Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell Us about China Today

Deep China: The Moral Life of the Person: What Anthropology and Psychiatry Tell us about China Today, by Arthur Kleinman, Yunxiang Yan, Jing Jun, Sing Lee, Everett Zhang, Pan Tianshu, Wu Fei and Guo Jinhua. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. ? + 311 pp. US$65.00/ £44.95 (hardcover), US$26.95/£18.95 (paperback), US$26.95 (eBook).This is one of the most important books on China to be published in recent years. One can tell immediately by the seriousness of the title (Deep China) and the stature of its eight contributors (most notably pre-eminent anthropologistpsychiatrist Arthur Kleinman) that this is no ordinary collection of what- to continue the depth psychology metaphor- must necessarily focus on the surface. The aim of this book is to find what is profoundly true in contemporary China. It is concerned with "the moral life of the person", drawing on resources from anthropology and psychiatry. Aside from Kleinman, the contributors are all originally Chinese (including from Hong Kong) - and his former students. Six are anthropologists; one is a psychiatrist.The book's focus is on change and transformation. In most chapters, China's pre-Revolutionary past is ancient history. In keeping with the dominant Chinese narrative, certain moments are landmarks: the Cultural Revolution, the reform era, Deng Xiaoping's southern tour in 1992, and some vague sense of the current moment, characterized by cosmopolitanism and the Internet, middle-class prosperity and China's increased international power.This has been a dizzying half-century for Chinese citizens, and individuals have experienced disorienting changes in what life means. While affected by politics and economics, every individual also lives a personal life. Every person comes from a family and has some kind of affective life, as well as some kind of value system. Putting things like contemporary nationalism into a framework of personal meaning is powerful, and to some extent reverses the line of causality that dominates offhand public discourse. This book reverses facile pontificating. It presents painstaking, long-term inquiry into the most private and intimate of concerns, possible only with a commitment to the region and its people; it seeks to uncover trends beneath the obvious.I found the most moving chapters to be those on morality, depression, suicide, stigma and meaning. These seemed to delve most deeply to an inner core that can in turn generate other more observable phenomena. (The other chaptersalso meritorious, but more specific- concern blood donation, changing ideas of sexuality and Shanghai s cultural landscape.) If we are after explanatory power, the deeper the rule, the broader the implications (to borrow from generative grammar's original formulation).Metaphors permeate social science (and natural science) research. Those of depth and inwardness have been somewhat out of fashion for the last two decades, as a postmodern focus on practice has dominated scholarship. Here, however, we find the reverse: sincere grappling with something real, dark, profound and less visible. I credit this focus to the moral earnestness of Kleinman and the other contributors, themselves prominent in the subsequent generation of China scholars.The depths of the book are evident from the chapter titles. …