Performing Engaged Research

To tackle these issues, the chapters that follow draw heavily from firsthand

observations and interview sessions with Mianzhu’s nianhua makers and users. The field

research for this project was carried out during the summer months of 2006 and several

weeks in the winter of 2007. In the summer of 2006, I came under the guidance of the

artist and scholar Liu Zhumei, a researcher at the Mianzhu Nianhua Museum who has

published extensively on the history of Mianzhu nianhua. Through Liu’s guidance and

support, I gained access to the many historic nianhua and archived documents held in the

museum. Before conducting any recorded interviews in Mianzhu, I spent many weeks

following her lead in obtaining the necessary research permissions and establishing social

relations with Mianzhu’s nianhua workshops. As an artist herself, she had close ties and

long standing relationships with the nianhua producers I interviewed. This process of

engagement, shaped by local custom and many shared meals, provided opportunities for

me to conduct several in-depth interviews in the community.

Instead of imposing a rigid interview questionnaire, I chose instead to document

the natural flow of informal and open-ended conversations with nianhua makers and

users in Mianzhu. However, a guiding point of inquiry revolved around nianhua’s

102 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1995), 2.

attributed function to “pursue the auspicious, repel the portentous,” a topic that seemed to

come up in conversation quite naturally. As an open-ended concept, it often sparked the

sharing of personal histories, memories, stories, or popular sayings tied to nianhua

production or use.

From the many hours of interviews, I selected excerpts that best exemplify the

range of varied perspectives shaping Mianzhu’s nianhua industry. I include conversations

with both urban and rural residents who have displayed nianhua in their homes. I also

draw attention to excerpts that reveal the high stakes involved in the presentation of

nianhua’s ritual efficacy. This is particularly the case for the three established lineageholding

nianhua workshops in Mianzhu, where the notion of a nianhua “lineage” (pai 􀮊)

refers to a familial line of nianhua producers who construct and assert their lineageholding

status through a variety of means, including their family genealogy, signature

production skills, and territorial claims to a particular production site that may or may not

belong to the family. Currently, the Wang, Chen, and Li family workshops are the only

lineage-holding workshops still active in Mianzhu. With the support of my mentor Liu, I

had the fortune of interviewing the three elders leading these workshops.

When directly relevant, my position as an outside researcher becomes a part of the

analysis of these interviews. The self-reflexivity of the researcher can be an asset here, as

it serves as a continual reminder of the power relations and institutional agendas that

inevitably come into play when “research” is conducted in a living community. In this

regard, I will turn to the lessons of critical ethnography that illustrate how transparent

research methods and a participatory approach to data collection can lead to greater

collaboration between researcher and subject as well as a sensitivity to the impact of

research on local communities. In practice, this translates into a documentation of my

interaction within the local hierarchy of social relations. While this study is not designed

as ethnography, it will bring certain ethnographic strategies to bear on nianhua research.

As discussed above, my study emerges out of the intersection of anthropology and

art history in an effort to critique disciplinary divides and to blur the constructed

boundaries between the archive and the repertoire. The interview sessions included in this

study play a central role in this endeavor, as they vividly demonstrate the dynamic

interactions between nianhua and the embodied gestures, stories, and discourses that

activate the object while simultaneously being activated by the object. A key challenge

here is the question of how to represent the interview sessions in written research without

erasing the embodied forms of meaning making. What is lost in translation when one

writes about the irreproducible repertoire of living practices? In probing this question, I

draw attention to the non-verbal modes of communication in the interviews, including

gestures, the use of props, and shifts in vocal intonations or rhythms. I have thus included

video stills and photographs of the interview sessions throughout the chapters to capture

the situated nature of such embodied interactions and their implications for the study of

nianhua.

In dealing with this problem of representation, oral history scholars have

recognized the co-creative nature of the interview process itself, a “transformational

process” that involves the “mutual embedding of one’s vision of the world in the

other’s.”103 In other words, the oral history researcher cannot occupy an objective

position because these histories arise as a result of their direct participation. In speaking

to different nianhua makers and users, it is inevitable that their responses will reflect

103 Della Pollock, Remembering: Oral History Performance (Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 3.

what they perceive as “research” and what they think my expectations are as an outside

researcher visiting their community. The conversations are also colored by my

institutional ties and affiliations, as I have adopted a fully transparent approach to

requesting consent where all interviewed subjects have prior knowledge of how the

research will be used.

It is therefore critical to keep in mind that these interviews may not be

representative of the entire nianhua community. They are highly situated interactions that

provide only fragmentary snapshots of a wide range of debates occurring in Mianzhu

today. Yet these momentary engagements may point to a continual unfolding of meaning

around nianhua, where present conversations build on ones from the past. Oral history

scholars such as Della Pollock and Sam Schrager have argued that the sharing of orally

transmitted knowledge bears “the dialogical imprint of many voices and perspectives”

because they are “cultivated in narrative environments” and not in isolation.104 An oral

history interview is not completely idiosyncratic, as “no one person ‘owns’ a story. Any

one story is embedded in layers of remembering and storying.”105

It is therefore possible to critique the oral history interview as part of a broader

network of unfolding discourses, continually remade by its participating speakers and

listeners. Drawing from what Chandra Talpade Mohanty calls the “politics of

engagement” rather than the “politics of transcendence,”106 the researcher’s position

consequently becomes part of the narrative of this study, as it contributes to the notion of

104 Ibid., 5.

105 Linda Alcoff. “The Problem of Speaking For Others,” in Who Can Speak? Authority and Critical

Identity, ed. Judith Roof and Robyn Wiegman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 5-32.

106 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity,

(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003).

a living nianhua archive that continually evolves within different social spheres,

including that of academic research.

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