The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth- Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art

Beginning in the 1970s there has been a shift in cultural anthropological methodology from participant observation toward the observation of participation. During participant observation ethnographers attempt to be both emotionally engaged participants and coolly dispassionate observers of the lives of others. In the observation of participation, ethnographers both experience and observe their own and others' coparticipation within the ethnographic encounter. The shift from the one methodology to the other entails a representational transformation in which, instead of a choice between writing an ethnographic memoir centering on the Self or a standard monograph centering on the Other, both the Self and Other are presented together within a single narrative ethnography, focused on the character and process of the ethnographic dialogue.

From Participant Observation to the Observation of Participation: The Emergence of Narrative Ethnography

Religion in Chinese Society

Other Modernities: tendered Yearnings in China after Socialism. LISA ROFEL. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999; 330 pp. Lisa Rofel's Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China After Socialism explores the processes by which three cohorts of women working in a silk factory in the city of Hangzhou have crafted memories and narratives of their lives. Drawing on factory floor discussions, interviews, and personal conversations, Rofel focuses on the constitution of gendered identities as a means of probing aspects of modernity inflected with power. The result is a theoretically sophisticated yet broadly accessible account which combines an analysis of narrative based on cultural and historical specificities, and on the politics of representation, with a reflexive interrogation of western representations of Chinese women and China, beginning with views formerly held by Rofel herself. Rofel begins by problematizing modernity as something imagined, a discourse that the west subscribes to as opposed to an essence or a state of being. She challenges western assumptions of modernity as a monolithic category-sort of an endpoint in a teleological tale in which the United States and Europe are exemplary models. Non-western constructions of modernity are neither simply part of a universal phenomenon (that is, essentially the same beast as western modernity), nor can they be explained as an entirely different animal, a phenomenon unique to its cultural or local context. Rofel criticizes the former view as omitting culture and the latter as omitting power. Her alternative framing pluralizes modernity and then anchors "modernities" in particular historical moments. For Rofel, modernity is a process that when scrutinized reveals how local and global configurations of power have been "knit together." Divergent constructions of modernity shape the gendered identities of the three cohorts who are the subjects of this book. These cohorts are comprised of women who came of age roughly during the 1950s, the Cultural Revolution, and the postMao era. The women in the oldest cohort construct identity in terms of their work performance and portray themselves as having been liberated by the revolution which enabled them to work. Prior to the revolution the cultural arena was characterized by a gendered distinction between "inside" and "outside." China scholars have long identified "inside" activities with femaleness and the family, and "outside" activities with maleness and the public domain. Due to this spatial designation working class women employed as factory laborers were suspected of having questionable morality, not on account of their actions but because of the "outside" location of their labor. Rofel points out that it was largely working women, formerly tainted by the inside/outside distinction, who found the new socialist state's framings a meaningful medium for crafting new gender identities through "labor" and for representing pasts that were once culturally problematic. This form of agency was shaped by Chinese Marxist discourse, which held that "work" meant activities in the public domain outside of the home. However, she argues that this framing resulted in an erasure of other forms of agency. For urban entrepreneurial families the "inside" was actually a hetero-gendered space where women interacted with male kin and engaged in labor. Thus, after the revolution women who had worked in household silk weaving workshops during the pre-revolutionary era were denied histories as workers, while women who had labored in factories could re-cast themselves as incipient feminists and revolutionaries. Rofel argues that these erasures and forms of agency were given credence by Marxist and international feminist binaries that erroneously identified women who were confined to "inside" activities with feudalism/tradition and those engaged in "outside" activities with productive labor/liberation. She accuses such binaries of replacing history with teleology and of assuming "women workers" could constitute a homogeneous subject as opposed to several situated positionalities differentially shaped by power. …

Other Modernities: Gendered Yearnings in China after Socialism

On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods

Common Core Standards: RH2 Determine the central ideas or information of a primary or secondary source RH 7 Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media (e.g. visually, quantitatively, as well as in words) in order to address a question or solve a problem. SL1 Initiate and participate effectively in a range of collaborative discussions SL 2 Integrate multiple sources of information presented in diverse formats and media

Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life

This work explores what it means to be modern and what it means to be Korean in a culture where courtship and marriage are often the crucible in which notions of gender and class are cast and recast. Touching on a number of important issues - identity, romantic love, women's work, marriage negotiations, and wedding ceremonies - Laurel Kendall gives us a new appreciation for how Koreans have adapted this pivotal social practice to the astounding changes of the past century. Kendall attended her first Korean wedding in 1970, soon after she arrived in the country with the Peace Corps. Years later, as a seasoned anthropologist, she began interviewing both working-class and middle-class couples, matchmakers, purveyors of dowry goods, and proprietors of wedding halls. She consulted etiquette handbooks and women's magazines and analyzed cartoons, photographs, and weddings themselves. The result is an engaging account of how marriage matches are made, how families proceed through the rites, how they finance ceremonies and elaborate exchanges of ritual goods, and how these practices are integral to the construction of adult identities and notions of ideal women and men. The book is also a reflection on what it means to write 'Korea' in a complex and ever changing social milieu.

Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity

Recent studies have taught us that “religion” is not a fixed category but an instrument of popular consciousness. While the studies' subjects have often been victims of colonialism and capitalist exploitation, cultural production through magical means need not be restricted to a society's most oppressed elements. Counter to the expectations of Max Weber, for whom capitalism marched to the drumbeat of “rationalization,” many of the clients who patronize the shaman shrines of Seoul, Republic of Korea, are engaged in high-risk petty-capitalist enterprises. Shamans, clients, and spirits address the seemingly arbitrary fluctuations of good and bad fortune that can bring sudden wealth or ruin, and offer wry commentary upon what their world has become.

Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism

Since the late 1960s, the lives of South Koreans have been reconstructed on the shifting ground of urbanization, industrialization, military authoritarianism, democratic reform, and social liberalization. Class and gender identities have been modified in relation to a changing modernity and new definitions of home and family, work and leisure, husband and wife. "Under Construction" provides a portrait of south Koreans in the 1990s - a decade that saw a return to civilian rule, a loosening of censorship and social control, and the emergence of a full-blown consumer culture. It shows how these changes impacted the lives of Korean men and women and the very definition of what it means to be "male" and "female" in Korea. In a series of provocative essays written by Korean and Western scholars, we see how Korean women and men actively engage, and at times openly contest, the limitations of gender. "Under Construction" is part of a turn in the anthropology of gender - from its early quest for the causes of female subordination to a finely tuned analysis of the historical, cultural, and class-based specificities of gender relations and the tension between gender as an ideological construct and as a lived experience. Grounded in the political and economic history of south Korea, this volume fills a gap in Korean studies and East Asia gender studies in English.

Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea

Emerging from a conference on Communities in Question: Religion and Authority in East and Southeast Asia, held in Hua Hin, Thailand, May 1989, this volume examines some of the tensions and conflicts between states and religious communities over the scope of religious views of the communities, the

Laurel Kendall

Papers

Shamans, Housewives, and Other Restless Spirits: Women in Korean Ritual Life

Getting Married in Korea: Of Gender, Morality, and Modernity

Korean Shamans and the Spirits of Capitalism

Under Construction: The Gendering of Modernity, Class, and Consumption in the Republic of Korea

Asian visions of authority : religion and the modern states of East and Southeast Asia