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In retrospect, the shortcomings of Faure's book stem less from his abilities as a scholar than from the practical difficulties of accurately reconstructing a historical account of local society during the traditional period on the basis of available materials and living testimony. His challenge to historians to look beyond the archives to exploit other possible sources of data is a positive contribution to the writing of local history in any case. His attempt to measure the breadth of ethnographic diversity against the depth of historical experience will undoubtedly force anthropologists to look beyond the narrow time-space confines of their own village world. Moreover, judging from his use of the oral historical data, there appears to be no doubt that he is a first-rate fieldworker.
Nonetheless, the richness of Faure's data with regard to the nature of local history and society in the New Territories indeed points to a host of problem areas. Given the already chaotic state of understanding among various scholarly interest groups about the content and value of lineage theory in relation to Chinese society, I wish to cast in somewhat different light in the following pages certain central problem areas in a way which exposes some serious faults in the prevailing literature and hopefully will open up new fields of investigation. The following discussion centers upon the nature of ancestor worship, locality, and history, respectively.
Most anthropologists, not to mention anyone else, take for granted the fact that at the heart of any descent theory lies the notion of a social structure. More than just a quaint coincidence, underlying the very intelligibility of the concept of descent resides a set of assumptions about the nature of "the social world" and its functional consistency, which is exactly what the principle of social structure is all about. For A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the claim that continuity of the social structure (defined as relations of interconnectedness between persons) is the key to the stability of a functionally consistent society is more often taken for granted as a fact than as an assumption which needs to be empirically verified. Likewise, his contention that descent relations constitute the ideal-typical social structure is rooted in his assertion that descent is a fact of birth which cannot change and that descent engenders an exclusive set of rights and duties "as against the world". The rationality of the latter set of assertions cannot be understood without reference to its embeddedness within the former set of assumptions Radcliffe-Brown makes about the
250
In retrospect, the shortcomings of Faure's book stem less from his abilities as a scholar than from the practical difficulties of accurately reconstructing a historical account of local society during the traditional period on the basis of available materials and living testimony. His challenge to historians to look beyond the archives to exploit other possible sources of data is a positive contribution to the writing of local history in any case. His attempt to measure the breadth of ethnographic diversity against the depth of historical experience will undoubtedly force anthropologists to look beyond the narrow time-space confines of their own village world. Morcover, judging from his use of the oral historical data, there appears to be no doubt that he is a first-rate fieldworker.
Nonetheless, the richness of Faure's data with regard to the nature of local history and society in the New Territories indeed points to a host of problem areas. Given the already chaotic state of understanding among various scholarly interest groups about the content and value of lineage theory in relation to Chinese society, I wish to cast in somewhat different light in the following pages certain central problem areas in a way which exposes some serious faults in the prevailing literature and hopefully will open up new fields of investigation. The following discussion centers upon the nature of ancestor worship, locality, and history, respectively.
Most anthropologists, not to mention anyone else, take for granted the fact that at the heart of any descent theory lies the notion of a social structure. More than just a quaint coincidence, underlying the very intelligibility of the concept of descent resides a set of assumptions about the nature of "the social world" and its functional consistency, which is exactly what the principle of social structure is all about. For A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, the claim that continuity of the social structure (defined as relations of interconnectedness between persons') is the key to the stability of a functionally consistent society is more often taken for granted as a fact than as an assumption which needs to be empirically verified. Likewise, his contention that descent relations constitute the idealtypical social structure is rooted in his assertion that descent is a fact of birth which cannot change and that descent engenders an exclusive set of rights and duties "as against the world”. The rationality of the latter set of assertions cannot be understood without reference to its embeddedness within the former set of assumptions Radcliffe-Brown makes about the
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