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Kinship, Contract, Community, and State

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Introduction.................................................................................................................................1SECTION I: Late Imperial China and Its Legacies1 Introduction to Arthur H. Smith's Village Life in China....................................................................................192 Being Chinese: The Peripheralization of Traditional Identity...............................................................................393 Cultural and Political Inventions in Modern China: The Case of the Chinese "Peasant".......................................................60SECTION II: The Family4 North China Rural Families: Changes During the Communist Era...............................................................................77SECTION III: Lineage Studies5 Lineage Development and the Family in China................................................................................................1536 Lineage Organization in North China........................................................................................................1657 Lineage Organization in East China.........................................................................................................195SECTION IV: Historical Anthropology: The Minong Community During Qing8 Commodity Creation in Late Imperial China..................................................................................................2239 Writs of Passage in Late Imperial China: Contracts and the Documentation of Practical Understandings in Minong, Taiwan.....................252Notes........................................................................................................................................307Bibliography.................................................................................................................................331Character List...............................................................................................................................347Index........................................................................................................................................351

Chapter One

Village Life in China

Village Life in China is one of the vital sources for data on Chinese society during the late nineteenth century; the book deals with rural life at a time when the growing impact of the West was still only minimally felt over most of China's countryside. When Arthur H. Smith lived and traveled in China, the Qing dynasty still held sway, although it was to topple only a few decades later, in 1911. Most of what Smith observed was "traditional" Chinese behavior and social organization, the product of over two millennia of development during which the Chinese subcontinent attained a degree of political, economic, and social integration perhaps unparalleled among preindustrial civilizations. Smith's work, then, is valuable reading for anyone concerned with China, including the present-day Chinese People's Republic, for he deals with the culture and society from which much of life in China to this day derives.

Smith's book is not what anthropologists and sociologists would call a "community study." Rather than comprehensively describing a single village, Smith deals with rural society in general, as he observed it mainly in the northern province of Shandong. Nevertheless, much of what he observed pertains to basic patterns of organization in Chinese society: the ways in which social, economic, and political relationships crosscut village boundaries and fixed villages within larger social arrangements.

The book's first chapters deal with the physical appearance of the countryside and its villages. In most of China the population lived in concentrated settlements: hamlets, villages, towns, and cities. The spatial dimension provided a crucial framework for social organization. Territorially defined social units were arranged hierarchically such that they were integrated into the nation as a whole. As spatial and settlement units, local areas were organized roughly as follows: in a larger village or in a town or city, the basic unit would be a ward or a neighborhood, and in a smaller village or hamlet the unit would be the entire settlement itself. Such basic-level units were formally organized community entities; in its simplest form, the organization might be expressed by nothing more than a common ritual or religious focus on a shrine representing Tudi, the "earth god" or the "local god" (see Smith, pp. 99-100), with such a focus defining the territorial community as a religious congregation. In communities that were more prosperous, advantageously located, or with especially influential members, religious organizations might be much more complex, boasting large temples with a clearly defined group of managers; secular organizations could also be more clearly defined and undertake a variety of activities.

Such basic community units usually were components of larger territorial entities, with several small hamlets or village neighborhoods forming a larger village organization. It seems safe to say that in the case of larger villages subdivided into neighborhoods, the major organizations, with functions most vital to village life, were those that encompassed the village as a whole. But even in a concentrated village settlement the organizational importance of the component segments might, in what was probably a minority of cases, outweigh that of the higher-level unit. Smith refers to this in passing: "If the village is a large one, divided into several sections transacting their public business independently of one another, there may be several temples to the same divinity" (pp. 99-100). The hierarchy of local units usually involved more than two levels: in the countryside regional communities comprising several villages were important in rural life, with a shared temple often serving to identify such a multivillage community; and it was commonly the region occupied by such a community that people identified as their "homeland" or "ancestral home" (xiang, guxiang). Multiple levels of community and regional organization were especially characteristic of larger towns and cities. While there also must have been cases where the small size and isolated location of a settlement precluded its involvement in such local hierarchies, such circumstances almost by definition had to pertain to only a very small minority of China's population.

Local settlements, irrespective of the degree of their internal complexity, were fitted into hierarchical structures of yet larger scope; these centered on towns and cities that supported larger populations and were the sites of markets, commercial and manufacturing establishments, and other specialized economic activities. Thus, since the surrounding villages were dependent upon such a town, it formed a central point for intervillage activities of many sorts. A market town, therefore, usually served as the focal point of a region composed of many villages. Just as there was variation in the number of organizations and their functions at the village segment, village, and village cluster levels, so were there differences in the extent to which there emerged important organizations encompassing a region...