P. Steven Sangren

Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and the Structure of Value in Chinese Rituals

Chinese religion is inseparable from the entire spectrum of discourses and texts (including, in addition to written and printed texts, all kinds of rituals, shamanism, architecture, economic transactions, knowledge, even daily conversation) through which meaning is produced, reproduced, and fought for, and in which individuals create themselves socially and (which amounts to the same thing) society socializes individuals. The meaning generated in all forms of symbolic action is premised on, and perpetuates, what is almost always an unspoken, usually unconscious epistemology. I take these to be among the central insights of the deconstructionist movement in Western academia (see, for example, Sturrock, 1979). An important corollary of this view of things is that such epistemologies and the institutions in which they are embodied and reproduced depend on suppressing consciousness of their own genesis in social reproduction. This suppression is not

'Masculine Domination': Desire and Chinese Patriliny

This article reprises 1970s discussions of gender inequality in feminist anthropology to critique contemporary assumptions regarding gender construction, advocating a psycho-cultural explanation for the ubiquity of masculine domination. The currency of what I term ‘culturalist empiricism’, in its emphasis on cultural difference, downplays inquiry into human commonalities with respect to gender and entails questionable assumptions regarding how culture operates to construct. Analysis of Chinese patriliny understood as a ‘mode of production of desire’ provides a case in point toward rethinking how cultures can differ with respect to gender construction without abandoning anthropology’s commitment to comprehending human commonalities. The approach is relevant beyond China’s culturally particular context, and it suggests substantial revision of idealist assumptions regarding anthropology’s object — culture.

Social Space and the Periodization of Economic History: A Case from Taiwan

Case studies in local economic history and organization conventionally employ either of two rhetorical strategies. In the first, a particular world view, theoretical orientation, or set of basic categories is assumed and forms the basis for organizing a description of a particular case; in the second, the facts or data are marshaled in an attempt to validate, authenticate, or test an explicitly stated theoretical position. Of course, these are ideal types, and many studies quite appropriately combine both. Progress is conceived as an outcome over time in which both kinds of study contribute to ever more elegant, encompassing, and parsimonious orderings of data. The nature of the relationship between theory, assumptions, world view, and so forth on the one hand, and data, subject, or facts on the other, transcends otherwise widely divergent arguments-for example, “Marxist,” “dependency,” “neoclassical,” and (more subtly) “substantivist.” In short, a common value, broadly “positivist,” informs most Western sociaI science discourse.

Ontologies, ideologies, desire

Professor Sir Geoffrey Lloyd’s Being, humanity and understanding (2012) offers anthropologists a salutary commentary from the vantage of history and philosophy upon what is arguably our discipline’s defining-project—how to apprehend and assess cultural difference, on the one hand, while sustaining a long-standing inquiry into humankind’s essential psychic unity, on the other.1 Lloyd’s enviable erudition, especially with respect to ancient Greek and Chinese philosophy, enlivens anthropology’s abiding interest in these issues. Moreover, Lloyd’s observations are especially timely given a recent and, perhaps, growing trend among some anthropologists to approach culture in terms of variant, sui generis ontologies2 Lloyd is especially interested in the provocative implications of perspectivism (epitomized by the works of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro [1998])] and animism (as articulated by Philippe Descola [2013]), 3 but he also engages earlier ethno-

Chinese Ghosts: Reconciling Psychoanalytic, Structuralist, And Marxian Perspectives

This chapter addresses a problem in anthropological analyses of Chinese beliefs regarding ghosts and/or the soul. The author suggests that neither anthropology nor psychoanalytic theory has wholly succeeded in bridging an important gapa gap that can be located variously in distinctions between logic and affect, structuralism and psychoanalysis, and even (perhaps) mind and body. Images of supernatural powers that are products of human imagination are understood to be the producers of human social life, thus in the classically Marxian sense inverting the real relations between product and producer. The author believes that this structuralist/Marxist analysis can be augmented by a Freudian consideration of how ambivalence toward parental figures manifests in variously malevolent and benign supernatural powers. Keywords: Chinese ghosts; Marxian analysis; psychoanalytic theory; structuralist

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.