Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism (review)

At the end of the second chapter of her study of silk workers in Hangzhou, Lisa Rofel asks what may be the key question of this work: "How do women workers inhabit the uninhabitable edges of modernity?" (p. 127). To understand why this question is so important, for China studies and for anthropology, it is necessary to grasp Rofel's insistence that modernity in China is an imaginary, having an "allegorical" rather than a "literal quality" (p. 19). Although it is not novel to see modernity as both imagined in teleological cultural logics and as highly diverse in its many invocations around the world, the application of this understanding to China studies is rare. Once modernity is grasped as a cultural and political ideal, one that is constantly emphasized in all manner of mainstream discourses in China, it is also possible to see why aspects of modernity are "uninhabitable, " and especially so for certain social groups. Women workers in a state-controlled industry would certainly be one of these groups, stuck on the edges of China ' s modernization by policies and popular visions that repress older revolutionary commitments to workers and stereotype the female nature as part of a new naturalization of gender. Like rural people and migrant workers, women workers tend to be the subaltern others against whom an ambitious emerging business class quite publicly declares its hegemonic identity.

Thus Rofel's field research in Hangzhou during the 1980s and early 1990s is a contribution to the anthropology of subalterns, and it is one of the best achievements of this book that it shows the diverse and contingent ways in which women find their ways through a relatively hostile discursive environment. Rofel focuses on three cohorts of workers: the Liberation generation who entered silk factories during the earliest phases of collectivization, the Cultural Revolution generation who developed an oppositional "politics of authority" in the course of their activism, and a reform generation who now actively seek feminine private lives. Each of these groups is stereotyped by nonworkers as some kind of obstacle to modernization—they are seen as inept, or too rebellious, or uncaring; the youngest are poor marriage partners because their jobs do not adequately allow a home life, and the oldest are losers whose attitudes are inconsistent with the new entrepreneurial spirit. The various ways in which the subjects of this research negotiate both their lives and their explanations of these lives, in a context that accords them little respect, are therefore important to understand; the ways in which the edges of mainstream discourses are (impossibly and diversely) inhabited keep us from confusing hegemony with culture.

In the course of contextualizing the lives of women workers in Hangzhou's silk factories, Rofel also recounts an impressively analyzed history of the PRC. This history is well informed by recent theoretical work. As Rofel points out, "ethnographic histories reside in [the] tension between a historicity of knowledge and a knowledge of history" (p. 148). Always aware of the diversity of agendas active in any particular telling of history, as well as of the activity of memory and forgetfulness in both recollections and formal accounts, this history does not oversimplify. Rather it demonstrates the tight links between national histories and "local" personal lives via an exploration of the many complex ramifications of state policy and practice that unfolded over several decades. This "ethnographic history" achieves a nuanced version of the national saga of socialist and post-socialist development; it does so by weaving memory and the vicissitudes of personal lives together with a careful understanding of the concrete conditions in which silk workers have passed their lives.

Other Modernities is one of several recent anthropological works with analytical ambitions that extend beyond the China studies field. Drawing on recent debates in anthropology, social and political theory, transnational feminism, and postcolonial and globalization studies, Rofel shows...