| Titre | Rights in people, rights in land : concepts of customary property in late imperial China | |
|---|---|---|
| Auteur | Sucheta Mazumdar | |
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Revue | Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident |
| Numéro | no 23, 2001 La coutume et la norme en Chine et au Japon | |
| Rubrique / Thématique | II. La coutume, vecteur d'identités ethniques ou sociales |
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| Page | 89-107 | |
| Résumé anglais |
The essay investigates how the legal term "property" elaborated in contracts and deeds can be understood in social practice in eighteenth and nineteenth century China. As "property" is better understood as a set of relations or "rights" rather than the material object, the existence of contracts for land cannot be taken at face value. Rather than tools of a market-mediated exchange society, these contracts were stitches in the webs of reciprocity and redistribution peculiar to rural society. By way of comparison to the issue of land rights, the essay examines another form of "property", namely, rights in humans. These questions are explored in the context of two very dissimilar geographical areas : Guangdong Delta in coastal south China, with a dominant pattern of intensive small-holder commercialized agriculture, and land-locked Anhui (Huizhou prefecture) in central China with a dominant pattern of serf-labor based commercialization. Source : Éditeur (via Persée) |
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| Article en ligne | http://www.persee.fr/web/revues/home/prescript/article/oroc_0754-5010_2001_num_23_23_1137 |
