Opera in Sichuan: Theater as Social Institution and the Politics of Culture in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century China

My idea is to analyze opera in Sichuan from the perspective of social history, treating it as a social institution. By social institution I mean a firmly established and widely pervasive form of communal organization and practice that is indispensable for the constitution and perpetuation of communities. My overall aim is to examine the forms and consequences of the various usurpations of opera from late nineteenth century till 1957 and how they affected Sichuanese society and its culture. Or, why did opera change so much and what was the “social” price of this transformation? In this presentation I will demonstrate how opera manifested itself as a social institution in the Guangxu and Xuantong periods. From the perspective of the sources I analyzed it appears that staging opera had three functions: that of building and strengthening local communities, of validating an existing social order, and of undermining this order by providing a space for social disruption and even rebellion. These functions have changed radically after the introduction of the New Policies (1901 – 1911) and even more in the Republican period when forces of market and mass politics used opera to reconstruct local communities and the whole Chinese society.