Seperation and Re identification in Modern China
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11/19/03
Separation and Re-identification
In his book Seperation & Reuninon in Modern China, Charles Stafford lays out an argument for the universal constraint of seperation with the intention of applying it to a broad range of Chinese activities which attempt to both celebrate and counteract that constraint. In his introduction, he cites a passage by Freud in which Freud attempts to illustrate the idea of seperation and reunion as a defining feature of human relationships. In summary, the passage details a childs need to deal with the inevitability of sepearation through a game which Freud defined as fort/da (gone/there). According to Stafford, this exaple is a major feature of the Chinese way or as he puts it, "... we should certainly bear in mind that in the end this 'making explicit' -- not unlike Freud's famous fort/da game-- may simply be a Chinese way of trying to ameliorate or control the problems posed for human relatedness, in all societies, by the inevitability of the seperation constraint." (Stafford, pg 178). Again in another passage, Stafford writes, "Using ethnography from Taiwan and mainland China, I'll describe, bit by bit, the Chinese fascination with separation and it's counterpart, reunion. This is in order to illustrate, by the end of the book, how the elaboration in China of a universal constraint-- separation-- helps stage for, and arguably even intensifies, the highly contientious Chinese politics of unity" (Stafford, pg 2). As I considered Staffords argument in comparisson to other reference materiels, I could'nt help but come to the conclusion that reunion or unity was not the only action taken by Chinse people to control the inevitability of seperation...