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.
The Segmentary Lineage: An Organization of Predatory Expansion1
THERE has been a broad inclination in social anthropology in recent years to apply the designations "segmentary system" and "segmentary process" to a wide variety of societies. Only slightly narrower is the application of the concept to lineages or societies with lineages. While granting certain general similarities in all the organizations popularly called "segmentary lineage," it seems more useful to restrict the term to a very few societies, most notably the Nuer and the Tiv. The argument can be made on purely formal grounds: Tiv and Nuer are in critical respects organized differently from other societies that have been placed in the category "segmentary lineage system." Thus, in Tribes Without Rulers, Middleton and Tait were moved to classify Tiv and Nuer-along with Lugbara, which seems inaccurate-as a subtype of segmentary lineage systems, at one point as the "classical" variety of such systems (1958:29). But the type can also be considered in an evolutionary perspective: TivNuer, the segmentary lineage organization properly so-called, is a specific adaptive variety within the tribal level of society and culture. (The criteria of "tribal level" and the meaning of "specific adaptive variety" will be spelled out below.) This evolutionary perspective is adopted here because it furnishes a practical basis for distinguishing Tiv-Nuer from other "segmentary" societies and, at the same time, it has the power to suggest the circumstances which produce segmentary lineage organization, to "explain" it, at least partly. Conversely -and contrary to the vision of Radcliffe-Brown for a comparative-structural approach-formalism alone has only tended to obscure the salient characteristics of the segmentary lineage organization. Focusing on such general structural and functional resemblances as "segmentation" and "complementary opposition," the formal definition of "segmentary lineage" threatens to become as broad as the formal view of the "lineage" itself. For segmentation and complementary opposition are very widespread-nearly universal-features of human social organization. It is then no wonder that Tiv and Nuer have been lumped with societies that virtually run the evolutionary gamut from simple tribes to protostates, such as the Alur (Southall 1956). Our dissatisfaction with this procedure parallels Fried's discontent with the use of "lineage" in current social anthropology: