Constituting the Minangkabau by Joel Kahn

Author:Joel Kahn [Kahn, Joel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367716868
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

Clan and Village in the Minangkabau Highlands: 1800–1870

As we have seen, the images of Minangkabau constructed in the first few decades of this century are focused largely on either forms of suku organization or on basic territorial units known as nagari. If, as assumed by most of our observers, Dutch and Indonesian, these institutions were eroded by changes association with the liberal colonial reforms after 1870, then what was their role in the earlier part of the nineteenth century?

In much of the literature on the Minangkabau, we are presented with an image of a society in which the village community or nagari is the basic unit of social and political organization. This has led some writers to speak of nagari as “village republics.” Even more so than today, Minangkabau people in the nineteenth century belonged almost exclusively to individual nagari communities. As late as 1905, for example, at the time of our first vaguely reliable census, the total population of Sumatra’s West-coast was reckoned to be just over 1.3 million people, while the population of Padang, the capital, stood at just over 90,000. Apart from Padang there were no towns in the Government of Sumatra’s Westcoast of more than 3,000 people. Indeed, the largest was Pariaman, north of Padang, with 2,863 inhabitants, and Fort de Kock (now Bukit Tinggi) in the center of the Agam plain, with 2,239 inhabitants.4 These figures, particularly those for Padang, are considerably higher than they would have been in the pre-1870 period, due to the rapid expansion of Padang and other towns served by the railway built in the 1870s and 1880s. A proportion of most town residents, moreover, would still have been temporary migrants from nagari, identifying themselves largely with the latter rather than the former.

4. The results of the 1905 census are available in the Koloniaal Verslag (Colonial Report, henceforth KV, of 1907).

The nagari were territorially-based communities, made up of a varying number of groups known as suku, a term perhaps best translated as clan. While some groups described by that term are quite clearly matrilineal kin groups of relatively shallow generational depth, the term also refers to what are usually seen as more inclusive groups within which precise kin ties are either assumed (but not known), or, sometimes, which do not seem to be genuine kin groups at all. For example, as we shall see, migrants from outside the nagari may attach themselves to individual suku within the nagari, but they may not be granted all rights associated with the suku membership of full kin. The term suku is, therefore, doubly ambiguous: first, because it can refer to groups of greater or lesser scope, and second, because at least in some of its usages it does not refer unambiguously to a group of people related by ties of consanguinity.5

5. I am consciously avoiding using the concept of “levels of segmentation” here, although it might be deemed appropriate, because of the lack of isomorphism between groups of lower levels (quite clearly kin groups),

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