Culture, Power, and the State (North China Rural Areas, 1900-1942)

Author: (American) Du Zhengqi, translated by Wang Fuming
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2004-09-01
Features: This book conducts a detailed case study of rural 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 seems quite different 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 local groups "resist" the "attacks" coming from above—these are the main issues discussed in the second book.
An important point is that the author consistently incorporates a methodology in his writings: when considering how discourse, subjects, and institutions construct history, many external factors and factors 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, the so-called "saving of history" is actually a methodological issue, not a substantive goal. 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—with the nation-state as the object, historical accounts naturally exclude other possibilities. 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 researchers like Du Zhengqi, what he focuses on is how histories outside the nation-state have been suppressed, and the village remains his stance.