More effort must be made to protect the local and particular, critical as are they to what underpins our sense of nationhood, argues anthropologist W. E. MATTHEWS. And we should look to China’s example of the Space of the People for inspiration.
It is too easy today to forget that a nation is not an abstract concept but the sum-total of all the people and relationships that exist within it: a collective of the institutions, roles and connections that foster livelihood, meaning, and, at the core, a shared sense of local identity and community. The nation does not only exist in the flag, the institutions of government, or economic statistics. It exists in the local pub and its open mic night, the independent corner shop, the town football club, the church second-hand book sale, the allotment association, the volunteer friends of the local historic building or nature reserve – even, sometimes, in the much-maligned youth centre.
These are all crucial elements of place, rural, urban, or suburban. They are also things that have long been subject to denigration through policies born of the pretensions of governments and corporate elites distant from local conditions and with gazes turned to the universal at the expense of the particular. This is an inherent tendency of modernity, of overrationalised and centralised governance and businesses whose loyalty to profit far outstrips that to the communities, local or national, of which they are part.
The more that those tendencies continue, the more the locally particular is either made generic or outright destroyed – and the harder it becomes for local voices to be heard. Remaining local festivals, grassroots music and regional foods are part of a tradition once far more widespread. Many aspects of it come under the rubric ‘folk’ – folk music, folk arts, folklore – but this tradition extends through chains of transmitted local knowledge to trades, skills, food, and community history. These are kept alive because people feel attached to them – not always because they are profitable – and they often offer some of the last spaces in our society that don’t rely on consumer transactions. There is a word in Mandarin Chinese which encompasses this idea: minjian. Translated literally it means ‘among the people’, though I prefer the slightly more liberal translation of it as ‘the space of the people’.
In my work as an anthropologist, I studied popular – minjian – religion in China in the form of divination, and the role of this knowledge in people’s decision-making. I spent many of my evenings with local friends at a small restaurant one of them had set up so that he and his friends would have a place to play folk music while enjoying local food. In doing both, I met various people who would be described as grassroots intellectuals. Among all these people, minjian was a common self-descriptor of what they were doing. Wenhua zai minjian: culture exists in the space of the people.
Why is the idea of minjian so popular in China? In the People’s Republic, civil society is entirely permeated by the Chinese Communist Party, which exercises control and oversight of that domain just as it does over government. This control extends to the active suppression of any form of organisation which attempts to be independent of its orbit. It is associated with a rhetoric of legitimacy and illegitimacy. In the realm of religion, the Party recognises five traditions – Daoism, Buddhism, Protestantism, Catholicism, and Islam – provided they remain obeisant. Minjian religion – the ‘popular religion’ of local temples, festivals, and day-to-day community – is not one of these, though it draws on Daoist, Buddhist, and Confucian traditions. As such, in the eyes of the Party-state, it is often illegitimate – superstition, not religion. And yet, it persists.
It persists alongside minjian music played by retired men and women in local restaurants, alongside minjian bloggers and writers, alongside minjian festivals. It persists because in a nation where Party, government, and civil society are one, and combine to relentlessly pursue the to make things generic, sweeping away street stalls, moving along roadside fortune tellers, and creating so many iterations of the same manufactured ‘old town’ tourist streets, there must be a counter.
The people will talk to each other, and they will transmit culture as they do so – and while the Party may seek ever-greater control and exercise this in part by emphasising the low-status, anti-scientific backwardness of all sorts of practices that come after the adjective minjian, people are creative, and they know how to navigate the machine, even if that means playing along, or regularly entertaining (or even telling the fortune of) the local Party Secretary.
Minjian persists in the wake of a history, in living memory, of near-inconceivable cultural destruction from within under Maoism, and back through several generations beyond living memory to an existential cultural crisis brought about by the Qing empire’s encounter with Britain, followed by Japan and other colonial powers. The Chinese traditions that survive today in the People’s Republic do so in no small part because they were kept alive in the space of the people.
The ‘space of the people’ is a concept that politics in the UK sorely needs. We might be content deluding ourselves that civil society is enough – that in the modern age the best check on government and the greatest vessel of our culture is to be found in NGOs, universities, museums, and the like. These are, of course, important – but they are insufficient, and especially so if they lean into a high-status, socially destructive ideology which also influences the instruments of government. The more the local is displaced or made generic, here not by a Party-state but by a combination of consumerism, hyper-rationalism and political indifference, the fewer chains of transmission continue.
In the past, the ‘folk’ domain represented an alternative – the ‘radical tradition’ whose radicalism consists not only in divergence from the political establishment but from ‘high culture’ as the preserve of elite politics and civil society. The decline of that tradition amounts to a loss not only of local vitality but also of a powerful alternative source of knowledge and political action. Our cultural heritage in Britain is one in which, historically, this tradition has played a key role through interaction with civil society and the state. Its diminishment amounts to a major cultural diminishment. Today in Britain, the chains of knowledge and meaningful community relationships, insofar as they remain, are subject to neglect, ridicule, or corporate repackaging as ‘artisanal’, a term designating the full absorption and breakdown of the particular and its transformation into the generic – our equivalent of China’s consumerist ‘old town’ tourist streets.
For culture in its fullest sense to survive, it is vital that the chains of transmission which make possible the character and meaning of places, and the sense of being part of something worth being part of, also survive. They are not to be seen as backward irrelevancies to bulldoze in favour of a generic declining high street, to be replaced with cut-and-paste mass produced artisanal ‘products’, or to be preserved in aspic as lifeless examples of a backward past. The nation is an aggregate of the people who make it up, and its culture an aggregate of all of those local chains of transmission. These flourish best when they are allowed to evolve – when people have the space and liberty to pursue them among themselves.
Culture thus understood might seem alien in a world of universalist politics, virtue-signalling, global social media, and consumerism. Culture thus understood is often low-status – it involves concern for and action to protect and foster one’s immediate community, whether supporting local businesses, caring for – or even talking to – one’s neighbours, coming together to save churches from demolition or pubs from closure, or even creating and using spaces that do not require the exchange of money. Culture thus understood remains the basic fabric of society – a culture that exists in the space of the people.
