ABSTRACT
Unlike standard fieldwork involving academic “informants,” my academic Chinese collaborators and I relied on local people to write about their own history and society. This required going with them into the field to show them what we were after but also giving them written guidelines for the subjects they were to cover, namely, local lineage history, the economy, and local customs. This paper is an extended commentary on these guidelines, focusing notably on the extraordinary variety of local customs; the “self-governing” village; the special importance of oral culture as complement to written documents for understanding local society; the unique role played in traditional society by religious specialists of all kinds; and the need for a spontaneous style of interviewing that adapts to the person interviewed.
