Village Beat Sound

Since 1980s, the Chinese folk handicraft took on a trend of renaissance without being established as a scope of industry, still maintaining the manner of production as a family workshop. Yet inspired by the packaging of media and the industry of tourism, the folklore value of the handicraft with its local characteristics was excavated, of which the vitality was coruscating, and meanwhile this special economic and cultural phenomena drew a large sphere of attention by those who were concerned.In this thesis, the author mainly focused on the production and the exchange of the handicrafts in the community of its original producing area through a period of close fieldwork research, from which the author has been investigating the activities in the Village of Xin, in order to analyze the importance of the manufacture and the trade for journeymen and the development of the local economy by exhibiting the holistic pictures such as the process of manufacturing, trading and marketing etc. as well as the reconstruction of social relations during the processes mentioned previously. Besides, after carefully referring to the local literatures, the author probes into the issues about the traditional handicraft's potentials in the current society by taking the Village of Xin, the trade and the exchange of the handicraft as the case study,The thesis is divided into six chapters. The Chapter one is the introduction. The author extended a series of general picturesque backgrounds, such as the reason, the meaning and the perspective of the research, also the related printings and publications, and the basic orientations and the approaches of the research as well. In Chapter two, the history, the geography of the fieldwork place the Village of Xin, and also the change of the handicraft work were related. The Chapter three, which is the main body of the whole thesis, the manufacturing scene and the manner of trading were described in details in the Village of Xin through some concrete descriptions and analysis. The author did some surveys of the journeymen from the Village who were engaged in the manufacturing and trading outward in Chapter four. The journeymen's social relation and their functions in the expanding market were analyzedthrough picturing the expanding prospect of the handicraft market in this chapter as well. In Chapter five, based on the description of both the manufacturing and the trading of the handicrafts in the Villages of Xin and Xinhua, the importance of the handicrafts' manufacturing and trading were construed. The Chapter six is the summary of the whole thesis. Based on the case study, the conformity functions of the social relation from the handicraft manufacturing and trading were expounded. Therefore, while probing into the issues such as the survival and the development of the traditional handicrafts in the modern society, the realization of the "reconstruction of the tradition in the modernity of the society" must be carefully concerned.