Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia 9781474214117

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Preface

This book was originally conceived in the early 1980s when I began work on what at the time seemed a fairly straightforward piece of historical research. Having completed ethnographic research among Minangkabau villagers in West Sumatra, Indonesia and Negeri Sembilan, Malaysia, I became increasingly concerned to develop an understanding of the processes that might be said to have generated the situation I observed in the 1970s. There was in particular one characteristic of Minangkabau life that intrigued me, but that no amount of atemporal theorizing adequately explained. The close integration of Minangkabau within regional, national, indeed global economic, political and cultural communities has continually prompted scholars and other observers to predict the ultimate demise of a distinctively Minangkabau culture and form of social organization. At least from the turn of this century, it has been maintained that the impact of the "modern" world would eventually take as its toll that which is culturally distinctive about Minangkabau. And yet, at least when I was carrying out ethnographic research, the prophecy was still not realized. In their peasant-like forms of economic organization, their adherence to certain principles of matrilineal inheritance and kin-group control of land alienation and their everyday discourse on adat (custom) Minangkabau villagers on the face of things remain stubbornly premodern. At the same time neither do the traditionalist images of Indonesian village life ring true to me. In many ways village life as I experienced it was intensely competitive, economistic and individualistic. Money, prices and the difficulties of earning a living, together with intense and often highly malicious gossip about the pecuniary nefariousness of government officials, merchants and even close friends and neighbors were everyday topics of conversation. Communal rituals known on Java as selamatan and in Minangkabau as baralaik were mostly perfunctory

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The Interpretation of Minangkabau Culture: Traditions of Modernity or Modernist Traditions?

The Minangkabau of Indonesia and Malaysia constitute something of an enigma for the student of Southeast Asian cultures. Accustomed to images of traditionalism, at least in the vast western literature on the cultures of Asia, the student of Minangkabau culture finds him/herself outside the mainstream. If, at least from the eighteenth century, Asia has played the role of foil in western accounts of the modernity of Europe, then Minangkabau culture has become an awkward exception to the established image of a backward, communalistic, ritualistic, fatalistic, noncommercialized and courtly, even despotic, Asia. If, for example, the observer of Indonesia is bombarded with images of

Javanese and Balinese traditionalism, then what is he or she to make of the culture of Minangkabau, portrayed as it so often is as individualistic, commercialized and rationalistic? Consider the contrast between the Javanese and "Outer Island"l response to Dutch colonialism offered by the American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who is otherwise more committed than most to the traditionalist image of Indonesian culture: Thus, as the bulk of Javanese peasants moved towards agricultural involution, shared poverty, social elasticity, and cultural vagueness, a small minority of the Outer Island peasants moved towards agricultural specialisation, frank individualism, social conflict, and cultural rationalization. The second course was the more perilous, and to some minds it may seem both less defensible morally and less attractive aesthetically. But at least it did not foredoom the future. (1963:123) 1. Geertz's main "Outer Island" example is Minangkabau. He based this account almost entirely on the work of the Dutch sociologist Schrieke, of whom more below.

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Peasantization and Class Formation in Minangkabau Villages

This book is the work of an anthropologist and an amateur historian seeking to come to grips with aspects of social and cultural life in modern Minangkabau villages by means of an analysis of longer-term historical processes in which they are embedded. Doubtless, the fact that I begin here with an ethnographic account of aspects of life in contemporary villages, hence writing that history backwards as it were, will be taken as proof of my amateur status as a historian. But if history may not often be written backwards, it may more often be done out of present concerns. So there may be some logic in this way of proceeding. Tradition in Modernity: The Past in the Present? As we have seen, a central enigma in Minangkabau ethnography concerns the relationship between, on the one hand, the distinctiveness of Minangkabau culture and traditions, and, on the other, the existence of modernist traditions and a long history of westernization. At least since the turn of this century, Minangkabau and non-Minangkabau intellectuals alike have maintained that the latter must inevitably dissolve the former. And yet, the prophecy notwithstanding, culture, economy and society in modern Minangkabau has neither remained unchanged, nor developed along the path laid out in existing narratives of an unfolding modernity. At first sight, this might lead the observer to the use of various journalistic cliches - "combining the old and the new," "stubbornly clinging to a timeworn tradition," or of their academic equivalents, "the past in the present," "the coexistence of capitalist and precapitalist modes of production" - to characterize contemporary Minangkabau culture. One author has gone so far as 31

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The Constitution of Indonesia in Colonial Discourse

In 1982, more than ten years after my first bout of anthropological research, I returned to West Sumatra as a prelude to what I hoped would be a second piece of research in the field. As it transpired, this was not to be, since the Indonesian government, for reasons never given to me, decided that I would not be permitted to return for an extended period. In any case, during this preliminary foray I boarded a bus in Padang to travel to the town of Bukit Tinggi in order to return to the highland village that was the site of my first research. One of the delights of bus travel in Sumatra, which sometimes offsets its extreme discomforts, is the way at least the westerner very quickly becomes involved in friendly conversation with fellow passengers, and as usual, after an the early awkardness was overcome, I resurrected my now very rusty Minangkabau dialect and began to talk to the man sitting next to me. When I told him that I was an anthropologist with an interest in Minangkabau culture he began to tell me about another anthropologist who had lived in a highland village over ten years ago. He spoke in terms that would clearly flatter the object of his conversation, about a European who spoke fluent Minangkabau, went about dressed in sarong and kopiah (the black felt hat that in Indonesia has become a badge of national identity), took part in the rice harvest, and generally lived like a Minangkabau villager. My new acquaintance was somewhat sketchy on details after that. He was not certain which country this anthropologist came from, nor entirely sure which village he lived in. But as the conversation progressed I began to think that perhaps he was talking about me. The problem was that some of the characteristics of this anthropologist were based on myself, while others were derived from stories about a number of other western anthropol-

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Nationalism, Modernism, and Neotraditionalism

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If anthropological accounts of Indonesia's cultural otherness are constructed through a discourse whose origins are European, what must we conclude about their validity? There are those who would use the fact that the origins of terms like peasantry, community, modernity and the like are non-Indonesian to argue that the whole exercise is futile. While such arguments are not without persuasive power, they are, in my view, premature. First, the argument presumes that the "western" discourse by means of which I have characterized Minangkabau peasants is something more than a simple lexigraphical tradition, hence assuming a more or less direct link between lexicon and culture, between word and thought, with which presumption not everyone would agree. Second, to argue that concepts such as peasantry and community in particular are western, and hence irrelevant in a nonwestern context, is to seriously misrepresent their origins. For these concepts have developed in European thought specifically in the frame of a critique of the universalizing claims of Enlightenment philosophy. In other words, if as concepts they have their origins in continental Europe, they are part of what might be called an anti-European European discourse. Third, we are not dealing here with a language that developed first in Europe, only later to be (mis)applied elsewhere. Instead we have already pointed to the synchronicity of the development of these concepts in Europe and Asia. Chayanov "discovered" the Russian peasantry at the same time as peasants were being discovered in Indonesia. Fourth, alien or not, Dutch discourse on Indonesian otherness was not somehow external to Indonesian society in the 1920s - it was a part of the developing colonial formation, embedded in the practices of the ethnically European colonial elites. Finally, the orientalist critique of the anthropological project implies, falsely as it turns out, that we have to do here solely with the discourse of westerners in the orient. Whatever we might ultimately conclude about the pertinence of anthropological discourse, we must accept that it has not been the sole property of westerners. In this regard it is important to note that at the same time as Dutch orientalists like van Vollenhoven and Boeke were constituting Indonesians as culturally unique, Indonesian intellectuals were developing parallel notions about the specific characteristics of "traditional" Indonesian cultures.

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Images of Tradition: The Selective Constitution of Minangkabau Culture

In a fascinating re-analysis of the Philippine revolution, Reynaldo Ileto has taken issue with what he takes to be the dominant mode of Philippine nationalist historiography. The main themes of the resultant accounts of Philippine history are, according to Ileto, the following: Economic changes in the nineteenth century, such as the opening up of the islands to international commerce and trade, led to the rise of a relatively more prosperous class of natives and mestizos. For the first time, families could afford to send their sons to universities in Manila and Europe. Influenced by Western liberal ideas, educated Filipinos (called ilustrado: the enlightened) were determined the situation in the colony should benefit from radical changes in the Mother Country. In the process of agitating for reforms, the ilustrados, through vigorous propaganda that focused upon friar abuses, were able to sow the seeds of nationalism among the masses. Even as the reformist or assimilationist movement faltered and died in the early 1890s, the upsurge of nationalist sentiment was such that a separatist movement was able to take root among the masses, leading to the Katipunan revolt of 1896. By 1897, the original secret society was superseded by a revolutionary government with republican aspirations. (Ileto, 1975:3f.; see also, Ileto, 1979)

The problems with such an account, argues Ileto, are that it leaves a major gap in our knowledge of the history of Filipino nationalism and, as a result, generates an ultimately misleading picture of revolutionary history, and hence the underpinnings of the modern Philippine nation. The gap, which Ileto's work is an attempt to fill, results from the fact that prevailing nationalist histories do "not really enter into a discussion of how ideas of nationalism and revolution were shaped by the lower classes, or the 'masses'. An assumption is made that the meaning of inde149

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State Formation in Colonial Indonesia: Bureaucratization and Land Alienation, 1874-1926

In 1911 a book was published in Padang under extraordinary circumstances. The title, Ontwerp Agrarische Regeling voor Sumatra's Westkust (Draft Agrarian Regulation for Sumatra's Westcoast), seems innocuous enough. What is extraordinary is that this slim volume was published privately by the then governor, J. Ballot, at at his own expense; that it was intended for circulation among Dutch colonial officials; and that in it the governor expressed himself very critically on the subject of colonial land policy, at the time a very sensitive issue indeed. Partly because he expressed open criticism of the governments in Batavia and The Hague, and also because he chose to air dirty laundry in such a public way, Ballot was severely chastised first by the director of the Department of Internal Affairs, Nolst Trenite, and later by representatives of the Minister of Colonies in the Hague. And because he failed to recant, Ballot was eventually eased out of the governorship of Sumatra's Westcoast, to be replaced by one of his underlings, Lefebvre, who was prepared to toe the official line. 1 In his actions Ballot was casting his lot with those Dutch opponents of liberalism whose critique of colonial policies had come to be called "ethical," a position that derived from a paternalistic concern for the welfare of Indonesia's "native" population, presumed to be threatened by untrammeled commercial development and westernization. Those associated with the ethical turn 1. See Ballot (1911). The whole affair is charted in V 3 Feb 1913 A3 no. 4 (this contains a longer draft of Ballot's submission together with a copy of the 1911 book and Nolst Trenib;?'s reply) and in subsequent exchanges of correspondence, first between Ballot and Batavia, and then Lefebvre (still resident, before officially replacing Ballot) and Batavia (see, for example, v 17 June 1915 A3 no. 16; V 6 July, 1915 A3 no. 19; V 15 June, 1916 A3 no. 41; and V 2 October 1916 A3 no. 23).

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Land Alienation and the Reconstitution of Minangkabau: Economy and Society in Minangkabau's Southern Frontier in the 1920s

Before returning to the interrelations between the modernizing processes discussed in the previous chapter and traditionalist discourses, it is important to look at the impact of the economic and political changes brought about by colonial state formation on Minangkabau villages in the early decades of this century. As one might expect such a task is not an easy one, largely because at least the source materials I have been able to consult were not written with a view to answering questions about the lives of ordinary villagers except insofar as evidence of their dissatisfaction impinged on the interests of the colonial state. Moreover, as we have had occasion to note, documentary material for Outer Island Indonesia in this period is far less rich than that available for Java, the center of colonial power. Nonetheless, based partly on archival and other colonial sources, partly on the results of my own research in Minangkabau villages in a later period, and partly on speculation, I shall maintain here that at an economic level, the changes in colonial society that began toward the end of the last century had the effect in West Sumatra of generating small-scale units of social production and distribution that were increasingly constituted and reproduced by means of circuits of commodity circulation. That is, through this period individuals and households that had in the nineteenth century been reproduced largely by means of the kinds of sociopolitical relations of common kinship and territoriality described in the previous chapter - and earlier, perhaps, by hierarchical structures of Kingship and Bigmanship - came more and more to rely on market mechanisms for the supply of productive and distributive inputs. 224

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Conclusion: The Hypertrophic Modern State, Culture and the Peasantry in Colonial Indonesia

I began this book by outlining two concerns - one with the methodological dilemmas of an anthropology increasingly aware of the contingency of its models of cultural otherness; the other with the inadequacies of existing narratives of modernity in the face of processes of cultural differentiation in the modern world. I further suggested that anthropologists might be in a better position to deal with the latter if, instead of continually seeking to escape their own intellectual heritage into the cultural categories of others, or engaging in prolonged bouts of highly individualized reflexivity, they were to locate their own project (that of constructing cultural otherness) within the social and cultural processes they have sought to study. As I made clear, my aim in all this was not to give credence to a postmodern alternative in anthropology. At least those of us who were stimulated by the reemergence of Marxist approaches in the social sciences from the late 1960s were never under the illusion that anthropology would, or should, be an objectivist project. Very few of us were really comfortable with that one plank in the Althusserian platform in which a case was made out for a renewed Marxist scientism. As we saw it the new Marxisms were very much directed against not just ruling positivism, but at positivisms in the social sciences in general. The adoption of a Marxist paradigm was quite clearly perceived, by advocates and critics alike, as an attempt to "take a position" when others were refusing to admit that they were doing so. But, equally clearly, anthropology cannot escape critical evaluation, even, or especially when it adopts a relativist position based, supposedly, on the views of others for whom the anthropologist 261

Bibliography

I. Unpublished Sources I have cited two kinds of unpublished materials. The first are documents that form part of the archive of the (former) Ministry of Colonies of the Netherlands, now housed in the Algemeen Rijksarchief (General State Archive) in The Hague. The second are materials that form part of a number of personal collections. The archival materials bear inventory numbers according to the system employed by the Ministry. They consist mainly of individual items called mailrapport (here abbreviated as MR) sent from Batavia to the Ministry in The Hague, and were numbered consecutively in the year of receipt. Hence, for example, the fifth such report received in 1928 is cited as MR 1928/5. These mail reports were classified into two separate categories: open and secret. Reports in the secret series are distinguished by a "x," hence MR 1928/5x. Included among the documents sent from Batavia to The Hague were the so-called Memorie van Overgave (here abbreviated as MvO). These are the reports written by colonial administrators on leaving their posts. The MvOs of higher level officials are stored in a separate series in the Archive. Some MvOs of lower level officials (assistant residents and controleurs) are also now available in the Rijksarchief, although many were severely censored by the Ministry. Occasionally a complete version of these MvOs can be found in personal collections (see, for example, Collectie Korn no. 321). Because this collection was originally housed in the library of the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, they are referred to as MvOs from KIT. Many of the most important documents sent back from Batavia have been removed from the MR series and included, together with related documents, in what were called Verbalen. The reason for this is that when the minister or some other official was concerned with a particular matter, employees of the Ministry would put together related documents for his consideration. In such cases the documents are stored in a separate series of Verbaal, again inventorized according to date and

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