About

Project history

The ethnography is a joint effort of a historian (John Flower) and an anthropologist (Pamela Leonard). It is based on the extensive fieldwork research in Xikaou Village we have carried out since 1991. We began working on the digital version of the ethnography in 2001 at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, refining prototypes of the site structure and digital mapping component, and using the website in courses. A sabbatical year in Ya'an in 2004 allowed us to expand the project's geographical scope and to develop our research materials into multimedia "artifacts." A 2007 NEH Summer Stipend enabled John to work on GIS mapping, and in 2008, an ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship funded a yearlong collaboration with the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia to create the website's core information structures, relational database, and overall design.

Project goals

The ethnography addresses issues of environment, cultural landscape, and local history in the Chinese countryside, and it explores new ways of presenting a body of research in digital form, online.

History, environment, and agency in the moral landscape

The story of Moral Landscape in a Sichuan Mountain Village is the dramatic transformation of the village's social and physical environment, primarily over the course of the past century. At the horizon of villagers' memories are stories of the warfare and chaos in the republican period (1930s and 1940s), during which older networks with their landed gentry, imperial connections, and protective peasant associations were reworked into new power relations based on national military networks, local secret societies, banditry, guns, and opium. With the coming of the revolution, we explore the ways in which the national objectives of the Maoist program articulated and conflicted with local interests and local desires for social change. The new regime successfully addressed what villagers perceived as the state's moral obligations for basic infrastructure development, but the extreme centralization of power revolutionized agricultural production with disastrous results: nearly half the population of the village died in the early 1960s during the famine following the mass collectivization of the Great Leap Forward. After 1981, the second land reform re-introduced family-based production in a new context of fast-paced changes associated with China's integration into the global economy.

Throughout this period, the village and its broader region have undergone truly radical environmental changes. Before 1949, the North Road was just a footpath, and the upland river valley still held rich stands of timber and abundant wildlife, from man-eating leopards to over twenty varieties of edible fish. By the early 1990s, the forest cover and wild animals had all but completely vanished, the rivers had been mined of their stone resources, the soil was thin and dependent on chemical inputs, the steep hillsides were prone to erosion, and new sources of pollution threatened basic water resources. Changes over the last few years have been particularly far reaching, with massive dam projects to generate electricity for the national power grid, and development policies that have redefined this region an “ecological zone” in which farming is being replaced by reforestation, eco-tourism, and wage labor.

In trying to understand the significance of the environmental changes that have taken place in this valley, we frame issues of environment and economic development within local cultural practices and historical knowledge. How do local people draw on their historical understanding of place in adapting to economic development policies introduced from outside? How do those development policies in turn influence their livelihoods, and change their understanding of the landscape? The digital ethnography's research on the understanding of place focuses on the meanings local people have ascribed to and inscribed in their landscape; thus we analyze stone monuments, tombs, temple stele, shrines, bridges, road markers, as well as soil, waterways, and “fengshui trees” as concrete texts embodying local knowledge and expressing moral values. Landscape, then, is more than the physical setting of development; it speaks to development discourse by disclosing the complexity of local self-understandings enacted and gathered in place.

Ways of belonging: new village studies and mapping the cultural landscape

What is a village in China? A wide range of scholarship has addressed this central question, from the perspectives of regional systems analysis (Skinner 1964) to cultural landscape studies (Knapp 1992, Feuchtwang 1997). Our approach tries to give priority to villagers' conscious representations, analyses, and understandings of their relationship to “their place.” The resulting geographical scope goes beyond the village itself to encompass the communities along the North Road, running through an upland valley forty kilometers from the county seat of Ya'an to the White Horse Temple, and, under some conditions, extends to include the broader eight county Ya'an region. Within these geographical parameters, our project addresses the issue of attachment to place and identity formation, exploring sites of interaction and memory common to the villagers beyond administrative boundaries. These sites, vividly presented through an archive of multimedia artifacts, are the source materials through which our project aims to more precisely define and understand the landscape of the village.

Beyond Revolution: an inductive approach to local history

Another fundamental goal of our project's landscape approach is to reframe modern Chinese history away from the master narrative of the nation and toward local stories of the grassroots. (Duara 1995, Prazniak 1999, Bianco 2001). How do the villagers of Xiakou understand their history? What memories and meanings from the past still animate their place, and how are they remembered and explained? How does that local understanding of history reiterate or differ from historical narratives based on the nation-state, China, as subject? While there are excellent village-based histories (e.g. Chan et al 1992, Friedman et al 1991, Potter and Potter 1990) that focus on the local impact of national events, particularly the Chinese revolution, in Moral Landscape in a Sichuan Mountain Village we try to adopt a more localized, inductive approach. The historical scope of our project thus largely corresponds to the way villagers mark the turning points in their past, based on their personal experiences in local places and marking events that fall within their horizon of memory. Our primary goal is not to attempt an "objective reconstruction" of local history, but rather to explore historical memory and to suggest the continued relevance of the past in lived experience of the present (R. Watson 1994, Jing 1996, Muegglar 2001). The historical sources for the project's essays and artifacts are oral histories drawn from interviews with older residents of the village; information found in the gazetteers of Ya'an county (xianzhi 1924, 1938, 1993), Yazhou prefecture (fuzhi 1739), as well as the old and new gazetteers of surrounding counties in the Ya'an region; and local texts such as family genealogies, and tomb, temple, and monument inscriptions.

Structure, content, and logic of the digital ethnography

The ethnography's narrative is presented in six thematic chapters—History, Landscape, Belief, Folklife, Authority, and Work. Chapters are not airtight divisions, but rather groupings that highlight the dominant themes of the essays within them. 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. The interactive maps under "Places" offer spatial representations of sites in the cultural landscape, dynamically presented through GIS layers, sorted by kind and historical period. Both the maps and essays are illustrated and documented by “artifacts,” which appear as icons (in the case of maps) or thumbnail graphics (in the case of essas) linked to multimedia content—photographs, video and audio recordings, image maps, diagrams, supplemental texts, primary source documents, and field notes. The artifact frames this multimedia content within supplementary fields, including description, transcription, translation, analysis, and in relation to particular places, people, features, texts, and events. Artifacts float free of chapters and essays—they may be referenced by one or more essays or they may have no special associations, but they serve as a flexible narrative tissue linking essays and artifacts together, and they highlight thematic overlaps and interconnections within the ethnography. The essay/artifact structure allows us to experiment with different approaches to conceptualizing and presenting the ethnographic research. For example, artifact-centered essays are intentional inversions of the more familiar text-driven narrative presentation, and they point the way to readers who want to engage the ethnography more interactively. To enable that level of engagement, we have assigned keywords to the media objects, features, people, texts, and essay subsections, making the whole site fully searchable through the database.

The overall approach we want to adopt in the digital ethnography is to maximize freedom of intellectual movement through a thick set of primary sources and interpretive essays. The reader is thus liberated from a fixed “authorial” linear narrative, and enabled to move through a tissue of alternative narratives that are “opened” both by disclosing the source material on which our interpretations are based (i.e., artifacts) and by the interactive functions of the maps and database (i.e. search functions). At the same time, the reader is not simply free floating in an inchoate mass of information. All the artifacts comprise media that are embedded within a contextual framework of data, and the selected keyword approach to searching, along with the set number of map layer variables integrated with the essays and artifacts, creates a guiding structure for the digital ethnography as a whole.

Project Documentation

One of our main goals is to provide documentation on the whole development process of this project, from grant application to database design to GIS mapping to final online implementation. Below we make available the schema and editorial policy documents that govern the database, as well as the original grant applications to the ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship and to the NEH Summer Stipend program.

Credits and acknowledgments

ACLS, IATH, UNC Charlotte, NEH Summer Stipend