ON FENGSHUI IN SOUTHEASTERN CHINA
79
tion was limited as the population pressure increased in the two other land-owning communities as well. Generally, new land was not available. As time passed people of Plum Grove Village reached the optimum point where they had to look for new alternatives to traditional local production. The men started to emigrate, mostly to Southeast Asia. But the prospects of these areas were very different from those in America. Around 1910 some ten men left for Nanyang. People have never heard from them since. It is supposed that they were killed by the effects of the damp climate. But the movement had to continue. Later emigrants set out for Singapore but they returned as poor as they went, and there was no accumulation of capital at all. Today it is very apparent that Plum Grove Village is a much poorer place than Big Stream Village.
What has been exchanged between the two lineages Zhang and Wu is not their respective localization, but the image of their relative prosperity. What is communicated in the myth is that the economic situation of one settlement has improved while that of another has declined. The shift of the respective conditions is referred to as emanating from natural influences.
Fengshui is not just a way to communicate, but is a believed-in-order. In Big Stream Village one can still find traces of earlier attempts to minimize negative influences; large stones inscribed with the conventional trigram — yinyang patterns and series of characters have been erected outside some of the houses in order to avert negative forces in the natural surroundings. The four character series are completely meaningless to villagers, who nowadays know nothing about the stones, except that they realize that they have been erected there for fengshui purposes. It is apparent that special knowledge is required to make sense out of a combination of words meaning 'purple', 'minimal', 'first month', and 'illuminate'. These stones, however, are evidence that people in Big Stream Village were really concerned about their bad fengshui position at one time. But this aspect cannot be separated from the aspect of communication. The stones carried a message telling about misfortune. They made the poverty of the locality explicit and understood by others. Nothing comparable to these stones is to be found in Plum Grove Village. In the latter place they now explain their decline, in a less explicit way, by referring to the bad
ON FENGSHUI IN SOUTHEASTERN CHINA
79
tion was limited as the population pressure increased in the two other land-owning communities as well. Generally, new land was not available. As time passed people of Plum Grove Village reached the optimum point where they had to look for new alter- natives to traditional local production. The men started to emi- grate, mostly to Southeast Asia. But the prospects of these areas were very different from those in America. Around 1910 some ten men left for Nanyang. People have never heard from them since. It is supposed that they were killed by the effects of the damp climate. But the movement had to continue. Later emigrants set out for Singapore but they returned as poor as they went, and there was no accumulation of capital at all. Today it is very apparent that Plum Grove Village is a much poorer place than Big Stream Village.
What has been exchanged between the two lineages Zhang and Wu is not their respective localization, but the image of their re- lative prosperity. What is communicated in the myth is that the economic situation of one settlement has improved while that of another has declined. The shift of the respective conditions is referred to as emanating from natural influences.
Fengshui is not just a way to communicate, but is a believed- in-order. In Big Stream Village one can still find traces of earlier attempts to minimize negative influences; large stones inscribed with the conventional trigram — yinyang patterns and series of characters have been erected outside some of the houses in order to avert negative forces in the natural surroundings. The four character series are completely meaningless to villagers, who nowa- days know nothing about the stones, except that they realize that they have been erected there for fengshui purposes. It is apparent that special knowledge is required to make sense out of a com- bination of words meaning 'purple', 'minimal', 'first month', and 'illuminate'. These stones, however, are evidence that people in Big Stream Village were really concerned about their bad fêngshui position at one time. But this aspect cannot be separated from the aspect of communication. The stones carried a message telling about misfortune. They made the poverty of the locality explicit and understood by others. Nothing comparable to these stones is to be found in Plum Grove Village. In the latter place they now explain their decline, in a less explicit way, by referring to the bad
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