[
    {
        "id": 206428,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1971",
        "page_number": 245,
        "title": "RAS-1971",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n219\n\ntestify, long ago revealed the theoretical relevance of much of the earlier literature on China: it is pleasing to note, therefore, that some of the contributors to this volume are now combining field research with an extensive use of the available documentation on China. This has led to a much more sophisticated treatment of theoretical problems and has, I feel, made such works much more interesting to read and more intellectually attractive for people in other disciplines.\n\nThe essays in this volume, apart from one by Professor Arthur P. Wolf, were in their original form papers written for, and discussed at, a conference on Kinship in Chinese society, held in New York in 1966 and sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council (New York). As it is not possible for a workaday sociologist to discuss every paper meaningfully and in detail in a short review, I shall comment on only a few of the papers, not because they are necessarily the best or the more significant but simply because I have some comments on them.\n\nThe first essay is by Professor Myron L. Cohen, who discusses a key problem: the structure of the Chinese family. Professor Cohen argues that the relevant components of the chia (family) can be reduced to three: the chia estate, the chia group, and the chia economy, and that the connection between the three components can assume a variety of forms or types. As he writes, 'the Chinese family has by and large been described in terms involving or assuming the existence of a chia in which the estate is concentrated, the group is concentrated, and the economy is inclusive'. Much of his essay is taken up by a rigorous discussion of chia variations, such as that an inclusive economy can be found in association with a dispersed estate and, of necessity, a dispersed group. Professor Cohen concludes that 'the possibility arises that a good deal of the movement of persons in Chinese society, movement connected with \"horizontal\" or \"vertical\" social and economic mobility, or with efforts to achieve such mobility, in fact occurred within a chia framework'. The points he makes are important and crucial: they illuminate basic concepts used to understand Chinese society; and I am persuaded by his claim 'that there may be more to domestic units than meets the demographer's eye'. There is certainly some evidence from nineteenth century Hong Kong to",
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        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 206430,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1971",
        "page_number": 247,
        "title": "RAS-1971",
        "content_text": "BOOK REVIEWS\n\n221\n\nProfessor Jack M. Potter's essay on land and lineage in traditional China draws heavily on the data collected for his Hong Kong study, Capitalism and the Chinese Peasant (1968). He sets himself the problem of trying to account for differences in the distribution of strong lineage organization in various parts of China, of lineage structure Type Z, as described and formulated by Professor Freedman. The hypothesised factors favourable to the development of a strong lineage are given by Professor Potter as a rich agricultural environment, frontier conditions, the absence of strong governmental control, and commercial development; all present, he concludes, in the New Territories of Hong Kong, where the Ping Shan Tang lineage flourished. He also argues that in all areas lineage organization would tend to be weaker under strong dynasties and stronger in inter-regnal periods or under weak dynasties. Professor Potter affirms that the four variables 'can form a set of inter-related hypotheses that, if validated by further research, would allow us to predict when and where strong lineage organization tended to appear in Traditional China'. But I should also think that strong lineages must depend very much on the quality of the personnel contained within them; for some human groups do seem to produce a more adroit leadership for a longer period of time than others. An institutionalization of virtue, as it were, may take place in some groups (lineages) more readily than in others.* And the task of plotting the frequency of powerful lineages in China has scarcely begun, so far as I know.\n\nThe study of Chinese society by Western scholars has been mainly androcentric in its selection of problems, thus reflecting Chinese views of their own social universe; but both Professor Freedman and Professor Arthur P. Wolf in their respective papers pay attention to the ambivalent and ambiguous status held by women in Chinese society. Professor Freedman's essay on ritual aspects of Chinese kinship and marriage discusses, among other matters, the problem of 'how is a woman to reconcile her duties as wife and daughter-in-law with those she has as sister and daughter?' The rites of marriage, he argues, \"are not to be taken as simple statements capable of being given clear and unambiguous meanings by those who participate in them. Rites, as symbolic\n\n* Dialect groupings may constitute another variable that has not yet been examined.",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1971.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/z029vt43g",
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    },
    {
        "id": 213853,
        "series_id": 26,
        "series_slug": "histsyn-rashkb-journal-engine",
        "series_title": "RASHKB Journal 皇家亞洲學會香港分會學刊",
        "series_use_hku_proxy": false,
        "document_key": "RAS-1996",
        "page_number": 205,
        "title": "RAS-1996",
        "content_text": "178\n\nNOTES\n\nAbbreviation JHKBRAS = Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society\n\nThe present study is part of the research product of the Historical Fieldwork Project on Old Settlements in Tung Chung, Lantau Island, conducted by the History Department, Chinese University of Hong Kong, in summer 1991, under the auspices of the Antiquities and Monument Office, Government Secretariat, Hong Kong. In the section on Tung Chung's socio-religious activities, Wai-yee Ho was one of the field interviewers and the major processor of interview transcriptions on the subject. The authors of this article would like to thank Mr Wing-kai To and Dr Cathy Potter for reading and commenting on the draft. Official geographical names are used in this paper although their romanization may deviate from the Wade-Giles system adopted by this journal.\n\nJ.L. Cranner-Byng & A. Shepherd \"A Reconnaissance of Ma Wan and Lantao Islands in 1794,” JHKBRAS, Vol. 4 (1964), p. 115\n\nAdministrative Report (1912), p. 110. VII-Crops\n\n* Stewart H. Lockhart, \"Report on the Extension of the Colony of Hong Kong,\" 1898\n\n* \"Table of Population Figures in the New Territories,\" Hong Kong Gazetteer (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 1958)\n\n6 Interviews Cheng P'o (age 77), upper Ling Pei, Jun 15, 1991, Hsieh Ch'i (age 72), San Tau, Jul 7, 1991, Mr Wang (Age 30+), San Tau, Jul 7, 1991. Wang's father was known as the \"king of folk song.\" He used to keep some song books which are now lost.\n\nInterview of Mr & Mrs Lo # (age Mr Lo 69), Shek Mun Kap, Jun 18, 1991. Mrs Lo, who was a child bride, as were her sisters, mentioned that quite a number of child brides came from San Tau, Sha Lo Wan and the western border of Tung Chung. Interviews \"Uncle Cheng\", the Tung Chung Public School, Jun 24, 1991, Chang Yen, Ma Wan Chung, Jul 7, 1991. \"Uncle Cheng\" indicated that the price for a child bride was HK$20 or more fifty years ago, whereas Cheng Yen pointed out that the price was HK$50-60 sixty years ago.\n\nOn the Hakka mores of women labouring as farmers/housewives while their husbands and grown-up sons worked outside or overseas (mostly in southeast Asia), see Wu Tsung-chuo & Wen Chung-ho, Chia-ying-chou chih (reprint of the 1898 edition) (Taipei: Ch'eng-wen ch'u-pan-she, 1968), chuan 8, pp. 53-55. For this tradition, and the custom of child brides, see also Yang Hung-hai, \"Yueh-tung k'e-chia ti min-su t'e-se,\" in KROANKAHė K'e-chia wen-chin, ZRERE, Vol. 1 (1989), pp. 277, 281.\n\n* Interview of Cheng Man-hung W (age 63), Aug 8, 1991\n\n\"John Brim, \"Village Alliance Temples in Hong Kong,\" in Arthur P. Wolf, ed., Religion and Ritual in Chinese Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), p. 95\n\n179",
        "txt_file_path": "txt/dfo323lmgvd/RAS-1996.txt",
        "external_url": "https://digitalrepository.lib.hku.hk/catalog/3n209j641",
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    }
]