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BOOK REVIEWS
affirmations, are the opposite of jural rules. Jural rules rely for their value on their relative clarity; rites derive their strength from their poetic vagueness. Indeed, when the jural rules are themselves lacking in clear definition and are internally contradictory, then the rites exploit them by exaggerating their ambiguities and discrepancies. It seems to me that the Chinese rites of marriage above all stress the ambiguity of affinal relationships'.
Professor Wolf in an essay on Chinese kinship and mourning dress shows how his informants in the Taiwan town of Sanhsia, an old riverport near Taipei, gave conflicting versions of the mourning attire to be worn by daughters. As he writes, 'where disagreements occur, they reflect conflict in the kinship system. . . . Disagreements between people are inevitable because there is ambiguity in the kinship system. The only way to avoid variation in mourning dress without imposing an arbitrary code would be to resolve the conflicts that it reflects'.
The conflicts discussed by both Professors Freedman and Wolf take us further away from an idealised and literary version of Chinese society: they supply data and arguments that allow us to see the Chinese family and kinship group as it really is. Contradictions are the heart of the matter.
The other essays in this volume deal with a variety of interrelated problems. Mrs. Irene Taeuber, a demographer, takes another look at the data collected on farm families by J.L. Buck in 1929-31 and shows that there is some adaptation of family size (and family structure) to primary economic resources. Mrs. Ai-Li S. Chin analyses samples of short stories from the Mainland and Taiwan and concludes that, whereas in tradition-oriented Taiwan the writers concentrate on portraying the problems of the alienated and isolated individual, the Mainland writers seem to accept (in the period under review, 1962 to mid-1966) the family itself, if it is ideologically sound, as a source of happiness for the individual. Professor Johanna Meskill discusses the Chinese genealogy as a research source, describes different types of genealogy, and demonstrates its uses and limitations.* Professor John McCoy writes of Chinese kin terms of reference and address. This is a highly technical but interesting paper. Finally, in a terminal paper Professor
* Hugh D. R. Baker has used genealogies with effect in his A Chinese Lineage Village: Sheung Shui (London, Frank Cass, 1968).