Caged in on the Outside

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, it would have been impossible without those methods to make the kinds of arguments this book makes— or, more fundamentally, to offer the kind of ethnographic material that it does.

The notion of subjectivity is that people live life from the perspective of their own existence: they live social life as selves. The meaning of “self ” and its relationship to other terms such as “person” and “identity” has been inconsistent in anthropology (Harris 1989; Lindholm 1997; Spiro 1993). For some, the term may bring to mind cultural concepts of self or the assumption of a particular psychological system or entity, but these are not what I have in mind. I think of selves as lived. Individual minds and bodies bring together and work to more or less integrate different systems and information into the living of par tic u lar lives in an ongoing process of self-formation (cf. Parish 2008).2 by contemporary knowledge of neurology (Quinn 2006). Selves are thus the emergent cohesive qualities of this process. Selves may of course entail self-reflection, evaluation, and attempts to refashion themselves. We know ourselves in multiple ways— as physical, social, historical, and consciously reflective beings— often reflected in, but not created by, our cultural representations of self (Neisser 1988). It is in the process of putting these together that the self continuously emerges.

That all these terms— self, subject, identity, person— alternately or simultaneously bear passive and active forms is a sign that our manner of being ourselves, or persisting as who we are, involves both the ways in which our selfhood is a matter of natural sameness, and the ways in which it must encompass the differences within ourselves that being human unavoidably occasions and contains. . . . Questions about the self are not about whether some one term best names what is essential to it, but about the ways people seek and find to establish operative and meaningful relations between the various constituents of their lives. Concern about the self is concern about how we put the diverse parts of our personal being together into some kind of whole. (Seigel 2005, 16– 17)

Jerrold Seigel (2005) thus argues that selves must in the most basic terms be understood to account for three dimensions of human existence: bodily, as physical beings; relational, as beings made up by our social relations and structures; and refl ective, as conscious and self- conscious autonomous beings. These dimensions of human existence are bound to enter into human experience and emerge in cultural repre sen ta tions. The ways these dimensions are elaborated in social interaction, conceptualized, and valued is thus highly variable. Their existence is a stubborn existential fact, but their subjective significance goes beyond their existence to the ways they are given meaning and value through social interactions and representations.

Seigel’s thoughts grow out of his thorough historical exploration of Western philosophic theories of selfhood. As formal theories, many of the ideas he traces deny or minimize one or more of the dimensions he identifies, leaving them internally coherent but open to critique. The experience of living forbids anyone from settling into the tidier confines of theory.

The argument in this book builds in a basic way off of the insight that subjectivity must therefore reflect this multidimensional nature of selfhood. This is a way of understanding self that is also supported. It focuses particularly on tension between the relational and reflective dimensions of self as it emerges in moral subjectivity in the Minangkabau context. The moral relationship between relational and reflective dimensions of selfhood in a Minangkabau context is particularly compelling because each has come to be realized not only in individual experience, but also celebrated in robust cultural repre sen ta tions (cf. Gregg 2005, 336– 339, on Middle Eastern cultural psychology). this situation can be traced to the historical development of contemporary Minangkabau society, especially over the past two centuries. Of particular importance in this regard are an increasing reliance on individualized economic endeavor amid a thriving matrilineal system, the emergence of notions of traditional Minangkabau identity, and a growing emphasis on Islamic piety.

The account in this book is thus a cultural account, but one in which culture must answer to existential demands. It is possible, of course, for cultural repre sen ta tions to make it difficult for people to easily categorize or represent some dimensions of experience (Levy 1973; Hollan 1992). One aspect of existence may be elaborated and celebrated and another marginalized. Yet even the most hegemonic cultural systems, in complex societies at the very least, still engender their own forms of ambivalence and even conscious re sis tance (Parish 1996). Further, such hegemony represents only one possible way that cultural patterns can be organized. The push and pull of integration and autonomy in Minangkabau does not take this unipolar form.

The fact that forms of both social integration and autonomy are valued by Minangkabau people and fi nd a means of expression and celebration in Minangkabau cultural patterns allows the discussion in this book to move beyond claims about the essentially social or essentially individual nature of selves, or conceptions of selves, in given societies. The Minangkabau case fits poorly into any effort to make a contrast between socially oriented non-Western (and especially Asian or Oceanic) selves and ostensibly individual and autonomous Western ones (cf. Geertz 1984; Hsu 1985; Markus and Kitayama 1991; Shweder and Bourne 1984).

Such a dichotomy has proved a poor way to theorize the place of these moral orientations in different societies. Constructing this kind of dichotomy requires the assumption that there is a single, unified model that describes the way an entire community— and every member of that community— thinks about persons, all the time. Such an assumption is simply unwarranted and does not match what we can observe ethnographically (McHugh 1989; Hollan 1992; Murray 1993; Spiro 1993; Lamb 1997). For example, although we may fi nd ways that Japanese people orient themselves toward others, and Westerners orient themselves toward an inner ego, we can also find ways that the reverse is true (D’Andrade 2008; Lindholm 1997). Seigel (2005) notes that anthropological arguments about the self are most prone to place a reductive emphasis on the relational dimension. Of course it is not a surprise that theorists who see themselves as interrogators of the social have found themselves arguing for the essentially social nature of selves. On the other side, not all Western conceptions of the person are necessarily characterized completely by the egocentricity, boundedness, and other qualities associated with Western selves in some anthropological literature, where, as in Geertz’s (1984) famous account, this is often implied to be a particularly strange or distorted conception of human existence. Certainly there are many and conflicting visions of the self in Western societies, articulated not only in daily life, but also in the explicit formulations of philosophers and social theorists since the Enlightenment (Morris 1991; Murray 1993; Seigel 2005; Taylor 1989). Finally, even when a par tic u lar orientation like individualism is widely celebrated in a society, it may emerge in very different ways among its members (Kusserow 2004).

Ultimately, this book argues that the cultural forms through which these dimensions of selfhood are elaborated and valued need to be understood less as self- contained and coherent moral visions that erase alternatives and more as ways of articulating and managing the inevitable tensions between these dimensions. In the Minangkabau example explored here, these tensions are intrinsic to the cultural forms, a reason they have been elaborated and sustained. If autonomy and integration are two centers of moral gravity, they ultimately revolve around each other. Borrowing from a Minangkabau saying, I describe people’s efforts to realize both an integrated as well as an autonomous self as moral endeavors to reach for a transcendent, if never truly obtainable synthesis: to be “caged in on the outside.”

The Research

I conducted fieldwork in and around Bukittinggi from January 2002 to November 2003, with a short return trip in 2008. My hope going into the field was to live, along with my wife, in a Minangkabau house hold. Ideally, this would allow me to observe an example of domestic life and provide a conduit through which I could be introduced to others in a neighborhood, and allow us to spend less time on domestic chores. Before arriving in Bukittinggi, however, I was warned by some Minangkabau people and experienced anthropologists alike that most people in West Sumatra would be reluctant to share their homes with anyone other than family, and might be particularly wary of their neighbors’ reaction if they hosted foreigners.

We were fortunate. Within a few days of arriving we were introduced to Inyiak Datuak, a man in his mid- thirties who offered us the opportunity to live in his family’s home, where he had been raised. Only Minangkabau women inherit rights to use the property owned by their lineage. The house was thus home to Inyiak Datuak’s sisters, while he lived elsewhere with his wife. He nevertheless felt responsible for looking after the house, his sisters, and his sister’s children. In doing so, he was living up to his position as mamak, or mother’s brother. this seemed especially important considering that his parents were no longer living, and even more so because he holds a high title in his lineage, meaning that he is responsible for looking after the best interests of all members of his lineage— essentially, of being a mamak to all of them. “Datuak” is, in fact, his title, while “Inyiak” is an honorific identifying him as “grandfather,” despite his youth.

The household consisted of two of Inyiak Datuak’s sisters and the elder sister’s husband and their two children, a boy who was six and a girl who was a year and a half when we moved in. Several houses belonging to other members of the lineage sit on the same small plot of land. We provided their household with an extra source of income; they provided us not only with food and shelter, but also companionship and assistance that were essential for shaping our experience in West Sumatra and making our stay possible.

From the perspective of those living out on the edges of Bukittinggi or beyond, the neighborhood in which we lived was sometimes described as urban, but for those living nearer the city center, it was often described as an example of village life. While a few homes in the neighborhood are rented out, most of the population, including Inyiak Datuak and his family, consider themselves natives, living on land first claimed by their lineage ancestors. The level of respect for Inyiak Datuak and his family in this neighborhood, and their deep network of kinship and other social ties within it, gave the family the social capital necessary to counter the suspicion aroused by hosting foreigners.

It also helped that our bedroom was attached as an addition to the side of the house, with a separate entrance. this eased the sense that we were occupying a room that should be reserved for one of the women in the family, several of whom were living in other parts of the country but should always have the option of returning home. The room had served this function before: it had been Inyiak Datuak’s bedroom as an adult, before he married. It worked well for us, as we could maintain some degree of privacy and independence while still sharing meals and the common areas of the house with our host family.

I learned a great deal by observing the habits and rhythms of people in this house and in my own neighborhood, hanging out in one of its coffeehouses and attending celebrations at its prayer house. However, I also spent much of my time in other neighborhoods, other coffee houses, in people’s homes in other parts of the city, in the marketplace, and occasionally in other parts of West Sumatra. Daily observations and casual conversations in various corners of Bukittinggi formed the foundation for my understanding of life in Minangkabau and for what I discussed in greater depth with people during recorded interviews.

Thirty-five people participated in recorded interviews with me. About two-thirds were men, reflecting the better opportunities I had in general to spend time with men. The ability to offer perspectives from both men and women is, on the whole, a strength of the ethnographic account in this book, but it will become apparent that it leans toward a male perspective at times. These interview subjects ranged in age from their early twenties to their eighties, and their economic positions from relatively poor to relatively well-off , but class distinctions within this population are not very well defined: all of my subjects would identify as some variation of “normal” (biaso).

In all, I recorded 176 interviews, resulting in well over 2,000 pages of typed transcriptions. Following each interview, I recorded additional information about the conversation in my field notes. I often listened to the recording of the interview not long after the interview itself to help me recall and make a record of details and contexts not preserved on the tape (e.g., hand gestures, posture, the meaning of references that were not obvious in the recording itself). this also helped me to plan for the next interview.

For a small subset of the people I spoke with I pursued a person-centered approach to the interviews (Levy and Hollan 1998). While I would come prepared with one or more topics I wanted to explore, these were open-ended interviews, not structured ones. The interviews proceeded more like conversations, as I would allow the subjects’ answers to determine the course of the discussion, thus getting a better sense of their own concerns and the connections they saw between different issues and experiences. I tacked between asking questions about general cultural concepts and social practices and about personal experiences and opinions. The goal was to gather information— both from the content of their answers as well as their patterns and emotional tenor— on their individual engagements with the cultural material we were discussing, and to avoid being channeled into the direction of research that my subjects often seemed insistent on taking me: into creating a picture of “Minangkabau” life rather than getting a sense of the subjective engagements of my subjects with their social context.3 topics that occupied the largest portions of the interviews were childhood, marriage and family life, religion, emotions, gender, morality, supernatural phenomena, and health, illness, and bodies. The topics tended to bleed into each other.

Thirteen subjects, nine men and four women, completed what I consider to be a full series of interviews following the person- centered approach, each consisting of a minimum of six separate, substantial interviews. These series generally took place over the course of several months and lasted as many as fourteen interview sessions, with the great majority consisting of at least ten separate interviews. The sessions normally ranged from close to an hour to as a long as two hours, with the entire series generally ranging from close to ten to over twenty hours of recorded interviews. I spent many more hours conversing with many subjects outside of these recordings. It is from this smaller subset of subjects that I draw the richest and largest portion of the material presented in this book.

When possible, I interviewed people in a small room I had secured above a shop in the marketplace. this setting was private, reasonably quiet, and relatively neutral in relation to any particular social roles inhabited by the subjects. I made ad hoc use of a number of other locations to conduct interviews, when necessary, but some people felt uncomfortable coming— or being seen coming— to any secluded place to participate in what was already a peculiar activity. Being alone with a woman especially risked being seen as inappropriate, although this did not usually prevent me from conducting private interviews. My wife or my research assistant, Yessi Asiswanti, accompanied me for a few interviews, and I interviewed most women and several men in their homes. This occasionally presented problems with privacy, although it also assured me glimpses into the domestic lives of my subjects.

A major goal in this project was to gather the kind of ethnographic information on subjectivities that has been lacking in previous studies of Minangkabau and is too rare in studies of Islamic societies. In this book I lean heavily on what my subjects told me about their experiences. Beyond using my subjects’ words to uncover underlying cultural patterns (Quinn 2005), I treat them as legitimate windows into their lives and subjectivities. In many instances I do take a step back from my subjects’ statements and stories to offer context and analysis, at times considering my exchanges with subjects as objects of study in themselves. In these instances I offer perspectives on my subjects with which they may not agree. What people say about what— and why— they do and experience is not the same as what they actually do and experience. Still, I am inclined toward taking seriously what people tell us about themselves and to treat what they say as worthy of extended consideration. Caveats apply, but there is perhaps no better way to get a sense of others’ subjectivities.

I conducted most of the interviews in the Minangkabau language or a mixture of Minang and Indonesian. Minang children grow up in West Sumatra speaking Minangkabau as their first language, and then begin to speak the national language of Indonesian regularly in school. Minang and Indonesian are closely related but generally considered distinct languages. By

school age most Minang children are at least passively fluent in Indonesian due to their exposure to it, especially through television. Minangkabau is most closely associated with family life, friendships, and most salient emotions, while Indonesian is most often linked to more formal public interactions and the mass media. Heider (1991) describes different cognitive maps for emotion terminology in the two languages among those who speak both fluently, indicating some differences even in the case of close cognates.

I began my fieldwork already fluent in Indonesian. I first studied it formally in 1990 and subsequently spent about a year and half in Indonesia in the 1990s, mostly on the island of Java. To become profi cient in Minang I studied with tutors during my first six months living in Bukittinggi. I waited until the second year of my fieldwork to conduct most of my recorded interviews.

Recorded interviews were initially transcribed by a Minangkabau person in Padang. The translations are my own. Except when important for conveying emotional tenor or state of mind, I have cleaned up the translated transcripts by eliminating some stutters, pauses, and other quirks of speech. Portions of recorded interviews that were too unclear to be reliably transcribed are marked as “[un]” in the text.

All of the names I use in this book are pseudonyms, and I have occasionally changed some identifying details. In addition, I have attached Ni to the beginning of the names of the women and Da to the names of the men. In proper usage these respectful titles— short for uni, older sister, and uda, older brother— mark someone as older, although not greatly older, than oneself. Here, I employ them to help readers more readily identify which subjects are men and which are women.

Structure of the Book

Chapter 1 surveys the social geography and rhythms of Bukittinggi and demonstrates that the thrust of the moral tension between autonomy and integration explored in this book has been propelled by the par tic u lar economic, religious, and political history of Minangkabau society. this tension is reflected in the structure of Bukittinggi, which is conceptually and morally divided into “the village” and “the marketplace.”

The moral meanings attached to Minangkabau identity are taken up in chapter 2, addressing three interlocking concerns: adat (traditional culture), Islam, and conceptions of Minangkabau character. this latter perspective trains its focus on how individuals maneuver themselves through ordered society, preserving their autonomy in ways that avoid defying the demands for unity and deference as defined by adat and Islam.

Chapter 3 describes the ways an aesthetic of social unity is created in everyday interactions. It suggests that while this aesthetic constitutes a very real locus of moral selfhood, it is not ultimately a way of fashioning or even valuing the self as one kind of thing (socially integrated, deferential) as opposed to another (individual, autonomous), but a way to manage conflicting aspects of selfhood, keeping each in its proper place.

The ways that morality is imagined to move between the socially integrated and autonomous capacities of selves are examined in chapter 4. The argument made here is that while it is possible for both Minangkabau people and ethnographers alike to excise coherent moral arguments and precise topographies of selves out of these discourses— such as Islamic discourses emphasizing the superiority of learned reason over innate passion, or ones positing the greater truth of an inner essence as distinct from an outer appearance— they ultimately work together within moral subjectivities to manage the uncertain boundaries between what is self and what is not self.

Chapter 5 argues that in publicly obscuring potentially disruptive or troubling individual emotions, thoughts, and desires, Minangkabau people not only work to realize social integration, but also to create and protect paribadi (personal) spaces where autonomous selves can be realized and cultivated. While the chapter explores how the paribadi is created, imagined, and protected through shared discourses and practices, it also argues that the paribadi is necessarily prone to elaborate individualization. The chapter thus draws heavily on individual experiences, concentrating especially on two subjects, Ni Saia and Da Luko, and the ways they imagine, order, and find value in the paribadi, using it as a locus of self work. The accounts of Ni Saia’s autobiographical poem and Da Luko’s tattoos and spiritual battles illustrate how culture is given life through the work of individual selves.

Chapter 6 brings the arguments made in the preceding chapters together within an analysis of Islamic subjectivity among Minangkabau people. The tensions and ambiguities of moral subjectivity described throughout the book are juxtaposed here to the totalizing demands and promises of transcendence made by conceptions of Islam, imagined as perfect and certain. The chapter first examines the ways that shalat, the obligatory daily prayers, crystallizes the tensions between moral impulses toward integration and autonomy. Shalat promises the transcendence of these conflicts, but in confronting the enduring tensions of multidimensional selfhood, it sometimes leads to distressing experiences of failure. The engagement with shalat thus does not determine moral subjectivity, but reflects attempts to transcend stubbornly enduring tensions of human selfhood that have become the focus of Minangkabau and Islamic discourses. The chapter then attends to the ways that notions of conviction in Islam are employed in West Sumatra as a way of maintaining Islamic selfhood in the face of ambiguously Islamic practices and experiences, and as an alternative to the impossibility of transcendence or the impulse to respond to that impossibility with a fundamentalist social agenda to transform the world.

Ultimately the accounts in the fi nal chapter show how it is through grappling with and reflectively attempting to manage tensions— and not simply within the singular lines of discursive logic— that Islamic subjectivity, or moral subjectivity of any kind, emerges in people’s lives. The book’s coda thus suggests that this sort of reflection and work is inherent in moral life, as intrinsic to the subjectivity of human flourishing as it is to the subjectivity of dysfunction, subjugation, and suffering.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, it would have been impossible without those methods to make the kinds of arguments this book makes— or, more fundamentally, to offer the kind of ethnographic material that it does.

The notion of subjectivity is that people live life from the perspective of their own existence: they live social life as selves. The meaning of “self ” and its relationship to other terms such as “person” and “identity” has been inconsistent in anthropology (Harris 1989; Lindholm 1997; Spiro 1993). For some, the term may bring to mind cultural concepts of self or the assumption of a particular psychological system or entity, but these are not what I have in mind. I think of selves as lived. Individual minds and bodies bring together and work to more or less integrate different systems and information into the living of par tic u lar lives in an ongoing process of self-formation (cf. Parish 2008).2 by contemporary knowledge of neurology (Quinn 2006). Selves are thus the emergent cohesive qualities of this process. Selves may of course entail self-reflection, evaluation, and attempts to refashion themselves. We know ourselves in multiple ways— as physical, social, historical, and consciously reflective beings— often reflected in, but not created by, our cultural representations of self (Neisser 1988). It is in the process of putting these together that the self continuously emerges.

That all these terms— self, subject, identity, person— alternately or simultaneously bear passive and active forms is a sign that our manner of being ourselves, or persisting as who we are, involves both the ways in which our selfhood is a matter of natural sameness, and the ways in which it must encompass the differences within ourselves that being human unavoidably occasions and contains. . . . Questions about the self are not about whether some one term best names what is essential to it, but about the ways people seek and find to establish operative and meaningful relations between the various constituents of their lives. Concern about the self is concern about how we put the diverse parts of our personal being together into some kind of whole. (Seigel 2005, 16– 17)

Jerrold Seigel (2005) thus argues that selves must in the most basic terms be understood to account for three dimensions of human existence: bodily, as physical beings; relational, as beings made up by our social relations and structures; and refl ective, as conscious and self- conscious autonomous beings. These dimensions of human existence are bound to enter into human experience and emerge in cultural repre sen ta tions. The ways these dimensions are elaborated in social interaction, conceptualized, and valued is thus highly variable. Their existence is a stubborn existential fact, but their subjective significance goes beyond their existence to the ways they are given meaning and value through social interactions and representations.

Seigel’s thoughts grow out of his thorough historical exploration of Western philosophic theories of selfhood. As formal theories, many of the ideas he traces deny or minimize one or more of the dimensions he identifies, leaving them internally coherent but open to critique. The experience of living forbids anyone from settling into the tidier confines of theory.

The argument in this book builds in a basic way off of the insight that subjectivity must therefore reflect this multidimensional nature of selfhood. This is a way of understanding self that is also supported. It focuses particularly on tension between the relational and reflective dimensions of self as it emerges in moral subjectivity in the Minangkabau context. The moral relationship between relational and reflective dimensions of selfhood in a Minangkabau context is particularly compelling because each has come to be realized not only in individual experience, but also celebrated in robust cultural repre sen ta tions (cf. Gregg 2005, 336– 339, on Middle Eastern cultural psychology). this situation can be traced to the historical development of contemporary Minangkabau society, especially over the past two centuries. Of particular importance in this regard are an increasing reliance on individualized economic endeavor amid a thriving matrilineal system, the emergence of notions of traditional Minangkabau identity, and a growing emphasis on Islamic piety.

The account in this book is thus a cultural account, but one in which culture must answer to existential demands. It is possible, of course, for cultural repre sen ta tions to make it difficult for people to easily categorize or represent some dimensions of experience (Levy 1973; Hollan 1992). One aspect of existence may be elaborated and celebrated and another marginalized. Yet even the most hegemonic cultural systems, in complex societies at the very least, still engender their own forms of ambivalence and even conscious re sis tance (Parish 1996). Further, such hegemony represents only one possible way that cultural patterns can be organized. The push and pull of integration and autonomy in Minangkabau does not take this unipolar form.

The fact that forms of both social integration and autonomy are valued by Minangkabau people and fi nd a means of expression and celebration in Minangkabau cultural patterns allows the discussion in this book to move beyond claims about the essentially social or essentially individual nature of selves, or conceptions of selves, in given societies. The Minangkabau case fits poorly into any effort to make a contrast between socially oriented non-Western (and especially Asian or Oceanic) selves and ostensibly individual and autonomous Western ones (cf. Geertz 1984; Hsu 1985; Markus and Kitayama 1991; Shweder and Bourne 1984).

Such a dichotomy has proved a poor way to theorize the place of these moral orientations in different societies. Constructing this kind of dichotomy requires the assumption that there is a single, unified model that describes the way an entire community— and every member of that community— thinks about persons, all the time. Such an assumption is simply unwarranted and does not match what we can observe ethnographically (McHugh 1989; Hollan 1992; Murray 1993; Spiro 1993; Lamb 1997). For example, although we may fi nd ways that Japanese people orient themselves toward others, and Westerners orient themselves toward an inner ego, we can also find ways that the reverse is true (D’Andrade 2008; Lindholm 1997). Seigel (2005) notes that anthropological arguments about the self are most prone to place a reductive emphasis on the relational dimension. Of course it is not a surprise that theorists who see themselves as interrogators of the social have found themselves arguing for the essentially social nature of selves. On the other side, not all Western conceptions of the person are necessarily characterized completely by the egocentricity, boundedness, and other qualities associated with Western selves in some anthropological literature, where, as in Geertz’s (1984) famous account, this is often implied to be a particularly strange or distorted conception of human existence. Certainly there are many and conflicting visions of the self in Western societies, articulated not only in daily life, but also in the explicit formulations of philosophers and social theorists since the Enlightenment (Morris 1991; Murray 1993; Seigel 2005; Taylor 1989). Finally, even when a par tic u lar orientation like individualism is widely celebrated in a society, it may emerge in very different ways among its members (Kusserow 2004).

Ultimately, this book argues that the cultural forms through which these dimensions of selfhood are elaborated and valued need to be understood less as self- contained and coherent moral visions that erase alternatives and more as ways of articulating and managing the inevitable tensions between these dimensions. In the Minangkabau example explored here, these tensions are intrinsic to the cultural forms, a reason they have been elaborated and sustained. If autonomy and integration are two centers of moral gravity, they ultimately revolve around each other. Borrowing from a Minangkabau saying, I describe people’s efforts to realize both an integrated as well as an autonomous self as moral endeavors to reach for a transcendent, if never truly obtainable synthesis: to be “caged in on the outside.”

The Research

I conducted fieldwork in and around Bukittinggi from January 2002 to November 2003, with a short return trip in 2008. My hope going into the field was to live, along with my wife, in a Minangkabau house hold. Ideally, this would allow me to observe an example of domestic life and provide a conduit through which I could be introduced to others in a neighborhood, and allow us to spend less time on domestic chores. Before arriving in Bukittinggi, however, I was warned by some Minangkabau people and experienced anthropologists alike that most people in West Sumatra would be reluctant to share their homes with anyone other than family, and might be particularly wary of their neighbors’ reaction if they hosted foreigners.

We were fortunate. Within a few days of arriving we were introduced to Inyiak Datuak, a man in his mid- thirties who offered us the opportunity to live in his family’s home, where he had been raised. Only Minangkabau women inherit rights to use the property owned by their lineage. The house was thus home to Inyiak Datuak’s sisters, while he lived elsewhere with his wife. He nevertheless felt responsible for looking after the house, his sisters, and his sister’s children. In doing so, he was living up to his position as mamak, or mother’s brother. this seemed especially important considering that his parents were no longer living, and even more so because he holds a high title in his lineage, meaning that he is responsible for looking after the best interests of all members of his lineage— essentially, of being a mamak to all of them. “Datuak” is, in fact, his title, while “Inyiak” is an honorific identifying him as “grandfather,” despite his youth.

The household consisted of two of Inyiak Datuak’s sisters and the elder sister’s husband and their two children, a boy who was six and a girl who was a year and a half when we moved in. Several houses belonging to other members of the lineage sit on the same small plot of land. We provided their household with an extra source of income; they provided us not only with food and shelter, but also companionship and assistance that were essential for shaping our experience in West Sumatra and making our stay possible.

From the perspective of those living out on the edges of Bukittinggi or beyond, the neighborhood in which we lived was sometimes described as urban, but for those living nearer the city center, it was often described as an example of village life. While a few homes in the neighborhood are rented out, most of the population, including Inyiak Datuak and his family, consider themselves natives, living on land first claimed by their lineage ancestors. The level of respect for Inyiak Datuak and his family in this neighborhood, and their deep network of kinship and other social ties within it, gave the family the social capital necessary to counter the suspicion aroused by hosting foreigners.

It also helped that our bedroom was attached as an addition to the side of the house, with a separate entrance. this eased the sense that we were occupying a room that should be reserved for one of the women in the family, several of whom were living in other parts of the country but should always have the option of returning home. The room had served this function before: it had been Inyiak Datuak’s bedroom as an adult, before he married. It worked well for us, as we could maintain some degree of privacy and independence while still sharing meals and the common areas of the house with our host family.

I learned a great deal by observing the habits and rhythms of people in this house and in my own neighborhood, hanging out in one of its coffeehouses and attending celebrations at its prayer house. However, I also spent much of my time in other neighborhoods, other coffee houses, in people’s homes in other parts of the city, in the marketplace, and occasionally in other parts of West Sumatra. Daily observations and casual conversations in various corners of Bukittinggi formed the foundation for my understanding of life in Minangkabau and for what I discussed in greater depth with people during recorded interviews.

Thirty-five people participated in recorded interviews with me. About two-thirds were men, reflecting the better opportunities I had in general to spend time with men. The ability to offer perspectives from both men and women is, on the whole, a strength of the ethnographic account in this book, but it will become apparent that it leans toward a male perspective at times. These interview subjects ranged in age from their early twenties to their eighties, and their economic positions from relatively poor to relatively well-off , but class distinctions within this population are not very well defined: all of my subjects would identify as some variation of “normal” (biaso).

In all, I recorded 176 interviews, resulting in well over 2,000 pages of typed transcriptions. Following each interview, I recorded additional information about the conversation in my field notes. I often listened to the recording of the interview not long after the interview itself to help me recall and make a record of details and contexts not preserved on the tape (e.g., hand gestures, posture, the meaning of references that were not obvious in the recording itself). this also helped me to plan for the next interview.

For a small subset of the people I spoke with I pursued a person-centered approach to the interviews (Levy and Hollan 1998). While I would come prepared with one or more topics I wanted to explore, these were open-ended interviews, not structured ones. The interviews proceeded more like conversations, as I would allow the subjects’ answers to determine the course of the discussion, thus getting a better sense of their own concerns and the connections they saw between different issues and experiences. I tacked between asking questions about general cultural concepts and social practices and about personal experiences and opinions. The goal was to gather information— both from the content of their answers as well as their patterns and emotional tenor— on their individual engagements with the cultural material we were discussing, and to avoid being channeled into the direction of research that my subjects often seemed insistent on taking me: into creating a picture of “Minangkabau” life rather than getting a sense of the subjective engagements of my subjects with their social context.3 topics that occupied the largest portions of the interviews were childhood, marriage and family life, religion, emotions, gender, morality, supernatural phenomena, and health, illness, and bodies. The topics tended to bleed into each other.

Thirteen subjects, nine men and four women, completed what I consider to be a full series of interviews following the person- centered approach, each consisting of a minimum of six separate, substantial interviews. These series generally took place over the course of several months and lasted as many as fourteen interview sessions, with the great majority consisting of at least ten separate interviews. The sessions normally ranged from close to an hour to as a long as two hours, with the entire series generally ranging from close to ten to over twenty hours of recorded interviews. I spent many more hours conversing with many subjects outside of these recordings. It is from this smaller subset of subjects that I draw the richest and largest portion of the material presented in this book.

When possible, I interviewed people in a small room I had secured above a shop in the marketplace. this setting was private, reasonably quiet, and relatively neutral in relation to any particular social roles inhabited by the subjects. I made ad hoc use of a number of other locations to conduct interviews, when necessary, but some people felt uncomfortable coming— or being seen coming— to any secluded place to participate in what was already a peculiar activity. Being alone with a woman especially risked being seen as inappropriate, although this did not usually prevent me from conducting private interviews. My wife or my research assistant, Yessi Asiswanti, accompanied me for a few interviews, and I interviewed most women and several men in their homes. This occasionally presented problems with privacy, although it also assured me glimpses into the domestic lives of my subjects.

A major goal in this project was to gather the kind of ethnographic information on subjectivities that has been lacking in previous studies of Minangkabau and is too rare in studies of Islamic societies. In this book I lean heavily on what my subjects told me about their experiences. Beyond using my subjects’ words to uncover underlying cultural patterns (Quinn 2005), I treat them as legitimate windows into their lives and subjectivities. In many instances I do take a step back from my subjects’ statements and stories to offer context and analysis, at times considering my exchanges with subjects as objects of study in themselves. In these instances I offer perspectives on my subjects with which they may not agree. What people say about what— and why— they do and experience is not the same as what they actually do and experience. Still, I am inclined toward taking seriously what people tell us about themselves and to treat what they say as worthy of extended consideration. Caveats apply, but there is perhaps no better way to get a sense of others’ subjectivities.

I conducted most of the interviews in the Minangkabau language or a mixture of Minang and Indonesian. Minang children grow up in West Sumatra speaking Minangkabau as their first language, and then begin to speak the national language of Indonesian regularly in school. Minang and Indonesian are closely related but generally considered distinct languages. By

school age most Minang children are at least passively fluent in Indonesian due to their exposure to it, especially through television. Minangkabau is most closely associated with family life, friendships, and most salient emotions, while Indonesian is most often linked to more formal public interactions and the mass media. Heider (1991) describes different cognitive maps for emotion terminology in the two languages among those who speak both fluently, indicating some differences even in the case of close cognates.

I began my fieldwork already fluent in Indonesian. I first studied it formally in 1990 and subsequently spent about a year and half in Indonesia in the 1990s, mostly on the island of Java. To become profi cient in Minang I studied with tutors during my first six months living in Bukittinggi. I waited until the second year of my fieldwork to conduct most of my recorded interviews.

Recorded interviews were initially transcribed by a Minangkabau person in Padang. The translations are my own. Except when important for conveying emotional tenor or state of mind, I have cleaned up the translated transcripts by eliminating some stutters, pauses, and other quirks of speech. Portions of recorded interviews that were too unclear to be reliably transcribed are marked as “[un]” in the text.

All of the names I use in this book are pseudonyms, and I have occasionally changed some identifying details. In addition, I have attached Ni to the beginning of the names of the women and Da to the names of the men. In proper usage these respectful titles— short for uni, older sister, and uda, older brother— mark someone as older, although not greatly older, than oneself. Here, I employ them to help readers more readily identify which subjects are men and which are women.

Structure of the Book

Chapter 1 surveys the social geography and rhythms of Bukittinggi and demonstrates that the thrust of the moral tension between autonomy and integration explored in this book has been propelled by the par tic u lar economic, religious, and political history of Minangkabau society. this tension is reflected in the structure of Bukittinggi, which is conceptually and morally divided into “the village” and “the marketplace.”

The moral meanings attached to Minangkabau identity are taken up in chapter 2, addressing three interlocking concerns: adat (traditional culture), Islam, and conceptions of Minangkabau character. this latter perspective trains its focus on how individuals maneuver themselves through ordered society, preserving their autonomy in ways that avoid defying the demands for unity and deference as defined by adat and Islam.

Chapter 3 describes the ways an aesthetic of social unity is created in everyday interactions. It suggests that while this aesthetic constitutes a very real locus of moral selfhood, it is not ultimately a way of fashioning or even valuing the self as one kind of thing (socially integrated, deferential) as opposed to another (individual, autonomous), but a way to manage conflicting aspects of selfhood, keeping each in its proper place.

The ways that morality is imagined to move between the socially integrated and autonomous capacities of selves are examined in chapter 4. The argument made here is that while it is possible for both Minangkabau people and ethnographers alike to excise coherent moral arguments and precise topographies of selves out of these discourses— such as Islamic discourses emphasizing the superiority of learned reason over innate passion, or ones positing the greater truth of an inner essence as distinct from an outer appearance— they ultimately work together within moral subjectivities to manage the uncertain boundaries between what is self and what is not self.

Chapter 5 argues that in publicly obscuring potentially disruptive or troubling individual emotions, thoughts, and desires, Minangkabau people not only work to realize social integration, but also to create and protect paribadi (personal) spaces where autonomous selves can be realized and cultivated. While the chapter explores how the paribadi is created, imagined, and protected through shared discourses and practices, it also argues that the paribadi is necessarily prone to elaborate individualization. The chapter thus draws heavily on individual experiences, concentrating especially on two subjects, Ni Saia and Da Luko, and the ways they imagine, order, and find value in the paribadi, using it as a locus of self work. The accounts of Ni Saia’s autobiographical poem and Da Luko’s tattoos and spiritual battles illustrate how culture is given life through the work of individual selves.

Chapter 6 brings the arguments made in the preceding chapters together within an analysis of Islamic subjectivity among Minangkabau people. The tensions and ambiguities of moral subjectivity described throughout the book are juxtaposed here to the totalizing demands and promises of transcendence made by conceptions of Islam, imagined as perfect and certain. The chapter first examines the ways that shalat, the obligatory daily prayers, crystallizes the tensions between moral impulses toward integration and autonomy. Shalat promises the transcendence of these conflicts, but in confronting the enduring tensions of multidimensional selfhood, it sometimes leads to distressing experiences of failure. The engagement with shalat thus does not determine moral subjectivity, but reflects attempts to transcend stubbornly enduring tensions of human selfhood that have become the focus of Minangkabau and Islamic discourses. The chapter then attends to the ways that notions of conviction in Islam are employed in West Sumatra as a way of maintaining Islamic selfhood in the face of ambiguously Islamic practices and experiences, and as an alternative to the impossibility of transcendence or the impulse to respond to that impossibility with a fundamentalist social agenda to transform the world.

Ultimately the accounts in the fi nal chapter show how it is through grappling with and reflectively attempting to manage tensions— and not simply within the singular lines of discursive logic— that Islamic subjectivity, or moral subjectivity of any kind, emerges in people’s lives. The book’s coda thus suggests that this sort of reflection and work is inherent in moral life, as intrinsic to the subjectivity of human flourishing as it is to the subjectivity of dysfunction, subjugation, and suffering.