My Intellectual Endeavors

Mayfair Yang

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Mayfair Yang in Taroko National Park, Taiwan, formerly the homeland of the Taroko people. Passerby October 15, 2023, Photo by Mayfair Yang

Citation: Religion and Society 14, 1; 10.3167/arrs.2023.140102

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My BA was a double major in anthropology and what was then called ‘Oriental languages’, and my MA and PhD were in anthropology, all at the University of California, Berkeley. Berkeley instilled in me a strong sense of politics and power dynamics and a penchant for social critique in my work. My PhD advisers were Jack Potter, a cultural Marxist who had done fieldwork on peasants in rural Hong Kong and Guangdong Province in China; Paul Rabinow, a philosophical anthropologist and early science and technology studies scholar who hosted Michel Foucault at Berkeley and introduced me to the world of French theory; and Robert Bellah, a sociologist of Japanese religion and American civil religion. As an immigrant originally born in Taiwan but who had grown up in multiple countries, I was very drawn to knowledge about Mainland China, the land from where both my parents fled the Communists. In the late 1970s, there was still very little knowledge about China in the outside world, but I was lucky to go there on a new graduate student exchange program between Berkeley and Beijing universities in 1981.

Living in Beijing and traveling around China at that time was like experiencing severe culture shock on a different planet. I discovered that the leftist politics of Berkeley and the Marxist theories we were immersed in were not appropriate in addressing the main power dynamics in China, for Marx had a diminished view of the state as the mere handmaiden of Capital. In modernity, China did not go through Enlightenment liberalism (except fleetingly), so after the Communist Revolution of 1949, the state became everything, after the Soviet model. For example, the main class division between the disadvantaged rural people and the privileged urban population was instituted by the state in the 1950s, not the forces of Capital. The state household registration system (hukou) prevented rural people from working or settling in urban areas and created a caste-like system of inequality, until its relaxation in the 1980s, but it remains in effect today.

The state-owned economy is still strong, and individual, community, or corporate rights are not installed, so how can China be described as ‘neoliberal governmentality,’ as some have labeled it? As I write in the Introduction of my new edited volume (Yang, ed., forthcoming), in China's ascendancy to the second economic and political power player in the world, given its particular histories, we must understand it as a different model of capitalism. Even though China is now capitalist, we must ask, who is (are) the primary agent(s) of Capital? The answer is not the same everywhere. In developmentalist and many post-socialist states, of which China is one, par excellence, Capital is actually often an administrative level, office, or officials of the state. The power of private Chinese Capital must first have access to state offices to open bureaucratic gates or to preserve a tenuous hold over the means of production. What informs all my work is the realization that anthropology as social critique cannot simply export the critique developed in one place to other places with very different historical structures of power. We cannot assume that the whole world needs the same critique as those developed in the modern West to address liberal capitalism. Part of fieldwork must entail the learning of what to critique, and how to critique from the locals, in negotiated exchanges with different native points of view.

The Gift and Sacrifice in China

My first book, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets: The Art of Social Relationships in China (Yang 1994), was about opening the various gates controlled by officialdom. It examined the importance and pervasiveness of the ‘gift economy’, or the culture of gift-giving, social connections (guanxi), and reciprocity of favors to maneuver one's way through a state-controlled society. I contrasted this with the state redistributive economy and the increasing commodity economy (Gregory 2015), where one could just pay money without prior social connections or indebtedness. This was a book that married Marcel Mauss (1967) with Karl Polanyi (1957) in embedding gift relations within the institutional structure of a state socialist command economy, and the entrance of capitalist market relations. Of course, Foucault's disciplinary power and governmentality also informed my analysis of Chinese state social provisions for urban people. Borrowing from Marilyn Strathern's (1990) discussion of the incomplete personhood in relations of social debt, called ‘dividualism’, I analyzed the fluid construction of the subject in guanxi relations. Deploying psychoanalytic theory, I contrasted the guanxi subject of horizontal ties with the subject of the cult of Mao, a secularized religious phenomenon known to many modern nationalisms. The latter ‘incorporated’ the image and will of the supreme subject (Mao) into the ‘hearts’ and ‘veins’ of each and every subject in the nation, while the guanxi subject expressed people power that undermined both the vertical relations of state power and the impersonal profit transactions of market relations. I suggested that the gift economy built up horizontal bonds that strengthened civil society in a thoroughly state-ordered system. At the same time, emerging Chinese civil society was guanxi-centered rather than individualized.

I have always been intellectually restless and have occasionally wandered into other people's specialized research territory, such as ancient China. Building on archaeologist Kwang-Chih Chang's (1983, 1987) suggestion about possible links between ancient Bronze Age China and South American archaic states, I published “Mauss or Bataille? Gift, Sacrifice, and Feasting Across China and the Northwest Coast” in Mauss International (Yang 2022a). Several anthropologists (Boas, Lévi-Strauss), sinologists, and archaeologists have noted the striking similarity between the artistic styles and iconographies of bronze ritual vessels of the Shang and Western Zhou Dynasties in ancient China and the wooden masks and totems of the Northwest Coast potlatch societies of coastal Alaska, British Columbia, and Washington State. Recent archaeological works on the ‘maritime thesis’ or the ‘Great Kelp Highway thesis’ support the argument that ancient Asians did not need the Bering land bridge to cross into North America but could cross and recross at any time via maritime routes and travel south down the long western coast of the New World. We do not have evidence of direct ancient China and Northwest Coast contact, but we can surmise indirect contact via intermediary societies over long time spans.

I suggest that there is something about the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Northwest Coast excess of agonistic generosity and destruction of property in potlatching that seems reminiscent of ancient Chinese descriptions of Shang Dynasty drunken feasting and the archaeological discoveries in China of precious bronze ritual vessels and statuary that were deliberately broken, smashed, burned, and buried. Archaeologists call this latter phenomenon ‘smashing vessels’ (huiqi). This record of ritual excess, wastefulness, and wealth destruction suggests that instead of Mauss's emphasis on reciprocity, we might find the theory of religion by Georges Bataille (1991) on the nonreciprocity and anti-utilitarian transcendental ethos of excessive waste in rituals and sacrifice to be more relevant in archaic religions, and more challenging of our contemporary capitalist assumptions about life and economy.

Histories of the Longue Durée

The history of anthropology was the study of small-scale Indigenous societies without writing, so cultural anthropology does not have a strong tradition of engaging with the written texts of civilizations. I am part of the ‘historical turn’ in anthropology, and I have dabbled in histories of the longue durée. As a continuous civilizational state, China really lends itself to or perhaps requires this perspective, so I am an anthropologist who engages with the field of sinology. During a time of the ‘Liberation’ of thought in 1980s China, the work of Chinese philosopher Li Zehou (1980) inspired me to write my first history of the longue durée, a chapter in Gifts, Favors, and Favors (Yang 1994). I explored how the upsurge of guanxi culture was in some ways an iteration of the ancient struggle between Legalism and statism on the one hand, and pre-Qin Confucianism. While the Legalists called for a system of state laws and punishment to reestablish social control at a time of social breakdown in the fourth and third centuries BCE, the Confucians emphasized strengthening the ethics of social relations and ritual conduct, which included gift, banquet, and sacrificial rituals to the living and dead. Modern anthropology has theorized ritual, but ideas about ritual's social functions, emotions and affect, histories, power effects, and strategies of ritual had all been thought out by the ancient Confucians.

Another publication from a longue durée perspective is “Millenarianism in the Soviet Union and Maoist China” in the online publication The Immanent Frame (Yang 2018). I argue that the Chinese Communist Revolution followed the structural pattern of earlier millenarian peasant rebellions in Chinese history. I show the similarities between the Communist Revolution and the Taiping Rebellion, a nineteenth-century Daoist-Christian hybrid religious movement that called for land rights, equality of classes and the sexes, the overthrow of the oppressive state order, and the establishment of social justice by divine intervention. I support Marshall Sahlins's (1987) work on the histories of structures and the structuration of history, which helps avoid the linear developmental history that has been so dominant from the nineteenth century to today. As Prasenjit Duara (1995) has shown, linear history has been in service to the establishment and maintenance of modern nation-states, and both historians and anthropologists from Lewis Henry Morgan on down have been complicit.

In “Chinese Popular Religion and Economics” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Economic Ethics (Yang 2024), I continue in the longue durée vein where I trace the mutual imbrication of Chinese popular religion with a long-standing market economy in China that traces back to the commercial and urban revolution of the Song Dynasty (von Glahn 2003) a thousand years ago. Counter to Marxist historical materialism, Chinese spirit money, which was burned for the ancestors and gods, predated the invention of paper money as legal tender, which was invented in China at least four hundred years later than religious money. I show how a common economic logic permeated religious and economic transactions, marked by a quantifying of spiritual merit and material items, as well as the indebtedness of both material wealth and the moral debt of one's sins and the length of one's lifespan. Given the deep cultural history of this intertwined religious and economic logic, it is no wonder that, with the economic reform period starting in 1979, Chinese commercial and religious culture would quickly spring back to life in tandem.

Religion, Modernity, and the State

My second monograph, Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Yang 2020) was based on three decades of intermittent fieldwork in rural and small-town Wenzhou on the Southeast China coast. Partially inspired by Pierre Clastres (1987), who outlined the mechanisms whereby non-state Indigenous societies ward off the state, I document the resurgence of popular religion and ritual (Daoist, Buddhist, popular religion and shamanism, ancestor worship and lineages) and how they form Indigenous religious civil societies to counterbalance the modern state. I examine how all the generous religious expenditures in this dynamic market economy of small, private, family enterprises comprise a ‘ritual economy’ that counterbalances the profit economy. While the profit economy is about accumulation and raking in, the ritual economy is about giving out generously, to others in charities or in hosting feasting rituals, or to the gods and ancestors in religious expenditures or sacrifice.

While it depends on the profit economy for sustenance, the ritual economy is also a religious extraction from the profit economy, as it robs the latter of the reinvestment of wealth to further expand capitalism. Instead, the ritual economy invests in the gods and ancestors, in the form of the building or restoration of temples and monasteries, ritual sites and ancestor halls. Expenditures on rituals and social banquets, and on one's self-cultivation and karmic accumulation for one's own or one's family's afterlives, are all part of the material investment in transcendental worlds. I often heard the local officials chastise the people about their ‘waste’ of good wealth on rituals, which could be reinvested in expanding their family's enterprises or in local industry. In a Bataillean (1991) vein, this ‘waste’ was the local people's implicit critique of state-capitalist secular modernity, whose power relations denied them their local community and kinship- building, and aspirations for transcendence to other worlds.

I have been uncomfortable with postcolonial studies because it recenters the West as the only object of critique and does not sufficiently deal with new power formations after the end of colonialism. In my article “Postcoloniality and Religiosity in Modern China: The Disenchantments of Sovereignty” (Yang 2011), I borrow Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff's (1997) notion of ‘colonization of consciousness’ to discuss the modern decimation of China's traditional religious landscape by native Chinese themselves. Beginning in the early twentieth century, China's elite urban reformers and revolutionaries embraced the linear evolutionism of Western thinkers and the Western missionaries’ disapproval of ‘idolatry’ and ‘heathenism’ to attack traditional Chinese religiosities. These scattered efforts were later systematized into full-fledged state secularization campaigns under, first, the Guomindang and then the Communists, which have caused an ethics vacuum and high levels of cynicism today, as well as lowering the ability of society to take initiatives to help itself. My point is that often, native agency may adopt colonial discourse and propel colonial destruction of native culture far more effectively than what the colonial forces or missionaries ever dreamed.

In my introduction to the edited collection Chinese Religiosities: Afflictions of Modernity and State Formation (Yang 2008a), I extended Talal Asad's (1993) questioning of the construction of the modern category of ‘religion’ in the West to an inquiry about the introduction of this category into modern China (Goossaert and Palmer 2011). In China, the category of ‘religion’ (zongjiao) was set up in contrast with ‘superstition’ (mixin) to privilege the former, with its formal institutional structure, clergy, and scriptural texts that resembled Protestantism, and to denigrate the latter, which is the diffuse popular religions of the people. Superstition was originally a Protestant pejorative term against Catholics, which found its way into early Western social science as another pejorative category, ‘magic’. On the one hand, the new category of religion enabled the Chinese nation-state to promote itself as the true savior of the people, while religion was depicted as merely a conservative holdover of the past with no relevance for modernity. On the other hand, religion was better than superstition, since formal institutions are ‘visible’ and can be more easily captured, penetrated, and in James C. Scott's (1998) terms, made ‘legible’ by the state. In Deleuzian and Guattarian (1987) terms, the ‘rhizomatic’, mobile, and flexible popular religious impulses with less institutional forms can elude the ‘apparatus of capture’ and disappear into the customs, kinship, and daily rituals of the people.

Expanding on Henri Lefebvre's (1991) The Production of Space, in which space is not an inert empty vessel or background for human activities, but actively constructs and shapes human subjects, movements, and motivations, I wrote “Spatial Struggles: State Disenchantment and Popular Re-appropriation of Space in Rural Southeast China” in the Journal of Asian Studies (Yang 2004). I showed that in the struggle for space in rural Wenzhou, the two antagonists understood this active agency of space. State forces had the upper hand in what Michel de Certeau (1984) called its ‘strategies’ to preserve all space as secular and available for economic developmentalism and profit, while local communities wished to set aside spaces for kinship and religious rituals. The latter had to act with cunning ‘tactics’ and ‘poach’ on state territory to build and restore temples and ancestor halls.

“Goddess across the Taiwan Straits: Matrifocal Ritual Space, Nation-State, and Satellite Television Footprints” (Yang 2008b) in Chinese Religiosities combined my interests in religion, gender, media, and the modern state. From Taiwan, I followed the pilgrims of the maritime goddess Mazu on their historic journey to Mainland China's Meizhou Island, from where satellite television broadcast their ritual to the goddess, held jointly with Mazu followers in Fujian Province, back to a Taiwan audience. I argued that the ‘liveness’ of the broadcast, even though there was a two-to-five-second delay instituted by Mainland authorities to guard against ‘counterrevolutionary’ utterances, created the contours of a Mazu community that stretched to Japan and Southeast Asia and did not align with the borders of the nation-state. In other words, Mazu created a matrifocal community and ritual space that did not reenforce the nation-state but undermined it in favor of a transnational religious space and community that was gendered female.

Gendering the Chinese State, Religion, and Media

My work on gender, like the history of gender studies, moved from a focus on women to masculinity studies and gender fluidity. It also proceeded from examining gender in the secular domain to an interest in women's religious agency, which is where I will start. In Chapter 8 of Re-enchanting Modernity (Yang 2020; see also Yang 2022b), I analyze several types of women's religious agency that I found in rural and small-town Wenzhou, including a surprising number of female religious leaders and initiators of new temples and religious groups. In The Politics of Piety, Saba Mahmood's (2011) defense of conservative pious Egyptian women as exercising agency is certainly relevant here, as these women in Wenzhou also do not behave like Western secular feminist individualists engaged in outright resistance to the patriarchal order. While practicing female modesty, these Wenzhou women were variably engaged in acceding to female subordination, as well as eluding, subverting, and implicitly challenging patriarchal power and creating sisterhood bonds and shelters through their religious activities.

I depart from Mahmood's critique of Western liberal feminism to explore the possibilities of womanist or feminist religious agencies within traditional culture. The most interesting discovery was the female agency of a popular regional Daoist goddess, Mother Chen (Chen Jinggu), who deployed martial arts and commanded a spirit army to battle demons to save the people. She took charge of her own reproductive process by aborting her pregnancy in order to perform a strenuous rain ritual to relieve a drought; she cut open her womb to take out the fetus and later put it back in to give birth. In some accounts, she even barges into the court of the highest (male) deity, the Jade Emperor, to demand that he end the drought. This goddess shows that traditional religiosity is far more varied and complex than the modernist depiction of it as uniformly patriarchal. The female resistance model is there in Mother Chen, an icon of traditional religion, awaiting contemporary women to adopt her as a model to address the present.

I also examined the gender of contemporary Chinese shamanism (Yang 2015), aiming to historicize this religious practice. Due to the introduction of Western evolutionism into modern China, shamans, spirit mediums, and ritual healers have a low status in both the state and societies’ implicit ranking of forms of religiosity. Based on preliminary fieldwork in rural and small-town Wenzhou, I propose that the feminization of post-Mao Chinese shamanism stems from the fact that the economic and political domains of competition have high social stakes and rewards for men, who are drawn to them. Traditionally positioned in the domestic realm, women's bodies have been less absorbed into the modern capitalist and state-bureaucratic order, and thus have remained more sensitive to the voices and movements of the gods and ancestors, and thus better able to communicate with other beings.

In my chapter “From Gender Erasure to Gender Difference: State Feminism, Consumer Sexuality and a Feminist Public Sphere” (Yang 1999), I delve into the dominant Chinese secular world of media to discuss the ‘state feminism’ of the Maoist era, which has given way to a post-Mao consumer culture that exaggerates the gender binarism and sexualizes women's bodies. When the Maoist state supported ‘women's liberation’ by pushing women out of the domestic sphere into public waged labor, and socializing meal preparation, childcare, and to a limited extent elder care, the media depicted masculinized female bodies and clothing, creating an effect of ‘gender erasure’ and a modicum of gender equality. At the same time, the discourse was dominated by the state, and most state agents were men, while grassroots feminist discourse or organizations by women themselves were not allowed. This lack of women's control over discursive agency created the conditions for the rapid loss of women's status when state feminism declined in the 1990s with the entrance of capitalist consumer culture.

My most recent foray into gender and media studies is the production of masculinity in nationalism, which I regard as a form of religious culture. Whereas Jurgen Habermas and the Frankfurt School undervalued popular media culture, and Benedict Anderson's work on nationalism did not address the power of gender, I wanted to develop Judith Butler's focus on body and performativity in media production. In studying popular culture instead of the elite world of letters, so much is missed if one focuses only on texts and discourse. In “National Allegory and Media Performativity: Chinese Masculinity in the Context of K-Pop and American Rambo” in Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in China (Yang, forthcoming), I lay out two different historical moments of masculine representation in contemporary China: the soft Confucian paternalism of the figure of the ‘Party representative’ in the film Red Detachment of Women (1961) and the muscular, militaristic, and individualistic manhood of the character Leng Feng in the film Wolf Warrior II (2017). Whereas the former emphasizes military discipline, self- sacrifice, and martyrdom, the latter bears the influence of Hollywood action films. Wolf Warrior II reflects a new moment of confident nationalism in China, as expressed by the swagger, bare chest, and individualistic masculinity of the hero, who breaks rank with military discipline but promotes loyalty to a nation-state that now must protect its overseas interests in Africa. I contrast this nationalist masculinity with the feminine masculinity of transnational K-pop performers who bend and render fluid the binary gender construction. Female audiences across the world, including Chinese women, vote for this soft masculinity with their wallets.

The Ontological Turn and Religious Environmentalism

Finally, my current work has moved into the new field of religious environmentalism and anthropology's ‘ontological turn’, for which Eduardo Kohn (2015) has written a useful overview. Bruno Latour (1993) and Philippe Descola (2013) have brought our attention to the crucial split and opposition between the categories of ‘Nature’ and ‘Culture’ that made modernity and its relentless environmental degradation possible. Culture was constructed with agency and intelligence, imposing its will on an inert Nature that was to be manipulated for human interests. Since anthropology as a discipline has long led this effort to ‘purify’ these categories, it is fitting that the anthropology of religion is now engaged in the repair work of reflecting on alternative constructions of the relations between humans and other species or beings. We can now reexamine shamanistic cultures in which humans cross these categories and transform into animals, gods, ancestors, or plants from a new environmental perspective that we did not have in earlier studies. We can now retrieve the notion of ‘animism’ from its original pejorative sense in Victorian anthropology and understand it in a new way as the sacralization, personification, and animation of the natural landscape (mountains, animals, rivers, rocks, lakes, trees) that produces awe and respect for and protection of these elements. The big question is how to translate and bring these valuable alternative ontologies from their peripheral locations among Indigenous societies and non-Christian religiosities into the urban industrial dominant societies of the world.

As climate change makes itself ever more felt with droughts, wildfires, floods, and hurricanes around the globe, I have started this new inquiry with an edited volume, Chinese Environmental Ethics: Religions, Ontologies and Practices (Yang 2021). I have also submitted a new article, “No Nature, No Culture: Chinese Buddhist Vegetarianism, Kinship, and Transmigration,” based on my fieldwork in Wenzhou (Yang 2023). I examine the Chinese Buddhist notion of karma and multiple afterlives and the notion of kinship between humans and other sentient beings. Buddhism anticipated Donna Haraway's (2016) call to ‘make kin’ two thousand years ago, but unlike Haraway's this-worldly focus, Buddhist structuration of kinship is very much a transgenerational and trans-worldly one, in keeping with its imaginary of ‘deep time.’

Finally, I am engaged in new fieldwork in Taiwan: (1) on the global Tzu Chi Buddhist Merit Foundation and its environmental activism promoting vegetarianism, recycling, and charity relief for natural disasters (often resulting from climate change); and (2) on Taiwan Indigenous cosmologies that link up humans with their ancestral spirits who often dwell in forests and sometimes assume the form of animals, earth, and the natural world. This new research will be combined with prior fieldwork in Wenzhou for a monograph titled Religious Environmentalism in the Anthropocene: Potentialities and Actualities in China and Taiwan.

Mayfair Mei-hui Yang on Chinese Civilization

Peter van der Veer

Mayfair Yang is a prominent anthropologist of China, both Mainland and Taiwan. Her first book about the art of relationships (guanxixue) in China was a great success (Yang 1994). Every society depends on relationships that form networks beyond the family, but Yang shows in a detailed analysis the specificity of the Chinese way of building and maintaining personal relationships. The title of the book is Gifts, Favors, and Banquets, which draws attention to gift giving and reciprocity, to the importance of doing favors and receiving favors in return, and to the extraordinary lengths the Chinese go to in giving banquets for establishing relationships. While the iron cage of bureaucracy also exists in China, the culture of personal relationships continues to be prevalent even today. The tension between an impersonal, bureaucratic way of dealing with citizens and a personal, gift, and favor way of addressing the officials of the state finds its expression in regular campaigns to eradicate favoritism and corruption. Much of this we can also find in many other societies, but Yang's broad-ranging analysis convinces the reader that the scale and depth of the art of relationships is a specific Chinese civilizational trait.

Banquets are a regular feature of official life in China, as anyone who has visited a Chinese university as part of a foreign delegation can testify. The quality of the restaurant and the special dishes offered and the quantity of expensive drinks are indexical of the respect given to the visitor and of the favors that are expected in return. This custom places many foreign academics in considerable trouble when they are honored by a return visit and must provide hospitality following, say, German or Dutch frugal norms. In 2013, the Communist Party launched the ‘eight provisions’ curtailing extravagant dining by officials. This policy must have come as a relief to many of them after having been subjected to daily banquets. The food and restaurant business must have taken a hit, but of course nothing compared to the devastation brought by Beijing's draconic COVID response.

For an outsider to Chinese society, it is hard to imagine how pervasive these guanxi practices are. The great contribution of Yang's book is that its exhaustive coverage of this fragment of social life throws light on Chinese civilization as a whole, including its economics and politics. Certainly, Chinese economy is a modern behemoth that has shown three decades of spectacular growth and is, like any other economy, subject to economic laws and expectations. Nevertheless, Yang demonstrates that without studying the networks forged by guanxi one can hardly understand China's political and economic system. The story of her fieldwork access is in itself a hilarious study of guanxi. Yang, born in Taiwan with a graduate education in the US, is both an outsider and an insider, and thus clearly a suspicious person who could bring an official into trouble. Yang gives us not a localized ethnography but one that surveys a great number of sites in which guanxi is an essential aspect of dealing with intransigent bureaucracy. To an extraordinary extent, the various guanxi practices are explained by citing proverbs and sayings that illustrate them.

What does Yang say about religion in this book? Religions create ‘ties that bind’, a great variety of social relations (also with the world of spirits and gods) established through doing ritual. One could plausibly argue that the religious realm is one of the most crucial arenas where guanxi (social relationship) is played out. Except for a discussion of the cult of Mao, there is surprisingly little about it in Yang's first book. She does not spend much time on the wide variety of contemporary rituals that establish relationships between gods and humans. The gift economy that is related to religion in China is huge but is not addressed. The book deals with Chinese civilization rather than Chinese religion.

According to Yang, guanxi is rooted in ancient Chinese civilization. In a chapter that deals with the ancient history of competing ideological factions during the Warring States period (from the fifth to the third century BCE) and the unification of China under the Qin, she lays out these origins. Such a foray into deep history may surprise readers, but it is not uncommon in the anthropology of China. The notion that social practices in today's China have deep civilizational origins is found both in the communist struggle against them and in the writing of anthropologists who describe them. It is certainly an important feature of Yang's work.

Yang's later publications continue the civilizational interest, but with a focus on religion. In her pathbreaking edited volume on Chinese religiosities (Yang 2008), she argues that the secularism and even atheism of the Chinese state is a pathological product of Western modernity. The Protestant opposition between ‘religion’ and ‘superstition’ has gained particular influence in China. Nevertheless, Yang observes that the religious scene in China is extremely vibrant, despite a century of attacks on religions and superstitions. Yang's own chapter in this volume (besides the lengthy introduction) is a brilliant ethnography of the cult of Mazu (patron goddess of seafarers) across the Taiwan straits, flowing back and forth from Fujian in Mainland China and Taiwan. In this and other work, she pays ample attention to the role of gender. She argues that the cult's female iconicity and matrifocal logic transcends the masculine spaces of the nation-states of China and Taiwan. Modern media enable the cult's creation of a transnational space in which worshippers from both nations meet and perform rituals together. Yang outlines the tensions and conflicts within the cult without losing sight of the larger political and cultural field in which television plays a mediating role of great significance.

Over the last 20 years, Yang has been working on Chinese religion in the Wenzhou region of South China. This region in China is famous for its extremely fast economic growth and the role of ‘private’ capital in its development. The secular modernity of the Chinese state has not succeeded in wiping out religion in Wenzhou. Re-enchanting Modernity (Yang 2020) shows how the economy and society of Wenzhou is entwined with religion. Yang's main purpose in this book is to give a detailed description of the rebuilding and revitalization of religion in this area after some 50 years of suppression and destruction by the Communist Party. The book is based on fieldwork notes and interviews during many relatively short trips in the area. The political and social conditions of the fieldwork are described in painstaking detail.

The book shows the remarkable resilience of Chinese religious traditions in the face of official state atheism. I know of no other ethnographic account that has given such a grand overview of contemporary religious beliefs and practices in one particular region of China. Moreover, this is a region that has attracted much attention because of its economic model. Yang shows that economists, who have looked at the Wenzhou economy as a model of privatization and highlight the potential of private capital, miss the point. It is in fact lineage associations, rotating credit associations, and temple associations that are the backbone of the economic boom. The chapter on the ‘Wenzhou model’ is one of the most successful in the book.

Yang is engaged not by history as such but by civilizational narratives. The latter include the multiple stories of gods and goddesses in local religion. Through narrating the stories of people involved in religious activities, she lays out how much of communal life is based on the people's relations to gods and goddesses. In that way, one gains a quite complete picture of a resilient civilization that has weathered the atheist storm to continue a fully modern life that is reenchanted. It is hard to imagine such a communal life from the vantage point of China's huge cities, but Wenzhounese merchants are very mobile, so we may assume that their religious conduct of life is also sustained in the interstices of China's metropoles. Wenzhou is not a backwater that has escaped the huge economic transformation of China. In fact, it is connected to world trade through transnational mobility in ways that surpass other regions of China.

Yang's work shows a China that is very different from what we learn from economists and political scientists. This is not so much a local perspective, enabled by ethnography, but a different take on China's modernity. Against a prevailing discomfort with religion as a sign of backwardness among Chinese intellectuals, Yang shows the importance of it not only in itself but also for economy and politics. In her current project, she is extending this analysis to environmentalism in Taiwan. Yang's work will not break the anti-religious consensus of official party ideology in China, but it may have positive effects for the development of social science in China. At the same time, her work has brought the anthropology of China's civilization and religions to the attention of anthropologists working on other regions of the world. Especially with her deft use of contemporary (French) theory, she has been able to connect her work to concerns and debates that are also relevant elsewhere. Given the long period of relative closure of mainland China to anthropological field work the anthropology of China has not been as influential in anthropological debates as it should be. Yang's work has been extremely significant as an attempt to change this predicament.

The Symbolic Foundations of the Modern Nation-State and Market

François Gauthier

I am honored to have been asked to contribute this profile on Mayfair Yang, whom I consider to be among the best scholars not only on modern and contemporary China but also within the social sciences more widely. When asked about fieldwork methodology, Victor Turner would answer, “Go! The only way is to learn by doing. Watch. Interview. Take notes. Write.”¹ What makes a good social scientist is not how good one is at applying a recipe but how good one is at reflecting on the research process itself and the (shifting) position of the researcher with respect to the object of study. In this light, Mayfair's methodological reflections in the introduction of Gifts, Favors, and Banquets (Yang 1994) should be a classic. Here, as in all her work, she goes well beyond the ritual critiques of Western-centrism to find, within herself and her social relations in the field, two acting selves that carry with them their own strands of analysis and heuristics: a Chinese American and an ‘overseas Chinese’.

Taking inspiration from her example, the following is similarly grounded in my own biography as a French Canadian born on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River, in an English-speaking majority neighborhood. As a consequence, my perspective here crosses that of a scholar with roots in both the French and Anglo-Saxon traditions of the study of religion and social sciences. Finally, my thoughts here mirror the preoccupations of the MAUSS,² of which I am part, and its project of a general social sciences based on Marcel Mauss's essay on The Gift.³ Because of this background, I am appreciative of how Mayfair combines deep historical investigation with detail-rich ethnography buttressed by sophisticated, profound, and incisive theoretical and analytical discussions often inspired by French authors and concepts. I will therefore insist on what I deem two very strong propositions regarding the symbolic and religious dimensions belying the modern nation-state and capitalism in Gifts, Favors, and Banquets (Yang 1994) and Re-enchanting Modernity (Yang 2020). These are of course only two of the very many possible takeaways one finds in Mayfair's work, but they are particularly important for thinking about contemporary—intellectual and political—challenges.

The Ebbs and Flows of Guanxi

Mayfair's doctoral thesis, published under the title Gifts, Favors, and Banquets, is an investigation into the Chinese art of guanxi, or gift-based relationships. Although rooted in timeless Chinese tradition, the nature and extension of guanxi practices explored by Mayfair show how they change depending on the social environment. The modern “art of guanxi,” or guanxixue, “involves the exchange of gifts, favors, and banquets; the cultivation of personal relationships and networks of mutual dependence; and the manufacturing of obligation and indebtedness” (1994: 6). The recent emergence of the term guanxixue in China points to the fact that these practices “cannot be reduced to a traditional Chinese resistance to change” (7). Rather, they appear “as a shortcut around, or a coping strategy for dealing with, bureaucratic power” (15) in the Popular Republic of China.

As a variation on Mauss's (2016) gift cycle of giving, receiving, and rendering, guanxi distinguishes itself by being significantly motivated by a dose of self-interest. One invests in guanxi (by agreeing to a favor or giving presents) in order to produce obligations that might come in handy in the future—a feature that orients its denunciations and critiques as being ‘false’ or a remanence of ‘feudalism’. The recent efflorescence of guanxi and its emergence as a topic of discussion are “blamed” (Yang 1994: 146) on the Cultural Revolution and its “intense social chaos, revolutionary zeal, and terror,” which pressured “everyday social relationships among family and kin members, among friends, and among coworkers” (154). Interestingly, the decade that followed the Communist Revolution of 1949 is recollected as a period in which “guanxi was seldom practiced” and “human relations were simple and straightforward (danchun).” The socialist ethic of working hard to build a new society and helping others was a shared ideal, and a “universalist ethic of ‘comradeship’ came to displace the personalistic ethics of friendship and kinship.” Moreover, many were actually loath to “approach people for favors, fearing someone might inform on them for lacking collective spirit” (153). Meanwhile, the state could and did appear to provide for people's basic needs.

The Cultural Revolution shattered this institutional and social order and destroyed the sense of security. Another form of state power emerged that brought state control “over all aspects of society down into the family.” In the face of this politicization of life, “the people went back to thinking that they needed a larger ‘private sphere’ (siren quanzi) of friendship, kinship, and guanxi network around them to serve as a sort of buffer zone against the state” (158). One would think that the death of Mao, the end of the Cultural Revolution, and the shift toward a market economy at the end of the 1970s might amount to a new decline of the social need for the exercise of guanxixue, but the contrary is the case. The entrance of market forces and the turn to capitalism was made possible by networks of guanxi, especially among entrepreneurial classes at first, and then among greater society. The case of post-Mao China shows how “the emergence of a profit-driven market economy does not always lead to the waning of the gift economy,” since guanxi provides the trust that is required for commercial transactions and “personalizes an otherwise impersonal money transaction.” At the same time, “the art of guanxi is also altered in its basic raison d’être as its very structure and form become commoditized into a shadow of the money exchange” (167).

This portrait of guanxi calls for the following comments. The ebb and flood of guanxi after the Communist Revolution and during the Cultural Revolution and beyond reminds me of Karl Polanyi's analysis of Western modern societies and how the disintegration of social bonds through the forces of modernization prompted social reactions, whether reparatory (solidarity movements and labor unions) or (self-)destructive (fascism, ultranationalism, Stalinism). In The Great Transformation, Polanyi (2001) wrote about reactions to capitalism and market forces, yet the Chinese case shows how state-bound totalitarianism provokes similar reactions. In both cases, indeed, it is a matter of Gesellschaft-type sociality replacing a Gemeinschaft-type ‘traditional’ one, to draw on Ferdinand Tönnies's classic distinction. Mayfair's analysis shows how webs of gift-based social relations are both remedies and conditions for state or market enlargement.

Second, the persistence of guanxixue during the marketization operating in the ‘Reform Era’ sheds significant light on the social and cultural conditions of capitalism in non-Protestant (and non-Western) countries. In an article entitled “L’éthique catholique et l'esprit du non-capitalisme,” Marcel Hénaff (1998) argued that capitalism's imperative of utility maximization was partly inassimilable within more communitarian Catholic cultures, which do not share the Protestant ethics that seem to act as a moral domesticator of self-interested hubris. Hénaff notes how forms of corruption tend to emerge from Catholic cultural backgrounds while showing how these practices can also be interpreted as ways of incorporating the profit motive into gift-based social networks. Those who have knowledge of postcommunist Christian Orthodox countries will probably recognize similar dynamics (see Gauthier 2022). Mayfair's analysis of China, where the turn to capitalism has generated widescale ‘corruption’ and ‘nepotism’, tends to show that Hénaff's argument might be expanded to include a much broader cultural geography and used in favor of a paradoxical reevaluation of the causes, dynamics, and remedies for ‘corruption’. In this light, the latter might therefore be not so much a sign of the ‘backwardness’ of non-Western societies with respect to the ‘correct’ embodiment of sound utilitarianism as an ideal-typical social reaction to the acculturation of market rationality into non-Protestant societies.

How Capitalism Needs Religion

Mayfair's interests in guanxi led her to investigate the constitution of a civil society in the Wenzhou region, which in turn led her to research the vibrant religious efflorescence that has accompanied China's extraordinary economic boom over the last four decades. This religious boom has developed largely under the radar because it has occurred mostly outside the strict confines of the official category of religion (zongjiao), which is a term for the ‘churched’ brand of religion on the Western Christian model that was actively forged by the Chinese nation-state over the course of the twentieth century (see Gauthier 2020). Rather, the ongoing religious boom has seen the revival of ‘traditional’ and folk forms of religion (although in new guises) and the urban explosion of ‘spirituality’-type religiosities. Unexpectedly, therefore, the lightspeed development and institutionalization of capitalism has been accompanied by a religious surge, filed officially as ‘culture’ and ‘timeless Chinese tradition’ by the regime, which finds its center of gravity in the over two million local temples that have been (re)built across China.

This massive ‘re-enchantment’ (German: Entzauberung) and profound reconfiguration of religion in China is the focus of Mayfair's latest book (Yang 2020; see Gauthier 2021), which asks how this phenomenon is connected to the development of capitalism. In this remarkable book, she shows how the local temples and ancestor halls that have been (re)constructed since the very beginning of the Reform Era (1978– ) are loci for the constitution of “local identities and collective memories” and therefore belong to a “religious civil society” (Yang 2020: 269). Like guanxi, popular religion acts as a social reaction against and support for the profound transformations of Chinese society since Mao's death and the turn to marketization.

Drawing on Mauss and Hubert, as well as Georges Bataille, Mayfair describes the “ritual economy” of Wenzhou, that is, the “expenditures of wealth on ritual, religious, ethical, and social bonding practices, forms of consumption that do not directly lead to profit accumulation and indeed often eat up profits and savings for nonutilitarian ends” (281) that have accompanied the emergence of an entrepreneurial class and a profit-based market economy. According to Mayfair, this conjunction has a deeper significance than the simple fact that the (re)construction of temples and sacred sites, as well as the reintroduction of temple fairs, were justified by local and national authorities as means to fuel the development of pilgrimage tourism, attract foreign investment, and catalyze interior consumption. In fact, the diversion of resources toward religious expenditure “deploys the gods in its redistribution of wealth, reconstruction of community, and promotion of the public good” (281). The concomitant development of the market economy and the religious revival, far from being anecdotal, participate in the same wider social transformation and conceal a game of complementarity by which the ritual economy “counterbalances and restrains” (280) the market economy.

Far from producing the disenchantment of the world and the de-ritualization and ‘de-magification’ (Entzauberung) of religion, the development of capitalism in China in the age of neoliberal globalization leads to a process of re-enchantment, ‘re-magification’ (Wiederzauberung), and re-ritualization. This is a major proposition, and one that can be extended far beyond China, in neighboring Vietnam and Cambodia for sure, but also on a putatively global scale, as similar religious efflorescence can be seen in many, many other countries as well.

Conclusion

Taken together, the modalities of modern guanxixue and the popular religious boom in Reform Era China buoys a formidably rich intellectual project that renews some of social sciences’ foundational concerns while opening the way for innumerable developments and normative considerations. Furthermore, Mayfair's work replaces religion at the center of social sciences’ attention, as a fundamental dimension to consider when investigating the supposedly ‘secular’ subjects of nation-state formation and capitalist development. If anything, her work shows how neither state nor capitalism are ‘natural’ phenomena.

Mayfair Yang

Ritual Economy and the Modernity of State Power in China

Susan Brownell

Anthropological theories of ritual were in the middle of a paradigm change in the early 1980s, while a new brand of China studies began to take shape after the restoration of US-China relations in 1979. As an undergraduate anthropology major at the University of Virginia, I had the good fortune to take Victor Turner's famous seminar in 1981–1982 when he, Edith Turner, and their collaborators were exploring how to extend ritual theories largely developed through studies of non-Western, non-industrialized societies into ‘modern’, urban, and/or Western settings. Eight years later, I was a PhD student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in the final year of writing up my dissertation, when Mayfair Yang arrived as a newly hired assistant professor in the anthropology department in 1989. I asked her to join my dissertation committee, and from that time to the present, I have repeatedly benefited from her broad and creative thinking about ritual and China. In order to describe what I believe to be her most important intellectual contributions, I want to situate Mayfair's work by drawing on my perception, based on my own experience, of what was happening at the intersection of anthropology, ritual studies, and China studies when she launched her career, and then by tracing why the theoretical synthesis she developed has continued to develop and remain relevant.

From the 1980s to the present, Mayfair has remained committed to a unified ritual theory that does not artificially divide ritual practice into religious/secular, traditional/modern, and non-Western/Western binaries, but instead embraces the entire range of ritual practices, and in so doing recognizes our common humanity across cultures and throughout the millennia. From today's vantage point, it may seem surprising that not until 1974 did a Wenner-Gren symposium organized by Victor Turner and his friends explore a question that was groundbreaking in the discipline of anthropology at the time: Must rituals be connected with the supernatural realm, or are there some rituals that are not fundamentally religious—is there such a thing as a “secular ritual”? (Moore and Myerhoff 1977). That the symposium included many of the brightest stars in anthropology of the era suggests both the perceived urgency of the question and its role in a broader paradigm shift in the field. With the addition of Richard Schechner from performance studies, they would continue to explore the topic in three more symposia, the last held in 1982. The participants generally agreed that ‘secular ritual’ existed, but could reach no consensus about how far the concept could be extended.

Turner (1984) distinguished “liminal” from “liminoid” phenomena (rituals in premodern and agricultural societies, and “religious” rituals in industrialized societies, versus performance genres such as theater, sport, and music in industrialized societies). The liminal/liminoid distinction has largely been discarded over the decades, and key concepts such as ‘liminality’ and ‘communitas’ are now typically applied across the full range of human societies. However, in the 1980s, the separation between ‘traditional’ ritual and ‘modern’ cultural performances reflected the fact that modernization theory still largely prevailed in the social sciences: it assumed a fundamental difference between the non-Western developing world and the modernized, industrialized, largely Western world (with Japan as the lone non-Western exception). It portrayed the non-Western, developing world as much more fettered by tradition that, it was thought, hindered Western-style social and economic development (a viewpoint that would soon be controverted by the rapid development of Hong Kong, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan in the 1980s and 1990s). The ritual practices of organized religions and cults in industrialized societies were something of an anomaly for this viewpoint, perhaps even a ‘traditional’ holdover from the past.

When Mayfair arrived at Santa Barbara, I had completed dissertation work on sports in China, based on fieldwork largely conducted in urban settings in Beijing and other major cities, where the state-supported training centers were located and major sports events were held. I had struggled mightily to develop a conceptual framework for my research because anthropological fieldwork in general, and in China in particular, had until then been almost completely conducted in rural villages. During the Cold War, when diplomatic embargoes of the newly founded People's Republic of China (established 1949) by the US and its allies prevented Western scholars from entering the mainland, fieldwork was conducted in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and elsewhere. Mayfair was among the first cohort of scholars able to conduct research on the mainland after the restoration of US-China relations in 1979. The location of her fieldwork in two factories in a city—Beijing—was unusual, since almost all the newly admitted anthropologists conducted fieldwork in rural areas among ethnic minorities or Han peasants. Her urban fieldwork clearly revealed plenty of urban ritual practices that fit the conventional rural-based theories.

In her first major publication, she jumped right into what would become her central argument about the “modernity of power” of the Chinese state, contesting the usefulness of a “totalitarian” model of power identified only with Communism (this being the end stage of the Cold War). She argued that state power represented both an extension of the culture of the old imperial order and a departure from it, in the form of a more thorough coordination of power practices (Yang 1988). Since then she has criticized as overly simplistic the notion that Chinese state power is thoroughly ‘modern.’ Both this article and the book based on her dissertation fieldwork (Yang 1994) argued the case by examining the everyday ritual practices (summarized in the book's title, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets) used to cement social connections through guanxixue, “the art of social relationships.” One of the most striking features of the book, given the trends in anthropology and China studies that I have described, was that it afforded a central role to a hoary anthropological theory—the theory of the gift economy first outlined by Marcel Mauss ([1923–1924] 2016)—while also employing a wide range of postmodern theorists (e.g., de Certeau, Foucault, Habermas, Lyotard) to elucidate the dynamic relationship between the workings of official state power and the oppositional, underground, relational ethics of guanxi.

For me, at a stage in my career when I was searching for a theoretical framework for my ethnographic research, Mayfair's emerging body of work was mind-blowing. It made sense of what I had observed in an urban context, it overcame the limitations inherent in 1980s ritual theory by rejecting modernization theory and incorporating the state, and it connected with postmodern theories of power. My first publication reveals my intellectual indebtedness. In it, I compared Chinese National Sports Games with Qing Dynasty Grand Sacrifice, asking whether the games could be considered a ritual of state. I borrowed heavily from Mayfair's thinking to conclude that the training of the body through sports exemplified the “modernity of power” because it was far more continuous, detailed, calculated, and normalizing than the Qing rituals ever were (Brownell 1993: 60). I would argue that this original and clever synthesis of timeworn, conventional anthropological theories with cutting-edge interdisciplinary theories has been Mayfair's most important contribution to her fields. At the same time, this synthetic way of thinking has been her most important contribution to our understanding of China because it embraces the complex reality of today's China and rejects the old Cold War and Western-centric binaries.

I was not the only one who recognized that Mayfair had realized the 1980s vision of a unified ritual theory. In 1995, Gifts, Favors, and Banquets won an honorable mention in the Victor Turner Prize for Ethnographic Writing from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology (which had been established in 1974, the same year as the Wenner-Gren symposium on secular ritual, and was intended to center on Turner's work). In the journal issue that announced the prizewinners, another of my professors at Virginia, the tremendously creative Roy Wagner, lauded the book for exposing the arbitrary divide between art and science, ideology, and mysticism, as well as for how it connected ethnography and personal experience with ancient cultural traditions:

Mayfair Yang brings forward a kind of li, or human propriety, as the real basis of social life in contemporary China. Guanxixue, the “study” or perhaps “knowledge” or “knowledgeable finesse” of interpersonal relations, is an art disguised as a science . . . Yet its very practicality makes proletarian dictatorships and socialist final causes look like far-fetched mysticism. . . . In her marvelous personal and candid account, Mayfair Yang invokes her own experiences as well as several millennia of humanistic internal revolution. (1996: 4)

I would now like to jump forward to Re-enchanting Modernity: Ritual Economy and Society in Wenzhou, China (Yang 2020). The work is framed by the notion of ‘ritual economy’, a concept that I see as an outgrowth and culmination of three decades of ethnographic research and theoretical brainwork (I would dare to call it a ‘theory of ritual economy’, although she might resist that label). I find the notion remarkable for the fact that it incorporates much complex theory while retaining an Occam's-razor-like simplicity and coherence. A ritual economy consists of expenditures on rituals and their associated gifting and feasting, which revolve around displays of generosity to humans and gods. The concept builds on her years of engagement with Mauss's theory of the gift economy, and incorporates insights from Georges Bataille ([1949] 1991). Furthermore, as was typical of her work from the beginning, it draws on extensive ethnographic fieldwork, including 26 years of research on the revival of Buddhist and Daoist ritual practices in Wenzhou, observation of Northwest Coast potlatches, and readings of ancient and premodern history and philosophy. Mayfair argues that the ethos of ritual economy is excessive generosity and the willingness to part with one's material wealth, toward the goal of obtaining a social and spiritual return on investment, rather than material profit (Yang 2020: 280–281). Ritual and market logic operate in parallel: Wenzhou's ritual economy simultaneously was funded by the profits generated by industrial production, stimulated industrial production, and acted as a check on profit-oriented industrial productivism and the capitalist market (305–310). This last point borrows from Bataille the idea that the seemingly wasteful ritual expenditures provided an ecstatic moment of liberation from servitude to the world of work, reason, and ‘things’, thus expressing a more or less deliberate rejection of the incessant grindstone of production and rational-utilitarian profit maximization.

This snapshot cannot possibly capture the complexity and richness of Re-enchanting Modernity, but I hope it provides a bookend to this essay to illustrate my point that, in the new millennium, Mayfair is one of the few anthropologists and China scholars whose theory and ethnography have consistently centered on an understanding of ritual practices as fluid and potentially embedded in a limitless variety of epochs, cultures, and state formations—rather than being strictly divisible by their social and historical context. Because of the importance of ritual in Chinese history and culture, this approach has opened up innovative ways of understanding China, both past and present, that are unique in China studies for their sophisticated criticism of the overly rigid insistence on using the concept of the ‘modern’ to understand contemporary China. The development of the Turnerian brand of ritual theory in anthropology was cut short by Victor Turner's death and the postmodern turn in the late 1980s; but Mayfair, as a student of Paul Rabinow at Berkeley, was well-trained in incorporating postmodern theory into anthropological thinking, as he had done in French Modern (Rabinow 1989). With her synthesis of classic and postmodern theories, ethnography, and history, Mayfair has created a more all-encompassing and mature version of ritual theory that overcomes the flaws of the past versions, illuminates the workings of state power and everyday forms of opposition, and remains relevant in the twenty-first century.