Kinship and Community in Two Chinese Villages . By Burton Pasternak . [Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1972. xiv + 174 pp. $8.50. London: Oxford University Press, 1973. £4–25.]
This book has the merit of being unusually short, but although it is written tightly, the ground to be covered is not small, and the pursuit of brevity may have caused the sacrifice of the fuller detail which I found myself wanting at some points. The author sets out not only to describe, compare and contrast two villages and their social organization, but also to use these two case studies in illustration of generalizations on lineage settlement and on the effects of irrigation. The two villages chosen for study are both in south-western Taiwan. Tatieh was founded in 1811 by Hakka people from Kwangtung Province, while Chungshe, 50 kilometres away, was founded a few decades earlier by Hokkien. The villages remain respectively Hakka and Hokkien speaking today. Both villages have populations of over 1,000, and both are predominantly supported by agriculture. Chapter one covers the geography, history of settlement and pattern of landholding in each of the villages. Chapter two, " Agriculture," is chiefly concerned with irrigation methods and changes in them of recent years, but labour, capital and credit are also discussed. A large section of the chapter, roughly from p. 39 to p. 52, has appeared elsewhere. Chapter three contrasts kinship organization in the two villages; and chapter four, "Village Integration," compares the cohesiveness of the two. The final chapter seeks an explanation for the differences between the settlements, concentrating particularly on differences in kinship organization, and looks at material from other parts of south-eastern China for comparison. Again, quite a lot of the argument has been presented before. The essential difference between Tatieh and Chungshe is seen by the author to lie in their kinship organization. Tatieh is a multi-surname settlement and is characterized as a village which eschews the playing on agnatic ties and the identification between kinship and settlement which might be expected of a lineage-village. Chungshe is also a multi-
The Role of the Frontier in Chinese Lineage Development
Many writers interested in Chinese culture and society have drawn attention to the uneven distribution of large, highly corporate, localized lineages in China. Many have noted the concentration of such lineages in the two southeastern provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, but relatively few writers have attempted to offer anything like a systematic explanation for the distribution. The most recent and ambitious attempt to come to grips with the problem is found in Maurice Freedman's book, Chinese Lineage and Society. The author reviews a number of factors relevant to the emergence and persistence of strong lineages, and singles out a few which he considers to be of special importance. A relationship is suggested between rice cultivation, extensive irrigation, the exigencies of frontier life, and the emergence of large, localized, highly corporate lineages. The purpose of this paper will be to reassess the role of the frontier in the development of the Chinese lineage. We will consider the extent to which the conditions of frontier life may have functioned as a catalyst in the formation of elaborated, localized lineages in China. Freedman has suggested that the need for cooperation in opening and bringing water to wild land, and in defending life and property, stimulated a rapid development of corporate, localized lineages on the southeastern Chinese frontier.
French film theory and criticism : a history/anthology, 1907-1939
These two volumes examine a significant but previously neglected moment in French cultural history: the emergence of French film theory and criticism before the essays of Andr Bazin. Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to "bite into" the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.