Canberra: ANU Press, 2024. US$40.00, paper; free ebook. ISBN 9781760466411.
Gingko Village is an unusual book. Its author, Tamara Jacka, is an Australian anthropologist who, over the course of her career, has made important contributions to the study of gender, labour, and migration in contemporary China. In her latest book, she eschews many of the conventions of the ethnographic monograph, while at the same time reflecting deeply on what it means to practice and write ethnography. The result is an innovative, sensitive, and at times moving, account of the transformation of rural China, but also of the experience of conducting ethnographic research.
An earlier monograph had foregrounded the storytelling of Jacka’s migrant women interlocutors (Tamara Jacka, Rural Women in China: Gender, Migration, and Social Change. Armonk: M. E. Sharpe); in Gingko Village she goes a step further and becomes the storyteller herself. The book is “a melding of ethnographic storytelling, social history, and personal reflection” (3), comprising eight tales of everyday life in Xin County, rural Henan Province. These tales are fiction, “to protect identities and to make the writing more engaging” (4), with the villagers being composite characters, their experiences and life histories based on fieldwork findings.
If the explicitly fictional aspects of the book place it firmly in the company of those post-empiricist anthropologists who have, particularly since the 1980s, emphasized the literary quality of ethnographic writing (e.g., Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), in other ways the book is redolent of an earlier era of ethnographic monographs both in its location in a single village, and in the way that its rich observations from this single village are not pressed into the service of an overarching concept or theory-building project.
The book wears its scholarliness lightly. There is deliberately little direct engagement with theory in the main body of the text, and academic jargon is avoided. Indeed at one point Jacka pokes gentle fun at herself for asking a puzzled informant to tell her about “the gender division of labour in the collective era” (105). Mention of academic literature is confined to the footnotes. Nevertheless, the book deals with various themes that have become central to the anthropology of contemporary China.
The opening chapter is the most formally conventional in its description of the eponymous (pseudonymized) village’s geography, demography, economy, and recent history. Running through the rest of the book is a concern with the gendered experiences of China’s twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapter 3, for example, describes these experiences through the lens of textile production. The burden of weaving cloth and stitching clothes fell on women during the deprivations of the Maoist period. Villagers did not start buying clothes until the 1990s, by which time women were also receiving sewing machines as part of their bride-price; nowadays, brides ask instead for an apartment. For younger generations clothes are no longer made by women at home, but are bought online. Rather than insisting on her own interpretation, Jacka gives the reader space to reflect for themselves on the ambiguity of this unremunerated labour in which older women nevertheless took a certain degree of pride.
Various other topics are explored in the course of the book’s eight tales, woven loosely together by the titular themes of trauma and transformation. Chapter 4 is an account of agrarian change which focuses on the transformations of gendered agricultural labour. Grounded studies of contemporary China have increasingly been foregrounding infrastructure; without explicitly mentioning it, Gingko Village contributes to this emerging field in chapter 6, which provides useful insights into the lineage-inflected politics of infrastructure construction at the village level.
The most notable departures from the conventions of ethnography occur at the end of chapter 4 and the beginning of chapter 5. Here Jacka the author/anthropologist bestows an imagined interiority on two of her characters, including a female suicide whose self-poisoning, Jacka suggests, was a response to domestic abuse. Jacka acknowledges in a footnote that she “cannot truly know what goes on in another person’s mind” (127), but these passages nevertheless imbue the ethnographer with an epistemic authority that Jacka is at other times quick to qualify. I found the book more compelling when it reflected on the difficulties of knowing, and on the inevitable failures and clumsiness of the ethnographer: “Perhaps I was so intent on hearing one story that I scarcely noticed another, different one,” she confesses (54); at another point she admits herself “exhausted and confused” (158).
Jacka’s stated aim in writing the book is to “build empathy” as a means of countering “those who fuel injustice and conflict by construction ‘the other’ as ‘the enemy’ or as lesser than ‘us”’ (9). Empathetic understanding, for her, is central to ethnographic knowledge, but Jacka also painstakingly describes how it is sometimes difficult to acquire in the face of the biases and assumptions that even an experienced ethnographer carries with them. While Jacka writes honestly of her failure to empathize properly with a young mother whose house is a mess and who is rough with her child, there is noticeably less attempt to build empathy with the male local cadres at their tedious banquets. But when the Western imagination today sets about constructing the other as the enemy, it is more likely to take the form of a Chinese Communist Party official than a young rural mother, and one could argue that these cadres might have provided an interesting limit case for the project of empathy which Jacka espouses.
Gingko Village is a beautifully written, meticulously observed account of the transformations that rural China has undergone in recent decades. With its warts-and-all depictions of the difficulties inherent in asking people about the details of their lives, the bookalso provides an excellent introduction to the practice of ethnographic research, and deserves a wide audience beyond China Studies, including undergraduates who are learning about qualitative methodologies, but also graduate students preparing to go to the field.
Thomas White
King’s College London, London