Because of the region’s long and complex history, the people of Southeast Asia have a great diversity of cultures and religious traditions. Now globalization and urbanization are adding yet more diversity as new cultural influences come in from abroad and as urban women gain more independence and pursue careers outside the home.

Southeast Asia is a place of cultural pluralism in that it is inhabited by groups of people from many different backgrounds. Over the past 40,000 years, migrants have come to the region from India, the Tibetan Plateau, the Himalayas, China, Southwest Asia, Japan, Korea, and the Pacific. Many of these groups have remained distinct, partly because they lived in isolated pockets separated by rugged topography or seas. However, the religious practices and traditions of many groups show diverse cultural influences (Figure 10.24).

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As discussed in the “Religious Legacies” section, the major religious traditions of Southeast Asia include Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Islam, Christianity, and animism (Figure 10.25). In animism, a belief system common among many indigenous peoples, natural features such as rocks, trees, rivers, crop plants, and the rains all carry spiritual meaning. These natural phenomena are the focus of festivals and rituals to give thanks for bounty and to mark the passing of the seasons, and these ideas have permeated all the imported religious traditions of the region.

The patterns of religious practice are complex; the patterns of distribution reveal an island–mainland division. All but animism originated outside the region and were brought primarily by traders, priests (Brahmin and Christian), and colonists. Buddhism is dominant on the mainland, especially in Burma, Thailand, and Cambodia. In Vietnam, people practice a mix of Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism that originated in China. Islam is dominant in Indonesia (the world’s largest Muslim country), on the southern Malay Peninsula, and in Malaysia, and it is increasing in popularity in the southern Philippines. Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion in Timor-Leste and the Philippines, where it was introduced by Portuguese and Spanish colonists, respectively. Hinduism first arrived with Indian traders thousands of years ago and was once much more widespread; now it is found only in small patches, chiefly on the islands of Bali and Lombok, east of Java. Recent Indian immigrants who came as laborers in the twentieth century (during the latter part of the European colonial period) have reintroduced Hinduism to Burma, Malaysia, and Singapore, but only as minority communities.

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All of Southeast Asia’s religions have changed as a result of exposure to one another. Many Muslims and Christians believe in spirits and practice rituals that have their roots in animism. Hindus and Christians in Indonesia, surrounded as they are by Muslims, have absorbed ideas from Islam, such as the seclusion of women. Muslims have absorbed ideas and customs from indigenous belief systems, especially ideas about kinship and marriage, as illustrated in the vignette below.

Globalization Brings Cultural Diversity and Homogeneity Southeast Asia’s cities are extraordinarily culturally diverse, a fact that is illustrated by their food customs (Figure 10.27). But in some ways, this diversity decreases as the many groups continue to be exposed to each other and to global culture. For example, Malaysian teens of many different ethnicities (Chinese, Tamil, Malay, Bangladeshi) spend much of their spare time following the same European soccer teams, playing the same video games, visiting the same shopping centers, eating the same fast food, and talking to each other in English. While rural areas retain more traditional influences—of the world’s 6000 or so actively spoken languages, 1000 can be found in rural Southeast Asia—in cities, one main language usually dominates trade and politics.

One group that has brought cultural diversity to Southeast Asia is the Overseas (or ethnic) Chinese (see Chapter 9). Small groups of traders from southern and coastal China have been active in Southeast Asia for thousands of years; over the centuries, there has been a constant trickle of immigrants from China. The forebearers of most of today’s Overseas Chinese, however, began to arrive in large numbers during the nineteenth century, when the European colonizers needed labor for their plantations and mines. Later, those who fled China’s Communist Revolution after 1949 sought permanent homes in Southeast Asian trading centers. Today, more than 26 million Overseas Chinese live and work across Southeast Asia, primarily as shopkeepers and as small business owners. A few are wealthy financiers, and a significant number are still engaged in agricultural labor.

Chinese success at small-scale commercial and business activity throughout the region has reinforced the perception that the Chinese are diligent, clever, and extremely frugal, often working very long hours. Although few are actually wealthy, with their region-wide family and friendship connections and access to start-up money, some have been well positioned to take advantage of the new growth sectors in the globalizing economies of the region. Sometimes externally funded, new Chinese-owned enterprises have put out of business older, more traditional establishments that depend on local people of modest incomes (both ethnic Malay and ethnic Chinese).

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In recent years, when low- and middle-income Southeast Asians were hurt by the recurring financial crises, some tended to blame their problems on the Overseas Chinese. Waves of violence resulted. Chinese people were assaulted, their temples desecrated, and their homes and businesses destroyed. Conflicts involving the Overseas Chinese have taken place in Vietnam, Malaysia, and in many parts of Indonesia (Sumatra, Java, Kalimantan, and Sulawesi) as well. Some Overseas Chinese have attempted to diffuse tensions through public education about Chinese culture. Others have shown their civic awareness by financing economic and social aid projects to help their poorer neighbors, usually of local ethnic origins (Malay, Thai, Indonesian).

Gender roles are being transformed across Southeast Asia by urbanization and the changes it brings to family organization and employment. Here we look at some surprising traditional patterns of gender roles in extended families. Moving to the city shifts people away from extended families and toward the nuclear family. The gains that women have made in political empowerment, educational achievement, and paid employment have not erased gender disparities.

Family Organization, Traditional and Modern Throughout the region, it has been common for a newly married couple to reside with, or close to, the wife’s parents. Along with this custom is a range of behavioral rules that empower the woman in a marriage, despite some basic patriarchal attitudes. For example, a family is headed by the oldest living male, usually the wife’s father. When he dies, he passes on his wealth and power to the husband of his oldest daughter, not to his own son. (A son goes to live with his wife’s parents and inherits from them.) Hence, a husband may live for many years as a subordinate in his father-in-law’s home. Instead of the wife being the outsider, subject to the demands of her mother-in-law—as is the case, for example, in South Asia—it is the husband who must show deference. The inevitable tension between the wife’s father and the son-in-law is resolved by the custom of ritual avoidance—in daily life they simply arrange to not encounter each other much. The wife manages communication between the two men by passing messages and even money back and forth. Consequently, she has access to a wealth of information crucial to the family and has the opportunity to influence each of the two men.

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Another traditional custom that empowers women is that women are often the family financial managers. Husbands turn over their pay to their wives, who then apportion the money to various household and family needs.

Urbanization and the shift to the nuclear family mean that young couples now frequently live apart from the extended family, an arrangement that takes the pressure to defer to his father-in-law off the husband. Because this nuclear family unit is often dependent entirely on itself for support, wives usually work for wages outside the home. Although married women lose the power they would have if they lived among their close kin, they are empowered by the opportunity to have a career and an income. The main drawback of this compact family structure, as many young families have discovered in Europe and the United States, is that there is no pool of relatives available to help working parents with child care and housework. Further, no one is left to help elderly parents maintain the rural family home.

Political and Economic Empowerment of Women Women have made some impressive gains in politics in Southeast Asia. Economically, they still earn less money than men and work less outside the home, but this will likely change if their level of education in relation to that of men continues to increase (see “On the Bright Side”).

Southeast Asia has had several prominent female leaders over the years, most of whom have risen to power in times of crisis as the leaders of movements opposing corrupt or undemocratic regimes. In the Philippines, Corazon Aquino, a member of a large and powerful family, became president in 1986 after leading the opposition to Ferdinand Marcos, whose 21-year presidency was infamous for its corruption and authoritarianism. She is credited with helping reinvigorate political freedoms in the Philippines. Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo, from another powerful family, became president in 2001 after opposing a similarly corrupt president, and then she was accused of corruption herself. Still, her administration kept the economy sound throughout the global recession starting in 2007. In 2010, Corazon’s son, Benigno Aquino III, became president.

In Indonesia, Megawati Sukarnoputri became president in 2001 after decades of leading the opposition to Suharto’s notoriously corrupt 31-year reign. In Burma, for more than two decades, a woman, Aung San Suu Kyi, has led opposition to the military dictatorship. In Thailand, Yingluck Shinawatra was elected prime minister in 2011 as part of a popular political movement started by her brother.

All of these women leaders were wives, daughters, or siblings of powerful male political leaders, which raises some questions of nepotism. However, family favoritism cannot account for several countries where the percentage of female national legislators is well above the world average of 18 percent: Timor-Leste (29 percent), Laos (25 percent), Vietnam (24 percent), Singapore (22 percent), the Philippines (22 percent), and Cambodia (21 percent).

Despite their increasing successes in politics and their acknowledged role in managing family money, women still lag well behind men in terms of economic well-being. Throughout the region, men have a higher rate of employment outside the home than women, and are paid more for doing the same work. But changes may be on the way. In Brunei, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand, significantly more women than men are completing training beyond secondary school. If training qualifications were the sole consideration for employment, women would appear to have an advantage over men. This advantage may be significant if service sector economies, which generally require more education, become dominant in more countries. The service economy already dominates in Singapore, the Philippines, Thailand, and Indonesia.

Southeast Asia has become one of several global centers for the sex industry, supported in large part by international visitors willing to pay for sex. Sex tourism in Southeast Asia grew out of the sexual entertainment industry that served foreign military troops stationed in Asia during World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. Now, primarily civilian men arrive from around the globe to live out their fantasies during a few weeks of vacation. The industry is found throughout the region but is most prominent in Thailand. In 2013, twenty-six million tourists visited Thailand alone, up from 250,000 in 1965, and some observers estimate that as many as 70 percent were looking for sex. Even though the industry is officially illegal, some Thai government officials have even publicly praised sex tourism for its role in helping the country weather the economic crises, because it supported jobs. Some corrupt officials also favor sex tourism because it provides them with a source of untaxed income from bribes.

One result of the “success” of sex tourism is a high demand for sex workers, which has attracted organized crime. Estimates of the numbers of sex workers vary from 30,000 to more than a million in Thailand alone. Gangs often coerce girls and women into remaining in sex work once they have been forced into the trade. Demographers estimate that 20,000 to 30,000 Burmese girls taken against their will—some as young as 12—are working in Thai brothels. Their wages are too low to enable them to buy their own freedom. In the course of their work, they must service more than 10 clients per day, and they are routinely exposed to physical abuse and sexually transmitted diseases, especially HIV.

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