Women in Minangkabau

Women in Minangkabau

On 11 June 1996 Joke van Reenen defended her PhD Thesis entitled: Central Pillars of the House: sisters, wives, and mothers in a rural community in Minangkabau, West Sumatra. Her position as AIO, Doctoral Assistant (PhD student) at the Research School CNWS: School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies at Leiden University, had come to an end in December 1995. Discussing the position of assistant and the subject of her passion: Minangkabau, we present a portrait of Joke van Reenen.

By Dick van der Meij

The first question that springs to mind is rather predictably: Why Minangkabau?

In 1984 an anthropologist and a sociologist specialized in non-Western societies were invited to Padang to help developing a Department of Anthropology at Andalas University in this West Sumatran city. This request for funding was submitted to the Dutch Minister for Development Cooperation and to the - then called - Netherlands University Foundation for International Cooperation (Nuffic). So I went to Padang. I spent 5 years in West Sumatra setting up the Anthropology Department and training university staff. While I was there of course I had the opportunity to look around and conduct some research of my own. After my appointment had ended I had the opportunity to do yet another six months of research, so I had a fairly good idea of what I wanted to do and Minangkabau presented itself as the ideal and natural choice.

The second question: Why women?

Gender relations and women's views on gender have always had my special interest. I had conducted earlier research on female perspectives in Tunesia, and it seemed to me to be a natural progression to continue investigating female views in the Minangkabau matrilineal setting. As a matter of fact, I do feel that to try to understand a culture, or even part of it - how can one even begin to try to understand a whole culture? - it would be best to study both male and female roles and perspectives. However, since the roles and perspectives of males had already been studied, I decided to make a complementary study of the female views.

One of the most striking phenomena in Minangkabau is merantau, going out of Minangkabau and seek experience elsewhere. How does this affect the lives of the women who stay behind?

It very much depends on the individual. Many women have no problem at all seeing their husband leave for abroad. Some even encourage their men to leave and find a way to earn money. You see, the problem is that agriculture is no longer sufficient to make a living. There is very little cash around to pay for school fees, uniforms, transportation, and what have you, so the men are forced to leave for longer or shorter periods to earn money. It is really as simple as that.
Some women are really very low after their husbands have left, and some also spoke of the sexual problems this causes, but on average, they can cope fairly well. I have not come across any instances where the women have actually forced their husbands to leave to get rid of them, but this may occur. Nowadays many women follow their husband out of the Minangkabau area, joining them for instance in Jakarta or other places in Java to be with them. Women themselves go out to merantau, for instance for study or in order o find a job. It is no longer an exclusive male prerogative. Another new phenomena is the permanent merantau situation where a single man or a couple decide to stay away from the Minangkabau area, permanently settling elsewhere.

I have the feeling that matrilineal systems like that of the Minangkabau are very rare in the world, is this indeed so?

Actually not really. There are quite a lot of societies which might be labelled matrilineal. However, societies which combine matriliny with matrilocal residence are rare. Intriguingly, there are certain features of Minangkabau matriliny which may be called unique. In Sumatra we have evidence that other societies used to be matrilineal too. For instance, in Aceh where the kinship ties are now organized bilaterally but the settlements are matrilocal, in some aspects the situation resembles that in Minangkabau. Similar systems also existed in South Sumatra, for instance Enggano springs to mind.
At present the matrilineal organization is being evaluated by the Minangkabau people themselves and the views they express are far from unanimous. Many Minangkabau are critical of certain aspects of their own culture, yet few would actually advocate the abolition of the matrilineal kinship system.

What are your feelings about the phenomenon 'Doctoral Assistant'?

Well, before I begin on that, let me tell you that I have been very lucky throughout. I had already done a fair amount of research when I started as assistant and, of course, I knew the field very well. Another great help was that I already had my assistants in the field. So my experiences are not really comparable to those of the average AIO who starts with his/her research in a field he/she does not know. Also, because of my prior research I have used much more than the 4 years allotted to an AIO. By the way, I really needed that time!
While gratefully acknowledging these advantages, I have some criticisms. Even though I feel that 4 years is not unreasonable, I have the impression that both AIOs and their supervisors are still uncomfortable with that time limitation. Sometimes the scope of the research is too ambitious in relation to the time available, thus causing a lot of time to be lost by using it for problems which would have been avoided.
In fact, on the bottom line what I mean to say is that what happens now is that people are required to write a traditional book in a modern setting. Those two are incompatible.
A question of equal importance is: What are we to do with all those young people who have just defended their thesis? Especially, is you remember that the traditional network is still very much in effect, it seems to be fairly pointless to produce a bred of young doctors who will have a terribly hard time to find a suitable job. Many young people who are now doing research have so little experience in anything but research that they find themselves caught short in the skills needed to find a job outside academia. Sadly, in academia, jobs are very rare at the moment. So, I have my reservations about the effect of the new system, but perhaps everything will turn out fine in future.

What are your plans for the future? Going back to Minangkabau and doing more research?

O, yes indeed. I would love to go back to Minangkabau. Of course, I would like to present my book to the people there. They have every right to know what I have made of their information.
On the other hand, I would also like to go back to the Ministry of Development Cooperation. I feel it would be a good thing to work on defining new projects and making contacts with new counterparts. It need not necessarily be in the field of Indonesia, or Southeast Asia. Other places in the world are equally interesting and I am open to whatever job presents itself.