Body, Subject and Power in China.

This ambitious collection is an attempt not just to add new topics to Chinese social history but in the Foucauldian tradition to question Western social science, rooted in 18th century rationalism, which, it is argued, essentializes the individual, separates power from culture, divorces the biological body from spirit, mind and role, converts this viewpoint into common sense, and thereby masks ongoing systems of inequality. The authors see the self (or the "subject") as always in process, produced in everyday practices whether ritualized or unritualized, and look for the basis alike of inequality and resistance in the intimate and public actions of daily life.

The subject matter is varied. In one of the collection's most original pieces, John Hay asks why the nude is absent in Chinese art and concludes it was because it was absent from Chinese culture. An undressed, and therefore uncoded body would not, he suggests, seem human, certainly not Chinese. The body is seen as social, and is represented by its garments, their surfaces as not solid but interfacing with the environment. In literature as in art, female allure is represented in analogy and through texture. There was no Western sense of a body articulated by a skeleton and conceived as a whole. Instead the body is a microcosm, and the self evolves in the relation between bodies and the macrocosm of humanity.

In a chapter building on the more developed field of Chinese medicine, Judith Farquhar stresses the multiplicity of Chinese "medical bodies." Although practitioners' proper apprenticeship and experience are strongly emphasized in contemporary China, medical practice refers to causes that are not empirically provable. Openness to many possible points of view contrasts with the Western view of knowledge preceding action and kept separate from it.

Fiction is another area of relevance. Keith McMahon examines a deviation from usual gender roles in the seventeenth-century genre of "the beauty and the scholar" story in which smart and chaste young women are at least a match for their male counterparts. Lydia Liu, seeing the nation-oriented modern critical tradition as male-centered, examines the novelist Xiao Hong's ambivalence about homeland from the point of view of a woman reluctant to subordinate female identity to nation. Both chapters help to complicate standard views of women's place in China.

The most political of the chapters are two on the eighteenth century and two on the Communist period, all dealing with bodies as a source of meaning and a locus of power. Angela Zito deals with the fruitful subject of boundaries, though her sophisticated argument is here distilled into a few pages. Taking her cue from a portrait of the Emperor Qianlong, she argues that it was on surfaces that human beings, and the Emperor in particular, found the site for order and pattern in the battle against chaos. The metaphor for body is the vessel, seen as an inscribed surface in an immanent cosmos empty of purposeful divinity. There are "no fixed boundaries ... between the internal self and the external world" (111). In the case of the Emperor's body this permeability facilitated his sacrificial rituals, which referred both to his qualities as a model sovereign and to cosmic principles. Sacrifices had the double effect of creating the yang body of power (producing authoritative fathers as well as sovereigns) and of centering humanity as a whole in resonance with the cosmos. James Hevia uses the European controversy over the koutou required of important foreign visitors to distinguish two kinds of bodily practice and two kinds of sovereignty: the European, in which bodies represent absolute abstract principles, and the Chinese, in which bodies constitute relationships, their location and movement conveying meanings and forging asymmetrical relations.

The two chapters on local rituals in the PRC make one wish that more anthropologists were engaged in studying contemporary China, the usual province of political science. Andrew Kipnis takes apart the current practice of koutou in Shandong weddings and other events. Rather than betokening servility, such rituals, he shows, help the villagers to "construct" themselves as "subjects." ("Identity" is forsworn by most writers here as a Western concept). It is not a question of "Who am I?" but "Who should I commit myself to?" Like Kipnis, Ann Anagnost sheds new light on the relationship of peasant to Communist cadre, examining the production of docile yet self-interested political subjects through a fascinating analysis of an apparently simple incident.

Concepts of the body are either very persistent or too little researched in China, for only two chapters illuminate historical changes. Shigehisa Kuriyama discusses the emergence of early medical ideas of the formative Han period (206 BCE-221 CE) by contrasting the new science of the body with early views on the working of winds, seen as external to the body. Tani Barlow explores the very different understandings behind terms for woman in the past century. In late traditional times, funu distinguished a female person not by anatomical difference but by ethical behavior in the family context. Only modern intellectuals made Chinese nuren part of a universal category, but "under a patriotic inscription" (263). Maoism retained the statist slant in the standard term funu, understood as a woman emancipated from traditional marital practices and footbinding, and participating in class-based politics. Recent discussion defines women essentially through sexual physiology.

Rejecting the implicit perspective of modernization, which assumes that the Chinese have been held back from political and economic progress by their culture, these authors are faithful to the tradition of Western sinology, insofar as they seek to uncover particular Chinese meanings embedded in language, and refuse to assume that what is discovered at one point in Chinese history is necessarily true at another. They strike out in a new direction by rejecting such familiar scholarly terms as individual and identity, and by demonstrating that accepted Western notions of knowledge and the body have hindered our understanding of Chinese practices. The language they borrow from cultural studies can on occasion be hard-going, and inferior to what is replaced, but read closely this collective work rewards effort and whets the appetite for full-length studies by the New Wave of China scholars here represented.

Donald S. Sutton Carnegie Mellon University