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The urban landscape vanished entirely as the bus entered the tunnel. In a few minutes, I would be arriving on Dongmen Island with a group of strangers to collaborate on an educational program called by its conveners “a summer utopia with humanistic knowledge.” The courses covered many domains—design, medicine, the environment—but most featured an anthropological flair, and most of the organizers had an anthropology background. I titled my course—one of the four core courses—“Tears of the Earth: An Anthropological Thinking Experiment.” The other core courses included one on island ethnography and one that linked architecture and anthropology. Alongside this distinct interest in anthropological treasures, the lifestyle was also remarkable. Our students would lead a commune-like, digital-free life aimed to slow down and collaborate in a fast-paced and individualized Chinese society.
As the bus exited the tunnel, the island displayed itself (Figure 1). Across two square kilometers, not a single corporate chain shop could be seen. Over 80% of the islanders work in fishing; several local groceries were the only source for “outside” products. Besides the picturesque scenery, the island has preserved a Mazu Temple, a military fort, and a lighthouse, documenting its centuries-old past. I was thrilled that the island’s geohistorical features seemed just perfect for my course on the environment. I was also nervous: would we live harmoniously together—perhaps like comrades—in this secluded place?
I am not unfamiliar with such experiments. In recent years several overseas Chinese students have returned from leading universities in the Global North to launch nonprofit programs back in China (Veritas China is a decade-long example). These programs painstakingly endeavor to elevate what Chinese academic environments have long downplayed: liberal education, humanities disciplines, and skills like critical thinking. They draw a diverse student body in terms of ages, places of origin, and education levels. Teaching for these programs entails complex processes of translation, during which teachers must remain sensitive to shifting contexts (how Western classics fail to speak to the Chinese context) and learning outcomes (how a diverse student body can generate unpredictable responses).
If other programs generally seek to translate treasures of Western liberal education, this program called One Res (an abbreviation for “One Residence”) was especially committed to anthropology. This tendency is first expressed through its course design—three of the four core courses on “anthropology” while the last one on history being arguably a sisterly discipline. Yet, anthropology was also treated as a treasure of praxis. Take the curious guidelines: no digital devices allowed, no grading systems, no course requirements. Most courses involved a great amount of hands-on, bricolage-like fieldwork or crafting practices, encouraging students to make do based on what was discoverable around them. Assigned to one of the residential buildings, each group functioned like an autonomous commune, independently designating residence rules, financial plans, and self-sufficiency models.
The program differs from conventional anthropology education in formal institutions, which usually takes place in a classroom setting before sending individual students to their respective sites. While some Chinese anthropology departments keep the tradition of extensive collaborative work, One Res presented a more “liberated” version where ideology did not matter, and authority could be challenged. Through thinking, practicing, and living, the program radically “excavated” treasures cherished by anthropology: be experimental, keep noticing and imagining, and stay connected—with the nearby, with oneself, and with all beings.
The Utopian Dream and its Pushbacks
“In this summer, with the warm sea breeze, on this island, let us escape from the digitalized and standardized world, and build a utopia of knowledge with a group of sincere and lively people.”
——Translated by the author from OneRes’ publicity materials
Like most utopian projects in history, One Res’ limitations were soon exposed once put into practice. Dissonances arose from day one, when two students missed the group bus and had to reach the island by taxi at their own expense. While this issue was peacefully resolved with the clarified requirement of punctuality, other issues could be stuck in the blurred area between what shall and shall not be regulated, who had the right to regulate and who did not, and where was the baseline that no one could transgress.
The “digital-free” goal was harder than expected. The committee made thorough plans to minimize the disruption caused by limited digital access. On day one, digital devices were collected; reading materials were printed and bound into books; audio-visual materials were scheduled to be screened from lecturers’ devices. The rationale was that, by restoring the “physicality” of life, we could rediscover the treasures we had lost in a highly digitalized world, be it the capacity to attend to surroundings or connect to other beings and things. One may recall Chinese poet Tao Qian’s story about the other-worldly “peach blossom spring,” where the main character needs to forget the “external” world and focus on reconstructing an ideal one on a strange land.
Yet not all saw the experiment of severing with the external in a positive light. While students appreciated that digital-free spaces gave them a purer and more connected life, some parents tried forceful interventions against it from their doubly justified position as both a client of the educational services and a legal guardian of the teenage child. They raised safety concerns and expectations of their children to continue previous work remotely. While the program saw value in “suspending” that hectic lifestyle, parents insisted upon integrating One Res into their children’s original trajectories. What was treasured by One Res—more focus, more connection, and less distraction—appeared to the concerned parents as obstacles. Indeed, I later learned that many parents were drawn not by the program’s utopian ideals but by the prestige of lecturers’ affiliations. For them, it is not an occasion for humanistic experimentation, but one of the stepping stones for their kids’ future entry into elite universities.
Even within the autonomous communes, things were not smooth. A commune is a domesticated space for collectivity and regulatory structures; Mary Douglas even calls the domestic regulation “tyranny.” Many of our Gen Z students have grown up in a highly atomized society and might not be used to compromising personal preferences for collective good. Besides parents’ interventions, varied individual voices formed the primary challenge to the sense of connectivity and community that the program hoped to construct. For one, each commune tried to set up a clear and fair system of labor division, like how dinners shall be prepared collaboratively and alternately. Yet the real situation turned out that some would labor much more than average and others would easily be laid back enjoying the harvest. Occasionally some folks slipped into the nearby city to fetch “external” food—what seemed especially desirable after days of communal eating.
These tensions culminated when the use of alcohol and cigarettes was detected in one of the residences. Behaviors like smoking and drinking were clearly stated as a big “no” by the committee for protecting underage students, yet were tolerated in certain communes at the discretion of commune leaders. Because legal enforcement regarding underage use of those substances in China is much looser than places like the United States, it is not rare to see it among teenagers who may drink or smoke for social occasions. This ambiguity was taken advantage of and contested by some at One Res who tried to justify their proposal through libertarian ideas. “Individual freedoms” was their response when the committee tried to correct their behaviors. While the committee considered everyone’s behavior in relation to the group atmosphere, the smokers and drinkers refused that relationality and resorted to the panacea of individualism. On the last day, when those rulebreakers rotated between residences announcing their inviolable “freedom,” I rushed out of the building before they started and lamented to myself, “Isn’t this emblematic of one major challenge facing anthropology today? When we tirelessly tell the world how connected we all are, some continued to dismiss that as inconvenient truth…”
Take a Piece of Anthropological Treasure Home
The challenges to the program’s vision did not overshadow its capacity to convey anthropology as both a discipline and a praxis. One core question during my preparation for the One Res course was, if most students were high schoolers who likely would not choose anthropology as future careers, how could I make a short-term introductory class interesting and relevant to their everyday life? Or, what is the potential of our discipline beyond its professional boundary? An introductory course may follow an intuitive logic, moving from historical trajectories to contemporary discourses. Yet, invoking the program’s experimental spirits, I decided that might not be the best approach to show the charm of anthropology. In my own first anthropology course, Diane Nelson gave this bold remark that “anthropology is what anthropologists do.” Her words enfolded a precious treasure endorsed by the discipline—be active and innovative. Each contribution will be shapeshifting to the contours of anthropology. Likewise, I hoped to show my students a boundless, unconstrained, and somewhat ambitious image of anthropology and to ask them to lead me as the course unfolds. The goal was not to remember certain theories or figures, but to embody or take a piece of treasure home—which piece of treasure then was up to each student’s discovery.
The course was thus designed to be “anti-definition.” I framed anthropology as a way of seeing, understanding, communicating, and living. I picked three words to capture why I believed anthropology mattered: “fun,” “kind,” and “open” (Figure 2). For “fun,” I explained how the discipline could teach one to “make the strange familiar and the familiar strange” and thus uncovered relational and comparative ways to look at the world. Commenting on “kind,” I emphasized that the discipline had the potential to enhance deep empathy and deep reflexivity—for all beings and oneself—which involves the ability to unpack the forces and structures that condition one’s agency. As for “open,” I tracked that the discipline has continuously expanded its objects of study (e.g., beyond human) and transformed its methodology, and that anthropologists were trained to open their body-mind during ethnographic work.
To put the words into praxis, a portion of each session was devoted to “teaching the world one thing at a time.” Students were to select and “implode” an ordinary object, brainstorming and depicting complex relations entangled in its formation. We attempted to see the world in, for example, a small piece of digital device, unraveling its biographical trajectory embedded in global processes of labor, power, politics, cultures, and economies. We also learned together to apply this way of seeing through into our daily life on the island. For instance, we tried to unpack the history of tombstones based on their minute traces. We also had numerous chats with the locals about their fishing careers and especially their integration into the country’s swift modernization. The magic continued to expand. To quote one student, “I found anthropology particularly … spiritual (you lingxingde). It is almost viscous. Once you see it in your life, you cannot stop seeing it. It is everywhere” [my emphasis]. I supposed she had found one treasure to take home—what Anna Tsing calls “arts of noticing.” And, in my student’s iteration, this type of arts is viscous; you don’t need to chase it, for it follows you!
Around halfway into the course, however, our amorphous exploration incurred some confusion. Someone asked, “I think I understand ‘implosion’ thinking, class readings, and video materials, but I still have a very vague image of anthropology. Could you tell me more about its history? Like a textbook?” That struck me as an interesting moment, when my “anti-definition” approach lost traction. Indeed, openness can hit the limit, while traditional ways of learning have their own merits. In response, I offered an extra session to introduce anthropology’s key figures and main ideas. Yet I still stressed that none of the classics shall be taken as a textbook. If conventional learning usually follows a pattern of “know-and-then-create,” my course turned out to reverse that order. Perhaps because a boundless anthropology was first “implanted” into those “undisciplined minds” and a praxis was readily honed as everyday practice, this unexpected return to conventional learning did not at all cancel the wild creativity that this unique program and place has inspired.
After eight days of immersive anthropology training, the One Res program ended with a 24-hour-long artistic creation “boot camp,” during which students were asked to materialize their takeaways in any ways that proved feasible on the island. While my course followed the multimodal trends in anthropology and included various ethnographic forms, I was greatly amazed by the even more diverse and fruitful outputs created by my students. In addition to familiar media like slide shows and documentaries, I received a short story, two poems, an original song, an installation, a policy plan, and two flyers, among others. Some were inspired by course topics, and others recorded episodes of the island life. Some kept a realistic tone, while others presented as a thought experiment. Like how anthropologists actively tap into public-facing domains of artistic creation, my students wove various talents into their anthropological concerns—be experimental, in both forms and substances.
Lin created an installation with discarded plastic bottles that could be easily found in all the residential buildings and seminar rooms (Figure 3). For convenience, unlimited bottled water was offered to students. A student could easily fetch a bottle. Yet when they left for the next place, they completely forgot about that bottle. Unfinished bottles kept piling up in students’ living areas. Lin’s work drew attention to a collective issue while suggesting a solution. Customizing a bottle, as Lin reasoned, was essentially against disposability, a kind of mentality nourished by mass production. Lin’s work inspired the committee to consider alternative ways of water supply, like distributing reusable bottles and fetching water from drinking fountains. As one of the course sessions concerned global waste, the treasure that Lin chose to take home was the capacity to notice again what has been rendered invisible by contemporary society.
Several students echoed similar themes. Jiang’s piece was an elegy for the natural landscape lost to mining extraction and those who suffered the most from environmental degradation; Kay’s song imagined a journey through post-apocalypse ruins; Tian’s video was devoted to the landscape of Dongmen Island, where he learned to notice the surroundings and reconnect to more-than-human beings. Perusing their artwork was deeply humbling, for they had creatively translated anthropology in unique directions and languages. I was the student who was taught, time and again, about the potential of anthropology. Last but not least, this is also a story of anthropology being radically “situated knowledge,” for which uniquely designed space and environment could lead to different kinds of treasure-hunting, and one of anthropology being productively “anti-prototype,” for which re-crafting work in the Global South will and should continuously transform such a discipline that originally rose from the colonial West.