Introduction Chinese kinship metamorphoses

The essays in this volume focus on kinship in China1 from a broad anthropological perspective, one that is firmly committed to the work of ethnographic description and imagination. Our volume proposes an update to previous collections of essays on this classic anthropological topic (Ebrey and Watson 1986; Freedman 1970),2 in light of the dramatic changes that have occurred since not just in China, but also in anthropological kinship theory itself. More specifically, this volume – which follows from an international conference held at the University of Manchester in April 2006 – seeks to move beyond such earlier collections in at least two fundamental respects. First, the volume responds to an increasingly manifest urge within Chinese

anthropology to question and revise the ‘lineage paradigm’ – originally inspired by the groundbreaking work of the late Maurice Freedman (1958, 1966) – that has dominated the study of Chinese kinship for much of the second half of the twentieth century (Santos 2006; Watson 1982). Second, after almost two decades of enormous growth within the China field (hitherto a rather ‘specialist’ region within general anthropology), this volume poses the question of what the Chinese kinship experience can bring to the anthropological understanding of kinship in general, and vice versa. Here we are following in the footsteps of Maurice Freedman himself, whose adaptation of the famous descent group theory, laid out in African Political Systems (Evans-Pritchard and Fortes 1940), to the study of China powerfully demonstrated that kinship can also be of enormous social, cultural and political importance in civilizations with an ‘old state’ (Baker and Feuchtwang 1991). Freedman’s intellectual achievement and important legacy is thus acknowledged here. However, we believe that a revision of Freedman’s central ideas, and a more general rethinking of the anthropology of Chinese kinship, is timely in both disciplinary and empirical terms. The post-Mao transformations beginning in the 1980s have marked the beginning of an unprecedented wave of field research on Chinese soil that has prompted many anthropologists to come back to the classic topic of kinship and family relations. This recent research – many of whose authors are represented in this volume – highlights the remarkable transformations that have

happened in China since the post-war period, if not since the late imperial and the early republican eras. This work has also generated a new set of synchronic and diachronic perspectives on Chinese kinship that we think deserve wider attention. The more so, we suggest, because this rethinking coincides with a remarkable resurgence of interest in kinship within the general field of anthropology – and in the public realm of many Western societies – that has yet to be confronted with the Chinese case study – and vice versa. The present volume makes an important step in this direction. In addition

to providing fresh historico-ethnographic snapshots of the Chinese kinship experience, the various chapters in this volume demonstrate that transformation and variation – and thus ‘social change’ – are central rather than marginal elements in the making of Chinese kinship. They suggest that the Chinese case study, rather than providing an example of extreme historical unchangeability or stasis, is the illustration of a rather extreme capacity to adapt continuously to widely varying circumstances, both geographically and historically. Yet, despite these ongoing transformations, the Chinese kinship experience has also remained recognizably ‘similar to itself ’ over very large historical and geographical distances. We believe that this apparent paradox of malleability and constancy, fluidity and rigidity is not just typically Chinese, but is an important element of human kinship cross-culturally. That this aspect of human kinship is particularly visible in the Chinese case study is probably because there is an unusual amount of easily available historical data on Chinese kinship practices (both public and domestic). We think these data suggest that the anthropology of kinship must theorize transformation as central, rather than as exceptional, to what human kinship is and does. We aim to capture this theoretical insight with the expression ‘Chinese

kinship metamorphoses’ – an expression of our invention that evokes a recent work by Maurice Godelier (2004), in which he provides a remarkable account of the human kinship experience from a cross-cultural perspective. Drawing on the chapters that follow, our introduction highlights three important theoretical perspectives or ideas that a focus on transformation in the Chinese kinship experience can generate. First, the idea that human kinship practices and representations are subject to significant cross-cultural (and intra-cultural) transformations built around diverse sets of ‘ideals’ and ‘materialities’. These not only go well beyond issues of biological reproduction, but also recast the nature/biology and culture/social divide that has informed kinship theory in significantly different ways. Second, the idea that people’s kinship practices and representations are everywhere not just about what is inherited or given from the past, but also about what is acquired in the present and aspired to in the future. And third, the idea that kinship might be represented as emerging from the local, the moral, the emotional or the traditional, but that kinship practices and representations are historical and therefore subject to historical transformations. This is because the realm of kinship (including the ways sex and gender, and age and generational

relations are regulated) is both embedded in and contributes to the reworking of the larger politico-economic and sociocultural processes that form its particular ‘experience’. The focus on Chinese kinship as a (static, traditional or local) ‘thing’ has been coterminous with understandings of China as a (politically bounded) culture. Focusing on transformations, instead, also implies approaching ‘China’ as a historically shaped, evolving cultural field of relations, where kinship is increasingly engaged in the complexities of global markets and modern state formation. Our volume is organized into three thematic sections – (1) Motion,

migration and urbanity; (2) Intimacy, gender and power; (3) State, body and civilization – that are symptomatic of the current diversity of research interests in the China field, and that aim to operationalize transformation through focusing on the different materialities central to the making of Chinese kinship. ‘Materialities’ is, for us, a term that does not just comprise ‘things’, but that is conceived in contrast to ‘ideals’ or even ‘ideologies’ and thus that also comprises, for example, emotional or memory practices. We shall come back to these ‘materialities’ later on. For now, we would like to note that the volume also includes a considerable diversity of field settings and historical periods purposefully designed to capture the remarkable historical and spatial variations of kinship in China (Map 1). While most chapters focus on the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and on the contemporary post-Mao era, the Maoist era and even the late imperial and early republican eras are also the object of some attention. For example, Chapter 8 (Bray) is a historical ethnography of elite practices and medical discourses of ‘multiple parenthood’ during the late imperial period. Beyond the PRC, Chapter 10 (Feuchtwang) focuses on modern Taiwan, and Chapters 6 and 7 (Stafford and Brandtstädter) compare the PRC and Taiwan. The focus of this volume is the Han Chinese (the politically and numerically dominant ‘ethnic group’ in both the PRC and Taiwan), but we also remain sensitive to the diversity of ethnic and identity issues at play in the Chinese world. Two chapters deal with non-Han communities, in western Sichuan (Chapter 2, Han) and Inner Mongolia (Chapter 3, Jankowiak), and one with a Minnan-speaking Han community in Fujian (Chapter 4, Friedman) that is often associated with ‘non-standard’ marriage practices. The volume also highlights the variations between urban and rural settings, a duality that in ‘modern’ China has acquired increasing political, economical and cultural significance. Moreover, the collection brings together material from different regions including the far south (Guangdong), south-east (Fujian and Taiwan), south-west (Yunnan), central-west (Sichuan), coastal east (Shandong) and north (Inner Mongolia). Taken as a whole, this recurrent emphasis on diversity is not merely descriptive; it has the theoretical aim of drawing attention to Chinese kinship through its multiplicities rather than through defining a standard ‘model’ and exploring all variations as ‘deviances’. Emphasizing transformation might appear too contemporary and too

much influenced, both empirically and ideologically, by the scale and scope

of the process of social change going on in the mainland since the foundation of the PRC, including the current accelerated move towards globalization and industrial capitalism. We can only gesture here towards the enormous amount of historico-anthropological scholarship – partly triggered by a groundbreaking volume edited by Patricia B. Ebrey and James L. Watson (1986) – that shows how Chinese kinship and gender were constantly affected and transformed, during the high imperial era and the late imperial period, by political and economic developments, growing class inequalities and local warfare, and historical upheavals of state-making and ‘civilizationmaking’ (Bossler 1998; Birge 2002; Ebrey 1991; Faure 2007; Furth 1999; Ko 2005; Mann 1997; Sommer 2000; Szonyi 2002; Zheng 1992).3 Beyond this question of the relation between kinship and history, we also think that our emphasis on transformation is more in tune with Chinese ancient forms of knowledge and philosophical concepts, which combined an emphasis on classification and categorization with the recognition of the pervasiveness of metamorphosis and transformation both across and within classes/categories. An example of this is the famous duality of yin and yang, which is constantly reshaping and reorganizing while always remaining recognizably the

same.4 We think that this ancient emphasis on metamorphosis and transformation is not a mere relic of the past, but informs much of China’s recent history, and is particularly visible in the realm of kinship and family relations. In what follows, before proceeding to a detailed presentation of the var-

ious chapters in the volume, we first provide a brief ‘genealogical’ overview of the key debates in discussion. This overview prompts us to spell out the major contributions of the volume to recent developments in anthropological kinship theory and Chinese kinship studies.