Abstract
The purpose of this study is to investigate the social and residential mobility and to describe the mechanism of movement among the Orochon around the Greater and Lesser Khingan Ranges of northeast China in the first half of the 20th century. Since the 1950s, the Orochon began to change their migratory way of life, by means of hunting, fishing, and collecting, to a sedentary onerelying on forestry and agriculture.
The analysis of the residential mobility of the Orochon was mainly based on the documents of Chinese scholars who depended upon the Orochon elders' memories concerning their hunting-gathering way of life. The inter-settlement movement of the households is analyzed by tracing the names of heads of house holds from year to year.
As a result, it is confirmed that many households changed their home base from one settlement to another. The residents of a settlement are found in different settlements before the time when they were surveyed. The composition of members from each settlement changed substantially. These fluid residential groupings were recognized to be mainly caused by the nature of hunting-gathering activities and by the deaths of resident members.
The resident members, who lacked sufficient horses for their hunting activities, moved their home base to another settlement for a time to borrow a few horses from their kin or friends. When households moved between settlements, they moved independently in most cases. On the other hand, the resident members disbanded and moved to other settlements upon the death of a certain resident, separating themselves into a few different groups.
