Food and Environment in Early and Medieval China. E. N. Anderson

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СКАЧАТЬ foodways studies like those brought together by Cheung and Tan (2007) emphasize the fact that from early times, China was involved in a huge, active network of trade and contact. The Chinese created a great civilization that has its own wonderful and fascinating features but is broadly parallel to other civilizations and went through the same stages as other civilizations: invention of agriculture, development of settled life, construction of great cities, development of law codes, and the rest.

       Diffusion, Cultural Choice, and Chinese Distinctiveness

      Those points are rather obvious, but they are worth stating because they stand in contrast to the old Orientalist view, still not uncommon in China studies. It holds that China is unique, homogeneous, and isolated and that its civilization cannot be compared with any other. Often it adds the idea that the Chinese live in a world of mystical correspondences, ancient texts, and changeless 2,500-year-old thoughts that are “not true philosophy” (whatever that may mean), rather than in a world where people concern themselves with food, clothing, and shelter and are quite willing to update or selectively reapply ancient guides.

      Students of agriculture, metallurgy, and other “manual arts” have long recognized that China influenced, and was influenced by, other cultures; but students of medicine, political theory, philosophy, poetry, and other arts of the mind, including perceptions of the environment, still sometimes insist that China can be interpreted only on its own terms. They appear to believe the Chinese had not only different theories but different physical realities from the rest of humanity.

      This belief in the uniqueness and changelessness of Chinese culture seems based, ultimately, on a Platonic view of the world. Plato held that we know only what is in our heads, and we can meditate to full knowledge of the Ideal. In contrast, his student Aristotle held that we must try to find out what we can about real, tangible things out there in the world. Western civilization has ever since been trying to deal with the difference between studying things of the mind and studying things that we can all see, touch, and discuss on the basis of the knowledge from those senses. Many people, especially in the humanities, prefer a broadly Platonic approach; they are more comfortable in a world of ideas. Others, especially in the hard sciences, are Aristotelian. The Chinese fail to make a huge distinction, and I have always followed them in this; I prefer to study both and to use both approaches in studying particular cultural matters.

      Pointing out that China shared basic perceptions of agriculture with the West does not mean that they had the same crops or production systems. Pointing out that China shares much medical knowledge with the West does not mean Chinese medicine is merely some sort of variant of world medicine. The middle ground is the only tenable one: Chinese, like Westerners, responded to real-world conditions, but they responded in ways conditioned by the cultural and personal environments and knowledge systems they brought to the task.

      Ultimately, however, agriculture has to produce food, and medicine has to provide at least some visible curing. Thus there is constant feedback from reality in both cases. Every society produces not one, but many, distinctive solutions, with different styles, perceptions, philosophies, and experiences. Wheat, maize, millet, and potatoes can all be starch staples. Beans, peas, cattle, pigs, and many other species can provide protein (contrary to myth, bean protein is not “incomplete”).

      In medicine, the body is basically the same everywhere, and malaria, dysentery, and smallpox vary only with the local microbial strains; but cultural understandings of the body, and above all the solutions people invent for their health problems, differ profoundly. Yet they are not in free variation; people want to be healed, and hence it is no surprise to find that the Chinese found many perfectly effective cures. Qinghaosu (Artemisia annua) cures malaria whether one is a traditional Chinese or a modern Brazilian. The difference between old China and modern Brazil lies not in the effect but in the perception: it determines whether one attributes the effects of the drug to its qi or to the toxic effect of artemisinin on Plasmodium falciparum. This is not a simple contrast of “error” and “truth,” nor is it merely two different arbitrary cultural claims. It is a difference between an early, sincere, serious, well-thought-out scientific theory that is now in some ways inadequate, and a later serious, well-thought-out theory that is clearly more accurate but will no doubt prove inadequate in the future. We do well to respect all those who have seriously tried to understand these matters, and to understand their understandings as serious theorizing—not as some sort of random cultural noise or ignorant mysticism. Cultural arbitrariness of the sort alleged by postmodernists would never have let anyone find qinghaosu in the first place or observe its effects.

      Kwang-chih Chang (2002a) pointed out that early China shared with Native American cultures a basic sense of continuity between humans and the rest of the cosmos—animals, plants, hills, stars. This was a concept that the Chinese themselves discussed with words like “harmony” (he) and “resonance.” The West, in his view, committed itself to a rupture not only between people and nature but also between people and the gods. This he traces back to ancient Sumer (K.-c. Chang 2002). Chang rather exaggerates—I believe for effect—but the difference is real—and critically important. Any lingering doubts about the importance of the idea of continuity were removed when Mao imported to China the quintessentially Western idea of struggling against nature. Within a few decades, China had devastated an environment that five millennia of imperfect but concerned management had at least partially preserved (E. Anderson 2012; Marks 2012).

      Even this case, however, was not open-and-shut. The West is not wholly anti-nature, and China was certainly not environmentally perfect. The West has Celtic poetry, Renaissance botany, and the conservation movement to remind us of our intimate connections with nature. China has its love of the “heat and noise” (renao) of cities and its fear of wild beasts to balance the poetic love of “mountains and water” (shanshui) that define so much of its art. How much the very real difference prevails, and how and why it matters, is a question for serious investigation.

      The Chinese fondness for continuity and the Western fondness for rupture, or dichotomy, is seen also in the west’s Platonic/Aristotelian conflict and the Chinese lack of such a conflict. The Chinese never doubted that the world is important to know and that how we think of it is also important. Another example of continuity versus rupture is seen in religion. The Chinese and their neighbors have been relatively religiously tolerant compared to the West. The Chinese had many conflicts between Confucians and Daoists, Daoists and Buddhists, and the state and Islam; they also had to deal with millennial rebellions, the most clearly faith-driven being the Taipings. Still, it seems that China has nothing in its premodern history comparable to the Crusades, especially the Albigensian Crusade, the Fourth Crusade, and others that targeted “other” Christians rather than Muslims. China did not have anything quite like Europe’s Wars of Religion or like the many sectarian conflicts within Islam. Many recent scholars have seen fascism and Communism religions (of a sort), which would add those ideologies to the pool of Western divisive ideas. Since 1800, the Chinese have become increasingly Westernized in these matters: the Muslim and Taiping rebellions of the nineteenth century had major religious components, and with Communism China adopted an exclusive dogma. The contrast with earlier dynasties is instructive.

      Central Asian regimes were even more tolerant than the Chinese. The Khitans and Mongols of their golden era were dramatically tolerant. One can see a first documentation of this attitude in Cyrus’s religious tolerance in ancient Persia; his dynasty came from Central Asia.

      Related to the debate over China’s uniqueness is a question of how much China is like the rest of the world. Chinese civilization does indeed broadly resemble civilizations elsewhere. This similarity can come from parallel invention—ancient Chinese farms and cities looked a lot like ancient Aztec ones—but more often it comes from actual borrowing. However, China is so obviously distinctive in many ways that one is always tempted to ignore such evidence of the unity of humankind.

      The debate between those who see “a culture” as a unique, harmonious whole and those who СКАЧАТЬ