This thesis is about kinship and social change in the Kerinci valley, an isolated region in the mountains of Central Sumatra. It is an area about which little has been written, at least of an academic nature. There are several official reports written for the purposes of the colonial administration, but since these date only from the end of the nineteenth century they provide an account of only the most recent past, and besides, their treatment of social organisation, as one might expect, is weighted towards consideration of matters of administration and government. Questions of kinship and family life are only mentioned in passing. There are one or two articles by observers who came to Kerinci on brief visits in the twenties and thirties and occasionally one can glean some information by looking through these. The one sustained scholarly work about the region is by H.Morison who was a colonial administrator in Kerinci in the thirties. He wrote a doctoral dissertation entitled De Mendapo Hiang in which he described the adatrecht , the customary law, of one district within Kerinci. The book is thorough and informative but very limited in scope since it deals mainly with various principles of customary law and the slant is again towards problems of administration.
One of the reasons why Kerinci has been so far ignored by anthropologists is because it has usually been assumed that the valley, which borders on West Sumatra and has always had close contacts with that region, is simply a rantau area for the Minangkabau, where the latter have settled and formed colonies as they did on the West coast. At first sight, then, there is little to draw to Kerinci the anthropologist who is more interested in esoteric Minangkabau culture as it exists in pristine form in the heartland rather than in its manifestations in the border areas. In fact, however, Kerinci is different from Minangkabau in most respects. There are superficial similarities, it is true, but in fact the matrilineal streak in Kerinci culture and institutions which resembles what is found in Minangkabau is more deceptive than helpful in its resemblance when it comes to an understanding of Kerinci society.
Since so little has been written about social organisation in Kerinci, part of the purpose of this thesis is to fill the gap in our knowledge of the ethnography of the area, and to provide some detailed information about kinship. The student interested in kinship terminology or in marriage institutions or in behaviour among kinsmen will, it is hoped, find sufficient here to enable him to make comparisons with what happens in West and South Sumatra. In kinship studies there is always a problem of which analytical approach to adopt and, as anthropologists have been made only too well aware, the academic descriptive vocabulary intended to clarify issues often ends by obscuring them under a host of terms which mean different things to different anthropologists.1 This seems to be as true of Sumatran kinship studies as of any other. I have tried neither to shirk problems of analysis, nor unnecessarily to convolute them further, but since my aim here is first of all to describe the situation and not address myself to controversial issues such as cross-cousin marriage, I have concentrated on keeping my remarks brief and on defining and describing terms and relationships as lucidly as possible. And I have often preferred to retain indigenous words rather than gloss them in an academic translation.
Although the ethnography takes up a substantial portion of the writing, I have also attempted within the compass of the thesis to discuss kinship in relation to that subject which more than any other fascinates contemporary anthropologists: social change. It is the source of endless debate in relation to Minangkabau society and it is within the context of that debate that I have found it most useful to consider change in Kerinci. The questions that scholars have posed have been concerned with how long can a society like the Minangkabau withstand the impact of modernising influences which inevitably come into conflict with matrilineal institutions,2 and to what extent have these institutions already, in fact, undergone change in the last one hundred years. The classic statement outlining the problem comes from Schrieke writing more than fifty years ago. Unquestionably the organisation of the Minangkabau community even now rests on the traditional basis and Minangkabau society moves within the framework of adat. But this must not blind us to the fact that natural social forces are unceasingly busy undermining that basis, labouring to make that framework fall to pieces. The outer appearance of social forms must not mislead us. The "closed production economy", the economic foundation of the ancient customary social system has had its day. The undivided family property is crumbling to pieces under the pressure exerted by the money economy. Land tenure is growing less certain; economic differentiation is increasing. The restrictions laid down by tradition are becoming an embarrassment. (Schrieke, 1960:142).
The issues have subsequently been taken up by Maretin (1961) and most recently by Kahn (1976 and 1980a) and von Benda-Beckmann (l979). Maretin following Schrieke speaks about economic developments leading to "profound changes in the social life of the Minangkabau." Kahn seems to agree with this but gives the argument an interesting twist by maintaining that the social life of the community, which often serves as "a reference point against which change is measured", was in fact an artificial creation of the colonial system which led to an ossification of the social structure in the nineteenth century. Von Benda-Beckmann rejects Kahn's interpretation of the history of events and again tries to work from an ideal construct to illustrate those changes which he thinks have occurred, and which are often, as far as he is concerned, more shifts in emphasis rather than profound structural changes.
Necessarily, all the writers have been selective in describing the changes which have come about as a response to external influences and which they feel have introduced specific innovations into the life of the community. For the most part they have been concerned with intra-family relations and to a lesser extent with the structure of authority within the community as a whole. Thus the arguments have been about to what extent solidarity and cooperation within the extended matrilineal family have been replaced as fundamental principles of organisation by the narrower interests of the nuclear family; and whether contemporary marriage arrangements reflect the influence of socio-economic pressures or are simply the same as what they have always been. Most important of all in the various discussions of change has been the examination of the effect of the rapid monetisation of the economy on the institutions of property and inheritance. The problem in this sphere has always been to try to gauge whether contemporary arrangements are an indication of profound changes of attitude or whether they are extensions of established principles already latent, though perhaps not much in evidence in earlier times. The controversy in this case has centred upon the different categories of property and the respective rights of anak (children) and kemenakan (sister's children) with respect to inheritance from a father and mamak (MB).
Property and inheritance are the obvious institutions to examine if one is looking for evidence of change; one does not have to be a materialist to perceive that structural changes affecting the distribution of resources in the community between generations will have numerous consequences and ramifications in the society at large. This thesis follows that line of argument and also constructs a description of change around the framework of a history of the development of property and inheritance in Kerinci. There are, however, dangers in an intensive focus on these institutions alone, the most obvious of which is the failure to perceive the issues in the context of social change on a broader scale, making it difficult to assess the significance of particular matters one discusses in the whole spectrum of events. Current academic preoccupation with specialisation and the tendency to investigate single issues in detail have added to this risk of missing the wood for the trees. It is something of which I have been very conscious when thinking about the themes of this thesis, where considerations of form and presentation of argument have led me to exclude discussions of, for example, demographic change, the incorporation of the regional economy into the international market economy, the effects of education on the community, the influence of religious movements, agricultural innovations and other significant matters relating to social change. All these receive passing mention but none is examined in any depth. They are all subjects to which I hope to return in future writing. Where I have tried to pursue a subject in detail because I feel that it is essential to a proper understanding of property arrangements has been in the discussion of territory and village government. In earlier times villages were more or less autonomous but they have gradually become included within wider and wider spheres of political organisation, so that not only in administrative matters, but also with respect to judicial institutions, that autonomy has ceased to exist. It is important to see the stages by which this has taken place, particularly in relation to the laws concerning land, so that questions of property and inheritance can be connected to attitudes arising out of new types of consciousness which are a product of changes in the political and legal spheres. Let me try to make clear the connections by outlining the argument of the thesis.
I begin with a chapter on general information about Kerinci and then give some details about the particular village in which I conducted most of my fieldwork. The thesis proper starts with a description of the principles of kinship which obtain in the village and which are reflected in the kinship terminology, rules and expectations governing behaviour among kin, and residential arrangements. The intention of the description is to provide the reader with an overall view of the ideal kinship system from which one will be able to perceive clearly the points of difference from, and similarity with, other ethnic groups in Sumatra,3 particularly the Minangkabau.
The following chapter describes the domestic life-cycle within the village and shows how the principles just recounted are realised in the day-to-day life of the community. A possible source of confusion in this chapter is the way in which the description moves at different levels of analysis, sometimes discussing different orders of problems, and some mention should be made of how this chapter is to be read. At one level the description is synchronic, dealing with the situation as I observed it in the ethnographic present of my fieldwork, and since it is a general description it works within an idealist frame of features of the system abstracted from general observations. Yet at the same time I have tried to provide a diachronic dimension by discussing particular changes in organisation which have occurred over the last fifty years. I have done this very briefly in what may appear to be an unsatisfactory fashion since each change I document warrants a far lengthier discussion, but given the reference of the thesis there was little choice. Omission of these topics altogether would, as I have suggested above, distort the general view of social change, but close detailed attention to each would have made the thesis unmanageable. Describing, then, some of the mechanisms of change I have dealt with particular instances and examples and have moved from abstraction to a documentation of cases and events, looking, for example, at the effects of the introduction of modern educational establishments into the community. This intellectual leaping about from one form of presentation to another is not entirely satisfactory, but nevertheless, I hope that the loss in terms of sharp focus is a gain in overall perspective.
The examination of one or two themes in detail commences with the chapter on territorial organisation. Reading the literature about change in relation to property and inheritance in Minangkabau society I have always felt uneasy about the way in which changes within the village and within the kinship group regarding the disposition of land have never been clearly located within the general context of political change and territorial organisation. Historians, in particular Christine Dobbin (1975, 1977), have shown themselves perceptively alert to the problems arising from the different geographical and administrative features of different Minangkabau regions which have led to dissimilar historical developments. Kahn (1976)4 is also aware of the need to consider any description of village organisation within a historical dimension, but has not yet done more than raise the issue as I am sure he would concede. What I try to do in this chapter is, first of all, to show how village government was radically changed during the colonial period and how concomitant with this change came shifts of perception as villagers became aware of themselves as members of other groups and communities than those bounded by the universe of the village. At the same time I also point out that the actual geographical and demographic shape of the community was changing during this same period and this too was giving rise to new attitudes and new principles of communal organisation, all of which directly affected questions of property and inheritance.
In the next chapter following on from this I pursue the subject of changes in the law relating to land. That these changes have come about as a direct consequence of the new economic opportunities created by the development of the agricultural infra-structure and the introduction of cash-crops is something which I take for granted. The socio-economic history of the region is a subject about which I intend to write separately at some future date. What I discuss here, though, is the forms of new legal and political institutions to which the economic pressures led, and the way in which these institutions made it possible for people to ignore or by-pass traditional kinship organisation when it came to the disposal of landed property.
Finally, I link the discussions of principles of kinship, the new conceptions of individual identity and changes in legal and administrative procedure by documenting the history of the evolution of arrangements concerning property and inheritance. I begin with a certain amount of inevitable conjecture about the nineteenth century and work up to the present with an increasing number of examples. The emphasis in the description is always to try to pinpoint when changes have occurred and how they have been made possible by new institutional arrangements.
That there has been social change which has greatly affected kinship
institutions does not seem to me open to doubt, but what I think
emerges from my study is that although some of these institutions,
particularly where they concern matters of legal control, have been
withering away and are being replaced by national institutions of
government, nonetheless others seem to undergo modification and persist
in an altered form, while a third category, especially in the sphere of
domestic arrangements and affective behaviour among kin, remain much
the same as they always appear to have been. As one might have
expected, structured relations between kinsmen in small, relatively
closed communities do not simply disintegrate and disappear in the face
of external pressures, and any study of the effect of development on
the institutions of kinship must distinguish carefully among the latter
in order to identify the force of change on village society.
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