218
BOOK REVIEWS
In answer to the review in the Journal of the previous book, one of the authors wrote "I am impelled to emphasize that we wrote avowedly as dealers. Our objective has been achieved and the work has brought us a substantial volume of business". Where desire for success prevails over truth, accuracy and scholarship, one gets only gallery patter. The present volume has all the bad points of its predecessor.
Peabody Museum
Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1971.
F. B. LOTHROP
J
FAMILY AND KINSHIP IN CHINESE SOCIETY, edited by Maurice Freedman. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1970., pp. XV, 269.
Students of Chinese society are not able at present to undertake field studies in the Chinese homeland, the People's Republic of China. The last major social investigation was carried out in the vicinity of Canton by Professor C.K. Yang over twenty years ago. Despite this formidable obstacle - the fact that China is closed to direct sociological observation - the study of Chinese domestic institutions by Western and other scholars has quickened rather than slackened. A small group of dedicated social scientists have been active since 1949 in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other areas of Overseas Chinese settlement. Paradoxically, since 1949 much data have been collected, some important hypotheses formulated, and some parts of theory tested. As this volume makes clear, we have learned much about Chinese society since 1949 - at least about the older China now being transformed by political, social and economic developments.
It is natural, I feel, that the editor of this volume should be Professor Maurice Freedman, whose two major studies of this area - Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (1958) and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (1966) — have deeply influenced many other researchers in the same field. Professor Freedman, as the bibliographies appended to his works amply
* A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition and The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (both M.LT., 1959),
218
BOOK REVIEWS
In answer to the review in the Journal of the previous book, one of the authors wrote "I am impelled to emphasize that we wrote avowedly as dealers. Our objective has been achieved and the work has brought us a substantial volume of business". Where desire for success prevails over truth, accuracy and scholarship, one gets only gallery patter. The present volume has all the bad points of its predecessor.
Peabody Museum
Salem, Massachusetts, U.S.A., 1971.
F. B. LOTHROP
J
FAMILY AND KINSHIP IN CHINESE SOCIETY, edited by Maurice Freedman. Stanford. California, Stanford University Press, 1970., pp. XV, 269.
Students of Chinese society are not able at present to undertake field studies in the Chinese homeland, the People's Republic of China. The last major social investigation was carried out in the vicinity of Canton by Professor C.K. Yang over twenty years ago. Despite this formidable obstacle- the fact that China is closed to direct sociological observation the study of Chinese domestic institutions by Western and other scholars has quickened rather than slackened. A small group of dedicated social scientists have been active since 1949 in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other areas of Overseas Chinese settlement. Paradoxically, since 1949 much data have been collected, some important hypotheses formulated, and some parts of theory tested. As this volume makes clear, we have learned much about Chinese society since 1949 at least about the older China now being transformed by political, social and economic developments.
It is natural, I feel, that the editor of this volume should be Professor Maurice Freedman, whose two major studies of this area Lineage Organization in Southeastern China (1958) and Chinese Lineage and Society: Fukien and Kwangtung (1966) — have deeply influenced many other researchers in the same field. Professor Freedman, as the bibliographies appended to his works amply
* A Chinese Village in Early Communist Transition and The Chinese Family in the Communist Revolution (both M.LT., 1959),
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