Everyday Life in Southeast Asia

Part Two. Family, Households, and Livelihoods

P A R T T W O Family, Households, and Livelihoods The flexibility, stability, and shape of Southeast Asian social structures have been dominant themes in the anthropological study of the region at various points. While anthropologists today do not devote as much time to the study of social structure and kinship as they once did, understanding these aspects of social life is still essential to understanding how people of Southeast Asia relate to each other—because those people use these structures and roles to figure out their rights, duties, and obligations to one another. Southeast Asian social structures have often been described as loosely structured (Embree 1950). Up until the mid-twentieth century, scholarly research on social structure had been dominated by the study of lineage societies . The ethnographic example of Southeast Asia opened up a new perspective , a different possibility, for examining social structure. Loosely structured societies are marked by dyadic relationships, relationships between two people. We have already seen in chapter 1 (Aragon) that personal pronouns are not stable for a person (in contrast to English, in which “you” are always you), but in fact shift depending on who “you” are interacting with. Likewise, in many Southeast Asian languages, personal pronouns shift, depending on whether one is speaking to someone older or younger, more prestigious or less prestigious. This is an expression of dyadic relationships. The term loosely structured implies a lack of structure, and many anthropologists who have worked in Southeast Asia have found this unsatisfying. There is structure—people interact in patterned ways and act to keep these types of relationships in place. But it is clear that some existing structures are so unlike the classical analytical units of kinship based on African models that they are not evident to observers. This issue has been addressed frequently in anthropological literature about Southeast Asian societies. 60 / Part Two In “Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order” (chapter 7), Lucien M. Hanks, Jr. demonstrates the importance to Thai social structure of the entourage , a kind of patron–client relationship. These are based on dyadic hierarchy—a series of relationships that are not equal, in which each person in the relationship is subordinate or superior to the other. Entourages are structured around a person of power, whose charisma is based on concepts of “soul stuff” or “prowess” (Wolters 1999), a kind of personal efficacy. This, too, is a key concept throughout much of Southeast Asia. We will see in Part III on “Crafting the Nation-State” how this concept is implicated in political systems. A common kinship form in Southeast Asia is cognatic (Murdock 1960), meaning that kinship is reckoned through all descent relationships—that is, through both the mother and the father. Cognatic kinship systems are marked by small domestic households, often owning property together (corporate ); and all of the kinspeople on both the mother’s and the father’s side are called the kindred. This form will be quite familiar to many readers of this book—it is the kinship type practiced in the United States. We can visualize these as kinship circles that surround each person (Eggan 1960). The Hanunóo discussed in chapter 5 (Conklin) have this type of kinship. There are advantages to this system—in particular, it supports mobility and flexibility because each person can call on a wide range of kin for support and access to resources; and wherever one goes, there are likely to be kin. It is also a kinship system that made sense within the cultural logic of Southeast Asian history, in which populations moved around in response to war or disaster or new access to resources. This is also the foundation of other features of Southeast Asia noted by observers over time: the flexibility of marriage and frequency of adoption. But this kind of kinship has implications for political power, as Anthony Reid (1988) pointed out in his discussion of common phenomena that unite Southeast Asia. Succession and inheritance are unclear in a cognatic system. Therefore, considerable competition exists for power and social influence. People show this by demonstrating their personal power and attracting followers; the costs of the need for ongoing demonstration of one’s prowess, of one’s prestige, are illustrated by the story of the Thai “Rocky” as told by Pattana Kitiarsa (chapter 15). Personal power is the basis of the patron–client entourage in Hanks’s discussion. For the Thai and other Buddhist peoples of mainland Southeast Asia, the power of the...