Chiang Village: A Household Survey

Abstract

The data presented in this paper are drawn from observations and materials that I acquired as the result of a short visit to Kwangtung Province in April 1977. During that time I was able to travel as an individual and undertake 10 days of concentrated interviewing on the composition of the household, marriage and kinship relationsin a selection of rural villages and urban neighbourhoods. During this visit I specifically set out to test the correlation between differing patterns of marriage with the structure and functions of households and primary groups that I had already developed from a study of the documentary sources. In making these correlations from documentary sources, I found that I was far from clear about questions such as household composition, post-marital residential arrangements and relations between households and kin groups in rural villages. I hoped that my visit might allow me to make an inquiry into the structure of domestic groups and the nature of primary kin groups in rural and urban areas. Restricted by time, I had to be less concerned with the actual marriage patterns themselves and with other areas of interest, such as the relation of kin groups to leadership patterns. My collection of data is, therefore, directly relevant to a very limited subject area. The materials collected from one village have been published here because the opportunities to acquire a survey of, or more comprehensive materials from, a single village are still limited, and previous such collections stand out as land-marks in the history of the study of social institutions in China.