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Having now put forward the point of view that the village, the concept of "closeness" (chan) and the corporate cult of the dead all have to do with the principles of locality rather than ancestral worship in the strict sense of tsung (or descent for that matter), it now remains to explain in what sense this notion of locality is necessarily the product of history. All ideologies, customs and institutions, if they are indeed meaningful to the people who practice them, must be seen within the context of a kind of living history. Without speculating whether this history has a "life" of its own or whether it is the inevitable consequence of some evolving structure or process, I think it would be foolhardy to take for granted that these principles of locality, systematic as they may be in conceptual terms, should be reflective of some irreducible, static notion of culture, especially as the ABCs of Chinese society and civilization. The practical difficulties of pursuing empirical research in this regard aside, I think there is sufficient basis to believe that all of the above phenomena can be seen as the product of a particular and evolving social milieu (not to be confused with the functionalist concept of social structure) in broader socio-political terms. The diversity of local phenomena seen over an ethnographic spectrum at any one time as well
as the peculiarity, even ephemerality, of these phenomena in a history demands that we look at these deeper issues, difficult as they are to characterize precisely. There is thus a need, as Faure's work clearly demonstrates, to look at local history. However, unlike him, I do not think that local history can be understood simply by looking at events and personnages as they take place “on the ground”. Works like those by Karl Polanyi (1944), the Annales historians, Clifford Geertz (1963), Barrington Moore (1966), Eric Wolf (1982), etc., have cogently shown that local events and institutions can be seen as part of a larger process which may be conscious or non-conscious to the actors themselves. What is needed then is a wider vision of what constitutes historical “change”. Faure's book begins with this promise but in the final analysis falls far short of expectation. Rather than being the open and shut case that he makes it out to be, the study of Chinese local history and society is in my opinion still very much an open field,
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Allen J. Chun