John Embree used the phrase “loosely structured social system” in reference to the Southeast Asian social systems. Thus he evaluated the degree to which individual behavior was influenced by membership in local communities by making comparisons with Japan. “The local group in Japan, he claims, has a clear-cut social unity with special ceremonies for entry and exit and a whole series of rights and obligations for its members.
Each man must sooner or later assume the responsibility of being the representative of the local group, each must assist on occasions of hamlet cooperation such as road building or funeral preparations. In Thailand, Embree continues, the hamlet also has its own identity and its members also have rights and duties, but they are not clearly defined and not strictly enforced. Exchange systems are less clear cut.” (Embree, 1950, p. 183)
Potter’s Family Life in a Northern Thai Village (1980) and Keyes’ The Golden Peninsula (1995) count a number of examples that support Embree’s argument about little discernable structure of Southeast Asian social systems.
In his work Potter explores the social structure and social organization of family life in a Northern Thai village. Discussing how a female-centered system differs from a male-centered one, he examines its workings in a variety of social contexts. The analysis suggests that the structural principles of female-centered family system are more difficult for anthropologists to grasp. “The system itself is not formless or inchoate, but its shape has been difficult for anthropologists to see.” (Potter, 1995, p. 13)
Thai family consists of parents and children living together in one household. The father of the family controls the division of property, children get equal parts. There are three kinds of family groups: the household, the spatially extended family, and the remotely extended family. The structure of the Thai family is a loose one, there are family obligations recognized in it, but they are not followed very strictly. Husbands and wives are duty-bound to each other and their children rather than to their parents.
There are no structural relationships in Thai kinship with the exception of respect relationships based on age within the family. This is the only structural phenomenon that determines the basis of the unity of the family.
In Therevada Buddhist Southeast Asia that Keyes explores, prescriptive characteristics vary from area to area, though a basic ascriptive division between the sexes is recognized throughout the village (this is practically the only inalterable social attribute determined by birth). Even one’s kinship status is potentially changeable. Nowhere in the region one can find social action constrained by kinship patterns to the degree that it is, for example, in India or China.
There are no regions in Therevada whose social parameters are absolutely and unchangeably defined. All villagers in the region believe that they have some considerable degree of freedom of action whereby they generate the Karma whose consequences will establish their position on the hierarchy of torment (Keyes, 1995, p.165). The dual direction of Buddhist belief, one to past Karma whose consequences are obvious in the current state of the social world and the other to present Karma whose consequences will determine future freedom from suffering does not contribute to the image of Southeast Asia as a region where social structure is clearly defined.
References
Embree J. (1950). Thailand: A loosely structured social system. American Anthropologist, 52, 181-193.
Keyes, C. F. (1995). The Golden Peninsula: Culture and Adaptation in Mainland Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press.
Potter, S. H. (1980). Family Life in a Northern Thai Village: A Study in the Structural Significance of Women. University of California Press.