Love, Duty, and Moral Order Across Cultures: An Anthropological Comparison of the Cowherd and Weaver Girl and Selected Sri Lankan Narratives

Abstract

Folklore provides an important anthropological lens for examining how societies construct, transmit, and reinterpret cultural meanings concerning social relationships, morality, gender, and cosmological order. This study presents a qualitative narrative review of the Chinese Cowherd and Weaver Girl (Niulang and Zhinu) narrative in focused comparison with two selected Sri Lankan traditions: the story of Prince Saliya and Asokamala and the Pattini tradition. Drawing on Lévi-Strauss's structural anthropology and Geertz's symbolic anthropology, the study examines five interconnected dimensions: narrative oppositions and social order; gender and labour; love, social hierarchy, and moral discipline; cosmology and environmental meaning; and ritual and cultural expression. Relevant literature was identified through Google Scholar, JSTOR, and Scopus, supplemented by backward and forward citation tracking, and was analysed thematically. The comparison demonstrates that the selected narratives address recurring concerns involving individual desire, social obligation, gender expectations, moral order, and relationships between human life and wider cosmological or religious systems. However, these concerns are organized and resolved differently. The Cowherd and Weaver Girl narrative places personal love within a celestial and ritual framework, while Saliya and Asokamala foreground the relationship between personal attachment and social hierarchy. The Pattini tradition provides a contrasting framework centred on gendered virtue, moral authority, religious symbolism, and ritual practice. The study argues that these narratives should not be treated as culturally equivalent versions of the same story; rather, their comparison reveals how comparable social concerns acquire culturally specific meanings. The study contributes to comparative folklore and anthropology by demonstrating the value of combining structural and symbolic approaches to examine both recurring thematic tensions and culturally distinctive forms of interpretation.

Keywords

• Folklore
• Chinese Mythology
• Gender Roles
• Symbolic Anthropology
• Structuralism
• Myth and Ritual
• Cultural Comparison