How traditional rural communities persist: hydrosocial territories, cultural meaning, and the making of robustness

This paper draws on hydrosocial territories to unravel the persistence of traditional rural communities, which is centred on localized cultural meanings embedded in, yet underpinning, water-related farming practices and community relations. Based on ethnographic examinations in a Miao village preserving its rice-fish co-culture in Guizhou, China, this article finds that, the local community sustained these plural cultural meanings by proactively adapting them in continuous negotiations with the state and market. These included embedding state institutions into local social networks shaped by the material agency of the water-rice-fish nexus, mobilizing cultural resources to participate in tourism economy while integrating it with reciprocal ethics, and selectively adopting modern technologies based on vernacular knowledge. Through such practices, cultural meanings were recursively invoked and transformed, enabling the community’s co-evolution with external territorializing forces. The findings reveal how robustness of rural communities is generated through strategic engagements in hydrosocial territorial politics.