Potter,ping Sian. Hsin-an county.Each group of this class occupies a compact gave 30,000 as the upper limit for the size of Punti villages in not always very misleading,and it may be recalled that Krone may be suspect as a good round Chinese number,is probably than the Ping Shan Tang group;the figure of Io,ooo,although it quotations will have indicated,are very much larger in numbers in southeastern China in general.Some of them,as earlier class of such lineages in the New Territories-and,by extension, Now,we may take the Ping Shan lineage to belong to a large have a share in an estate held in that ancestor's name. lineages tracing their descent to the first ancestor in the county of Tang which will concern us later on).All the Tang loca one at Kam Tin and the other at Tai Po (the latter being a group Two of the Ping Shan ancestor's brothers founded other lineages, sons of the Tang who first established himself in the county of Ping Shan is given in the genealogy as being one of the grand- bracing Tang lineages scattered widely in the region.The founder but this in turn is part of a wider corporate agnatic group em- each with its territorial base,compose the Ping Shan lineage, lineage are found.Hang Mei and its co-ordinate sub-lineages, further 32 of the houscholds belonging to the Hang Mei sub- flows into two neighbouring villages of the complex,wherc a the outsiders)80 Tang households;but as a sub-lineage it over- village and a sub-lineage.As a village it contains (in addition to grouping can be seen from the example of the village of Hang Mei,the one most closely studied by Potter.Hang Mei is both a The relation at a lower level between territory and agnatic who is the oldest man in the most senior surviving generation. hall of the complex and nominally under a single lineage head, form a single descent group focused upon the central ancestral recent immigrants among them).All Tang in the eight villages figure includes various non-Tang residents (servile families and with a total population of about three thousand,although this It is in fact made up of a cluster of cight,not seven,villages, territorial constitution of the Ping Shan Tang lineage.1 able from his material to get a clear picture of the agnatic and they formed the subject of Potter's study in 1962-3,and we are agnatic grouping in China.Let us take the case of the Tang settle- ments mentioned bricfly in the last paragraph.It happens that VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN 8 local lineage Second,a local lineage may be grouped with other local say,the headquarters group of the dispersed Jincage. hall and its associated property are likcly to be found)arc,so to who occupy the main settlement (where the ancestral be called dispersed lineages.Those of its members,forming a local docal communities;we have in such cases what may conveniently common among poorer groups,some of the descendants of the ancestor who defines the iocal lincage will be resident in other people not living in their local community.First,as will be fairly members of a jocal jineage may be linked by lincage bonds to "lineage'.There are two different sets of conditions in which the sertlements.It will be obvious that'local lineage'does not exhaust and plus their wives)living in one settlement or a tight cluster of they are corporate groups of agnates (minus their married sisters defines the whole class of local lineages,great and small,is that with a few outsiders but also with other local lineages.What tacularly sited and defended.Some share their village not only great majority of local lineages are much smaller and less spec- But it is in fact only the extreme case of the local lineage.The lower orders.To this kind of group I propose to apply the term cach settlcment such that it was divided up among scgments of there may have been a further residential discrimination within belonged to different agriatic segments of the total group,and Traditionally at any rate,the different settlements in one complex settlements were huddled behind their walls in pre-British times. will be seen,therefore,that a very considerable proportion of rougher;and not all wai have that word as part of their name.It brick wall and tower;some fortifications were humbler and the description of wai,which usually implies the existence of a for wai.It is important to add that not all forms of enclosure earn names in the Colony as a whole,about rTo include the character and the New Territories that of some 1,600 traditional Chinese from the official A Gazctteer of Place Names in Hong Kong,Kowloon been walled enclosures and may still be so today.I have calculated in the New Territories,indicating that at some time they have wai-Mandarin:wei-still appears in the names of many villages walled and moated,or was so fortified in the past.(The word central settlement.One at least of the settlements is likely to be cluster of settlements which have grown up around the original VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN
4:P·7 N gically alliances. differentiated ineage lincage' Structure in Rural China,Part I',The Joumal of Asian Smdits,vol.xxrv,no.I, The laer term is used by G.William Skimer inMarketing and Social justified.In gencral terms,the genealogical information on a clan and lineage in the ways in which they are genealogically It might be argued that there is an important difference between into autonomous lineages linked only by ties of claniship. a total lincage exists.Otherwise the proliferated segments turn which the geographically distinct units continue to share,then leges entailed in that property.If a common estate is kept up in ance of common property and the ritual obligations and privi- related but independent lineages turns upon the mainten- corporation and a network of historically-or at any rate genealo- between a system of physically dispersed segments of a single has once more been condensed into lineage bonds.The difference bine and establish a common ancestral hall or estate, But if several local or higher-order lineages in fact com- be used for gencalogical reference and for forming temporary almost devoid of significance.They may, common interests and activities. and dispersed.) and 'composite lineage'1 suggest, on the other hand, The ties of clanship may be genealogically but are not members of an 'cnduring group with of clanship,where lineages of like surname may be tied together above the level of any unit we call a lineage we are in the realm of a surname is by itsclf a fact of agnatic kinship.But once we get body knows who has read a book about China,the mere sharing Agnation does not stop at the higher-order lineage.As every- development by which what was once a local lincage is now segmentation,new local lineages being formed as part of the but it is just as likely that they will have emerged by a process of in some cases,indeed,they may have come about in this manner unit has been formed by the banding together of local lineages. wrongly,that the appropriate one.(it seems io me that terms such as'compound because I cannot for the moment think of a more example in the Tang)I propose to use the term 'higher-order For this larger scale of group (of which we have just seen an in turn being focused on an ancestral hall or other piece of property descended agnatically from a common ancestor,the whole unit lineages on the basis that the ancestors of these lincages are all then clanship China has both clans and lineages,and that pt.1,January-Junc 1957.Fried classifics the Chinese descent group (ts)as incage because it has Unilineal Descent Groups township'. Nanchin 39c5. descent'1. demonstrated 'demonstrated descent'is crucial to My argument is thar This expression is used by Morton H.Fried.The Classificarion of Corporate village complexes. There are twelve such lineage hsiang. Hui-an is divided among ten major surnames (lineages),each of which 'occupies predominantly.at-least one of the Hsien crossed on foot in a couple of hours.'4 Most of the population of name.It is usually a market center. An average hsiang can be of villages and hamiets forming some kind of unity,or again,the largest village of this complex from which the latter derives its grouped into about fifty hsiang,a term which he translates as the term hsiaug may designate either a complex however briefly,at the evidence he presents on Hui-an county Amyot says that its 'several hundred villages and hamlets' documentary sources and from emigrants.3 It is worth looking, a good deal of information on Ch'tian- chou,Fukicn,from Amyot's study of the Chinese in Manila.He was able to collect possess altogether about.twenty mow of sacrificial land within A wide range of relevant material is to be found in ter's clan land.In addition,the subdivisions of the Lee clan did branches.Every year the Lee clan of Nanching received over 10.000 catties of unhusked rice from the income of the headquar- clan were located,the clan.in this village being only one of the In Nanching the 'clan land'of the Lee was in another county, some cighty miles away, 'where the headquarters of the Lee example which I interpret to be a case of a higher-order lineage. Let us consider some of the ethnography. Yang provides an much in debate,as we shall see presently-and yet they function as effectively as other,genealogically better endowed,local line- clan and lineage is contingent,not necessary;for some of the local lineages,lacking written genealogies,have no'demonstrated indeed,their genealogical frameworks may he very needs to be shown now is that the genealogical difference between fixed;that on a clan grouping is comparatively tenuous and subject to change.I shall return to this question in a later context;what local or higher-order lineage is relatively complcte and relatively VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN The
carry the wrong connotations for Americans. 1m2.42 villagers'immediate private world and the larger impersonal but its boundaries are those which 'mark the line between the This 'district'has never been recognized by the bureaucracy. hin (a Hokkien word)which make up the'district'of Chi-chou. the outside world in terms of the village's status as one of the five near Taipei,tells us that the villagers orient themselves towards Taiwan.Wolf,setting the background to his study of a village I am able to offer another example,on a smaller scale,from I suggest that we refer to our crucial territories as'vicinages'. develop may have little to do with bureaucratically dictated areas, the areas within which higher-order lineage systems are lkely to implying formal divisions laid down by governments,3 and since and the English words have often been administrative termis, Amyot translates hsiang as 'township',but since both the Chinese hsiang (which'can be crossed on foot in a couple of hours' lationships are likely to be confined to the small areas formed by essence of it is that what I have called higher-order lincage.re- but his analysis is extremely interesting and important.The I.think Amyot uses the word 'lincage'rather too vaguely limits of one territory or between contiguous territorics.'2 across spatially separated sub-branches as they have within the Their populations do not have the same kind of interrelationship as sub-branches having migrated away from the founding village. surname.There is none even when they belong to the same lineage them,certainly not merely from the fact that they have the same places.There is no immediate organizational connection between Groups with the same surname can show up in ten different pattern appears from the point of view of social organization. of surname groups in relation to one another,no significant small dimensions. Considering now the spatial distribution constantly associated with a specific district or hsiang of relatively on southeastern China Amyot says that 'lineage organization is fang or sub-lineages. And so on.In his summary of his findings Membership runs to about ten thousand distributed into six lineage occupies two.It has an ancestral hall in both places. others are shared by two or more surname groups. ··VI VI VI 1111:22.327 +:059 writren on the Cornel Univ., basis of the thesis will appear at about the same time as my argument,limiting myself severely and hoping that the book whichn is now being ship,has placed at my disposal.But I have drawn on it at a few points is my plundered the material which ProfessorWolf,his generosity matching his scholar- this book.It is a remarkably original analysis of Chinese marriage and adoption Wolf for his gift to me ofa copy of the thesis and permission to make use of i for September 1964. I am profoundly grateful to Protessor .2 Arthur P.Wolf,Mfarriage and Adoption in a Hokkien Village,unpublished Ph.D that 'the dominant localized lineage within a composite lineage about a Fukien'standard marketing community',by suggesting pushes the argument a step further,drawing on some information standard marketing areas tend to erode with time.' uated whereas bonds between localized lineages sited in different tained within a single marketing system are likely to be perpet- marketing community but little outside it,interlineage ties con- pcasant families have much social intercourse within their standard lowest leve!of market town. My suggestion here is that,since village depends for its conformation on the catchment arca of the persuasively that lineage organization above the level of the is usually a market centre.And he has put forward the view very that the largest village in a hsiang (itself also called by that term Chinese rural socicty,Skinner has scized upon Amyot's remark significance of marketing areas in the non-official structure of Arguing with cogency and great scholarly clegance for the agnatic group in the'district',provides it with its organizational form (or formed)a higher-order lineage,which,as the dominant a local lineage.1 I take it that the five Ong local lineages together the fact that it is built around a core of Ong familics who make up while the separate identity of each of the five hin is a product of unity of Chi-chou rests on the common origin of the Ong people, third of their neighbors are families of another surname'.The Ong.lincages cach of which occupies a community in which a to settle.As a result,today Chi-chou'consists of five independent spread,and people of other surnames began entering the district the'district'made up a single lineage.In time it segmented and sumably,Mandarin:Wang)and in early times the inhabitants of in the latc eighteenth century by men of the surname Ong (pre- world of society at large'.Chi-chou appears to have been settled VJLLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN strange this And he
vicinage shows lineage organization working within a framework much more s The example cited above from Welf's work on Taiwan of a small-scaie Skinner,op.cit.pp.36f. analysis of modern Chinese agnatic organization.'The hsing tinction between clan and lineage which needs to be made in the arc both translatable as anciem China the terms hsing and shih (which in modern Chinese which they are used. county 1a1210·1 'surname)indicated precisely the dis- Yet Crecl has recently argued that in pointers to the precise nature of the groups and quasi-groups for isung-tsu;the Chinese nouns by themselves are not unambiguous these terms are used by anthropologists);so too are tsung and The Chinese term tsu is applied to both lineages and clans (as cally wide-ranging higher-order lineages. Tang and Man (Mandarin:Wen) were members of geographi- (perhaps all)of the local lincages belonging to the surnames the frontier between China and the Colony of Hong Kong.Some market town of Sham Chun,which now lies just to the north of leaders of these local lineages had an active interest in the superior grouped together)were dependent on the fact that the influential (such that local lineages very widely separated.werc of the few dominant 'surnames'in the southern part of Hsin-an from this that the great lineage groupings maintained in the case in relation to higher-order market centres;and it may follow political and economic horizons will operate within areas defined of substance.It is part of Skinner's argument that men with wider those whose affairs are in the hands of gentlemen and merchants which are predominantly peasant in their composition,but to it may well be that most of this evidence relates,not to lineages account,were members, higher-order lineage of which the Nanching Lee,in Yang's contrary evidence (how were separated by eighty miles?),but for example,that units of the how local lineages are normally grouped together.There is congruent and that they provide us with the key to understanding that in fact vicinage and standard marketing area are usually It may well turn out,after the matter has been fully explored may arrogate prepondcrant control in the marketing com- VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN its generai title,the book rests very heaviiy on the two geneaiogies Mrs Hui-chen Wang Liu,The Traditional Chinese Cian Rules.Locust Valley, .The foural of Asian Si H.G.Creel,'The Beginnings of Bureaucracy in China:The Origm of the On the one hand,some of the data on the geographical movement ground.In reality both assumptions seem partly to be borne out. historical'sense of the present distribution of lineages on the pective constructions of the relations between lineages,making ramifying of agnatic branches.S for studying the geographical fow of population by the constant First,the genealogies are statements of historical truth.documents we may ask which of the following two assumptions is correct. In trying to understand what these giant genealogies are about, students of southeastern Chinese society.3 Eberhard has analysed two such compilations of direct interest to are by no means uncommon in China. enormous populations and spanning a thousand or more years do they say?Why do they exist?Written genealogics embracing together to form clans may be a puzzle.What do they do?What structurally and historically, ies,vol.xxm,no.22,February 1964.p.168 Second,the genealogies are retros- In a recent major work the gcnealogies linking lineages while it is easy enough to interpret the genealogy of a hneage both Descent and genealogics justify both lineages and clans,but this problem of terminology hanging in the air. Lacking the requisite sinological knowledge, regretfully leave usage of these terms would generally show this kind of distinction. and lineages tsu;but I do not think that the southeastern Chinese one Chinese scholar that in some parts of China clans are hsing lineages than we have thought.(It has been suggested to me by linguistic distinction in Chinese between what we call clans and Creel has done for the ancient usage,that there is in fact a clearer terminology for descent groups,he might be able to assert,as and anthropologically focused)eye on the modern Chinese by the evidence.but it may be that if a sinologue tnrned a crirical ancient China,I cannot say how far Creel's distinction is justified group"Not being a sinologue and knowing very little about in the fullest sense of Max Weber's terminology,a might not produce united action.But the much smaller shih was, an attitude of solidarity which in a specific situation might or was a large and rather loose"common descent group",showing VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN corporate
known daughter settlement.' 1701.2.7. branches,each resulting new unit being independent of its parent 'reconstruct',the manner in which branches send out further pologists prefer to call fission.That is to say,it aims to record,or A genealogy such as this is concerned with vhat some anthro- was created by a member of the main house,or a member of a doubt the assertion of the genealogy that each of these settlements it is possible that the'facts'are historical:'We have no reason to concentrated,some scattered,and at this level of the genealogy further ramification produced a number of settlements,some tionship remains unclear'.Each of the this framework,and where they admit that the degree of rela- other branches 'which the genealogists could not integrate into Wus now existing,disregarding their cthnic origin',there are while the compilers'constructed a frame which would accept all are arranged to show how branches ramify within them,but and fourtecn,in the case of the shallowest.?All the'great houses origins to twenty-eight generations,in the case of the deepest but the.'great houses'themsclves genealogical data to make a coherent system. accuracy and creative imagination. R1058.2.67. trace back their individual The gencalogy reaches down to the eighty-fifth generation. the compilers had to struggle to fit together various kinds of of their first settlers.Through Eberhard's account we can see how to find all the villages where Wu lived and to establish the names more Wu than he could account for genealogically,but he tried provinces just mentioned.He knew that there were in this region in his compilation to the eight'great houses'of Wu in the two origin back into the first millennium B.c.,but confined himself alogy thought that all the Wu came of a single'family'tracing its provinces of Kwangtung and Kwangsi.The author of the gene- (c.1933).The Wu clan of south China is spread widely in the General Genealogy of the Wu Clan of Ling-nan in its latest edition Consider the genealogy which Eberhard treats at length:the their compiling seems to have ensured a mixture of historical great genealogies are scholarly works,and the scholarship put into of the links 'established'in the genealogies are fabricated.The On the other hand,there are good reasons for supposing that some of branches are supported by historical evidence of another kind. VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN 'great houses'has by Lincage Organization,chaps.4 and 6. producc the great genealogy. Eberhard,ep.cit.D.58. Jinked in a clan framework may make political claims on onc another;if a man needs protcction or favour from the bureau- given it may lead people to base their social relarionships on it. Charter and grouping may interact.Individuals from lineages general gencalogy.Contrariwise.once the general gencalogy is may stimulate the members of scattcred lineages to produce a The need to form effective social relationships among them for prestige,and scholarly appetite for writing history converge to intrinsic virtue demonstrated by fruitfulness.Filial piety,hunger fil a pious obligation in acknowledging the root from which the clan sprang,at the same time they bask in the warmth of an the grounds of sheer numbers.A line has prospered and spread So that while the scholars who edit and compile the genealogy ful- draw.)But the general genealogy also makes a bid for prestige on ments of their own members;the general genealogy provides them with evidence of clan achievements on which they can ancestral halls put up boards showing high honours and examina- tion successes,they need not confine themselves to the achieve- somebody,somewhere,at some time has been a scholar,held office,or otherwise brought honour to his agnates.(When lineage many generations and enumerating vast numbers of men,the genealogy must of necessity document some success for the clan alogies often begin thus proudly and remotely.)In chronicling may look back to an ultimate origin of glory.(The came from the ancient,mythical emperor Chuan-hsui'.2 Gene- production of a panorama of fission? There must be several answers to this question.The genealogy to segmentation is simple cnough to grasp.What motivates the system of units. being corporate and distinct precisely because they are part of a explain history' The significance of the gencalogical background division refer to segmentation:how within the largest unit lesser and lesser units are contained in an unfolding series,all units local or higher-order lineage the genealogical justifications of ings for action (although they may in some circumstances come to be);they presuppose common origin and not joint interest;they and not 'sociology'.In contrast,within the groups.The'great houses'and their subdivisions are not group- unit and only potentially forming with it a system of articulated VILLAGE,LINEAGE,AND CLAN