Family Descent And Marriage Strategies

To the Chinese society, marry off the daughters to other families was the main marriage formfor the last two thousand years. The daughters who were married off should live with theirhusbands’ families and could not attend the family activities of their parents’ families. Accordingto the modern law, married off daughters have the same right to inherit their parents’ heritage astheir brothers in home, but the law do not insure the married off daughters’ right to inherit theirparent’s kinship systems. During the last30years, the one-child policy limited the number ofchild of every family in one or two, which made the daughter-only families are unwilling tomarry their daughters off. Based on this background, people in rural Jiaxing choose a new formof marriage which is called “be members to both families” to solve the problem betweenmarriage and descent.It seems that in such kind of marriage form, the daughter han her husband are whole membersto both parents’ families, they can attend the family activities of both side. Their child, use thekinship terminology which is used to call their father’s relatives to call their mother’s relatives.To these new families, they can inherit the heritage and kinship system of both the wives and thehusband’s parents’families.Researches to Chinese family, marriage and kinship system during the last century usually onthe perspective of clan system, which not only ignored the interaction between the two familiesin the marriage, but also fixed the marriage form on relationship of marry in and marry off.According to the theory of practice, Pierre Bourdieu pointed out that it is the practicality kinshipwhich build the marriage. This thesis is about the marriage practices between two families andthe new family of their children’s, by constructing the process of the special marriage form andthe life of the new family we can find out how the habitus change make people choose marriagestrategies to insure both of the two parents’ families can pass their heritage and kinship on totheir children and grandchildren.There are five chapters of this thesis. The first chapter is bout the reason to choose this topicand the literature review. The second chapter is about the basic information and description to themain marriage form of my field. The third chapter is the description of the social condition andhabitus. The fourth chapter is detail of people’s marriage strategies, which is described on theperspectives of marriage process, life after marriage and reproduction of family. The last chapteris the conclusion of this thesis.The difference of this thesis is that this thesis describe the whole life of the new marriage form“be members to both families” on the practice perspective, and point out the reason to the changeof marriage form.