Where To Have A Home

Returning daughter is a newly emerging group in Dai village. It refers to those married daughters who return and settle near their parents’ village with their husbands and children. They are not hurried passers, they expect to settle down and enter into the central circle of their parents’ village. However, in the village, they are unpopular and even marginalized as "outsiders". Can they settle down and live in peace in the village? Where to have a home? In order to deeply analyze the phenomenon, the author takes the returning daughter of Pusi as a research case and conducts from the perspective of village membership and land rights, and "village collective ownership".This thesis consists of six chapters:Chapter I Introduction:The topic of this thesis is drawn from a story of the returning daughter’s natal family, and then the process of their settling in the "Jing Xiang" is described. Combining the longitudinal synchronic with the transverse diachronic to sort out and organize the relevant literature, and introducing the employed data collection and field research methods used in this thesis.Chapter II:The Pusi’cultural and geographical environment and the history of the village are depicted mainly based on field data. The traditional custom of exogamy which has been perfectly retained against dramatic social changes is shown. The status quo of the returning daughter and their families is microcosmically" thickly described "from the way of embedding into their parents’ village and source of income.ChapterⅢ:Analyzing the cause that why the returning daughter is able to format a new group. Expounding their hard life in their husbands’ families, the risks and hardships as migrant workers, the parents’ sympathy and assists of returning home, as well as the impetus from the relatives and neighbors’ affection and human morality.ChapterIV:Round the kinship and religious sacrificial activities, describing the embarrassing situation of establishing their own kinship between the parents’ families and the husbands’ families, and then analyzing the cause of the confusion in the religious sacrificial activities.Chapter V:Expounding the nondescript and exclusion of returning daughter from marginalized "outsiders", equivocal relatives appellation, and life and death. Discusses the exclusion from their brothers, marginalization from the village, the village committee recognizes the behavior of brothers and villagers in practice. Analyzing the nondescript and exclusion of cultural cognitive by appellation and ownership.The last chapter summarizes the thesis. The author concludes that the practical logic of the uncertain state of the returning daughter and their difficulty of entering into the central circle of the village is due to the concept of "village collective ownership". Nevertheless, obtaining village land by these "outsiders" makes the village membership and the land rights tend to be separated in cases of the returning daughter.