In One's Own Shadow: An Ethnographic Account of the Condition of Post-Modern Reform Rural China (review)

Xin Liu's carefully crafted ethnography of rural life in late twentieth-century central China carries the reader deep into Shaanxi loess country along dusty paths, across valleys and hilltops, into the cave houses for which this region is renowned, and then into the lives of the people themselves. His research site of Zhaojiahe is geographically situated between Xi'an, an ancient capital highly symbolic of imperial Chinese civilization, and Yan'an, Mao's headquarters, often labeled in popular discourse as the cradle of the communist revolution. Located within such opposite poles, in the back of the beyond, this Han community is neither highly cultured nor on the cutting edge of current government reforms. In a kind of moral geography, Liu explores ideas about backwardness—being in the shadow of the modernizing process. We hear stories, familiar to anyone living in and/or studying contemporary Chinese society, of deprivation, ideological struggles, personal trials and triumphs, family relations, and economic reforms. The acuity of Liu's dynamic analysis of everyday practice, in tension with cultural production and symbolic forms of the modernizing countryside, makes this a notable book.

The introductory chapter frames local practices with the phrase "dead brains" (sinaojin), applied by an out-migrating youth to people left behind, meaning those so backward, so incapacitated, that they can make no changes in their lives. In contrast to those who leave, the villagers who remain have great nostalgia for the good old days of collectivism under Mao. They are deeply suspicious of a present that devalues peasant status and marginalizes their way of life. These folks are Liu's fascinating subjects. To analyze their lives, Liu engages a theoretical orientation built from Pierre Bourdieu's and Michel Foucault's notions of individual and collective practice. From this perspective he critiques two tendencies that he perceives in scholarship about Chinese society: a lack of attention to the social unconscious embodied in everyday experience and a focus on state-driven power dynamics overlooking the practices that constitute constantly changing subject positions (p. 25). Liu successfully portrays and explains the complexity of these everyday lives in a world made inexplicable through political and economic transformation. This is a community mired in an "immoral politics" of arbitrary meanings that inform their negotiations and relationships.

Xin Liu has brought to his ethnographer's task a "halfie" perspective—that of someone who partially understands from his own lived experience just what is going on. As an urbane Beijing native, Liu has an insider's view of the political economy while being a cultural interloper—about the same as any of his university colleagues. This dynamic of knowing but not knowing the moral economy of Zhaojiahe shapes Liu's analysis. The depth of his understanding comes from diligence as well as theorizing. Woven throughout the book are reminders of how Liu felt, what was uncomfortable, pleasing, or confusing as he puzzled out just why people were acting the way they did.

Some of these actions seem inexplicable as they are first described by Liu, who then parses them as signs of the times. For example, the knock-down brawl of two lipstick-smeared grannies at a wedding feast (p. 147) is seen by Liu as violence that has immediate bodily meaning, but no order. These images stick in your mind, and this book is a pleasure to teach with. Students will grasp Liu's clear presentation of practice theory and then plunge into the lives of people in Zhaojiahe. They will be intrigued by the contrast between Liu's analysis and other contemporary scholarship on guanxi relations and reciprocity. The minutiae of household arrangements—what it is like to live in carefully circumscribed spaces of kang platform, cave house (yao), and walled courtyard (yuanzi), and the dynamics...