8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent, well-balanced, easy-to-read study, July 6, 2004
Peggy Reeves Sanday has done an excellent job with her description of the Minangkabau of West Sumatra, who are by far the largest matrilineal society in the world today.
"Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy" has much to recommenend anybody interested in studying peoples different from their own. We see clearly the way in which Minangkabau culture works and why it has held together as well as it has amidst such influences and Islam and modernity, as well as being shown the character of the ancient law system that still forms the heart of Minangkabau culture. The remarkable thing, as Sanday points out, is that the Minangkabau have always seamlessly blended such opposites as matriliny and Islam.
Sanday shows exactly how the Minangkabau contrast so much with classic patrilineal cultures, most especially in the way in which women have such an important role in their culture's most important ceremonies. Throughout "Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy", she looks in very good and effective detail at how these ceremonies are carried out, and why they are so important to their own identity.
Women in Minangkabau culture have a very important ceremonial role, despite the spiritual power of the male "penghulu", who are clearly discussed in a separate chapter. We gain a good insight into the role not only of food and land, but also of song in Minangkabau culture to show how each individual relates to the society as a whole. This is also seen in the lengthy, but reasonably clear, discussion about how Minangkabau people marry - and how this has been changed in recent decades. Sanday is so practical that she will illustrate very clearly some actual examples of modern Minangkabau people and how they have married to prevent any reader misunderstanding them.
Overall, this is a highly recommended text for those interested in anthropological studies. it is clear, well-written and in no way sentimental. Most importantly, its understanding of the questions it looks at cannot be denied.
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2 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Down and out in West Sumatra, December 30, 2008
This review is from: Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Paperback)
"Women at the center" is a book by American anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday. It was indirectly suggested to me by a rather extreme feminist, and comes with an appealing subtitle, "Life in a Modern Matriarchy". The book describes an ethnic group in West Sumatra, the Minangkabau, and their way of life. The Minangkabau use the Dutch term "matriarchaat" to describe their society. Their customs are a combination of matrilinear clans, belief in spirits, and Islam. They give the latter a distinctly "matrilinear" interpretation.
The book turned out to be a real disappointment. It's badly written, poorly edited, and surprisingly boring. Also, the writer is too uncritical of the legends and religious superstitions of her host people. It almost sounds as if she has "gone native". To take just one example, Reeves Sanday contrasts the Minangkabau legends positively with Darwin's theory of evolution. Yawn. Yeah sure, evolution is just another legend, right? She also acts as if she believed in the spirit-beings conjured up by the local shamaness. Et cetera.
All this is unfortunate, since Peggy Reeves Sanday is probably right on what I take to be the central issue which prompted her to write the book in the first place: that Western anthropologists have been looking for matriarchy in all the wrong places. For too long, anthropologists, archaeologists and historians have assumed that matriarchy must be the mirror-image of patriarchy. In other words, a matriarchy is a society where women dominate men, in the same way as men dominate women in a patriarchy. Since no female Taliban seems to have existed anywhere in the world, Western researchers drew the hasty conclusion that all societies have been patriarchal.
Reeves Sanday points out that a "matriarchy" might rather be a society where men and women rule together, perhaps by consensus. Among the Minangkabau, all land is owned by the matriclans, and the clan is ruled by a woman and her male relatives. All public officials are male, but their women relatives have substantial influence back-stage. At the marriage ceremonies, the female relatives of both bride and groom play a prominent role, and both bride-price and groom-price is negotiated. As already noted, the Minangkabau actually call their society "matriarchaat", and are openly contemptuous of the patrilineal Javanese. One of the central myths of the Minangkabau is about an ancestral queen who commissions a male warrior to subdue a band of male bandits. The bandits lack the proper "adat" (custom or law), which stipulates respect for women, peaceful consensus, etc. As already noted, this particular people even reinterprets Islam according to their adat, and their favourite hadith is one where the prophet Muhammad explicitly says that mothers should be honoured above fathers.
In all honesty, however, I cannot give this book five stars. My main problem is the lousy writing style, although I must say that the postmodernism rubbed me the wrong way as well.
As for the Minangkabau...live long and prosper! ;-)
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