Caged in on the Outside: Moral Subjectivity, Selfhood, and Islam in Minangkabau, Indonesia (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory, 38) - Hardcover

Simon, Gregory M.

9780824838300: Caged in on the Outside: Moral Subjectivity, Selfhood, and Islam in Minangkabau, Indonesia (Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory, 38)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0824838300 ISBN 13: 9780824838300

Publisher: University of Hawaii Press, 2014

Caged in on the Outside is an intimate ethnographic exploration of the ways in which Minangkabau people understand human value. Minangkabau, an Islamic society in Indonesia that is also the largest matrilineal society in the world, has long fascinated anthropologists. Gregory Simon’s book, based on extended ethnographic research in the small city of Bukittinggi, shines new light on Minangkabau social life by delving into people’s interior lives, calling into question many assumptions about Southeast Asian values and the nature of Islamic practice. It offers a deeply human portrait that will engage readers interested in Indonesia, Islam, and psychological anthropology and those concerned with how human beings fashion and reflect on the moral meanings of their lives.

Simon focuses on the tension between the values of social integration and individual autonomy―both of which are celebrated in this Islamic trading society. The book explores a series of ethnographic themes, each one illustrating a facet of this tension and its management in contemporary Minangkabau society: the moral structure of the city and its economic life, the nature of Minangkabau ethnic identity, the etiquette of everyday interactions, conceptions of self and its boundaries, hidden spaces of personal identity, and engagements with Islamic traditions. Simon draws on interviews with Minangkabau men and women, demonstrating how individuals engage with cultural forms and refashion them in the process: forms of etiquette are transformed into a series of symbols tattooed on and then erased from a man’s skin; a woman shares a poem expressing an identity rooted in what cannot be directly revealed; a man puzzles over his neglect of Islamic prayers that have the power to bring him happiness.

Applying the lessons of the Minangkabau case more broadly to debates on moral life and subjectivity, Simon makes the case that a deep understanding of moral conceptions and practices, including those of Islam, can never be reached simply by delineating their abstract logics or the public messages they send. Instead, we must examine the subtle meanings these conceptions and practices have for the people who live them and how they interact with the enduring tensions of multidimensional human selves. Borrowing a Minangkabau saying, he maintains that whether emerging in moments of suffering or flourishing, moral subjectivity is always complex, organized by ambitions as elusive as being “caged in on the outside.”

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:

Gregory M. Simon has taught in the University of California, California State University, USA and California Community College, USA systems. He holds a Ph.D from the department of anthropology at the University of California, San Diego, USA.

Introduction

This is an ethnographic study of moral subjectivity among Minangkabau people, who form an Islamic society in the Indonesian province of West Sumatra. In using the term “moral subjectivity,” I mean the ways people think about and experience the realization of human value or the failure to realize that value. this book focuses on moral subjectivity among Minangkabau people in the early twenty-first century in the small city of Bukittinggi. It examines how they imagine the nature of human value and the work involved in fashioning themselves as moral―cultivating a sense of their own “moral selfhood,” in my terms―in the context of contemporary life in West Sumatra. By extension, this study enters into larger anthropological conversations about subjectivity and the moral dimension of human existence.

Together, the chapters of this book form an extended ethnographic essay arguing that the moral subjectivities of many contemporary Minangkabau people are drawn into the management of tensions between seemingly conflicting yet simultaneously culturally celebrated visions of moral selfhood. Schematically, these visions can be imagined as having two centers of gravity: selves are often imagined as essentially and most properly constituted by their integration with others, united and made perfect in submission to God; yet they are also imagined as essentially and most properly autonomous, innately pure but forced to maneuver through a corrupting world. Taking account of both broad cultural patterns and the more particular experiences of individuals, the book examines different ways these tensions emerge―economically and historically, in terms of ethnic identity, in everyday interactions, in conceptions of selves, in religious life, and so on―and how they are managed. Although rooted ethnographically in contemporary Minangkabau society, the book suggests that related tensions and forms of management are apparent in other Southeast Asian societies and emerge in Islamic traditions. It further argues that in any society cultural conceptions of selfhood and morality, and moral experience, must necessarily reflect and elaborate on such subjective tensions. Subjectivity, in other words, reflects not only social forms, but also the existence of selves; social forms reflect the subjective living of lives as selves. Linked by subjectivity, social forms and human selves are forever answerable to each other (cf. Cohen 1994).

There are more than four million Minangkabau―or, simply, Minang―people in West Sumatra, the vast majority of the province’s population, and approximately two or three million more elsewhere, mostly in other parts of Indonesia. I sometimes generalize about Minangkabau in this book, doing so only when confident that a claim applies broadly within the contemporary population in question, or when referring to those things that my subjects identified as Minangkabau. Nevertheless, the specific claims made in this book apply to the contemporary Minangkabau population in and around Bukittinggi.

In carrying out this project, I have had the luxury of building on, and at times drawing contrasts to, a rich body of previous ethnographic work on Minangkabau society. Minangkabau form a small group in the context of Indonesia’s population, now about 240 million, yet they have been relatively heavily studied. In part this is because, in contrast to so many of Indonesia’s several hundred ethnic groups more thoroughly marginalized by a national narrative centered mostly on Java and Bali, Minang society and Minang people have been celebrated for playing substantial roles in the intellectual, political, and economic development of the nation. Another reason for this attention is the fact that Minangkabau is the largest matrilineal society in the world. The interrelated kinship and property systems employed in Minang society, in which rights to property are inherited by women from their mothers, have been the subject of sophisticated anthropological studies (e.g., F. von Benda- Beckmann 1979; Benda-Beckmann and Benda-Beckmann 1985; Josselin de Jong 1952). The history of Minangkabau social forms and their conceptualization have been carefully detailed (e.g., Hadler 2008; Kahn 1993; Kato 1982). Minangkabau matriliny, particularly as employed within an Islamic context, has especially drawn the attention of anthropologists interested in gender and ethnographic explorations of women’s lives and roles (e.g., Blackwood 2000, 2010; Krier 1995; Pak 1986; Prindiville 1984; Reenen 1996; Sanday 2002; Tanner and Thomas 1985; Whalley 1993; cf. Peletz 1996). Frederick Errington (1984) offers a far rarer inquiry into the construction of meaning in Minangkabau discourses, and Karl Heider (1991, 2011)― who notes the dearth of ethnographic research on experiential dimensions of Minangkabau culture (Heider 2011, 2)― has presented detailed studies of Minangkabau emotion terminology and folk psychology.

This is the first ethnographic account of Minangkabau society― and one of the rare studies of an Islamic society― to directly explore moral subjectivity in its methodological and ethnographic approach. this allows it to offer insights quite unlike those of previous ethnographic studies carried out in West Sumatra. It also allows the ethnographic material presented here to speak to broader anthropological debates on moral life and subjectivity, two of the most compelling issues being worked on within contemporary anthropology.

In taking on moral subjectivity within an Islamic context, the book joins a growing conversation on the way Islamic traditions participate in the formation of subjectivities, experiences of selfhood, and moral consciousness (e.g., Ewing 1997; Hirschkind 2006; Lambek 1993; Mahmood 2005; Mansson McGinty 2006; Magnus Marsden 2005; McIntosh 2009; Qureshi 2013; Rasanayagam 2011). It has been too easy for scholars to fetishize and reify Islam, substituting public religious debates― especially those carried out by small sets of individuals exceptionally devoted to them― and discussions of what Islam is for more complex explorations of moral lives and subjectivities of Muslim people (Schielke 2010). Islam exists as a product of active negotiation and self-reflection (Magnus Marsden 2005) as well as lived experience (Rasanayagam 2011), and Islamic traditions can emerge in different ways as they are refracted through emphases on different dimensions of personhood and the capacities of human selves (McIntosh 2009). “Islam” itself is thus never assumed in this book to be the central object of study or the defining arena of people’s lives or moral subjectivities. Instead, the book explores how Islamic traditions, as they are lived by people in West Sumatra, actually reflect broader subjective tensions and are used by people to help think through and manage them. this means that while Islamic discourses and practices matter to the discussions in this book, they are never imagined to exist wholly as logical abstractions through which subjectivities may be read, and cannot be seen as simply creating subjectivities.

Many of the issues that this book discusses for Minangkabau― such as etiquette, the use of indirect communication, or the control of emotional presentation― take a form that will look familiar to those who have knowledge of other Indonesian, Malay, and Southeast Asian societies, Islamic and otherwise. At the same time, the analysis of these as moral practices undermines the often taken-for-granted notion of them as simple expressions of the cultural value of social unity, or even the expression of social selves. The argument made here for Minangkabau may speak to something of importance in other societies in the region as well: while these practices do express
that value and help to constitute social selves, they simultaneously work to constitute and preserve autonomous selves.

Most broadly, in taking on the subject of moral life, the book enters into what has become an increasingly lively topic of anthropological inquiry, reaching out in different directions through explorations of forms of social order, conceptions of persons, values, and so on (Fassin 2012; Heintz 2009; Singe Howell 1997; Lambek 2010; Zigon 2008). These explorations share a sense that morality is central to much of what ethnographers have always examined, yet is only just emerging as a sustained focus of anthropological inquiry. Even within this current literature, the very quality of those things we identify as morally significant goes largely unstated.

I find the term “moral” useful as a way to acknowledge the human disposition for interpreting and appraising ourselves and others in terms of human value. Human beings grasp some forms of doing and being as speaking to the “the ultimate terms of their existence” (Parish 1994, 290), and thus to their human value. These terms of existence and the ways they are engaged are culturally variable. In practice, morality comes to life through particular terms (what is fair, pure, corrupted, etc.) rather than through abstract designations of “the good” or “ought” (Zigon 2008, 16). Ethnographers can best explore the moral in a society through an inductive process of engaging these particulars, rather than beginning with a rigid definition (Fassin 2012, 5– 6). Still, not all goods and oughts, and not all terms, are moral ones. The sense that human value is at stake, the possibility of realizing or failing to realize that value― through who we are, how we treat oth-
ers, and how others evaluate us (Taylor 1989)― seems to me to be characteristic of those things we identify as morally significant.

One of the challenges in developing an anthropological discussion of the moral has been overcoming the assumption that in simply describing different social and cultural systems, ethnographers are already detailing moral life. As James Laidlaw (2002) has argued, Durkheim left us with a legacy in which the moral is simply merged with the social, consisting of sets of rules or norms defining what is right and good. However, this is a way of understanding human existence that “simply lacks ethical complexity, dilemma, reasoning, decision, and doubt” (Laidlaw 2002, 315). Laidlaw urges us to go beyond this by closely examining those arenas in which actors come to experience themselves as exercising freedom to consciously choose between multiple possibilities, and in understanding how these particular arenas have been carved out by social relations.1

Part of what makes morality fascinating to explore ethnographically is that while human beings have the capacity to internalize cultural conceptions of what is right and good, and to enact them through habitus, we also have the potential to engage in conscious deliberation on the significance of these concepts, behaviors, and even the internal states we inhabit as we act (Lambek 2000a). Understanding the relationship between socially structured moral worlds and the reflective engagement of morality, rather than simply dismissing one or the other, is a challenge. Joel Robbins (2007a) demonstrates that the kind of morality in which actors experience themselves as free to weigh competing values may sometimes arise as a result of social disruption and cultural change. Such change can disturb well-ordered moral systems in which different values, pursued more or less unreflectively through established norms, or ga nize different spheres of life. Yet ethnographers have found that more enduring tensions between conflicting demands and moral conceptions are often central to the discourses and practices that make up everyday life (e.g., Laidlaw 1995; Nuckolls 1996, 1998; Parish 1996). Exploring moral freedom can mean more than exploring instances in which there are no clear norms, leaving the weighing of moral value in the hands of individuals. It can also mean exploring the role of reflection and work in applying norms to individual lives and confronting instances of moral significance in which individuals find their ability to choose greatly constrained.

As I will argue in this book, even established norms may sometimes be best understood as ways of managing or working through competing values and conflicting dimensions of human experience. this insight helps us to link rather than dichotomize flourishing moral orders and the complexities of moral experience. Part of this management involves a socially ordered pursuit of diff erent values within different spheres of life. Yet as Jarrett Zigon (2009) has argued, in practice even this maintenance engenders reflection and work and is often marked by repeated moments of moral “breakdown” when values and circumstances come into conflict. In the Minangkabau case examined in this book, the value of one’s integration with others appears to or ga nize many kinds of norms of interaction, and yet norms are also worked through in ways that allow people to simultaneously realize their individual autonomy. The point is not to dismiss the idea that a particular value may dominate the or ga ni za tion of a particular sphere of social life, but rather to acknowledge that this domination is rarely if ever absolute. Neither can individuals be completely different selves in each sphere. Tensions between values and experiences follow them. It is not merely in cases of social disruption that some kind of freedom makes its way into moral life; moral orders that allow people to flourish and realize moral selfhood require their share of work and reflection as well.

For the anthropology of moral life to venture beyond a recounting of social rules and norms, it must therefore explore moral subjectivity, a term that pushes us to consider the world as it is experienced through the process of living as individual human beings. Taking subjectivity seriously requires employing methods of research developed specifically to explore it as directly as possible. this means using a “double lens” (Linger 2005) that captures both individual experience and the social and cultural structures in which it is embedded. Ethnographic approaches that focus on delineating abstracted social structures and systems of meaning― even those that offer case studies of individuals― may put us at risk of considering individual lives and experiences as signifi cant merely for their illustrative value, when in fact those structures and systems only matter to us, and only emerge, because of the human lives and experiences that constitute them (Linger 2010).

For this reason, the research on which this book draws included the use of person-centered ethnographic methods (Levy and Hollan 1998). The methods are described below in more detail, but here it is important to emphasize that despite their common designation, person-centered studies are not designed to uncover cultural conceptions of persons in a generic sense, nor are they designed to employ case studies of individuals merely as illustrations of larger social and cultural forms at work. Rather, person- centered studies have made distinctive contributions within anthropology precisely because they are designed to explore subjectivities, a dynamic engagement between individuals and their social and cultural contexts (Hollan 2001). While this
study employs person- centered methods in strategic relationship to other forms of ethnographic investigation, ...