Lineage And Marriage: Intra And Inter-Ma Village Relations In Eastern Shandong (1886-2012)

Since the Opium Wars, western style modernization has been on the agenda ofsuccessive governments from late Qing onwards, and western discourse has alsoexperienced momentum in explaining social problems in China. Meanwhile, theview, held by scholars and politicians alike, that the family system is a hindrance tomodernization prevails even until today.Any study of Chinese society would be incomplete if the countryside wereexcluded. Yet the fundamental characteristics of the countryside are yet to be clearlydefined, and students of different schools have proposed various models in order todescribe the social relations in the rural areas. Among the various theories is theSkinnerian model, which claims that the market model reflects rural relationsindependent of official political territories. Other scholars focus on the familysystem within the village but often ignore the maternal side of the family and clan.The nature of inter-village relations in different historical periods and how they havebeen intertwined with the marriage circles is yet to be explored. Clearly, we havecome to a point in the argument where we must expand the studies to include allmembers of both genders and try to give them a meaning that is precise enough tohelp in the analysis of the complete forms assumed by agnatic groups.Ma Village is a typical village in eastern Shandong whose ancestors, Ma An andhis wife Wang, migrated from Chengdu during the early Ming Dynasty. The Ma’s,through the waxing and waning of the Ming, Qing, early Republican, Nationalist, andCommunist periods, are now in their28thgeneration. This research is based on anexamination of Ma Village for six centuries with special emphasis on the past one anda half centuries, and on first-hand and archival research from Ma village as well aspast studies on rural China. It concludes that under tremendous political andeconomic pressures, leading to the agnatic lineage being progressively underminedand eroded, the family institution has nonetheless perpetuated family ties throughmarriage. Yet a new form of lineage is assumed. Through an historicalexamination of political and economic transformation, the expansion and involutionof marriage have been revealed as reflections of this transformation. It turns out thatthe fundamental relations in eastern Shandong are lineage ones within the village andmarriage with other villages, instead of Skinner’s proposition or of any other theories.This conclusion implicitly assumes two premises: first, this finding appliesstrictly to eastern Shandong; and secondly the relation between officialdom and thevillagers has always dominated other relations, with lineage and marriage relationsbeing secondary. Modern industrialization and commercialization unequivocallyplay an instrumental role in dramatically accelerating the subversion of thecenturies-old lineage system.