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Re: Montanian

From:Roger Mills <romilly@...>
Date:Monday, September 24, 2001, 3:27
H.S. Teoh wrote:
>There's a culture in southeast asia (in the Malaysia/Indonesia area) that >is matriarchical(sp?). My memory fails me as to the name of that >tribe/culture, but I do know that they have the females own property and >get inheritance (instead of the males), and the husbands take the wives' >name instead of vice versa, etc., as opposed to (only) the males receiving >inheritance, which is common in other asian cultures. > >This may no longer be true today, though. They probably no longer keep >their distinctive culture.
You may be thinking of the Minang Kabau, of southern Sumatra (Palembang area), and some I think in Malaysia too. They're a quite numerous group; the language is very close to Malay. The society is basically matrilineal, in that the women own the property and inherit, as you say; I don't know about the marriage customs. The interesting thing is that they were fairly early converts to Islam, which seems to have produced a number of cultural problems. Under the Dutch, bright young MK men tended to leave the homeland and adopt Malay; many gained places in the native bureaucracy and intelligentsia-- and early on became part of the nucleus of the independence movement. I am not sure, either, whether or how well the original culture has withstood the last 50 years, though my impression is that it has.