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Chinese woman at marriage is expected to literally "cross over" to the family of the husband (嫁 (C), chia (M)). By custom, the wife becomes a full member of the husband's family and thereby ceases to be a burden upon her natal family. It is possible for the analyst to see relations of "descent" within such a village by demanding verification of genealogical linkages or membership to various ancestral estates, etc., all questions about which will undoubtedly be answered to satisfaction. But there is a crucial difference between the concept of chan (closeness) and that of "descent" which can be tested. If the villagers of a "single-lineage village" indeed conceptualize themselves as sharing relations of "closeness", then there should be nothing to stop a married out woman's family, affines or all kinds of close relatives (親戚 (C), ch'in-ch'i (M)) from moving in as well. In fact, in terms of chan, there is nothing to stop such an occurrence. In Wo Hang, where I did my fieldwork, there were several instances of married out women, their husband and family moving back to their natal home to live, some for several years. They were, as expected, considered temporary residents, but it was not really "descent" that prevented their acceptance as villagers so much as the fact that this village was not their heung-ha. In other words, had it been any other residential community like a market town or urban block which was not a village of this sort, there would have been no problem about letting any kind of relative move in. That is precisely the pattern of residence one can expect to find in non-village (especially urban) communities today. Close relatives, irrespective of their descent status and all other things being equal, tend to reside close to each other. In a village, given the existence of a patrilocal residence rule and that set of moral obligations pertinent to a customary definition of marriage and the household, people then live among their nearest "agnates" precisely because they are their closest relatives. Within the village, brothers also tend to live close to each other in a way which creates a concentrically radiating pattern of residence over time. I repeat; the key to understanding the meaning of locality in the context of the village resides less in our ability to abstract functional criteria of membership than in our attempt to explain the nature of the Chinese village as a distinctive kind of moral community in light of its concrete historical situation.
One other relevant phenomenon which has caused confusion in the literature concerns the concept of the localized lineage. Quite distinct