Minangkabau

Its heartland is the three highland luhak — Tanah Datar, Agam and Limapuluh Kota — spoken of in customary usage as the darek, with coastal and outlying territory called the rantau. The darek–rantau division is not an administrative boundary but a customary category: it states where adat authority is held to originate and how far it extends.

The name Minangkabau serves both as self-designation and in outside writing. In ordinary speech people more often say urang awak. This encyclopedia takes Minangkabau as the primary name on the basis of its use by the customary bodies themselves.

Membership of a suku — a named matrilineal clan such as Koto, Piliang, Bodi or Caniago — descends from the mother. Ancestral property, above all rice land and the rumah gadang, is held jointly by the women of a line and cannot be partitioned by men. The authority to speak for the suku is held by men, the mamak and penghulu, but it is exercised on behalf of the female line and conferred by it.

Calling this arrangement a “matriarchy” is inaccurate and is rejected within the customary domain itself: what is matrilineal is inheritance and membership, not rule.

The formula adat basandi syarak, syarak basandi Kitabullah — custom rests on religious law, religious law rests on the Book of God — states the relation between customary law and Islam as settled after the upheavals of the nineteenth century. It is the outcome of a dispute, not a permanent condition; the Padri War (1803–1837) was its violent form.

In practice inheritance questions are often decided twice over, under faraid and under pusaka, with the distinction between ancestral and self-acquired property serving as the resolution.

Merantau — leaving the home village for a livelihood, with the expectation of return — is a social institution, not simply migration. It bears directly on matriliny: since men do not inherit ancestral property, departure is the route open to them for building standing.

The Padang restaurant across Indonesia is merantau's most visible form but not its only one; cloth trading, tailoring, printing and, from the twentieth century, the bureaucracy and literary life belong to it too.