Merchants' Daughters: Women, Commerce, and Regional Culture in South China

4 - Women’s Work and Women’s Food in Lineage Land

Introduction Patrilineal descent has dominated the study of Chinese society in late imperial and early modern periods. The lineage model has been under considerable critical scrutiny.1 But the influences of the paradigm on the study of women and gender in South China have not received comparable attention. In fact, influential studies on Chinese women seem to reinforce the lineage model rather than challenge it. For example, Margery Wolf’s2 theory of women and the family in Taiwan is based on a single “Chinese concept of family” equated to patrilineal descent, outside of which women are supposed to have constructed “uterine families,” which are used to explain phenomena such as the difficult relationship between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law. A more recent, influential formulation equating women’s active roles in relationships across family and descent group boundaries to “women’s community” implies that peasant men lived entirely within their lineage.3 D. K. Feil has observed a very similar tendency in the study of Highland New Guinea society: Women’s Work and Women’s Food in Lineage Land* Wing-hoi Chan 4 * Initial research on which this chapter is based was supported by Yale University’s Center for International and Area Studies, its Council on East Asian Studies, and Graduate School. Additional research, especially on land records, was carried out when the author was a postdoctoral fellow at Centre of Asian Studies, The University of Hong Kong. Wing-hoi Chan 78 [T]ies of kinship and descent, and affinity as well, are frequently separated or disproportionally analyzed in Highlands social structural studies and are usually, if subtly, attached to the domain of one sex or another.4 Feil’s study of a Highlands society highlights structures mediated by women. Comparison of South China to Highland New Guinea may seem far-fetched, not least because familiar image of Chinese lineages based on rice farming.5 However, building on a project re-examining the relationship between representations of descent and gender in South China,6 this chapter will argue that, in the study of early modern South China, the lineage model has obscured sweet potatoes and swine, and women’s roles in their consumption and production, and in economic aspects of peasant families’ ties beyond the descent group. The chapter further demonstrates that an extreme version of the lineage model and a dichotomous approach to the study of women reinforce each other. Since its beginning, scholarship on Chinese lineages has emphasized the rice land endowment of such groups. Most of the extensive studies attempted to understand the historical Chinese lineage through Hong Kong’s rural communities, although for the latter the earliest detailed data are colonial records from the 1900s and ethnographic fieldwork from around 1960. The picture of dominant patrilineages as a community closed in on itself for its male peasant members has become influential and received little critical scrutiny. As a result, gender aspects of the rural economy have been obscured, despite increased attention to class and gender inequalities within powerful lineages. The new study of oral accounts and land records presented here will show that since long before the arrival of the first anthropologist in rural Hong Kong in the 1950s, rice farming was unable to meet the needs of such communities. Women’s work to produce other food and income and their consumption of a larger proportion of an alternative staple were major elements in the rural economy. These features of the economic system were important factors to some aspects of gender and family relations often attributed to the kinship system. Double-cropping irrigated rice land in southeastern China, with a high potential for rent extraction, is considered a major factor to the rise and maintenance of large localized descent groups. It was the most important kind of asset set aside to produce income for the worship of ancestors and, where the income is large enough, other benefits for their descendants. Some advantages of rice land for lineage development are clear enough. The opportunity to develop such land might promote the establishment of 79 Women’s Work and Women’s Food in Lineage Land extended social organization; the high profitability of the asset provided support for ritual and other activities that help maintain a descent group and its subdivisions. However, various authors have gone further in emphasizing the power of the lineages found in Hong Kong and the nearby region to argue that lineage...