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

By focusing on a broad array of sources related to a large number of kinship groups around Fuzhou in Fujian province, this important book advances our understanding of kinship practices in China on several fronts. First, it shows how genealogies were constructed in different historical circumstances between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries to serve particular ends, including the establishment and legitimation of Han ethnic identity. Second, it shows how particular individuals and groups established lineage temples as institutions that met demands created especially by the Ming imperial state (1368-1644), including obligations to maintain local order and forward tax payments. Third, in a chapter previously published in Journal of Chinese Religions, XXVIII (2000), 93-125—"Local Cult, Lijia, and Lineage: Religious Organization in Ming and Qing Fujian"—it shows how practices of local religious cults became increasingly integrated with kinship rituals in lineage temples between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fourth, it argues persuasively that individual and collective strategies evident in the development of kinship institutions and ideologies changed the meaning of kinship again and again, reinventing rituals and creating new corporate structures in a process that continues to this day.

Szonyi uses theories and methods developed during the last three decades by anthropologists, historians, and religious-studies scholars working in the China field. Included among his sources for facts, figures, and discourses about religious practices and moral values are local gazetteers, family and lineage histories, law codes, letters, and essays spanning a period of 800 years. He also draws on field observations of ritual practices and interviews with participants and non-participants for interpretations of meaning and collective memory. Carefully balancing the methods and concepts that inform historical and anthropological analysis, he stops short of using the theories or the data of one discipline to challenge the arguments of the other. Instead, he employs each to inform the questions and hypotheses of the other. For instance, in challenging the view that the spread of kinship institutions and rituals demonstrates the steadily increasing power of a local scholar-official elite and its orthodox rules, he raises specific examples to the contrary. Some examples show that the fifteenth-century lijia system, intended to engage local elites in tax collection and law enforcement, produced state demands that were "powerful but malleable," influencing the creation of lineage institutions "by ordinary folk searching for ways to respond" (69). Others show that, no matter whether the law proposed in the sixteenth century that would allow local elites the right to offer sacrifices to distant ancestors was implemented—a point debated by historians interested in the influence of elite interests on imperial law and vice-versa—it was never introduced locally. Szonyi also shows, however, that conflicts over the use of resources within particular kinship groups reveal intensive "strategizing in the language of orthodoxy" by scholar-official elites and nonelites alike (136, 205).

To accomplish his goal of neither missing nor oversimplifying significant practices, Szonyi casts "a wide net" in order to investigate a full range of forms not recorded for any single lineage or community. The practices that fill this net, he argues, "could potentially be found in any social group in the region," were found in many, but were recorded only in some (7). This approach allows him, and the rest of us, to draw significant comparisons between particular strategies in this region and those in other parts of China. Rather than looking for universals of "orthodoxy" or even "orthopraxy" in what historians have called "the localist strategy" of national elites, he looks for "strategies in which conformity, or the appearance of conformity, to orthodoxy played an important role" (204).