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IS THERE A STRUCTURE OF CHINESE RURAL SOCIETY? A REVIEW ARTICLE
In recent years, it has been trendy to criticize lineage theory, not only in the overall anthropological literature but also in the sinological literature as well. In the sinological literature, the lineage model as developed most systematically in the work of Maurice Freedman has proven to be a useful tool for both anthropologists and historians not so much in the study of Chinese kinship itself but also in the ramifications of the basic model for the study of diverse aspects of Chinese history and society. Criticisms of the lineage model in recent years by anthropologists and historians in the China field have been many. Their diverse perspectives reflect to a great degree diverse readings of Freedman's original thesis.
David Faure's The Structure of Chinese Rural Society: Lineage and Village in the Eastern New Territories, Hong Kong is in this regard a major attempt to cast our understanding of lineage and village in Chinese society in different light based upon his extensive fieldwork in Hong Kong's New Territories and intensive analysis of local historical materials pertaining to the nature of traditional customs and institutions. Perhaps to his credit, he has amassed in the space of a short monograph an incredibly dense ethnographic description of different varieties of local organization found in the traditional New Territories in the context of its historical development in order to put forth an equally dense conclusion about the nature of lineage society in traditional China. However, in spite of his commendable attempt to put forth a radically different view of the history of Chinese local society, I find his ethnographic and historical synthesis flawed and his critique of the theoretical literature grossly misdirected. Nonetheless, the wealth of data produced does suggest in my opinion a radically different interpretation that makes Faure's initial "critique" mild by comparison, and I hope to expound upon these points more fully in the latter half of this paper.
As Faure states on the first page of his preface, his book began modestly, as a preliminary attempt to outline the political history of the New Territories of Hong Kong until about 1900, that is to say, "the