Reading List (2023)

chapters

• intro
• foundations of religion in society in manchukuo
• from the blood of the martyrs
• the mind of empire
• piety in print
• the laws of men
• a charitable view
• manchukuo's filial sons
• may god bless manchukuo
• concluding thoughts

chapters

• intro
• pt 1 comparative/historical perspective
  • ch 1 imperialism + nationalism in 20th century
  • ch 2 manchukuo historical overview
• pt 2 civilization and sovereignty
  • ch 3 asianism + new discourse of civilization
  • ch 4 embodying civilization: women + figure of tradition within modernity
• pt 3 authenticity of spaces
  • ch 5 imperial nationalism and the frontier
  • ch 6 local worlds: poetics + politics of native place
• conclusion
  • manchukuo + imperialism
    • language/culture ideas made possibility of integration of non-japanese in empire as citizens but blood descent stuff prevents
    • contradiction in korea and taiwan: assimilation or exclusion
    • contradiction in manchukuo (more complicated): alliance based on independence, making necessary quest for authenticity that would justify sovereignty, VS imperialist power structure that just loots the area
    • jp formed alliance with local elites, redemptive societies, old power structures — which could bargain with them
    • manchukuo looking for sovereignty foreshadowed postwar/cold war type imperialism with "independent" client states
  • manchukuo + east asian modern
    • narrative of puppet state increasingly dominated by imperialist militarism remains in place
    • but that civilizational and nationalist state project had been started and it took some dismantling
    • identity cultivated had to avoid excluding japanese or reducing their superiority, so took weakly territorial forms: Concordia framework ethnic nationality, Asian civilization, spatial representation of forest frontier nation
    • Asian civilization (confucianism, redemptive society syncretism) to appeal to Han majority, Manchuria as frontier (primeval nature, savage place) to limit Chinese claims / endorse Japanese as caretakers of the primitive
    • native place authenticity could go multiple ways: Tungus homeland connected to Japanese by Ural-Altaic myth, or Shanding's Chinese style representation
  • sovereignty + scales of identity
    • "civilization" could mobilize people (redemptive societies) in ways that combined modern/historical/religious community conceptions together and were not always compatible w/ territorial nation
    • but ofc could also be v us vs them, east vs west
    • culture not merely received tradition or non-territorial upper-class phenomenon or methodology of meaning production—in 20th century it became "a bounded and holistic set of ideas, institutions, and practices that constituted and distinguished a people," "rewired to serve identity"
      • culture/rights connection not reducible to nation; can be tiny Boas type community or vast Asian/Islamic civilization—but in either case can be used to claim sovereignty and therefore authenticity had to be found in it
      • after WWI europe was getting violent trying to match national and cultural boundaries, while RoC did 5 nationalities thing, USSR was multinational, Manchukuo influenced by these
      • distinct problems due to domination by japanese minority but still continuous with RoC/USSR
      • Duara is aware that sometimes there doesn't seem to be much resource for resistance against empire besides nationalism, and says it can be provisional and contextual—but it's always got the ability to harden boundaries and lose universalism, as happened here

chapters

• intro: "popular confucianism" is novel but more like tiny shoots than a tendency of significance. 20th century confucianism often took the form of "philosophy" (the 新儒家 of Mou Zongsan etc.), a western category that severed it from the ritual and self-cultivation aspects historically integral to it. this, though, is something at most adjacent to academia, sometimes in friction with it, with a broader social vision and more eclectic social base. it aims to create a new kind of collective body and connection to the past. this is also something to distinguish from generic state (PRC) appropriations of Kongzi as a patriotic symbol or secular conservative morality.
• 教化
  • C20 confucian education. traditional schools 私塾 for confucian education in the imperial period were preliminary to entering academies and could be run by a scholar, family/group of families, lineage, or village. there was no standardization and they relied on rote memorization and physical punishment, though those who attended them did not necessarily have bad memories. academies 書院 were the proper neo-confucian instiutions run by lineages or the state, which were dismantled in the early 20th century for modernization yet often missed or remembered ambivalently. in the 1930s, a couple marginal recreated academies tried to pose self-cultivation or the study of the six arts and six classics against western learning, but this tendency was kicked out of the mainland after '49. on the other hand, there was Liang Shuming-type rural reconstruction, which at least as a motif of rural traditional culture informs some of the contemporary confucians.
  • new institutionalization of conf. edu. confucian activists see academia as very important to their project, but their projects struggle to get accreditation, although this doesn't stop them from garnering interest from people—e.g. already-successful enterpreneurs and cadres—who don't meet a traditional confucian stereotype and don't seem to have utilitarian motivations, instead looking for high culture or existential fulfillment.
  • modern anti-intellectualism: child/body/people another side of confucian education is the "children classics reading movement," which is very much in reaction to May 4th type progressive pedagogy. mathematics in particular is taken as emblematic of soul-destroying contemporary education, whereas the almost ritual chanting of classics is supposed to imbue children with a holistic moral and reasoning capacity, even if the children in fact don't understand what they're learning, receive little or no explanation, and are expected to fully process it only perhaps decades later.
• 安身立命
  • varieties of religious experience. examining case studies of women's experiences of confucian conversion, Billioud and Thoraval note the importance of buddhist promoters of confucianism, mixed feelings on the proximity of confucianism to the westernized category of religion 宗教, and the reactivation of master-disciple transmission narratives. fascinatingly, one of their subjects draws transmission through Mou Zongsan, insisting that the term "philosopher" mistakes his real role as "sage"!
  • questioning modern categories. Billioud and Thoraval recapitulate the vexed relationship between confucianism and "religion" and "philosophy" (cf. Anna Sun).
  • quest for recognition of conf religion. on the other hand, there have been various attempts to religionize confucianism, reviving debates from the republican period: making it an independent religion on the christian model, merging it into "redemptive societies" (it's highly valued by Yiguandao), or making it a state religion or "civil religion" in a way questionably modeled on amerikkkan christianity (or maybe state shintō?).
• 禮教

  • the third part of the book covers the cult of Confucius and confucian ritualism in its imperial and revived forms. the imperial cult to Kongzi was essentially mid-level; it was prestigious and promoted by the state but still needed to be open to all scholars. naturally it centered on Kongzi's home of Qufu and the Kong lineage who always promoted and benefited from it. the cult was sporadically maintained in the first half of the twentieth century by warlords and the ROC.

    the "Confucius Festival" in Qufu in 2007 showcases the fundamental differences between activist and state promotion of Confucius, even when they converge. activists want to engage in real rituals, recreated from texts, for a spirit audience, whereas the state takes Confucius as representative of a national essence which confirms the state's power and conveys even a claim on chinese people outside the PRC, and the events it organizes are for only a human audience—in fact, with how much media presence there is, it may be more for a mechanical audience.

methods

ethnographic but very sociology vibes

scholars in conversation with

the authors are closely interested in David Palmer's work on qigong, which like popular confucianism is a project of reinventing traditions and creating a new kind of collective in a postsocialist secular context, traditions whose identity with or difference from religion adds much anxiety to the process. they also engage with Philippe Descola's idea of analogism in trying to place these phenomena in relation to non-modern indigenous notions of a continuous universe in which nature and society are coextensive.

praise/criticism

posing this over and over again as "popular" in contrast with the state is, i think, questionable and can easily be reductive, though Billioud and Thoraval aren't inattentive to the background of particular actors. if these phenomena are so rare and unrepresentative, shouldn't we call it unpopular Confucianism? the text feels like an interesting scrapbook of developments that i'm glad to become familiar with, but like it isn't very critical about the overall context in which moralizing ideological projects become appealing, a certain class of parent can significantly restrict the kinds of educational influence their children are subjected to, etc.—it's just not very political and it doesn't inspire me methodologically. i think the authors are reasonably a bit dismissive about the prospects of some of these projects. but do they think trying to create this kind of ritual collectivity is a misguided project? knowing that Billioud has written a monograph on Mou Zongsan's confucian philosophy, i sort of expected more complex intuitions (if not outright partisanship) about these contemporary projects.

chapters

introduction: book is concerned with the hoary Zürcher question of buddho-daoist mutual influence. specifically, it aims to illuminate in more detail the dynamics of one corner of that "influence"—ritual-centric medieval scriptures which originate on one side but also have plagiarized copies or pastiches on the other. this is benefited by the Dunhuang collection, which contained many chinese-composed buddhist texts of the kind that were clearly popular on the ground and copied frequently for merit. Mollier goes over supreme clarity 上清 and conversion of barbarians 化胡. with her particular sources, she wants to show buddho-daoist interaction as not a confused muddling or harmonizing syncretism, but confrontational, polemical, piratical. the copying goes in both directions, and there are more examples than the book actually covers in depth. they also vary from obvious plagiarisms with find/replace run on key terms (laozi becomes the buddha or vice versa) to more considered responses that appropriate key elements and place them carefully in a new context.

1. 3 kitchens sūtra 三廚經: buddhist copy of daoist scripture, denounced quite early as such. the "kitchens" idea (familiar from Ge Hong) is about divine food that gives you immortality and involves abstinence from mundane food. the term does show up in some early buddhist translations but it's obvious here that it's the daoist concept.
2. 2 texts that show us how sorcery was envisioned and combated in medieval times: the buddhist sūtra for conjuration of bewitchments, and the daoist scripture for unbinding curses (which is actually more concerned with conversion of barbarians i.e. owning buddhists than stopping witches). as you'd probably expect, sorcery is mostly done by weird resentful marginal women with gu poisons and effigies that make you vomit blood. it's lucky the buddha preached this scripture informing us how to summon a million bodhisattvas and break their heads into seven pieces and make millipedes devour their eyes.
3. sūtra to increase the account 益算經: buddhist copy of daoist scripture. involves star worship, talismans, and standard chinese conception of life allotment.
4. 北斗 (big dipper) cult: moves from daoism to buddhism early (pastiche scripture at Dunhuang as well as promotion by high class buddhist ritual experts), then yuan version promoted by the state, translated into uyghur, tibetan, mongolian, as well as exported to japan. in reality there are seven stars, but often it's talked about as nine just because nine is yang and daoists love it; two of them are sort of hidden stars. they're all gods, govern our lives astrologically, correlate to different cereals.
5. everybody loves the universal gateway chapter of the lotus sūtra that describes all the hairy situations you can be saved from by invoking the name of guanyin, and it inspired tons of artistic production. the feminine guanyin also (how true is this?) was prototype for e.g. princess miaoshan (clearly), mazu, azure cloud princess, the unborn mother. but the earlier, male guanyin also inspired:: HEAVENLY VENERABLE SAVIOR FROM SUFFERING 救苦天尊 JIUKU TIANZUN.
6. conclusion. Zürcher had that metaphor of 佛/道 as 2 peaks (elite stuff) emerging from a base of undifferentiated popular stuff. but these texts are if anything more like a middle layer of ritual practitioners committed to one or the other side and engaged in covert subversion. it's not high scholasticism, but presumably utilitarian; it seems easy to imagine needing a counterpart scripture that will accommodate or appeal to rituals already in practice. ritual formality is something generally resistant to alteration but quite amenable to recontextualization; you can just move the blocks around. we have a "third class" of parareligious ritual specialists in the milieux of astrologers, medicine men, whatever.

chapters

1. it's the nineties, so scholars are going back and forth on whether different cultural phenomena represent "resistance" or "accomodation." does this taiwanese ritual resist the state or show patriotism? most of the time it seems to do neither with particular energy, and occasionally it does both. Weller very reasonably says that we need to stop trying to find a single interpretation ourselves, and pay attention to the social relations of interpretation that practitioners are bound up in. each phenomenon endlessly subject to reinterpretation, and in fact maintaining ritual in particular in a "saturated" state which offers lots of connections but refuses to commit to any single overall meaning is exactly how it remains sort of autonomous and prepared to commit itself one way or another (or another). informants asked about a striking cleaver through the head of a pig in a ritual say "we're chinese, we just do it like that" [wittgensteinian lol] or "it just looks pretty."
2. Weller uses this metaphor of "saturation" of a solution in chemistry, mixtures which are "as full as they can get"—and therefore on the verge of precipitating something new and tangible. precipitation is a rationalizing process which reduces polyvocality and potentially produces flashier results (like a rebellion), so we're tempted to focus on it, but we need to resist that impulse and put it in the context of the much broader substrate from which it emerges. he wants to take a counterfactual approach that pulls out "potentials" from saturated solutions, of which maybe none or only one are realized. the indeterminate meaning of e.g. chinese popular religion is not resistance per se, but it is still "perverse" as far as official discourse is concerned, because it's at least resistant to going out of its apparently pointless way or being overcoded, and could at some point mutate and become volatile.
3. Weller describes the beginnings of the Taiping movement in the 19th century. Hong Xiuquan has his vision and his encounter with christianity, but is effectively quarantined from causing disruption until he comes to east-central Guangxi (Xunzhou Prefecture)—he's an eccentric, but not one anyone is likely to listen to, and his ideas don't explain the movement. Xunzhou (where Weller did fieldwork), was during the 19th century undergoing economic breakdown and banditry.
4. the movement began to grow in power and numbers while its leaders were away from Guangxi and it could merge into the local religious fabric unmolested. God became a god among gods, proving his power through the decidely conventional means of harassing other temples, resistance to the authorities, and magical curing.
5. it gained even more momentum through spirit mediumship—a locally well-established tradition which, wherever it happens, creates a cacophony of voices directly in touch with divine authority which can't be systematized without attacking the practice itself. possession is great for recruitment but bad for institutionalization (we need a mass line for spirits…).
6. the Taiping movement transitioned away from creative but fragmented spirit possession by clamping down on who could be possessed, creating military and bureaucratic institutions, and settling on a single dominant interpretation of themselves as a rebellion (saturation→precipitation). until then, though, resistance/rebellion had been only one of the possible readings.
7. Weller describes the basics of Taiwan temple religion, 热闹 aesthetics, ritual, and particularly focuses on the very odd temple of the "eighteen lords." these are not gods but unknown ghosts, 17 men and a dog. it began as a typical pity shrine to the unknown dead but has reached traffic on par with the most popular god temples.
8. the 18 lords temple innovates only through recombination of existing elements. the lords seem comparable to gods in scale, but cigarette offerings, a spooky underground chamber, and the lack of curved eaves on their temple make it obvious that they're a gang of ghosts; it's not hidden but underlined. ghosts are the scum of spirit society, associated with prostitution, gambling, crime, and precisely because of their desperation, you can count on them to fulfill any request, as long as they're properly compensated. gods won't give you gambling numbers. Weller emphasises the variety and contradictoriness of their connotations, e.g. that in some ways their "yin power" is valorized (resistance?) while in others (the offering of the yang food of sesame oil chicken, like to a mother who has just given birth) it is read as weakness (accomodation?). in the economy of 80s Taiwan, with too much capital and too few investment opportunities, gambling became popular and turning to ghosts made sense.
9. in contrast to the Taiping, we can find lots of failed precipitations, interpretations that just didn't catch on, often because they were too thinly self-interested while reducing the eighteen lords material: a "fake" cash-in temple, a movie (actually somewhat successful just by virtue of being totally incoherent and immoral), a too-moral tv show, a booklet on the lords' "true" origins serving to promote the Lian lineage which chairs the temple committee, academic readings of this kind of phenomenon themselves…
10. the secular taiwanese state, which no longer even bans Yiguandao, has basically made itself incapable of interfering with religion effectively, where formerly chinese states could at least canonize gods. its requests to e.g. stop pig sacrifice are routinely ignored or get bare lipservice. we see in more confucian, state rituals what it takes to achieve state control of an interpretative community: typically you need far fewer people in the room!
11. Weller discusses the Tiananmen Square protests, emphasizing that the students actually had little clear idea of what they were asking for. mourning seems to be a space that easily supports excess that escapes official discourse. excessively eager socialist nostalgia, following official discourse too closely also produces a lot of ambiguity that doesn't seem to be what the state actually asked for.
12. socialist discourse presents the impersonal, explicit, universalizing face of science. but what it produces in people is instead a field of implicit meanings, cynicism, and personalization of information to trust in whoever conveys it. this is what characterizes the "second economy" in which things are provisioned through personal connections and "corruption" (which no one stigmatizes as such). the claimed thinness of official language makes everyone suspiciously comb it for coded messages, and the prospect of censorship encourages people to engage on the same wavelength. Weller cites examples of statements of apparent coded support for the Tiananmen protests: newscasters coincidentally(?) wearing black (fired), newspapers using suspiciously on-point headlines (impossible to prove), a poem with messages in the diagonals (caught), allegorical songs (escaped). and again, too much enthusiasm can denature official meanings: is a t-shirt with an inflammatory Mao quote pro-state, anti-state, a statement on the meaninglessness of those words? similarly, there is nineties ennui, refusal to engage at all.

scholars in conversation with

• Bakhtin on Rabelais, Umberto Eco, James C. Scott, Gramsci, Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Bourdieu, Weber, Victor Turner, Taussig

praise/criticism

splendid book; i think he has the right position on interpretation for sure and it's helpful to read something good out of that "resistance" discourse we aren't so concerned about anymore. i think though that the next step of reflexivity would be to think about how actors are themselves calculating the tradeoffs of saturation and precipitation. isn't that exactly what socialism spent so much time on? trying to distill the breadth of people's wants and claims without totally reducing or coopting it (even if it failed in the end, or failed everyday).

summary

the predominantly women's buddhist charity Ci Ji/Tzu Chi is an organization defined around simultaneous poles of Zhengyan's charisma and the routinization of (still often "formless") bureaucracy. it uses a variety of techniques to maintain and channel personalistic and affective elements, trying to make them effective and sustainable while the situation of the organization and its following also grows and mutates.

• "shapeless bureaucracy" with unclear lines of authority and a system of clear tasks for adherents rationalize charisma
• 2 types of physical circulation renew vibes: Zhengyan's monthly tour of Taiwan (centrifugal), and adherents' visits to the Still Thoughts Abode in Hualian (centripetal)
• adherents remake their identities through morality, etiquette, and gendered hair/dress codes. outside Taiwan their is less local formalization, but adherents are drawn to it as a way to redefine their own activism.
• by having a strong moral element, Ci Ji gets away with what would be seen as cultish in another group, and becomes the model for humanitarianism and civil society in Taiwan after the end of martial law
• emotionality plays a significant role in Ci Ji, in the mutually exclusive forms of crying and sign language song. cijiren are weepy people, they cry randomly because they've seen "上人" or witnessed suffering or are just overcome by a ritual. there are no formalized crying times, and they insist when asked that they don't really know why they cry, both of which just underline the non-constructedness or spontaneity or authenticity of the performance. volunteers at Ci Ji's Taipei hospital are basically misery tourists who want the Experience of exposure to suffering (and crying afterwards) but don't have the long-term investment to wait around how long it really takes to see someone get better (or so a doctor implies). it seems like there's an energy they get from direct exposure to Zhengyan, and this is another way of charging it up (you know it when you see crying). Ci Ji also habitually engages in sing language interpretation of song lyrics. this is something that was adopted from a nationalist youth group (what Ci Ji's own youth group is essentially modeled on) created to divert the young from communism. aesthetically, this is quieter than singing and more disciplined than dance, so seems to fit their sunday school style. it doesn't serve a lot of utilitarian function, despite the omnipresence of sign language song and subgroups dedicated to learning and practicing it—it's not like deaf people are around that option, and cijiren justify it by saying "it's nice." Huang suggests it's an outlet for those who don't have any more useful skills. Zhengyan comments on its similarity to mudras, but this doesn't seem to be a significant part of it.
• Huang has a concept of "three bodies": the leader's body = her personal appeal, phenomenology of seeing/hearing her, her extraordinariness; follower's body = organization, symbolization, practice of identity; collective/musical body = transformation of inchoate emotional "communitas" to interpretive community.
• Ci Ji doesn't have a following beyond chinese people in whichever country, which suggests limits to its mode of appeal. it can serve as a kind of connective tissue for cultural identity, and one that even institutes a new homeland (Taiwan/Hualian). in Boston it even brings together both mandarin and cantonese speakers. on the other hand, Ci Ji participants in Malaysia think of it as about Ci Ji, not about chineseness or Taiwan at all; when they make pilgrimage to Hualian, they have zero interest in other things taiwanese. it also doesn't look particularly culturally-specific, which may even impede its purchase among westerners, for whom it is too familiar.
• in japan, there's a policy that the volunteers don't actually have contact with the nursing home seniors they're doing charity for(?) because the japanese are just that racist against taiwanese immigrants apparently lol
• the big question for Ci Ji is succession—what happens when Zhengyan dies? i wonder if they've made progress on this question since the book was written

scholars in conversation with

• Weber, of course, although i think she lets the materials speak for themselves rather than pushing them to converse with the standing literature on charisma
• basic stuff on discipline (Foucault, Bourdieu)
• writers about transnationalism and deterritorialization? Appadurai

praise/criticism

• as a study of what charisma and routinization actually are, rather than theoretical intuitions based on thin data on long-dead historical figures, i think this is hugely valuable—assuming charisma isn't itself somehow an artefact of our anthropological gaze. it does seem like a sensible analysis here, though.
• i would have liked to see a million times more attention to the politics of Ci Ji. what does it mean that it's born out of non-confrontation with a fascist state? what's the significance of "compassion" over "justice" and its medical-humanitarian idiom?
• what should multi-sited ethnography be? i would want to say: we need to see the full local contexts before we can understand the trans-local process linking them. basically, too much of this was showing the Ci Ji perspective and how Ci Ji participants conceive of their work. how do the recipients of their charity see them?
• Huang mentions multiple times that Zhengyan was "born with" personal appeal, but nothing particularly supports this besides her own official biographies, and i've actually seen a more recent study of Ci Ji's origins claiming that it was a multi-person effort at the beginning and reterritorialization on the leader took place later.

What is Orthodox Marxism?

• Lukács sketches and refutes a kind of bourgeois-tainted revisionist empiricism
• empiricism follows the model of the natural sciences, studying "facts" governed by "laws" which are nominally universal but (like the facts themselves) always conveived at a great distance from the one studying them. i imagine a Scientist standing over his work with magnifying glass and tweezers. put to sound innocent and banal, they go from studying things they're not very much part of to things that they are, and transport with them an increasingly inappropriate model of the connection between the two
• of course, this is all a consequence of capitalism's own vital need to pretend its laws apply to all societies and make itself appear necessary, and its fragmentation of knowledge corresponding to the breaking-down of the production process
• the correct, dialectical method, on the other hand, knows it's specifically studying society or history, and conceives itself as such: it is an expression of the process, which is becoming reflexive, coming to know itself. the historical emergence of the proletariat is the precondition for this self-knowledge
• correct method aspires to holism; it studies the specific "isolated facts" in order to reach "concrete totality." but reciprocally, concrete totality as context is the only thing that can give the facts themselves their proper measure. i think if you just said "hermeneutic circle," people nowadays would get the idea, though maybe that's a problematic reference.
• revisionism sees contradiction as only between theories, presumed to misunderstand the non-contradictory actuality, whereas orthodoxy refers indissoluble theoretical disagreements back to contradiction in the subject matter itself (viz. contradiction between forces and relations of production…?)
• the correct and true goes beyond Hegel, because he was still disgusted by the specific, and because his Absolute Spirit was only the philosopher's retrospective battlefield salvage, not a knowledge that the process itself would have as it took place
• but even though he claims to criticze the fragmentation of knowledge, Lukács maintains the same thing, rejecting Engels' and Hegel's use of dialectical method when it comes to "nature" and not only "society." what does he think, that empiricism is actually the correct attitude in its own area, and so it and dialectic should simply leave each other alone? that means he's instituting a higher-level attitude that subsumes both the method of totality and and the method of fragments, and the higher-level attitude is a method of fragments. it seems like even calling dialectic a "method" is already a sign that his head isn't on straight! sad! he justifies this by invoking "subject and object," "theory and practice," dyads which he thinks are not present in nature. does he think animals aren't subjects which perceive and interact with objects? like us, animals are capable of misapprehending their world and responding to that misapprehension, even if they don't speak or write German in particular.
• i say: the dialectical attitude is appropriate everywhere, or it's vitiated. if this fool read Levins and Lewontin, he would realize that "natural laws" are just as historically mutable as social ones. it's the very idea of isolated facts and governing laws that is wrong, not only its application to history.

• In feudal society man could not yet see himself as a social being because his social relations were still mainly natural. Society was far too unorganised and had far too little control over the totality of relations between men for it to appear to consciousness as the reality of man. (The question of the structure and unity of feudal society cannot be considered in any detail here.) Bourgeois society carried out the process of socialising society. Capitalism destroyed both the spatio-temporal barriers between different lands and territories and also the legal partitions between the different ‘estates’ (Stände). In its universe there is a formal equality for all men; the economic relations that directly determined the metabolic exchange between men and nature progressively disappear. Man becomes, in the true sense of the word, a social being. Society. becomes the reality for man.

  guess what fuckface: all of that is wrong. capitalism's universe does not have "formal equality for all men," and especially not for women. (reading something from 1919) how long are people gonna be spouting this shit? the persistence of "non-economic" domination, the treatment of the gendered and racialized as closer to natural resources than to citizens, is not an artefact of capitalism's still-not-complete grasp on the planet which we can wish away or hurry up, but an essential part of capitalism's functioning. seems to me that the idea of human "social being" as the truth of our life is precisely the illusion capitalism is most invested in upholding. this calls into question the universality of his implicit conception of real equality; if he doesn't address this directly, he might as well ask for the democracy of Athenian slaveholders. of course, it isn't accidental that he makes both this error and the error of denying the application of dialectics to nature. he's desperately coping because he intuitively senses the great difficulty of the most important and radical implication of communism. need i say it? pigs and monkeys must be extended the franchise, access to the communal store, and control over their working conditions (and lazing around conditions).

cranegroup

• reading group is gonna do early crit theory stuff
• crane needs to sit in the sun wrinkling for awhile but he definitely has what it takes for the great thinker look
• we in this piece are already past the "end of marxism" being announced
• Lukács like many (Korsch) thinks that most of the marxism around him since Marx has nothing to do with the core of marxism
• critique of historicism "historicism" wrongly says we're not any longer in a situation where what marx said applies
• "even if everything Marx said was factually wrong, marxism would still be wrong." bold move people will get mad at (Mattick)
• crane has a nice voice too :)
• theory grips the masses early Marx on coordinated abolition of philosophy and proletariat…philosophy concerned with freedom…one-sided autonomy of thought…can't be realized in domain of theory…needs social movement that rises to it…theory grips the masses
• later Lukács defending marxism as worldview, general framework for meaning, general vibe, not necessarily fully inconsistent, takes over function of religious worldview or ideology, sure of oneself and place in the world
• but here, earlier, he is NOT like this. he is criticizing it. so the point of marxism is not to answer any question anywhere or to provide meaning in our lives
• Korsch, Horkheimer will say: our job as theorists is to critique worldviews, not to make them
• so how can theory grip the masses? question of "orientation" (kantian thing), points that allow certain things to come forward [thsi seems like the same thing lol].
• okay so lingered on first 2 paragraphs but it's cos they're deceptively easy and everyone dunks on them
• aside: coughcoughPostonecough badly reads false consciousness
• vulgar marxism = aspires to pure descriptive science that forgets why it's in it with presuppositions it does not question, laughs at others for not being scientific/abstract enough. criticism at this time primarily at 2nd international: Kautsky, Bernstein, they'll denounce as revisionists. not as much moral problem as boring and dumb [so true!]. marxism just pretending to be like a bourgeois social science.
• critique of Engels for putting the dialectic "out there" he will himself be vulnerable to this later, where he's like oh shit did i just reinvent Kant.
• the problem is that if there's a dialectic working itself out at the "objective" level regardless of what we think at the subjective level—if we think of unilateral determination of social being to consciousness—it raises a lot of issues like, how do we know that if it's outside our consciousness.
• if we think that's what dialectic is and that our job is to reflect it, that's not dialectical at all [very true!]. Engels/other orthodox (he says heterodox) approaches fail to see us as implicated in what we study, basically.
• he has a clear idea here about what theoretical writing as social criticism should accomplish, but he will later lose it.
• dialectic happens between subject and object, not one to exclusion of other, means showing objectivity of subjectivity and vice versa lists some bad oppositions that are insufficiently dialectical.
• you're trying to make theory adequate to your object. but at some point you have to account for the emergence of your science from the history that is the object of your science. oh no!! it's merely subjective(?) because it's just an object. but also: world confonts us a just given, not historically mediated, data + laws both brute givens. so he says, objectivity shaped by warring "subjective" projects, political ideals in historical struggle. same goes for material landscape.
• example: you can tell class of neighborhood based on squirrel species (where are trees taken care of, where do people leash their dogs)

1. lydia says: so why write this essay, what's it supposed to do?

   • crane: it's tailored to an audience of natural+social scientists interested in scientific status of histmat (it's not)
   • lydia (positivistically): why not >:(
   • crane: because the method isn't to be disproved by facts. polemically against those who criticize marxism for not being verifiable/falsifiable, against enemies of marxism, and against friends of marxism (even worse) who want marxism to be more positivistic. also probably conditions of speaking to communist party: correct theoretical line that could derail strategy.

2. samthomas

   • something about Hume and Kant idfk
   • crane: post copernican revolution active role of subjects in creating world, Kant critical of third person totalization of world in terms of theoretical reason. so in that sense it does take off from whatever this Kant thing is.

3. kevin (who?)

   • why do people get mad at the first couple paragraphs…? <something about method>
   • mac (who??): yeah when i hear method i get kantian vibes. Hegel would say you can't separate out method.

4. lydia

   • consider: for Lukács to detach phenomena from immediately given form and find intrinsic link to essence…doesn't that just give you all of science
   • crane: mm. "is he falling into bad kind of method indifferent to content" + people hate "totality"… Kant(?) knows there's something wrong with how he talks about theoretical reason…quid juris…no better right than intersubjectivity…practical reason to get back to reality. anyways, in the same way: practical reason has advantage because it can prove something forward (shills book called All or Nothing)…by what right to we speak of ourselves as free? because if we think of ourselves as free, what we do changes. freedom is only there insofar as we actualize it. Lukács does something similar. so Marx has all of these theses, some of them look economic, but they have to be transcended—we need to prove forward what Marxism looks like rather than relying on stock of theses. important thing in Marx would then be shift from theoretical to practical reason, important toward what it gives us toward diff social life. content is practical.
   • crane: wrt totality. Jameson got called a "totalizing bastard." what does totality mean here? how is it different from self-consistent propositions or complete theory in physics? you can only understand totality by destroying it (analyzing, breaking down). more tendency than fact of society.

5. me

   • my shtick
   • crane: you're saying he excludes both interdependence of humans and non-humans and intra-human interdependence of those who do and don't have formal equality. so yeah he his failing to get to totality. on nature itself: this is a problem resolved best by critiques of orthodox marxism on metabolism; it's pretty naive and i won't defend it; he's overcorrecting. cherry tree trade routes thing from German Ideology making fun of Feuerbach. weakens his claim of legitimacy of dialectics if he shrugs at nature and goes "okay that part's just empirical."
   • crane: unit of people he's talking about, for whom formal equality material inequality is the rule, he's thinking in much narrower terms than Marx and Engels. he didn't take into account well enough what they saw, universalizes the picture at the beginning of Capital. only good critique of him retains the aspiration to totality and says he fails it [so true!!].

6. aaron(?)

   • on purpose of this book. orthodox marxism is a method, becomes diamat when tranlated into practice. calling it a method maybe a bad place to start, since that's not a method, it's practical "because you can't describe it exactly, you just have to do it." you don't say dialectic is X, you jsut do it. also can i hear more about machists and historicism.
   • crane: Bernstein style revisionism and late C19/early C20 neokant wave we've been dealing with fallout of ever since—attempt to historicize what Marx was doing by saying we know better now. for Bernstein: revolution no longer necessary, just do reform, politics has gotten more Advanced. socialism as Kant style regulative ideal we can push toward. parly cos there was already criticism at this point that there was no more revolutionary subject lol. Lukács says rev subj has to be made. other hand, machists say science has progressed more and it's good now. we've just been seeing moves like this over and over forever. wrt dialectic as method or not a method…let's hear what people say.

7. jack

   • subject/object opposition…Gillian Rose says speculative totality in this essay is interesting but some particular line is confusing(?) comes too close to neokant
   • crane: Rose does think this is a speculative essay which actually doesn't commit methodologism, partly b/c subject/object relation… Lukács says people want to see one person as subject and other as object in any given situation… you can read master/slave dialectic where one person is reduced to object and other can't be full subject (kojevian reading) but it's a typical bad reading. Rose+Lukács say it's relation we have to ourselves where we are both subject and object. we adopt position of subjects towards our own objectivity. internalization of dynamic. what's happening in this essay, bong hit parts, class consciousness as self-knowledge of objectivity. has to do with subjectivity as self-relation of reflection. in this essay we have: distinction of historical facts and brute facts, critique of aspiration to exactitude, account of Marx's immanent critique method, definition of idealism, totality as not just reciprocity of separate things, line on fetish everyone people fucking hate because they think it's THEY LIVE, critique of Hegel through Marx, definition of conceptual mythology in Hegel, reflection on dia and histmat with comment on Kant.

8. "owen" (not mine)

   • can't exactly call it a method but if you're looking for a method then this is where you land

9. samthomas

   • integrates Grundrisse and Philosophy of Right. piece of its time: practical activity as purpose of it all, history hanging on swordpoint(?).
   • crane: denounced as his early fichtean period for shifting to practical reason to reconcile subject and object. definitely primacy of practical. diamat gives action a direction.

10. adam (who?)

    • hung up on totality issue for literary reason. L says totality doesn't reduce to undifferentiated unity or identity, cool. but quote from Marx contrasts social totality with undifferentiated organic totality. can you really ground in organic bodies? falls short.
    • crane: yeah totally. arguments on organism. we associate organism with closure. we use organism as image to mean closed system. so we can't see teleological closure in society or in organism. Kant voice how tf does that bird work, someone must have put it together. analogy to organism has one function and it's not grounding. 3 ways organisms reproduce in Kant: reproduction, assimilation/growth, self-repair. Kant loses his mind talking about animal digestion, because you'd expect them to take bits of parts from nature and put them in as machinery, but actually they first convert it, break it down. not just a pile of things put together. fullmetal alchemist scene where Edward talks about chemicals in human which don't add up to a human. slavery is not natural or intrinsic to any race, even if it looks natural, but only because of their incorporation into a broader totality, which changes them. so we're at far as reciprocity. that's all organic comparison should give us. problem with totality of capitalism is it's not organic, you can't pretend it is, like you could maybe say precapitalism was[?]. mimimal systematic whole, doesn't even reach level of organism.
    • adam: yeah that's awesome. i'm coming at this through Jameson.

11. jack

    • nature changes in a circle [Hegel?]. sounds silly. first dialectical thing i read was Gould [go tf off jack!!!!].
    • crane: yeah again with nature stuff, Hegel's phil of nature…no time to talk about that…anyways nature changes but not because it learns from what it does (for Hegel). german idealists associate sexual reproduction with early death. spirit keeps coming back even after it's dead. problem and why it learns

12. me

    • my shtick on organism and Levins and Lewontin and eco-holism as fascism
    • crane: yeah. Schelling gets Hegel on natural history and this is my whole dissertation. niche construction not taken into account properly. ecological relations of mutually constituting env and org is sorta reserved to humans, and this is kinda in L here.

13. mac(?)

    • had a feeling while reading that all the critiques of Hegel that Hegel actually does the stuff L claims only comes in Marx. "concept as subjective."
    • crane: this is a crit of H initially made by Schelling, badly adapted by Feuerbach, better done by Marx. thing 1 in Hegel's work: "transition" from encyc logic to logic of nature. no moment to rest where he hands you the truth. rather, he's like, that's why the logical idea is an empty shadow and you gotta go back into reality, throws you out into nature see ya later kid!! transition criticized for not being a real one, not a deduction or derivation, can only be defended by zooming out to system level. Houlgate type readings based on immanent necessity from one paragraph to another doesn't work. how does the concept relate to nature? Schelling says: God thinking everything he can think, then getting bored, then makes the world. other point: what falls outside concept in Hegel—"mere existence" (which is less than even actuality). some will say: nothing falls outside! actually, a lot does. so, brute/mere existence sometimes bracketed, says in nature you find its impotence to live up to concept. it doesn't get as far as conceptual unity. there should only be one type of bird, no platypuses, and so on. you can't make certain kind of logical judgment about nature because of dominance of contingency over freedom. you can't do syllogism gynastics(?) with nature so it sucks to him. so S/F/M argue H lets thinks fall outside concept and makes it subjective.
    • mac: makes sense
    • crane: re critique of H overall…L says M takes historical tendency of H to logical extreme, etc. "In this sense Marx’s critique of Hegel is the direct continuation and extension of the criticism that Hegel himself levelled at Kant and Fichte."

14. daniel(?)

    • [incomprehensible background noises] why is knowledge of capitalist production here smth different from knowledge of ruling ideology(?)
    • crane: it's kinda hard to know what even is the object here if the totality changes when you know it. objective delusion. you can't understand ideology as a whole because it never amounts to one, it's just an expression of it as it tries and fails to grasp it.

15. aaron(?)

    • orthodoxy as theory=practice or way of approaching reality…idea that a marxist method should tell us why it's possible to thin the thing we're thinking at a certain time. imagine spectrum of analytic marxism "there's only one correct facts" to proletarian science "we couldn't do math till we had coins"(?), where do you put L.
    • crane: L doing 2 things at once, alternating. sometimes talking about…Jameson says histmat is history of object and history of subject, hist of what we call objective history and then history of why we call it that from a theoretical point of view…? this text more difficult than it's taken for. are we talking about objective history here (doing the thing he criticizes Engels for) or about historical research? it's both, but in specific way that only becomes possible with capitalism. L: we tell a story about history to a certain point, do Braudel stone age mediterranean, get around to our own position. then we're interrupted by trying to fit ourselves back into this story. maybe certain things you literally can't think until you make real changes.
    • crane: with primacy of practical, Sartre, what's the difference between action that frees us and action that will limit us? Sartre better than L on this one cos L doesn't make such a distinction wrt objective conditions limiting our thinking and doing. he puts the problem well though.

16. me

    • words
    • crane: yeah L isn't specific about conditions of intellectual production like e.g. Benjamin is. second, does L think we do history all of a sudden when proletariat shows up? no, once proletariat shows up, bourgeois historians keep doing their thing and being unable to do so. Marx says this about Ricardo vs later poleconists; Ricardo has to admit certain problems in polecon due to class antagonism. others trying to repeat Ricardo just become apologetics. so it's because we do really bad at history for awhile that we have to develop more critical history. third, if L is just saying you can't know how to do revolution until you do revolution, that's totally unhelpful. so what is he saying? you can't understand things because of your standpoint? standpoint of the proletariat becomes available to everyone when proletariat appears on the scene. you don't have to belong to a class to adopt its standpoint (even if you can't speak for its experiences). no necessary relationship between demographic status and thinking from a position. this is controversial in H&CC, people think he's saying proles don't know themselves right unless it's in his terms. he was a baron and class traitor and doesn't think he can speak for proletariat. workers' councils were an advance in practice that everyone else has to catch up with in thought. it's available to you but you won't be at forefront of discovery, except insofar as you participate in struggle, which is also no guarantee. he's not saying you can't think anything, space opened up for thinking differently, when you're playing game of positions and thrown back and forth between different standpoints. proletariat to know itself has to know itself from other standpoints as well. pretty high demand.

17. mac(?)

    • i've been reading early Schelling. parallel with L. being able to pose question of subject/object duality shows productive freedom that underlies it.
    • crane: L doesn't have good reading of S. try to make totality in reason, try to make it in practice (fichtean), try it in art (S). L runs through all of these in H&SS and has more sympathy for romantics.
    • and we're done

main theses

what are the causes and conditions of religious revival in china (more specifically, heilongdawang temple religion in longwanggou, northern shaanxi)?

• political ambitions of local activists
• local state intervention
• economic interests of temples, merchants, specialists, performers
• worshippers' nose for fun
• translocal linkages

sociopolitical enabling factors

1. temple associations are key institution in producing pop. religion
2. activities like festivals give place to express peasant values like hosting, mutual aid—extension of peasant secular life, easy to revive
3. village level local activists latch onto temples as political/economic/symbolic power source: emergence of local elite
4. reform era priorities mean local state regulates rather than suppressing

popular religion and folk cultural revivalism

• book studies social organization of heilongdawang temple / longwanggou complex which has grown to contain more halls, a primary school, a reforestation project
• "real" revival or imitation of form? this question becomes silly once you realize things have always been under reinvention
• communal resistance? actually the heilongdawang case is incredibly thin on identity formation, discursivity, doctrine. you go to festivals because it's 热热闹闹!! there's kinda a collective melding at the affective level and it emerges from networks of resource+labor reciprocity but there's not "imagined community"
• instead: focus on action of local state and local elites
• temples are kinda businesses providing 灵

agrarian political culture and agrarian public sphere

• folk social institutions contribute to new power field, local state and local society interacting in new ways
• not habermasian obviously, no reasoned discourse

local state and shifting state-society relations

• mutual dependence of local state (township, county, prefecture) and local society
• bribes fly around everywhere. damn electricity tigers shutting the power off in the middle of the opera if they don't get enough gifts. temple revival is good business for local state
• temples have to buy legitimacy by doing pro-social stuff and getting registered as daoist even if they're not

scholars in conversation with

talks variously about Hill Gates, Wang Mingming, Victor Turner, Clifford Geertz, Mayfair Yang. basically the main names in anthropology of chinese religion and local society and anthro theory in general. sometimes there's an excessive need to theorize here. you don't need to tell me that "sociality" here means "people doing stuff in the same place" and is different from "social interaction"!

chapters

1. introduction
2. shaanbei history/society/culture
3. history and types of popular religion in shaanbei
4. religiosity and efficacy, modes of doing religion. five modes
   1. discursive/scriptural (literary, philosophical)
   2. personal-cultivational (meditation, sutra chanting, etc., again pretty high class)
   3. liturgical/ritual (exorcism, fengshui, feeding hungry ghosts. for specialists)
   4. immediate-practical (divination, charms, consulting mediums; we see this at the temple)
   5. relational (between humans and deity. building temples, making offerings, taking vows, spreading miracle stories, deity birthday celebrations, pilgrimages)
5. history of heilongdawang temple, idea of "text acts" for textual/inscriptional legitimation at the temple
6. temple finance, personnel: how it's run
7. "event production" contrasting funeral and temple festival: basic set of principles/mechanisms used makes pop. religion easy to revive. anthropologists often make the mistake of thinking a ritual is all about the liturgy, but the better half of it is prep work and finding and hosting guests!
8. "red-hot sociality" honghuo: aesthetics of heat, noise, sensory excitement as supreme value for events and even families. this seems to me like exactly what a modernist state hates. it gets stigmatized as boorish and backwards compared to Proper religion. why?? is it a totally opportunist attack?
9. temple boss Lao Wang: master craftsman, enterpreneur, peasant intellectual, local elite. the author gives Lao Wang's side of things more than the anti Lao Wang faction, because he needs to stay on his good side (living at the temple) and not seek that information out, he says. i do kind of wonder though how some of Lao Wang's legitimation attempts are received; we mainly see how they're conceived. the author is like, "i know the Prime Directive forbids me from taking sides in local politics. But" and then details proudly how he composed this commemorative stele inscription that eloquently ties Lao Wang and the temple to a japanese environmental ngo and the state's latest eco-rhetoric. we should keep this anecdote in mind whenever we're trying to interpret historical steles! the circumstances of their production are highly political, they don't merely passively reflect events that happened, etc.
10. policy and practice of feudal superstitions, Lao Wang's "rituals of legitimation" for temple and himself

thesis

main argument of book in a couple sentences (does it have a thesis? it's mainly a primary source)

summary of arguments

explain what each chapter accomplishes wrt main argument. book's structure is like

• Bokenkamp foreword defending translation
• part 1: study of religious conten/xt of work (exactly what people were previously arguing we needed to move away from Ge Hong to find)
• part 2: critical translation of the text, sections grouped by earliness of attestation

1. ch. 1: Ge Hong's biography

   • born 283 into aristocratic family connected to Wu and then Jin courts
   • literary and alchemical training but his master left and also he couldn't afford to make elixirs
   • gradually compiled Baopuzi and Traditions, had a military career under the Jin and some mostly honorary appointments in government
   • finally practiced cultivation and alchemy himself and ended his life by the impostor corpse escape method, though his personal experience does not inform his writings

2. ch. 2 (longest): nature of the religious world of which his works are a culture

   • "pneumatic idiom": qi is the compactable vapor everything is technically made of. probably everyone agrees if you could subsist on qi alone instead of coarse food, you would be well on your way to divinity. Ge Hong takes qi circulation techniques like breath ones ("guiding and pulling") very seriously; you can get powers and reverse aging.
     • almost all Ge Hong's methods are "salvation by ingestion" (of qi, and including avoidances). grains synecdochally = civilization, state, culture, all normal foods. instead you eat anything exotic: vegetable, even better mineral, occasionally animal, often from faraway inaccessible places, with weird appearances. "excrescenses" zhi.
     • arts of the bedchamber are also about qi. Ge warns in Baopuzi against reckless sex but in Traditions denounces celibacy.
     • seems to have access to a bunch of 太清 texts on complex alchemical recipes for "reverting" substances into elixirs with various definite effects, in which ritual impurity or faulty procedure could result in failure. gold is iconic of the adept's journey by its non-corrosiveness, cinnabar by its blood-red to quicksilver transformations. there's much negotiation between revealing signs of one's methods' power and jealously guarding their secrecy.
   • "bureaucratic idiom": allotted lifespan and death are governed by heavenly moral-judgmental procedure which is vulnerable to mistakes, corruption, and deception. death is a transition of cultural status as much as or more than natural kind! think of rites of passage etc.
     • bodily explanations like 3 corpses mutually ground pneumatic and bureaucratic idioms.
     • there's tension between necessity of merit to transcendence and transcendence as escaping merit-judgment system, especially simulated corpse method, which Ge Hong therefore ranks lowest.
     • the potency of talismans/tallies is that they carry authority to command spirits. their uses are: amusement, self-protection, healing and exorcism, locating medicinal substances, long-distance travel, and body replacement (in simulated corpse method).
     • adepts also often carry bamboo staves (or swords), and these can stand in for them as corpses
     • for divination, Ge Hong liked directly summoning and questioning spirits of the calendar
   • Ge Hong is trying to persuade specific audiences of the value of these methods and the ranking of those values
     • highest is ascending into heaven, though this just puts you back in a boring government job.
     • middling but imo rather appealing is the earth-bound "concealed transcendent" more like Zhuangzi's, and a heavenly analogue to the recluse scholar.
     • lowest is the duplicitous simulated corpse method, which is maybe only a temporary measure.
     • Ge Hong writes in opposition to: those who use sacrifice to bid for longevity, ru who ignore/criticize longevity pursuit, Zhuangzi-inspired xuanxue death acceptors, unsubstantive "teaching and precepts" dao books (incl. Taiping jing), and practitioners who make inflated claims
   • adepts in these hagiographies are strikingly social in comparison to the half-bird immortals of early accounts; they depend on the attention of disciples, "lay" supporters, and admirers, and there's kinda an undecideability between worried-about fakers and the real thing
     • transcendents may skip out on their familial duties or try to make good on them in various ways; there's definitely a tension between the quest and the family
     • Han texts would show immortals as advisers to rulers, but here they're definitely above anything earthly

3. ch. 3: why this text is hagiography and what that means

   • Campany really doesn't like the treatment of hagiography (or miracle tales, or zhiguai) as merely "fiction" when that wasn't how they were intended or received. hagiography is both "model of" and "model for."
   • it seems pretty reasonable to say Ge Hong did compose a version of his text, collecting stories from previous hagiographies, scriptural sources, Han essay collections, and stele inscriptions. stele inscriptions in particular are fascinating to think about, just for how many voices would have been involved in the local canonization of a particular person as god or transcendent before they were adapted into this textual tradition.
   • we know that the text was popular and taken seriously by many people, as well as quoted and adapted by various later daoist traditions
   • Ge Hong uses several strategies to adapt his materials
     • argumentation (only occasionally, or placing things in the mouths of his subjects)
     • recontextualization (reframing a story as about a transcendent)
     • shifts of emphasis
     • co-optation of figures from other traditions (Mozi, Dong Zhongshu)

4. ch. 4: text-critical challenges to translation

   • Campany finds unconvincing the dismissals of Ge Hong's authorship
   • but we do have to work from a very difficult set of late editions and quotations; there is no definitive text
   • we can only probabilistically date materials, but he finds it most useful to arrange everything by earliest attestation

methods

3 levels of inference: understanding of the text's composition itself, then of the genre/function/rhetorical features of the text, then the social world that gave rise to the text

impressions?

thesis

something like: qigong uses "traditional body techniques" with long and often disparate histories, but their meaning/purpose is modern, and they are transmitted in very new ways ("charismatic individuals" but also "mass training networks"). the state has been deeply involved in the suppression of qigong, but also in instigating its formulation and proliferation, but qigong was also the largest "social movement" in recent times autonomous from the state.

arguments

• qigong was born between 1949 and 1964 (thanks firstly to Liu Guizhen) as adjunct to the maoist attitude towards traditional chinese medicine: recuperation of traditional knowledge, purged of superstition, in a framework of health, disciplined bodies, formalized and large-scale (rather than closed, esoteric) transmission, and an ontology of physicalism and diamat. at this point it did not develop mass appeal.
• public practice in parks began with a woman named Guo Lin c. 1970, who managed to cure her cancer using daoist techniques learned from her grandfather. as it spread on the popular level, qigong was associated not just with therapy but considered a new scientific discovery, connected to "extraordinary powers" (kids reading with their ears etc.) and "external qi." qigong was able to grow thanks to its political defense by certain influential figures: Qian Xuesen (science), Wu Shaozu (sports), Lü Bingkui (chinese medicine), and Zhang Zhenhuan (military), who believed in extraordinary powers and that they promised something for the nation.
• from 1981 till 1999, there was a public and legitimate space for qigong, in which methods proliferated under different charismatic masters.
• the state presented a fragmentary face: a qigong organization only needed to get patronage from a unit or a piece of the bureaucracy somewhere, and maybe find a way to share some profits. there wasn't a single overriding policy, but a patchwork of scientific/sports/medical authorities. so qigong's advantage was its expansive holism: it could partake in all these different areas and grow in the cracks between them, it could develop a unitary worldview which neither scientific nor religious authorities regulated but which capitalized on moral, scientific, patriotic, etc. appeals.
• the offers from qigong denominations of personal and collective revitalization and specific extraordinary powers were linked to the experiental "proof" of strange experiences the techniques really do induce, winning over practitioners' faith.
• qigong masters changed qigong from a way of healing and strengthening oneself to a kind of faith healing that won them wide acclaim. they took part in many "experiments" meant to prove extraordinary powers like telekinesis real and which lent them scientific authority. public lectures were immense stage magic type performances in which they zapped audiences with qi and made paraplegics walk; these often went on for many hours. video recordings were distributed which were supposedly imbued with the qi and so power of the master; qi was considered a universal medium for information and therefore representations of power retained the power of the original.
• Zangmigong, essentially a vehicle for regular tibetan buddhist practice, is an example of a denomination which stayed small-scale, maintained good relations with the state, and avoided repression. it made the required show of reiterating the latest party rhetoric and ostensibly encouraging practitioners to study it.
• Zhonggong was run according to the new techniques of capitalist management and pyramid schemes. impressively organized operation. it had highly standardized teaching routines, with distinct levels of practice associated with different powers etc. teachers were given targets for how many practitioners they needed to bring up a level in a given period, and profits for books and videos were funnelled upwards.
• it became harder to defend qigong science as its political supporters (esp. Qian Xuesen) died and wholesale westernization became the move. Falun Gong coped very well with this by rejecting science and medicine for quasi-buddhist apocalyptic discourse and fostering exclusivism and a will to suffer among its followers. its leader, Li Hongzhi, kept a tight control over charisma in the organization so that organic power couldn't develop outside his control: practitioners weren't allowed to heal the sick, he alone was considered the source of a power which could desert them at any time, his messages were spread directly over the internet, etc. his ideology was a fascistic denunciation of moral degeneration, new music, equality for women, and so on. like classic chinese sectarian movements he maintained that the world would imminently be blown up and only his good followeres would survive.
• Falun Gong harassed any news outlet that criticized it, escalating things to the point of a major protest in Beijing, after which thorough suppression began. fuck around and find out!!
• after 1999, qigong as a collective project gave way to more commodified and individualized desires, with yoga maybe being the new prototypical body technique—this seems like the state we have in the west.

methods

historical sources + fieldwork in the 1990s

other thoughts

• we're seeing here the same kind of interplay of spontaneous/artificial, active and supporting (but also repressing), charisma and institution, as the Wang Mingming book had. especially once (as Palmer does at the end) you put it alongside historical sectarianism and redemptive societies, it looks like something universal, something totally natural and organic. aren't there ways to circumscribe it a bit more? what does it mean that qigong was primarily an urban phenomenon? is there a certain kind of public space that must exist to make chinese sectarianism possible, or certain social relations it needs to work/spread through?

theses

methods

historical anthropology—"ethno-historiography"

summary of arguments

• standard narrative: imperial early/middle period of rural self-sufficiency, "high" imperial control; then post-agrarian petty capitalist period decadence of commerce and "public sphere." Wang says: rural self-sufficiency still the imperial court's ideal model as corrective to commercial chaos as late as the Ming—imposed "ruralization"
• "protodemocratic" but non-discursive affordances of pujing—though often (m)aligned with licentious cults/superstition

1. genealogy of pujing 铺境 system of spatial organization is backbone of work

   • Song: urban neighborhoods managed with civil means for purpose of defending boundaries.
   • pu administrative apparatus imposed (C13). extension of Mongol (semi)military control over local places, units of exploitation.
   • early Ming (late C14, early C15) perfecting of pujing. purposes of pacification, taxation, local admin, policing, info storage/transmission, state rituals: display order to local communities. moral, confucianizing.
   • re-appropriation into popular religous institution in middle/late Ming (late C15 to C17)
   • late Ming installation of ineffective communal pact system
   • "conferences of gods" system installed by regional elites, unexpectedly creating irresolvable feuds
   • further innovations in pujing (late C18, C19) in folklore and by urban elite
   • regional efforts to transcend local boundaries (late C19)

2. ch. 2: 712–1368

   • Zhou five zones 五服, concentric squares: capital, outer princes, zone of pacification, semi-barbarians, savages
   • county 县 admin system under Qin (controlled territories, representatives of central power) coupled with commanderies jun4
   • area of Quanzhou originally populated by "yue" people, incorporated C2
   • division and "feudal" part of oscillation contributes to expansion that unity and "asiatic" part capitalizes on
   • Han migration to Quanzhou especially in "chaotic ages" (Yongjia Chaos, North/South, An Lushan rebellion) facilitated urbanization
   • Quanzhou emerged as city in Tang
   • 天下 empire without sovereign boundaries
   • regional autonomy of Fujian prefectures at start of C10. Minnan local rulers promoted trade because supported by trade levies.
   • branch of South Song royal clan established in Quanzhou initially stimulated economic expansion, eventually a burden. massacred by Pu Shougeng, defector to Yuan (lol).
   • Zhu Xi spent most of his life in Fujian—center of 道学
   • foreign merchants continue to expand influence in Yuan.

3. ch. 3: pu 960–1400

scholars the author is in conversation with

• Marshall Sahlins, local histories as not just utilitarian rationality, also cultures as "cosmologies of related social beings, divinities, and 'natural phenomena'"
• Hill Gates
• Maurice Freedman: history as gateway to culture, sensitivity to official/unofficial topographies. inadequate due to generalizing late Qing/Republican experience too far back and excessive structural focus.
• Jacques Gernet: "alternating modes" in chinese history. "open" near-worldwide tributary empire (Yuan, Qing) vs "closed" sinicizing bounded monarchy (Song, Ming). with pujing we have opening (Yuan), closing (Ming), reopening (Qing).

criticism

praise

Capitalism in the web of life⁴⁶

(me)

something Gramsci

on the southern question. james

Planet of Slums⁴⁷

james

Grundrisse

james. whole thing? which parts?

Misery and the Value Form⁴⁸

james. specficially "Misery and Debt"

A brief history of commercial capitalism⁴⁹

The Economic History of China⁵⁰

China Transformed⁵¹

The peasant economy and social change in North China⁵²

China's Motor

Cardcaptor Sakura, Book 2⁵³

The Captive

Destruction and Sorrow beneath the Heavens: Reportage⁵⁴

Nevada⁵⁵

The Savage Detectives⁵⁶

recommended by meir

The Emigrants⁵⁷

recommended by meir

The Rings of Saturn⁵⁸

recommended by james

long things i am not allowed to start any time soon

1. The Story of the Stone, or The Dream of the Red Chamber, Vol. 1: The Golden Days⁵⁹

2. My Struggle: Book 1⁶⁰

The Return of Nature: Socialism and Ecology⁶¹

China: An Environmental History⁶²

The King's Harvest: A Political Ecology of China from the First Farmers to the First Empire⁶³

The Whites Are Enemies of Heaven: Climate Caucasianism and Asian Ecological Protection⁶⁴

The Global Interior: Mineral Frontiers and American Power⁶⁵

Across Forest, Steppe, and Mountain: Environment, Identity, and Empire in Qing China's Borderlands⁶⁶

China's Environmental Challenges⁶⁷

Chinese Architecture: A History⁶⁸

ancient

1. Mengzi: With Selections from Traditional Commentaries⁶⁹

2. Xunzi: The Complete Text⁷⁰

3. The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han⁷¹

4. The Classic of Changes: A New Translation of the I Ching as Interpreted by Wang Bi⁷²

medieval

late imperial/early modern

1. The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy⁷³

   rec from J (and anti-rec from shi buyuan)

2. Early Modern China and Northeast Asia: Cross-Border Perspectives⁷⁴

3. Polygamy and Sublime Passion: Sexuality in China on the Verge of Modernity⁷⁵

4. Protest with Chinese Characteristics⁷⁶

5. The Laws and Economics of Confucianism⁷⁷

20th/21st century

1. Carbon Technocracy: Energy Regimes in Modern East Asia⁷⁸

2. Knowing Manchuria⁷⁹

3. Power over Property⁸⁰

4. The Peasant in Postsocialist China⁸¹

5. The Magic of Concepts: History and the Economic in Twentieth-Century China⁸²

6. Women in China's Long Twentieth Century⁸³

7. Fifty Years That Changed Chinese Religion, 1898-1948⁸⁴

8. Staging the World: Chinese Nationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century⁸⁵

9. Engendering the Chinese revolution⁸⁶

10. Gifts, Favors and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China⁸⁷

11. Belt Road and Beyond : State-Mobilized Globalization in China⁸⁸

12. How China Escaped Shock Therapy⁸⁹

13. Transtopia in the Sinophone Pacific⁹⁰

14. Insurgency Trap⁹¹

Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism⁹²

Buddhism, Diplomacy, And Trade: The Realignment Of Sino Indian Relations, 600 1400⁹³

Sacred Economies: Buddhist Monasticism & Territoriality In Medieval China⁹⁴

tried to read a slightly earlier article by this guy and it sucked ball's—caution

Thriving in Crisis: Buddhism and Political Disruption in China, 1522-1620⁹⁵

Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China⁹⁶

Taixu’s ‘On the Establishment of the Pure Land in the Human Realm’: A Translation and Study⁹⁷

Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History⁹⁸

The Sublime Perversion of Capital: Marxist Theory and the Politics of History in Modern Japan⁹⁹

Tosaka Jun: A Critical Reader¹⁰⁰

The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion, 1590-1800¹⁰¹

recommended by meir

Civilization and Capitalism 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1: The Structures of Everyday Life¹⁰²

recommended by owen

Capital, Vol. 2: The Process of Circulation of Capital¹⁰³

The Chumash World at European Contact: Power, Trade, and Feasting Among Complex Hunter-Gatherers¹⁰⁴

Memory and the Mediterranean¹⁰⁵

recommended by meir

Out of Italy: Two Centuries of World Domination and Demise¹⁰⁶

recommended by james

Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from the Industrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline¹⁰⁷

Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France¹⁰⁸

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism¹⁰⁹

Consent: Sexual Rights And The Transformation Of American Liberalism¹¹⁰

Pandora's Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies¹¹¹

The Triple Helix: Gene, Organism, and Environment¹¹²

Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life

recommended by meir

The Dialectical Biologist¹¹³

Smart Machines and Service Work: Automation in an Age of Stagnation¹¹⁴

Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian Yukaghirs¹¹⁵

The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays¹¹⁶

The General Theory of Law and Marxism¹¹⁷

Mathematics: Its Content, Methods and Meaning¹¹⁸