In what ways could ethnographic studies of the contemporary speak to the analysis of early imperial China? I am intrigued to see links between Charles Sanft’s contemplation of literary activities and my fieldwork in Southeast China. The links come not just from a cherry-picking of resemblances; they offer a way to explore how literacy works and how people interact with text in a broader sense. This is Sanft’s primary focus. His insightful article raises a question for scholars of Early China: how to analyze what lies beyond texts when texts are the only evidence left? One approach is to think about texts not just semantically, but socially—that is, how textual practices create and are created by social beings, which, I think, comes to the fore of ethnographic studies. It is, of course, not that novel to make connections between the ancient and contemporary. Archaeology, for instance, has drawn heavily on modern Western social theories and ethnographic cases, harvesting fruitful explorations and careful reflections. In this comparison of early and contemporary China, I line up two theoretical themes for analyzing literary practices: sociality and performativity. These features are salient in both observations across spacetime and relate to the two keywords—community and interaction—in Sanft’s article. He proposes a theoretical framework of understanding literary activities in early China that foregrounds the multiple ways people interact with texts at the community level. Drawing upon the fieldwork data on poetry writing in rural South China, I show how people read and write as a social practice within, or sometimes not confined to, a community. Furthermore, I analyze how reading and writing become social when people practice these activities as a performance, in both the public and private domains.

Sociality

A question at the center of Sanft’s article is the motivation of literacy: why, after all, do people learn to read and write? The question already moves from individual practices to more collective phenomena. Sanft argues to understand literary activities at the “community” or “group” level within which people transmit and consume literary works (Sanft: 54). He cites Brian Stock’s discussion of “textual community” (68) and Robert Bagley’s “script community” (68), both of which study textual practices, whether religious or bureaucratic, at the community level. Inspired by Michael MacDonald’s “literate society,” Sanft puts forward a term “literate community” to “consider text’s social roles in early China” (68). Community, or community studies, an old iconic category in anthropology, has been frequently discussed in analyses related to reading and writing. In linguistic anthropology, speech community became influential after studies by Dell Hymes and John Gumperz, who used the concept of speech community to analyze shared norms, styles, and patterns (Hymes 1968; Gumperz 1968). Sociolinguists Frank Salomon and Mercedes Nino-Murcia bring up the concept of graphic community, as an analogy to speech community, to denote a broad lingua franca usage in South America (Salomon and Nino-Murcia 2011). Anthropologist Patrick Eisenlohr traces the relation between language ideologies and temporal indexicality among Hindus communities in Mauritius. Drawing from Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community,” Eisenlohr shows that the ancestral language has been indexed across spacetime in the figuring of diasporic communities (2004). These scholarly works connect the textual practices with identification within a social aggregation, highlighting the interplay between linguistic expressions and some kind of community membership.

Here I come to my “community,” where villagers join in a poetry club in a Hakka speaking area in Guangdong Province (Southeast China). Club members—farmers, school teachers, cadres, and shop owners—regularly meet together to circulate and discuss their poems. The poetry club is exclusive to residents of a town, call it T Town, which issues and delivers more than a thousand copies of quarterly periodicals, The Myrtle, to current residents and people who have migrated to urban areas or abroad. In the club members’ own words, writing is for making friends (yi wen hui you). Poems make their authors known to other people, be it neighbors or those whom they have never met, or “hometown fellows” from a distance. Writing poems in this rural club is more of a community-oriented activity than a personal hobby.

The concept of community draws attention to what is behind seemingly individual reading and writing practices, a social and geographical scope that makes writing meaningful to a broader audience. The concept of writing presumes the existence of a community, one whose prior existence is taken for granted and that serves as the raison d’être for literary production. But this is not always the case. Sometimes literary practices emerge before the formation of a community; in some cases, textual activities remain even after a community breaks down. In my field site, what club members call the hometown, T Town, had been annulled and incorporated into a neighboring town more than a decade ago. Club organizers, supported by the town residents, endeavored to keep the poetry club alive by raising funds and seeking government subsidies. Since then, the poetry club and The Myrtle have become a locus of nostalgia for hometown fellows, a place that reinforces their memories and identification of being “T Town people.”

The relationship between communities and literary practices is more generative—a particular community does not necessarily demarcate a particular writing/reading practice. Different types of communities (military, religious, or linguistic) make it possible for multiple ways of reading and writing; while various textual activities reinforce and redefine how people understand their communities. But a focus on community helps explain not merely why people learn to read and write, but also how literary activities work. The efficacy of a written text is not itself guaranteed; the social recognition of a written document depends on factors beyond what is written on a piece of paper. In T Town’s poetry club, members write on a variety of occasions, such as essays, mountain ballads, and wedding or festival couplets. These are not just for entertainment among themselves, but also for their neighbors, fellows, or wider audiences. Writing brings income, especially for versatile writers. Lau, the vice director of the poetry club, a village cadre, is a part-time geomancer (fengshui shi), scribe, and funeral host. His other kinds of writings exercise stronger social or legal power than poems and ballads—for instance, an adoption contract, which he is sometimes hired to write, can bring a new social relationship into existence. What makes his writings forceful? His role as a scribe and witness should be understood at a community-level, where his reputation is known and recognized.

Rian Thum in his book (2014) on Uyghur literary history comes up with the term “community authorship” to trace the “interface of manuscript flexibilities,” i.e., the adding, revising, and retelling of the texts, which transforms a variety of texts into a local creative genre, Tazkirah. The flexible texts are authored across the longue durée and vast region, forming a “community identity” beyond ethnicity and nationalism. Both Patrick Eisenlohr and Rian Thum show that the relationship between community and textual practices can span extended periods of time. This is also the case in T Town, where literary practices are connected to the past and as far back as the imperial period. In the field site, I encountered familial archives of land deeds of both paddy and forest purchases, written during the Qing Dynasty and the Republican Era (ranging from the eighteenth century to 1949, the founding of PRC). Most of the transactions took place within the same village. The recorded participants, including scribes and witnesses, were local residents. Certain personal names repeatedly appeared in several lineages’ land deeds, which implies that they were specially hired or invited to write the contracts (see also Myron Cohen’s 2005 book on written contracts of late imperial China). In many land deeds, Lau’s grandfather and uncle, who were well-known “culture people” in the village, were listed as the scribe or witness. Lau told me that his uncle taught him to write couplets and left a notebook of poems, secretly written during the Cultural Revolution. Competence in writing a particular genre, such as poems and couplets, is often related to other literary activities of importance, including writing contracts, drafting letters, and composing gazetteers. These indicate that the efficacy and transmission of writing in the community is linked to previous generations. The successive veneration for the literate, or “wise hometown fellows” (xiang xian), in this community is demonstrated in residents’ long-term social and financial support to the poetry club.

The concept of community has proved useful in social analysis, but it has received criticism in both anthropological and linguistic fields in recent decades. In linguistic anthropology, scholars have re-scrutinized and adapted the classic concept of “speech community.” Michael Silverstein compares the concepts of speech community, language community, and linguistic community. He suggests looking at social processes of named languages and the labeling of groups, emphasizing hierarchy and identification (Silverstein 1998). In a review and reflection on the concept of community, Judith Irvine (2006) warns against conflating language with community. She points out that the term of community readily implies a homogeneous entity with boundaries. However, language patterns are hardly confined to clearly demarcated social units. Instead, scholars show increasing interest in studying conflicts, differentiation, and multiplicity in language usage. Given the limits of community, it is an option to employ the term alongside related concepts—for instance, “social relation,” which implies more fluid and contingent connections than community membership in social interactions. A classic concept, social relation has been adopted to analyze the formation and acting of subjectivity in anthropology and other fields (Strathern 1999; Wagner 1991). This approach shifts the attention from the structural framework of a community to a more dynamic capture of the sociality of reading/writing.

The sociality of literary activities is not only manifested as the formation of community membership, but more broadly, as the unsettling of social relations in and around texts. Writing is an intellectual activity, yet it is not confined to the domain of knowledge. One needs to look beyond what the writing is about; but, rather, at what the writing is for. Social relations play a significant role in people’s creation of texts. In the poetry club of T Town, members restrict their published poems to a particular genre—regulated verses (ge lü shi). Tonal patterns and rhymes are more appreciated than semantic profundity, so the expertise of phonetic knowledge becomes decisive for establishing authority among club members. Members evaluate each other’s knowledge of poetry when they compose, correct, and comment on their works. They have gradually formed a mentoring relationship based on the mastery of prosody. What complicates this mentorship is the social roles—age, occupation, economic status—outside the club, which are readily challenged by and challenging to the mentorship that members build up in the club. The director of the club, a former schoolteacher and the eldest in the club, is said to be a bad poet who often makes mistakes on tonal patterns. He constantly asks for suggestions from those who are younger and less prestigious members of the village. His need to consult others comes into conflict with his position as a respected teacher. For other club members, knowledge of verse becomes a tool for bargaining with social roles outside of the club: when communicating poems, they are more of a poet or a mentor, than a peasant, a worker, or a shop runner, roles they perform in the village. While these people seem to be just writing and talking about poems, there is much more going on. They are also shaping social relations, relations mediated by the evaluations and consensus held by club members and the larger community. The domain of social interaction is a middle ground between human propensity and their social history (Keane 2015). It is in these moments of interactions, whether they occur in face-to-face or via text message, that social relations are acted out and negotiated through reading and writing.

Performativity

The sociality of literary practices is one way to understand how people interact with text, and the performativity is another—these two approaches are not entirely separated. An attention to social relations in writing/reading inevitably leads to an emphasis on “interactions”—another keyword in Sanft’s article. Sanft uses the term to refer to multiple ways of creating texts—reading (aloud or in silence), writing, dictation—each of which renders different experiences of knowledge transmission. This multiplicity of literary activities produces multiple effects of sociality and performativity. It accounts for the complex reasons why people learn to read and write: utility, pleasure, or prestige.

Here I connect Sanft’s usage of interaction to a broader sense—social interaction. The term “interaction” in Sanft’s article is more about the communication between persons and texts, whereas the concept of social interaction extends this communication to person-person interrelations around texts. Social interaction has become a key research field in social analysis, particularly after Erving Goffman’s leveraging of social actions in public and everyday life (1959) and Harold Garfinkle’s ethnomethodological studies on experiments in familiar interactions ([1967]1991). In particular, I wanted to talk about how reading/writing is performed in both the public and private spheres. Literary activities are performative to the extent that the act of writing itself is as significant as the content of what is written down. Certain types of writings, such as an adoption contract or a geomantic date-selection omen, are an essential part of rituals. As recorded in the historical land deeds in T Town, contract writing is a big event. On such occasions, the two parties hold a feast, inviting prestigious people in the village to be middlemen or witnesses. The invited people are paid an “etiquette” fee. The authority of writing lies somewhere other than the mere movement of hand wriggling; the act of dipping ink or twisting the brush is more than a prerequisite for creating texts—it evokes an aura of formality and prestige. It is a scene, a performance, and a display. Now in T Town, having someone record is necessary for initiating gatherings and ceremonies: as long as there is a significant occasion that involves gift exchange, guest attendance, or fundraising, there will be a person sitting beside a desk, holding a pen and taking notes.

Moreover, literary practices are performative in the sense that materiality matters, which is closely related to Sanft’s definition of interaction with texts. Roman Jakobson in his article “Linguistics and Poetics” suggests looking at the poetic function of language—not only the semantic aspect, but also the palpability of signs (Jakobson 1960). A focus on materiality moves beyond the intangible aspects of texts, linking the intellectual activities with intertwined palpable things: paper, a pen, a desk, or a laptop. The creation of texts is inseparable from people’s experience and sensation of the material surroundings (Mueggler 2011). Since the material (ontological) turn in social sciences in recent years, scholars have been increasingly interested in how the materiality of paperwork is shaping a reality in which texts are written or drawn about (Hull 2012). Texts are materialized as inscriptions on paper, stone, or walls; texts are also manifested and transmitted through various material semiotic forms, such as enunciation, recitation, and gesticulation. The materiality of texts conveys different information than the mere semantic part, as in the T Town poetry club, where members always read each other’s poems aloud. They read aloud in Hakka dialect with a rhythm. They nod or shake their head when reading. Reading aloud is ritual-like in that the readers express their opinions in tones and rhythm: sometimes, it is an aesthetic appreciation (reading the mentor’s poems), and sometimes a scrutinization (reading the mentee’s poems). Sound is a material semiotic form that indicates changing social relations; while at the same time, their social positionings mediate the phenomenally sensible.

An analysis of ethnographic data is still, in many ways, different from that of texts in early imperial time. What makes it particularly challenging to examine early textual evidence is the loss of traces of social interaction. Sanft’s inspiring proposal on textual practices in early China highlights community as the locus for multiple ways of engaging with texts. This framework endeavors to reconstruct the social interactions in and around texts. Drawing on my fieldwork research of a rural poetry club, I make connections to Sanft’s theoretical framework by taking literary activities as social and performative. I have compared the two concepts—community and social relation. I have also suggested the need to adopt a more generative and interactionist way for understanding how people interact with texts socially and performatively.

Works Cited


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