It's nice to theorize about Chinese and other societal modes of reciprocation based on what one learned in courses some three (or more) decades ago, but as someone who spent seven weeks in China in mid 1998 traveling all over the country after giving some lectures at Rinbin (People's) University in Beijing at the invitation of the head of the sociology institute who I had met when I invited him to speak at my university where we had Chinese students from the PRC for some years as well as from Taiwan and faculty from Taiwan including one PhD from Michigan (in demography) in my department twice as a visitor who I got to know well, not to mention visiting and being involved with many Chinese in Toronto when I taught there including a fellow faculty member from China who I had known as a student in the US as well as on in innumerable visits to family in Toronto and suburbs and visiting people's homes in China in Beijing and smaller cities, visiting locations in China with one other American and a Chinese student as interpreter, traveling backpack on Chinese transport of all types from tiny mini bus to regular bus, train, airplane and river boat to huge cities Beijing, Shanghai, Chungching, Nanjing,some then moderate size cities Xian, Wuhan, Suchow ... as well as tiny isolated villages in the countryside; in all size places often people did not want to sit or stand next to "white" foreigners. I have often been given small gifts or tokens or meals with no form of reciprocation or favor expected or any form of bribe to expedite acceptance or assistance in obtaining admission to a university or other position I could help them obtain. I have been given small cultural tokens after students I had taught or befriended during their study here -- students from the US, China, Korea, Chile, Austria, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria, Sweden that had no relation to any population size of the location where I met them or taught them. So much for theoretical concepts as permanent rules on a list service devoted to Charles S. Peirce.
Harold L. Orbach Emeritus, Kansas State University Sent from my iPhone On Jun 10, 2014, at 2:25 PM, "Edwina Taborsky" <tabor...@primus.ca<mailto:tabor...@primus.ca>> wrote: Ulysses - well, we do have our differences; I taught anthro for 30 years - and certainly don't see a tribe as in any way non-stratified, for there can be and usually are, hierarchies of hereditary authority in a large tribe. Indeed, since a tribe is also a political entity, there HAVE to be clear lines of authority and non-authority. You can't have 1,000 different voices in a collective system. Furthermore, 'culturally distinctive' is an ambiguous term and doesn't define, per se, a 'tribe'. After all, it can define a clan, an ethnic group, a religious group etc. And yes, I know all about the phatries and moieties and these terms have no relevance to this discussion. Of course a clan is a mode of political organization, as is a tribe, for any organization of society establishes 'who has the authority to make decisions in that group', be it a clan or tribe'...and that focus on who-has-authority defines the political activities of the group. Is it the elders - all the elders? Is it one hereditary family? Is it the men? The women? Is it one subclan in the tribe? You are misunderstanding the notion of tribalism in my analysis of Chinese society. By tribalism I mean as differentiated from a civic societal organization. A society organized within the tribal mode views interactions between people to operate within a network of personal obligations akin to those within a family. Guanxi, in the old Chinese ideology (Confucian) is the visible method of establishing networks of personal obligations and expectations. Therefore, you must interact with people on a personal level - and you 'get things done' - within the network of bonded interactions. The 'gifts' are signs of the recognition, by both sides, of this bonded obligation. This is not the same as corruption. No-one is doubting that China is as a nation, operating politically and economically as a state. BUT, it hasn't shaken its old infrastructure of local, not national, agriculture - and that was politically and societally - tribal - understanding tribal as meaning based around kin-networks of obligations and expectations. I used to tell my students that it takes at least three generations to change a societal ideology. Much of China is still agricultural - and a large proportion of the population, even those in cities, remain ideologically embedded in the 'old ways', and these are not Mao's ways, for he ignored and indeed rejected the vast diversity of China, in its peoples, dialects/languages, economic modes etc. You can't ignore this diversity by trying to establish one size-fits-all in a geographic territory with such huge ecological diversity. Blood kinship or marriage is not the only method of establishing kin-based or tribal networks. The very notion of loyalty to those with whom one interacts need not be biological. In, for example, the smallest societal groups, bands, the kin bonds are NOT necessarily biological or based on marriage. It's the notion of personal loyalty and bonds that defines tribalism. The civic mode, on the other hand, rejects interactions based only on personal bonds and instead, inserts a mode of interaction based on the work-action (not the persons involved). So, you treat the patient because of your obligation to your profession. In the tribal society, you treat the patient because of your obligation to the personal network and to the person. You can immediately see that one mode functions in very large populations (civic) and the other, in smaller populations. The civic model developed to deal with very large populations; the tribal model was dominant for most of human history - and functioned in smaller populations. I don't see that this focus on 'getting things done for each other out of personal interactions and loyalty' - which is the tribal mode - has anything to do with a reaction to communism. And people in modern China (and India etc) don't form relationships with bureaucrats to reduce the severity of life. They BRIBE bureaucrats to get things done because the centralized communist system has, all on its own, decentralized into local personalized power-blocs and local powerful authorities immersed in nepotism. You have to deal with them by the tribal method of acknowledging their personal existence and their power rather than appealing to their civic duty. And the method of acknowledgment is: bribes. That's the only term for it. I don't see that defining guanxi as bribery has anything to do with 'reductionism'. Indeed, the old guanxi is not the same - and I think you are making an error in trying to conflate the two. To have to resort to bribery to get anything done in these dysfunctional bureaucracies is unethical, and for you to suggest that it's merely 'a different culture with different morals' seems to me to be cultural relativism at its worst. What 'unilinear concepts of cultural evolution'? There's no such thing. But there ARE clear cut normative modes of societal organization according to the size of the population. And population sizes are directly related to the economic modes..and the economy is directly related to the ecological realities of the area, the biome. So, in a biome with rich soil, plenty of accessible water, readily domesticated plants and animals - you can develop a large population. In a biome with poor soil, water problems, climate problems, local plant and animal problems - you can only sustain a small population. And, all over the world, the modes of societal organization will be the same - even though the people have never met - dependent on the size of the population. {That's my first year ecological anthro course...in part]. The article was flawed in its ignorance of Peircean pragmatics and its ignorance of the difference between a tribal and civic mode of societal organization - and - its ignorance that bribery, in a large population, is not the same as semiotic signs of personal network obligations in a smaller population and has nothing to do with Peircean pragmatics or indeed, any philosophical theory of pragmatics. Edwina ----- Original Message ----- From: U Pascal<mailto:upas...@gmail.com> Cc: Peirce List 1<mailto:peirce-l@list.iupui.edu> Sent: Tuesday, June 10, 2014 2:28 PM Subject: Re: [PEIRCE-L] Re: NYTimes : From China, With Pragmatism Edwina I subscribe to the contemporary definitions of terms used by cultural anthropologists. Clan: a group that claims unilineal descent from the same ancestor, though the actual genealogical path to that ancestor need not be specified/specifiable. The ancestor often is thought of as a mythical being called a totem. Tribe: nonstratified, cultural distinctive kin-based society note: yes, kin-relations include biological descent and perceived descent. Though this degree of subjectivity is not flexible enough to accommodate your doctor on the basis of giving him a gift. A combination of clans is a phratry. In the case that a tribe is composed of two clans each clan is termed a moiety. Segments of clans are termed lineages. Clans are not forms or units of political organization. They exist in a variety of forms of political organization, such as bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. Tribes are a form of political organization often based upon clan lineage though they may be based upon cognatic descent groups as well. There is no doubt that contemporary China is a state. The fact that there are networks of reciprocity does not entail the society is tribal, as the form of political organization is not based on a kinship or marriage. Giving gifts cements social interaction. period. the interaction need not be ‘familial.’ Again, a Hongbao is not a dowry. Over 680 million people live in China’s cities, which is over half of the entire Chinese population and over double the population of the United States. So I do not know what your claim that ‘China is still strongly in the grip of its old agricultural mode of life’ is supposed to mean. I suppose I agree insofar as what you mean is that China has a cultural history with some continuities. Frankly, I do not see guanxi networks as a carry-over from agrarian life as much as I see it as an adaptation on part of local agnatic cadres to “civic” life under maoist dictatorship/managerial corporatism. If you wish to judge local cadres for attempting to reduce the severity of life under maoist communism by forming relationships with state bureaucrats there is likely nothing I can say to convince you otherwise. The reduction of guanxi to bribery is very common western reaction. While there indeed is overlap between guanxi gifts and bribery, guanxi can operate within bureaucratic norms. In any case ‘bribery’ —as well as unilinear conceptions of cultural evolution— are highly morally inflected categories to impose on a culture. I do not see any scientific or analytical benefit to imposing moralizing categorizes on any subject of research, especially on other cultures with different moral frameworks than your own. But all-in-all I agree that the article is fatally flawed in its attempt to link the teaching of American Pragmatism in Chinese universities to colloquially ‘pragmatic’ justifications for guanxi and hongbao. ---Ulysses On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 1:02 PM, Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net<mailto:jawb...@att.net>> wrote: Phyllis, Oh, I think I grokked the spirit with which you posted that, but it caught me headed off to bed and I couldn't manage any response more articulate than what I did. On third thought, I'll leave any public protest to those who have the energy and/or haven't already tilted with the ever-indominable windmills of mainscream press and popular understanding, whether it be about pragmatism or anything else more complex than hockey scores. Regards, Jon Phyllis Chiasson wrote: Jon & List, I didn't mean it was worth reading because it was a great treatise of pragmatism, Peirce's or otherwise, but because it wasn't and it was in the NY Times. I wonder if there is a message here for us-something like taking control of the way pragmatism is defined. I think a piece like this needs careful, objective analysis and refutation. I thought the comments about social Darwinism were especially important, considering how long it has held on as a justification for the sort of economic and social specialness we're encountering today. Gospel of greed might be a good place to start. Maybe we need to form a PAC for effectively communicating Peirce's concepts the masses. Regards, Phyllis Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net<mailto:jawb...@att.net>> wrote: Yes, thankfully a few of them saved me from total despair. Jon http://inquiryintoinquiry.com On Jun 9, 2014, at 1:05 AM, Phyllis Chiasson <ath...@olympus.net<mailto:ath...@olympus.net>> wrote: Did you read the comments following the piece? Jon Awbrey <jawb...@att.net<mailto:jawb...@att.net>> wrote: good grief, what tripe ... -- academia: http://independent.academia.edu/JonAwbrey my word press blog: http://inquiryintoinquiry.com/ inquiry list: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/ isw: http://intersci.ss.uci.edu/wiki/index.php/JLA oeiswiki: http://www.oeis.org/wiki/User:Jon_Awbrey facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/JonnyCache ----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu<mailto:peirce-L@list.iupui.edu> . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu<mailto:l...@list.iupui.edu> with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm . -- Ulysses ________________________________
----------------------------- PEIRCE-L subscribers: Click on "Reply List" or "Reply All" to REPLY ON PEIRCE-L to this message. PEIRCE-L posts should go to peirce-L@list.iupui.edu . To UNSUBSCRIBE, send a message not to PEIRCE-L but to l...@list.iupui.edu with the line "UNSubscribe PEIRCE-L" in the BODY of the message. More at http://www.cspeirce.com/peirce-l/peirce-l.htm .
