ABSTRACT
The village communities of southeast China and Taiwan are populated by families that are joint in both the usual anthropological senses. It is conventional for a man's sons to bring their wives to live with him in his house or compound, and his sons are also joint owners with him of the family estate. When a family estate is divided, some portion of it may be set aside in the name of the deceased family head to remain joint property. If a sacrificial-estate group persists for very long, it may expand into a multileveled collection of joint families within ever higher order joint families; and this is one of the social forms commonly described as a lineage in the ethnographic literature. Most significant, women are considered to be members of their husbands' groups, and this for the simple reason that the constituents physical though not jural, of these sets are joint-family households.
