Moral Speech and Social Order: Relational Ethics in Southeast Asian Proverbs
DOI: https://doi.org/10.65840/jllcd.v1i3.50
relational ethics, Southeast Asian proverbs, ordinary ethics, social governance, family duty, communal solidarity, cultural pragmatics
Abstract
This article develops a relational-ethics reading of Southeast Asian proverbs through a strengthened corpus analysis. From a 227-record workbook of proverbs and wise quotations, 18 source-gap rows were excluded and 209 analyzable records were retained. A relational sub-corpus of 106 items was then constructed from five domains: integrity and self-governance, communal solidarity and cooperation, family and intergenerational duty, leadership and power, and economic stewardship. These domains account for 50.7% of the cleaned corpus, showing that moral discourse in the data is not only about individual character but also about regulating relations among persons, households, communities, rulers, and resources. Integrity is the largest relational domain (28 items), followed by communal solidarity (26), family duty (23), leadership and power (16), and economic stewardship (13). Country profiles show Cambodia/Khmer with the highest relational proportion among major clusters (60.0%), followed by Brunei/Malay, the Philippines, Laos, Myanmar, and Vietnam. The article argues that Southeast Asian proverbs encode relational governance through five mechanisms: reciprocity, genealogy, authority, material restraint, and self-accountability.
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