Fieldwork Connections: The Fabric of Ethnographic Collaboration in China and America

5. Getting Started in Southwest China, 1987–88

5 GETTING STARTED IN SOUTHWEST CHINA, 1987– 88 stevan harrell M y idea that fieldwork in China was a distant dream changed dramatically when my graduate student Dru C. Gladney would not take “no” for an answer. In summer 1982, at the height of the chill induced by the Mosher aªair, Gladney traveled to China to study language, and talked to professors at the Central Nationalities Institute, a college for minority students in Beijing, about conducting ethnological studies among the minorities. They encouraged him to contact them when he received funding. Less than a year later, against my advice to be sensible and go do something in Taiwan, he was a visiting graduate student at the Institute, spending most of his time in Beijing but conducting two field swings around practically every province of China, checking out the situation of the Hui Muslim minority in each place. The following year, he received permission to be a visiting graduate student at the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region Academy of Social Sciences, conducting further forays into the field in Ningxia and neighboring provinces. When Gladney returned from his two years in China, he arranged for a delegation of bureaucrats from the Guojia Minwei, or Central 53 MIYI PANZHIHUA MIYI RENHE PANZHIHUA Jinsha R Y a l o n g R 0 25 km 0 15 mi PANZHIHUA CITY YUNNAN PANZHIHUA CITY YUNNAN Meigu Yanyuan Xichang Panzhihua Meigu Yanyuan Xichang Panzhihua 0 50 km 0 30 mi LIANGSHAN PREFECTURE PANZHIHUA CITY LIANGSHAN PREFECTURE YUNNAN YUNNAN PANZHIHUA CITY Zhuangshang Futian Hengshan Puwei Yishala Gaoping Renhe Malong Zhuangshang Futian Hengshan Puwei Yishala Gaoping Renhe Malong map 2. Panzihua Municipality 54 stevan harrell •C CI IT TY Y π F Fi ie el ld d s si it te e Nationalities Aªairs Commission,1 to visit the University of Washington , and they then invited us for a return tour in 1986, visiting nationalities institutes in Beijing, Chengdu, and Kunming. Six or seven of us spent three weeks on this junket, and in addition to meeting scholars young and old eager to exchange stories with foreign colleagues, many of us gave lectures to audiences of faculty and students. One member of our delegation was Professor Charles Keyes, an expert on the theory and political economy of ethnic identity and ethnic relations, who works in Thailand and Vietnam. While translating his talks and his conversations with local scholars, I was beginning to develop an interest in the topic of identity, but felt far from competent to conduct research on it. Each of these institutes ended up hosting University of Washington anthropology faculty or graduate students for their field research. I never conducted field research under the auspices of any of these institutes,however.NotlongbeforeourtourinSeptember1986,Dr.Kathleen Tomlonovic arranged a visit to Seattle by Professor Tong Enzheng, a polymathic archaeologist, ethnologist, novelist, designer, and general visionary who taught at Sichuan University in Chengdu (fig. 5.1). When I met him, I had already been thinking about doing fieldwork in minority regions, not because I was interested in minorities, but because it seemed clear that the Nationalities bureaucracy was more open than others to fieldwork by foreigners, never having been o‹cially placed under the three-week post-Mosher ban (see chapter 3). Realizing that not every approach to an institution in China would result in a research a‹liation, I explored with Professor Tong, then director of the Sichuan University Museum, the possibility of conducting field research under his auspices. He invited me to come to Sichuan in March 1987 to talk about details. By the time I was ready to spend my spring break in Sichuan and Yunnan, I was already assured of funding for a project to study the eªects of economic modernization on family structure in a series of Chinese getting started in southwest china 55 1. The Central Nationalities Aªairs Commission, or Guojia Minwei, as it is known informally, is a cabinet-level agency that manages the system of minority autonomous areas. There are also minwei at provincial and prefectural levels of government. villages. Like a general preparing to fight the previous war, I wanted to test in China some of the ideas I had formed in Taiwan throughout a decade of intermittent fieldwork on industrialization and the family. I would find an area where there were both Han and minority people, and choose two Han villages and two minority villages...