Chapter 6, “Making Hierarchy: Garrison, Court, and the Structure of Jiankang Politics,” analyzes the contrasting political cultures of two functional/occupational groups: garrison and court. While garrison culture emphasized relatively fluid patron-client ties, personal honor, violence, and vengeance, court culture emphasized rigid status hierarchy, calm restraint, and skillful deployment of the Sinitic paideia. The imperial household played a key brokerage role between the two cultures, but the garrisons dominated the process of imperial succession, which did not follow the rules of primogeniture and was always contested. The chapter then uses the Churen group (jituan) of the early fifth century as a case study to demonstrate that the strong regional basis of patron-client cliques, though similar in many ways to the rise of military groups such as the Tabgatch Compatriots in the north, did not result in significant ethnogenesis. The chapter offers as an alternative the model, taken from studies of Southeast Asian regimes, of the “man of prowess.”
