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Yesterday I finished reading The Shadow of our Ancestors by Francis Hsu. It was a mid 1940's sociological/anthropological study of "a small semi-rural community in south west China". Despite collecting his fieldwork in 1941, 1942 and 1943 there was no mention of the war with Japan, or the struggle for political leadership. He mentioned only the problem with inflation and that one of the villagers had been killed in Japan several years ago. It was an interesting choice, he presented a fairly well off area where things tended to be better than the rest of China. It was almost as if he were trying to present as close to imperial conditions as possible for his study and didn't want anything to change or distract from that.
His idea for the book was based on the classic idea of dynastic cycles, which have since fallen out of favor with most historians. He held the same belief about families, the idea that a family would become rich and successful but would not be able to hold onto that success and would instead squander it and within a few generations become poor again. To explain this he gave a description of several aspects of life and then drew his own conclusions about how and why this happened.
His descriptions of life were fairly interesting. Though not too detailed or involved it did give a glimpse into life at the times. He spent a chapter looking at the lives of women. He raised some interesting points about their lives that he totally failed to incorporate into his conclusion. He brought up how women were considered inferior to men but that they also worked more, they helped in the fields, they worked in shops, and they spent a great deal of their time traveling to markets to arrange sales, sell items and check prices. They had a monetary income that was independent of their husbands entirely. However he does not in any way show how this financial independance and increased work affected the lives of these women. In his conclusion Hsu talks about how the children of the rich families have access to money any time they desire by asking their fathers, however not once does he mention if mothers ever give their children any money, or what their relationship with their sons was.
It was almost as if the women were not part of the family at all. He looked at the relationship of father and son as if this was the entire circumstances of the family. In his analysis of how children behaved it was clear that any reference to "children" meant only sons. He focused entirely on the male sex, men had sons, women did not, and no one had daughters. Having read the latter works of Margery Wolf it makes her study stand out all the more and become all the more interesting and obvious. She looked at the role of women and how they relate to their sons and daughters and the importance of that role. Her study looked at the family as a whole, not simply as a family as a paternal descent line.
Hsu's gender bias definitely left me with a bit of a negative impression at the end of the book however, there were several things that were very interesting to read about in the earlier chapters. He spent a great deal of time looking at the world of the dead in Chinese society and how it meshed with the realm of the living. He had clear and interesting descriptions of rituals involving ancestor worship and services to the dead. He explained very well the idea that ancestor worship unlike western religion was not a question of "Belief" explaining that everyone accepted it and it was as much a part of their daily existence as the physical world. I liked the idea of the closeness this drew between the living and the dead. He wrote how your responsibility and relationship with your parents remained the same whether they were living or dead it was just the expression of this that changed. Which I thought was a very interesting idea.
It's been awhile since I've read an anthropological study of China. It was nice to read one that was on the mainland and pre-communist. In a way it felt a little more like history than anthropology. Hsu's background was also interesting, he was a professor in the USA but had grown up in Manchuria, (perhaps the reason he didn't mention the war with Japan). Because of his not being a native to the US his comparisons between the US and China were rather interesting. This was particularly evident in his treatment of the differing relationships between parents and children. He wrote how in the US no-one wanted their children to act like adults but encouraged their individuality and childhood. Of course he didn't know that this was a recent development in Western culture and that until the mid-Victorian era or so children were simply looked at as young adults and expected to do as much work, and act much the same way as grown ups.
Hsu's conclusions seemed to be too simplified, he argued that rich families would give their children (meaning sons) too much money making them spoiled and lazy and unable to uphold the standards that made the family rich in the first place. Whereas sons of the poor families would need to work hard to get anything and so would be more diligent and work harder and improve their lot. However his argument over the family cycles did nothing to explain why it is that most families remain poor, or are poor while only a few achieve any success. His arguments stemmed from the idea of father son identification and "the big family ideal" however he did little to address the problem in this of more than one son, instead focusing on the multi-generational aspect of the family.
But I'm glad I found it and read it. Despite not always agreeing with the author it was an interesting record of how he saw the times.
His idea for the book was based on the classic idea of dynastic cycles, which have since fallen out of favor with most historians. He held the same belief about families, the idea that a family would become rich and successful but would not be able to hold onto that success and would instead squander it and within a few generations become poor again. To explain this he gave a description of several aspects of life and then drew his own conclusions about how and why this happened.
His descriptions of life were fairly interesting. Though not too detailed or involved it did give a glimpse into life at the times. He spent a chapter looking at the lives of women. He raised some interesting points about their lives that he totally failed to incorporate into his conclusion. He brought up how women were considered inferior to men but that they also worked more, they helped in the fields, they worked in shops, and they spent a great deal of their time traveling to markets to arrange sales, sell items and check prices. They had a monetary income that was independent of their husbands entirely. However he does not in any way show how this financial independance and increased work affected the lives of these women. In his conclusion Hsu talks about how the children of the rich families have access to money any time they desire by asking their fathers, however not once does he mention if mothers ever give their children any money, or what their relationship with their sons was.
It was almost as if the women were not part of the family at all. He looked at the relationship of father and son as if this was the entire circumstances of the family. In his analysis of how children behaved it was clear that any reference to "children" meant only sons. He focused entirely on the male sex, men had sons, women did not, and no one had daughters. Having read the latter works of Margery Wolf it makes her study stand out all the more and become all the more interesting and obvious. She looked at the role of women and how they relate to their sons and daughters and the importance of that role. Her study looked at the family as a whole, not simply as a family as a paternal descent line.
Hsu's gender bias definitely left me with a bit of a negative impression at the end of the book however, there were several things that were very interesting to read about in the earlier chapters. He spent a great deal of time looking at the world of the dead in Chinese society and how it meshed with the realm of the living. He had clear and interesting descriptions of rituals involving ancestor worship and services to the dead. He explained very well the idea that ancestor worship unlike western religion was not a question of "Belief" explaining that everyone accepted it and it was as much a part of their daily existence as the physical world. I liked the idea of the closeness this drew between the living and the dead. He wrote how your responsibility and relationship with your parents remained the same whether they were living or dead it was just the expression of this that changed. Which I thought was a very interesting idea.
It's been awhile since I've read an anthropological study of China. It was nice to read one that was on the mainland and pre-communist. In a way it felt a little more like history than anthropology. Hsu's background was also interesting, he was a professor in the USA but had grown up in Manchuria, (perhaps the reason he didn't mention the war with Japan). Because of his not being a native to the US his comparisons between the US and China were rather interesting. This was particularly evident in his treatment of the differing relationships between parents and children. He wrote how in the US no-one wanted their children to act like adults but encouraged their individuality and childhood. Of course he didn't know that this was a recent development in Western culture and that until the mid-Victorian era or so children were simply looked at as young adults and expected to do as much work, and act much the same way as grown ups.
Hsu's conclusions seemed to be too simplified, he argued that rich families would give their children (meaning sons) too much money making them spoiled and lazy and unable to uphold the standards that made the family rich in the first place. Whereas sons of the poor families would need to work hard to get anything and so would be more diligent and work harder and improve their lot. However his argument over the family cycles did nothing to explain why it is that most families remain poor, or are poor while only a few achieve any success. His arguments stemmed from the idea of father son identification and "the big family ideal" however he did little to address the problem in this of more than one son, instead focusing on the multi-generational aspect of the family.
But I'm glad I found it and read it. Despite not always agreeing with the author it was an interesting record of how he saw the times.