After arriving in Shanghai in 2011, anthropologist Julie Starr took her mundane social relationships with young, middle-class, college-educated Chinese and expat women as the basis for a broad comparison of how the “Chinese” and “Western” women conceived of the materiality of selfhood and embodied identities. The Chinese women were Han, mostly from provinces adjacent to Shanghai, and the expat women were “Western” women from the US, Australia, Britain and continental Europe. Modified Bodies, Material Selves provides a good ethnographic sketch of middle-class, female expat life in Shanghai, a group rarely covered by anthropologists. Starr concludes that the Chinese women were “untroubled” (p. 4) by the pursuit of beauty and a host of related issues, such as “race” and “gender,” which the Western women viewed with a high level of critical awareness. Unlike the Western women, the Chinese women linked concepts of body and beauty with nationalism. Focusing on three beauty ideals shared by the Chinese women – thinness, big eyes and white skin – Starr weaves together a multitude of explanations for the differences between the two groups, including individualism, the connection between Chinese traditional medicine and food culture, the Western naturalization of beauty and biologization of race, the hegemony of Western beauty ideals, neoliberalism, capitalism and more. The book's conclusion is that the Chinese women did not feel tension between the individual and society as the Western women did because, living in a non-democratic society, they did not assume that the individual has power over society.
In sum, Starr makes a very ambitious attempt to pull together wide-ranging interdisciplinary approaches – such as theories of embodiment, selfhood and gender, and feminist critiques of the politics of beauty – into a coherent conceptual framework and then to connect it with her fieldwork. The introduction is a competent review of the relevant concepts and theorists, which could be a nice reading for an upper-level undergraduate course on gender or the body. However, despite its well-written ethnographic anecdotes, the book tends to repeat the same conceptual assertions without developing them more deeply in the context of the actual fieldwork, so the arguments start to seem redundant after the introductory chapter.
The fieldwork largely consisted of noting spontaneous statements about beauty while eating, shopping, attending yoga class, patronizing beauty and nail salons, and hanging out with the two categories of women, and occasionally engaging in deeper conversations. Starr provides a good programmatic description of her method, which she calls “situated comparison” – comparisons that highlight the different orientations of subjects to their locally meaningful cultural contexts (p. 26). She also utilizes the related notion of “situated feminisms” to criticize much feminist theorizing about beauty practices, asserting that her ethnographic research method will reveal material bodies and social practices as culturally informed and dependent on local contexts, avoiding the fallacies of universalistic claims about the entanglement of body, nature and power, which tend to be generated by philosophical methods.
Starr's proposed methodology combines the traditional anthropological emphasis on culture and the comparative method with a more up-to-date awareness of postmodern and feminist critiques of reified categories, such as her two main categories (“Chinese” and “Western”). Nevertheless, the research would have benefitted from more of the traditional approach, because not enough “culturally informed” context is provided to fully situate the ethnographic descriptions, and much of the comparison with the “West” seems to be based on her own status as a “Westerner” rather than systematic research. One area where more cultural background would be helpful is in the discussion of the Chinese women's beliefs about food, where Starr argues that concepts grounded in traditional Chinese medicine and cosmology (e.g. hot/cold or seasonal foods) shaped the women's understanding of the effect of food on their bodies and their beauty. However, their underlying cosmology is not described in detail. Another intriguing argument is that the Chinese concept of race is not grounded in biology as is the Western concept, but her argument is not illustrated by the research solidly enough to be convincing. This would have required more systematic interview techniques: for example, given the historical importance of fears of racial miscegenation in the West due to the “one drop of blood” theory of blackness, it would have been interesting to ask the Chinese women their opinion about mixed-race marriages, and whether they thought race was passed down to the children in the form of “genes,” “blood” or some other construct. However, it appears that Starr rarely pushed to get more depth from her acquaintances than she obtained from their social outings.
The main descriptive evidence comes from the realm of discourse. Beauty, gender and race are three fields in which translation between Chinese and English can be very difficult because the underlying worldviews are so different. Several translations of English “race” (minzu, zhongzu, renzhong) are offered in the summary of Frank Dikötter's The Discourse of Race in Modern China (Stanford University Press, 1992), but it is not clear whether Starr's research subjects used any of them to organize their own thoughts. Little background is provided about the women – some or all of whom may be composites in order to protect the identities of the real women – so the book lacks an in-depth analysis of the real social structures underpinning their lives, and the reader does not get a thorough picture of the power relations that motivate their beauty practices.
Modified Bodies, Material Selves contains readable overviews of key topics in Chinese gender and beauty in the reform era, with sections appropriate for undergraduates. As a work of research, the book falls short of the methodological promise raised in the introduction: it does not provide a satisfying and convincing depth of local, cultural background for the practices examined. In the end, the research methodology was not up to the task of supporting the ambitious conceptual framework that Starr put forward.
