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The precise uses to which this new social organization might be put varied. (p. 160, emphasis mine)
If all of this can be reduced to "politics", then what are we to think of political history as a kind of historiography? Is it just the history of politicking and wheeler-dealerism at the local level? It is precisely this kind of eventual but nonanalytical historiography which gave rise to more serious forms of social history in the first place. If Faure is sincerely interested in reconstructing such a social history, I think one can only conclude that his historical synthesis remains premature, to say the least, in spite of his bold intentions.
Similarly, with regard to his critique of anthropological attempts to perceive the ancestral hall as a locus of communal wealth, to the contrary, I think Freedman comes away unscathed. An anthropologist of functionalist persuasion is not interested in whether property is bestowed as a royal fiefdom or accumulated over generations as a process "on the ground". In the end, the ancestral hall is made possible only as a condition of that pre-existing wealth. Simple (and ridiculous) as it may seem, this is in the nature of a functionalist argument.
On the other hand, Faure would have been much more to the point had he been able to see that this argument was made possible only under the assumption that one can explain in theoretical terms the operation of a lineage apart from the circumstances of its historical evolution. This is, of course, the point of departure for Freedman's attempt to construct a model of Chinese lineage organization, irrespective of actual historical considerations.
Faure's data shows instead that the kind of phenomenon one has taken to be the sociological ideal-type of the Chinese lineage is in fact a historical peculiarity rather than the inevitable consequence of the model itself. Moreover, rather than seeing the ostentatious ancestral halls of "The Five Great Clans" as being exceptional in comparison to more recent lineages which have not been able to replicate the "official style", as Faure put it, I have been struck by a peculiarity of a rather different kind which embraces both greater and lesser lineages found in the New Territories and perhaps elsewhere throughout south China as well.
In all known instances, as one looks at individual villages, one rarely if ever finds ancestral halls for anything more than the founding ancestors or the founding segments (fong in Cantonese (C), fang in Mandarin (M)) of that village, even when there is sufficient corporate wealth to permit the establishment of further ancestral halls for subsidiary segments, as would be expected from