Contemporary Chinese Studies: Gender, Voice and Change. Conversation with Maria Jaschok, August 2014
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-173
Intervista a Maria Jaschok.
application/pdf
2239-625X
1793
2
en
Vanessa Maher
Anuac
Contemporary Chinese Studies: Gender, Voice and Change. Conversation with Maria Jaschok, August 2014
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
3
Interviews
2015-06-28
2015-05-17
2014-12-28
2015-05-17
97-117
1
Vanessa Maher
2014
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-173
97
Università di Verona, Italy
2239-625X
2
en
117
Contemporary Chinese Studies: Gender, Voice and Change. Conversation with Maria Jaschok, August 2014
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/1793/1502
3
             Contemporary Chinese Studies: Gender, Voice and Change
                  Conversation with Maria Jaschok, August 2014




                                                                                    Vanessa Maher
                                                                               University of Verona
                                                                         mahervanessa9@gmail.com




                Dr Maria Jaschok                               Dr Vanessa Maher




Summary

       This interview is partly an intellectual biography of Maria Jaschok, a renowned scholar of
contemporary China, partly a rare account of the changes in Western approaches to the study of
China over the past fifty years. It also touches on relationships of mentoring and collaboration
among scholars and in the field. Prominent themes are the history of gender studies, the question of
“muted groups” and “voice” and the valuable international networks established since the Seventies
by the Oxford Centre for Cross-Cultural Research on Women, comprising anthropologists who later
founded the International Gender Studies Centre, of which Maria Jaschok has been Director since
2000. The Centre has been based at Lady Margaret Hall, University of Oxford, since 2011.




                                     Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   97
Maria Jaschok

    Research Fellow and Director of the International Gender Sudies Centre at Lady Margaret Hall,
University of Oxford, is also affiliated to the Oxford China Centre, Interdisciplinary Area Studies.
Her research interests are in the areas of religion, gender and agency; gendered constructions of
memory; feminist ethnographic practice; marginality and identity in contemporary China. She is
involved in on-going collaborative research projects in central China. She has published widely on
gender, Islamic feminism and indigenization of religion in China; for instance, among her more
recent indicative publications: “Outsiders Within’: Speaking to Excursions Across Cultures” (in
Christina Hughes, Ed., 2000, Researching Gender. Situated Knowers and Feminist Standpoint,
vol.1, Sage Publications, London); “Sources of Authority: Female Ahong and Qingzhen Nüsi
(Women’s Mosques) in China” (in Masooda Bano, Ed., 2012, Women, Leadership and Mosques:
Changes in Contemporary Islamic Authority, Brill, Leiden); Women, Religion, and Space in China
(2011, Routledge, New York); “Gender, Religion, and Little Traditions: Chinese Muslim Women
Singing Minguo” (in Mechthild Leutner, Nicola Spakowski, 2002, Women in China. The
Republican Era in Historical Perspective, Lit Verlag, Münster); “Sources and methods for research
on women and Islamic cultures in China, 1700-1900” (in 2003, Encyclopedia of Women and
Islamic Cultures, vol. I, Brill, Leiden); The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam: A
Mosque of Their Own (2000, Curzon Press).


Introductory note by Vanessa Maher1

        The International Gender Studies Centre grew out of the Centre for Cross Cultural Research
on Women, CCRW, founded in Oxford by a group of women anthropologists in 1983. Its first
Director was Shirley Ardener, whom I had met in the Seventies. She was already known for her
incisive theoretical contribution to the new feminist anthropology and for the ethnography she had
carried out in the Cameroons and Nigeria with her husband Edwin Ardener in the 1950s and 1960s.
In the introduction to her edited volume Perceiving Women (1975, Wiley, London) she examined
the concept of “muted groups” as it applied to women. The volume included her chapter on sexual
insult and women’s militancy in the Cameroons as well as a chapter by Edwin Ardener on the
“lack of voice” of women in the ethnography of the time (“Belief and the Problem of Women”, first
published in 1972). 2 For many years the Oxford Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women was
largely self-financed. Based in Queen Elizabeth House, together with diverse research groups and
postgraduate courses, it was a hive of activity, hosting Visiting Fellows from various parts of the
world, organising seminars, workshops and producing books, many of them edited by Shirley
Ardener herself. In 2009 Shirley Ardener was awarded the OBE (Order of the British Empire) for
her services to anthropology. I spent some months at the CCRW in 1984 and a year in 1986/1987 as
Visiting Research Fellow. In subsequent years I kept in touch. During a period of leave in 2011, I
attended the seminar series on “Muslim Women in China”, organised by the current Director of
IGSC, Maria Jaschok. I also witnessed the IGSC’s Trentennial celebrations and its move from
Queen Elizabeth House to Lady Margaret Hall, an Oxford University college originally founded for
women. The Directorship of Maria Jaschok, a renowned scholar of China, has ushered in a new
phase of which she gives an account in this interview and which will be of interest to Italian
anthropologists. I have provided some explanatory footnotes since the subject matter may be
unfamiliar to many readers. The bracketed references within the text are intended to provide a time-

1
    See end-note for profile of Vanessa Maher
2
 I was a member of the London Collective of Women Anthropologists in 1972 when the first version of Edwin
Ardener’s article came out, causing a certain furore. V.M.


                                                Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   98
line and refer to only a few of the publications of the authors mentioned. These are detailed in the
bibliography at the end.


Vanessa Maher: How did you get involved in the International Gender Studies Centre?

Maria Jaschok: Well, at the time I was far away geographically from the UK. I was working in
China, commuting between Central China, Henan and Hong Kong. I was working on the first
stages of a manuscript on women’s mosques in Chinese Islam that became the first of a series of
publications on Muslim women in China. At the time there was nothing written on Muslim women’s
mosques in China. It was many years before we were ready to publish: first we had to do
exhaustive research and field work. The very geographical area we had to cover was enormous
because the Muslim community is scattered all over China. Working through the feminist and the
gender studies literature in order to follow up my particular interest in the organisation of space
and the collective organisation of women, I encountered the publications by members of the Centre
for Cross Cultural research on Women and in particular Women and Space. Ground Rules and
Social Maps edited in 1981 by Shirley Ardener. Of course, the series was very interesting. I noticed
the authors and the editors of the series who were working closely with Berg publishers. On the
theme of women and space I felt I needed to raise some issues. I wrote to Shirley Ardener, hoping
my letter from China would get to her. Of course, Shirley being Shirley (I didn’t know her at the
time) not only replied in due course via airmail. She also suggested, in her wonderful way, “By the
way we’re also running research fellowship programs and if you were ever so inclined you might
find that our Centre could provide you with a place to write, resources and a community of
support”. That was the starting point, my contact with the CCRW. It was quite early on, around
1997 or 1998 and before I thought of joining IGS. This meant that when I wrote to Shirley, I was
still only in the early stages of writing. The book came out in 2000 but by that time I had already
spent a term as a Visiting Research Fellow of CCRW and that was a good experience. My
preoccupation at the time was to get that manuscript to a stage where it could be submitted to
publishers, working flat out. It was a co-authored book so I was working in Chinese and English.
My co-author was a Chinese social scientist (The history of that collaboration is interesting in itself
and is detailed below).
        So my entry point as far as CCRW was concerned was as a writer needing a facility, a
community, resources, all of which I found at the Centre. I received a very positive impression of
that community and a sense of “sisterhood”, of affinity, a link that lasted long past that one term.
When I left the Centre I kept in touch and was even invited to give the commemorative lecture in
honour of Barbara Ward.3


VM: Oh yes, I remember she worked in Hong Kong.

MJ: Exactly. She did fieldwork and taught in Hong Kong. She was an inspiring anthropologist.
When I arrived in Hong Kong, Barbara Ward had already passed away. But she was remembered
fondly as someone to whom the individual mattered and the community she studied mattered. She
wasn’t there just to get her publication out. And that impressed me. I thought “My goodness, these
informants remember her after all these years, because of the friendship and respect she showed
towards them”.



3
 Barbara E. Ward (1919-1983) was a British anthropologist who carried out fieldwork among boat-people in Hong
Kong in the Fifties and later in Indonesia .


                                          Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X           99
VM: She was at Cambridge when I was doing my Ph.D. She asked me to supervise some of the
Newnham undergraduates in social anthropology, so I occasionally had lunch with her. I remember
her as an admirable person, very observant and easy to talk to.

MJ: I heard so much about her when I was in Hong Kong as a student doing fieldwork for my
Ph.D. thesis. I’ve never forgotten the impression made on me as a student. When the villagers talked
about her, I wasn’t only finding out more about my topic, which was domestic slavery and
concubinage, I was also developing an idea of appropriate methodology: how to be sensitive to a
situation which is foreign to me. Barbara Ward raised important questions. What is the relationship
you set up with people in the field, how do you justify entering into the lives of people who haven’t
invited you to do that, and from whom you ask such huge favours? How do you justify that to
yourself? And from these questions stem observations, not only about the people you meet in the
field but also about the older generations of anthropologists and social historians. You don’t work
on a blank canvas, as if there had never been another anthropologist there before you. I’ve learnt so
much from older scholars. That also happened when I met James Lee Watson, who was an
important scholar of Chinese lineages in the New Territories of Hong Kong. He was teaching
Anthropology at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS) when I entered the
M. A. in Chinese Sociology and Anthropology. We never lost touch. Later on he went to Harvard
and became the Fairbanks professor of Chinese Studies (Watson, 1975,1977). He retired a few
years ago but just recently sent me an article of reflections on his early work in the Sixties and
Seventies when he was doing fieldwork in Hong Kong and the New Territories. 4


VM: A few chronological things to fill in. Where did you go to university and when?

MJ: I grew up in Germany. My parents felt I should have a chance of spending a “gap year”5
abroad, before going to university. They expected me to attend a German university, but my interest
in England and English literature was well known to them. My father was quite an Anglophile, and
they decided to send me abroad, to London, which was quite rare at that time. I was only eighteen,
nearly nineteen. I decided I liked living in England very much. I also liked the education, the
tutorial system, which compared favourably with the German system at that time, where there were
massive numbers of students crowded into a lecture hall and the Herr Professor was a distant figure.
The academic establishment in Germany was very hierarchical. I was interested, quite early on, in
the English university system and got permission from my parents to study here. I opted for Sussex
University, where I took a degree in International Relations, in the School of Social Sciences. I
didn’t enter a Chinese Studies degree at the undergraduate level. It was when I was doing Foreign
Policy Analysis with a visiting American professor, who was an expert on the Cold War and
especially on Cold War perceptions of China, that I got interested in China, but not from a Cold
War perspective. Actually, I was frustrated by my teacher’s refusal to consider foreign policy except
from the viewpoint of a particular superpower agenda. My question was (we are talking about the
late Seventies): What about viewpoints that would take into consideration Chinese national
interests, fears and trepidations? What are we learning about China? There was huge interest in
this vast country, but we knew very little. The little we knew at that time about the Cultural
Revolution was romanticised, ridiculously so. But we had to ask whether what we were being taught
at university level was adequate, whether we should be receiving such a tunnel vision of the rest of
the world. China and Russia in particular were seen from the vantage point of the Western powers,
4
    New Territories: a peninsula of Hong Kong, one of three regions besides Hong Kong and the Kowloon peninsula.
5
    “Gap year”: year of “leave” which some students take between finishing school and starting university.


                                              Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X          100
with their values and normative systems. Anything which did not match those particular norms was
dismissed as inferior or dangerous. That got me so angry: I decided I needed to challenge this
view, but I couldn’t do that unless I were better informed. Sussex had a tutorial system which I loved
because we were encouraged to argue our views and challenge received ideas. That unpromising
beginning, the sense of frustration because of this professor’s dismissive approach to non-Cold War
interests meant that I had to read up on China. This was around 1975.


VM: Your professor had probably been trained during the period running up to the Vietnam War.

MJ: Yes, absolutely. Now I know I could have challenged that view in a different and more nuanced
way, but as an undergraduate you do the best you can. I am pleased, looking back, that I didn’t
accept a blinkered viewpoint and thought it was my right to question it. At that time foreign students
studying in the UK, even from European countries, were classified as “alien”, but I considered that
I was first of all a “student” rather than a “foreigner” and that I had the right to ask critical
questions in a tutorial, even if they weren’t welcome. The research I had to undertake in order to ask
those critical questions gave me a huge interest in China. Once I started out, I was “hooked”, as
they say. I even briefly joined the Sino-British Friendship Association which was so popular at that
time. A lot of people called themselves the “friends of China” which was a bit extreme since none of
them had been there. People had to study China at a distance, but many had a rose-tinted view of
China. A romanticised view. That was my entry point, when I was in my second year at Sussex. And
I had to make a decision. Would I take Chinese studies seriously? In that case I had to study the
Chinese language. I didn’t realise how hard that would be, but I knew I wasn’t bad at languages as I
was already educated in a second and third language.
       The second formative experience was my encounter with Joseph Needham, the great iconic
figure who towered over everything to do with Chinese Studies.6 I wrote to him and he invited me
over to Cambridge to spend the day talking about my plans. He impressed me so much so that I
began to believe that everyone who studied Chinese culture had his extraordinary broad ranging
humanity.


VM: Jack Goody’s work made frequent reference to him, so I came across him in that connection. 7

MJ: So you know what I’ m talking about. I spent a wonderful day with him. He could so easily
have sent me off after half an hour, but his genuine curiosity for my interest in China, his wish to be
helpful and offer constructive suggestions, led me to take certain steps and eventually brought me to
the School of Oriental and African Studies in London (SOAS). My supervisors there were all great
admirers of Needham. Was this serendipity? For me it was decisive and inspiring to meet Needham,
that particular representative of Chinese studies. It set the bar very high and subsequent experience
didn’t always match that, but I will always be grateful for his humanity, his interest in a young
person. His wonderful, exemplary mentorship impressed me and influenced me in my subsequent
career as a researcher and a teacher. It set me on my career in Chinese Studies: the study of the
Chinese language, Chinese history, then Chinese sociology and anthropology. I was supervised by
the great historian of the Tai Ping rebellion, Charles Curwen.8 Tai Ping was a quasi-Christian

6
  Joseph Needham (1900-1995) British scientist, historian and sinologist, known for his research in biochemistry and in
the history of Chinese science. He launched and edited the first seven volumes of the monumental work Science and
Civilisation in China, which has now reached the 27th volume.
7
    Jack Goody (1919-) British anthropologist. See Goody, 1996.
8
    Charles Curwen, historian of China, worked in China between 1946 and 1954

                                            Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X           101
rebellion.9 Charles Curwen was someone Joseph Needham recommended after many hours of
conversation with me. Initially I had thought of going to Cambridge, but Cambridge then did not
offer degrees in modern Chinese Studies. Needham was aware of the circumstances of my interest in
China, the books I had read. He thought that Cambridge wouldn’t give me the academic support I
needed, whereas SOAS would be ideal because of the scholars who were teaching there and their
particular interest in 19th and 20th century China.


VM: Had they studied with Needham?

MJ: They were people he had mentored and with whom he had many conversations. Joseph
Needham was part of the inter-faith dialogue of Christianity and other religions and so was Charles
Curwen who became my first tutor at SOAS. They were left-leaning liberal intellectuals, interested
in the Maoist ideal, deeply identifying with Chinese national aspirations but not always sufficiently
aware of the brutality of the Communist era. These things emerged later on. I became acquainted
with that circle of intellectuals through Joseph Needham and SOAS.


VM: You moved to SOAS halfway through your degree?

MJ: No, I finished the degree at Sussex. I went back to Sussex to talk to my teachers about my plan
for the future, and they tried to dissuade me. They were convinced my future was in philosophy for
which, moreover, there were scholarships - unbelievable when I think of my students’ situation now.
We had the Frankfurt School and Habermas influencing us at Sussex, which was a fantastically
lively, radical, progressive and intellectually challenging environment. I loved it. I thought about
that later on. Would I have been better off staying at Sussex? But they didn’t have the courses in
Chinese studies which interested me. SOAS proved tough in many ways, because we had to work
very hard to cope with the Chinese language. Many students had been there from the beginning of
their university studies, but I only decided after I got my BA that I would enter Chinese Studies. I
did a Master’s degree first and then was accepted to do the Ph.D. I then did an additional language
course because when you enter the Ph. D. you have to use primary sources and quite a bit of
classical Chinese. Most of my research was in Hong Kong and the Territories, where they speak a
rather classical Chinese, not the newspaper style. It wasn’t the modern Chinese.10 I really did it all
the hard way.
         The feminist student would have appreciated more supportive mentoring from sympathetic
tutors. But, alas, my feminist ideals and convictions had to tide me over negative experiences.
Chinese Studies at the time were very male dominated, and so was the culture of the School. The
great icons of learning were men. There was misogyny even in the classroom, but that was true of
most subjects, not only of Chinese Studies. As a student that was something you had to deal with at
that time. But mixed with that ambivalence over the quality of mentoring, although there were some
shining exceptions, because of my interest in revolutionary 20th century China, the role played by
women fascinated me greatly. I was unaware, at least initially, of the many rose-tinted
representations of China of which the women’s liberation narrative formed a prominent feature.



9
  The Taiping rebellion was launched by the followers of a millenarian movement against the Manchu Qing Dynasty in
the name of Jesus Christ. It gave rise to a devastating civil war lasting from 1850-1964.
10
  Standard (modern) Chinese is a simplified form of Mandarin, taught in the schools of the People’s Republic of China.
There are many regional dialects. Cantonese is the official language in Hong Kong and the Territories.


                                           Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X           102
Women driving tractors, women as “half of the sky”.11 A wonderfully orchestrated propaganda
came out of China and became the subject matter of academia. That was also the great time of
feminist anthropology, of the Rosaldos12 who had such an impact on us students (Rosaldo, M.,
1983; Rosaldo, R., 1986,1989). I think a tension was set up between our personal experience - for
example of sexual harassment - and the aspirational standard we set for ourselves. We weren’t just
going to put up with it or conform to the idea that we weren’t fit for Academia, that we would just
become foot soldiers as it were. The genuinely inspiring, critical and revisionist writing on aspects
of women’s experience of Maoist-style liberation started appearing from the late 1970s onwards,
coinciding with the slow opening up of Chinese society to the outside world.


VM: What do you mean by revisionist history in this context?

MJ: I refer to the attempt to review critically the received historiography, in this case officially
sanctioned narratives of the experience of women under the Communist revolution and even earlier
in the liberated areas which the Communists took over before 1949, before they assumed political
control and became the government of China, and also up to 1959. It is a revision of that early
Western literature which was naively optimistic. It saw much of what was coming out of China as
positive, and accepted what turned out to be unduly positive representations of the situation of
women, under Communism and during the years of consolidation. That had a personal effect on us;
it set up certain expectations for ourselves. For us the role of women in China wasn’t just an
academic interest, it also became something that we absorbed existentially. We read about the way
that women could do more than be mere handmaidens of the revolution. The early literature
suggested that they could be genuine comrades, participants and co-workers in the task of
revolutionising the country. That idea was extraordinary and inspiring. It suggested that our
experience in the European context wasn’t necessarily replicated elsewhere. There were alternatives
out there where revolution for women was more than empty words. This perception inspired those
who were closely involved in contemporary Chinese Studies. It was like experiencing revolution
vicariously. We felt part of something new and exciting, and that had a very personal effect which
went far beyond a mere academic interest. It left its mark on all of us at that time.


VM: And who were “us”?

MJ: I’m thinking of a group of about eight or nine Master’s students, many of them women,
interestingly enough, taught by a Chinese studies expert “Woody” Watson (James Lee Watson),
who taught Chinese anthropology and sociology. He put us in touch with young American scholars.
He was genuinely interested in issues of gender. He brought us well-known writers we knew from
our reading of Chinese gender studies literature: Margery Wolf, talking about gender and family
relations in the New Territories (Wolf, 1972), Phyllis Andors on patriarchy and the social revolution
in China (Andors, 1981), Judith Stacey on the “unfinished liberation” of Chinese women (Stacey,
1983), among others. They were his personal friends. He brought them into the classroom and we
enjoyed the privilege of asking questions of these authors. The impact on us was extraordinary, but
what we didn’t take into account was that it was all happening at a distance. It wasn’t our society
which was changing. We were not feeling personally the impact of Chinese policy changes or law

11
     See Broyelle, 1972. “Half of the sky” referred to the Chinese adage “Women hold up half the sky”.
12
  Michelle Rosaldo 1944-1981 and Renato Rosaldo carried out important ethnography of the Ilongot people of the
Philippines. Michelle made a pioneering contribution to the anthropology of gender. Her husband Renato Rosaldo has
written important works of ethnographic and cultural theory.


                                         Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X         103
reforms. We were feeling vicariously the best side of it but not what was oppressive and a source of
disappointment to many Chinese women who had given their energy and talents, and many their
lives, to the ideals of a genuine social and cultural revolution. So we had the best of both worlds,
the excitement and the ideals, without having to deal with the downside, the oppression and the
consolidation of power during the years of compromise, when extraordinary concessions were
renewing the conditions supporting continued subordination of women.


VM: Who made the concessions?

MJ: Many Chinese female and male intellectuals and revolutionaries who had given much of their
life to the revolution. Promises had been made which were quickly broken, as they found out, simply
because the “interest of the nation had to come first”, that is, before the interest of women who
could all too easily be co-opted into the overriding agenda of a national project. That was very
clearly spelled out in the archival documents that I read and which I made myself go back to later
on. But when I first began my studies I was reading the literature on China through a lens of
optimism which heightened the intensity of my own personal engagement with China. Much later in
my subsequent career as a researcher I had to go back and reflect upon this literature in a different
and more nuanced way. So it was complicated: the personal, the existential and the academic
experiences were interwoven. You must know that among the people who taught us in my early
years in British academia were members of the Peace Corps movement who considered their
foremost identity to be that of “friend of China”. In the years following Deng Xiaoping’s economic
liberalization, these friends of China too were beginning to feel disenchanted.13 The years of
revolution had been replaced by years of repression and a dictatorial autocratic regime built on the
foundations of an enduring system of Confucian gender morality. The sacrifices were taken for
granted, the years of starvation, the persecution of the great contributors to the revolution and the
victory of the Communist Party. In the end, too many idealistic revolutionaries, women among
them, were castigated and branded as enemies of the revolution. All these events slowly filtered into
the seminar room, only reluctantly critiqued by supporters of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, but it took
my own personal experience when I was doing fieldwork, visiting and living in China, to bring
home to me the troubling significance of these developments. When I was doing fieldwork in Hong
Kong, around 1980, I had the opportunity to go into China proper, not long after the Cultural
Revolution.14 You could visit China but it was difficult to approach anyone. It was so unlike the
society I thought I knew after studying the literature. There was a more critical literature already
coming out from certain publishers. But my own rather sobering encounter with China “on the
ground” made me ask myself a number of hard questions about my motives for entering this area
of studies and my relationship with the country I was studying.


VM: There were connections also with the women’s movement in Britain, for example in the
writing of Delia Davin, who studied in China in the Sixties.15

MJ: Yes. Delia Davin was very important. Indeed, I had contacted her before I decided to enrol at

13
  The Peace Corps is a volunteer organisation run by the United States to provide technical assistance in “developing
countries”.
14
  Cultural Revolution. A political movement (1966-1976) aimed at purging traditional and capitalist elements from
Chinese society, destroying “old” customs, cultural habits and ideals and reimposing Maoist thought.
15
     Delia Davin is a British sinologist and President of the British Association of Chinese Studies.


                                               Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X      104
SOAS to ask whether someone with a social science background should consider entering Chinese
Studies. She strongly recommended me to do so because she thought Chinese studies needed more
social scientists. Then she taught at Leeds.


VM: In Italy at the time there was Eduarda Masi who did important work on China (Masi
1968,1978), also Enrica Collotti Pischel (1972)and Renata Pisu(1999). Did you come across
them?16

MJ: The fact that I did not meet with these important scholars tells you of the influence we were
under at that time. Like many of my fellow-students, my inspiration came from American academia
which was dominant particularly in my area of research. It is still correct to say that in many ways
Chinese Studies continue to be dominated by American academia. We went to the conferences of the
American Asian society, AAS, for instance, rather than to European conferences. We were more
exposed to the likes of Margery Wolf and Arthur Wolf and other American anthropologists, the
Johnsons (Elizabeth Johnson, and Kay Johnson and husband)17 than to European scholars.
Moreover, the exciting conferences and workshops seemed to take place in the United States. And,
last but not least, the funding, scholarships and resources to support Chinese studies also came
largely from the United States. But the SOAS legacy with its mix of Needhamites and non-
Needhamites left us with one conviction: that we had to have lived in China, and done fieldwork,
before we went into teaching; that is, we couldn’t teach straight after our Ph.D. I decided early on
that I wanted to spend some time in China, however difficult it might prove to be. It was quite tough
in the 1980s, when I was young, only recently out of university. That decision to live there was
important. On and off I lived in China for many years. Life in China became quite difficult because
in later projects, such as the one I took part in when I was helping to set up Chinese Studies in Long
Island University, we encountered more official barriers. I should just say that I did my
apprenticeship in China, and I’m convinced that it was the making of me as a sinologist because I
did it in a most personal if sometimes quite difficult way. I taught in China, I did research, I
participated in academic and social events, I made friends and acquired a large network of social
contacts.


VM: Did you teach anthropology?

MJ: No, at that time the only way I was able to teach in a university was to offer supervision in
English literature and “general studies”. My university of choice was Zhongshan University in
Guangzhou, Guangdong Province. I had done my doctoral research on concubinage and domestic
slavery but you couldn’t just do research in China; you needed a role, a justification for your
presence. So I offered to teach as a so-called “foreign expert”. My responsibility was largely to
supervise graduate dissertations, and Master’s theses, mainly in English – and I was attached to the
English Language Faculty. The dissertations were in literature and “general subjects”: literary
appreciation, “industrial novels”, socialist critique etc. I was asked to do this because the Chinese
staff didn’t want to be too closely associated with subjects that might get them into trouble. The

16
   Eduarda Masi (1927-2011) was an Italian sinologist and scholar of Chinese society and literature. Renata Pisu is an
Italian translator and journalist (1935-) who lived in China for many years from 1957 to 1964; Enrica Collotti Pischel
(1930-2003) was a political scientist who specialized in the study of China and Vietnam. Apart from Renata Pisu, they
did not pay particular attention to women or gender.
17
  Elisabeth Johnson was a sinologist specialised in the history of Chinese art. Kay Johnson writes on women and the
family in relation to the Revolution(1985).


                                           Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X           105
Eighties were still the time of anti “bourgeois liberalism” campaigns. University campuses were
not safe from campaigns, interrogations, inquisitions. Students had to be careful. Those who were
daring enough to choose a particular subject matter were then lucky enough or unlucky enough to
have me as a supervisor. Often I had very little background in their subject matter. I could
supervise a thesis on Emily Dickinson but I was more uncertain when it came to "industrial
novels”. But that was my role and it was a fascinating learning experience, inside the actual
university. You saw the inner workings of a society which was in the transitional stage from
enforced revolution to a slow gradual liberalization. A very slow process of change was taking
place that brought with it uncertainty, precariousness and faint hopes of a better future. There were
attempts to stabilise the country and strengthen the economy, yet politically, culturally and
existentially, the scars left by the Cultural Revolution and all those political campaigns had not
healed. Their repercussions in the universities were barely addressed. This situation left unspoken
personal angst, silences among colleagues and a sense of the frailty of progress made. These were
very sobering experiences for me. I needed to understand the experience which Chinese people had
had of the Cultural Revolution. It contradicted the optimistic representations that I had entertained
when I was a student in Britain. It was at that time that I started getting letters from former fellow
students telling me they were opting out of Chinese studies. They felt that the China they
experienced in the field was not matching up to the China they had imagined in their student days.
But I felt I owed it to myself to learn more and that the personal learning could benefit my study of
Chinese society. I could not stop as I was already too deeply involved with a China that had
moreover acquired most personal associations for me: of friendship, of poignant discoveries of
human courage and heroism. And which also provided me with much critical self-reflection. So I
remained in the field and with the choices that I had made when still a young ignorant student.
        Then I went through a second phase of immersion in the society and in all the complex
processes of confrontation or closure to that experience. Many Chinese refused to face up to what
had happened because they couldn’t process it. They couldn’t talk about it because the people who
had been punishing them and physically assaulting them in the famous criticism sessions were
working with them now as colleagues, in their Faculty and in their Department. For example,
while I was there, there was an older professor of 18th and 19th English Literature who had been
made to work in a pigsty as a punishment. When he came back to the University, the former Red
Guard who had put the dunce’s cap on him, who had criticised him as a bourgeois, decadent
capitalist – a black element - corrupted by Western ideals and values, was now a young lecturer in
that same department. They never discussed what happened but they had to collaborate, in order to
make the educational reforms work. That was very striking, sometimes even troubling, the capacity
of people to work together with former adversaries when the memory of cruelty and cowardly
conduct was still so fresh in their mind.


VM: What about the link between Chinese studies and gender?

MJ: First of all, there was the wonderful anthropological literature we were able to read at
university and discuss in our seminars, inspiring all of us young students. Then, as I intimated
earlier on, I had to start facing up to the sober realization that on closer examination, things hadn’t
been quite so straightforward for many women who lived during the years of the Chinese civil war
and the time of Communist government consolidation, during the 1950s. After the Communist Party
came into government in 1949, government priorities were the consolidation of state power and
control over a vast nation rather than keeping its promises to the women who had participated in
the early years of the revolution and continued to do Party work after 1949. To serve the interest of
women would have endangered the national project of marshalling national resources to strengthen
the country against its enemies, perceived and real, whether internal or external. My focus of
interest became: how were women continuously marginalised? My research questions shifted to an

                                     Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   106
interest in “voice” in the political, public and civil spheres of society. What conditions were needed
for women to develop a collective “voice” that would have repercussions on the most intimate
spheres of their lives? How could they break through the silences I felt around me and articulate the
experiences they were part of? Issues of marginality, silence and voice gave rise in turn to
perplexing methodological implications. How could an outsider/researcher approach concerns and
questions that were on the one side deeply ingrained norms, values and convictions and on the
other side politically sensitive? Women’s liberation had never been one of the main pillars of the
Communist Party’s legitimacy. At that time it became also important to me to develop a
methodology that would respect diversity of contexts in which women construct specific narratives
of emancipation that might be different from mine. I began to develop a collaborative methodology,
to define my idea of reciprocity and the mutuality of learning. What would that entail, given the
often unequal relationship between Western researchers and local researchers?
          This again needs to be put in context. In the Nineties, the whole question of women’s
history and Chinese women’s history was no longer dominated by Anglo-American voices such as
those of Delia Davin, Elizabeth Croll (1978),18 Margery Wolf, Judith Stacey, Phyllis Andors.
Chinese voices, and other so-called Third World feminist voices, increasingly came into the debates.
These were often women who had gone abroad to study, at Harvard, Berkeley or at other
universities, bringing different perspectives and positionalities, so that the need for dialogue
became increasingly evident and necessary. The range of subject matter and topics in Chinese
Studies increased greatly, to the benefit of us all, but in my case, these developments also convinced
me of the need to engage in more collaborative research projects.
          I will single out a particular formative experience which shaped my quest for a
methodology more suitable to the research I planned to do. This was when I joined a small group of
Chinese feminist scholar/activities at a time when Women’s Studies in China became a contested
and at times divisive debate. Women’s Studies in China can be said to have started in 1985, when
the first Women’s Studies Centre was set up by Li Xiaojiang. It developed into a nation-wide
phenomenon in the course of the Nineties, in great measure due to the charismatic leadership of Li
Xiaojiang.19 She was an iconic figure who dominated Women/Gender Studies discourse in China for
several decades, with an influence that extended into Anglo-American feminist circles. She
convened important conferences, edited major volumes and wrote influential cultural studies of
female representation in elite and popular historical narratives. A well-known intellectual dissident,
she nevertheless succeeded in attending conferences abroad, making herself the most eloquent voice
on matters relating to China’s gender politics. Li Xiaojiang, together with a small group of women
academics and activists, established China’s first ever International Women’s College and a
Women’s Museum which was also intended as a research institution.


VM: When was this?

MJ: This was in 1994 in Zhengzhou, the provincial capital of Henan. It was a very daring act to set
up such institutions during a rather volatile period when the Chinese Government was preparing to
host the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women, fearful of the impact of a large number of
foreign feminists on China’s gender regime that had been so effectively controlled over many years.
When I joined that small group of women, I left my position in Long Island University, a large
undergraduate university in the USA, to become part of an exciting adventure. I was the only
Western academic in a small team of women academics, seeing an opportunity for unprecedented

18
  Elisabeth Croll (1940-2013) was born in New Zealand but taught Chinese Studies in Britain, with a particular focus
on the social life of Chinese women.
19
     Li Xiaojiang, pioneer of women’s studies in China. See Li Xiaojiang, 1983, 1999.


                                             Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X       107
contributions to higher education and to Women’s Studies in particular. There were a lot of
difficulties in setting up the College. The campus was the former Women’s Cadre School, where
historically women cadres had been trained, in preparation for roles in government institutions,
and in particular for leadership roles in the All-China Women’s Federation. So that campus was
given over to this venture, to the Women’s International College and the Women’s Museum. It is
quite fascinating to think that a government-owned space gave way to a radical feminist initiative.
The whole enterprise was extraordinary. Building a suitable curriculum, training and appointing
suitable teachers and enrolling students for a most unorthodox educational organization required
enormous alliance-building, organisation and patient preparation. This could only happen because
there was a forceful and charismatic figure behind this project, Li Xiaojiang. Without her
connections, her extraordinary strength, her conviction in a rightful cause, her charisma, and the
force of her influence over the women around her, there would have been no Women’s International
College. She addressed with ease the hundreds of women who thronged the lecture halls, and she
brought to these women a recurrent, and enthusiastically received, message. It was time for women
to take their lives into their own hands, whether as thinking or as doing creatures. It was not
enough, she would always say, to be given things, to be given entitlements, to be given rights. How
could women dream of acquiring the status of equal partners, of claiming “half of the sky”, if they
had become dependent on hand-outs from a patriarchal state? That was not liberation. Women had
grown complacent in their dependency and she was the voice, she said, to wake them into a state of
collective energy.
           Li Xiaojiang then did something which surprised everyone. She appointed me as Vice-
Principal of the International Women’s College and the Deputy-Director of the Women’s Museum.
And for a few months everything went well. The students had enrolled in large numbers; the first
research projects for major exhibitions to introduce the new Women’s Museum were also under way.
The plan was for both institutions to turn into major sites of learning, not only for international
research, not only for international students, but also for local research and local educational
needs. In my role as a Museum Deputy-Director, I started a research project on a rural woman
artist in Shaanxi, Ku Shulan, who found her voice through her extraordinary talent as a paper
cutter. Her paper-cuts were more like collage-type works of art, highly complex in style, yet very
traditional, though somewhat subversive, in content. I was interested in Ku Shulan’s reputation as a
woman possessed, a wupo, or witch, who enjoyed renown as a healer and notoriety as a creator of
magic healing potions. Her art and exquisite poetry which depicted powerful female deities and
strong women and her confined life as a brow-beaten wife of a husband known for his violence were
to provide the stuff for a major exhibition. We hoped that this would encourage delegates attending
the World Conference on Women in Beijing to travel to Zhengzhou. That was our hope.
            It went terribly wrong. How? We had had tremendous support, part locally, part
internationally. Everyone offered their help. The Smithsonian offered support for the Museum, and
so did the Museum of Mankind in London. We had much of the infrastructure needed for the College
and the Museum already in place. Students were enthusiastic and looking forward to many more
years of learning. What defeated us in the end was a combination of internal and external obstacles.
At the heart of our endeavour stood a charismatic figure who promoted emancipation, critical
political engagement and the assertion of individuality, but on the other required blind obedience
from the women who were entrusted with the task of implementation. This inherent tension
developed in the course of time into a crisis. People who had been carried along on the waves of
aspiration and inspiration felt themselves doubly betrayed in the end: by their own optimism and by
the perception that their role in the experiment had always been conceived of as limited.
           My own situation was an interesting one because I was placed in a senior and politically
vulnerable position. It was unheard of for a Western academic to be in an administrative position
in the Chinese educational system and it became a reason for criticism, serving the agenda of those
who were most eager to close us down. Another issue was the accusation that we were engaging
illegally in women’s rights’ activism. According to our accusers, women were already blessed with

                                    Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   108
rights and entitlements in China and our educational and research projects were at heart alien to
the history and aspirations of Chinese women. So it ended rather sadly and acrimoniously, with the
closure of all institutions and confiscation of much of our research. It was a painful process.


VM: How long did it take?

MJ: There was nearly a year of interrogations, self-criticism, complaints and allegations which
made the actual closure of the institutions the most orderly of the many episodes that constituted a
lengthy process of disorderly unravelling. Whereas the closure happened very quickly, there were
many factors which made the process of closing us down take an eternity. We had to deal with the
students and their need for continued, uninterrupted study. There was faculty and support staff
which needed help. Well, there was the embarrassing fact of a Western academic, who had lived
through the whole event. I wasn’t just a foreign expert. Indeed, the anomaly was that I was the Vice-
President of a College which had received official permission to open its doors only in the previous
year. In the end, the Museum artefacts were confiscated, the institution was dissolved, and I had to
move out of the campus too. I left China just before the Beijing World Conference to join the Centre
of Asian Studies at Hong Kong University. The closure of a promising project, and the nature of its
closure, was difficult for me personally you can imagine. I had given up everything because the
plan had been for a permanent position, a lifetime’s work. To see such promising institutions being
dismantled in that way was worse for me than the temporary confiscation of my possessions or my
personal situation.
           But a wonderful thing happened at that time which was to shape my work for many years
to come. It was just before I left for Hong Kong, when I was left more or less to my own devices. I
was in a state of limbo. I used my unoccupied time to walk around the city of Zhengzhou and on one
of my long walks I caught sight of something I had never seen before: a large sign on the wall of a
modest building which read qingzhen nüsi, women’s mosque. I suddenly also noticed in the vicinity
of this mosque women getting out scarves from pockets and shopping bags which they put over their
heads before crossing the threshold into the mosque (at that time very few Hui Muslim women in
central China women wore hijab). Other women wore white hats similar to those worn by non-
Muslim women and so they didn’t stand out. Muslim women hadn’t been visible to me, because they
lived in a very different part of the city which I thought I knew so well but didn’t. They moved in
very different circles, yes, in a parallel universe to the one in which I had been immersed. I was in a
large city which was very secular and moved in a university environment where many of my
colleagues were indeed contemptuous of those of religious faith. The women believers were
considered feudal and backward. Religion was mentioned only when feminist scholars talked about
past ills. Nor did religious faith form a part of our university research and so it became visible to
me only, and suddenly, when I was disconnected from those institutions that had both hosted and
also effectively confined me. I was extremely curious, and eventually I was given permission to visit
a particular mosque. Initially, there was usually an official sitting at the back of the room to make
sure I wasn’t being a troublemaker again. But this practice soon ceased, and the attitude became:
“Oh, she just wants to find out about women!“
           So it was this first discovery, this first visit that opened up a new area of work for me and
made for the realization that no comprehensive study of any depth of women’s mosques, whether in
Chinese or in any other language, existed. There was no documentation of the fact that China’s
Muslim population had given rise to traditions of women’s own mosques. Moreover, these mosques
were presided over by nü ahong, women imams, proud of the unique contribution they made to
Islam. I asked myself: How was it that we in the Women’s Museum, of which I had been Deputy-
Director, had left these women out of our women’s histories? In the large oral history project that
took shape in the first year of the Museum, Muslim women, like other women of faith, were not
visible. We had many discussions about women’s voices in history, about the process of gaining

                                     Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X    109
voice where women’s voices had been muted, but we had excluded those women of faith as somehow
not part of the modern era, assigning them to bygone times. That realization sent me back to do
some very necessary exercises in reflexivity.
          So, this first visit to a women’s mosque led to my first meeting with a woman ahong, a
female imam, and then I just continued to visit until I became a familiar face. Very quickly, the
ahong suggested that I should meet a researcher in the sociology of religion from the Academy of
Social Sciences20 in Zhengzhou. She had also been visiting her, asking very similar questions. As the
ahong put it to me “Why should I repeat myself? Why don’t I ask her to come along so that I can
answer your questions at the same time and not tire myself out!” This inquisitive woman turned out
to be Shui Jingjun, a researcher affiliated to the Henan Academy of Social Sciences. She was
totally flabbergasted to find me with Guo Ahong, because although the Academy wasn’t far from
where we had the Museum, she had stayed away from us. She didn’t think much of what was
happening there. She was Hui (one of the ten ethnic minorities which make up China’s Muslim
population) and Muslim herself. We began to talk. Of course I was interested in how not only
academia but also Chinese mainstream women’s history had completely ignored religious women.
There was very little on Muslim women in China. To begin with, Shui was very diffident but
eventually I suggested we collaborate on a research project. That relationship with Shui was key to
our subsequent research. She became a research partner, co-author, colleague and friend.


VM: What about Barbara Pillsbury? That was a long time ago in the Seventies. 21

MJ: In the Seventies Barbara Pillsbury couldn’t do fieldwork in China and she was forced to
confine herself to researching Muslim women’s situation in Taiwan (Pillsbury, 1981). Her work
became important to us, and she identified the double burden of marginalized identity these women
were carrying, in terms of gender and of religion. Whilst she couldn’t get into China to do the
fieldwork, this was no excuse for the others who came after her, like myself. So there I was in China,
doing good work on a number of research topics, I think, but I didn’t see what was missing, what
information waited out there to be discovered, until I embarked on my seemingly purposeless walks
around the inner city of Zhengzhou. I was struck by the discouragement which came from a number
of my Chinese colleagues when I announced my intention to fill a huge gap in our knowledge. They
said, “Why are you doing this? This religion is a feudal residue; these are women of the past; why
don’t you study modern women such as successful entrepreneurs and scientists who demonstrate
the progress Chinese women have made?” If women professed religious beliefs, they were backward
by definition.
          On her part, Shui had been approached by a number of Canadian, or Western, academics
and she had declined invitations to enter collaboration. She wasn’t going to be a token native
collaborator who just had to deliver the empirical material, she told me, and then leave the
important task of analysis and interpretation to her Western colleague. It took more than a single
conversation to understand, and overcome, our mutual wariness.


VM: Turned into an “informant”. A bit like Boas did with Ella Deloria for example, though that was
a more continuous collaboration. In fact there is a discussion about the authorial status of many so-

20
  The Academy of Social Sciences, established in 1977, is an important research organization in the People’s Republic
of China, with branches in the different provinces.
21
 Barbara Pillsbury (1943-2012), a student of Margaret Mead at Columbia University, was an American anthropologist
who wrote on Muslim women in China, especially Taiwan, and subsequently devoted her energies to the promotion of
women’s health worldwide.


                                          Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X           110
called “informants”.

MJ: Yes, for too long we have travelled into our intended community of study as resource-rich
outsiders, purchased local knowledge and expertise at an advantageous price, taken the
information back home, dismissed the local story-teller as redundant and never bothered to return
to give an account of ourselves to those who shared their life-stories with us. Shui didn’t want to
enter into such an unequal relationship. So for us the relationship required hard work and critical
self-reflection. There was no automatic or immediate relationship of trust for us. We had to work
through that. She asked me why I wanted to work on Hui Muslim women in China, given that my
previous research and collaborative involvement concerned largely Han Chinese women and their
secularised paradigm of modernity. Moreover, Shui also knew of my religious identity.


VM: What is your religious identity?

MJ: It’s Catholic. My wider background is Jewish but I was brought up a Catholic. So these were
difficult questions to resolve and present to each other. We had to work through a long discussion
over what we meant by a fair and equal collaboration. How were we going to work in a way which
was based on mutual respect, to define a methodology which would be acceptable to both of us and
to the women and men we studied? How would we do the research, the fieldwork, the interviews
and what division of labour could be termed collaboration? What was the best way to effect joint
work and what were the questions to be asked, and how did they differ for each of us, because of
our respective backgrounds? So for me that opened up a whole new area of investigation in Chinese
Studies which had paid precious little attention to the nature of our partnerships with Chinese
researchers.


VM: In Chinese studies, is your name associated more with the work on women’s mosques or with
this kind of collaboration with a Chinese scholar?

MJ: More publicity has been given to our work on women’s mosques, Islamic patriarchy and
gender in China. There is a very small group of people working in that area, and ours was the first
study of its kind. We continued to publish findings from our research on female-led Islamic sites
and added writing on the nature and process of our collaborative research and authorship within a
feminist theoretical framework.


VM: There is the problem of agenda setting in research and what different participants think
important. For example, our research on migration in Turin was initially supposed to focus on the
labour market but ended up devoting more attention to religion because of the interest of the
migrant researchers. Another interesting question is about culturally variable gender constructs and
what people want to change. It is not always clear in any particular instance what women from
different backgrounds mean by feminism.

MJ: Yes. Research design, formulating questions for interviews and suitable methodology – it was
all up for discussion. More so because of the lack of scholarship in our area of study and it was up
to us to set the aim and objectives of our project. We couldn’t reference anything. We had to literally
walk the length and breadth of China. We took forever. How else could we gauge the impact that the
first educational initiatives had had on women historically? How could we reconstruct the origin of
women’s mosques? How could we reconstruct the first tentative educational instruction behind
curtains in the privacy of imams’ homes and the path from that to the development of women’s

                                     Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   111
mosques? We had nothing to rely on but the knowledge and memory of informants. We argued about
directions of research and disagreed on interpretations as well as on our role as researchers. Of
course, Shui addressed an audience of fellow-Muslims as well as Chinese officials when it came to
writing. My audience was elsewhere, requiring at times different sets of questions and
contextualisation.


VM: Did the Muslim women know any Arabic? What language did they use for religious purposes?

MJ: They used Farsi, ancient Persian. This has been the language used historically in women’s
mosques and even to this day some Farsi scriptures are read. Now Arabic is coming to the fore
because the borders to the Muslim West have opened, and Arabic is the language of a shared faith
and of communication, whether for pilgrims or for commercial transactions. Arabic is thus also a
source of career choices. Only recently have Muslim women started to learn modern Arabic at
Islamic Colleges. Some women’s mosques are now offering basic language classes to women but
also to men. To return to the subject of collaborative research: the years that it took to do all the
research, to provide documentation, the fieldwork, interviews; it meant that the two of us had plenty
of opportunity for discussion, for interpretation. Certain activities we did together, others we
divided up, otherwise we would never have finished our work. And from time to time we invited
colleagues of Shui, sociologists and economists, to join our research and consider findings from
within their disciplines. The whole process was extraordinarily instructive. Everything was subject
to critical examination: our own convictions and assumptions, our religious backgrounds, our
respective family histories, and more. All this became food for thought and reflection, helping to
hone our approach. This could be very painful and very personal. Yet it was important to bring
different narratives into the final co-authored text and make our divergent viewpoints clear to our
respective audiences.


VM: What language did you publish in?

MJ: Chinese and English. The first publication came out in English and once it was out, we looked
at some of the reviews to get a sense of how the study had been received. We then applied for a
grant to help us bring out the Chinese-language publication.22 And that was lucky timing. There
was a window of opportunity at that time because later things became very strict again, and we
might not have been able to publish the book in Beijing. We published it with Sanlian Publishers in
their Harvard Yenching Academic Library series. The idea of this series was to bring to the fore
promising Chinese academics. It provided a little breathing space for dissenting authors. Working
with this publisher was a well-known Chinese editor who was close to retiring age and the last job
she took on was our manuscript. She had to do battle with the Ministry of Education and the
National Islamic Association to get their permission to publish all the chapters. They wanted to
exclude or alter a number of chapters, especially mine, but the editor insisted on the integrity of the
book. It took us two years to get it published: it came out in 2002. I am very proud that we took our
time to get the Chinese edition right and the language was important. Accuracy, fluency,
readability; all this took time. It is often the language that lets you down when you read Chinese
textbooks translated from a Western language, but we, the authors, worked closely with the
translator and the editor. It was worth the effort, beautifully produced, the integrity preserved, we
had the advantage of a political window of opportunity and the professional support from a most
22
  Maria Jaschok and Shui Jingjun Shui, 2000, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam, London,
Routledge/Curzon. Followed in 2002 by a Chinese (revised) version: Shui Jingjun and Maria Jaschok, Zhongguo
Qingzhen Nüsishi, Beijing, Sanlian Chubanshe Harvard-Yenching Academic Library series.


                                       Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X     112
able editor, and we were lucky. The fact that we published in Chinese meant that the study was
accessible to all communities and individuals who featured in our work and that made an enormous
difference.


VM: Were the Muslim women able to read it?

MJ: Younger women are literate in Chinese. Those who couldn’t read would ask someone to read it
aloud. Their feedback transformed everything. We received an award and the book was quite highly
regarded. But the comments from our informants meant most to us. Of course, there was criticism
from the more orthodox Islamic quarters, for talking too much about gender, Islamic gender
regimes and not enough about Islamic values of submission. But, on the whole, the book had
pleasing resonance and is still used in university courses all over China. I think the collaborative
aspect of the book was appreciated. We are starting on a new project this summer. We are going to
look at the religious and cultural tradition of sound in China’s Islamic mosques, trying to
understand also the function of sound in reconnecting Islamic communities with their past. My
contribution will be the salvaging, recording and interpretation of jingge, a body of Islamic chants
which formed part of the rich tradition of women’s mosques in central China. These jingge
constituted also the conduit of Muslim family morality, jiatingdao and women’s morality, funüdao.
So there is a wonderful body of chants which have never been properly recorded or written down.
        The collaborative approach to fieldwork was intrinsic to our ideal of conversations in the
field as sites of insight and discovery. But our on-going conversation was also appreciated by our
informants who became friends and active participants in conversations and more, in the shaping
of our, that is, their, stories.


VM: Can you say something about IGS and the Oxford seminar series on Muslim women?

MJ: What we have just discussed, I think, links up with the discussion over the impact of IGS in a
most interesting way. I was appointed the Director of IGS in 2000 when it became the International
Gender Studies Centre because members of the Centre for Cross Cultural Research on Women felt it
was important to widen our area of enquiry, debate, research and teaching to incorporate Gender
Studies (including, for example, Masculinity Studies); they wanted to have it “opened up”. Apart
from the continuous IGS core activities, we facilitate seminars, conferences, special lectures and
workshops. We pride ourselves on generating a culture of openness and critical discussion which is
felt and truly appreciated by everybody who comes to give presentations or to attend our lectures.
The Centre provides important services to the College and the wider University community through
supervision, tutoring and lecturing. At any given time, we feature particular research projects. Our
current research clusters relate to Myanmar/Burma and China. We are now preparing two more
research clusters, one of a comparative cross-cultural nature, the other concerned with Eurasia, the
former Soviet Union. Of course, with each Director, the research profile and geographical area of
investigation and debate shift somewhat, according to her specialisation. That is inevitable. Before
me, the Centre was focused predominantly on African Studies and migration studies. Whereas under
my directorship, given my background in Chinese Studies, East Asia and SEAsia have come to
feature more prominently. Also, because of my China connections, Visiting Research Fellows have
also come from China, but not exclusively so. In my first years as Director, the project I brought to
IGS was funded by the DFID, the Department for International Development of the UK
Government. The funding underwrote an international research consortium, with researchers from
Indonesia, Iran, Pakistan and China. I joined as the lead China researcher responsible for multiple
research sites in Muslim contexts in China. Our brief was to revisit core concepts in Development
Studies, importantly empowerment, agency, gender, and social transformation. We asked how much

                                    Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   113
sense do these key drivers of development make across different cultural contexts? We compared
both the different minority Muslim contexts and those where Muslims are in a majority.
        This large project only came to an end in 2010/2011, coinciding with the move of IGS to
Lady Margaret Hall (LMH), one of Oxford’s earliest women colleges. This entailed important
changes for IGS and its role. When the Centre was set up formally, in 1973, it had been associated
with Queen Elizabeth House, a semi-collegial institution which identified itself as part of the
growing development studies field. For many years, the Centre happily cohabited with Queen
Elisabeth House (QEH). Only in later years, when QEH became the Oxford Department of
International Development (ODID), did it become apparent that its institutional direction was
increasingly diverging from the enduring cross-cultural and multi/inter-disciplinary approach that
is such a marked feature of Gender Studies. Our range of topics, disciplines and methodologies
could no longer be fitted into a Development Studies framework. We had to think very hard about
the way we wanted to go. If we couldn’t see ourselves fitting easily into the evolving academic
identity of QEH, where could we fit? So we welcomed the opportunity to have an association with
Lady Margaret Hall, LMH, the first women’s college at Oxford, which offered us a very open and
congenial arrangement, accommodating our many and multi-disciplinary interests. This move
turned out to be the right decision and the relationship with LMH has worked very successfully. In
2011, we moved to Lady Margaret Hall, and within a few months, precisely in 2013, we marked our
30th anniversary with a great many festive events. Throughout, however, we have continued our
close collaboration with ODID. After all, quite a large number of IGS Research Associates situate
themselves within Development Studies. And I still co-convene an M.Phil. Option in Gender and
Development at ODID. Of course, our primary institutional tie is with LMH, and I am glad to
observe that we have recently concluded a successful review of IGS at LMH which was signed off by
the Governing Body of LMH in the middle of last summer. We are now looking forward to the next
stage of our association with LMH.


VM: The first stage has just come to an end?

MJ: Yes. The first Letter of Agreement was of three years of duration during which we were to see
whether the collaboration would work to the advantage of both. For both institutions this sort of
association was a first. The College had never taken a research centre into their fold and we had
never joined a college before. Our institutional review, lasting several months, and involving all our
members included academic research and teaching as well as our practical and financial situations.
This was quite a critical and detailed review, involving many discussions and interviews. My
Director’s Report went to the Governing Board of the College, and I was interviewed by the College
Academic Planning Committee, chaired by the Principal. There was a great deal of satisfaction with
the work we have done, with the Gender in Burmese Studies program we have set up, the funding of
a Junior Research Fellowship, the funding of a Visiting Research Fellow in Burmese studies, and
with our various research awards and grants. The appraisal of our general activities and progress
made in ensuring sustainability of the Centre was most satisfactory. We are now looking forward to
a further five years with Lady Margaret Hall.


VM: How about the association with Aung San Suu Kyi (patron of IGS)?23

MJ: Daw Aung San Suu Kyi exhorted us to add gender to the Oxford Burma Program “mix” when
23
   Aung San Suu Kyi (1945-) born in Yangon, studied in India and Great Britain, where she married an scholar of
Oriental Studies and had two sons. She returned to Burma (Myanmar) to become the leader of a non-violent movement
for human rights and against the oppressive regime in her country. She received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1991.


                                         Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X         114
she came to receive her honorary doctorate in June 2012. She used that occasion to address the
Oxford community, asking for their greater engagement in educational development in Burma. She
has been our Patron since 1996. She asked us at IGS, “What can the study of gender contribute to
the transformation of education in Myanmar?” As a research institution, we took on board the
request for more evidence-based research, always keeping in mind our emphasis on gender-critical
perspectives. As a result we set up a Junior Research Fellowship in Gender and Burmese Studies.
This is the first Fellowship of this kind and we established it together with LMH, going jointly
through the entire application and selection process. The new Research Fellow has just left to do
her fieldwork in Myanmar, and I will join her in October to co-convene a workshop with colleagues
at Yangon University. We also applied successfully for a Body Shop Foundation grant to support a
Burmese activist/academic doing research on the pawning industry in Burma, and how the poor, in
particular women, are locked into a dreadful cycle of pawning, debt and dependency. I was
fortunate to get financial support to support my travel to Burma, in order to make connections and
establish the basis for further academic collaboration. Our work forms part of the official Oxford
University’s Burma Portfolio. Oxford enjoys a special relationship with Yangon University, which
Aung San Su Kyi wanted. My aspiration is to support Burmese colleagues in order to establish a
national Burmese Women’s Memory Archive, to gather narratives from women of diverse ethnic and
religious contexts in Myanmar so as to enrich but also critique officially sanctioned narratives that
fill the storage rooms of the nation’s archives. Such an oral history project demands a lot of
institutional and financial support to make it sustainable. We shall have our first oral history
methodology workshop in October in Yangon. In addition to the Burmese Studies Program, we have
supported Burma-related events and hosted speakers on relevant topics. You might say that LMH
quite inadvertently has become a critical site for Burmese studies, something which most certainly
had not been foreseen.


VM: Are there any researchers interested in Burma other than those connected with IGS?

MJ: Fortunately, by sheer serendipity, a stipendiary lecturer of law is closely associated with LMH.
His work concerns constitutional reform in Burma. Another colleague is a Junior Research Fellow
at LMH who is working on the situation of Burmese refugees in Thai and Malaysian refugee
camps. So there is a critical mass of people working on Burma-related topics and issues.


VM: What about the language?

MJ: We have two Burmese researchers who provide an important grasp on Burmese perspectives.
We have joint seminars and joint round tables on Burma. So unexpectedly there are several people
in Oxford interested in a critical in-depth research engagement with Burma. That development was
important for IGS and has had unexpected but welcome consequences, giving us access to certain
resources and opportunities which are serving to enhance our overall impact. So you might say that
whilst committing ourselves whole-heartedly to developments in Myanmar/Burma, IGS gains from
the Burma connection and from our linkages with other contributing faculties and colleges within
the University, where we provide more the social science and the gender perspectives.


VM: How do the other scholars in IGS who aren’t involved with Burma fit into this?

MJ: We are an eclectic and diverse community of researchers sharing common values and causes,
and we are interested in subjects also outside our comfort zone of specialisation. This means that
non-Asianists among my colleagues happily join debates and events and bring their perspectives to

                                    Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   115
bear on scholarship on Myanmar society. Actually, there is much appreciation of the fact that
forming part of the Oxford University’s Burma Portfolio is not a bad thing for IGS. This has given
us desirable publicity, networks and support of different kind, including funding. Thinking
pragmatically, it has given access to the University’s central projects and thus to important
connections and decision-making processes. However, besides the Burma project there are other
research clusters in the making, as stated earlier, as well as preparations for closer linkages with
academic institutions in order to establish a large Fellowship Program. The work for us is on-
going. Happily so.


VM: Well thank you, you’ve covered everything.

The interview took place on 1 August 2014, Bodleian Social Science Library, Oxford.


References

Andors, Phyllis, 1983, The Unfinished Liberation of Chinese Women, Bloomington, Indian
University Press.
Ardener, Shirley, Ed., 1981, Women and Space. Ground Rules and Social Maps, London,
Bloomsbury.
Banton, Michael, Ed., 1965, The Relevance of Models in Social Anthropology, London, Routledge.
Broyelle, Claudie, 1972, La moitié du ciel. Le Mouvement de Libération des femmes en Chine,
Paris, DuNoel Gonther,
Collotti Pischel, Enrica, 1972, Storia della rivoluzione cinese, Roma, Editori Riuniti.
Curwen, Charles, 1977, Tai Ping Rebel. The Deposition of Li Hsiu Ch’eng, Cambridge, Cambridge
University Press.
Davin, Delia, 1979, Womanwork, Women and the Party in Revolutionary China, Oxford, Oxford
University Press.
__________, 1999, Internal Migration in Contemporary China, London, Palgrave Macmillan.
Goody, Jack, 1996, The East in the West, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.
Jaschok, Maria, Shui Jingjun, 2000, The History of Women’s Mosques in Chinese Islam, London,
Routledge.
__________, 2012 (2000), 'Outsiders Within': Speaking to Excursions Across Cultures, in Christina
Hughes, Ed., 2000, Researching Gender. Situated Knowers and Feminist Standpoint. Vol.1. London,
Sage Publications.
Johnson, Elisabeth C., 1988, Ritual and Power. Jades of Ancient China, New York, Chinese
Institute in America.
Johnson,Kay, 1985, Women, the Family and Peasant Revolution in China, Chicago, University of
Chicago Press.
Li Xiaojiang, 1983, Human Progress and Women’s Liberation, translated in 1999, W.T. De Bary
and Lufrano, R., Eds. Sources of Chinese Tradition 2, New York, Columbia University Press.
__________, 1999, With what discourse do we reflect on Chinese women, in Mayfair Mei-Hui
Yang, Ed., Spaces of Their Own. Women’s Public Spaces in Transnational China, Minneapolis,
University of Minnesota Press: 261-277.
Masi, Eduarda 1968 La contestazione cinese, Milano, Feltrinelli.
__________, 1978, Per la Cina. Confuciani e proletari, Milano, Mondadori.
Mei-Hui Yang, Mayfair, Ed., 1999 Spaces of Their Own. Women’s Public Spaces in Transnational
China, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press.
Needham, Joseph, 1981, Traditional Science in China. A Comparative Perspective, Cambridge,
Harvard University Press.

                                    Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   116
Pillsbury, Barbara, 1981, Mosque and Pagoda. The Muslim Chinese, Houston, University of Texas.
Pisu, Renata, 1999, La via della Cina, Milano, Sperling e Kupfer.
Rosaldo, Michelle, 1980 Knowledge and Passion. Ilongot Self and Social Life, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press.
Rosaldo, Renato, 1986, From the door of his tent: the Fieldworker and the Inquisitor, in G. Marcus
and J. Clifford, Eds., Writing Culture: the Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, Berkeley,
University of California Press: 77-96.
__________,1989, Culture and truth. The Remaking of Social Analysis, Boston, Beacon Press.
Stacey, Judith, 1981, Patriarchy and the Socialist Revolution in China, Berkeley, University of
California Press.
Shui, Jingjun, Jaschok, Maroa, 2002, Zhongguo Qingzhen Nüsishi, Beijing, Sanlian Chubanshe
Harvard-Yenching Academic Library Series.
Ward, Barbara E., 1989 [1964], Through Other Eyes. An Anthropologist’s View of Hong Kong, Hong
Kong, Chinese University Press.
__________, 1965, Varieties of the conscious model. The fishermen of South China, in Banton,
Michael, Ed., 1965, The Relevance of Models in Social Anthropology, London, Routledge:113-137.
__________, Ed., 1963, Women of the New Asia. The Changing Roles of Men and Woman In South
and South East Asia, Paris Unesco.
Watson, James L., 1975, Emigrants and the Chinese Lineage. The Mans in Hong Kong and London,
Berkeley, University of California Press.
__________, 1977, Ed., Between Two Cultures. Migrants and Minorities in Britain, Oxford, Basil
Blackwell.
Wolf, Margery, 1972, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan, Stanford, Stanford University Press.



Vanessa Maher, Ph.D Cambridge, Honorary Professor, University of Verona, has taught
anthropology in Italian universities since 1974 and has carried out ethnographic research in
Morocco, Britain and Italy. Her interests are in migration, social and colonial history with special
attention to gender studies. She is a founder member of Cirsde, Centre of Women’s Studies, Turin,
and of associations of Italian and migrant women. She was Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Centre for
Crosscultural research on Women in 1984 and 1986/7. She has published widely in English and
Italian and has recently edited Genitori migranti (Turin, 2012) and Dalle parole ai fatti: il
linguaggio fra immaginario e agire sociale (Turin, 2014).




                                    Anuac, Volume III, Numero 2, dicembre 2014 - ISSN 2239-625X   117
