BOOK REVIEWS
THE STUDY OF CHINESE SOCIETY: Essays by Maurice Freedman. Selected and Introduced by G. William Skinner. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1979. xxiv, 491 pp. Notes, References Cited, Character List, Index.
The late Maurice Freedman produced three books on Chinese society and edited a third. As William Skinner points out they have earned him an honoured place in the annals of social anthropology and sinology. Yet "both fields would be impoverished if the remainder of Freedman's sinological oeuvre came to be neglected. The greater part is contained in this book. The Study of Chinese Society is more than a collection of essays however; it is a tribute to their author's work in the development of studies of Chinese in overseas communities and in the traditional homeland, both through his own research and the inspiration he gave to others.
Maurice Freedman was Director of the Institute of Social Anthropology at Oxford and Fellow of All Souls' College at the time of his death in 1975, but most of his work was undertaken while at the London School of Economics where he taught for many years following his own days as a student at the School. Freedman's work on the Chinese began in 1949 with a just short of two-year period in Singapore where he studied Chinese family and marriage. Instead of settling in a village and conducting the sort of single community study for which anthropologists are perhaps more noted, and particularly at that time, he decided to make his work "as broadly based as one lone field worker could..." It was a study which opened up all sorts of questions and problems connected with overseas Chinese society (a topic which was to remain a life-time interest) and with the homeland society from which it derives.
Matters connected with the homeland-traditional Chinese society were to occupy him in the years following his return from Singapore. From some intensive "armchair" studies conducted with archival materials, Freedman developed some models of Southern Chinese lineage organization which were to be tested in subsequent field research by a variety of students. While visiting the New Territories in 1955 he began to realise their potential as a base for testing his lineage hypotheses and conducting many other kinds of study of traditional society. In 1963 he returned and wrote a report on those topics he considered of major importance both for anthropology...
BOOK REVIEWS
THE STUDY OF CHINESE SOCIETY: Essays by Maurice Freedman. Selected and Introduced by G. William Skinner. Stanford University Press, Stanford, California, 1979. xxiv, 491 pp. Notes, References Cited, Character List, Index.
The late Maurice Freedman produced three books on Chinese society and edited a third. As William Skinner points out they have earned him an honoured place in the annals of social anthropology and sinology. Yet "both fields would be impoverished if the re- mainder of Freedman's sinological oeuvre came to be neglected. The greater part is contained in this book. The Study of Chinese Society is more than a collection of essays however; it is a tribute to their author's work in the development of studies of Chinese in overseas communities and in the traditional homeland, both through his own research and the inspiration he gave to others.
Maurice Freedman was Director of the Institute of Social An- thropology at Oxford and Fellow of All Souls' College at the time of his death in 1975, but most of his work was undertaken while at the London School of Economics where he taught for many years following his own days as a student at the School. Freedman's work on the Chinese began in 1949 with a just short of two-year period in Singapore where he studied Chinese family and marriage. Instead of settling in a village and conducting the sort of single community study for which anthropologists are perhaps more noted, and par- ticularly at that time, he decided to make his work "as broadly based as one lone field worker could..." It was a study which opened up all sorts of questions and problems connected with over- seas Chinese society (a topic which was to remain a life-time interest) and with the homeland society from which it derives.
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Matters connected with the homeland-traditional Chinese society were to occupy him in the years following his return from Singapore. From some intensive "armchair" studies conducted with archival materials, Freedman developed some models of Southern Chinese lineage organization which were to be tested in subsequent field research by a variety of students. While visiting the New Territories in 1955 he began to realise their potential as a base for testing his lineage hypotheses and conducting many other kinds of study of traditional society. In 1963 he returned and wrote a report on those topics he considered of major importance both for anthro-
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