We could choose among several transformative sagas, starting from the unification of China under Qin Shi Huang Di (he burned the books...), perhaps visiting the Tokugawa and Meiji watersheds in Japan, the post-WWII Occupation of Japan, the reformation of North Korea under Kim Il Sung... and those are only the more dramatic and well-known episodes of transformation. Consider also the Japanese occupations of Korea, Formosa, Manchukuo... or the end of the last Dynasty (Manchu, or Qing) in China, or the shift from Koryo to Chosun in Korea... Each of those grand processes is (among other things) an epic of information management by the victors in a historical struggle, and a horror of chaos for the large numbers of anonymous victims of the social and cultural and military upheavals each entailed.
This is not the usual territory of anthropology, which generally works at smaller scale. But we can entertain greater ambitions, since our intention is to explore how to study such a vast spatiotemporal domain. My approach has been to tell larger stories via vignettes, via the personal testimony of writers and interpreters, and via broad strokes of historical reconstruction. I want to call your attention to subjects and episodes and methods that you might revisit at some later time.
The transformative saga we'll take on this week is China's last 50 years or so. The materials we'll use are centered on two films: Zhang Yimou's Huozhe [To Live], and the recently-released Morning Sun. The former is a foreign-financed mass-market film based on a novel and made by one of China's "Fifth Generation" film directors (he also directed Red Sorghum, Ju Dou, Qiu Ju, and others). The latter is a documentary produced and directed by Carma Hinton, Geremie Barmé, and Richard Gordon, and supported by an astonishing Web site: Morning Sun
It's instructive to ask Google who has linked to this site, via the search link:http://www.morningsun.org --more than 280 hits, well worth exploring.
This somewhat unconventional pairing of basically-fictional and basically-journalistic resources is part of a plot on my part to broaden your experience and raise questions: the (fictitious) Tale of the struggles of Fugui and Jiazhen involves us directly in believable lives, but is one pinpoint in a sea of about a billion real-life experiences; the story told by Morning Sun also has personal stories narrated by a very interesting set of people (including the wife and daughter of Liu Shaoqi, and by one of Mao's secretaries and his daughter), but it's probably the documentary footage that will remain the most memorable part of this experience: we see history being made.
The question is: what to do with the opportunity/experience of these two films? One realization I want you to carry away, and apply to your own lives, is the great significance of the concept of age cohort: how one sees the world, how one interprets the evidence presented by "reality", is powerfully influenced by one's personal age-and-stage. The Red Guards you see in both films are people of your age --or, more correctly, they're NOW people of my age, more or less. They are real people whose lives were formed by (and in many cases, ruined by) the circumstances they found themselves in. People belong to (indeed, can't escape from) the generations into which they are born, and it's often difficult to communicate across the temporal chasms that separate people of different ages. What would you have done if everything and everybody around you was heading in one direction, if taking a different position from the "correct" one was a life-and-death matter? How does Fugui manage to survive? How about Li Nanyang and the others interviewed in Morning Sun? And what are the events and influences that are shaping the people you will become? These are deep waters... but swimming in them can teach some profound lessons.
Assignments: