Money, the Mountain, and State Power in a Naxi Village

This a study of daily life in Yulong, a Naxi village, and the nearby market town of Lijiang in northern Yunnan Province.' It is also a response to recent calls to put time and space at the center of social analysis (Giddens, 1984; Harvey, 1989). It concentrates on space, taking its production and manipulation in Lijiang county as fundamental to the daily experience of such varied phenomena as money, reciprocity, the power of the state, and the news of rebellion. Social analysts who understand it as more than merely the environment of social action have generally followed one of two approaches to space. One approach identifies conceptual orders, cosmologies or ideologies embodied in space. Anthropologists often attempt to demonstrate that conceptual orders are built on skeletons of spatial metaphors and that these metaphors are embedded in the spaces of ritual action or daily life. For instance, basic attributes of the cosmos are represented in the architecture of shrines or churches (Middleton, 1960; Gossen, 1972), the structure of houses (Cunningham, 1972; McKhann, 1989), or the topography of mountains (Nash, 1979). The body is understood in terms of analogies to houses (Daniel, 1984) or