group of netizens were also “watching” the earthquake disaster with their own eyes, and at the same time they were thinking deeply with their brains, thus associating the disaster with themselves leading a humble life as ordinary people. Those netizens who were not anthropologists engaged in disaster research were both participants and observers, revealing their humble selves by producing a somewhat ironic image.

154  Disaster, art works, and irony But at this time, anthropologists, always known as reserved intellectuals, were once again invisible, not only unable to realize or know the ironic political art with such rich meaning, leaving a large space for artists, who, through artistic creation, completed a concrete ethnographic writing about the social life of pigs similar to anthropology. This art itself contained a fatalistic concept of anthropology, that is, it is extremely sensitive to the expression of differences; meanwhile, it actually presented the dynamic process of manufacturing cultural expression, which affected the society and the natural environment in a wider range later on. Therefore, it left a cultural writing in which anthropology participated in ethnography, although anthropologists themselves did not really participate. With the help of the sympathetic action or “telepathy” of an idea, the artist’s soul was imbued with the thinking paradigm of an anthropologist, while the expressive power of anthropology itself was trapped in excessive self-reproach and humility in its profession because of its dogmatic concern about the culture that might be dead, which greatly devalued its own ability. As a result, the tremendous power or authority of the most dynamic anthropologists was constantly consumed, gradually declined, and finally lost its value of existence. Obviously, in people’s minds, the “pig” is not an animal excluded from being cursed, abused, and judged. But with regard to pigs that have a magical or miraculous significance for people, people have to treat them differently. No matter what the original classification of this animal in people’s mind, as long as it is different and shows magical signs beyond life, it will naturally be given a special meaning, and be written about, remembered, and shaped by people themselves, or the meaning of this sacred sign will be expressed to people. From this, we can see that in a polytheistic world, people, animals, and gods live in one place, forming a rich and diverse interdependent pattern. The recorders, makers, and disseminators of sacred things can be parties to some miracle or local people, and naturally they can also be bystanders or outsiders to the miracle. In short, in this era, because of the 2008 Wenchuan earthquake, the story compilation and event manufacturing process of the “pig brothers” from “ordinary pigs” to “saints” with the help of the Internet seems to give us much enlightenment. At least, we can think that individuals who can endow a strange social fact with symbolic meaning and make it become the expression of a transmissible culture, as social actors with dynamic cognitive abilities, can be regarded as writers of “written culture.” Anthropologists are not the only people competent at cultural writing. At least today, such a situation is certain. We can see how many expressions of cultural issues in rural or urban society are obviously beyond the descriptive framework of anthropologists, and the invention and presentation of these expressions are obviously not carried out by anthropologists who regard themselves as cultural writers. As a result, society no longer just consists of isolated professional divisions shaped by modernity where anthropologists only do anthropologists’ job, while artists are just painters in front of the drawing board. There is a change here, in that anthropology is beginning to think about what art is, while artists are using the expression of social and cultural significance to demonstrate their own value expression. All these reflect a form of cultural existence after modernity and a great transformation of social writing forms.

Disaster, art works, and irony  155 In this respect, behavior artists, a group always suspicious of modernity, as emerging roles in society, have played half the role that anthropologists once played, while the other half of the role is of course expected to be played by anthropologists who have self-knowledge. Today, this self-knowledge requires anthropologists to learn to jump out of the thinking box of the “mirror of nature” in which words reflect reality, and to see the process of meaning and cultural expression of symbols created by all people, especially millions upon millions of ordinary people, as well as the power’s control over meaning creation and its new manifestations in this process. At this point, we should be aware that people are obviously not politicians with the art of escaping from reality and resisting society. The situation may be just the opposite. Some self-conscious people among the myriads of ordinary people are bound to instill or endow a political power like divine power into the works of art that they can create and grasp. Therefore, people become “political” in Aristotle’s terms, and with such a political humanity that holds power or authority, people attempt to deny the lowliness, pettiness, and weakness of man’s own existence, and with the help of the magical creativity inspired by this self-identity, try to seek and find a positive life in the face of hardship and disaster. This kind of life may come from self-perception or inspiration from artists, and this may be another real essence of life, which has been completely ignored or even forgotten by social scientists who only see the “weak” holding rude “weapons” over a long time. In this sense, the usual expression of “weapons of the weak,” which once influenced the expression of political anthropologists, should be rewritten as “arts of the weak,” drawing closer to the real life of people in society. Notes 1 From news from Baidu, we can see that many netizens were so excited and so moved by the strength of the rescued pig that they called for its life to be saved. For example, a netizen from Guangzhou said, “Such a strong and energetic pig! Let it live until it dies a natural death.” A netizen from Kunming said, “Don’t kill it. If necessary, I will pay money to keep it.” A netizen from Shaanxi said, “As a hero of the pig world, this pig should be kept and raised well.” Even Wan Xingming, the owner of the pig, recalled some supernatural activities of the pig. For example, when the pig was rescued that day, he covered it with a wooden board for fear that it would suddenly become uncomfortable in the light. Later, when Wan Xingming’s wife fed the pig, she unexpectedly saw this Strong Pig shed two streams of tears. Wan Xingming and his wife both thought that this pig seemed to be compassionate like a human. They were so moved that they did not wish to see the pig slaughtered. However, as they could not afford to keep the pig, they later sold it to Jianchuan Museum, where the pig stayed until its natural death. 2 By 2014, Strong Pig had grown to 7 years old in Jianchuan Museum, weighing 300 kilograms. For its health, its keeper even fed it special nutrients such as cod liver oil. 3 A song titled “Song of Strong Pig” about Strong Pig quickly spread all over the Internet, with the following lyrics: “I said my name is Strong. Dream strong, love strong, and sing strong. At the moment when the Earth shook, I showed tenacity with my strong life. Alive! Vivre! There is always hope when alive. Even buried in ruins, I would stubbornly climb to the light. Although I am a little pig, I have the strength and hope of the weak. Ah! Hope! I said my name is Strong. Live strong, walk strong and strive strong. In the

156  Disaster, art works, and irony plain years, I support my ideals with my life. Go forward! Forward! The ideal is right in the distance. Even if I eat coarse grains, I still keep my noble vision. Although I’m just a little pig, I also have the dignity and ideal of a little pig. Ah! Ideal!” 4 For example, on September 17, 2008, on the Strong Pig blog, there was a dialogue between a reporter and “Strong Pig” – “Q: You’ve been rescued after being trapped for 36 days. Do you think you’re lucky? A: Lucky, my ass, lard has gone up in price, but I’m so thin! Q: Why do you eat charcoal? (What a skilled reporter) A: Don’t I want to eat sweet potatoes! Q: When you were rescued, did you know how many days you had been buried below? A: You pig, you know I’m a pig and you ask, how can I count? Q: Do you have any relatives? A: Several brothers and sisters were sold to slaughterhouses before the earthquake. I wonder if the sow next door is still there?” (http://zhujianqiangvip​.blog​.sohu​.com/). 5 In March 2009, a Beijing writer pen named Xiazi published a fairy tale called My Name Is Strong Pig through China Children’s Publishing House. In this fairy tale, the story of Strong Pig is further personified, and Strong Pig becomes the image of a kind, optimistic, cute pig who dares to fight against disasters. This book emphasizes the “happy” nature of Strong Pig, which is inherited from its mother. It spreads this happiness in all directions and gains happiness. When the earthquake, described as a “big monster” in the book, comes, many animals manage to escape, but Strong Pig is trapped in the pigsty. However, the happy nature of Strong Pig enables it to survive the disaster, overcome despair, fight to the death with the “big monster” of the earthquake, and finally be rescued. 6 See http://zhujianqiangvip​.blog​.sohu​.com/. 7 The words accompanying the presentation to Strong Pig in the 2008 Top Ten Animal Awards for those that had touched China were: “Bajie (Pigsy, a protagonist in The Journey to the West), I’m sorry for you as your mentor. I did not expect could stand pressure better than Wukong (the magically gifted Monkey in The Journey to the West, who was rescued by Xuanzhuang from a mountain under which he had been trapped for 500 years). You have vividly interpreted the spirit of ‘never giving up’, becoming a banner that China entrepreneurs strive to hold high in their attempts to survive the economic winter.” 8 Lin Xuda. Interpretative Anthropology: Interactive Commentary on Ethnographic Reading and Writing. Taipei: Laurel Book Co., 2015: 122. 9 James C. Scott. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance, trans. Zheng Guanghua, Zhang Min, and He Jiangsui. Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2007. 10 The color photo of Zhang Huan named “Twelve Square Meters” was sold for 216,240 yuan at the 2005 Spring Art Work Auction at Island Shangri-La, Hong Kong on May 1, 2005. 11 Zhao Xudong. Being Together: A New Vision of Anthropology of Cultural Transformation. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 24–35. 12 Fei Xiaotong. On Raising Pigs and Eating Pork, in A Complete Collection of Fei Xiaotong’s Works: Vol. III (1942–1945). Huhhot: Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House, 2009: 213–217. 13 Fei Xiaotong. On Raising Pigs and Eating Pork, in A Complete Collection of Fei Xiaotong’s Works: Vol. III (1942–1945). Hohhot: Inner Mongolia People’s Publishing House, 2009: 213. 14 George C. Homans. Anxiety and Ritual: The Theories of Malinowski and Radcliffe Brown. American Anthropologist, 1941 (43): 172. Quoted from Roy A. Rappaport. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968: 2. 15 Roy A. Rappaport. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968: 3. Emphasis in original.

Disaster, art works, and irony  157 16 Roy A. Rappaport. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of New Guinea People. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968: 3. Emphasis in original. 17 Zhao Xudong. The Ready Influence of Folklore. Folklore Studies, 2005 (2): 5–28. 18 Zhao Xudong. Clue Ethnography: New Paradigm of Ethnographic Narrative. Ethnological Studies, 2015 (1): 47–57. 19 Anthony Giddens. Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure and Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1979: 22.

8

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome

The Enlightenment in modern Europe has arguably brought about a worldwide change. The protection of the moral order of society as a whole with legal culture has been turned into the control of individual behavior, which is an unexpected consequence of the Enlightenment. A passion for enlightenment has resulted in development syndrome, which is thoroughly reflected in the construction of our current social order and the daily practice of future modernity planning. China’s culture and society must develop a kind of cultural consciousness amidst such rapid development, and find an appropriate pathway to move forward steadily. 8.1 Enlightenment and legal rationality The Enlightenment movement initiated by modern Europe has never really stopped even now, meaning that the world no longer consists of separate continental plates, but all corners are interrelated to truly become a world system in the sociological sense. Moreover, far-reaching changes have ensued from this. First of all, the social system has changed, and it has gradually been affected by a force of world convergence, with local differences becoming indistinct. Although such differences have never really disappeared and are constantly being recreated, the general trend remains a kind of convergence. What followed, more importantly, was an earth-shaking revolution, which was technical in form, but cultural in essence. That is, under the waves of Enlightenment and pro-Enlightenment discourses, all kinds of traditional ideas seemed to become extremely pale and eventually fade out, thus sweeping away the graceful and tranquil self-confidence and self-sufficiency based on nature itself developed over thousands of years of cultural growth in various parts of the world. Undoubtedly, this change is a longterm result of modern enlightenment, or at least it is inseparable from the discourse of Enlightenment. This result is not only creating a modern social order based on human rationality, but is also driving the idea of planning and arranging people’s life and the world in the future to be deeply rooted in people’s hearts, and deeply influencing changes in people’s lifestyles and values. The most obvious development is that people are unconsciously suffering from “development syndrome” because of their excessive dependence on this development plan and road map. Development syndrome, though not a fatal disease, may be a difficult case to address. As a result, thinkers concerned about the development of the world, DOI:  10.4324/9781032678986-9

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  159 that is, those who are concerned about whether there is a development model that really benefits human society, must reflect upon and effectively eliminate this development syndrome; or bearing in mind the consequences of development, we should keep alert and conscious, and seek new theories of development based on cultural consciousness. Undoubtedly, the two words “reform” and “change” have become keywords for the existence and development of this enlightened world. With the help of social enlightenment centered on reform and change, China has created a republican system completely different from the traditional empire. The public and social elites have begun to take these two keywords as the starting point of their thinking about social construction, in attempts to solve many problems in life and society. With the popularization of these two new concepts in society, social reform and change supported by the enlightenment discourse will naturally gradually be implemented in various social systems in modern China according to the Chinese understanding of the translated term, qimeng (启蒙, enlightenment), and changes in the laws are inevitably carried out step by step under the framework of this modern country. A modern nation-state constructed by modern law emphasizes the rule of a republic based on individual rights.1 In Harold J. Berman’s interpretative framework of “law and revolution,” this represents the first revolution from the European feudal medieval to capitalist individual rights.2 In another sense, this was an era when civil rights began to flourish, that is, when the people elected their representatives, from whom a leader recognized by everyone was elected. Finally, the leader exercised military and judicial power on behalf of the people. According to the spirit of the social contract, the leader’s governance should focus on the protection of people’s well-being as the ultimate goal. This is the basis of the so-called constitutional concept in today’s world, and it is precisely the idea inspired by and the pursuit followed by the Enlightenment. Most importantly, this concept has been accepted by most countries and their cultures in the world, although the differences in form can be very large. The concept of the political legitimacy of the founding of the People’s Republic of China depends on such a constitutional concept, and because of this concept, a new republican system has emerged. In short, without exception, the Enlightenment is a kind of consciousness of human beings, which urges people to feel a degree of voluntariness and compulsion to replace the old concept of life with a new one. In China, the initial form of this kind of consciousness was awakening, that is, awakening the slumbering people. Gao Qifeng, who painted for Zhongshan Memorial Hall in Guangzhou during the Republic of China, was invited to paint a lion, a rare image in Chinese painting. This was a lion with eyes wide open to see the world, intended to wake up this slumbering country and its people.3 Obviously, this kind of consciousness was a transformation in terms of social form itself, that is, seeking transformation from the traditional social form to the modern one, which, as far as the process of history itself is concerned, embodied a linear developmental view, that is, the unremitting pursuit of future ideals after distinguishing between the beginning and the change, a pursuit with the ultimate goal of changing what it was like in the beginning. This pursuit has become a common principle and action program of social construction

160  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome because of the call of the enlightener himself, and it has also become the raw power or driver for all future social transformation. In the era after the Enlightenment, the concept that “the Emperor is the country” in the imperial era and the concept of divine rights of the king in that era were completely replaced, turning into the concept that “the nation is the country.”4 In another implicit sense, “the nation is also democracy,” that is, the people are the masters of the country. Although early enlightenment in the imperial era, such as the proposition by Huang Zongxi in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties that “not all people have the same surname,”5 was in line with the modern republican spirit, and this idea was fundamentally derived from the model of “rise and fall” of dynasties. Huang Zongxi actually wished to find a wise monarch in the world, who was expected to properly govern society and remove chaos. Therefore, in Huang’s eyes, power was still generated from top to bottom. However, the true enlightenment with modern significance consists precisely of returning power to the people’s hands, to be mastered and judged by the people themselves, instead of relying on imperial power or divine right. Therefore, power is no longer conceived as a direct endowment by an external god, but is transformed into voting by all the people or their representatives. As a result, the concept of order in which life is built with people as the center has become the most fundamental demand and direction of any political power in a modern nation-state. In this sense, overall careful planning using significant blueprints is a way for a nation-state to present its rationality in actions. This rationality reflects its own value through the powerful arrangement of social order, and what can be mobilized is a national initiative equal to that of the country. Obviously, no one will deny that “a smooth lake rises in the narrow gorges” in the poem “Swimming” composed by Chairman Mao in 1956 was a powerful public symbol at the beginning of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and even for a long time afterwards, it continued to support the people’s great enthusiasm for the construction of reservoirs or water conservancy efforts inspired by the idea of building the Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project, and still deeply influences the planning of reservoirs and water conservancy in China today. From a philosophical point of view, the layout and planning of modern water conservancy projects subject the original natural rivers to the trap of “utilization of natural resources,” and the rivers are thus destined to develop according to this idea, just as the philosopher Heidegger lamented the hydropower station on the Rhine: “This river is now only a hydropower station, which originated from the essence of a power plant.”6 The first thing that should be made clear here is that a paradox implied by a modern nation-state per se is that there is no complete correspondence between the nation and the state, simply because that there are about 2,000 nationalities in the world, but only over 190 states have been formed on this basis.7 Therefore, the real nation-state relies on the name of the state, plus the construction of the commonality between the state and the nation, that is, the construction of an abstract national community beyond nationalities. This has also become a common criterion for modern countries to unite more people to rule. At the beginning of the establishment of the first nation-state in modern China, there was a large-scale debate and

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  161 around the creation of the new concept of the “Chinese Nation,” and the power elite attempted to cover and contain all Chinese people in the five ethnic groups Han, Manchu, Mongolian, Hui, and Tibetan.8 However, no matter how tortuous the process from “many” to “one” can be,9 the value of a nation-state’s integration has been recognized all over the world without exception, and this concept has been put into practice in the world to the maximum extent with the help of nationalism and patriotism. China is no exception in this regard. Moreover, this value concept has become more concrete and operational through the improvement of legal concepts and legal provisions. For example, this process is like people drawing a straight line where there is no such line in the original. In this regard, there is no real order in the original meaning, but jurists as a group can sort out an order or conceive a set of rules from disorder with their own legal logic. The result is as follows: on the one hand, there are specialized legal experts making legal rules that seem to be self-contained; on the other hand, of course, there is also a powerful state apparatus built on the modern concept of contract to supervise and manage the implementation of these rules. Today, almost no one will deny that a certain law has an irreplaceable core position in the construction of order. If someone denies the role of law, he or she will be regarded as a freak in society or as being an “ignoramus of law,” and then be excluded from society; in severe cases, they will be investigated for “legal liability.” However, it is obvious that the construction of order simply under law does not give room for various other possibilities for the construction of order, while legal pluralism respecting the rights and interests of minorities is more easily ignored. Moreover, under the mode of modern legal order construction, law has risen to become the most legitimate concept of social order construction, which is fully accepted by nation-states and fully promoted among social groups, while other rules and logics of order construction can only be defined as secondary or supplementary, and most of them belong to customs and habits outside the constitutional law, and some non-legal rules or norms are even dismissed as heretical. For example, the life order constructed by folk beliefs is obviously reclassified in this process, falling within the scope of heresy, and particularly squeezed and rejected. Although today’s civil society seems to be seeing a new revival of folk religion, it does not mean a real revival of such a folk order. From the national point of view, it can be categorized as a controllable cultural order, and it has been given a new meaning. In addition, morality and religion in the general sense of society, and even established rules, belong to the secondary and subordinate concepts of order in society, and are therefore ignored or even excluded, although the state will pay attention to and advocate these subordinate concepts from time to time to serve political needs. It can be said that order based on law is a rational order based on rules. That is, the order embodies itself in the form of rules, and it is based on people’s ability to have a certain control over their own behavior, with the basic criterion being not to harm the interests and existence of any other person, which is also the basis of modern legal concepts. In this vein, law is certainly not geared to ideal saints, but to the general public in society. Consequently, the law is the basic code of conduct

162  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome that people living in modern society must abide by, but it is certainly not the highest standard code of conduct that exists in any society. Law must therefore exist as the last line of defense for order construction in any society. When law turns into the first line of defense to maintain order in society, that is, when more and more people in a society consciously resort to law to solve the problem of order in their daily life, this society must, first of all, be a secular society, although it cannot be described as a society based on rule of law. This is actually taking the most basic behavior rules of ordinary people as the basic rules of social composition. However, the moral or ethical demands that transcend such rules all go to the periphery of society because of this secularization. This is also completely in line with Ernest Gellner’s exposition of industrialized society, maintaining that in such a society, there is no outstanding value that can be used as a model of society, and the society is gradually moving toward a kind of assimilation-oriented social entropy, that is, homogenization. Meanwhile, in such a society, the enhancement of the legal consciousness of individuals converted to mere questions of law only has become a general and inevitable trend. This is discussed in another sense, that is, “the fall of public man” due to the retreat toward individualism in Richard Sennett’s terms, a kind of erosion of the overall social existence by individualism first advocated by Americans: “increasing intimate contact and decreasing sociability.”10 Hence, in the construction of a modern nation-state, what the legal order and the resulting development of laws lead to or aim at is a society based on individual rights.11 In the construction of such a society, not only do individual rights see constant and conscious enhancement, but also the law spares no effort to safeguard and guarantee the acquisition and holding of such rights, because in the order framework of a nation-state, no citizen in the territory can or should be ignored by such rights. From the top leaders of the country to the ordinary people, they are at least equal de jure: “everyone is equal before the law.” The other layer of meaning of this sentence is, of course, that they all share equal rights in the legal sense. Although there is still a certain distance between the concept and the actual embodiment of such equality, this concept of equality is extremely important, precisely constituting the core of enlightenment thought: as Rousseau has observed, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.”12 This fact, therefore, has determined the enlightenment thinkers’ own tragic consciousness in another aspect, that is, they clearly knew that society composed of people was never equal, or at least did not take equality as its first principle, and equality or freedom with no shackles were found only in people’s minds, which led people to pursue “unrealistic” goals. At the same time, society after the Enlightenment is inevitably full of tension, which stems from the inconsistency between conception and reality. The concept of equality in the pure psychological sense has always been the primary drive for enlightenment thinkers’ attempts to transform, with a romantic attitude, the reality that will never be satisfactory. As a result, the search for order has turned into the drive for social transformation. Modern law is bound to play the role of arbitrator in this process. It seems that any conflict or confusion induces people to believe that as long as law is present, it can finally bring about a just and correct solution,

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  163 which is taken as the basis for Western laws to justify their legitimacy. In this sense, there is indeed a lack of terms in Chinese vocabulary to express this concept of justice, while in English the term “justice” includes this meaning of law. More importantly, if the Chinese term falv (法律) is used to correspond to the English term “law”, the core meaning of 法律 may be lv (律) instead of 法, that is to say, its ultimate pursuit may be discipline in society or harmony in rhythm, or the availability of controllable regulations to follow.13 Therefore, as the British sinologist Michael Loewe has pointed out, China’s laws in the Qin and Han dynasties were not inspired by some divine revelation or endowed by any hero. They were just pragmatic rules formulated to deal with interpersonal conflicts. They basically embodied two principles: one was to emphasize the harmony of the operation of the universe, and the other was to retaliate for or punish criminal acts. These two points have nothing in common with Justinian Laws, Canon Law or United States Law in meaning.14 Understanding and grasping this point may precisely reveal the obvious differences between Chinese and Western legal cultures. Even in the literal sense, these are extremely obvious, not to mention their substantive connotations. This point is often ignored by transplant theorists of law. 8.2 Law, order, and control of individual behavior Law has changed from maintaining the moral order of the whole society to controlling individual behavior, which is an unexpected consequence for the enlightenment thinkers. The core of this unexpected consequence is turning from the high-profile pursuit of personal freedom and equality to a rigorous surveillance or monitoring from which no one can escape. As a result, the states of freedom, distraction, and even ennui in life are no longer possible because of such monitoring. For example, a woman’s natural right to have children is obviously more restricted today than in the past. Based on the conflict between people and resources, traditional village community life formed some customs of birth control, which are collective consciousness and self-control at the level of a visible acquaintance society, and can promote the community’s own long-term and sustainable development, or more precisely, the continuation of family or ethnic life.15 Today’s concept of birth control does not come from the real and visible community life in acquaintance societies, but directly from the intelligentsia, especially early demographers pursuing enlightenment, as represented by Thomas R. Malthus. What they conceived and addressed were the broad masses of ordinary people they might never have met. They expressed concern or dissatisfaction with population growth, and also reflected on the problem of poverty in China, like Malthus,16 inadvertently building an imagined community based on the consciousness of crisis resulting from population expansion or explosion among ordinary people, and convincing everyone of its truth. Through the unremitting efforts of the legislature, the imagination of this modern intellectual community has been transformed into common people’s life practice and thinking logic. On behalf of these scholars, the state promises that population control and decline will enable the next generation to live in some kind of happiness. Obviously, however, unexpected new problems

164  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome in the field of population are increasingly outweighing old problems stemming from population expansion or explosion. When children who have been screened by the family planning policy grow up, the problems they face may no longer be overpopulation and economic poverty, and they are still pestered by many problems, which have just turned into new problems such as persistently rising housing prices, uneven distribution of social and public service resources, specializations mismatching employment opportunities, and inability to find suitable jobs after college graduation, which are practical social problems that are difficult to resolve. The parents of these children, who have accepted the idea of elite education, wish to spend all their income on their children’s education, and most people are even willing to sacrifice their comfortable lives for this, in the hope that their investment in education will enable their children to have decent and useful jobs and gain some necessary benefits. However, development has brought new social problems, about which most parents can only express their disappointment, a disappointment obviously caused by their own high expectations for their children. For many people who grew up after the introduction of the family planning policy as a national policy, the majors they pursued in their undergraduate or graduate studies do not match their jobs. It has become a very common phenomenon for a new generation of young people, the post-80s generation, to have high academic qualifications while working as mechanics. Their situation is roughly comparable to that of the so-called “lost generation” born in the United States during 1965–1975.17 If such is the reality, it may really fulfill the prophecy of modernity bankruptcy, that is, all development plans promoted by the intentions of the modern state will eventually end in some kind of failure, or they will succeed accidentally in one aspect and fail in others.18 As a responsible researcher, this thoughtful prediction is by no means as absurd as Nostradamus’ prophecy, but its conclusion is very similar. This concept of development, that is, the construction of a modern state based on an imagined community, has made tangible progress in the legal norms of order construction, but obviously, the construction of legal order has not naturally led to the construction of a truly moral way of social existence. When Hernando de Soto emphasized the triumph of the property rights system in the West, he shared the same argument with microeconomists stressing individualistic rationality, that is, such economists always liked to take the “tragedy of the commons” as their umbrella term. If they had some field knowledge of anthropology about the meaning of the commons that actually exists in non-Western social club culture, they would not have made such an empty conjecture as “imagine that there is grassland shared by villagers, and every villager can graze freely on the grassland.”19 Because this was almost an impossible freedom for farmers or herders in a community society, such a “tragedy of the commons” would not really take place anywhere outside the stage of Western individualism. It really happened after such a sense of community was broken, and after foreign national forces fundamentally despised and wiped out traditional customs. In fact, under the vigorous promotion of the state, the life of local communities is gradually disappearing, and the moral and transcendental binding force in society is far away from people’s daily life. However, the law, once the bottom line of survival, has been deified as

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  165 the first choice in real life, which in itself is an inevitable result of being detached from the construction of a community society. 8.3 Sense of security and the view of development based on separation from nature 8.3.1 Discrimination of “litigious society” and “no-litigation society” and its implications: state and society in the dispute resolution mechanism

Although it is undeniable that the concept of “no litigation” in traditional society is only an ideal,20 it is obvious that the annual increase in litigation cases today and its strong correlation with the growth rate of Gross Domestic Product21 are closely related to the enhancement of modern legal consciousness. When we regard respect for the law as the only reliable way to construct social order, with the help of this view on law, we naturally or inevitably introduce the view of development that has gradually occupied the core of our consciousness since the Enlightenment. Here, the logic of knowledge acceptance may be as follows: law is considered to guarantee a certain order, which promises that people can be treated fairly and live in a relatively safe atmosphere, in order to be free from a state of fear from antagonism as envisioned by Hobbes in Leviathan, and more importantly, people can get rid of the suffering in the natural state subjectively conceived by Hobbes. The core of this concept is based on the understanding that humans’ natural aptitudes are equal, and the story model of humans’ natural state is: “Any two people who want the same thing but cannot enjoy it at the same time will become enemies.”22 In order to realize the happiness of human beings, the design of unnatural fairness and security becomes extremely important, which is also one of the most important elements in Western Enlightenment thinking. Obviously, this guarantee of fairness and security not only seduced Hobbes himself, who was famous for his timidity, but also seduced modern people who are equally timid. First of all, they dislike the direct combination of man and nature, and they do not like the combination of man and nature, which seems to make the whole of mankind deeply ashamed. This is so-called natural view of nature. This consciousness of distinction constitutes the root of modern Western identity. With the help of distinctions (close to myth) between us and them, culture and nature, advanced and backward, and civilization and barbarism, the progressive concept of attempting to rank the level of civilization of historical relics in different regions. Although anthropologists have repeatedly warned the world that it is almost impossible for this arrangement to cover all special cases, people still believe in the special effect of this progressive myth as always,23 because no matter how the ranking changes, Westerners will be arranged at the top of this civilization hierarchy. Of course, modern Western law, as a benchmark for comparison, cannot escape this mythical narrative logic.24 Travelling along the track of “rational man” defined by Socrates, humans are farther and farther away from nature. They try to respond to their own behavior instead of obeying the call of nature, or as Ernst Cassirer explained, “Man becomes a ‘responsible’ entity and a moral subject.”25 Friedrich Schiller, a German Enlightenment thinker, saw this very clearly, and made a

166  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome special distinction between the satirical sentimental poems featuring the separation of man and nature in his time and the simple poems and songs featuring the close integration of man and nature in ancient times.26 By the time of Enlightenment philosopher Thomas Reid, the natural view of justice was completely overthrown, and thinkers of that era began to emphasize the view that “justice is not a natural virtue, but an artificial virtue,” which was also a complete acceptance of the philosopher David Hume’s view of law.27 Naturally, this distinction marks the beginning of modern enlightenment consciousness. Building a social order different from the natural state by law has become the daily pursuit of people today, and a new world order around the law has therefore been constructed. People began to stop believing in a natural god-made order, but completely believed, like Descartes, in human reason per se. In this sense, “man is, first of all, a rational being,” and “man’s rationality, that is, man’s essence, has become the only thing that can give people value.”28 Many aspects of social life, including marriage, are therefore no longer regarded as natural or divine, but as endowed by external laws created by people. This is obviously what Rousseau noted when holding that people give up the natural state to seek a social contract.29 As a result, marriage between man and woman is no longer regarded as a gift from heaven or God as in the past, but as given by law made by people and protected by this law. Behind the various relationships derived from this relationship, there is actually a virtual supervisor, that is, the law per se, which may have replaced the position of God, which is dead according to Nietzsche, but also monitors people’s daily life in real time more strictly and closely than God. Therefore, people cannot laze, depend on luck, or lurk, let alone secretly convert to other beliefs. Of course, in the most general sense, people cannot do things that violate the laws made by themselves, that is, man-made laws have become the object of worship. This is similar to the “commodity fetishism” discovered by Karl Marx in modern capitalist society, and it is also regarded as the reason why capitalism has triumphed in Western Europe, that is, property laws make capitalism “mind-friendly,” as Hernando de Soto has observed.30 At the same time, people’s trust in the law, and the contract that the state built on the law to allow all people to have a stable and safe life, enable people to live safely outside nature and without relying on the direct supply of nature. To achieve this, it obviously depends on the demand for nature itself, and equitable distribution, at least legally, of resources to every citizen of the state built by all the people. In the real world, this fair distribution may never have been realized, otherwise there would not be so many reports of social problems today, most of which are directly related to the failure to realize the modern concept of fairness.31 Although people may have very different understandings of Marx’s concept of “alienation” in different scenarios, this concept put forward by Marx emphasizes the change of social life caused by the separation of man and nature. The core of this change lies in keeping people away from the real nature with the help of technical rationality, virtualizing nature with the help of the invention of new technologies and knowledge tools, and further realizing and socializing the separation between man and

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  167 nature.32 The pace of this distancing from nature can be sufficiently illustrated by a set of data. Demographers’ data tell us that during the three decades of modernization development in China from 1978 to 2012, people quickly moved away from nature by rapid urbanization as a demand on nature. More and more of us unconsciously moved into reinforced concrete buildings. During this period of rapid development, the consumption of steel exploded, increasing by 423 times, followed by cement, which increased by 329 times, and then by crude steel, which increased by 218 times. Scientific activities are guaranteed by the law established for the pursuit of a stable life, and therefore their unique legal identity of knowledge production has been continuously strengthened. This is very attractive in modern society, forming a firm belief among people and going deep into the hearts of ordinary people. The powerful ideology behind it is, just as Alvin Toffler, a futurist, has summed up: Over 300 years, Western science has portrayed the world as a giant clock or a huge machine with known causes leading to known results. It looks at the universe from a fatalistic point of view, thinking that the universe is orderly, and once it is started, the subsequent step-by-step process can be predictable.33 This huge machine world is apparently taken for granted as interlocking and causal, but the price paid by human beings is in fact no less than that paid by scientists to conceive this huge machine. With this process of scientific development, the norms of life passed down from generation to generation have been replaced by this scientific knowledge, finally all labeled as “results of scientific experiments.” This constitutes the core of what Paul Rabinow called “Technocosmopolitanism” in late modernity.34 Indeed, in today’s life, what activity is not a trace of so-called scientific rationality left after scientific exploration? In other words, we are constantly abandoning a community life with mutual understanding only offered by a family or a village, and gradually accepting more general abstract knowledge. Such knowledge may first have come from a university laboratory, or from the special research of a research institution, but one thing is certain: it is definitely not derived from the local society as it was in the inception of science.35 Knowledge therefore no longer comes from the local society, but only from the outside world. On the Earth where people live, the speed at which people are divorced from nature can be judged by the sharply declining size of collecting and hunting populations over the past hundred years. It can be said that among the few huntergatherers left,36 each year more and more people will not depend on the acquisition of subsistence materials directly from nature, and therefore they will be virtually separated from nature, living a life that seems to be independent of nature. This process should not be the inevitable result of natural evolution, but closely related to the spread of modern Western civilization. Francis Haines, an anthropologist, paid special attention to the history of horse raising by Indians on the American plains. In the area centered on Santa Fe in New Mexico, no custom of raising horses was found as late as 1600 CE. It was only after contact with Spanish

168  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome whites that this custom gradually formed there, but with very slow development. After about half a century, no horse-raising tribe emerged.37 The British historian Keith Thomas has deeply studied the transformation of the British concept of nature, maintaining that the original sin of Westerners cannot be erased for the destruction of nature. The Indians, in the eyes of the colonists, were educated by Westerners to hunt wolves crazily, motivated by the colonists’ offer of exchanging a cow for eight dead wolves. Indeed, as Thomas has pointed out, this exchange was definitely not a simple exchange: “This exchange clearly shows how they think nature should be used.”38 With the gradual implementation of this enlightenment policy, the purpose can be realized, that is, finally, these aborigines submitted to the Christian doctrine39 and were made to unconsciously accept the underlying superior Western value that people could subdue nature. In any case, human beings began to produce food almost 11,000 years ago, and the separation between human beings and nature can also be said to start from the stable supply of food produced by themselves or by others, because “indirectly, food production is a prerequisite for the development of guns, germs and steel and iron,” as Jared Diamond has observed.40 On the other hand, human technological inventions, especially Westerners’ obsession with and unremitting pursuit of modern technology, bring more convenience to people’s lives, and at the same time, make it more and more possible for people to break the constraints of nature to lead an isolated and independent life. For example, with the development of architectural technology, people do not have to live like wild animals, which have to avoid attacks from all sides at any time. The reduction of this anxiety has gradually enhanced people’s sense of security in their daily life. Today, a person can lie on a comfortable bed and have a sound night’s sleep, but its foundation is that we have a strong lock and a solid house in our life, and more importantly, that we believe there is a social order guaranteed by sound laws. From the emergence of an agricultural society marked by farming, human beings have begun to live a safe life. Indeed, the domestication of wild crops has enabled people to eat according to a fixed rhythm every day, and in case of famine, they can also use the grain accumulated in granaries to withstand various crises that naturally occur in life. Darwin’s explanation is not outdated in this regard, that is, human beings have experienced a process from collecting wild fruits extensively to gradually cultivating them artificially. Therefore, the fact that cereal became a staple food for humans is a result of artificial selection.41 Thanks to their stable residence, people’s migration has a direction, that is, constantly returning from the outside to their homes as the origin.42 As a result, more and more people are gathering and living together, and organizing with each other to form huge regional alliances, with some even developing armed organizations with the ability to attack and defend. Earthen tulou (castles) of various shapes in Nanjing County, Zhangzhou, South Fujian Province, which have been identified as a cluster of world cultural heritage sites, were once inhabited by certain clans. Clans with the same surname lived in the encircled earthen castles, which were both safe and conducive to mutual care and social support. This was especially true for large clans with a large amount of common wealth.43

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  169 These are probably the general characteristics of social organizations in agricultural societies. Before the emergence of industrial civilization, this was a relatively stable social form invented by human beings, which maintained a semi-contact and semi-dependence relationship with the natural world. Such a society was premised on the fact that people chose to domesticate nature in order to get rid of the animal anxiety in the natural state, but this was definitely not a complete and thorough domestication, but a semi-domestication, that is, to resolve the unstable and unsafe state of existence as the bottom line of their domestication. As a result, for a life based on agriculture, on the one hand, it was necessary to maintain, at a level not excessive, a family and even a clan for a long time; on the other hand, such a life was not too far away from nature. Fei Xiaotong’s picture of rural China is arguably a model of such an agricultural society, that is, a rural society in which people were bound to their land. People and land were so closely connected that people born and growing up in one place would eventually pass away here. “One place,” of course, refers to nature, including “land.”44 8.4 Industrialization and the transformation of the life world Industrialization, which first appeared in the West following the agricultural society, brought not only machines and factories, but also a kind of power, which was introduced into the arrangements of machine operation and running,45 separating people from their direct contact with the land. The basis of industrialization is the substitution of technology for our life, on which point Heidegger was not wrong when he reminded us that traditional technology was nature acting on technology to make it move, while modern industrialized technology was technology making nature move.46 Therefore, this lifestyle guided by industrialization based on modern technology is increasingly breaking the relative balance between man and nature, and people’s attachment to or worship of land, in particular, is almost lost in this society, while mass industrial production and continuous energy supply make people in such a society have or be shaped with a passion for ruthless consumption and work. It can be said that for the most developed countries, one of the most important tasks in social services is to deal with a large amount of garbage of various types. The invention of clock time makes it unnecessary for people to arrange the rhythm of life and work according to the rising and falling of the natural sun, which used to be an unquestionable rhythm of life in traditional agricultural societies. As an ancient Chinese poem goes, “work when the sun rises, rest when the sun sets, what has the power of the emperor to do with me?” Or as Norbert Elias observes at the end of his discussion on the sociology of time: However, maybe people should remember the moon – As a timing tool, it has almost disappeared from the life of urbanized citizens in industrialized nation-states, who suffer from the pain of not understanding time – used to be a messenger, so that people could have a breathing space in their social life at a more or less fixed interval.47 According to the modern invention of abstract time, people began to make a life and work arrangements without real natural references. One second is negligible for people in traditional society; in the era of machines, however, a second

170  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome has become the most basic unit of time in people’s lives, and people may be overwhelmed by working until the last second. Mu Shiying, a “New Sensation School” novelist, described the meaning of one second to modern people in a plot in his novel Five People in the Night Club. The five characters in the novel are “eventually crumbled by ‘one second,’ a mechanical unit of time measurement, which seems to be the hand of God that determines the inevitability of their fate.”48 Another writer truthfully recorded how the original rhythm of “half a year’s hard work and half a year’s leisure” in rural China changed because of this modern clock time. From the 1950s to the 1970s, a water conservancy project meant that farmers around Lake Poyang completely lost their traditional rural life with its “half a year’s leisure time,” and gradually adopted modern, fragmented time divisions.49 In fact, with the help of this arrangement, the time and space of people’s life and work have changed accordingly, and they have gained a life guaranteed by fixed time and space, and this guarantee has been further strengthened and improved by law. People strictly divide their daily life into two parts: leisure and work. In this way, they can work with peace of mind and then accumulate capital to enjoy leisure. The two parts of life reinforce each other, forming a monotonous life rhythm of what the 18th-century philosopher Julien Offray de La Mettrie called “man a machine”.50 In daily life, behaviors that transgress norms seem to be rarer and rarer, while the degree of civilization of crimes in society is getting higher and higher, becoming more and more imperceptible in public. Even in our life, unconventional behaviors are becoming less and less frequent, while the phenomenon of homogenization can be seen from body shape to clothing to diet, and even to tone of speech. Friedrich Nietzsche once described the “last man” era, in which “every generation is dumber than the last,” which is another expression of this phenomenon of world homogenization.51 When more and more people in society accept the artificial legal order and reject the natural order, the society will escape from the world created by God to become a unique artificial world, in which the artificial order guided by law occupies the core and leading position. Both earlier private life and public life with local characteristics are involved in this artificial world, where people once again return to the self-centered position in ancient Greece, that is, to the position centered on people’s life and thinking. If we have a chance to look at the sculptures of Rodin in France, we may clearly feel the prominence of human power: people, not God, and ordinary people, not God, become the yardstick for measuring good, evil, beauty, and ugliness, which is the basis for the possibility of an artificial world deliberately divorced from nature. Therefore, man is no longer a slave of God, and is thus no longer subject to the enslavement of nature. People have discovered the power of knowledge creation that they can control. That “knowledge changes everything” has become a new belief of ordinary people in modern society. That society is also transmitting and practicing such a new belief in knowledge through the education system, which can even be described as a kind of worship. Under the impact of waves upon waves of Western tides, all these trends have entered China’s public discourse system and been implanted into its public culture.

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  171 Meanwhile, the type of knowledge has gradually changed from the meticulous annotation of theological classics to the acceptance, criticism, and re-creation of new knowledge and new ideas. The legal knowledge system in the Western world has also been produced in such an ideological atmosphere. A social order maintained by law has begun to inflate people’s individual desires to an extreme extent. It is stimulating social rationality, and on this basis, it will lead the whole society and even the whole world, so that it can be completely copied and changed and developed according to this model. It seems that where passion cannot see hope, dynamic and powerful rationality in society is extending an olive branch to people’s life world. Society promises to each of us that with the creation of knowledge by the expert systems, there will be no insurmountable difficulties in not only people’s appearance, but also their health, and even everything in life. We do not need to search much for evidence to support this point. Just look at the overwhelming advertisements in various media every day, and it will show that such a social rescue plan is really exerting its influence. As Arjun Appadurai has noted, this is actually “the project of the Enlightenment,” which is trying to create a group of people in an era eager to make their lives more modern in the future.52 As a result, a massive plan for the transformation of human life came into being, which is still having a lasting impact on the development of today’s world. This is a seemingly random, casual, and unstructured development plan, which, like a spreading flame, has gradually expanded from the center of this plan to all corners of the world at an accelerating speed. The so-called concept of development based on the world system is similar to the world tour of sculptor’s sculpture model. The attitude of this model deeply affects the confidence of local people and their views on the true colors of the world during the confident tour around it. The imitation and solidification of the Western concept of Enlightenment realized by “theoretical travel” in the local area53 is also taking place, which will further affect the transformation of local social structures. In this sense, the whole world has begun to experience this change, leading to the considerable development of the concept of the nation-state. Therefore, the invention of the concept of nationalism in Europe during the 18th century can be said to be intrinsically related to such a model of industrialized development, which encouraged people to unite and march toward a non-industrialized world, and to transform and even conquer everything in this world. Underlying this was the construction of modern law as a powerful pillar, with the concept that “everyone is equal before the law” most extensively mobilizing the general public. Here, the capitalist spirit projected by modern law intentionally mystifies the concept of equality, holding that only by relying on the “invisible hand” can equality and efficiency truly open their arms to everyone. In this process, with an emphasis on the economics of efficiency, fairness, the most legitimate core appeal in modern state ruling, has been shelved or ignored. In contrast, the traditional structural constraint relationship has become so shaky and fragile, at least conceptually, that it can survive only through the protection of modern laws with the pursuit of fairness as their responsibility, and deliberately make itself an object of observation in the eyes of modern people, that is, a pile of exhibits under the principle of customary law.

172  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome The social change ensuing from industrialization is not only a revolutionary change, but also a blanket revolutionary change, that is, it is a comprehensive change without leaving a corner uncleared. Although this social change has encountered different degrees of resistance in the world outside the West as embodied in the discourse expression of post-colonialism,54 this process has undoubtedly never really stopped. Maybe the original form has ceased, but the process can be restarted in another form. This process is generally called modernization, taking early or late forms, underpinned by the idea called modernity. It is difficult to define modernity comprehensively in one sentence, because it is multi-faceted as a social concept popular since the Enlightenment.55 Its core characteristic can be roughly summarized by the word “conciseness,” which can be used as a standard to measure the degree of development of a certain modernity. This conciseness under modernity does not mean that it is not complicated, but it cleans up all the decorative accessories and messy piles of things in the traditional era, not leaving anything not tolerated by modern rationality. Therefore, modernity has many synonyms, such as convenience, clarity, directness, unambiguity, unity, and efficiency, and of course, it also includes such specialized terms as law and development. Many results have ensued. In state governance, the indicators of development are clearer and the control of people is more direct. In personal life, the rules of life are more obvious and organized, with no ambiguous ideas; convenience has become the main theme of life, so our food can be purchased conveniently and cheaply from supermarkets, and three meals a day can be provided in fast food restaurants; the rhythm of life has become more unified, and by subdividing time into seconds, this unified life can be realized on a global scale; the unified life further makes time an object for people to manage, and to live is no longer to kill and pass the time, but to live an efficient life in which every second counts. Many other examples can be listed, which are not far away, but just around us. 8.5 Planning, modernity, and development syndrome It should be particularly mentioned that in the process of modernization sweeping all over the world, law has begun to move from its initial marginal position to a core position in society. Law not only meets the principle of conciseness required by modernity, but also can be used to rule or control as many people as possible without much time and effort. Of course, the more important significance of law is that it provides all people with a desire for fairness, which has been pursued and expanded by rationalism behind the theory of justice from Thomas Hobbes to John Rawls. Law tries to equate history with the future while making the future hope for the discovery of historical rationality.56 Because of this, people will put special trust in modern law, so law is arguably the most important and reliable imaginative foundation for modern people to gain a sense of equality and fairness. Although lasting and universal fairness has never been realized, people still pin all their hopes on the enactment of various possible laws and regulations. Before we believed in such a law, we did not delve into the evolution of the history of thought in Western society from the Christian theological concept of “not listening

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  173 to admonition and causing original sin” to the construction of a “perfect” human society, thus replacing God with reason.57 Instead, we have just assumed a posture of copying and imitating the social result of such an evolution, that is, the social construction of law, because in people’s eyes, it seems that such a successful example of the West just stands there. As a result, the concept of rational planning based on the mode of legal order began to be more and more deeply rooted in people’s hearts, and affected the planning of various tasks in modern nation-states. Through the implementation of various development plans, people have learned to survive in a development plan instead of living and working aimlessly. Therefore, life, like the career development model of modern states, has become a part of grand plans, and the losses caused by these plans can be compensated for or repaired through various social insurance undertakings. This naturally makes the concept of planning bold, self-confident, and unimpeded in any society. At this point, law definitely provides a paragon that modern people inspired by enlightenment reason cannot but imitate and pursue. In modern people’s eyes, the logic of rational rules created by law can not only generate a wonderful order in chaos, but more importantly, it also provides a possibility for people’s imagination in the future. Otherwise, it would be really hard to imagine why all Enlightenment thinkers wished to put rigid law in the position where the king was missing and worship it. But law is an abstraction after all, even more abstract than the existence of God. People need a specific action plan as a guide, just as people do not know when to leave home if it is not stipulated that they should start work on time at 8 a.m. Without specific guidance, people would feel confused and worried. When people make detailed plans for their lives, they actually relieve their primordial anxiety and find inner peace. In fact, when people first left the arms of nature, their ability to plan life declined with the decrease of arrogance. People gradually handed over the ability of life planning to other people, which is the basis of organic solidarity caused by division of labor in Émile Durkheim’s analysis.58 These kinds of living arrangements relying on others can be truly realized with the completion of the specialization of social division of labor. In a relatively simple society, people rely more on themselves and less on others, making it difficult to have a real social division of labor. In this sense, primitive people had all-round abilities as compared with moderns. Undoubtedly, primitive society was a society in which people helped each other, but this kind of help was sought as little as possible, even if there was no shortage of such mutual help. Having gained a variety of abilities in the process of socialization, which enabled them to cope with many things in life, they would not seek help unless they encountered problems they could not solve with their own two hands. Consequently, the cultural logic of primitive society was not competition between individuals, but the exertion of their respective abilities, and the order of the whole society would not be affected by any one person’s mistakes. In modern society, which is, to put it bluntly, a society where things are increasingly measured by money, on the one hand people have separable independence, and this kind of independence, like “the single naked individual,” embodies the essence pursued by modern individualism and is effectively guaranteed by law;59

174  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome on the other hand, the individual would not have to get caught up in all kinds of entanglements in social relations because of the constant redistribution of economy caused what Marcel Mauss has termed gift exchanges.60 While the modern person has become an individual with independent rights, he or she has also acquired the freedom to arrange his or her own life independently, that is, to exercise freedom of choice,61 and then exercise the exclusive power to control his or her personal life by controlling his or her income. But obviously, his or her power is definitely not infinite, but rather very limited. He or she can indeed exclusively control his or her own money, but he or she can never control whether the products or services provided by society are authentic or fake, plentiful or scarce, present or absent. He or she can only once again transfer this power to the laws constantly being made in society in the hope that the production or service of products and even the supply of general social necessities will be authentic rather than fake by virtue of his or her own coercive power. This is obviously a kind of separation among people brought about by social division of labor. In Marx and Engels’ discussion of this separation, although their writings focus more on the transformation from patriarchy to slavery, hierarchy, class, and other relations of production,62 the separation among people caused by their division of labor is the most enlightening aspect of their work. In the mean time, it should be clear that the division of labor is still a kind of transfer, that is, the power to master oneself is transferred to others in society. It is precisely this habit of transfer, developed gradually by human beings, that makes all kinds of national development plans really possible. When an individual begins to be dissatisfied when fraud is discovered in the work he or she has transferred to others, he or she can only resort to law outside himself or herself. Therefore, he or she is no longer likely to use his or her fist, in a form of purely “primitive resistance,”63 to attack a company, a food store, a cinema, or a supermarket that he or she does not like or is aware of cheating. He or she can only turn to the common law, on which he or she has agreed and to which he or she has transferred his or her own power, in the hope that this law entrusted by him or her can justly work out a corresponding measure to make continuous changes to the unsatisfactory status quo. This may be a sequela ensuing from the modern enlightenment of a state in its development. As Anthony Giddens has pointed out, in the view of Enlightenment philosophers, the more our reason can understand the world, the more we can shape history with our own intentions, and therefore we should abandon all outdated habits and prejudices to grasp the future directly.64 This not only marks the beginning of the demand for sustainable development, but also will lead to an endless progressive cycle between discontent and social improvement. When the practice of development in reality can no longer meet people’s demand for perfection, the demand for further improvement and development may be a prelude to the next discontent. Underlying such a cycle is an optimistic view of development, that is, a belief that human nature or human suffering will be changed with the intervention of a certain environment or external forces.65 It can be said that as a result of people’s desire for “a better future,” this development tragedy has been staged again and again under the support of “false consciousness” in Marx’s terms, and people cannot have self-awareness about it to bring an abrupt

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  175 end to it. Even if the tragedy is ended, the ensuing trouble will be more serious, because this may destroy the only hope left in human society. If a repeated developmental tragedy leads to a melancholy and inexorable development syndrome in modern society, and most people believe that this syndrome can be temporarily alleviated or even permanently cured by some good medicine made by further development, then stopping the staging of such drama will not only lead to overall uproar among the audience, but even worse, it may directly lead to the “collective suicide” of the theater-goers. Of course, this would not be a real suicide, but a symbolic suicide, that is, symbolically killed by the collapse of a development concept, or strangled by various types of false consciousness created by people themselves. Obviously, modernity takes development as its only pursuit and progress as its ultimate value, which, when reflected in daily life, becomes a kind of persistence in the concept of development and progress regardless of resources and environmental conditions. The underlying fearless self-confidence and overuse of human reason has become an important aspect of modern people’s characteristics of modernity. Continuous and uninterrupted progress depends on the over-affirmation of human rationality and the over-neglect of human irrationality,66 and it is taken for granted that a human is like a machine that will never get tired. But a human is obviously not a machine. No matter how much material conditions are improved and how fine the mechanical performance is, fatigue is one of the most basic psychological attributes, which people cannot resist, and it is also a precursor to people’s illness and even aging, which is a self-evident fact. As far as the concept of development is concerned, when it goes deep into people’s life through ideological propaganda and is integrated into various institutional arrangements of social life, it will also cause people’s fatigue, and then lead to various uncomfortable diseases. Such diseases do not have a focus clear enough for people to know or grasp them. They are reflected in the residual fatigue after the whole body is excited, manifested as follows: not thinking about making progress, but shouting the slogan of making progress; not seeking development, but proposing high-profile development goals; becoming rich from the acquisition of money and therefore thinking that everyone else in the world will or should become rich in this way. The meaning of being rich, in the eyes of these people, is no other than this one, having nothing to do with any transcendental experience. In real life, however, this is not the case. But as a developmentalist, he or she cannot tolerate a life without any change. Even natural growth must also be included in an unnatural development plan, that is, let the development plan replace natural life, with the aim of realizing a controllable change, that is, to develop toward the predetermined so-called “human perfection” goal at any expense. Perhaps the urbanization development of China has provided a model for the realization of this goal, which has set a benchmark for the world in reversing the anti-capitalist development model before reform and opening up, that is, seeking a model of independent development, losing no time to integrate itself into the socalled global urbanization wave driven by the power of growth. In this regard, a study on urban planning completed in the Pearl River Delta region reminds us that a state-led and completely top-down imperative planning model, on the one hand,

176  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome cannot obtain full support from the grassroots government; on the other hand, in its potential function, it reveals the wrestling between many political forces not involved in planning, and at the same time, with the help of the mandatory discourse of planning, social attention to various practical conflicts originally caused by urbanization is shifted. Therefore, it seems that the original intention is to exercise a kind of space control technology produced by planning, that is, the purpose is to provide more public space for the general public and effectively control the efforts of over-development. When the potential functions of planning repeatedly show their energy with the aid of power, the previous desire for public welfare has to become a secondary concern, squeezed and marginalized by watered-down urban planning.67 However, in this world, the world in which we live, the hostility between countries during the Cold War is perhaps gone, but risks or dangers within and between countries are increasing day by day. The world, instead of developing along the track expected by the original rational understanding, has become more and more entangled in social, religious, and even cultural problems that rise and fall one after another. The world has not only got out of control because of many excesses, but also has become a veritable “runaway world.”68 Although the concept of uncertainty of knowledge belongs to the field of social science, just as Immanuel Wallerstein asserted that “human society is inherently uncertain,”69 this assertion does not seem to stop people pursuing social knowledge itself. People try to turn the concept of development into the foundation of future society. There seems to be a self-evident logical argument here, holding that all future problems can be solved by developing knowledge. Therefore, after the concept of development has become widely accepted in the world today, the concept of development itself has become an important cause of obsessive-compulsive disorder in human development. Its pathology is: first, there is a curiosity about the illusion of development, followed by a submissive dependence on it, which one wishes to get rid of, but in vain, ending up in being helpless. As a result, the things in front of us have to be done, but we do not do them out of our own free will. Such a complicated and intertwined living condition can be given a unique name, and I would like to call it “development syndrome.” Based on the above discussion, it is obvious that the core of this development syndrome lies in the progressive view of human history consistent with the tone of modern enlightenment consciousness, that is, everything should be solved by the abilities of “the single naked individual,” and other external or internal forces are non-fundamental and must be eliminated, and all human development and possibilities should be attributed to the continuous growth of reason, otherwise there will be no future for mankind. Knowledge creation is regarded as another revolution after the Industrial Revolution. Yet, just as we lack a rigorous evaluation of the effect of industrialization itself, we lack a real assessment of the unintentional social impact of the Knowledge Revolution. The voices of a few naysayers amidst the cheers are insignificant anyway. This kind of practice precisely responds to the practice of “the legitimacy of the modern age” pointed out by Pail Rabinow,70 but real in-depth and critical research and judgment have yet to be conducted on the crisis of knowledge innovation.

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  177 In this sense, the culture in which we live will naturally change, from emphasizing a rhythmic and recurring life culture, that is, a culture that stresses a ceremonial order, to a normative life culture that stresses the rule of law. While people cannot do what is prohibited by law, they also accept the planning concept that the life trajectory can be predicted, that is, life becomes a matter of strict planning underpinned by a concept that life is constantly moving toward civilization and progress, and a belief that good laws can really guarantee the gradual implementation of this planning. The dichotomy between secular life and sacred life in the traditional era has become increasingly blurred, and due to the guidance of the concept of planning, a large number of new means of differentiation, which depend on a very clear and accepted concept of planning development, have begun to emerge in the life world. Here, a new meaning is no longer a kind of difference, but a kind of advancement or development in comparison. It is closely linked with the creation of new knowledge, and they coexist in all corners of society, such as universities, research institutions, and other institutions in social life. Life depends on the creation of new ideas and the application of new products in society. Due to creative behavior implied in this process, there is always uncertainty, which has become the logic of discovery universally recognized by the scientific community, while the practice of a sustained and stable belief is gradually declining in this journey of discovery, not because scientists do not have faith, but because their faith involves constantly challenging themselves and others. The subtle changes entailed by the popularization of this concept call for anthropologists’ careful observation. At least they will obviously notice that people today are increasingly sensitive to the details of their lives, and various unpleasant emotions are no longer vented through daily small talk and aimless conversations, but solved by others through newer technical means. The rise of various designs in modern society, from advertisements to TV programs, from clothing to daily necessities, from health knowledge to medical devices and even countless “cure-all” panaceas, from food packaging to household appliances, and then to automobiles and houses, is popularized through modern designs and subsequent mass production. As the French sociologist Marco Diani has noted, design experts have to “define design as a field of forgery” just as Charles Baudelaire thought it was “an era supported by illusion and forgery”; in other words, “we are shifting from a culture concerned with good form and function to a non-material and pluralistic reproduction culture”, backed by the “decline of the strict logic principle” of the present era.71 As a result, the concept of consumerism accompanied by a large amount of modern consumption has been popularized, and consumerism itself has become a culture, making everything in the world an object of consumption, which may include the tradition of meaning, truth, and knowledge.72 This is an inevitable result of “over-communication” in today’s world based on written words, as pointed out by the structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss: “we are now threatened by the prospect of being only consumers. We can consume anything from any part of the world and in every culture, but they all lose their origin.”73

178  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome Of course, the concept of modern garbage has also come into being. Anything read, printed, outdated, or expired, etc. will be treated as some kind of garbage. Although modern society has created the concept of garbage recycling, it only refers to a kind of reprocessing of things that have become garbage, and such processed things will still become predecessors of future garbage. In fact, garbage recycling merely lets some garbage re-enter our life world in brand-new forms through physical or chemical transformation mechanisms, and in the future, after being used or even just becoming old, they will become new garbage and enter a new round of recycling. Social elite planners, at the beginning of their planning, definitely do not first think of the production and transformation of this kind of garbage. The process of garbage production and reprocessing here can be regarded as the inevitable product of a kind of “guerrilla warfare” in Ye Qizheng’s terms, resulting from the “positional warfare” of modernity in elite language.74 No matter how imaginative planning turns out to be, it must be the overall social planner who has to face the bad consequences of incidental garbage that he or she has never thought of. It can also be anticipated that when our life depends more and more on some development plan deemed perfect, we are actually shaped with a hope for the future, and we have to try to turn this hope into some kind of action force. That is, we believe that we can have development with progress or civilization through transformation, characterized by the continuous improvement of existing values in modern society to achieve an advanced level. As a result, nuclear power plants, hydropower stations, bioengineering, high-tech agriculture, advanced technology of industrialization, etc. have all seen unimpeded development in modern countries. At the same time, groups of people specially identified by researchers, such as poor households, vulnerable groups, women, disabled people, AIDS patients, migrant workers, and left-behind people in rural areas have been brought into the scope of planning and development by modern countries one after another. The core purpose of this practice is to make some changes in the phenomena intolerable to modernity, with the best result being the disappearance of such phenomena, in order to realize modernity in society by reversing backwardness. But it seems that no one can guarantee that such a development plan will not bring some unexpected consequences, and it turns out that such consequences have ensued. Nuclear power plants have caused nuclear leaks, hydropower stations have led to the destruction of the ecological environment in river basins, and the high yield of agriculture has made agricultural products insecure. In addition, as for the poverty problem, although the poverty situation in the past may have changed noticeably because of a large amount of government investment and the introduction of poverty alleviation policies, no one can deny that today, new forms of poverty have been emerging one after another, and the degree and difficulty of solving them is no less than the previous poverty problems. Indeed, the number of poor people in China dropped from 2.5 billion in 1978 to 34 million in 1999 as an indirect result of rapid economic growth. But it is undeniable that unfairness is also developing at a high speed in this country,75 and relative poverty in society has

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  179 gradually replaced absolute poverty to become a new source of deprivation, which was definitely not predicted at the beginning of the planning and design for reform. Despite all this, the Western world is still trying to find some new legal concepts to build a new blueprint for world planning. The concept of global justice emerging under the impact of the concept of global governance may be one of these.76 However, the possible consequences of advocating this new concept have not been evaluated based on cultural comparison. In the formulation of a new round of global planning, it seems that the right to dominate has returned to the hands of Westerners, who once appeared as colonialists, but in fact, when shouting the empty slogan “global justice,” the first question that should be asked is probably “Whose justice?”, as Alastair MacIntyre asked before.77 Otherwise, we will continue to maintain a “development syndrome” that has been learned and stubbornly exists in the existing development framework dominated by Western discourse, and that cannot be truly relieved by any remedial measure, because its fundamental solution lies in jumping out of the existing thinking box to a brand-new mindset, which is even more important, especially for modern people who have great expectations for the pursuit and exploration of the meaning of human existence. In this regard, Nietzsche’s reminder about “the birth of tragedy” at the dawn of Western industrialization still offers a profound meaning when it is reread today: we need to remold the value and significance of human existence by getting rid of a kind of Apollonian rationality.78 8.6 An inclusive rather than separated view of the world For people, perhaps thinking about the future is fundamental, or more accurately, revolutionary. It is definitely not tinkering, nor is it finding some cultural elements or concepts different from the West from the Chinese tradition humbly called indigenous culture in order to eliminate the disadvantages of rationalism, scientism and individualism arising from the Western idea of Enlightenment, assuming that it can address all the problems to be faced in the future. In fact, this may be a very irresponsible and over-optimistic idea for the development of the world. The preconception that a certain culture has such a strong power naturally that it can borrow one of the cultures to destroy another seems to advocate cultural enlightenment,79 but in fact it may be just secretly encouraging cultural weaknesses, which may only lead to cultural suicide in the end. Today, we need to look at the core value of a culture with a long history as a whole: where will it be? What are its core features? Can its existence really offer a complete cure for the stubborn disease of unexpected social consequences caused by Western Enlightenment? Perhaps for people, medicine is not good or bad, and the key is to prescribe the right medicine. Similarly there is no difference between a good system and a bad one, and the core point is whether the implementation of a system can lead to benign, peopleoriented operation and construction in society.80 In Chinese culture, there used to be a kind of thinking on a global scale, but it was different from the thinking on globalization dominated by the West or the Englishspeaking world today. Probably a completely different thinking, it is characterized

180  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome by tianxia zhuyi (cosmopolitanism), with its core being the thinking of tianxia wuwai (no absolute opposites all under heaven), which further leads to the idea of “no absolute opposites in thinking.”81 In the mean time, “this concept of tianxia (all under heaven) should be inclusive of all mankind.”82.If tianxia is compared to a person, then his or her mind is all-inclusive, that is, all differences are completely included in it, with no preconceived hierarchical distinction between the advanced and the backward. This kind of thinking has not been confirmed by Westerners even in the “Imperial Age” acclaimed by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri in the Middle Ages, because in the “World Empire” pursued by Dante, there was a clear dichotomy between the center and the periphery, with the world constructed centering on the Roman Empire. Dante, with poetic romanticism, acclaimed that “the Roman nation is the noblest nation.” Therefore, in his view, “it is axiomatic, rather than abusing power, for the Romans to establish an empire to rule all people in the world.”83 According to such a proposition, we can accurately predict the seeds of deep ethnocentrism in the construction of Western “world empire.” However, the concept of tianxia does not follow this kind of thinking, but features tolerance and pursues a world of great harmony without differences. The difference between Yi and Xia and the difference between the inner center and the periphery derived from the former difference are not inherent in the original meaning of the concept of tianxia, but a product of conceptual alienation. This must first be clarified before using the concept of tianxia to understand today’s world. Therefore, fundamentally speaking, this kind of tianxia thinking of accommodating differences in the world is particularly worth promoting on a global scale today as a wisdom preserved in human society to create an era with fewer conflicts and more harmony. This wisdom clearly accommodates differences and considerably tolerates all kinds of differences. It will never unrealistically change differences into some kind of veiled social distinction that takes people by surprise, it will never advocate eliminating all kinds of differences by means of strong egocentric preference, highprofile pretexts or creating its own enemies; it will never claim that through some form of social transformation, these differences can disappear, or social differences can converge and become uniform.84 Today, no person or group will make such a promise to society: with the help of such changes, the developmental syndrome left for modern people will really disappear. What we really see as observers is the emergence of new social distinctions caused by reforms and changes, and muchdesired accelerated growth based on future development. Generally speaking, today’s world, more than any other time, calls for understanding and forgiveness, as Qian Mu has asserted about the future of the world based on his understanding of human life, “Human beings should never be led by machines, but must be led by humanity in the end.”85 Obviously, only when observing the rules of law is regarded as the last line of defense rather than the first can people lead a truly decent and peaceful life, and only in this way can it awaken the other side of human nature, that is, the passion and irrationality of people outside the rules of rationality. Otherwise disputes based on rational argumentation at different levels may be the normal state of future social life. For human society, disputes are indispensable, and sometimes war seems inevitable, but it must not be the

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  181 essence of human social life. In today’s world where culture is undergoing a major transformation, it is all the more necessary for us to absorb the wisdom of human order construction in different cultures from a perspective of cultural comparison, so that each cultural transformation can be smoothly unfolded, thus creating a more conscious and reliable legal culture and corresponding system closer to humanity in China in the present era. On this basis, we should also be deeply concerned with the persistent development syndrome in society, and make the track of social development a track of obtaining the meaning of life under a new enlightenment consciousness of anti-enlightenment, or at least make it possible to provide an important track for the meaning of human existence. We used to rely on modern reason and technology to look for the meaning of human existence as a group. From ancient times to the present, that is, since the dawn of the development of wisdom, people have been spinning around on this road. It does not mean that there is no answer, as obviously many answers are available, rather than just one. At this point, exam questions with just one correct answer are definitely not an invention of ancient people, but a natural expression of modern people’s paranoia about their own rationality. Similarly, for different cultures in different times, there are completely different answers. Therefore, this requires tolerance and understanding of various lifestyles created by people themselves. Without tolerance and understanding, disputes will go on ceaselessly and only temporary solutions can be found to them. Disputes and hatred are obviously a barbaric driving force leading to wars between human societies and cultures. They have existed since ancient times, but they are no longer the pursuit of today’s civilization. Obviously, all kinds of disputes and hatred between individuals, between groups, and between individuals and groups in society cannot be alleviated by the formulation and promulgation of some unequivocal norms, but can be relieved by the tolerance and understanding and even concessions of one party. As the war historian Geoffrey Blainey has wisely reminded us: “There can be no war unless there are at least two countries which prefer war to peace.”86 This idea coincides with a paragraph in Chapter 31 of Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching: “As for weapons – they are instruments of ill omen. And among things there are those that hate them. Therefore, the one who has the Way, with them does not dwell.” In this sense, the core of civilization is not mutual conflict, but mutual understanding. Without this understanding, all civilizations created by human beings will not be able to coexist in the diversity of today’s world. This diversity, though not flawless, belongs to all civilizations and cannot be lightly dismissed. Hence, the most urgent task today is a kind of self-change which aims to make dedication, not claims, a part of the education in people’s lives. Only with such a return to collectivity and sociality can people be prevented from falling apart, and be kept closely connected “together.”87 China has invented the concept of “harmony between man and nature,” but the development syndrome we have inadvertently developed is leading us farther and farther astray from this ancient concept. It is not difficult to understand this point when we look at the decline of our natural and historical man-made environment.

182  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome Therefore, a passion for Enlightenment has led to development syndrome, which is fully reflected in our daily life practice during the construction of social order at present and modernity planning for the future. Should we fail to recognize this social disease and its specific manifestations in our daily life and in everyone and try to seek a therapy via local culture, then all our development will only be a temporary glory, and the price we pay for it will in turn dim this glory. In the modern world, law committed to development has become a guarantee for its safe operation, but the insecurity or risk of development itself renders this guarantee almost an empty promise. If we fail to realize the insecurity of this development today and try to alleviate this symptom by diverting attention, then our development syndrome will never be cured, but will go completely out of control in the future because we have no sense of orientation or vacillate in our direction. Perhaps, to make matters worse, it will also lead human beings headlong to self-destruction because of their failure to find a way to counter this loss of control. Judging from the current experience of world development, this is by no means alarmist talk. China’s culture and society must have a sense of consciousness in this rapid development, and find an appropriate way to move steadily forward, otherwise the dream of great harmony will remain merely a dream. Notes 1 Kang Youwei, one of the enlighteners of China’s modern thought, wrote a long article titled 共和平议 (Gonghe Pingyi, “A Discussion on the Republic”) in December 1917, comparing the democratic republican system in the West and even in North and South America with the democratic republican system of the Republic of China, which was established just six years earlier. Kang dismissed the republic established in China, deeming that it had not only failed to realize republicanism, but had led to an imperial system ruled by Yuan Shikai. Instead of achieving republicanism, it resulted in an autocratic system, and consequently “turmoil continued, autocracy revived, just like the beginning of the French Revolution.” In addition, the Republic of China, in pursuit of republicanism, led to the establishment of a government in order to protect the people and guarantee them peace, tranquility, happiness, rights, life, and property. In reality, however, after less than six years of construction, the situation was just the opposite. People’s lives, property, rights, peace, etc. could not be truly guaranteed, and more importantly, the democratic will could not be communicated (Kang Youwei. Kang Youwei’s Political Essays, Vol. II., Ed. Tang Zhijun. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1981: 1018–1023). 2 Harold J. Berman. Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition, trans. He Weifang, Zhang Zhiming, Gao Hongjun, et al. Beijing: China Encyclopedia Press, 1993: 35. 3 John Fitzgerald. Awakening China: Politics, Culture and Class in the Nationalist Revolution, trans. Li Gongzhong, Li Lifeng, Li Xia, et al. Liu Ping annotated. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2004: 6. 4 One of the most significant events happened in France in the mid-17th century. At that time, the court recipes were imitated by the public, and in 1651, the influential book Le cuisiner françois was published, the first cookbook on the cuisine of “France.” More importantly, this book also marked the beginning of a new school of cooking in French society in which the concept of state gradually replaced the concept of court, then the French food culture began to be gradually accepted by the world. François Pierre, a private chef of Henry IV, the grandfather of the French King Louis XIV, published this mod-

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  183 ern cookbook under the nom de plume La Varenne. This was a bait-and-switch approach, and an instance of a metaphorical transformation becoming a reality of life. That is, from then on, the court’s monopoly on high-level food came to an end, and ordinary people could also taste the royal palace meals in the streets and lanes (Florent Quellier. The Fabrication of the Renowned French Cuisine in the 17th and 18th Centuries, in Hing Wah Cheung, Ed., International Conference on Foodways and Heritage: A Perspective of Safeguarding the Intangible Cultural Heritage. Hong Kong: Leisure and Cultural Services Department, 2013: 267–269.) 5 Huang Zongxi. Waiting for the Dawn: A Plan for the Prince, in Hou Wailu. Works of Historical Papers Selected by Hou Wailu, Part II, Ed. Research Office of History of Chinese Thoughts, Institute of History, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1988: 193. 6 Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978: 297; Keith Tester. The Life and Times of Post-Modernity. London: Routledge, 1993: 94. 7 Akiji Hoshino. Global Politics: Change, Conflict, Governance and Peace in the Process of Globalization, trans. Liu Xiaolin and Zhang Shengjun. Beijing: Xinhua Press, 2000: 73. 8 Zheng Dahua. Modern Nationalism in China and the Awakening of Consciousness of the Chinese Nation. Ethno-National Studies, 2013 (3): 114. 9 Zhao Xudong. An Outline of the Ethnical Relationship on Diversity under the Unity of Chinese People. Social Sciences, 2012 (4): 51–62. 10 Richard Sennett. The Fall of Public Man. New York: Vintage Books, 1976: 15. 11 In the book Homo hierarchicus: Essai sur le système des castes, Louis Dumont made a clear comparison between traditional society and modern society. In his view, if the focus of traditional society is the collective and man is a collective person, then, modern society is just the opposite, that is, “‘man’ is regarded as an inseparable basic person, both an organism and a thinking subject. In a certain sense, every individual is the embodiment of the whole human race. He is the yardstick of all things (in a comprehensive and novel sense)” (Louis Dumont. Homo hierarchicus: Essai sur le système des castes, trans. Wang Zhiming. Taipei: Yuan-Liou Publishing Company, 1992: 64). 12 Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Social Contract, trans. He Zhaowu. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1980: 8. Due to the limitations of the Chinese language, the temporal nature of the original sentence cannot easily be translated. Dumont provides the English translation of this sentence: “Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The italics were added by Dumont in the hope of reminding people of the temporal nature of Rousseau’s expression of this statement. Therefore, I would venture to suggest that the accurate Chinese translation of this sentence may be ‘Man was born free ever, but now everywhere he is in chains.’ (Louis Dumont. Homo hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, trans. Mark Sainsbury, Louis Dumont, and Basia Gulati. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1980: 11). 13 According to Lydia H. Liu’s etymological tracing of Chinese loanwords, the Western word “law” was first translated into the Chinese equivalent 法律 by Jesuit missionary Giulio Aleni in 1623. In ancient Chinese, there are also corresponding words, such as “scholars versed in law always wish to promote rule of law” in “Xu Wugui” of Zhuangzi. In Guanzi, it is also written that “laws are to promote contribution and deter violence; regulations are to define obligations and settle disputes; orders are to order people to manage affairs. Laws, regulations and orders are rules for officials and civilians to follow” (Translingual Practice: Literature, National Culture, and Translated Modernity: China, 1900–1937, trans. Song Weijie et al. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2002: 379). 14 Michael Nylan and Michael Loewe, Eds. China’s Early Empires: A Re-appraisal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010: 253.

184  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome 15 For example, due to the limitation of land, in the 1930s, when Fei Xiaotong and Wang Tonghui surveyed the Yao nationality, the local people knew how to avoid pregnancy or abortion, which was required by the family system of community life. It was said that when a woman not versed in these techniques gave birth to a child, she would be described as “stupid wife” by local people (Fei Xiaotong. Six Visits to Yaoshan. Beijing: Minzu University of China Press, 2006: 58). 16 James Z. Lee, and Wang Feng. One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Reality, 1700–2000. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing House, 2000: 20–23. 17 Sherry B. Ortner. Generation X: Anthropology in a Media-Saturated World, in Sherry B. Ortner, Ed., Anthropology and Social Theory: Culture, Power, and the Acting Subject. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006: 80–106. 18 Hernando De Soto has observed that the reason why capital or capitalism triumph in the Western world and fail elsewhere is that the West has property rights guaranteed by law, which seems to have no direct relationship with culture (Hernando De Soto. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books, 2000: 218–223). 19 Zhang Weiying. Information, Trust, and Law. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2003: 131. 20 See the following article for the discussion of this problem: Discrimination of “Litigious Society” and “No-litigation Society” and Its Implications: State and Society in the Dispute Resolution Mechanism. The Jurist, 2013 (1): 1–14. 21 According to statistics, the 18 years from 1979 to 1997 were a period of rapid increase of legal cases, and after this period the increase slowed down, but it remains at a high level of more than 5 million cases per year, more than 10 times that at the beginning of reform and opening up. Specific data and analysis can be found in the following documents: Zhu Jingwen. China Law Development Report: Database and Indicator System. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2007. Statistics of the number of litigation cases up to the end of 2006 can be retrieved from the following website: http://www.law.ruc.edu.cn/ fazhan/ShowArticle.asp? Article ID=22325. 22 Thomas Hobbes. Leviathan, trans. Li Sifu and Li Tingbi, checked by Yang Changyu. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1985: 93. 23 In the article “Race and History”, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss comments on this point as follows: “As our prehistoric and archaeological knowledge grows, we tend to make increasing use of a spatial scheme of distribution instead of a time scale scheme. The implications are two: firstly, that ‘progress’ is neither continuous nor inevitable; its course consists in a series of leaps and bounds, or as the biologists would say, mutations” (Claude Lévi-Strauss. Race and History/Race and Culture, trans. Yu Xiuying. Beijing: Renmin University of China Press, 2006: 27). 24 Peter Fitzpatrick. The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge, 1992: ix. 25 Ernst Cassirer. An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture, trans. Structural Cluster. Taipei: Structural Cluster, 1989: 10. 26 Friedrich Schiller. On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, in Editorial Committee of Translation Series of Classical Literary Theory. Translation Series of Classical Literary Theory, Vol. II. Beijing: People’s Literature Publishing House, 1961: 149. 27 Thomas Reid. Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind, trans. Ding Sandong. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2011: 409–410. 28 Leonhard P. Wessell. G. E. Lessing’s Theology: A Reinterpretation: A Study in the Problematic Nature of the Enlightenment, trans. He Zhigang. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2007: 78. 29 Carol MacCormack. Nature, Culture, and Gender: A Critique, in Carol MacCormack and Marilyn Strathern, Eds., Nature, Culture and Gender. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980: 1.

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  185 30 Hernando De Soto. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumph in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. New York: Basic Books, 2000: 218. 31 A special academic discussion on this subject can be found in Liang Zhiping, Ed., Social Justice in the Transition Period: Problems and Prospects. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2010. The researchers in this collection discuss the current social injustice in China from different angles, such as education, migrant workers, urban housing, forest right reform, environmental problems, medical system reform, health rights, and the income gap. 32 Although Marx puts forward the concept of “alienation” when discussing alienated labor, he undoubtedly wants to show the existence of people who are enemies to themselves at present. On the one hand, it is the alienation or separation between workers and their own products; on the other hand, it is the alienation and separation between people’s daily activities and activities in production and work, which is a kind of “selfalienation,” “that is, turning against his own activities that do not depend on him and do not belong to him” (Karl Marx. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Liu Pikun. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1979: 48). 33 Alvin Toffler. Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century, trans. Liu Jiang, Chen Fangming, Zhang Yijun, et al. Beijing: Party School of the Central Committee of CPC Press, 1991: 485. 34 Paul Rabinow. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996: 59–79. 35 Ironically, the European Renaissance promoted the growth of science, but its innovative scientific research came from civil society at the beginning. Not only did the thinkers of the Renaissance, including Francis Bacon, René Descartes, Galileo Galilei, and Isaac Newton, have the shadow of mysticism, but alchemy had always been the basis for supporting early experimental scientific research. Moreover, compared with the situation where the scholastic school followed only Aristotle and Galen, this early scientific research was completely carried out outside the scholastic system, which seemed rigid and suspicious to them, that is, the local groups of early academies of science and scholars played a more important role in this work (Allen George Debus. Man and Nature in the Renaissance, trans. Lu Jianhua and Liu Yuan, checked by Wu Zhong. Hangzhou: Zhejiang People’s Publishing House, 1998: 173). 36 According to anthropologists’ estimates, there were 10 million hunter-gatherers in about 10000 BCE, 100% of whom lived on hunting and gathering. By the year 1500, the population of the world was about 3.5 billion, of which only 1% were engaged in hunting. By the year 2000, the population of the world had increased to 6 billion, but only 0.001% of them, one in 100,000 people, lived as hunter-gatherers (Anthony Giddens and Philip W. Sutton. Sociology, 7th edn. Cambridge: Polity, 2013: 114). 37 Francis Haines. Where Did the Plains Indians Get Their Horses?, in E. Adamson Jennings and Jesse D. Hoebel, Eds., Readings in Anthropology, 2nd edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 1966: 184. 38 Keith Thomas. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, trans. Chen Li. Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2008, 19–20. 39 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800, trans. Chen Li. Nanjing: Yilin Press, 2008, 20. 40 Jared Diamond. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, trans. Xie Yanguang. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2006: 64. 41 Charles Darwin. The Variation of Animals and Plants under Domestication, Vol. I., trans. Fang Zongxi and Ye Xiao. Beijing: China Science Publishing House, 1957/1963: 226. 42 Zhao Xudong. Going and Coming: A Methodology of Ethnography beyond Earthbound Research. Northwest Journal of Ethnography, 2009 (1): 131–142. 43 Freedman pays special attention to how this social mutual aid system based on common wealth can indirectly help the poor to maintain their lives in his discussion about the lineage organization in South China. He points out that due to the existence of a large

186  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome number of common wealth clans who live together, the situation of their poor members is much better than that of their counterparts in poor clans, because they are safer and have higher prestige faced with the outside world and at least there is hope that they and their descendants can get closer to the center of controlling interests in time (Maurice Freedman. Lineage Organization in Southeastern China, trans. Liu Xiaochun, checked by Wang Mingming. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2000: 162–163). 44 Fei Xiaotong. From the Soil: The Foundations of Chinese Society. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1985: 17. 45 Ralph Borsodi. This Ugly Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1929: 8. 46 Martin Heidegger. Basic Writings, Ed. David Farrell Krell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978: 297. Keith Tester. The Life and Times of Post-Modernity. London and New York: Routledge, 1993: 93. 47 Norbert Elias. Time: An Essay, trans. Edmund Jephcott. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1992: 200. 48 Han Yuhai. Beneath the Sky: An All-inclusive China. Beijing: Jiuzhou Press, 2011: 300. 49 Zhang Ning. Dusk of Land: Micro Power Analysis of Rural Experience in China, revised edn. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2013: 26. 50 Julien Offray de La Mettrie. L’homme-machine, trans. Gu Shouguan, checked by Wang Taiqing. Beijing: Commercial Press, 1959. 51 Han Yuhai. Beneath the Sky: An All-inclusive China. Beijing: Jiuzhou Press, 2011: 301. 52 Arjun Appadurai. Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996: 1. 53 The concept of “traveling theory” was first put forward by Edward Said, who pointed out how an idea about the East was introduced into Europe in the early 19th century and how European social thoughts were introduced into the Eastern society through translation in the late 19th century. In this process, “theories and concepts move from one culture to another,” forming a change in nature. A concept that is originally critical may turn into a conservative defense, and a theory that is originally a sharp weapon may be transformed into a cultural dogma through this kind of travel (Mustafa Bayoumi and Andrew Rubin, Eds., The Selected Works of Edward Said, 1966–2006, trans. Xie Shaobo, Han Gang, et al. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press, 1999: 138–159). 54 Zhu Yaowei. Images of China in Contemporary Western Criticism. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 2006: 59–80. 55 Fredric Jameson specially set four maxims for the fashionable concept of modernity: firstly, it refers to a kind of periodization; secondly, it refers to a narrative category; thirdly, modernity has a variety of situations; finally, modernity should deal with the problem of post-modernism or the break between modernity and modernity. This can be regarded as his family’s opinion, but he made it very clear that different contexts will have different expressions about modernity (Fredric Jameson. A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present, trans. Wang Fengzhen and Wang Liya. Tianjin: Tianjin People’s Publishing House, 2005: 65). 56 He Huaihong. Contract Ethics and Social Justice: History and Rationalism in Rawls’ Theory of Justice. Beijing: China Renmin University Press, 1993: 269–281. 57 Leonhard P. Wessell. G. E. Lessing’s Theology: A Reinterpretation: A Study in the Problematic Nature of the Enlightenment, trans. He Zhigang. Beijing: Huaxia Publishing House, 2007: 82–87. 58 Émile Durkheim. De la division du travail social, trans. Qu Dong. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2000: 92. 59 Lawrence M. Friedman. The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990: 24. 60 Marcel Mauss. The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison. London: Cohen & West, 1970: 68. 61 Lawrence M. Friedman. The Republic of Choice: Law, Authority, and Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990: 23.

Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome  187 62 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. German Ideology. Beijing: People’s Publishing House, 1961: 14–21. 63 Eric J. Hobsbawm describes in detail social movements from the bottom in Europe from the 19th century to the 20th century in his book Primitive Rebellion, such as outlaws, the mafia and the Millennium Movement. He used the term “primitive rebels” to collectively refer to these kinds of social movements, which can also be translated as “primitive rebellion.” However, for the resistance of the general public, the Chinese translated meaning of “rebellion” is too strong to express its meaning, so the word “resistance” is used instead (Eric J. Hobsbawm. Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries, trans. Yang Derui. Taipei: Rye Field Publishing Co., Ltd., 1999: 4–21). 64 Anthony Giddens. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books, 2002: 2. 65 John Bagnell Bury. The Idea of Progress, trans. Fan Xiangtao. Shanghai: Shanghai SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2005: 240. 66 Obviously, since the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche discussed the importance of irrationality to human beings, there has been a tendency to reflect on the excessive emphasis on rational value since the Enlightenment in Western social theory, especially in the French intellectual community. Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice is one kind, and Michel Maffesoli’s sociological reinterpretation of carnival is another (Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977: 22–30. Michel Massefoli. The Shadow of Dionysus: A Contribution to the Sociology of the Orgy, trans. Cindy Linse and Mary Kristina Palmquist. New York: State University of New York, 1993: 2–11. 67 Bai Lanzhi. Politics of Spatial Planning and Discourse: Reflections on the Urbanization Strategy of the Pearl River Delta. Taiwan Province Social Research Quarterly, 2008 (70): 121–161, 143. 68 Anthony Giddens. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books, 2002: 2. 69 Immanuel Wallerstein. The Uncertainties of Knowledge, trans. Wang Bing et al., checked by Hao Mingwei. Jinan: Shandong University Press, 2006: 1. 70 Paul Rabinow. Essays on the Anthropology of Reason. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996: 7. 71 Marco Diani. The Immaterial Society: Design, Culture and Technology in the Postindustrial World, trans. Teng Shouyao. Chengdu: Sichuan People’s Publishing House, 1998: 13. 72 Cheng Boqing. Out of Modernity: Toward Reorientation of Contemporary Sociological Theory. Beijing: Social Science Academic Press, 2005: 148. 73 Claude Lévi-Strauss. Myth and Meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978: 20. 74 Ye Qizheng. Waiting for the Dawn: Mixing of Tradition and Modernity. Shanghai: Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 2005: 159. 75 Anthony Giddens. Runaway World: How Globalization Is Reshaping Our Lives. London: Profile Books, 2002: xxviii. 76 Thomas Pogge. Kant, Rawls and Global Justice, trans. Xu Xiangdong. Shanghai: Shanghai Translation Publishing House, 2010. 77 Alasdair MacIntyre. Whose Justice? Which Rationality? trans. Wang Junren, Wu Haizhen, and Wang Jinyi, checked by Wan Junren. Beijing: Contemporary China Press, 1996: 116. 78 Nietzsche recounts the exuberance of the Dionysus spirit in Germany in the Middle Ages: “So also in the German Middle Ages singing and dancing crowds, ever increasing in number, were borne from place to place under this same Dionysian power.” Next, he satirized the modern-like behavior affectations of those afraid that the joyful passion would destroy their health: “there are some, who, from lack of experience or obtuseness, will turn away from such phenomena as ‘folk-diseases’ with a smile of contempt or pity

188  Enlightenment, order, and development syndrome prompted by the consciousness of their own health: of course, the poor wretches do not divine what a cadaverous-looking and ghastly aspect this very ‘health’ of theirs presents when the glowing life of the Dionysian revelers rushes past them” (Friedrich Nietzsche. The Birth of Tragedy: Selected Works of Nietzsche’s Aesthetics, trans. Zhou Guoping. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 1985: 5). 79 For the latest discussion on cultural enlightenment, see Liu Yuedi. From “Great Enlightenment Thought” to “New Culture Enlightenment”: Rethinking the Integration of China’s Thoughts and Culture Today. Exploration and Free Views, 2013 (2): 73–77. 80 On this point, Kang Youwei offered a wise comment almost a hundred years ago when he noted in “Gonghe Pingyi” (“A Discussion on Republic”) that “politics is like a prescription. There is no distinction between good and bad medicine, and we only seek medicine that can cure diseases. Similarly there is no distinction between good and bad politics, and we advocate politics that can lead to order and peace” (Kang Youwei. Kang Youwei’s Political Essays, Vol. II, Ed. Tang Zhijun. Beijing: Zhonghua Book Company, 1981: 1,019). 81 Zhao Tingyang. Tianxia System: An Introduction to World System Philosophy. Nanjing: Jiangsu Education Press, 2005: 14. 82 Zhao Xudong. On the Edge of the Indigenous and Foreign Lands: Self, Culture and the Other in Anthropological Researches. Beijing: Peking University Press, 2011: 83–107. 83 Dante Alighieri. De Monarchia, trans. Zhu Hong. Taipei: Taiwan Province Commercial Press, 2000: 45. 84 Andrew B. Kipnis’ research on urbanization in Shandong Province has noticed the commonality in the resolution of differences in nation-building. This convergence is becoming more and more obvious in the fields of standardization of education, mutual imitation of urban space, and the construction of network commonality (Andrew B. Kipnis. Constructing Commonality: Standardization and Modernization in Chinese National Building. Journal of Asian Studies, 2012 (8): 731–755). 85 Qian Mu. Blind Talks in the Evening of My Life, Vol. I. Beijing: SDX Joint Publishing Company, 2010: 12. 86 Geoffrey Blainey. The Causes of War. New York: Free Press, 1988. 87 Zhao Xudong. Being Together: A New Vision of Anthropology of Cultural Transformation. Journal of Yunnan Minzu University (Philosophy and Social Sciences), 2013 (3): 24–35.

Index

**Page numbers in bold reference tables. abstract time 169–170 acquaintance society 31–32, 47 action consciousness 134 after cultural consciousness 134–137; living conditions 137–140 agapastic evolution 129 agricultural society 169 agriculture 112–113 alienation 166, 185n32 animal protection 76 anthropologists 3–4, 6, 154 anthropology of being together 7–8 anxiety, branching society 26 apartment buildings 108 aristocrats 136 art 144, 146–150, 154; behavior artists 155; lions 159; politicalization of 155 astronomical knowledge 23 authority 72–73 awakening 159 awareness 65 backwardness 130 behavior artists 155 “being together” 7–8, 77–84, 139 “being-towards-death” 12 Belt and Road Initiative 5, 16–17 betrothal money 94–95 biao 85 biotechnology 73, 116 birth 141 birth control 163 black soil civilization 112 bodies 73–74, 131; death 129 books: access to 115; knowledge production 46 brainwashing 45 branching society 35; diversity 25–30

brotherhood 40 Buddhism 78 buildings 108 cage-dwellers myth 133 capitalism 70, 166 Cast-Iron Pig (Zhu Gangpiang) 146–150, 152 change 9–10, 159; of culture 61; see also cultural transformation chaos 109 chatting 117–118 chaxu geju (differentiated pattern) 40 children 98–99; gaming 102–103n11 China Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences 18 Chinese consciousness 6, 51–54, 130 Chinese culture 6 Chinese Nation 161 Chinese society 39 circling society 21–25; kinships 31; rupture of 30–36 civilization 7, 112 civilized China 11 clans 168 climate change 76, 110, 138–139 clothing, evolution 110 clue ethnography 153 cluster society 35 code of brotherhood 40 cold society 99, 139 collective self 122 collective social life 24 collective suicide 175 collectivism 27 colonization 49 communication 105; chatting 117–118; Internet 29; telephones 29 community 12–14 

190 Index Community of a Shared Future for Mankind 9 computers 30 conception of matter in post-cultural consciousness 120–124 concrete culture 70 Confucianism 41 Confucius 136 conquest, concept of 70 consciousness 65, 77, 105, 110, 132; action consciousness 134; conception of matter 120–124; false consciousness 174; legal consciousness 162; of localization 12; modern consciousness 120; modern enlightenment consciousness 166, 176; sacred consciousness 119–120 constitutional concept 159 consumerism 177 controlling people 33–34; law and order 163–165; with technology 73 convenience foods 98 Corridor Concern 16 cosmetic surgery 138 cosmopolitanism 105, 180 credit cards 133 criticism 84 cultivating individual personality 94 cultural barriers 19 cultural comparisons 42–45, 53, 181 cultural consciousness 4, 39, 42–45, 48, 50–54, 99, 122–123, 127–129, 132–137 cultural contact 134 cultural convergence 10, 57 cultural criticism 99 cultural diversity 10, 18 cultural embellishment 66 cultural expression 46, 51, 66, 151 cultural hegemony 66, 135 cultural heritage 135 cultural identity 135 cultural knowledge 124 cultural protection 135 cultural reconstruction 4, 52 cultural reorganization 51 cultural tolerance 8–11 cultural transformation 1–5, 18, 38–39; anthropology of 99–102; cultural variability 48–51; implications of current transformation in China 45–48; pneuma of society 61–65; power transfer 68–74 cultural traps, cultural consciousness and 42–45 cultural variability 48–51

cultural virtualization 71 cultural war 135 culture 19, 44–45, 50, 54–55, 75–76; concrete culture 70; defining 52–53, 62–63; elite culture 136; ling (pneuma) 63–64; mass culture 136–137; official culture 40–41; primitive culture 140; reenchantment 84–85; value of 51; violence 66; virtual culture 51; visible culture 65–67; writing culture 16 customary law 171 Darwin, Charles 129–130 date to know 76 death 33–34, 129, 141 decline: in paper media 56; of parental roles 90–92, 98–99 decolonization 58n13 Descartes, Rene 76, 78 development 174–175; based on separation from nature 165–169 development syndrome 158–159, 175–176, 180, 182 differences 67, 109; tolerance of 9 differentiated pattern 44 digital printers 114–115 dining habits 119 disasters, Wenchuan County, May 12, 2008 144 discourse 71 diseases 23–24, 75, 80 disputes 180–181 diversity 181; branching society 25–30; with unity 18–19 division of labor 173–174 dogs 100 dominion 69 Dragon 147 earthen castles 168 earthquakes, Wenchuan County, May 12, 2008 144, 154 ecology 127–129 education 90–92, 164; separation technology 98 educational anthropology 99–102 egoism 79 elderly 96–97 electric power 29 elite culture 136 emancipation politics see life politics Enlightenment 65, 78, 171; legal rationality and 158–163 environmental protection 76

Index  191 equal rights 162 equality 162, 171 ethnic groups 71–72, 161; evolution of species 110 ethnographers 77 ethnography 6; clue ethnography 153 evolution of minds 129 evolution of species 109–110; irreversible biological evolution 129 exchange, concept of 31 fairness 165–166, 171–172 faith 74 false consciousness 174 family 90; decline of parental roles 90–92; marriage 94–95; separation and role transformation 97–99; separation technology 92–97, 117–118 family dinners 117–118 family feasts 96 family separation 118 farming 168 fathers 91, 99 Fei Xiaotong 48–49, 126–128, 150 field research 3, 15–16 flash memory 96 flies 150 food production 168 foods, convenience foods 98 fortuitous variation 129 freedom 28, 133; of choice 174 functionalism 63 Future City 142 gaming, children and 102–103n11 Gao Qifeng 159 garbage 178 genetic screening 116 geographical discovery 2–3 ghosts 107; dispelling ceremony 24 gift exchanges 174 gifts 81 global governance 179 global justice 179 global village 71 globalization 105; of culture 71 growth, individual 132 harmony between man and nature 44–45, 92 health 75, 80 Heaven, worship of 23 high-rise residential buildings 108 high-tech transformation 114

hindsight 65 historical narratives 72 Hobbes, Thomas 56, 66, 165 home appliances 91, 93–94 Homo sapiens 64, 80 homogenization 162, 170 homogenous space 137–138 horses 167–168 hot society 99 housewives 91, 93 Huang Zongxi 160 human collective memory 46 human culture 5 human nature 13 human rationality 75–77 human social development 121 humans 1–2; see also Homo sapiens “Hundred-Day Banquet” 32 hundun (primal beginning) 109 ideal anthropology 12–14 independence 173–174 Indians 167–168 individual achievement 25 individual consciousness 31, 126, 132–133 individual mentality 127; see also cultural consciousness individualism 173–174 individuality 90–92 individualization 90, 133 individuals, controlling through law 163–165 industrialization 43, 169–172 information revolution 3 inheritors of intangible cultural heritage 10 in-law family 32 institutions, power 70 instrumental rationality 116 intangible cultural heritage 5, 10, 135 integration tools, and separation technology 109–113 interconnectivity 14–17 Internet 29–30, 51, 91, 105; libraries 115 intuitive association culture 44 invisible violence 65–67 irreversible biological evolution 129 isolated karaoke rooms 121 Japan, decline of parental roles 91 Japanese society 39 jianghu (gathering place) 40–41 jiangshan (territory) 43 justice 166; global justice 179

192 Index Kant, Immanuel 75–76, 131 kareoke rooms 121 kinships 31, 40 “knockoff” meaning creation 71 knowledge: legal knowledge 171; virtual knowledge 71 knowledge creation 170–171, 176 knowledge production 46, 68, 167 Kula ring trade, Trobriand Islanders 22, 24 labor, division of 173–174 land 44, 58n16, 112, 169 “last man” era 170 laundry work 93 law 160–165, 172; of kinship 40 legal consciousness 162 legal knowledge 68, 171 legal rationality, and Enlightenment 158–163 Lei Feng spirit 139–140 life politics 132 life relations 72 life world 105; and separation technology 106–109 life-and-death transformation 33 ling (pneuma) 62–65, 86n7 linghuo (flexibility) 63 lingqiao (dexterity) 63 lingyan (efficacy) 63 lions 159 litigious society 165–169 living conditions, after cultural consciousness 137–140 living space 109 localization of culture 71 loess civilization 112 lost generation 164 Malinowski, Bronislaw 48 “man a machine” 170 mankind, unity 14 man-made laws 166 marriage 94–95 marriage circles 31–33, 166 Marriage Law 94–95 mass culture 136–137 matchmaking 113 matter, conception of in post-cultural consciousness 120–124 meaning, discourse 71 media 54–56 medical technology 73 medical treatments 23–24

membership cards 121 memory 46–47; flash memory 96 mentality 127–128 micro-observation 124 mind 62 Ming dynasty 102n3 mobile phones 107 modern consciousness 120 modern enlightenment consciousness 166, 176 modern neurotic personality 25 modern rationality 75 modern society 27, 29, 35, 173–174 modern states 67 modern subjectivity 71 modern world 34, 139; pristine condition (yuanshengtai) 130–132; and technology 104–106 modernity 76, 81, 110, 133, 172, 175, 178 modernity bankruptcy 164 modernization 172 Monpa people, wizard dance 23–24 moral rationalism 88n41 mothers 91, 93, 96; convenience foods 98; replacement of 98–99 narrative 66; historical narratives 72; social life of pigs 150–153 nation 160 nationalism 67, 122 nation-state 160–161, 171; modern world 159 natural selection 129–130 natural view of nature 165 nature 44, 53–54, 69–70, 74–77, 130–131; harmony between man and nature 92; separation from 165–169; see also pristine condition (yuanshengtai) negation, housewives 91 network society 50 networks 3 New Culture Movement 54 new media 54–55 Nietzsche, Friedrich 170 no-litigation society 165–169 nomadic society 35 non-struggle 73 nuclear family 94; see also family observation, micro-observation 124 Oedipus complex 98, 99 official culture 40–41 online dating/matchmaking 113

Index  193 order: concept of 160–162; control of individual behavior 163–165 Orientalism 2, 51, 54 otaku 124 other 8, 78–79, 124 Oxford Flower 149 paper 111 paper media, decline in 56 parental roles 101; decline of 90–92, 98–99 philanthropists 135 Pierce, Charles Sanders 129–130 pigs: Cast-Iron Pig (Zhu Gangpiang) 146–150; social life of 150–153; Strong Pig (Zhu Jianqiang) 144–146 Place 56 planning 173, 176–179 pneuma of society 61–65 political legitimacy 159 political transformation 67 politicalization of, art 155 population 139, 163–164 post-cultural consciousness, conception of matter 120–124 Potlatch 81 poverty 17, 178 power, violence 66–67 power domination 69 power transfer 68–74 prayer, dining habits 119 pre-marital property 94–95 primitive communism 109 primitive culture 140 primitive society 109, 173 printing 114–115 pristine condition (yuanshengtai) 126, 128–132, 140 private property rights 94 production 121–122 progress 25, 165; see also social progress property, marriage 94–95 Protestantism 70 public spaces 11; see also space qimeng (enlightenment) 159 Qing dynasty 102n3 rational planning 173 rationality 74–77; instrumental rationality 116; legal rationality 158–163 real 4 reality 39, 51, 61, 72, 81, 115, 123–124, 128–130, 141–142, 162, 174

reason 131 reciprocal relationships 13 reconstruction 4–5, 38, 45, 51–52 red soil civilization 112 redistribution of economy 174 reenchantment 84–85 reform 159 relationships 65, 81, 100, 136 replacement of mothers 98–99 reproduction 10, 32 responsibility 8–11 rhythm 22–23, 169 rice cookers 118 risks 26 ritual exchanges, Kula ring trade 22 rituals 151–152 road study 16 role transformation, and family separation 97–99 rupture of circling 30–36 rural society 33, 112, 169; death 33–34 sacred consciousness 119–120 sacredness 119–120 sacrificial circle 33 school estate 98 science of culture 63 secularization 119–120 security 165 self 54, 79, 148 self-awareness 27, 57, 78, 92 self-circling society 25, 31 self-consciousness 31, 65, 110, 115 self-creation 145 self-development 126 self-enclosed circles of interest 41 self-enlightenment 65 self-existence 25 self-identity 123 self-knowledge 155 self-restraint 54 self-separation technology 122 self-struggle 34 sensibility 92 separation 8, 78, 81; division of labor 174; of family and role transformation 97–99; from nature 165–169 separation technology 74–77, 90; credit cards 133; field of 114–118; integration tools 109–113; and life world 106–109; substitution of family functions 92–97 shaping our world 105 shehui 39–41

194 Index shou (living long) 32–33 single-parent families 93 social body 111 social change, from industrialization 172 social circling, rupture of 31 social cohesion 85 social community 13 social connection modes 47 social contracts 166 social control 70 social differentiation 84–85 social division of labor 173–174 social evolution 129 social existence 78 social healing 83, 121 social humanity 13 social life 121, 180–181; of pigs 150–153 social media 6, 101, 122 social motivation 29 social mutual aid system 185–186n43 social order construction 161 social progress 38–42 social renewal 29 social self 25; see also self social transformation 5–6, 38–42, 67–68 social-oriented achievement 25 society 12–13; acquaintance society 47; agricultural society 169; branching society 35; branching society of diversity 25–30; cluster society 35; cold society 99, 139; hot society 99; litigious society 165–169; modern society 35, 173–174; network society 50; no-litigation society 165–169; nomadic society 35; primitive society 109, 173; as prison 77; rural society 33, 169; see also circling society sociology 39 souls 110, 129, 131 space 40, 47, 55–56, 62, 170; education 90–91; homogenous space 137–138; living space 109; public spaces 11 state 66–67 stoves 118 Strong Pig (Zhu Jianqiang) 144–147, 152 subjective consciousness 47, 50 substitution of family functions, separation technology 92–97 suicide, symbolic 175 supermarket membership cards 121 surgical technology 117 survival of the fittest 129–130 sustainable development 174–175 symbolic rule 70

tea 74 Technocosmopolitanism 167 technology 99, 169; controlling people 73; and modern world 104–106; see also separation technology telephones 29 text production 114 thinking 76 Three Gorges Water Conservancy Project 160 tian (heaven) 44 tianxia (world) 45–47, 180 tianxia wuwai (no absolute opposites all under heaven) 180 tianxia zhuyi (cosmopolitanism) 180 Tibetan-Yi Corridor 16 time 2, 46, 47, 55–56, 62, 129; abstract time 169–170; rhythm 169 tolerance, cultural tolerance 8–11 tong (communication) 24 totems 24 “tragedy of the commons” 164 transformation of patterns of power domination 69 traveling theory 186n53 Trobriand Islanders, Kula ring 22 true self 25 tu (soil) 112 tulou (castles) 168 tuqi (rustic) 112 TV technology 100 tychastic evolution 129 uncertainty 176, 177 unconscious struggle 34 unity 14; with diversity 18–19; national unity 67 urbanization 17, 167, 175–176 value of culture 51 villages 135 violence, invisible violence 65–67 virtual 4 virtual culture 51 virtual knowledge 71 virtual space 47, 50 virtuality 123 visible culture 65–67 volunteer spirit 144 wan wu xiang tong (everything is connected) 24 war 28, 181 water conservancy projects 160

Index  195 water conservancy technology 73 WeChat 16–17, 101 Weibo 101 Wenchuan Count, May 12, 2008 154 Western civilization 42–43 Western colonialism 49 Western industrialization 43, 49 white myth 2, 78 witchcraft 106 wizard dance, Monpa people 23–24 world (tianxia) 45–46 worship of knowledge 170 writing culture 16 written language 66, 72

xia (Han Nationality) 45 xiangxiaren (country people) 112 yi (minorities) 45 yuanshengtai (pristine condition) 126 Zen Buddhism 79 Zhang Huan 146–150 Zhou 23 Zhu Gangpiang (Cast-Iron Pig) 144, 146–150 Zhu Jianqiang (Strong Pig) 144–147 zi meiti (self-media or social media) 122