Ancestral Shade: Kinship and Ecology in South China, 1200-1850

FAIN: FEL-273182-21

Ian Matthew Miller
St. John's University, New York (Queens, NY 11439-9000)

Research and writing leading to a book on the role of kinship organizations in the environmental history of South China from 1200 to 1850.

This project explores the roles played by kinship organizations in the environmental history of South China between 1200 and 1850. Through both case studies and cross-sectional analysis of kinship groups in Jiangxi Province, I explore how lineage organizations emerged as the key institutions in local political ecology. Lineages anchored their control of village-level environments to graves and shrines. They endowed land to corporations held in the name of their ancestors, and used fengshui geomancy to govern the vegetation and landforms permitted in discrete segments of the village landscape. Most importantly, they used the framework of patrilineal descent to determine who was permitted access to shared resources. Far from eternal features of the Chinese environment, village landscapes were created through repeated interactions between people and their natal soils and waters, flora and fauna, governed by a coherent ethics joining kinship and ecology.