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being has any more to do with descent than with those rules which are constitutive of the village as a village. Especially in light of the above remarks pertaining to the irrelevance of ancestor worship to territorial residence, it should be ever clearer that only principles of locality can explain the constitution of territorial groups like the household, village and other higher-level groups, whether they are composed of one or many "descent groups". Yet in its present form, locality is a catch-all concept whose precise definition must be further understood properly in a concrete historical context. In relation to the problem of what constitutes the Chinese "lineage-village", it suffices to say for now that the group that prays together must be analytically distinguished from the group that stays together.
If this is so, then the very terms single-(multi-) lineage village and (God forbid) real lineage society must be avoided as unnecessary illusions inculcated by a model of descent-cum-social structure. At this point, I agree superficially at least with Faure's basic point that villages and village clusters must be looked at in terms of villages and village clusters, to which I add the important clause regardless of how the village (cluster) "appears" to be constituted in descent terms. Even in the case of the ideal-typical "single-lineage village", one should not take for granted a priori that it is the descent principle more than anything else which accounts for the nature of that group as a group.
In this regard, I think much more needs to be said about how villages have come to be settled in specific concrete historical situations rather than whether one can abstract in jural terms hard and fast rights of settlement. Contrary to Faure's claim (p. 30) that “no village could have been founded in the New Territories in the last five centuries unless the founding ancestors had come to terms with incumbents”, I suspect that the majority of multi-surname villages and village clusters have come about during the formative period when there was really no clear definition of an established "settlement” or village and instead a flexible aggregation of households. The “single-lineage” village of Wo Hang presently occupied by members surnamed Li tracing their origin as residents from the same settler is a case in point. For the first 3-4 generations of its 10-generation history, the aggregation of Li households could hardly have been called a village. Occupied during that time by 3 other surname groups, it was not even the first group of settlers there.
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being has any more to do with descent than with those rules which are constitutive of the village as a village. Especially in light of the above remarks pertaining to the irrelevance of ancestor worship to territorial residence, it should be ever clearer that only principles of locality can explain the constitution of territorial groups like the household, village and other higher-level groups, whether they are composed of one or many "'descent groups". Yet in its present form, locality is a catch-all concept whose precise definition must be further understood properly in a concrete historical context. In relation to the problem of what constitutes the Chinese "lineage-village", it suffices to say for now that the group that prays together must be analytically distinguished from the group that stays together.
If this is so, then the very terms single-(multi-) lineage village and (God forbid) real lineage society must be avoided as unnecessary illusions enculcated by a model of descent-cum-social structure. At this point, I agree superficially at least with Faure's basic point that villages and village clusters must be looked at in terms of villages and village clusters, to which I add the important clause regardless of how the village (cluster) "appears" to be constituted in descent terms. Even in the case of the idealtypical "single-lineage village", one should not take for granted a priori that it is the descent principle more than anything else which accounts for the nature of that group as a group.'
P
In this regard, I think much more needs to be said about how villages have come to be settled in specific concrete historical situations rather than whether one can abstract in jural terms hard and fast rights of settlement. Contrary to Faure's claim (p. 30) that “no village could have been founded in the New Territories in the last five centuries unless the founding ancestors had come to terms with incumbents”, I suspect that the majority of multi-surname villages and village clusters have come about during the formative period when there was really no clear definition of an established "settlement” or village and instead a flexible aggregation of households." The “single-lineage❞ village of Wo Hang presently occupied by members surnamed Li tracing their origin as residents from the same settler is a case in point, For the first 3-4 generations of its 10 generation history, the aggregation of Li households could have hardly been called a village. Occupied during that time by 3 other surname groups, it was not even the first group of settlers there.
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