Ji'an Literati and the Local in Song-Yuan-Ming China (review)

Neo-Confucian social thought accorded unprecedented importance to the local community as a crucial intermediate zone of social action between the family on one hand and the state on the other. In the Southern Song period, and indeed for much of the late imperial era, it was precisely in this arena that Neo-Confucian literati (shi 士, or shidafu 士大夫) believed they could exert their moral authority in ways that would truly transform society. In this intriguing and innovative book, Anne Gerritsen addresses how the literati of Ji'an 吉安 prefecture (in Jiangxi province) sought to define their relationship to the local community so as to enhance their roles in mediating between universal Confucian ideals and local institutions and practices. In contrast to earlier studies, Gerritsen is principally concerned with conceptualizations of community and the place of literati within it-with, as she puts it, "ways of being local"-rather than the institutional legacy of the literati activism inspired by the Neo-Confucian movement. The long time span from the Southern Song to the late Ming covered in this study permits Gerritsen to trace both the continuities and disparities in conceptions of community otherwise obscured by the limited perspective of the dynastic cycle that still dominates much scholarship on imperial China.

Gerritsen identifies three stages in the evolution of the Ji'an literati's thinking about localism during the five centuries from 1100 to 1600. During the first phase, spanning the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties, writings about the locality conspicuously focused on temples and religious culture. Literati cast themselves in the roles of "guardians of local morals, as teachers and spiritual leaders, as translators of local practice" (p. 98). During the second phase, the early Ming period, the unparalleled success of Ji'an men on the national political stage drew their focus away from Ji'an to the capital. Gerritsen contends that local identity still mattered to capital officials despite their absence from Ji'an, but their relationship to the local community changed. No longer intimately involved in local cultural life, capital officials nonetheless commanded immense political and social prestige that gave their voices significant weight. Finally, in the late Ming, Ji'an literati lost their prominent position in the national government and once again turned their attention to their home region. But although late Ming literati again took an active role in founding and shaping local institutions, they typically addressed intellectual and social issues with an eye toward a national audience rather a purely local one.

Gerritsen emphasizes the malleability of literati conceptions of locality; depending on time and circumstance, individual literati offered "differing, conflicting, and overlapping answers" (p. 13) to the question of local identity and its significance. At the same time she posits a basic distinction in conceptions of localism between the Song-Yuan era on one hand and the mid- and late-Ming period on the other. In her view, the resurgence of the authority of the central state in the early Ming (and the exceptionally prominent place of Ji'an literati at the highest echelons of the imperial state at that time) fundamentally altered the scope and nature of localist identity and activism. The return to localist strategies in the mid and late Ming did not simply reprise the earlier Song-Yuan pattern, but rather assumed new forms reflecting the altered relationship between literati and society.

The notions of community Gerritsen finds in literati writings displayed a distinctly elite vision of the relationship between society and state. Indeed, in defining community "as a dynamic process, as an imagined construct, as a vision that existed in the minds of the people of Southern Song, Yuan, and Ming Ji'an, rather than as an actual state of being or a social-organizational device" (p. 62), Gerritsen is speaking of imagined communities constructed as much by history, myth, and memory as by actual social relationships. Correspondingly, "community" is less a realm of social action than a...