An Essay On Fictive Kinship Of Yi People Study

This thesis takes the investigation of Yi people’s fictive kinship living in Bocun Village of the Ailao Mountain as an example, studying the whole of Yi people’s fictive kinship, and attempting to discuss the independence and integrity of fictive kinship. I treat the process of the non-kin members of Yi people in the Bocun Village building, maintaining and the termination of fictive kinship as the main clue, in order to summarize the elementary shape and micro-process of it, and elaborate its social background, structure, function and change, then analyze the independence and integrity of fictive kinship studying. This paper is mainly elaborated as the six following parts.The first part, Introduction. This part introduces the reason why I choose this thesis, overview of the former researchers’studies, to make the definitions and research scope clear.The second part, Introducing the background of fictive kinship in Bocun, that is, survey of the investigation field, containing two parts are survey of Bocun and survey of its social structure, exemplified the basic introduce including elementary survey, ethnic minorities, history, fork belief, Patriarchal clan structure, intermarriage circle and fictive kinship structure of Bocun, in order to make a base for the following.The third part, the classification of fictive kinship in Bocun, Yi ethnic group (it is the La-Lu branch) in Bocun Village has two large categories on its fictive kinship named ritual type (including types can be subdivided into passive class and active class) and terminological type.The fourth part, the micro-process of fictive kinship in Bocun, that is a process made of building, maintaining and interacting,ending the fictive kinship among non-kin individual.The fifth part, analyzing the structure, function and the change of fictive kinship in Bocun, containing four aspects, which are the social background, structure, function, and change.The sixth part, conclusion, summarizing the discussion of description, in order to put forward the purpose of the paper.From what has been stated above, fictive kinship is the essential basis of different nationalities, different surnames of many rural social non-kin individual behavior form. The stability of its integral structure relies on the changing process among non-kinship individual members establishing, maintaining and terminating the fictive kinship to sustain, yet which won’t exterminate with the end of the individual relationship. Therefore, fictive kinship as an independent studying object is an independent, complete social structure,which affects the composition of the local society.