Tamara Jacka’s Ginkgo Village: Trauma and Transformation in Rural China opens with a novelistic scene of the ethnographer, her assistant Li Wei, and a composite informant called old Widower Yang, basking in sunlight and working. The man, Yang, describes a memory-scape of long-gone giant ginkgo trees, destroyed during the Great Leap Forward in 1958, and Jacka begins elaborating a key analytic framework for the book—traumatic political change. The composite figures of Jacka herself, “Li Wei,” and Yang Yurong, who rents the researchers their quarters and pulls them into village life, as well as Liang Anqin, an entrepreneurial poor peasant who with her husband builds a noodle factory, and the difficult Tan Zimei, who makes poor choices about virtually everything, including the decision to continue getting pregnant until she has a son, all appear throughout the narrative conveying experience mediated through chance, the author’s own experience, and state policy. Once I realized where the book was rooted—generically, it is a “village study”—the didactic “Introduction” made sense. Also, because it draws on an even older, more novelistic ethnographic genre, Jacka’s list, literally a “cast of characters,” helps readers negotiate villagers’ decades-old social relations and their complicated work itineraries. Woven into her sophisticated exposition are vivid individuals, their autobiographic performances, and records and stories about conflicts among individuals and lineages. Significantly, Jacka regularly notes the sound, smell, familiarity, routine, and food she shared with her informants over the years of her fieldwork—and the abrupt, unforeseen end of that fieldwork.

Chapter One, a deep history of the village and county, sets the historical scene. The second chapter, titled “Ghosts,” is about the mythic and actual deaths of a baby girl and the possibility that her corpse was consumed by starving villagers. In Chapter Three, “Weaving Lives,” Gao Xiuhua figures as an elderly, overburdened villager, still enmeshed in childcare after raising her own five kids and five grandchildren. She is also still negotiating complex village politics, which within the time-span of Gao’s adult life have primarily included rising bride prices and the ever-present but ever-changing state policies that expand or restrict female paid labor in the interest of capital extraction. Chapter Four, “The Good Earth,” challenges Pearl Buck’s gender-blindness by drawing on the character of Wang Xinran, a woman who resented being paid less than she had earned for work, and earning nothing for her social capital investments, despite her uncompensated work organizing and leading the female workforce. Chapter Five, “Two Funerals,” knits together ethnographic descriptions of death rituals now openly performed at significant expense for elders who have lived prosperous lives to the end, and defensively for supernaturally dangerous, embittered young brides who have poisoned themselves. Chapter Six, “The Road-Concreting Conflict,” elaborates on the social violence among lineage groups that begins when the state’s poverty alleviation projects go into effect in Ginkgo Village and an all-female gang barricades the local state’s bulldozers. My favorite chapters are Seven and Eight, “Yang Yurong’s House,” on family strategies of wealth accumulation and capital investment, and “Motherhood,” which introduces a stubborn, badly educated, dirty woman whose poor parenting and general slothfulness snag the ethnographer’s attention and psychic defenses. “Motherhood” interrupts the smooth flow of narrative to show how Jacka’s persona is projecting her own back story onto this impoverished bad mother, Tan Ziwei. Tan ’s ugliness, in particular, shows how women’s own intentional acts reinforce oppressive, patriarchal precedents. The final chapter, “New Year,” finds the village in a good mood. It made me nostalgic in a way I never am: realizing that once left to their own devices, villagers are enacting rituals I remember from my first guonian in Taipei, home-staying with refugees from Beijing.

This book deepens and retools an old plot in China studies: morally outraged female ethnographer leaves an advanced economy to excavate the lives of the poor women peasants. Here we meet women left behind in villages, some too old to travel, some assigned to do fulltime housework while men migrate to cities. Interestingly, however, this book does not express outrage. Instead, Jacka chose to conduct a village ethnography in the vein of even older studies by familiar pioneers such as Marjorie Wolf, Ruby Watson, Hill Gates, and Ellen Judd, and by Lin Yaohua, Xu Shilian, Wu Wenzao, and Li Jinghan. This vein of ethnography was revived in the 1980s. Its attention to female participation in everyday life demonstrated women’s social presence and female work burdens in social reproduction. The next generation of social scientists, like South Korean anthropologist of poverty Mun Young Cho, historian Xiaofei Kang, social theorist Yuk-Lin Renita Wong, historical sociologist Gao Xiaoxian, and historian Gail Hershatter, expand on the feminist investigation into rural female poverty not to prove women’s social visibility, but to decry their enmeshment in an unfair social world.

Unlike both the foundational and contemporary work, however, Jacka makes a point to situate her “self” as the writer of a village study. In a distinctive, sophisticated move, she highlights not simply the literary quality of all field studies (which must, for the sake of professional ethics, anonymize the village’s location and name, its major power brokers, and its true history of conflict), but also her own fictionality, meaning that she identifies herself as a collaborative ethnographer, but also a reflexive writer, whose presence in the book is as real and as fictionalized as the subjects “Jacka” represents. This deft move also alleviates the deadly moralism I find taxing in some feminist research. Tamara Jacka’s avatar has its own complex back stories: of motherhood and of her mother’s seeming repudiation of motherhood (Jacka dedicates the book to her mother). She acknowledges the problems that psychoanalytic good sense raises once one understands the mechanism of projections, one’s own and those of others. That acknowledgement gives Jacka freedom to speculate openly about others’ motives, which breaks up the monotonous sense of tragedy. As in the best ethnographies of compromised, poverty-stricken women, Jacka finds comfort where they do. She wonders at individual choices, such as leaving a kitchen unfinished in an otherwise new house, and pillories bad parenting rather than excusing it, or unrelentingly grieving it because its root causes can be traced to social-sexual injustice. The book is refreshingly free of maternalism.

The field of feminist subaltern China studies, excavating the experiences that burden the poorest of the poor, sometimes blurs disciplinary distinctions. Jacka’s study exemplifies why sociology, history, and anthropology have their own “proper” or set of rules of engagement that shape by degrees and valence what answers scholarly questions can deliver. For instance, Paul Rabinow and his students called into question the materiality of social anthropology in his Reflections on Fieldwork in Morocco (1977), and James Clifford and George Marcus drew attention to ethnography’s literary foundations in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (1986). These once contentious claims are prosaic now. As a consequence, anthropological commonsense incorporates high degrees of analytic awareness. This is not the case among social historians, and particularly among feminist social historians. So, while Jacka folds into the narrative significant markers about her own class, race, personal trauma history, familiarity with everyday village life and so on, I never felt imposed upon. At the descriptive level and with her interesting use of temporalities, including the future anterior, Jacka normalizes a figure at the center of the book, a version of herself. Social historians can presume that direct observation mediated through (at times, prolifically) documented prehistory, shields the researcher from the gaze of the other. This actually has counter-intuitive results, and we end up knowing too much about the historian; particularly her chronic outrage that poor women always get the short end of the stick. The oddly impersonal interpersonality a good ethnologist can achieve rarely happens in social history. For Jacka, I suspect, self-dramatizing outrage is not a goal.

To my understanding there has never been an analogous move in social history, a turning of the lens onto the writer. Perhaps there should be. Maybe we should have an explicit discussion of women’s history’s missionary roots, not to decry but to analyze how foundations shape disciplinary scholarship. Successful counter-histories exist. Toby Meyer-Fong took on the burden of writing about nearly unimaginable mass death, but as she makes clear in What Remains: Coming to Terms with Civil War in 19th Century China (2013), she stumbled into history of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom; she did not set out to write a micro history of death. We have no historiographic precedent for debating how our histories can be illuminating and instructive, but at the same time avoid finger wagging and pity porn. In fact, my impression is that social historians have doubled down on the effort to “recover the voices” of the poorest of the poor. We tend to be less perturbed than other scholars by the possibility that there is no “other voice”—that Gayatri C. Spivak was correct that alternative or subaltern voices will never lead us to the truth about extremely poor peasants and their damaged expression. Historians bob and weave around the question of epistemological difference and, unfortunately, in my view, luxuriate in fruitless debates over indigenization of feminism and the imaginary “western gaze,” which points us back to the eternal battle over nationalism and away from shared epistemology, ontology, and methodological concerns. I found in Jacka’s most recent book a model that social historians might do well to emulate, and I have adopted it for teaching “Modern China” next spring.