The editors' Introduction states the aim of this book as being "to question and revise the 'lineage paradigm' - originally inspired by the groundbreaking work of the late Maurice Freedman," but it should not be understood that this is a hatchet job, and explicitly or implicitly almost every contributor writes with Freedman's work as a given base, neither flawless nor complete, but a solid one from which further exploration can be undertaken. The principal dissatisfaction with the lineage paradigm is identified as being its failure to take into account the many and varied ways in which relationships in Chinese society were more complex than the paradigm suggests and in particular the failure to give weight to non-patrilineal ties of both a kinship and extra-kinship kind.
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