Articulating relational rurality amidst urbanization: Agency, spatial paradox and the de/reterritorialization of lineage landscapes in contemporary rural China

This paper seeks to offer a nuanced understanding of how the rural responds to and speaks back to the urban in the context of increasingly blurred rural-urban landscapes. The prevailing theorizations remain entrenched in an intellectual impasse that still treats the rural as a residual space or a reactive actor besieged by external urban forces. Using lineage spaces as an empirical lens, this paper delves into rural geographies of lineage landscapes in post-reform China by articulating rural agencies in more active, non-lineal ways. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in rural Wenzhou, southeast China, this paper argues that the articulation of rural voices amidst China's urban modernity unveils a spatial paradox of landscape de/reterritorialization at the dimensions of discourse, practice and (trans)locality. We first reveal how official rural discourses de-territorialize and lessen lineage groups' control over their symbolic buildings while simultaneously opening up opportunities for them to mobilize officially-sanctioned discourses to expand lineage spaces and reterritorialize their power. Second, we show how villagers embrace the de-territorializing practice of landscape commodification, which becomes a crucial source of finance for them to perform ritual activities at specific festivals, thereby re-asserting rural collectivism, sociality and sacredness. Third, we unpack the trans-local dimension of rural de/reterritorialization by exploring how villagers forge lineage-based rural networking that transcends space-time, which paradoxically reinforces the spatial claim for territorializing rural power that is demarcated from urban/modern orientations. We further argue that these multiple spatial processes of rural de/reterritorialization challenge a reactive or neatly-divided account of rural agency during its engagement with urbanizing relations and processes. In all, this paper offers a more complex, paradoxical account of relational rurality in a rapidly urbanizing China, and foregrounds an agenda towards more 'inclusive' rural studies.