Pointing out that China shared basic perceptions of agriculture with the West does not mean that they had the same crops or production systems. Pointing out that China shares much medical knowledge with the West does not mean Chinese medicine is merely some sort of variant of world medicine. The middle ground is the only tenable one: Chinese, like Westerners, responded to real-world conditions, but they responded in ways conditioned by the cultural and personal environments and knowledge systems they brought to the task.
Ultimately, however, agriculture has to produce food, and medicine has to provide at least some visible curing. Thus there is constant feedback from reality in both cases. Every society produces not one, but many, distinctive solutions, with different styles, perceptions, philosophies, and experiences. Wheat, maize, millet, and potatoes can all be starch staples. Beans, peas, cattle, pigs, and many other species can provide protein (contrary to myth, bean protein is not “incomplete”).
In medicine, the body is basically the same everywhere, and malaria, dysentery, and smallpox vary only with the local microbial strains; but cultural understandings of the body, and above all the solutions people invent for their health problems, differ profoundly. Yet they are not in free variation; people want to be healed, and hence it is no surprise to find that the Chinese found many perfectly effective cures. Qinghaosu (Artemisia annua) cures malaria whether one is a traditional Chinese or a modern Brazilian. The difference between old China and modern Brazil lies not in the effect but in the perception: it determines whether one attributes the effects of the drug to its qi or to the toxic effect of artemisinin on Plasmodium falciparum. This is not a simple contrast of “error” and “truth,” nor is it merely two different arbitrary cultural claims. It is a difference between an early, sincere, serious, well-thought-out scientific theory that is now in some ways inadequate, and a later serious, well-thought-out theory that is clearly more accurate but will no doubt prove inadequate in the future. We do well to respect all those who have seriously tried to understand these matters, and to understand their understandings as serious theorizing—not as some sort of random cultural noise or ignorant mysticism. Cultural arbitrariness of the sort alleged by postmodernists would never have let anyone find qinghaosu in the first place or observe its effects.
Kwang-chih Chang (2002a) pointed out that early China shared with Native American cultures a basic sense of continuity between humans and the rest of the cosmos—animals, plants, hills, stars. This was a concept that the Chinese themselves discussed with words like “harmony” (he) and “resonance.” The West, in his view, committed itself to a rupture not only between people and nature but also between people and the gods. This he traces back to ancient Sumer (K.-c. Chang 2002). Chang rather exaggerates—I believe for effect—but the difference is real—and critically important. Any lingering doubts about the importance of the idea of continuity were removed when Mao imported to China the quintessentially Western idea of struggling against nature. Within a few decades, China had devastated an environment that five millennia of imperfect but concerned management had at least partially preserved (E. Anderson 2012; Marks 2012).
Even this case, however, was not open-and-shut. The West is not wholly anti-nature, and China was certainly not environmentally perfect. The West has Celtic poetry, Renaissance botany, and the conservation movement to remind us of our intimate connections with nature. China has its love of the “heat and noise” (renao) of cities and its fear of wild beasts to balance the poetic love of “mountains and water” (shanshui) that define so much of its art. How much the very real difference prevails, and how and why it matters, is a question for serious investigation.
The Chinese fondness for continuity and the Western fondness for rupture, or dichotomy, is seen also in the west’s Platonic/Aristotelian conflict and the Chinese lack of such a conflict. The Chinese never doubted that the world is important to know and that how we think of it is also important. Another example of continuity versus rupture is seen in religion. The Chinese and their neighbors have been relatively religiously tolerant compared to the West. The Chinese had many conflicts between Confucians and Daoists, Daoists and Buddhists, and the state and Islam; they also had to deal with millennial rebellions, the most clearly faith-driven being the Taipings. Still, it seems that China has nothing in its premodern history comparable to the Crusades, especially the Albigensian Crusade, the Fourth Crusade, and others that targeted “other” Christians rather than Muslims. China did not have anything quite like Europe’s Wars of Religion or like the many sectarian conflicts within Islam. Many recent scholars have seen fascism and Communism religions (of a sort), which would add those ideologies to the pool of Western divisive ideas. Since 1800, the Chinese have become increasingly Westernized in these matters: the Muslim and Taiping rebellions of the nineteenth century had major religious components, and with Communism China adopted an exclusive dogma. The contrast with earlier dynasties is instructive.
Central Asian regimes were even more tolerant than the Chinese. The Khitans and Mongols of their golden era were dramatically tolerant. One can see a first documentation of this attitude in Cyrus’s religious tolerance in ancient Persia; his dynasty came from Central Asia.
Related to the debate over China’s uniqueness is a question of how much China is like the rest of the world. Chinese civilization does indeed broadly resemble civilizations elsewhere. This similarity can come from parallel invention—ancient Chinese farms and cities looked a lot like ancient Aztec ones—but more often it comes from actual borrowing. However, China is so obviously distinctive in many ways that one is always tempted to ignore such evidence of the unity of humankind.
The debate between those who see “a culture” as a unique, harmonious whole and those who see “culture” as complexly and contingently constructed is a very old one. Postmodernists often claim to have invented the latter view, but in fact it goes well back in social science. Deborah Tooker has provided a wonderfully concise list of the sins of old-time anthropology, as seen by today’s postmodern anthropologists: “1) being too functionalist; 2) following a romantic Germanic notion of culture; 3) following a discipline-based rhetoric of holism in text construction … ; 4) biologizing culture by viewing it as organic; 5) imposing a coherent notion of culture that does not allow for contradictions and inconsistencies; 6) naturalizing culture and ignoring the fact that it must be socially produced; 7) exoticizing the other[s] by placing them out of time and space; 8) reinforcing indigenous systems of power inequalities by silencing alternative viewpoints (sometimes in collusion with colonialist interests) [this sin is actually more common among postmodernists than it was among the old-timers—ENA]; or 9) isolating indigenous cultures from historical forces and larger regional systems of power inequalities” (Tooker 2012: 38–39).
All these criticisms of old-time anthropology are well taken; they have much truth. (In fact, I was making them long before postmodernism was heard of.) But many old-timers succeeded in avoiding them, and many postmodernists do not. One might also counter that postmodern anthropologists often 1) deny any function to cultural ways, thus making them seem arbitrary and vapid; 2) forget that Herder (the “romantic German”) was arguing for cultural tolerance and was the first known human being to do so with a full-scale logical argument; 3) ignore holism when it is there; 4) deny any biology in culture, even to alleging that people construct foodways with no attention to nutrition; 5) look only at contradictions and inconsistencies, ignoring real consensus; 6) unnaturalize culture by describing it as if it were mere arbitrary claims; 7) exoticize the others by maintaining that “indigenous” people had no power or resource conflicts; 8) focus only on external power imposition; 9) focus only on larger systems and never describing, or even showing any concern for, local cultures.
As always, truth is in the middle, but in this case it is not in some kind of missing middle ground, but rather in adopting all eighteen alternatives—but only to a reasonable degree. A functionalist explanation of eating with knife and fork is not historically adequate; people did fine before forks were adopted during the late Renaissance. But claiming