A façade project and a funeral: everyday forms of state formation in contemporary China
Keywords:
state, rituals, morality, rural China.Abstract
Based on the experience of eighteen months of participant observation in several villages in one township in Hubei province, I describe "everyday forms of state formation" in rural China. My examples are the conflicts between local cadres and farmers related to the developmentalist policies of local government, and the combination of moralities and symbolisms in one funeral. Both represent rare examples of close contacts between higher-level officials and ordinary villagers. What is reproduced in such governmental and popular practices is not only a modernist state, but also inchoate cosmologies of authority and hierarchy, of what is decent (li), and a certain way of being and belonging – all that over-lapping with a modernist state apparatus. The conflicts between individuals and with local government and the symbolic creation of authority in ritual and everyday practice, on the one hand, articulate much longer continuities of certain cultural logics than a modernist and developmentalist political discourse would have it. On the other hand the violent ruptures of modernization in China, as in Maoist forms of governance up to the Cultural Revolution and capitalist growth now, should become visible clearly in my argument.
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