Folk Art And The Autonomous Tradition Of The Folk Society

Dressing-up is a rural collective performance held during the spring festival at Sandefan village in the central region of Shandong province.It fulfils the cultural functions of seeking ethnic identity and enhancing cohesion of the village community.Moreover,taking the art tradition and public spirit embodied through dressing-up as a link,the people at Sandefan make full use of both the state power and the local custom,to carry on an everlasting and ever-refreshing autonomous tradition underlying the autonomous mechanism of collective action in the folk society.Based on the related thick description of the field investigation into Sandefan village,this paper reveals at a deeper level the complex and profound coexistence relationship among national politics,civil society,and community life,from the perspective of the interactions of these three organizations.As a community unit,even without considering the natural environment and other subjective and objective conditions like population and life,only regarding the so-called rural governance,the "village governance model" of Sandefan remains a special existence.From the end of 1930s to date,as a big natural village,the grassroots-level power structure of Sandefan has experienced 13 times of changes,ranging from the commune,district,town,village,and revolutionary committee,to the production brigade,the administrative committee,the subdistrict office,and ultimately to the co-operating "economic community" and "management district"offices,governing with the political pattern of "one commune with four villages".However,no matter how changeable the national politics is,or how huge the social and cultural transformations are,the historical vicissitude is still orderly amidst disorder:Sandefan always maintains its trait of positioning between "Village" and"town",along with its unique grassroots-level power structure.In other words,in the course of the downward movement of modern and contemporary national power,the Sandefan village preserves an implicit set of autonomous traditions that both accept the state's authoritarian dispatch,and keep regulating the village politics by the subject of life.Field survey found that,the formation of this rural order landscape is absolutely not a product of the passive confrontation,collision,and loss of control of one party resulting from the dualistic opposition of "control and anti-control" and"governance and anti-governance" within the framework of state and social analysis.Instead,from the perspective of the "micro-politics" resting on long periods,large regions and folk society,the fact that the Sandefan village can basically maintain the delicate balance between "change and stability",is precisely owing to the co-construction,constant negotiation and diversified cooperation of multi-agents and multi-forces like the national politics,village traditions,the people in the Chinese customary society.This paper therefore argues that the political tradition of the mediation between state(state power)and society(civil life)is still exerting a deep influence in the overall functioning of the folk society in northern China,and it is a fundamental institution reflecting how the state realizes,with the aid of cultural traditions,the unification of societal and daily life.Observing modern Chinese vernacular society from the Sandefan village,the boundary between "State and family","government and people","public and private" is not clear,neither alienated nor confrontational.In other words,the development of rural society,including dressing-up inheritance of the Sandefan village,also results from the collision,negotiation and compromise among the complex factors such as national will,village tradition and people's life practice:it is in line with the realization of the national political ideology,and to a great extent,with the sanctity foundation and autonomy logic of the village folk traditions.In short,based on the above field discovery,the innovation of this study mainly lies in the following three aspects.First,although there is a considerable body of research revolving around performance text,narrative system,social organization of folk arts in the context of the local rural society,this study deepened the related discussion to the relationship among rituals,politics and power from the lens of folk autonomy tradition,with the standpoint of village discourse and filed investigation.This approach enjoys both theoretical and methodologically novelty.Second,previous research mainly focuses on national institutional arrangement or the phenomenon of realizing certain cultural adjustment by functional civil society.This article,however,starting from the narrative of daily life and festival life,further sketches the logic and mechanism of diverse interaction among state politics,local society and life subject.Undoubtedly,this is a powerful correction of and supplement to the"state-society" dualistic analysis model.Third,as a social tradition with Chinese cultural characteristics,"folk autonomy" is more and more submerged in the assumptions and discussions of the western democratic model.From the perspective of folk art,through field investigation and theoretical analysis,this paper explores the cultural mechanism and practical significance of Chinese tradition of folk autonomy,hence providing theoretical and empirical implications for the developing Chinese"villager autonomy" system,which is,to an extent,currently in a predicament.Based on the above consideration,the main structure of this paper is as follows:Introduction:This paper introduces the research ideas and the structure of the paper,and reviews the related domestic and foreign research findings.Since the core concern of this paper is the negotiating relationship among the state,the local society,and the village traditions,and the main way to achieve the research goal is field investigation of village units,the author also expatiates,after presenting his research rationale and design,his research methodology as well as his field experience.Chapter One "Village Life in Flux" provides a thick description of the human geography and life narrative of Sandefan people,based on the on-going life practice of the village.This chapter shows that the village is not a static and super-stable system,no matter in the light of village settlement or local cultural space.Logically,this is the starting point of understanding the village culture and tradition,the rural characteristics,as well as the evolution of daily life.Meanwhile,the related diverse local knowledge in this chapter,like the geography,hydrology,population,transportation,planting,commerce and labor mode,not only constitute the evolution context of dressing-up text and folk autonomous tradition,but also generate intertextual and interactive effects on them.In the second chapter "Inner Village Organizational System",a village is considered to be a community composed of multi-dimensional organizational life,inaddition to being the living environment consisting of land,rivers,resources and phenology.It can be claimed that eco-environment is the real-life foundation of the work pattern and culture mentality inside the village,while the deep-seated structure of realizing the collective action of the villagers underlies the inner organizational system and its functioning mechanism of the village.This chapter intends to understand and grasp the construction process of the multiple agents including state politics,the villages and villagers,by probing into the several organization modes of the village in the historical evolution,as well as the dressing-up narrative of organization tradition and operating mechanism.Chapter Three "Country,Village and Folk Arts" tries to analyse the complex attitude reflected from state politics towards folk arts,in the context of the pervasive change of human-land relationship as well as the grassroots-level organization configuration in the Chinese traditional society.By interpreting the historical thread of dressing-up narrative,this chapter summarizes the state's practice of infiltrating into the local rural society,as well as the influence of this approach on the organizationalactivities of folk arts.By probing into the events at several historic nodes of dressing-up as a group performance in Sandefan village over the past two decades,we reflect on the historical logic of the interaction mechanism among the state,the village and the villagers,while examining the evolution of the rural folk life in the lens of"living in the present".In Chapter Four "Performance,Rituals and Village Autonomy",traditionally speaking,the adult game of dressing-up as collective performance is believed to possess the public function of enhancing the social cohesion of a village as a community.The symbolic ceremony of "bringing a lawsuit",a key step in of dressing-up,is deemed to be a major window to understand the constructive role of dress-up in realizing its public function.Based on the performing text and thick description of the performance field of the festive dressing-up at Sandefan Village,Chapter Four reports the focused investigation into the organization mechanism as well as its historical evolution of the symbolic ritual of "bringing a lawsuit".The author holds that,as a dynamic tradition,the symbolic ritual of "bringing a lawsuit"originally has a cultural function in practice,and finally lose its reason and meaning for existence,only after the completion of modern transformation of the folk autonomy,due to the interaction between state power and folk society.Conclusion:Based on the systematic investigation into the folk arts and autonomy mechanism of this central region of Shandong province,we can see that"autonomy" in the Chinese social context is not a fading tradition,and the village governance logic within the western discourse framework cannot thoroughly explain and answer the practical problems in rural China.Sandefan villagers' folk art performance and its interwoven autonomy mechanism indicate that,instead of being an obstacle to modernization or disappearing along with the social changes,the autonomous tradition of the folk society has become traditional resources most available for building relationship between the state and the localities,with the standing point of state-society interaction.From the point of view of folkloristics,within the context of village discourse and overall regional life,incorporating the understanding of the autonomous tradition in the folk society into the observation of village community and its operation mechanism,can not only provide a broad perspective for the study of Chinese rural society,but also will get closer to the rural China in its constant transformation,and hence may make contributions to the current rural construction in full swing.