Governing rural culture: Agency, space and the re-production of ancestral temples in contemporary China

Abstract

This paper offers a nuanced understanding of rural people's agency in cultural governance. Most of the existing literature on rural cultural governance in China confines the discussion of people's agency within the given political context of cultural governance, in which villagers are described as reactive agents in response to the state-oriented cultural transformation. I argue that rural people's agency in cultural governance has not been fully investigated and a richer understanding requires a close examination of the wider rural socio-spatial processes. In my case study of the re-production of traditional ancestral temples in rural areas of Xincheng Town, southeast China, I show that rural people develop great initiatives in promoting the transformation of lineage culture by drawing on their experiences of the changing rural environment. The state-sponsored cultural project, which seeks to convert traditional ancestral temples into cultural halls, memorials and elderly activity centers and to develop a modern, civilized and socialist countryside, is in fact incorporated into the self-development of modern lineage culture by local people. On the one hand, the state's cultural governance in Xincheng is significantly shaped and confined by specific rural socio-spatial relations. On the other hand, lineage groups take firm control of the construction of temple landscapes and even reproduce converted temples as ‘extended’ and ‘shadow’ temples. This paper contributes to understanding the complexity and flexibility of local people's interaction with the state in rural cultural governance.