Staying at the Margins: A Reflective Interview with Yongjia Liang
By Eileen Jahn (University of Bayreuth, Germany) and Pamila Gupta (University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa) interviewing Yongjia Liang (Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China)
In his recent American Anthropologist article, “Esteeming Goods for Non-Accumulation, Small Realms with Few People: Interpreting Kula with Laozi,” Professor Yongjia Liang, an expert in local cosmology and Asia-Pacific ethnography, teases out new avenues to mobilize the kula for understanding societies. Liang’s article is special in that it is likely the first published in the journal by an author both trained and based in China. Shifting our perspective and rethinking the kula through Chinese philosophy and history allows us to glimpse the vast knowledge that scholars often miss and exclude by relying on a consolidated Euro-American anthropology tradition.
Continuing from “Blowing up ‘the World‘ in World Anthropologies” (Papailias and Gupta 2021) and our initial interview with Gustavo Lins Ribeiro, we aim to highlight non-Euro-American knowledge traditions of and in World Anthropologies. We sought out Liang as an initial interlocutor, using his article as a starting point to probe the genealogies of Chinese anthropology and to learn more about anthropology in and of China. Through this interview, we seek to understand the realities of doing anthropology (a liberal discourse of Euro-American empire) in China (a rising empire) and what this means at this particular moment in time from within Chinese institutions.
Admitted to the English program at Wuhan University of Hydraulic and Electric Engineering in 1991, Yongjia Liang encountered a self-taught anthropologist, Zhu Bingxiang, who introduced him to works by James George Frazer, Bronisław Malinowski, Franz Boas, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. Later, he met French anthropologist David Gibeault, who came to China for fieldwork. Together they read and discussed French classics, such as those by Durkheim, Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, and especially Louis Dumont. “I didn’t realize at the time that I was kind of trained in a very classical way by him. And I didn’t know the landscape of anthropology at the time,” Liang remembers. In 2000, he went to Peking University for a PhD in anthropology, one of the first anthropology programs established in China. His supervisor was none other than Professor Fei Xiaotong, the founder of Chinese anthropology and the last student of Malinowski. Liang’s other mentor during graduate training was Professor Wang Mingming, who had returned to China from the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) University of London and, in 2017, became the first non-Western speaker to give the Radcliffe-Brown Memorial Lecture. Since Professor Fei was nearly 90 years old, Liang’s study was mainly supervised by Professor Wang Mingming.
This interview was conducted on April 11, 2022, between Professor Yongjia Liang from his home in China; American Anthropologist contributing editor Eileen Jahn, based in Germany; and World Anthropologies associate editor Pamila Gupta, based in South Africa. We would like to thank Professor Liang for taking the time to speak with us, and Elizabeth J. Chin and Penelope Papailias for editorial support.
Yongjia Liang
Studying Non-Chinese Worlds and Training Anthropologists in China
Eileen Jahn (EJ): How do you see your own intellectual formation, and how has your background shaped your understanding of anthropology?
Yongjia Liang (YL): I’m from a generation that came of age when the Chinese economy was booming rapidly—most people wanted to make money, to have a good career. And it was very easy to find a good job. An English major could easily get a well-paid job. But somehow, I was not that kind of person. I was trying to find something alternative, something that went beyond myself, beyond the here and now. I was kind of a weird person at that time. Unlike my peers, I was very interested in distant worlds—Africa, Melanesia, India.
In the wider landscape of the anthropology of China back then, the main topics were lineage and popular religion among the majority Han people in southeast China. And there had been so much literature on them. Many Chinese-based anthropologists at the time were very keen to study the “real” China, but somehow I was not that interested in it. I’m interested in the non-Chinese world, studying someone I’m not familiar with. This was already clear to me on day one of my anthropological career. So, I completed my PhD fieldwork in southwest China, among the Bai minority, and produced a monograph based on my research (Liang 2005).
EJ: What does graduate training in China look like? What is read as the canon, and what are typical fieldsites? Are there sensitive or undesired topics?
YL: For social science training more generally in China, of course, there are some restrictions, but I would say the training is very sophisticated. In anthropology, however, we are struggling to improve. In my graduate years, studying your hometown was popular. People are keen to disprove certain Euro-American theories with facts from their hometowns. We read very classical works: Malinowski, Evans-Pritchard, Lévi-Strauss, Edmund Leach, Victor Turner, and Clifford Geertz. We also read classics about Chinese society: Fei Xiaotong, Lin Yaohua, Francis Hsu, etc. At that time, with my mentor Wang Mingming’s influence, post-1945 studies on Chinese society conducted in Taiwan and Hong Kong become the canons: Maurice Freedman, Arthur Wolf, Steve Sangren, William Skinner, and many others. Then, some other scholars also discovered Writing Culture (Clifford and Marcus 1986). My generation, however, has focused on the non-Han Chinese studies, a booming area since 2000, because foreign anthropologists can have access to the field. Nowadays, one of the popular topics is still to study non-Han Chinese ethnic minorities, or study peoples along the China Belt and Road Initiative. Population-wise, the ethnic minorities are few, but they are in fact millions of people living on more than half of China’s landmass.
More opportunities have come up in recent years. Anthropologists in China also study science and technology, medicine, public health, and religion, just to name a few topics. Fieldwork sites are everywhere, all over China and beyond. Now there’s also a lot of different types of funding for students to apply for to study overseas, and you can find a career by studying foreign societies.
Most of these studies are not published in English. This is not necessarily a bad thing, because China has a vigorous academic publication system, a system two millennia old. I don’t think there is anything like this in the world—you can even straightforwardly respond to a question raised by someone who was living two thousand years ago, like contemporary political philosophers responding to Plato. However, like many other disciplines, the best publication venues are usually in English, and they are not very accessible to China-trained and China-based anthropologists. I believe in the near future, many anthropologists based in China will have more opportunities to publish their research results in English because many universities encourage that.
Whether published in English or Chinese, a paper or book has to be original. I mean, you try new ideas. However, the Chinese traditional academic system prefers erudition more than originality. As a result, many publications stop at summarizing others’ works without much of the author’s own ideas. Academic journals like publishing these kinds of papers more than publishing original ideas. Another thing I worry about is that many PhDs continue to work too closely with their supervisors after graduation. Many spend their careers repeating the works or just the names of their supervisors instead of developing their ideas or coming up with something original. After their supervisors retire, many of them lose more opportunities to produce original research. This also happens to many overseas-trained anthropologists. It’s quite surprising, and I always wonder why. Perhaps it has something to do with the international division of academic labor. This is the imbalance I’m talking about: Chinese anthropologists have been doing too much testing of the ideas put forward in Europe or North America, and they seldom or never try the reverse—testing their ideas in foreign realms.
In terms of sensitive or undesired topics, my impression is that each supervisor has their own policy—there are in fact no official guidelines. But, of course, people are aware of the restrictions. However, anthropology is not confrontational politics. We don’t believe human beings are a smart species. At least I don’t. We always come up with lame solutions, solving one problem by creating two. Of course, you can’t decide the final research projects for students, but if your advice is well-intended, they usually understand.
China has this kind of master-disciple relationship when it comes to supervision, a very traditional one. It is perhaps not very different from the old system in Germany, even as it is very distinct from the advising style in the United States. And so, if a student makes a wrong choice (topic and/or geographic area), the supervisor is responsible for giving advice and making helpful suggestions to get the student back on track, but if the student doesn’t listen to the supervisor’s guidance, the supervisor is free of that responsibility, and the student is on their own. In addition, students have to go through all the stages for the completion of the PhD, including proposal submission and qualification exams, and will be given additional suggestions by many scholars along the way.
Offering a New Perspective on the Kula
EJ: How would you see your own work and your article in American Anthropologist connecting to calls for indigenization and producing more inclusive knowledge through conversations as a method?
YL: During the publication of the article for American Anthropologist, I had one reviewer who is apparently an expert on the kula. They gave me very good suggestions, trying to think through my paper and point out what is wrong while being very frank with their doubts about my argument.
Peer review for me was really a journey of learning. I found it very interesting that the reviewers were not defensive or condescending with their knowledge at all. It was the opposite of my assumption. They were very helpful. If you’re trying to bring something different to their field, they’re very open, which of course is not necessarily what one might expect.
I could also see the humble quality of anthropologists who are not confident with the knowledge they have produced during fieldwork. And that is very different from other social sciences, like economics, for example. Economists are always very keen to interfere with the economy, but we anthropologists never try to change a ritual. But I think at another level we need to do something different from just publishing papers or anonymous reviews. We can do more.
What I am defending with my work is implicit comparison. This is Louis Dumont. He says when you are studying another society, you implicitly compare it with your own. So, be sincere with your “naive” observation—we are not “objectively” studying something, but unconsciously comparing. That means if you grow up in a Chinese social universe, you have a good chance to see other societies differently, different from your peers who grew up in their universes. So, I’m trying to ask, what’s uniquely Chinese when it comes to “implicit comparison”? Is there something “authentically” Chinese? I know “authenticity” or “essentialism” is a nearly pejorative word, but I disagree with those who abuse Foucault, deconstructing everything by accusing them of “essentialism.” That’s why I think Laozi and other works from that epoch are important. China is a mixture of all kinds of influences, especially influences from India and Buddhism. So, I’m trying to find something free of civilizational influence, something not “essentialized” or even “authentic” but original. Laozi wrote a book before China was a word, before it was consolidated. Also, it was written before civilizational contacts. It was a time of “Axial Age Breakthrough,” but more importantly, human ancestors did so without borrowing from each other. So, on the one hand, Laozi didn’t borrow from India or Greece. On the other hand, Laozi never thinks about China; instead, he is thinking about the humanities, the universe, the world. In that sense, I think it guarantees originality and universality. And I believe there are things like this across the world. That means it is possible to develop multi-universalisms.
EJ: In what ways would you say multi-universalism relates to pluriversality, which is often proposed in decolonial scholarship, for instance by Latin American scholars like Aimé Césaire or Enrique Dussel?
YL: I believe I came across that word when I read Viveiros de Castro. I also wrote an entry for a dictionary called Pluriverse, but I don’t know exactly what pluriversality means. It sounds similar to multi-universalism, as I am using it. When I say “universalism,” I don’t mean that there is a knowledge system that can be applied everywhere. Social science is not there yet. It’s far from it. We don’t have a neutral language at all. At most we can try to deterritorialize a concept. If a concept can reveal something around you and also something far away from you, it is already a kind of universalism. That’s how I am using that word.
EJ: In your article you talk about the “sinic perspectivism transcending the nationalist or imperialist bias that often imagines other societies as primitive.” Could you expand a bit more on this idea?
YL: One of the reviewers raised this question, as he’s very aware that China was an imperial power with a colonial record. It imagined the Other as primitive, backward, and in need of being civilized. But what I’m trying to do with sinic perspectivism is to ask if these Others can teach us something that China has already lost. Of course, classical Chinese thought is not free from imperial hierarchy when it comes to ethnic differences. But this is true for every pre-modern classic.
Laozi says nothing about other societies are primitive. Actually, one of Laozi’s merits is that it’s free of anthropocentrism. Humans are not the center of the world. Instead, humans should follow the Way, as other entities naturally do. Laozi was warning his contemporaries to not expand too much, to not build a large kingdom, to not excessively use power, extract resources, and concentrate key resources into capital in order to exploit the people. Laozi was a historian, so he observed historical cycles in terms of a long historical process. He found that all attempts to build large societies failed. So, his ideas are not linear at all. Somehow, though, Chinese history didn’t follow his advice, and that is why we have dynasties—the rise and fall of royal houses. Rise or fall, it’s always the people who suffer.
To build a large empire, China broke into an irreversible civilizing process, making people’s lives harder than “small societies.” Deaths, famines, and all those kinds of things came with statehood. So, looking at the kula, it has taught us to be very conscious in our attempts to keep society small, try not to expand too much, and keep the balance because probably many of its members experienced warfare and a concentration of coercive power. And then they realized they cannot sustain this way of life. So, they created a very delicate system in trying to keep society small. There are glimpses of evidence. These people are not primitive at all; rather, they offer lessons on how to avoid a destructive civilizing process.
An afternoon in South Street. (Xichang, China, 2012)
Becoming One’s Own Center of Knowledge Production
EJ: How would you describe the relation between anthropologists in China and the hegemonic centers of knowledge production?
YL: In China, anthropology is weak. The job market is very limited. Except for academic work, very few enterprises or companies want to hire anthropologists. I am aware that anthropology in Europe, and especially in the United States, is much stronger. It has sort of a hegemonic aura.
In Global South academia, postcolonial and decolonization movements are strong. People are keenly interested in deconstructing the “hegemonic aura” of the West. However, this is less so in China because the country keeps its own academic language autonomous. It’s not just language, but its academic tradition, as I said just now. If you study Chinese history or philosophy, studies from the “hegemonic centers,” the West, are complementary at most, sometimes auxiliary. For example, in the study of the pre-Qin era, the time of Laozi, you seldom see pathbreaking studies by nonnative Chinese speakers. Marcel Granet is one of the few exceptions. Today, Chinese-speaking knowledge production is rigorous. It’s a unique situation: you have an unbroken academic tradition for two millennia. I mean, anthropologists in China don’t feel the kind of pressure from the hegemonic centers as our peers in other Global South countries might.
However, it doesn’t mean that Chinese anthropologists are doing well. We don’t have much of an agenda of our own, following their Western supervisors too closely. The question of China and Western academia is not dominated periphery versus hegemonic center, but multi-universalism. Today, many Chinese intellectuals are trying to develop an alternative perspective in terms of social theory by negotiating between the history of thought of the “West” and China. It’s very inspiring for anthropologists. We can learn from them. In a word, I don’t think the answer to hegemony is resistance, but mutual aid. The academic world is one with a liberal spirit of debate, and the “hegemonic centers” are full of such venues.
EJ: What does decolonization, indigenization, and diversification stand for in the Chinese context? What role does it play?
YL: Decolonization is not very popular in China because China keeps its mode of knowledge production quite fine. It’s also because Chinese intellectuals generally believe that China was never colonized. But indigenization is very popular. People still feel that when it comes to knowledge production, everyone we quote has a European name and originates from what I call a “Greco-Roman episteme.” Many people are trying to revive the Chinese intellectual tradition, and studying China in that tradition. But I must say indigenization sometimes went too far, with people trying to argue that only indigenous people can understand their own culture and that others’ interpretations are always wrong. Apparently, Chinese past and present scholars understand China more than most of the outsiders, if not all. However, it doesn’t mean Chinese scholars are better scholars. An outsider studies China by implicitly comparing China with their own culture. But a Chinese scholar has nothing to compare if they study their own people, their hometown fellows. It’s a different game—an outsider is producing a social theory, and an insider ends up with an indigenous insight. So, real indigenization theory is to study other societies with Chinese civilizational concerns. A true indigenizing scholar should study non-Chinese society.
That’s why I think anthropology is important for the sake of diversification. It is one’s own understanding of others. It tells us that every scholar is doomed to be some sort of “-centric,” and that is inevitable. As long as you’re an anthropologist, you are producing knowledge for your own culture, for your own social universe. We are all formed by our culture; whatever we see, we are seeing from our own cultural lens. That’s why I would say anthropology should be the field that does the work of multi-universalism. That means everyone can see others from their own perspectives. And as long as we are in conversation with each other, we can produce a more acceptable, more inclusive knowledge.
In a word, knowledge about others is culturally positioned. So, I don’t think Western-centrism is wrong. It’s just inevitable. So is Sino-centrism. All universal knowledge has to be some kind of centrism, but we should respect others’ universality and open to improve ours.
An Uncertain Future at the Margins
EJ: There are multiple anthropologists that grew up in China who decided to leave for higher education purposes, sometimes after finishing their undergraduate training in China. How are people viewed who come from the outside and use China predominantly as a fieldsite for extracting raw data?
YL: Most Chinese anthropologists trained in Europe and America will take China as a fieldsite for raw data. Home anthropology may be the norm for most non-Western anthropologists. Of course, many people feel this is not a good division of labor, including Chinese anthropologists studying China. After all, why do non-Western anthropologists have to study themselves? To me, I don’t think this is a problem entirely, but it needs balance. European and American universities should welcome more Chinese anthropologists studying non-Chinese topics. On the other hand, non-Western countries should encourage cross-cultural fieldwork. So, in that way, we can produce real anthropology.
Pamila Gupta (PG): The other larger issue is that the humanities are being scaled down dramatically across the world, particularly in Asia. I know in India and Japan they’re questioning the humanities in general and if there should even be training and disciplines because, with regard to larger economic systems, there are technically no jobs in those fields. Anthropology is one of those disciplines which is increasingly seen as obsolete, as also tied to its own history of colonialism. I guess we are experiencing uncertain times as it proliferates in places like the West, but is under threat in other places.
YL: I agree. Speaking about the decline of the humanities, I feel it everywhere across Asia. Probably, Asian nation-states have to face the challenge of development in an age of fierce competition. The governments think the humanities are too costly. Of course, this is an unhealthy idea. Politicians usually have no idea about “life world”; they only see “systems,” as Habermas put it when he worries about how systems colonize the life world. Anthropology is a discipline between the humanities and social science, but it is under threat too. It can never go “mainstreaming,” and it shouldn’t, because staying at the margin is an ideal position for anthropology—being disinterested and reflexive. But we are living in an age of academic boasting; anthropology has to prove its “use.” Otherwise funding and positions will be cut. I don’t know how to solve this problem, but it seems this is a new issue: we anthropologists are on the brink of extinction. Well, I should say we still have to stay at the margin, even if the discipline has little chance of survival. But who knows? Sometimes mainstream disciplines die first, like the dinosaur survived by the crocodile.
References Cited
Clifford, James, and George E. Marcus. 1986. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Liang, Yongjia. 2005. Diyu de Dengji: Yige Dali Cunzhen de Yishi yu Wenhua [Territorial hierarchy: Ritual and culture in a southwest China town]. Beijing: Sheke Wenxian Chubanshe.