Lestariweb
culture and traditions of the Minangkabau
Lestariweb
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.
Written by The Library of Congress - Country Studies
Data as of November 1992
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