Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China Maris Gillette (bio) Judith Farquhar . Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China. Body, Commodity, Text, a series edited by Arjun Appadurai, Jean Comaroff, and Judith Farquhar. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002. xii, 341 pp. Hardcover, $54.95, ISBN 0-8223-2906-9. Paperback, $18.95, ISBN 0-8223-2921-2. In Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-socialist China, anthropologist Judith Farquhar explores the emerging new ideologies of the body, desire, gender, personhood, and the social order that pervade the lived experiences of contemporary Chinese citizens. "New" in this case signals a broad array of Western imports, such as the idea of the bourgeois individual, and revamped versions of the old and the very old, for example the 1980s and 1990s reimaginings of collectivist ethics and ideals by fiction writers, filmmakers, and advertising companies, and Reform Era reinterpretations of ancient Daoist sex manuals. Farquhar is interested in the politico-historical forces that promote particular ways of remembering and forgetting Maoism in the Reform Era. She investigates how food, sex, and other aspects of embodied life in the contemporary People's Republic, such as love, subjectivity, and the practices surrounding traditional Chinese medicine, respond to and often react against Mao-era imaginings of the person and society. Her methods of inquiry encompass close readings of Maoist and post-Mao cultural artifacts such as novels, short stories, films, social science surveys, the autobiographical writings of senior traditional Chinese medical doctors, medical case histories (traditional Chinese medicine), and publications on ancient Daoist erotic arts, and reports and reminiscences from her ethnographic research in Guangzhou, Zouping, and Beijing from the early 1980s to 2000. In Appetites Farquhar argues persuasively that "appetites" are never natural, and she demonstrates conclusively that Mao's [End Page 146] collectivist ideals remain part of the national imaginary in China in complex and contradictory ways. Like the cultural historian Joan Scott, Farquhar wants her readers to recognize that "experience" is thoroughly saturated with ideology. To this end Far-quhar provides situated readings of literary texts and ethnographic materials wherein she explores the explicit and implicit ideas shaping these artifacts and their ramifications for the embodied experiences of Chinese citizens. Farquhar's rich text ranges from the most personal of anecdotes to structural descriptions of the principals of traditional Chinese medicine, from translations of and reflections upon contemporary Chinese fiction and autobiographical writings to detailed examinations of Reform Era sex surveys, from the meticulous scrutiny of advertising posters to ethnographic accounts of banqueting among cadres. Her methods resonate with those used by Ann Anagnost in her 1997 volume National Past-Times and by Louisa Schein in her 2000 study Minority Rules. All three authors work to expand the analytical methods and domains of cultural anthropology, and all three attend closely to the discourses that create and animate the social and cultural worlds of PRC citizens. Farquhar shifts back and forth between the collective and Reform eras in Appetites. She simultaneously reinforces and troubles the clarity of this most common of historical periodizations. The difference between the Maoist and post Mao eras is Farquhar's most persistent point of departure and the foundation for her political critiques of the Reform period. As her text makes clear, Farquhar shares these points in common with many of the Chinese intellectuals whose work she studies. At the same time, Farquhar gives many examples of the persistence of Maoist ideals, longings, and rhetoric among her informants and in the novels, films, and advertisements that she explores, demonstrating the myriad ways in which the collective era continues to influence the Reform period. Farquhar's investigations of the emerging social order in China lead her to express the hope that the historical experiences of Maoist collectivism might make possible a post-socialist alternative to Western neo-liberal capitalism that avoids the essentialisms and selfishness of bourgeois individualism and the extreme sacrifices and deferral of Maoist collectivism. Farquhar divides her text into two parts. The first half concerns the sensory politics of eating. Here Farquhar explores Maoist and Reform Era ideas about hunger, satiation, and health and their link to politics. For example, in chapter 1...