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  • Cultural Anthro-Apologies
  • Earl Rovit (bio)

One of the somewhat illicit pleasures in encountering an environment markedly different from one’s own is the temptation to make large irresponsible generalizations about this alien culture—something I think of as an admittedly puerile impersonation of a credulous Herodotus or a levitated Claude Lévi-Strauss. Obviously many places vary significantly in how they differ from us and in what we take for granted. The European industrialized nations certainly seemed more familiar to me on first encounter than most Asian and African countries. Furthermore in the last half-century the whole world has become more homogenous in appearance. Jeans have replaced lederhosen and dirndls, everyone wears baseball caps; every airport terminal seems the same; and one is no longer surprised to find familiar fast-food outlets in what were once exotic hinterlands. My first foreign foray was to Korea in 1946 where, except for gaping at the tall black conical hats that old men wore and finding that almost everyone seemed to be named either Kim or Lee, I was too young and self-preoccupied to pay much attention to my surroundings.

Since then, however, having enjoyed the opportunity as a semi-nomadic teacher to live and work in a number of what we used to call foreign climes, I must confess that I have enthusiastically indulged in amateur cultural analyses over the years. Some strange customs and environmental oddities seem indigenously eccentric to me, but others appear to provide something like a defining key to the culture. I held no brief for the validity of my anthropological speculations; but, like the challenge of a difficult puzzle, they were intriguing for me to cogitate upon, and they helped me focus my attention on what seemed otherwise baffling and strange.

I. China

In 1985 I spent a year in Shanghai, assaulted every day by the vivid colors, vibrant sounds, and pungent smells of a world so unlike any [End Page 512] I had ever known that my normal day would arc from exhilaration to exhaustion as my sensory receptors became depleted. Strolling on Nanjing Lu toward the Bund, I was stunned by the swarms of people on the sidewalks and the Niagara cascade of bicyclists in the street. As a seasoned New Yorker, I thought I was inured to population density, but these masses in motion, clogging the roads, jammed in buses, cresting like a Hokusai wave made Times Square seem like a pleasant picnic spot. I believe that there are just four hundred family names among the Han people—and the Han people are 94 percent of the billion-plus population. The director of my institute told me that when his son was born, he had been named according to an ancestral scroll which assigned the proper names for the first-born males of thirty-two generations. Now the scroll was complete, and he wondered uneasily how his son would be able to name his future grandson. I imagined a mammoth pyramid of thirty-two generations accumulating more and more weight over hundreds of years and bearing down on the present, much like the crowds cramming the Shanghai streets. Clearly there had to be some deep cultural mechanism to keep these masses from smashing into one another—some way of separating the burgeoning generations in a way that would retain their identities while allowing an integration into the larger collective.

What gradually occurred to me as I tried to sort through my daily Shanghai confusions was what I began to see as the ubiquity of secure boundaries that surround almost every Chinese structure. The one thing that everyone knows about China—whether it’s really visible from the moon or not—is the Great Wall. What is less recognized is the fact that the Wall is multiply replicated— large, medium, and small—throughout and within Chinese culture. A city like Xi’an still has its wall—as most Chinese cities once did—and this wall is then repeated in smaller and smaller densities throughout the town, coming to a center perhaps at Xi’an’s stately Drum Tower. In Shanghai I was fortunate enough to live in the Jin Jiang Hotel in...

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