A helpful source to extend several of these lines is this article, which I've augmented somewhat by bolding parts to which I wish to call particular attention: Women, Marriage and the Family in Chinese History (Patricia Ebrey 1990)

We need to get around the idea that "traditional" is static, unchanging, fixed... traditions have origins and histories and (often enough) half-lives too. And we want to outrun the simple notion that people have "customs" and that customs are what culture is all about. We're working toward elaborating our understanding of why people do what they do, individually and collectively. We interest ourselves in (among other things)

• what's in people's heads
• what people say they do
• what the actually DO do

East Asian societies have long and glorious histories of [written] commentary on Propriety --how things are supposed to be, how people are expected to act. The literati have been moralizing and prescribing and articulating the normative for thousands of years, and one of the great advantages of studying literate societies (which is mostly not what anthropologists have done) is that one can trace that evolution. Keep in mind, though that the literati are the elite...

We also need to address the question of what is a 'society' or a 'culture' in some empirical ways. One starting point is afforded by a diagram I know as "Skinner's Onion". This summarizes a great number of complexities in a small space, and gives us plenty of material for weeks to come... some of which we'll never get to.