The Evolution Of Family Settlement Space Morphology From The Anthropological Perspective

Settlement is the basic unit of a local society. There are many time-honored settlements which were formed through the long history of Chinese feudal society. Along with the return of the traditional culture, people nowadays pay more and more attention to researches in those local settlements with distinct regional features. Cultural anthropological researches on local settlements can uncover the relationship between the superficial morphology and deep structures of a local settlement from a new point of view, and can better understand the evolvement and regular morphology of the local settlement. Therefore, this article is trying to discuss the evolvement of a Chendai settlement in south Fujian resided by descendants of western regions Muslims in a cultural anthropological field of vision. By means of many on-site investigations, photo-takings and mappings, using plentiful literature and history documentations and image materials, this paper reviews the history of the settlement's development, explores the cultural kernel within its morphology evolvement and analyzes the generality and uniqueness, in hope of making some contributions to the research on the traditional settlement.This research paper has three main parts:The first part is Chapter 1 - Introduction. This part covers the background of topic choosing, definitions of related concepts, current research status and the contents, methods and significance of this paper.The second part is Chapter 2 to 4 and is the body of this paper. First of all, based on the information of the location, organizational structure, environment and historical culture background of Chendai Ding's settlement, this part discusses the impact of natural environment, politics, economics, and culture on settlement evolvement, with application of related principles and theories, using the course of Ding's settlement from cradle to grave as a breakthrough point. Then, it analyzes at macro level the evolvement of Ding's settlement morphology in more details, pointes out the nature and human factors behind the base site selection of Ding's settlement, and also discusses the creation of settlement overall morphology and the morphology evolvement of settlement cluster from the aspect of family branch system. Last but not least, this part takes a micro level analysis of the most typical architecture within Ding's settlement - ancestral temple, with discussion of the morphology evolvement through big ancestral hall, small ancestral hall and ancestral mansion respectively.The third part is Chapter 5. It analyzes the spiritual characteristics of Ding's people in six aspects using related cultural anthropological theories, in order to show the deep influence of these spiritual characteristics on the settlement pattern evolvement. The six aspects, namely, the ecological awareness that respects nature, the coexistence awareness that pursuing neighborhood harmony, the ethic awareness that priorities the norms of propriety, the pragmatic awareness that attaches importance to bachelor, peasantry and merchant, the conspicuous awareness that brings honor to ancestors, and the propitious awareness that prays for luck and sacrifice to avoid disasters.