Typology Of Asian Societies

This book is about generating types of societies by the degree of individuals’ satisfaction with life domains, aspects, and styles via factor analysis. It adopts an evidence-based approach in typologizing and a bottom-up rather than a top-down perspective. Thus, the book’s position is against Hegel (freedom for one person), Marx (the Asiatic mode of production), Weber (Protestant ethics and the spirit of capitalism), Wittfogel (Asiatic autocracy), and Rostow (Western-led modernization). These classical and modern authors tend to see Asian societies with somewhat fixated eyes and categorize Asian societies in a top-down manner. When random-sampled respondents are questioned about their satisfaction with daily life in terms of life domains, aspects, and styles, public policy and institutions as well as survival and social relations are inevitably touched upon—the latter two being the key dimensions common to the World Values Survey and other cultural surveys. This book proposes a new mode of typologizing societies, Asian or non-Asian, not immediately familiar to human geographers, cultural anthropologists, or sociologists, but revealing many complex unknowns with the easy-to-learn typologizing method.

Despite its extraordinary diversity of ethnicities, religions, and political systems, Southeast Asia plays a key role in global economies and geopolitics, especially in light of its strategic position bordering China and India.

This book provides an overview of the anthropological debate on house societies, pertaining particularly to Southeast Asian social formations. The book’s point of departure is a comparative model of social formations in Southeast Asia outlined by Shelly Errington. Although this model features prominently in anthropological discussions of the region, no detailed analysis of this comparative approach exists. This might be attributed to the fact that Errington’s model is theoretically dense, alluding to the rather complicated anthropological field of kinship studies. Errington’s model combines premises of Lévi-Strauss’ Structural Anthropology with Clifford Geertz’ symbolic or interpretative paradigm and situates the synthesis in the anthropology of insular Southeast Asia. This book traces the genealogy of this model and provides detailed explications of its basic theoretical premises before it explores the concept of house societies and how it is applied by Errington to approach and compare Southeast Asian social formations. The book reveals the structuralism that speaks through Errington’s comparative approach by discussing the concept of transformation and indicates the potentials and limitations a typology of different house societies has for the anthropology of Southeast Asia.

Cultural Politics and Asian Values looks at the political, cultural and religious background of East and Southeast Asian societies and those of 'the West', with a view to seeing how they are affecting contemporary national and international politics: democratization, the international human rights discourse, NGOs and globalisation. The book surveys the political history and pre-history of the 'Asian values' debate, taking it up to the era of Megawati Sukarnoputri, Chen Shui-bian and Kim Dae-jung. In chapters on Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and liberalism, Barr explores the histories and conceptual essences of the world religions involved in or affected by the debate.

Social cohesion has become an important public goal in many countries across the globe, not only in the Western hemisphere, but also in Asia. Despite the growing political and academic interest in the concept, there is no generally accepted definition of social cohesion. As a result, empirical insights are lacking. Against this backdrop, the Bertelsmann Stiftung has initiated the "Social Cohesion Radar" which now, for the first time, presents empirical findings on South, Southeast and East Asia. The study provides an analysis and review of social cohesion in 22 Asian countries in a comparative perspective. It presents a valid and reliable measurement of current and past levels of social cohesion and explores its most important determinants and outcomes. As an extension of the Social Cohesion Radar series the study will be of interest and value to policy makers, academics, think tanks and civil society organizations.

In many non-Western contexts, modernization has tended to be equated with Westernization, and hence with an abandonment of authentic indigenous identities and values. This is evident in the recent history of many Asian societies, where efforts to modernize – spurred on by the spectre of foreign domination – have often been accompanied by determined attempts to stamp national variants of modernity with the brand of local authenticity: ‘Asian values’, ‘Chinese characteristics’, a Japanese cultural ‘essence’ and so forth. Highlighting (or exaggerating) associations between the more unsettling consequences of modernization and alien influence has thus formed part of a strategy whereby elites in many Asian societies have sought to construct new forms of legitimacy for old patterns of dominance over the masses. The apparatus of modern systems of mass education, often inherited from colonial rulers, has been just one instrument in such campaigns of state legitimation. This book presents analyses of a range of contemporary projects of citizenship formation across Asia in order to identify those issues and concerns most central to Asian debates over the construction of modern identities. Its main focus is on schooling, but also examines other vehicles for citizenship-formation, such as museums and the internet; the role of religion (in particular Islam) in debates over citizenship and identity in certain Asian societies; and the relationship between state-centred identity discourses and the experience of increasingly ‘globalized’ elites. With chapters from an international team of contributors, this interdisciplinary volume will appeal to students and scholars of Asian culture and society, Asian education, comparative education and citizenship.

This book studies and compares quality of life in 29 countries/societies in Asia: Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Japan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Korea(South), Laos, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Vietnam. We utilize the AsiaBarometer Surveys conducted annually from 2003 through 2008. We focus on the notion of subjective quality of life and conceptualize it as two levels, global and domain. After we explain about the AsiaBarometer Survey Project, we explore current country profile, demographics, lifestyles, value priorities, specific life domain assessment and overall quality of life. We then estimate the independent effects of demographics, lifestyles, value priorities, life domain assessment on the overall quality of life within each society. As well as comparing the results between nations, we look for key generalized characteristics of life quality for the entire and sub-regions of Asia.