Family Life in a Northern Thai Village : A Study in the Structural Significance of Women

"Potter's 'humanistic narrative' probes family social structure and social organization in Chiangmai, a Northern Thai village ...a solid, informative, and very interesting and alive picture."--Library Journal "Gives us a rare inside view of daily life in a northern Thai village ...The reader gets a feeling of life, pleasure,jealously,anger, pain, and death that is seldom discussed in the anthropological literature."--Asia "Rejecting the traditional 'loosely structured' theory of the Thai family, Potter suggests a system that is female--centered with structurally significant consanguineal ties between women rather than men. This alternative not only explains the data presented but offers a new way of looking at comparative kinship." --Intercom "The dynamic interplay between the structural dominance of women and the ideological dominance of men is vividly brought out, challenging earlier, and possibly male-biased, perspectives on Northern Thai family structure."--Population and Development Review "Potter succeeds in presenting ethnographic material in a lively, humanistically oriented manner. By the time we have encountered three generations of Plenitudes at home in their courtyard ...we know them as individuals as we as representatives of an exotic culture. ..Potter presents individual portraits alongside this vivid picture of family and social structure, communal and individual economic activity, political factionalism, and religious observance ...this book stands as a challenge to cross-cultural psychology."--Contemporary Psychology "Dr. Potter's study is highly readable and will be of interest to the general public as well as to scholars."--Asian Student