TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES IN ASIA

ᴥThis chapter surveys the traditional societies of Asia,
primarily before about 1900.
ᴥTheir emphasis on hierarchical ranking
ᴥThe primacy of the family
ᴥLarger groups beyond it within the context of
group solidarity and group effort
ᴥPatterns of marriage and sexuality and child
rearing
ᴥStatus of women
ᴥImportance of education and learning
ᴥMaterial welfare
ᴥAttitudes towards nature and human life
ᴥThe role of law

ᴥAs is still true today to a large extant, traditional Asian
societies showed a remarkable similarity in their
emphasis on hierarchical status groupings based
primarily on age, gender and occupation or social role.
ᴥPeople were discouraged from trying to operate on their
own and certainly from attempting to challenge, subvert,
get around or change the group oriented social system.
ᴥIndividualism and individual expression, so highly
valued in the modern West, were seen as antisocial,
disruptive, selfish and destructive of the group interest,
except to a degree in Southeast Asia.

ᴥGiven the relative stability and the impressive
accomplishments of traditional Asian societies, it must
be acknowledged that their social systems and values
worked well, however different they were from modern
Western norms.
ᴥOne measure of the success of this traditional social
system was its survival, essentially unchanged, for some
2000 years in India and China and only slightly less long
in the rest of Asia.
ᴥIn contemporary Asia as a whole, authority, power and
patronage still tend to be controlled by heads of groups;
family, village, work or administrative units, corporations
and even states.

ᴥThe longevity of traditional social systems suggests
that they delivered rewards and satisfaction to most
people most of the time.
ᴥThe authority of those with superior status, including
family heads ad elders, was seldom questioned, still
less defied; people were supposed to follow their
directions, a pattern still widely observable in
contemporary Asia.
ᴥThe traditional social system particularly
disadvantaged women, except in Southeast Asia, and
the young as well as tending to stifle individual
initiative.

۞Traditional Asian civilizations were hierarchically based, marked not only by the
uniquely Indian institution of caste but by the status groupings associated with
kingship, feudal-style relations, occupation, age, gender and levels of literacy and
learning.
۞The emphasis on achieving status through learning remains a distinctive aspect of
Indian, Chinese, KoreanandJapanesesocieties to the present day.
۞The importance attached to education and learning both for prestige and for
advancement, was andis greaterin most Asia thanelsewhere.

۞In most traditional Asian societies it was a relatively tiny elite who acquired
full literacy and advance learning through them superior status, authority and
power.
۞Southeast Asia has remained fundamentally different from China, Korea,
India and Japan because of the influences of Buddhism and Islam, both of
which stress equality but mainly because of the indigenous nature of Southeast
Asia society whichhelps to explain whythese two religion were acceptedtheir.

In contrast to the merit-based system of China founded
examinations and its variants in Vietnam, Korea and Japan, caste was
decreed by birth and affected nearly all South Asians including those
living in what are now Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri
Lanka.
Caste evolved as a sociocultural rather than religious practice with
some religious concepts woven in.
It is still practiced by South Asian Muslims, Christians and
Buddhists.
Caste provided a system of social organization that was otherwise
largely lacking and gave each individual a sense of belonging in the
form of membership in a larger group beyond the basic nexus of the
family.

CHRISTIANS
BUDDHISTS
M
U
S
L
I
M
SOUTH ASIA

Ritual pollution and purity became the essence of caste
definition, drawing boundaries of intergroup interaction, but its
operative units were and are subcastes or JATIS, commonly
linked to occupation: potters, weavers, learners.
Each jati was and is endogamous and members are forbidden
to eat with or water from any member of other jatis.
Caste cannot be changed, any more than one can change the
place where one was born.
Individuals might improve or degrade their status as their caste
group rose or fell in the hierarchy.

Those outside the original four VARNAS came to
be regarded as outcasts and later centuries dalits,
since their touch or even their shadow could defile.
Their occupations were defiling in themselves
they performed the essential services of cleaning and
disposing of the dead bodies of animals and people,
including the tanning of leather from hides and the
making of leather goods.

Most of the dalits also ate meat even beef, forbidden to
higher-caste Hindus or Buddhists and lived squalid,
segregated ghettoes.
In Buddhists Japan a comparable group emerged people
now referred as BURAKUMIN or hamlet people who were
also considered untouchable and for the same reasons
although the Japanese did not adopt the rest of the caste
system and may even have been aware of it
But caste distinctions seem not to have been observed
rigidly until relatively late in Indian history in Gupta times.

Escape from caste was always possible through religious
devotion again underlining castes nonreligious nature.
The ascetic SADHU or holy man was regardless of his
earthly origins beyond caste and honoured by all.
Such figures and other mystics were and remain like priest
BRAHMINS, far more numerous in India than elsewhere.
For centuries all South Asians have known what jati they
were born into but it is not really part of their religion
perhaps no more than genealogy, social class or occupation
are for Christians

Caste has remained a highly flexible system.
Although individuals are born into a given subcaste, by sustained
group effort any jati might raise its status often by adopting the
religious, dietary and other practices of higher-status groups and by
asserting higher status.
The process called SANSKRITIZATION from the use of Sanskrit
rituals associated with Brahmins.
This particularly characteristic of Asian societies where the
individual is important primarily as a member of a group whether
family, clan, caste, guild, or regional or linguistic division.

Caste also served the need for some form of hierarchical
order in a region of complex divisions.
Caste provided a sense of group identity, a means of
support and defense and cultural vehicle as well as since
each caste was necessarily local and shared a common
language.
Caste was a less matter of religious than of social
ordering and the hierarchy it involved was perhaps less
important than day-to-day supporting functions it served,
while at the same time it made social mobility possible for
group members.

Brahmins have always been as widely distributed as
Hinduism, but nearly all other caste groups remain limited to
much smaller areas, speaking a common regional language
and sharing common local culture.
As in all premodern societies, most people moved about
every little from where they were born.
People travelled in groups, not only for better security and
for company pilgrims from other areas and they camped at
the pilgrimage site in the same groups preparing meals and
interacting only with one another.

Despite the uniqueness of caste, Indian society conformed in other respects to the
dominant Asian social model, of whichChina is the principal example.
China was the original model for the rest of East Asia and remained overwhelmingly
its largest and most populous unit.
Under the empire in China, which lasted from the third century B.C.E. to 1911, power,
responsibility and status formed a pyramidal structure, with the emperor at the top as a
truly absolutemonarch.
But this was not merely a political pyramid and it did not act alone.
The emperor and his officials has as their highest duty the setting of a good example
of virtuous conduct.

In practice social order or in Confucian parlance the Great Harmony, was preserved
primarilyby the family system; this operated in much the same wayin the rest of Asia.
The familywas the state in microcosm.
Younger people deferred to their elders as did wives to their husband and social
inferiors to their superiors.
This was the Confucian formula for happiness and social harmony which spread
Confucianismto Korea, Vietnamand Japan.
But it was most respects paralleledby Indian socialmores.
For all Asians age was equated withwisdom andauthority.

The hierarchal structure of society was less pronounced in
Southeast Asia, sometimes attributed to the egalitarian
emphasis of both Buddhism and Islam, but even before these
religions spread to the area the traditional society appears to
have been more open , less rigidly stratified, and with far
more opportunity or even equality for women.
Women had different functions from men, but these
included rice cultivation, handicraft production and
marketing.
Their chief distinction from men was child bearing of
children which tended to attribute magical and ritual powers
to them.

SOUTHEAST
ASIA
BUDDHISTS
ISLAM

Daughters were valued far more highly than in the rest of Asia
or in Europe; indeed they were regarded as an economic asset.
Southeast Asians commonly practiced bilateral kingship, in
which inheritance might pass through either the male or female
ancestors.
At marriage money and property were transferred from a
husbands to his wife's family whereas in most of Asia a bride had
to be given with a dowry, often a heavy burden to her parents
who were at the same time losing her help.
Many Southeast Asian grooms had to pay a bride price a kind
of reverse dowry.

Southeast Asian married couples often moved to the wife’s
village or family rather than the other way around as in the
rest of Asia and the property was held by the couple jointly
Property was frequently inherited equally by all the
children whatever their sex again departure from other Asian
practice where the eldest son inherited all or most.
In may parts of Southeast Asia women retained their own
names and identities and sometimes passed them on to their
children; property also could descend through the female
line.

Early European observers of Southeast Asia in the 16th
century whose early modern cultures were often rather
prudish about sex and frowned on premarital sexual
activity, were shocked at the behavior of Southeast Asians.
Portuguese described the Malays as FOND OF MUSIC
AND GIVEN TO LOVE while Southeast Asians were said
to be VERY LASCIVIOUSLY GIVEN, BOTH MEN AND
WOMEN.
The relative economic freedom of women and their
income-earning ability, mainly in trade, made it easier for
them to leave an unsatisfactory marriage.

This seems to have made both spouses try harder to
make the marriage work.
What was called TEMPORARY MARRIAGE often
took the place of prostitution as a means of providing
foreign traders with female companions, an
arrangement that apparently brought no shame on the
woman and may even have increased her appeal as a
marriage partner in part because she was well paid for
her services.
Husbands including TEMPORARY husbands
generally treated their wives with respect.

There was a deep prejudice against political power
for women in most mainland Asia (East and South
plus Burma, Thailand and Vietnam), but in
Indonesia and the Philippines there were occasional
women rulers and in few areas most rulers were
female.
Women were also often used as diplomatic and
commercial negotiators because they were seen as
more reasonable and less bound by male codes of
aggression or HONOR.

With the exception of Southeast Asia, the paternalistic
family was a hierarchical structure in which group welfare took
precedence over individual preferences.
The father was like a little emperor, not only with absolute
power but also with absolute responsibility.
In family relations age was the major determinant.
Younger sons were subject to their older brothers and all to
the eldest male.
Individual initiative other than by the patriarch was not
tolerated the welfare of the family as interpreted by him came
first and all decisions were accordingly made by the elder
members.

The larger the society had no adequate mechanisms for
taking care of the elderly, so they died in the households
where they were born, or in total penury in the few cases
where they had no surviving children.
Family continuity also and a semi religious aspect not
only in the context of Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and
Japanese ANCESTOR WORSHIP but also in India.
The oldest surviving son had the responsibility in all of
these cultures to conduct funeral services for his parents
and annual and periodic rituals thereafter theoretically
forever so as to ensure the well-being of the departed
spirits and their continued help form the hereafter.

In China and India each generations eldest son might thus
be responsible for rituals on behalf of past generations of
ancestors by name over many preceding countries.
In Vietnam, Korea and Japan similar practices developed
although continuity with ancestral past was less extensive and
rituals usually did not name ancestors for more than a few
generations back.
But the general Asian belief in the basic importance of
family and generational continuity and in the permanence of
family and personal identity was a further expression of the
central role of the family as the anchor for all individuals and
their place in the temporal and spiritual worlds.

A new Asian bride was the servant of the husbands
family and was often victimized by a tyrannical
mother-in-law.
This classic conflict reflected the distribution of
power in a traditional Asian home, in which a bride
had the potential to undermine the security, power
and happiness of the older woman whose closest
relationships were often with her sons.
In a typical story a bride was carried in an enclosed
cart or sedan chair to her new husbands family; when
the curtains were opened, an unwilling bride would
sometimes be found to have killed herself.

Marriage was seen as a business arrangement between
families not as an individual choice or a love match.
In later centuries the custom of foot-binding
become widespread in China, inflicting dreadful pain on
growing girls, emphasizing their role as erotic play
things and defining their beauty in Confucian terms of
self-practice, domesticity and obedience.
About the same period, the practice of PURDAH the
veiling and sequestering of women, spread with the
Muslim conquerors even through Hindu northern
India.

Few Asians questioned the family hierarchy .
The family operated as a collective entity; each member
was both socially and legally responsible for the behavior of
all other members.
Collective responsibility, family pride, and the shame of
family disgrace are still credited for the relatively low rate of
crime in much of Asia.
Government from higher levels was far less necessary.
Asian societies have been called self-regulating, and to a
very large extent was true.

Individuals moved through life only as members of families,
as did members of larger groups such as caste, clans, guilds.
Yet there was a surprising amount of vertical mobility in
Chinese society, which also explains the appeal of the Confucian
system to the lower classes.
Downward mobility was often said to have been hastened by
the corrupting effects of wealth and its sapping of the ethic of
hard work in favor of luxurious and idle living.
In Asian countries families and sometimes villages, clans or
guilds squeezed their resources to support promising boys
through the lengthy education needed for entry to the
scholarly ranks, in effect as their representative and as one who
could bring prestige and profit.

Many Asian-American families and students continue this
tradition, at least for a generation or two, including the
realization that education, like anything else worth having,
cannot be achieved without hard work.
The larger society offered few support mechanisms.
Without family or descendants to care for them, the sick, the
poor and the elderly could not survive.
In the Hindu and Buddhist countries, minimal shelter and
food were available to all at temples, as they still are, but in most
Asia the production of offspring, especially sons, was the
overriding goal for simple self preservation.
Those who did well in life were bound to help not only
siblings but also uncles, aunts, cousins and their families.

The bonds of obligation and collective responsibility reached
throughout the extended family, which included all paternal and
maternal relatives, or at least those with whom a given nuclear
family was in touch.
It was thus fortunately uncommon for individuals to be
wholly without some family connection and consequent claim
for support, although for those whose relatives were too poor
to often much help which was not so uncommon life was often
a losing struggle.
Most Asian societies retain even now a complex variety of
name designations for each of these kin relationships.
This extended network of relationships not only put a heavy
burden on individuals but also provided mutual support.

♂Marriages were almost always arranged by agreement
between the two families concerned.
♂Dowries were commonly part of the marriage contract
outside Southeast Asia, especially in India; Southeast Asia
the males family commonly paid a BRIDE PRICE.
♂Part of woman's dowry, again especially in India, was
often, however in the form of jewellery that remained her
own and that could serve as a kind of security against hard
times.
♂The average age at marriage was lower than in the medieval
or early modern West: approximately 21 for males and 17
for females in traditional China, 16 and 14 respectively in
India, and 20 and 16 in Japan and Southeast Asia

♂Except for most of Southeast Asia and small region of
South India, most marriage was and remains patrilocal; that is,
the bride, who was almost invariably recruited from another
village to avoid interbreeding, left family and became a
member of her husbands family.
♂Under this patrilocal agreement, she was the lowest-status
member until she has borne a son.
♂She might visit her parents occasionally, but she was lost
them as a family member or helper and cost them heavily in
dowry.
♂Girls were often loved as much as boys, but on practical
grounds they were of far less value, although girls did much
of the household work.

♂Sons were essential for family continuity and security.
♂Because life was an uncertain business and death rates were
high, especially in the early years of life, most families tried to
produce more than one son.
♂Girls, on the other hand, might be sold in hard times as
servants or concubines in rich households.
♂The childless family was truly bankrupt and might even pay
relatively large sums to acquire a son by adoption.
♂A wife who failed to produce a son after a reasonable amount
of time was commonly returned to her parents as useless, for
the prime purpose of marriage was perpetuation of the male
line.

♂It was known until recently that the sex of a child is
determined by the father of that childlessness may result from
male as well as from female sterility, so the woman was always
blamed.
♂In time, however, most women became willing and even
enthusiastic members of their husbands families, passing on
these attitudes to their children.
♂Eventually they might sometimes achieve considerable power.
♂Marriage was seen by all as a contract between families for the
furthering of their interest.
♂Virtually all marriages were arranged by the families, usually
through a go-between.

♂Go-betweens were often older widows surveyed the
assortment of suitable partners in the area.
♂They made it their business to keep informed, to investigate
the characters of prospective partners and their family
circumstances, and to do at least the preliminary primary
income.
♂The small fee they charged was often their primary income.
♂Bride and groom had usually before their wedding.
♂Sometimes they might be allowed to express preferences,
although these might be overruled in the family interest.
♂Compatibility was rarely considered, and love marriages were
extremely rare, although affection might grow in time.

♂Divorce was rare in Asia outside the Southeast, but
though difficult, was still possible.
♂Remarriage was even more difficult if not
impossible, and that knowledge probably helped
people try harder to make their marriages work.
♂There is abundant evidence from biographies,
memoirs, popular literature, and legal records that
most marriages were successful within these terms,
and that husbands and wives valued and even loved
one another and worked together in the family unit
to reproduce the dominant social pattern.

Asian women outside Southeast Asia were
expected to be modest and chaste.
Upper-class women seldom appeared in public,
and any open display of affection with their
spouses was taboo, as it still tends to be.
The elite Asian cultures are famous for their
erotic literature and art for the development of a
courtesan (prostitute) tradition older than in any
other living civilization.
The GEISHA tradition of Japan and its original,
the ‘sing-song’ or ‘flower-boat’ women of China,
are well known, as is the cult of ritual sex among
Indian temple priestesses and the orgies of Tantric
Buddhism.

In India, courtesans were also patronized by the
elite as witty and learned conversationalists, and
even poetesses, steeped in the classics and able to
match wits and learning with their patrons or to
cap a classical quotation with a brilliant extempore
invention.
All of this the pleasures of the elite was far
beyond the experience of most people.
For the great mass of the population, sex was a
brief and often furtive pleasure after dark and
centered on procreation.
Most people lived close together and almost most
households included three generations, sharing at
most two small rooms.

Privacy was nonexistent and one was almost
never out of sight or sound of other people.
As in the West a double standard after
marriage again outside of Southeast Asia.
Wives were strictly forbidden to commit
adultery and were often very harshly punished
for it, while male sexual infidelity was often
tolerated.
As pointed out, philandering and visits to
sing-song girls of other prostitutes was largely
limited to the elite, who could afford such
indulgences and also could afford additional
wives and concubines.

In India and East Asia children were taught to
obey, boys as well as girls, but until about the age of
seven boys were especially indulged, as were infants
of both sexes.
Given the pressing need for sons, boys were clearly
favored, but children in general were welcomed and
loved and much fuss was made over them.
They were often not formally named until they
were about a year old and their names earlier was
often thought to be tempting fate.
Girls were trained early to accept their lowly place
in the hierarchy of the family and the larger society,
and there seems to have been little or no possibility
of rebellion.

Some modern psychological studies have in
fact shown the females, at least in the modern
West, are far less inclined than males to think
and act hierarchically or to accept such ranking
as appropriate, but we lack comparable modern
studies from Asia.
Women's much lower level of literacy also
tended to mean that their voices remained
unheard, including whatever objections they
may have had in the past to their general
subjugation.
Boys were not free of what we would call
oppression, especially at the hands of their
fathers, older brothers and other male relatives.

The great indulgence that boys were accustomed
to often came to an abrupt end when they were
seven years old, around the same age when
Chinese girls began the footbinding process.
Some autobiographies suggest that this was
commonly a traumatic time for the male child, no
longer waited on and coddled but subjected to an
often harsh discipline, especially in Japan and
China.
The early years of life were made as easy and
pleasant as possible, and by the modern consensus
that is the critical period for the development of
an individual.

Babies were commonly nursed by their mothers.
Until they were at least two or three and were
carried everywhere.
First on their mothers back in a sling and later in
her arms or those of an older sister.
Babies and young children were handled, played
with, touched and kept close to mother, father, or
siblings until they were about five or six and were
given lots of love.
Fathers often looked after the babies and young
children.

In any case, Western observers find that the
Asian adult male, especially an oldest son,
remains heavily dependent on others throughout
his life.
He not only tends readily to accept the
hierarchy of society.
His place in it but also assumes that people will
take care of him especially his wife, society in
general, his superiors, his friends and so on.
This extreme dependency has been most
remarked on in Japanese and Indian adult males.
There is a range of such behavior in all societies.

Dependent adult males are far from
unknown in our own society.
This trait does seem to be related to
Indian and East Asian child-rearing
practices.
In contemporary term, there is
plenty of evidence to suggest that the
patterns just described have a very
long history and were part of
traditional Asian societies.

Many women might have been
powers within their families, their role,
in general, was highly subordinate.
Females were subject first to their
fathers and brothers, then to their
husbands and to their husbands male
relatives.
Most Asian widows, again outside the
Southeast and parts of South India,
were not supposed to remarry or even
to have male friends,

Although in the lower classes, necessity would
overcome the social stigma, especially if a widow
was young and childless.
Given the high death rate and the unpredictable
fortunes of life, many women often no more than
girls were condemned to celibacy, loneliness and
penury for most of their lives.
CHASTE WIDOWS were praised and though
some managed a little of their own, most
conformed to the expected model and suffered.
The suicide of widows was not uncommon in
China.

Footbinding in China, apparently first
practiced by the elite in the Song Dynasty
(960-1279) was another example of the
limitations imposed on women.
The custom spread in later centuries and
became accepted by the Qing Dynasty (1644-
1911) as a painful rite of passage if a Chinese
girl was to obtain a good husband.
The so called lily foot, or the three inch
golden lotus, came to be praised as a sexual
object and much was written about its erotic
charms

While the girls were still young and their bones
were supple, their feet were tightly wrapped and
prevented form growing or they were distorted
until the arch was broken and the toes bent
under.
Many women with especially small feet were
effectively crippled and could walk only in painful
hobble; they became mere playthings for men,
especially for the well-to-do, and their freedom
action was further limited.
Other women after the first few painful years,
found that they could move about relatively
freely.

The size of a woman's foot was often closely linked
to her class status; poor women spent far too much
time working to be able to devote the time required
to produce an exceptionally tiny foot.
Westerners have long condemned footbinding, in
many cases for good reasons, but the custom meant
,any things in Chinese.
The excruciating process of footbinding according
to some scholars was one way that a Chinese
mother conveyed to her daughter the limitations of
female life.
Footbinding was also perceived by Chinese as a
particularly manifestation of beauty in Confucian
world.

Over time the bound foot became an object of
great pride among many Chinese women and
their men, and it was seen as a symbol of Han
civilization, in contrast to BARBARIANS who
were often depicted with unshod feet.
Despite the appeal of many aspects of Chinese
thought and culture, footbinding remained a
uniquely Han Chinese custom and many minority
peoples in China (including Manchus who ruled
during the Qing Dynasty) did not bind their feet.
The custom seems incomprehensible today,
although male admiration of small female feet is
certainly not confined to China.

As in the West in hard times female infants were
sometimes killed at or soon after birth so that the
rest of the family could survive.
Female babies were also sold as servants or
potential concubines.
Power within the family brought women rewards
that were especially important in this family-
centered society.
Their key role in ensuring family continuity
brought much satisfaction.
In most families women, as the chief raisers of
children, shaped the future.

They managed most families finances as they still
do in Asia.
In India, China, and Southeast Asia few women
became rulers in their own right, but only in India
could one find women who were brilliant generals
and cavalry fighters, such as the Rani of Jhansi.
But the crucial role of women in what mattered
most the family its well being and its perpetuation
was recognized within clear status limits.
In reality for most people women were as
important as men even though their public rewards
were far less and they suffered form discrimination.

Upper class women lived a generally idle life
and commonly turned their children over to
nurses or tutors.
Southeast Asia has traditionally been freer of
sex discrimination than India, China, Korea or
Japan and most of its regional cultures included
some matrilocal marriage, female control and
inheritance of property, and female dominance
within the family.
Property usually descended through the female
line.
Children often carried their mothers family
name.

In the Islamic areas women were discouraged
from participating in activities outside the home by
the conviction that females should be secluded as
well as veiled.
Women who engaged in trade or educational
pursuits were rare exceptions outside Southeast
Asia, where orthodox Muslim restrictions on women
did not apply, even in the Islamic areas of Malaya,
Indonesia and the southern Philippines.
The women's primary task was to marry and
raised children, especially boys.
They were regarded as the property of their
husbands, a view reinforced by the Qur’an.

The Qur’an was used explicitly to
legitimate the subordination of the women.
This point was succinctly stated by a 17th
century Iranian theologian who asserted
that a wife's principal spiritual duty was
subservience to her husband; “A WIFE MUST
OBEY HER HUSBAND, NEVER DISOBEY HIS
COMANDS, NVER LEAVE THE HOUSE
WITHOUT HIS PERMISSION.”
As early as the 1200s Islamic society was
characterized by a separate social life for
men and women.

TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES IN ASIA

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TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES IN ASIA