172
BOOK REVIEWS
Dr. Freedman's essay is concerned with problems in an area to which Professor Firth has made significant contributions. This is the role of the deceased in the organization of the society left behind them (see for example, Firth, Frazer Lecture, 1955). The particular concern here is with the deceased as members of a kinship system.
In "Ancestor Worship: Two Facets of the Chinese Case”, Dr. Freedman discusses first the question of geomancy (fêng-shui) in regard to buildings and to tombs (the yang and yin of geomancy), and differences found in the incidence of the two types in two parts of what he calls the sinicized world. China, Vietnam and Korea all practise both kinds of geomancy, but Japan has only that of buildings. He suggests this situation might be explained in terms of the kinship system of these countries. In Japan we do not find the kind of agnatic descent system which we associate with China and can be seen in Korea and Vietnam. He also suggests a relationship between the elaborateness of the geomancy of graves and that of the lineage structure, saying it is probably no accident that in the south-east part of China (principally Fukien and Kwangtung) both lineages and geomancy of tombs have been carried to extreme forms of development.
The principal argument is that where the authority of past generations represented in the cult of ancestors weighs heaviest, there men redress the balance by recourse to the geomancy of the tomb. It is pointed out that geomancy delivers a man's ancestors into his own hands, so to speak (he may determine fortune by siting one or more graves in a way so that influences of the landscape are channelled through the ancestors' bones to agnatic descendants); but in ancestor worship, which Dr. Freedman then goes on to discuss, ancestors are beings with rights and duties.
The problem here is why Chinese ancestors are essentially benign. An interesting argument is developed relating this to the connexion between ancestors and the nature of command of those taking over from them in the world of the living. The weight of ethnographical evidence is that ancestors, by being displaced, resent their successors, and also endow them with authority to rule in their place. But in the last two millennia in China there has been a situation whereby the family is a property-owning estate dissolving on the death of each senior generation to reform into successor-
172
BOOK REVIEWS
Dr. Freedman's essay is concerned with problems in an area to which Professor Firth has made significant contributions. This is the role of the deceased in the organization of the society left be- hind them (see for example, Firth, Frazer Lecture, 1955). The par- ticular concern here is with the deceased as members of a kinship system.
In "Ancestor Worship: Two Facets of the Chinese Case”, Dr. Freedman discusses first the question of geomancy (fêng-shui) in regard to buildings and to tombs (the yang and yin of geomancy), and differences found in the incidence of the two types in two parts of what he calls the sinicized world. China, Vietnam and Korea all practise both kinds of geomancy, but Japan has only that of buildings. He suggests this situation might be explained in terms of the kinship system of these countries. In Japan we do not find the kind of agnatic descent system which we associate with China and can seen in Korea and Vietnam. He also suggests a relationship between the elaborateness of the geomancy of graves and that of the lineage structure, saying it is probably no accident that in the south-east part of China (principally Fukien and Kwang- tung) both lineages and geomancy of tombs have been carried to extreme forms of development.
The principal argument is that where the authority of past generations represented in the cult of ancestors weighs heaviest, there men redress the balance by recourse to the geomancy of the tomb. It is pointed out that geomancy delivers a man's ancestors into his own hands, so to speak (he may determine fortune by siting one or more graves in a way so that influences of the land- scape are channelled through the ancestors' bones to agnatic de- scendants); but in ancestor worship, which Dr. Freedman then goes on to discuss, ancestors are beings with rights and duties,
The problem here is why Chinese ancestors are essentially benign. An interesting argument is developed relating this to the connexion between ancestors and the nature of command of those taking over from them in the world of the living. The weight of ethnographical evidence is that ancestors, by being displaced resent their successors, and also endow them with authority to rule in their place. But in the last two millennia in China there has been a situation whereby the family is a property-owning estate dissolv- ing on the death of each senior generation to reform into successor-
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