What_is_going_to_happen_next_(LSERO)

Charles Stafford What is going to happen next? Book section Original citation: Stafford, Charles (2007) What is going to happen next? In: Astuti, Rita and Parry, Jonathan and Stafford, Charles, (eds.) Questions of anthropology. London School of Economics monographs on social anthropology (76). Berg, Oxford, UK, pp. 55-76. © 2007 Berg This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/8747/ Available in LSE Research Online: February 2011 LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. This document is the author’s submitted version of the book section. There may be differences between this version and the published version. You are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. What is going to happen next? Charles Stafford, London School of Economics In the early and mid 1990s, while conducting fieldwork in northeastern China, I became friends with a farmer, Mr Huang. Although he was only sixty-one when we met, I thought at first that he might be a good deal older. He had a nervous disposition, and I later learned that he suffered badly from insomnia. It seemed he was worried about many things – indeed, about almost everything – ranging from the rising price of fertilizer, to whether or not Taiwan might decide to separate from China, thus provoking war. I can’t really hope to explain, based on a few months’ fieldwork, exactly what generated Mr Huang’s various anxieties; but even a cursory glance at his life story may provide us with some clues. He was born in 1932, and grew up during the Japanese colonial era in Manzuguo, so- called. This may well have been a nervous-making time to be a child. He told me that, among other restrictions, the Japanese forbade local people to eat rice, nor were they allowed, during the crucial New Year offerings, to give rice to their ancestors. Some families dared to do so in secret, but this could have dire consequences because there were informants in the countryside – “running dogs” – who might tell the Japanese. When Mr Huang was twelve years old, the colonial era collapsed around him, to be replaced by the further dangers and uncertainties of the Chinese civil war. Eventually, the Communists defeated the KMT, after which some of the “running dogs” were killed. During this same volatile period of modern Chinese history, the 1940s, Mr Huang faced personal tragedy. The year before the Japanese defeat, when he was eleven, his mother died, to be followed by the death of his father four years later when he was fifteen. My 1 understanding is that both deaths were caused by illness, but I have not been able to confirm this. Mr Huang’s story since then has been one of trying to establish networks of support, however fragile, against the odds. With no parents to handle the negotiations, he nevertheless secured a marriage agreement. Then, as his ties to his parents’ village became increasingly tenuous, he and his wife moved to her natal community – in order to receive help from her kin. This was an important consideration, not least because they had no children of their own. Eventually, however, they adopted a daughter who went on to marry a Chinese-Korean man. This new son-in-law, having come from a poor background, agreed to live in his wife’s village, and in the home of Mr and Mrs Huang. He was to be their yanglaoxu – “support-the-elderly son-in-law” – but he did not take on Mr Huang’s surname, nor did he hand over his income to him, nor was he, in any meaningful sense, under his father-in-law’s control. Still, everyone liked and respected him, especially after his wife gave birth to two rather wonderful grandchildren, a girl and a boy. At the time of my first visit to the village of Dragon Head in the early 1990s, these children were six years old and two years old respectively. It might be noted that Mr Huang, when I met him, was living with a number of kinship arrangements which, although very common in China, would still be seen by many people in the countryside as nervous-making. He did not have the support, to any significant extent, of an existing patrilineal network, nor – in the absence of a son – could he be said to have put very reliable arrangements in place for his old age security. Instead, he depended primarily on his wife’s relatives, on an adopted daughter, on the adopted daughter’s husband (who was an outsider in the community where they lived), on grandchildren who did not share his surname, on friends, and on the state. Nor had Mr Huang exactly prospered under the post-Mao economic reforms. At an age when most people would like to stop worrying about such things, he faced considerable financial insecurity. When I met him, he was trying to figure out how to build a new house, because his old one provided limited insulation against the bitter cold of the north 2 China winters. As you might expect, this generated many headaches for him, not least because the house would cost more than seven times his annual income. In order to start building he was obliged, in his mid-sixties, to borrow a significant amount of money from relatives and neighbours which would fall due within three years. What if he could not pay it back? *** Now, I could go on with this list of things that worried Mr Huang. But let me stop there, because my focus in this chapter is not so much on the particularities of Mr Huang’s life, interesting though these may be. What I really want to examine are his attempts, in the context of this life, to address what is presumably a very common type of human question, namely: what is going to happen next? I take it for granted that most people in most societies are at least somewhat anxious not only (retrospectively) about things that have already happened, but also about what is waiting around the corner. Of course, many anthropologists, on hearing this, will think of the huge range of ways in which such concerns might be articulated and addressed. Consider, for instance, Weber’s famous account of religious anxiety. He tells us, among other things, that Calvinists were concerned about being “saved” – a prospect which, so far as I know, is a matter of total indifference to Mr Huang. More to the point, given the beliefs of Weber’s Calvinists about predestination (which, again, are very unlike Mr Huang’s ideas about “fate”), they approached the present and the future in very particular ways. They believed that worldly success now – something which required careful planning and investment – could be taken as a sign of having been chosen by God. To put this differently: anxiety about a future which could not, in any case, be controlled (thanks to predestination) was sublimated through (controllable, future-oriented) activity in the present (Weber 2001). Pierre Bourdieu, for his part, has written of people who face a very different kind of dilemma: those for whom the future is more or less without hope. Commenting on the 3 uneven distribution of life-chances in society, he suggests that those with power over the world tend to have aspirations that are, in effect, “adjusted to their chances of realization”. By contrast, the relatively disempowered are more likely, he says, to come up with aspirations that are: … detached from reality and sometimes a little crazy, as if, when nothing was possible, everything becomes possible, as if all discourses about the future … had no other purpose than to fill what is no doubt one of the most painful of wants: the lack of a future (Bourdieu 2000:226). So although I’ve suggested that everyone worries about what will happen next, there is clearly a significant gap between the responses of Weber’s Calvinists and Bourdieu’s subproletarians to their respective predicaments. By contrast with the enterprising hopefulness of the former, and the daydreaming hopelessness of the latter, there is also, perhaps, the possibility of indifference. And indeed we do have ethnographic accounts of societies in which relatively little emphasis – in some cases, almost none – is placed on thinking about or planning for the future (Day et al 1999). Along these lines, my colleague Rita Astuti has described the “short- termism” of the Vezo of Madagascar, a fishing people who claim to be constantly “surprised” (tseriky) by much of what happens to them (Astuti 1995, 1999). Astuti describes the Vezo as “present-oriented”, and notes that they see themselves neither as heavily determined by the past, nor as capable of planning for the future. But perhaps in thinking this they are being a bit disingenuous, because they do sometimes plan and save – not least in order to be able to meet future ritual expenses (1995:128). They also worry about some eventualities; for example, they speculate that the arrival of Japanese fishing vessels near Madagascar might cause the sea to run out of fish (1995:48). And activities in the marketplace compel at least some Vezo, some of the time, to try to predict the course of supply and demand (Astuti 1999). So even in societies where a lack of concern about the future seems unusually marked, I assume there are at least a few mechanisms – historically and culturally variable ones, of course – for thinking and talking about what might happen next. 4 But let me stay for a moment with the Vezo. Astuti tells us that when it comes to dealing with life the Vezo describe themselves as “lacking wisdom” (tsy mahihitsy), and this specifically means that they do not know how to learn from the past in order to deal with the uncertainties of the present and the future (1995:51). Thus, as I’ve noted, they frequently express surprise at what happens to happen. A more rational way to proceed, as the Vezo themselves seem to know, would be to engage in a bit of learning. *** When Mr Huang thinks (with some anxiety) about what is going to happen next, he has the benefit of more than six decades of personal experience, some of it bitter and all of it presumably educational. But he can also draw on a Chinese tradition which – unlike the Vezo one – is very strongly oriented towards both the past and the future. That is to say, this tradition stresses not only the extent to which the historical past (including the history of kin relations within and across ancestral lines) weighs upon and determines the present, but also the extent to which the future may be predictable, and in some ways even controllable. To put this differently, this tradition holds that the sequence of events we confront is not entirely (or even predominantly) random. Those who can see the patterns in the sequences, and who can learn from observed regularities, have acquired a potentially important type of knowledge or, as the Vezo might have it, wisdom. In what follows, I want to focus on two “pattern-recognition exercises” of this kind, both of which are highly relevant to the case of Mr Huang. The second, which I’ll come to in a moment, has to do with patterns in interpersonal relations. But the first has to do specifically with predictions of the future, and is centred around China’s cosmological system. I should start by saying that soon after I met Mr Huang he made it clear to me that he was against traditional Chinese “superstitions”, and had basically supported the Communist effort to root them out once and for all. He is certainly not religious in any observable 5 way. So I was a little surprised to learn that he is personally very keen on suan ming, i.e. on “calculating fate”, and actually sees himself as something of an expert in it. In fact, this isn’t entirely surprising, because there is something proto-scientific about Chinese cosmology which makes it attractive to people who wouldn’t be caught dead worshipping gods. In terms of comparisons across cultures, this is a very important point. One reason for Mr Huang to concentrate on what will happen next is that quite a few bad things have, of course, already happened to him during his lifetime. However, because he does not believe in gods – unlike many people in the world, including many people in China – a theodicy, as such, isn’t of much use to him. That is, he can’t make use of a god-centred explanation of his (possibly unfair quota of) suffering. What he relies on instead is the naturalistic or quasi-naturalistic system for explaining fate which is found in Chinese cosmology/astrology.i There isn’t space here to go into the details of this system, but let me briefly explain its logic as understood by many ordinary people. Basically, what happens in the universe can be explained with reference to patterns. This is partly because the universe’s temporal cycles repeat themselves; but also because many other transformative processes in the universe (e.g. the process whereby one natural element changes into another) have their own repetitive logics. An individual, born at a particular moment in time, acquires a certain destiny. One can predict this destiny through analysing the individual’s position within the natural patterns of the universe, but one can also manipulate it in certain ways. For instance, one can reckon which days or years will be especially dangerous for certain types of activities, and then avoid them. This Chinese way of comprehending things – which is built significantly on “structural logics” in the Levi-Straussian sense – may be characterised as mathematical in orientation, and it certainly has a numerological tendency.ii For instance, fortune-tellers often simply manipulate numbers of years or days or hours in order to “calculate” (suan) the significance of a particular moment in time for an individual. If you visit a suanmingren, literally a “calculating destiny person”, you’re likely to find that among other things he writes down sequences of numbers, and literally does some calculations, 6 before discussing the possible course of events. As practices of this kind illustrate, within the Chinese cosmology numbers are held to reveal something profound about the nature of the universe and the position of individuals in it. So this is one way of pondering the future, and even quantifying it. But given that much of his life has already passed him by, what is its relevance for Mr Huang? In his house, he keeps copies of several different lunar calendars (almanacs), which contain a good deal of information useful for calculating fate, along with at least one well-thumbed specialist book about fortune telling. When he thinks of the future – e.g. when he sorts out his house-building strategy – there’s no question that the cosmological framework I’ve described comes into play. Outside experts may also be consulted, especially when very serious matters are at stake. For instance, his wife’s health was frail during my last visit, and everyone was of course taking incredibly seriously the news, from a “calculating destiny person”, that she might well die within the year to come. Another matter of concern during the time I spent with him was the fact that one of his nephews (his wife’s brother’s son) was not yet engaged to marry. It drove Mr and Mrs Huang to distraction that this young man was so nonchalant about finding a wife. Fortune-telling indicated that he had only two years within which to arrange a satisfactory match, after which the prospects for a happy outcome would dramatically decrease. On the one hand, I found it easy to sympathise with the nephew in this case, who couldn’t quite believe that things were so pressing. On the other hand, given Mr Huang’s own experience of the brutal fatefulness of life, it doesn’t surprise me that he should be anxious about the risks – and turn to the cosmological system, i.e. the system for reading the patterns of the universe, for guidance. Of course, Chinese cosmology is a very particular type of cultural-historical artefact, as is the more general “numerical orientation” – in many respects very highly elaborated – within Chinese culture and thought (cf. Stafford 2003a). And yet some of the principles 7 behind these things are undoubtedly widely shared across human cultures. So if, as I’ve been suggesting, it’s a very human thing to ask questions about what is going to happen next, it is also a very human thing to seek answers through observing the patterns of reality in numerical or quasi-mathematical terms. Obeyesekere remarks, for instance, on the “persistence and proliferation” of astrological practices (which have a numerological orientation) in South Asian lay Buddhism, and a great many other examples of this same tendency could be cited.iii Indeed, when Astuti tells us about ritual planning among the Vezo – who, as I’ve indicated, are generally very un-Chinese in their approach to the past and the future – it turns out that they, too, care a good deal about the auspiciousness of certain days and times for key activities. They consult diviners (known as ombiasa) who are specialists in the difficult task of finding “good days” within the flow of time on which important rituals can be safely held (Astuti 1995:129). It happens that the sikidy techniques used by these Malagasy diviners draw directly upon Arabic influences, and that they are explicitly numerical and mathematical in orientation (Ascher 1997). I might add that one attraction of “scientific” divination techniques of these kinds is that they resist – or at least raise the possibility of resisting – interference from humans.iv Through them, we might hope to gain direct access to the truth, while short-circuiting the messy business of human intentionality. And given the tendency of humans to interfere in the plans and projects of others, this is surely a wise move? *** Now let me turn to the second “pattern-recognition exercise” I’ve referred to, the one which has to do with patterns in interpersonal relations. In thinking about this, it may help to draw on the notion of schemas as used by cognitive anthropologists. Schemas, in simple terms, may be thought of as “learned expectations regarding the way things usually go” (Strauss & Quinn 1997:49). An advantage of schemas, in terms of cognitive efficiency, is that they free us from the need to constantly rethink the fundamental categories and practices of life. 8 So: what is the pattern or schema, in China, for “the way things usually go” in interpersonal relations? As you might expect, a proper answer to this would be hugely complex, not least because in China there are folk theories of many kinds about human relationships, the life of the emotions and so on. But in previous work I’ve stressed the organising power of what might be called the “separation and reunion” schema (Stafford 2000a, 2003b). To put it as simply as possible, this holds that the normal thing in