Cultural constraints on marriage: anti-exchange behaviour in nineteenth century South Sumatra

Abstract

As an ethnographic region Indonesia can be characterized by a variety of phenomena. In the domain of kinship and marriage one finds a distinctly Indonesian interplay between the principles of descent and the principles of alliance. The best known and understood of these kinship systems are those in the eastern Indonesian archipelago and those on the island of Sumatra. From the perspective given by these typically Indonesian systems indigenous South Sumatra represents a somewhat extreme example in that it appears to place great emphasis on principles of descent while at the same time undervaluing principles of alliance. In fact, this negative attitude to alliance is sometimes so strong that one finds documentary evidence suggesting hostility to marriage itself. This hostility to marriage and its demographic effects makes South Sumatra something of an oddity not only in an Indonesian context but in an Asian one as well. In Indonesia, and in Asia generally, where marriage rates are usually very high and illegitimacy rates low, any cultural practice which restricts the frequency of marriage is likely to have a major impact on the birth rate. Thus the South Sumatra data are of interest from both a kinship perspective and a demographic perspective. The following study documents one particularly clear case of a district in which there is a marked un willingness to marry, and calls upon material from the region as a whole to illustrate the general characteristics of the descent system and attitudes toward marital alliance.