Culture And Popular Authority

"Mai-huo Fair"(a kind of Temple Fair) has been held in Lu Village in Middle China since the beginning of20century. What’s more, Lu Village Temple was rebuilding by some elder villagers from the year2009on. And the dissertation is an anthropological study which aims at understanding and interpreting these practices about Temple and Temple Fair, including the reason and power relations of the practice. Then, this paper takes "cultural schemas" of the practice theory as theoretical viewpoint, and focuses on the two questions:"who organized the events of Temple and Temple Fair", and "why did they do it". And the conclusion as follows:Firstly, on the basis of analysis about some local concepts such as Ren-qing, Guan-xi, Pao, Public or Private Morality, etc., using two common words in Lu village (e.g. Jiang-li and Guang-gun), the dissertation discusses Lu villagers’cultural schema:the people who is called "Guang-gun", which complies with the standard of "Jiang-li", is a successful villager and the goal which people strives for. That is to say, the cultural schema in Lu village is "becoming Guang-gun on the basis of Jiang-li"Secondly, it is this cultural schema that is the driving force of the practices about the Temple and Temple Fair. Impelled by this conception,"Mai-huo Fair" and Temple were held by those people called "Guang-gun" in different era. At the same time, these practice strengthened the authority of the organizers or "Guang-gun".Thirdly, Lu Villagers’cultural schema itself was continuously reproduced and transformed in the long historical practice or circumstances, which exactly help us to understand and interpret the complex power relations and local politics revealed by the current practice of rebuilding the Lu Temple.These conclusions mentioned above play an important role in understanding the theoretical questions such as revival of tradition, power relations, construction of authority etc. Specifically speaking, to begin with, according to the nowadays literatures about the revival of tradition, most of scholars analyzed these question form the viewpoint of outer reason, like globalization, state power and so on. That is to say, inner dynamic reason of a community itself was neglected more or less in these analyses. Thereafter, this dissertation uses the concept of "cultural schema", and analyzes the "’Mai-huo Fair"/Temple and its driving force from the point of view of inner cultural conception of this community in Lu village. By doing this, the paper tries to provide a new point of view to interpret the phenomenon of "revival of tradition"Then, the viewpoint of cultural schema also helps us to discuss culturally the complex power relation revealed by the events of Temple and Temple Fair. Accordingly, it put forward another new interpretation of power relation or local politics, that is, a kind of cultural interpretation.Next, the paper put the Lu villagers’cultural schema in the framework of practice theory, and discusses the process of the reproduction and transformation of this schema. That is also to say, the dimension of history is another theme in the paper. Thereby, the dissertation is an effort to deepen the understanding of cultural, power, and history, by putting the three factors together, e.g. culture in the framework of power relation and historical circumstances, power constructed by culture, and history culturized by culture.Last but not least, form the viewpoint of cultural schema, our understanding of popular authority in the rural society gets deepened. Concretely, the reason why those people were called popular authority or Guang-gun is that they satisfy or comply with the conception of "Jiang-li" However, with the change of the contents of "Jiang-li", the meaning of Guang-gun or popular authority was transformed accordingly. And the paper describes exactly the process of the change of Charisma Guang-gun, which is from construction, production, weakening to disappearing at last, and also indicates the tendency that more and more rowdies participate in the public affairs in Lu village.