Redefining the Market Town through Festivals in South China

Abstract

In David Faure’s paper on Foshan town (zhen) during the Ming (Faure, 1990), one finds dynamic processes of culture making. The mercantile elite created vast territorial bases in the sands with the language of lineage, reinforced by their ‘literati’ pretensions. They successfully marginalized former leaders whose power bases centred on local temples and negotiated their emergent positions in the expanded late imperial state. Their shrewd manoeuvres gave the town a peculiar flavour — fluid social mobility and public contests juxtaposed with increasingly established notions about identity, status and authority. The town gained significance as an open arena where cultural meanings and political agendas were debated and reworked, transmitted, experienced — out of which emerged notions about agriculture and trade, village and town, popular society and state, lineage and ethnicity, merchant and literati. These notions were perceptions of differences based in fact on intense social interaction and fluidity in membership. Faure’s treatment of the town’s cultural dynamics is quite similar to that of Raymond Williams on emergent images of country and city in English literature whose authors experienced unprecedented social change. (Williams, 1973)