Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China (review)

Modern study of the Chinese lineage by both historians and anthropologists can be traced back to the late 1950s. Writing at approximately the same time, Maurice Freedman described the structure of lineages in Fujian and Guagndong in the language that had been developed to analyze African unilineal descent groups and Denis Twitchett examined the textual sources concerning the earliest lineage estate, the charitable estate founded by Fan Zhongyan in the eleventh century.¹ Scholars who came after Freedman and Twitchett followed their lead in pursuing questions about regional differences in the incidence of lineages, the nature and significance of lineage property, the role of elite leadership and elite interests in the founding and operation of lineages, and the like. Of particular importance have been case studies of particular localities over time. Works by Hilary Beattie, David Faure, John Dardess, Robert Hymes, Jerry Dennerline, Keith Hazelton, William Rowe, and others have shown that in different parts of China, descent group organization began at different times and took varied forms.² Michael Szonyi's gracefully written book, Practicing Kinship: Lineage and Descent in Late Imperial China, both adds to and challenges this literature through a study of one of the places where lineages were strongest, Fuzhou in Fujian Province.

In many ways Szonyi goes beyond earlier historians. As China is now much more open to outside researchers, he was able to do his research in Fuzhou. He read some three hundred genealogies of local lineages and talked with local people about the histories of their lineages, often finding discrepancies between his written sources and what his local informants told him. In addition, since the Fuzhou region is one of the areas of China where lineage organization is being revived, Szonyi is able to make frequent reference to contemporary practices that he observed while he was there.

The principal way in which Szonyi challenges the existing literature is by downplaying the importance of Confucian ideas and elite leadership in the development of lineages. In contrast to David Faure, who wrote "It cannot be emphasized too strongly that the lineage as an institution was to a large extent introduced into the New Territories from outside and that, in this process, it filtered downwards from the richer to the poorer villages over four centuries,"³ Szonyi wants to see lineage formation as something that filters up, from the choices made by ordinary people.⁴ He repeatedly says he is looking at kinship in a new way, one that emphasizes practice, multiple versions, negotiation, and contestation, and implies that this approach allows him to read his sources in ways previous authors have not. He offers no analysis of the differences between his findings and those of historians who looked at other localities, which gives the impression that he thinks the difference lies primarily in his greater skepticism toward the sources written by members of the elite, rather than differences in the historical development of each place. As the title of the book makes clear, his goal is to give us a new view of the history of lineage and descent not in Fuzhou but in China as a whole.

Szonyi's work thus invites evaluation at two levels: How convincingly does he explain what happened in Fuzhou? And to what extent do his findings offer new insight into kinship organization elsewhere in China? Szonyi's reconstruction of the history of lineages in Fuzhou puts particular emphasis on the assimilation of non-Han groups and the unintentional effect of the early Ming lijia system. All lineages in the area in their written genealogies claim to be descended from a migrant from North or Central China from the Six Dynasties or later. From this Szonyi quite reasonably infers that descendants of earlier residents have found ways to graft their genealogies onto the genealogies of migrants. In particular, Szonyi suspects that people belonging to the despised she and dan groups (mountain people...