The Inter-constructional Process Of "Household" And "Family"

With the continuous development of urbanization, the scale of city is expanding, and the value of the suburb land is rising up, too. So the standard definition of peasant collectivity membership also becomes more important than ever before. For farmers, the defining standard means whether they can have the right as collective members and then enjoy collective welfare and interests. For the country, the defining standard relates to the governance pattern about peasant collectivity, which should undertake the function of organizing the peasants and take connection of "home" and "state".This paper has done the fieldwork in 3 investigation sites at Shanghai suburbs, mainly focused on the process of replacement of homestead. Through the investigation, I find the different defining standard of collective membership between the country and family. In terms of Shanghai suburbs experience, we can find there are two levels of collective membership. First, in "household" level, the membership of collectivity can be divided into household memberships, which is determined by institutional norm. Second, in "family" level, all the individuals belong to family, so they also have family membership. And the defining standard of family membership is decided by non-institutional norm. So the paper comes to the conclusion that "household" and "family" work together to define the standard of collective membership, and ascertain that who can enjoy collective welfare and interests further eventually. In this way, the membership of collectivity is confirmed in fact.Going even further, observing this phenomenon is to study on the inter-constructional process of institutional norms and non-institutional norms actually. And in fact, this research is my tentative answer to the relationship between state and society in nowadays China. This article finally tries to understand this problem from the perspective of collective attribute. I think that the peasants collectivity in our country is a entity which including three attributes of political, economic and cultural, and this collectivity has a unique role in the memory of peasants. In the transforming society, only reconstruct the collective of three attributes which can be the bridge connecting private "home" and public "state".