Introduction

This project explores the histories, beliefs, livelihoods, and local identities in Xiakou (sha-ko) Village, located in the mountains of Ya'an County, in western Sichuan Province of the People's Republic of China.The goal of the project is to understand Xiakou Village as an evolving cultural landscape, defined as the interwoven field of physical environment, historical memory, and moral agency, in which particular places gather a people's sense of themselves and serve as sources of belonging and identity.

This project will attempt to pioneer digital ethnography, or the interactive presentation of focused, long-term fieldwork research results in the form of an online monograph, media archive, and information structures such as relational databases, and GIS mapping. Our plan is to use the project's digital form to reinforce its ethnographic content, using new technologies to render more transparent the relationship between source and interpretation, to open up non-linear narrative paths through the ethnography, and therefore to more vividly reveal the interconnections among different dimensions of village life that are the core content of the project.

The digital ethnography is organized through eight chapters: History, Landscape, Belief, Folklife, Authority, Work, Gazetteer, and Biography. There are three main types of content within this chapter structure: essays, interactive maps, and artifacts. Essays are the basic interpretive building blocks of the ethnography and are accessed through the chapters. Visitors looking for a sense of one of the ethnography's multimedia essays might visit Folklife > Mountain Songs.The interactive maps under the Gazetteer chapter will offer spatial representations of sites in the cultural landscape, dynamically presented through GIS layers, sorted by kind and historical period. For demonstration purposes, a flash animation of how this might eventually work in GIS can be accessed through Gazeteer > interactive Gazeteer map (note that because this is an animated simulation the rollovers are not linked to artifact pages).

Xiakou Village

1958 looked like a bumper crop for the villagers of Xiakou. The weather had been exceptionally good, and the progressive collectivization of labor over the last few years, from the first mutual aid teams of 1955 to the larger chujiishe (lower-level collectives) begun the year before, seemed to be working out well. In fact, most people felt that life had never been better. The endemic banditry that had so plagued their mountain village just a decade before was now just a bad memory. On taking power with the new year of 1950, the Communist Party had worked swiftly to break up the local paoge bandit gangs, execute their duobazi leaders who had worked hand-in-glove with the corrupt Guomindang regime, and eliminate the opium trade that had supported the bandits but reduced some village families to ruin. Under the rhyming slogan "Clean out bandits, oppose local tyrants; reduce the rents, relieve the pressure" (qingfei fanba; jianzu tuiya), the new Communist government brought peace and an appealing message of social "egalitarianism" (pingjun zhuyi).

Land Reform had also been carried out successfully, with hardly any violence in the village after the failed attack on the hydroelectric station by the local duobazi and big landlord Yang Yunzhong, and his subsequent execution. Besides Yang, there had been little difference in wealth between the landlords, the rich peasants, and the middle and lower-middle peasants; they had all been poor compared to the rice growing villages further up or down the valley. The real winners were those with nothing who had been forced to sell their labor as porters on the steep mountain paths connecting remote villages to the city of Ya'an.Now they had land.Not everything had gone smoothly, of course. Investigations into class backgrounds by outside workteams had, on several occasions, served as catalysts for feuding between the dominant Wu clan and the rival Yangs. Nor had everyone greeted the higher levels of collectivization in 1956 and 1957 with enthusiasm.

Still, villagers saw that the Party officials had carried out the building of the new system conscientiously, gathering information on local conditions and connecting with the people through ""consultation with the masses" in a way that they had never experienced before. The Party itself had kept its word to reconstruct China, felt locally by the construction of a road linking Xiakou to the Taiping township and on to Ya'an. Perhaps even more important to villagers looking back from the vantage of 1958 was the sense that, as a song of the period put it, "the people's status is high" (renmin diwei gao). The whole period since Liberation had been one of unfolding possibilities.