Culture, Power, and the State: Rural North China, 1900-1942

Author: (American) Du Zhengqi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2003-08-01
Features: This book conducts a detailed case study of the rural areas in North China from 1900 to 1942. The author attempts to bridge the gap between history and sociology, proposing new concepts such as the cultural network of power from the perspective of popular culture, and elaborates in detail how state power penetrates the grassroots through various channels. Culture, Power, and the State is structured around the cultural network of the village and examines its functions, which differs significantly from the structural form of the author's second book, Saving History from the Nation (Chinese translation forthcoming). However, the themes he focuses on continue to extend: how modern states construct new cultures and how groups resist the "attacks" from above—these are the main issues discussed in the second book.
An important point is that the author weaves a methodology throughout his writings: when considering the construction of history by discourse—subject—institution, many external factors and elements should be included. This is because not only discourse but also external factors contribute to the formation of subjects and subjectivity; and the institutions constructed by subjects should also include the logic of the institutions themselves andity. Therefore, what is called "saving history" is actually a methodological issue, not an objective with a tangible purpose. The author argues that when the nation-state becomes the historical subject under modernity, other histories cease to exist, because different historical writing methods carry different purposes—history written with the nation-state as its object naturally excludes other possible histories. Thus, what the author seeks to save from the nation-state is not some entity, but a method. This method demonstrates that we should have had many kinds of history all along, and they are intertwined. For a researcher like Du Zhengqi, what he focuses on is how histories outside the nation-state are suppressed, and the village remains his standpoint.