2023 年 2023 巻 12 号 p. 47-57
The precedent studies about the Chinese patrilineal kinship insist that ancestors who left more kinship common property become objects of more active ancestor worship and that through the segmentation of lineage, the voice among the kinship is enlarged, the members of the lineage are organized, the common property of the lineage is accumulated, and rituals for specific ancestors are performed. In this way, previous studies have emphasized the economic and political elements of ancestral rituals.
However, these studies have focused on large-scale patrilineal kinship organizations in southeastern China. On the other hand, this paper focuses on small patrilineal kinship in northern China. The case in this paper confirms that there is little economic and political element in ancestral rituals, as well as the history of patrilineal family migration. Methods of ancestral rituals have also tended to be increasingly simplified in recent years. On the other hand, the culture of patrilineal relatives has been handed down and reconstructed. This paper attempts to analyze the actual situation of the transmission and reconstruction of patrilineal kinship organizations not from the viewpoint of economic and political factors, but from cultural one.