Authority And Order In The Change Of Village Governance

Taking Shuang Village located in Eastern Sichuan as a case, and applying the method of political anthropological fieldwork and the framework of ethnographical narration, this paper makes an exhaustive study of the process of the case village's governance throughout 100 years of the 20th century, which centers on the change of the forms of the village's authority and order during the course.In this paper, authority as a concept in the arena of village means the ability of the state to control and influence the village, meanwhile it concerns the possible influences of economy, society and culture as a kind of resource over the man's behaviors. In this sense, authority embodies not only political meanings but also economical, social and cultural aspects. In addition, it may concern all the kinds of latent or manifest inductive influences brought about by such modernity factors as technology, media and so on in the process of permeation into the village as a kind of discourse and ideology. While order herein means the result of the function and interaction of various authoritative factors, namely the structure of Shuang Village's politics, economy, society and culture. The paper argues that, the essence of the change of Shuang Village's governance is the pounding and reinstitution of various authoritative factors within modernization to all the structured relationships of the original village, which are directly embodied by the aspects of political public authority and order, and in broader sense by the whole figure of the village in social anthropological sense as well. Consequently, the study of the change of the authority and order in Shuang Village does not only concerns the village's public authority and order, but also deals with all the fields of economy, society, culture, custom and belief influenced by them. Whereas owing to the modernization of China, a late modernization from the outside world, the transition of the former is the reason and premise of that of the latter, therefore it is also an essential point of the study.Likewise, this paper argues that, modernity, state and the local knowledge of village are the basic variables that influence the forms of Shuang Village's authority and order in the 20th century, of which the interactive relationships and structures are decided by Chinese revolution in the 20th century. As a historical process, Chinese revolution in the 20th century has gone through the stages of happening,developing and reaching a climax, ultimately being surpassed by reform. Just for this historical change, the interaction among modernity, state and the local knowledge of village manifested in different forms, and further shaped different features of the village's authority and order in different periods.State factor is the medium which links and channels modernity and the local knowledge of village. In the process of modernization, the relation between state and Shuang Village lies in state's "planned change" imposed on the village community. Such "planned change" is manifested both in state's reshaping village's public authority and state's introducing modernity element to villages. Modernity element includes two aspects: One is modem material and knowledge element; the other is ideological discourse. The feature of China's late modernization from the outside world presupposes that the introduction of modernity material and knowledge elements to village community will often have state as the carrier; while the modernity authoritative discourse will legitimize the feature of modern country in the rural community which is different from traditional country. The local knowledge has a long history. It is the mixture of country's "general culture" of pre-modem society and the local knowledge of Shuang Village, which stands on one end of the time and space coordinate that develops from the traditional society into the modern society.The three basic variables?modernity, state, and the local knowledge of the village interactively influence the process of the village governanc...