What does it really mean to take on the challenge of an Anthropology of a part of the world, and more specifically how should one be thinking at the beginnings of an effort to wrestle with East Asia from this perspective?
The academic discipline of Anthropology is a pachyderm over which blind men swarm. The traditional distinction among social (and/or cultural) anthropology and physical anthropology and archaeology is further complicated by the current squabbles over biological anthropology (and/or human biology), but there is a long and complicated history of problematic relations between various definitions of anthropology and adjacent disciplines in the humanities and social sciences --linguistic anthropology, psychological anthropology, human geography, symbolic anthropology, folklore, gender studies, gerontology, history, ethnomusicology... The point is that anthropologists have interests in many other fields, and feel free to draw upon disciplinary findings and research paradigms in magpie fashion. But very little holds anthropologists together, and the experience of fieldwork in some corner of the world adds a geographical specialization that complicates matters further --typically, an anthropologist is a survivor of prolonged immersion in at least one other culture.
Historically it's certainly true that Anthropology has been concerned with humankind, and with human universals of various sorts. It's also true that the discipline grew up in the service of colonialisms (British, French, German, Japanese... and American) from which it is still recovering, and that Anthropology has been affected by academic fashions (structuralism, positivism, postmodernism, etc.).
My own personal history as an anthropologist colors how I see the field as a whole and how I approach the study of anything I turn my interests to. The relevant parts of that for Anthropology 230 include about 7 years during which I thought of myself as a Southeast Asianist (including two years in Peace Corps, spent in Sarawak, and four years of graduate study at Stanford), more than a dozen years of teaching Human Geography, and three years of Peoples and Cultures of Asia. At Stanford I was a student of G. William Skinner, whose name and works will come up quite often throughout the term. I've never been to China or Japan or Korea (except for airport stops in Tokyo and a couple of days in Hong Kong), so much of what I know is via print and other media. I'm an interested student, not an authority. On the other hand, I am a librarian, which is to say that I'm professionally concerned with how to find information across a broad spectrum of subjects. And that's the basic approach we'll be taking: we'll be using the resources at our disposal (in the library, on the web, etc.) to piece together a basis for improved understanding of the human dimensions of a pretty large territory. We'll consider past, present, and possible futures. We'll explore lots of perspectives and sources of information, concentrating more on the process of discovery than on any one specific goal that can be defined in advance. At the end of the term you will know a lot more than at the beginning, but it can only be a start at what can become a life-long quest to integrate new information and improve your understanding.
Along the way we'll do a lot of geography, because I think a spatial perspective is ideal for organizing and summarizing the realms of data we'll encounter. We'll adopt the perspectives of demographers, epidemiologists, ecologists, historians of technology, ethnographers, agronomists, folklorists, philosophers, feminists, linguists... And we'll consider how outsiders of various stripes and eras have tried to make sense of what they encountered in China, Japan, and Korea. But we'll always be asking geographers' questions: how does x or y or z actually express itself on the spatiotemporal Landscape of East Asia? How can we visualize distributions and interpret patterns?
The reasons I've chosen to teach this course in a hands-on computer lab are several: the GIS component can only be realized in a lab setting, I want to include a substantial in-class writing component, I want to encourage the integral use of Internet resources in discussions, and the work of the course will be conducted via personal web pages constructed by (and read by) all participants. All four are experiments, pushing the envelope of classroom and pedagogy.
There is no textbook; instead, we'll use books and periodicals and web resources and other materials, many of them local but some electronic. We want to discover what's available that can cast light on the questions that arise as we proceed. Michael Dutton's preface to his Streetlife China (1998) says it admirably:
For me, this book is like a treasure box of possibilities... (xii)and that's what I mean the whole course to be. It should certainly inform, but even more it should incite its participants to follow curiosity and explore implication. We can't hope to assimilate all of China, still less East Asia, so we should learn to make the most of the Tales we can collect and connect.
The Country Studies (also called Area Handbooks) series, produced by the U.S. Government Printing Office and distributed electronically by the Library of Congress, for China, Japan, North Korea and South Korea provide basic and generally reliable --though not always up to date-- descriptive information.
An especially valuable resource is the collection of East Asia periodicals at JSTOR:
Asian Survey 1961-1998
Far Eastern Survey 1935-1961
Memorandum (Institute of Pacific Relations, American Council) 1932-1934
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London 1940-1997
Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies, University of London 1917-1940
China Journal 1995-1997
Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 1979-1995
China Quarterly 1960-1997
Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 1979-1999
Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 1936-1997
Journal of Asian Studies 1956-1999
Far Eastern Quarterly 1941-1956
Journal of Japanese Studies 1974-1997
Journal of the American Oriental Society 1854-1996
Journal of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 1972-1999
Journal-Newsletter of the Association of Teachers of Japanese 1963-1972
Modern Asian Studies 1967-1997
Modern China 1975-1999
Monumenta Nipponica 1938-1997
Pacific Affairs 1928-1998
News Bulletin (Institute of Pacific Relations) 1926-1928
We have the last 5 years of most of these in paper (in Leyburn Library). The question for us to answer is: what can these journals tell us that will help us to understand these societies?
Another useful journal is China Review International (1999-2001 only, but rich with reviews of new books in the fields of East Asian studies). Other periodicals which may prove useful (indeed, we might take on gauging their utility as a project...) include Far Eastern Economic Review's online edition (a reasonable source for news of Asia), Asian Survey (available in Leyburn Library in paper, and electronically via the Publications Library of Dow-Jones Interactive), South China Morning Post (Hong Kong's English newspaper), Asahi Shimbun (a leading Japanese newspaper), and asiaweek.com (archive 1995-2001) and CNN.com In ternational's Asia coverage.
Books will also be important resources. The library has many treasures in the DS section (and in other places too...) with which any student of things East Asian should be familiar. ...Needham... Skinner... Freedman... etc... so there will be exercises to identify and extract useful material from these resources.
While our emphasis will be on contemporary East Asia, a historical perspective is essential and, indeed, inescapable in societies that have thousands of years of continuous recorded history and 'borrowing' of cultural items. Here's a link to China and East Asia Chronology, one of many. Historical issues are absolutely alive within these societies, as exemplified by current contretemps about the Xia dynasty. (This document is a good example of the sort of stimulus material that will take the place of the conventional textbook --it raises a number of issues that need to be woven into a developing understanding of great complexities. A google search for 'Xia dynasty' gets quite a few hits...)In any case, the framework of dynasties is essential as a temporal roadmap --though it sometimes will seem a long way from 'anthropology'. It does interdigitate with the Skinner open-closed-open model of Chinese civilization.
Another issue worth exploring is "tradition" and "modernization" --there being a tacit tendency to see what's perceived as "modern" to be a corruption of something older and somehow stable.
And it's important to recognize that the received views of history and civilization emphasize the activities of the tiny minority at the peak of the stratification system --the wealthy, the powerful, the learned, the distinguished. It's only comparatively recently that some students of culture and society have attempted to redress the balance by exploring the lives and doings of people other than the elite and the powerful. "Subaltern studies" is one such attempt (see a bibliography from UVa) ...and the village locus of traditional anthropology could be seen as another.
The discipline has tended to emphasize the study of other people's cultures, and East Asian anthropologists have generally studied peripheral peoples (such as ethnic minorities) but there are some exceptions...
Item: The riddle of 'Peking Man' in specific and East Asian paleoanthropology and human evolution is still quite open. See Maps Locating Fossil Hominids from China and Center for the Study of Chinese Prehistory home page... and lots of others with a search for 'choukoutien' in AltaVista.Item: the oldest pottery in the world is Japanese [ca. 10,000 BC] --or, to be more precise, was produced by inhabitants of present-day Japan [whom we refer to as the 'Jomon' culture (see some nice images) and identify with more than 28,000 archaeological sites --but Japan was not disconnected from the Asian mainland in 10,000 BC, and probably not until about 7,000 BC --see bathymetry of Sea of Japan and a page about Eurasian climate history]... or, still more exactly, as far as we know at the moment... But as for who the Jomon were in a human-biological sense, and how they connect to the Japanese or the Ainu of modern times remains a matter of conjecture. Did the Jomon people become the agricultural Yayoi, from about 300 BC, simply because they adopted technologies from China [rice cultivation in particular, and metalworking], or did Yayoi people enter Japan from Korea, displacing the Jomon? What sorts of data can we draw upon and/or must we integrate into an understanding?
Item: genetic evidence [Cavalli-Sforza 1994:225ff] identifies a cluster of more closely related contemporary peoples which includes North Chinese, Japanese, Ainu, Korean, Mongolian and Tibetan, but differentiates them from South Chinese (who have closer affinities to peoples of Southeast Asia).
Item: linguistic evidence separates Chinese (the Sino-Tibetan family) from Korean and Japanese (and Ainu) and Mongolian (the Altaic family --though agreement is not universal that Korean and Japanese belong)
Item (but not prehistoric): the Chinese (and/or other East Asians) invented a remarkable array of the technologies that Europeans later turned into the wherewithal of world domination: moveable type, gunpowder, the compass... among other things. But for a variety of reasons (in some dispute) East Asians didn't capitalize on technological precedence.
And we'll compile a glossary of encountered terms...
I'm beginning to think about the sequence of subjects, and fully expect to adjust, augment, and depart from... but here's a preliminary list, not necessarily in the order in which we will explore them:
perspective
basic geography, physical and ecological and human and macroregional and toponymic
demographic history
water control
the outsider's view: stereotyping and -isms (Orientalism, Communism, capitalism, etc.)
languages and dialects
ethnicities [viz: Hakka]
technologies
family and kin
locality and region... viz. some Chinese stereotypes
stratification
diasporas
colonialisms
culture: high, low, popular... food, music, divination, geomancy, 'ancestor worship', foot binding... very under-construction...
There will always be toothsome fragments like this, seemingly falling out of the sky and asking no more and no less than to be stuck into the Album someplace:
stuff under construction:
topography
Korean archaeology and identity
And why does one teach? ==> to surprise people into seeing things differently
5 Dec
I feel it's important to keep adding to this, even though the class is all but over for the year. I keep thinking of things I don't want to lose sight of in developing materials for next year's iteration, and I expect that will continue even when I'm not focused on East Asia. One note to myself:
I seem to believe deeply in the idea that it works to give people a text to read... an image to look at... something to play with... and that they'll do something with the information event. But I'm not so sure now that they do know what to do or how to proceed, and I don't have a good solution for how to get them to focus, or how to inspire evolving consciousness about the process of learning. It seems that I should be directing the process more, not leaving it to students to make the leaps themselves?(to be continued)