Organizer and Chair: Charlotte Ikels, Case Western Reserve University
Discussant: Myron L. Cohen, Columbia University
The proposed panel will examine the ways in which adult children practice filial piety in contemporary China. "Practice" here should be understood as the various behaviors, beliefs, and sentiments that demonstrate to oneself, one’s parents, and one’s community that one is a filial child. The post-Mao economic reforms have radically changed the opportunity structure in both rural and urban China. The impact of these changes on inter-generational relations and, particularly, on the expression of filial piety has been the subject of extensive debate, some scholars arguing that the family has been strengthened with others arguing that increased differentiation within the family has weakened its internal solidarity. The presenters on this panel are all experienced fieldworkers who have been in a position to observe and interpret the current compromises that parents and their adult children have been making as they together confront the economic and physical issues associated with aging. The data on meal rotation, gender differences in the expression of filial piety, living separately, and mortuary ritual are based on long-term stays in four different parts of China: the northwest (Gansu), the east (Shandong), the center (Hubei), and the south (Guangdong). The first three sites are rural while the last (Guangzhou) is urban. Together the four sites provide an overview of how the elderly are faring under the reforms. The discussant has worked on these same issues in Taiwan and in North China and can add a historic and comparative perspective on the issues dealt with in the papers.
Meal Rotation and Filial Piety
Jun Jing, City College of New York
This paper deals with family relations in rural China, focusing on how married sons fulfill the filial responsibility of looking after their parents. My discussion is based on research conducted in two villages in northwest China in the summers of 1998 and 1999, drawing on my earlier fieldwork in Yongjing County, Gansu Province, where the two villages are located. In each village, thirty-five households were interviewed and a questionnaire was used to gather basic information on issues of old-age security, especially the arrangements of practical support for aging parents. Central to my discussion is the practice of "meal rotation," meaning that married sons—usually through their wives—take turns providing their physically or financially dependent parents with regular meals. A basic finding to be discussed is that meal rotation, which involves other kinds of instrumental support for the elderly, is often at the center of conflicting expectations between parents and children as well as among married sons and their wives. These expectations, it can be argued, embody particular relations and personal interactions within the family, resulting in different interpretation of inter-generational reciprocity and filial piety. On the basis of the information from these two villages in Gansu, my discussion will situate an analysis of local data and individual experiences within the context of old-age support in rural China. Studies of meal rotation in other parts of rural China will be cited for comparison.
Filial Daughters, Filial Sons: Comparisons from North China
Eric Miller, University of Pittsburgh
In Mazhuang Village parents expect filial behavior from both sons and daughters but clearly the relationships of daughters and sons with parents differ. This paper compares the filiality of sons and daughters and the role of household division contracts in defining parent-child relationships. Mazhuang is a moderately prosperous multi-lineage village in Shandong’s Zouping County. Interviews with 60 of the village’s 150 individuals over the age of 60 and a sample of 15 household division contracts collected during a one-year ethnographic project in 1997–98 are the basis of this paper. The primary purpose of household division contracts is to ensure support of parents by sons in old age and an equal contribution by brothers. Sons are the primary or only source of support for most of the non-working aged in Mazhuang. Thus, significant support by sons is regarded as an essential part of filiality while support by daughters is considered optional. By emphasizing equality, contracts also function to limit the amount of support sons provide. A daughter need provide only token gifts to be considered filial, but she may provide far more than her brothers. Only sons, like daughters, do not enter into a household division contract. The result is that daughters and only sons share a flexibility in the parent-child relationship that is not found among sons with brothers. Filiality for most sons in Mazhuang is largely defined by the terms of the household division contract. For daughters and only sons, filiality is defined more by circumstance and opportunity.
"Living Separately" and the Rural Elderly: Strategy and Agency in Post-Mao China
Hong Zhang, Drew University
Recent ethnographic data have shown that the post-Mao reform period has witnessed an increase in the number of rural elderly parents living apart from their grown-up children. Some studies have attributed this phenomenon to the preference of young people for conjugal living arrangements, but others emphasize the fact that some older people embrace danguo (living separately) as a way of maintaining autonomy in the face of their diminishing authority and a shift of power within the household to the younger generation. Based on my fourteen-month fieldwork in a Hubei village in Central China during 1993–94, this study examines the family circumstances and the changing economic conditions that led to the rise of rural elderly living in separate households. Filial piety is a focal point in my discussion as it is inevitably connected with providing care for the aged. In particular my paper will demonstrate how the rural elderly use "living separately" as a strategy both to gain moral support from the community and to force their married children to conform to the obligations of filial piety to provide their elderly parents with old-age security.
Filial Piety: When Is Enough Enough?
Charlotte Ikels, Case Western Reserve University
This paper considers the limits of filial piety by examining its expression in contemporary urban mortuary ritual. Late 19th- and early 20th-century accounts of Southern Chinese mortuary rites document their importance as indicators of filial piety. During the Maoist era these same rites were condemned as wasteful and superstition-ridden, and in the urban areas cremation gradually replaced burial as the only legitimate means of body disposition. In the post-Mao era the state has held the line on cremation but has loosened up its policies with regard to other traditional practices. This paper addresses the following questions: How have urban families utilized this newly-opened ritual space? What constitutes an acceptable series of rites that will earn its sponsors recognition as filial children? Why and how do some children exceed these newly-established norms? To answer these questions I draw on a longitudinal study that I have been carrying out in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, with 200 randomly selected households. At the beginning of the study in 1987 each of these households contained at least one member 70 or older. The households were subsequently revisited in 1991 and 1998. Over the course of the study, 133 focal elders as well as 28 of their spouses and 15 other household members have died. Extensive data on mortuary rites were obtained for nearly all senior generation deaths and include pre-mortem preparation, body disposition, nature of the series of rites themselves, memorialization practices, and subsequent interaction with the deceased.