Annemarelle van Schayik

On the wall are handwritten notes and posters, yellow ribbons are distributed and thousands of students from various Hong Kong universities listen to student speeches and calls for action. It is September 22, 2014, the first day of a weeklong student class boycott. The kick-off was held at the Chinese University of Hong Kong [CUHK], but the following days students could be found outside the Hong Kong Government Offices where professors were giving lectures on democracy and freedom of speech.

A supporter posting his words of support at a CUHK wall. Photo courtesy Annemarelle van Schayik

Five days after the start of the student class boycott a small group of student activists would successfully climb over the fences into Civic Square, as coined by the protestors. Until July 2014 the square had been open and it had acted as a demonstrating space. Protestors saw the move to close fences at night as an attack on the freedom of assembly. A freedom considered a core value in Hong Kong. Storming the square was considered illegal and occupants were forcefully removed and taken into police custody.

The fate of the arrested was unclear for many hours and the day after Hongkongers of all walks of life took to the street. Due to poor management of the constant stream of people, the public poured onto the streets. As the evening fell, in response to the swelling number of people occupying key roads in Hong Kong’s Central district, the police used pepper spray, fired tear gas and employed batons in an attempt to disperse the crowd.

Behind the scenes: cutting and folding of yellow ribbons. Photo courtesy Annemarelle van Schayik

The use of police force shocked the city. Western media were quick to jump onto the bandwagon and write about it as a student movement. But little was written about the students who did not participate.

The movement seen through the lens of Hong Kong students when they were not protesting on the streets gives a glimpse into their political consciousness. Most students did not camp outside the Government Offices, they were not on the streets 24/7 and therefore stories of those who were not at the forefront are left untold. I was 5 minutes away from the protests when the police fired teargas, but decided not to join the ranks. Not because I did not care, but because I do. I came to Hong Kong seven years ago for studies and since then have slowly felt a sense of belonging to the city. While my heart told me to go out and stand besides my friends, my students and my fellow city residents, I did not.

Midnight meeting to decide on the continuation of the class boycott. Photo courtesy Annemarelle van Schayik

Ethnographers at times may want to participate in the environment that they are observing and so did I, but I felt that my hair and eye color would impede rather than support the movement. People who know me know I see Hong Kong as my home, I understand Cantonese and have a deep understanding of the city and Mainland China. Yet, an outsider would just see a foreigner who is ignorant about the deeper issues at stake. The Chinese Communist Party, the Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, Mainland media, as well as certain groups in Hong Kong did indeed assert that the movement was pushed by external forces, and I did not want to fuel those suspicions.

Initially I felt conflicted about not joining, but as I was talking to students I realized I could also become a participant of the unseen and unwritten stage. These included the large-scale consultation sessions on whether or not to continue the class boycott indefinitely, but also the smaller gatherings in which the safety of protesting students and the duties of those who stayed on campus were discussed.

Observing the students behind the scenes was relatively easy as I had been a student at CUHK and as I was a Resident Tutor (American RA), I was already somewhat part of the community. Students knew me as someone they could go to when they had issues so when friendship groups were falling apart due to conflicting views on the police I became the first person students would come to. In their eyes I would not judge their political affiliations and personal feelings of the movement.

The movement seemed the hardest on students who had parents or relatives working for the government because how do you defend them, but also support the movement? One strategy was to help from the sidelines by helping with the collection of food, drinks and masks that would be distributed by other students. Other students spent hours on the street much to the anger of their parents. Their strategy was to simply claim they would be sleeping at the dormitories that night and though parents may have suspected the real motives they had to let go of their, at least in a legal sense, adult children. Some students supported the cause, but not the protesting and they had to deal with attacks from their friends. And a final group simply did not care. All students dealt with psychological issues as everything a person said or did become political and led to personal attacks. University students, critical in classrooms, were suddenly overcome by emotion: you are either with us or against us.

Being at the university listening to these students, offering them comfort and, if asked, advice became, to me, much more meaningful than being on the streets. Media reported on the ruptures, disagreements and diversity of protesters on the street. My participation in the shadows showed me the psychological discomfort of all students, regardless of actual participation. This discomfort was not only due to a polarizing discourse, but perhaps also because of an unfamiliarity with politics. Hongkongers have often been labeled as apolitical and materialistic, yet in recent years the attack on what students consider Hong Kong core values and the perceived increase of Beijing intervention, has led to a rise in political consciousness. The movement and its occupation of Hong Kong roads may not have led to a change, but those who believe in the rightness of the movement and its ideals have not yet given up.

Annemarelle van Schayik is a teaching assistant at the Centre for China Studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her M.Phil dissertation focused on the lived experiences of Mainland Chinese students in Hong Kong’s tertiary institutions.

Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Memories, and Gender in Contemporary Mongolia written by Professor  Manduhai Buyandelger (MIT) won the 2014 Hsu book Prize. Tragic Spirits illustrates how shamanism has been revived by the Buryat people in Mongolia after the collapse of socialism and the further impoverishment of this marginalized ethnic group under the pressures of neoliberal capitalism. Through analyzing how economy, gender, and the state’s power influence the spirit world, Buyandelger documents the shamanistic practices that the Buryats use to make sense of their current misfortunes, reconstruct their memories, and recover their communal histories.

Yi Zhou: I love your book title, Tragic Spirits. Can you give us some background on how you chose this as your title?

Author with Darim. Photo courtesy Manduhai Buyandelger

Manduhai Buyandelger: It was visceral. It came from the consistent sadness and hurt that the supernatural beings communicated at almost every ritual that I had attended. I also wanted to convey the spirit of the place and time and what I understood about the people living through ongoing life-threatening misfortunes in the impoverished Mongolian countryside at the time of the collapse of socialism and the beginnings of capitalism.

YZ: As you stated in your book, shamanism is many things: a local epistemology, a medical practice, a political struggle, etc. Why do you prioritize shamanism’s ability to make memories and history?

MB: Shamanism and other inspirational practices have been theorized in anthropology in all sorts of ways and I spent a lot of time working through each of many framings, the epistemology, healing, resistance, etc. against my ethnographic material. But one theoretical framework seemed to downplay another. The emphasis on memory and history was inspired by many teachers and colleagues, but especially by Mary Margaret Steedly’s book Hanging without a Rope on Indonesian spirit mediums. She brings together various narratives by misfits, colonial officials, female mediums, and many others into an intricate shifting history, accompanied by a piercing analysis of postcolonial, narrative, and feminist theories. I wanted to bring in the stories of Buryat Mongolian shamans into a similar rendering. Once I began analyzing the production of memories, many other frameworks, especially the gendered politics, resistances to the colonial and socialist states as well as the influence of the market economy, began to fall into place as constitutive and constellating parts of the memory-making process.

While in the field I consistently encountered shamanism’s ability to mark lacunae and forgetting, and leave the people attending the rituals on the threshold of knowledge and who then became highly invested in attending to their experiences of epistemic crisis and interpretive dead ends! Much anthropological work tends to treat the local epistemologies as readily existing and more or less consistent. I wanted to show people’s experiences of living with forgetting, partial knowledge, and even the impossibility of knowing, especially after the state control of knowledge during socialism.

There is also a more direct answer to your question: regardless of the outcome of the rituals and the clients’ initial motives for consultations, the stories of spirits tended to take life of their own and become a part of the local history. Poignantly, most people sought shamanic help to solve their problems, especially economic devastation, but they got memories instead of resources.

YZ: How did the lens of gender help reveal the uniqueness of shamanism in the Buryat community for you, especially aspects of shamanism that otherwise would have been difficult to see?

MB: Attention to gender provides some key insights into memory making as an innovative and creative process. It was convenient to be around the generous, charismatic, and often hilariously entertaining male shamans and their families. They were the knowledge experts attracting anthropologists and tourists from all over. Because men controlled their domestic resources, the male shamans were also able to sponsor their rituals on time, mend their state-disrupted genealogies, and exclude the dangerous spirits and their disturbances.

Female shamans were usually in the midst of a series of inconveniences: their rituals stagnated, degrees postponed, resources ended, families abandoned, their spirits betrayed, and they received ambiguous messages. All of that led me to attend to the shifting qualities of history, conceptualize the ephemerality of voices, experiences of lacunae, and gendered politics behind silences.

Yet even if I just followed the male shamans it would have been hard to avoid gender issues. The vindictive spirits include male and female ancestors. But female spirits tend to be forgotten because in a patriarchal and patrilineal setting women’s names are not mentioned in genealogies, and women are discouraged from becoming shamans (which would make them into ancestral spirits after their death) by their husbands’ families. Yet in order to end the misfortunes caused by their malicious spirits, the community must appease both male and female spirits. The most qualified shamans to deal with the most malicious spirits happen to be, although not always, male. More, these male shamans must then challenge the ritual mechanisms and epistemological boundaries of shamanism that they have favored. Instead, they have to expand the neatly established notions of genealogy into a constellation of stories and include the narrative shreds about female ancestors. These efforts do not solve forgetting at a large scale, but they do something equally important; they reveal a structural crisis that is embedded in a gendered inequality in everyday practice, which is obscured in representations.

YZ: Could the Buryats’ shamanism be seen as participating in what a recent Cultural Anthropology special issue called “emergent indigeneities,” forms of indigeneity that are inextricably linked with the emergence of new ideas about politics and citizen rights (Issue 25, Vol 2, 2010)?

MB: Much of shamanism throughout Mongolia can be seen as participating in “emergent indigeneities,” as a political reaction to recent development in mining industries and the deterioration of the natural environment. But some shamans also participate in mining so it cannot be the dominant idea. “Indigeneity” would not work in ethnic terms either, as it might push the hierarchization among Mongolian ethnic groups all of which are experiencing the repercussions of extractive capitalism.

Manduhai Buyandelger is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She is the author of Tragic Spirits: Shamanism, Gender, and Memory in Contemporary Mongolia (University of Chicago Press, 2013). In her next project she explores the experiences and strategies of women candidates’ participation in Parliamentary elections in Mongolia.

Meichun Lee

An iPad, fixed by a pair of slippers on the second floor of the Legislative Yuan (the congress of Taiwan), was shooting down the chamber with its lens. On the screen of the iPad, a big banner reading “Occupy 500 Hours” covered the bottom of the portrait of Sun Yat-Sen, the national father of Republic of China, otherwise known as Taiwan, hanging high on the wall. Two entrances next to the rostrum were blocked by piles of chairs. Inside, some occupants were discussing in groups; some were fighting hard with their lunchboxes; still others, holding cameras before their eyes, were capturing images as they were being captured by the iPad. The red light on the left-top corner had been running for 500 hours. Since the very beginning of the occupation, the images of the congress had been broadcasted non-stop online by the occupants themselves.

An iPad was filming the occupation and broadcasting it online via video streaming technology. Photo courtesy Slipper Family.

Down on the first floor, more cameras, tablets, mobile phones and CCTVs were operating at almost every corner of the congress. Outside, SNG cars of major TV channels stretched out their huge electronic plates while work stations of civic journalists equipped with free and speedy Wi-Fi systems were strategically located in the occupied site. Inside and outside, it was a real-life version of The Truman Show, a miniature of the surveillance society, only in its extreme sense. Open and transparent, the core concept and the goal of the movement, had been embodied in its own nature.

The scene took place in Taipei, Taiwan when the Sunflower Movement occupied the congress and its surrounding streets in the spring of 2014 to protest against the pass of the Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement between Taiwan and China. The agreement was mocked by the Taiwanese as a “black-box agreement” since the procedure of negotiation and formulation were mostly made under the table regardless of the fact that it would influence tens of thousands of Taiwanese lives. “Anti-black box” was the most effective incentive of the movement, even more powerful than anti-trade pact, anti-government or anti-China in winning over support. A belief that the resistance to the “black-box” agreement can protect the democracy of Taiwan became so strong that open and transparent seemed to be the only remedy to cure Taiwan’s critically ill democracy.

Open and transparent was the idea that motivated young generations in Taiwan to participate in this movement. While the term “politics” had long been corrupted as a political game, the power struggle, or fights among the legislators, open and transparent was believed to be capable of “purifying” the politics and bringing it back to the foundation of equality and justice. Even more, open and transparent was the ideological weapon the people wielded against China. For many Taiwanese, China was seen as the largest threat to democracy—no freedom of speech, no open dissent, and guanxi (the personalized networks) overpowered the law. The people on the islands feared that, with its strong economic power, China would erode Taiwan’s democracy and freedom, which the people have struggled for decades to acquire. Indeed, China, not merely as a threat, was also a mirror that reflected the resistance of the Taiwanese to the era of martial law, which only ended three decades ago. The images of the supposed-to-be enemies, the KMT party in Taiwan and the Chinese Communist Party, ironically overlapped.

Occupation of the congress. Photo courtesy Slipper Family.

Embodied with the spirit of open and transparent, the occupation was destined to be exposed to the gaze of the public. Stories about drinking beer in the chamber or consuming sweets from a legislator’s office were reported by the mainstream media to show the irresponsibility and thoughtlessness of the movement while recycling and maintaining the cleanliness of the chamber became signs that the occupation was carried out by rational and responsible citizens. How to legitimize resistance in front of cameras became the critical issue. “We are not rioters, we do this out of right intention“ was the message the occupants tried to convey. The paradox thus lay at what it meant to behave well. While the occupation was to transgress the social norm, why should the occupants still behave according to the norm? One of the student leaders expressed after the movement that “prisoned in the congress, I was like an actor in those days”. Yes, acting, like The Truman Show. There was no way to escape surveillance, and one had better act in consistent with the expectation of the public in order to gain support and sympathy.

The movement was both accomplished and ruined by open and transparent. Its pursuit of transparency helped to win support from half a million Taiwanese who appeared around the congress in the massive rally on March 30th. The main slogan, “legislating the regulation before reviewing the trade pact” (xian-li-fa hou-shen-cha), aimed to make the political and economic interactions between Taiwan and China transparent under a monitoring mechanism. Such a demand was in the end accepted by the speaker of the congress. On the other hand, the omnipresent gaze from the public and the occupants themselves put great pressure on the occupation so that any radical resistance was handicapped. Even though there emerged dissenting voices, such as the critiques of global capitalism or Taiwan independence, the movement was compromised to the mildest demand of legislating a monitoring mechanism.

Whatever achieved or failed, with the encouragement of the Sunflower Movement, the pursuit of transparency in politics has continued in Taiwan. The aim to transform the representative democracy to an open and participatory one won its first victory in the election of the mayor of Taipei at the end of 2014. A non-partisan, a new face in politics, Ko Wen-Je, was elected for his proposal of “open government, civic participation, open and transparent.” This was a new page in Taiwan’s political history. With the promise and the illusion of transparency, what will the future of Taiwan look like? I would rather be optimistic while hearing so many young Taiwanese expressed as the occupation ended: “What remained unaccomplished will be our duty.”

Meichun Lee is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. Her work focuses on the political potentiality of digital images and technology in Taiwan.

Biao Xiang

Unskilled Chinese workers pay an average of US$8,000 (including US$ 3,000 “security bond” that would be confiscated if they violate any rules) in 2010 to secure a job in Japan, Singapore and South Korea, their top three choices. The high costs of international labor migration worldwide, but especially in Asia, have recently attracted high-level policy attention. The UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon stressed that “there are enormous gains to be made by lowering costs related to migration” during the General Assembly High‐level Dialogue on International Migration and Development 2013. At the same forum Asia Pacific countries identified addressing recruitment costs as one of five policy priorities.

Why do migrants have to pay so much? A strong consensus among international organizations and national governments is: private labor recruitment intermediaries are to blame. International Labour Organization launched a high-profile “Fair Recruitment Initiative” in 2014 aimed at better regulating recruiters. The U.S. Department of State and a number of intergovernmental agencies make explicit links between fee-charging labor recruiters and human trafficking, arguing that the two should be addressed together. Concerns about the costs of migration became a policy anxiety fixated at recruitment intermediaries.

A recruitment fair held by a private recruitment company in Shenyang, northeast China, 2008 (by Biao Xiang)

Surely it is intermediaries who take the money, but should we explain the fact that domestic job search normally cost the worker nothing, and most international recruiters charge employers in the beginning, and only at a later stage do they prey on migrants? Furthermore, the fees went up sharply over the last two decades, in China as well as in many other Asian countries, at the same time as communication and travel became unprecedentedly affordable, and as the number of recruiters increased that should have encouraged competition and reduced the cost. The rise in recruitment fees also took place in tandem with the tightening of migration regulation and heightening of emphasis on migrant rights protection. Only detailed field research can make sense of these paradoxical developments. A veteran in the recruitment business in Beijing told me about changes in Chinese labor migration to the Middle East in the 1990s:

In the early nineties, when I talked to the foreigners [recruiters], they told me what workers they wanted, I told them the number of our foreign currency account. The commission must be paid to the account within ten days, otherwise forget it! Or, for some countries, you pay me the commission every month [after the migrant starts working]. But now the international society talks about human rights more and more. Foreign employers and intermediaries are not allowed to deduct workers’ wages. They must meet this criteria, that criteria. The employer doesn’t want to pay commissions anymore. Nowadays, we have to get our profit from the migrants here. […] And we have to get the profits for the foreigners here too!

What happened across countries was repeated within China. First of all, despite the government’s suspicion about recruitment companies, in practice it relies on them for achieving orderly migration and protecting migrants’ rights. This is because recruitment companies, by following through increasingly complex bureaucratic procedures and fulfilling paperwork requirements, are indispensable to make migration legible and therefore governable. Migrants are not “protectable” unless they are first bureaucratically documented. Licensed recruitment companies in big cities in turn rely on subagents in the countryside to find workers. The subagents are important also because they effectively discipline workers who are working overseas by pressuring the migrants’ families, making the licensed companies attractive partners for overseas employers without tarnishing the companies’ formal image. Once such a multilevel recruitment chains are in place, every intermediary makes its cut.

Thus, the costs of migration are high not only because private agents are greedy, but also because state regulation is complex and the pressure on rights protection is high. Rather than matching demand and supply, the intermediaries’ main function seems to be manufacturing migrant legality on the surface while hiding the irregular means that create and sustain the legality (such as the subagents’ withholding migrants’ property certificates in rural China to force them to comply with border control and employer requirements). The intermediaries are not working outside of laws as usually assumed, but are firmly embedded in the operation of regulations. How the intermediaries make money is how the state make order of migration.

My ethnographic research in China, Japan, Singapore and South Korea since 2004 makes it clear that, what mediate international labor migration is not recruitment intermediaries alone, but are many actors who are intricately inter-related. Without realizing that they are in the same space of mediation as commercial intermediaries, policy makers and NGOs have taken initiatives that make migration more instead of less costly. Recruitment fees in China are particularly high not because its regulation is ineffective, but precisely because the state capacity is strong.

An instruction issued by the Japanese authorities on how a form should be filled. A foreign worker has to fill up an additional 37 forms issued by the Japanese government with the same level of meticulousness when applying for visa (by Biao Xiang)

The mediation processes are not ephemeral or transient, passively bridging pre-defined demands of other actors and then disappear once others’ demand are satisfied; they have developed their own structure and quasi- autonomous dynamics, and actively shaped all the actors involved. The structure of the space of mediation is probably more important in effecting actual migration processes than market demand, state policy or migrant decision alone. It should be foregrounded and studied in its own right. Beyond migration, the notion of space of mediation may also provide a tool for investigating ethnographically more general social transformations that take place on multiple fronts that often appear contradictory, like what we witness in China today.

Biao XIANG teaches anthropology and migration at the University of Oxford

The Minzu University of China hosted China’s first conference on “Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Chinese Culture” on June 21-22 in Beijing. Anthropologists, filmmakers, and NGO representatives from America, Germany, Mainland China, and Taiwan offered diverse perspectives that sought the theoretical and practical development of visual anthropology as an important lens to understand contemporary Chinese culture and social dynamics.

Conference on “Visual Anthropology and Contemporary Chinese Culture”

This two-day conference had five major panels: The Embodied Momentum of Ethnographic Film, Theory and Methodology of Visual Anthropology, Film-making in the Countryside and Local Communities, Visual Anthropology and Cultural Heritage Protection, and A Round Table Discussion on Visual Anthropology and Media Communication. Along with in-depth discussions focusing on visual anthropology as a new yet powerful research field, many panelists tried to braid it together with anthropological traditions and topics unique to China. Many of them, for instance, focused their research on the ethnic groups that constituted the multiplicities of China’s contemporary culture. The photographic and filmic images used in presentations reinforced their arguments and detailed the religions, human-nature relationships, and everyday lives of the Tibetan people, Wa people, and Amis tribe in Taiwan, etc. Another key anthropological study area in post-Mao China has been the interrelations between the cities and countryside which has drawn scholars’ attention to media and mediation. They discussed how media – the city mechanism– depicted and culturally translated life in the countryside for the audience, how life in the countryside has been (re)produced by the media discourses, and how media may possibly contribute to peasants’ new forms of subjectivity.

The conference also highlighted China’s social movements that have been put in motion by media and visual culture. The NGO of “Leimin Visual Studio – Youth Visual Plan and Action ” records the voices of the socially marginalized people and mobilizes the young citizens to pursue social justice. “Eyes of the village – Nature and Culture Documentation Project”, a group made up of anthropologists and filmmakers, aims at training villagers to use the film equipment. Villagers hence replace the visual anthropologists as ethnographic filmmakers and narrate their own stories. The representatives from these projects introduced their activities in the conference and also raised the ethical questions: how do anthropologists deal with films which are records of sacred rituals and ceremonies that only the villagers as cultural insiders could access and document? What are the results of showing the films to the local communities in which the “villager-directors” have recorded the private and personal aspects of their daily lives?

During the screening times, more than twenty ethnographic films were shown adding further depth to the discussions. Below are the links for several trailers with English subtitles that panelists kindly shared.

1. “Returning Souls” by Taili Hu：

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZAEH-Gmq1pE

Description: In the historically most famous ancestral house of the matrilineal Amis tribe in Taiwan, the carved pillars tell legends, such as the great flood, the glowing girl, the descending shaman sent by the Mother Sun, and the father-killing headhunting event. After a strong typhoon toppled the house 40 years ago, the pillars were moved to the Institute of Ethnology Museum. Recently young villagers, with the assistance of female shamans, pushed the descendants and village representatives to communicate with ancestors in the pillars. They eventually brought the ancestral souls（rather than the pillars）back and began reconstructing the house. In an environment highly influenced by western religions, national land policy, and local politics, the dream of the young people for cultural revitalization and to bring back not only the ancestral souls but also the soul of the village encountered many frustrations. This documentary interweaves reality and legends as well as the seen and the unseen as it records this unique case of repatriation.（85 minutes)

Taili Hu: Researcher, Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica, Taiwan

2. “The Wonder of Water” by Wangta:

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcX6WYzlMXM

Description: Wangta is from Jisha Village of Xiao Zhongdian Town, Shangri-la country. Besides farming, he used to drive a huge truck to deliver cargo. He participated in the training workshop of “Eyes of the Village – Nature and Culture Documentation Project” which was organized by Shan Shui Conservation Center. He then picked up a video camera to record several environmental disasters that took place in Jisha Village which he later edited into a film titled “Jisha Chronicles”. He also likes to shoot daily life and festival ceremonies of Jisha Village and share his video clips with his community members. Through documenting various rites and Tibetan people’s narration about the role of water in their lives in Yunnan, his work “Wonder of Water” tells about the views of Tibetans about water in a poetic manner.

Wangta: Villager, Jisha Village of Xiao Zhongdian Town, Shangri-la country

Bing Lu: Representative, Eyes of the Village – Nature and Culture Documentation Project

3. “Peasants Family Happiness” by Jenny Chio

Trailer: http://vimeo.com/33633767

Please see Chio’s article on “Peasants Family Happiness”: 

http://www.anthropology-news.org/index.php/2014/03/11/2013-david-plath-media-award/

Jenny Chio: Assistant Professor of Anthropology and associated faulty in Film and Media Studies, Emory University