Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2020. 288 pp. (Illustrations.) US$26.95, cloth. ISBN 978-1-4780-0815-6.
Dashalar is a small neighbourhood located southwest of Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing. Despite being steps away from some of the city’s most important public monuments and glitziest shopping areas, Dashalar has long been one of its poorest and most densely populated neighbourhoods. In 1990, Dashalar was targeted by a state campaign of “demolition and relocation” (chaiqian) that by 2017 had almost completely replaced the neighbourhood with a gentrified and ersatz new replica of “old Beijing.”
In this richly detailed and innovative book, which is both an anthropological ethnography and a work of oral history, Harriet Evans creates a haunting portrait of Dashalar and many of the disadvantaged and marginalized people who until recently called it home. Evans chronicles the effects of decades of neglect, deprivation, and dislocation on the residents of Dashalar as well as how its inhabitants nevertheless find ways to enact their own agency and make ethical claims to equal personhood and dignity in conditions of extreme inequality and precarity.
The data contained in Beijing from Below was gathered through archival research, interviews, and participant observation. Fieldwork was conducted in Dashalar between 2004 and 2017, with primary fieldwork taking place between 2007 and 2014. The remarkable length of time that the author spent conducting fieldwork is a major strength of the work, as it allowed her to develop and sustain deep and long-lasting relationships with the Dashalar residents she describes and to track changes in their lives and in the neighbourhood over time.
Beijing from Below contains seven main chapters beginning with a first chapter that describes the social, cultural, and economic history of Dashalar. Each of the following six main chapters is named after a person from Dashalar and tells the story of one family from the neighbourhood. These chapters weave together both the author’s own narrative description of her repeated visits to Dashalar and extensive verbatim quotes from her informants. Each biographical chapter is followed by a short interlude in which Evans analyzes the chapter’s contents and connects them to the major themes and arguments of the book. This structure recalls experimental ethnographies by American feminist anthropologists like Marjorie Shostak’s Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (Harvard University Press, 1981) and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Writing Women’s Worlds: Bedouin Stories (University of California Press, 1993). Evans endeavours to allow her subjects to narrate their own life stories, in all their messy and sometimes contradictory complexities, which emphasizes their humanity as well as the paradoxes and tensions of both China’s recent economic “rise” and the workings of global capitalism. Beijing from Below also features numerous figures and illustrations, including several detailed maps and dozens of striking black-and-white photographs of Dashalar taken by the author and a local photographer and resident who is featured in the final chapter.
One of the things I found most interesting in Beijing from Below is how the lives and memories of the residents of Dashalar challenge our standard ways of thinking about cultural change and continuity in China. Evans describes how, despite seismic shifts in state power and politics, the everyday lives of people in Dashalar remained largely unchanged from the 1930s to the 2000s, complicating notions of historical “ruptures.” While some residents were able to capitalize on economic reforms, for the vast majority life continued to be characterized by the same chronic poverty and overcrowding that stretched back to the earliest years of state socialism. As the rest of the city experienced a dizzying economic transformation, the occupants of Dashalar were left further and further behind. Even as many residents dreamed of leaving the neighbourhood and only stayed because they had no alternative, the space of Dashalar had become an essential part of their identities. Threatened by imminent dislocation at the hands of the local development authorities, many Dashalar residents seemed to be stuck in time, unable to move on or imagine a future for themselves in a city whose very future was predicated on the eventual destruction of their homes, community, and senses of self.
A central argument of Beijing from Below is that the stubborn resiliency and determination of the residents of Dashalar in the face of grinding poverty and extreme inequality should be interpreted as a “subaltern agency not associated with subversion or protest” (102) but rather with “a form of struggle on the part of disadvantaged people to claim a dignity in an environment that, objectively, denied it to them” (222). Inspired by Saba Mahmood’s definition of agency in Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005) as “the multiple interests and motivations involved in people’s assertion of self” (71), Evans shows how the residents of Dashalar had a nuanced relationship to both expressions of state power and traditional norms around gender and family. While they often expressed doubt or derision over state-sponsored development plans, many residents were also eager to profit from them whenever possible. Despite coming of age at a time when women were able and expected to work and often acting as the main breadwinners of their families, many Dashalar mothers and wives asserted their agency through claims to equal dignity and ethical personhood in ways that often accommodated rather than challenged male authority. For Dashalar residents of all genders and generations, the family continued to be an important source of personal identity and motivation.
Although the book contains so much rich detail that the author sometimes inadvertently repeats information that was already mentioned, the writing style overall is very clear, direct, and unpretentious, without a lot of jargon or dense theoretical verbiage. This makes it well suited for adoption in advanced undergraduate and graduate-level courses. In addition to being a gripping and moving read, Beijing from Below makes major contributions to the literatures on Chinese anthropology, economic anthropology, political anthropology, urban anthropology, and the anthropology of women, gender, and the family.
Casey James Miller
Muhlenberg College, Allentown