History in Three Keys: The Boxers as Event, Experience, and Myth.

By Paul A. Cohen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. xviii plus 428pp. $34.50).

This long-awaited book on the Boxer Uprising is a critical inquiry into the different ways in which we understand the past. Cohen seeks to distinguish the historian's reconstruction of the event from the participants' experience on the one hand, and from the myths of polemicists on the other. Although the 18991900 anti-foreign uprising in North China is his example, Cohen's book is as much about the nature of history as it is a study of collective action in China.

The first part of the book summarizes the Boxers as event. This is the past reconstructed by historians, and Cohen's construction is not markedly different from that of other historians (including the present reviewer). He describes the movement's origins in the villages of Shandong province, where young men and boys turned rituals of mass possession and invulnerability to antiChristian purposes. Then in the spring of 1900, as drought gripped the North China plains, idling peasants and raising anxiety, the movement spread toward Beijing and Tianjin, encouraged by a vacillating policy at court. In the cities, the Boxers' anti-Christian activities became more generally anti-foreign, provoking defensive military action from the foreign powers. As foreign actions became more provocative, the court openly supported the Boxers. This brought on the siege of the refugee-filled legation quarter and Northern Cathedral in Beijing and the foreign concessions in Tianjin. By August, eight foreign powers organized a relief expedition to rescue the besieged foreigners and Christians, punish Boxers (and civilians) throughout North China, and impose a crippling indemnity on the Qing government.

Part 2 is the longest and freshest part of the book. It attempts to recapture the experience of the various participants in the Boxer movement, and stresses the "outcome-blindness" (p. 61) of contemporary accounts by witnesses and participants for whom the future remains unknown and undefined. Six chapters treat the drought, mass spirit possession, magic and female pollution, rumor, and death. Each is full of graphic accounts by Chinese and foreign eyewitnesses, with frequent comparative asides to similar phenomena in other cultures and times.

The chapter on "Drought and the Foreign Presence" offers a compelling picture of the special anxiety that drought produces. Floods have clear beginnings and identifiable causes, and can often be blamed on official malfeasance. But the onset of a drought is only known after it has continued for some time, and is far more likely to be assigned supernatural cause. In the drought of 1900, both Boxers and missionaries sought religious explanation for the crisis and saw a form of divine punishment. But the Boxers saw the gods angered by Christian disrespect, and predicted an end to the drought only when the foreign religion was eliminated from China. Cohen finds in this experience a major causal dynamic for the uprising. Noting that the Boxers did not arise where the impact of imperialism was greatest, he rejects explanations which link the Boxers to the aggressive imperialism of the late 1890s. Instead he sees anti-foreignism as "there all along in latent form" (p. 94) with drought the anxiety-producing factor that "more than any other ... accounted for the explosive growth of the Boxer movement." (p. 95) The only problem with this logic is that it fails to explain why other droughts (for example the much worse one of 1877-78) did not bring similar anti-foreign violence.

The discussion of mass spirit possession notes the important blend of ritual and theater in Boxer performance, and makes an important distinction between the more professional spirit mediums of South China who were called on for personal (especially health) crises, and the mass possession of the Boxers which responded to community crisis. He describes the various forms of Boxer magic, and the problem of female pollution blocking its efficacy. Rumors are rife in any situation where information is scarce and credulity abundant, and the Boxer Uprising produced all sorts of rumors - from tales of Christians stealing body parts to widespread accusations (often to settle personal scores) of well-poisoning. The final chapter in this section, on death, provides plenty of eyewitness accounts of dead bodies - but little that allows us to specify with more precision than past studies just how many of what groups died at whose hand.

The final section of the book covers much the same ground that Cohen treated in a 1992 article in the Journal of Asian Studies. It discusses and analyzes the image of the Boxers in the New Culture movement (when they were a symbol of all that was backward and superstitious in China), in the 1920s (when leftists appreciated the Boxers' anti-imperialism, but criticized their lack of organization or class consciousness), and in the Cultural Revolution (where the female Red Lanterns became a particularly popular model for youthful anti-imperialist revolutionary empowerment).

Much of the point of this final section is to distinguish between history and myth making. His discussion includes much good common sense wisdom from a serious practicing historian. The basic distinction is between the historian whose primary objective is "as accurate and truthful an understanding of the past as possible," and mythologizers who "start out with an understanding of the past ... [and] draw on it to serve the political, ideological, rhetorical and/or emotional needs of the present." (p. 213) But he quickly admits that "Even the most accomplished historians ... in the process of challenging one mythologized past, inevitably fashion others." (p. 213)

If even historians end up creating myths, then Cohen's distinction between history writing and myth making seems largely a matter of intent: whether one's object is understanding the past or serving the present. Given that some service to the present is involved in most historians' efforts to understand the past, this may prove a difficult distinction to draw.

Joseph W. Esherick University of California, San Diego