{"id":122570,"date":"2019-03-05T18:06:06","date_gmt":"2019-03-05T23:06:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=122570"},"modified":"2021-02-10T09:07:47","modified_gmt":"2021-02-10T14:07:47","slug":"look-what-we-found-wes-chaneys-historical-contracts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2019\/03\/05\/look-what-we-found-wes-chaneys-historical-contracts\/","title":{"rendered":"Look What We Found: Wes Chaney’s historical contracts"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe history of Chinese emperors and generals has been written,\u201d says Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney. \u201cI\u2019m interested in telling the stories of everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n

He\u2019s doing that with historical contracts related to land, household division, and marriage that he has collected from antique marketplaces near farming communities in Gansu and Qinghai provinces.<\/p>\n

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This household division contract allows two brothers who want to live separately to divide their family inheritance (dated from 1914).<\/em>\u00a0(Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

Dating from 1800 to the mid-1900s, these records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. Chaney can\u2019t actually reproduce their voices \u00e0 la Studs Terkel, yet he’s always looking for those places where individual experience bubbles up. His collection represents this effort\u00a0\u2014 <\/em>“the voice of the subaltern” is muffled, he says, but trying to hear these peasants’ stories is “what I like about it.”<\/p>\n

Each contract has its own distinctive texture, color, and calligraphy. There\u2019s also a distinction between red and white contracts. The former display the government office seal. The latter \u2014 comprising most of Chaney\u2019s collection \u2014 were never registered with the county office, making them technically illegal, since they mimic the red ones but without a tax payment.<\/p>\n

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Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney looks through his collection of Chinese land, household distribution, and marriage contracts in his Pettengill Hall office. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

In Chaney\u2019s Pettengill office, he pulls out a household division contract from January 1914 that represents the realities of Chinese peasant life. According to Confucian ideology, he says, brothers remain in the same household for life. In reality, that often fails to work out. In this particular case, where two brothers didn\u2019t get along, the contract stipulates how each brother will receive exactly half of their deceased father\u2019s inheritance.<\/p>\n

Chaney reads aloud from a list that, in addition to a few parcels of land, includes \u201cone shoehorn, a broken wok, seven sheep, and a leather strap.\u201d<\/p>\n

This contract also provides their widowed mother with assets to support both her life and the cost of her eventual funeral.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

A land exchange contract dated from 1938 in Huzhu County, Qinghai Province.<\/em>\u00a0(Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s typical of the hundreds of contracts he has collected, and together, they tell the story of an illiterate peasantry who left no written record other than the kinds of municipal and private contracts he has in his possession. \u201cYou can construct the history of a family over time and the kind of changes in the land that they owned and why,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

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These records feature mostly boilerplate language, where thumbprints represent the only likely written record of the individuals whose lives they document. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n

In preserving these stories of everyday village life, Chaney imagines the different ways in which he can use these papers in his research on Chinese law and land disputes. \u201cThese are not seen as important documents, they’re not seen as important to the writing of history, but I think these voices are important to history. And so I think there’s a moral argument for why I’m collecting them,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

Eventually, he would like to return to China \u2014 when it\u2019s politically feasible \u2014 and donate the documents to local libraries in their counties of origin so they can be accessible to everyone.<\/p>\n

This Short Term, Chaney will work with a Bates student to catalog more of these documents that he often shares in the classroom. In an increasingly digital world, Chaney says it\u2019s essential for his students to experience what the document would have felt like.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s an importance to the materiality here,\u201d he says, \u201cand we lose that when we read it on Lyceum or downloaded onto our phones or computers. It\u2019s actually important to touch things.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cThe history of Chinese emperors and generals has been written,\u201d says Assistant Professor of History Wes Chaney. \u201cI\u2019m interested in telling the stories of everyday life.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":91,"featured_media":122573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,1,44,166,224],"tags":[253,165,11321],"class_list":["post-122570","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-batesnews","category-enewsletter","category-humanities-history","category-society-culture","tag-china","tag-history","tag-look-what-we-found"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122570","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/91"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=122570"}],"version-history":[{"count":22,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122570\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":122746,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/122570\/revisions\/122746"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/122573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=122570"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=122570"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=122570"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}