This chapter aims to deal with two main topics, one analytical, the other substantive. First, I want to look at how the analyses of marriage presented in the field studies of Fei and Hsu, which were carried out before the lineage became such a dominating concept in anthropology, should modify our view of the ‘exchange of women’ between lineages in Chinese society and how such lineages themselves differ substantially from the African model, at least in the South, in ways that are related to the workings of domestic groups.

The second, related, topic is how to reconcile or oppose the notions of the lineage in China with that of the conjugal fund, actual or potential, established at marriage, a fund whose existence is critical in the break-up not of the lineage itself, which has its own corporate estates, but of the residential, cooperative and property-owning groups that operate at the domestic level. In other words I want to examine the articulation of the agnatic lineage with the bilateral family, especially at the level of domestic groups.

Patriliny, widowhood and divorce

I have pointed to the difficulties that arise if we try to view Chinese or any other kinship institutions purely within the framework of patrilineal (or alternatively matrilineal) ties alone. For we then run into problems not only at the general level of the cognatic bonds generated in the elementary family (giving rise to what Fortes called ‘complementary filiation’) but also more specifically.