Cognatic descent and the generation of social stratification in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Anthropologists and other social scientists have long been fascinated by the intricacies of Indian culture and society. Consequently it seems surprising that they have given relatively little attention to the tradi tional states of South-East Asia which, with the exception of Viet Nam, maintained and developed an essentially Indian cultural tradition albeit in a very different setting. In this paper I discuss a number of issues concerning the significance of the regulation of rights in women for political organization and the development of social stratification. Recent contributions to the his torical record of nineteenth century Siam now make such an exercise productive for that country and provide a basis for comparison with the Malay states, primarily as they are described and analysed in J. M. Gullick's Indigenous Political Systems of Western Malaya (1958). Merely to illustrate the importance of descent and marriage rules in structuring political relations is to ignore the more fundamental problem with respect to the control of women of the nature of the relationship between the spheres of kinship and marriage on the one hand and the political order on the other. Indeed, Georges Balandier's assessment of the study of segmentary societies, that Power and 'kin ship' are in dialectical relation, hence the failure of any unilateral interpretation (1972: 77) provides a useful perspective for the analysis of South-East Asian states with their very different descent and political structures.