ABSTRACT
The western scientific tradition, which seeks to categorize and systematize information as a starting point for understanding rural societies, may miss much of the infinite, elusive and rapidly changing diversity which characterizes the lives of women throughout Asia. Women naturally devoted most of their time to reproduction, participating in subsistence when men were engaged in warfare, or in favourable conditions, such as exist in swidden or horticulture ecosystems. The low status of women throughout the world has, however, been explained on the grounds that the dangers of hunting and the physical strength required meant that men always performed this essential activity; women's primary responsibility has always been producing and raising children. The structural/functional outlook which stresses the importance of the structure of society in governing economic relations and roles between men and women sees the status of women as being low in pre-industrial society and improving in post-industrial society.
