"Social Transformations, Family Life, and Uxorilocal Marriages in a Hubei village, 1870-1994" by Hong Zhang

Hong Zhang

Deposited 1998

Abstract
This dissertation examines the practice of uxorilocal marriage in Zhongshan, a rural community in Hubei Province of central China, over the course of the past century, documenting its rise and fall as a predominant marriage form, as well as looking into the reasons and causes that might help us understand this unique history. Based on participant observation fieldwork, extensive interviews and household surveys, this study reconstructs the collective history of marriage practices and their consequences through the memories of the villagers as well as the personal life experience of the villagers who made this history, and shows how rural family structures and marriages were adaptive to rapidly changing social, economic and demographic contexts in modern China's history and especially what kind of impact such social transformations as land reform, collectivization, and decollectivization had on the local practice of uxorilocal marriages.

The high frequency of uxorilocal marriages over the past half century in Zhongshan demonstrates the variability and adaptability of Chinese rural families in utilizing strategies for survival and continuity during a period of great historical turbulence and social and political reforms. The prevalence of uxorilocal marriage in Zhongshan also gives us valuable data to reexamine the relationship between the dominant cultural model that emphasizes the patrilineal descent and virilocal marriage on the one hand and the actual articulation of this cultural model at the domestic level and in real life situations on the other, the influence of lineage or rather the absence of it in the local region, and the role of women in Chinese family.