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Deception and the Chinese Ritual Economy
From: London School of Economics and Political Science
| By:
Charles Stafford |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
 Can the boom of the Chinese economy be explained culturally? In this interview with Fathom, Charles Stafford, a specialist in the anthropology of China and Taiwan, argues that a close look at the micro ritual economy in China reveals fascinating links between marriage, banquets, social networks and the local economy--a socioeconomic web that is also affected by a preoccupation with deception and gullibility. |
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| Charles Stafford on the relationship between culture and economy | |
Fathom: What kind of debate has there been about the relationship of culture to economic performance on the macroeconomic level? |
Charles Stafford: In China, there has been an enormous debate about the relationship between culture and economy. This is partly because there has been an enormous boom in the East Asian economies, and a lot of people around the world, including people in East Asia itself, are trying to figure out how this happened and what happened. |
Some people have analysed that in terms of institutional factors. I have just read a book by an institutional economist which basically claims that the reform era in China has worked because the incentives were there for local cadres to participate in and encourage rural industrialisation. On the other hand, those who have stressed cultural factors such as the Confucian-values school of thinking have said the reason that Asian economies have boomed in the last period is simply because all of these Chinese, Japanese and Korean people were raised in a cultural context which is itself conducive to a particular kind of modern capitalism. So there are lots of debates about this kind of thing. |
I happen to be a sceptic as far as these debates go, primarily because it seems to me that although cultural factors (so called) obviously feature in the history of economic life in China we can also say that, even with identical cultural background, very different things can happen to the economy. So there are limits to these culturalist arguments, as we can see from a quick look at Chinese history in the twentieth century. |
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| Charles Stafford explains how culture affects the micro-economy | |
Fathom: Do you find that similar debates about the relationship of culture to economy can be applied on the more local or microeconomic level? |
Stafford: Interestingly, if we talk about the really micro level, then the cultural factors seem terribly important. If you look at the Chinese economy as a whole, it seems that a lot of things can be explained in pure and formal economic terms: there are inflationary pressures; the market is working this way and that. It all seems rational in the same way that one can explain an economy anywhere in the world in these formal economic terms. |
But, of course, if you get down to the nitty-gritty everyday economic activity level then one finds that cultural factors suddenly become very prominent. Because all those individual agents who are participating in and effectively creating economic life are heavily constrained by cultural values, their incentives derive from the particular cultural context in which they have been raised and in which they live. So, interestingly, at the micro level the cultural explanations of economic life have a lot of force, which is why anthropologists who tend to conduct research in very localised settings might believe that culture is a big factor in economic life. Whether that is true or not is a matter for debate, but one can see where that perspective comes from. |
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| Charles Stafford describes the ritual economy | |
Fathom: Is it worth talking about a ritual economy in China, and how would you define and describe this? |
Stafford: The ritual economy in China, as elsewhere, can be defined in several different ways. In narrow terms, the ritual economy in China consists of the wealth that has circulated because of rituals such as marriage and temple building. Now, that is not a minor thing, because in China, and especially in rural China, a rather high proportion of total wealth is circulated in the form of gift exchanges, wedding banquets, temple construction and so on. The ritual economy in strict narrow terms is already a fairly large thing. |
One can also adopt more open-ended definitions of the ritual economy in which it really accounts for a much larger proportion of overall economic activity. You could say that corruption, which can involve the giving of gifts and bribes in a fairly ritualised manner in China, can be counted as part of the ritual economy. If one does that, then the size of the ritual economy becomes much larger, and one can also say that, because all wealth ultimately circulates through family, kinship organisation and local community, the base of the whole economy, is a kind of ritual economy in which money is effectively socialised down to the level of families and personal relationships. |
So there is a very broad definition of ritual economy in which it would account for a very high proportion of economic activity in China. |
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| Charles Stafford on the Chinese preoccupation with deception. | |
Fathom: Considering the social and trust-based nature of the micro economy, would you say that Chinese society has been particularly preoccupied with deception and fraud? |
Stafford: It is always hard to say whether people in a particular place are concerned about something more than people in another place, but I do know that during the time I spent living in rural northeastern China and in rural southeastern Taiwan it certainly struck me that people spent an awful lot of time talking about deception. In other words, it is very often an explicit item for discussion. People talked about it a lot. |
On buying a traditional herbal remedy, for example, they will worry about whether it was artificial or a fake. Will they have been ripped off? They talk about spirit mediums whose services they sometimes use in the countryside in Taiwan and in China and they worry about whether these people may be fakes. Then, when they go into town and to a store and buy some goods they also worry about fakes. So there is a lot of discussion about deception and a lot of concern that one should not be seen to be the type of person who is gullible. But this is really a matter of open and public discussion. In general, I don't know if it is a bigger problem or not. But people talk about it quite a bit. |
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