Ordinary Ethics in China

Charles Stafford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000189568
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Drawing on a wide range of anthropological case studies, this book focuses on ordinary ethics in contemporary China. The book examines the kinds of moral and ethical issues that emerge (sometimes almost unnoticed) in the flow of everyday life in Chinese communities.How are schoolchildren judged to be good or bad by their teachers and their peers - and how should a 'bad' student be dealt with? What exactly do children owe their parents, and how should this debt be repaid? Is it morally acceptable to be jealous if one's neighbours suddenly become rich? Should the wrongs of the past be forgotten, e.g. in the interests of communal harmony, or should they be dealt with now?In the case of China, such questions have obviously been shaped by the historical contexts against which they have been posed, and by the weight of various Chinese traditions. But this book approaches them on a human scale. More specifically, it approaches them from an anthropological perspective, based on participation in the flow of everyday life during ethnographic fieldwork in Chinese communities.

PART III

TECHNOLOGY, TECHNIQUES AND THE MATERIALITY OF ETHICS

CHAPTER 10

TOOLS FOR VIRTUOUS ACTION: TECHNOLOGY, SKILLS AND ORDINARY ETHICS

Francesca Bray

Sometimes there are situations where [my husband and I] don't say anything face-to-face, but which we communicate through SMS. Like if it's my birthday, neither of us will mention it face-to-face but later, he'll SMS me. Sometimes we'll argue and he'll apologise to me via SMS. I find this function of mobile phones really useful—what you can't say face-to-face, you can say via SMS. (32-year-old teacher, Shanghai, quoted in Lim 2008: 200)

In the chapter-opening quote we see a technological device, the mobile phone, being used to resolve a dilemma In ordinary ethics. This middleclass couple, like many others in China today, are feeling their way between deeply rooted conventions of reticence and formality and new, more demonstrative ideals of companionate marriage. They use their mobile phones as gadgets not only for facilitating communication between family members but also for exploring new emotional registers without losing face. The Shanghai teacher explains that she and her husband use the SMS function of their phones to push the boundaries of etiquette and the conventions of intimacy. I-chieh Fang's study (in Chapter 4 of this volume), meanwhile, shows us young migrant workers in a Shenzhen factory turning their mobile phones to ethical use in at least two ways. The first is quite straightforward: the young women use their phones to keep in touch with their parents. The second is more complex, involving judgements about their own and others' moral personhood: phoning, texting and online chat rooms allow groups of friends to engage in detailed explorations of what constitutes an ideal husband and whether they themselves are making progress in their search for a 'serious' relationship, the 'perfect match' that will be their life's achievement.

It comes as no great surprise to observe high-tech devices such as mobile phones or the Internet deployed as instruments in emergent moral practices. We are all aware that communications technologies, from television to the personal computer to CCTV, can both create and resolve ethical challenges. Social scientists, anxious parents, corporations and nanny or authoritarian states have variously scrutinized their potential for transforming, maintaining or breaching the boundaries of moral personhood and pondered how to achieve the best balance between control and freedom, protection and autonomy. But as anthropologists, can we postulate a more general role for technology in everyday ethics? Is it only the high-tech innovations of recent decades, such as the Internet or 'assisted reproduction', that deserve our attention, or should simple, mundane technologies such as the light bulb or the kang (traditional heated bed) figure more systematically in our studies of how people express values and construct moral personhood?

Engineers, says Bruno Latour, play a role analogous to the novelist in analysing and developing the modern human psyche. Yet while we consciously appreciate how novelists manipulate their characters to explore emotional or moral subtleties, we remain largely oblivious to the skills that engineers deploy as they 'shift out characters in other spaces and other times, devise positions for human and non-human users, break down competences that they then redistribute to many different actants, build complicate narrative programs and sub-programs that are evaluated and judged' (Latour 1992: 232). Why are we so blind to the 'subtle beauties of socio-technical embroglios', asks Latour, and to the hidden—or unnoticed—masses of material artefacts with which we have surrounded ourselves? No doubt, he says, because they involve a shift of expression or of frames of reference, from words to material constructions. Rather than the producers and the users of the technologies being linked through a shared consciousness of what the artefacts are there to do and how they do it, the engineering or 'technical shifting-out' effects a mystification of the non-material dimensions of the problem; 'techniques allow [the human actors] to ignore the delegated actors and to walk away without even feeling their presence' (232). This was as true of medieval house-design in China as it is of nuclear weapons testing (Bray 1997; Gusterson 1996). In a much more recent publication, Latour laments. 'The problem with techniques is that people love to hate them and also hate to love them, no matter if they are academics or not, so it is extraordinarily difficult to get the right distance with the mass of things with [which] they cohabit' (Latour 2007: 129).

This chapter argues for the analytical value of integrating technology, both high- and low-tech, into the anthropology of ordinary ethics and everyday virtuous (or vicious) practice. As a domain of skilled action which shapes and expresses both mental and material worlds, technology offers a potent analytical framework for tracking embodied practices of virtue and for highlighting the tensions and contradictions that may arise between ethics operating within different spheres (Carrier and Miller 1999; Ingold 2001; Bray 2008b).

Most of the contributions to this book focus primarily on the social and discursive practices of everyday ethics. Yet we should beware of reducing ordinary ethics to discursive practices and conscious judgements: some of our most profound experiences of emotion, and our most potent expressions of opinion, follow a grammar of bodily movements and of the manipulation of material objects—conscious at some levels, tacit at others, sometimes interwoven with speech acts and sometimes mute. Often our technical routines and their ethical implications go unexamined not only because of 'shifting out' but because they appear self-evident. The material worlds we construct about ourselves, and the repertories of action that they support, naturalize values and beliefs and inscribe them in social memory; the messages they convey are all the more powerful for being mute (Bourdieu 1973). In consequence, technological innovations at any scale are likely to trigger 'moments of breakdown' (Roberts. Chapter 9, this volume) and are frequently explicitly perceived as posing moral dilemmas. In sixteenthcentury China, intensification of textile production led to men replacing women as weavers, a change seen by moralists as undermining the cosmic order of harmonious complementarity between yin and yang (Bray 1997). In Java in the 1970s, reaping-knives were gradually replaced by sickles in pursuit of speed and efficiency, displacing the troops of landless women who had previously participated in the harvest. The innovation was perceived as threatening the supposedly redistributive ethos of village life (White 2000). More recently, new technologies of assisted reproduction have challenged publics and legislators around the world to ponder what constitutes the 'real' bond between parents and child, reaching an astonishing diversity of conclusions (Edwards 2000; Bray 2008c).

Anthropologists and social and cultural historians (most notably perhaps Marcel Mauss, Norbert Elias and Fernand Braudel) have long recognized the silent moral power of established bodily habits— although within anthropology little serious attention was given to the peculiar systemic potency of technology (Pfaffenberger 1992). More recently, as just suggested, the anthropological gaze has fastened upon a range of painful ethical dilemmas raised by a few technological innovations that have posed highly visible and much debated challenges to conventional social values. Less attention has been devoted within anthropology, however, to a far more characteristic phenomenon, that is, to the much less dramatic, more gradual and often largely uncontentious processes of technological adaptation and selective assimilation that steadily transform our everyday experience. It is largely thanks to the new disciplines of technology studies and STS (science and technology studies)¹ that researchers are becoming methodologically and analytically equipped to explore the ethical dimensions and the trajectories of naturalization of mundane yet transformative technological innovations such as supermarket bar codes, cellphone upgrades or new safety codes for domestic wiring.

In this chapter, I therefore propose some concepts and methods drawn from technology studies or STS, including sociotechnical systems, operational sequences, technological repertories, domestication and user scripts, delegation, communities of practice and technological code, to explore the material grounding of ordinary ethics and the ethical impact of technological shifts. Most of my illustrations are drawn from recent anthropological or STS studies of everyday technologies in China.

Technology studies is an interdisciplinary field; the spectrum runs from philosophy to engineering by way of history, sociology and anthropology. By consensus the focus is not on individual gadgets and their mechanics per se, but on how technical features are embedded in the systems or networks—material, social and symbolic—which support their use. As well as the nuts and bolts one must consider the task that is being performed, the resources it requires, its impact, uses and representations. Different societies may solve the same material or social problem through quite distinct technological choices, while an identical gadget in engineering terms may be deployed completely differently in another cultural context. At the same time, technology studies differs from material culture studies in paying due attention to the material constraints and affordances inherent in technological processes: technologies involve a 'tight coupling of causally related elements' (Nowotny 2006: 17), which means that the systems or assemblages of artefacts, institutions and interpretations that the discipline addresses are treated as contingent (Collier and Ong 2005) but not arbitrary, by no means reducible to semiotics.

The field of STS emerged in response to the challenges of technocracy and technoscience and in consequence has focused principally on high-tech; however, its practitioners are increasingly concerned to develop analyses that apply to all human societies and all levels of technological activity. A common concern is to connect individual action and social or political process. Feminist critiques within the field have been particularly effective in highlighting and theorizing the articulations between macro-processes and everyday technological practice (Bray 2007), echoing (if in a different register) the concern of anthropologists of technology to expose the articulations between material work and community autopoiesis (Pfaffenberger 2001; Flitsch 2004). Thomas P. Hughes first proposed the term sociotechnical system in a study of the rise of electrical power systems, noting that good engineering alone was not sufficient to guarantee successful electrification; political, legal, social and economic measures were equally necessary—as were cultural and aesthetic adjustments (Hughes 1983; Gooday 2009). 'Sociotechnical systems are heterogeneous constructs that stem from the successful modification of social and non-social actors so that they work together harmoniously—that is, so that they resist dissociation' (Pfaffenberger 1992: 498). In the terms of actor-network theorists such as Bruno Latour or Madeline Akrich, successful innovation depends on enrolling and mobilizing human and non-human elements (actors or actants) to believe in the project, get it working and carry it forward (Akrich 1993). This systemic or network perspective draws consumers and users (or refusers) into the analysis as active contributors to the process of innovation. In the anthropological vein, it encourages us to focus on linkages between the values inherent in the goals and expectations of individuals; in the design, production and distribution of the technical products or services available to them; and in national or supranational levels of investment, regulation and policy. From an STS perspective, failure is as interesting, and as complex a process, as success.

Spanning and linking the domains of domesticity, business and governance, ranging in sophistication from the wok to the microwave, technological devices, practices and choices constitute a rich field for exploring the multiple levels at which shared values and everyday ethical practices, as well as societal shifts in ethical expectation, emerge and are negotiated (Bray 2008a; Oldenziel and Zachmann 2009). The systemic nature of technological practice or innovation also offers useful insights into how new practices, the changes in skill they necessitate and the values they embody, spread and stabilize. Whether high- or low-tech, the investigation of technological practices offers a privileged field for integrating materialist and interpretive analysis and for linking what Raymond Williams dubbed 'structures of feeling' to political economy (Pfaffenberger 2001; Bray 2007; Santos and Donzelli forthcoming).

Everyday ethical behaviour can be viewed as a form of skilled practice, one that always mobilizes social and symbolic resources and that frequently also deploys material, technical skills and instruments. The French school of anthropology of techniques/technology (the term techniques has both meanings in French) has developed a practical and flexible analytical method for linking the material, social and symbolic dimensions of technical or technological practices and skills, regardless of whether they are high- or low-tech. The approach grows out of the French anthropological convention of defining technique to include bodily practices (techniques du corps) as well as the use of tools. This dates back to Marcel Mauss, who saw techniques du corps as distinctive cultural practices, and to Andre Leroi-Gourhan, who treated tool, anatomy and speech as inseparable in his analysis of the logic of technical action (a position close to that of most classical Chinese theorists of ritual and ethical action). It begins with the documentation of chaînes opératoires or operational sequences, 'the series of operations involved in any transformation of matter (including our own body) by human beings' (Lemonnier 1992: 25). Skills (savoir faire), documented through operational sequences, are laid out as an ordered convergence of material, mental, social and cultural resources (d'Onofrio and Joulian 2006). The core observational and analytical methods may be deployed within a variety of overarching theoretical frameworks, including actor-network theory (Latour 1993), modes of production (Guille-Escuret 2003) or anthropology of ritual (Lemonnier 2004). It would seem a very promising method for mapping the materialities of virtuous or immoral action and the interfaces and articulations between political economy and structures of feeling. A recent article by Lu Xiaohe (2008) on business ethics in the PRC uses roughly this approach to track the production and decision-making processes of two or three defective or dangerous Chinese products and to identify the key points at which technological choices translate into ethical or unethical decisions.

The operating sequence approach is generally useful for mapping how technological practices translate values. Let me illustrate with two examples developed by anthropologists of technology. One is a reframing of Malinowski by Bryan Pfaffenberger (2001); the second is a study of N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• I: Childhood, Youth and Ethical Trajectories
• II: Ethical Action and Moral Evaluation in Rural Communities
• III: Technology, Techniques and the Materiality of Ethics
• Afterword
• Index