For simplicity’s sake: no context, no China

Generations of China anthropologists have complained about the marginality of Chinese research in general debates in anthropology. One reason for this malaise may be that anthropologists of China did not get the balance of context and substance right. Either they adopted context created by other disciplines (for instance, to describe the setting of a village ethnography), or they focused merely on context (when providing commentaries on social change). Both approaches typically fail to capture social complexity. To approach social complexity, we need to bracket the problem of ‘context’, and instead follow actors in their own practices of attention, through the resonances that background and foreground action. Such an approach is not necessarily related to ‘China’ and never exhaustively given in ‘texts’, but it requires the analyst to attend to the forces of simplification in action and in analysis, against which it is possible to measure complexity.