Abstract
This chapter analyzes the element of Genos and the role of kinship and descent in the construction of local identity. The author focused mostly on the most prominent branch of the Catholic families in Shuiwei, the Zhong family. This chapter details the genealogical records of the family, in the form of genealogical diagrams. The data come mostly from the Zupu, the genealogical records of the family, which presents a strong peculiarity: the integration of women, which is quite unique in the Taiwanese context. It is argued that this shows how the idea of the Christian community as a large family pervades these highly local and Chinese practices, obliterating the distinction between men who stay and women who move to other families, in the face of a non-Christian environment—here, practices of kinship immediately relate to identity and alterity. One of the most conspicuous moments in this metaphoric integration of Christians as a family is the replacement of the ancestral altar at the center of the house by Christian images and the worship of Mother Mary.
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Notes
- 1.
The person, a non-Catholic in Lunbei, was referring to the Soviet warplane MiG, which in Chinese is translated with the same characters—and clearly with the same sound—of the name of the Catholic faithful Michael, 米格 Mı̌gé.
- 2.
This story is present, with some minor changes from the version I heard, in the book of 朱介凡 (1989).
- 3.
The awareness that conversion involved a renunciation of the Chinese identity , or at least a deep division between the converted and his/her original family and culture, was felt and taken under big consideration by many missionaries who worked in China. An exemplar figure is Richard Wilhelm, a German sinologist, theologian, and missionary. He lived in China for 25 years. He admitted that during his entire 20-year stay in China, he was very proud to have never baptized a single Chinese (Jung 1989, p. 375).
- 4.
房 fáng is one of the basic concepts to understand Chinese kinship (陳其南 1990).
- 5.
This practice has been the object of research of Arthur P. Wolf (Wolf and Huang 1980) who focused on the adoption of girls of poor families. Also Margery Wolf discussed such arrangements (童養媳 Tóngyǎngxı́, called in Minnan language shim-pua) in her 1972 book. Within social anthropology research of Chinese marriage, shim-pua marriage is referred to as a “minor marriage” because the daughter-in-law joins her future husband’s household when both are minors, in contrast to Chinese major marriage, in which the bride joins her husband’s household on the day of the wedding. For those interested, please refer to Arnhart (2005) or to Wolf (2005).
- 6.
Please refer to Lazzarotti (2008), especially Chap. 4.
- 7.
The idea that Chinese people learn their social relations through rituals is shared also by Ahern (1981).
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Lazzarotti, M. (2020). Genos. In: Place, Alterity, and Narration in a Taiwanese Catholic Village. Asian Christianity in the Diaspora. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43461-8_5
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