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BOOK REVIEWS
tributed to the resolution of an outstanding problem of understanding by presenting this detailed analysis. This could now lead very profitably to a systematic analysis of the informal social system of Chinese lineage villages which operates this formal structure. Baker himself provides some hints that the formal organization and its informal operation are by no means identical. Other studies of formal organization would of course support this contention." The next step would be to identify the methods by which villagers adapt their formal organization to the demands of everyday life.
In short, what Baker has done is open up a whole new series of problems which he himself (quite properly) has not talked to. His work is most promising because it is problem-oriented and is not, in itself, an end point of investigation. It is more or less a stopping-off point on the road to a better understanding of the Chinese village (as dangerous as that concept might be) and as a consequence is far more fruitful than the standard ethnographic works which describe individual Chinese villages. These works, of course, are valuable in that they provide interesting data about human behavior and social organization. But they lose part of their value in that they tend to be final and complete products, leading not to further research but at best to use as a base for comparative studies.
Much of the recent work in Hong Kong villages has been of this problem-oriented type and some fruitful comparisons can be made. Bracey in her study of a poor Hakka village focuses on the problem of the migration of laborers out of the village and the impact that this has on village social structure.10 It would be highly profitable to reexamine Dr. Bracey's data to find out what can be said about lineage organization in a situation where enough men are not available to fulfill the necessary ritual and social functions, and try to compare lineage organization as it actually operates in a poor Hakka village with the "ideal structure" which Baker had described.* The potential usefulness to the social science...
9 Part of Baker's problem in effectively introducing behavioral data is his insufficient differentiation between formal and informal organization, between ideal patterns of organization and the informal arrangements which, in fact, allow formal structures to function in the daily routines of life.
10 Dorothy H. Bracey, The Effects of Migration on a Hakka Village. Unpublished Ph.D. dissertation: Harvard University Library, 1967.
* See also Göran Aijmer's article “Expansion and Extension in Hakka Society" in JHKBRAS, Vol. 7 (1967), between pp. 42-79, Ed.