|
|
|
Is Global Shanghai "Good to Think"? Thoughts on Comparative History and Post-Socialist Cities*
JEFFREY N. WASSERSTROM
University of California, Irvine
Shanghai is many-sided ... unique among the cities of the world ... almost indescribable.
|
| —Thomas F. Millard, China: Where It Is Today and Why (1928) |
|
|
No two cites in China could be more unalike than Shanghai and Beijing. It is not uncommon to hear visitors to China sing praises about Shanghai and speak grimly of Beijing.... For all its congestion, shabbiness, and pollution, Shanghai remains China's most interesting and vibrant city.
|
| —Jack F. Williams, "Cities of East Asia," in Cities of the World (1993) |
|
|
Quantitative factors [such as number of major corporate headquarters and percentage of local people working in high-level service fields like finance] are generally used in defining world city status.... Beaverstock et al. (1999) have prepared a "roster of world cities" in terms of level of advanced producer services, namely, accountancy, advertising, banking/finance and law. They combine their data into scoring systems in which London, Paris, New York and Tokyo score twelve, with Chicago, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Milan and Singapore scoring ten. These are Alpha world cities. Beta world cities scoring more than six but less than ten include San Francisco, Sydney,... and Moscow. Gammas scoring less than seven but more than three include Amsterdam, Melbourne, Boston, Warsaw, Atlanta, Kuala Lumpur and Shanghai.
|
| —David Byrne, Understanding the Urban (2001)1 |
|
|
| The title of this essay alludes to a famous discussion of animal symbolism by Claude Lévi-Strauss in his oft-cited book Totemism. Whereas some earlier theorists had argued in a functionalist vein that types of animals are often used to stand for human groups because these beasts are "good to eat," Lévi-Strauss insisted that it is the fact that species are "good to think" that matters more.2 Drawing on Rousseau's earlier claim that rational thought depends on the ability to establish contrasts and homologies (to find various ways that entities are different from and similar to one another), Lévi-Strauss argued that totemic systems should not be seen as curious manifestations of the workings of the savage mind. Instead, they were symbolic constructs that followed the same principles as modern categorization schemas.3 |
1
|
|
What makes animals "good to think" in this view is that people can do more than simply describe them and revel in their unique qualities. We can also single out features that make them similar and dissimilar to one another and group them together in various ways. While remaining aware (at one level) of the things that make each species unique and individual members of species different from one another, we can integrate them into or use them as the basis for systems of correspondence, then carry these correspondences over into the human world. |
2
|
|
Building on Lévi-Strauss, we can think of three different stances that might be taken toward any city's value as something to think with. A metropolis that is bad for thinking would be one that could only be described; it might be good for writing (e.g., useful as a setting for a novel) or for representing visually (e.g., used as the backdrop for a film) but not for theorizing. The first epigraph to this essay draws attention to the tendency of many to claim that this is or at least has been the case with Shanghai. |
. . . |
There are about 15663 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
