Society and Culture in China Research Paper

1. Ethnicity And Identity

China’s government recognizes officially 56 minzu or ‘nationalities,’ based on an evolutionary scale of material progress derived from Lewis Henry Morgan and Friedrich Engels. Some groups, notably Tibetans and Uighurs of Western China, and Mongols in the north, have historical claims to large geographical areas, and aspirations for political autonomy. Other groups (for example the ‘Miao,’ ‘Zhuang,’ and ‘Yi’) have been dispersed among Han and other minzu over many provinces in South, Central, and Southwestern China. Official recognition as a nationality confers certain legal privileges (most famously, exemption from the ‘one-child’ policy of population control), but also implies backwardness and legitimates paternalistic treatment from the government. In this respect, China’s current government continues a self-consciously ‘civilizing’ mission with respect to its non-Han populations that dates to imperial times (Harrell 1995).

China’s ‘Han’ peoples are by no means culturally homogeneous, but scholars are divided as to the degree to which Han Chinese can be said to share a common culture. For example, only about half of Han peoples are native speakers of ‘Mandarin’ or ‘the common language’ (putonghua). The rest speak one of about a dozen major ‘dialects’ (related languages, but often mutually unintelligible). Broadly speaking, the provinces of Southern and Southeastern China manifest the greatest linguistic diversity among Han Chinese. This diversity reflects the fact these areas were incorporated into the Chinese empire somewhat later than North and Central China. In addition, the preservation of regional cultures in the South and Southeast results from the fact that these areas have been relatively less frequently beset by dramatic population displacements caused by dynastic crises, droughts, floods, and other disasters than have areas in the North and West.

Mitigating regional and linguistic diversity is the fact that Han Chinese of all provinces share a common written language, elite traditions, and a long history of political unification under a succession of dynasties and into the era of nationalist and, now, communist governments. Moreover, although there is no clear consensus as to the precise defining characteristics of Chinese culture, many Chinese communities are marked by similar family institutions, popular religious customs, class relations, forms of corporate association, and broadly Confucian values emphasizing, most importantly, filial piety. Yet the issue of China’s cultural unity, or lack thereof, has long vexed anthropologists, and is increasingly becoming one of political moment in the Sinocentric world. Among China’s national minorities, for example, there are movements among Tibetans and Uighurs for independence. By the same token, regional and dialect-based communalism is strong among Han Chinese in the Southeast.

At the time of writing, the potentially most volatile locus of separatist sentiment is Taiwan. Separated politically from the mainland during 50 years of Japanese colonial rule (1895–1945) and subsequently governed by an exile nationalist government, Taiwan’s majority Han population—including speakers of the Southern Min dialect (minnanhua) shared with southern Fujian province, and of Hakka, another dialect widely dispersed in Southern China—increasingly asserts its political and, in some cases, cultural separation from China. These assertions are anathema to China’s government, which considers Taiwan a renegade province. Given such circumstances, the issue of cultural unity and diversity has a political significance that extends well beyond the concerns of anthropologists.

2. Scale And Complexity

China’s vast scale and complexity pose particular problems for anthropology because the discipline’s crucial organizing concepts—culture and society— have developed historically in the study of small-scale societies. Anthropology’s traditional claim to illuminate social-cum-cultural systems holistically—most explicitly in the functionalist traditions of Bronislaw Malinowski and A. R. Radcliffe-Brown—is more easily accomplished in ethnographic descriptions in which overarching institutions and consciousness of common identity do not reach much above the village or tribal level. Given such limits, the interpenetration of kinship, political, religious, and economic institutions is described and analyzed more easily than in China, where economic, cultural, religious, and political ties link metropolitan centers to distant rural locales. An additional complicating consideration is the historical depth of supra-local social organization: China’s history of economic, political, and cultural integration at local, regional, and empire nationwide levels has exerted and continues to exert a strong influence on local life and institutions. China’s significance for the discipline of anthropology lies most of all in the challenge this complexity poses for adapting and modifying conceptual and theoretical tools developed in analyses of societies of much more limited scale.

To this end, the path-breaking work of G. William Skinner, growing out of ‘central-place theory,’ is particularly significant (Skinner 1964–5, Skinner 1977). Skinner has developed a spatial-cum-temporal model of market-, town-, and city-centered regions in China in late imperial times that form an eight-tiered nested hierarchy culminating in nine ‘macro-regions.’ Ascendance in the central-place hierarchy (for example, from villages to market towns, to higher-level central places) is characterized by increasing specialization of economic function, social complexity, and cultural sophistication. By the same token, macroregions are divided into more densely populated and economically concentrated cores and more sparsely populated, and less productive, peripheries. These distinctions are reflected in class characteristics, kinship and religious organization, and other social differences.

Interpenetrating the hierarchy of economic local and regional systems is a hierarchy of political administration. Although there exists a rough articulation of administrative and economic regional organization (for example, many district capitals are also important economic centers), these correspondences are far from perfect (for example, consumers often have access to more than one higher-level economic center, whereas every administrative district is discrete, with a single capital at the next higher level). The ramifications of regional analysis for more conventional styles of ethnographic work are fundamental. Put simply, Skinner’s work obviates imagining China as being crudely dividable into distinctions such as ‘rural’ and ‘urban,’ or ‘elite’ and ‘folk’: From the vantage point of village-based ethnographic studies, it is necessary to situate a locale with reference to its place in both administrative and economic systems if one is to comprehend its place with reference to China as a whole. This caveat applies across the board of social relations and culture—kinship, religious and ritual organization, social class, gender relations, and demographic processes. The potential implications of regional analysis for Chinese anthropology are well recognized, although yet to be thoroughly assimilated. The existence of China’s essentially ‘global’ scale of civilization antedating the emergence of the Westerncentered ‘capitalist world system’ also poses a fundamental conceptual challenge to the recent growth of academic interest in processes of ‘globalization.’ At the very least, China should provide a comparative reference point to discussions that all too often imagine ‘globalization’ to be unique to Western history and or capitalism.

3. Local Communities

Historically, China’s population has been overwhelmingly rural (until recently about 85 percent could broadly be characterized as rural), although some of China’s cities were probably the world’s largest during the European Middle Ages. But, as noted above, ‘rural’ is a designation too crude to capture the cultural and social distinctions between farming villages located in close proximity to large urban centers (with consequent access to urban markets and culture), and those located in distant peripheries. In brief, more centrally located rural locales tend to conform to more orthodox forms of social organization (for example, with leadership in the hands of Confucian literati), and more peripheral ones tend to be more variable and less orthodox (leadership often exercised by local ‘strongmen’). Villages in many parts of China are ‘nucleated’ (dwellings grouped close together), although some areas (the Sichuan basin, for example) lack nucleated villages, with the population being dispersed. Typically, groups of villages are linked to a market town economically and culturally, and this may also serve as a focus for important local ritual activities, higher-level kin-based groups (e.g., lineage corporations), and other voluntary associations. Most classic ethnographic studies have focused on villages with some references to villagers’ participation in market-town-focused activities.

The general picture that emerges from village-based ethnographies is one of considerable variation, but some significant commonalities are also discernible. Single-surname villages and strong corporate patrilineages seem to be relatively more common in the more productive and prosperous regional cores and in the South. Such villages are more likely to find ritual solidarity in lineage-based activities. In contrast, temples to local gods are the more frequent ritual focus of multi-surname villages. The contrast should not be overdrawn, however. Ancestor worship at domestic altars, although discouraged during the high tides of communist reform, seems to have been nearly ubiquitous among Han Chinese, and may be making a comeback in areas where it was repressed during the 1960s and 1970s. By the same token, some deities (Guanyin, for example) are worshipped nearly universally, and most locales produced some local gods closely associated with local lore and history.

Although some village-based ethnographies have a penchant for treating the village as a self-contained community, Skinner argues forcefully that the standard-marketing community was until recently the most important unit of rural social life (Skinner 1964–5). In frequent, sometimes daily, trips to markets, farmers had access to the cultural amenities of the town, interacted with traders, landlords, and other local dignitaries, and found occasion to worship and attend festivals at temples. Higher-level lineage corporations often built lineage halls in market towns, and voluntary associations with market-system-wide memberships also concentrated their activities there. Improved transport and economic development have to some degree eclipsed the traditional ‘standard market towns,’ thus expanding the horizons of China’s rural population, and (at least in some areas) resulted in the emergence of what Skinner terms ‘modern trading centers.’ During the Maoist era, many of the functions of ‘standard-marketing communities’ were assumed by communes (often territorially isomorphic with them), but in the reform era, local markets are reemerging rapidly (Skinner 1985).

4. The Local Impact Of Imperial And State Institutions

In imperial times, the impact of the state on local life was mediated largely by local elites; imperial administration extended to the county level, but the maintenance of social stability depended on local leaders and institutions (Ch’u 1962). The imperial state managed to maintain its hegemony largely because local elites were thoroughly committed to the Confucian ideology upon which the legitimacy of both the state and literati leadership rested. This commitment, in turn, was sustained in part by the imperial examination system. Aspirants in the highly competitive examinations were required to master Confucian classics. Success came in the form of academic degrees and appointment to administrative office. The symbolic and material rewards for successful candidates redounded to the benefit of their kin and communities. Consequently, local wealth and institutional effort were invested in the production of successful examination candidates (for example, lineage corporations often established schools for its sons), on the one hand, and successful candidates were able to use their official positions to return wealth and prestige to their communities. Although the prospects for advancement through the theoretically meritocratic examination system were distant or unrealistic for all but the relatively wealthy (Ho 1962), its values exercised a strong hold on popular imagination in all of China’s social classes.

Beyond the pervasive impact of the imperial examination system on China’s class system and consciousness, state power affected localities primarily through taxation and social control. In these functions, too, county magistrates often relied on the mediating services of local elites, with whom they shared a similar class background and Confucian education.

The mediating role of local elites and institutions in integrating localities and the state began to unravel in late imperial times, and reached a crisis during the Republican era, when government policy tended to undermine local authority (Duara 1988). The momentum during the post-1949 era was to establish greater central control by binding local cadres and officials more firmly to the policies of the center, often undermining local leadership and institutions. The period of economic reforms beginning in the late 1970s has seen a general loosening of central control over individuals (as, for example, in the initiation of the famous ‘household responsibility system’) and, to some degree, over local governments. As a result, some of the forms of traditional communalism (for example, territorial cults worshipping local gods) are re-emerging in some parts of China (Dean 1993, Jing 1996).

5. Family And Kinship

Patrilineal descent, virilocal residence, and equal inheritance among sons characterize the standard model of Han Chinese kinship. It is a standard model less in a statistical sense than in the fact that it serves as an ideal type; even families whose own organization does not conform are likely to acknowledge this ideal type as how things ought to be. In principle, a bride should leave her natal household and take up residence in the natal household of her groom—including his parents, unmarried siblings, married brothers, and their wives and children. Prior to 1949, ‘five generations living in a single household’ was widely held to be both an admirable and enviable achievement. But it was an achievement also recognized to be difficult to attain. Domestic strife, economic misfortune, mortality, or infertility could intervene to prevent the achievement of such a ‘grand family.’

The characteristic ethos of Chinese family life is one of the dimensions of Chinese culture that has been examined most closely by ethnographers. The picture that emerges of the Chinese domestic cycle includes tensions between daughters-in-law and their mothersin-law, stemming in part from their divergent interests with respect to maintaining a large, unified family structure. Daughters-in-law often desire to escape the authority of their mothers-in-law, and agitate for a family division; mothers-in-law exercise their often strong influence over their sons in the interest of keeping the extended family united (Fei 1939, Wolf 1968, 1972, Cohen 1976). By the same token, sons owe filial allegiance to their fathers, but they also owe their children as good a start in life as they can provide. These circumstances can set brothers’ interests against each other (Freedman 1966). In the end, competing interests and domestic tensions can result in agreement to divide an estate. For many rural families, the most tangible and immediate manifestation of division was the setting up of separate cooking stoves. Members of the formerly united family continued to reside in the same building, but the separate stoves indicate separate budgets and, symbolically, a parting of ways.

As one might expect, by no means all families were of ideal-typical form. We have already noted some of the factors that might prevent achievement of the ideal of a ‘five-generation’ household. In addition, we now know that both uxorilocal marriages and ‘little daughter-in-law’ marriages were quite common in some parts of China (Wolf and Huang 1980). Uxorilocal marriages seem to have occurred most commonly as a strategy in families lacking a male heir. In such circumstances, a son-in-law might agree to marry into his wife’s family. Because a married-in son-in-law was looked down upon (having at least partially abandoned his filial commitments to his own patriline), they typically were men of relatively lower socioeconomic status and background. Because such marriages self-consciously deviated from the ideal type, arrangements for inheritance, descent of children, and so forth would be stipulated in a formal marriage contract. (For example, children might be divided between the patrilines of both the husband and the wife; the groom might agree to change his own surname and become his father-in-law’s adopted son; the groom might agree only to support the father-inlaw in his dotage.)

‘Little daughter-in-law’ marriage involves adopting an infant or girl with the intention that she marry her foster brother when she comes of age. No longer widely practiced (they are now illegal), such marriages were common in some locales through the first half of the twentieth century. They were said to save the expense and trouble of a wedding, but Wolf and Huang contend that their real advantage lay most of all in the fact that mothers-in-law were able thereby to develop more amiable relations with their daughtersin-law, having raised them essentially as daughters. Wolf and Huang also argue that improvement of mother daughter-in-law relations were won at the expense of conjugal ones; divorce rates and infidelity were higher among ‘minor marriages’ in northern Taiwan, and fertility was lower (Wolf and Huang 1980).

Contracts typically drawn at family division might stipulate that some portion of the estate remain undivided in the form of a corporation in memory of an honored ancestor (often the father of the sons dividing the estate). The income of the corporation typically might be shared among the descendents, used to build an ancestral hall, or to fund annual banquets in memory of shared ancestors. Corporations formed in this fashion are often referred to as lineages (Freedman 1958, 1966). However, lineage corporations could also be formed when a group of patrilineally related men decided to invest in shares and to purchase some common property. By the same token, unrelated parties might form similar corporations to help put the maintenance of a temple or any other enterprise on a stable financial footing. In short, although many lineages in China were organized as shareholding corporations with both ritual and (in some cases) entrepreneurial goals, similar corporations were also founded on bases other than kinship (Sangren 1984).

Lineage corporations, as noted above, tended to be more numerous in prosperous, core areas, especially in the Southeast. However, even in the absence of lineage corporations, patrilineal kinship ties were considered to be important. Consequently, some ambiguity attends to Chinese terms for ‘lineage’ (congzu, zu) because they might refer to a formal corporation or merely to those related to one patrilineally.

The nature and quality of affinal ties seems to have varied considerably by region and social class. Women sought to maintain ties with their natal families, and in some areas such ties were important in the development of the social connectedness (guanxi) so important to Chinese social relations. However, in terms of customary law, women retained few rights in their natal lines. Except for gifts bestowed upon them at marriage, women did not inherit. Moreover, after her death a women could be worshipped as an ancestor only in the patriline of her sons.

6. Religion And Ritual

Considered as philosophical or liturgical traditions, Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism have exercised an important historical influence on Chinese religion. However, these influences are not clearly distinguishable at the level of popular belief and practice. For example, because of its emphasis on ‘filial piety,’ ancestor worship is often considered to be in some sense ‘Confucian.’ However, ideas having to do with the afterlife of the soul, the nature of supernatural spirits, geomancy (the operation of unseen forces in the landscape), and communication with supernatural powers all play an important role in ancestor worship, just as they do in the worship of the local deities (often termed ‘Daoist’) central to territorial cults, and in the popular worship of Buddhist deities (Guanyin, for example). In other words, Buddhism, Daoism, and Confucianism are relatively distinguishable only in the contexts of monastic Buddhist institutions, the texts and practices of the ordained Daoist priesthood, and (arguably) the self-consciously Confucian writings of the official elite.

‘Popular,’ ‘folk,’ or ‘local’ religion is, as C. K. Yang argued influentially in his definitive treatise (Yang 1961), ‘diffused’ throughout the institutions of social life. Ancestor worship, for example, can be considered the religious dimension of domestic life. Similarly, territorial cults give form to local communities at levels ranging from neighborhood ‘Place God’ (Tudi Gong) shrines, village-level temples, market-based temples, upward to the City God temples found in administrative capitals (Sangren 1987). City Gods also played a role in the official rites of the imperial state. District magistrates were not only governors; they also officiated as priests in the state cult which culminated in the sacrifices to heaven performed by the emperor himself (Feuchtwang 1977).

Fundamental to popular religion is a belief in the power of supernatural spirits (ling); from the point of view of the majority of worshippers, it matters less whether a god or goddess is Buddhist or Daoist, heterodox or orthodox (from the point of view of the Daoist priesthood or Buddhist clergy), than whether it has a reputation for answering prayers and performing miracles. Individuals pray to gods for blessings for themselves and their families; community leaders organize ritual celebrations to the same gods in the hope of ensuring prosperity on behalf of the community. Indeed, such celebrations constitute one of the main entertainments of local life, punctuating the annual calendar.

The majority of Chinese gods are viewed as deified historical personages; their accumulated legends of posthumous divine intervention on behalf of individuals and communities play a crucial role in the dissemination of their cults. The cults of some gods are of strictly local provenance, while the cults of others (such as those of Guanyin, the ‘Goddess of Mercy,’ and Guandi, the ‘God of War’) are popular throughout China. In imperial times, successful local cults might grow to the point where they received imperial recognition, with the emperor claiming the authority to promote and demote such deities. Pilgrimages from local temples to distant centers tied local communities into wider ritual spheres and provided welcome opportunities to travel and see the world outside an individual’s own locale.

Chinese polytheism is widely conceived in terms of a celestial bureaucracy that roughly mirrored the imperial state; many gods are viewed as supernatural governors of their assigned districts. Alongside such celestial officials, however, Chinese people worshipped a variety of mother goddesses, tricksterish imps, and even demonic figures.

At death the soul is imagined to journey through the underworld where it is judged and (if found guilty) punished for its deeds. One of the obligations of descendants is to perform rituals on behalf of the deceased to bribe these underworld officials and their demonic henchmen, thereby winning the soul’s release. Both Daoist priests and Buddhist clergy may be employed to perform such funerary rites. Lonely ghosts (souls of those who die in tragic circumstances or who have no descendents to worship them as ancestors) are pitied and, in some cases, feared for the mischief they may bring down upon the living. Communities commonly propitiate such spirits during the seventh lunar month.

Communication with unseen powers is established by a variety of techniques. Individual worshippers can often cast ‘moon blocks’ or draw lots at temple altars in an attempt to discern a deity’s response to their queries. ‘Spirit writing’ via an apparatus believed to be possessed by a god or spirit is another common technique (Jordan and Overmeyer 1986). Spirit-mediums possessed by gods speak directly in the gods’ voices (Elliott 1955), and revelation through such mediums has played an important role in the production of hagiographies (Seaman 1987, Kleeman 1994).

There has been a significant growth of Western academic interest in Chinese popular religion in recent years. One of the reasons for this growth is the close association between local social organization and collective ritual activity. Moreover, as Paul Katz argues, China’s closest analog to Western ‘civic society’ or a ‘public sphere’ is most likely to be found in local temples and their rituals (Katz 1995).

7. Gender

The feminist movement in academia has inspired a large body of research and writing about women in China. In anthropology, much of this work has focused on domestic life. Among the most important conclusions is that, despite the ideological emphasis on patriarchy, women exercise a good deal of practical influence (Wolf 1972). Much of this influence is linked to mothers’ close emotional relations with their children, especially their sons. Whereas Confucian ideology emphasizes the fundamental importance of father–son ties, ‘filial piety’ manifested in popular myth, entertainment, and ritual more often emphasizes children’s affection for their mothers. Some analysts (e.g., Martin 1988) believe that women’s views on life differ so radically from those of men that a distinctive female ideology exists, one that often contradicts the male, or official, ideology. Alternatively, differences in men’s and women’s views can be conceived as generated within the family system considered holistically as a productive process.

One of the problems confronting sinological anthropologists at the time of writing is to assess, on the one hand, the degree to which changes in gender ideology (the government now officially advocates gender equality) have improved women’s lives—very little, according to some (Wolf 1985)—and, on the other hand, the degree to which changes in family organization (for example, those consequent on the ‘one-child family’ policy) have altered gender ideology.

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