Donald S. Sutton

Ritual, Cultural Standardization, and Orthopraxy in China Reconsidering James L. Watson’s Ideas

This special issue contains five reassessments of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on the role of ritual in cultural standardization: Kenneth Pomeranz (History, UC Irvine) examines the Bixia yuanjun cult; Michael Szonyi (East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard) analyzes the Five Emperors’ cult and ancestral sacrifices in Fuzhou; Paul Katz (Modern History, Academia Sinica) discusses the cult of Marshal Wen and blood sacrifices to banners; Melissa Brown (Anthropological Sciences, Stanford) takes up the case of frontier acculturation; and Donald Sutton (History, Carnegie Mellon) looks at death rituals. To round out the special issue, Professor Watson adds his own rejoinder. On the basis of these essays and other recent scholarship, the introduction in turn questions the effectiveness of state standardization, outlines the phenomenon of heteroprax standardization, argues that “pseudo-orthoprax” local elites subverted the state’s cultural policies, reconsiders the applicability of the paired terms “ritual” and “belief,” and underlines the subjectivity of the notion of Chineseness.

From Credulity to Scorn: Confucians Confront the Spirit Mediums in Late Imperial China

Aversion for shamans or spirit mediums pervades Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) publications of all varieties. The legal code provided that a doctor who accidentally killed a patient was simply forbidden to practice, but a spirit medium or Daoist priest who did so while using heterodox (yiduan) healing techniques was strangled. The gazetteers celebrated local hermits, Daoist priests, Buddhist monks and the workers of medical miracles, but individual mediums became part of the historical record only as the cause or beneficiary of Confucian good works, like Cao E, who committed suicide in 143 CE after her spirit medium father drowned performing a water-side ritual, and a late-Ming fellow-regional who gave up his own life in place of his father, sentenced for sorcery. 4 There was also the rare instance where a shrine erected in memory of an apotheosized spirit medium was too popular to ignore. At the end of the Qing period, when spirit mediums were still wide-

Violence and Ethnicity on a Qing Colonial Frontier: Customary and Statutory Law in the Eighteenth-Century Miao Pale

No less than in modern times, law under imperial systems can do many things. Its enactment can be a focus for bureaucratic debate and struggle. Its implementation may provoke bitter resistance or creative adaptations. It can be ignored or it can spur unpredictable social change. In eighteenth-century southwestern China, law did all this: issues of law are paramount in the burst of Qing (1644–1911) expansion and Han Chinese colonization which brought many local non-Han societies directly under imperial governance for the first time. This paper examines both its development and its effects in the remote region of the Eastern Miao (Hmong) (see map), a group based on settled agriculture in the Hunan/Guizhou provincial border zone west of the Yuan river. It begins with administrative incorporation (which occurred in two stages in 1703–4 and 1727–32) and ends on the eve of the Miao uprising and its suppression in the 1790s.

Consuming Counterrevolution: The Ritual and Culture of Cannibalism in Wuxuan, Guangxi, China, May to July 1968

People are eating each other, came the message from southern Guangxi to Peking in the early summer of 1968, as the violent phase of the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close. When militia reinforcements arrived in Wuxuan, parts of decomposing corpses still festooned the town center (Zheng 1993:2–3). No proper investigation was conducted, however, for this was a county in which order had already been imposed and the rebels had been crushed. Only in 1981–83, long after the Gang of Four had collapsed, was an investigation team sent into the county. It compiled a list of those eaten and a number of the ringleaders in cannibalism. Fifteen were jailed, and 130 Party members and cadres were disciplined. The Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region announced the expulsion from the Party of all who had eaten human flesh.1 But the regulations were withdrawn quickly for fear that the document would be slipped out to Hong Kong and reveal this episode of cannibalism to the world (Zheng 1993:52).

Recasting Religion and Ethnicity: Tourism and Socialism in Northern Sichuan, 1992–2005

In China, as in the cases examined elsewhere in this book, imperialism has shaped the idea of “religion” —though imperialism will require redefinition—and there were marked continuities in how religious faith was cast in postcolonial times.1 Like other contributors, we hypothesize that along with officials, locals have also been agents in deciding how “religion” was understood and practised. Using documentary and ethnographic evidence, our case study looks both at contemporary policy in the People’s Republic and at its origins in late imperial and Republican China, and evaluates how religious policy has been manipulated and evaded on the ground. Recognizing that ethno-religion is a key manifestation of religion in China, we focus on a multiethnic site on the inner western periphery; and in view of the recent cultural and economic impact of tourism on religion, we select for examination a place that has become a tourist Mecca for east coast urban Chinese and since 1992 a World Heritage site.

Death Rites and Chinese Culture Standardization and Variation in Ming and Qing Times

This essay argues for a modification of James L. Watson’s influential ideas on official cultural standardization via ritual in late imperial China. Focusing on Watson’s introduction to Death Ritual in Late Imperial and Modern China, co-edited with Evelyn Rawski (1988), it refutes Watson’s hypothesis that officials deliberately confined themselves to effective reform of death rituals in the period before the corpse’s expulsion from the community: gazetteers show that officials tried—and failed—to modify numerous practices, both before and after expulsion. The essay proposes that some reported orthoprax standardization was illusory, resulting from defensive, subversive, or self-deceiving writings of local elites, and it also recognizes forms of unofficial standardization that did not follow Zhu Xi’s Family Rituals. In explaining resistance to official standardization, it emphasizes local agency: as key sites of culturally appropriate emotional expression and as important vehicles for upholding and redrawing local status, funerals tended to develop distinct regional patterns and ramifying variation within them.

German Advice and Residual Warlordism in the Nanking Decade: Influences on Nationalist Military Training and Strategy

Some 150 Germans in all served as advisers to Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek (Jiang Jieshi) in the decade between the Guomindangs Northern Expedition against the warlords (1927-28) and the end of the first year of Japans full-scale invasion. Their importance to a government struggling to survive and modernize in the face of Japanese aggression and the threat of rural-based communism is recognized, and several studies describe the diplomacy and work of the unofficial mission at Nanking.2 But it is difficult in military as in civil reform to uncover how policies worked in practice. Chinese plans and pronouncements tended to gloss over contemporary realities, of which the most intractable were the persisting habits of warlordism within ex-warlord and even nominally Central armies. A cross-check of German, American, and British assessments with evidence from the Chinese side can indicate how

Contesting the Yellow Dragon

Xiaofei Kang and Donald Sutton examine a garrison city and a pilgrimage center in the Sino-Tibetan borderland, tracing the dynamic role of religion and ethnicity in state/society relations from the Ming founding through Communist revolution to the age of tourism.