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Kinship, Contract, Community, and State: Anthropological Perspectives on China, by Myron L. Cohen. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. 376 pp. US$24.95 (Paperback). ISBN 0-8047-5067-X
It is impossible to adequately summarize a lifetime of intellectual accomplishments by a senior scholar. What Professor Cohen has excluded from this volume is as important as what he includes. Risking simplification, I shall focus on two major themes that run through his works in this volume.
Historical Anthropology
The anthropological use of history varies. Most scholars provide historical backgrounds to their ethnographies. Others use documents and oral histories to supplement them. Still others construct historical arguments to situate their analyses of the present. In his overview of late imperial society and its response to change, and in his focus on the competence of ordinary villagers in communities held together by a matrix of family, kinship, economic management, rituals, education, and political imagination, Cohen uses all three aspects of the historical method. His introduction to Arthur Smith's Village China, and the two essays on the fate of Chinese cultural identity in the twentieth century, portray a composite picture of the cultural resourcefulness of villagers.
Cohen focuses on common features of being Han Chinese. Drawing from documents and fieldwork in Southern Taiwan, Sichuan, Hebei, and Jiangnan, he argues that the late imperial legacy remains strong. He sees appeals to cultural legacy, against the backdrop of a century of politically motivated antitraditionalism, as major constitutive elements of modern cultural inventions. His work thus engages with paradigms that use demographic, historical and ethnographic data to explain unity and diversity in the cultural patterns and identities of late imperial and modern China, linking localities with institutions beyond (Fei, Hsu, Freedman, Ward, Skinner, Wolf, Watson, Faure, Crossley, Siu and Sutton, Shepherd).1 By highlighting how the shared cultural features incorporated "a cosmic vision" (p. 8) that extended not only beyond local community, but also to heaven and the underworld, Cohen joins the above scholars in appreciating the historically layered, translocal mappings of village life, in material means and cultural imaginations. It was an ironic historical twist, Cohen rightly asserts, that urban-based nationalist elites rejected such...