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Toward a Paradigm for Paradox: Observations on the Study of Social Organization in Southeast Asia

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 April 2011

Neil L. Jamieson
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Extract

It is curious and probably quite significant that the nature of social organization in Southeast Asia has proven to be so elusive a quarry for several generations of academicians. Hundreds of thoughtful and scholarly books and articles have addressed this issue or some portion of it in one way or another, and yet our work remains on the whole strangely cautious. A sense of uneasiness hovers over our discussions. We reveal some discontent with both the textual and the conceptual underpinnings of our endeavors. To a greater or lesser extent we all appear to share David Wyatt's misgivings that we may “have it all wrong”. One might well ask why this should be so after all these years of effort.

Type
Symposium on Societal Organization in Mainland Southeast Asia Prior to the Eighteenth Century
Information
Journal of Southeast Asian Studies , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , September 1984 , pp. 320 - 329
Copyright
Copyright © The National University of Singapore 1984

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References

1 Hickey, Gerald C., Sons of the Mountains (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), p. xvGoogle Scholar.

2 The Book of Changes (I Ching) itself implies a rudimentary theory of continuity and change. The hexagrams upon which it is based form a system, and many learned commentaries upon the book have emphasized that the system is based upon a “theory of reversion”; i.e., each hexagram stands in direct opposition to those immediately preceding and following it. The inescapable implication of this arrangement is that anything which is pushed to its purest or most extreme form reverts to its opposite. Thus chapter forty of the Tao Te Ching states that “reversion is the motion of the Tao”; and this theme is expressed in both mystical and metaphorical terms throughout ancient Sinitic cosmological writings, reinforcing the notion that the structure of reality consists of cyclical oscillation around a point of equilibrium between the two poles in an interlocking relationship of logical opposition and functional complementarity.

3 Kirsch, A. Thomas, Feasting and Social Oscillation: A Working Paper on Religion and Society in Upland Southeast Asia (Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program, Data Paper No. 92, 1973)Google Scholar.

4 Leach, Edmund, Political Systems of Highland Burma (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), p. xiiGoogle Scholar.

5 Ibid., p. xii.

6 Ibid., p. xiii.

7 See also , Kirsch, Feasting and Social Oscillation, p. 3, on this point.Google Scholar

8 , Leach, Political Systems, p. xiiiGoogle Scholar.

9 This brief description combines emic and etic characteristics. It proves to be astonishingly easy to describe Vietnamese emic constructs in the terminology of Sinitic cosmology and then to restate them in the vocabulary and concepts of modern cybernetic theory. The simplified results of such a procedure as presented in the following pages represent a conflation of these three distinctive but highly compatible ways of describing the process of social organization in Vietnam.

10 On the concept of “uterine families” and their relationship to patrilineal organization see Fortes, Meyer, The Dynamics of Clanship Among the Tallensi (London: Oxford University Press, 1945)Google Scholar; Wolf, Margery, Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1972), pp. 32–41Google Scholar; and Turner, Victor, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine, 1969), pp. 114–18Google Scholar.

11 For further illustration and discussion of this point, see Boonsanong Punyodyana, “Social Structure, Social System, and Two Levels of Analysis: A Thai View”, in Loosely Structured Social Systems: Thailand in Comparative Perspective, ed. Evers, Hans-Dieter (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1969), pp. 78–83Google Scholar.

12 Spiro, Melford E., Burmese Supernaturalism (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967), pp. 264–80Google Scholar.

13 Ibid., p. 279.

14 Leach, Political Systems, focuses upon power; while Kirsch, Feasting and Social Oscillation, suggests that ritual efficacy is closer to the heart of the matter.

15 See also , Kirsch, Feasting and Social Oscillation, pp. 15, 18Google Scholar.

16 Kham, Nguyen Khac, An Introduction to Vietnamese Culture (Saigon: Vietnam Council on Foreign Relations, 1970), p. 17Google Scholar.

17 There arc homologous cases in control engineering and in neurophysiology (e.g., “purpose tremor” or “cerebellar tremor”). See, for example, Wiener, Norbert, Cybernetics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 1948), pp. 13–15, 113–14Google ScholarPubMed.