(lineage) performed many of the social services on the local level that are now provided by public schools, police, and social welfare agencies” (US 1990, parentheses mine).

Strong supernatural sanctions ensured conformity to the Confucian rules. Kendall (1984) describes beliefs in ancestors and ghosts in rural Korea in the 1980s, and spells out how they served to generate a great deal of pressure to conform to the needs of the corporate group.<sup>16</sup> Ancestors with male descendants who take care of them can be a benign influence on their family. But even these can be restless and dangerous if they died with unfulfilled desires, such as seeing their grandsons. Those who died unmarried or without male descendants are filled with resentment and can create all kinds of problems for their siblings and other kin. It is apparent that there is much pressure from a wide range of family members to ensure that each individual performs their filial duties of marrying and bearing sons quickly, and caring for their ancestors.

The main features of this kinship system were maintained through the twentieth century: “During the colonial period (1910-1945) under the Japanese, the Confucian norms of loyalty and filial piety continued to be taught in schools....and the norms of the patriarchal family system with a male house head were written into the Civil Code. Household registration records used to enforce these norms also served to aid the colonial authorities in social control.” (Sorensen and Kim 2004:156) After becoming independent, the South Korean state incorporated these patrilineal kinship rules into the Civil Code in 1958.<sup>17</sup> The traditional principles of loyalty to the ruler and filial piety were thus used to help maintain social and political stability under a series of authoritarian governments.

# **_c) Northwest India_**<sup>18</sup>

Much of Northwest India is dominated by the Jats, who have a lineage system organized on similar principles as that promoted by neo-Confucians in China and Korea.<sup>19</sup> The origins of the system are unknown, but the records indicate that the basic elements of the system have been in place since at least the thirteenth century (Pradhan 1966). The Jats are concentrated in the presentday Indian states of Punjab and Haryana, but are also found in parts of Western Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Gujarat and Rajasthan.<sup>20</sup> As in China and Korea, the clans are patrilineal, patrilocal and exogamous, organized into territorial units in which one clan will dominate. Daughters leave the parental household on marriage. While a man may seek help from his mother’s brother, there is no question of seeking it from his daughter or her husband’s family. The patrilineage (subclan) is a propertyholding descent group, and land cannot be alienated from it: if a man without sons tries to pass on his land to his daughter’s son, this will be challenged as appropriation of ancestral property.

Conserving land within the lineage also meant that members of sub-clans lived near each other, making it easy to control individual members. And the lineage members had a shared interest in the furthering of their lineage’s prestige and power.

“Like the clan, the _thok_ s (sub-clans) of a village each have a compact area, both residential and agricultural.... (T)he rules of inheritance maintain this 11