She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Learning to Love: Intimacy and the Discourse of Development in China, and reported the following:
From page 99:Discover more about Learning to Love at the University of Michigan Press website.Though representing different approaches and emphases, it might nonetheless be argued that, overall, scholarship on Chinese selfhood suggests a certain amount of flexibility in terms of the ways in which the dawo is conceived by different individuals at different times and in different social locations in China. The fluidity of the notion of self at the level of the individual, I argue, points to the ways in which culturally salient notions of “individualism” or “collectivism” constitute ideologies that, in everyday lived reality, “may be partial, situational, ad hoc, or inconsistent in nature” (Hollan 1992, 285). It further underscores the ways in which normative modes of enacting scalar intimacy are forged, as dominant cultural chronotopes are reproduced constantly in interactions, institutions, and less formal settings, thereby getting “inside” the body-selves of culturally situated actors (Pritzker and Perrino 2020). Hollan (1992) nevertheless underscores the ways in which, instead of looking for rigid and enduring forms of cultural personhood, anthropologists might rather center the processes through which people continually navigate their relationship to dominant discourses of the self. As a deeply affective and embodied way of enacting scalar intimacy, in other words, individual’s ways of relating to and embodying ideologies of self- hood here inform their everyday experience of the self as well as the ways in [sentence cont. p. 100] which they understand their own body-self in relationship to other bodies as well as concepts like “love,” “harmony,” “order,” or the Great Self itself, all of which become phenomenological orienting devices in future interactions (Ahmed 2007).The text on page 99 of my book derives from Chapter 3, a pivotal chapter emphasizing the affective, embodied and moral geography of New Life as a kind of spatiotemporal atmosphere that guided participants towards novel ways of being emotional and embodied with others. A significant portion of the chapter thus focuses on the ways in which the kind of “intercorporeal intimacy” that took shape at New Life often challenged participants’ normative and entrenched ideas about and experience of the self in relation to others. The paragraph cited above derives from the introductory part of the chapter and very concisely summarizes the point I develop in and across later sections, especially in terms of how it relates to anthropological theories of and methods for studying the self in the context of culture. It also points to and turns readers towards the broader project I aim to accomplish in the book as a whole. Whereas the first two chapters engage with the notions of scalar intimacy and scalar inquiry as they emerge, at least tentatively, in particular interactions between interlocutors during interviews as well as in opening and closing circles at New Life, Chapter 3 is where I begin to really get into the ways they are enacted as a kind of scalar intensity that moves both within and across the bodies of participants. This constitutes the basis for my further development of these central notions in later chapters engaging with (re)considerations of culture (Chapter 4), embodied engagements with “ghosts” (Chapter 5), the embodied “defrosting” of intergenerational trauma (Chapter 6), and moments of “tinkering” with the patriarchy as they take shape at New Life. As such, I would absolutely conclude that the Page 99 Test, in this case, wins the day again!
--Marshal Zeringue
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