Lineage Society on the Southeastern Coast of China: The Impact o ...

prominent lineages of Haining for information—about their settlement history, the construction of their ancestral halls, the establishment of their corporate estates, and their accounts of interlineage relations and more—makes possible an in-depth examination not only of the background and the process of lineage creation but also of the resultant struggle among the different lineages for social and political ascendancy within the locality during the sixteenth century.

The Lineage Paradigm

The concept of the lineage as a corporate property-controlling group defined by agnatic kin relationships based on a common patriarchal ancestral cult was introduced to the study of Chinese society by Maurice Freedman.⁷ Freedman’s theoretical framework draws on the functionalist tradition in British social anthropology and on the work of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes with African societies—work that assumes kinship as a central principle of organization in simple societies.⁸ The work of Freedman changed the way anthropologists and historians study Chinese society by allowing for analysis of the Chinese descent group in terms of resource control and allocation rather than through the definition of kinship as presented in the clan rules and ideas of common descent.⁹ Studies were carried out in the 1960s and 1970s on Taiwan and colonial Hong Kong by those who followed in Freedman’s wake; in the process, a paradigmatic approach to the study of Chinese society developed.¹⁰ This shift toward the “political-jural principle of patrilineal descent” came to dominate the field of Chinese kinship studies, which, after Freedman, was critiqued as too closely associated with “descent, property and lineage organization.”¹¹

It is now apparent that Freedman’s static, ideal model of the A–Z lineage formations centering on a continuum of various permutations of corporate property trusts and common ancestral cult is far from universally applicable. Robert Hymes, for example, has found that ancestral halls and corporate estates—the hallmarks of Freedman’s model—were in fact very rare in Fuzhou during the Southern Song and Yuan dynasties.¹² Likewise,