This book summarizes twenty years of the author's work in historical anthropology and documents his argument that in China, ritual provided the social glue that law provided in the West. The book offers a readable history of the special lineage institutions for which south China has been noted and argues that these institutions fostered the mechanisms that enabled south China to be absorbed into the imperial Chinese state—first, by introducing rituals that were acceptable to the state, and second, by providing mechanisms that made group ownership of property feasible and hence made it possible to pool capital for land reclamation projects important to the state. Just as taxation, defense, and recognition came together with the emergence of powerful lineages in the sixteenth century, their disintegration in the late nineteenth century signaled the beginnings of a new Chinese state.
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David Faure is Professor of History at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He is the coeditor of Down to Earth: The Territorial Bond in South China (Stanford University Press, 1995).
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黄佐于明世宗嘉靖四十年(1561)刊行的《广东通志》,则收录了主簿苏缄的故事:在一个宴会上,有一富商试图坐在苏缄身边,被苏缄以杖刑处罚。富商向苏缄的上司投诉,苏缄坚持已见,谓自己官职虽低,地位仍高于商人。
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