Oh, absolutely. To take an extreme example, in areas of China with a large Manchu population, the Han Chinese bound women's feet at a much higher rate than the rest of the country--sometimes to the point that even slave girls' feet were bound. It was more important to establish us/not-us distinctions than to preserve half the population's economic value.

The thing about Tsarist Russia is interesting, and I wonder if the fact that the gap between the nobility and the serfs was so incredibly huge had something to do with it.

Very likely. The peasants (not serfs, though they might have been the descendants of serfs) had a zero-sum conception of the world, so if one of their fellows rose above the others, he was somehow taking something from everybody else. There was one older peasant who wanted to start an orchard next to his house, but people broke in and destroyed the trees so often that he had to give it up. The orchard wasn't on contested land, or likely to overshadow someone else's garden, or a symbol of the man's religious or political beliefs. It was just his attempt to enrich himself. Unacceptable. Must go. In a system as hermetically sealed as that, the peasants were probably finely tuned to what was good for them, and to hell with the rest of it.