Social implications of the resurgence of lineage culture: The case study of a single-surname village in Guangdong within the currents of industrialization

This study offers an ethnographic account of the resurgence of lineage culture and its implication to social life in a Cantonese single-surname village in the course of industrialization. Based on a long-term fieldwork in the village, the author tries to explain the causes for the resurgence of lineage culture in modern society and the relationship between the local tradition of lineage culture and the modern social change. The author argues that there is compatibility between the tradition and the modern from the perspective of lineage culture. The traditional resources of lineage culture have been employed in the rural community. It is necessary to reconsider the widely recognized point that both tradition and modernization are not compatible.; The resurgence of lineage culture in the village is accompanied with the process of drastic change from traditional agricultural economy to modern processing industry on the one hand, and from natural economy to market economy on the other. Besides the surfaced elements such as political looseness and relief of control to peasants in the countryside, the causes for the resurgence of lineage culture have another two important aspects that are often ignored. Firstly, the rural lineage culture can provide useful functions to satisfy the villagers' practical needs under the transformation of society and economy in the context of reform and open-up policy. Secondly, the deep structure of lineage culture has been kept well in the area. What the author would like to stress in this work is that, the villager's cultural concept of ancestor and their memorialization of the ancestors down through the generations sets up the main foundation of the resurgence of lineage culture.; This research shows an integrative process of how villagers adopt kinship tie of lineage culture to develop their economy and modify it in the course of such a process of adoption so as to fit into the modern context. Focusing on the land system, community welfare, endogamy and administrative management in the village, the author explores how the traditional resources of lineage culture are adopted by the villagers. A two-fold attention must be given here. It is necessary to understand the continuity of the traditional and modern lineage culture; but it is more important for one to articulate how the latter adjust itself in the process of industrialization. The author concludes that a dialectical unity of tradition and modern exists in the process of the resurgence of lineage culture in contemporary industrializing area.