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2) the parallel process by which the wider market has penetrated the village economy; Potter here provides a detailed analysis of family finances.
In each of these two sections, one chapter is devoted to an historical analysis, and another to a description of the modern situation.
3) a single chapter on the ownership and management of property, which describes the structure of the local lineage in terms of the distribution of its landholdings. This is, both descriptively and analytically, the best section of the book: the treatment of conflicts within the lineage and its prospects for change and survival, is worth a review in itself.
There is then an all too brief chapter on the social and cultural effects of economic change, before the concluding essay.
All this goes to make up a wealth of material for the general anthropologist, the China specialist, and the interested Hong Kong reader. I have nothing but admiration for the field-work which lies behind this book, and hope that by selecting only a few points for comment, I shall not do any injustice to the quality of the data and the thoroughness of its presentation.
Potter gives a lucid exposition of the changes in a peasant economy which result from its adaptation to the modern world, observing that in a traditional society the economic is not fully differentiated from the social, political and ritual spheres of activity. It is unfortunate, however, that he makes little more of this crucial point. The body of the book is concerned with the increasing differentiation of the various spheres of peasant life; but one could have wished for a fuller analysis of their previous integration. For background data on the traditional economy, the quotations from the reports of Colonial Secretary Lockhart and Governor Blake, about 1900, might have been supplemented by information contained in the Chinese gazetteer for San On county, if not by the "historical data available in out of the way places" (p 32 fn), which, one hopes, will soon be located and researched.
At a more theoretical level, I feel that Potter might have attempted to place the social structure of peasant China in a wider context: he does not, for example, cite Leach's work on the balancing of the "total social exchange account". It may well be that the differentiation of spheres of activity has gone a good deal