Asia Blog: China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam

• Filial sons and chaste widows
• Arches, temples to Village worthies
• Symbolic means of reproducing / maintaining social order
• Fixed administrative size v.s. growing population
• Symbolic Capital

Having an arch built for a chaste widow involves finding someone good at manipulating literary illusions to write an official report describing the young woman’s piety towards the elders and all her virtue.  The center of devotion should be her husband’s new parents—especially the mother in law.  Then, at some time, her husband must die an untimely death.  The daughter then has a number of options:

1. Caring for the mother in law
2. Resistance to remarriage
3. Resistance to suitors
4. Possible attempts at suicide
5. Preservation of chastity

These mirror the filial son stories from older times with a dramatic physical sacrifice required.  Then, story in hand, the local administration verifies the truth of the story, and embellishes it for the sake of his own advancement in the government, to catch the eye of people higher up, who are more educated.  As it moves up the levels to the governor-generals, it’s been enhanced with allusion all the way.  These men will launch another investigation, and if it turns out well, he will send a request to the emperor to build or rededicate an arch of temple.

The emperors saw so many of these things (perhaps three hours a day), that they rejected them wholesale, annotating their margins with critical comments.  Eventually, law was passed that made embellishment punishable by death.  In spite of the throne’s unwillingness to do this, they keep granting these symbolic recognitions.  This is happening alongside troubled financial times, as revenues stayed along the bottom of the government.  The government used monopolies of salt and other goods to bolster their funding, but it was never enough.  Graft and corruption became part of finance.

Pierre Bourdieu introduced the notion of symbolic capital.  Marxists say that everything is economic; Bourdieu said that can’t explain all human behavior.  For example, the guy who can’t afford to buy a Ferrari but does anyway.  Well, Bourdieu says we’re in competition over symbolic resources as well as capital resources.  The Ming and Qing are good examples of this, because a family can invest time into symbolic functions—feasts, the exam system, piety.  Then, the system of erecting monuments to improve a family’s symbolic capital can be leveraged by the government to use them as leaders to mobilize resources for various enterprises.

What is the practice of foot-binding and why did it come about?  In small regions of the Song, very young daughters feet were bend-toe-to-heel and kept tightly wrapped, which breaks and wraps the foot-bone in.   It left women crippled and in pain their entire life.  For some reason, it takes off in the elite of the Ming.  There are regions where it never becomes popular (the Hakka).  For families that wanted to be socially upwardly mobile, it was a sign of affluence.  It said, “our daughters are viewed as products to be sold via marriage, so we invest in them to make better wives.”  It’s also a marker of the submission of the women to their families.  This tradition kept women inside houses, with only the men allowed to walk freely towards the outside.  The social role of women has been completely reduced to the background.  For 400-500 years, footbinding was the practice, and no mainstream voice argues against it.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 13th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is tagged with graft and corruption, physical sacrifice, filial piety, pierre bourdieu, governor generals, filial sons, symbolic capital, new parents, critical comments, financial times, local administration, embellishment, recognitions, maintaining social order, monopolies, untimely death, allusion, mother in law, chastity, suitors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback.

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