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The aim of this essay is to contribute to the anthropological exploration of “traditional culture” in the Chinese south. Focussing on a description of one early-spring celebration in a township in Jiangxi Province, it suggests that these ceremonies are connected only superficially with local society and therefore lack a local message. A brief comparison suggests that there was nationwide conformity in the staging of these ceremonies, a degree of conventionality pointing to a single common origin —the discourse of the imperial state. Supreme dominance was articulated in ways that made the idea of the omnipotent emperor blessing his country manifest locally. Historically foreign to local southern societies, the festival was concerned with political incorporation, while still maintaining a degree of social alienation in that its main rituals were performed by the local state administrators alone. Demotic responses in local southern cultural contexts were limited and different.

There are good reasons to look at violence from new perspectives. In its endless manifestations violence is part and parcel of human existence, and is very probably a constituting element of human society. And yet violent action - warfare, penalties, insults, feuding, assault, murder, rape, suicide, sports - remains in all its complexity one of the least understood fields of human social life.The book's contributors identify the symbolic and ritualized aspects of violence, and suggest ways of 'reading' violence as it occurs in the world, whether as violent duelling and age-group violence in Southern Ethiopia, bullfighting in Iberia, cattle rustling in Kenya, guerrilla and militia wars in Colombia, or public executions in China.These case studies suggest that 'violence' is not a simple, universal urge, but is contingent and context-dependent, shaped by social relations of power, force and dominance. To be the victim of violence is a humiliating and frightening experience. But the many ambiguities that occur in the use of violence must be considered, to understand why peace seems only to exist as a contrast to the violation of peace.

This essay in historical anthropology juxtaposes some rice rituals in southern China with their counterparts in the Shan States of Upper Burma. The approach is one of symbological analysis of iconic codes, and it is suggested here that the two sets of rituals, superficially different, may be seen as morphological transforms of a common cultural semantic pattern. This understanding has a bearing on further explorations of the formation of the wider Southeast Asian field.

This essay discusses idioms of continuance in a village in southeast China, based on what was recorded some one hundred years ago by an American sociologist, Daniel Harrison Kulp II, and his resear...

This article explores a case of ancestor worship in Taiwan, within the southern sphere of Chinese culture. Ancestry as a system of belonging works as a fundamental grammar for building structural continuity in traditional China, yet the system displays a great deal of variation. The Hakka peasants of southern Taiwan are shown to honour, in an ‘unorthodox way’, several different agnatic lines of descent as forming an individual, while at the same time strongly collectivising the dead into one single unit. The latter works as a denial of the first pluralistic message.

This article seeks to explain the traditional celebration of Cold Food and some other springtime customs in the mid-Yangzi basin in central China. In these rituals the ancestors and their influence in the production of new rice were highlighted while, at the same time, social reproduction through women was temporarily suspended. Female generative energy was not allowed to compete with the creative force of the ancestors in the fields. Cold Food is seen as a trope on seasonal agricultural tasks. The myth of moral constancy, which accompanied the festival, was on another deeper level an iconic exploration of the preparation of the agricultural fields. Death was seen to propel life, ancestral energy being transferred to the living through rice.

This essay explores the distribution of the ownership of land in a coastal village in the New Territories of Hong Kong at the beginning of the last century. The study examines land and houses as indices of relative wealth in a poor community. Above all, it points to the discursive social use of land as a genealogical tract in an area where written genealogies would have been scarce or nonexisting. Belonging in terms of agnatic continuity and its ramifications over time were mapped out in the agricultural landscape to form a complete depicting graph.

This article suggests a new reading of the famous wooden sculptures formerly carved in New Ireland to celebrate the dead. It is argued in terms of a holistic approach implying different ontological perspectives and shifting cultural modalities and discusses the available fragments of ethnography stemming from observations made in the early part of the last century. It proposes that in terms of iconic semantics the making and exposition of a malanggan sculpture formed a symbolic imagery telling how recently deceased persons assumed a new but temporary body and were given a brief spell of renewed social life. It is further argued that the essence of the dead was then absorbed into an anonymous non‐structured assembly of deceased contained in some particular named malanggan design. Malanggan designs moved over time between different places, thus transporting sets of accumulated anonymous dead to new places. Thus getting rid of the departed was intuited as a device to negate the possible creation of kinship‐i...

This article examines the initiation of boys in Lesu, New Ireland, in 1929-30. It is argued that these rituals not only transformed the initiands but also their fathers and thereby created counterpoint notions of social continuity in an openly ‘matrilineal’ society. Discursive and iconic symbolism identified and made manifest an alternative male cultural modality, not generally accessible to women. The neophytes' socially ascribed fathers, not necessarily their actual genitors, were in the world of female presuppositions ritually very marginal to their discursively defined children, but circumcision established a new sort of iconic fatherhood. Male social continuity involved the construction of flows in two directions, the future being dependent on the establishment of a past.

This historically inclined study examines features of habitation and domestic symbolism originally encountered in fieldwork in New Ireland in 1929-1930 by Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to reconstruct important aspects of early social life with a focus on houses as mundane institutions and expressive devices. The examination concerns the organization of shelter into continuous groups and social communities. Men's houses and women's houses stood out as symbolic topoi, each evoking a main cultural modality. The respective iconic narrations of these two possible worlds offered radically different solutions to the existential problem of continuity.

This study examines features of social organization originally encountered in New Ireland in 1929–30 by the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker. It aims to depict important aspects of social life before these were transformed by colonial and missionary influences. Kinship and marriage are discussed as topoi in discourses of continuity. It is suggested that in a social landscape of demographic limitations and widespread violence, social morphology was generated through categorical distinctions providing symbolic order in a dense texture of factual kinship, an order imposed to counteract the ever‐present shadow of incest. The social grammar prescribed a primary uterinely defined demarcation of belonging. As a parallel counterpoint, there was also an agnatically inspired alternative cultural modality. In this other possible world, the main distinction was that between men and women, uterine belonging being irrelevant.

For a long time students of China have held the view that ancestral cults formed one of the pillars of the Imperial state, that they were the backbone of family life and provided the ideological source for the political class.1 In a vague and general way this is no doubt true. However, from an anthropological perspective, the position of the dead in Chinese society is not well known. China is a vast country with a great variety of ecological circumstances and ethnic substrata, which have contributed to differences in ritual articulation. The most important of the regional differences may have been the divide between the rice-producing areas in the south and those producing wheat and millet in the north. China was sinicised in a slow process by the acceptance of hegemonic influences under shifting political conditions, and we must expect rich and diverse strands within the substrata lingering in the mix that we sometimes superficially designate 'traditionally Chinese'. Furthermore, we must realise that there have been shifts in these ancestral cults through the ages, and that what was conducted in earlier dynasties might in some important aspects have been rather different from what went on in the later days of the Empire. In this article I wish to continue earlier work on the Chinese cult of the dead in terms of time cyclical, calendrical and linear. Soochow (Suzhou M')M) is situated in the vast delta of the River Yangzi to the south, in an area generally referred to as Jiangnan lM or 'The Riverine South'. About fifteen per cent of this alluvial plain is occupied by lakes, of which Lake Tai Adjust outside Soochow is the largest. Intensive cultivation has long been a characteristic of the area, with rice, and from the fourteenth century onwards cotton, as the most important summer crops and wheat and broad beans predominant in winter. Throughout history a network of canals has supplied

Peter Boomgaard, Denys Lombard, Marchands et hommes d’affaires asiatiques dans l’Ocean Indien et la Mer de Chine 13e - 20e siècles, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 1988. 375 pp., Jean Aubin (eds.) - Gary Brana-Shute, David I. Kertzer, Ritual, politics and power, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. xi, 235 pp. - G.W.J. Drewes, Chantal Vuldy, Pekalongan; Batik et Islam dans une ville du Nord de Java. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1987, Études insulindiennes/Archipel 8. 311 pp. - Ch.F. van Fraassen, Hubert Jacobs, The Jesuit Makasar documents (1615-1682), edited and annotated by Hubert Jacobs SJ, Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu volume 134, Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1988, xxiv + 36* + 285 pp. - M. Hekker, Penelope Graham, Iban shamanism: An analysis of the ethnographic literature, Canberra: Occasional paper of the department of Anthropology, The Australian National University, 1987. x + 174 pp. - Huub de Jonge, Jennifer Alexander, Trade, traders, and trading in rural Java, Asian studies association of Australia, Southeast Asia publications series, No. 15. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987, 223 and xvi pp., plates, tables, figs and maps. - Peter J. M. Nas, Ben F. van Leerdam, Henri Maclaine Pont: Architect tussen twee werelden; Over de perikelen rond het ontstaan van de gebouwen van een hogeschool, het ‘Instituut Teknologi Bandung’, Delft: Delftse Universitaire Pers, 1988, 90 pp. - P.J.M. Nas, B. Hauser-Schäublin, Bauen und Wohnen, 1987. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag. Mensch, Kultur, Umwelt 2.84 pages, - Peter Pels, Göran Aijmer, Symbolic textures; Studies in cultural meaning, Göteborg: Gothenburg studies in social Anthropology 10, 1987. - Robert Ross, Ido H. Enklaar, Life and work of Dr. J.Th. van der Kemp, 1747-1811: Missionary pioneer and protagonist of racial equality in South Africa, Cape Town/Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1988, xi + 234 pp. - A. Teeuw, Jack Goody, The interface between the written and the oral, Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. [Studies in literacy, family, culture and the state.] xxi + 328 pp. - Willem Ijzereef, Martin Rössler, Die soziale Realität des rituals. Kontinuität und Wandel bei den Makassar von Gowa (Süd-Sulawesi/Indonesien), Kölner Ethnologische studien, Band 14. Berlijn: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987. 405 pp.

Peter Boomgaard, Denys Lombard, Marchands et hommes d’affaires asiatiques dans l’Ocean Indien et la Mer de Chine 13e - 20e siècles, Paris: Éditions de l’École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. 1988. 375 pp., Jean Aubin (eds.) - Gary Brana-Shute, David I. Kertzer, Ritual, politics and power, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988. xi, 235 pp. - G.W.J. Drewes, Chantal Vuldy, Pekalongan; Batik et Islam dans une ville du Nord de Java. Paris: École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1987, Études insulindiennes/Archipel 8. 311 pp. - Ch.F. van Fraassen, Hubert Jacobs, The Jesuit Makasar documents (1615-1682), edited and annotated by Hubert Jacobs SJ, Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu volume 134, Rome: Jesuit Historical Institute, 1988, xxiv + 36* + 285 pp. - M. Hekker, Penelope Graham, Iban shamanism: An analysis of the ethnographic literature, Canberra: Occasional paper of the department of Anthropology, The Australian National University, 1987. x + 174 pp. - Huub de Jonge, Jennifer Alexander, Trade, traders, and trading in rural Java, Asian studies association of Australia, Southeast Asia publications series, No. 15. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1987, 223 and xvi pp., plates, tables, figs and maps. - Peter J. M. Nas, Ben F. van Leerdam, Henri Maclaine Pont: Architect tussen twee werelden; Over de perikelen rond het ontstaan van de gebouwen van een hogeschool, het ‘Instituut Teknologi Bandung’, Delft: Delftse Universitaire Pers, 1988, 90 pp. - P.J.M. Nas, B. Hauser-Schäublin, Bauen und Wohnen, 1987. Basel: Birkhauser Verlag. Mensch, Kultur, Umwelt 2.84 pages, - Peter Pels, Göran Aijmer, Symbolic textures; Studies in cultural meaning, Göteborg: Gothenburg studies in social Anthropology 10, 1987. - Robert Ross, Ido H. Enklaar, Life and work of Dr. J.Th. van der Kemp, 1747-1811: Missionary pioneer and protagonist of racial equality in South Africa, Cape Town/Rotterdam: A.A. Balkema, 1988, xi + 234 pp. - A. Teeuw, Jack Goody, The interface between the written and the oral, Cambridge etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1987. [Studies in literacy, family, culture and the state.] xxi + 328 pp. - Willem Ijzereef, Martin Rössler, Die soziale Realität des rituals. Kontinuität und Wandel bei den Makassar von Gowa (Süd-Sulawesi/Indonesien), Kölner Ethnologische studien, Band 14. Berlijn: Dietrich Reimer Verlag, 1987. 405 pp.

The study of migration is generally conducted along the lines of communication theory and it is assumed that we deal with a source, a medium of transfer and a receiver. An investigation of a particular migratory movement should ideally embrace two discrete geographical territories and their socio–cultural contents, and the means providing passage from one to the other. The communication model provides an overview understanding. However, when anthropologists have scrutinized migratory movements, the clear–cut categories of source and receiver have turned out to be less obvious. In this paper it is my intention to give an ethnographical account for the “end” of a channel in a process of migration, the final stage of a transfer in which people who are on the move reach their destinations. It is obvious that “destination” is not the same thing as “terminal.” Often people move in stages, and it is quite possible that what we regard as a destination in one study would turn out to be a stage in a chain of stages in a future enquiry.