ABSTRACT
The exposure to both the minor, day-to-day creative strategies employed by social actors in Beijing and the momentous cultural innovations of the People's Movement forced me to travel much farther along the path of postmodernism than originally anticipated. In Chapter 1 I have described some of the personal and methodological ramifications of this experience, which are summarized by the words dialogue, flexibility, and event. But the implications of this experience are not limited to methodology. My fieldwork problematizes culture and social structure, the objects of conventional anthropology. I found them to be continually appropriated, changed, and reconstituted in the course of an endless succession of minor and major events. My fieldwork therefore required me to reflect on theoretical consequences of the postmodern critique as well.
