Obedient Autonomy: Chinese Intellectuals and the Achievement of Orderly Life (review)

What stands out in this well-written and most interesting book is the lucidity and straightforward approach of its author. From experience gained as the result of intensive fieldwork, Erika Evasdottir has become extremely well acquainted with the archaeology of China, and yet she has kept enough distance from her object of study to give us a confident picture of the field based on an analysis of the facts as well as a creative approach to theoretical speculation. That is why this book is not only worth reading by archaeologists interested in China but also an important contribution to research on intellectuals in China and their attitude toward the Chinese state and society.

The general question that Evasdottir attempts to answer is why the majority of Chinese intellectuals refrain from engaging in the act of changing or even overthrowing a system that many outsiders regard as utterly oppressive, inefficient, and unattractive. But while answering this question, with an eye on the benefits and incentives the system has to offer, she never forgets that her point of departure is the field of archaeology itself, which in China is uniquely different from the field as practiced in the rest of the world.

The particularity of Chinese archaeology is based on the fact that history plays a central and dominant role in Chinese culture. As archaeologists produce "knowledge about the Chinese past that can support Marxist historical materialism" (p. 12), they play a central role in the interpretation of history and therefore cannot but act in close relationship to the state. At the same time, archaeology has exceptionally close ties to Chinese society. Without peasant support archaeologists cannot excavate historical treasures and therefore cannot achieve what the profession and the state expect archaeologists to do. In China, peasants are the collective owners of the fields that they till, which is why they, represented by their local administrators, have a clear say as to when and under what circumstances excavations can take place and what price must be paid. Archaeologists must therefore be experienced in dealing both with the state and with peasant society. Their success in terms of professional achievement is impossible without handling these two relationships adequately.

However—and this is often misunderstood by outsiders—their close relationship to the state does not imply that archaeologists cannot hold a critical attitude toward the state. In the context of Chinese culture, the intellectual at the center has the duty "to provide a corrective, to model upright behavior, and to guide people into right actions" (p. 12). The way archaeologists go about balancing loyalty and criticism is described by Evasdottir as "orthopraxy," which implies that any action must "conform to commonly held standards" (p. 14). It is therefore not of primary importance what an archaeologist might intend to accomplish in his or her work but rather how the audience reacts to what the archaeologist does. At work here is "obedient autonomy," which, in the context of orthopraxy, means "active intervention in the process of judgement undertaken by the audience" (p. 21)—a form of intervention that is able to achieve and maintain order (p. 22). Order is both the precondition and the goal to be achieved by this kind of intervention. Only if actions by the state and reactions by society are predictable can interventions achieve their aim, and only if interventions do not disturb the order of things can they be acceptable to the audience that is part of this order.

A principal characteristic of this order is the strictly hierarchical structure of a profession like archaeology. Position in the hierarchy defines access to resources. At the same time, a rise through the hierarchy implies an increased opportunity to intervene in the judgment of the audience of one's actions. That is to say, the position in the hierarchy determines the degree to...