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need for structural continuity in the maintenance of a stable society. Those who recognize the concepts of descent and social structure as being "objective" thus merely fail to see or accept the "subjective" nature of their underlying propositions.
The above discussion has in my opinion a great deal of relevance to the very definition and usage of descent relations (and descent groups) in China. No scholar in the China field has to my knowledge questioned the validity of descent or social structure as a mechanism for explaining what the Chinese perceives to be "ancestor worship". There was no word in Chinese for "descent" until sociologists created one out of pedagogical necessity, and even with that the term has been constantly revised. Yet, anthropologists and historians of China still prefer to talk about descent and descent groups without realizing that they are simply projecting a set of constructs they have been trained to see instead of taking native facts as a concrete point of departure. Even when it does not take an electronic calculator to figure out that there are no descent relationships in China which are not at the same time relationships of ancestral worship, scholars still prefer to discount the latter as "illusions". Somewhat reflective of this general sentiment, Faure (p. 4) remarks, for example:
The belief in common descent, and the need to maintain worship (or the excuse to do so), can be the basis for the foundation of lineage property trusts, held in common by all lines of descent from the ancestor in whose name the trust is created. (emphasis mine)
Why no anthropologist bothered to look at ancestor worship seriously as a thing in itself perhaps had to do with the fact there were models for almost everything else. Fortes had a descent theory of social structure, Freedman had an economic theory of the corporate lineage, Fried had a political theory about the functions of genealogies in Chinese society, etc. Nonetheless in Chinese society, what observers take to be a descent relation is for the most part a relation of worship between a living male and his deceased ancestors before him. The act of worship is simply a way of remembering the dead, and it is usually the deceased prior to his death who sets down the conditions for this act of "remembrance". He may set aside a portion or all of his estate as ancestral property to