In this anthropological investigation of the nature of an underdeveloped peasant economy, Joel S. Kahn attempts to develop the insights generated by Marxist theorists, by means of a concrete case study of a peasant village in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. He accounts for the specific features of this regional economy, and, at the same time, examines the implications for it of the centuries-old European domination of Indonesia. The most striking feature of the Minangkabau economy is the predominance (...) of petty commodity relations in agriculture, handicrafts and the local network of distribution. Dr Kahn illustrates this with material on local economic organization, which he collected in the field in the highland village of Sungai Puar, the site of a blacksmithing industry, and with published and unpublished data from other parts of Indonesia. Dr Kahn's book is unusual for its combination of a theoretical analysis of underdevelopment with a detailed regional study. It will appeal to those interested in South-east Asian studies, in development, and in neo-Marxist approaches in anthropology. (shrink)

Ahmad Khatib originated from Minangkabau, West Sumatra and after his settlement in the Holy City of Mecca in 1877, he grew into a scholar in Islamic sciences of great repute and eventually died there in 1916. His written work, educational and other activities have played a vital part in the exchange of religious ideas between Mecca and the Malay-Indonesian archipelago and make him an important person in the history of Islam in Southeast Asia. In my paper I will go (...) in detail into a fatwa he gave on the question of whether or not it was allowed to sell chickens to Chinese. The paper aims to shed light on the mufti-ship of Ahmad Khatib and will look into the wider implications of the issue as far as religious authority is concerned, in particular into its locus. (shrink)

Batu baraguang is music performed on massive stone gong chimes found ins Luhak 50 Koto, Minangkabau, Indonesia. Very little has been written nor investigated regarding much of the megalithic remains found throughout Sumatra and Nias. The researchers employed a qualitative methodology in this investigation. As the primary data collection instruments, they utilized observation, interviews, document analysis, and data interpretation. The study adopted an ethnographic approach, which placed a strong emphasis on observational techniques. The instrument consists of six stones placed (...) on a bamboo cushion. Rhythmic motifs are played by three people in a cross-legged sitting position. Each player hits two stone slabs that have different pitch levels. The interlocking tones produce cumulative short melodies which are recognized as discrete melodies or pieces. In this article we seek to describe the musical system as evidenced in these stone chimes, and the manner of batu baraguang performance. We deployed both qualitative descriptive methods coupled with quantitative techniques in pitch measurements. The ensemble consists of six talempong stone slabs which we call B1, B2, B3, B4, B5, and B6. The pieces are based on indigenous concepts called palau, tongah and panyudahi. Each of these corresponds to three pairs of stones performed by three players. We contend based on the findings of this research that the ancestors of the Minangkabau people in the Megalithic era already possessed an aesthetic musical identity as exemplified through the medium of this stone chime. (shrink)

Upon previous research, the matrilineal system seems to oppose Islamic teaching. However, the matrilineal system practiced by the Minangkabau society in West Sumatra, Indonesia has its uniqueness. Thus, this study aims to examine the correlation between the Qur’an and gender roles within the context of Minangkabau customs, specifically focusing on the matrilineal aspect. The present study employs qualitative methods for conducting library research through critical analysis. This study discovered that the matrilineal system practiced by the Minangkabau society (...) aligns with Qur’anic teachings that respect the position of women in Islam. In the matrilineal system of Minangkabau, women hold significant strength and play an influential role in cultural and traditional practices. The Minangkabau tribe’s matrilineal system encompasses three key elements: marriage, inheritance and offspring. The marriage system is exogamous. Additionally, the practice of marriage is localised, with the husband typically residing in the wife’s household. Their inheritance is divided into pusako tinggi [from ancestors from generation to generation] and pusako randah (from the efforts of married couple). Women get pusako tinggi as they serve as protectors and a symbol of their community. In comparison, men take the responsibility of overseeing its preservation to prevent any form of misuse. Pusako randah is distributed as Islamic teaching. Lineage determination is primarily based on paternal lineage, aligning with Islamic teaching. Upon comprehensive analysis, it becomes evident that there is no conflict between the matrilineal system and Islamic teachings, particularly concerning principles of gender equality. Both women and men have significant roles, as the Qur’an provides extensive explanations regarding gender equality.Contribution: This research holds significant findings in establishing a great relation between Islamic teachings based on the Qur’an and the matrilineal principles practiced by the Minangkabau tribe. (shrink)

The global reform of Islamic thought had impact of dividing the Minangkabau ulamas (Muslim scholars) into both “kaum tuo” as a traditionalist and “kaum mudo” as a modernist. Even today, the history of Minangkabau ulamas cannot be separated from this category. Ibrahim Musa is one of the ulamas who had unique position because of his affiliation to some groups. He also was recognized as “kaum mudo” due to his involvement in their movement. At the same time, other historical (...) records showed his engagement with “kaum tuo.” His ambiguities in siding among Minangkabau ulamas are worth-investigating. This article seeks to analyze Ibrahim Musa’s thoughts based on his kitab, Hidāyah al-Ṣibyān. It argues that Ibrahim Musa did not clearly state his stance, except providing two views. Further, he was trying to explain their interpretations which proved that in the history of Islam in Minangkabau there are ulamas who cannot simply categorized as traditionalist or modernist due to the complexity of their thoughts of Islam. In this respect, the study of non-mainstream ulama figures like Ibrahim Musa is scholarly pivotal to construct the historiography of Minangkabau ulama as a whole. (shrink)

In studies of transnational sexualities, locality has remained a contentious but important site to disrupt the universalizing tendencies of queer academic and activist discourses. In this article, the author uses a feminist approach to transnational studies of sexualities that takes into account particular locales within the global movements of queer idsentities and discourses. She does so by examiningthe way individuals in West Sumatra, Indonesia, access and appropriate circuits of knowledge to produce their gendered and sexual subjectivities. The locality the author (...) examines is Padang, West Sumatra, a part of the Indonesian state that is ethnically Minangkabau, devoutly Islamic, and matrilineal. Through stories of lesbi in Padang, the author demonstrates the way state and Islamic discourses shape gendered subjectivities that are not always explicitly resistant. At the same time, the circulation of queer knowledge creates an imagined space for a community of like-minded individuals. (shrink)

This paper discusses the contents and roles of the bulletin Giat, a community-based periodical published in Jakarta by a Koto Gadang foundation to support development in Koto Gadang, West Sumatra. Giat played a role as a communication medium linking people from Koto Gadang who lived outside their home area to their original villages. In describing and analysing the bulletin, I explore its content and focus on its collecting of funds for the clean water pipeline project in Koto Gadang and on (...) its distribution of information, especially information about Minangkabau customary law, culture, literature, and the women’s movement. The bulletin also facilitated the sharing of family news among people from Koto Gadang in the village and the rantau. Giat became a medium for maintaining interpersonal connections and accommodated initiatives to develop the village. It is shown that, as a community-based publication, Giat played a role in developing village infrastructure as well as its social and cultural fields. (shrink)

Publishers love titles that begin How or Why. Better still, How and Why, combining edification with utility. The target group is that overlap between the self-help audience and the idly curious—which is to say, most of us. And since emotions are very much about self-help and self-harm, they offer rich pickings in a burgeoning market. Flanagan's How to Do things with Emotions is a philosopher's take on moral emotions, the allusion to J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words (...) chiming with the self-help milieu. Reviewing cases, Flanagan points out that most scientific work in this field derives from experiments on psychology students, about as unrepresentative a slice of humanity as you could find. For Flanagan, they are too WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) to tell us much about the non-weird majority. To learn to “do emotions better,” he argues, we have to look farther afield. Although the emotional lives of cultural others are surely different from those taking Psychology 101, at some functional level they might be similar. Work out the conceptual logic and practical rationale of culturally elaborated emotions—Minangkabau “shame,” Ifaluk “righteous anger,” American “road rage”—and there is scope for comparison. Indeed, anthropology has shown as much, and it is from anthropology that Flanagan takes his cues. To mention two famous cases, what can we learn about anger management from Utku igloo-dwellers and Ilongot headhunters? Mutually dependent for survival in their snowy isolation, the Utku cannot risk getting angry. (They mercilessly tease their children into learning the futility of anger.) In the jungles of Luzon, Ilongot youths cast away their anger in externally directed violence: headhunting as cathartic sport. We can think of parallels closer to home.Flanagan's vigorously argued book, a tour de force of its kind, is both an anatomizing of anger and shame—two moral emotions we tend to “do badly”—and a proposal to “change how we do these emotions.” Indignation is fine, but anger that is vengeful or “pain-passing,” rather than righteous, is irrational and socially harmful. Shame can be incapacitating and cruel (the undeserved burn of a Twitter pile-on). What we need is reflective anger directed at injustice and a “mature sense of shame” that reminds us of the social contract and stops us misbehaving.In its How-and-Why format, the book combines theory and practice, metaethics with moralism. Here is how a prof should do self-help. But if the diagnosis is well made, the remedy is hard to imagine. As Flanagan recognizes, moral sentiments and practices are embedded in intricate forms of life and not readily detachable. Anger Utku-style is not a transferable skill, nor are educative routines forged in social ecologies remote from our own. Lacking serviceable models, Flanagan falls back on the anthropological justification that knowledge of cultural diversity expands our sense of human possibility, of other roads taken. In a globalizing world, difference is its own reward. For me, an anthropologist, that maxim is enough. Yet difference bedevils comparison, jinxing the units, warping criteria. Most languages lack a word for emotion or an equivalent umbrella concept; nor do emotion words translate well across languages. Emotion may be an incoherent notion, or at best a heuristic.Flanagan's use of the WEIRD tag makes things a bit too easy. Does it cover farmhands and factory workers? Are we so democratic, anyway? More damagingly, a typological approach blurs the circumstances of family, community, and biography that define an emotional episode and shape its phenomenology, the way it is felt and experienced—what a violent outburst or fearful exit means in the context of a life. Take Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim, who flees a scene of failure and derails his life. It requires a long narrative to unravel the implications of his jumping ship and the paralyzing shame he experiences before the judgment of society. Or consider the scene in Anna Karenina in which the dignified and self-important Karenin, apprised of Anna's adulterous liaison, agonizes over the threat to his existence. To call his response jealousy would not scratch the surface. Characteristically for Tolstoy, the emotions go unnamed. Instead, we witness Karenin's fervid deliberations (emotions involve thoughts), vacillations (emotions have action tendencies), anguished calculations of impending scandal (emotions are appraisals), and bodily changes (emotions are cognized feelings). We shudder at the brutal metaphors through which he grasps his predicament and its cure: like rooting out a bad tooth, he decides. That welter of particularities escapes the theorist who needs clear-cut, comparable units, formulaic instances of jealousy or anger. But what are you left with if you omit the details? What would remain of Karenin's existential crisis?The novelist's privileged access to subjectivity is, of course, unavailable to the scientist, but the larger context of plot and character—a history of relations that gives emotional episodes their shape and power—has its analog in the ethnographic domain. Emotions are public as well as private events, their meanings and effects depending on a fit with social reality, a clash of perspectives. In thought and feeling, we are never really alone. All of which suggests that narrative, fictional or nonfictional, can capture the ongoing moment in a way that eludes other methods. If what we are after is living emotion, it is the movie, not the snapshot, that surely matters. No point in comparing “emotions” no one ever really experienced outside of an experiment.But there's the rub. In generalization—the goal of emotion theory—an emotion's social meaning, personal significance, pragmatic function, and narrative context get stripped out. All that makes it what it is! Even in doggedly empirical anthropology, detailed emotional episodes are rare (Jean Briggs's Utku ethnography Never in Anger, published in 1970, is still unsurpassed). Instead we get recollections and summary examples, lacking the constitutive detail, real-time evolutions, and consequences of the real thing. Yet these must serve for comparison, fodder for countless theoretical speculations. Are we at risk of analyzing faux emotions and building theories on cardboard constructions?An empty Arctic stage, a handful of characters, life simplified to survival: Briggs is a hard act to follow. Bare life does not make for basic emotions. On the white set, emotions prove hard to parse. That gruff hesitation, that flashing glint—are they tokens of anger? Empathy will not suffice. As Briggs shows, narrative context is all. And in our more cluttered emotional worlds, the value of backstory, interwoven biographies, and emotional plots is all the greater. Flanagan is right; we must do emotions better. (shrink)

This article examines the “urang awak”, a term referring to the Minangnese who trace their origin to Minangkabau in West Sumatera, and their dakwah activism in diaspora. It problematises the relation of Islam activism and ethnic identity of a diasporic community in contemporary West-Java, Indonesia. It further argues that mosque has been central to the activities of dakwah activism of the urang awak in diaspora. As this article demonstrates, the Harakatul Jannah Mosque and Al-Anwar Mosque reserve as important bases (...) for dakwah activism of urang awak in a dominant culture of Sundanese and Javanese. Through these mosques, the urang awak attempt to preserve their ethnic identity, mainly expressed through the mosques’ architecture, language, and religious activities that clearly symbolise the identity of urang awak. (shrink)