‘Families we create’: women’s kinship in rural China as spatialized practice

In the quest to understand the lives of women and men in rural China, we have continually been led to the tight weave of ties that we have thought of in classical kinship terms, or in the now more inclusively conceptualized modes of relatedness (Carsten, 2000, 2004). Virtually everyone in rural China is related somehow, and these varied ties form the idiom through which rural social life is expressed. In very many places, including most where I have worked, patriliny forms the framework for community social relations, and anthropology has been resourceful in tracing how it can work to form effective bonds between men and, through men, with women (for example Cohen 1976, 2005; Faure 1986; Freedman 1966; Liu 2000; Potter and Potter 1990; Watson 1985; Yang 1945). This has extended significantly into our understanding of the collectives of an earlier period (Croll 1981) and, together with patrilocality, underlies emergent shifts in the second phase of land division under way in the past decade.1