The "Home" And Its Changes In Rural Areas Since 1980s

This is a field research combining anthropology,sociology and cultural studies.A case study is made on a village located at the southwest part of Anhui Province,i.e.Z village as is referred to in the paper."Managing to make a living" is the basic status of traditional village life.People manage to make a living to keep themselves alive.Hence,being alive is both a way of life and an attitude towards life.What is the significance of being alive?How to make it possible?In an era of changes,do such concepts of being alive and lifestyles also vary accordingly?What factors contribute to the changes and what are the consequences?This research aims to find answers to the above questions.Being alive is a philosophical and pragmatic term that centers on the daily life of villages,which rolls around periodically in different phases and events,and has been endowed with specific significance and method,but overall,for the family.Family is the keyword of village life,which is the basis of the significance of being alive for the villagers and a basic unit for the social structure of the villages.Family also comprises the important spiritual structure of the village life which is enlarged to a broader sense of hometown.Immersion in a village to experience families leads to a better understanding of the villages than being merely outside observers.This paper explores into the current status of villages based on families and villagers as the living-makers.Family is the basic analysis unit in the research and also a method we employed.The narrative method we adopted is historical sociology.The period we focused on is from 1980s till now,which is roughly divided into three phases:the 1980s,1990-2000,and from 2000 till now.The research was carried out from household-neighboures-village-county-city in terms of space and from fortunate life-staying home-family memeber-village community-hometown in terms of emotional hierarchy.Based on the different characteristics of making a living in different phases,the paper consists of three parts:staying home in 1980s,leaving home from 1990 to 2000 and going back home ever since 2000.What makes it possible for the farmers to make a living at home in the 1980s?Social conventions of good fortune have contributed to the sanctity of family.From one household to a whole village,the hierarchical structure of a village forms a community.The residents of a village depend on the natural environment and local products to fulfill their basic needs,with handicraft practices serving as supplements.Family members and neighbors in a village help each other in terms of work and economy which is the basic public welfare system of the village.Reciprocity guarantees the vitality of families,which opinion leaders and the senior villagers serve the administration functions of the community.In a word,in 1980s the social convention and administration of staying home and working together contribute to the possibility of family survival.From 1990 to 2000,family members were divided into two groups,the migrant workers and left-behind villagers.Macro-adjustment of social structure of the time made it impossible for the farmers to depend on the natural environment for a living.You can only live by leaving your home,which fact led to the dual social structure.Family members were forced to fall apart,and traditional families were shattered.The major problem those migrant workers facing was not physical pressure,but a totally different way of life.Those workers were marginalized both physically and emotionally.Staying in a city while missing home badly,is a vivid picture of most migrant workers.This discrepancy of their physical and emotional worlds did vicious harms to these migrant workers.Farmers with manual skills firstly rushed into the cities,then their relatives and neighbors,who mostly were strong and honest workers without specific skills.While the children of them all followed their steps into the cities.Traditional families have been sacrificed as an implicit cost for urbanization and city development.Yet,the contributions of the farmers and the villages have never been acknowledged.A group of people,i.e.peasant-workers,became a unique group in cities.Under social pressure and primitive employment relations,these migrant workers no longer practice moral ethics for they are also neglected by the legal system.Sometimes,they break the social morality purposefully just to protect themselves.However,once they are back home,they recover their real identity as farmers confined by social conventions in their familiar social system.A farmer's life is inseparable from the natural world around him,and this lifestyle has continued for many generations.Once a farmer is deprived of his usual circumstances,his life is doomed to foresee a bleak future in the modern dual social structure.Consequently,his dream of seeking a better life for his family has been shattered.Ever since 2000,the farmers who used to be migrant workers gradually go back home,in concept and in practice.Going back home is basically the peasant workers' dream.30 years have passed since the first farmers sought their lives in the cities.For those earliest migrant workers,going back home means a pleasant retirement life.While for the children of these workers,they want to go back home to carve out a new niche for themselves,so that one day they will also enjoy a cozy life just like the citizens.So the older workers view going home as a return while the young generation actually treats their hometowns as a resource to start a business so as to live a modem and urban life.Since 1980s,traditional village life has been threatened,which leads to the decline of family life.While returning in whatever sense,can relieve the hollow status of villages because finally the real owners of the families come home.Family now enters the picture,and the self-salvation consciousness is now activated.The government should show more concern to the families that have been destroyed,and protect the migrant workers when they choose to go back home to make a living through legal measures.A complete family should entail a life of all family members living together in their own home in their own hometown.Village life as a way of life is a promising land for a career drawing capital from the society.For the long run,villages are still facing an unsure fate of development.The construction practices of the Z village can be a solution to the fierce competition between urban and rural development.By mutual recognition and communication,this urban-rural relationship could be reconstructed,and both sides may establish a healthy image representing the good way of life for each.