Families in Asia

Home and Kin

Stella Quah

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134050017
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política social

Families in Asia provides a unique sociological analysis of family trends in Asia.

Stella R. Quah uses demographic and survey data, personal interviews and case studies from China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam to provide a wide-ranging comparative analysis of family trends and the role of the state and social policy.

Focusing on the most relevant and significant aspects of family and kin, chapters include:

Concepts and research trends

Family forming

Parenthood

Grandparenthood

Gender roles in families

Marriage breakdown

The impact of Socio-economic development

This new edition has been updated and expanded throughout and includes new material on dowry, singlehood, adoption, the transformation of the senior generation, changes in family courts and the role of the state in family wellbeing.

Families in Asia will be the perfect companion for students and scholars alike who are interested in family sociology, public and social policy, and Asian society and culture more broadly.

1
Studying families in Asia

The objective of this book is to provide a comparative analysis of family trends in Asia by focusing on the most important aspects of family and kin, from the process of dating to the impact of economic development on homes and family life, as they are experienced in ten Asian countries. I begin the story by highlighting the efforts made by researchers since the 1950s to study Asian families. This background information helps the reader appreciate the details of studies and findings discussed in the other chapters.

The study of families in Asia has experienced a slow but unambiguous shift over the past six decades. While most studies up to the 1960s were authored by European and North American researchers, today researchers in Asia are actively analyzing family structure and behaviour in their own countries. This development has produced a wider range of themes and research approaches to the study of families. Three main questions are explored in this chapter: What themes are dominant in studies of Asian families? What are the theoretical perspectives most commonly applied? Also, what are the most common methodological approaches used? However, before dealing with these three questions, we need to clarify what ‘family’ means in this book.

Defining family

Family, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. We would be happy settling the matter that way, except that to study families accurately we need clear and systematic definitions. Now, systematic definitions of family abound as shown in comprehensive reviews of family research such as the two volumes on A Sixty-Year Review, 1930–1990 published in 1991 by Stephen Bahr (Bahr, 1991a, b) and the second edition of the Handbook of Marriage and the Family (Sussman et al., 1999). Naturally every textbook on the sociology of family offers a definition (e.g. Cherlin, 2006; Ingoldsby and Smith, 2006; Adams and Trost, 2005); but sociologists David M. Klein and James M. White (1996:20–24) provide one of the most useful definitions of family. These authors propose that we think of family as a social group that is substantially different from other groups such as co-workers or close friends. In their view, four characteristics distinguish the family from other social groups. First, ‘families last for a considerably longer period of time than do most other social groups’. Second, ‘families are intergenerational’. Third, ‘families contain both biological and affinal (e.g. legal, common law) relationships between members’. And fourth, these relationships link families ‘to a larger kinship organization’ (Klein and White, 1996:20–23). In sum, these four features make the family a unique social group.

In addition to being unique, the social group known as family displays a wide variation in form, structure and internal dynamics across time and space. In Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand, analysts and policy makers have recognized for some time now, the existence of a multiplicity of family forms (Rapoport and Rapoport 1982; Sussman and Steinmetz, 1987; Moen, 1989; Kamerman and Kahn, 1989; Edgar, 1990; Koopman-Boyden, 1990). To appreciate this variation we need to distinguish between ideal family and actual family forms. This conceptual distinction introduced by M. J. Levy (1949, 1965) based on his study of the family in China, is highly relevant to Asian countries in general. I discuss this distinction further in Chapter 3 but the notions of ideal and actual families are relevant at this point.

Over the decades, Asian communities have continuously followed and transmitted to their children their image of the ideal family as dictated by their respective cultural traditions. For example, studies of families in China (Cheung and Liu, 1997; Yi, 2002), Japan (Sasaki and Wilson, 1997), Korea (Inoue, 1998), Malaysia (Ngin and DeVanzo, 1999), Philippines (Medina, 1991), Singapore (Quah, 1998), Taiwan, (Lu, 2000), Thailand (Schvaneveldt et al., 2001) and Vietnam (Thi 1999; Knodel et al., 2000), indicate that, notwithstanding the cultural differences across Asian countries, they are all inclined to regard as their ideal family the extended family, understood as a tightly knitted group involving at least three generations where parents, their married children – all, some, or only one child – and their children’s children and spouses live in the same household or compound or at least in the same neighbourhood. Thus, the concept of the ideal family has undergone comparably minor variations in Asia across time.

The actual family, however, is that which people can ‘afford’ to have according to the specific circumstances of their lives. During the past decades the ideal family has remained a cultural icon of Asian tradition while the actual family has been reshaped by the changing tides of social, political and economic development, as documented in the chapters that follow. Today, the legal arrangements covering housing, income tax, inheritance, child maintenance, adoption, health care and other aspects, suggest that there is a certain awareness of the actual presence of different types of families such as three-generation families, nuclear families and single-parent families born out of widowhood, separation or divorce. Yet, these tend to be perceived as variations of a sole socially recognized legitimate family where parents are legally married and the children are born within such a legal union. Studies on the perception of family in Asian countries show that although people are aware of the wide diversity in household arrangements, other family forms not based on, or derived from, a legal marriage may be tolerated informally under certain conditions – such as getting a second or third wife if the first wife failed to produce a son – but are typically denied the same social recognition (see for example Yoo, 2006; Quah, 1998; Bélanger, 2006).

One additional aspect of the definition of family is the personal or subjectively perceived family. This aspect refers to the affective meaning we give to family in our personal lives, a meaning that determines our subjectively marked family boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. For a child rescued from a decaying orphanage by an adopting couple her loving adopted parents may be her true parents even if she knows she is adopted and has met her natural parents. You may not see the son of your divorced parent as your ‘half-brother’ because you feel as close to him as you are to your ‘full’ brother. The subjective perception of family boundaries encapsulated in the concept ‘boundary ambiguity’ proposed by Pauline Boss (1977, 1988) in her study of divorced families and that she developed with Kay Pasley (1987, 1993) is a very important concept in family sociology. This concept illuminates the affectual and subjective definition of family in each person’s life and will be discussed further in subsequent chapters.

Families as unique social groups, therefore, may be studied from a wide variety of angles of analysis. Researchers may investigate the ideal, actual or affectual (subjectively defined) family forms either at the individual’s or small group’s level (that is, micro-level analysis) or focusing on the societal implications for larger groups, institutions or socio-cultural or economic structures (that is, macro-level analysis). Besides these various levels of analysis, family sociology offers a rich body of theories and methodological techniques that, as it should be, are constantly under critical appraisal. In addition, family sociologists also do collaborative research with other social scientists, such as psychologists, economists and political scientists.

Studying families in Asia

As it happens around the world, the factors affecting the selection of family research topics and methodology in Asia have changed over time. In the process of knowledge creation, the selection of research themes is commonly determined by many factors including the researcher’s personal interest. Because most sociological studies are conducted at universities or research institutions, other factors affecting the selection of research topic are institutional agreement on the relevance of the topic and the availability of financial support and research facilities. Considering the impetus on university-led research that took off in the 1990s in the most developed countries in Asia, the development of family research may be generally classified into two historical phases: the ‘early’ period covering developments up to the end of the 1980s; and the ‘contemporary’ period starting in the 1990s.

The early period of family research

Systematic social science research on the family started very slowly in Asia. The beginning of this process is difficult to pinpoint precisely for the ten countries in this study but some main trends may be identified. Personal interest and the availability of financial and logistic support are factors influencing scientific research everywhere, including Japan (Fuse, 1996) and South Korea (Cho and Shin, 1996). Both countries lived through the destruction of war in the 1940s and 1950s, but regained their political and social stability and have attained high socio-economic development at a relatively fast pace. Correspondingly, their tertiary education institutions and social science research have also advanced.

On the other hand, higher education and research including studies of the family in China where drastically curtailed by the revolutionary change in the political system initiated in 1949. According to Chinese sociologist Tan Shen,

… sociology and anthropology were abolished in the readjustment of the institutions of higher education at the beginning of the 1950s, thus suspending for nearly 30 years the study on family through actual examples. Even till now, there have not been specialized studies of this period. I can only make a preliminary depiction of it in the light of the relevant documents issued by the Party and the government at the time.

(Tan, 1996:20)

The destruction caused by war and the subsequent change in its political system exerted the same damaging impact on social science research in Vietnam for almost four decades. Today, both China and Vietnam have regained their interest in scientific investigation and are actively upgrading and expanding their universities and research institutions.

The trajectory of Japan, China, South Korea and Vietnam differs significantly from that of the other six countries. Three features of Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand have been particularly influential in shaping the type of family research conducted in these countries. These features, all derived from the history and level of wealth of these countries, are: (a) colonial background; (b) flow of foreign scholars; and (c) restricted access to sources of financial support.

Colonial background features prominently in the description of the development of sociology and other social sciences in several Asian countries (Kumar and Raju, 1981; Quah, 1998:3–12) including Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore. According to Isabel Panopia and Ponciano Bennagen (1985:220–224), Spanish missionaries during the nineteenth century and American missionaries and scholars during the first half of the twentieth century exerted a significant influence upon the introduction and development of a research tradition, first in anthropology and later in sociology, in the Philippines. Both Spanish and American colonial administrators, missionaries and scholars were keenly interested in the study of indigenous peoples’ culture, religion, social structure and language, among other things. These topics dominated the research scene in sociology before the Second World War. The interest in indigenous culture produced studies of family structure and family behaviour such as kinship systems and marriage customs.

E.K.M. Masinambow and Meutia Swasono (1985:182–195) describe a rather similar scenario with respect to the role of the Dutch colonial government in Indonesia. From the mid-1800s until the 1940s, the Dutch colonial government was interested in understanding the culture and the level of assimilation of Indonesian peoples. Among the first research themes explored by officially sponsored studies were ‘land tenure, land ownership, migration … child marriages … prostitution’ (1985:183–184) and other aspects that were related, directly or indirectly, to the traditional family system of different Indonesian communities. Given the historical period, it is understandable that none of these studies were conducted by what the authors refer to as ‘trained sociologists’ who were available only ‘after Independence’ (1985:183) that took place soon after the Second World War.

Vietnam and Cambodia were French colonies in the latter part of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth century. Three other countries with a colonial past are Brunei, Malaysia and Singapore. They share a common history and the same British colonial rule with Hong Kong. The presence of the British colonial government in Malaysia and Singapore began in 1819, when the British Crown acquired the island of Singapore. In 1826, the territories of Penang and Malacca – in peninsular Malaysia – together with Singapore became the British or ‘Straits Settlements’. Malaysia gained full independence from Britain in 1963 with Singapore as one of the states of the Federation. Singapore separated from Malaysia and became an independent republic in 1965. Given this shared background as a unified British colony, there were no significant distinctions in the sociological research scene between these two countries before the Second World War. It appears that the British colonial government was less concerned with collecting systematic information on the cultures of indigenous peoples in the Straits Settlements than were the Spanish or American colonial administrators in Philippines or their Dutch counterparts in Indonesia. However, there were interested British and European scholars and missionaries who investigated various aspects of local customs and behaviour during the late 1800s and the first half of the 1900s. Following the trend reported in Indonesia and the Philippines, pioneer researchers during this period were foreigners not formally trained in sociology (Buckley, 1902; Reith, 1907), but their descriptions of customs, daily life and places provided data of great sociological interest. Japan and Korea have also a history of Western influence although it is more recent, briefer and the circumstances of the American presence in both countries were different. Nevertheless, following the same trend of British colonies, American researchers also initiated systematic studies of social and family life in these countries. In contrast to other Asian countries, Thailand does not have a colonial past.

In addition to the presence or absence of colonial background, the country variation in selection of research themes on family sociology is also in...

Table of contents

• Contents
• Charts
• Tables
• Preface
• 1 Studying families in Asia
• 2 ‘I do’, ‘We do’
• 3 Parenthood under siege?
• 4 Age, grandparents and social capital
• 5 From ‘His family, her duty’ to ‘Their family’
• 6 Conflict, divorce and the family court
• 7 Home, kin and the state in social change
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index