村落研究:解说模式与社会事实

In his research on the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican period, Prasenjit Duara, an American scholar who emigrated to U.S. from India, put forward the famous concept “cultural nexus of power” as a kind of explanatory model for state local society relations. This model has tremendous influence on the academic studies of Chinese social history, sociology, and anthropology. This paper mainly reacts to Prasenjit Duara's village level research in North China Plain, critically evaluates his rural studies, and has a dialogue with him focusing on the issues of village nature, kinship space, and state brokerage.