Sui People - Society

Society

The Sui are organized around family clans. Villages usually have a few hundred inhabitants, most of whom have the same family name (Wei 2003:ix).

Traditional Sui houses are usually made of fir or pine, although today the houses are increasingly made with bricks. There are three main types of traditional Sui housing (Wei 2003:ix):

  1. ɣaan2 faaŋ1 (Chinese: ganlan mulou) - The ganlan stilted house, which has two or three stories. The second floor is used for the living quarters whereas the first floor is used primarily as a stable and storage area.
  2. ɣaan2 hum5 - The ground house, which has one story.
  3. The split level house - a "hanging foot" building called diaojiaolou in Chinese. These houses are built on hillsides, with longer pillars supporting the downhill-facing side of the house, and are called "hanging house" (diaojiao) since the pillars supporting the house are sometimes located outside the walls.

If a woman is widowed, she covers her hair with a fabric of white color for three years. The Sui possess a lunar calendar that is initiated in the ninth lunar month. Their funeral services are elaborate and long ceremonies where animal sacrifices are carried out in honor of the dead. Except for fish, Sui villagers usually refrain from eating meat after the death of a person (Wei 2003:xvi).

Read more about this topic:  Sui People

Famous quotes containing the word society:

    “Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
    —Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)

    “The worst enemy of truth and freedom in our society is the compact majority. Yes, the damned, compact, liberal majority.”
    —Henrik Ibsen (1828–1906)

    “In abnormal times like our own, when institutions are changing rapidly in several directions at once and the traditional framework of society has broken down, it becomes more and more difficult to measure any type of behavior against any other.”
    —John Dos Passos (1896–1970)