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老百姓网友，请将此文给你的英国丈夫看看 -- 芦笛 - (51526 Byte) 2004-8-08 周日, 上午1:02 (438 reads) |
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作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
遵嘱将该文示先生。答曰：It is a well written, coherent essay，although it is a bit rough and hasn’t got its introduction and conclusion. Therefore the arguments are unclear. The tone of the essay is rational and positive, but it is a boring way in dealing with such a big topic.
以下是老百姓的读后感：芦笛写给洋人和国人看的东西文风迥然不同。不知是文化差异还是文字差异使然。两个问题：（1）既然中国从秦始皇以来形成的社会政治结构没有变，若干年后看现在毛政权是否是中国历史长河王朝更替中的特殊的一环？（2）既然西方人比中国人更有创造性为什么中国能在十四世纪前创造世界领先的科技？
谈到创造性，老百姓正在酝酿一本书，主题与中国人的创造性有关。正如十四世纪前中国的科技创造在世界领先，当下中国在玩弄社会关系\与人奋斗方面的创造性依旧领先世界。西方的马基亚弗利主义与中国的法术势的术相比还相去甚远。中国人现在并非缺乏创造性而是其许多方面的创造性被扼杀或受到压抑，如在科技方面的创造性长期受到压抑其功能也就减退，有些人（如芦笛）的科技创造性到了海外才释放出来。正如西方人十四世纪前西方处在黑暗的中世纪一样，西方人的创造性也是在文艺复兴后才释放出来的，加上启蒙运动后光大的理性主义更使之如虎添翼。
顺便贴上该书草稿中的一节（请包含没做任何编辑，注释也在上贴时丢了），请批判，但不要扩大化，谢谢！ 老百姓只跟贴不张贴，这不过是借助公共空间的私人讨论。
6.3. Creativity and motivation of lishang-wanglai
When I mentioned creativity my English husband said Chinese people are generally less good at scientific creativity than English. He got this view from his teaching experiences over many years at a University, where Chinese students (including who came from Hong Kong, Taiwan, Malaysia and Singapore, overseas, etc.) are always at the top of passing examinations but often perform less well doing project work. However, he and many like-minded Europeans have been similarly categorised as simple-minded or scatter-brained (que xinyanr) by Chinese people because they are not good at working out complicated human relationships in everyday life. Here the Chinese character of xin (heart) has been translated as mind or brain. Half a century ago Liang Suming (1949, 1975) believed that the human heart is different from the human mind. He said non-Chinese scholars have not yet acknowledged the importance of a kind of study related to a human being’s heart, not just mind which is different from psychology , and is so advanced in Chinese culture that it is impossible to have an equal dialogue with the West in this field (132, 280). However, towards the end of the twentieth Century a Chinese woman’s American husband Kipnis (1997) conceptualised a kind of ganqing which touches upon Liang’s “human heart” in its understanding of Chinese people and culture. Liang’s notion can also be linked to social creativity in the Western social sciences.
6.3.1. Kipnis’s ganqing and Liang’s qingli
I will involve Kipnis’s study on ganqing first and extend it to Liang’s study on human heart. Apart from embodying ganqing (see ganqing in 6.1.2) Kipnis’s study of ganqing also touches upon its psychological effects and cultural aspects (111 and 195, n.2). In Fengjia village clinic a four-year-old boy was crying for fear of an injection and his mother told him that “[There] won’t be a shot (bu dazhen)” or “[No] more shots (bu dazhen le)” before and after the injection. Kipnis thought this way of handling children would normally be considered as lying or dishonest by the Western standard or at least “white lies” (111-115) and explained this kind of ganqing with “nonrepresentational ethics”. However, in China it is considered as comforting or soothing for the boy because the mother shared the boy’s pain with her heart (ganqing) and encouraged the boy “It’s OK” (renqing) – an interpretation of “There won’t be a shot” and “No more shots”. By contrast, it would be considered that the mother was too cruel (no ganqing) with her son if she told him the truth. Let’s move to another common case in China. A warm-hearted host offered to share her favourite hot dish with a guest and told him “It is not hot (bula bula) and have some (chang yi chang)”. This is considered as perfect manners (renqing) for the host because she believed that if your mind thinks “it’s not hot” your body would feel “it’s not hot” and therefore you will enjoy the food well. In contrast, it would be impolite or rude if the guest refused her (renqing) because it would hurt her feeling (ganqing).
In China this kind of effect of ganqing is very powerful. For example, there is a pair of sayings representing two kinds of extreme ways of how the contemporary Chinese government controlled its people. One is “A fine example has boundless power (bangyang de liliang shi wuqiong de)” meaning that to make a model of a positive character, like Lei Feng in 1960s or models of patriotism nowadays, could gain endless benefits. Another saying is “to kill a chicken in front of monkeys”, or “to punish someone as a warning to others” (sha ji jing hou) which is also very effective, examples of its use being counterrevolutionaries in the Cultural Revolution or the Chinese democrats or Falungong practitioners. This kind of ganqing can also be used by an elite to encourage a youth. A successful Chinese writer, Liang Xiaosheng, said that all his achievements were inspired by a famous writer Ru Zhijuan’s one sentence. She said “Xiaosheng is a good young man (Xiaosheng shi ge hao qingnian)” in a symposium when he was an undergraduate. There is another saying which appeared in the June Fourth Event in 1989 and still quite popular: “You will be fine if you are told you should be, even you are not; you won’t be good if you are told you aren’t, even if you are really good (Shuo ni xing ni jiu xing buxing yexing, shuo ni buxing ni jiu buxing xing ye buxing)”. This gives rise to several questions: Who said that to whom? What is the real power which determined the person’s fate?
I will now invoke a Chinese sinologist Liang Shumin’s (1949/84) qingli (reason, sense, code of human conduct) which is central to Liang’s ideas of human heart. Here the qing of qingli relates to human feelings. According to Liang, qingli includes external and internal feelings, such as to be a kindly and loving father, to be a filial and dutiful son, to love people, fairness, a sense of justice, etc. This kind of qingli comes from the human heart (129, 134). This kind of qingli relates to Kipnis’s other kinds of ganqing: one person’s anger at another (a woman shouted at a watermelon seller, 2 , informal group ganqing (a women yelled at birth control officials, 107), collective ganqing (2, class ganqing (104-10, 185-86), etc. Apart from these ganqing in China there is also patriotic ganqing, nationalist ganqing and religious ganqing, etc. These ganqing can be grown to reqing (a strong warm feeling, ardour, glow, enthusiasm, etc.) or even kuangre (excessive, irrational zeal, fanaticism and craze). Where does the re of reqing or kuangre come from? According to Liang (1975) it might be driven by “qi (spirit, morale, anger, rage, insult, vital energy, energy of life, etc.)”. For Liang, the human heart is formed by zhudongxing (go-aheadism), linghuoxing (flexibility) and jihuaxing (plan, arrangement) (16). The character of human heart is jing (stillness) of xinqi (heart and qi) (40-41). It sounds like psychology, religion, or something beyond human knowledge. There are some ganqing related Chinese phrases involving “qi”: “acting impetuously (ganqing yongshi)”, “be swayed by personal feelings (yiqi yongshi)”, “get angry (shengqi)”, “try to make a good showing or win something (zhengqi)”, “with justice on one’s side, one is bold and assured (lizhi qizhuang)”, “full of vigour and vitality or sap or animal spirits (xueqi fanggang)”, etc. The translations of the above phrases lose some of the original meanings because “qi” is too difficult to be well translated. It might be helpful if we concretise these abstractions with some questions: Why do the peasants shout at each other in villages in rural China, as well as in urban China professors shout at each other in a top institution, or doctors fight each other physically in a top university not only during the Cultural Revolution period, as well as normal days even in the twenty-first century? Why did the Chinese people climb Everest from the North side in 1960 without having the technology, advanced requirements and traditional interests of the British mountaineers who failed at the same route? What are the different motivations between Mao Zedong starting up the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping’s suppression of the June Fourth Uprising, and Jiang Zemin’s suppression of Falongong? Solutions to this kind of question might come from the “human heart” that Liang (1949/84, 1975) proposed.
According to Liang (1949/84) the li of qingli relate to lixing (理性) which came from Confucius lunli (ethic) and its core li (Confucian theory). Liang divided li into liyue (religion and moral rites, 108) and lisu (customary rites) based on his human heart theory and idea of Chinese society formed with Confucius lunli. For Liang, liyue relates to religion, ideology and morality, which means people can cultivate themselves with li through enjoying music, poems, songs, and dance, etc (109-113). Here the yue of liyue is the same character and a synonym of the le (happiness and enjoyment) but with different pronunciations. Lisu is customary rites and can also be understood as a kind of popularised morality (daode) which is much more flexible than law (118-120). Thus over two thousand years Chinese people acted based on the above understanding of qingli (human feelings with moral judgement) and lixing (clear, bright, still and harmonious heart) and consequently formed the respective structure of Chinese society (128-41).
Many popular Chinese usages in everyday life can back up Liang’s idea of human heart. For instance, when children do homework their parents often encourage them with the characters of yonggong (use your energy for working hard), yongnao (use your brain and mind to get the correct answers – good results depend on the intelligence of the child), yongxin (use your heart for willing to do it well – it depends on attitude of trying) and zhuanxin or zhuanxin zhizhi (concentrate your attention on the work with your heart or with single hearted devotion – if you concentrate the qi will pull you to finish the work easily). Apart from the Chinese saying which I mentioned at beginning of this section that que xinyanr (literally, lack of a hole at the right place in the heart blocking spirit qi from getting through, which was inaccurately translated as simple-minded or scatter-brained ), there is another popular Chinese saying that “there is no grief greater than the death of the heart, and no anxiety greater than the loss of the aspirations (ai modayu xinsi chou moguoyu wuzhi)”. Here the death of heart is not a medical term, which can be reinforced by the second half of the saying using loss of the aspirations (zhiqi), in which qi is involved again. Yan Yunxiang also found Xiajia villagers used “heart” in this way, e.g. mei liangxin which was translated it as “no conscience” (1996b:70). Should be “heartless” which opposite to “be good-hearted” according the context, and fumuxin (heart of parents) which means the parents’ limitless benevolence and love of the children, though Yan explained it as psychological factor (2003:181). Similarly, Kaixiangong villagers always used xiaoxin (filial heart or sentiments) rather than xiaodao (filial duty or obligation), xiaojing (filial respect) or xiaoshun (filial obedience) to describe elderly care (see 4.3).
Therefore, as I mentioned earlier, based on jing (stillness) of xinqi (heart and qi) Liang (1975) claimed human heart formed with three xing (nature or character): zhudongxing - go-aheadism, linghuoxing - flexibility and jihuaxing - plan or arrangement (16-41). To a certain extent, the above three xings of human heart can be generalized with Mao Zedong’s one xing: chuangzaoxing – creativity and interpreted with Mao’s famous slogans. They are “[People], only people are a real force of creating world history (renmin, zhiyou renmin caishi chuangzao shijie lishi de zhenzheng dongli)”, “[Only] human beings can create whatever wonder in the world (zhiyao you le ren shenme renjian qiji dou keyi chuangzao chulai)”; “[Fighting] with the Heavenly gods and the earth (nature) and creating a new world (zhantian doudi chuangzao xin shijie)” and “[It] is endless enjoyment of fighting with the Heavenly gods, the earth (nature) and human being (yu tian fendou qi le wuqiong, yu di fendou qi le wuqiong, yu ren fendou qi le wuqiong)”. This kind of creativity with enjoyment might represent Chinese people’s social creativity in the process of people making, maintaining, or stopping relationships with lishang-wanglai.
6.3.2. Social creativity and a case study
I am finally moving onto a relatively new theory of social creativity as motivation for lishang-wanglai, which is a combination of principle, motivation, criteria, etc. Social creativity was a quite common phrase in the 1960s, according to John Davis (1994). In rural China the real work in managing family social support comes from decisions to change exchange relationships by developing some, or dropping others. The chapters 1 to 4 have shown how the dynamics of lishang-wanglai can be considered a socially creative process.
Here I would like to omit a full literature review in the field of social creativity by first quoting some statements directly from John Davis. After reviewing other researchers’ work, Davis reached his points, “social order we seek to create is in fact not a system, nor a structure, nor an organic functioning whole nor a necessary and inevitable evolutionary track, but a series of ramshackle contraptions which serve to get us through from one day to the next. They are ingenious, clever, often pleasing to contemplate, but they are inherently unstable and need continual affirmative re-creation and maintenance” (1994:107-108). “People use their given sociability to create agreements about actions” (97). “Every action and thought which involves other people is creative sociability, attempting to make a social world which is secure and stable to live in...... This is a universal, popular and irrepressible activity: everyone is creating most of the time” (9. Therefore, “social creativity is purposeful action aimed at routinising and ordering life to make shared existence predictable from one day to the next; and is in fact a universal, continuous activity”(99). He suggested that social organisation is the product of humans using their imagination and social creativity to work on raw materials, rather than an organic growth of some systemic kind or spontaneous product of society itself. He also suggested that “social creativity is part and parcel of human creativity as a whole, and that the principles and procedures for studying it are those we use when trying to understand the production of music and pottery, songs and dances, houses and cathedrals. In this sense we are all authors of our social worlds, engaged in continuous creative activity” (103).
My understanding of Davis’ idea of social creativity is that people are always creating in order to maintain. In order to make it as it always has been, they are actually always changing things. Based on my empirical study and Chinese literature study I join Kipnis’ notion of “nonrepresentational ethics”, and Liang’s idea of “human heart” to Davis’ social creativity and made it as motivation of lishang-wanglai. Liang’s human heart includes qingli (positive human feelings), lixing (clear, bright, still & harmonious heart), & three xings (social creativity –go-aheadism, flexibility & planning, p100). Liang’s idea of three xings related to human heart is partially proved by one of my important findings that lishang-wanglai is the way in which participants enjoy balancing the multiple criteria in personalising different relationships. Therefore, Davis’ idea of social creativity has reached the same goal as Liang’s three xings by a different route. From the quotations in the above paragraph we can see that for Davis social creativity is purposeful action because the social order people sought is a series of ramshackle contraptions which are ingenious, clever, pleasing to contemplate, inherently unstable, and need continual affirmative re-creation and maintenance.
Davis also classified social creativity into two kinds. One kind of social creativity “implies centres of power”, namely it is a top down type, e.g. Thatcher’s programme of social engineering. Another is “populist sociability - a form of diffuse power”. For me both these types of “implied centres of power” and “populist sociability” can be understood as vertical and horizontal ways, respectively, of social creativity. They are thus highly appropriate to be used with lishang-wanglai and social support in rural China.
Finally, I will analyse a small case to show how social creativity works with lishang-wanglai. In Kaixiangong Village there are many events on the 5th day of the 5th lunar month, the traditional Chinese Dragon Boat Festival (duanwu jie). According to the villagers, children less than one year old should wear tiger hats, clothes, and shoes. The reasons for wearing the tiger suit are for health and luck, because they believe it can keep mosquitoes and evil away from the child. A working mother told me a story of how she created a new way for getting the tiger suit (see Photo sets 2:19) for her son. In the past some mothers gathered together to do this because they enjoyed working together to discuss fashions, helping each other to make different parts of the tiger suits. However, she had a job in township and couldn’t use the same way to get a tiger suit for her son. Eventually she worked out an appropriate way and enjoyed it very much.
This case illustrates many points. The working mother created a new way based on the customs of a tiger suit; she did it based on the local customs for the tiger suit & through her brother (lishang); she altered the customs a bit to fit into her change of situation; she enjoyed both that she created a suitable way in her case & the allusive way of ending a labour support relationship with neighbours & friends; different types of wanglai can be changed between the same people or different people over time, i.e. expressive wanglai to market relationship; different types of wanglai can be changed with space, i.e. geographical / social distance or closeness; the tiger suit case illustrates how lishang-wanglai worked in a social support arrangement in which the relationship can be maintained and ended. Below are detailed analyses of the case.
(1) The tiger suit involves both lishang-wanglai and non-lishang-wanglai relations, and indicates how one has to always be creative to maintain existing relationships. The working mother had several possibilities to obtain the tiger suit. The simplest way would be to buy one from a shop in the township where she worked, which wouldn’t involve lishang-wanglai. However, according to local custom, the material should be given by her brother, which involved an expressive wanglai between non-agnatic kin. If her brother noticed that the tiger suit was not made from the materials given by him, then he would feel hurt (ganqing). If she followed the local custom, she would have had to ask somebody to make it for her because she couldn’t do the main job all by herself, which would involve them in an instrumental wanglai. In the end, she asked her brother to give her some money before he or his wife purchased the materials. She then used the money to buy the outfit from a shop. The idea of buying a tiger suit, and asking her brother for the money, without bothering another person to make it, was creative.
(2) The effect of a particular wanglai on a relationship is determined by the existing lishang of the relationship. In the relations with her brother, the working mother thought she should keep in with the local custom to let him express himself on that occasion. This can be counted as a moral judgement. She should also care for his feelings and keep his face by letting him take part in the event. This counts as human feelings. She asked for money to buy it because she did not want to waste the materials, which is a rational calculation. Although the tiger suit was optional for some families on the Dragon Boat Festival, it was very important for her because she believed the tiger suit would bring her baby double luck because her baby was 100 days old at about that time. This is a religious concern. However, the above reasons worked together with different weights. She agreed in this case that human feelings and religious sense were more important than others. This example shows how lishang cause the making, maintaining, altering, and stopping of relationships. They can explain why and how people use their wanglai in different ways. What a particular contact or lack of contact means depends on the reason for it. Wanglai are the actions of people making relationships. The ways in which people, through contacts (wanglai), exchange resources are according to different reasons and principles (lishang). In other words, the real reasons behind wanglai for people to seek different resources are different criteria of lishang. Thus an observation of wanglai gives a superficial view of social contacts, whereas the determination of lishang allows the overall effect of the contacts to be evaluated.
(3) The tiger suit example illustrates that the local custom can be adapted in changing situations, although customs normally determine what a wanglai means. Yan also noticed this (1996b:230-32). Local customs involve lishang’s aspects of morality, human feelings, rational choice, and religious sense. According to the local custom, in the past, good luck (tu jili) required that the tiger suit be made by oneself, or any other personal connection. This led to the enjoyment of making it and expressive wanglai with others. This local custom was adapted by the people who bought a tiger suit instead of making one. The working mother was one of the first people who did this. Nowadays, villagers accept the idea of buying a tiger suit for practical reasons. Lishang is also intimately related to local customs for annual and life cycle ceremonies. These customs are used by villagers to make wanglai – and the lishang is affected by the local traditions, as shown by commonly understood customs. Kaixiangong’s villagers created their customs while they were using them to support each other. On the one hand, they can meet all changes by remaining unchanged - coping with a constantly changing situation by sticking to a fixed principle (yi bubian ying wan bian), which can be understood as lishang, even though the contents of the lishang could change. On the other hand, they keep a principle of adaptability for survival (shizhe shengcun) to adapt themselves to all the changes. In this point of view, customs live. I think sometimes people want to zao shi (do something new-- create something.), but they always like to have excuses to support their ideas. They make changes, but only for adaptation. They explain that other people always do this, or people already have done something. Their changes may be similar or close to what other people have done, but this is creativity. In other words, the villagers count adapting customs as being socially creative, although it is less creative because customs act as external constraints on what is possible. The most significant observation from my fieldwork relates to the way in which customs are modified by villagers when necessary, in order to get the right lishang for wanglai and so maintain or alter lishang-wanglai networks.
(4) In the village the ability to work out lishang-wanglai in creative ways for resources is valued and enjoyed. Among the above lishang criteria I will enrich the meaning of human feelings, which the working mother weighted importantly, by stressing the element of enjoyment. The way in which she worked out an appropriate way, without speaking to others, to balance and maintain different wanglai, had even more enjoyment than working with others in making the tiger suit. This tallies with the nature of Chinese people who prefer to do things in a way that is indirect: “hazy, dim, or allusive” (Smith, 1894: chapter . It also conforms to Chinese academic habits, which are also said to be similarly allusive (hanxu) or imaginative (xiangxiang) in (Gao, 1994:167-205). This can be seen from an old Chinese saying buyao tongpo chuanghu zhi (don’t poke a hole in the window paper - there was no glass in ancient China). This is a single phrase with a double meaning. On the one hand, the obvious meaning of poking a hole in the window paper is that it causes broken property and lets wind through, and looks nasty even after repair. This is why grownups stop children from doing naughty things to the window paper. On the other hand, the real meaning behind the saying is usually used among adults, especially for educated Chinese people. It would be considered too foolish to point out why or to ask why one shouldn’t poke a hole in the window paper. The philosophy behind it is to let the audience or reader understand (wu) and enjoy the taste (wanwei) of it. For them an educated Chinese should be able to understand that poking a hole in the window paper would give a clearer view and at the same time destroy the enjoyment of a hazy view. Since the window paper is too ancient for modern people there are some common sayings developed from it meaning the same thing, such as “buyao tongpo (don’t poke through)”, “diandao weizhi (don’t mention more than a little touch)”, yidian jiutou (someone understood it as soon as one touched it a bit), etc. There is an essential difference between “don’t poke a hole in the window paper” and “don’t give him or her all the answers”, a Western principle of education. The former wants to keep a thing unclear because if it is obvious it would be tasteless (meiyou yisi or weidao). The latter wants to encourage others to think for themselves and it doesn’t matter whether the answer is superficial or not. This explains the non-explicit nature of Chinese people’s actions in personalised relationships and Chinese social studies in which the method of allusion has often been used. I assume this is why people enjoy the maintenance of different wanglai, even if it causes misunderstandings (see section 7.3) or even get it wrong sometimes.
(5) The creation and change of lishang-wanglai between individuals or groups and the institutions can be seen at work over time. As the working mother said, traditionally women made tiger suits together, and this can be counted as expressive wanglai because they enjoyed themselves. She has had such expressive wanglai in many ways with her relatives, neighbours, and friends. She did not want the tiger suit to reduce her relations with them from expressive wanglai to instrumental wanglai. That the working mother asked her brother for money to buy the tiger suit could drop her expressive wanglai with her brother into instrumental wanglai because the local custom was designed for a son who inherited a family’s wealth to support his married out sister by giving gifts on different occasions. However, the way in which she did it tactfully kept her brother’s mianzi (face) and ganqing (human feeling) so that expressive wanglai remained. The working mother’s purchase of a tiger suit can also be seen as a market exchange, which is not lishang-wanglai. This case also shows the time dimension of lishang-wanglai can be a reduction of expressive wanglai in favour of market exchange along with the market economy growing in rural China. In other words, market exchange can be used to reduce the amount of obligation which occurs under expressive wanglai.
(6) The case of the tiger suit shows lishang-wanglai can be changed with space. The way in which the working mother did not want to bother others for the tiger suit is one type of changing relationships with space. It can be seen from a close distance geographically. On the one hand, she and the neighbour are neighbours and friends to each other and might have a business relationship at the same time. If the neighbour provides labour support for her the relationship this time between them is more instrumental wanglai than expressive wanglai. On the other hand, they invite each other for meals, or see each other often socially. In this way they can be close to each other with no or small gifts. These kinds of contacts are more generous wanglai or expressive wanglai than instrumental wanglai, because this involves emotion and enjoyment. There is another type of changing relationships with space that can be seen from the quality of relationships. This is similar to the above point (2) but from the angle of space rather than time. This means people can convert a relationship into a better or worse relationship by moving to exchanges of higher or lower types. For example, suppose household A was normally engaged in an expressive wanglai relationship with household B. A for some reasons rejected that kind of relationship, by going down to the next lower type of wanglai with B, namely instrumental wanglai. This was a visible sign that A no longer wanted to have the better (expressive) relationship with B. By doing this A was increasing his social distance from B. Under this circumstance B would not expect to have expressive wanglai with A, without involving a word. Thus, lishang-wanglai allows some space for people to apply all levels of wanglai relationship into their relationships. Even one relationship can have different types of wanglai at the same time.
(7) The case of the tiger suit shows how lishang-wanglai networks work, although it is a very small example from everyday life. Household events, e.g. tiger suit or wedding, make variable demands on resources. Resources normally include material, financial, labour, information, technological, emotional, sociability, enjoyment and others. Different people are dependent on different sources with different resources – one can have emotional closeness but not rely on each other, e.g. a relative, for information resource, or one can rely on each other, e.g. a friend, for finance or professional advice, but not for emotional resources. It is these demands, particularly, which require villagers to make creative use of wanglai based on lishang and hence get the required resources. According to what the resources are, social distance may be much more to do with relationships of interdependence and sharing, including sharing emotional resources and several others. The closer you are the more different kinds of resources you share. The greater the mixture of resources, the more close they are. The tiger suit case involved financial support from the baby’s uncle and the possibility of labour support for making the tiger suit. Lishang will determine to what extent a particular relationship can be used, currently and in the future, to provide social support. Lishang will also determine, for a particular relationship in given circumstance, what for the villager is the appropriate type and quantity of a social resource to provide. This use of lishang is regarded by the villagers as important both for reasons of utility, to manage household resources, but also as an expressive and enjoyable exercise. Thus, the relationships can be made, maintained, altered, and stopped through contacts of resource exchange.
The wanglai of lishang-wanglai are practices including social support in which different types of relationships can be altered based on lishang. Wanglai can be held with a great variety of contacts. In the tiger suit example, the woman could have asked relatives, neighbours, friends or fellow villagers to make the suit. In both the ESRC project and my study, to deal with different relationships means to connect with different contacts or sources. For major events, contacts or sources include personal sources like kin, neighbours, and friends, and impersonal sources like collective, government, markets and other institutions. Wanglai describe how individuals or groups use different sources and ways at different times to keep in touch with others. It is typical of geographically (but not necessarily socially) close relationships and not identical with physical contacts. It may alternatively be made spontaneously without deliberate intent. The essential difference is that a social contact will have some deliberate effect on exchange relationships. There are a number of ways for new and old contacts to change relationships. Firstly, a new relationship can be promoted, by e.g. making a marriage relationship between two families. Secondly, contacts can maintain or alter exchange relationships. In Kaixiangong, families would update their list of different relationships by adding some new relationships or removing old relationships. Thirdly, people can discontinue an old, no longer desired relationship. Relationships can end gradually or suddenly. When relationships change suddenly it affects people more. People are not so affected by a gradual ending, such as the married out woman stopping the relationship with her father’s father’s brother’s grandson’s family. This example looks not gradual. However, there were several years between the girl’s first engagement with her fiancé and the marriage. Acutely, this process involved the establishment of relationships between two families and their relatives. According to local custom, everybody who is related to these two families would update their relatives’ lists, without involving any words. Thus the married out woman’s great-uncle’s grandson’s family wouldn’t feel shocked if they didn’t receive an invitation from her.
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To sum up, my argument is that to deal with different personal or personalised relationships in different ways (lishang-wanglai) is a creative process, and the creativity of people in making and maintaining their relationships is an operation of lishang-wanglai. Just as Yan attempts to use renqing and guanxi as conceptual instruments in social analysis of China (1996b:123), I suggest that lishang-wanglai as a whole can be such a concept which serves both principle and action functions of reciprocity by using its framework. For the purpose of analysis, I will separate lishang-wanglai into its two constituent parts, lishang and wanglai. There are different dimensions of social closeness and social distance. I observed practices (wanglai) and looked separately at what contacts are and what the principle (lishang) for the practices is. I also used lishang-wanglai networks to show how people change, start, maintain, alter, and stop their social relationships, and how social support resources are transferred. I have shown how social creativity works with lishang-wanglai in making personal or personalised relationships throughout the book.
Section 6.1 has reviewed how within Chinese culture there are a variety of terms describing the principles behind social relationships. I have already shown that these terms have been the subject of much debate among anthropologists and sociologists inside and outside China. From these ideas in 6.1.3 I developed the lishang-wanglai model, which is crucial to the concept of lishang-wanglai.
In section 6.2 a brief review was undertaken of the large field of social support and particularly social support networks. From this the concept of lishang-wanglai networks is developed. In this book I am emphasising the dynamic nature of exchange relationships. In rural China the real work in managing family social support comes from decisions to change exchange relationships by developing some, or dropping others. Chapters 1 to 4 looked at in more detail in, where the theoretical ideas developed here were applied to analyse fieldwork materials.
Finally, 6.3 reviewed Kipnis’s ganqing, Liang Shumin’s qingli and especially Davis’ work on social creativity and shown how they can be fitted together. I highlighted that enjoyment of social creativity can be a motivation of conceptualised lishang-wanglai and showed how the dynamics of social exchange relationships can be considered a socially creative process.
作者：Anonymous 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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