"Jie, Junctures: An Historical Ethnography of Networking & Survival in the Mountains of Western Fujian" by Drew Hopkins

Drew Hopkins

Deposited 2008

Abstract
This is an historical examination of the ways in which villagers in remote, impoverished settlements in the mountains of western Fujian have navigated the tumultuous change over the last 150 years of perpetual revolution and how they were coping with the novel opportunities and risks they now confronted in the ideological apparatuses in this new post-socialist China and its rapidly globalizing commercial political-economy. It is a study of the institutions and practices, the discourses of authority and value that have been constructed in the triangulated space where inner-mountain villagers negotiate their transactions with transregional and transnational commerce and with the imperial, Nationalist, Maoist and post-collective states.As an historical ethnography of cultural institutions and practices, the work traces the particular historical processes through which local social and political-economic formations were structured, dismantled and transformed. It identifies specific junctures in the ethnographic terrain, in order to discern the ways in which people in inner-mountain township use resources available to them strategically to position themselves to advantage within on-going, shifting and contingent fields of administrative state power and commercial vitality.This historical foundation affords critical purchase from which to examine the apparent resilience and endurance of late-imperial conventions and practices in the post-socialist present. It provides the means to interpret present-day phenomena in light of the ways in which villagers historically identified novel opportunities in rapidly-changing social and political-economic topographies, positioning themselves in such a way as to maximize benefits and minimize losses in their negotiation of rapid change.