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exception. In villages affected by large-scale emigration, houses are often occupied by close agnates, making the inaccuracies of the official record even greater. How Faure was able then to extrapolate that a certain descendant must have moved out during a certain generation (p. 51) is pure and unfounded speculation. He (p. 57) should refrain therefore from talking about the native's "mental picture".
7 Please note that I do not claim that settling into a new village is impossible but rather unusual from a native's point of view. What is required on the part of the two parties is a mutual sense of "belonging" to the community, not just the fulfillment of “objective" membership criteria.
In Wo Hang, the village I studied, it would be very easy to map out on the basis of genealogical information residence patterns according to affiliation to particular ancestral estates and to show that particular blocks of land "belong" to (the members of) specific estates. However, one has not proven that the villagers actually think in those terms. In fact, upon further questioning, they will repeatedly deny that there is any such territorial imperative and that people are "free" to live wherever they choose. When asked where they would build a new house if "free to choose", they would almost always build in the immediate neighborhood of their own house and in the vicinity of people with whom they are familiar (i.e., close relatives).
There are many ways of maintaining one's closeness to one's heung-ha after physically living away. Building or maintaining a house there is the most obvious way of keeping a permanent base. Many overseas Chinese have built new houses in the village without the slightest intention of ever living there, instead letting a needy close relative live in it. In the final analysis, the commitment to remain a villager is determined by one's willingness to maintain ties of closeness, which may involve frequent contact or just the sending of photos to keep up one's memory. On the other hand, people who move away, for reasons of breaking off ties of closeness, can seldom be expected to return. For this reason, segments which have moved out to establish new villages do not feel "close" (in terms of chan) to its original village, despite the "genealogical" linkage.
Anthropologists in particular have mistakenly contrasted the asymmetric segmentation of China to the balanced segmentation of the typical African case when in fact they are simply contrasting two different definitions. If the criteria of definition is wealth, then segmentation everywhere is in fact asymmetric, unless of course one admits to being communist.
By its absence of an ancestral hall, the Lins of Wufeng should be a perfect example demonstrating that the cult of the ancestral hall is a phenomenon of locality which is not analyzable in terms of the model, structural or otherwise.
The rise and fall of the yeuk is perhaps a good example reflecting changes of a social milieu-at-large. It is perhaps easier to argue that the "great" lineage-villages and the yeuk were products of the same "structural" environment. Such an argument has always been central to the concept of a so-called temple-alliance system. However, crucial to this **structural environment is much less the empirical existence of the social structure per se and more importantly the fact that this structure serves to define rights and obligations of persons “as against the world”, as Radcliffe-Brown put it. In historical terms, the yeuk and the temple-alliance system disappeared under the period of colonial pacification, which not only made such a system of security functionally unnecessary or superfluous but also made the idea of a territorial structure incompatible with the increasing penetration of a global economy and the dissolution of a traditionally regional consciousness.