Conclusion

This book has explored the intersection and interaction between personal lives and dramatic political changes in Kinmen -a geopolitically salient archipelago located between Taiwan and China -over the past century, a period of rapid modernization in Asia.Marriage has been highlighted in mainstream theories of modernity, mainly grounded on Euro-American experiences, as an index of wider social changes enabling individual men and women to become independent of familial bonds and assert their personal freedom and autonomy.This has been challenged by a signifi cant body of literature in Asian studies showing how 'traditional' familial or patriarchal norms remain effective in shaping individual life.While this scholarship compellingly argues that Asian governments have created or reinforced familial or patriarchal prescriptions of gendered roles through their policies, very often kin ties and the patrilineal family are treated as zones of conservatism demanding the individual's compliance with unequal gendered expectations.Building on new kinship studies in anthropology, I have moved beyond the oft-posited dichotomy between individual autonomy and familial bonds, and a hypothetical practice which circumscribes kinship as a 'private domain' in theses of modernity.Exploring the future-making and relational aspects of marriage in the life stories of multiple generations in Kinmen, I argue that, rather than zones of conservatism, kinship and marriage engender new futures and changes in society at large.Mid-twentieth-century anthropological studies of kinship, including those of Chinese kinship, have pointed out the constitutive power of kinship and marriage in forming political structures and processes.In theses of the lineage paradigm or the corporate model of Chinese kinship, patrilineal descent was the politicojural principle of social organization (Cohen 1976

Anthropological Studies and Insights · Computer Science · Intergenerational Family Dynamics and Caregiving · Japanese History and Culture