Culture, power, and the state : rural North China, 1900-1942 / Prasenjit Duara.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Duara, Prasenjit.

Contributor:

American Council of Learned Societies.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Rural development--China, Northwest--History--20th century.

Rural development.

Power (Social sciences).

Local government--China, North--History--20th century.

Local government.

China--Social conditions--1912-1949.

China.

Physical Description:

1 Recurso online (326 p.)

Place of Publication:

Stanford, Calif. : Stanford University Press, 1988.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Introduction

1. The Cultural Nexus of Power

2. Brokering Rural Administration in the Late Qing

3. Building the Modern State in North China

4. Lineages and the Political Structure of the Village

5. Religion, Power, and the Public Realm in Rural Society

6. Networks, Patrons, and Leaders in Village Government

7. The State and the Redefinition of Village Community

8. The Modernizing State and Local Leadership

Conclusion

Postscript: The Methodological Limbo of Social History

Notes:

Incluye referencias bibliográficas e índices

ISBN:

9780804765589

0804765588

9780585303277

0585303274