Separation and Reunion in Modern China (review)

Based on his fieldwork in Dragon-head, a farming community in northeastern China, and in Angang, a fishing community in southeastern Taiwan, anthropologist Charles Stafford conceptualizes and defines the importance of separation and reunion as a key aspect of the Chinese experience.

Stafford foregrounds Separation and Reunion in Modern China with an extended introductory chapter in which he elaborates a theoretical construct for understanding the significance of leave-taking and reuniting. This introduction is important for the rest of the book because in it he argues that the idea of separation and reunion is not only central to the Chinese world but, more importantly, a fundamental aspect of the human experience that has not been fully explored by earlier anthropologists and social theorists. Early on Stafford argues that the existential constraint of death (much discussed by anthropologists since Frazier) is merely a subset of the more fundamental existential constraint of separation—something, Stafford believes, that has for the most part gone unrecognized and which, incidentally, is key to his argument for the axial importance of separation and reunion in Chinese life. For Stafford, there is something special about the Chinese way of dealing with parting and coming together that, although arguably situated in the wider context of human sorrow and joy over separation and reunion, draws from an ancient tradition that has consistently focused particular concern on the act of leave-taking. Stafford argues that "Chinese practices and idioms of separation and reunion, when viewed together, imply a coherent way of thinking about all human and spiritual relationships—which are always seen to be in flux, in a very fundamental sense, and therefore repeatedly subject to partings and returns" (p. 2), thus making separation and return an integral part of how Chinese experience themselves in the world.

Interestingly, Stafford claims that investigating the concept of separation and reunion as it is manifested in Chinese culture was not his original intention; rather, the idea gradually came to light during his extensive fieldwork in Taiwan and the People's Republic, during which time he became convinced of its importance and validity as a way of better understanding the intricacies of Chinese life. Most of Stafford's introduction focuses on establishing the legitimacy and importance of the "separation constraint," noting that many others, in the areas of both psychology and anthropology, have considered this concern worthy of study. Stafford's most important assertion here, however, is that anthropologists for the most part have not taken separation to be the common or universal constraint that it surely is, to be considered from a "realist" (as opposed to an "idealist" or "culturalist") perspective. Stafford's point seems to be simply that however we wish to think about the concept of separation in human life, in some fundamental way the experience is universal, for we all, as human beings and members of society, necessarily and unavoidably suffer from painful separations from those we love, and this is a fact of life regardless of culture, ethnicity, or social status. Stafford, in fact, characterizes life as, among other things, a series of problematic actual physical as well as emotional and social separations (of which death is, perhaps, the most extreme example) that bring forth a range of culturally influenced, although not entirely determined, social and psychological adaptations.

Chief among those whom Stafford mentions concerning the social and psychological consequences of separation is Freud, whose discussion of this topic in "Beyond the Pleasure Principle" Stafford takes to be a watershed for later investigations in this area in both psychology and anthropology. This Stafford does to call attention to the importance of the topic—quickly moving on, however, to critiques of later commentary. Drawing on the work of John Bowlby, Stafford argues, again in an effort to prove the central importance of separation in human societies, that Bowlby's research with children shows that their reactions to situations in which separation...