Bathing in the Far Village: Globalization, Transnational Capital, and the Cultural Politics of Modernity in China

Bathing in the Far Village

Figure 1.

Far Village batik bathrobe hanging in a Seattle clothing boutique.

In the summer of 1996 I was browsing through a chic clothing boutique in downtown Seattle when I came across a batik bathrobe prominently displayed alongside several elegant dresses (fig. 1). It caught my attention because it was of a particular style of batik that I recognized. The sight of it—displayed among the silk, linen, and rayon gowns from around the world—stopped me in my tracks, for two years earlier I had seen this type of batik being produced in the rural households and town workshops of Guizhou, China. Knowing what peasant women earned in the laborious and highly skilled work of applying wax for batik dying, my first impulse was, of course, to check the price tag. The bathrobe was going for a cool $150. By my calculation, the Guizhou household that contributed the majority of the labor needed to produce the bathrobe earned roughly 2.5 percent of the retail sale price.

The labor of women villagers in Guizhou was being sold in Seattle under the label of Far Village, a small company established in 1993 by a Los Angeles designer. As the bathrobe’s tag—on rough handcrafted paper—sought to make clear, the purpose of Far Village was to promote and protect the art and craft skills of “ancient cultures” such as Guizhou’s Miao people. More than this, Far Village claimed that it promoted the empowerment of Miao peasant women, the actual producers of its clothing. As the tag made explicit, the consumer was purchasing much more than just a bathrobe; indeed, the item itself was almost secondary to the concept being sold: the possibility of organic cultural continuity in the modern world and—as an added bonus—the modern emancipation of village women as well. The Far Village project promoted a multicultural politics of consumption that has become a hallmark of advanced capitalism in the neoliberal West, a “politics” constituted less by the production of difference than by its circulation according to the needs of flexible accumulation and postmodern cultural relativism. Within this politics of consumption, a blissful collage of abstracted and consumable identities substitutes for the real social differences that have historically emerged within and been so disruptive to capital. ¹

One way of interpreting the displacement of cultural politics from the realm of production to that of consumption is to see it as part of the global penetration of the commodity form—the colonization and exploitation by transnational capital of the remaining modes of production that have previously functioned beyond its reach. Capital, according to this view, roams the world in search of cultural otherness that is ripe for commodification, while consumer-tourists, transfixed by the ideologies of multiculturalism, quickly follow to “appreciate” and “preserve” the wreckage that remains. Indeed, an apparent condition of advanced or “disorganized” capitalism is a pattern of everyday consumption that renders us more and more like tourists as we purchase not products but representations and experiences. ² Thus, in Seattle, one can be an ethnic tourist by purchasing a batik bathrobe; one can bathe in the far village without ever leaving the bathroom—and believe that the village is better off for it. At any rate, that is the marketing pitch that Far Village, as a capitalist venture, relies upon. ³

At first glance, then, the Far Village project reflects the familiar story of transnational capitalism, with its pervasive extension of the commodity form into the final frontiers of premodern “tradition” and the metropolitan fetishizing of those commodities into the misplaced metaphors of preindustrial cultural preservation and justice for Fourth World women. ⁴ But the ethnographic details underlying the Far Village project compel us to challenge the assumption that globalization is a straightforward process of capital commodifying everything in its path and enlisting cultural differences into its repertoire of surplus-value extraction. The social relations of production that underlie the Far Village project are profoundly conditioned...