Fei-wen Liu is a research fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Syracuse University in the United States in 1997. Before joining Academia Sinica, she had taught at Colgate University as visiting assistant professor in 1997-98. She was a visiting scholar at the Harvard-Yenching Institute in 2003-2004 and served as curator of the Museum of the Institute of Ethnology in Academia Sinica in 2013-2014 and since 2017.
Liu has conducted fieldwork in rural south China on the world’s only “women’s script” known as nüshu女書 (women’s writing) since 1992.This script was used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, and as a script that men could not read, it had nearly faded away. Driven by urgency to salvage this endangered cultural heritage, she has devoted herself to documenting nüshu, its social and humanistic significance, while that is still possible. She also discovered that nüshu, although most famous for its written form, constituted a living repertoire that was performed by chanting or singing – thus making it mostly interchangeable with the local women’s singing traditions, referred to as nüge女歌. Liu treats nüshu not simply as text, but a form of expression (combining writing and singing), a social field for dialogical inspiration (through practice and performance), and the embodiment of women’s voices (sentimental and cognitive). She is currently developing a theoretical construct from the notion of “expressive depths” and building an open-access nüshu database.
Liu has published in many flagship journals at home and abroad: Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China, American Ethnologist, Journal of American Folklore, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, Research on Women in Modern Chinese History, etc. To promote interdisciplinary research, she has edited Empathy, Affect, and Intersubjectivity: Anthropology and Psychology in Dialogue (with Ruey-ling Chu). Shehas also produced a nüshu documentary titled Calling and Recalling: The Sentiments of Nüshu (with Yu-I Kuo and Chia-Kuen Hsieh) to introduce nüshu to the wider public.
Her representative publication is Gendered Words: Sentiments and Expression in Changing Rural China (2015), published by Oxford University Press. This book is the first full-length ethnography on nüshu. Since at least the nineteenth century, women in rural Jiangyong used nüshu to construct sisterhood networks beyond patriarchal kinship lines and village confines, compose biographic narratives to solicit support from the social world and divine realm, and proclaim women’s virtue while lamenting their sentiment of kelian可憐 (misery). Writing history had long been the privilege of Chinese male elites, so what does peasant women’s accounts of their life histories bring to the fore, epistemologically and historiography? Furthermore, how does nüshu’s “sentiment-imbued” quality throw new light on emotion as an analytical construct? In China, writing often carries a tinge of moral justification; in the West, influenced by the Enlightenment, rationality enjoys quite a supreme privileged position. Nüshu as a genre for “lamenting one’s misery,” nonetheless, opens a new horizon for exploring how emotion functions as a source of inspiration and field of transformation.
Further, as the intersection of writing and singing, nüshu offers an intertextual reference for capturing the dialogical interplay between voice and other forms of expression, especially when juxtaposed with illiterate peasant women’s singing tradition and literate gentry women’s writing world. Last but not the least, with nüshu now on the verge of extinction, the politics of salvaging this disappearing cultural heritage have significantly reshaped its poetics in contemporary society.
Based on twenty years of fieldwork, this book proposes an innovative triangular approach—combining writing, singing, and orality—along with practice-oriented and performance-sensitive perspectives that illuminate nüshu’s humanistic and social implications in areas of gender, class, voice, expression, and emotion. All this has fed the development of Liu’s theoretical construct “expressive depths.” To better locate women’s socially prompted and diachronically developed subjectivities, as a group and as individuals, Liu also incorporates the life narrative approach to highlight the trajectories of four women of different generations, born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s, respectively. As an anthropological project, this book is also an attempt to document, if not salvage, the true face of nüshu and restore it to history before it is too late. Nüshu was silent for so long, and history may just repeat itself if we let the “women’s script” become blurred beyond recognition and slip into oblivion.
Fei-wen Liu is Research Fellow at the Institute of Ethnology, Academia Sinica. She received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Syracuse University of the United States in 1997. Before joining Academia Sinica, she had taught at Colgate University as Visiting Assistant Professor in 1997-98. She was a visiting scholar at Harvard-Yenching Institute during 2003-2004, and served as Curator of Museum of the Institute of Ethnology in Academia Sinica during 2013-2014 and since 2017.
Liu has conducted fieldwork in rural south China on the world’s only “women’s script” known as nüshu女書 (women’s writing) since 1992,a script used exclusively among women in Jiangyong County of Hunan Province, script that men could not read, script that is nearly fading away. Informed by an urgent sense of salvaging this endangered cultural heritage, she devotes herself to documenting nüshu, its social and humanistic significance, while it is still possible. Also considering that nüshu, although in written form, must be performed in chanting or singing – thus making it mostly interchangeable with local women’s singing tradition, called nüge女歌, such as bridal lament – Liu treats nüshu not simply as text, but a form of expression (combining writing and singing), a social field for dialogical inspiration (through practice and performance), and embodiment of women’s voices (sentimental and cognitive). She is currently developing the theoretical construct of “expressive depths” and building an open-access nüshu database.
Liu has published in many flagship journals at home and abroad of the concerning fields: Journal of Asian Studies, Modern China, Nan Nü: Men, Women, and Gender in Early and Imperial China, American Ethnologist, Journal of American Folklore, Taiwan Journal of Anthropology, Research on Women in Modern Chinese History, etc. To promote interdisciplinary research, she has edited Empathy, Affect, and Intersubjectivity: Anthropology and Psychology in Dialogue (with Ruey-ling Chu). Shehas also produced a nüshu documentary titled Calling and Recalling: The Sentiments of Nüshu (with Yu-I Kuo and Chia-Kuen Hsieh) to introduce nüshu to the public audience.
Her representative publication is Gendered Words: Sentiments and Expression in Changing Rural China (2015) published by Oxford University. This book is the first full-length ethnography on the world's only gender-defined written system, nüshu. Since at least the nineteenth century, women in rural Jiangyong had usednüshu to construct sisterhood networks beyond the patriarchal kinship lines and village confines, compose biographic narratives to solicit support from the social world and divine realm, and proclaim women’s virtue while lamenting their sentiments of kelian可憐 (the miserable). Writing history had long been the privilege of Chinese male elites. What does peasant women’s account of their life histories bring to the fore, epistemologically and historiography? Furthermore, how nüshu’s “sentiment-imbued” quality throws new light on emotion as an analytical construct? In China writing often carries a tinge of moral justification; in West, influenced by the Enlightenment, rationality enjoys quite a supreme privileged position. Nüshu as a genre for “lamenting one’s misery,” nonetheless, opens up a new horizon for exploring how emotion functions as a source of inspiration and field of transformation.
Thirdly, as an intersection of writing and singing, nüshu offers an intertextual reference for capturing the dialogical interplay between voice and forms of expression, especially when juxtaposed with illiterate peasant women’s singing tradition and literate gentry women’s writing world. Last but not the least, with nüshu now on the verge of extinction, the practice of nüshu embodies how the politics of salvaging this disappearing cultural heritage has molded the poetics of nüshu in contemporary society.
Based on twenty years of fieldwork, this book proposes an innovative triangular approach—combining writing, singing, and orality—along with practice-oriented and performance-sensitive perspectives to illuminate nüshu’s humanistic and social implications in areas of gender, class, voice, expression, and emotion, and to develop the theoretical construct of “expressive depths.” To better locate women’s social-prompted and diachronic-developed subjectivities, as group and as individual, Liu incorporates also the life narrative approach, centering around the life experiences of four women of different generations, born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s respectively. As an anthropological project, this book is also an attempt to document, if not salvage, the true face of nüshu and restore it to history before it is too late. Nüshu was silent for so long, and history may just repeat itself if we let the “women’s script” become blurred beyond recognition and slip into oblivion.