Down and out in West Sumatra

"Women at the center" is a book by American anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday. It was indirectly suggested to me by a rather extreme feminist, and comes with an appealing subtitle, "Life in a Modern Matriarchy". The book describes an ethnic group in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau, and their way of life. The Minangkabau use the Dutch term "matriarchaat" to describe their society. Their customs are a combination of matrilinear clans, belief in spirits, and Islam. They give the latter a distinctly "matrilinear" interpretation.

The book turned out to be a real disappointment. It's badly written, poorly edited, and surprisingly boring. Also, the writer is too uncritical of the legends and religious superstitions of her host people. It almost sounds as if she has "gone native". To take just one example, Reeves Sanday contrasts the Minangkabau legends positively with Darwin's theory of evolution. Yawn. Yeah sure, evolution is just another legend, right? She also acts as if she believed in the spirit-beings conjured up by the local shamaness. Et cetera.

All this is unfortunate, since Peggy Reeves Sanday is probably right on what I take to be the central issue which prompted her to write the book in the first place: that Western anthropologists have been looking for matriarchy in all the wrong places. For too long, anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have assumed that matriarchy must be the mirror-image of patriarchy. In other words, a matriarchy is a society where women dominate men, in the same way as men dominate women in a patriarchy. Since no female Taliban seems to have existed anywhere in the world, Western researchers drew the hasty conclusion that all societies have been patriarchal.

Reeves Sanday points out that a "matriarchy" might rather be a society where men and women rule together, perhaps by consensus. Among the Minangkabau, all land is owned by the matriclans, and the clan is ruled by a woman and her male relatives. All public officials are male, but their women relatives have substantial influence back-stage. At the marriage ceremonies, the female relatives of both bride and groom play a prominent role, and both bride-price and groom-price is negotiated. As already noted, the Minangkabau actually call their society "matriarchaat", and are openly contemptuous of the patrilineal Javanese. One of the central myths of the Minangkabau is about an ancestral queen who commissions a male warrior to subdue a band of male bandits. The bandits lack the proper "adat" (custom or law), which stipulates respect for women, peaceful consensus, etc. As already noted, this particular people even reinterprets Islam according to their adat, and their favourite hadith is one where the prophet Muhammad explicitly says that mothers should be honoured above fathers.

In all honesty, however, I cannot give this book five stars. My main problem is the lousy writing style, although I must say that the postmodernism rubbed me the wrong way as well.

As for the Minangkabau...live long and prosper! ;-)