Max-Planck-Institut für ethnologische Forschung
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology
CALL FOR PAPERS
Workshop
Is Chinese Patriarchy Over?
The Decline and Transformation of a System of Social Support
26-29 June 2013
Organizers:
Stevan Harrell (University of Washington)
Gonçalo Santos (Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology)
Venue:
Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, Halle/Saale
For thousands of years, Chinese societies approached the dilemmas of social support
through a system we call Chinese patriarchy. This system served all social classes with
claims to property or the income from property. In the Chinese patriarchal system, property
belonged to patrilineal family corporations, and the income from property was distributed
among the members of mostly patrilocal households composed of the members of those
patrilineal corporations and their attached dependents. Control of property and income in
such corporations meant that older males (patriarchs), as trustees of the property-holding
corporations, had control over the productive and reproductive labor of females and junior
members of the households. This system was reinforced by formal and customary law, as
well as by cultural elements from Confucian philosophy to folktales and forms of expressive
culture. It led to specific cultural and behavioral features, including filial obedience of
younger to older generations, male dominance in domestic power and in ideology, high
fertility, son preference, and arranged, usually patrilocal marriage.
Even in the heyday of Chinese patriarchy, however, the system weakened around the edges,
at times and in places where it was possible to sustain livelihoods through income deriving
from sources other than patrimony, for example where wage labor was available, particularly
for women. This suggests that the Chinese patriarchal system was significantly grounded in
patrimonial property.
Patriarchy also had its social and psychological costs, especially for women and younger
generations, and, a fortiori, for young women. Although many cultural forms reinforced and
naturalized the morality of the patriarchal system, other cultural forms recognized its personal
and psychological costs.
In the early twentieth century, Chinese intellectuals and politicians who had discovered either
European liberal ideas of individual rights and/or Marxist ideas of class oppression and the
promise of its overthrow attacked the patriarchal system and attempted to abolish it through
education, propaganda, legislation, and, ultimately, through the abolition of the patrimonial
property foundations of the patriarchal system. However, features of the patriarchal system
proved tenacious even in the face of revolution, economic modernization, and ideas of
individual freedom. Filial piety, male dominance, arranged marriage, and son preference
remained features of Chinese societies into the last part of the 20th century. We suggest that
this is less a matter of cultural lag than a matter of the ability of these features of the
patriarchal system to provide social support for individuals even under changed social and
political conditions.
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In recent decades, however, patrimonial property has declined steeply as a source of
livelihood, and with it many features of the patriarchal system have weakened or
disappeared. Filial piety remains a cultural ideal, but has weakened from a survival
imperative to a merely moral one. Male dominance continues, but in different and attenuated
form, and is no longer most strongly exercised by patriarchs. Marriages are rarely purely
arranged, and even patrilocal residence has become only a nominal form in most areas.
Fertility has declined drastically, and although some of this decline is attributable to state
coercion, much social research reveals that ideal fertility is much lower than it was a
generation ago. Son preference, while remaining strong in some areas, has practically
disappeared from others. And other groups, including the state and corporations, provide the
economic and social support that was once guaranteed by the patriarchal system, allowing
people to escape the psychological costs of that system because they no longer need its
security benefits.
The ‘transition’ away from patriarchy is proceeding at different rates under different political
regimes, in different regions, in cities and villages, in the cores and peripheries of regional
systems. And it is not clear what forms will eventually emerge to replace patriarchy, what will
be the norms for marriage, sexuality, family economy, gender relations, fertility, or gender
preference. As poorly as we understand this transformation, however, we consider it to be
one of the most important social changes going on in our world, affecting labor, capital,
migration, social services, and psychological health, not only in Chinese societies but in the
societies with which they increasingly interact.
The papers will be organized into a series of topics. In each case, scholars will be asked to
write on the ways that changes in the specific phenomena they are writing about do or do not
reflect changes away from the patriarchal configuration, and to speculate on the implications
of their data for the future system of social support in Chinese families. The selection of
specific topics for the conference will ultimately depend on the availability of speakers, but
we have already selected key thematic guidelines:
Fertility decline and son preference. The reasons for choosing singlehood,
childless marriage, or very low fertility; the lives and careers of men and particularly women
who choose childlessness or a single life; spatial patterns and temporal trends in son
preference.
Changing norms of sexuality and marriage. Changes in attitudes and behaviours
toward premarital sexuality and toward marriage choice, and reasons for the rapidity of this
radical change.
Work and the autonomy of women and youth. The relationship between the ability
of women and young people to earn incomes and the degree of autonomy they have
achieved in other aspects of life.
Filial Piety and the Care of the Elderly. Changing configurations of marital and
elderly residence, the reasons for fertility decline beyond the level required by state familyplanning programs; the degree to which daughters have become as important or more
important for urban families as the burden of filial piety shifts from economic support to daily
care giving.
Technology and material culture. The impact of technological changes on family
and especially on gender relations. Can science and technology liberate women - from the
tyranny of biological reproduction, the drudgery of housework, etc - or are the new
technologies reinforcing sexual divisions in society?
Children, education, and careers. New strategies of child-rearing as well as the lifecourse consequences of low fertility both for the parents and for the children in single-child
families.
Abstracts (200 words) should be submitted to the organizers by September 1st 2012 at the
latest.
Contact:
Gonçalo Santos, email: [email protected]
Stevan Harrell, email: [email protected]
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