The Cultural Review of Traditional Chinese Society

The Cultural Review of Traditional Chinese Society

ANT 234

Instructor Lucy Lea Brown

December 15, 2013

The Cultural Review of Traditional Chinese Society

        Culture is a term used to define a set of learned and shared behaviors and beliefs by a group of people.  Those behaviors and beliefs tend to be developed out of necessity that eventually creates and shapes certain aspects about a culture.  The purpose of this paper is to present a cultural review of traditional Chinese society by discussing and analyzing the function and structure of marriage, family, and kinship relations by examining their mode of subsistence, gender relations and expectations, and social stratification.  In comparison, the paper will present, briefly, how economic and political changes have since affected traditional marriages practices and family structures in modern Chinese society.  

        In order to understand the marriage practices, family structure, and kinship relations it is necessary exam traditional Chinese society's economic and political station as an agrarian society.  The economy of China relied on agriculture.  The Chinese specific mode of agriculture was on the use of the plow (Stockard, 2002).  Unlike horticultural societies, where people would use the land as a resource and then move seasonally after exhausting all the animals and plant resources, plowing allowed people to stay and utilize the land a great deal more.  Plow agriculture required a great deal of investing in the land itself, but yielded more subsistence to support populations and allowed permanent settlement.  Therefore, land ownership became very significant in agricultural based society (Stockard, 2002).  According to Stockard (2002), "The high-calorie grains, such as rice and millet, which were the preferred crop of plow agriculture, could be readily stored and enabled the rise of great cities and states, dependent on large populations engaged in farming" (p. 41).  The plow allowed the means to improve land usage and increase crop productivity.  However, it also required demanding investment into irrigation and fertilization as well.  The more land a family owned and could invest into the cultivation helped determined their class status.  In addition, the introduction of the plow also allowed a shift to new varieties of crops (Stockard, 2002).  In an agricultural subsistence based society such as traditional Chinese society, physical labor represented value.  This value gave an individual both power and responsibility.  This also included those who could afford to pay for the physical labor of others, such as landowners who employed poor peasants to work their land for them.

        Traditional Chinese society had a very distinct class system.  Gonya (2011) explains, "While technically, ancient Chinese culture did not have a true caste system, there were divisions according to education, occupation, and family background that kept various segments of the society from co-mingling" (para. 1).  There was a very wealthy upper class as well as a poor, peasant class, and each lived their own separate ways.  In the book entitled "Marriage In Culture," Janice Stockard (2002) states, "Chinese society was not clearly not egalitarian, but highly stratified, crosscut by the interests of different social classes" (p. 39).  Different lifestyles, occupations, and opportunities were characterized by varies access to economic resources, power, and prestige.  The four main classes that made the social hierarchy in traditional Chinese society were the elite, artisan, merchant, and the peasant (Stockard, 2002).  However, prestige and value between the four classes was based on their contribution to the agrarian society.