his 60th birthday. For example, no villager would dare refer to or address the 93-year-old p triarch of the wealthiest family in Ha Tsuen as ah baak. In general, however, with advancing ge the playful aspects of names and naming are taken away as is a mans power to transact his name. In old age a man has little control over what he is called and in this respect hi situation is similar to that of a married woman. As with wives, old men have left (or are leaving) the world of public and financial affairs to become immersed in the world of family and kinship where they are defined not by a set of distinctive names but by their relationship to others o name women At one month a Ha Tsuen girl is given a name(ming); when she marries this name ceases be used. Marriage is a critical rite of passage for both men and women but the effect of this rite on the two sexes is very different. Just as a mans distinctiveness and public role are enhanced by his marriage and his acquisition of a marriage name, the marriage rites relegate the woman to the inner world of household, neighborhood and family. On the one hand the marriage rites seek to enhance the young bride s fertility but on the other hand, and in a more negative vein, they also dramatize the bride's separation from her previous life and emphasize the pro- hibitions and restrictions that now confine her. when the young bride crosses her husbands threshold, what distinctiveness she had as a girl is thrust aside It is at this point that she loses her name and becomes the"inner person"(nei jen), a term Chinese husbands use to refer to While the groom is receiving his marriage name on the first day of marriage rites, his bride being given an intensive course in kinship terminology by the elderly women of Ha Tsuen Marriage ritual provides a number of occasions for the formal, ritualized exchange of kin terms (for a description of marriage rites in Ha Tsuen see R. Watson 1981). These exchanges, which always feature the bride, instruct the new wife and daughter-in-law in the vast array of kin terms she must use for her husband s relatives. The prevalence of virilocal/patrilocal residence means that the groom remains among the kin with whom he has always lived It is the bride who must grasp a whole new set of kin terms and learn to attach these terms to what must seem a bewil dering array of people. Two women resident in the groom s village (called in Cantonese choi gaa,"bride callers")act as the brides guides and supporters during the three days of marriage rites, and it is their responsibility to instruct the bride in the kin terminology she will need der to survive in her ne These ritualized exchanges of kin terms do more however than serve as a pedagogic exer cise; they also locate and anchor the bride in a new relational system. As the groom acquires his new marriage name-a name, it should be noted that denotes both group or category mem- bership and individual distinctiveness-the bride enters a world in which she exists only in relation to others. She is no longer"grounded"by her own special name(ming), however saic that name might have been; after marriage she exists only as someone's eBw or yBW or as Sing s mother, and so on. Eventually even these terms will be used with decreasing fre quency; as she approaches old age, she will be addressed simply as"old woman"(ah po) by all but her close kin When i first moved into Ha Tsuen, i quickly learned the names of the male residents (mostly nicknames), But for the women I, like other villagers, relied on kin terms or category terms. Significantly the rules that govern the use of these terms are not dependent on the age of the function of the lineage generation of their husbands Women married to men of an ascending generation to the speaker (or the speakers husband may be addressed as ah suk po (a local expression meaning FyBW)or by the more formal ah sam(also meaning FyBW) For women married to men of one s own generation (male ego)the terms ah sou (eBW)or, if one wanted to give added respect, ah sam(FyBW) may be used erican ethnol