Traditional Social Merit-commending Activitaties And Grass-roots Community Controlling

From the angle of social evaluation theory, this thesis mainly deals with the historic process of traditional social merit-commending activitaties in China and has found the passage through which the traditional social authoritive organization imbued their nucleus values and commom people acceped the moral concepts,so that the inner relationship between the moral exemplar rewarding activities and grass-roots community controlling.By summing up and analyzing the historical facts,we can deduce the process in which how the traditional social evaluation and mass judgement interacted,and also we can outline the basic model of the control over the grass-roots community by the traditional Chinese authoritative organizations.The whole paper consists of six chapters.Chaper one starts with the introduction of the subject including the angle of view,the sphere and the significance of studies, as well as study materials.Chapter two mainly deals with the supporting system of social movality,discussing the system from the view-point of ethnology and standards of exemplary person rewarding respectively,and based on the social evaluatoin theory,pointing out that the supporting system of exemplary person rewarding serves as authoritative evaluation activities and mass evaluation activities.Chapter three deals with the activities of commending and rewarding big families living together from generation to generation and the control of lower level stratum.This chapter first distinguishes and defines some easily-confusing concepts such as 'family', 'clan', 'the clan of inhabitation of different clans' and 'grand household', and then the chapter probes into the social evaluation activities in the development of big families living together from generation to generation,so that the big families living together for generations,which indicated that the principal goal of big family rewarding was in fact to recognize the legality of the controlling power of the big families when the local authority was formed in the area the big families inhabited;at the same time, the rewarding activities could be used by the state as a special honor to exert its influence on the folk custom and life of the whole society.Chapter four is focused on the filial piety commending and the control over the grass-roots community.The principal studies include two aspects.The state's organizations commend and reward filial piety and the common people worshiped this moral character,which resulted from the combination of authoritative evaluation and popular judgement of grass-roots people.The essence of 'filial piety'commending lies in applying the filial piety to educate and bring people under control so as to pacify people and enjoy their support.Chapter five is focused on the women's virginity and loyality and control over the grass-roots community.By scrutinizing authoritative evaluation of the virginity and common people's response to the main stream outlook on the virginity in Chinese history ,we find that women were not born with the outlook on the virginity,but they were imbued with it during their life time.The widow's remarring had been defamed for a long time,so the 'chaste or virginal woman', who remained faithful to her husband even after his death,had to accept the outlook imposed on the women's will and personality,so that the authorities could control them completely.Chapter six mainly deals with the model of lower level community control,i.e. the authoritative evaluation was inculcated on common people and the grass-roots stratum willingly accepted such activities. As analyzed in the chapter above, we can conclude that the model of the authoritative organizations' control over the grass-roots community is that the authorities inculcated their nucleus values, by means of the stratums of wealth and good position and, in turn, the lower social groups were willing to accept the values as their code of conduct. Though the interaction of the authoritative evaluation and mass judgment, the state powerful influence could, by means of commending and rewarding activities, permeate the grass-roots community.