This book is about the farm family. Aside from the family relationship that are not terribuly different from what you have seen in other works and think of every day living in the traditional family. One of WOlf's strengths in this book is her interaction with the lim family. This book is good to know the chinese large family which was village life for those with a general interest in china. It was interesting to know the other country's family society.

I read this book for an anthropology class. I find it very enjoyable as a novel (very lively dialogues and interesting characters, some of whom you will like and identify with), but I question its credibility as an ethnography. Half of the people in my class believed that the author is biased, and that her views towards the women are especially harsh. As someone who is familiar with Taiwan (the book is not about mainland China), I find some descriptions/observations from the book very foreign. Just don't make too much out of the book.

Being a student at Johns Hopkins University, and majoring in East Asian Studies, I found this book to be very educating and interesting. The stories are fast paced, and the reader needs no prior understanding of Chinese society and tradition. This is a story of a Chinese farm family entangled in conflict, and the methods in which the father, Lim Han-Ci, and later, the second son, Lim Chieng-cua, operate to maintain the traditions and honor of the family. One of Wolf's strengths in this book is her interaction with the Lim family, and her reactions to different events. She understands the culture and traditions of a farm family in 1930's Taiwan, yet is able to put a Western perspective on all of it. Ms. Wolf is able to show that the most important thing to a Chinese man is tradition, face, filial piety, honor, and respect. In sum, Wolf's understanding of the integral relationships between parents, foster parents, children, adopted children, wives, second wives, and even the locals, enables us to gain a full perspective of why certain family issues were relevant, and how they were properly adhered to. This work is a brilliant contribution to our understanding of the Chinese family hiearchy, and why discrimination, sex biasness, and family honor was so important to so many different generations in Chinese society.

I always feel suspicious of books that contain such sentences as----"The cook poured my second cup of coffee. I had never been able to get him to leave the coffee pot on the table. He seemed to feel that would lessen his dignity." The reason for my hesitation is the slightly wry humor aimed at someone the speaker might have asked, but didn't. However, on finishing OLD MADAM YIN, I have to conclude that it has some excellent points. I chose to read it thinking that it was an autobiography or an edited life story by an anthropologist. No, it is more the story of contact between an American hospital worker in pre-revolutionary China and a Chinese woman from an upper class family of the old school, Old Madam Yin. The Chinese lady has no voice, the whole book being the summary of Ida Pruitt's observations. As she, the author, spoke Chinese and knew China well, we find an interesting picture of a certain style of life, the manners and innuendoes of a bygone age in Beijing, family dynamics before Mao. It makes for fascinating reading, a useful source of social history, and is a book which makes you ponder how much of Chinese culture survives into the present even if somewhat overshadowed by the decaying but still-powerful Communist Party, the Internet, vast movements of labor, the cementing over of vast areas, in a noisier age of nightclubs and cars. I would guess a lot does survive. It seems to me that a reader who wants to know what Chinese think would be wiser to look elsewhere, but if you are looking for acute observations by an old-style American lady, this is definitely the book. At 129 pages of non-academic prose, you can read OLD MADAM YIN quickly, but the atmosphere will remain with you for a long time.

This book is a personal account of friendship that developed between an American woman raised and working in China and a Chinese woman raised in the pre-cultural revolution period. Madame Yin is a strong, intelligent person who is an individual of her time. Ida describes Madame Yin with a great respect and love as well as the curiousity of one culture for another. I came away from the book with a much greater appreciation for Chinese family values and traditions. This is a quick but very informative read. Ida writes in he first person narrative and, although her writing is only occasionally stilted (a product of its time as well), she is an excellent story teller.

This account of a typical life-cycle of Chinese women in a multi-surnamed Hokkien village, aptly characterized as an "afterthought to fieldwork" by Norma Diamond in _The American Anthropologist_ enlivens the demographic analyses of her (then-) husband Arthur Wolf's work on patterns of adoption and marriage. She stresses the importance of informal neighborhood groupings of (unrelated) women and dwells extensively on prostitution, especially by adopted daughters (the obssession of Arthur Wolf's life work), and on rivalry between women. In particular, Margery Wolf stresses the rivalry between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law as leading to the breakup of larger family units into nuclear family households (although in her earlier work she had emphasized the fragility of bonds between brothers that preexisted sister-in-law rivalry as a centripetal force within families ).

Wolf considerably underestimated the extent to which women's work outside the house was (and is) important to to the economic well-being of their families and to financing family enterprises. As Diamong complained, "there is little feel for how adult women view themselves and their lives, how they interact with the males in their lives, and how completely they accept the male evaluation of them as economically useless and ritually polluting." Taiwanese scholars have challenged the Western conception of female "pollution" in the work of Wolf, Emily [Martin] Ahern, and others.

The specificity of Wolf's _House of Lim_, although it probably depends on unnamed Taiwanese research "assistants" eliciting and translating the data, makes it the most useful of her books.

Margery Wolf's anthropological case study of women in a rural Taiwanese farm village reexamines the traditional patriarchal view of women roles with a closer look at the ways women manipulate the Confucian family by their uterine family connections and by networking within the women's community. Wolfsets forth a revisionist dynamic: the Uterine family and how mothers bond with sons as opposed to the traditional Confucian family values. Wolf claims there is a women's community and a the support system it can provide underlaying the traditional patrilineal values.

To make her point, Wolf describes the socialization of female children in the natal family from birth through young womanhood and within the marital family from engagement and marriage to the time they take over the domestic duties of the mothers-in-law. Kingroups and various women's social groups are juxtaposed against village locales. The close relationship between a mother and her sons is compared to the harsher treatment of daughters. Also depicted is entrance into the women's community and the ways the women's community can apply pressure through gossip and loss of face. She also explains non-normative situations: the simpua child, uxorilocal marriages, prostitution. These show examples of women on the outside of the traditional family roles. Adopting a wife for a son as an economic savings and to eliminate stress by training the daughter-in-law, and the difficulties of marrying a brother. Husbands who take their wives family name to provide sons for the lineage, and the stresses of the uxorilocal marriage. Prostitution as a lucrative alternative for some families.

Wolf has clearly demonstrated a different dynamic employed by women which overlays the traditional male power structure of the Confucian family, within which women create for themselves a position of security and limited control over their lives and their children's lives and can thus make bearable and even improve family life within the limits of the patriarchal patrilineal society of rural Taiwan.

I was assigned this book as part of an introductory anthropology course, however, once I started reading it, I had no problem finishing (unlike most other assigned college reading.) The book details and defines all aspects of women in rural Taiwan shedding light on a culture very misunderstood and stereotyped by Americans. A very interesting and even exciting read as the culture of rural Taiwan enfolds. A truly exceptional anthropological field study by Margery Wolf.

The author, an anthropology professor at the University of Iowa, did not speak or understand the language of the people she writes about. Although Wolf makes a fanciful case that Taiwanese women's identities are obliterated by not using their names, she herself appropriated the work of the Taiwanese woman who did the research on a woman who was judged to be crazy rather than possessed by any deity and obliterated the name of the researcher.

Wolf's ignorance extends beyond ignorance of the language her subjects spoke (Holo/Hokkien) to ignorance about basic anthropological conceptions (terms of address in contrast to terms used in reference to a person, spirit mediums in contrast to shamans). There are no shamans in Taiwan. There are spirit mediums. Previous literature documented that some Taiwanese spirit mediums were female.

Wolf did not gather any data on Taiwanese criteria for recognizing true spirit possession, but even her inadequate 30-year-old fieldnotes provide ample material contradicting the "conclusions" (actually, a priori beliefs about female victimization) she presented.Instead of criticizing postmodernists, a better tactic, given her failures of scholarship and ethnography, would be to embrace it and abandon empirical claims altogether.

In this book an anthropologist looks at what seems to be the shamanic possession of a Taiwanese woman from three angles: the field notes she took at the time, an essay, and a work of short fiction. You really get a feel for how different the situation can be viewed through these three lenses...and for the courage required to present it in innovative and subjective prose not typical of acceptable scholarly "social science."

I found myself put off a bit by what I perceived to be a steady note of defensiveness throughout the book, a tone that felt partly assertive and partly self-justificatory, even in those places where the author emphasized that feminist writers of social science need not accept the academic standards of their male colleagues and critics. "We don't need no stinking postmodern graybearded men," it seemed to say in different ways. At times the sarcasm directed at these critics was quite open, and it distracted me from the excellent content of the author's arguments.

I would ask male readers of this book, which I recommend for its fine critiques of the postmodern anthropological tendency to condemn all field research as oppressive colonialism, to bear in mind its context: namely, thousands of years of patriarchy which we've yet to see any end to, particularly in academia. And to reflect that we can't dismiss such books as mere axe-grinding, political or otherwise, because while entirely personal bitterness ought to be dealt with personally, this sort affects half of us directly and the other half through collective complicity. If anything, these axes need to be even sharper.

Wolfe takes a very sensitive approach having put thought of the highest anthropological calibur into the meaning of this ethnography and the meanings of ethnographies as a whole. The author's focuses include systems of power differential, voice and inclusion. Everything Wolfe writes is put in perspective through culture and situation so as not to mislead or overstate. This approach can be sharply contrasted to that of Napoleon Chagnon in his work, The Yanomamo. Her feminist voice is refreshing and appropriate but struggling in a male dominated field. Very interesting ruminations and aproaches to a story. Author is not academically ignorant in the least.