The challenge of Immanuel Wallerstein—to reconceive the history of South Asia since 1750 as part of the development of a capitalist world system—has yet to elicit an adequate response from South Asia's historians. While a few social scientists interested in the past have sought to apply his model, the majority of historians have either gone no further than to acknowledge the importance of bilateral relations with imperial Britain in the construction of modern South Asian society, or else—it would seem increasingly—have retreated behind the walls of the “indigenous,” the “local,” the “particular,” and, at times, the just plain “peculiar” in their interpretations of South Asia's modern experience. But few historians of imperial Britain see it as a completely freestanding and self-determining entity, able to direct its relationships with India or elsewhere in a manner unconstrained by developments in other areas of the world. And on closer examination, many of the most quintessentially South Asian institutions and structures, including a large number of those that twentieth century modernization theorists please to call “traditional,” can be seen to have been shaped by global forces.

North china heretofore has been only minimally involved in the modern anthropological analysis of Chinese patrilineal kinship. In this region, lineage organization prior to the Communist era comprised a social structure, symbolism, and arrangement of ritual that call into question the line of anthropological inquiry that has focused almost exclusively on the linkages between a lineage's corporate resources and its social cohesion. The characteristics of lineages in Yangmansa, a village approximately seventy-five kilometers south of Beijing, appear to have been typical of this broader north China pattern considerably different from those associated with the southeastern Chinese model that has dominated the anthropological literature. Although many elements of northern lineage organization are found also in the southeast and elsewhere in China, they are combined in the north into a distinctive arrangement of cemeteries, graves, ancestral scrolls, ancestral tablets, and corporate groups linked to a characteristic annual ritual cycle. I deal first with the expression in Yangmansa of key features of the north China pattern, but also draw on other sources to fill out the picture and establish its broader regional relevance.

The procession troupes at the gods' festivals so common today in southern Taiwan, as on the China mainland in the past, perform a kind of ritual drama. The processions themselves occur on god's birthdays, in great ceremonies of renewal (jiao) or, in a more abbreviated form, at pilgrimage sites. The troupes (zbentou) are dramatic elements in the procession in that the performers dress up, portray a story, and try to entertain. What they do may be classified as ritual: forms and content are stereotyped, repetitive, condensed, and conventionalized (Tambiah 1985). The performances are for divine as well as for human enjoyment, and vary little as the troupes parade from temple to temple.

The anti-rightist campaign of 1957 and 1958 had dire consequences for many of China's artists, just as it did for hundreds of thousands of China's intellectuals (Link 1984:11–14). A sculpture instructor and Communist Party member at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, for example, refused to testify against the artist Jiang Feng, the academy's director and a man to whom he felt personal loyalty. The sculptor was declared an “extreme rightist” and sent to a labor camp at Xingkai Lake in Heilongjiang on the Soviet border. His entire sculptural output for the following years, 1958 to 1979, was a small box filled with crudely carved tree roots, work conducted in secret without professional tools or materials (interview with A 1986).

Until recently, modern Chinese art attracted little scholarly attention, either in China or in the West. Western art historians might occasionally glance at the more traditional kinds of painting in the twentieth century, but their serious publications were on the great periods of Chinese art, Ming or before. The contemporary China-watchers—social scientists and modern period historians—trained their gaze on the harder stuff of politics and economics, ideology and organization. In the United States and the West in general, art seemed to slip through the crack between ACLS- and SSRC-funded research projects. In China, anything on the twentieth century, even art, was too sensitive politically for safe handling. The result was that throughout the Maoist years modern Chinese art could occasionally pique the interest of collectors or dealers outside China or draw carefully calculated praise from critics and publicists within, but it was not a promising area for critical scholarship. Michael Sullivan's pioneering survey, Chinese Art in the Twentieth Century, London and Berkeley, 1959—strong on developments in the later Guomindang period when he was in China, but understandably rather out of touch with the main currents in the People's Republic—remained for almost thirty years the sole monument in a neglected field.