Content area
Full text
[A] process of systematic fragmentation . . . can . . . be seen in the disciplinary carve-up of the indigenous world: bones, mummies and skulls to the museums, artwork to private collectors, languages to linguistics, "customs" to anthropologists, beliefs and behaviours to psychologists. To discover how fragmented this process was one needs only to stand in a museum, a library, a bookshop, and ask where indigenous peoples are located. Fragmentation is not a phenomenon of postmodernism as many might claim. For indigenous peoples fragmentation has been the consequence of imperialism.
-Linda Tuhiwai Smith, "Imperialism, History, Writing, and Theory"1
Since 1900 non-Western objects have generally been classified as either primitive art or ethnographic specimens.
-James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture 2
Transacting Untimely Native Remains
OF THE NUMEROUS MEMORABLE SCENES in early twentieth-century Chinese literature, one holds a special tenacity for me, with a resonance that does not seem to diminish with the passage of time. Is it a coincidence that it happens to be a scene of mourning? This essay will be an attempt at probing this question.
Master Gao, the patriarch in Ba Jin's classic Jia (Family, 1931), has just died.3 In keeping with age-old mourning rituals, the Gao family hosts an elaborate funeral, with a group of female mourners present at the funeral parlor, collectively performing the customary mournful wailing whenever guests arrive to pay respects to the dead. In a novel of substantial length, such a narrative detail seems rather insignificant,4 but what makes it remarkable is the manner in which it is described:
The women behind the curtains were having a hard time. Since guests kept arriving, the number of times they had to wail kept increasing too. At this point, wailing had turned into an art; it had, moreover, the function of socializing with guests. For instance, if, while the women were chatting or eating, the musicians started playing [to signal the arrival of guests], they would have to burst into a loud cry instantaneously-and the more sorrowfully, the better, of course. But most of the time they were simply shrieking as there were no tears. There had also been farces, as when signals of guests arriving and departing were confused. Mishearing "guests departing" for "guest arriving," the women...