Yunnan Tibetan Settlements Villagers Of Cooperative Behavior

Because of the increasing division of labor, cooperation between individuals has become increasingly crucial in modern society. This tendency of social development, however, is inconsistent with China’s particular contemporary history:traditional moral norms and social orders were collapsed during the Cultural Revolution, followed by the implementation of the market-oriented economy that results in the maximization of private interests and the atomization of individuals. Interestingly enough, according to a preliminary fieldwork of black-earth pottery making in a Tibetan community in Yunnan Province, I found cooperative dynamics among local inhabitants in daily life, which is both frequent and spontaneous. The cooperative dynamics has inspired the framing of this study:an examination of a regional Tibetan culture from a sociological perspective. Based on two phases of fieldwork, this thesis argues that the cooperative process is organized not only through traditional social orders, but also with modern managerial techniques. Although a cooperative action is conditioned by particular geographical, ethnical, religious, social and economic factors, a systematical review and deep understanding of cooperative strategies and local social capitals will be profoundly instructive to our insights into the restructuring of modern urban and communal culture.In addition to an ethnographic investigation, the study is theoretically formulated with the duality of structure and agent, a notion developed by Anthony Giddens that reveals a dialect process, in which cooperative agents’ social action is simultaneously constrained by and constitutive of particular social structures. The paper is organized into several sections. From Chapter2to Chapter4, I examine the contexts, contents, and occasions of cooperative action in the area. In Chapter5and6, I analyze causal factors of the cooperative acts. In particular, the paradigm of social action, theorized by Talcott Parsons, is used in Chapter5to describe the logic of the cooperative actions; and I conduct an analysis of the cooperative action’s social contexts, involving both social structure and social capital in Chapter6, with theoretical frames such as Max Weber’s thesis on social action, Ferdinand Tonnies’ theory of community, as well as Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of social capital. In Chapter7. I develop some discussions on a settlement community’s organization of social orders with notions such as social connection by He Xuefeng, and social solidarity by Durkheim. Finally, on the basis of my understanding of the causal factors of the cooperative action, I create an ideal model for the strengthening of a modern city’s network relation, trust, and norms as integral parts of social capitals.