Resources And Rules:A Study On The Social Transformation Practice Of Gazha Village

China has entered a new period of socialist modernization,and the problem of unbalanced and inadequate development has become the major factor constraining social development.Coordinating urban and rural development is an important part of China’s comprehensive construction of a modern socialist country.The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China proposes the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy and the rural society has ushered in unprecedented development opportunities and entered an important stage of social transformation.How to combine tradition with modernity based on local characteristics is the main topic of rural social transformation research.In this paper,Gazha village,Gannan Tibetan Autonomous Prefecture,Gansu Province is selected to study the social transformation practice of plateau villages based on the duality of structure and energy,resources and rules.The resource scarcity and ecological diversity of plateau villages are not only the constraints of social transformation,but also the agents of social transformation.Utilizing the initiative of plateau villages,continuously optimizing the resource allocation pattern,and allocating resources in a larger space are the core issues of social transformation.This study is based on the method of ethnography,through a 14-month field survey,using participatory observation,in-depth interviews and questionnaires to obtain the first-hand information,and combining with the local chronicles,historical documents and existing academic research to study and analyze the rural social transformation specifically from various practices in historical space,production space,kinship space,symbolic space and organizational space.In the historical space,Gazha village went through the tribal system,chieftain system and temple system to enter the socialist society.The transformation of the land system from feudal aristocratic ownership to socialist communal ownership has given people equal rights to use land and has led to a huge leap in social development.This historical process is the process of local society entering into the whole national distribution system.Historical space is the premise for the current social transformation.In the production space,the villagers’ agro-pastoral production revolves around three spaces of settlement,pasture and borrowed grazing land.Under the condition of limited valley resources,through spatial rotation to break through the resource constraints,the village has achieved the effective allocation of agro-pastoral resources.Production space is the material basis for social transformation.In the kinship space,the family structure is mainly the expanded family,and the intermarriage scope is concentrated within the valley,which is closely related to the local agro-pastoral production pattern.In terms of the forms of gifts in human relations,khada+money is the most common form.The monetization trend of gift is becoming more and more obvious,at the same time the symbolic meaning carried by the khada becomes broader,and gifts in physical forms shrink between close relatives.Kinship space is the rule basis for social transformation.In the symbolic space,people perform the rules of resource sharing through rituals.Different units of mountain god’s ritual,Tsuowa,village and valley,represent different ranges of resource sharing and dispute regulation.Dunba fast ceremony and Mani chanting activity,on the other hand,regulate social norms of cooperation and competition through the convergence and dispersion of things.Symbolic space is the cultural basis for social transformation.In the organizational space,with the implementation of national rural revitalization strategy and the construction of ecological civilization,using tourism resource development,environmental protection associations and cooperatives as carriers,new organizational forms are established beyond the village level to enable villages to integrate and utilize resources in a broader range.Environmental protection associations and cooperatives have become new carriers for rural areas to undertake the guidance of national policies and market mechanism,becoming a key area of social transformation.Organizational space is the institutional guarantee of social transformation.In general,from the perspective of the overall living space composed of historical space,production space,kinship space,symbolic space and organizational space,the social transformation of Gazha village is based on traditional agro-pastoral production and the values emphasis on collective collaboration.Historical space and production space are the premise and basis of social transformation;kinship space and symbolic space are the local resource allocation pattern formed in the long-term social transformation,while organizational space is the carrier of new resource allocation pattern formed by combining rural relationship network with national policies and market mechanism.From the theoretical perspective of resources and rules,rural social transformation is a structuration process of resources and rules.The structure has the duality of resources and rules,and resources are composed of allocative resources and authoritative resources,while rules have duality of regulative and constitutive.Social transformation needs to give full play of the allocative nature of resources and the constitutive nature of rules,as well as utilize the authoritative nature of resources and the regulative nature of rules.The key point of social transformation of Gazha village lies in the local authoritative resources and the constitutive rules of national policies and market mechanism.Local authoritative resources are formed through long-term regularization process on the basis of allocative resources,while the constitutive rules of national policies and market mechanism is transformed into local new allocative resources through resourcization process,which is done through production space.Production space and other spaces interact through resourcization and regularization,among which organizational space,as the most authoritative resources with constitutive nature,renews the local resource allocation pattern and forms new authoritative resources.Production space and organizational space as two important spaces for resource and rule transformation,connecting local and nation/market,become the main field of practice from social integration to system integration.In a word,the social transformation of plateau villages is a process by which the villages,under the guidance of the national policies,apply the market mechanism on the basis of the rural relationship network,to form development patterns and lifestyles based on local characteristics through the structuration process of resources and rules.