ABSTRACT
This chapter proposes an ethnographic description of the expressive dynamics of kinship in rural South China based on long-term field research in a small Cantonese single-lineage village – the local term is tuhng-sing-chyun2
or ‘common-surname village’ – situated in the southern coastal province of Guangdong. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, the subject of kinship in rural South China was of some magnitude within the discipline of sociocultural anthropology. At the time, the post-war Maoist period, China was still largely closed to international researchers, and anthropologists were seeking some kind of consolation in the exploration of topics such as kinship, which were then often seen to point more in the direction of the past and its traditions than in the direction of the present and its ongoing metamorphoses. The region of South China – the homeland of much of the Chinese diaspora and a former frontier area of the Chinese empire – looked particularly exciting in this respect. At this earlier stage, China appeared to anthropologists as a complex
agrarian society in which people attached particular importance to the family, to the practice of ancestor worship, and to the tracing of family genealogies based on the principle of patrilineal descent. This was the principle that coordinated the transmission of family resources (including family surnames) over the generations, and that allowed people to define themselves as members of more or less inclusive descent groups whose apical ancestors could go as far back as the founding period of the Chinese empire, several millennia into the past. In most regions of China, these descent groups were trans-local and dispersed in space, but in rural South China – and this is what made this region look so exciting – these descent groups were quite often objectified in concrete, localized ‘family-like’ units well above the level of a Chinese ‘extended family’ with three or five generations. These compact rural communities came to be known technically as ‘lineage-villages’ or ‘localized lineages’ because their resident families claim to descend patrilineally from a common founding apical ancestor and practice patrilocal exogamy at the group level – other defining factors include the sharing of rights of territorial settlement, the sharing of ritual duties of ancestor worship, and sometimes the sharing of land and other resources (for an overview see Watson 1982).
