Emperor and ancestor state and lineage in South China - Faure, David (Stanford University Press, 2007)
Includes bibliographical references and index
Introduction -- Historical geography -- Exotic Guangzhou -- Confucian incursions -- We and they -- The land -- From registered households to lineages -- Early Ming society -- The recession of labor service -- The Yao wars and ritual orthodoxy -- Administrative transition -- Lineages gentrified -- Lineage building: the Huo surname of Foshan -- Magnates on the sands -- From Ming to Qing -- Gentry leadership in local society -- The end of empire -- The proliferation of lineage institutions -- The ordering of community in ritual life -- Incorporation: the power of an idea -- A note on prosperity -- The nineteenth-century transformation -- The Mulberry Garden dike -- From paramilitary to militia -- Local power in the Taiping rebellion -- The foreign element in Pearl River Delta Society -- Contradictions of the nation-state: the backwardness of lineages -- Epilogue -- Beyond the Pearl River Delta
Faure argues that, in China, ritual provided the social glue which law provided in the West. He traces the special lineage institutions for which south China has been noted and argues that they fostered the mechanisms which enabled south China to be absorbed into the imperial Chinese state - first, by introducing rituals that were acceptable to the state, and second, by providing mechanisms which made group ownership of property feasible and hence possible to pool capital for land-reclamation projects important to the state