Authors: Peggy Reeves Sanday, Mita Choudhury
ISBN-13: 9780801489068, ISBN-10: 0801489067
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Date Published: February 2004
Edition: 1st Edition
Contrary to the declarations of some anthropologists, matriarchies do exist. Peggy Reeves Sanday first went to West Sumatra in 1981, intrigued by reports that the matrilineal Minangkabauone of the largest ethnic groups in Indonesialabel their society a matriarchy. Numbering some four million in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau are known in Indonesia for their literary flair, business acumen, and egalitarian, democratic relationships between men and women. Sanday uses her repeated visits to West Sumatra in the closing decades of the twentieth century as the basis for a new definition of matriarchy. From the vantage point of daily life in villages, especially one where she developed close personal ties, Sanday's narrative is centered on how the Minangkabau conceive of their world and think humans should behave, along with the practices and rituals they claim uphold their matriarchate. Women at the Center leaves the reader with a solid sense of the respect for women that permeates Minangkabau culture, and gives new life to the concept of matriarchy.
Author Bio:Peggy Reeves Sanday is R. Jean Brownlee Endowed Term Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. Her many books include Divine Hunger: Cannibalism as a Cultural System, A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial, and Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality.
Preface | ||
Introduction: Coming Home, 1996 | 1 | |
I | "Nature Is Our Teacher" | |
1 | Adat Matriarchaat as a World View | 15 |
2 | The Divine Queens | 32 |
II | Discovering Belubus | |
3 | Looking toward Mt. Merapi | 51 |
4 | Diversity in Daily Life | 63 |
III | Celebrating Life | |
5 | Discovering Adat Ibu | 79 |
6 | Eggi Becomes Minangkabau | 87 |
7 | Exchanging Husbands and Bananas | 100 |
8 | Negotiating Marriage | 118 |
9 | Getting Married | 131 |
10 | Songs and the Performance of Desire | 149 |
IV | How Men Uphold Matrilineal Adat | |
11 | Being and Becoming a Penghulu | 173 |
12 | Death of a Penghulu, Reprimand of Another | 188 |
V | Millennial Musings | |
13 | Adat in the Twenty-first Century | 207 |
14 | Redefining Matriarchy | 225 |
Notes | 241 | |
Glossary | 255 | |
Bibliography | 261 | |
Index | 267 |