Stephan Feuchtwang

The anthropology of religion, charisma and ghosts : Chinese lessons for adequate theory

It has been said that Chinese government was, until the republican period, government through li. Li is the untranslatable word covering appropriate conduct toward others, from the guest rituals of imperial diplomacy to the hospitality offered to guests in the homes of ordinary people. It also covers the centring of self in relation to the flows and objects in a landscape or a built environment, including the world beyond the spans of human and other lives. It is prevalent under the republican regimes of China and Taiwan in the forming and maintaining of personal relations, in the respect for ancestors, and especially in the continuing rituals of address to gods, of command to demons, and of charity to neglected souls. The concept of ‛religion’ does not grasp this, neither does the concept of ‛ritual’, yet li undoubtedly refers to a figuration of a universe and of place in the world as encompassing as any body of rite and magic or of any religion. Through studies of Chinese gods and ghosts this book challenges theories of religion based on a supreme god and that god’s prophets, as well as those like Hinduism based on mythical figures from epics, and offers another conception of humanity and the world, distinct from that conveyed by the rituals of other classical anthropological theories.

Chinese Civilisation in the Present

Commentators on China frequently find a continuity of imperial dynastic rule with the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, thus perpetuating the stereotype of Asian despotism, not knowing the character of the Chinese civilisational tradition of sage rule. Or else they predict, starting with the successors to Mao, a gradual transition to the full panoply of democratic and civil society under the influence of entry into the world capitalist economy. Conversely, there is a reverse politics by Chinese political leaders, Chinese intellectuals and many middle-class Chinese promoting the national civilisation of China and identifying it with the philosophy of Confucius. The paper argues that there is continuity, but it is neither of despotism nor of Confucianism. It presents a summary of sage rule and self cultivation and analyses how the Chinese republican state has transformed sage rule and popular self-cultivation into a quite different state relationship.

Between Civilizations: One Side of a Dialogue

My colleague in anthropology, Wang Mingming, has written an article criticising nativist anthropology. We both profess a vocation for academic learning and of anthropology in particular as a space in which knowledge of selves and others can be produced and criticized. But a space as such is filled with nothing. As Brian Barrys (2001) critique of pluralism points out about the space of dialogue, it must have a content for it to function. Call this content ‘civilization’ and it provokes immediate questions of bias and hegemony. An ancient Chinese slogan for the idea of civilization is hua ren wen, yi cheng tianxia—activate and spread the intrinsic pattern in people to complete the universe. Universe is also imperium. How do we negotiate between two civilizations, so that the content remains an open one in which knowledge of all claims to universality can be tested, by argument, research, interaction? I shall present my equivalent of Brian Barrys insistence on a universal morality and a basis for antiracist policy. I will say how it extends to an anthropology that cannot be nationalist. Following this I will present my side of a dialogue with Wang Mingming on Chinese anthropology as one whose main topic is a universalizing civilization. It will serve as the sketch of a case study, a test, and a reflection on our joint insistence on the possibility of positive and critical anthropological knowledge. The question to be raised, if not answered definitively, is what is and what is not negotiable in maintaining the space for academic knowledge of cultural difference.

Peasants, Democracy and Anthropology Questions of Local Loyalty

The gulf between intellectuals and peasants, in which the latter are perceived to be a drag on the modernization led by the former, is usually selfaggrandizement. When, as in China, peasants have the ambivalent status of being the base of revolution and the drag on political reform in the direction of democracy, anthropologists are in a good position to challenge the intellectuals’ pretensions. But we don’t. This article asks why, points out the ways in which we can, and then refutes the notion that Chinese peasants have no democratic tradition with an example. It is an example of self-organization around an incense burner, a religious tradition of territorial association. I put it to the test of a number of concepts of democracy, most of which it passes. But its leaders are chosen by divine selection, raising the question whether this is a form of benign charisma rather than standard electoral democracy. The institution persists into the present of the People’s Republic of China and the government of Taiwan, where it functions as a public good, a test of local loyalty, and a moral basis by which the conduct of state officials and elected representatives are judged. It is a civil institution, but now the issue is whether it will last or be soaked up by central state cultural policies. Whatever the answer, the example also throws down a challenge to anthropologists in other regions to explore ‘peasant’ self-organization and cultural resources for democracy and civil judgement.

Fanon's politics of culture: the colonial situation and its extension

The idea of cultural resistance has been taken up in combative analysis of metropolitan racist situations. It is a legacy from analyses by combatants in anti-colonial struggles. Fanons were among the most searching of such analyses. His writings indicate an unusual concept of culture and of a people. The concept is at the same time of a political subject and of a the formation and direction of psychic energies. What he wrote on violence and counter-violence should not be abstracted from his concepts of culture and its colonial situation. That situation as it is described in Fanons writings and then the concept of culture and people are elaborated and then extended so that their application to metropolitan racism can be tried.

Memorials to Injustice

It is normal to find an event of great loss at the foundation of a nation. It is an occasion of sacrifice in the physical assertion of dignity against its denial. For instance, the first nations, as famously pointed out by Benedict Anderson, were composed of South and North American colonial settlers, revolting against their subordination and waging wars of independence against their distant sovereigns.1 At the same time they were blotting out their own violent suppression of native and slave rebellions. There is typically, as argued by Ernest Renan, a disavowal or a silenced sub-plot of collective violence at the origin of national stories.2 Historical enquiry prompts and can satisfy calls for adequate recognition of such suppressed catastrophes.3

The anti-racist challenge to anthropology in the U.K.

Social anthropology has an obvious concern with conceptualising, investigating and working against racial discrimination and individual anthropologists have addressed these concerns off and on for many years. However, action by the profession as a whole is indecisive even now.

Too ontological, too rigid, too ahistorical but magnificent

Comment on Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond nature and culture. Translated by Janet Lloyd with a foreword by Marshall Sahlins. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Exhibition and awe: regimes of visibility in the presentation of an emperor

As a publicly funded institution, the British Museum has a mission to draw in a public that might not otherwise visit a museum. For this purpose, it puts on exhibitions such as the series on emperors, for which a special exhibition space was created under the dome of the Reading Room. The first exhibition (followed by exhibitions on Hadrian, Shah Abbas and Moctezuma) was a show of 20 terracotta figures from the complex of the Chinese First Emperor’s tomb, on display between September 2007 and April 2008. The result of years of planning and diplomatic negotiations, the exhibition proved to be a blockbuster success for the British Museum. This article is a revised version of the William Fagg Lecture delivered by the author in 2007. It addresses and compares the particular regimes of vision entailed in exhibition, rather than permanent museum display, and those that are assumed to have informed the creation of the First Emperor’s tomb in the 3rd century BCE — the interaction between what can and what cannot be seen, ways of making the invisible apparent and of imagining it.

Some Chinese directions in anthropology

Stephan Feuchtwang & Michael Rowlands London School of Economics & University College, London interviewing Wang Mingming. Wang Mingming is a Chinese anthropologist, born in 1962 in the city of Quanzhou in southern Fujian, China. He was trained in archaeology and ethnological history at Xiamen University in the same southeastern province of Fujian. Later he went to study social anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and gained his Ph.D. there. In 1994, he returned to China to teach in Peking University and is committed to staying there. Since returning, through numerous publications, books he has written, series he has edited, journals he has founded, and through his teaching of postgraduate and doctoral students, he has been dedicated to the re-formation of anthropology in China as an academic discipline,not as an aid to programs of development and of government, nor as simply an import from English-language social and cultural anthropology, but as an anthropology coming from China that can and does have something to say to a larger anthropology.