Social control and the hue and cry in two fourteenth-century villages

This paper seeks to explore aspects of peasant community policing and keeping order in two fourteenth-century villages. The raising of the hue and cry was not only an important tool for policing local communities, it was also a communal ritual. The cases which caused the hue and cry to be raised, and which were then recorded in the manorial court rolls, can reveal a great deal about peasant attitudes to different types of offending behaviour, as well as local mechanisms of social control. At the same time such cases can be explored for peasant attitudes to gender, gender roles as well as peasant attitudes to seigniorial authority. Discrepancies in offending behaviour between men and women can be evaluated and compared between two manorial communities. Similarly peasant communities appear to have applied some degree of discretion in their dealing with particular offences, by, for instance, not drawing attention to some of them by raising the hue and cry. These issues allow us important insights into peasant mentalities and attitudes to order, disorder, gender and seigniorial authority.     

古村·老屋·手艺人

江南的三月,杂树生花,莺飞草长,春意盎然.我乘双休日与学校美术系的几个学生结伴,一同去了永嘉县最北边的一个偏僻的小山村--林坑村采风.早就听说那里山美,水美,是典型的浙南山区村落,只要用三、四个小时就能到那里.可没想到一路上不停的转车、行路,再加上山路崎岖窄小,车又颠簸,搞得人十分疲惫.临近村庄时,车子一拐入山口,远处就出现了一群镶嵌在青山绿水中、错落有致的浙南山区民居.它们一下子就把我吸引住了,一路的疲惫也好象被赶到九霄云外去了.     

Slavery and plantation capitalism in Louisiana's sugar country

Sugar planters in the antebellum South managed their estates progressively, efficiently, and with a political economy that reflected the emerging capitalist values of nineteenth‐century America. By fusing economic progress and slave labor, sugar planters revolutionized the means of production and transformed the institution of slavery. Slaveholders and bondspeople redefined the parameters of paternalism and recast the master‐slave relationship along a novel path. Louisiana slaves accommodated the machine, holding no torch for Luddism while concurrently shaping the agro‐industrial revolution to achieve modest economic independence and relative autonomy within the plantation quarters.     

三川土乡长联

上联龙离大海飞来,永住偎依恋三川。况弹丸之地扼关嗌(1)、通五县、接甘青、控丝路,险堑雄关军士兵家争夺也!暴风骤雨洗礼三川,常演触目惊心悲剧。此处西倚积石岿岭,东与永靖娅(2)接,北靠龙支山岭,南有黄河划界兮!仰望静明天宇,宿辰忭(3)和,舛星(4)化昊空。月晕、月辉,月辉、月晕,嫦娥昉(5)面素装,欲渡漭泱(6)银河舞自由。坠星踪去,日月永存,悠悠苍天,赐放晅(7)光照环球。嗟嗟!天公宠爱此间依山傍水,又无寒暑,温和润候,花昳瓜苾(8)赢得青海江南之美称。神工鬼斧拓宽盘古鸿猷(9),造就景观:积石垭(10)口吐波涛,寺沟俣(11)嘴吞黄河。临天池仙境…     

Hindu cosmology and the orinetation and segregation of social groups in villages in Northwestern India

This paper presents a cultural analysis of the directional orientation and segregation of castes in villages in a part of the northwestern plains of India. It interprets the built environment in terms of Hindu cosmology. Recent literature in cultural geography interprets the landscape as text or through symbols. The symbolic approach has greater relevance for traditional societies where clear schemata are discernible in built environments. This paper attempts a critical appraisal of Hindu cosmology as a schema for interpreting built environments in Indian villages.
Challenging the widely held view that Indian villages lack order, the paper demonstrates that there is a religiously ordained order in the landscape. The order is manifested in the form of orientation of several features of landscape, especially the caste mohallãs (wards) to the cardinal directions. Orientation of caste mohallãs to the 'sacred' directions in a settlement follows a system evolved by Indian civilization to harmonize the fractured social order with the segmented cosmic order. The paper also demonstrates that segregation is an inherent characteristic of orientation.
As a background for regional diversities, empirical evidence reveals that in the study region Hindu cosmology is impressed on villages, though often in a modified form. Villagers believe that the social space known as khenúã slopes down from west to east, while the southern sector is the 'lowest' segment of the village. Dominant castes characteristically reserve for themselves the best western site of the village and low castes are placed in lower social spaces, with scheduled castes being generally placed in the south.     

情暖土乡--胡锦涛总书记视察互助土族自治县纪实

隆冬的土乡大地,天寒地冻。北风在山梁上吹过,河水在冰层下悄悄地流淌,红红的太阳爬上了山头,人们到处都在传播着一个特大喜讯:中共中央总书记、国家主席、中央军委主席胡锦涛要来互助了!土乡各族群众奔走相告,38万土乡的干部、群众的心被这个喜讯感动着。这是一个让所有土乡人     

Revolution, war, and villages: A case study on villages of Licheng county, Shanxi province during the war of Resistance Against Japan

This paper focuses on several villages of Licheng county in the southeastern part of Shanxi province, probing into how the war and the revolution affected village society in North China. The primary concern of most existing studies on the Chinese Revolution has been to examine how the Communist Party of China (CPC) mobilized peasants in a certain area, boosted their revolutionary consciousness, and ultimately led them to win the revolution, and to carry out this inquiry in the context of the orthodox history of the CPC, from top-down perspective. The paper focuses on the microscopic world of a village, and examine, from the bottom-up perspective and in the context of the history of the village itself, what the war and the revolution meant to the village, several factors that have remained rather inconspicuous begin to surface. The case studies of several villages in Licheng county shows that the revolution unfolded as an extension of various conflicts or rivalries that had existed for years within each village, or between different villages. One group of well-to-do people who had once monopolized public authority within a village fell from power, while a group of poorer peasants who had been dominated by the richer group joined the CPC and emerged as new power holders in the village. The motives that drove peasants to join the CPC were often far more complex and diverse than conventional theory would have us believe.     

Representations of an Imagined Past: fairground heritage villages

This paper is concerned with groups of historic vernacular buildings, assembled and displayed as 'villages' at agricultural fairgrounds. These are grassroots versions of open-air museums and heritage sites developed by public institutions and private foundations. The fairground heritage village structures are usually collected by volunteers and moved to existing county or state fairgrounds, then used in similar ways as professionally managed sites. The location and situation offer certain advantages, but also present problems that stem from being authentic structures presented as a fictional village. Because narrative, scale and editing are factors in the conflict, adding an outward-directed layer of interpretation would visually reconnect the dislocated buildings with their original sites. This is intended to destabilise the past as a fixed, isolated place, and link the village display to landscape change in the region.     

Institutional ethical analysis of resident perceptions of tourism in two Chinese villages

Existing research on perceptions of tourism has mainly focused on the empirical study from the perspectives of management, sociology, statistics and other disciplines. However, the ethical or philosophical perspective has been relatively neglected. Many issues related to institutional ethics have not been given sufficient attention by tourism academics. This article will test the effect of tourism on institutional ethics from a new perspective: by comparing the residents’ perceptions and attitudes towards tourism's impact in the villages of Zili and Maxianglong in Kaiping County of Guangdong Province where they share similar geographical locations and demographic features. Findings show that due to different levels of tourism development, the residents’ pursuit of institutional ethics varies. In particular, citizen ethics cannot be derived from traditional Chinese ethics. In fact as the level of tourism increases, the awareness of being involved in public affairs becomes stronger and the pursuit of a fair distribution and a focus on public interest becomes more obvious. For example: (1) a more developed tourism industry results in a larger demand for equal distribution from residents; (2) as the tourism industry develops, resident awareness increases as well as the ability to participate in public management; (3) with the development, resident demands for democracy become more obvious; and (4) with the development of the tourism industry, residents pay more attention to public interests and the construction of public spaces, and they acquire more of a public spirit.     

A social geography of preindustrial labour migration in Japan: Tajima and Kurome villages in the nineteenth century

Labour migration to and from two preindustrial villages in Japan is examined over nearly three-quarters of the nineteenth century. The history and geography of migration are related to local and regional conditions, and to natural events. Natural disasters are demonstrated to offer the best single explanation for much of the movement of labour.     

Cultural impact of modernization and tourism on Dai villages in Xishuangbanna,China

The development of tourism can have a considerable sociocultural impact on ethnic communities, but few studies have attempted to separate the unique impact of ethnic tourism from the overall impact of modernization and describe its mechanism clearly. This paper describes a quasi-natural experiment performed in three typical Dai villages in different stages of tourism development. A crosswise and longitudinal comparative study was performed on Dai village culture. The study indicates the following: (1) spiritual culture has been transmitted relatively unchanged across generations in three Dai villages, but material culture has undergone various degrees of change. (2) The changes in material culture and some parts of institutional culture have been caused primarily by the pressure of overall social modernization. (3) Currently, the overall thrust of modernization in mainstream Chinese society has driven some ethnic cultural practices out of use, while the endogenous driving force of tourism development in ethnic communities has pulled them back into use. (4) Under the influence of modernization, the issue of whether ethnic tourism communities can be developed in a sustainable way depends on both bottom-up and top-down factors: the leading role played by community elites internally, developing useful parts of ethnic culture and discarding useless parts during repeated games in the tourism field, and government policy and guidance facilitating planning.