China Review International

What ties these three books together is the sense that the historical or ethnographic reconstruction of earlier time periods is an educated guess at how things "really" might have been, an approach to an epistemologically impossible condition of knowing all the relevant facts about the time, place, peoples, and belief systems one is investigating in order to understand their significance. The authors/editors of these volumes suggest, through their narrative and editorial choices of ethnographic, historical, religious, and anthropological material, that we must deal with the fact that our conceptions of what "really" happened are fluid and subject to revision. This position attempts to tread the narrow border between a cultural/historical relativism that risks devaluing updated results of genuine, competent, and serious research and the much slighted "myth" of progress that suggests that we are getting a better and fuller (more accurate) picture of things rather than simply changing our vantage point.¹ To put this in plainer language, the authors of these volumes suggest that their predecessors were wrong about certain things relating to their topics, which of course is fair justification for publishing new material, yet the findings in these three books suggest also that what they propose may best be looked at as temporary stopping points on a much longer journey.

The three volumes reviewed here take an appropriately postmodern look at the state of knowledge in their respective areas of investigation in that these texts aim, in some degree, to break down or "deconstruct" prevailing views of their topics. Liu and Shek's volume examines the explanatory function of "heterodoxy," seemingly a part of Chinese culture from its earliest foundations as a kind of "minority" position, and through such consideration whether the idea of a "unified" development of Chinese culture can begin to be effectively challenged. What [End Page 13] Liu and Shek suggest, in effect, is a China that has been in profound dialogue with itself since its very beginnings. Similarly, Cohen examines the interdependence and sophistication of late imperial economic culture, religion, family, and government and the traces of this cultural complex in contemporary Chinese society, questioning whether the generally accepted idea of the Chinese peasant and rural backwardness needs to be reassessed in the light of the evidence he brings forth. Di Cosmo and Wyatt, too, attempt to challenge prevailing orthodoxies regarding the long trajectory of China's cultural formation, with the aim of destabilizing, through an examination of newly envisioned boundaries, our view of the entity that we call "China," the China that we have come to know and believe in and which is perhaps not the whole picture.

The first volume, Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China, attempts to situate heterodox practice, which the editors define in the Introduction as "dissent that challenges certain premises of culture-the beliefs and meanings of the established norm" (p. 1), within the larger historical framework of so-called Chinese orthodoxy, the persistent, though not entirely static idea of which views and practices were thought to be properly Chinese and which were not. This said, the volume perhaps has the curious function of serving ultimately to further define Chinese orthodoxy, since all heterodox thought and practice is by definition seen as heterodox only in relation to what is perceived as orthodox. And because heterodoxy was seen as being in opposition to orthodox practice, which tended to be sanctioned by the government, heterodoxy is almost by definition viewed as destructive, as indeed it was in a number of cases. What is particularly interesting is the sense that heterodox practice naturally arose at certain "pressure" points in society, where...