A Conversation With Harriet Zurndorfer

HTZ: I see myself in the first place as a social historian, and if you want to understand the development of Chinese society as a whole, then the Ming dynasty is crucial. When I started my studies at Berkeley under Fred Wakeman, my plan was to focus on the Song dynasty, on a project I provisionally entitled ‘Song manors and Song manners’. The Naito Konan thesis was still very influential, and scholars wanted to investigate the Song dynasty as it was considered to be the start of the ‘modern era’ in China. Wakeman suggested I spend time in Cambridge, England, to work with Denis Twitchett, and from there I went to Japan to study with Shiba Yoshinobu. At that time, Braudel’s publications and the Annales school were very influential. At Berkeley, as in Japan, scholars were approaching China’s past by looking at the longue durée. Instead of working within what was then considered the older dynastic model, scholars were beginning to regard historical change over the long period from 1500 to the present. Shiba was already examining the longue durée in Huizhou, and so I left behind the idea of concentrating on the Song dynasty, and started to contemplate broader patterns of historical change that included the Ming dynasty. In that context, working within a single dynasty did not seem to offer the opportunities that the long-term perspective could bring. At the same time, scholars were gradually moving away from the Marxist approach. Of course, studies continued to appear with an emphasis on Marxist analysis; Mi Chu Wiens, for example, used a Marxist model for her analysis of landholding in the Jiangnan region. But gradually, other approaches, other social science models, and thus other periodizations started to appear. Shiba Yoshinobu showed the importance of having a more open approach to studying the past. I should also add that at that time, in the mid-1970s, I fell under the spell of the idea of l’histoire immobile and the work of the French scholar Le Roy Ladurie, who was helping to crush Marxist reverence in the academy.