Wang Mingming interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 22nd July 2008 0:09:07 Born in Quanzhou in 1962; father started working as a young boy making ice cream for cinemas; at Liberation in 1949 he had the opportunity to become a border soldier but his mother was not happy as he was her only son and withdrew him; he moved back to the city since when he has worked as a civil servant; mother trained as a nurse in a school some seventy miles away; at that time it was in a Republican area; she came here to work in the first hospital; although my surname is Wang my face looks different from the Han Chinese; mother's mother has brown eyes and people here say she is of Persian descent; there was a huge number of Persians here in the Yuan Dynasty in the thirteenth century, either merchants or soldiers employed by the Mongols to control this area; our genealogy says that our first ancestor was one of the three brothers who conquered Fujian in the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdom period; they were from Henan and established the Bin state; I do not know if this story is correct; my father and mother still work for the Government; my mother's mother often complained that her fellow villagers gave her the nickname "cat's eye"; her village was not recognised as a Hui (Moslem) community so she never thought of herself as a Hui or Persian; we have never been interested in this ethnic matter in the family, but I do think I look different from Han 6:54:09 I have two sisters, one living here, the other, in the Philippines; this is typical for families here; for my undergraduate degree I wrote an article on the huge emigration; noted a demographic decline in population in this area during the Ming and Qing; according to local historical studies it wasn't through death but through emigration; think that the Imperial State did not allow enough space for commerce which was critical to their livelihood; agriculture here was not good; there is a saying that the Fujianese treat the sea as their field; as the late Imperial Empire was closed, those who had gone overseas were not able to come back and know that they could leave again; also there was too little agricultural land and a large population due to earlier migrations from North China, from the Jin period onward; in my dissertation I tried to argue that it was heavy pressure on the land that forced people to go out but the Ming ban on Maritime trade meant that they didn't come back as once they had 11:11:18 My experience in Quanzhou has informed my studies; my view was clarified when I went abroad, especially from England, when studying anthropology; this is a city of mixtures; when I went to London I realised that in Western social anthropology people emphasise categories without paying much attention to mixtures of peoples; in this place, the mixtures are enlightening for any anthropologist, so am especially interested in this topic; of course, structural anthropology has taught us a lot about mixtures in kinship but doesn't deal with historical mixtures; I have written quite a lot, only in Chinese, about this 13:54:11 First went to primary school aged seven called 'The East is Red School'; about two years after the Cultural Revolution became quite violent so the school was not working effectively even though the teacher tried hard to maintain order; older students could arrest teachers and struggle against them in front of us; we were encouraged to throw stones at the teachers to humiliate them; I remember throwing a piece of brick during one struggle meeting; later I found that the older students who did this were those naughty boys who had not done well in school so hated the teachers; Chairman Mao had thus provided them with a means to display their anger; I went to the school in 1969, before which, in 1966, I went to a kindergarten; there was tension among the classmates; my older sister was in another class; I remember on my second day, a big boy in my class who was actually aged ten but backward, held a red flag and led us into the street and we demonstrated against Mao Tse-Tung's personal enemy Liu Xiao-Chi, the President of Peoples Republic of China; I continued to receive such revolutionary education until university; later on in middle school we had a music teacher from Beijing; she was sent down in early 1970's to the mountainous area of Fujian because she had said something bad about Mao Tse-Tung's wife; she performed music so well that the Government moved her to our school; as an excellent music teacher she attracted a lot of good students; I joined her team and learnt the violin in a semi-secret manner; we had to be trained in Western style, not Chinese, but the musical scores were not available so we had to copy them; this had a big influence on me; her conscientious behaviour helped me to form my own opinion about the school; the teachers were good but the institution was awful; I continued to play until I was a student in Xiamen University; I stopped and I went to London without my violin as I thought that British people would be extremely good at music; I was also very busy trying to read Western books; I became an archaeologist and later changed to anthropology; I listen to music now in Beijing, but very little Chinese music, only that which sounds Western; it is a stupid prejudice but it is part of the legacy of my middle school experience when I thought that Western music was perfect; they liked Beethoven and Tchaikovsky 23:47:18 On Maoism, I have complex feelings; sometimes now I think that Mao was partly correct because young children had more time to play; nowadays all children study all the time; I find that towards the end of the Cultural Revolution his ideas were wrong because there were so many stories about Deng Xiao-Ping; he was a legend among ordinary people and I had to think which one of them was correct; at fourteen I had a big argument with my father who was quite a senior cadre, a Party Secretary of a State owned sugar factory; I said that maybe capitalism was correct and he was really angry with me; that people should seek a better life and avoid suffering seemed quite sensible to me and that Deng Xiao-Ping was aware of this benefit of capitalism; certain rituals of the school and the country during the Cultural Revolution turned out to be ironic in the end; on the one hand they were enjoyable as when Mao Tse-Tung announced to students that reading too many books was useless; he forbade us to study English; at that time we didn't speak Mandarin, only Hokkien, so we were quite grateful that our English lessons were stopped; every day there would be some ritual activities like going to the street to shout against something or other; gradually these rituals became quite funny; the teachers needed to organize us into official gatherings, but they were ashamed to be wearing red scarves themselves; they tried to teach us Mandarin but their pronunciation was awful; at Mao's funeral, the Principal of the middle school was chairing our ceremony, but his Mandarin was so funny that I laughed; I was heavily criticised by my teachers; the images of the ten years of the Cultural Revolution may be marvellous for anthropologists, but for us it is more complicated as there is a mixture of positive and negative about it; I cannot reject those in the West who call our generation ignorant; we haven't paid sufficient attention to our history; we are children of revolution; we are responsible for a lot of disasters in this country; when I was small knowledge was called reactionary, nowadays knowledge is everything 31:04:11 Looking back at Mao's experiment I think it was a disaster though I should not say so in China; I have a more sensible explanation of the disaster as I don't think Mao was responsible for everything and neither was the Communist Party; long term history explains it, beginning in the mid-Qing Dynasty when the relationships between cultures, economies and nations changed; there were more contacts but less consensus among different cultures and this was the main driving force of later violence which contributed to the formation of Chinese modernism; this modernism had begun gradually but in 1895 Chinese thinking changed radically because of its defeat in the Sino-Japanese War; we had been defeated by Europeans in the early nineteenth century and seemed not to care too much because these were different races; the Japanese were our students so how could they defeat us? A lot of intellectuals then turned their attention to Japan; they found it had been successful because it had absorbed European culture so we had to do the same; this had already changed the Chinese mind by the beginning of the twentieth century; during that time China has pursued modernity in a radical way; Mao is part of that continuum; he is different from other modernists as, unlike Marx or Lenin, he put his trust in peasants; he had a great knowledge of strategies, of traditional wisdom, and thought he would win by trusting the peasants; he stirred up this great revolution of the peasantry; this was very different from other branches of Chinese modernism; for instance, Sun Yat-Sen was a synthesizer of social theories and Chang Kai-shek wanted to gain support from national capitalists; Fei Xiao-Tung placed a lot of emphasis on the gentry class and thought that to promote Chinese modernity one should rely on the elite, who know how to write; Mao was totally different; if the Cultural Revolution is a disaster it is a disaster of one option that was successful; this was an option derived from the majority - we call it the correct option in social science; wonder whether this emphasis on the will of the majority is a mistake in social science; The Great Leap Forward was similar to the Cultural Revolution as another instance of Mao's desire to improve livelihoods for the nation; he saw himself as an heroic leader who could achieve the goal of development; he wanted to catch up with Britain, to modernize China 39:51:05 At school I listened carefully to teachers and did what they told me to do; I was quite good in all classes except sport; I enjoyed making collections of things like cigarette cards; I was selected for the elite class in secondary school; if I had not studied music I would have gone to a university for science and technology; I was very good at maths, but bad at chemistry; found maths teachers were always eccentric, their classes interesting, and they behaved differently from other teachers; found it very interesting; after school spent three years trying to get into a music academy without success; maybe my standard was not high enough; during the transitional period, between 1978 and 1981, when China opened its universities to everyone, not only to good workers, the intellectuals were liberated again; they had a lot of children and relatives to come into the music academies; freedom began in the field of arts, so more freedom for intellectuals to choose which subject to follow; my father was not aware of these music academies so I had no back door method of getting in; by 1981 I was fed up with failure so decided to give up desire to go to a music academy; took the National exam in humanities and was quite successful; I went to study archaeology in Xiamen University; I enjoyed archaeology although my father wanted me to study management; for me, archaeology meant that I could travel to remote sites to dig; even now Chinese archaeology is good and has a lot of content, while social science is very empty; I was interested in dating artefacts; was not really aware of the great discoveries at the time but felt I just needed to study the many books, new and old, that I found in the book stores; I felt so ignorant as I had been taught not to study; to look at a text book was more than enough; I read more and more and the books were so exciting; one could even get European novels whereas before they were forbidden; that kind of blossoming of a hundred flowers was exciting; I don't know whether there were more discoveries in archaeology as there were discoveries even under Mao, thanks to Guo Moruo, a great scholar of archaeology; he was digging even during the Cultural Revolution; the only journal that continued to publish academic articles during that time was on archaeology; a quotation from Mao appeared on the front page, but the contents were good; I was influenced by Su Bin Qi, the Beijing University archaeologist and Zho Heng, also at Beijing University; later on I had a chance to meet with Professor Tong Enzheng of Sichuan University; he moved to Michigan Museum in the 1980's; also Zhuang Weiji and Ye Wencheng, great archaeologists, whom I find very interesting; I had to finish my degree so followed the archaeologist Zhuang Weiji, who died some years ago; he was the discoverer of the Sung boat in Quanzhou port; I studied with him in the final year and he taught me a lot about Quanzhou archaeology and I wrote the article on demography under his instruction; I read a lot of his work and became interested in this city 51:59:09 In the third year at University our section had been enlarged to include an anthropology department which had been established in 1983; the archaeology section was attached to the Department of History before then; I took the post-graduate exam and got a high grade so became an anthropology student; it was a different kind of anthropology to what I am doing now; it was called ethno-history and was the study of ethnic groups in ancient times in South China; my teacher was Chen Guoqiang, the founder in 1981 of the Chinese Anthropological Society; he studied with Professor Lin Huixiang who was in Academia Sinica before Liberation, and had studied anthropology in the Philippines; he was the same generation as Professor Fei; as a post-graduate student I had the opportunity to join the movement to promote anthropology in China; I began to do some translation of basic text books which my teachers assigned me; I had a lot of opportunity to read more and more English books; I had begun to learn English in 1981 as part of the necessary exam to go to university; I continued to study it in University without being able to speak it; I finished a Master's degree in two, rather than the usual three years, and then I went to London in 1987 55:46:22 Our University had received a document from the Ministry saying that three students could go to England on a Sino-British Friendship Scholarship; I took an exam and was selected as one of the three; one of them went to Oxford to study finance and has become a top stock market advisor here; I stuck to anthropology, particularly ancient anthropology; it may have been the wrong choice; later I tried to go to Africa, but without success; I went to SOAS Department of Anthropology in October 1987; I was looking forward to arriving but after landing I felt so sleepy; the first room I had was in the Chinese Ministry of Education Office in London where they had a hostel; I remember watching TV and finding that I couldn't follow it as they spoke so quickly; I fell asleep immediately; the next morning I discovered the weather in October was so cold and that Underground tickets were so expensive, the equivalent of travelling from Xiamen to Beijing from the suburbs to the centre of London; I felt so badly about Britain in the beginning; felt very depressed and homesick; at home my parents could give me money but here I just waited for the Chinese Government to pay something into my account which I had to open in a bank; I had never done so before as banks were not popular in China; those Chinese students who had come from Beijing or Shanghai were so excited, but I came from a small town which was a third of the size of today's Quanzhou; I just followed these students as they could manage city life, were open minded and talked to the British people; I couldn't speak even though my English was much better than theirs; I spent a month in an English school for language tuition Second Part 0:09:07 Arrived at SOAS and was advised to see Richard Tapper who was then in charge of post-graduate students; he sent me to see Lionel Caplan, the Chair of the department; Lionel asked me what kind of books I had read; I told him Lewis Henry Morgan, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict; he thought that I should do a one year Master's degree rather than starting a Ph.D.; I was in a hurry as I had only three years; he insisted and said he would talk to the British Council; did two terms of an M.A. and followed a quite systematic course on anthropological theory on kinship, ritual, economics and politics; kinship was taken by Stuart Thompson; Christina Torren taught both ritual and politics; David Parkin and Mark Hobart did a special series of lectures on contemporary trends in anthropology; Paul Spencer lectured on classics of social theory; found his lectures good; I couldn't quite catch up with Parkin and Hobart who had new ideas and complicated philosophy though later I did begin to understand them; Hobart was quite eccentric, but enjoyable; Richard Burghardt taught on India and he organised a lot of discussions among students, my English didn't enable me to do much discussion 5:06:01 In Xiamen our professors gave repetitive lectures; British teaching was more practical; they would make you read before the class and tried to make you speak; I found this very attractive even though I couldn't speak; by the second term I had improved and I began to think about the good sides of Britain; before that I was deeply homesick; my class was so international with people from London, Scotland, Wales, Bhutan, Egypt, Japan, Sri Lanka; sadly I have not remained in contact with them because during fieldwork and writing up we went away, and some had gone when I graduated; I still think it was a very good teaching system; I am trying to promote a symposium in China, inspired by the first year in London; during that year I was supervised by Richard Tapper who was in charge of essays but only saw him fleetingly; after two terms I had to take an exam to judge my standard; my essays were submitted to Tapper who read them and found them interesting; he marked them quite highly and then passed me on to Lionel Caplan; he agreed that I could do a Ph.D.; I then spent another year doing library research for my M.Phil. report; I spent many hours in SOAS library which is one of the best in the world, reading sinologists - William Skinner, Maurice Freedman - checking which were relevant; I was interested in ritual and politics; I got to know Stephan Feuchtwang; in my first month he was chairing the London-China Seminar at SOAS; he asked me if I was from Quanzhou which excited him as a number of anthropologists were planning to go to South-East China; originally they had gone to Taiwan; he took me for a meal with Michael Palmer, Stuart Thompson and several other students afterwards; I met him quite often after that and he influenced my thinking, especially writing about religion in China 11:19:23 Stephan is a warm person and a very good anthropologist in China studies; through him I have learnt to respect religion among the Chinese which was not there before I met him; in China we disregard anything deemed superstitious whereas people like him, trying to study Chinese culture and social organization looked at religion; found it an inspiring perspective; in this aspect he has made very important contributions, not just to British anthropology but also for Chinese anthropology; for instance, Professor Fei Xiao-Tung had never studied religious life, only economic; religious studies are one important thing that we can learn from Western anthropologists, and he is a very important bridge; his Mandarin is not very good but his Hokkien was fluent when he was in the field in Taiwan 14:35:09 The theme of my library study was festivals; I wrote a long report which was approved and then I wrote a shorter proposal to the central fund of London University and they gave me a grant to be able to stay in London for a year; my original plan was to go to Anhai township to see the coexisting calendars of rituals; I met with a Buddhist expert who tried to persuade me just to study Buddhism at his temple and tried to stop me from going to any other temple; I thought it dangerous to stay and just become his follower so I left Anhai and went to Quanzhou where I had more freedom as I knew so many people; my middle school teacher, Mr Chen, became Director of the Bureau of Culture so he appointed me as a kind of academic associate; I had the freedom to read his archives; thesis on existing calendars, how the national, regional and neighbourhood, calendars of ritual in some way reflect three senses of space and place, coexisting in the city; for me the national calendar of ritual was defined in terms of national holidays whereas the regional calendar was always changing as the local elite made it for art performances etc.; the third kind was more traditional, each neighbourhood having its own annual cycle of rituals involving the households, including those of officials; could see how national holidays were bound up with the work unit system, the 'danwei' system; if you go out of 'danwei' the so-called cultural arenas are not important; you even have some regional elite who tried to revitalize Quanzhou as a prosperous place by not only fitting on the national calendar but also absorbing traditional calendars of ritual; they are innovative but are built on the knowledge of the history of this area; also they are keen to attract overseas Chinese and foreigners; that is the regional place; then you have neighbourhood territorial cults, rivalry between different communities and what can be shared among households; I was looking at contesting histories within one city; I am ashamed of it as it is less cultural and more political as a sociological analysis of ritual, but proud of it as this sort of thing is still being discussed in anthropology 20:48:00 At the time I was confused; I had read many books and tried to absorb all of them in just one thesis; not only Durkheim, but Bourdieu, Foucault, Giddens - particularly for the national space; my mistake was that I neglected much of the history of anthropology, trying to be too fashionable; I even sounded like Bourdieu in writing; supervisor for this was David Parkin; he was very helpful and read my first draft which was very long; he told me that it was not anthropology but an encyclopaedia of Quanzhou; he said that anthropology should be a case study; this didn't convince me as I thought that Chinese anthropology in Britain and the United States had this shortcoming of just focussing on one village; I tried to do something else using David Parkin's semantic model; I tried to focus on semantic ontology, such as Chinese concepts of happiness, but he didn't like that; he was fed up with me so I talked to Elisabeth Croll and Stuart Thompson; Thompson had been helping me a lot as he had studied China; I transferred to Elisabeth Croll; however, she was very busy but when she spoke in our class she was very interesting, and her teaching was technical on how to analyse and use data, and how to write a dissertation; I did not see her much but relied on Stuart Thompson's advice; I finished my thesis in 1992 and was examined in the following January; I was examined by Stephan Feuchtwang and Chris Pinney and they were very positive as I had studied both history and ethnography; the thesis has never been published as I would have to rewrite it to be satisfied with it; I have written a history of Quanzhou which will appear in another form in English in 2009; it is very historical so quite different from the thesis 28:42:16 Feel the book purportedly by Jacob D'Ancona on Quanzhou is quite exciting; the translator, David Selbourne, has been heavily criticized by both Western and Chinese scholars, is an important political philosopher at Oxford; he does not need to fake this case of the City of Light; also a lot of the criticisms stem from prejudices about the history of cultural contacts between Europe and China; people are more used to saying that only by the late Ming did Chinese and Europeans come together; my impression is that this is totally wrong; how can you explain the Nestorians and Franciscans; as early as the Yuan Dynasty there were at least two great Catholic cathedrals in this area; we discovered in Italy the journals of those missionaries; some suspicion of this book derives from this foreshortened history of Sino-European contact; I don't say that this book is a totally true story; even if D'Ancona had travelled to Quanzhou he would have used other contemporary writers materials; you can see some mistakes in the writing so it may not be totally trustworthy, but there are also biases against the history; some even doubt that Marco Polo came to China but the people of the city of Quanzhou use him as their trademark, to question it is very challenging; that Marco Polo didn't mention the Great Wall reflects its little importance in the Yuan Dynasty 34:14:03 After SOAS I stayed with Stephan and then went to Edinburgh; I was his field researcher for his project for two years but I went independently to Edinburgh to do post-doctoral research; after that I had another joint project with Stephan; I was in Edinburgh for a year where I got to know Nicholas Tapp who had worked in South-West China on the Hmong; he was a new lecturer there at the time and his wife was Chinese; I worked more with Barney McDougall, the Chair of the East Asian Department; Edinburgh was a wonderful city that I still miss; then came back to China and spent a year in the Institute of Sociology and Anthropology at Peking University, where Fei Xiao-Tung was a post-doctoral fellow; I was then appointed as Associate Professor and within two years I became a full Professor in 1997 by which time I had written some books 36:40:23 Fei Xiao-Tung's strength was his ability to communicate; he was practical - he had the traditional literati habit of being able to think and do; he was also a good politician but that was also his shortcoming - he was not academic enough; his writing was half academic and half political and this confusion meant that his writing was light-weight; this meant that it was sometimes more effective than more pretentious academic writing; so I have a confused view about him; I am more determined to do what I think is good anthropology which is at once related to his, but also quite different; I am a lot more historical and inclined towards ritual studies, cosmological studies, whereas he was only looking at contemporary issues; in his village study 'Peasant Life in China' he did not do a good study of the temples that exist there; to Westerners this might be a boring subject but in China it is quite important as several generations just destroyed them and neglected their significance; he was a modernizer and could be criticised for supporting the idea that minorities should be absorbed into the Han State; however, under him a lot of intermediate systems were tolerated; one was the gentry class, another was the local native chiefs in Western China; in his theory such intermediate layers had been tolerated but his critics would have liked to turn the whole issue into one of ethnic politics; if they had succeeded it would have been disastrous because before 1950s a lot of ethnic minorities had their own kingdoms; in Western ethnicity theory this is not recognised, they are just seen as ethnic groups; Fei's theories did have some negative effects, both his modernization theory and the pragmatism of his anthropology, prevented Chinese anthropology from becoming even slightly critical or analytical; I am happy with his writings in the 1940s which were historical, critical, and have some spirit; he was purged during the Cultural Revolution; his two important 1940s works are still not allowed to be published as monographs but have to be included in a larger book; in the 1950s he suffered from the distrust of the authorities and was assaulted by his classmates who had already turned themselves into Marxist ethnologists; thus he became very cautious; still, our generation needs something more, not just to admit but also to rethink 45:11:11 If I was to write on rethinking Chinese anthropology, the first chapter would be 'Why Chinese Anthropology is not Chinese', it is general; later chapters will explain it in several ways; think that Chinese anthropology can contribute to the world's anthropology by looking at China just like our ancestors, Professor Fei etc.; we should not say that this is unique because by looking at China we are looking at human beings and the world; what is the difference of China - this should be explained in specific anthropological terms; in anthropology China is different because no Sino-anthropologists have high positions in general anthropology so far; China is different from either tribal or European civilizations; what is China? - this question we need to discuss; like India, I think it is a kind of third type from the Western perspective; but is China the same as India? - no, it has no caste system; I am thinking about bureaucracy perhaps, a kind of civilizing bureaucracy, which was not only political, militant, but also symbolic and economic; is this perspective useful for anthropology in general? - I think it is quite important; China is both different and similar to Europe; think that if one wants to contribute to anthropology in general, Chinese anthropology needs to be a kind of social or civilizational theory, not just ethnography; ethnography may be important to explain China's difference, but to admit its similarity is also quite important; Western anthropologists working on China, like Freedman, have not tackled this; within China, have only found ethnographies that rely on translations of Western theory; difficulty of using the Chinese language in social science; it was a business language and will take time to become an academic language; we have to write better and better Chinese academic writings; there are no Chinese thinkers who have made direct comparisons between China and the West; at present, students of anthropology are trying to get good degrees and jobs and are careful about what they do; I have a professor's freedom to think, but I am still powerless; what I am trying to do is not separate from Western anthropology; the important point is to have respect for each culture; we must rethink universalism and be really universalist