Life in the Menagerie
Orientalism treated the entire "Orient" as an
object to be dissected, defined and studied, and the West China Border Research
Society took the same approach to its surroundings, transforming the cultural
and physical landscape of West China into a single
object for study. Since the Orient and
Orientals were something one could put under a microscope to study, it made
sense to treat both the human and
nonhuman elements as objects. Rev.
Thomas Torrance, a missionary and Society member, eloquently articulated this
attitude in his article "Notes on the West China Aboriginal Tribes,"
albeit eschewing the microscope for a cage.
Ideally, researchers could construct a "human menagerie"
through which a scientist could "at his ease... study all by measuring
their skulls, comparing their chatter, studying their habits, recording their
diseases and noting their religious tendencies." Torrance
noted that any such project would not be attempted for some time, and humbly
offered his notes and observations of the people in its place.
Torrance's ideal
of a "human menagerie" was essentially an anthropological museum,
which allowed viewers to access truth through careful scrutiny of the human
object. Steven Conn has discussed the
importance of museums to American intellectual culture during the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, arguing that museums were premised on
an "object-based epistemology."
This way of knowing emphasized material objects as points of access for
truth. "Late nineteenth century
Americans held a belief that objects, at least as much as texts, were sources
of knowledge and meaning," Conn
wrote. "Many believed that objects,
systematically arranged, could make perfect sense of the world." This epistemology defined much of the work of
the West China Border Research Society; members sought after artifacts,
anthropometric measurements, and specimens (human and otherwise) to fill the
pages of their Journal and stock the
Museum of the West China
Union University. Speaking of this Museum in 1936, J. Beech
wrote, "Eleven thousand
six hundred and thirty-four of these objects are in the archaeological
division, largely representing the cultural history of Western China, Tibet, and the Border Aboriginal
Races." All researchers needed to embody the various
peoples of West
China,
their cultures, and their history were about 12,000 objects sitting in a
museum. This perspective implies that
the people were equivalent to the objects.
Indeed, in Torrance's "menagerie" they were the objects, and Society research
tended to treat humans in the same fashion as potsherds or ancient coins.
A dynamic of power inhered in this relationship between
researcher and object. The representations
of objects in Society research frequently reflected Orientalist biases and
assumptions. For instance, Torrance
urged readers to see the minority peoples of West China
in a more sympathetic light by portraying them as damaged goods. Chinese aggression and domination had brought
many of the ethnic groups into a debased state, he argued, such that only
"respectable remnants" remain of their cultures. Torrance
went on to conceptualize the Ch'iang, Miao and other groups as a decaying
artifact. "No one despises a piece
of beautiful old porcelain though its colour may have lessened in brightness or
it shows a crack at the edge or has a few brass rivets to prevent its falling
apart," Torrance wrote. "While much of their early learning and
skill in the arts has been irretrievably lost in the resistless submerging tide
of Chinese aggression, some things of worth and beauty remain." In some ways, Torrance
offered a positive view of the minority groups, noting "worth and
beauty" in their cultures. Of course,
even those worthy and beautiful aspects were "things," found in
people who were little more than "remnants" of genuine humanity. Indeed, the minorities were faded and
damaged, "falling apart," compared to the observer - who we may
assume was fully colored and in fine working condition.
The notion of an earlier, superior state implies an innate
potential for progress and creativity in the minority people, but this aspect
of Torrance's thought also carries
Orientialist overtones. By fixing the
realization of this potential in the past, the missionary reinforced an
Orientalist stereotype that denied the people a contemporary existence. As Stevan Harrell noted, Orientalists have
traditionally conceived of the Other in a variety of
demeaned positions with respect to themselves, including the characterization
of Orientals as "ancient." For
Torrance, the minorities of West
China were like a porcelain dish - specifically, an old one.
The real life of their culture occurred somewhere in the past, such that
even the living, breathing members of the group today were
"artifacts" themselves. In
studying the people of West China, Society members
routinely sought after old evidence and attributed greater value to older
objects. When describing the contents of
the WCUU Museum
- for which he was curator from 1932 to 1948 - David Crockett Graham always
noted the age of cultural specimens as an indicator of their value. "The museum possesses the largest
collection of Ch'iang artifacts to be found in any museum, which includes
ancient garments and leather armor, embroidered shoes and belts, and pottery
ranging in age between five hundred and two thousand years," Graham
reported.
D.C. Graham sometimes purchased cultural items for the
University and Smithsonian collections, and he was careful to select items that
were appropriately historical, rejecting contemporary cultural products -
however similar - as inauthentic and useless.
"There are so many snuff bottles being made now just to sell that
one has to very careful to get the genuine old ones," Graham wrote during
his 1929 Smithsonian expedition to Chengdu. If a Chinese person produced a bottle in the
present, Graham suggests, then it carried no meaning
as a representation of her culture. For
an object to be genuine, it had to be old; and since
objects offered the truth about a culture, the real culture must have only
existed in the past. "The
imitations are terrible," Graham observed, "and one needs to be
constantly on the lookout." Graham's statement insinuates that the
imitations and the "genuine old ones" were sufficiently similar to
confuse a buyer, since one had to be highly vigilant in purchasing the
bottles. However similar old and new may
have been, though, the belief that age equaled authenticity was Graham's
overriding concern in selecting objects.
Moreover, his evaluation of the people's modern material culture as
"terrible" correlates with Torrance's
notion of the broken porcelain. In both
representations the people are reduced to objects of - at least in the present
- inferior quality.
Anthropometric measurement represented another important way
in which the West China Border Research Society's work tended to objectify the
local population. In studying the
Chinese and neighboring ethnic groups, researchers would make note of the
skin-tone, eye color, and other characteristics of their human specimens. Thomas Torrance alluded to a central part of
this research when he spoke of "measuring [the] skulls" of the local
people in his human menagerie. Society
members used anthropometrics to measure and record the physical features of
people they studied. In fact, early
Society writings drew little distinction between anthropometrics and
anthropology itself. In his first
Presidential Address, W.R. Morse announced that the West China Border Research
Society would need "the chemist's laboratory, the astronomer's telescope, the mathematician's observations" and so on. Among these skills were "the
anthropologist's measurements," implying that the anthropologist's primary
pursuit should be the measuring and recording of people's physical
characteristics. Thus, researchers could discuss human beings
in terms of weight, size and dimensions just as they might speak of a piece of
pottery.
David Crockett Graham routinely employed anthropometrics
during his own research, and he often encountered opposition among the people
of West China in carrying out measurement. Throughout Graham's collecting diaries,
recorded during expeditions for the Smithsonian Institution, the missionary
reported seeking measurements of the people he encountered, including Chinese,
Lolo, Ch'uan Miao and Tibetan individuals.
Quantity was often a concern. "I
have now measured 140 Chinese men and about 35 women," Graham wrote during
his 1930 expedition. "I want to
increase the number of Chinese men to 200 as rapidly as possible." The stark imbalance between male and female
measurements points to one area where Graham encountered particularly strong
resistance: women. Further along on the
same trip, Graham reported that he had increased his total of female
measurements to 50. "This is doing
very well," he wrote, "for all over China
it is very hard to measure Chinese women and girls." Most likely, this related to a cultural
reluctance to have a strange or foreign individual physically interacting with
female members of the community.
Many others felt discomfort at being sized up and treated as
an object; cultural barriers and, perhaps, the individual's sense of personal
dignity sometimes stood between him and Graham's measuring tape. "The Lolos, full-bloods or half-breeds, are afraid to have me measure them
with the anthropometrical instruments," Graham wrote. "They are afraid it may do them harm, or
even cause their death. I think that if
I can get measurements enough it well prove quite interesting. It seems evident now that Lolos are both
darker and taller than Chinese." Although many of his subjects were clearly
uncomfortable with the process, Graham pressed ahead in the interest of
science; as this quotation indicates, a major purpose for anthropometrics was
comparison, which assumed that different racial "types" could be
studied and contrasted with each other.
Graham took little interest in measuring specimens of mixed "stock." During his 1929 collecting trip, Graham
wrote: "Because there has been so extensive inter-breeding between the
Chinese and the aborigines about Mupin that you can never be sure that you are
measuring a half-breed, I did not take any anthropometrical measurements this
summer." Graham's language in these collecting diaries
often constructs the Other as something
"bred," like a dog or a horse.
The practice of anthropometrics, then, carried an implication that those
measured were inferior or even less human than the measurer. Sometimes Graham's efforts with
anthropometrics went too far and individuals entirely rejected the
possibility. "I saw a Chinese with
red whiskers today," Graham wrote, during a 1930 visit to the village of Huang Sa Chi.
His interest piqued by the unusual sight, Graham tried to cut off some
of the man's facial hair "as a sample," but the man refused.
If Society members could identify "some things of worth
and beauty" in the local cultures, then they also felt entitled to take
these things for their own, in the name of science. Missionary-researchers gathered material such
as pottery, bricks, coins, and other cultural artifacts, which they analyzed in
their Journal and eventually placed
in the WCUU Museum. D.C. Graham described his own findings in a
variety of other journals, ranging from the missionary publication The Chinese Recorder to the British
anthropological magazine Man. An example of this cultural acquisition can
be found in a 1938 article Graham wrote for Man,
analyzing the Temmoku porcelain of Sichuan. Graham came across the porcelain pieces
during an April 1936 visit to Chungking, where he was
conducting an excavation of tombs from the Han dynasty. At the urging of friends, Graham wandered
from the excavation site and discovered an old kiln, filled with "an
abundance of the chien yao tea
cups, black or brown with small bases." He described the teacups and bowls in detail
in his Man article, and closed by
noting that "all the objects 1-34 are in the West China Union University
Museum of Archaeology, Chengtu." The process of research numbered, analyzed,
and stored away physical elements of the local culture. Much as Torrance
accepted the idea of taking human beings and placing them in a menagerie for
study, his peers assumed the validity of taking the local people's material
culture from them and storing it in a museum.
Society members dug up ancient graves and freely took whatever objects
they found, as in the aforementioned Chungking dig. This cultural acquisition occurred parallel
to the economic extraction of imperialism and could, in a sense, be said to
resemble it. While colonial administrators may have taken rubber under the
rubric of empire, progress, or economic development, men like Graham took from
the Orient in the name of science. When Graham learned of the graves in Suifu -
uncovered by local people during the creation of a parade ground - he postponed
an imminent trip to Chengdu to work
in the graves, since they were "of much scientific interest." A Westerner's museum, it was assumed, was a
more appropriate place for the possessions of the Chinese ancestors than their
own graves.
D.C. Graham's March 1936 excavation in Suifu shows how
Orientalist assumptions supported the work of scientists in appropriating local
property. For researchers, the cause of
science legitimized despoiling ancestral graves, but their own sense of the
local people's ineptitude reinforced this attitude. Graham had to excavate the graves and save
the artifacts inside, because "it was quite certain that everything it
contained would be destroyed by the workmen or carried away into private homes,
so that in the future the objects would be of little or no scientific
value." It made more sense for
Graham to pillage the grave if the locals would do so anyway. Indeed, if the artifacts fell in the hands of
the local population, they would lose their "value." Torrance's
Ch'iang people could not explain their own culture and, similarly, the Chinese
of Suifu could not appreciate the value of theirs, making it necessary for a
Westerner to rescue Chinese culture from the Chinese. "Nobody in Suifu recognized the
importance of the grave," Graham observed.
As condescending as this attitude may have been, D.C. Graham
and his fellow missionary-researchers took from the people in the name of the
people, although actual circumstances in West China
complicated their vision in this regard.
As we have seen, the West China Border Research Society saw its work as
a service to the local population, and the University museum was seen as a part
of this process. In his report on the
Hanchow excavation of 1934, Graham wrote that the discoveries now resided in
the West China
Union University
Museum, "for all the people of
West China."
Thus, Graham and his peers were rescuing Chinese culture from the
Chinese for the Chinese. Preserving objects from an ancient tomb meant
that all the people could enjoy and learn from them, instead of a few
"private homes" having a monopoly on the goods. This was an undeniably noble aim, but reality
deemed that preservation did not necessarily ensure access for "all the
people," as Graham suggested. Being
a missionary school, the West China
Union University
was a private institution and was not required to throw open its doors to any
and all. As Kristin Stapleton observed,
"At times in the 1920's there was tension over the question of whether the
Chengdu public had the right to
walk around the campus and enjoy its beautiful grounds." Moreover, Graham and his fellow missionaries
sought middle and upper class converts more eagerly than the poor, meaning that
the masses may not have been entirely welcome at the University or its Museum. As such, removing "rare and valuable
sacred objects" from a grave to the WCUU
Museum did not necessarily fulfill
a goal of preserving Chinese culture for the Chinese. Working in the name of science and of the
people, the West China Border Research Society tended to take freely from West
China's material culture, and this tendency reveals how
Orientalist prejudices about the local population influenced the institution's
activities.
Another peculiar pattern
emerges in the West China Border Research Society's work: a desire among
missionary-researchers to see similarity with themselves in their human
objects of study. Anthropological
accounts by Graham and his colleagues frequently projected familiar qualities
onto the local people and their culture, especially minority nationalities like
the Lolos or Ch'iang. One notorious
example exists in the work of Reverend Thomas Torrance, a missionary, Society
member, and Graham friend who worked among the Ch'iang people. Torrance
began to work with this ethnic group in 1915, preaching and building schools
and churches. Certain Ch'iang told Torrance
that they practiced monotheism and the missionary readily believed them. He began to discern "Jewish-like type of
features" among the Ch'iang "of pure stock,"
and saw in their religious culture an "Old Testament pattern of
religion." Torrance
gradually developed a theory that the modern Ch'iang were
descendants of an ancient Jewish settlement in China,
which he discussed in several articles for The
Journal of the West China Border Research Society.
David Crockett Graham also
demonstrated a desire to see similarity with himself and his own culture in the
people he studied. Many missionaries,
including Graham, accepted the Torrance
theory at the time, although Graham refuted it years later in his 1958 text Customs and Religion of the Ch'iang. For instance, in his earliest article on the
Ch'uan Miao people, Graham discussed the tribe's music primarily in comparison
to Western musics. "The tunes of
these songs bear a slight resemblance to chants often heard in Christian
worship," Graham asserted.
"When it is played the musician performs a dance much like that of
a Scotch bagpipe player." Like Torrance, Graham sought to identify
Western religious traits in the people he studied, as when he reported that the
Lolos practiced monotheism in a 1929 article.
Pere Paul Vial, a Catholic missionary who worked among the Lolos decades
before Graham, had been highly enthusiastic about the Lolos' supposed
similarity to Europeans, but even he dismissed the possibility that they were
monotheists. Although some Lolos argued
that their cultural hero Iesou was equivalent to Jesus, Vial dismissed the
parallel as a merely "fortuitous resemblance." The scientists of the West China Border
Research Society were often not so judicious.
This tendency was not unique to
D.C. Graham's mission community, as many of their predecessors practiced the
same sort of "wishful thinking."
For instance, the earliest Western account of the Lolo people, an 1881
paper by British diplomat E. Colbourne Baber, enthusiastically pursued the
conception of the Lolos as quasi-Western.
Baber commended this ethnic group for being "joyous, timid,
natural, open-aired, neatly-dressed... tall, graceful creatures with faces much
whiter than their brothers," i.e. Han Chinese. In Baber's eyes, they were "an
oval-faced, Aryan-like race." Pere Vial too echoed this identification of
the native minorities with European characteristics. His perception of the people, however, was
even more specific and personal.
"In their administration, their morals, their character, and their
religion, the Lolo vividly recalls our [fore]fathers,"
Vial wrote, comparing the Lolos to "the Gallic tribes" of his own
roots.
Why then did the
missionary-researchers of West China so determinedly see
similarity with themselves in the people they studied, even when the truth was
sometimes unavoidable? There are several
possible explanations, none mutually exclusive.
One may be a natural tendency to render intelligible what is unknown by
comparison to the known. D.C. Graham could
describe the music of the Ch'uan Miao by referring to something his readers
likely found familiar: Scottish music.
In this sense, it may be unsurprising that these researchers constituted
identities of the local people from elements of their own culture. However, a close reading of these texts
suggests that several more complex motivations were at work, both with
missionary-researchers like Graham and the people-objects themselves.
Members of the West China Border
Research Society aimed to produce knowledge about the local people that
missionaries would find useful, and images that portrayed potential converts as
quasi-Western served a distinct purpose.
The Ch'iang identity invented by Thomas Torrance, for instance, was far
more "convertible" than an alternate conception of their culture,
which might portray this ethnic group as intractably different from
Europeans. "An oval-faced,
Aryan-like race," as Baber put it, had greater potential for conversion to
the superior Christian culture. Torrance
conceived of the Ch'iang, with whom he personally worked, as "an
attractive lovable people of non-Chinese origin… with gallant tenacity,"
unlike the "terrible Lolos" or "prowling robbing Bolotzse,"
among whom he did not missionize.
These images also rendered
ethnic groups more convertible by providing the possibility of cultural
continuity in conversion. Finding a
basis for Western culture among these people made it easier for missionaries to
lay Christianity over existing traditions.
Graham, for one, commented that Ch'uan Miao music resembled some
Christian hymns; this observation could lead to a useful cultural synthesis,
Graham later argued, if a missionary could implant Christian themes in native
music or reconfigure a Christian hymn to fit local musical traditions. Thomas Torrance did precisely this in his
work with the Ch'iang. He allowed his
congregants to use a name by which their deity was
known - "Jed-su" - in place of "Jesus" when singing
"Jesus Loves Me," finding that this practice "adds great zest to
the singing." This process did not entail a simple search
for commonalities between cultures, however; missionaries sometimes had to push
the limits of reason in order to conceptualize minorities as Western-like. It took several leaps of logic for Torrance
to equate the traditional name of a Ch'iang deity, Abba Malah, with elements of
Hebrew tradition:
Abba means Father: here, the
Father in Heaven. Malah is not known
other than as a name. They do not seem
to be able to define or explain the term, but the pronunciation is very
precise. The 'lah' is spoken with a
definite click, so much so that it is a virtually Malak, the Hebrew word for
Angel. Have we not in this another
strong indication of the Semitic origin of the Chiang religious beliefs?
Starting with the name of a
Ch'iang god - the only one he was aware of - Torrance
turned these people into Hebrews via several tenuous and creative linguistic
connections. Abba Malah only meant
"father" for the Ch'iangs, but Torrance
could make it mean "Father in Heaven" by asserting that
"lah" was "virtually Malak." The Ch'iang may have not been
able to explain themselves, but Rev. Torrance was
fully capable of doing so on their behalf.
Indeed, he closely approximated Marx's dictum in the above passage:
"They cannot represent themselves; they must be represented."
Of
course, men like Torrance and
Graham were not alone in creating these images, as the local people themselves
often provided "evidence" that helped in constructing Western-like
identities. Although the missionary
accounts probably distort the local people's reaction to Christianity to some
degree, some native people eagerly participated in the process of
identification with Western culture. Kou
P'in-shan, for instance, was a Ch'iang who actively took up the cause of
explaining his people's ostensibly Israelite roots. He authored and distributed a tract entitled
"An Open Letter to the Ta Ch'iang People Concerning the Origin and End of
Paying Vows"; in it, he explained that careful study of Genesis, Exodus,
and the Four Gospels proved to him "that our sacrifices which worship the
God of Heaven have the same roots as those methods of sacrifice of ancient
Israel." The example of Pere Vial and the Lolos
suggests that the local people were forthcoming in offering points of
similarity. They offered their own
cultural hero "Jesamo" as a surrogate Jesus, despite Vial's basic
rejection of the possibility; the Lolos' conflation of Jesamo with Jesus does
not appear to have occurred at Vial's direct initiation. This instance suggests that the idea of
similarity between minority peoples and Europeans did not exist only in the
imaginations of missionaries and their representations of the people. Missionaries demonstrated enthusiasm for the
similarity of minority peoples and Europeans in a wide variety of
circumstances, and local people picked up on the desire of missionaries to see
them as compatible to European culture.
A Ch'iang Christian once confided in Graham that some of his people
intentionally misled Thomas Torrance into believing they were monotheists
"because of Mr. Torrance's very strong disapproval of polytheism and
idolatry."
This situation exemplifies part
of the power dynamic existing in the religious and scientific projects taken on
by David Crockett Graham and his colleagues, in which indigenous people
deliberately misrepresented themselves in order to
curry favor and resist Western analysis simultaneously. Some local people understood that these
foreign visitors were powerful people whose wealth could be accessed through
cooperative and pleasing behavior. Late
in his career, Graham observed the problem this dynamic posed for research:
"The task of studying and interpreting as accurately as possible the lives
and customs of these people is not an easy one... The researcher cannot always
tell when he is being deceived, and he needs to be extremely careful, checking
and rechecking the information he is given." More specifically, Graham identified the
locals' "willingness to give illusive and inaccurate answers that they
believe will satisfy the inquirer" as a roadblock to accurate
research. Thus, the people whom Graham
studied were often willing to distort and possibly even transform their own
culture in order to please a Western outsider.