Social historians and social anthropologists may differ in respect to methodology but they often study the same kinds of problems and ask similar questions of their data. This is particularly true in the field of Chinese studies. Anthropologists who work in Chinese villages, towns or cities cannot help but be aware of historical issues; if they are not their hosts will soon set them straight. Historians, in turn, must become anthropologists of sorts if they hope to understand the complexities of Chinese social institutions.

Chinese Kinship Reconsidered: Anthropological Perspectives On Historical Research

The meanings of a heritage trail in Hong Kong

North china heretofore has been only minimally involved in the modern anthropological analysis of Chinese patrilineal kinship. In this region, lineage organization prior to the Communist era comprised a social structure, symbolism, and arrangement of ritual that call into question the line of anthropological inquiry that has focused almost exclusively on the linkages between a lineage's corporate resources and its social cohesion. The characteristics of lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader north China pattern considerably different from those associated with the southeastern Chinese model that has dominated the anthropological literature. Although many elements of northern lineage organization are found also in the southeast and elsewhere in China, they are combined in the north into a distinctive arrangement of cemeteries, graves, ancestral scrolls, ancestral tablets, and corporate groups linked to a characteristic annual ritual cycle. I deal first with the expression in Yangmansa of key features of the north China pattern, but also draw on other sources to fill out the picture and establish its broader regional relevance.

Lineage Organization in North China

Emphasis on descent and kinship in analysis of traditional Chinese corporations, a legacy of structural-functional theory, mistakes the analyst's theoretical categories for native culture. In this paper, the author attempts to sort out some of the resulting conceptual muddles, and he proposes a more rigorous analytical framework for discussing the range of organizational variation in traditional Chinese corporations. Analysis of ten representative cases from Ta-ch'i, Taiwan, reveals greater flexibility of corporate form and function than structural-functional theories would predict. Close attention to the cases also reveals the absence of any compelling reason to treat the “Chinese lineage” as analytically or culturally distinct from the entire range of Chinese formal associations (hui). To understand what is uniquely Chinese in Chinese corporations, past emphasis on differences in formal group-membership requirements must be complemented by attention to the cultural values and norms of operation that transcend such differences.

Traditional Chinese Corporations: Beyond Kinship

RELIGION, CULTURE, AND MODER ITY: SOME MISSIOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE PROCESS OF SECULARIZATION IN EAST ASIA

Jack M. Potter

Papers

Capitalism and the Chinese peasant : social and economic change in a Hong Kong village