FAMILY SYSTEMS, POLITICAL SYSTEMS AND ASIA'S ‘MISSING GIRLS’

Abstract

China, South Korea and northwest India manifest extreme child sex ratios. This paper argues that this is because their pre-modern political and administrative systems used patrilineages to organise their citizens, generating uniquely rigid patriliny and son preference. It also argues that the advent of the modern state has unravelled the underpinnings of the rigid patriliny, unleashing forces that reduce son preference. Firstly, the modern state has powerful tools for managing its citizenry, rendering patrilineages a threat rather than an asset for the state. Secondly, the modern state has brought in political, social and legal reforms aimed to challenge traditional hierarchies, including those of gender. Thirdly, industrialisation and urbanisation have ushered in new modes of social organisation, which reduce the hold of clans and lineages. Studies suggest that states can accelerate the decline in son preference, through media efforts to help parents perceive that daughters can now be as valuable as sons.

Keywords:

• governance
• political economy
• kinship
• Asia
• modernisation
• son preference

Acknowledgements

Valuable feedback from Prasenjit Duara, David Faure, Hill Gates and Helen Siu on the discussion of China, and from Martina Deuchler, on the discussion of Korea, is gratefully acknowledged. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ‘Inter-Asia Roundtable on Gender Relations in the 21st Century Asian Family’, organised by the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. Valuable feedback from Terry Hull, Gavin Jones, Lan Pei Chia, Leela Visaria and other participants at the roundtable is gratefully acknowledged. These are the author's views and should not be attributed to the World Bank or any affiliated organisation or member country.

Notes

1. See, for example, Hill and Upchurch (1995), Klasen (1994) and Yount (2001).

2. See, for example, Das Gupta (1997, 1999).

3. I am grateful to Terry Hull for this vector analogy.

4. These residence rules are sometimes called ‘virilocal’, i.e. living where the husband lives, or ‘uxorilical’, i.e. living where the wife lives. Neolocal residence can go with any of the three types of inheritance system, since circumstances may require the couple to set up an independent home.

5. Fox (1967, chapter 4) also points out that matrilineal kinship systems can become inherently unstable once pressure on resources grow and property becomes scarce and valuable, leading men to seek control of their parents' property, as with the Nayars of south India. Arrangements can then become complex as the men pass on their property to their sisters’ sons, generating a clash between matrilineal inheritance rules and the men's desires to provide for their own sons. Such pressures are far lower if there is an abundance of land to cultivate, or in hunting and gathering societies, where there is little property to be passed on.

6. See, for example, Banks (1983), Dube (1997), Fox (1961), Frankenberg et al. (2002), Geertz (1961), Geertz and Geetz (1975), Limanonda (1995) and Ong (1990). In Bali, Geertz and Geetz (1975, p. 1) sometimes found large organised kin groups with corporately-owned common property, but these groups did not necessarily have any detailed knowledge of their genealogical relationship.

7. Some of these systems can verge on matriliny. In north Thailand, daughters are the main source of old age support. The norm is for newly-married couples to live with the wife's parents for some years, and for the last daughter to stay on and inherit the land and house after the parents' death (Limanonda 1995).

8. See, for example, Arensberg and Kimball (1968), Nakane (1967), and Sieder and Mitterauer (1983).

9. See Arensberg and Kimball (1968), and Sieder and Mitterauer (1983). A fuller comparison of these Asian and European kinship systems, and their theoretical and empirical ramifications, has been developed in Das Gupta (1999).

10. Note that regardless of whether or not an individual parent is endogamously married, they will absorb social norms set in the framework of the overall level of expectation that daughters will not be lost to their family after marriage.

11. See, for example, Kandiyoti (1988), and the readings in Cornwall (2005).

12. In the rare cases when women do return, they and their parents have to struggle to make it work, because other members of the village resist the incursion on their property rights; see the case studies in Das Gupta and Li (1999), and Das Gupta et al. (2003). This continued to apply in China even after private property was abolished, because women lost their right to be supported from communally-held property once they married (Gao 1994).

13. For China, see Duara (1988, pp. 94–95).

14. Dowry became the norm in this region after the 1930s, when reductions in child mortality created a situation where, given that men marry women younger than themselves, there was a surplus of marriageable women for each cohort of men. There are reports of brideprice being once again resorted to in these states, as fertility decline has ended the ‘marriage squeeze’ against women (Kaur 2004).

15. Ancestor worship is found in many places, including several African societies and Japan. However, it is only in China, Korea and northwest India that the objective is to bind all the men of the lineage together; people are obliged to worship all their male ancestors in systematic recognition of their position in the lineage. In African societies, the worship of ancestors is ad hoc, with those especially notable or powerful being selected for worship. In Japan, people can expand their universe of ancestor worship to include non-kin of whom they were fond of, and Buddhism continues to exert a far greater influence on rites than the neo-Confucianism dominant in China and South Korea (Janelli & Janelli 1982, pp. 177–182; Smith 1974). In most of India, ‘ancestor worship’ consists mostly of a series of funerary rites to help a deceased person make the transition from this world to the next.

16. See also Janelli and Janelli (1982).

17. Inter alia, these stipulated that family headship must be held by the men in the line of the eldest son, that inheritance should be through the male line, that men must marry outside their lineage, that women should be transferred to their husband's family register upon marriage, and that the children belong to the father's lineage even in the case of divorce.

18. This section draws on Pradhan (1966), and the author's dissertation fieldwork in a Jat village.

19. The Rajputs’ social organisation was also clan-based, but it allowed much scope for individuals to establish their own alliances outside the clan, and to accumulate wealth and power thereby (Kasturi 2002). Such success led people to set up fiefdoms and kingdoms. Unlike the Jats, the Rajput clan system was not used for administrative purposes, nor did it emphasise the equality of men within the brotherhood.

20. The areas where Jats are to be found are indicated in the frontispiece map of Pradhan (1966), though this does not indicate the proportion of the local population that they constitute.

21. The Hindu Jats’ religious beliefs are loosely linked to mainstream Hinduism, and a significant number of them have converted to Sikhism and Islam while maintaining their Jat identity.

22. Author's dissertation fieldwork. This system of mobilisation is also described by Fortescue (1911), writing in the first half of the nineteenth century.

23. For example, Toennies discussed a shift from Gemeinschaft (community) to Gesellschaft (purposive association), Maine, a shift from status to contract, Durkheim, a shift from mechanical to organic solidarity, Weber, a shift from behaviour motivated by tradition, affect or values to a goal-oriented rationality, and Parsons, a shift from ascribed to achieved status.

24. See, for example, Inkeles and Smith (1974), and McClelland (1961).

25. This is based on the author's dissertation fieldwork in a village near Kanjhawla, which included the observation of this fight. Kasturi (2002) also documented the colonial administration's efforts to undermine the considerable military and economic power of Rajput lineages in northern India.

26. For more detailed discussion of these issues, see Das Gupta et al. (2004).

27. For details of these efforts in China, see Croll (2000), and for China and India, see Das Gupta et al. (2004). See also Naqvi (2006) for a description of recent media efforts in India.

28. Indian Muslims maintained their own separate family laws.