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MARJORIE TOPLEY
Ancestor worship in lineage villages could be built into an extended and extensive organization making for more efficient control for the village unit. The mono-lineage village with a strong ancestral organization was probably the best regulated in China, but there were built-in limitations. Promotion of the cult depended on wealth and scholarship, and both worship and management tended to be gentry affairs. This left ordinary peasants open to form other associations and join religious groups cutting across village boundaries. The power generated by an ancestral hall association could also effect village stability in another way. It could lead to conflict with other communities coveting or opposing its control over land and property and also to State intervention.
Organizations associated with temples to popular deities with significance for a whole community could provide some control over village affairs also. Mono-lineages could use them to back up their own ancestral cult but they probably exercised a greater control in villages with no competitive community-scale religious organizations: multi-lineage villages without extended ancestral hall associations. Similar kinds of persons, the rich and educated, tended to be involved in matters of promotion and management, as those in ancestral hall associations. Again, as with the halls, because such temples depended much on the wealthy and educated (but not for ritual affairs as with the halls), conflicts could arise between different families involved in a temple's more secular affairs, management of property for example. In highly differentiated villages, moreover, social differences might be mirrored in multiple temple organizations providing cohesion for special groups rather than whole communities. Divisions could take place in differentiated mono-lineage villages also, with the wealthy starting their own branch hall association; but they tended to preserve some common interests and activities nevertheless: worship of the founding ancestor for example.
The ideological and other satisfactions provided by Buddhism and Taoism tended to attract particular types of persons as full-time members: in Buddhism, those not fully integrated into other social institutions of the village - particularly widows, and the unhappily married or unmarried. Buddhism might discourage such persons from becoming a problem for a village by providing them with special residential institutions, and the satisfactions of a