Filial Piety: Practice and Discourse in Contemporary East Asia - Softcover

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ISBN 10: 0804747911 ISBN 13: 9780804747912

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2004

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How has rapid economic development and the aging of the population affected the expression of filial piety in East Asia? Eleven experienced fieldworkers take a fresh look at an old idea, analyzing contemporary behavior, not norms, among both rural and urban families in China, Korea, Japan, and Taiwan.

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Charlotte Ikels is Professor of Anthropology at Case Western Reserve University.

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How have rapid industrial development and the aging of the population affected the expression of filial piety in East Asia? Eleven experienced fieldworkers take a fresh look at an old idea, analyzing contemporary behavior, not norms, among both rural and urban families in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Each chapter presents rich ethnographic data on how filial piety shapes the decisions and daily lives of adult children and their elderly parents. The authors’ ability to speak the local languages and their long-term, direct contact with the villagers and city dwellers they studied lend an immediacy and authenticity lacking in more abstract treatments of the topic.
This book is an ideal text for social science and humanities courses on East Asia because it focuses on shared cultural practices while analyzing the ways these practices vary with local circumstances of history, economics, social organization, and demography and with personal circumstances of income, gender, and family configuration.

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How have rapid industrial development and the aging of the population affected the expression of filial piety in East Asia? Eleven experienced fieldworkers take a fresh look at an old idea, analyzing contemporary behavior, not norms, among both rural and urban families in China, Japan, Korea, and Taiwan. Each chapter presents rich ethnographic data on how filial piety shapes the decisions and daily lives of adult children and their elderly parents. The authors ability to speak the local languages and their long-term, direct contact with the villagers and city dwellers they studied lend an immediacy and authenticity lacking in more abstract treatments of the topic.
This book is an ideal text for social science and humanities courses on East Asia because it focuses on shared cultural practices while analyzing the ways these practices vary with local circumstances of history, economics, social organization, and demography and with personal circumstances of income, gender, and family configuration.

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Filial Piety

PRACTICE AND DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY EAST ASIA

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2004 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-4791-2

Contents

List of Tables and Figures...................................................................................................................................viiList of Contributors.........................................................................................................................................ixIntroduction CHARLOTTE IKELS................................................................................................................................11. Ritualistic Coresidence and the Weakening of Filial Practice in Rural China DANYU WANG..................................................................162. Filial Daughters, Filial Sons: Comparisons from Rural North China ERIC T. MILLER........................................................................343. Meal Rotation and Filial Piety JUN JING.................................................................................................................534. "Living Alone" and the Rural Elderly: Strategy and Agency in Post-Mao Rural China HONG ZHANG............................................................635. Serving the Ancestors, Serving the State: Filial Piety and Death Ritual in Contemporary Guangzhou CHARLOTTE IKELS.......................................886. Filial Obligations in Chinese Families: Paradoxes of Modernization MARTIN KING WHYTE....................................................................1067. The Transformation of Filial Piety in Contemporary South Korea ROGER L. JANELLI AND DAWNHEE YIM.........................................................1288. Filial Piety in Contemporary Urban Southeast Korea: Practices and Discourses CLARK SORENSEN AND SUNG-CHUL KIM...........................................1539. Culture, Power, and the Discourse of Filial Piety in Japan: The Disempowerment of Youth and Its Social Consequences AKIKO HASHIMOTO.....................18210. Curse of the Successor: Filial Piety vs. Marriage Among Rural Japanese JOHN W. TRAPHAGAN................................................................19811. Alone in the Family: Great-grandparenthood in Urban Japan BRENDA ROBB JENIKE............................................................................217Glossary.....................................................................................................................................................245Notes........................................................................................................................................................251References...................................................................................................................................................267Index........................................................................................................................................................291

Chapter One

Ritualistic Coresidence and the Weakening of Filial Practice in Rural China

DANYU WANG

The process of household formation for newlywed couples in rural China has changed drastically in the past fifty years. In the past, living with the parents and joining the parental household economy was a matter of course for newlyweds. Since the 1980s, instead of pursuing the old ideal of a large complex household, rural families have turned to a new practice-early household division.

The practice of early household division is exemplified in the case of Lun of Stone Mill, a village in northeastern China where the research for this chapter was conducted. Lun is a typical young man who married in the 1990s. Upon his wedding, Lun's parents had prepared for him and his bride a separate housing unit of three rooms within the family house. The bridal room, which was festively decorated with red paper cutouts of the Chinese symbol for happiness, was set up in their new apartment by Lun's parents. Although they lived in their own apartment, Lun and his wife were not considered to have their own household before the formal household division. After the wedding, the couple ate at their parents' apartment, an important symbol that the couple were members of the parental household. A month after the wedding, Lun and his wife hosted a stove-warming party, which marked and celebrated the beginning of their new household. Unlike the traditional household division, which involved a complex division of the joint family property, this division simply served as a formal recognition of the conjugal assets-from large pieces of furniture and modern electric appliances to small items, such as utensils-that had been set aside for the newlyweds at the time of their wedding. (Examples of division contracts are presented in detail in the following chapter.)

In Stone Mill since the 1950s, the tradition of newlyweds settling in the parental household has gradually lost its status as a normative practice, and the once-cherished ideal of a multigenerational household has increasingly become a faded memory (Wang 2000a). Since the 1980s, an increasing number of newlyweds in Stone Mill have lived with their parents only for a very short time. In the 1990s, the majority of the newly married couples in the village moved out of the parental household within a year. The village of Stone Mill was not alone in shifting to a new practice of early household division. Ethnographic studies in villages in northern, central, and southern China (Cohen 1992, 1998; Harrell 1993; Johnson 1983; Judd 1994: 173-81; Parish and Whyte 1978: 131-34; Potter and Potter 1990: 196-224; Selden 1993; Danyu Wang 1999; Yan 1996: 176-209, 1997) have demonstrated the recent practice of early household division to be widespread. At the national level, demographic studies have shown a substantial decline in the duration of postmarital coresidence since the 1980s in many rural areas of China (Lavely and Ren 1992; Zeng et al. 1994). What was noticeably consistent in these radical departures from the custom of settling in the parental household was the retention of a short period of coresidence with parents after marriage. That this short coresidence lacked any real practical function or economic advantage revealed it to be primarily ritualistic.

Six decades ago, before the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) in 1949, having generations of family members living under the same roof had been a symbol of social-familial success and self-fulfillment. Complex households were the embodiment of the sons' filial loyalty, as well as the family living regime in which filial practice could be carried out through everyday life. The understanding and practice of filial piety in contemporary rural China have changed substantially. With early household division putting an end to the old regime of practicing filial piety within the household, how did rural families find new ways to address and practice filial piety in this particular stage of family transition?

In this study, using the village of Stone Mill as an ethnographic case, I examine, in the context of the Chinese family tradition and the state's reformation of the family, the changing intergenerational dynamics of rural families, as well as their complex views on intergenerational relationships. Even though the ideal of filial piety has remained constant in a general sense, the means of achieving filial piety have changed in the postsocialist period. Rituals and ritualistic performance have been an important element of rural community life, especially where direct intervention from the state is weak. Ritualistic transitional postmarital coresidence is the new solution by which rural families reconcile filial piety in the ideal sense with the weakening of filial piety in practice. Living in the paternal household after marriage has thus been transformed from a customary stage of adult family life to a rite of passage in the household formation process.

Before proceeding to an analysis of filial piety in ritualistic coresidence, the following brief introduction to the village and my field research there provides the ethnographic and methodological context in which this study was developed. The village of Stone Mill is located in Dalian Prefecture, Liaoning Province, in northeast China. In 1997 Stone Mill was an average-size village, with a total population of 2,300 people and 730 households. The village is in a basin surrounded by hills, on which generations of villagers have planted fruit trees, raised livestock, and buried their deceased. A river passing through the village has provided the water with which villagers have irrigated their orchards and fields; on the banks of the river, women have washed clothes and exchanged neighborhood news. The hills and river are still there, and the rural way of living has remained; however, the village community has begun to change. Apples and other fruits have been the major source of income in Stone Mill, but during the 1980s and 1990s, villagers-especially young people-began to explore economic opportunities in urban areas. Since the 1980s, the younger generation has begun to bring back earnings as substantial as, if not greater than, those of their parents.

I went to Stone Mill in 1997 to conduct fieldwork, primarily on family change. I interviewed individuals of different ages and family backgrounds and of both genders who had had different family experiences in different historical periods. I also conducted a survey of 315 couples born after 1930 to collect information on family history and villagers' views of family life. In order to learn about the community, I interviewed individuals in the village who were knowledgeable in certain areas, such as local history and family rituals. While experiences and perceptions are limited by the individual's family experience and the time in which he or she lived, by interviewing a wide spectrum of individuals I was nonetheless able to gain a general understanding of cultural ideas about the family and changes in family customs. By collecting archival materials from various sources, including county annals (xian zhi), local newspapers, and folk literature, I situated individual cases and Stone Mill as a whole within the political-cultural context of the Dalian region and the PRC state.

Navigating Tradition in Light of Family Life in the Past

Collective memories of local family lives, as well as classic Confucian discourses on the family, were the local cultural foundations on which Stone Mill villagers built their ideas of family tradition. In popular culture, filial piety, which had been the highest family value, permeated every corner of daily life and extended to the realm of rituals and ritualistic performance. Filial sons were generally defined as those who served their parents kindly and rightly when their parents were alive and observed the mourning rites when their parents died.

Among the paths to filial piety in everyday life, maintaining a multigenerational large household was one of the most important. Indeed, partitioning the parental household was socially disapproved of and was considered notoriously unfilial. The prevailing stigmatization of household division in many areas of China and the family pride gained from maintaining a multigenerational household (see, for example, Ahern 1973; Fei 1939; Freedman 1958) had once been everyday realities, and are still vividly remembered by elderly residents of Stone Mill. In leisurely chats and nostalgic recollections of the "good old days," older villagers have passed on stories of the past to the young. The following story told by an elderly man is one of the many family anecdotes that constitute the oral history of Stone Mill families.

After years of hard work, my family was wealthy enough for my father and uncles to split the property and start their own households, but no one dared to propose this. Whoever caused the family partition won himself a bad reputation for breaking up the unity of the family. One would have to live with this bad reputation for the rest of his life. My father and my uncles, who were regarded in the village and in neighboring villages as obedient, filial sons, waited until a few years after the death of my grandparents in 1929.... The year when my grandfather died, the big poplar tree in front of our house suddenly fell down. Every event is foreshadowed by an omen sent to us by the heavenly god (laotian), and I believe the fall of the poplar tree was the sign for the splitting of the household. I also heard a similar story from elderly family members-that one lunar New Year, the plate that contained buns served to our ancestors broke into four pieces. In that same year, my grandfather and his three brothers divided the household.

The social disapproval of family partitioning was strong in the area, such that this and many other oral histories of Stone Mill families have often emphasized various justifications (for instance, supernatural indications or family misfortunes) for the division of the household.

While men practiced filial piety by maintaining the unity of the parental household, women practiced it by helping their husbands fulfill their filial duties and by fulfilling their everyday duties as daughters-in-law. Daily household chores in complex households were tedious and never-ending, requiring round-the-clock compliance with filial codes. A local folk lyric, written as a dialogue between a young woman and her sister-in-law (her brother's wife), describes the local codes of women's everyday behavior.

* * *

When you get married and become a daughter-in-law, Be submissive and well behaved. Be able to weave and sew clothes. Do not forget the three rules of obedience and the four virtues. Being filial to your parents-in-law is of utmost importance. When you cook, ask your parents-in-law what dishes and soup they want. When the meal is ready, you set the table. Set up two pairs of sandalwood chopsticks for your parents-in-law. When you serve the rice, serve it elegantly with the bowl eight-tenths full. When you serve a dish, make sure you drain the extra sauce. When your parents-in-law are dining, wait beside the table but do not join in their conversation. When your parents-in-law finish their meal, hand over the mouth-wash soup right away. Clear the dining table and serve cigarettes to your parents-in-law. If your parents-in-law praise you, it is to the honor of us, your natal family, as well (Wang et al. 1987: 102).

Detailed descriptions of housework etiquette not only instructed women how to serve their parents-in-law, but also prescribed ways of serving that manifested a daughter-in-law's filial respect for her parents-in-law. The practical end and ritualistic manifestation of a daughter-in-law's filial piety were thus intertwined in every detail of everyday life.

Indeed, serving parents in everyday life was considered merely ordinary and rudimental; it was not sufficient to establish one as a filial son or daughter-in-law, nor to express one's devout filial loyalty. Filial piety could only be eloquently, legitimately, and formally addressed through the performance of ritualistic acts (often involving physical suffering) or elaborate family rituals (for instance, death rituals). Family rituals occupied a significant position in the conception of filial piety. (See Chapters 5, 7, and 8 for further discussion of the importance of death ritual as markers of filial piety.) As addressed in the teachings of Confucius, "Today, when people call a man filial they mean that he is supporting his parents. But he does as much for his dogs and horses! If he does not show respect for his parents, how is he differentiating between them and the animals? ... When the parents live, serve them according to the rites. When they die, bury them according to the rites and make the offerings to them according to the rites" ("As One Learns," see Ware 1955: 26, 22).

Through family rituals, such as mourning for deceased parents and providing splendid funeral ceremonies, sons demonstrated to the public their filial piety (Ebrey 1991: introduction; Kutcher 1999). This can be illustrated by the legend of three Stone Mill brothers told by an elderly villager.

There used to be two kinds of funeral rites-the grand funeral rite, which lasted seven days, and the small funeral rite, which lasted three days. Average families usually observed the small funeral rite, whereas only rich families could afford to observe the grand funeral rite. In the early 1930s, three sons from a wealthy family held a splendid grand funeral for their father. They hired a band to play day and night for the mourners and for the funeral rituals. They provided one pig each day at the funeral feasts for the guests; even passersby and beggars were invited to join the feast.... After they buried their father, the brothers were broke. They had to sell their farms to pay for the funeral expenses. With almost no land left, they divided the household. It ended up that two migrated to the northern frontier in Manchuria and one migrated to a city to look for a job.

Public and ritualistic expression of filial piety could go to such extravagant lengths as to result in the depletion of one's wealth and the loss of one's socioeconomic status. Both in Confucian classics and popular culture, filial piety was supreme beyond any other social or political aspirations or obligations. The true practice of filial piety required giving up one's physical well-being, material interests, public obligations, and political ambitions when such sacrifices were required in order to serve one's parents. No doubt, traditional family culture had set a high standard for the performance of family duties, as well as a high family-based standard for judging the social achievements of every man and woman. This foreshadowed its repositioning in the new family regime as China began to transform itself into a modern nation-state.

The State's Promotion of the New Family Regime

Whereas the late imperial states and the Republican state officially supported filial piety and ancestral rites, the successor PRC endeavored to revolutionize them (see Kutcher 1999; Watson and Rawski 1988). The primacy of filial loyalty to parents was a threat to the integration of individuals into the political-economic system of the new socialist state; ancestor worship contradicted the state's demand for public belief in Communist ideology. Because of the drastic transition from an imperial state to a modern nation-state, it was imperative for the PRC to take a position on the traditional family regime, which it condemned as a feudal, patriarchal marriage-family system. From the framework of the Marxist theory of social evolution-development, the state viewed peasant culture as backward, superstitious, and a living representation of the feudal past (Kipnis 1995). Consequently, it disapproved of a range of beliefs and practices, such as the kowtow, and regulated some family rituals, such as funerals and ancestor worship (see, for example, Kipnis 1995; Whyte 1988). Along the same lines, the state proposed to revolutionize the feudal patriarchal marriage-family system through socioeconomic reforms and legislation, as well as through the official cultural discourse.

(Continues...)

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Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804747911
• ISBN 13: 9780804747912
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Herausgeber: Ikels Charlotte
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar