Getting An Heir: Research On Uxorilocal Marriage In Traditional Society

There are three forms of unfilial conduct, of which the worst is to have no descendants. This is not only a religious and social problem, but also a moral and ethical issue in traditional society. For the folk society, in order to cope with the problem, people universally take method of changing or virtual consanguineous relation between each other. Uxorilocal marriage, which means to take a son-in-law, is one of the main parts to build the fictitious blood relationship.However, in traditional society, the study of uxorilocal marriage is still a weak thing for educational circles, especially lack of comprehensive research systems. In virtue of the existing profile, this dissertation will unfold the system study of uxorilocal marriage from the respect cultural field based on traditional social parties, and especially focuses on the uxorilocal marriage and family members'life as well as the implied ideology and culture factors.About called-in sons-in-law origin, this paper argues that sons-in-law originated in mortgaging the male, sons-in-law is just to pawn as slave. Uxorilocal marriage has different displayed forms in different historical period.For both parties themselves, the reason of uxorilocal marriage can be traced to religious reasons, functional reasons, and emotional reasons. Due to this thing, it results in the uxorilocality diversification.Just as the common marriage, uxorilocal marriage should be established within certain conditions and procedures in traditional society. To be concrete, uxorilocal marriage in traditional society includes substantive and form conditions.Uxorilocal marriage is just a kind of Chinese marriage layout, however, this variety of marriage form owns different shape seen from interior. Except traditional uxorilocal marriage, it also covers special pattern such as Jiejiao uxorilocality, uxorilocality happened to servants, Uxorilocality happened to dead and so on.Taking so many comprehensive functions into account, son-in-law is usually in low position, no matter from state law, social status, or family status.After sons-in-law joining other family, they still keep close contact with their biological family. This contact mainly reflects in some respects such as in daily life economic, blood relationship and spiritual feelings. However, for the women family, the relationship between sons-in-law and them are in different diversity, especially the tense relation phenomenon. These tensions is resulted from various reasons, character, behavior, emotion, economy, responsibility, daily life are the main influential factors. It is worth noting that wife play a special role between parents and their husband, who you can call sons-in-law. Different from other women, they take on more duty. The key points for sons-in-law is to deal with their children properly. "Women first, then average distribution, and one son to succeed" is the basic distribution principle between children. And this is also a clear line to divide the two families. Obviously, this arrangement strengthened the society paternal consciousness.Entirely speaking, uxorilocal marriage is a kind of flexible adjustment and elastic apply in the patriarchal system with the situation of having no children. Besides, it is also a complement to marriage form, a temporary practice under specific condition. However, this kind of marriage just usually exists in one generation, once the next generation has children in male, common marriage pattern will become main stream. It has not yet challenge the patriarchy system fundamentally, on the contrary, it is still only in the manipulation of patriarchy framework. It appears profoundly in children distribution, property distribution and symbolic ceremony.