Family Structure in Early Modern Vietnam: A Case Study of Villages around Huế

Abstract

In present-day Vietnam, patrilineal kinship groups called dòng họ are widely dispersed. However, from a historical viewpoint, there have been various arguments about the formation and transformation of the Kinh people’s patrilineal kinship groups. In this article, we will introduce the village documents called Viên bộ and examine the family structure and household division around Huế in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From those examinations, this article concludes that the patriarchal image of the patriarch having strong authority in a large family based on polygamy does not apply to rural areas near Huế in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Rather, it is supposed that members of the next generation were separated from the patriarchal household one after another. This brought about a loosely knit household group comprising two or three generations based on paternal blood relationships, which was formed with the patrilineal family at the top. When paying attention to the inheritance of ancestral rituals and inheritance of property, it can be said that they were clearly a kind of Confucian patrilineal kinship group. On the other hand, we can also find a point in common with multi-household compounds in the rest of Southeast Asia. It may be necessary to reconsider the family structure of the Kinh people in comparison with Southeast Asia and East Asia from a historical viewpoint.