TV Tears Made of Fear: Anatomy of the Spectacle of Power on Display in China's Forced Confessions

Video of full lecture with presentation slides edited into the video.Professor Magnus Fiskesjö, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Cornell University. After years of building a new system of courts of law, and after many solemn declarations to prohibit police torture and forced confessions (which both have been longstanding, publicly acknowledged problems in China), the Chinese authorities have recently reverted to extrajudicial show "trials" reminiscent of Maoist times. Select victims are detained and in due course forced to go on state TV and perform statements of self-incrimination which clearly have been rehearsed under duress. These choreographed spectacles of public confession are widely regarded as fake -- not least because several new witness accounts from former detainees emerged during 2016, which have revealed the current techniques used in some detail, and which unavoidably evoke Kafka's masterful allegory in The Trial on how self-incrimination is induced from the innocent, by the powerful. However, the question remains what is the purpose of this, and how we should interpret the case of contemporary China. This presentation will address the tragedy of historical antecedents as one part of the explanation, but also focus on sketching what power structures are built through these spectacles of forced confessions.Cornell East Asia Program1_iq9bto1

World Heritage Craze in China: Universal Discourse, National Culture, and Local Memory. Haiming Yan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. 242 pp., 20 illustrations, bibliography, index. Hardback US 120.00,ISBN978−1−78533−804−5;eBookUS120.00, ISBN 978-1-78533-804-5; eBook US 35, eISBN 978-1-78533-805-2.

This aptly titled book takes on the Chinese obsession with World Heritage (capitals required!). It is an obsession rooted in a worldview that is not pluralistic, but rather like the spirit of a competitive Olympic game in which there can be only one gold medal winner. The Chinese pursuit of this gold medal is a riveting and sometimes disturbing story, well presented by the author, Haiming Yan, in a book nicely produced by the publisher. This book brings a wealth of information and spirited discussion to a wide readership and could readily be considered for courses on heritage issues in Asia and globally. Yan traces Chinese struggles to get potential sites onto the official UNESCO World Heritage list in three dimensions, which he calls the universal agenda, national practices, and local responses. This is not a dry book dealing only with government-devised policies and international convention text-making. From time to time, Yan pays attention to the real people involved and notes both the joy, tears, sadness, and frustrations that mark the people actually engaged in these struggles

Exploring China's Past : New Discoveries and Studies in Archaeology and Art. Translated and edited by Roderick Whitfield and Wang Tao (International Series in Chinese Art and Archaeology, No. 1)

Fiskesjö Magnus. Exploring China's Past : New Discoveries and Studies in Archaeology and Art. Translated and edited by Roderick Whitfield and Wang Tao (International Series in Chinese Art and Archaeology, No. 1). In: Arts asiatiques, tome 57, 2002. pp. 240-241

The limits of “ontology” and the unfinished work of “ideology”

Comment on Kipnis, Andrew. “Governing the souls of Chinese modernity” Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 7 (2): 217–238

Outlaws, barbarians, slaves: Critical reflections on Agamben’s homo sacer

Agamben’s political philosophy of state power as founded on the expulsion of outcasts, who are embraced as key components of the system precisely by virtue of their potential exclusion, strangely omits such cardinal and long-familiar figures of sociopolitical inequality as the slave and the barbarian. These are neglected despite how they, together, stare us in the face from the very same pages in Aristotle from which Agamben derives his theory of bare life, and despite their key historical role in imperial state ideology and in the formation of empires. Agamben instead resurrects the obscure figure of homo sacer, an ancient Roman form of outlaw interpreted as bare life, mainly for the purpose of rethinking and debating citizenship, exclusion, and the ruse of the “rule of law” in the modern Western state form. As a transhistorical-paradigmatic figure it leaves aside not only its obvious counterparts—slaves and barbarians (whose real-life referents, like homo sacer, are also both historical and contemporary)—but also the pre-state and pre-law excommunication of outcasts. In this article I discuss the historical and political anthropology of outcasts and outlaws, slaves, and barbarians, what is obscured by homo sacer, and what this “limit figure” can bring to light