Janice E. Stockard

This is a remarkable example of anthropological research, in that Janice Stockard nimbly changed the direction and the whole focus of her research based on a clue dropped parenthetically by one thoughtful informant. No, hardly any women in her village refused to live with their husbands -- most cohabited about three to four years after the marriage! It turns out that this was traditionally the main form of marriage in a large part of Kuangtong province, but they called it simply marriage, thus obscuring its radical difference from marriage practiced elsewhere. Based on the information, Stockard followed up the clue with "The Right Question" (she has an Appendix by that title): "In your village, did a bride settle with her husband immediately after marriage?" and the answers came pouring out.

I do appreciate Stockard's providing an appendix with Cantonese characters for the terms and expressions referenced in Romanized form in the text. It would have been better for the reader, but no doubt more troublesome and expensive for editor and printer, to print these within the body of the book, but it is welcome to have them anywhere at all instead of the horrible guessing game of trying to come up with the actual words based on a completely inadequate representation in letters. There's also a map and list of place names in Cantonese transliteration and characters (although without any indication of what the people living in those places actually call them, which would have been useful since the local dialects vary as much as Romance languages from one another).

Overall a very well researched and well presented work, for which we can be grateful because her informants in the 80s were advanced in age and she grasped the opportunity to interview them almost at the last possible moment.… (altro)