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facilitate future generations in their act of remembrance. Lacking such a communal estate, it becomes the obligation of the worshippers in their capacity as individuals to maintain the continuity of worship. Needless to say, such communal ancestral property often provides more than is necessary for the worship itself and can be used to offset educational expenses, supplement individual family income, or do whatever its members see fit as benefitting common interest. From the perspective of the worshippers, his relationship to his deceased(s) is simply one of a straight line, which will include also close agnates who died without local lineal successors. A relationship which a worshipper shares with another worshipper via links to a common ancestor is termed t’ung-tsung, literally one of common divinity or common worship. Relations of common worship are not meant in the end to be synonymous with a genealogical record, although actual relations of worship often provide the raw data for compiling a written genealogy. The written genealogy as a thing in itself is a well-known historical invention whose uses were not limited exclusively for facilitating worship, hence Faure's emphasis on politics. Yet the written genealogy as an historical invention must also be clearly distinguished from the functions of the genealogy in terms of descent theory, which is a different kind of politics altogether. It is the latter genealogy or the idea of one that is solely relevant to the understanding of a segmentary lineage system.
The above exposition suffices to demonstrate that the "structure" of Chinese ancestral worship, from a native's point of view, really cannot be synonymous with that of a segmentary lineage system. More importantly, there is nothing in the content of native ancestor worship which stipulates or even suggests that it must or should constitute the foci of common residence, common economics, or common politics. Strangely enough, the "weak" explanatory power of ancestor worship was what probably led the anthropologist to rely upon a descent-based model in the first place. In the process, however, a grave analytical error was committed. For if descent represents the (objective) "social structure" of what Chinese perceive in native terms to be relations of ancestor worship, as all good functionalists have claimed, then descent in a Chinese context cannot possibly constitute the foci of those other common interests as well, in spite of appearances to the contrary. That is to say, when one sees the existence of a single-lineage village, there should be no a priori reason to believe that its sociological reason for
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facilitate future generations in their act of remembrance. Lacking such a communal estate, it becomes the obligation of the worshippers in their capacity as individuals to maintain the continuity of worship. Needless to say, such communal ancestral property often provides more than is necessary for the worship itself and can be used to offset educational expenses, supplement individual family income, or do whatever its members see fit as benefitting common on interest. From the perspective of the worshippers, his relationship to his deceased(s) is simply one of a straight line, which will include also close agnates who died without local lineal successors. A relationship which a worshipper shares with another worshipper via links to a common ancestor is termed t’ung-tsung, literally one of common divinity or common worship. Relations of common worship are not meant in the end to be synonymous with a genealogical record, although actual relations of worship often provide the raw data for compiling a written genealogy. The written genealogy as a thing in itself is a well-known historical invention whose uses were not limited exclusively for facilitating worship, hence Faure's emphasis on politics. Yet the written genealogy as an historical invention must also be clearly distinguished from the functions of the genealogy in terms of descent theory, which is a different kind of politics altogether. It is the latter genealogy or the idea of one that is solely relevant to the understanding of a segmentary lineage system.
The above exposition suffices to demonstrate that the "structure" of Chinese ancestral worship, from a native's point of view, really cannot be synonymous with that of a segmentary lineage system. More importantly, there is nothing in the content of native ancestor worship which stipulates or even suggests that it must or should constitute the foci of common residence, common economics, or common politics. Strangely enough, the "weak" explanatory power of ancestor worship was what probably led the anthropologist to rely upon a descent-based model in the first place. In the process, however, a grave analytical error was committed. For if descent represents the (objective) "social structure" of what Chinese perceive in native terms to be relations of ancestor worship, as all good functionalists have claimed, then descent in a Chinese context cannot possibly constitute the foci of those other common interests as well, in spite of appearances to the contrary, That is to say, when one sees the existence of a single-lineage village, there should be no a priori reason to believe that its sociological reason for
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