© Minneapolis Institute of Art
This is posted on the Institute’s rich and well organized site, Art of Asia, which notes that combination pig sty-latrines can be found in rural China today.
© Minneapolis Institute of Art
This is posted on the Institute’s rich and well organized site, Art of Asia, which notes that combination pig sty-latrines can be found in rural China today.
The intriguing pig map in Alan Baumler’s post, “Pigs” (January 11) reminds us that 2007 is the Year of the Pig. Wikipedia informs us that a person born in the year of the Pig (or Boar) is “usually an honest, straightforward and patient person,” someone who is a “modest, shy character who prefers to work quietly behind the scenes.” The article’s list of famous people born in the Year of the Pig includes Chiang Kaishek, Jerry Lee Lewis, Lee Kuan Yew, Ronald Reagan, and Woody Allen. Does this increase your respect for astrology?
I have known some pigs. Well, maybe not exactly “known” – I’m a city kid – but at least had feelings for them. We won’t count Charlotte’s Web or the Three Little Pigs, and I probably shouldn’t even mention the pig jokes (“I haven’t had so much fun since the day the pig ate my little brother”).
If you deal with China, pigs are part of the deal, but they play a different role from elsewhere. Anthropologists duel over why peoples in the ancient Middle East (not just the Jewish pastoralists) avoided the “abominable pig.” This is a puzzle. Pigs are supremely efficient at converting their feed to meat, sows farrow quickly, and the meat is quite tasty. So what’s not to like? Mary Douglas argued that pigs were impure because they defied proper categories (Douglas 1966). Marvin Harris, in his classic Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches, makes an ecological argument: pigs were not suited to the hot, arid climate (they don’t sweat, so they wallow in mud); goats and sheep eat grass, but pigs don’t; pigs were a cultural marker of difference from the settled agriculturalists; in short, they were too expensive. Richard Lobban, Jr. followed up with a comparative study which found a correlation between pig ecology and prohibition; cool, moist conditions, such as those in Europe and China, correlated with eating pork. (Lobban, 1994; p. 71).
In China no supreme being commanded “eat not this flesh,” whether of pig, dog, or cow; still, from early on the main role of the pig was not at dinner. Economically, pigs were a great deal for farmers. They recycled waste which nobody else would touch, produced fertilizer, and at the end of the year this “piggy bank” could be carted to market to realize a cash profit. One scholar counted the fluctuation in pig skulls in neolithic tombs and concluded that pigs were important not only to eat and in religious ceremonies but to build political power (Kim 1994). Han Dynasty funerary models found in tombs included combination pig sty-latrines – when we say pigs “recycle waste” we’re not fooling! Ch’u T’ung-tsu and Hsu Cho-yun describe Han dynasty herders whose pigs rummaged through the swamps and forests.
By early modern times, the forests which fed herds were gone. The human population was so intensive that it didn’t make sense to feed animals on grain since a given piece of land could support many more people if they ate what they grew rather than feeding it to animals. But pigs fit into a niche where cows or other grain eaters could not; the disgusting eating habits of the pig came from the power of its gut to get nutrition from what had already passed through an inefficient human’s. (The fascinating subject of nightsoil will have to wait for another day). The value of this pig fertilizer was low, but the cost was almost nothing.
A knowledgeable American who lived in China in the 1930s related the “biography of a Shantung pig.” It was a “rare thing,” he observed, “for a hog to be raised from piglet to pork chop by a single farmer, and equally rare for a Chinese farmer to raise more than a single hog at a time.” The piglet was sold at market by a breeder (after being castrated to prevent competitive breeding); raised in a private pig pen-latrine; fattened by still a third owner for the meat market; then “betrayed to the butcher.” None of these farmers could afford to eat the meat, which the butcher sold by the ounce. (Winfield, 1948 pp. 64-66)
The cultural overtones of pigs in Chinese society were quite different from the Middle Eastern ones. Who could forget “Pigsie ,” Arthur Waley’s name for Zhu Bajie, the half pig, half human character in Journey to the West? Farmers are not sentimental about what they raise to be butchered, but one of my first Chinese teachers in Taiwan explained that the Chinese character jia (often translated as “home” or “family”) shows a pig under a roof. I had long wondered if this was reliable or just a folk etymology, and am thankful to Alan Baumler for sending me a solid reference which clears up the question:
Mark Lewis, in his Construction of Space in Early China, p. 92, says (following Xu Shen) that the character 家, home, is not a pig under a roof, but a child under a roof, as the seal-script hai 亥 looked a lot like shi 豕. In his notes he has a quote from Lu shi chun qiu that illustrates the possible confusion:
Zi Xia was going to Jin and passed through Wei. Someone reading a historical chronicle said “The Jin army, three pigs, forded the Yellow River.” Zi Xia said, “That is wrong. This says ji hai”[己亥, one of the sexagenary cycle used to indicate the day] The character “ji 己”is close to three [san 三] and the character pig [shi 豕] resembles child [hai 亥]
But the folk etymology reflects a truth. Pigs often lived under the same roof with the family (I have seen this myself in the Sichuan countryside). This human/ livestock cohabitation is the reason viruses pass back and forth between humans and animals more easily in China than in places with the luxury of grain fed meat. One hypothesis is that the virus pandemic of 1918 started in Chinese pigs, while the transmission of SARS from domestic fowls to humans is well established.
What can pigs tell us about China’s modernity? Sigrid Schmalzer shows us in an eye-opening article, “Breeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place,” (Schmalzer, 2002), about agrarian reform and modernization in Ding Xian in the 1930s. I had thought I knew something about this. After all, I had written a book (Hayford, 1990) which told the story of the Ding Xian [Ting Hsien] Experiment. James Yen [Yan Yangchu] and his colleagues set out to demonstrate that Maoist revolution was not needed in order to transform the Chinese village; they also rejected the wholesale, uncritical adoption of Western models. They aimed to produce Sinified scientific techniques which fit Chinese realities. Including pigs.
So Sigrid’s article took me by surprise. By looking at what “science” actually meant to these agrarian reformers, not just their intentions, she dissects what goes astray when social experiences are not taken into account in defining “science.” The article challenges the universality of modernity based only on Western practice.
A little background: In the late 19th and early 20th century, Chinese farmers actually did pretty well. Imperialist depredations damaged China politically but many farmers benefitted from new technology, expanded transportation, growing urban markets, and even exports. Alan’s map suggests to me that the number of pigs in North China grew because farmers, long skilled at responding to the market, used these old friends on a new scale. The Rural Reconstruction reformers correctly saw that the key to improving village life was not to destroy some unchanging “feudal” system but to take advantage of the long standing commercial mentality of the small farmer. Among other things, they introduced better breeds of pigs.
Schmalzer argues that the reformers nonetheless made several mistakes. One was to assume that Chinese pigs served the same function as American ones. American farmers wanted pigs to convert their abundant corn into bacon, not scraps into fertilizer. American pigs were “scientifically” bred to produce more meat and therefore less fertilizer. Second, the reformers left out gender: Chinese pigs were domestic partners, raised mostly by women. What’s more, the Chinese system prized sows, and over the years bred selectively for sows which produced large, frequent, litters of admittedly smaller piglets; American breeders valued boars and bred for size and fashionable looks to compete at the county fair. The reformers introduced American boars so huge that they had to build special support platforms for mating.
When the Japanese invasion of 1937 ended the Ding Xian experiment, the imported pigs disappeared into the chaos of war. James Yen and agricultural scientists had no time to produce modern, scientific techniques based in Chinese practice. So in the end the difference was not between “scientific” (i.e. Western) pig breeding and Chinese folkways but between American and Chinese needs and situations.
An afterword. When my wife and I visited Yen’s Philippines Rural Reconstruction Movement in the late 1960s, local workers showed us the air conditioned pens housing the pigs introduced from the States; the new pigs, they explained, couldn’t stand the heat, were sensitive to sun burn, and demanded special treatment – not unlike, the local workers slyly added, most of the other Americans they knew.
And you thought pigs were pigs! If so, you should read Richard P. Horwitz, Hog Ties: What Pigs Tell Us About America (1998). Rich, a friend who teaches American Studies at University of Iowa, worked on a pig farm and knows his… fertilizer. Pigs are more like people than most animals, so Rich demonstrates that the way we treat them says a lot about our values and practices.
This is the famous 洛阳铲, or luoyang shovel, one of the most important tools in Chinese archeology. The basic idea is that you take it and shove it in the ground and then pull it up and look to see if you have found something. It is particularly handy for finding the rammed earth walls that mean you have found a settlement of some sort. The thing I find interesting about it is that the shovel was originally invented by grave-robbers i.e. bad people who wanted to find ancient relics and sell them for money rather than use them in the name of science and preserving the national past and tenure. It was borrowed by real scholars and they started to use it.
Moving away from the news reports for the moment, something a bit more speculative. The above question is one that crops up in my mind every now and then when I read something about how Korean history is distinguished by the number of invasions the country has suffered or hear a Korean say that their country has never invaded anyone else.
Reading this post by Jay (an English teacher in Inch’ŏn), set me off thinking about his some more (this is slightly circular as Jay’s post itself was inspired by Noja’s post below on anti-Americanism). In his post, he notes the bits of Korean history that are not taught in Korean schools:
· the massacres of Vietnamese peasants by ROK forces
· political prisoners, imprisoned for 40 years
· WW2 crimes committed by Korean soldiers
· the widespread and calculated terror pursued by Rhee’s regime, from 1948 and continuing into the civil war
· reference to the war as a civil war
· patriotism as something other than loyalty to the state
· a defence of the right to withhold labour
· the dangers lurking in “pure blood” mythologies
· feminist, race, queer theories of any kind
Perhaps the easy answer to the question posed above is simply no, since the whole point of the nation as it was conceived in the late nineteenth century is to impose the will of a minority of people on others. If it can’t do this externally via imperialism, then the nation will sure as hell do this internally by stifling dissent, enforcing conformity through nationalist education and militarism and creating an ‘identity’ that necessarily closes off one group of humans from another (thus helping to prevent us from collectively realising the global transformations that are so clearly required if we are to survive).
But perhaps this is too simple: there really are historically determined differences in the way that different countries behave at different times; and there really is a hierarchy of strong and weak states in the modern world.
Chosŏn Korea, for example, is not a society that I would aspire to live in (assuming that time travel technology was perfected). Like other feudal/tributary societies it was based on the brutal exploitation of the great majority, who lived short lives and for much of the time barely subsisted, even as they saw the fruits of their labour taken from under their noses by the magistrate’s tax collectors and the local landlords. On the other hand, perhaps because of its particular geographical and ideological location within the Sinocentric world order, it was a country that showed no interest in expanding beyond its borders, conquering and subjugating other peoples, in clear contrast to Hideyoshi’s Japan or Qing China.
I’m not sure whether there is a conclusion to my meandering thoughts. But perhaps my uneasiness whenever I hear someone tell me that Korea has, in effect, ‘always been innocent’, comes from the fact that class societies, whether premodern polities or modern nation states, are always guilty in some way or another.
As a side note to these thoughts, I heard the excellent Gary Younge speak last night at a meeting on Islamophobia and racism. Discussing the press reaction to the recent furore here in the UK over racism on Celebrity Big Brother, he wondered how it was that whenever countries like Britain and the US ‘lose their innocence’ in a controversy like this they seem to be able to regain it again so quickly.
It’s syllabus time here at FrogInAWell. I’ve got a bit of an overload this semester, and I’m trying to be really good-humored about it, but I suspect that the mid-semester crunch is going to strain my acting abilities. I got dragooned into teaching a course in our graduate program, our US-China Masters degree (no, they haven’t built the dorms yet, either), but the History department really can’t give me a release to go do something in another course, so I’m teaching it as an overload. Then my seminar on Meiji Japan came in under the limit for enrollment, so it was decided to drop it and have me teach a second section of World History; more grading, but it means one less course prep, so I said OK. It would have ended there — three preps, four sections — but a few of the students who had registered for the Meiji course actually need it (or something like it) to graduate, so I agreed to tutor them through the course as a directed study. So I’m up to the functional equivalent of five sections of four preparations.
My Early Japan course (pre-1600) is very similar to the last iteration, with the biggest difference being the addition of Mary Elizabeth Berry’s Culture of Civil War in Kyoto as a capstone reading. It’ll be a challenge, but it’s the kind of secondary scholarship I love: richly detailed with primary materials, with a kind of “core sample” approach that gives a taste of what’s going on from the highest to lowest levels of society. The Meiji Japan course is mostly material that I’ve read over the years…. except for Donald Keene’s biography of the Meiji Emperor — I think “magisterial” is the only word we’re permitted to use to refer to books of that magnitude — which I’m really looking forward to seeing students respond to. If my dedicated directed study kids can handle it, it might work in actual classes.
Finally, there’s my China course, the first time I’ve ever gotten to teach a “what’s happening now” instead of a historical syllabus, not to mention my first graduate course. It’s fun! I did have to do some scrambling on readings, though, including one I just picked up in Atlanta. On the other hand, any news articles on China that come out in the next three months are classroom fodder.
And, as is something of a tradition here at the Frog, I am posting links to my syllabi for comments and suggestions. Actually we usually do this early enough to change things based on your advice. This time it is a little too late to order new books, but any advice about things I should keep in mind while working with any of this, or suggestions for future versions of the classes are quite welcome.
News comes, via the Korean Studies mailing list, that Jonathan Best’s history of Paekche is now out. I wouldn’t normally use this blog to advertise a single book, but I’m personally quite excited about this one, since a book in English on an ancient Korean kingdom is a very rare thing*. I’m looking forward to seeing this in our library.
From the blurb:
This volume presents two histories of the early Korean kingdom of Paekche (trad. 18 BCE-660 CE). The first, written by Jonathan Best, is based largely on primary sources, both written and archaeological. This initial history of Paekche serves, in part, to introduce the second, an extensively annotated translation of the oldest history of the kingdom, the Paekche Annals (Paekche pon’gi). Written in the chronicle format standard for the traditional official histories of East Asia, the Paekche Annals constitutes one section of the Histories of the Three Kingdoms (Samguk sagi), a comprehensive account of early Korean history compiled under the editorial direction of Kim Pusik (1075-1151).
*Actually I can’t think of any others, except possibly Kenneth Gardiner’s book The early history of Korea: the historical development of the peninsula up to the introduction of Buddhism in the fourth century A.D., which I believe is based on his PhD thesis on Koguryŏ. Perhaps we can persuade fellow Frog contributor Noja to translate his thesis on Kaya into English one day.
Bo Yibo has died
He is probably best known today for being the father of one of the leading members of the so-called Prince’s faction and current Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai, and having been the hardliner most in favor of a crackdown after Tiananmen.
I find his passing at least somewhat interesing since he seems to be the last remaining major figure of the Communist revoltution. He worked with Yan Xishan, warlord and sometime Frog commentator in setting up the Sacrifice League during the war with Japan and was instrumental in the relationship between Yan and the Communists. After the war he was mostly in financial and economic posts and was big on the development of heavy industry. He seems to have opposed the Great Leap about as much as you could without loosing his job, but his liberal ideas and connections to Liu Shaoqi got him in trouble during the CR. I really have nothing of interest to say about him, but I remember the shock I felt when I was an undergrad in a Russian history class and found out the Molotov was still alive.
Jack Weatherford’s piece reprinted in the latest edition of (the increasingly inaptly named) Japan Focus argues that the US occupation of Iraq is a failure, while the Mongol occupation of Persia was a success, and that — and here’s where I have start to have problems — it must mean that the US can and should learn something from the differences. It’s kind of odd, actually, to see a Japan Focus piece which argues that the US should have been killing more people, more efficiently — “the Mongols perfected the list of who to kill in a conquered land,” says Weatherford — to produce a “better” result.
Let’s face it: if the US had followed a Mongol policy, as described by Weatherford — proxy armies, mass population displacement, “selective” massacres, blanket execution of leadership, etc. — Japan Focus and every other left or “progressive” venue would be seething with justified righteous rage. Moreover, a good deal of what Weatherford describes as the redeeming qualities of Mongol rule — secular government, low taxation, redistribution of government assets, harsh enforcement of law-n-order — are entirely in line with what the US has been trying to accomplish.
Ultimately, the difference seems to come down to the Mongols ability to monopolize force, not to some kind of superiority in their post-occupation planning, and the modern revolution in small arms and explosives and transportation has made that considerably less tenable. Additionally, the Mongols were not trying to be leaders on a world stage in which moral capital mattered; they were conquerers who cultivated an aura of death, and there were no neighbors with competing interests fomenting instability in their borders. It’s true that the US has used some restraint in responding to insurgent provocations, but then the US is not trying to create a colony with a figurehead scholar-governor, nor is it content to leave in place the kind of government which existed before, with its secret police, limited religious freedoms, etc.
It has been argued, I’ve argued it myself, that the US should have gone in with considerably greater forces than they did, in order to have a better chance at social stability and political reconstruction. But that’s hardly an endorsement of the slash-and-burn methods of 750 years ago.
Joshua Kurlantzick has an article in American Prospect that is both interesting and frustrating. It’s about Cambodia, and the Chinese language press there. Loh Swee Ping is a Malyasian-born Chinese who runs a Chinese paper in Cambodia. (The paper seems to be 柬埔寨星洲日報, although this is never made clear) The journalistic world of Cambodia seems rather free-wheeling, giving considerable scope to people like Loh, who takes journalism seriously, while also being full of all sorts of semi-corrupt types who like good coverage and are willing to get it either through payola or violence.
The hook for the article is that the Chinese government is encouraging the growth of a Sino-sphere, with Chinese language newspapers, schools, and a growing Chinese presense. So far so good, and there is some interesting stuff in here. He ends, however, with a lament on how the Americans are not doing enough to counteract Beijing’s fairly authoritarian advice on how to handle things like the press. While I as an American would also like to see the U.S. government stand up for things like freedom of the press (standing up is free, furcrissakes) I am always a bit amused at articles like Kurlantzick’s, or like this that assume that the Americans, their model, and their actions are what really matter here. I agree that the Americans could matter more, and the -very rapid- decline of American soft power is partly attributable to stupid things we have done of late and could and should stop doing. On the other hand, some decline is probably built in. You don’t need an American-style press to be an economic success, China proves it. If you are the Cambodian government and you are going to look ideologically acceptable by jumping every time someone says frog you are probably better off listening to China anyway. I just don’t think the old Cold War model of understanding Asia as either more or less like the U.S. works at all, and it is a bit frustrating to see a journalist who actually went to Cambodia and found some good stuff shoving things into that pattern.
How many pigs were there in China during the warlord era?
I came across the wonderful site Strange Maps, and one of their offerings was a 1922 map of world hog production
The text says that this is a map of industrial-scale pig breeding. China seems a bit over-represented here. Yes, every farm in China should have a couple pigs. So should every farm in Ohio and Korea, but the densities there seem much lower, and it can’t just be population. Were Chinese really eating all that much ? Or was there a big export industry? Either would be interesting as the first would be a sign of a surprising prosperity, and the later a sign of China getting an export industry right in the 1920s. Does anyone know if there is anything out there on Late Imperial/Republican pigs?
Time for part two of my history news round up. Another big history-related story toward the end of last year concerned a proposed new rightwing history textbook designed for use in Korean high schools. Now it was the turn of ‘leftist’ politicians (scare quotes denote my extreme scepticism about calling Uri Party politicians in any way leftwing) to be upset by distortions of history, ideological bias and so on. Actually things kicked off properly when a press conference held at the end of November by a New Right-affiliated textbook group called Textbook Forum was invaded by progressive civic groups and a punch up ensued.
It seems that the new textbook is rather pro-Park Chung-hee and as historian An Pyongjik claims, attempts to get away from history teaching as the ‘history of movements’ (the independence movement, the democracy movement etc). Its critics particularly took issue with its treatment of the April 1960 Students’ Revolution which overthrew President Syngman Rhee, since it bascially denies that it was a revolution at all, but rather a ‘student movement’ controlled by leftists. Han Hong-gu of Sungkonghoe University (bastion of all things progressive) commented that the textbook was no different from those currently being promoted by the Japanese far right.
As usual, the Hankyoreh cartoonist had a good take on this:
(Hankyoreh Geurimpan, 4 December 2006)
On the left, a former Japanese collaborator and a (presumably dead) Park Chung-hee are addressing a member of the New Right who is carrying a copy of the textbook, saying:
“What the hell are you doing revealing our true intentions so carelessly?”
On the table behind them sit books which praise the dictatorial Yusin system of Park and attempt to justify the actions of Japanese collaborators.
But then almost as soon as it looked like it might get interesting, the storm blew over and the erstwhile opponents met and agreed to cooperate, after the Textbook Forum people had agreed to use the word ‘revolution’ to describe the April 19, 1960 movement. Amazing what a difference a word can make.
Anyway, something is definitely afoot here and no doubt the Korean right really is trying to take a leaf out of the textbooks of the Japanese right. It also strikes me that this attempt to rebrand a conservative view of history as ‘new’ (part of the whole ‘New Right’ rebranding project) is rather disingenuous – there is nothing new or daring about claiming that what Park Chung-hee did was wonderful or in the best interests of the nation (even if it was a bit painful) this is just the old propaganda warmed over for a new generation of school students. That doesn’t mean, on the other hand, that current Korean school history textbooks are above criticism or revision.
I have been thinking about public history and the uses of the past a bit lately, and reading Craig Clunas’ Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China. Like all of his work it is very good, but I was interested in his discussion of the uses of the antique in Ming culture. He quotes Matteo Ricci, who was impressed with the level of interest in the antique, but pointed out that the Chinese were not interested in “statues nor medals” but rather in bronzes, jades, and paintings. Ricci was of course an Italian, and was aware of the role of antiquities in the Renaissance relationship with the past, but that relationship was centered on marble statues and coins (nuministics was an important field of study in a way it never was in China.) The difference is in part because the past society produced different things, but more importantly because the uses of past things have as much more to do with the present society than with the past. The Ming connoisseurs were pretty knowledgeable, and had been generating knowledge about old items for a long time at this point. They had managed to connect existing bronzes to the bronze types mentioned in the (unillustrated) classics, and they were aware that these vessels were windows to the past. Many of them were inscribed, and some scholars, like Zhao Mingcheng understood their value
When archeological materials are used to examine these things, thirty to fourty per cent of the data is in conflict. That is because historical writings are produced by latter-day writers and cannot fail to contain errors. But the inscriptions on stone and bronze are made at the time the events take place and can be trusted without reservation Clunas p.95-6
The AHA Annual meeting is over, and I’m packing up to go home. I have some Japan panels left to blog, as well as some Islamic history ones. There’s a discussion of the business meeting fiasco (ongoing) at Cliopatria, and reports from HNN’s Rick Shenkman, including the arrest of an historian for jaywalking.
The picture below is my plunder from the book exhibit Sunday morning fire sale: $10-15 hardbacks and $3-5 paperbacks. Except the Berry: I paid the normal conference discount for that one, because I just want it.
Click over to Nick Kapur’s post at Frog Japan for news on new plans to allow archaeologists to access Japanese imperial tombs (kofun). Depending on how far things get, this could have very important implications for our understanding of both Korean and Japanese history… there might even be results within our lifetimes.