A STUDY OF PROPERTY INHERITANCE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY RED RIVER DELTA

In this article, family structure and land ownership in Vietnam during the first half of the nineteenth century are considered by analyzing two testaments and the land cadastre of the Nguyễn Dynasty.From these, it seems probable that the nineteenth-century Vietnamese village had multi-household compounds that were biased toward patrilocal residence. These compounds share certain characteristics with Southeast Asian multi-household compounds and indicate that paternal kinship groups (dòng họ) were formed from cohabitation groups based on bilateral descent owing to the spread of patrilocal marriage with the popularization of Confucianism in the early modern period.Although abundant village documents still exist in Vietnam, they have not been fully utilized as historical materials owing to a lack of cooperation with anthropologists. The analysis in this article incorporates anthropological as well as historical perspectives and offers new possibilities for the utilization of village documents.