BOOK REVIEWS
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testify, long ago revealed the theoretical relevance of much of the earlier literature on China: it is pleasing to note, therefore, that some of the contributors to this volume are now combining field research with an extensive use of the available documentation on China. This has led to a much more sophisticated treatment of theoretical problems and has, I feel, made such works much more interesting to read and more intellectually attractive for people in other disciplines.
The essays in this volume, apart from one by Professor Arthur P. Wolf, were in their original form papers written for, and discussed at, a conference on Kinship in Chinese society, held in New York in 1966 and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (New York). As it is not possible for a workaday sociologist to discuss every paper meaningfully and in detail in a short review, I shall comment on only a few of the papers, not because they are necessarily the best or the more significant but simply because I have some comments on them.
The first essay is by Professor Myron L. Cohen, who discusses a key problem: the structure of the Chinese family. Professor Cohen argues that the relevant components of the chia (family) can be reduced to three: the chia estate, the chia group, and the chia economy, and that the connection between the three components can assume a variety of forms or types. As he writes, 'the Chinese family has by and large been described in terms involving or assuming the existence of a chia in which the estate is concentrated, the group is concentrated, and the economy is inclusive'. Much of his essay is taken up by a rigorous discussion of chia variations, such as that an inclusive economy can be found in association with a dispersed estate and, of necessity, a dispersed group. Professor Cohen concludes that 'the possibility arises that a good deal of the movement of persons in Chinese society, movement connected with "horizontal" or "vertical" social and economic mobility, or with efforts to achieve such mobility, in fact occurred within a chia framework'. The points he makes are important and crucial: they illuminate basic concepts used to understand Chinese society; and I am persuaded by his claim 'that there may be more to domestic units than meets the demographer's eye'. There is certainly some evidence from nineteenth century Hong Kong to