VILLAGE LINEAGE,AND CLAN VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN is easy to understand how,once their numbers and riches are accustomed us may have played its part;ifone lineage failed to meet the regular challenge of arms it perhaps went under,its economic force it finally to abandon its crumbling foothold.The economic pressure on a weakening minority was not,however,always tion by retreat.(There was,however,a way of retreating without exerted directly by rivals.The climatic hazards of the leaving the village:men could marry into the families of the area of China we are concerned with-typhoons,floods,and dominant lin abandoning their right to transmit their sur- name to their children.And,as a quotation from a ninetecnth- droughts-must certainly have borne m ore he cavily on thosc with fewer accumulated resources and have led to their being the first century Western source will presently show,the process of ab- sorbing the weak may have sometimes taken place by a simple to give up the struggle. I think we must assume that the desire to form a single lineage change of surnamc.) territory is a motive given in the system.Where realie that a few particularly powerful in one village thereisenough land,of agnates sive to build themselves lineages dotted over the whole region were not subject to chal up to form a large homogencous settlement.If to begin with they lenge by outsiders.They certainly admitted strangers to their land as tenants,for even if they had wished to cultivate their own must share a territo ory with members of one or moreother lincages they will await their opportunity to dominate and eventually fields,diverting their energies from the more prestigeful and pro- drive out their many cases it is not cear why nthe ductive occupations of scholarship,administration,and busincss, first place strangers are permitted into the village territory they could never have rallied the necessary manpower.The tenants how the newcomers manage to establish a strong position for they took were held in a state of subjection to masters of unques themselves.As far as I know,the historical eviden ice bearing on tionable and unchallengeable political and economic power,and these quest tions does not exist;it is a deficiency which might formed satellite village which were called upon to support the conceivably be made good by a careful analysis of the recent past dominant lineages in their fights and pay taxes thro ugh (and of a the,the most partwe perhaps largely to)their landlords.1 In some cases the subordinate shall probably always need to have recourse to speculation. tcnants were thrust into the status of servile families (s Chen Han-seng calls them)2 the New Territories the 'invasion hereditary tenants,as who look on entirely new upon the members of the clans that harbour them as their masters s from Communist China admitted as tenants and who,in addition to farming the fields assigned to them, terms;the refugees to the lands and houses of long-cstablished lineages are unlikely render additional services as labourers,servants and watchmen, for which they are paid no wage,though here and there their consolidate themselves to form agnatic groupings.) that,in the past,outsiders taken on as tenants f wretched condition is occasionally alleviated by perquisites of It may be agricultural land were sometimes successful and contrived to This appears to have be organize to the point where they could begin to challenge their ,cg,the了 ng lineage of Ping Shar longer-established neighbours.Good fortune,and withit the powe to drive off unwanted fellow-villagers,may perhaps on occasion allowing me to of his Ph.D.thesis,P'ing Cali have come from ties built up with the bureaucracy.The fighting between lineages,to which the study of southeastern China has ation which its rich mater Ms of this book was finished before Potter a copy of 1profcsorskinmncrheaspoinodouotL"ecxtga outsiders admitted to his paper, d by I lineage-village wil ect that such ld n Prtilamt it oemChm Shanghl P-
VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN various kinds'In one district of Kwangtung,witha total popula- difference in the alignment of the ancestral halls;the villagers tion of some ten thousand,about 30 per cent were sia-wu in the simply assume and assert-it to exist.) I930s.1 Geomancy is thought to have destroyed the two older lineages The process of the decline and climination of agnatic groups but it is also credited with having broken of one segment of the becomes even more interesting to us as soon as we realize that i triumphant lineage,for the three major segments now in the can be seen at work not only in the relations between different village are the second,third,and fourth.Facing their ancestral lineages,but also in the relations between different segments of hall there is a dip in the line of the hills which is interpreted one localized lineage.Again,gcomancy may ‘explain why gcomantically as bringing ill fortune to seniors:younger sons segments disappear,a nd political and economic pressure account fare better than older and junior segments better than senior.The for their climination.Let me illustrate from the case of a Hakka fourth sub-lineage is the most successful (in the Chinese restauran business in England,among other things);the first has disappeared. Some fifty years ago the last surviving family in the senior sub- three primary segments of a lineage.Local history'has it(no lineage,resigning themselves(it is said)to the inevitability of their genealogy survives,ifit ever existed)that the lineage was geomantic misfortne,went off to South-East Asia whereon founded over since when fourteen last member is thought to live on.When the family departed it generations have appearedThe fouder father had left his pawned its land to the second sub-lineage,which has now tak native place in the northern area of the county of which the were formerly part and had tried to sett on the of it;the senior sub-lineage has ceased New Territories island of Lantau.He died there. of his "Pare Chen Ta's reference to a lineagc in easter in the 193os of which the sccond branch had declined family did not fare well,so that,with his father's bones over one fourth was growing more prosperous.The village head explained shoulder and his little son on the other,the founder made his way the change in fortune:The southern mountain has the shape of to the present home of the lineage. Here there were already es. a monster lobster The graves of the second branch are cated tablished two other lineages,with whom the newcomers at its head and thus far have had numerous offspring and plenty down.The three groups s decided to build ancestral halls and align of money.Recently,the fourth branch has unfortunately placed a them so that they faced in one direction. and caused disharmony to branch.This is why the latter is not doing so well these days.1 I shall have more to say on geomancy in a story)took advantage of the workmen's mporary absence to later chanter make a slight adjustment to the angle at which his own hall was Migration has been a constant feature of southeastern Chincse to stand,and the subterfuge worked so well that the two longer established lineages died away;their geoma ncy had been ruined. sickness,lack of sons,or some The and cestor tablets which they abandoned were in recent tim vinced their inhabitants that their geomancy is wrong.I.W. removed by the surviving li ineage and placed in a'vegetarian hall Hayes has demonstrated for Lantau Island in the New Territories in another part of the New Territories so that the derelict ancestral was originally Ch'cn territory and still retains the halls might be made use of(There is in reality no detectable attracted by a burial site co ered to eage firs st came to Ch'enta r descendants eventually displaced the Ch'ens Studi M .7
VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN VILLAGE,LINEAGE AND CLAN 3 that several villages have moved their sites in the last fifty years' themselves from the endles feuds,which the aggres- drastic sive conduct of their neighbours enclosed them in.' have gone off to secka living elsewhere;and during the last Outsiders may gain a foothold in lineage territory (perhaps first only as tenants)and,in consequence,multilineage scttle- hundred years or so there has been a steady drain of espccially men,away to South-East Asia and the United States. ment may develop;such a heterogeneous community may survive for along time (as appears to be the case in the village of Nanching to mention only the major areas of overseas migration.So that as described byYang):but then one lincage,either latcly comeo while the population of the provinces of Fukin and long established,gets the upper hand and a single-lineage settle- has risen as a whole,"there have been striking disparities ment emerges once more.indeed,as I have tried toilustrate increase between local settlements.Some have expanded to from the case of a New Territories village,the process of ex number several thousands while others have shrunk to,or failed to grow beyond being.small hamlets.Whereeconomic conditions clusion may cut away part of the victorious lineage itself. favourable,lineages have tended to exclude outsiders It may be that some of the very mixed settleme nts to be found have been or cast ou their ncighbours of other surnames and to develop into in Fukien and Kwangtung were formed by the gathering together of elements pushed out of communities by oppression (or what massive single-ineage settemn as we can sec very clearly in ame the New Territories. the excluded took to be oppression).Chen Ta ng in the the part of Hsin-an county which 1930s of a community composed of seven villages and one town There the largest and most powerful lineages occupy the most fertile stretches of land.We have a description of Hsin-an in the n of a missionary who spent several years in it;he writes:The villages in the plain of woman:'We came here from a neighbouring hsien [county San-keaou [outside the area ter to become the New Territories about twenty-three ycars ago.In our former ome .1 are almost exclusively inhabited by fou clans Man Mak emb age we The villages inhabited by other ers of the minority and frequently ill-treated by those .Tsang.,and Chang. clans,and gradually ther become absorbed who bclonged to the majority of the clan.In this little community here people do not show that kind of discrimination.' in the more powerful clans,or are ruin ed by their hostility,and forced to remove to some other part of the country. the villagers of Hung-tiu chan of the powerful clan which inhabited San-keaou.This was done Kong.I850. for teling me of the existence of Krons's info .Reasons',foumal 'Mo lation of 12 millions an 6 lions in clan iven in at p. Hon of the ar oclan villages io Sratistics of China,A.D.2-1953 of this eld ations in fukicn and population increases Chen Ta,op.cit.,pp.199 E
VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN Clearly,geomantic ideas in the Chinese south-east enshrine, back to the late cleventh century numbered fewer than 6o0 people when Yang studied it n the late.The NewTe explain, and justify the attachment of particular lineages to their territory.By the same token they demonstrate the unsuitability I have referred to has two-thirds of this population of the territory for peopl e of other lineages.Okada Yuzuru,the but only a third of its time-span.Obviously,a lineage which Japanese sociologist,studying villages on Amoy island in 1940, starts off small and has only a very few gener rations behind it found that it was said of two villages (it is not clear to me whether (compare the groups in the village studied by Gallin)cannot have they were settlements belonging to one lineageor to two lineages many people in it.But it does not follow that a lineage with a of one surname)that their natural feature were not suitable for small population must have been in existence only a short time. members of other clans.Outsiders who had moved in had for Disease,poverty,migration,and desertion to other lineages may the most part fallen sick,and none of them had settled down there on increasing Even the schoolteachers from other villages returned home after discussed y anthropologists studying non-literate societies,by school hours,neve er attempting to live in the villa ge territory. On the one hand,people may usc unfavourable geomantic means of which the record of the past is tailored to fit the present. influences to explain retrospectively why they have not settled in a Certainly,by no means all Chin se lineages kept written genealo- particular place. On the other hand,a dominan lineage may gies;probably only a minority did;and in many lineages there as not even a stock of ancestor tablets to provide a genealogical framework for the past.But even without saster for them. Lineage sett lements differ their prosperity. past and of writing or tablets Chinese still count gencrations,so that exten- present,and in the extent to which they have lost members sion in time cannot besimply translated into population size.Andin migration and gained them by'marrying in'sons-in-law and by this connexion it is wo noting the interesting case of the adoption.Consequently,there isno simple relationship between lineage discussed by Miss Pratt in which,despite the absence ofan the generation-depth of a lineage and its numerical size. We tend agreed genealogical framework to explain the precise relations to think,as do the Chincse themselves,that a lineage isa kind of among the segmentary divisi 'all the males traced their apex and common descent back to the founding ancestor sixteen genera- tions before'. In his study of Manila Chinese. Amyot quotes some very losses by death, interesting data from a clan record,published in Manila in 1953, and others may well,because of epidemics,poverty,and migra- tion,diminish e point of extinction ofocageOaniio{cBrtaheumaloSacolog It follows that not all very deep lineages are very large.Not all h)Miss Barbara E. age may have been long estab 。 addct t failed to be fruitful.It may ave only a few gencra- oN.pp.69 f. tions behind it and yet have fared so well that early and universal marriage,high fertility,and adoption have brought its numbers 956-70fem to a bustling prosperity.The lineage in Nanchi ng which goes Inve in South China:Village Life She-lu K'o-isich Pan (Journa a-en of A stelt-pn iniph Tokyo,14 ro Ch'en Ch'i-lu And I should like to thank Professo ed in the article th interesting sourcc of mater Op.pp.ew
VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN 1 VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN which provides material on the distribution of lineages of the Present Hung surname in Ch'tian-chou,Fukien.I shall draw on on c2 section of this material (for Ying-ling ing of Chin-chiang hsien) 400 20 to illustrate the great variation in time-depth and size of local 48 20 settlements.In the first village listed we can see the full time- 290023 0 extension of Hung settlement in that area and the number of 8 % At pp.f.of Lineage I said that 'the southeastern since first settlement is correct,the time-depths of settlement are Chinese commonly extended to about twenty-five clearly very rough,to say the least.(It will be noted that thirty- generations in recent time'.I am more cautious now,for I am five generations have emerged in years in the first village and aware of the constant movement within the area and the conse- thirty in only oo years in villages and) quent establishment of many local lincages of time-spans con- siderably shorter than twenty-five gencrations.About 1955 the Years of Generations District Commissioner of the New Territorics sent out a ques- elapsed tionnaire which sought on the dates 2,000 first settled in their present villages and on the numbers of the 720 2 3 炒汤粮粮0汤0000锁00 4 570 500 idea of the range of lineage depth.1 They also provide an indica- 61812 tion of the balance between single-lin d multilineage 678。 0010饮0剪汤3015059 settlements.I shall draw two examples from these data. The first example consists of the villages in the Sha Tau Kok area,which abuts the Chinese frontier in the tern part of th .(I have excluded the dataon the islands which fall in this area,because I am concerned here with agricultura 70123456789022345678 5420732654311009890 settlements;the analysis of communities which get heir living from the searaises different problems.)Twenty-six single-surnam villages are listed,one of 26 generations,four of 12,six of II six of Io,five of 9,one of 8, two of 7,and one of 5.There are 00汤负汤601000汤幼%0 eighteen multi-surname villages,although one of them might 90 better be classified as a single-surname settlement because only 1IetheDtiCommi NewTefor 汤00汤的00 oyWa。f○iental Suedies (Hongo22922C.auy9⊙ ‘Float of the el.The vol. C,o63.D en often d about them,the Tankaa r estrangement from the land makes shown in this material is 14.000(p.169)