Kinship and Fictitious Kinship in Eastern China

Some Aspects of the Cultural Semantics of Belonging

Abstract

An ethnographic account of 1936 from a village in Jiangsu Province, eastern China, reports that one feature of social life there was the extensive use of kinship terms to designate almost everyone living in the village, despite a lack of genuine biological bonds. It is suggested that this comprehensive use reflected a shallow cult of ancestry that drew on a cultural semantic complex, a figuration combining rice, ancestral land and the dissolving and subsequent absorption of the dead into the sphere of divinity. It also reflected a fragmentation in ownership of land. Through this metamorphosis of the dead, separate lines of agnatic kinship were fused into unity. The combination of kin and land into a notion of common local belonging provided a grammar for marriage, women, funerals and celebrations for village people. By internalizing ‘agnatic matter’ (rice) from iconically coalesced land, people were turned into quasi agnatic relatives and acted accordingly in their daily discourse. Kinship in the real world was openly paralleled by an iconic imagery of kinship in a possible world.