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Overview
In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era.
The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and other structures of human interaction overlapped to form what he calls the cultural nexus of power in local society. The author's concept of the cultural nexus and his tracing of how it was altered enables us for the first time to grapple with change at the village level in all its complexity.
The author asserts that the growth of the state transformed and delegitimized the traditional cultural nexus during the Republican era, particularly in the realm of village leadership and finances. Thus, the expansion of state power was ultimately and paradoxically responsible for the revolution in China as it eroded the foundations of village life, leaving nothing in its place.
The problems of state-making in China were different from those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; the Chinese experience heralds the process that would become increasingly common in the emergent states of the developing world under the very different circumstances of the twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804765589 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 04/01/1991 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 340 |
| File size: | 6 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Culture, Power, And The State
Rural North China, 1900-1942
By Prasenjit Duara
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1988 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6558-9
CHAPTER 1
The Cultural Nexus of Power
In Rebellion and Its Enemies in Late Imperial China, Philip Kuhn probed ways of distinguishing dynastic decline from the fall of a civilization in 19th-century China. He concluded that although the imperial administration was disintegrating, the power of the local gentry, an important foundation of the old order, had by no means been undermined. In its time, this was a novel and powerful argument, not least because it rooted the analysis of the polity in the social order. The notion of the "cultural nexus of power" seeks to widen the framework for understanding the polity of a civilization still further — to encompass the realm of culture, especially popular culture. In so doing, I go beyond such obviously important but partial concepts as gentry society and Confucian ideology.
The cultural nexus formulation enables us to understand the imperial state, the gentry, and other social classes in late imperial China within a common frame of reference. It achieves this by grounding the analysis of culture and legitimacy within the organizational context in which power is wielded. In its organizational aspect, the cultural nexus serves as the framework that structures access to power and resources in local society. It also serves as the arena in which politics is contested and leadership developed in this society. Since its other roles rest on this organizational foundation, I consider this foundation first.
The cultural nexus integrates a variety of organizational systems and principles that shape the exercise of power in rural society. These include hierarchies of a segmentary or nested type, found, for instance, in the organization of lineages and markets. Hierarchies may be composed of territorial groupings whose membership is based on an ascriptive right, as in certain temple organizations; or they may be formed by voluntary associations, such as watercontrol or merchant associations. Also part of the nexus are informal networks of interpersonal relationships found, for example, between affines, patrons and clients, or religious teachers and disciples. Organizations may be inclusive or exclusive, singlepurpose or multipurpose, and so on.
The point is that these principles cannot exhaustively be understood by a single overarching system, such as the marketing system or any other system. Rather, together they form an intersecting, seamless nexus stretching across the many particular boundaries of settlements and organizations. Thus, from an objective point of view, the nexus appears not to be a very useful construct. But its coherence lies within a subject-centered universe of power. Persons and groups who pursue public goals do so within it, and it is their reach within this nexus, and not a geographical zone or a particular hierarchical system, that defines the parameters of local politics and the perimeters of local society.
Organizations in North China were rarely fully isomorphic with each other. That is to say, it is hard to find both identical centers of coordination and identical spheres of jurisdiction among them. Rather, they were interlocked in various ways, including personal relationships in informal networks that acted as the weft linking key points in these organizations. Power in local society tended to be concentrated at the densest points of interaction — the nodes of greatest coordination within the nexus.
From a historical point of view, these nodes of coordination constantly shifted over time, moving from within the village to outside of it, or gathered density, sometimes concentrating at one point, such as the village or market town, and sometimes becoming much more widely diffused. I believe that the changes of the 20th century reshuffled the points of coordination. One important result of this reshuffling was the rise, for the first time in the recent history of China, and the subsequent decline of the village as a nodal unit of great significance. Below, I examine how these developments were in no small measure bound up with the fiscal and political imperatives of state penetration.
The Cultural Nexus and the Marketing System
One can scarcely venture far into the study of local society without encountering the magisterial work of G. William Skinner on marketing systems. At first sight, the idea of the cultural nexus appears to represent a step backward in our understanding of this society. If local social systems can be explained by the principles governing the marketing system, as Skinner initially claimed, then why encumber an elegant model with complications? In fact, however, as Skinner himself later acknowledged, there is no isomorphism between the marketing system and the social system. In The City in Late Imperial China, he wrote:
Local organization above the village is a vastly complex subject. It is clear from work published in the last decade that the internal structure of the standard marketing system was more variegated and interesting than my 1964 article began to suggest. Extravillage local systems below the level of the standard marketing community were variously structured by higher-order lineages, irrigation societies, crop-watching societies, politico-ritual societies ... and the jurisdictions of particular deities and temples; many if not most were multipurpose sodalities manifesting more than one organizing principle.
My purpose, therefore, is not to flog a dead horse. Instead, I hope to salvage the most valuable insights of the marketing system model and rework them into the cultural nexus formulation. In the analysis of marriage networks and irrigation associations in this chapter, I demonstrate two different ways in which the marketing system was assimilated within the cultural nexus; and throughout the book, I indicate ways in which this system was articulated with other organizational systems in the nexus. I begin by looking briefly at the role of markets in the villages of the CN survey, particularly in the 1930s and 1940s.
Most of the CN villages were located near the county capital, which also served as their market town. Consequently, they were oriented to a larger marketing center — usually an intermediate market, rather than the standard markets. A notable exception to this was Hou Lineage Camp, in Changli county, Hebei, whose principal market was Nijing, a standard market that also became the headquarters of the administrative village in 1940–41. Villagers mostly frequented this market, which operated on a five-day cycle, but they also participated in the market of the county capital located about 10 kilometers away (1 km = 2li). Xia Walled Village in En county, Shandong, was also oriented to a standard market town before the Japanese invasion of 1937. Subsequently, its market was shifted to the county capital, as part of an effort by the Japanese to acquire greater control over markets by limiting their numbers to larger centers.
County capitals often corresponded to intermediate or central marketing centers commanding an area with a radius of 7 to 10 kilometers. This included as many as 10,000 people from 30 or 40 villages. These centers also functioned as standard markets on certain days when villagers participated from a more restricted area of about 2.5 kilometers. Unlike the standard marketing area studied by Skinner in Sichuan, the standard marketing areas in North China varied considerably in size. In Luancheng county, Hebei, marketing areas were said to comprise as few as 3 and as many as 20 or more villages.
Markets were most important for villagers as places to buy and sell products and to acquire credit. Since the data from the CN villages do not make it possible to quantify the actual amounts of peasant produce marketed, I limit my comments to a few impressionistic statements on the marketing process. Although there had been a discernible increase in the number of families growing commercial crops and in the acreage devoted to commercial crops since the late Qing, notably of cotton, agriculture was still basically subsistence oriented. In the case of cotton, evidence from North Brushwood and Wu's Shop Village in Hebei suggests that peasants marketed their surplus cotton only after satisfying their domestic needs for clothes and shoes. In the case of food grains, only high-value crops such as wheat and rice, grown mostly in small quantities, were sold in the markets. As with cotton, they were sold only after a certain amount had been set aside for domestic consumption, chiefly for use during the New Year festivities. Sorghum and corn were consumed at home, but for most families in the villages the amounts available for consumption were insufficient. They often bought food grains with the proceeds from the sale of high-value crops or took loans to tide themselves over the year. Even in one of the most prosperous villages of the survey, Hou Lineage Camp in Hebei, where most of the crops produced were consumed at home, only six of the 114 families did not buy food in the market in any year. Thus, for the most part, the subsistence orientation of villagers was modified by having to turn to the market during periods of shortage.
Aside from periodic purchases of food grains, villagers also bought oil, agricultural implements, and, occasionally, cloth. But these were not always bought at the market towns. Some villages, like Xia Walled Village and Cold Water Ditch in Shandong, had stores in the village where the residents bought many of their daily necessities. Villagers also bought these goods from itinerant peddlers who made the rounds of the villages. Moreover, items like agricultural implements and cattle were bought at temple fairs, sometimes held in distant parts of the county.
Because of the greater availability of capital at the marketing center, it was an important source of credit. This was especially so for poorer villages like North Brushwood, where the financial grip of the moneylending landlords living in the market increased through the 20th century (see Chapter 6). In Sand Well, too, it was claimed that in any year, eight or nine of the 70 families borrowed from the market, and four or five borrowed from families within the village. However, in others like Xia Walled Village and Cold Water Ditch, a greater portion of the credit was generated from within the village itself. In Wu's Shop Village, few people received any credit since they were so impoverished. Informants stated that in the late Qing eight or ten households had received loans from the market, but that hardly any did so by the 1930s. Since a great deal of land had been sold outright to outsiders, credit was not easily available because villagers could not provide collateral.
Thus the market was not the only important source of credit. Furthermore, in many cases even when villagers received credit from the market town, the store supplying the loan was managed by a resident of the village. This was the case in Sand Well and Cold Water Ditch. Other services provided in the market also suggest the continuing importance of village ties, so strongly emphasized by Philip Huang. Village contacts were important as middlemen in the acquisition of credit and in the market for land and land use. In selling their produce, villagers were expected to use the services of a licensed middleman (yahang or jingji), who charged a commission for his mediation. In some villages like Wu's Shop and North Brushwood, villagers approached only those middlemen from their own village. It appears that the relations of the villager to the market did not develop at the expense of his ties within the village but may even have reinforced these ties as he used them to improve his position in the market.
I have attempted to establish that the market alone did not dominate the commercial life of rural folk; village ties were important in the provision of some services, as well as in facilitating actual transactions in the market. From the perspective of the cultural nexus, it was the interplay between market relationships and village ties that shaped rural economic transactions. But the nexus formulation goes still further; it shows that even together the village and market were unable to secure all the social and economic needs of the villager. Below, I look at a range of extra-village ties; none is fully subsumed by the marketing system, but neither can any be understood apart from its interactions with the marketing hierarchy.
A Case Study: Marriage Networks
In an effort to demonstrate that the marketing system also formed a social system, Skinner showed that the standard marketing area tended to be endogamous in Sichuan. Daughters-in-law were usually taken from within the standard marketing community. He demonstrated this by showing how marriage brokers operated from the market town. Data on marriage networks from two CN villages reveal that the marketing system model is only partially able to explain these materials. We have to look as well to other kinds of relationships in the cultural nexus to appreciate the full significance of marriage networks.
There are two sets of marriage data for Wu's Shop Village in Liangxiang county, Hebei, near Beijing. One set is derived from two informants who provided the names of villages from which their lineages had received brides. This sample includes 12 villages supplying 19 brides. The second sample is a list of affines contributing money to a funeral. Together the two sets consist of a total of 24 villages housing 75 affinal families. Two villages housing four affines could not be found on the map and were thus excluded from the analysis.
Another set of data is from North Brushwood in Luancheng county in Hebei. In this village, 17 from a sample of 180 brides were taken from the village itself. However, since we are interested in extra-village marriage networks, only the remaining 163 brides, drawn from 49 villages and towns within the county, are considered below. These brides were distributed among grooms from four lineages in North Brushwood, but an overwhelming number were married to the largest lineage, the Hao.
From the data on the distances of the villages to the market town, it appears that the bulk of the villages supplying brides were located within a five-kilometer radius of the market town. Thus, it is entirely possible that these villages were located within the marketing area and the relationship between the two was mediated through the marketing center. However, both North Brushwood and Wu's Shop are relatively close to their market towns, being 2.0 and 1.5 kilometers distant, respectively. Moreover, most brides were expected to come from villages within walking distance of those they married into. Thus the evidence can also be interpreted to suggest that the bride-giving village may have belonged to a sphere of the bride-receiving village organized independently of the marketing system, based, for instance, on the time needed to walk to these villages or on the existence of prior affinal relations.
One test to determine the sphere to which the villages belonged involves looking at bride-giving villages outside the marketing area. Were the bride-receiving villages obtaining large numbers of brides from villages outside their marketing area? A piece of evidence supporting the hypothesis that the villages were located in the market system is that in Luancheng county, only one of the 13 villages that sent out more than five brides (this group sent a total of 94 out of 163 brides to North Brushwood) was outside the five-kilometer range of the market.
A stronger test is to see whether most of the bride-giving villages were closer to the bride-receiving villages or to the market town. If a substantially larger proportion of the bride-giving villages were located in areas closer to the receiving village than to the marketing center, then we can hypothesize that the market was not of central importance to this network and that distances between villages formed the crucial variable. In Fig. 2, I plot the distance of bride-giving villages to the bride-receiving village, as well as to the marketing center of the bride-receiving village in the two counties.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Culture, Power, And The State by Prasenjit Duara. Copyright © 1988 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Copyright Page,Dedication,
Acknowledgements,
Table of Figures,
List of Tables,
Introduction,
One - The Cultural Nexus of Power,
Two - Brokering Rural Administration in the Late Qing,
Three - Building the Modern State in North China,
Four - Lineages and the Political Structure of the Village,
Five - Religion, Power, and the Public Realm in Rural Society,
Six - Networks, Patrons, and Leaders in Village Government,
Seven - The State and the Redefinition of Village Community,
Eight - The Modernizing State and Local Leadership,
Conclusion,
Postscript - The Methodological Limbo of Social History,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Glossary of Chinese Terms,
Index,