Using Jade As A Social Medium Investigation Of Nanyangpeoples Social Relationships In Ruli City

As the rapid development of social economy and the transformation of social structure, a large number of people left their hometown and gave up their traditionalway of livingas peasants, and went to other places looking for fortunes. During the process of seeking wealth,it leads to a large quantity of population flow, and this kind of social interaction has drawn great attention from the academic researchers in the field of media dissemination as well as sociology. The studies on the social relationships of migrant workers are quiet fruitful with many innovative academic results. Though the investigation subject of this thesis shares some common features with thesocial interactions of migrant workers, these Nanyang people have anuniquegroup identity as businessmen, therefore they have more social interactive demands and more complicated social networks.In this thesis, choosing Nanyang businessmen in Ruili as the research subject, itborrows the method of "local investigation" in anthropology, and applies varies studying methods in researching practice, such as in-depth interviews, questionnaire survey, participatory observationand other forms of researching methods. Through the way of successive observations in two jade cities, Ruili and Jiegao, it tries to find out how these businessmenconstruct the social network of their own and of their wider family using the medium of jade stones in daily life. Besides, it tries to analyze the deep roots of the social phenomena:with the rapid upgrading of medium technology, how could these Nanyang businessmen still rely on the biological connection of blood and kinship to build up their social network through the medium of jade.After analysizing and summarizing all researching materials, this thesis begins with the building up of the relationships, and then elaborates the construction, interaction, interactive analysis of social relations respectively. At last, it concludes that there are three kinds of construction models in their social relationships, including the model of acquiring information through relationships, the model of information factory, as well as the model of assisting with each other. Meanwhile, it also summaries three kinds of high representative social interactive forms, and chronicles the construction and interaction of social relationships. In the end, it concludes that these Nanyangbusinessmen are not highly dependent on media as most scholars think; on the contrary, jade stone has been acting as an important role of media in their social activities.Under today’s rapid development, they do not have high level of social modernization in their social interactions.Because and in their daily activities and deep in their wayof thinking, they view the social interactions based on blood and kinship asthekeyfactor for theirmutual survival Ruili.