So, today we move on to local society. We've looked at the state. Now we're going to go down to local society and see what that looks like from the point of view of religious organization and social organization. And the chapter that we will be relying on in the first half is Joseph McDermott's "The Village Quartet" in <i>Modern Chinese Religion</i>. But we're going to start by referring to another local author, David Faure, who teaches here in the History Department at Chinese University and one of his earliest books published in 1986 called <i>The Structure of Chinese Rural Society</i>. That book is totally focused on what are called the New Territories here in Hong Kong, so it's very much a study of local society. And when I read this book shortly after it came out, it was a real eye-opener to me. I had been studying, exclusively studying Daoist ritual at that time and seeing its importance particularly in Taiwan but also starting to do fieldwork in China. And of course what I had seen by studying Daoist ritual is how important it was to local society in Taiwan, but I had never seen anything and any historian who would observe this himself. And the anthropologists who had worked until that time, whether in Taiwan or in Hong Kong, or in Singapore —because it was difficult at that time to do fieldwork in mainland China— they had all put, almost all of them put great emphasis on the centrality of ancestor worship in rural society, in Chinese society throughout Taiwan, Hong Kong, Southeast Asia and paid very very little attention to the role of Daoists. But here was a historian and in chapter 6 of that book called "The Jiao" <i>醮</i>, he shows that this same Hong Kong New Territories village whose most beautiful expensive building right smack dab in the middle of the village is a <i>citang</i> 祠堂, an ancestor hall, and then out on the edge of the village, there is what I call a little dog-kennel-size hut or little tiny tiny temple for the earth god called <i>daiwang</i> 大王, <i>dawang</i>, big king, here in Hong Kong. So he draws attention to the fact that the earth god at the beginning of this <i>jiao</i>, this Daoist offering performed by local Daoists, they go out to the edge of the village and they invite this earth god into the ancestor temple. And so the <i>jiao</i>, performed by Daoists, while it's done in this place of Confucian worship <i>par excellence</i> is the site of ancestor worship in the heart of the village, is not done in honor of the ancestors. It's like the ancestors were hardly there. And in fact, if they're invited, they'll be invited last, way down at the very very bottom of the totem pole that starts with the highest Daoist gods and comes down to the local earth god. So what this illustrates is that we look at a village and we think there's just one village there. In reality, there are two villages. There is a village that we can call the "lineage village" —and many of the villages in southern China are mono-lineage, <i>danxingcun</i> 單姓村, and so you can have very large numbers of people all belonging to the same lineage with the same ancestors, the same genealogy, and so on. And yet in this mono-lineage village, there will still be a local earth god who is worshiped for this <i>jiao</i>, which is done not on an annual basis but every ten years, so it's in fact the biggest festival of this village. So what does this mean? Well, it means that there's two villages there. There's a blood lineage village —we could call that <i>xueyuan guanxi</i> 血緣關係 in Chinese— and there's a territorial village which we can call it <i>diyuan</i> 地緣 village: a territorial and a lineage village. And we could say that the lineage village is indeed Confucian with the worship of ancestors at its heart, but the territorial village—and I repeat: which has the biggest festival in the ritual cycle of the village —could be called a "Daoist" village. In the Song-Yuan period that we're talking about, most villages were territorial. And the village worship association, called the <i>she</i> 社, which is precisely the earth god, was central to village organization. So let's talk a little bit about the village worship association. "These village worship associations were the most inclusive institutions in Song and Yuan villages." Other than certain low status individuals, everyone could belong if they paid "full membership dues." The foremost "religious task" of these associations was, I quote McDermott, "the organization and performance of the village's collective worship of its earth god twice a year," that is, <i>chunqi qiubao</i> 春祈秋報, spring prayers and autumn thanksgiving. And in fact, these are the equivalent of the <i>jiao</i>. In many places that's exactly what they're called, and in many places they're still done today by Daoist or Buddhist priests, usually Daoist but okay, sometimes also Buddhist priests. So this <i>chunqi qiubao</i>, spring and autumn sacrifices to the earth god, are perfect summaries of the agricultural cycle. "These meetings," says McDermott, "also served as collective festivals. Feasts, parades, and plays (or operas) would fill a week or two of the village's annual schedule, as villagers treated themselves and their tutelary god (their territorial protector god) to collective riots of fun and food." That is, they also served the essential religious task of social reproduction. They also had, in McDermott's term, "non-religious tasks." This social dimension that we've just evoked is visible in the many "non-religious tasks" that village worship associations might also perform. I quote: "Other lineage graves were said to be tended and regulated by 'village association rules' (<i>shegui</i> 社規), rather than (by) any kinship institution's rules, and the dates of members' birth, honors, death, and burial were kept in 'village worship association registers' (<i>sheji</i> 社籍)," like the parish registers of medieval Europe, "and 'village worship association account books' (<i>shehu bu</i> 社户簿), rather than lineage genealogies." So here we see very concretely the degree to which Song-Yuan villages were territorial villages built around the central god, the earth god. So here we see also the so-called "religious" and "secular" being conjoined on the local level. Can we speak of—we spoke of a state-church— can we speak of a village-church? Let's look for a moment at North China. "In North China," according to McDermott, "from the year 1206," at the very end of the Jin dynasty, "and in the rest of China from 1270," that's the Yuan dynasty, "the village worship association served as the government's basic unit of rural administration. In 1206 the Jin dynasty established rural districts according to the number of their village worship associations, each of which had one to four heads depending on the size of its population. These heads were to help Village Heads in registering the population for regular censuses, collecting taxes, maintaining order, and encouraging the practice of agriculture." So, indeed, village government. "During the Yuan period, this inclusion of the village worship association within the formal structure of government administration of the countryside was extended, when the Mongol government ordered its establishment for North China in 1270 and then, after the fall of the Southern Song, explicitly for South China as well (first) in 1279, and then (again) in 1286." "As a rule, one village worship association (<i>she</i>) was to be set up per unit of 50 households," <i>wushihu</i> 五十戶. This will be later slightly modified by the Ming dynasty founder, who will create the so-called <i>lishe</i> 里社 system in which ten <i>jia</i> 甲 of 10 households each, so a hundred households, plus each <i>jia</i> having a <i>jiazhang</i> 甲長 —that is to say a head of the <i>jia</i> unit of the sub-<i>she</i> unit—constituting a <i>li</i> and this 100 plus the 10 <i>jiazhang</i>, the 10 heads of the subunits, a total of 110 households, would form the <i>lishe</i> or the earth god territory. So basically doubled in size with respect to the Jin, but it's very important to see here that the Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming's basic policy for administration of villages is carried over from first the Jin and then the Mongol Yuan. So 50 units, household units. And if there were additional households in the village, they constituted a separate association. This in fact is still very much what characterized the way villages grew and divided like cells' division in China in the late imperial period, including in Taiwan. So just as a family, when its brothers for whatever reason wanted to divide the family, <i>fenjia</i> 分家, they will divide what? They will divide the stove unit, <i>fenzao</i> 分灶, and they will take the fire from the stove of the ancestral home, of the common family home, and they will bring it to a new house of a younger brother or whatever. And in exactly the same fashion, a new village or segment of a village is signified by the creation of a new earth god, a new <i>she</i> or <i>tudigong</i> 土地公. So here we see that the identity of the village —whether it's lineage or territorial village that we're looking at— is determined by a religious focus, whether it's the hearth god on a level of the family or the earth god on the level of the village. The duties of these units, these worship associations, these village worship associations, "were not just to collect taxes and help maintain order. They now were extended to run their unit's elementary school and promote its agricultural production." There's a very interesting thing here now about Yuan opera called <i>zaju</i> 雜劇: "In 1317 and 1319 the government ordered village worship associations to halt the assembly of large numbers of people for drama performances." So what this tells us of course is that during these spring and autumn festivals, the people were inviting opera troupes in and it's precisely at this time that we see the very first <i>xitai</i> 戲台, the very first opera stages, some of them are still survived in North China, usually across from a temple. But here we see that they were also coming into the villages for these earth god festivals. McDermott gives an example of village government in northwest China. I quote: "All male, [the] members are expected to attend meetings of moral instruction twice a month (except for during the three summer months when they were very busy with agriculture). At these meetings they were told to take seats that strictly reflected differences in status and age and that thus temporarily constituted an ideal social order." An ideal social order: so this is about social reproduction of a village. "Non-members, unless invited as guests, were barred from attending. Once the association's members were all seated, its leaders were expected to launch into denunciations of gambling, play-going, and rude and unfilial behaviour and then to encourage sincere discussions of the Confucian classics and the dynastic histories." This is clearly the ideal, but we see once again how clearly Confucian these institutions are. "These sermons—assuming they did occur—" suggests McDermott, "quickly moved onto more practical concerns. The association's head, administrator, and manager, all appointed to these rotating posts due to their age, virtue, and talent, were to remind members of their village duties. Members had to tie up oxen lest these animals ramble into fields and damage crops. They had to farm diligently or face fines and ultimately expulsion from the association. They had to provide other members with flood and drought relief." There's welfare, village welfare. "And farm for families whose tillage was suffering from the sudden death of a member or an ox. They had to contribute to one another's funeral and marriage expenses and to run a village school for their children." So it's really a very collective organization for the governance of the village, a kind of village autonomy. "And, if they were found to have violated any of these prescriptions, they had to pay the resulting fines imposed and collected by the head and administrator and handled by the manager." So are these organizations "religious" or "secular"? Or, do these distinctions not work so well? "[The] funds (collected) were intended for the repair of the association's shrine and its images, but any surplus cash was to be distributed to fellow members and not pocketed for personal use." Very important, because this underlines that here a distinction, a very clear distinction, is being made: This is about public affairs as opposed to private matters. The distinction between the public, the <i>gong</i> 公, and the <i>si</i> 私, which is absolutely indispensable to the understanding of the theory of governance in China at all levels is therefore also applicable here in the village. "In short, the authors of these village pacts conceived of this village worship association, despite its religious tie to an already standing Dragon King hall, as a moral, social, and productive unit." So indeed combining religious and what we would consider secular features. "Only one of its members' duties," says McDermott, "the need to visit and pray at this shrine in times of drought," that is to say the Dragon King hall, "explicitly concerned religion. Indeed, through its blind disregard for the particularities of the locale it was meant to govern, this text in its entirety betrays its links to a largely secular tradition of a universalist Confucian discourse on village governance." Okay? I insist that this is McDermott's way of presenting things and it's a very normal away, given the way we use today the words "religion" and "secular," okay? But what we have to see is that it's the same organization, so that's why at the level of the state, we speak of a state which functions like a church and here we're seeing a village earth god association or Dragon King association which at one and the same time is religious and secular. So combining these functions in a single association.
