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The intriguing pig map in Alan Baumler\u2019s post, \u201cPigs\u201d <\/a>(January 11) reminds us that 2007 is the Year of the Pig. Wikipedia <\/a>informs us that a person born in the year of the Pig (or Boar) is \u201cusually an honest, straightforward and patient person,\u201d someone who is a \u201cmodest, shy character who prefers to work quietly behind the scenes.\u201d 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?<\/p>\n I have known some pigs. Well, maybe not exactly \u201cknown\u201d \u2013 I\u2019m a city kid \u2013 but at least had feelings for them. We won\u2019t count Charlotte\u2019s Web<\/strong> or the Three Little Pigs, and I probably shouldn\u2019t even mention the pig jokes (\u201cI haven\u2019t had so much fun since the day the pig ate my little brother\u201d).<\/p>\n 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 \u201cabominable pig.\u201d 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<\/strong>, makes an ecological argument: pigs were not suited to the hot, arid climate (they don\u2019t sweat, so they wallow in mud); goats and sheep eat grass, but pigs don\u2019t; 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).<\/p>\n In China no supreme being commanded \u201ceat not this flesh,\u201d 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 \u201cpiggy bank\u201d 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 \u2013 when we say pigs \u201crecycle waste\u201d we\u2019re not fooling! Ch\u2019u T\u2019ung-tsu and Hsu Cho-yun describe Han dynasty herders whose pigs rummaged through the swamps and forests.<\/p>\n By early modern times, the forests which fed herds were gone. The human population was so intensive that it didn\u2019t 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\u2019s. (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.<\/p>\n A knowledgeable American who lived in China in the 1930s related the \u201cbiography of a Shantung pig.\u201d It was a \u201crare 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.\u201d 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 \u201cbetrayed to the butcher.\u201d None of these farmers could afford to eat the meat, which the butcher sold by the ounce. (Winfield, 1948 pp. 64-66)<\/p>\n The cultural overtones of pigs in Chinese society were quite different from the Middle Eastern ones. Who could forget \u201cPigsie ,\u201d Arthur Waley\u2019s name for Zhu Bajie, the half pig, half human character in Journey to the West<\/strong>? 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<\/em> (often translated as \u201chome\u201d or \u201cfamily\u201d) 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:<\/p>\n Mark Lewis, in his Construction of Space in Early China<\/strong>, p. 92, says (following Xu Shen) that the character <\/span>\u5bb6<\/span>, home, is not a pig <\/em>under a roof, but a child <\/em>under a roof, as the seal-script hai<\/em> \u4ea5<\/span> looked a lot like shi <\/em>\u8c55<\/span>. In his notes he has a quote from Lu shi chun qiu<\/strong> that illustrates the possible confusion:<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Zi Xia was going to Jin and passed through Wei. Someone reading a historical chronicle said \u201cThe Jin army, three pigs, forded the Yellow River.\u201d Zi Xia said, \u201cThat is wrong. This says ji hai<\/em>\u201d[<\/span>\u5df1\u4ea5<\/span>, one of the sexagenary cycle used to indicate the day] The character \u201cji <\/em>\u5df1<\/span>\u201dis close to three [san<\/em> \u4e09<\/span>] and the character pig [shi <\/em>\u8c55<\/span>] resembles child [hai \u4ea5<\/span>]<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n 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.<\/p>\n What can pigs tell us about China’s modernity? Sigrid Schmalzer shows us in an eye-opening article, \u201cBreeding a Better China: Pigs, Practices, and Place,\u201d (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.<\/p>\n So Sigrid\u2019s article took me by surprise. By looking at what \u201cscience\u201d 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.<\/p>\n A little background: In the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> 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\u2019s 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 \u201cfeudal\u201d system but to take advantage of the long standing commercial mentality of the small farmer. Among other things, they introduced better breeds of pigs.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cscientifically\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201cscientific\u201d (i.e. Western) pig breeding and Chinese folkways but between American and Chinese needs and situations.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t stand the heat, were sensitive to sun burn, and demanded special treatment \u2013 not unlike, the local workers slyly added, most of the other Americans they knew.<\/p>\n And you thought pigs were pigs! If so, you should read Richard P. Horwitz, Hog Ties: What Pigs Tell Us About America <\/strong>(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.<\/p>\n \n <\/p>\n Works Cited:<\/p>\n T’ung-tsu Ch’u, ed. by Jack L. Dull, Han Social Structure <\/strong>(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1972).<\/p>\n Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo <\/strong>(London: Routledge, 1966).<\/p>\n Charles W. Hayford, To the People: James Yen and Village China<\/strong> (NY: Columbia University Press, 1990)<\/p>\n Richard P. Horwitz, Hog Ties: What Pigs Tell Us About America <\/strong>(Orig. Hog Ties: Pigs, Manure, and Mortality in American Culture <\/strong>(1998) rpr. University of Minnesota Press, 2002).<\/p>\n Cho-y\u00fcn Hs\u00fc, ed. Jack L. Dull, Han Agriculture: The Formation of Early Chinese Agrarian Economy, 206 B.C.-A.D. 220 <\/strong>(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1980).<\/p>\n Seung-og Kim, \u201cBurials, Pigs, and Political Prestige in Neolithic China,\u201d Current Anthropology<\/strong> 35.2 (1994): 119-141.<\/p>\n Mark Edward Lewis, The Construction of Space in Early China <\/strong>(State University of New York Press, 2006).<\/p>\n\n
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