Honolulu: University of Hawai ‘i Press, 2011. ix, 276 pp. (Figures.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-3532-3.
Blake has written a remarkable book on a ubiquitous Chinese practice. Ethnic Chinese peoples, including the reviewer himself, have at some point in their life, if not currently practicing the ritual, folded and burned paper money as offerings to ancestors, spirits and close family members who had passed away. In the first instance, the book is remarkable for trying to explain a phenomenon that defies emic interpretations because the Chinese are either coy or disingenuously polysemic when voicing the meanings involved in the ritual. This does not prevent Blake from venturing into holistic theoretical interpretations that go beyond current understandings of burning money as pre-capitalist epiphenomenon, codified ritual performance and expressions of Chinese identity.
Blake’s theoretical venture is a dizzying one, taking us through a survey of the paper money species, an account of its origins in ethnology, history and folklore, a semiotic analysis of its liturgical structure, a historical materialist analysis of its dialectical relationship with an advanced feudal mode of production, phenomenology of sacrifice, to the last chapters on hypertrophy and simulacra in the current transition to consumer capitalism. Regretfully, but understandably, there is no concluding chapter to wrap up the ambitious foray. There is only a brief postscript that points us to the thin but strong thread holding the book together: the Cartesian separation of the material and the spiritual does not apply to the Chinese lifeworld, which dialectically unites both in the material spirit of creating value by infusing nature with the social, producing a mysterious cosmos of immanent spiritual and organic beings to situate the self in.
The book’s strength lies in the recombination of historical materialism and anthropological structuralism in the analysis of value being created, burned and transmuted as the Chinese constantly switch back and forth between socioeconomic and religious-spiritual registers. It is refreshing, which says a lot about contemporary anthropology, to see the semiotic structuralism of Arnold van Gennep, Victor Turner and Terence Turner being revived to map out the five phases of Chinese ritual service. The burning of paper is convincingly placed as a threshold practice of sublimating handcrafted value to restore it to eternal nature through fire – humanity looping back into its universal essence.
The liturgical structure thus presented is persuasively situated as ritual mystification expressing the moral quality of labour in the sumptuary order of Chinese late feudalism. Unlike the ideological reification of money in modern times, paper money mystifies the social relations in the imperial order, pulsating through complex networks of differentiated labour and its mediating cash nexus. In a brilliant synthesis of Marx and Mauss, Blake explains money as gift in the Chinese cultural economy.
Crucially, Blake’s analysis of the religious superstructure is augmented by the phenomenological interpretation of burning money as a work of sacrifice. This grounds the practice in the commonsense and everyday consciousness of the Chinese lifeworld. In the folding of baskets of paper money, work in the production of value projects the interiority of the intending subject into the sensuous materiality of the outer world. When burned, with repeated stoking of combusting materials, hand-worked paper money is sacrificed for the sake of the extended family and the imperial order, thereby manifesting the interior space of the Chinese subject attuned to the cosmology of the ancestral paterfamilias. This is how the religious superstructure takes on a life of its own, persisting through the harshest Maoist purges and reviving into the capitalist present.
The last chapters speculating on the revived practice in the capitalist present and its explosion into spectacular forms, including the burning of paper replicas of commodities such as automobiles, luxury handbags and mansions, are disappointing. Blake makes a postmodern turn of sorts and enters into the conceptual headwinds of simulacra. Despite the detachment and irrelevance practitioners accrue to the proliferation of ghost bill designs mimicking and mocking the currency fetishes of late capitalism, Blake reads the ghost bill symbolisms to indicate the transition from the exchange of use values to the exchange of signs.
China, it would seem, is leapfrogging from late feudalism to late capitalism, in which rationalization quickly turns into irrational exuberance and burlesque parody. Despite Blake’s disavowal of the recent turn in American anthropology “towards a politics and poetics of consumption expressed in pathos of resistance, identity politics, and a ‘deconstruction’ that abjures the older possibilities of human enlightenment, emancipation, and reconstruction” (7), he walks right into it by seeing “native satire” as representing the ability of ordinary Chinese in seeing through the mystifications they create and reenact (196).
Nevertheless, there is method in the madness in the heady mix of Marcel Mauss, Karl Marx, Georg Simmel and Jean Baudrillard. The book is less about the specificity of Chinese civilization than it is the continuation of philosophical interrogations of the one fetishism that has inflicted much soul searching in Western civilization: the generalized commodity that is money. It so happens the Chinese civilization, the other of capitalism that is now infecting capitalism with its mystified social forms, likes to burn paper money, making the Chinese custom good to think with to understand the alienating magic of globalizing capitalism.
I have doubts about the linear historical materialism projecting from the gift to the simulation of money underlying Blake’s narrative. But it is truly ironic that we find postmodernity in China in the exemplary premodern religious practice that made one Chinese. Again, the mysterious Oriental, now knowingly mystifying himself, is pressed into service, this time, to give material flesh to the sublime object of desire of the West in the age of financial crises: value.
Daniel P.S. Goh
National University of Singapore, Singapore
pp. 328-330