Emperor and Ancestor: State and Lineage in South China

摘要

Historians often stress jural rules for state-making and societal integration, while anthropologists focus on rituals and popular practices on the ground. Faure's broad sweep of history contains excruciatingly fine details to delineate how the two intertwined to guide the evolution of a conscious regional construct termed South China. The rich and multi-layered study integrates centuries of change in which the language of emperor and lineage, mutually constitutive, became major ingredients to propriety, identity, status, property ownership, business practices, mobility and community formation. Faure synthesizes massive and diverse data gleaned from official memorials, contracts, land deeds, lineage regulations and genealogies, local gazetteers, diaries, biographies, street guides and ritual documents. A meticulous historian with deep ethnographic sensibilities, Faure has assembled materials from decades of archival and fieldwork. He highlights the myriad of characters, high and low, who exerted economic interests, political shrewdness and cultural imagination in making themselves and late imperial history.