Abstract
Change in China’s urban areas is dramatic, as cityscapes emerge from rice paddies. China’s rural areas reflect the impact of globalization, especially as villagers leave home for work in towns and cities. Much of the current research on migration out of China’s countryside has noted its negative consequences for village life, a phenomenon often dubbed “hollowing out.” Our qualitative research on “hollowing out,” undertaken by a student-faculty team from Dickinson College, focused on village sustainability in an area that has experienced substantial out-migration. Given the time constraints of our funding, we concentrated on village activities that were by and large public and observable – farm ecology and local culture. The village “stay-behinds” did most of the community’s agricultural labor and cultural work, the latter especially manifest in religious activities. Based on a combination of fieldwork and available published materials, we found evidence for optimism about the sustainability of the village community in the age of migration.
Highlights
“Hollowing out” is the term often used in a global context to describe the general deterioration of rural life as megacities prosper and proliferate
We observed and participated in a community whose stay-behinds continued to work in agriculture, not usually in the same ways typical of the village’s history under the People’s Republic of China (PRC) administration or earlier
Assad’s work helps illuminate how religion is authorized in different times and circumstances, and he sketches out a productive model for making sense of what we saw in West Brook
Summary
“Hollowing out” is the term often used in a global context to describe the general deterioration of rural life as megacities prosper and proliferate. We mean that as culture changes, it continues to serve the needs of the community as a source of useful values, meaning, and identity across generations (adapted from Daskon and Binns 2010) These concepts, translated into our work in the Bai village, meant that we focused on the work of the so-called “stay-behinds” (liushoude in Putonghua) and their physical labor in agriculture and other areas of the village economy, as well as the more culturally embedded work in long-standing village institutions such as temples and festivals. The people who migrated from West Brook for wage work in China’s towns and cities retained their rural identities in the household registration system. We wrote blogs (http://mosaics.dickinson.edu/chinapracticum/), which provided opportunities for us to begin to organize and synthesize our findings
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