Looking For Chengdu Report

Looking for Chengdu Book Review

This anthropological account of China after liberation from the communist constraints of the Cultural Revolution was somewhat enlightening, as I learned a great deal about the political and cultural history of the Republic of China. The biggest struggle I encountered in this read was sorting through the superfluous information, most of which read like Gates' personal diary of cultural likes and dislikes, and finding the meat of her travels--that which held the most traditional significance. Apart from that, her perspective authenticates the experience of the reader as a literary bystander and hopeful anthropologist.

Hill Gates embarks on her journey to China as an anthropologist, feminist, and Marxist during its post-Cultural Revolution years. Because of this Communist movement from the 1960s, travel from the U.S. to China was prohibited until the 1970s. To compensate, Gates travels to Taiwan and does fieldwork there for about five years. Thus, almost everything she views in China she views with the criticism of one who has seen much Chinese culture as it was 'misplaced' in Taiwan as a result of the Cultural Revolution. This, in my opinion, hinders Gates' ability to discern more original Chinese culture from the post-revolutionary Chinese culture she experiences, as her sinology is somewhat skewed. This affects her ability to experience ethnocentric events in all of their authentic splendor. If a particular event, location, or tradition doesn't quite match up to the standards set by her "Taiwan-trained eyes", one gets the impression that it is of less cultural significance to what she ascertains are remnants of more ancient Chinese tradition. In my opinion, this serves as a great example of the sort of attitude to avoid as an anthropologist; we should never presume that we know enough of one culture or aspect of that culture, since as anthropologists we could never reach the height of exoteric cultural understanding.

The purpose of Gates' visit to the new leader of the Third World was to study the development that followed the economic reforms of 1978, which allowed rural Chinese family-based entrepreneurship. Hill Gates, being a Marxist-feminist, chose to look more closely at the role women and others played as communities across China gained their own footing after living within a strict socialist structure. Its cultural authenticity, having great indigenous influence, is what attracted Gates to Chengdu in the Sichuan province of China.

There were several obstacles to Gates' research in Chengdu; much of the pre-Revolutionary historical documentation was destroyed or hardly recorded. In addition, only a keen cultural understanding and expertise in sinology would allow Gates to understand the voluminous ancient manuscripts that were written "by and for Chinese". Also, as is typical in many regions with strong indigenous roots, Gates' conversation and thus her research was limited to women because of taboo that existed in social gender-relations; this may have been fine for her general focus on women in the business community, but it seriously limits the perspectives she could gain into traditional and 'modern' cultural life in China.

As a newcomer to a country which she knows only from the periphery, Gates wonders about which aspect of China she sees--the old, or the new? The cultural adjustments she must make are obvious at first; and although the reader gets the sense that, especially as an anthropologist, Gates should more openly accept various aspects of Chinese culture in order to learn more from them, she exemplifies a sort of Westernized ignorance typical of a tourist. For example, on more than one occasion Gates passes up on opportunities to learn more about Chinese tradition, such as with the elderly woman who wanted to show her the village she was passing through earlier on in her travels. Gates allows her desire to explore the economical significance and development of particular traditions to hinder her sight as an anthropologist in understanding the importance of her cultural findings and gaining the insight of a person who has seen the change from pre-revolutionary China throughout the Cultural Revolution and then through liberation.

Throughout her travels, we find instances of the cultural impact which the revolution in China left behind. We see this in the attitude of the young intellectual woman, the director of the Dragon Mother Temple Gates visits. Disconnected from its traditional importance, she views its existence as nothing more than "feudal superstition", especially considering that the local villagers had it reconstructed but rarely used it--this in itself implies that perhaps the significance of temple worship for this particular cult was lost in the revolution as well. More so, this indicates that intellectual China is far removed from the indigenous roots of Old China.

It is interesting to note that Muslim culture is prevalent in the city of Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan. One notable observation Gates' makes is in regards to the traditional dress of the various minority ethnic groups; whereas with most groups the women's dress exemplifies cultural differentiation, amongst the Muslim community such differentiation is seen in the man's style of dress. Gates fails to explain, however, a seemingly important observation of ethnic structure; she observes that the child of a Muslim man and Yin woman is considered to be Yin, which may imply a strong sense of matriarchy in some Chinese culture. Gates neither confirms nor rejects this notion; simply overlooking what could be an important cultural find. She perhaps makes up for this by noting, while visiting the Yunnan Provincial Museum, that through its material cultural and archaeological exhibits it stresses a more gender-equal society of the past, despite the patriarchal nature of the majority Han tribe. This suggests too that this particular museum does hold some authentic remnants of Chinese culture, as is not particularly common in China at this time.

We might conclude that the remnants of old Chinese culture as they persist even through post-Revolutionary China are somewhat well in-tact; in her travels Gates encounters elderly women wearing traditional clothing, a local procession of outdoor altars and small temples, displaying revelry to different deities; here we learn about the importance of money in religious worship as offerings.