Suchergebnisse

A communication from 1868 tells us that in the eastern Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangsu it was common for people to cremate their dead. Being a rather unusual practice in a Chinese environment, this particular custom is discussed here from an anthropological perspective, a number of suggestions being made to form an "experimental" holistic explanation of this variation in traditional funeral procedure. The use of coffins, fire and ceramic urns is profiled against a background of the cultivation of rice, the production of silk, cross-cousin marriage and the position of women in this area. Women are seen as a key element in this cultural complex.

This article explores a case of ancestor worship in Taiwan, within the southern sphere of Chinese culture. Ancestry as a system of belonging works as a fundamental grammar for building structural continuity in traditional China, yet the system displays a great deal of variation. The Hakka peasants of southern Taiwan are shown to honour, in an 'unorthodox way', several different agnatic lines of descent as forming an individual, while at the same time strongly collectivising the dead into one single unit. The latter works as a denial of the first pluralistic message.

AbstractThis essay explores the distribution of the ownership of land in a coastal village in the New Territories of Hong Kong at the beginning of the last century. The study examines land and houses as indices of relative wealth in a poor community. Above all, it points to the discursive social use of land as a genealogical tract in an area where written genealogies would have been scarce or nonexisting. Belonging in terms of agnatic continuity and its ramifications over time were mapped out in the agricultural landscape to form a complete depicting graph.

The essay aims at identifying a number of problems (dismantling of the traditional social landscape, withdrawal from the Great Leap, the new legislation in respect of household production, economic realities and reform, demographic perspectives, urbanisation, economic differentiation, one-child families, ownership etc.) for future research linked with the drama of transformation in the Chinese countryside. (DÜI-Sen)

The study of migration is generally conducted along the lines of communication theory and it is assumed that we deal with a source, a medium of transfer and a receiver. An investigation of a particular migratory movement should ideally embrace two discrete geographical territories and their socio–cultural contents, and the means providing passage from one to the other. The communication model provides an overview understanding. However, when anthropologists have scrutinized migratory movements, the clear–cut categories of source and receiver have turned out to be less obvious. In this paper it is my intention to give an ethnographical account for the "end" of a channel in a process of migration, the final stage of a transfer in which people who are on the move reach their destinations. It is obvious that "destination" is not the same thing as "terminal." Often people move in stages, and it is quite possible that what we regard as a destination in one study would turn out to be a stage in a chain of stages in a future enquiry.