Our pattern is not a bundle of wood, but a ripple that seems to be pushed out in circles when a stone is dropped on the water. Each person is at the center of the circle to which his social influence has been pushed. What is pushed by the ripples of the circle is connected. The circle that each person uses at a certain time and place is not necessarily the same.Fei Xiaotong.
What kind of society was our China used to be? What is the social structure of the people's lives? How is it different from today's society? Mr. Fei Xiaotong used the book "Rural China" to discuss and explain these issues. The book is thin, fourteen chapters are equivalent to fourteen**, but the density of knowledge is high. Peel back the cocoons of social phenomena and summarize concepts, so that sociology, a discipline that sounds awe-inspiring, becomes approachable.
From the very beginning, Mr. Fei Xiaotong said: "From the grassroots level, Chinese society is rural. This is where "Rural China" comes from, and the grassroots of Chinese society are the countrymen who are known as the local people, and this book focuses on these people.
The relationship between Chinese and the land is inseparable, and in thousands of years of agrarian society, the vast majority of people have depended on the land for their lives. The land is not only their home, but also their source of life. In a society dominated by agriculture, every rural person is deeply attached to the land where they have lived for generations and is reluctant to leave. They were born, grew up, and died in Si, and after death, they will return to this land of life and seek to "settle in the soil".
China's rural society is not a mobile society. The self-sufficiency of the smallholder economy makes it difficult to communicate and trade with other villages, and the frequency of communication between villages is very low, i.e. isolated and isolated. I was born in a rural area, and although I am a post-90s generation and no longer a small-scale peasant economy, the isolation between each village is still obvious.
In the Tohoku region, there is a dialect word called "tunzi". The usage of "tun" here is the same as "village", such as "xjiatun" or "xx tun", etc. In some places, the "tunzi" is even smaller than the "village", for example, under my village, there are eight tunzi. We may not be familiar with other people in the same village, and at most we can only know some people who are engaged in special professions, such as primary school teachers, doctors at health clinics, and tofu makers. However, we are very familiar with the people in our own camp. There are hundreds of households in the whole tun, and we can draw a map in our minds, detailing the location and personnel composition of each household. Some elderly people can even know exactly whose field is next to whose field.
Due to the low mobility of society, the rural society formed a social structure based on acquaintance relationships. In modern society, people have stranger relationships, borrowing money requires written documents, and part-time jobs need to sign contracts. However, in the vernacular society, as I saw when I was a child, even acquaintances who were not very close to each other did not need to write a document when borrowing money. In the tunzi, when you go out to work, how much money is a day or how much a month, you can negotiate it first, and you don't need to sign a contract.
So far, I have a first glimpse of the collision and difference between the rural society and the modern society.
Saying that the countryside people are "stupid" is that after the contact between the rural society and the modern society, the people in the modern society find that the countrymen don't understand this, and they don't understand that. However, are rednecks stupid? Is it intellectually insufficient? No, it's just that they're not familiar with some things, like literacy. So why not be very literate? Because it doesn't need to.
Does the written word have any role in the vernacular society? Hardly.
Spatially speaking, the unit of rural society is the village, and the isolated small villages are generally not large, with a radius of several miles. You only need to walk a few steps to someone's house and communicate face-to-face.
The local society is a society of acquaintances, to what extent? For example, if you knock on the door and ask "who" in the house, and say "I" outside the door, instead of saying who it is, an acquaintance can tell who it is by sound. But in the modern world, in the city, in the society of strangers, if you knock on someone's door, you won't answer "I", you will say who you are or what are you here for, otherwise you will reply "I", and the people in the house will only think "You, who are you?" Sick. "When talking to strangers, new neighbors or colleagues, you have to be careful and pay attention to your expression, because you don't understand each other, and you are afraid of misunderstanding if you say something wrong. But in the rural society, it is simple, sometimes a word, an action, an expression can express a clear meaning, this way of communication is very common in the local society. "Everyone who understands understands", this word is really very suitable for acquaintances in the local society. In this kind of society, there are better ways to convey affection and information than words, without words.
In terms of time, the rural society is a society that changes relatively slowly, and it is also a stable society. The state of life in society remains unchanged day after day, year after year. The most extreme may be like in "The Story of the Peach Blossom Spring", "I don't know if there is a Han, regardless of the Wei and Jin dynasties". The village repeats the same days for a long time, and as Mr. Fei Xiaotong said, after entering this rhythm of life of "sunrise and daily rest", "memories are superfluous". Therefore, the experience of the old people must also be the experience of the younger generations. In this kind of society, language is enough to convey experience, and there is no need for words.
In vernacular society, spatial isolation leads to intimacy within space, and temporal repetition leads to temporal monotony, making writing indispensable. It is only when the population is on the move and society is changing rapidly that the written word shows its necessity.
Classics are classics