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Rural Malay Kinship
| Article
# : |
14610 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
5 / 1988 |
4,532 Words |
| Author
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David J. Banks
Anthropologist David J. Banks presently teaches at the State
University of New York at Buffalo. |
Few modern Americans would claim a comprehensive understanding of their kinship system. People seem to take their relatives for granted, as if kinship were based upon objective realities with little need for elucidation. But among the Malays of the rural inland district of Sik, Kedah (West Malaysia), there is a much more clearly articulated understanding of kinship and its moral, social, and intellectual traditions.
Rural Malays can deliver concise definitions of their kinship vocabulary and the social relationships connected to its terms. They can also contrast kinship relations with other kinds of social ties in a clearer and more consistent way than one encounters in the West. The usual interpretation is that kinship constitutes a way of making the best of the difficult human situation, smoothing over the often thorny surface of human nature.
The influence of Islam and Islamic ideas is apparent throughout this kinship system. Malays are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, and many of their ideas are intimately connected to this religion and its legal system. Islam came to Malacca, a port city on the southern west coast, around the early fifteenth century and seems to have spread to the rest of the Malay kingdoms in the next century or two. The coastal regions of Kedah, close to the royal capitals on the Muda and Kedah Rivers and to the trade routes of the Strait of Malacca, were objects of constant missionary activity from the years before British colonial expansion until independence in 1957. The coastal regions had Muslim advisers, tutors, and religious schools. The upland regions were targets of only sporadic missionary efforts, however, and thus present a more visible syncretism of Islamic and pre-Islamic ideas. In upland
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