Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China (review)

This review of Passage to Manhood is an intriguing presence in an STS journal, as the book is concerned more with subjects who bear the stigmata of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV)/acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) and illegal drug use in a marginalized ethnic society than with the objects, knowledge, and (infra) structures that are dubbed “technoscientific” and conventionally seen as domains of STS. Both the anthropological approach that informs the book and the STS themes that determine its starting points belong to disciplines that offer trenchant critiques of modernity. Passage to Manhood expands the scope of STS, adding to its critical arsenal by addressing important issues such as cultural practices, governmental strategies, fledgling individuality, and globalized stigmatization.

The book begins with two incidents that gained the author acceptance by the Nuosu people, a minority group categorized as “Yi” in China’s ethnic identification project and found to have a high prevalence of HIV/AIDS and heroin use. Interestingly, these episodes point to the abject and “backward” status of Yi people vis-à-vis Han society, underlining the considerable difficulties a researcher may encounter while living in such a community as Limu, a rural township of Nuosu that was stricken by poverty, deprived of infrastructure, and, in some sense, forsaken by the state. Shao-hua Liu argues that the combination of HIV and heroin use has to be understood in light of its social history: her portrayal of the Nuosu people focuses on how they came to be seen as hopelessly backward as China undertook a modernization drive in the 1950s. Categorized as a slave society, they suffered the fate of being marginalized not just culturally and geographically but also politically and economically. It was not until the socioeconomic transformation of the 1980s that emerging periodic markets began to offer a venue where Nuosu people could come to grips with aspects of modernity, rethinking their own identity in the process.

Nuosu youths drifted into and out of nearby cities. These urban adventures were driven by the dangerous attraction of economic prosperity and a youthful desire for novelty and modernity. But Nuosu youngsters with a historical conviction of superiority over Han people lacked the skills needed in the urban setting: they often sank into a downward spiral of petty crimes and drug use. The inherited image of Yi as strong predators deteriorated into a culture of delinquency: young Nuosu were marginalized and cut off from regular sources of income; many ended up turning to heroin and contracting HIV through contaminated needles. Although the book title indicates its emphasis on young men, the misery afflicted both sexes.

Opium and heroin had long been familiar among the Nuosu. They were referred to as yeyi by young men and suffered little stigmatization in Nuosu communities. But in the 1980s it ignited a deadly clash between tradition and modernity. The author depicts the evolution of a local antidrug association, which gained its momentum from the ad hoc yoking of state power and local lineages only to lose its way for financial and institutional reasons. The combination of tradition and modernity in effect tarnished the former and incriminated the latter—it had placed youths at risk. As the life narratives of some young Nuosu people show, they stood at a point where burgeoning individuality both broadened and endangered their lives by exposing them to an urban environment for which they were unprepared. In the end, it turned out to be a lose-lose situation where no one benefited. Readers cannot but wonder whether those young people were ever disillusioned enough to see through the dreams conjured by modernity.

A late chapter addresses the failure of state intervention, which is, I believe, the most politically sensitive issue—if not taboo—in the whole book. According to the author, the Chinese government showed no understanding of or even respect for local knowledge and social relations. In addition, Liu shows that this sociocultural anesthesia took the form of...