Charles Stafford

Numbers and the natural history of imagining the self in Taiwan and China

In the Chinese cultural tradition, numbers may be seen as meaningful, creative, even poetic things, and they figure prominently in accounts of the self. Rather than ‘reducing people to numbers’, quantification is used – by at least some people some of the time – as a mode of differentiating themselves from others, a means of narrating unique life experiences. This paper explores the role of numbers in accounts of the self, drawing primarily on a case study of one woman from rural Taiwan. It is suggested that a natural historical framework can help illuminate numbers and number systems as Chinese technologies of the imagination.

Introduction: reason and passion – the parallel worlds of ethnography and biography

The Introduction sets the frame for the issue, and draws out the interconnections between the essays through a discussion of our three core themes: biography, its transmission, and associated moral resonances and implications. We show how this collection differs from earlier reflexive and gendered approaches in arguing for a more integrated vision of ethnography and biography. We highlight how the biographical and the ethnographic are thoroughly entangled in relation to the conditions of possibility that we share and in which we act, as well as in the open-ended process of attending to the here and now, the hidden and the embedded, from multiple perspectives. Accordingly, we recuperate biography for the ethnographic project, not as a tangential exercise but by placing it, as a morally-inflected exercise of transmission, at the centre of our issue.

Being careful what you wish for: The case of happiness in China

This article takes ethnographic material from rural China and Taiwan and relates it to recent theories and findings in the psychology and economics of happiness. In brief, psychologists suggest that humans are not on the whole very good at “affective forecasting,” that is, at predicting their own emotions; this is consequential when, for example, they pursue money in order to be happy—not realizing that having more money will probably not, in fact, make them happier. Drawing on ethnographic findings, I suggest that people in China and Taiwan are often, in fact, as concerned with predicting the emotions of others as in predicting their own emotions. I then consider this in relation to Chinese family projects where the pursuit of wealth—“for family happiness”—appears to be a shared goal, as well as considering families in which this shared goal has to some extent, and sometimes for very different reasons, been lost.

Some qualitative mathematics in China

In this article, inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s comments on ‘qualitative mathematics’, I outline some features of Chinese cultural practices related to number and quantification. More specifically, I note that Chinese numerological practices are embedded in a more generally ‘structuralist’ and mathematical way of conceiving experience; that taken together they comprise a loose, and even ‘creative’ (rather than precise/rationalistic) type of life-accounting; and that number use in China is often emotionally loaded.

The Roads of Chinese Childhood: Learning and Identification in Angang.

List of illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Part I. Background: Introduction: 1. Two roads Part II. Angang: 2. Ghosts are not connexions 3. The proper way of being a person 4. Textbook mothers and frugal children 5. Red envelopes and the cycle of yang 6. Going forward bravely 7. Divining children 8. Dangerous rituals 9. Conclusion Part III. Epilogue: 10. Notes on childhood in northeastern China Notes Glossary References Index.