My research examines how historical cultural forms enter new political conditions carrying their own properties, traces of earlier political orders, and subsequent evaluations of those orders. I study how these forms interact with actors’ projects and contemporary social conditions to shape national life in ways that may exceed actors’ intentions and explicit understandings.
My dissertation examines how tradition is reconstructed when it is expected to play a constitutive role in contemporary national life but the social foundations that once sustained it have been transformed. I study this problem through the Hanfu Movement, a grassroots cultural revival in contemporary China whose participants reassess the relationship between tradition and national development and reconstruct cultural forms that have fallen out of continuous practice.
I examine the reconstruction of three cultural forms: imperial discourse, material objects, and Confucian ritual. I show that revival unfolds through a recursive interplay among actors’ political visions, the structures and properties of cultural forms, and the modern conditions of their reactivation and reception. The different structures and modes of social embeddedness of these forms shape both the possibilities and limits of reconstruction. Rather than treating tradition simply as a resource selectively mobilized for predetermined present purposes, I examine how cultural forms participate alongside social actors in shaping an unsettled national future.
My dissertation draws on content analysis of movement texts, in-depth interviews with 45 revivalists and 15 non-revivalist Hanfu wearers, and sustained participant observation at a local Hanfu association as well as shorter-term observation of Hanfu-related activities across nine provincial-level regions in China.
From discursive structures to material objects and embodied practice, these studies examine cultural forms that depend to different degrees on audiences and surrounding social conditions to become operative.
The Discursive Structure of Empire: Reactivating, Rescaling, and Projecting the Tianxia Discourse in Contemporary China’s Hanfu Movement
Working paper
This article theorizes imperial discourse as a moralized center-periphery structure. Because different imperial orders share that relational structure, an imperial discourse developed in one setting can be mapped onto another with a comparable hierarchy. The discourse, in turn, reorganizes how that order is understood and may morally recode its center and peripheries. Revivalists reactivate the distinction between Hua (the civilized Han) and Yi (peripheral ethnic barbarians) to reinterpret the Manchu-ruled last dynasty as a rupture in Chinese civilization, thereby explaining China’s subsequent decline into semi-colonial subordination. They then rescale the discourse to the modern colonial and contemporary global orders, recoding Western centrality as morally illegitimate and projecting China’s return to the center through civilizational revival. I show that imperial cultural legacies offer not merely images of past greatness but a substantive account of political order.
Object Grammar: Interpretive Divergences and Redirection around a National Object in Contemporary China’s Hanfu Movement
Forthcoming in Theory and Social Inquiry
This article asks what happens after national advocates invest a material object with national meaning but broader audiences interpret it differently. I find that revivalists articulate alternative national narratives through Hanfu that emerge from fissures within the mainstream national discourse, while the public interprets Hanfu within the mainstream framework. Hanfu’s materiality and historicity render it legible under both frameworks, producing divergent interpretations between revivalists and the public.
The focus of the articles lies in how revivalists respond to the interpretive divergences. I develop the concept of object grammar—the clustering rule of objects, which guides interpretation of objects as both a concept and its instantiations. I argue that meaning emerges from inter-object relations and that by rewriting object grammars, that is, reconfiguring the relations among objects, revivalists seek to redirect audience interpretations toward their expectations. With this intervention, they can stabilize Hanfu’s meaning without requiring audiences to abandon their existing national understandings. However, the effectiveness of rewritten object grammars depends on their dissemination to broader audiences, which is not guaranteed in practice.
This article contributes to cultural sociology by identifying inter-object relations as a source of meaning and highlighting the modifiability of classification rules. It also contributes to nationalism studies by showing how material objects mediate contestation over understandings of the nation and illuminating the potential for the strategic reconfiguration of national meanings.
Reviving Ritual in Modern Life: Reactivation, Transformation, and Limits in Contemporary China
Working paper
This article shows how modern social conditions both generate demand for the revival of traditional ritual and constrain its authority and efficacy, complicating theoretical accounts of the decline of traditional ritual under modernity. Revivalists value traditional ritual not merely as an inheritance from the past or a vehicle for traditional morality, but as an elaborate signifying system with rich symbolic and performative resources, especially in contrast to many newly designed ritual forms. Yet the institutional world that once sustained Confucian ritual has declined, raising the problem of how it can become socially meaningful and workable in modern life. Revivalists preserve what they regard as the core segments of Confucian ritual, in which actions channel interpretation in particular directions while leaving substantive moral meanings open to contemporary reinterpretation. Yet such reconstruction alone does not restore ritual’s social authority: participants and audiences may treat revived ritual merely as a performance or cultural experience. Even so, bringing participants with diverse understandings of ritual into a shared sequence of dress and movement enables collective practice to proceed. Staged ritual can generate affective engagement and serve as a provisional site for moral cultivation. It also presents particular visions of Chinese social and moral life as possibilities for the present.