Marriage, Mortality, and Identity on China’s Miao Frontier, 1750–1919

Around 1745, Magistrate Xie Shenglun arrived in Tianzhu county in southeastern Guizhou, intent on transforming the kinship and marriage practices of the local Miao. Indeed, during the eighteenth century, local families adopted markers of formal lineage, including graveyards, genealogies, and ancestral halls, aligning themselves with Neo-Confucianism and the imperial state. However, other aspects of Neo-Confucianism were adapted or ignored. Records of wives and daughters in the Pan genealogy present evidence of practices such as widow remarriage, cross-cousin marriage, and delayed-transfer marriage. Attention to affinal relations reveals an alternate kinship system recorded alongside patrilineal descent. Families adopted formal lineage to protect their political and economic interests, but instead of reforming or replacing local kinship and marriage practices, they reinforced them. Even as the Pan genealogy confirmed the family’s status as imperial subjects, the marriage practices and networks it recorded helped maintain an ethnic identity separate from state categories and grounded in the local community.