Indonesia Minangkabau
A traditional Minangkabau rice-storage building, Sumatra
Courtesy Hermine L. Dreyfuss and Festival of Indonesia
The Minangkabau--who predominate along the coasts of
Sumatera
Utara and Sumatera Barat, interior Riau, and northern
Bengkulu
provinces--in the early 1990s numbered more than 3.5
million. Like
the Batak, they have large corporate descent groups, but
unlike the
Batak, the Minangkabau traditionally reckon descent
matrilineally.
In this system, a child is regarded as descended from his
mother,
not his father. A young boy, for instance, has his primary
responsibility to his mother's and sisters' clans. In
practice, in
most villages a young man will visit his wife in the
evenings but
spend the days with his sister and her children. It is
usual for
married sisters to remain in their parental home.
According to a
1980 study by anthropologist Joel S. Kahn, there is a
general
pattern of residence among the Minangkabau in which
sisters and
unmarried lineage members try to live close to one
another, or even
in the same house.
Landholding is one of the crucial functions of the
female
lineage unit called suku. Since the Minangkabau
men, like
the Acehnese men, often merantau (go abroad) to
seek
experience, wealth, and commercial success, the women's
kin group
is responsible for maintaining the continuity of the
family and the
distribution and cultivation of the land. These groups are
led by
a penghulu (headman). The leaders are elected by
groups of
lineage leaders. As the suku declines in importance
relative
to the outwardly directed male sphere of commerce,
however, the
position of penghulu is not always filled after the
death of
the incumbent, particularly if lineage members are not
willing to
bear the expense of the ceremony required to install a new
penghulu.
The traditions of sharia and indigenous female-oriented
adat are often depicted as conflicting forces in
Minangkabau
society. The male-oriented sharia appears to offer young
men
something of a balance against the dominance of
adat law in
local villages, which forces a young man to wait passively
for a
marriage proposal from some young woman's family. By
acquiring
property and education through merantau experience,
a young
man can attempt to influence his own destiny in positive
ways.
Increasingly, when married couples merantau, the
women's
roles tend to change. When married couples reside in urban
areas or
outside the Minangkabau region, women lose some of their
social and
economic rights in property, their social and economic
position
becomes less favorable, and their divorce rate rises.
Minangkabau were prominent among the intellectual
figures in
the independence movement of Indonesia. Not only were they
strongly
Islamic, they spoke a language closely related to Bahasa
Indonesia,
which was considerably freer of hierarchical connotations
than
Javanese. Partly because of their tradition of
merantau,
Minangkabau developed a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie that
readily
adopted and promoted the ideas of an emerging nation
state.
Data as of November 1992
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