Paper short abstract:

Based on field research in a former emigrant village in the Pearl River Delta, this paper examines the role played by the lineage, a widespread form of kin organization in this region of South China, in sustaining the connection of emigrants and their descendants to their village of origin.

Paper long abstract:

Based on field research in a former emigrant village in the Pearl River Delta, this paper examines the role played by the lineage, a widespread form of kin organization in this region of South China, in sustaining the connection of emigrants and their descendants to their village of origin. In the 1950s, the lineage, a core object in Africanist anthropology, was imported into the study of China by Maurice Freedman. His functionalist interpretation of the lineage system has since then been widely criticized, and many scholars have drawn attention to other aspects of kin relations. Revisiting Freedman's theory, I make two arguments. The first is that against the supposedly 'natural' tendency for the lineage to segment, there has been a counter-effort on the part of the village-lineage leaders to foreground the founding ancestor in order to maintain unity in a context of strong emigration. This allows the lineage to act as a global framework for identification among all of the faraway kin. The second argument nuances the first. Using observational material on 'return' visits to the village by descendants of emigrants, I show how in spite of the rhetoric of global brotherhood held by lineage leaders, the interactions between locals and visitors from overseas are limited by the latter's absence of close kin. The dialectics between public and private kinship play a strong role in the ambivalence experienced by diasporic visitors between a feeling of global belonging and a feeling of estrangement.