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Third, it serves as an alliance across common surname groups. Fourth, it represents a claim to official status. In no case is it a substitute for the territorial community. The territorial community is represented by a different religion. It may be subsumed under the lineage; it often is in the case of single-lineage villages, (p. 166)
The transition from bad anthropology to good anthropology is a difficult one, even for anthropologists. I suggest therefore that Faure drop the anthropology altogether.'
With regard to the second dimension of Faure's work, I am somewhat disturbed by Faure's argument that the ancestral halls and grand written genealogies produced during the period of "The Five Great Clans” were simply status symbols which were meant to provide a kind of facade in dealing with official policy at the time. This is like saying people starch their shirts and blow dry their hair because it is the “in-thing" to do. It hardly suffices as any kind of serious explanation. Historians and anthropologists of China have known for a quite long time that large-scale agnatic organization of the kind which has typified the Chinese lineage is for the most part a phenomenon seen no earlier than the Ming. I think Faure's criticism of historians who have been content to focus purely upon the "visible" aspects of the lineage as text in the form of ancestral halls and genealogies is a legitimate complaint. But I think we are far from pinpointing the ideological and sociological roots of that phenomenon. More than just ancestral halls, genealogies and official policies, there exists in other words a whole complex of factors which underlies that total social phenomenon.
On a methodological note, there is a further danger in Faure's insistence that ancestral halls and genealogies were just public status symbols, to wit the following:
Nevertheless, the establishment of these ancestral halls represented an important stage in lineage-building because they provided symbols of territorial and lineage unity: fronts, if one wishes to call them that, behind which the segmented bodies tracing common descent might appear as corporate bodies in regional politics and in dealings with the yamen.
247
Third, it serves as an alliance across common surname groups. Fourth, it represents a claim to official status. In no case is it a substitute for the territorial community. The territorial community is represented by a different religion. It may be subsumed under the lineage; it often is in the case of single-lineage villages, (p. 166)
The transition from bad anthropology to good anthropology is a difficult one, even for anthropologists. I suggest therefore that Faure drop the anthropology altogether.'
With regard to the second dimension of Faure's work, I am somewhat disturbed by Faure's argument that the ancestral halls and grand written genealogies produced during the period of "The Five Great Clans” were simply status symbols which were meant to provide a kind of facade in dealing with official policy at the time. This is like saying people starch their shirts and blow dry their hair because it is the “in-thing" to do. It hardly suffices as any kind of serious explanation. Historians and anthropologists of China have known for a quite long time that large- scale agnatic organization of the kind which has typified the Chinese lineage is for the most part a phenomenon seen no earlier than the Ming. I think Faure's criticism of historians who have been content to focus purely upon the "visible" aspects of the lineage as text in the form of ancestral halls and genealogies is a legitimate complaint. But I think we are far from pinpointing the ideological and sociological roots of that phenomenon. More than just ancestral halls, genealogies and official policies, there exists in other words a whole complex of factors which underlies that total social phenomenon.
On a methodological note, there is a further danger in Faure's insistence that ancestral halls and genealogies were just public status symbols, to wit the following:
Nevertheless, the establishment of these ancestral halls represented an important stage in lineage-building because they provided symbols of territorial and lineage unity: fronts, if one wishes to call them that, behind which the segmented bodies tracing common descent might appear as corporate bodies in regional politics and in dealings with the yamen.
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