(This took me about 2 hours to put together, reading and commenting and extracting. I had the advantage of having read it before, and of possessing a lot of background that you don't have yet. And I've had a lot of practise at this game. What I want you to notice is that it's a sort of note making, partly quotations copied out for their trenchant or piquant or quintessential nature, partly observations, partly questions. I'll be glad to find this summary again sometime later; I might well add to it or reconfigure it if I reread the article one more time.)There are so many possible perspectives, entrées, emphases, definitions of problem that fit the rubric "Anthropology of...". I'm much more interested in sampling the variety than choosing any one, but if any one thing holds my own approach to the material together, it's probably landscape --but always very broadly defined.
The BIG Question: what organizes a landscape? And, secondarily, how do cycles (of development, of power) manifest themselves upon landscapes? How should we think about filling in an outline map of East Asia?
It's Time and Space, folks.
?how can one read this article without a map? Among the places mentioned as if readers knew where and what they were: Kaifeng, Luoyang, the Grand Canal, Hangchow, the North China Plain, Lower Yangzi, Shandong, Henan, Guangji Canal, Huimin Canal, Fujian, Quanzhou, Guangzhou, Tongzhou, Nanjing, Zhangquan, Xiamen (Amoy), Zhejiang, Fuzhou... the problem compounded by several orthographic systems (Canton=Guangdong, Yangzi=Yangtze, Nanjing=Nanking....)
Terms for the Glossary?
?dynasty? ?Mandate of Heaven? ?junk trade? ?the tribute system? ?treaty ports? ?jinshi degrees? ?outer barbarians? ?dynastic cycle?
Kaifeng was at the CENTER of a communication and commodity system --but one limited and constrained by transport costs; and other places (e.g., Peking) are the CENTER (viz: the Imperial capital) at other times, with various rearrangements
And China has component regions, which have specialties (viz: tea in the Southeast Coast) and may grow to be "not self-sufficient in grain" because of their specialties. Regions can be said to have strategies, such as "sending forth talented young men to seek their fortunes elsewhere..." (275). Component regions may be interdependent --open to each other, connected, involved in exchanges among places in "an integrated urban system" (276).
And sometimes it's external forces that instigate changes, viz: the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th c., as a result of which shipping/commerce revived. (cites Rawski 1972-- which turns out to be about Fukien)
Sometimes chains of causation:
Expanding markets led to a sharp increase in cash-cropping, in which tobacco... figured prominently. The demand for commercial crops led to a sharp increase in land prices, the opening up of new fields, more complex cropping patterns, extra investments in irrigation and fertilizer, more intensive labor inputs, and above all, increased yields... (278)
Significant passages, my selection:
Economic macrocycles are a systemic property of macroregional economies --not of provinces and not of the Chinese empire per se-- and consequently their contours become clear only when regional economies are taken as the unit of analysis... developmental cycles may be wholly unsynchronized as between regions. (275)In 1371 coastal traders were forbidden to go overseas, and in 1390 an edict forbade all trade with "outer barbarians". In the fifteenth century the ban was extended to coastal shipping as well. (276) In 1717 Chinese were forbidden once again to go privately overseas, and in 1757 the fate of the whole Southeast Coast was sealed for nearly a century by the designation of Guangzhou as the sole legal port for foreign trade. (278)
...each macroregional economy took shape in and was wholly contained within a physiographic macroregion that can be defined in terms of drainage basins. Each was characterized by the concentration in a central area of resources of all kinds... and by the thinning out of resources toward the periphery. (280) [core/periphery model --transport costs lower and agricultural productivity and population density higher in the core]
It is hardly surprising that the major cities of each region grew up in the core areas or on major transport routes leading into them, and that all cities within a physiographic region developed hierarchical transaction patterns culminating in one or more cities in the regional core. Trade between the centrally located cities of one region and those of another was minimized by the high cost of unmechanized transport, the great distances involved, and the more rugged terrain that characterized most portions of the regional peripheries. For these various reasons, then, there developed in each of the major physiographic regions a reasonably discrete urban system, that is, a cluster of cities within which interurban transactions were concentrated and whose rural-urban transactions were largely confined within the region. (280)
...macroregional economies should be seen as complex systems --internally differentiated, interdependent, and integrated, though much more loosely in the far periphery than in the inner core. As with other territorially based systems of human interaction, regional economic systems at various levels are manifested in the last analysis as patterned movements --flows of goods and services, money and credit, messages and symbols, and persons in their multifarious roles and statuses. There is, of course, no such thing as a steady state in any system; rather one sees continual flux, mutual interaction, and feedback. And most crucially for our purposes here, a bolow or benefit, a catastrophe or favorable stimulus sustained by any part of the interdependent system ramifies throughout the whole. (281)
I am encouraging you to think of Chinese history as having a hierarchical structure that parallels and expresses the on-the-ground hierarchy of local and regional systems. At every level from the standard marketing community to the macroregional economy, these nodal systems have characteristic rhythms and distinctive histories. They should be seen as spatial-cum-temporal systems of human interaction... (287)
...conception of China's historical structure: (1) that it is an internested hierarchy of local and regional histories whose scope in each case is grounded in the spatial patterning of human intersaction, and (2) that at each level the critical temporal structures of a particular regional system are successive cyclical episodes. (288)
the simple demonstration that the phenomenon of regional developmental cycles recurs, stirs the historical imagination and invites explanation... this approach can point us topward a histroy of China as a whole that incorporates rather than glosses over regional differences... a history of the civilizational whole must rest on comprehension and reconciliation of the distinct but contingently interrelated histories of its component parts. (289)
Now, what's an anthropologist doing with all this History?