Can Family Tree Renewal and Ancestral Hall Repair Provide a New Identity for Today’s Clan Society?
——The Case of Douzhuang Village in Huaibei City
- DOI
- 10.2991/978-2-38476-130-2_33How to use a DOI?
- Keywords
- village; clan society; Family Tree; Ancestral Hall; identity
- Abstract
Chinese people have always had a strong sentiment of searching for their roots, and the renewal of the Family Tree and the repair of the Ancestral Hall are manifestation of this sentiment. Family Tree and Ancestral Hall, both for individuals and groups, are important issues related to self-identification. This study takes Douzhuang Village in Shitai Town, Huaibei City, Anhui Province, as a field research site, and takes the village’s Family Tree renewal in 1992 and Ancestral Hall repair in 2006 as a starting point. Based on the author’s visits and interviews in Douzhuang Village during October 2022, the study attempts to use autoethnography and character interviews as methodologies to look into the issues of clan relations and identity therein. This paper concludes that the renewal of the Dou Family Tree and the construction of the Dou Ancestral Hall have different meanings for villagers of different identities, ages and genders, and that different people either find, or never have an identity in them. The situations vary. The study of this clan sample in Douzhuang village is of reference and empirical value for the realistic function of family trees and Ancestral Halls in the present day.
- Copyright
- © 2023 The Author(s)
- Open Access
- Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.
Cite this article
TY - CONF AU - Manman Dou PY - 2023 DA - 2023/10/29 TI - Can Family Tree Renewal and Ancestral Hall Repair Provide a New Identity for Today’s Clan Society? BT - Proceedings of the 2023 2nd International Conference on Public Culture and Social Services (PCSS 2023) PB - Atlantis Press SP - 264 EP - 275 SN - 2352-5398 UR - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-130-2_33 DO - 10.2991/978-2-38476-130-2_33 ID - Dou2023 ER -