Download PDF | E. N. Anderson - Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China-University of Pennsylvania Press (2014).
352 Pages
Preface
This book covers the development of the Chinese food system from earliest times into the Ming Dynasty. Most attention is devoted to recent work on predynastic China and on the Yuan Dynasty, since these are both key to the system and the subjects of recent major research. Considerations of space have made me leave most of Ming and all of Qing and postimperial China for other venues, but I provide conclusions about China’s food system at the end of imperial times in the early twentieth century, as well as a few comparisons with recent times. For notes on later times, see my website postings “Ming and Qing: Population and Agriculture” on late imperial food and science, “China’s Environmental Ruin” on contemporary mainland China, and “Chinese Food Updates” on contemporary food ethnography
. These are works in progress, are not to be taken as final, and not to be cited without my permission. This book owes everything to Victor Mair, who expressed interest in my work and helped and encouraged at every stage. I also owe an enormous debt to my lifelong coworker Paul Buell, and to many friends and helpers in the world of Asian food, especially those who kept contact and remained encouraging during my long years away from China studies—including Jacqueline Newman, Charles Perry, Françoise Sabban, and others. Many more recent friends and fellow scholars have also helped with the enterprise, including Sidney Cheung, David Knechtges, Zelda Liang, Nick Menzies, Tan CheeBeng, Jianhua “Ayoe” Wang, and Sumei Yi. Peter Agree has served ably as editor, and I am deeply grateful to Alison Anderson and Gail Schmitt for extremely detailed and careful copy-editing. Thanks also for incredible experiences in a lost world, to Choi Kwok-tai and Cecilia Choi, and to Chow Hung-fai; and to Purevsuren Tsolmonjav for an intense and inspiring introduction to Mongolian life and environment. Finally, I am deeply grateful, as always, to my wife Barbara and our children, children-in-law, and grandchildren; they give me life itself.
Introduction
Assembling a Food System Chinese food has swept the world. In general, “globalization,” whatever else it may be, has generally meant the spread of American popular culture. The cultural forms that have “swum upstream,” spreading worldwide in the teeth of American advances, are thus of special interest. Among such cultural ways, Chinese food has an almost unique place. Almost no town on earth is without a Chinese restaurant of some kind. Chinese canned, frozen, and preserved foods are available in shops from Nairobi to Quito. Chinese cookbooks abound in every bookstore. The credit for this belongs partly to the quality and diversity of the food, partly to the industriousness and enterprise of Chinese farmers, food workers, merchants, writers, and chefs.
However, much of the credit also belongs to the farmers and food entrepreneurs of the rest of the world and to the eclectic Chinese innovators who drew on this global storehouse of ingredients, techniques, and knowledges. In anthropological usage, a food system is a process for producing, distributing, and consuming food. It thus takes in agriculture, hunting, foraging, environmental management, trade, marketing, and food preparation, as well as consumption (see P. West 2012: 18–26 on anthropology of food). The Chinese food system did not develop in isolation. It was, in fact, formed from a diverse set of regional agricultures and cuisines, merging and borrowing from each other and being themselves further influenced by foods and foodways from every part of the earth. Many people are surprised to learn that such foods as chiles, peanuts, and potatoes were not indigenous to China, but rather Native American domesticates acquired by China in the last very few centuries. Much earlier, wheat, sheep, and dozens of other West Asian foods migrated across Central Asia to China. The present book does not attempt to tell the whole story, let alone the story of China’s contacts with the world.
Excellent recent histories, including the Cambridge History of China and the newer but briefer Harvard series of histories of the great dynasties, cover the story. Some of the new Harvard histories, including Mark Lewis’s history of Tang (2009) and Timothy Brooks’s of Yuan and Ming (2010), are particularly good on China in its world-system context. Instead of trying to do too much, this book centers on western Eurasian contacts and influences during the Yuan Dynasty—the Mongol Empire’s Chinese phase.
This book also provides dense coverage of all the events leading up to this period. I briefly consider the Ming, but have—in the interests of space—ended this book with the end of Ming, except for a final chapter that generalizes about China’s food and environment in history. Imperial China lasted 2,200 years, during which time the population grew from perhaps 40 million to 400 million. Assuming an average population of 100 million over that time, and three generations per century, perhaps as many as 300 billion individuals had to be fed. Famines were frequent, malnutrition common, and life expectancy short, but the accomplishment still stands as incredible. No other part of the world supported such a dense population for so long. Natural increase led to continual pushing the resource base hard. Serious famines occurred on the average of every other year. Yet most people, most of the time, managed to eat. Admittedly, China had some rough periods.
The time of the Three Kingdoms after the fall of Han, the period of Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms after Tang, the collapse of Ming in 1630–44, and other dynastic meltdowns were dreadful. But they were quickly resolved and did not lead to the long and profound dark ages that ended the Roman Empire, the lowland Maya civilization, or the great empires of Africa and Central Asia. China’s natural endowments have much to do with this but obviously are not the main story. Other parts of the world were well endowed with resources but did not do so well. China has a great deal of fertile soil and well distributed and abundant rainfall in much of the country and is well supplied with rivers.
It has the greatest biodiversity of any temperate zone area; this biodiversity is concen trated in the southwest, because of the lush mountains and valleys there. Much of contemporary China is desert or barren high-altitude plateau, but most of these areas were not part of China until the Qing Dynasty. China has a great extent both north-south and east-west, allowing people, crops, and other plant and animal resources to migrate freely but also to take advantage of resources from different climate zones. Jared Diamond (1997) pointed out the disadvantages of having a long, narrow north-south country; it is hard to transfer crops around—they have to readapt to new climate zones. Climate change was frequent in Chinese history but had minimal effect, because of the north-south and east-west mobility noted above. If the climate turned warm and wet, as it did in Zhou and to some extent in Tang, people moved north and west.
If the climate turned cold and dry, as it did in Ming, people moved south. The one time this was ruinous was the Medieval Warm Period—but not because of climate. That period of astonishingly rapid and dramatic warming led to the Jurchen, Mongols, and other Central Asian nomadic groups being able to increase their human and livestock populations by stunning amounts and to spread and conquer. Genghis Khan was particularly good at parlaying good weather into world empire, but the successes of the Liao and Jin show he was not alone. Conversely, Song was weakened by disease, drought, local torrential rainfall, and other phenomena probably associated with the Medieval Warm Period. Climate is not destiny, but it can enable figures such as Genghis Khan. Otherwise, China dealt with the worldwide cooling of the early centuries CE and the much more dramatic cooling of the Little Ice Age, around 1400–1800 (Pages 2k Network 2013; they note that the Medieval Warm Period was rather weakly correlated across continents, but their charts (5) show it as strong everywhere, with dramatic warmth during 1000–1200 in Asia). Another advantage, not often enough appreciated, is that China is centripetal. It seeks its center. The central part of the country is composed of the Yellow, Huai, and Yangzi valleys, a vast continuous area of fertile soil.
In early historic times, this was an unbelievably lush landscape— swarming with game, covered by billions of fruit and nut trees and edible wild plants, and generally blessed with riches. China is bounded by rugged mountains and deserts that protect it from invasion—not enough to keep invaders out, but enough to prevent them from routinely devastating the landscape, as happened in eastern Europe. The downside of this is that China is all too easy to centralize. Almost all historians now seem to agree that Europe’s great natural advantage is the fact that it cannot be conquered and held as one single empire—at least, nobody has ever managed to do so (Lieberman 2009; Morris 2010). The central spine of mountains is surrounded by a set of detached, widely separated, very rich lands: the regions we know as France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, and so on.
The fact that nobody could centralize control over this disparate range of countries has led to a great deal of independence. In particular, in the critically important seventeenth century, when science, capitalism, imperialism, and liberal politics were all becoming major forces, the desperate attempts by autocrats to enforce their absolutism (P. Anderson 1974) were doomed to fail, because dissidents simply went to the next country. China, unfortunately, could easily centralize, set up a dinosauric bureaucracy, and crack down on independent inquiry. This was done repeatedly: under Qin Shi Huang Di, Han Wu Di, and on down to Chairman Mao. The Warring States Period, of course, proves the point: China’s great age of thought and philosophy was precisely when the country was divided into many small states, each seeking to attain an advantage over the others by getting the best experts on statecraft, war, and policy. The period of disunion from 300 to 589 was probably similar , but is poorly documented.
Why Study the Chinese Food System? The world is now in desperate need of an intensive yet sustainable food production system. Such a system can be constructed on the basis of East Asian insights. For 10,000 years, East Asian peoples have been developing systems that often used resources in relatively sustainable and efficient ways, permitting extremely intensive and productive systems to survive over millennia. East Asian agriculture uses minimal land and resources for maximal production. One key design feature of that agricultural system—a rrived at by trial and error, not by deliberate plan—is the overall purpose of maximizing nutritional adequacy, not maximizing profit or starch or oil or any other single output. This objective has been accomplished by selecting strains of plants and animals that would produce maximum nutrients of all sorts, including vitamins and minerals, with minimum input. The result has been an agricultural system that maintains a great deal of biodiversity, both in the wild and in cultivated crops. Fields, gardens, managed semiwild lands, managed for ests, and specialized agricultural landscapes are all part of this integrated system. The system generally increased its food production capacity by intensifying the latter in place.
This required a “biological” development strategy (Hayami and Ruttan 1985), in which more and more fertilizer, compost, and land improvement were used, and more and more crop species grown, over time. This requires a concomitant increase in skill and knowledge. By contrast, the Western world has tended to rely on constantly expanding the range of cultivated landscape. The conquest of the New World and Australia was driven in great measure by the desperate need for more land. This was in large part because of concentration on animal husbandry—especially cattle and sheep—a nd on relatively low-yield grains, notably wheat and barley. The Chinese, typically, managed to develop high-yield wheat agriculture, and eventually the West did too, but expansion remained the key western developmental idea. Latin America, for instance, was, and continues to be, cleared of natural vegetation—and indigenous people—largely for cattle ranching.
There have been large pockets of intensive, and intensifying, agriculture in the West, for example, Italy throughout much of history, Moorish Andalucia, and northwestern Europe since the 1700s or earlier. China has had its extensive, expanding, low-yield zones, especially on the northwest frontier, where agriculture kept encroaching on the steppes, only to collapse and retreat when dry periods occurred. But the general difference was enough to make Chinese grain yields five times those in most of the West in the early twentieth century: about 2,500 kg/ha versus 500.
Comparing, say, Denmark with northern Shaanxi would reverse those figures, but we are still contemplating a real and important difference. It matters for the future: the world has run out of agricultural land, and a collapse inward has begun as more and more land goes out of cultivation due to urbanization and erosion. Especially intensive and sustainable has been the system that initially developed in southern China—long before it was “China” or “Chinese”—and spread widely throughout eastern Asia and Oceania. Rice paddy agriculture, highly fertilized vegetable plots, tree cropping, and intensive, dryland garden-fields are components.
The principal domestic animals—pigs and chickens—did not require the vast expanses of grazing land required by cattle and sheep. Variants of the system exist from northern Japan to southern Indonesia. China has generally been the major site of innovation, but far from the only one. Such hopeful and creative modern systems as polyculture carry these insights forward today. Traditional Chinese agriculture was far from perfect, but it was incomparably more efficient and environmentally sane than modern industrial agriculture—especially the form currently used in China itself.
The World-System Model My analysis of the formation of this food system rests on a generalized worldsystem model. The idea of a world-system began with Immanuel Wallerstein (1976), who had a detailed and systematic theory of how such a system operates. At some point, a translocal or transnational network of exchange becomes so important that it is a real system—a bounded entity within which goods and information flow in large quantities and relatively freely, as opposed to sharply reduced flows outside the bounds of the system. Furthermore, in a system, everything is connected, directly or indirectly. Any fairly major event in the system influences every part of it. A human body is a system. So is the electrical wiring of my house. A world-system—or oikumene, to use an old Greek term—is a system of interacting polities that are closely linked by trade, communication, and information flow. The world has had local “world-systems” (or local polity systems, if you will) for a very long time (Chase-Dunn and Anderson 2005; Chase-Dunn et al. 2007). The major ones had joined into a single world-system by 1600. Obviously, these definitions are vague and relative.
There is no question that the world today is one system; a financial shock in Japan ruins companies in Germany and South Africa. There is no question that the world economy of 15,000 BCE was not a system. The flood of population from Asia into the Western Hemisphere around that time, and its dramatic increase there, did not affect the rest of the world one whit. In between, a great deal happened. Fairly arbitrary cutoffs have to be selected if one is writing histories; thus the invasion of Syria by Pharaoh Thutmose I around 1500 BCE is somewhat—but not entirely—arbitrarily set as the point at which the Egyptian system fused with the West Asian one into a single Near Eastern oikumene (Christopher Chase-Dunn, forthcoming).
The corresponding date for the Near East and East Asia has not been set. In formal world-systems theory, it probably did not occur until the nineteenth century, when the West could directly invade, dominate, and dictate terms. But this was only the end of a long process. The Mongols definitively united East and West in the 1200s, and no one could really say there were separate systems after that. Still earlier, West and East first came into violent contact in 751 CE, when the expanding Arab and Chinese Empires met and clashed at the Talas River in the dead center of Asia; the Arabs won, and Central Asia became Muslim. Far earlier came the fateful moment when wheat and barley reached China.
No one knows the exact date, but it was apparently around 4,500 years ago. At some point a trader or farmer from somewhere that might later be called Afghanistan showed up at a compound in what would much later be called Shaanxi, and said “boy, have I got some seeds to show you!” Evidently this was a less memorable event than Thutmose’s magnificent and grim war, but infinitely more important and meaningful in historic terms. Shortly before this, around 3500 BCE, horse domestication permitted highly mobile steppe nomadism. The horse reached China by 1500, and west and east were well and truly united. The steppe became a vast freeway rather than a cold, hostile barrier. Today, in this world of air and ship transport, we have no concept of how important clear and unbarriered land routes were in earlier times. There was nothing to stop a rider from taking off at top speed in Beijing and galloping all the way to the Black Sea, changing horses as necessary.
In fact, under the Mongols, the courier service did exactly that. Similarly, there was nothing in the American Great Plains to prevent the same institution arising: the Pony Express was copied directly from the Mongol post (Weatherford 2004) and had a brief but glorious “run” in 1860–61. By the beginning of our Common Era, silk from China was already crossing Asia, to be exchanged for silver and other valuables. Not until the nineteenth century was the main route labeled the Silk Road (Hansen 2012), a term coined by geographer Ferdinand von Richtofen in 1877.
The term is a good one, though there was no single road but rather a shifting set of caravan tracks through the desert. Also, all manner of goods flowed in both directions; silk was only the most famous and probably the most long-lasting as a trade staple. In any event, this great route was the most important long-range transnational pathway on earth for over a thousand years. Empires flowed along it, but more important were the foods and other ordinary goods—textiles included. The empires fell or faded, and even the names of many of them have been forgotten, but the domesticated crops and food-processing techniques are still with us, giving us life. Wheat and barley had already been crossing Asia on the ancestral routes that became the Silk Road, but later, horses and chariots, metallurgy, and countless other technological innovations came along the road or along the more northerly steppe routes. As David Christian pointed out (2000), it was a major belt of interface for pastoralists and settled people from the beginning, as well as a route linking West and East.
The pas toralists often entered settled life by conquering Silk Road cities and settling down; at other times they worked, voluntarily or as slaves, for the cities and farms. The other useful concept I take from world-systems theory is the idea that a world-system has a core (a core nation or small group of nations), some semiperipheral polities, and some peripheral ones. The core tends to dominate terms of trade and conquest, such that it keeps the other polities down. The peripheral polities are particularly disadvantaged by being politically and militarily weak and often are exploited for raw materials. Semiperipheral polities are potential rivals and often diligently develop themselves militarily so that they can loot or even conquer and take over the core.
These dynamics have played out time and again in East Asia. Whatever state or states ruled central north China has or have generally been the core. Siberia and parts of upland Southeast Asia were peripheral. In between were the fascinating semiperipheral states that rose and fell, especially in Central Asia: the Xiongnu, Turks, Tibetans, Mongols, and others. Many of these were cut down by Chinese rhetoric into “nomad” and “barbarian” states. As we shall see, they were far from merely that. Korea and Vietnam have also been semiperipheral throughout a good deal of China’s history. China was a core—usually the core—of East Asia until the nineteenthcentury wars, in which China was brutally “semiperipheralized” in the unified world-system whose core became the Western European nations and, increasingly, the United States. Today we have seen the reemergence of Japan as a core nation and are watching China rapidly move into core status again.
The world of the twenty-first century has multiple core areas. The world-systems view takes advantage of the known facts of diffusion (Mair 2006). Humans are amazingly good at adopting each other’s ideas. Some measure of this phenomenon occurred when Lewis and Clark contacted Native American tribes who had never been within hundreds of miles of a white person before and found them telling French folktales, reworked in local languages. The tales had spread from Quebec by word of mouth, through thousands of miles of trackless and unexplored country where no whites had ever been and where writing and literacy did not exist. Similar spreads are numerous worldwide.
If folktales can spread that fast, it is clearly no surprise to find, for example, that the bow and arrow spread from its invention in Africa about 50,000 years ago to the entire world (though some isolated areas still lacked it at the time of European expansion). Nor are we surprised to find early Indo-European loanwords in Chinese and ancient Thai loans in Korean. A world-system theorist’s teeth are set on edge by words like “hybridity” when they are applied to cultures. Cultures are not remotely like different species. There never was a time when cultures were pure, homogeneous, isolated, or essentialized. People have always been wildly creative and dynamic and, above all, open to any influences from any direction. People appropriate anything good they can get their hands and minds on. Cultures reflect this. The Chinese had something like a world-system theory during the Warring States period, and to some extent afterward. Westerners are apt to think of the Chinese self-label Middle Kingdom (or Central Country) as mere vanity, but originally it seems to have meant “central states”— plural.
The Warring States writers, or even earlier ones, saw that there were core states and peripheral ones. The latter were labeled with terms we now translate as “barbarians,” but perhaps “peripheral peoples” would be a better translation. The Chinese even distinguished semiperipheral states—“cooked barbarians,” those that had picked up Chinese culture or a good deal of it—from “raw barbarians,” those without much Chinese culture. Snobbish, ethnocentric, and patronizing as this was, it displays awareness of the ideas underlying world-systems theory. Today, however, core nations are defined by military and economic might, not by culture. The Chinese, by contrast, looked at culture as basic.
This idea evolved into the Confucian theory that morality was key to politics, and politics to military and economic power. The counter-theories, based on a more sober awareness of military and economic influence, then became even more like world-system theory. Recent studies are radically different from the old studies that portrayed China as a remote, unique, isolated, changeless civilization. Modern historical studies like those of Lewis (2006, 2009a, b), Mallory and Mair (2000), Tan (2009), and Wade and Sun (2010) and foodways studies like those brought together by Cheung and Tan (2007) emphasize the fact that from early times, China was involved in a huge, active network of trade and contact. The Chinese created a great civilization that has its own wonderful and fascinating features but is broadly parallel to other civilizations and went through the same stages as other civilizations: invention of agriculture, development of settled life, construction of great cities, development of law codes, and the rest.
Diffusion, Cultural Choice, and Chinese Distinctiveness Those points are rather obvious, but they are worth stating because they stand in contrast to the old Orientalist view, still not uncommon in China studies. It holds that China is unique, homogeneous, and isolated and that its civilization cannot be compared with any other. Often it adds the idea that the Chinese live in a world of mystical correspondences, ancient texts, and changeless 2,500-year-old thoughts that are “not true philosophy” (whatever that may mean), rather than in a world where people concern themselves with food, clothing, and shelter and are quite willing to update or selectively reapply ancient guides. Students of agriculture, metallurgy, and other “manual arts” have long recognized that China influenced, and was influenced by, other cultures; but students of medicine, political theory, philosophy, poetry, and other arts of the mind, including perceptions of the environment, still sometimes insist that China can be interpreted only on its own terms. They appear to believe the Chinese had not only different theories but different physical realities from the rest of humanity. This belief in the uniqueness and changelessness of Chinese culture seems based, ultimately, on a Platonic view of the world. Plato held that we know only what is in our heads, and we can meditate to full knowledge of the Ideal. In contrast, his student Aristotle held that we must try to find out what we can about real, tangible things out there in the world. Western civilization has ever since been trying to deal with the difference between studying things of the mind and studying things that we can all see, touch, and discuss on the basis of the knowledge from those senses. Many people, especially in the humanities, prefer a broadly Platonic approach; they are more comfortable in a world of ideas. Others, especially in the hard sciences, are Aristotelian.
The Chinese fail to make a huge distinction, and I have always followed them in this; I prefer to study both and to use both approaches in studying particular cultural matters. Pointing out that China shared basic perceptions of agriculture with the West does not mean that they had the same crops or production systems. Pointing out that China shares much medical knowledge with the West does not mean Chinese medicine is merely some sort of variant of world medicine.
The middle ground is the only tenable one: Chinese, like Westerners, responded to real-world conditions, but they responded in ways conditioned by the cultural and personal environments and knowledge systems they brought to the task. Ultimately, however, agriculture has to produce food, and medicine has to provide at least some visible curing. Thus there is constant feedback from reality in both cases. Every society produces not one, but many, distinctive solutions, with different styles, perceptions, philosophies, and experiences. Wheat, maize, millet, and potatoes can all be starch staples. Beans, peas, cattle, pigs, and many other species can provide protein (contrary to myth, bean protein is not “incomplete”).
In medicine, the body is basically the same everywhere, and malaria, dysentery, and smallpox vary only with the local microbial strains; but cultural understandings of the body, and above all the solutions people invent for their health problems, differ profoundly. Yet they are not in free variation; people want to be healed, and hence it is no surprise to find that the Chinese found many perfectly effective cures. Qinghaosu (Artemisia annua) cures malaria whether one is a traditional Chinese or a modern Brazilian.
The difference between old China and modern Brazil lies not in the effect but in the perception: it determines whether one attributes the effects of the drug to its qi or to the toxic effect of artemisinin on Plasmodium falciparum. This is not a simple contrast of “error” and “truth,” nor is it merely two different arbitrary cultural claims. It is a difference between an early, sincere, serious, well-thought-out scientific theory that is now in some ways inadequate, and a later serious, well-thought-out theory that is clearly more accurate but will no doubt prove inadequate in the future. We do well to respect all those who have seriously tried to understand these matters, and to understand their understandings as serious theorizing—not as some sort of random cultural noise or ignorant mysticism. Cultural arbitrariness of the sort alleged by postmodernists would never have let anyone find qinghaosu in the first place or observe its effects. Kwang-chih Chang (2002a) pointed out that early China shared with Native American cultures a basic sense of continuity between humans and the rest of the cosmos—animals, plants, hills, stars. This was a concept that the Chinese themselves discussed with words like “harmony” (he) and “resonance.” The West, in his view, committed itself to a rupture not only between people and nature but also between people and the gods. This he traces back to ancient Sumer (K.-c. Chang 2002). Chang rather exaggerates—I believe for effect—but the difference is real—and critically important. Any lingering doubts about the importance of the idea of continuity were removed when Mao imported to China the quintessentially Western idea of struggling against nature. Within a few decades, China had devastated an environment that five millennia of imperfect but concerned management had at least partially preserved (E. Anderson 2012; Marks 2012). Even this case, however, was not open-and-shut. The West is not wholly anti-nature, and China was certainly not environmentally perfect. The West has Celtic poetry, Renaissance botany, and the conservation movement to remind us of our intimate connections with nature. China has its love of the “heat and noise” (renao) of cities and its fear of wild beasts to balance the poetic love of “mountains and water” (shanshui) that define so much of its art. How much the very real difference prevails, and how and why it matters, is a question for serious investigation.
The Chinese fondness for continuity and the Western fondness for rupture, or dichotomy, is seen also in the west’s Platonic/Aristotelian conflict and the Chinese lack of such a conflict. The Chinese never doubted that the world is important to know and that how we think of it is also important. Another example of continuity versus rupture is seen in religion. The Chinese and their neighbors have been relatively religiously tolerant compared to the West. The Chinese had many conflicts between Confucians and Daoists, Daoists and Buddhists, and the state and Islam; they also had to deal with millennial rebellions, the most clearly faith-driven being the Taipings. Still, it seems that China has nothing in its premodern history comparable to the Crusades, especially the Albigensian Crusade, the Fourth Crusade, and others that targeted “other” Christians rather than Muslims. China did not have anything quite like Europe’s Wars of Religion or like the many sectarian conflicts within Islam. Many recent scholars have seen fascism and Communism religions (of a sort), which would add those ideologies to the pool of Western divisive ideas. Since 1800, the Chinese have become increasingly Westernized in these matters: the Muslim and Taiping rebellions of the nineteenth century had major religious components, and with Communism China adopted an exclusive dogma.
The contrast with earlier dynasties is instructive. Central Asian regimes were even more tolerant than the Chinese. The Khitans and Mongols of their golden era were dramatically tolerant. One can see a first documentation of this attitude in Cyrus’s religious tolerance in ancient Persia; his dynasty came from Central Asia. Related to the debate over China’s uniqueness is a question of how much China is like the rest of the world. Chinese civilization does indeed broadly resemble civilizations elsewhere.
This similarity can come from parallel invention—ancient Chinese farms and cities looked a lot like ancient Aztec ones—but more often it comes from actual borrowing. However, China is so obviously distinctive in many ways that one is always tempted to ignore such evidence of the unity of humankind. The debate between those who see “a culture” as a unique, harmonious whole and those who see “culture” as complexly and contingently constructed is a very old one. Postmodernists often claim to have invented the latter view, but in fact it goes well back in social science. Deborah Tooker has provided a wonderfully concise list of the sins of old-time anthropology, as seen by today’s postmodern anthropologists: “1) being too functionalist; 2) following a romantic Germanic notion of culture; 3) following a discipline-based rhetoric of holism in text construction . . . ; 4) biologizing culture by viewing it as organic; 5) imposing a coherent notion of culture that does not allow for contradictions and inconsistencies; 6) naturalizing culture and ignoring the fact that it must be socially produced; 7) exoticizing the other[s] by placing them out of time and space; 8) reinforcing indigenous systems of power inequalities by silencing alternative viewpoints (sometimes in collusion with colonialist interests) [this sin is actually more common among postmodernists than it was among the old-timers—ENA]; or 9) isolating indigenous cultures from historical forces and larger regional systems of power inequalities” (Tooker 2012: 38–39).
All these criticisms of old-time anthropology are well taken; they have much truth. (In fact, I was making them long before postmodernism was heard of.) But many old-timers succeeded in avoiding them, and many postmodernists do not. One might also counter that postmodern anthropologists often 1) deny any function to cultural ways, thus making them seem arbitrary and vapid; 2) forget that Herder (the “romantic German”) was arguing for cultural tolerance and was the first known human being to do so with a fullscale logical argument; 3) ignore holism when it is there; 4) deny any biology in culture, even to alleging that people construct foodways with no attention to nutrition; 5) look only at contradictions and inconsistencies, ignoring real consensus; 6) unnaturalize culture by describing it as if it were mere arbitrary claims; 7) exoticize the others by maintaining that “indigenous” people had no power or resource conflicts; 8) focus only on external power imposition; 9) focus only on larger systems and never describing, or even showing any concern for, local cultures.
As always, truth is in the middle, but in this case it is not in some kind of missing middle ground, but rather in adopting all eighteen alternatives—but only to a reasonable degree. A functionalist explanation of eating with knife and fork is not historically adequate; people did fine before forks were adopted during the late Renaissance. But claiming that the fork has no function in modern eating would be insane. Particularly important is getting a reasonable perspective on the last two items in the list. All societies have power inequalities (if only old versus young), and all have to deal with other societies who may push them around or who may push back when annoyed. There were indeed many anthropologists in the old days who ignored this point (though many did not), and many today who focus so exclusively on power that the people are reduced to cardboard-stereotype victims—r educing them to Agamben’s “bare life” (1998) in description, when they are not in reality.
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