10
MARJORIE TOPLEY
certain groups with different secular or even religious goals? And could religion ever provide a rallying point for a total community or set of neighbouring communities under what conditions would this be possible? In this paper I want to see how far data available to me in the literature and sometimes my own research notes, enables examination of such questions for rural society a century ago.1
Rural China was by no means homogeneous in the nineteenth century. It was dotted with villages of different size and composition: some, particularly in the southeast, consisted of single lineages or "clans” — units with members tracing descent to a common ancestor; others comprised two or more lineages or branches of lineages perhaps being linked with similar units elsewhere. There were communities which were scarcely “villages" in the physical sense in mountainous areas particularly, there were groups of scattered farmsteads and there were some communities on the flatter plains which consisted of villages which had expanded and grown into each other forming large units of population. In many areas there were, also, numbers of dislocated peasants living outside villages and difficult to organize and control from village centres.
Religion entered into the organization of such communities everywhere to some extent. The nineteenth century was a time when villages had to provide a great deal in the way of their own control and often appealed to religious ideas to do so. The central administration was functioning less and less efficiently and itself used religious ideas in order to foster solidarities with the rural units.
Space does not permit me to deal with all known forms of religious and semi-religious association in rural life which are relevant to problems of cohesion. I will discuss four kinds here. Organized on a local basis were: cults operated by kin-groups and connecting individuals to their ancestors by virtue of their position in such groups; cults fostered by the State and connecting individuals to other kinds of dead, seeking thereby to inspire feelings of loyalty to its cause; and cults dedicated to popular gods of concern to man as member of a local community or of a grouping found at the local level. Cutting across local territorial units to some extent and connecting man to spiritual
Page 15
Page 16