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Matrilineal Inheritance and Migration in a Minangkabau Community

1991; Volume: 51; Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/3351065

2164-8654

R. J. Chadwick,

Asian Studies and History

The matrilineal and uxorilocal Minangkabau population of West Sumatra is composed of about five hundred self-contained communities called nagari.These communities are geographically discrete, largely endogamous, and formerly self-governing.1Each nagari has a specific ecological and economic adaptation according to its situation at home2 and pro duces a specific adaptation to city life among its very large emigre population.Migration from one's home nagari to another area is called marantau.Marantau is an ancient trend among the Minangkabau,3 is intrinsic to immemorial social process, and is functionally implicated in the social structure of villages in the homeland.But even in the 1 During my first fieldwork in Minangkabau, Koto Anu, the community I researched, did not constitute an ad ministrative unit in its own right.Together with a distant neighbor, the nagari Koto Apo, it was one part of an artificially created administrative unit, the kenegarian of Kaduo Koto (the two settlements).Under Dutch rule, it constituted one of the six communities in a different administrative unit, the lareh of Anam Koto (six settle ments).Neither lareh nor kenegarian were perceived as having any sociological relevance for Koto Anu people.(Like Koto Anu, the names Koto Apo, Kaduo Koto, and Anam Koto are pseudonyms.)The Village Law of 1979 (see Tsuyoshi Kato, "Different Fields, Similar Locusts: Adat Communities and The Village Law of 1979 in Indo nesia" Indonesia 20:89-114) constituted Koto Anu as a minimal administrative unit (desa) for the first time in liv ing memory and thus redressed the situation for Koto Anu people, at least.Since this law was enacted there have been grumblings of discontent in West Sumatra as elsewhere; other communities have not fared as well as Koto Anu, finding themselves broken into smaller divisions that are sociologically inappropriate from the point of view of the people living in those communities. The three luhakThe three traditional rantau areas Later ran tau areas [agricultural pioneering)