Burton Pasternak

On the Conditions Favoring Extended Family Households

This paper suggests that extended family households will come to prevail in a society when there are incompatible activity requirements that cannot be met by a mother or father in a one-family household. We discuss why we think that the extended family household is a more likely solution to the problem of incompatible activity requirements than other logically possible solutions. A cross-cultural test indicates that the hypothesis about incompatible activity requirements strongly predicts extended family households, in both agricultural and non-agricultural societies.

Guests in the Dragon : social demography of a Chinese district, 1895-1946

Using data from the Taiwan household registers established by Japanese colonial authorities from 1906 to 1946, Pasternak explores the sources and demographic consequences of variations in marriage and family life and questions long-held assumptions about the nature of Chinese society.

The Role of the Frontier in Chinese Lineage Development

Many writers interested in Chinese culture and society have drawn attention to the uneven distribution of large, highly corporate, localized lineages in China. Many have noted the concentration of such lineages in the two southeastern provinces of Fukien and Kwangtung, but relatively few writers have attempted to offer anything like a systematic explanation for the distribution. The most recent and ambitious attempt to come to grips with the problem is found in Maurice Freedmans book, Chinese Lineage and Society . The author reviews a number of factors relevant to the emergence and persistence of strong lineages, and singles out a few which he considers to be of special importance. A relationship is suggested between rice cultivation, extensive irrigation, the exigencies of frontier life, and the emergence of large, localized, highly corporate lineages. The purpose of this paper will be to reassess the role of the frontier in the development of the Chinese lineage. We will consider the extent to which the conditions of frontier life may have functioned as a catalyst in the formation of elaborated, localized lineages in China. Freedman has suggested that the need for cooperation in opening and bringing water to wild land, and in defending life and property, stimulated a rapid development of corporate, localized lineages on the southeastern Chinese frontier.

Cowboys and Cultivators: The Chinese of Inner Mongolia.

A book which explores the relationship between the environmental, ecological and political forces encountered by families in inner Mongolia and the means they employ to deal with these forces.