Locality, identity, and geography: Translocal practices of Huizhou merchants in late imperial China.

摘要

This dissertation is a study of cultural formation in late imperial China from the perspective of spatial mobility. Based on the recent scholarship of commercialization and local history, it asks how the broadening spatial movement impacted the existing institutions and practices such as lineage, local identity, and geographical imagination.; To capture the horizontal and relational nature of these dynamic processes across space, while at the same time recognizing the importance of highly developed local communities in late imperial China, I use the term translocality. It is defined as the frequent and periodic movements between local places by people who were deeply rooted in local societies back home. Based on research on the merchants from the Huizhou Prefecture, I argue that translocality involves not only motion across local boundaries, but also the transformation of ideas, practices, and institutions that had developed either in local arenas or by the state with regard to the localized communities. Thus I demonstrate that, first, local identity was constructed in relation to other places rather than just the hierarchical order of the state administration; second, lineage practice extended beyond the local arena and incorporated kinsmen in two or more distant places, resulting in the incongruence of kinship identity and local identity, third, the merchants' geographical imagination of the empire deviated from the official vision of a vertically organized spatial hierarchy, representing it instead as a web of horizontally interconnected places, finally, the methods with which the Chinese imperial state managed bureaucratic recruitment and local administration were also modified to cope with these increasing spatial movements of its population.; Recognizing, with local history, the diversity of local environments in China, I try to dispose of the (sometimes inadvertent) implication that these diverse locales were discrete. By highlighting the interconnectedness that was created by the movement of people, this dissertation brings out the social spaces created between local places, and sheds light on the dynamic processes by which the understanding of locality, the formation of place-related identities, the modes of geographical imagination, as well as the state's administration of spatial order all went through significant transformations.