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1. Java is often depicted as having merely replaced the repressive and exploitative colonial state. Audrey R. Kahin, Rebellion to Integration: West Sumatra and the Indonesian Polity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1999), esp. chaps. 7–8. INTRODUCTION Culture of Paradox A student of Indonesia could be forgiven for thinking that the two great cultures of the archipelago are the Javanese and the Minangkabau. When we count the names in the history books or tally the individuals who shaped the national culture, these two ethnic groups stand out. Dutch colonial scholars posited the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra—supposedly dynamic, outward-looking, and pious—as a counterweight to the feudal, involuted, and religiously syncretic Javanese. During the revolution (1945–1949), Indonesians coined the term Dwitunggal to refer to the two-in-one leadership of the Javanese president Sukarno and the Minangkabau vice president Mohammad Hatta. This duumvirate signified a balance between Java and the outer islands, and the split between the leaders in 1956 created a national rift that remains unhealed today.1 Minangkabau intellectuals of the early twentieth century were central in nationalist and Islamic movements, and they defined Indonesian literature and culture. The street map of any Indonesian city includes boulevards named after Haji Agus Salim (born 1884), statesman and foreign minister; Mohammad Hatta (b. 1902), first vice president; Muhammad Yamin (b. 1903), nationalist philosopher ; Muhammad Natsir (b. 1908), Islamic politician; Hamka (b. 1908), theologian ; Sutan Sjahrir (b. 1909), socialist and first prime minister; Rasuna Said (b. 1910), revolutionary leader and politician; and, where Soeharto’s censorship lapsed, Tan Malaka (b. 1896), communist revolutionary philosopher. The Minangkabau people take great pride in this first generation of leaders and in the scores of Minangkabau politicians, theologians, and literati who are less well known but who also had defining roles in Indonesian history. It is striking, then, that in 1930 the Javanese represented 47 percent of the population of the Netherlands East Indies. Add to this the Sundanese people of West Java and the Madurese people—three ethnic groups that, combined, were viewed by the state as its cultural heart—and we have almost 70 percent of the population. At that time, the Minangkabau were just 3.36 percent of the Indies population, fewer than 2 million people.2 Given this Javanese hegemony, it is perplexing that the people of Minangkabau , a small and marginal region in a huge archipelago, loom so large in the national history. The Minangkabau preponderance in the roster of Indonesian luminaries has never been adequately explained. In analyzing Minangkabau modernity, the historian Taufik Abdullah points to the tradition of merantau (male out-migration) as a key to Minangkabau openness and dynamism. In accordance with custom, Minangkabau men must leave their villages and travel into the expanded world—the rantau—seeking wealth, education, or whatever might make them of value before they can return home and appeal to the family of a potential bride. Taufik argues that this Minangkabau male custom of merantau contributes to a “spiraling rhythm of history” that makes Minangkabau people more open to exotic ideas.3 But here his usually incisive analysis hangs on cultural idealizations and lacks real historical determination. After all, other Indonesian ethnic groups migrate with greater frequency than the Minangkabau do.4 And the rantau is traditionally a completely male province. It is a mistake to eliminate women from cultural formulae, especially for Minangkabau culture, whose defining feature is that it is the world’s largest matrilineal Muslim society. Current ethnographic literature relies on Taufik for his historical authority and moves on to contemplate Minangkabau matriliny as one of the sturdier fundamentals of the culture. That a matriarchate has survived in West Sumatra is chalked up to the admirable resilience of Minangkabau tradition. Little attention is given to the historical processes that have defined the matriarchate. And, in fact, it is the dynamic tension between Islamic reformism and the matriarchate that not only has preserved the matriarchate in the face of colonialism but has made West Sumatra the incubator for that extraordinary generation of fin-de-siècle Indonesian leaders. Muslims and Matriarchs 2 2. Population data from the 1930 and 2000 censes are summarized in Leo Suryadinata, Evi Nurvidya Arifin, and Aris Ananta, Indonesia’s Population: Ethnicity and Religion in a Changing Political Landscape (Singapore: ISEAS, 2003). 3. Taufik Abdullah, “Modernization in the Minangkabau World: West Sumatra in the Early Decades of the Twentieth Century,” in Culture and...

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