村规、法律和政府:椒江区农村村规民约解读

Village Regulations,Law and the Government:an Explanatory Reading of the Village Regulations and People’s Agreements of the Villages of Jiaojiang District

在台州市椒江区农村,多以村规民约的形式把男娶女嫁等习俗做成强制性的规范。通常认为,对社员婚嫁的干涉、尤其是强制妇女从夫居是与法律相抵触,并侵犯了农村妇女的权益,其根源在于男尊女卑观念和封建意识。但实际上,土地集体所有制和计划生育政策改变了传统乡村。传统习俗所依附的不是自然村落而是土地集体所有制框架下的行政村。问题的悖谬更在于作为与传统决裂而建构的村集体还是个血缘与地域合一的组织,农村人口凭基于血缘与婚姻的身份享受集体地权。如此,被纳入村规中的男娶女嫁等习俗也已经成了维护集体资产利益有序分配的必要规范。所以,问题不在于所谓的'妇女维权'或移风易俗,关键在于如何解开产权和身份的纠缠。

In the villages of Jiaojiang district in Taizhou municipality,longstanding customs like the husband takes in a wife and the wife marries out to a husband have been made into binding norms by the so-called'village regulations and people’s agreements'.It is commonly thought that to interfere in the marriages of community members,especially to compel wives to move to the husbands’residence,goes against the law and wrongfully invades the rights of rural women—something traceable to'feudal notions'of male superiority and female inferiority.In reality,however,it is collectivization of land and planned child-births that have altered the traditional village.Such traditional customs have been sustained not by the natural village but rather by the administrative village under the system of collective ownership of land.The absurdity consists in the fact that the village collectivity,which ostensibly broke with tradition,was actually something that combined blood ties and spatial ties into a single entity,such that rural populations enjoy collective land rights on the basis of blood and marriage ties.In that way,the custom of the husband taking in a wife and the wife marrying out to a husband,written into village regulations,has actually formed the required standard for maintaining orderly distribution of collective property benefits.The key to the problem thus consists not in so-called'protecting women’s rights'or changing customs,but rather in dissolving the entrapment of property rights with status.