Constituting Unity and Difference: Vernacular Architecture in a Minangkabau Village (review)

The Minangkabau of West Sumatra are as renowned for their elegant architecture as they are for their matrilineal kinship system. Both these features arguably have been liable to some degree of romanticization, as much by Minangkabau scholars as by outsiders. Yet ironically, as the author of this work points out, surprisingly few detailed studies of the architecture have ever been carried out. Most works fail to get beyond a few superficial architectural clichés, and they have tended to present an idealized version of house styles found in the darek, the highland area considered by Minang to be their cultural heartland, at the expense of the rantau or peripheral areas. This has produced an over-standardized picture which obscures the actual variety of styles to be found throughout both central and peripheral regions. It was with these considerations in mind that Vellinga chose as the site for his fieldwork the village of Abai Sangir in the district of Solok, in the little-studied southern borderlands of the province. With this book he has given us perhaps the most detailed published study of Minangkabau architecture to date.

In the past, the Minangkabau "great house" (rumah gadang) often accommodated a number of matrilineally related nuclear families under one roof, and there were many that achieved impressive sizes. However disasters of war or accidental fires have taken their toll over the years and today's generation often prefer to enjoy the privacy of smaller dwellings, albeit usually clustering about the "mother" house. Abai village repays close study since its inhabitants can claim the achievement of having constructed the longest houses in the whole of West Sumatra. The village includes eight such houses (known as rumah barih), reaching lengths of over 70 metres. The longest comprises twenty-one bays or family compartments, more even than the exceptionally long house at a better-known village, Sulit Air near Lake Singkarak, which only has twenty. No other village has such a concentration of long houses, in such a well maintained condition. Their construction appears to have started in the early 20th century, developing a competitive element from the 1950s onward which caused them to become even longer. Nothing could convey the dynamism of Abai's vernacular architecture more vividly than Vellinga's comment that at the time when he started his fieldwork in 1993, out of thirty-two houses in the village eight had been built within the past forty-five years, and twenty-two (or two thirds) were still under construction or in process of improvement. The village would thus appear to be in a permanent state of becoming. Besides this, a large number of "small houses" for individual nuclear families had also been constructed. The villagers are not especially wealthy; nineteenth century travellers described the region as being very poor, with little land suitable for wet rice cultivation. Today they still depend largely on subsistence agriculture and small-scale cash cropping, as well as work on a nearby palm oil plantation. What could account for such vigorous investment in these extraordinary houses? That is the puzzle which Vellinga's book sets out to answer.

The explanation lies in a close examination of the kinship structure, one that provides a new and original perspective on the workings of Minangkabau matriliny. The insights Vellinga offers contrast in some significant ways with descriptions from other districts of West Sumatra, thus contributing to a more rounded understanding of cultural variations in the area. He also considers the question of whether this can best be understood as a house-based society in the sense outlined by Claude Lévi-Strauss, a concept that has provided the impetus for an increasing number of recent analyses of Indonesian kinship systems. As frequently turns out to be the case in Indonesian societies (but in contradistinction to most already existing descriptions of Minangkabau matriliny), in Abai, "descent" is not as straightforward as it...