La Pensée Cyclique (10)—Mulan Granet-a

Click here for the introduction to the Round and Square series about Marcel Granet, "La Pensée Cyclique"

One year ago on Round and Square (27 April 2011)—Seinfeld Ethnography: Poppie's Pizza

[c] Cyclical (round-square) RF

The next few posts in La Pensée Cyclique take a detour into territory that Marcel Granet would not have envisioned. It was, quite simply, inspired by him. One of the things that has startled me in my ongoing intellectual biography of Marcel Granet is that the fuel created by reading his work—and even his personal history—often leads me toward new avenues in my own writing. For years—and especially since Disney's release of the Mulan movie in 1998—I have thought about ways to explain not only how badly Disney got it wrong, but things in the Mulan tale that I feel have been missed precisely because the Joan of Arc mythos absolutely dominates Western cultural interpretations of strong women. What follows is a retelling and re-analyzing of the Ballad of Mulan...inspired by my reading of Marcel Granet. I call it Mulan Granet (but Marcel Mulan sounds pretty good, too). Let me be clear. The first two posts are not easy, but they are key to understanding the world of Mulan.

[b] Arc of Mythos RF

Joan's Interpretive Arc

Joan of Arc lives in Southeast Asia, as well as in the far-flung corridors of the East Asian world, and one need only look at the statue of her that can be seen in Cholon, near Ho Chi Minh City, to know her connection to South and East Asian images of strong, independent women in war. While the recent fascination in the West with the figure of Mulan has given some attention to women in warfare in China, it has far more often confused the image more than it has clarified it. Indeed, it appears to me from a recent re-viewing of the Disney movie Mulan that Joan of Arc has been “read into” the medieval Ballad of Mulan, only adding to the popular bewilderment surrounding Joan (and Mulan) these days.

What I want to do here is create a duet, of sorts, between Marcel Granet and the Ballad of Mulan. Although the Ballad (Mulan ci) played virtually no role in Marcel Granet’s teaching or scholarship, I believe that a close reading of the ballad from the perspective of Granet's sociology opens new interpretive possibilities for the Mulan legend. These go a long way toward breaking the hold of shallow Jeanne d'Arc readings in an East Asian context. In popular renderings (of which many children’s books are far more one-sided than even Disney) the martial side of Mulan is often greatly exaggerated in favor of what I wish to call the “marital”—the yin figure who leaves her family precisely in order to perpetuate the domestic order as a closed social unit with a sexual division of labor.

[a] Steppe-ing out RF

Finally, it is worth mentioning that, even though she is tucked far into the background of this series of posts, Jeanne d’Arc is ever-present in analyses of the Mulan legend, for the shadow that she has left in the scholarly imagination of sinologists and historians is every bit as great as that in the popular imagination. The Chinese themselves are fond of linking Mulan and Joan of Arc, even though the two have little in common beyond the fact that they were warriors. Let's thicken the stew a little.

Imaginative Ethnography

Let's get started by examining the hidden heart (as I see it) of the Ballad of Mulan—domestic solidarity in the closed kinship networks of early Chinese society. Disney doesn't have a clue, but Marcel Granet did long before they ever mixed celluloid and myth. His work represents a lifelong effort to resolve major issues at the heart of social theory with the Chinese world. He did not engage in this enterprise as a fieldworker, although he lived in China for a time. He engaged social theory through his Chinese texts. To use the language of ethnography, the classical texts were his “field.”  It is as simple, and complex, as that. 

As I like to say, Marcel Granet practiced a form of “imaginative ethnography” through which he sought to resolve the tensions between mythique and juridique—the realm of ideas, on the one hand, and the functioning of kinship and legal systems, on the other. His theoretical perspective on the sexual division of labor and the “closed” nature of the early Chinese family provide fruitful perspectives on the Mulan legend—a complex tale of gender, warfare, and marriage politics. Precisely because of his dual focus on mythique and juridique, we see opened before us a world of interpretive possibilities with a legend that easily might be read as merely that of a capable and ambitious young woman selflessly serving her father. It's a 天 and 地 of a lot more complicated than that. Hell (so to speak)...it's round and square.

[d] Cycles RF

The Cycles of Rural Life 

Marcel Granet’s sociological and sinological imagination is powerfully at work in his description of peasant life in The Religion of the Chinese People, and in his analyses we begin to see the outlines of family and village organization within a complex and nuanced world of nature. The domestic order is marked by a division of the year into two (the yang seasons that mark the high point of the agricultural season and the yin seasons that occur after the harvests and before the spring planting). This is echoed by the concomitant division of labor along gender lines. Over the short run, close-knit kinship groups are a very real strength. Yet in time, Granet argues, the centripetal pull of domestic cares can be stultifying and ultimately debilitating for both the family and the broader society.

          Throughout the year, in fields cultivated in common as in their shut-off 

          villages, the peasants had dealings only with their kinsmen. A village 

          enclosed a close-knit unit and homogeneous great family. Ties of blood, 

          natural filiations, did not introduce true divisions into this large community: 

          a nephew was not less than a son nor a father more than an uncle.

[e] Prospered RF

For Granet, the village was a “homogeneous great family.”  Ties of blood in such a community do not introduce divisions of a serious nature, and he goes on to show a startling example of common kinship distinctions such as father-son and uncle-nephew being of no significant difference at least within the closed domestic community. One suspects at least a bit of hyperbole here, but Granet’s point remains important. The kinds of jealousy and possessiveness that we can see in fragmented social settings is lacking (he argues) because the domestic order is driven by the rhythmic order of the seasons—one that places the larger unit (the work unit divided by gender) above smaller divisions within the household and community. Granet’s rhetoric is pointed.

          Domestic life had no exclusive sentiments: all the young people of one 

          generation, brothers or cousins (it was all one) married women who were 

          equally sisters and cousins. In this huge family maternal affection itself did 

          not take on an appearance of jealous affection: if anybody was preferred 

          it was the children of the eldest sister.

          Male or female, it is really only the generation of the village head, or father, 

          that has any kind of ascendancy at all, and that is of an order that fits the 

          natural rhythms. In like fashion, all the aunts were called mothers: the mother 

          most respected was not the woman who gave one birth but the woman who 

          by her age (or her husband’s) occupied the rank of mother of the family. 

          Indeed, age and generation were the sole principles of classification within 

          the domestic community, which was led, or better still, represented by the 

          oldest member of the most senior generation. This latter was called  

          head or father.

Granet has given us a picture of a closed system, in which exchange took place between linked partners who worked in concert (at least within their gendered units) and prospered as a group. The integration is deceptive, though, as Granet will show...tomorrow. And if you have made it this far, you are ready to understand things in and beyond Mulan that you never dreamed. Stick with it. Michael Eisner's head would be spinning.

[f] Oases RF

NEXT
The Need for Renewal
Now that we have a sense of Granet's theoretical perspective, we'll ratchet it up for one more post before getting into the heart of Mulan legend. The "background" is crucial, and the way that we see martial/marital Mulan hangs in the balance.