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Abstract
This dissertation explores how viewing kinship as a dynamic process rather than a fixed structure can provide a potent theoretical shift capable of changing the narrative of early Chinese society. While the Shang period (ca. 1600-1050 BCE)—often cited as the wellspring of Chinese civilization—saw rapid material and ideological change, it is portrayed as being entirely organized according to a rigid patrilineal kinship structure. Taking a cue from modern ethnographic work in China that finds other important processes of “relatedness” alongside lineage membership (Carsten 1995; 2000; Stafford 2000), this research seeks to reexamine kinship in early China through the lens of post-Schneiderian kinship theory to locate important currents of change within kinship that have evaded identification by previous studies of formalist structures. It asks: In a time of noted social, economic, and material change, how was kinship refigured? Following anthropological kinship theory that emphasizes how relatedness is produced, maintained, negotiated, or muted over time, this project looks beyond biological relatedness and lineage to examine how a person’s age and life stage factored into everyday experiences of relatedness. This dissertation combines the bioarchaeological analysis of 158 sets of human skeletal remains with a statistical exploration of associated mortuary contexts from Dasikong Cun locale, a non-elite lineage neighborhood from the last Late Shang capital site of Yinxu (ca. 1200-1050 BCE). This project is the first to apply life course theory at Yinxu, and illustrates that prioritizing age data and seriating mortuary data according to age at death is an effective way to track changes in burial practices at both the micro scale of a normative life course and the macro scale of change over Dasikong Cun’s occupation history. This project identifies many stages within the life course of Late Shang people, and moreover finds that the way that the life course is delineated changed over Yinxu’s occupation history, driven especially by changes to subadult graves. Finally, this dissertation considers how these findings might be better characterized as cycles of yang (养 “to care for”) and laiwang (来往 “come and go”) relatedness alongside lineage (Stafford 2000). This dissertation suggests new scales of inquiry grounded in site-specific data that are particularly useful to bioarchaeological research and research on quotidian interaction and bottom-up processes of social organization among non-elites. Broadly, this research contributes to ongoing anthropological discussions of kinship theory, mortuary theory, and the life course.