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

The ability to do fieldwork in the People’s Republic of China has enabled historians like Michael Szonyi to add historical depth to the anthropological scholarship on Chinese social organization. During the 1990s Szonyi visited all of the one to two hundred villages on Nantai Island, outside the city of Fuzhou, in Fujian province. He observed seasonal and ancestral rituals, interviewed local residents, and collected written documentation from local gazetteers, several hundred genealogies, household division records, land deeds, and stone inscriptions, all of which he has put to good use in this book, which is simultaneously a local history and an analysis of Chinese lineages, defined as “a self-professed patrilineal descent group (4).” Lineages were an important element in Fuzhou society through at least the last millennium.

In chapters focused on genealogies, the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) taxation system and lineage development, ancestral halls, calendrical rituals, and local cults, Szonyi explores the historical evolution of lineage organization and its diversity in this highly commercialized locality on China’s southeast coast. His basic argument is that “organized patrilineal kinship...is best understood as the outcome of individual and collective strategizing in a field that was shaped by the widely shared agnatic orientation, an elite model of kinship, and a set of other factors that include ethnic differentiation; commercialization of the economy; transformations in the composition of local elites; and in particular, responses to state policy for the registration of land and population since the Ming (8).”

Of the major themes that run through this work, perhaps the most important concerns the fluidity of local kinship practices. Lineages and genealogies entered Fujian with Han Chinese migrants in the tenth century. Analyzing genealogies as social charters rather than records of biological descent, Szonyi found that later editions tended to claim earlier and more prominent focal ancestors than their predecessors, revealing how lineages of humble origin tried to raise their social prestige and remove suspicion that they were descended from the low-status Dan or She aborigines who had initially populated Fujian. The widespread local custom of uxorilocal marriage (husband takes up residence in his father-in-law’s house, and agrees that his sons will bear his father-in-law’s surname) and cross-surname adoption (son is adopted outside the lineage, and thus acquires a different surname) enabled genealogists to plausibly explain changes of surname.

Abundant data from the Ming dynasty onward enable Szonyi to survey the historical evolution of lineages through ancestral halls, where agnatic kinsmen perform rituals before the ancestors’ spirit tablets. In the early Ming period, “official halls” honoring outstanding individuals were created by exclusive lineages composed of degree-holders and officials. In the more fluid society of the sixteenth century, lineage formation became a vehicle of upward mobility for the ambitious, while educated elites began to view lineage creation as a means of promoting social cohesion and stabilizing the social order in their localities. During the Qing dynasty (1644–1911), lineage formation percolated further down the social hierarchy; new lineages constructed ancestral halls that were open to all descendants in theory—but in actuality, often charging for the privilege of installing an ancestor tablet in the hall.

Ancestral halls were a most visible sign of a lineage’s local power. In a region known for its single-surname villages (some of which, through expansion and merger, became settlements dominated by two or three lineages in the twentieth century), it is not surprising that the festival days of local tutelary deities were often entangled with lineage ancestral halls. In many parts of China, the tutelary deity “tours” the territory of the community he protects: in Fuzhou he often enters the ancestral halls to receive worship. In one village, a female fertility goddess, normally worshipped by women at a temple, was paraded into the ancestral hall, where women were normally not permitted. Here Szonyi points to the “messiness” and fluidity of rituals and their frequent deviation from normative prescriptions...