Historical Anthropologist Wang Mingke: Ethnic Identity Is Not Your Only Identity, or Your Only Way Out | Interviews

Who are we? What is our culture? What is our history? When the dominant group holds the right to speak, what comes out is stereotypes.

For more than a decade, whenever he gets the chance, Wang Mingke has gone back to Songpan and Mao County in Sichuan to “see old friends.”

Songpan and Mao County are Qiang country, and they were once Wang Mingke's fieldwork sites. Now 66, he is a well-known historical anthropologist and the director of the Institute of History and Philology at Taiwan's Academia Sinica. He took his doctorate in 1992 from Harvard's Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, under K. C. Chang. From 1994 to 2003 he did fieldwork in the Qiang areas of southwest China, spending a month or two in Qiang villages every year. For the work he learned to speak Sichuanese, to worship the mountain god, to drink zajiu — the local rice wine sipped through a straw — to eat chilies and to smoke.

“I've actually been quitting smoking the whole time, but fieldwork is powerful — I can smoke for a month, then stop the moment I get back,” Wang Mingke told QDaily. His Qiang friends sum him up in two characters: pietuo, Sichuanese for blunt and free of airs.

In academia, by contrast, he is called a “poison cat” — a figure out of Qiang legend, close to the Western witch — because he keeps crossing and knocking down the walls between disciplines to build new scholarly paradigms. His best-known book, The Margins of Huaxia (《华夏边缘》), had a wide impact. It takes up the questions “What exactly is a ‘Chinese person’?” and “Why do we call ourselves ‘descendants of Yan and Huang’?” by way of how the ethnic margins of the Chinese people formed, held, and shifted.

Luo Xin, a professor of history at Peking University, once said of it: “[The Margins of Huaxia] is a work that has had a major impact on anthropology, ethnology, and historical scholarship in the Chinese-speaking world... it offers a new model for advancing the study of Chinese history.” Liu Suli, founder of Wansheng Bookstore, put it this way: “This book opens a door on the road to self-understanding for the Chinese nation — far beyond anything those who merely address the question at hand can manage. I sincerely salute the author!”

But until a new paradigm takes shape, or wins acceptance, it is by definition beyond the pale. So it was with Wang Mingke. He set out from the margins, he studied the margins, and for a long time he was himself treated as a marginal scholar.

Wang Mingke was born in 1952 in Huangpu New Village, a military dependents' village in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. His childhood was “spent mostly amid his father's frustrations and his parents' daily quarrels,” and as a teenager he ran a gang with his friends. In high school, with the family short of money, Wang Mingke's “way of forgetting these worries was to run with hoodlums and get into brawls”; he also “published a few essays in the newspaper to earn a little pocket money.” In the end he had to change high schools four times, and he failed the college entrance exam twice. Having failed to get in, he had to serve two years of compulsory military service.

Six months before his discharge, his father, Wang Guanghui, died. Wang Guanghui had been the son of a rich landowning family in Hubei and had studied at Chung Hwa University in Wuhan. After the War of Resistance Against Japan broke out, he entered the Whampoa Military Academy (then called the Central Military Academy), graduated in its 15th class, and later served as a company commander under General Sun Liren in the New First Army. “After I finished burying my father, I served out my remaining six months in the army. For the following six months I spent at least 15 hours a day studying, and I got into the history department of National Taiwan Normal University. What drove me — and what later drove me all the way to Harvard — was my gratitude to my father, who was proud of me,” Wang Mingke wrote in his essay “My Father's Never-Ending War.”

Across more than 30 years of scholarly work he has done fieldwork in Sichuan, Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, Shaanxi, and elsewhere, moving among anthropology, history, archaeology, and other fields. He “brashly claims” that the period he studies runs “from the Neolithic to socialist New China,” and he has his own theory, practice, and method.

The history closest to him, though — the war against Japan and the Nationalist-Communist civil war — is one he has “never studied.” “To me that is sacred ground inside personal memory, and I don't want scholarly knowledge polluting it. ... All of it has become the past. What is left is the memory of war that kept my father and the uncles of the dependents' village going, and my longing for their generation,” Wang Mingke wrote.

Not until he was 62 was Wang Mingke elected an academician of Academia Sinica. In 2017 he became director of its Institute of History and Philology. The Institute once gathered scholars of the first rank — Fu Sinian, Chen Yinke, Yuen Ren Chao, Li Chi — and it stands high in the academic world.

But in a sense, being marginal also meant being free. “[Becoming director] has been a very bad change in my life, a terrible feeling. Look at my academic career over the past two or three decades and you'll see how much it has affected my research. For two or three decades I liked to travel around. I think society — different societies — is the richest book there is. Now that I'm director, I naturally have far fewer chances to travel around,” Wang Mingke told QDaily.

In recent years Wang Mingke has been working on theory and method. In his last book, published in 2016, Reflexive History and Historical Reflection (《反思史学与史学反思》), he puts particular weight on reflexivity. His scholarly mission and his hope for the real world are the same: to spread a reflexive method of historical research, and the knowledge that comes with it — historical knowledge that can shape a “Chinese person” whose identity rests on reflexivity. Because right now government, the media, and intellectuals alike may all be busy “reproducing a great deal of stereotyped knowledge,” which leaves the public with stereotypes.

“To reproduce stereotyped knowledge is to reproduce an unjust reality. I have used our own Institute of History and Philology as an example. In its early years our ethnographers went to the southwest to collect artifacts from ethnic groups there. Later, when I was sorting those artifacts, I found that everything they had collected was hunting and fishing gear. We know perfectly well that the various peoples of the Yunnan basins and low hills lived mainly by farming — seventy years ago, a hundred years ago, even two hundred. The main groups there, the Miao, the Bai, the Dai, all worked the land. But under the stereotype of backward frontier peoples, it would never occur to an anthropologist to haul one of their ploughs home. When they saw hunting knives, bows and arrows, fishing nets, they felt these matched the picture of minority peoples in their heads, so they collected them and put them on display in museums. And then visitors came away with that impression — that minority peoples were backward, just like this,” Wang Mingke told QDaily.

His next book will carry his “poison cat” theory further and tie it to the ISIS problem and to what the internet is doing to us. As he sees it, the internet now is much like a Qiang village. People huddle together for warmth inside their own echo chambers, but it is dangerous in there. You had better go along with everyone else's opinion, or you will become the scapegoat for the group's fear of the outside world — a “poison cat,” or a witch. And when a campaign to strike down poison cats, or to hunt witches, gets going, the people who suffer most are usually the ones close at hand.

“The ones who really suffer most are what you might call the near enemy. Western media cover terrorist attacks heavily, so everybody notices that twenty died here and fifteen died there. But does anyone realize that the number of Muslims killed every day by religious extremist violence — jihadists' near or internal enemies — is far higher than those figures? So I have a feeling that, much as among the Qiang, jihadists tie the distant enemy to the enemy close at hand,” Wang Mingke said.

Q = QDaily

W = Wang Mingke

Should traditions like mountain-god worship be preserved?

Q: What do you make of preserving ethnic culture?

W: Some traditional culture really is still there. Culture is in fact an expression of human ecology. Humans are remarkable in this respect: they create a culture that makes people behave in certain ways naturally, without having to think about it. And that behavior, in turn, confirms the social reality that goes with it.

Take the Qiang worship of the mountain god. When people perform the rite, they have no idea why they are doing it. But performing it every year quietly reinforces the idea of village territory. The mountain god is the guardian spirit of the territory. So what is the point of worshipping the mountain god now? After the disaster everyone moved down off the mountains; the resource up there now is caterpillar fungus, and when people go dig for it, who cares whose territory it is? The whole notion of territory is long gone. So should mountain-god culture be preserved? Of course it can be — but only as a memory of the past. If we hold a Qiang culture festival, we can stage the mountain-god rite again to bring people together. But performing it in daily life no longer means anything.

Q: A lot of people know the term “ethnic minority,” but in your view the term itself seems to be a problem — they shouldn't be called a “minority.” Can you explain why?

W: The key isn't really the phrase “ethnic minority”; it's the concept behind it. “Ethnic minority,” or the other term we use in Taiwan, “Indigenous Peoples” — the content of both is built by the dominant population, and both end up becoming part of how the people they name understand themselves. Who are we? What is our culture? What is our history? The right to speak is in the hands of the dominant group, and in that situation what gets produced is knowledge coloured by stereotype. Under this unequal relationship of social power, minority or Indigenous people accept that knowledge and take it for their own culture and history. What they don't see is that under this hegemonic construction of history and culture they are kept on the margins forever, always a minority.

I think “ethnic minorities” should be encouraged to define themselves, to know their own culture, and to understand what that culture actually means now and how it changes. Know your own culture — but also know that it is a remnant of a past society. It doesn't have to be practiced in daily life. Why not do what the dominant group does and put your past traditional culture in a history museum?

Take traditional Qiang housing. The houses in the villages are packed tight against one another, with small windows, and few of them. That culture certainly took shape in an age when competition for resources was fierce, when everyone felt on edge and on guard against outsiders — hence that style of building. Behind a culture there is always a human ecology. But that human ecology of mutual suspicion and struggle no longer exists. Today everyone is a proud Qiang. The people next door who used to be called “barbarians” or “rotten Han” are Qiang too. Naturally the old fear is gone. So why should people still live in these houses? Just because somebody says this is your Qiang tradition? There's no need for it at all.

Both “Indigenous Peoples” and “ethnic minorities,” I think, are constantly urged to keep their traditional culture. Which is why some Indigenous people in Taiwan are still fighting for hunting rights today. And what did the fight get them? Taiwan's relevant authorities amended a few regulations so that Indigenous people may hunt, to a limited degree, under certain conditions. What did they actually win? I think all they won was a stronger version of the backward image of Indigenous people that mainstream society built in the first place — a people whose tradition is hunting.

Think about it: how long are Indigenous people supposed to go on hunting and fishing? The cultured people who now consider themselves part of civilized society had ancestors who were hunting a few hundred years ago, or a thousand. But their own traditional cultures have been put in museums and turned into the cultural tradition of an “other.” Why must “Indigenous” traditional culture be lived out day to day? Practicing that tradition pushes them further to the margins.

Q: Reinforcing the stereotype in the name of so-called traditional culture actually works against the survival and development of “ethnic minorities.”

W: Right. Ethnic identity can serve as a kind of refuge for the spirit. I still think it matters a great deal to us. When you hit a setback, when you're out in the world scrapping for a living, when you're suffering, ethnic identity is like a mother — there is warmth in it for you.

But you can't treat it as your only identity, your only way out. Many of us who study ethnic groups are trying to expose exactly this. We aren't emphasizing people's ethnic identity; we're telling people why they feel the need to emphasize it. The hope is that the next time they meet an economic or social setback, they will face the setback itself, rather than venting it through ethnic identity.

How can one ethnic policy answer the problems of people living in so many different human ecologies?

Q: How do you see China's ethnic issues? From your writing, it seems you don't think China's ethnic problems are a matter of ethnic policy at all — because allocating resources by ethnic group is unreasonable to begin with. It simply reinforces ethnic identity and makes conflict more likely.

W: Right, that has always been my view. Some people today praise the Qing for having different policies for the different peoples on each of its borders; the methods look unusually flexible. It made marriages with the Mongol nobility, built religious ties with Tibetan religious leaders, and handled the peoples of the south and southwest through native chieftains, the tusi, or by force. That policy wasn't necessarily good — we couldn't do it that way now, and the Qing government's bloody suppression of many local incidents is even less to be admired. But the difference from today is that now there is only one ethnic policy. Why did the Qing use different methods on different peoples along its borders? Because the peoples on the four borders really were different, with different human ecologies, so it had to answer each border situation in a different way.

Now that everyone has been made into a “nationality,” one problem is this: how do you use a single ethnic policy to answer the problems of people living in so many different human ecologies? Of course it comes up short at times. That is precisely why ethnic policy can't solve the problem here. Ethnic policy has to apply to everyone alike, but the problem in each place is different. So the simplest way to deal with the differences in human ecology from place to place is to start by recognizing that every person also holds the status of citizen. In a modern state made up of many peoples, everyone has, besides an ethnic identity, a citizen's identity. As citizens, people in poor regions should get the assistance poor regions are due, with poverty-relief measures designed for them. Why not use that identity as the basis on which a person gets help from the state?

Ethnic problems are sometimes caused, I think, by stereotyped knowledge — stereotyped knowledge about ethnic culture and religion — which makes people feel these things are “structural” or “sacred.” So anything that touches culture or religion can only be understood, never acted on.

I think the change still has to come through education, through knowledge, and above all through intellectuals from each of these peoples. Everyone needs to reflect: underneath the cultural and religious phenomena, what is the basic problem here? And the state needs a deeper grasp of what is particular about each place.

When the early Chinese Communist authorities entered Tibet, carrying materialist Communist ideas with them, they found the herders pitiable — living in such poverty and still giving a sizeable share of their income and property to the monasteries. This was read as a relationship of exploitation. But consider the human ecology there. In pastoral country, even far more income wouldn't buy much more in the way of material comfort. With nature unpredictable and life and property at risk, people naturally turned to religion for comfort of the spirit, and used the monastery to hold the risk to their lives and livelihoods down to a minimum. If a family lost its cattle and sheep and faced starvation, say, the monastery could take them in or give relief. Maximizing economic gain doesn't mean much here; minimizing risk is the main consideration. So the state has to find ways to make ordinary people feel their lives and livelihoods are secure. At the very least, a basic guarantee of subsistence has to be kept up. Then people's attitude toward religion, and their reliance on it, could change fundamentally, all on its own.

How did “descendants of Yan and Huang” and the “nation-state” come about?

Q: On nationalism, a lot of people in mainland China cite Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and argue that ideas like the Chinese nation and “descendants of Yan and Huang” were constructed in the late Qing. I gather you disagree, and think there are a number of problems with it. Could you explain?

W: I don't agree with that idea. Take the concept of descendants of Yan and Huang. I wrote a very long piece refuting this claim years ago. From the Han dynasty at the latest, people of the Central Plains already had a historical memory of being “descendants of the Yellow Emperor,” and at that point the people who shared the Yellow Emperor as a common ancestor already made up an ethnic group. It's just that the scope of “descendants of the Yellow Emperor” wasn't very wide yet; it went no further than the noble houses. Picture the layers of the Chinese people as a pyramid, with commoners at the bottom and the emperor and nobility at the top. At first, only the imperial house — that small group at the very apex — could trace a family memory back to the Yellow Emperor. From the Wei-Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties on, the ancestors of every great gentry clan could be linked to the Yellow Emperor as well. By the Tang, many mid-tier great families could probably also run their line back to the Yellow Emperor, or to the Flame Emperor. By the Ming and Qing, some say every household had a genealogy, and every genealogy could be traced up to the Yellow Emperor or the Flame Emperor. Finally, in the Republican period, it became every individual — not every clan, every individual — who was a descendant of Yan and Huang.

So within this pyramid of the Chinese people, from ancient times onward, from the top down and from the core outward, more and more people became descendants of the Yellow Emperor, or of Yan and Huang. It was a very long process, everyone attaching themselves to these ancestors. In the end the Yellow Emperor became the ancestor of all Han Chinese. This has to do with the individualism inside nationalism: the Yellow Emperor became the ancestor of every single Han person. Can a Han identity like that really be a modern invention? Or is the modern change simply the last stage of a long process of change?

Here is another reason I disagree with them. They hold that nation and state joined together — the nation-state — is a new invention of the modern era. I think that's wrong. Modern nationhood is nothing new: human beings have always joined ethnic groups (peoples, common-ancestor tribes) to political organizations (states, tribal confederations).

Think about it. We know an ethnic group is a body of people who bind themselves together by insisting on a shared ancestral origin. Why bind together? For common interest — people form an ethnic group for the good of all of them. But from the standpoint of common interest alone, an ethnic group is an empty shell. To protect and expand that common interest you are bound to need a political organization.

People of the same tribe, for instance, claim a common ancestor. That is, they are an ethnic group — but they still need the tribe's political organization to carry out their aims in the real world. Take early Huaxia identity: it took shape slowly from the Spring and Autumn period into the Warring States. As an ethnic identity, Huaxia identity in itself was vague and empty; but once it had more or less formed, its political organization appeared — the Qin-Han empire. Whenever an ethnic identity forms, it is bound to need a political organization to carry out its aims. So hard on the heels of the formation of Huaxia identity came the unified Qin-Han empire.

Q: Over the long view of history, political bodies of that kind — an ethnic group joined to a political organization — have always existed. But in the modern era the means of producing identity are different. Anderson stressed things like print.

W: You always need one [an ethnic group joined to a political organization]. As for printing, I actually don't think print was a decisive factor in the rise of nationalism. China had printing very early; by the Qing it was already quite mature. So why didn't nationalism appear in China a century or two before it did in the West?

I think Anderson has it backwards. An important ingredient of nationhood is that its members share a basic common knowledge of the nation; so it was because people under nationalism needed that knowledge that print capitalism could be deployed so widely, to spread national knowledge and national ideas. Put simply, there is one basic idea in nationalism that matters enormously: members of the nation share something in common. And what they share is a body of basic knowledge about the nation. What is that shared knowledge? The basic history, geography and national facts in an elementary-school textbook.

I have mentioned in an earlier piece that in the late Qing and early Republic, when nationalism reached China, intellectuals from inland China who went to Qinghai and Tibet and met the local people were astonished. Why had these people never heard of Sun Yat-sen or the Three Principles of the People? Didn't know where Nanjing was? How could our fellow nationals know so little? What does that astonishment mean? In the Qing, or the Tang, or the Han, when a man from the Central Plains travelled to Tibet, how much would he have expected the locals to know about the imperial court, or about China?

That astonishment at a fellow national's ignorance could only arise under nationalism, out of the idea that what members of a nation share is common knowledge. And it was that idea of common knowledge that made the printing trade urgently necessary, as the way to spread national knowledge. The two go together — and it was the demand for knowledge that drove print capitalism, and through it the spread of knowledge.

What will the online world do to our society?

Q: The situation now, as you mentioned earlier, is that the internet as a way of communicating also brings enormous challenges.

W: I've been thinking about how national identity and ethnic identity differ from one generation to the next. Perhaps the tools and forms of communication are the way in.

In a village of the past — the Qiang villages I used to study — identity among fellow villagers rested on daily, face-to-face contact, which produced feeling, fear, a sense of us and a sense of them. With modern national identity, what kind of communication produces the identity, and the love and hatred that come with it? That is what I said earlier: through national education and basic civic knowledge, an imagined community is built, and a love of the nation. So we can see that today's internet has completely overturned the way national identity is communicated.

The way we used to talk about village identity, for instance, was face to face. Today people can also communicate face to face with members of their own group through social media on the internet. On video. And so all of it — the nationalist state using the printing trade to pass basic knowledge to its citizens, what Foucault called the state disciplining and controlling people through knowledge-power — has fallen apart on the internet. One person can now take in all sorts of different versions of history, and all sorts of different accounts of culture. So the knowledge the state constructs and directs is gradually losing its authority as things circulate online.

What affects us more is the information we take from the internet every day, the things people say online. Every one of us is a social being. In a civil society each of us has various public and private roles. That is, I know what I ought to say when I'm in a given role. How I speak and behave as a university professor is somewhat different from how I am with my Qiang friends. We all know our social identities, so what we see is everyone behaving according to their identity. But the internet destroys all of that. Because online your identity can be hidden, and a university professor can post crude, extreme remarks. A great many remarks made with the speaker's social background hidden become social representations — and what kind of society does that shape? It's a large question, and worth thinking about.

Or take another example. Young people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait talk a lot now about internet natives, or digital natives. ... They say children born in the 1990s grew up inside the online world, and are supposedly better at accepting diverse views and thinking for themselves. I think the claim itself is deeply problematic: sorting people into original inhabitants and outsiders is an irrational exercise of power to begin with.

More to the point, it is people who are constantly immersed in the online world who are more inclined to obey authority. And in the imagined national community Anderson described, the enemy is imagined too. In America, or in Russia, it isn't like the old Qiang village life, where stepping outside the village got you cursed as a barbarian by the people downstream — where the enemy was right beside you.

Now it's different. In today's online world people seem to have gone back to the human dealings of village identity. Because the enemy can reach you online, right beside you, and curse you to your face. So online, to protect themselves, people huddle back into small communities again — what I call online villages. In other words, people feel safest going into an online community of people who think the way they do; and even there you have to be careful, and go along with the mainstream view, or you get bullied. I doubt this does much for human harmony or reason.

So: what will the online world do to our society? None of us has thought it through properly. I think the question reaches into a lot of disciplines. Why did I raise it yesterday? I was only raising it. I can't fully resolve it myself.

What can the ISIS problem make us think about?

Q: People all over the world are concerned about ISIS right now, but most Chinese probably don't understand it well. As an anthropologist who studies ethnic groups, what do you make of it?

W: I follow the issue closely, but my understanding of it is still very limited. The relationship between migration and ISIS, for instance, is very complicated. Let's look at it simply, from a few angles.

First, there is a long historical background behind it, and some of today's “victim” countries — Britain, France, Germany and others — carry a degree of historical responsibility. ... The borders of these Middle Eastern and North African countries are often dead straight lines. Why is that? Because the idea of states with clearly marked boundaries was never common there. Historically these were regions of many tribes, or of tribal confederations, where boundaries drifted with the struggle for power. ... But in the end, put simply, after two world wars Europe's colonial empires pushed their power into the region. When they withdrew after the Second World War, they encouraged the peoples of their former colonies to set up states of their own. What they actually hoped was that the new states would keep close political and economic ties with the old colonial power — imperial hegemony continued in another guise. Which naturally drew in the interests of the various European powers. ... In the end the borders of these Middle Eastern and North African countries were drawn on a map with a ruler, in bargaining between French and British officials. The endless wars, famines, and ethnic and religious conflicts in these countries are bound up, to no small degree, with these man-made borders. Because the borders wrecked the sectarian and ethnic boundaries that were already there, and wrecked the mobility by which people sought safety.

ISIS does of course have its own political and religious ideals. ... In the places where Islam first rose and first spread, tribalism was extremely strong. Put simply, everyone marked out their own ground, held on to their fertile oasis, and let no one encroach. The greatest thing about the Arab empire, I think, was that it set out to break down the boundaries between people and resources that tribalism had created. ... Most of the important long-distance trade was in their hands — the Arabs' — and they used commerce and politics to break down tribal boundaries, and looked to build an ideal realm in which the rich shared their wealth with the poor. Whether that ideal was ever reached, you only have to look at the gulf between rich and poor in the Islamic world to know. Has tribalism truly been done away with? Look at the political and sectarian divisions in these places. The reality is plain enough.

ISIS's ideal is the same: to break down the local national borders the Western powers built, and to establish a shared caliphate. But nobody would approve of its methods. This sort of Islamic movement is Salafism, which mainland China seems to translate as “fundamentalism” — it stresses a return to the purest teachings preached by Islam's earliest leaders. They believe that is the purest and the correct doctrine of Islam.

Today's global Salafism is promoted in part by Saudi Arabia, and it inherits from beliefs older than Salafism a fierce loyalty and a rejection of heresy, along with the anti-Shia thinking that goes with them. Some strands, perhaps more radical still, point their reforming spear at state power itself (the ruling groups in Saudi Arabia and Iraq, say), which makes things more complicated. Many groups that wage violent jihad claim they do it to save the faith from ruin with undiluted Islamic doctrine; but even within Salafi circles, many people do not approve of using terror and violence against the innocent to reach that goal, and feel it violates the doctrine.

Sometimes, in fact, certain ideas and acts shouldn't be laid at the door of Islam as a whole. Within Islam there is plenty of criticism, examination and argument about these acts. But there's no help for it: mainstream opinion worldwide is almost entirely occupied by Western media, so it is hard for us to know about the diversity of opinion inside Islam, where each strand comes from, and how they divide and converge. Which leaves the whole world with the notion that all of Islam is like this. Take the idea of jihad. Many Islamic scholars say the idea doesn't necessarily mean going to war; it means struggle.

Q: You've also said that the people who suffer most from this kind of extremism or fundamentalism are in fact the neighbours.

W: That's exactly why I care about the question. What I'm doing now carries on my earlier research into the Qiang legend of the poison cat, using it to discuss collective fear, suspicion and violence among human beings. What is it people are afraid of? Why do they grow suspicious? And why, in the end, do they pick someone close to them — the Qiang poison cat, the European witch — as the scapegoat? Of all such phenomena in human history, the one with the richest documentation and the most attention is the witch-hunting craze in Europe from the late medieval period to the early modern. Why did people burn a small number of the women in their own village or town as witches? I want to use these angles and cases to think about the same phenomenon in our society today.

Put simply, we human beings often can't tell the internal enemy from the external one. Among groups waging jihad — Al-Qaeda and the rest — the leaders of the various factions argue constantly over whether the main target of jihad should be the near enemy or the far one. Meaning: are we to go after America and France, to stage terrorist acts among the infidels of Western capitalism so that they too live in terror? Or must we first deal with the impure Muslims beside us, the ones polluted by Western politics and culture? In the end the ones who really suffer most are what you might call the near enemy. Western media cover terrorist attacks heavily, so everybody notices that twenty died here and fifteen died there. But does anyone realize that the number of Muslims killed every day by religious extremist violence — jihadists' near or internal enemies — is far higher than those figures?

So I have a feeling that, much as among the Qiang, jihadists tie the distant enemy to the enemy close at hand. That is, the more they hate America and France, the more they hate the Muslims beside them who have been touched by Western culture; and the more they despise the “impure” Muslims close by, the more they hate America and France.

We cannot let “history” treat us as puppets

Q: At the level of method, you put great weight on reflexivity. Can you explain in more detail why you stress it so much?

W: Views of history under “Greater China-ism” and under “Western-centrism” both lack reflexivity. Let's take the Chinese people and their history as the example, and start from the difference between deconstructive knowledge and reflexive knowledge. Many Western scholars, standing on doubt about whether the Chinese people and their history are real, deconstruct the national history of China and call that history a modern construction — and so, on their account, both the Chinese nation and its ethnic minorities are modern constructions.

My view, from the standpoint of reflexive knowledge, is this. First, we should acknowledge that the modern Chinese nation did go through a process of construction — but this modern construction is only one part of a long shift in East Asian human ecology. What we need to examine is whether, within that long shift, the modern change has moved toward a better human ecology or a worse one. From the standpoint of human ecology there is no question that things are far better now than before, though far from perfect. All 56 peoples live together; the tribes beyond the Great Wall no longer attack the Wall because they lack resources — they have become part of the nation. Isn't that a good thing? In the south and southwest there is no more contempt for “barbarians” and no more bloody military suppression of “barbarian revolts,” and that is progress too. So why not acknowledge that this modern process of construction took place?

At the same time, reflexive knowledge insists on criticizing the past and reflecting on it, so that we can “see the error of yesterday.” We shouldn't keep telling the kind of history that says my ancestors beat your ancestors; we shouldn't keep raising slogans like “expel the Tartars,” or keep condemning the history of the Xiongnu chanyu attacking the Great Wall. Instead we should place “the northern nomadic tribes attacking the Great Wall” in the setting of human ecology and long-run history. The human ecology behind these events was an uneven distribution of the resources people needed to live, which is why the northern tribes made their efforts to break through the resource boundary — and it is because of all those efforts that the Great Wall today has become an international tourist attraction rather than what it once was, a tool of wartime defence and resource monopoly.

So in a sense we should be grateful for all efforts of that kind, the chanyu's attacks on the Wall included, for slowly bringing the Wall down. Indirectly we might even thank the greed of the Shanxi merchants, who carried capitalism across the Wall to the outside, corrupted the upper ranks of Mongol society, and made the country inside and outside the Wall one capitalist world — creating the soil in which socialist thought and action could later take root on both sides of it. All of this calls for a reflexive understanding. And I believe a new knowledge of the history of the Great Wall, and the real-world change that knowledge can bring, can let every Mongol be a proud Mongol and a proud Chinese.

Q: What ordinary people probably care about most is how to develop this reflexivity.

W: The simplest form of reflexivity is to think from the standpoint of human ecology. Don't just talk about the rise of a great power or the glory of the Han and Tang. Ask yourself: apart from feeling honoured to be in a great country, is my life any better? Does the justice system protect people's fairness and justice in society? Are resources distributed fairly? Is it safe to walk down the street? If all of that is fine, then by all means take pride in your country as a great power — it's that simple. But if your own life isn't good and you still feel proud to be a citizen of a great power, then it's worth reflecting on why you feel that way. What knowledge is numbing us, and who — or which groups — are creating and promoting it? Reflexivity is a kind of waking up to your own situation: seeing the reality of where you actually stand, and beginning to doubt the universal knowledge, and the power in that knowledge, that produced your view of it.

Q: As a historical anthropologist, what attitude do you think young people should take toward history?

W: I do think that if it's history of the stereotyped kind, then it really has nothing to do with anyone. What does something that happened a thousand or two thousand years ago have to do with people alive today?

But the history I care about really is history that has something to do with us. Why? For a very simple reason. All history that people record and retell is a form of social memory — and all memory controls our actions. It's like the way a computer works, because there is a program built into it, some system inside it.

For each of us as individuals, the historical knowledge society hands us is a kind of built-in social program. We are what we remember. We act as we do because certain things are lodged in your mind: you remember that you belong to a certain family, that you belong to a certain people, and so you do things for the honour of that family, that people.

So for every one of us, history and the present are linked in this way. That is why I stress reflecting on history. Because we cannot let “history” treat us as puppets — as if someone were working history like a set of strings, pulling everyone along. Reflexive historical research means letting people see those strings, and the people pulling them; understanding where you stand in present-day society and in the long river of history, and so being able to act, and make the present better.

The cover image and banner show the Barkol grasslands beneath the Tian Shan; the long cover image shows Wang Mingke (right) in Yonghe Gully, Mao County, Sichuan. All images are from Wang Mingke's blog.