Changes Of Village Community Boundaries And Village Transformation

This thesis is focused on the geographic, economic, political, identity and cultural boundaries changes of a suburban village under the background of rapid industrialization and urbanization. The changes of village boundaries can also be considered as a transformation symbol of village which reveals the vanishing, transitional or recovering fate of the village community in the future.The function of boundary is to differentiation through which macro-social structure and micro-social relationships are formed. Social boundaries reflect both the segmentation and connection of social relations. Village boundaries reflect the distinction and connections between village and broad society such as state, market and the city.Traditional village is a community with clear boundaries which provide farmers peaceful social order and life significance. In the process of modernization, both the penetration of modern national power and the encroachment of market logic buried the traditional village community under the waves of mass society. Can village community continue to exist, and exist in what sense? These questions become highly concerned theoretical and practical issues? The opinion which upholds inverse urbanization and traditional closed village community is not as desirable as the opinion which upholds the vanishing of the village community. The discussions about the fate of the village will be preceded between these continuums from tradition to modern.Tonnies’theory about distinction between community and society has become an important dimension in explaining modern social transformations. With the penetrations of the market economy and the homogeneous mass consumption society, someone think that the village community will come to an end and be replaced by society. Others think that the community has aroused people’s continuing nostalgia as a source of security and belonging with the growth of modern individualism and modernity social risk. Therefore, the community is far from disappearing, but to revival due to modernization and individualism. From this perspective, village community can continue to be a valuable and meaningful social being through trans formation.From the perspective of sociology of knowledge, social boundaries reflect the construction process of social reality. On one hand, social boundaries put complex social relations into neatly orders through multiple binary encoding by categorizing and conceptualizing, revealing the characteristic of diversification, differentiation and incommensurable feature of social relations in daily life which means contradictions, confrontation and conflicts. On the other hand, Social boundary is a relative-relationship concept which embodies connection ways of social relations. Through sociological imagination and ongoing dialectic reflection in public sphere, boundaries can be re-demarcated and "ideal type" can be reconstructed. In the social constructivism perspective, the fate of the village community is derived from how we see it as legitimate and desirable.The conclusion of this thesis is that the village community boundaries are the places for peasants to fight against the risk brought by state and the market, to achieve economic support, identity, rights, and significance attributions. The research about village community boundaries base on peasant’s autonomy and empowerment can help us find the existence of society and defend for it, thus highlighting the humanistic value of social science.