Family
Start with the graphs in Skinner and Yuan 1999, which tell multiple stories: on the one hand, the data show that family composition and family strategy vary systematically in space ('One Child' being pretty well established in and near cities, but not in hinterland regions), and on another hand that couples (well, families) engage in reproductive strategizing, in keeping with "family system norms". We need to know more about those "norms", and enquire whether the phenomenon is universal --that is, that families everywhere have "system norms" of various sorts.
A newspaper story: China Losing 'War' on Births provides some more evidence for our growing picture: variations in enforcement of the One Child edict, mobility of parents, surplus of males...
So we find ourselves needing to know more about families, past and present. The cliché is that families are 'fundamental building block' of society, but we need to ask in what senses is that a useful generalization? And then we need to inquire into the details of family structure and organization, past and present, and see just how Chinese and Japanese and Korean families are thought (and supposed and believed) to be organized.
Maurice Freedman is (well, was ...he's been dead for about 30 years) a Grand Old Man of Chinese family studies. His The Family in China, Past and Present (Pacific Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 4. (Winter, 1961-1962), pp. 323-336) is an eloquent summary of (mostly) 'traditional' family issues, and raises a lot of important issues which will keep us amused for a while. Among them:
- 'family' vs. 'kinship' (where the latter "relationships traced exclusively through males... might be so extensive and so organized as to form patrilineal descent groups... [called] lineages... in some parts of the country (especially in the southeast) so wide in their extent that they encompassed large villages and sometimes even towns... [but] a lineage is no family" (pp. 323-324)
- a man's "obligations" as a kinsman include filial piety and mourning duties --both of which introduce some interesting complications --including ancestor veneration.
- the ideology of family is often spoken of as fundamentally Confucian, so we need to inquire into what that means (it's significant in Korea and Japan, too).
- Fundamentally the family-as-domestic-unit is an arena, with structural tensions built in from which arise personal dramas. The dynamics vary with wealth, particularly in the 'traditional' case, and are quite different for males and females.
On Page 3 of Skinner and Yuan 1999 is a cogent summary of family-building norms, as relevant to modern as to 'traditional' China.
Chinese Wedding Traditions, N.B. the family altar described
The Cultural Connotations and
Communicative Functions of
Chinese Kinship Terms (Huang and Jia)