The politics of culture or a contest of histories: Representations of Chinese popular religion

Conclusion

What then are we, a Chinese and a Western anthropologist, doing? As anthropologists we are commenting on the representative character, rather than the truth of all these accounts, the close and the remote. But by bringing them together, we are in addition forcing each others' issues upon them. To unreflective policy and scientific accounts, we bring critical anthropological inquiry. To the uncommitted anthropology of the distant object we ask questions about its political and historical implications.

The political equivalent of the anthropologists' straining after a cultural holism is the claim to national unity. National unity and sovereignty in China, as everywhere on the globe since the birth of nationalism in Europe, are asserted with passion. The Chinese nation's cultural soul and moral principle are in acknowledged crisis. The nation is the object of a politics of culture, which requires a research of the singular, if conflictual, history of its necessary emergence. Such a history is a teleology of the nation in the eternal existence of its tradition, already there in culture but not yet entirely apparent or alive to its population. Thus in the PRC, academics, cultural officials, ideological workers, and propagandists insist on national integration and engage in the search for its spiritual civilization. Sometimes, as at present for diplomatic and economic reasons, some provincial autonomy and its restoring of a local cultural identity is encouraged. Cultural workers still, like most Western anthropologists of China, seek answers to the question: what is Chinese-ness? In the PRC the question includes an additional word: what is modern Chinese-ness? The search for the prehistory of modern Chinese-ness for these workers therefore bears a selective project in addition to the teleology of national emergence. Their search is determined by what is meant by “modern” and therefore what is backward and represents the burden of the past, which has then to be distinguished from what is progressive and represents the future in the past. Western anthropologists are more eclectic, and perhaps less aware, certainly less conscious of their selectivity as an historical act. In China, “modern” bears the weight of dispute over what stage China has reached in variously conceived histories of human development toward socialism. “Modern” is not a consistent or a clear set of criteria. It is a contested terrain. The emphasis on socialist modernization can conflict with emphasis on modernization of productivity, technical renewal, and keeping pace with universal scientific knowledge and education. Here is a contest of priorities between ideological and political transformation on the one hand, material incentives, school education, specialization, and economic reform grounded in political and ideological stability on the other. In either case, popular religious practices are “superstitious,” representing a past that should be left behind.

But emphasis upon the necessity for ideological work means a more active attempt to eliminate superstition and in its place construct ideological institutions satisfying the spiritual needs of a new civilization, socialist with Chinese characteristics. This is itself given varied interpretations in action, for even if basic principles can be stated, they are contestable in practice since socialism itself is always in dispute, as is its accommodation to Chinese history and conditions. But such contests always receive the arbitration of one authority, and they become its internal struggles. According to the four basic principles which define patriotism as the party's monopoly of political organization, only the Party can say what the current interpretation of socialism with Chinese characteristics is. It mediates, not Heaven and Earth, but a history of the future and the Chinese people.

The second emphasis, on schooling and universal science as instruments of increased production and efficiency, whether that of market forces or of planned growth and improvements of livelihood and social security, merely ignores popular religious practices as relics.

A third emphasis focuses upon transformation, rather than neglect or elimination and replacement, stressing the importance of cultural modernization and at the same time the importance of preserving cultural treasures and records.

The three emphases in this politics of culture distinguish three strands of state agency: the Party as a Communist organization; the Party and the State Commissions and Ministries—including those of education—as a government of urgent economic and livelihood tasks; and the Ministry of Culture. The Party as communists may hold sway over the others, or the Party and its administration as government of an economy may hold sway over its revolutionary communism. The Ministry of Culture never holds sway. It holds a line, in its task of preserving (establishing) national heritage. Between the two poles of its own emphasis, on cultural modernization and on preservation, its workers register the disputes and changing balances of emphasis coming from the other agencies.

Public security organs also hold a line, that of securing national sovereignty and unity. As guardians of Party authority they are the most severe agents of the first emphasis, the emphasis upon elimination. They are charged with the task of eliminating challenges to that authority, ideologically suspended in the current mixture of versions of socialist modernity. In performing this job, practices—such as a spirit-medium heralding a new order, or a spirit-writing sect organizing secretly—which represent counterrevolution, according to the current balance of authority, are the target. But more basically, they are charged with the preservation of national sovereignty and its unity. Here the target is the celebration of any religious and cultural autonomy, which is interpreted as “splittist” or as “unpatriotic.”

For all these emphases on modernity, popular religious practices in the countryside are local and remote. The alternative emphases of their representations are “superstition” or “survival,” ignorance and backwardness, or disappearing history. Academic and museum researchers, social scientists and folklorists have passed through channels of schooling and higher education whose teachers and curricula have been among the chief generators of these very emphases on modernization and national construction. Rural and local religious practices are studied in social science as pathological symptoms of spiritual or economic deprivation, in folklore culturology as historical relics or as local elements of a national heritage.

But their research as an activity and its results as data are also resorts and resources for an inversion of the distance at which the local and the remote is held. Writers, artists, and film-makers who have passed through the same passages to modern urban life, have used research into popular rural culture rebelliously.⁵⁰ Chinese modernizing nationalists participate no less than nationalists of other countries in the romanticism which is the inverse of socialist or liberal modernization and rationality. The search for tradition is not confined to current policies of scientific progress, cultural transformation, or of governmental establishment of a national ethos.

The perspective of distance from urban heights upon the local and the remote can be turned rebelliously upon a populist leadership or into a hankering for the sources of a blocked and polluted creativity. The peasant roots of the communist revolution have been invoked to comdemn old veterans and feudal workstyles. They have on the other hand been remembered as a lost but revivable sense of community and responsiblity before it was corrupted. Or they are remembered ambivalently as a continuing, betrayed, yellow earth of despair.⁵¹

The Western anthropology of Chinese rural religion and ritual is removed from the Chinese polity but participates in the same distancing perspective. Foreign social science which respects the local and the remote can be condemned as out of order, politically hostile, or shallow—not understanding Chinese culture. On the other hand, these qualities can be put in positive terms—knowledge for its own sake, acquired independently, revealing truths hidden from the partial and the Party-bound.

When translated back into Chinese, such foreign research is doubly exotic. It comes from the widest reaches of aspiration to human science, but deals in local detail and cultural holism. It can serve the purposes of the emphasis on folklorist preservation and the emphasis on the national heritage of local elements. On the other hand, it can serve the purposes of romantic rebellion. Its exoticism favors the second. In either case, it simply extends the adoption of humanist categories in the construction of national polities. But as internationally authenticated academic science, it is clearly a challenge to the modernizing social policy science of Chinese academics and policy makers. It discloses and respects the contemporary social life of what they condemn, with increasing enforcement, as backward relics, as pathological symptoms, as anti-patriotic local culture, or secret organizations.

Where does that leave us, who have brought these strands together in a single overview? Not in the comfort of celebrating a postmodern mish-mash of representations. For there are definite clashes involved in these differences of emphasis and representation, and unequal forces are involved. We do insist on resisting the temptation to see in any one of them the truth, the correct representation. We see them as histories, or rather as history-making tendencies. But we are left in the uneasy position of requiring recognition of conflicting histories and the necessity of negotiation between them.