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2 - Ghosts are not connexions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2009

Charles Stafford
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

I recall having selected Angang as a good location for fieldwork partly on the basis of an illusion, namely the illusion of stillness. On summer days when the clouds break and the hot sun beats down on the village lanes, people mostly stay inside. Occasionally someone goes past, perhaps a woman slowly pushing a cart loaded with greenery for her goats and deer. An old Daoist, sweating and serious, bicycles along and ignores her. Children in blue uniforms silently read in their classrooms, the school-gates framed by the steep hills behind them. A puff of smoke rises from the Ma Co temple, the remnant of some private grandmotherly act of devotion, while a fishing boat makes its quiet progress out of the harbour and towards the Pacific, the ‘ocean of great peace’ (taipingyang). Then a blast of noise: a string of firecrackers is set off, celebrating who knows what, or a motorcyclist races at full speed through the middle of the village, sending chickens and dogs into a momentary frenzy, but apparently leaving everyone else unimpressed.

This shatters the illusion of stillness, and any adequate description of Angang would have to do the same, for movement (of people, spirits and forces) is a fundamental concern of the people there. I have said that schooling is seen not so much as a matter of learning as of competing. But it could also be seen as a matter of moving, because one of the most obvious effects of the educational system is that many students move (out of home, village, etc.) in order to study and to work.

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Chapter
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The Roads of Chinese Childhood
Learning and Identification in Angang
, pp. 33 - 55
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1995

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