Chapter 12 blood and geography

In a culture that lacks change, social differences occur between the elders and the younger, and the elders have coercion and power over the younger.This is the basis of a blood-related society.Blood relationship means that the rights and obligations of people and people are determined according to kinship.Kinship is the relationship formed by birth and marriage.Strictly speaking, blood relationship only refers to the parent-child relationship arising from childbirth.In fact, in a monophyletic family organization, the emphasis on relatives is more due to birth than marriage, so it doesn't matter if they are related by blood.

Procreation is necessary for the continuation of society, and it is the same in any society. The difference is that some societies use the social relationship generated by procreation to determine the social status of each person, but some societies do not.The former is related by blood.Generally speaking, blood kinship societies are stable and lack changes; societies with great changes are less likely to become blood kinship societies.The stability of society refers to the stillness of its structure. The individuals who fill the various positions in the structure cannot be static. They are limited by their lives and cannot stay there forever. They are bound to die.The kinship society wants to use biological metabolism and reproduction to maintain the stability of the social structure.The father dies and the son succeeds: the son of a farmer will always be a farmer, and the son of a merchant will always be a merchant—that is the blood succession of a profession; the son of a nobleman is still expensive—that is the blood succession of status; Succession of wealth by blood.Up to now, although few societies can completely abandon blood succession, it is not easy to do in the era when relatives are responsible for childbearing.However, if the social structure changes, it is impossible to completely replace it by blood.Before childbearing is socialized, the strength of blood relationship seems to be determined by the rate of social change.

The social status determined by blood relationship cannot be chosen by individuals.The least will-needing decision in the world, and at the same time the most influential decision in life, is who your parents are.Who will be your parents, before you say it, is completely an opportunity, and it is an existing fact before you exist.It seems most unreasonable for society to use this fact that cannot be competed, and is not easily concealed or distorted, as the criterion for allocating people's occupations, status, and property; The most basic way.As long as you accept this principle, (Which of us has ever seriously doubted this fact? Who of us has ever wanted to discuss the reason for the existence of this principle?) Many possible disputes in society will also disappear.

Blood ties are a stabilizing force.In a stable society, geography is nothing but the projection of blood ties, which are not separated. "Born here, died here" fixed the karma between man and place.Life, which is blood, determines his land.The reproduction of the population between generations is like a sapling growing from a root, which are close to each other geographically.Geographical proximity can be said to be a reflection of closeness in blood, and location is a socialized space.We distinguish between superiority and inferiority in terms of direction: the left is superior to the right, the south is superior to the north, these are the coordinates of blood relationship.The space itself is chaotic, but we use blood coordinates to divide the space into directions and positions.When we use the word "status" to describe a person's stronghold in society, this noun originally referring to "space" has the meaning of social value.This also tells us that the association of "land" is derived from social relations.

In a society where the population does not move, the population of the self-sufficient rural society does not need to move, and the community of the family contains the connotation of the region.The concept of a village can be said to be superfluous. In the nursery rhyme, "shake, shake to grandma's house", in our own experience, "grandma's house" is full of regional meaning.The unity of blood and geography is the original state of the community. But people are not plants after all, they still have to move.What is unavoidable in rural society is the process of "cell division". A consanguineous community in which the population is multiplying has reached a certain level, and they cannot live together in a certain area. That is because of the land area required by the community. , due to population reproduction, it has to continue to expand.When it expands to a certain extent, the distance between the place of residence and the place of work is too far, which hinders efficiency, and the community has to be divided geographically. ——This is still based on the fact that the land can be expanded infinitely.In fact, each family has very limited opportunities to cultivate outward. Population reproduction often results in inward intensive farming. Intensive farming is restricted by the law of diminishing land returns, forcing the community to split up. Look elsewhere for arable land.

If the separated cells can be reclaimed on the wasteland and reproduce into a village, it still maintains the blood relationship with the original village, and even calls the new place the original place name, which means denying the separation of space.Examples of this abound in immigrant societies.People who travel in the United States, if they only look at the place names, will have the illusion that this is a "messed up Europe".New England and New York (New York) are famous; London, Moscow and other place names can be found on American maps, and there are more than one.As far as we are concerned, the blood relationship is even more obvious.I left my hometown, Wujiang, when I was ten years old, and lived in Suzhou for nine years, but I have always filled in "Jiangsu Wujiang" under my hometown in various documents.I lived in Yunnan for eight years during the Anti-Japanese War, and my hometown has not changed. Even my children born in Yunnan have inherited my hometown.She will probably have to fill in "Jiangsu Wujiang" all her life.Our ancestors have been in Wujiang for more than 20 generations, but our lanterns have "Jiang Xia Fei" written in red.Jiang Xia is in Hubei, geographically speaking, what reason do I have to associate with Jiang Xia?She is really like my child, so why can she have a relationship with Wujiang, which she has never been to?Here it is obvious that in our rural society, geography has not independently become a relationship that constitutes unity.Our native place is taken from our father, not according to the place where we were born or lived, but inherited like the surname, that is "blood relationship", so we can say that native place is just "the spatial projection of blood relationship".

Many people who left their hometowns and drifted to other places cannot grow into new villages like seeds falling into the soil. They can only try to insert themselves in other established communities.If these unrelated people can form a local community, the connection between them can be purely geographical rather than blood.Only in this way can blood and geography be separated.But in fact, it is quite difficult in rural Chinese society.I often see people called "Kebian", "Xinke" and "Waicunren" in various villages.In the household registration booklet, it is also marked as "sending registration".In modern cities, the procedures for obtaining citizenship of the land are stipulated, the main thing is a certain period of residence.But the period of residence in the village is not an important condition, because I know that many generations of people in the village are still called Xinke or Kebian.

I have paid attention to this question during my investigations in Jiangcun and Lucun: "How can I become a villager?" Generally speaking, there are several conditions. The first is to take root in the soil: there is land in the village.The second is to enter the local circle of relatives from marriage.These few conditions are not easy, because land is not fully free to sell and buy in China's rural society.Land rights are protected by the clan, and unless the clan agrees, it is very difficult to sell the land to outsiders.Marriage is of course the gateway to geographical ties. When a person marries to another place, he becomes a person of another place (marriage allows a man to enter another local community), but "foreigners" who have already lived in one place do not. It is not easy to marry a local man as a wife, so that his children have a chance to enter the local community.In fact, one must first have land before one can take root in the blood kinship network. ——This is just my hypothesis, and it needs to be confirmed by more comparative materials before it can be established.

These sojourners on the fringes of the community cannot be said to have been inserted into the village community, because they are often denied the rights of an ordinary citizen, they are not considered their own, they are not trusted.I have said that rural society is a close society, but these people are "strange" people, with unknown origins and suspicious behavior.But it is in this characteristic that they find their special occupation in rural society. Intimate blood relationship restricts certain social activities, the most important conflicts and competitions; relatives are relatives, branches grown from one root, in principle, they should be related to each other, whether they are connected or not.Moreover, the interdependence of each person in the intimate common life is multi-faceted and long-term, so it is impossible to divide a sum of liquidation between the grant and the recipient.The solidarity of an intimate community depends on the unpaid debts owed to each other by its members.We can see it most clearly in our society. Friends rush to pay back the debt, which means that the other party owes us a favor, like investing a sum of money.If you owe someone a favor, you have to find an opportunity to repay the favor with a heavier one, and if you make it worse, the other party owes you a favor.Coming and going, maintaining mutual assistance and cooperation between people.In an intimate community, it is impossible not to owe favors to each other, and it is also most afraid of "reckoning". "Settling accounts" and "liquidation" are tantamount to breaking off friendship, because if there is no favor to each other, there is no need to communicate.

But no matter how close relatives are, they are actually outside the body; although the pain and itching are related, in fact the pain and itching cannot get out of the skin.If you want to maintain the intimacy in this kind of close group, and do not become "no friends and no meetings", you must also avoid overlapping favors. There must be a considerable balance between rights and obligations in social relationships, and this balance can be stretched over a long period of time. , but if it is one-sided, the social relationship will be unbearable, and unless the force of coercion is added, it will be broken.One of the ways to prevent breakage is to lighten the burden on social relationships.To give an example: In the countryside of Yunnan, there is a kind of Qianhui called [Bei Zong], which is a kind of credit mutual aid organization.I investigated the relationship of those who participated in [Bei Zong], and I saw two tendencies, the first is to avoid relatives of the same race, and the second is to focus on friends who are not related.I asked why they didn't find relatives of the same clan to join [Bei Zong]?Their reasons are very realistic.In theory, relatives of the same clan have the responsibility to communicate with each other and help each other. If they are capable and have good intentions, they can directly give money to help without entering [Bei Zong].In fact, there are not many relatives of this kind of generosity. If they are recruited into [Bei Zong], if they do not pay the money on time, they cannot be forced due to favors, and in the end [Bei Zong] also blows up.So they simply don't look for relatives of the same race.Although other relatives such as my uncle's family have entered [Bei Zong], they often fail to pay.When I investigated ten times, I saw a [Bei Zong] chief worrying about this.He said with emotion: It is best not to involve relatives in money transactions.This sentence is a commentary on what I just said to reduce the burden on social relations.

The more developed the social life, the more arduous the communication between people is, and it is difficult to maintain the balance of mutual rights and obligations by relying on human relations alone.As a result, the need to "settled on the spot" also increased.Currency is the unit and medium of settlement. With a certain unit, the settlement can be correct; with this medium, the credit that everyone receives and owes can be guaranteed. "Money exchange" is the kind of exchange that is willing to settle on the spot, that is, activities generally included in the scope of "economy", in a narrow sense it is business, or commerce. Commerce cannot exist in a society of close kinship.This is not to say that there are no transactions in this society, but that their transactions are maintained by favors, which are mutual gifts.In essence, gifting and trade are both related, and there is only a difference in the way of settlement.Large-scale barter with gifts can also be seen among the Pacific islands. The Kulu system described and analyzed by Malinowski is an example.But this system is not only complex, but also very limited.It is common to establish a commercial base outside of blood ties.In our rural society, there are street fairs dedicated to trading activities.The street market is often not in the village, but in an empty field. People from all over the place come to this specific place, each appearing as "ruthless".Here, everyone temporarily put aside the original relationship, and all transactions have to be settled on the spot.I often see the neighbors next door walk for more than ten miles to exchange ideas at the street market, and then come back all the way.Why do they have to go to the street fair? Isn't it possible to exchange in front of the door?This trip is useful, because it is a neighbor in front of the door, and a "stranger" in the street market.Settling on the spot is an act between strangers and cannot involve other social relationships. In the process of developing from street market trade to storefront trade, the status of "customer side" has a special convenience.Outsiders living on the fringes of kinship areas became the medium of commercial activities.The people in the village can negotiate the price with him, and they can settle the matter on the spot. There is no need to talk about human relationships, and there is nothing embarrassing about it.So as far as I know, most of the shopkeepers in the village are "new customers" from outside, except for poor old people who set up a stall, which is tantamount to beggars.Commerce develops outside blood. Geography is a social relationship developed from business.Blood ties are the basis of an identity society, while geography is the basis of a contract society.A contract is an agreement made among strangers.When making a contract, everyone has the freedom of choice. In the contract, there is credit on the one hand and law on the other.The law needs a power of consent to back it up.The completion of a contract is the liquidation of rights and obligations, which requires precise calculations, proper units, and reliable media.Here is calm consideration, not emotion, so rationality dominates people's activities-all these are the characteristics of modern society, and they are also lacking in rural society. The transition from blood ties to geographical ties is a change in the nature of society and a major change in social history.