'보편' 중국의 부상과 인류학의 국가중심성 비판
The Emergence of “Chinese Universality” and the Anthropological Critiques of State Centrality
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중국을 ‘비서구’ 위치에 두면서 ‘서구’식 개념화를 비판해 온 인류학 접근이 ‘서구’를 극복하면서 ‘보편’의 지위를 도모하는 최근의 중국을 어떻게 이해하고 분석할 수있는가? 본 논문은 ‘보편’ 중국이라는 쟁점에 한국의 중국 인류학이 어떻게 화답할 수 있는가를 탐색하는 시론적 성격을 갖는다. 국가를 상위의 실체로 가정하면서 구심적 힘의 행사를 정당화 하는 ‘국가중심성(state centrality)’이 서구의 인식론적 우위를 자명한 것으로 만든 현대화 기획의 결과이자 조건임을 환기시키면서, 본 연구는 서구가 스스로를 ‘보편’으로 정립하기 위해 거쳐 온 작업과 ‘보편’ 중국 기획의 관계를 규명할 출발점으로 인류학자들의 국가중심성 비판을 검토한다. 그간 한국 인류학자들의 중국 연구는 ‘국가-사회 관계’ 패러다임에 역동성과 다양성을 부여하면서 ‘하나의 중국’이라는 이데올로기에균열을 내고, 국민국가의 경계를 고착화 하지 않는 이주와 마주침(encounter)에 주목하면서 정치적 상상의 지평을 확대해왔다. 하지만, 중국이 서구 자본주의와 민족주의 역사에 독점되지 않는 방향으로 국가 개념 자체를 바꿔내고자 한다면 기존 국가 개념의 자명성을 낯설게 보는 작업은 얼마나 유효한가? 서구의 인식론적 우위에 균열을 내는 해체론적 작업은 단순히 신흥 강대국이 아니라 “또 다른 보편”이 되고자 하는 중국의 과업을 분석하는데 여전히 곤경을 유발한다. 이러한 곤경은 ‘보편’ 중국이 새롭게 창안하는 개념들을 직접 문제 삼는 대신 서구의 중국 인식 비판에 초점을 맞춘 영미 유학파 출신 중국 인류학의 접근을 재고하고, 서구의 ‘보편’을 문제화 하면서도 이론의 가공지로서 그 영원한우위를 암묵적으로 가정해온 성찰적 인류학을 재성찰할 기회를 제공한다.
Abstract
Since the late twentieth century, anthropology, an inherent field of the West’s geography of imagination, has based its primary mission in resisting the epistemological dominance of Western powers. China remained as a part of “non-West” in the discipline’s discursive field. In recent times, however, what we witness is China’s attempt to refuse the West world order and position its status as “universal.” Like Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls “North Atlantic universals,” that is, “words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they themselves have helped to create,” Chinese universals do not simply describe the world but offer visions of the world. They are prescriptive inasmuch as they suggest what is desirable or not. In this article, I examine anthropological critiques of state centrality in order to problematize “Chinese universality” in its analogous relationship to “Western universality.” State centrality, that is, the production of “the state” as an overarching entity, is deeply intertwined with managerial projects of modernization, which have naturalized the imaginary production of the West. As I introduced, many scholars who engage in the anthropology of the state have shedded light on state centrality as a “precarious achievement” (James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta), arguing that the seeming centrality of the state is recognized and produced through a series of state practices and processes. Like capitalism, the seeming systematicity of the state results from “the historically specific, nondeterministic encounters that create it” (Lieba Faier and Lisa Rofel). I have reviewed two dimensions in which South Korean anthropologists who study China have contributed to the critiques of state centrality. One is the paradigm of state-society relations. Long-term fieldwork in villages, migrant enclaves or multi-sites between rural and urban, which is rarely found in other disciplines and frequently frustrated in the People’s Republic of China, has helped anthropologists to unveil the dynamics embedded in the relationship between state and society and, furthermore, explore the precarious and patchy nature of state centrality. Given those dynamics, it is not a priori but an event that must be examined to unconsciously identify “China” with “the Chinese state,” “the Chinese government” or “the Communist Party.” However, the binary state-society framework is subject to a reductionist trap, even though one underlines complexities between “state” and “society” as well as within each category. Anthropological attention to migration and encounter has also contributed to unfolding state centrality instead of taking it as a taken-for-granted fact. Many anthropologists have refused to accept the nation-state and its boundaries as a given in their analysis. With an ethnographic eye to cross-border encounters, they have examined how state processes and practices are made and remade through unequal relationship involving various groups of natives and migrants. Those encounters are made in multiple sites such as the Sino-Korean border, Huaqiao associations or schools, multinational corporations, migrant enclaves in China and South Korea, and so forth. However, are such anthropologists’ efforts to denaturalize Eurocentric conceptualizations valid indeed if China attempts to change the concept of “the state” in a way that it is not monopolized by West-centered histories of capitalism and nationalism? China increasingly seeks “Chinese universality” against “Western universality” as well as “a new superpower” against American hegemony. Anthropological critiques of state centrality, which center on disrupting Western epistemology, are limited in investigating the former. From nostalgic futurity of a “Greater China” to the revival of the ancient notion of “All under Heaven” (tianxia) and the tribute (chaogong) system, recent China scholarship pursues a unique and historically sedimented path for universalism, in which China is “much more than just another culture” (Frank N. Pieke). I demonstrate that such predicament, not simply indicative of a failure, offers a reflexive moment for anthropology in two ways. First, it newly problematizes the academic trajectory of South Korean anthropologists of China, inquiring what it means for them to center on Western critiques against Western epistemology, not China scholarship in their own country, as their primary interlocutor. Mostly trained in North Atlantic regions and influenced by “reflexive” turn in the discipline of anthropology, these anthropologists are well-versed in provincializing “Western universality”: however, most of them are not sufficiently prepared for analyzing historically layered concepts that Chinese scholars newly introduced or invoked in order to re-position their nation as a birthplace of “theory.” Second, and more importantly, anthropologists’ predicament offers an opportunity to critically rethink a reflexive turn in anthropology. In the discipline of anthropology, “reflexivity” commonly refers to ethnographers’ awareness of their relationship to the field of study. Since the late 1970s, many anthropologists have reflected on both fieldwork and ethnographic writing, questioning how they are saturated with the colonial baggage of their discipline, as well as with the problematic representation of otherness. Reflexive anthropology has thus paid serious attention to the power relations of knowledge production while indicating the inherent asymmetry between “the West as the producer of theory” and “the non-West as the supplier of data.” However, anthropologists’ difficulty in situating “Chinese universality” in their theoretical framework leads us to question if “reflexivity” in anthropology is nothing but an Eurocentric action of tolerance as a governing technology. Borrowing from Wendy Brown’s conceptualization of “tolerance,” I emphasize that the action of tolerance inevitably affords some access to superiority while marking subjects of tolerance as inferior or marginal. In all, the emergence of “Chinese universality” suggests that even reflexive anthropology is not immune from a tendency to presuppose the permanent superiority of “the West as the producer of theory.”