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Suvi Rautio, "The Invention of Tradition in China: Story of a Village and a Nation Remade" (Springer Nature, 2024)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hi everybody. Welcome to New Book Networking Chinese Studies. My name is Professor Onru Li and I'm joining as a host to the show to talk about Suvi Rajio, a social anthropologist based at the City University of New York and the University of Helsinki. Suvi is joining me to talk about her new book, the Invention of Tradition in China, Story of a Village and a Nation Remade, published by Pilgrave in 2024. In China, heritage projects are sprouting across the countryside carrying the promise of Xi Jinping's Chinese Dream as a call for the great revival and rejuvenation of the nation. Sufi's book unravels the workings behind these promises through the story of remaking Mei Li, a Dong ethnic minority village nestled along the margins of China, into a traditional traditional village, quote unquote heritage site. In a past riven by deep political and societal disruptions, melee becomes a medium for contesting, mediating and continuously inventing representations of tradition that aligns with the Chinese Communist Party's mission towards continuity and stability. The outcome is an original depiction of the compromises that shape heritage making in a rural ethnic corner of China. Filled with rich, fine grained narrative and analysis, Suvi Ratio offers a unique lens to complicate the narrative of how heritage projects function by demonstrating the politics involved in inventing traditional and its far reaching consequences in contemporary China today. I'm honored to have Suvi join me on the show today to talk about her book in more detail. Hi Suvie, thank you for joining me on the podcast.
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Hi Anru, Pleasure is all mine. Thank you so much for taking on the role of host and inviting me as a guest to the podcast.
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B
Yeah, my pleasure. So to begin with, I want to ask you about what led you to do research on heritage projects in rural Guizhou.
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Yeah, so to begin, I should maybe start with my own personal history with China. I moved to Beijing when I was two years old in 1987 with my family and we lived there for eight years, moved to Singapore in between, and then returned to Beijing again. And I finished high school in Beijing. I went to the UK for university, but I was always returning to Beijing over the summers. And then after graduation I returned to work in China for a couple of years before my PhD. And it was during that few years that I was working. I was working in the environmental industry in Greenpeace. My last job was at Greenpeace. I was growing increasingly interested in environmental concerns and environmental awareness. And I was thinking a lot about belonging and place, how people have a sense of belonging in general. And I was interested, okay, with larger environmental changes, how do people in the Chinese rural context experience their notions of belonging or place? Does that have any effect? So I started my PhD with an interest in wanting to learn more about people's association to landscape, place and environment. And I got to know through my good friend Elaine Ho in Beijing. She put me in touch with somebody who was able to give me a place to live in Fujian in Tuolu, which is a beautiful kind of old. There are now many heritage sites across Fujian that are Tuolo, but this one in particular, not it was basically a few aunties and their grandchildren that lived there. So it was kind of an example of a rural site as a kind of empty nest hollowed out from the residents. And I started doing my fieldwork there, spent a month or two there with the aunties in this kind of beautiful architectural site. And when I was there, I returned to Beijing for a visit and I met an old friend who's a heritage specialist and she said, okay, if you can spend this much time in rural China and you don't seem to mind the mosquitoes, you don't seem to mind a lot of urbanites, imagine that countryside living is kind of Backward or you have different hygiene standards, et cetera. So she said, if you can do that, then why don't you come with me to Guizhou? We're just starting a project, a heritage scheme, and we need somebody to do some general surveys. Said absolutely, yeah, I'll jump, you know, finish wrap things up in Fujian and go visit you in Guizhou. And it was in that very short preliminary visit that I was completely kind of pulled into her project. Guizhou, unlike Fujian, this village we went to was not hollowed out. There were a lot of young people who had returned because of unemployment rates increasing, construction projects ending in a lot of China, sorry, a lot of urban spaces in China at the time in response to Xi Jinping' anti corruption scheme. So there were a lot of young people. It wasn't just the aunties I was hanging out with. And it was an actual heritage scheme. There were heritage specialists from across the country. There was a whole, you know, there was recognition under a lot of listings. So I thought this might be a bit more, have a bit more engagement in comparison to the TLU and Fujian. So I decided to switch to Guizhou. The reason why Guizhou and this particular region has so many heritage schemes is that the province is also home to the largest poverty stricken population amongst the country's 34 provincial regions. So poverty alleviation is a really key concern in this part of China. Guizhou is also ethnically diverse. It's home to 17 ethnic minority groups. And probably the most general impression that people have of the province is that it's a landlocked mountainous region. So there's an old saying that says there are never three sunny days in a row and there's never three square feet of land. So Scwizhou is a place of rough climate and terrain. And that's also an explanation that people use to inform others of why it is poverty stricken, which is a very unfortunate representation to claim on a group of people. So like you just said, my field work was in Meili, which is a Dong ethnic minority village in southeast Guizhou. It's approximately 1,300 registered residents. A large portion are working outside of the village or studying outside of the village in secondary school or a couple who've attended university by now. And the Dong themselves are one of the 55 ethnic minority groups in they refer to themselves as Gan. The Tung ethnic minority population are usually spread out across Guizhou, Hunan and Guangxi. They make up approximately 3 million of the Chinese population. So it's a relatively small ethnic minority group and their language group is the Thai Kadai language. So it's separate from Mandarin and separate from many other ethnic minority languages. Meili itself is in a steep valley surrounded by mountains and a rugged vertical landscape of folded classic mountains that encircle the village space. So it's mountainous. There's all kinds of sayings that people would tell me. These mountains signified a sense of marginality and the challenges of eliminating poverty. So people would say, first thing, you open the door in the morning and you're fit, blocked by a mountain. It was this idea that you were kind of trapped in this village scape because of the landscape. And of course, if we draw on kind of more academic discussions, James Scott comes to mind because of his very influential anthropological and political work on what he calls the Zombia highlands, which today includes mainland Southeast Asia, China, India, Bangladesh and southwest China. So Guizhou as well. And James Scott's very idea of this part of the world is to look at how marginalized people learn to flee the state and take on qualities to deliberately isolate themselves and keep them distant from the ruling, ruling elite. So Guizhou as well has this notion that it's a kind of the villagers around the area who were kind of isolated themselves, not just because of the landscape, but perhaps for political reasons in the past. They kind of have their own kind of enclaves that they live in. Of course, there's all kinds of lovely Chinese sayings that refer to this idea of peripheral being separate from rules of power, such as Shang Gao Huang Diyuan. The mountains are high and the emperor is far away. So this also very notion of being marginal and being up in the mountain, far away from power was something that really came up very often in my fieldwork. Yeah. So those were kind of the first. Those were some of the first representations I had when I started my research then that pulled me to do my actual long term doctoral work.
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Thank you. I think for a Han person like myself, Guizhou it's kind of a strange and distant place, I think. And I guess one question that we probably could talk about later is, I mean, after all this invention of tradition, how many outside visitors actually go there? I think.
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Right.
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With all these geographical distance and seclusion that you mentioned. But we will keep that for later. But I think the readers, if you opened Suvi's book, the first chapter.
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Right.
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It's a very beautiful paranormal view of the village. It's really gorgeous. And I think from outside, from looking from outside, it is indeed a perfect kind of site as a traditional village and good to explore and learn a different culture. But I think the whole book actually is unpacking. When insight, then is never that complicated, never that simple, never that naive, never that innocent. Right. So the first chapter, the Invention of Tradition in China, you position discussions around culture, cultural heritage, and cultural production, both through the wide national narrative and specifically focusing on your field site. Right. Mainly your analysis centers on the remaking of a village itself as sort of an invention. I think that one of the key points that you are making here. Can you talk about that both in terms of the analytical and methodological approach you took to study this?
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Thank you so much, Anru. And yes, absolutely. I first want to just point out that panoramic view, it was so important, and we'll return to that throughout our discussion, but that really was such an important impression that, that the village had. When you first enter the village and you have this panoramic view of a very. Of a traditional village, that's one of the kind of main reasons that it has become a heritage site, but tradition itself. As Hobsbaum and Rangers, their 1983 edited book, the Invention of Tradition, I'm coining their very term of tradition here as an invention that's part of the wider modernity project to establish collective identities. And so in my book, I'm looking at the remaking of a village into a traditional heritage site. And I'm also looking at remaking a nation so exactly like Hauptman and Ranchers have written about. Their work draws on other parts of the world. I'm looking at it in a very particular region of China, obviously, but in the same way, in remaking a nation through a heritage scheme, this is directly aligned with strengthening nationalism and a shared sense of collectivity. And in particular, considering it's an ethnic minority village, and for our listeners who are not familia familiar, the Chinese population is majority Han, as An Wu herself just mentioned, being Han, but from Taiwan. In the same way, in mainland China, the majority of the population are Han, and then the remainder, 8%, are ethnic minorities or Shao Shu Minzu. And heritage schemes really work. Heritage schemes really put a lot of effort. They use imagery, they use discourse, wording, terminology to create a shared sense of collectivity so that ethnic minorities feel like they belong with the Han rather than separate. And that's a very new political tactic in more recent years. And also, of course, ethnic minorities are very diverse. How an ethnic minority, how heritage works in an ethnic minority village, for example, in Xinjiang or Tibet, is going to be very different from Guizhou, but especially when you Go to regions of China where there have been more attempts of deep oppression. Here you see how officials can weaken or remove grassroots protection for cultural heritage and replace it with a manicured and sanitized celebration of tradition and a wider outside of the kind of ethnic minority regions, Cultural heritage industry is interlaced with economic development in China today. Across the countryside, heritage schemes are attempts to remove some of the social and economic impact that the country's seen with urbanization and hollowing out of villages. So through heritage schemes and with the attempt to boost tourism, these are efforts to reverse rural to urban migration patterns and to see more rural attorneys returning to the countryside. Just a couple of statistics for listeners who might not be as familiar with the Chinese case. Since China has gone through economic development and the economic reforms in 1978, the countryside has lost over 100 million permanent residents in the last decade. And since 2000, when China's world population made up of 70%, this is now 35%. So that's in 25 years. So these are radical changes in not just the use of the land, but also just complete shifts in getting rural populations to become urban populations. So of course, the government is extremely worried about this, because if there's no rural populations, it also means there's no agriculture production and so forth. So particular under Hu Jintao's regime in the early 2000s through to 2010, he initiated the new socialist countryside, Xin Nong Cun Jiansh. And this was pretty much the first political widespread campaign to reverse some of the migration. And this was amended under Xi Jinping rule with the rule revitalization scheme Xiang Tsun Zheng Xing. So these are wider campaigns that politicians have put in forth to reverse some of this mass change that China saw in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, and still obviously is ongoing. But migration has slowed down. And Meili is one of many villages across China that are being reinvented into traditional schemes to serve the rural revitalization scheme. The traditional scheme itself was initiated in the beginning of Xi Jinping's rule in 2012. And in order for a village to become a traditional village, It needs to fulfill these four criteria. It needs to have history and culture, needs to have conservation value of ancient architecture and ongoing practices of intangible heritage. And finally, it needs to be used to have vernacular layout that fits the Wanzhang or integrity of itself. I'll return to this very important term, Wanzhong, soon. But this is just to point out that these are very ambiguous classifications. So obviously, the way that Villages get chosen are much more complicated than just seeing if they fit these groups. In 2012, when the listing was made was first initiated, 648 villages were included. 90 of those were in Guizhou. So that really points to the of the state to use heritage in Guizhou province. By 2024, there is now six listings and a total of 8,155 traditional villages across China. So to make sense of the remaking of a village itself, as has sort of been mentioned, I undertook 13 months of ethnography between 2012 and 2017. So there were first two preliminary visits and then followed by a year 11 month research period and then follow up. And the last time I returned to Meli was last autumn just for a visit, for no longer research.
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All right, yeah. So thank you so much for the introduction. And of course in chapter two, you start talking about Meili Village, right, this village. And I like the title between the claws of a Dragon. And then that really reflects on the relationship between center and perip. And so can you talk about how this has shaped Mei Li's history a little bit?
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There's nothing like it. Based on total potential value of statement credits on select purchases and other benefits, enrollments required monthly and other limits and terms apply. Learn more@americanexpress.com Business Platinum thank you so much. Unruh. Absolutely. So this idea of the center and periphery, that's a very historical concept. Throughout history, China's rulers have paid considerable attention to the maintenance of what they considered were their vast peripheral land. So the idea that the center was where the imperial power was run from, where the Chinese rulers were, and anything outside of that was the peripheral. And they saw peripheral lands, the marginal spaces, as vital to the strength of imperial governance for obvious reasons. That's where, for example, a lot of high quality timber, especially in Guizhou Dong regions, was brought to central power. But also there were all kinds of medicine and Food and all kinds of other elements, vegetation that you couldn't get where the rulers were, whether that was Beijing or previous kingdoms. So this idea of the peripheries carried a general sense of otherness that was projected onto the margins of the kingdom, with its untamed landscapes and unruly people. So in the same way, like I was just talking about the mountains being high and people who live up in the mountains perhaps escaping rule, that was something that. This very notion that carries historical significance in the Chinese context. In addition to being untamed landscapes and unruly people, the people in the margins were associated with majestic sexuality and a sense of magical power that connected them to the supernatural world. There was a rarity, to the stranger and to the strange and unfamiliar. And these shaped ideologies and orders of knowledge associated with peripheral lands and the people who inhabited them. But if you live in the peripheries, your world is your center, and that's how you define your own inclusive social orderings. So if you're in the peripheries, you have your own cosmological notion where you yourself and the collectivity that you live with is the center. You have your own rituals, your own belief systems, and you're not in the margins, but you are in the center itself. And the idea of who's in the center and who's in the peripheries are never separate ideas, but they're always relational and mutually constitutive, and they're always shifting and being strengthened or weakened. This is important because the idea of marginality and Guizhou's villages as places in the peripheries continues today in the way that people outside of Guizhou imagine the province and the way that decisions are made about government, about the future of Guizhou. So, Professor Li Anwu, you just mentioned your impression of Guizhou is of a faraway province. And in the same way, before I started my research, my friends in Beijing would warn me, be careful of the sexually ruthless men that you can encounter in Kweizhou. These representations still carry strength to this day. Right, but that's something I use in my analysis. The way of looking at what's in the center and what's in the marginal, what's in the peripheries? And I build it through a notion of scale and vantage points. Obviously not my idea. Many anthropologists before me have written about it, Marilyn Strothern, Xiang Biao, and many others. And I found it was a very helpful way of looking at the political and social questions that come into play in China's rural development projects and looking, looking at different vantage points in different scales. I'm trying to analyze three things. One, whose version of a village space is being voiced and displaced. Two, how these versions are being mediated across institutions, agents and objects to facilitate these processes. And three, how do actors learn to maneuver through these definitions that constitute heritage worlds?
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B
At this juncture, I think it's good for us to turn to chapter three, entitled Cultural Heritage and Renderings of a Village Hall. In this chapter where you talked about China's technocratic elite of knowledge workers, which includes architectural and ethnographic scholars and their teams, and probably you included in this effort, although then you subsequently became kind of an observer. Right. Of this process and all these people played in rural development. Can you talk a bit about the role of technocratic elite as a tool of drive these state led heritage schemes in China?
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A
Thank you so much. And yeah, absolutely, you're right. I was one of the considered the knowledge somebody who belonged to the technocratic elite of knowledge workers. As I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast of our discussion Anru, I mentioned that I was included in the heritage scheme paperwork which was very important. It was a very important marker because to this day it's very difficult to do long term research in the Chinese countryside as a non Chinese citizen. So being able to be being incorporated in the heritage scheme paperwork was vital for my research. But it did mean it put me in a very ambivalent position because I had a couple of duties, not many. I was generally left to my own to do things on my own. But I was expected to, I was asked, requested to help with some translation work and also I sometimes perform the role of a tour guide. So because Meili is a Trenton ton Loi, a traditional village, when there is traditional village summits held in the area, I was sometimes called beforehand to prepare, dress in dong attire and bring my loudspeaker and take the they're oftentimes scholars and the visitors out on a little tour around the village. But obviously, like I just mentioned, my role was ambivalent also because it put me in a difficult position with the villagers who were very distrusting of the heritage scheme. So I really made a large portion, I really made a large portion of my ethnography as an attempt to rebuild that trust which I felt was broken with a lot of people from the very beginning. And I turned, in all honesty, I turned. I was very critical of the heritage scheme. And each time I tried to pose, yeah, each time I tried to pose the voices of villagers who were disagreeing with the heritage project. I have found that these reports I was writing and the advice I was giving trying to represent the local population were being ignored. Yeah, but anyway, to refer to your question.
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B
No, I want to say something like at this juncture when I was reading the book, there were a lot of moments Suvi actually reflected on herself as an ethnography and researcher. And at some point I said, why did she talk so much about it? But then now you say that it makes perfect sense. Right. I think as an anthropologist, you are constantly thinking about your positionality and how you should and you would see the whole situation from different perspectives. But yeah, please, let's go to. I like this, but let's talk about the very important concept the village. What do you call that? Village hall.
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Yes. Yeah. So I refer to the technocrats as the wider collective of China's urban knowledge workers. Generally speaking, in mainly they're the architecture scholars and research team that come from some of the top universities in China and travel to this area of Guizhou to bring the needed expertise to conduct research on vernacular architecture and rural ethnic China. And their role here was a reflection of an increasing prominence of technocratic skills required to steer heritage schemes. So why is their expertise required? Because they. In more recent years, with the push to implement more planning and modeling and state led rule schemes following the guidance of what's referred to as scientific rationality, government led projects need to incorporate lots of data, lots of figures, lots of plans, lots of work that usually academic scholars, for example, can do for them. So ultimately, the research and reports that architect scholars provide create a degree of leverage across vertical state power relations, making cooperation between the expert and local officials and the administration crucial. The strength of that partnership is frequently tested, generating tensions that are triggered by the incongruencies in the interpretation of preservation and its desired outcomes at moments of failure. It also allows government officials to place blame on the work of the technocrats, giving the government an opportunity to avoid accountability and mainly itself. When I was doing my research, there were always rotating groups of scholars, many other visiting teams of researchers, architect scholars and consultants that travel through and they're trying to provide the scientific expertise and research and report making. And by doing that, I began to understand, as anybody who does any research will understand, that this idea of objective stance is expected of them. And. And this objective stance was taken on from a particular dominant gaze of the protected building and village view from the above, as Anrulee, you just mentioned the panoramic view of the village and from looking at the panoramic view, it allows people to be committed to the objectivity and establishes a detachment from the inhabitants of a place, but also from the buildings and the site itself. And here I'm drawing on Thomas Yarrow's work, who works in the uk, and looking at conservation plans in Scotland. So it's a very different context. But I began to understand that, of course, if you're putting together a heritage scheme that follows certain scientific measures, they oftentimes do replicate general models from one another. So again, the commitment to objectivity provides a privileged stance of the objective researcher and is sustained by the dominant gaze of the view from above. So, Anwar, you just mentioned a lot of my chapters and the writing that I do incorporates my positionality, because I'm also trying to create a bit of a different perspective from what not all but many anthropologists do admit to, is that the work that we do is hardly ever objective. When we go out to do fieldwork and ethnography, we carry our bodies with us, we carry our own history with us. We are perceived by the people that we study in a particular way based, based on our bodies and our histories. And that idea of objectivity is very difficult to maintain, especially if you're doing long term research with a particular group of people. So that's also what I'm trying to do there is trying to bring up larger discussions around objectivity and the work that social scientists do. If we're looking from the panoramic view of a village, you're not necessarily listening to the voices of the people. And the closer you move to the village village, the closer you're hearing what people are saying and very often hearing the ruptures and the conflicts that also make up a village community.
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B
Right. And which is a perfect moment for us to turn to the next few chapters when Suvi delves into the village life. Right. And how local residents negotiate all these demands from outside. So chapter four, where planning and materiality intersect, integrates the workings of tangible and intangible heritage schemes in Meili to show the contested natures of heritage projects in general. So through ethnography, Suvi, you shed light on the instances of compromise between villagers and key actors working on heritage preservation. So where do these moments of compromise derive from? And what role do they have in the decision making processes involved in Mainly's heritage scheme?
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Thank you for the question. Yeah. So this chapter refers to the tangible heritage of Meili to show the contested matters of heritage projects. And in Meli, like many villages in China and beyond, when they become a Heritage site. The people who live. If there are a population that continue living in the heritage site, they're often faced with limitations or restrictions. In Meili, the restrictions came in not being allowed to change the vernacular layout or the wanzhong of the village. This means the old wooden homes that people live in cannot be modified. But in actuality, many people in Meili don't want to live in old wooden homes. They've seen how people in cities live. They've seen how luxurious a tall mansion is. They want those comforts and sense of status just like anybody else, but they can't do anything about it. So there are numerous examples in Melee where there's tension and disapproval of heritage schemes. And these tensions and disapproval are very much they circulate around discussions around materiality. When you actually study heritage schemes and everyday planning that gets put forth, you learn that there are moments of compromise between villagers and key actors working on preservation and anwu. Like you just mentioned, I look at compromise through materiality to depict how people respond to get around or reshape plan plans at the ground level. Planning is after all, never a fixed process. But the outcome of plans materialize in response to the social dynamics of the people involved. And the residents in Melee find means to get around plans without disrupting the objectives of the local cultural heritage administration. By identifying contradictions and gaps in the planning, they rework themselves into instance of a compromise. So in my research, I found that material compromises were coming to the fore to resolve disputes and tensions and to voice villagers needs want in the heritage scheme. On one occasion, in preparation for a big traditional village summit tour, orders came from above to replace all brick exteriors with mud. So sometimes the houses are fenced by brick exterior from their neighbors by a brick wall. And these had to be painted with mud to add a rustic element to the village so that it conforms to an authentic countryside appearance. So locals found this choice of mud to be very offensive. From their perspective, mud is unworked material that derived straight from earth. It carries stigma of backwardness. And mud was deemed inferior to brick, a material shaped by human and mechanical production and labor. To ensure that their plans to use mud could be revoked, village leaders such as the village leader and village secretary Tunjong, organized meetings with their peers to decide how they can try to find compromise with authorities. And they did this claiming that mud goes against Dong ethnic minority culture, which isn't entirely accurate, but it was an example of them drawing on the same logic of argument as cultural borough do to compromise the material outcome. Because after all, their concern with Dong ethnic minority traditions should be most important the local authorities. The village leader could have just said the mud looks cheap and ugly and we hate it. But instead they employed political concepts so that although undeniably ambiguous, they were able to use verbal cues that resonated with ethnicity, tradition and authenticity. These terms are very important and they're constantly circulating among urban elites. So this is an example of many where material compromise becomes a way that people make decisions in their village exterior. And even though the outcome of this particular mud wall didn't meet anybody's these expectations, but at least they didn't end up using mud, which went against the villagers wishes. So I just finally want to add, before we move to the next question, that this to reiterate why materiality is so important and crucial in heritage schemes. And here I draw on David Lowenthal, historian, geographer David Lowenthal's work, who reminds us that for heritage sites, the appraisal of its value is embedded in the material form and its properties. The authenticity of an object, place is self evident and innate in its material form. It's a dominant consensual view of tangible heritage that prioritizes stylistic inventiveness, form and substance of materiality, and thereby oftentimes overlooks the more intimate social, economic, historical and political conditions that define materiality. And in one way and another, this kind of goes, comes into kind of goes against or draws on a lot of it doesn't share much similarity with Chinese notions of something that might be valuable because it's been imitated and replicated to perfection. So for example, something like a Chinese garden oftentimes is used as an example refer to a Chinese garden that is considered that has stones that appear like mountains from a particular region, like, or has a lake that looks like a lake from Hangzhou or Zhejiang, but it's in actuality in Beijing. These kind of gardens are replications, miniature versions of landscapes. And its beauty, its value, its worth, is not in its materiality, but in the imitation, in its imitation of reality itself. So here there's different kind of frictions, perhaps in one way or another, in how the importance of materiality comes into play.
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B
Right. And I think then later we will come to discuss how then Suvi tells us that materiality actually is not the first and foremost important thing in binding the village together and the culture together. Right, but before we go to that, then the next two chapters actually are interesting because Suvi talks about men and women and how they each in their kind of designated roles, responding the heritage schemes. So in chapter five, Laboring Self Reliance and Masculinities, it centers on how three male rural returnees, right, they migrated to the city, but now they returned to Mali, continuously shape, adjust and redefine what it means to be a rural subject. And drawing on this term self reliant masculinity, can you tell us what that means within the framework of what kinds of labor and consumption male returnees have access to?
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Yeah, absolutely. Before I dive into the question itself, just a bit of kind of context. So labor and consumption have changed radically in mainland China over the past 45 years. And this really cannot be underestimated Coming out of Mao Zedong rule collectivity. Consumption wasn't even, you know, something that people, people could engage in. This has changed dramatically, you know, in the past 45 years. And China's prominent role as a rising global power, triggered by over three decades of rapid econ economic expansion, means that few countries have had the infrastructure to engage in ambitious projects of eliminating poverty on the same scale as China has. In rural China in particular, the biggest marker of some of the biggest changes that came to people's lives was the introduction of the household responsibility system. Collective farming, which was introduced during Mao's rule, was replaced with land use assigned to individual families who kept surpluses. This policy led to the gradual detachment of the state since the 1980s. And with this attachment from people in their land, it also led way to the mass rule to urban migration phenomenon which we've already touched upon in some areas of China, these policies has pulled out many people out of poverty, but in other regions it has not. At the same time, in more recent years, we hear the goals of Xi Jinping where leading up to the pandemic, he remained committed that China will lift 70 million people above the poverty threshold at the rate of over 36,000 thousand people per day. And since these figures have entered the popular imagination and has been repeated countless times, at least prior to the pandemic, hearing these promises and having experienced a trail of campaigns come and go over the years, people in Meilee are well aware that state led campaigns are interrupted, suspended promises made that are not counted, kept, and sometimes projects merely fold into the next. And yet, what I was always taken aback by, regardless of the distrust and the lack of faith in pulling these promises, there was still the deeper hope that economic development will one day materialize. Like in a lot of rural lands in southwest China, relying on agrarian lifestyle is pretty much unprofitable. And many villages are faced with with near total collapse of Rural public goods. At the same time, it's also important to keep in mind that land holds value not just as money and business, but as lifelong security. And for this reason, a lot of people continue to ensure that they uphold their land. Rice cultivation, planting gardens and vegetables and so forth, which requires the 12 month cycle. So in this chapter itself, what I'm trying to do is look at the labor of men and how they perform labor, in particular agricultural work and care for the land, and how they juxtapose that with urban technocrats. In this discussion, I'm going to introduce Uncle Long, even though in the chapter itself I refer to three men. But Uncle Long himself carried so much pride in his peasantry attributes such as hard work and frugality, unlike many others in Meili. When I first entered fieldwork, he was eager to take me to the paddy field and help him with the harvest season. When I first arrived, there was another family who agreed to let me help with the harvest and I almost cut my finger off. So after that it was, after that it was very difficult for anybody family to take me with them. But Uncle Long. But Uncle Long was committed to the thought that I can be of help. And his enthusiasm, his enthusiasm also was a way of him suggesting that I wasn't just a guest who needed to see, sit and wait for, you know, wait for the, the meal or whatever it might be. But his eagerness to put me to work signals his attitudes towards labor and being a productive individual, a subject that he often spoke about through his own life narrative. He carried pride in the tough labor that he does. And this also goes back to not just his agricultural work, but like as we mentioned many times so far, like many others, Uncle Long is one of the millions who have committed to work in the country's economic development. So he's worked many winters in northern China on the rail tracks, worked in factories, really difficult, long term, tedious jobs. But with all of that work, he's been able to collect money together and return home. And he and his wife, and now his son and grandchildren live in a very big guest house, one of the first that was set up in the village and. And by maintaining a business as a guest house, they also make sure that their agricultural work is still being tended to. So I refer to Uncle Long and the others in the chapter as a way of talking about a self reliant image that they carry and the pride that they carry that they use then to mock other people, how they mock urban, urban knowledge workers and technocratic elites who come to the village and make decisions on their lives without necessarily knowing how to do the labor. So Uncle Long has this wonderful quote that he told me he was hosting some of the technocratic elite. So he saw what they were doing on a daily basis and he told me, look at them. They think they're like professionals, but all they really do is look at their maps and charts. One of them sleeps all day and the other threats to girls on girls all night. They won't get anything anything done really. The problem is that they don't know how to get their hands dirty. And to do the work at Capella University. Learning online doesn't mean learning alone. You'll get support from people who care about your success, like your enrollment specialist who gets to know you and the goals you'd like to achieve. You'll also get a designated academic coach who's with you throughout your entire program. Plus, career coaches are available to help you navigate your professional goals. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at Capella. Edu. Jamie Lee Curtis and Lindsay Lohan are back in Disney's Freakier Friday, now streaming on Disney. We switched bodies.
- [47:42]
B
I am freaking out right now.
- [47:44]
A
I think I just peed a little. It's an absolute riot. And the only movie that can be described as so much weirder than the last time. What last time? It's the Frequel. You ready?
- [47:55]
B
We've been waiting for that absolutely slays.
- [47:58]
A
Disney's Freakier Friday now streaming on Disney. Rated pg. So this kind of skepticism towards the urban experts and their inability to work to get their hands dirty is in a way you could kind of refer to it and again, James Scott's terms, who's an expert, it's the real labor in the binary kind of description of the Matisse, the knowledge worker from the techne. So there's that kind of same dichotomy. And the reason why this is really important to pay attention to, I argue, is because the state expects villagers to be self reliant. And doing so, they expect them to be independent. But they also provide labor schemes that are extremely exploited. And it speaks to the bigger predicament that even as labor and consumption offer social prestige and opportunities for China's ethnic minorities to imagine themselves as cosmopolitan and imagine themselves as modern subjects and to, you know, the desire to spend money and consume, it's constantly being masked by the lack of consumer power that marginalized populations continue to live with in their precarity. And this is really important because it's something that I Learned the heritage scheme does not attend to at all.
- [49:13]
B
Thank you. And of course this analysis and observation of males perspectives and lives is then complemented by the next chapter, Women's work as weavers of tradition. And this chapter examined the marginalization of women's work as the labor of those left behind. And you look at this through the marketization of textiles and crafts that get redefined as a form of tradition through the intangible cultural industry. And women in mainly are expected to become entrepreneurs and produce ethnic crafts for the wider economy. Although you also pointed out that they don't really get paid for their work.
- [50:01]
A
Right.
- [50:02]
B
So can you talk a bit more about this procedure and how it changes the associations women have to their artisanal practices?
- [50:11]
A
Absolutely. To begin, I'm going to provide a bit more of context to what these artisanal practices are and also the bit of a context to the wider the relevance this has in China today. So unlike the Maoist era when political power was ready to turn all culture into politics, the new political and economic climate of the reform period has given way to the revised of ethnic cultural practices whereby culture coexists with political appropriation as a source to be exploited and marketed. So in post Mao China you see this capital accumulation, how it seeps into rural China through state led development and rebrands, places customs, people into tradition. And this rebranding, rural citizens are expected to take on new traits such as individual responsibility to empower their entrepreneurial potential regardless of the market conditions that they live in. So I'm looking at how this, in this chapter in particular, I'm looking at how the branding of ethnic craft industry comes into play in mainland as it's gained momentum. But first, a bit of context. So in mainland, most strong women over the age of 40 containers continued textile and craft practices that have been passed down over generations. So during the rest of the year, during the winter season, these women commit to long hours of outside the time they commit to agricultural labor. A handful of women continue to tend their needlework and weaving practices, either first thing in the morning or late in the afternoon before it gets dark. Women skilled in needlework spend hours producing intricately colorful embroidered patterns to embellishments, baby carriers and hats for newborns, shoe insoles and vibrant bands sewn onto the sleeves of women's blouses, which to this day Most women over 40 continue to wear the Dong blouse, which is a deep blue and it's, it's kind of like Qing dynasty clothing where it comes the, it's sewn by the sides of the. So it's clasped on the sides of the body rather than the front. Front. So not only do these crafts act as important material objects, being part of everyday attire that can bring protection for the wearer. Needlework is also used as a measure of a woman's marital quality. So if a woman can give, it's. Historically, when women gave handmade braided bands to their crushes before marriage, it was a token of affection and this was a way of kind of flirting and showing interest to a potential male partner. Partner. Alongside these handicrafts, the same group of women who are skilled in needlework are also skilled in textile production and weaving. Generally, two types of cloth are made and continue to be woven. They are woven on narrow 30 to 40 centimeter wide looms. And usually women will weave plain woven natural fabric which is later dyed with indigo and indigo and white striped fabric. And the white striped. Striped Indigo. White striped fabric is offered as a gift for mothers to daughters at marriage. And it's used for bedding and. Yeah, it's used for bedding. Dyed textiles are. If a fabric itself gets dyed with indigo, it's worn. And that's also a measure of a woman's worth. If a male singer who participates in singing competitions and travels in a beautiful indigo clothing, it's a sign that they're married to a. A competent wife. But in addition to indigo dyed clothing used in festivities, dyed textiles also serve as currency at the gates of the underworld, whereby it's used to pay back life debts. And it's vital that it's given to ensure a smooth route away from the world of the living. The dyed textile is also symbolic. It can be in a form of paper that's rolled up that looks like it's dyed. It doesn't necessarily have to be the dyed textile as a itself, but the deceased will wear dyed textiles as funeral attire. And it's these handmade textiles prepared by female kin that are worthy of clothing the dead, which is a role taken on by daughters, or when there's no daughters in the family, the sisters. And weaving and dyeing the finest quality fabric for the last change of dress is an expression of love and care that binds the giver and the receiver. And it's this bind that begins with the preparation of bundles of handmade textiles woven with cotton thread on narrow looms. White cotton is then either stored away or dyed with natural indigo, making a bond between the maker's womb, the very element that conceives life, and the clothing worn by the dead. So there was this General understanding that if a woman is pregnant or menstruating, they shouldn't go near the indigo bath where the cloth is being dyed because of the threat of them ruining the dye itself. So there was this general association with the maker's womb and the cloth that they were producing, producing. So that's a bit of context. But regardless of the popularity of these traditions among women of an older generation, the practice of passing down textile traditions is becoming increasingly rare. This is partly attributed to the vast rule to urban migration, but it also is because of large local populations, such as children, who rarely spend much time in the village because they go to school in the county town or county township. So they don't have time to learn these craft traditions. So it's more recently that women's communes have been set up, or one in particular during my field work that was being led by urban designers from cities such as Beijing. And women were expected to. Women that joined the commune were expected to empower entrepreneurial potential through rural schemes to liberate them and the market economy. It meant that when they produced, let's say, a pillow cover, the money got distributed across everybody in the commune, regardless of how many people actually made the pillow cover. And the reason why there was of course, the craft making, the artisans war woman. But the attraction to kind of set up a commune, I think really speaks to the wider assumption that women are bound to the role of being guardians and transmitters of tradition. So it's easy to kind of brand that. But on top of that, so what I was studying the commune and looking at, as Anri, you just mentioned the kind of exploitation that was happening there because people weren't necessarily being paid or they were being. The women who really were working more weren't. They felt like they weren't getting paid for their work because they're someone else in the commune. The money was distributed equally. And also there was a lot of. There were events. Because it's a commune, it meant that the work by one artisanal woman was not. If there was an exhibition in Beijing or outside in the city, it meant that the actual artisan's name was not on display. If they were displaying a pillow cover made out of dung fabric, it meant the entire commune's name was on display. And the maker of that pillow cover, I was told, was very upset by these decisions because it meant that their own labor was being sidelined in favor of this imagination that everyone's equal and can be egalitarian. And that's of course not unique to Guizhou. Not Unique to China, it kind of speaks to much wider projects, development schemes everywhere that seek to empower communities and kind of there's this promise that communities are the secret to the good life. But oftentimes in these schemes and development projects, it's experts who intervene and secure that goodness. So that's what I'm trying to do in that chapter, looking at how the process of textiles and crafts are marketed and branded into tradition and looking at how in that process, process, women's work gets passed over and neglected. Rather than transforming gender hierarchies, rather than liberating women necessarily, woman's participation remains and their emancipation remains tenuous in the context of Mele today.
- [58:43]
B
Right, right. And of course, I mean another. Another cultural element that is highlighted by the heritage project is the single performance that you mentioned just now. So this actually is the following chapter, fostering a tiger that grows up to attack you, which is really ironic, but really describe this chapter. Well, so in this chapter you look at the social unraveling that happens through existing power dynamics that have been supercharged by Meilee's heritage development. And then here we are talking about singing performances. Why do singing performances become a contested site of competition? And what impact does it have on the local community?
- [59:38]
A
Yeah, so again, a bit of context. So the Dong people are frequently associated with their musical attributes. Again, the Dong ethnic minority group is a relatively small one, but if anybody does know anything about them, it's usually they might know something about their singing or their musical skills. And today this link between the Dong people and their natural gift for song is strengthened by Chinese travel programs and marketing campaigns. But even historically, it can be traced to literature. And travelers who venture to dumb regions of China often refer to their singing. This can go as far back as the Ming Dynasty, when the famous writings of Kuan Lu, the historian is compilation of dictionary about the South China tria. He claims that the Dong people, quote, do not like killing and have a good command of music. They play the fiddle and the bamboo mouth organ. They sing love songs with their eyes closed and bend up and down and kick their feet to perform a simple minded dance, unquote. So since then, there's a lot of Dong scholars who continue to reiterate this very notion assumption that the Dong people are da, a docile population with a musical gift. I'm trying to scrap that. What I'm trying to do in the chapter is look beyond these romanticized stereotypes of the dumb people. I was often struck by just how much violence and aggression was on display. And it was Very difficult in my field work just because I was living with these people. I depended on a lot of the people and then suddenly you see a very brutal, aggressive side of them. It made me turn away and not pay attention. But the more time I spent there, the more I kind of became numb to it, which I thought, which is quite scary. But that's exactly, I guess, how many people in the village experienced it because there was quite a lot of violence on display. And violence did also come on display through song competitions, which I'll return to soon. But beyond the stereotypes associated with Dong people as being docile and having a natural gift for song, there's also other scholars like musicologist Catherine Ingram, who shows how song remains a vocal part of Dong people's mode of passing down inherited knowledge. After all, the Dong people don't have written text. So song is a very important form of expression and dialogue and passing down knowledge. So up to this day, although less so, popular singing practices when it's when people perform within the village itself just for rather than performing for outside audiences. Popular singing practices include antiphonal face to face Dwiku songs. These are what's considered perhaps more authentic to the people in Meili. One part songs are commonly paired with drinking if a special guest comes from outside, or when bidding farewell to a bride the night before her wedding. But perhaps the most popular Dwikula is songs expressing love. And even though this is hardly not much practice today, but the generation older than me would often refer to the past where they they would court their love interests by going to their house and singing. So flirtatious behavior was expressed through song, and it was often a way of testing the love of her sweetheart. Interestingly, even though love songs are not sung face to face anymore, I did see how it's being moved online. Large WeChat groups of old school friends would make their own chats and they would sing voice messages where they sing whenever another but outside of the singing for Dong audiences. When Dong song is performed for non Dong audiences, it's referred to as going on stage to sing. And here I'm referring to a lot of Catherine Ingram's work. And it's important to differentiate that this is different from the singing that's done to Dong audiences. Probably the most common song genre when it's song going on stage to sing is the Dong Daeg song, which is a polyphonic song genre sung in single sex choirs from five to 30 singers. It's composed of two part choral singing led by one to three high vocalists who Synchronically coordinate the song's tone from a low pitch that rises higher from accompanying the low line vocalist who carries the melody of the the song. It's stamped as an ethnic marker of the Dong people. And Dong Big Song has received considerable attention both domestically and abroad. It's even gained UNESCO heritage appeal. So in Meili, when people go on stage to sing, they usually do so when tourists are paying them or for cultural events arranged by local governments. So for example, government sponsored singing competition. Although most choir members who go on stage to sing sing for a hobby, there are external merits that come with it. They'll get paid for their choral singing. But also if you're very good at singing, you might gain recognition that might lead to full time employment in the local government seat or in tertiary education. And travel? Travel, absolutely always. There was even talks of one of the local villagers was attending university and she was taking classes in ethnic minority singing. And this is pre pandemic, but she told me that there's even hopes that they'll go to Paris to sing. So travel and migration is a very important avenue through Dong Daek song. So it's become a form of service labor that has to measure. At the same time, it's become a service labor that measures up to standardized aesthetics. The rhythm and tempo of a song has changed as it's been performed. It's been short. Lyrics have become more simple. The appearance or or emotion of the choir have to be of a certain kind and standardized. So they need to conform to ideal appearances. And also very important to note, when it's a female choir, it's generally favored to have younger singers. So that's a very new attribute and something that really calls us a lot of tension in the village and a lot of conflict because the older choirs were made up of women from the older age group and they would sing songs that were perhaps more authentic to the singing style. But as there's new merits to join in choirs, a lot of men in the village are seeking out family members, female family members, to join choirs that they lead. And they place the younger singers at the front and hide if there are older singers, usually at the back. So basically what I'm doing in that chapter is I'm showing how these discriminatory methods of choosing choir members based on age and their relationship to other family members, existing power structures, how it leads to verbal and physical fights, and how it unearths widespread conflict across the village. And the reason why I think this is so important that to write about and to pay attention to when we do research in heritage schemes is that oftentimes these kind of singing performances or what gets introduced through heritage projects create battlefields of cultural politics. And it can create a lot of tensions in people's everyday lives. Anyway, the point here is that heritage schemes have an effect and people's lives, they shape people's lives.
- [67:34]
B
Right, Right. Thank you. And the following chapter actually is an interesting one. Remaking a village home and where the spider rests.
- [67:43]
A
Right.
- [67:44]
B
On the surface. Well, this chapter talks about the death rituals. And on the surface, it seems to be unrelated to the heritage scheme. But I think Silvi Rajio did a good job to bring us back to the local perspective. Right. What is most important and what is. Is so core to the Tung culture here. So here, this chapter make it clear that for MLI's residence, the past is not something preserved in things, like we said, materiality such as buildings or old stones, but in the ongoing human relationships both to the dead and the living, therefore the death rituals. So these relationships bond the living and the dead in a landscape cosmology. So can you talk a little bit more about that? And what does it tell us about how ritual holds the village relations together?
- [68:41]
A
Yes, absolutely. So this is my last ethnographic chapter. And what I'm doing here is I'm showing the active involvement of kin at the start of preparations for death. I trace the moment when friends and family gather at the wake to express sorrow or pass the time gambling. The. The whole. The chapter begins at the moment of death. It then proceeds to locating the burial site. The requirements to follow the movement of the lost soul that's departed from the human body at the moment of death, how to catch the soul and how to consume the soul. Even so, the people in Meili have a ritual where after the day that. That a body's been buried, they bring rice to feed a spider. And they catch the spider. And three days after the burial, the sons of the family eat the rice. So there is this kind of constant kind of rejuvenation of the dead and the living. And why this is so important is that it shows how the centering of the land through direct flow and the kind of locating, the marking of the grave, the consuming of the spider soul that emerges from the land, the physical landscape, the kind of need to reconnect the deceased with the spatial orientation, how all of this is a way to regenerate the endogenous, often male line. These series of events that make up funeral rites inform us about the continuation of social practices that are Inherited and passed down from one generation, generation to the next. They're also carefully selected, socially engineered according to local beliefs and modern practicalities. They remind us of the temporality of the past and can also be understood as invented traditions in the same way that Hobbes, Palm and Ranger referred to it, which is what we started this podcast tradition is made visible in its continuity through rituals whereby enacting them, villagers are facing one another another and become the holders of their tradition. So, and also important to pay attention here, is that their tradition is a fusion of multiple overlapping traditions across histories and encounters that are constantly being redefined. The ritual creates and upholds a feeling of collective effervescence and a sense of loyalty. Within collectives that are tied to places, people and events, local festivities and rituals bring opportunities for residents to claim their village space and uphold a sense of social unity, which is of what many anthropologists before me have already showed as a strail of knowledge that is passed down from one generation to the next. For the residents of Meili, tradition is lived through ritual. And in concluding this book by paying attention to their ritual, I'm kind of reversing the perspective of the village with which I began, with which employed a panoramic view taken above from above by the technocrats. From that vantage point, Meili appears to be a traditional village that exists on the margins, far from the center. I conclude by discussing a perspective scale that locates the village as a center defined by its own inclusive ordering. In this inclusive ordering, the landscape that makes up Meli is like all living matter, reciprocating the bestowal of care and protection as configurations of a larger cosmological framework that the village says sustains the elements of landscape construct a sense of bounded territory. From this perspective, they radio out from the village from looking upwards to interpret and act on the world where they themselves are the center.
- [72:27]
B
Right, thank you. Now we come to the conclusion. In the conclusion, you return to one of the main themes of your book, remaking, and you shift from looking at the village that is being remade to look at the nation remade about that.
- [72:47]
A
So in the process that China has grown into a market nation, heritage projects have become consumer entities that carry a deep political weight, born in response to loss or the fear of loss. Heritage sites resemble shelters from the present moment to evoke nostalgic memories belonging to a time no more. The heritage industry clings on to carefully selected remnants of the past and names it tradition to give weight to the present, to give meaning and purpose to the the present and to glorify the present through a collectively shared narrative. Faced with a twin desire to modernize and develop while simultaneously conserving the national essence of the nation, heritage sites have become battlegrounds of contested meaning around tradition. These contested meanings are deeply intertwined with the CCP's notion motivations to display a carefully selected area of his heritage as a means to celebrate the unification of a multi ethnic nation state and to distort and conceal any breaks in its continuity. Under Xi Jinping's tightening crip, the Chinese population is increasingly confronted with campaigns that uphold a univocal depiction of national identity through a statist interpretation of history and tradition. Such campaigns that revolve around the politics of memory have been passed on through previous leaders prior to Xi's rule, deeply receded into the politics of nationhood. The tradition that gets embraced is one that also blocks out unwanted shadows of.
- [74:14]
B
The past before we end our interview, I want to ask you what you have been working on since the invention of tradition in China was released. Yes, great, please.
- [74:30]
A
Yeah, so where I just ended this idea idea of tradition that gets embraced is also one that blocks out unwanted shadows of the past. That's very much central to my current project that I've been working on. I continue on this topic of asking questions like how far reaching is the political recruitment of history. I also continue themes around politics of remembering and forgetting, but I do this no longer in rural setting in China or my project goes into look at historical events during Mao Zedong rule, looking at how intellectuals intellectual families were treated and the memories that were transmitted from the children of intellectual families to present day. The project itself starts in my own family history. So I I'm looking at the migration of my grandparents from Europe to China to Beijing and my father and uncle growing up in a mixed race family in a university ground. So I'm looking at trying to understand their life histories. I'm trying to understand my grandparents life histories through the letters that they wrote to one another and the photos that they preserved. And I've collected life histories centuries working with my uncle and my father and also returning to Beijing to do fieldwork with the children. Sorry, no longer children. The friends, the generation that grew up with my father. So it's basically a study on the university ground in Beijing BEI Shuddha Beijing Srivantashi and trying to understand the generation that grew up under Maoist rule in intellectual families. Their experiences both the very euphoric, both the very the moments of zeal and deep drive and joy and also the moments in history and events that turned very terrifying and were almost felt like a nightmare and traumatizing, faced by political violence and the political violence they saw their past parents being placed into. So it's a study on transmission of memory, which is, of course, what heritage is also about, but it's much more of a personal, intimate project. And also it's much more focusing on historical events and in particular, the political campaigning that shaped this generation that grew up in one way to another, moments of trauma and intense political stigmatization and exclusion.
- [77:21]
B
Yeah. Thank you. And I imagine the listeners of this show really look forward to hearing more about how it unfolds. And probably in no time, we're going to invite you back to have another book discussion. But for now, I want to thank thank you for putting time aside and for joining us today to talk about your work. And also thank you to our listeners for tuning in to New Books Network. Have a great weekend. And to Suvie and to all of you in the wider world, thank you.
- [77:55]
A
Thank you so much. Professor Lee, it's been such a joy talking to you and to share my insight. And thank you so much, Liz, listeners and everybody who tuned in. Goodbye.