Reinventing Chinese Tradition: The Cultural Politics of Late Socialism by Ka-ming Wu (review)

In Reinventing Chinese Tradition, Wu Ka-ming argues that rural folk culture in contemporary China might be usefully thought of in terms of "hyperreality" or, as she puts it, in terms of a "hyper-folk." By now many scholars of folk cultural practice in China are comfortable with approaching the recent revival of folk culture as something much more complicated than a mere return of traditional practices suppressed during the decades of high socialism and cultural revolution. The idea of a reinvented and recycled rural Chinese tradition has been around for some time now. But Wu wants us to move a step further and consider that the revival of folk cultural practices constitutes not just a reinvention or recycling of tradition, but, more provocatively, a practice that can "no longer be associated with any ritual reality, rural environment, or cultural origin" (p. 20, my emphasis). In this sense, rural folk practices constitute a "rurality without origins" in an era when, she claims, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish "a media representation from an original authentic ritual, or a state propaganda from a market or religious commodity" (p. 20). Although the idea of hyperreality has sometimes been invoked to convey a sense of anxiety over the postmodern condition within certain intellectual circles, Wu is not one to lament the apparent loss of authentic origins in rural Chinese culture. Instead, she astutely steers our attention to rural culture as a lively and contested field in which a whole range of actors are engaged in a dizzying array of conflicting projects and agendas. At issue is not the appropriation of rural culture by these projects and agendas, but the way rural culture is itself reproduced through them. In other words, Wu claims that the nature of cultural production in rural China today—in which ritual practices, performances, heritage recognitions, craft productions, and other reenactments of the traditional can no longer be viewed as either simulations or authentic originals—compels us to view rural folk culture as a field where a whole range of social contests, contradictions, and changes are being negotiated and worked out.

While a term like "hyper-folk" might suggest that Reinventing Chinese Tradition is a book full of abstract theoretical arguments being introduced via a "case study" from rural China, this is happily not the case at all. Instead, Wu's book is a rich ethnographic account of fieldwork conducted in the Yan'an region of Shaanxi in 2003 and 2004, with several follow up visits between 2008 and 2012. For all its theoretical nuance, which is considerable, what is most impressive about Wu's book is the ethnographic account itself, the care with which Wu treats the people with whom she has lived in Shaanxi, and the confidence we have in her ability to draw theoretical insight and intervention from that ethnographic account. In that sense, Inventing Chinese Tradition offers a nice model for seminar discussions in anthropology, human geography, cultural studies, and other fields, of how theoretical arguments and empirical accounts should be co-constitutive, and how they transform each other in the research process.

Wu's research focused on three predominant aspects of rural Yan'an cultural practice: paper-cuts, storytelling, and spirit mediums. The first two chapters focus on paper-cutting practice, exploring the history of urban intellectual and party-state engagement with the practice since the 1940s, as well as postreform commodification. Here, a familiar story of earlier revolutionary appropriation—in which gender empowerment and social justice were significant objectives—being colonized by a neoliberal logic of profit, risk, and individual improvement is complicated by Wu's notion of paper-cutting heritage as a "narrative battle" being waged by a whole range of actors. They include intellectuals (from Beijing and from more local places), local cadres and other officials, women craft practitioners, farming husbands, and tourists. Wu's argument here is that the so-called invention of tradition...