Culture, Power, and the State
Culture, Power, and the State
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Summary
In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era.
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Culture, Power, and the State by Prasenjit Duara
In the early twentieth century, the Chinese state made strenuous efforts to broaden and deepen its authority over rural society. This book is an ambitious attempt to offer both a method and a framework for analyzing Chinese social history in the state-making era. The author constructs a prismatic view of village-level society that shows how marketing, kinship, water control, temple patronage, and other structures of human interaction overlapped to form what he calls the cultural nexus of power in local society. The author's concept of the cultural nexus and his tracing of how it was altered enables us for the first time to grapple with change at the village level in all its complexity. The author asserts that the growth of the state transformed and delegitimized the traditional cultural nexus during the Republican era, particularly in the realm of village leadership and finances. Thus, the expansion of state power was ultimately and paradoxically responsible for the revolution in China as it eroded the foundations of village life, leaving nothing in its place. The problems of state-making in China were different from those of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe; the Chinese experience heralds the process that would become increasingly common in the emergent states of the developing world under the very different circumstances of the twentieth century.
Prasenjit Duara is Director of the Asia Research Institute at National University of Singapore.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780804718882 |
| ISBN 10 | 0804718881 |
| Title | Culture, Power, and the State |
| Author | Prasenjit Duara |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Stanford University Press |
| Year published | 1991-04-01 |
| Number of pages | 342 |
| Prizes | Winner of Joseph Levenson Prize, sponsored by the Association for Asian Studies 1989, Winner of John K. Fairbank Prize, sponsored by the American Historical Association 1989 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |