For Better or Worse: Marriage and family in Sarawak

By Whiting & Birch Ltd

Family and kinship structures have long been the subject of anthropological research in Sarawak, but little is known of the changes wrought by social transformative forces. Globalisation, urbanization and an increasing mobile work-force are some of the processes at work. The chapters in this book examine many important issues such as economic devel

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whiting & Birch Ltd
• Release date: Feb 12, 2015
• ISBN: 9781861770936

Book preview

Preface

The Malaysian state of Sarawak, situated on the island of Borneo is one of the most rapidly changing in the Southeast Asian region and it is the aim of this book to discuss the impact of these transformations on marriage and family. Trends in demography, marriage and family in the Southeast Asian region have been very well documented (Jones et. al, 2009, Quah, 2008, Smith-Hefner, 2005, Hing, 2004, Jones, 2002, 2001, Heaton et. al, 2001, Belanger, 2000) and it is not the purpose of this book to revisit these studies. Instead, it will fill a gap in the existing corpus of work by focusing on Sarawak. Although historically family and kinship structures have long been the subject of anthropological research in Sarawak, little is known of the changes wrought by social transformative forces. Marriage and family are not only the bedrock of individual happiness and well-being but have wider implications in terms of public policy for the support of fragile families and vulnerable children. Although they are subjects of wide appeal, little has been written in the context of Sarawak. Thus, whenever divorce statistics are highlighted in the media, there is moral panic over the disintegration of the family resulting in the young lacking family (read: moral) values. It is hoped that this book will debunk such a one dimensional view of the family. As I have argued elsewhere, the family unit is strong in Sarawak and when a nuclear family fragments, an extended one is resurrected. The interests of children are foremost and the majority of sole parents particularly mothers take enormous pain to ensure their children’s future.

The work presented here is grounded in many disciplinary areas and this diversity is its strength as it presents a rich tapestry of the processes at work in shaping contemporary marriage and family. In the context of Malaysia, heterosexual couples are the subject of this book. Some of the chapters take a feminist turn in unpacking the black box of the family and what happens inside; in terms of the gender division of domestic labour, the management of household money and marital satisfaction. Others interrogate how modernity has changed courtship patterns and interethnic marriages. Yet others examine how macro socio-economic processes have led to intergenerational social mobility; and how outward labour migration of men has shaped gender relations in Chinese and Iban households.

In putting this book together I have many people to thank, Sara Ashencaen Crabtree, the Editor-in-Chief of Critical Studies in Socio-cultural Diversity, the reviewer for the publisher who gave useful feedback on the chapters and last but not least, the contributors for their support and patience.

HEW Cheng Sim

1

Courtship, marriage and divorce Sarawak style

Hew Cheng Sim

Introduction

Sarawak’s population of 2.4 million consists of the Iban, Chinese, Malay, Bidayuh, Orang Ulu and Melanau in that order of demographic size. The classification of Orang Ulu alone includes the Kayan, Kenyah, Kelabit, Lun Bawang, Punan, Penan, Murut, Kedayan and a host of other smaller communities. It is said that there are at least 27 different ethnic groups but no one is really sure¹. The complexity of such a multiethnic population has led some to say that Sarawak is an anthropologist’s paradise or nightmare depending on how one looks at it². It has a rich history of research where anthropologists documented the indigenous cultures and customs dating back to pre-colonial times. As a result, we have much historical information on the family and kinship structures of the various indigenous groups but far less is known of the contemporary family.

In this chapter, I have tried to piece together whatever little there is to try to understand the changes that have occurred. In order to do this, we have to begin with the past. Although I have set up the following sections as a contrast between the past and the present, it is more accurate to talk of continuity and change. Present day Sarawak is, after all, a land which encompasses the full range of communities from the nomadic hunter-gatherer Penan in the hinterland to the globetrotting elites in the cities. It is therefore my intention merely to present a comparative rather than a dichotomous view – especially in the light of rapid socio-economic transformation in Sarawak. However, the focus of my discussion of the past will be on the indigenous communities in rural Sarawak.

Courtship: Then and now

In the days of old, courtship in rural Sarawak begins as a collective activity. Young men and women from the same village will go on a fishing expedition together or work in labour exchange groups especially during the harvesting season. A young man may visit a kin or friend in another village during a festive occasion or spend a night in another village on his way back from the bazaar and in this way, meets a girl in a neighbouring village. If he decides to court her, he will find an excuse to be in the village more and more frequently.

Courtship amongst the Iban is known as ngayap. When a young man fancies a woman, he will visit her in her mosquito net at night. As only a man can take such an initiative, the only thing the woman can do is to rebuff the visitor if she does not like him. On the other hand, if she likes her suitor, his visits will continue. Parents are sleeping in the same room and will therefore know when a young man courted their daughter at night. After a few such visits, her parents will ask him of his intentions. If her parents have no objections to his marriage proposal, he will inform his parents who will investigate the genealogy of the girl. Apart from incest which is taboo, the Iban have few restrictions on marriage between kin. Marriage with someone who is not kin is also permissible although there is a preference for marriage within the kindred (kaban) (Freeman, 1970). Gifts will be sent to the girl through her father and if these are accepted, the marriage is approved. The Iban ngayap is called nyadap in Kenyah. Both sets of parents have met to thrash out the all important question as to where the couple will live after their wedding (Whittier, 1978).

The Bidayuh has a similar courtship which they term maasu (visiting a girl after dinner) (Ridu, 1995). The young woman will weave a basket and the man will make a sheath for his machete (parang) while talking to each other. If he is welcomed by the woman’s family, he will be allowed to stay until the family goes to sleep. If not, they will ask him politely to leave. The same is true of the Kenyah Badeng (Armstrong, 1991) and the Baluy Kayan (Rousseau, 1973). They visit each other in the evenings and stroll around the village. They will sit and talk. This is encouraged by the girl’s parents as they are eager to hear more about his family. Taken a step further, sexual interest is expressed through activities involving physical contact such as plucking eyebrows and eyelashes (Armstrong, 1991:23, Rousseau, 1973: 47). Young men will ask girls for tweezers. The humorous description by Amai Lingi, the headman of Long Dungan on this subject is worth repeating (Armstrong, 1991: 83):

When you asked someone to give you tweezers, that was isu dalem (deep speech). It meant you wanted that person. So you would go walking to her amin (family apartment in the longhouse) in the evening and lie down on the mat with your head in her thighs (ah, so soft) and she would pluck your eyelashes. It hurt. Ai yah! But you always denied it. Even if she accidently pinched a fold of skin. ‘No of course it doesn’t hurt’ you’d say. ‘But there’s blood!’ ‘No, it’s fine,’ as you lay there, wanting to cry.

The plucking of eyebrow is also a courtship activity amongst the Western Penan. Penan courtship is known as ju’ paler which means ‘going towards each other ‘(Langub, 1995). When the relationship develops and they sleep together, they try to conceal their affair at first. Brosius (1992: 308) continues,

After some nights the couple at last make their relationship known. This is done through the simple expedient of the boy waking up with the girl in the morning in her lamin (family apartment³). Having woken up together, the boy sits beside the hearth in the girl’s lamin, speaking to her family and the couple openly express affection. Older people say that it is pleasant to see this. Members of other households within the community come to see the new couple together. It is this public recognition which establishes their relationship as a marriage.

Usually, once the proposal of marriage is accepted and the parents of both parties are happy with the union, the couple becomes engaged. It is fair to say that amongst the rural indigenous communities in Sarawak, an engagement is as good as marriage and sex amongst engaged couples are condoned while casual sex is frowned upon (Armstrong, 1991: 84). Discussing the indigenous groups in central Borneo, Rousseau (1990: 79) further adds that premarital sex between single people is tolerated in the village as marriage is expected to take place.

In the village, a suitor’s promise of marriage is not easily broken as courtship is supervised by parents and village elders. A suitor’s village of origin and family background will be known to the girl’s parents, and village elders can be counted on to enforce the customary laws (adat). If the girl becomes pregnant and the father of her child refuses to marry her, he must pay a fine for refusal of marriage, pregnancy and child maintenance. The family of the unmarried pregnant girl also has to perform a ritual such as the killing of a pig in order to restore the spiritual balance of the village. If this is not done, it is believed that illness will befall the dwellers of the village (Crain, 1970). In my study of the Iban in Batang Ai, a mentally challenged woman was made pregnant by a travelling salesman. She not only had the onerous task of bringing up the child and the financial loss of paying the fine, she was blamed (before the ritual fine was paid) for any misfortune that befell anyone in the longhouse. For example, the headman’s wife complained that the ill health of her youngest child was caused by her (Hew, 1995). If he is already married, he will be fined for adultery. Amongst the Iban and the Bidayuh, an unwedded mother is compelled by adat to name the father of the child. She has to pay a ritual fine if she refuses to do so. Thus Armstrong (1991:84) found illegitimacy rare amongst the Kenyah Badeng communities that she studied in the mid 1980s.

With rapid urbanization and the exodus of young people from the villages, the courtship game has changed. Single women migrants newly arrived from the villages experience greater sexual vulnerability. On Sundays and other days off, young rural migrants meet in the museum gardens, the Reservoir Park, the Waterfront, eateries and shops around the bus terminals in Kuching. In the cities, young women meet men from different ethnic communities, their family and employment background unknown and unfamiliar to them. Social mores which dictated courtship behavior in the village are not enforceable in the cities and hence many women are caught unawares when they first arrive in the city. Elsewhere I have argued that illegitimate births in the cities are not a consequence of a drastic change in values or new found freedoms expressed through romantic love and sexual encounters, but a persistence of old cultural values in new settings. In my study of single mothers, 14 per cent of 231 respondents interviewed said that they were abandoned by their boyfriends when they found out that they were pregnant (Hew, 2003b). When this happened, many returned to their villages to have the baby. Although unwed mothers have to endure village censure which includes a ritual fine, the child is often accepted into the fold. On the other hand, Christianisation and Islamisation of the indigenous community have led to new values and sexual mores. Many would now deny that premarital sex was ever condoned in the past. In our Kuching study⁴, 79 per cent of the respondents cited religious values as reasons against it. Some of the comments received were as follows:

Biblically, it is not right.

In Islam, we cannot stay together before marriage. It is a sin.

People will talk about it and it will bring shame to the parents. It is wrong.

Dayang Asmah’s chapter in this book discusses the impact of new communication technologies and the modern Muslim identity on present day Malay courtship and compared it to the courtship of the generation before.

Marriage and the household: Past and present

It is difficult to talk of a past and a present when it comes to the age of first marriage. Although the current mean age of first marriage in Sarawak is 28 for men and 24 for women⁵ (Rohani Abdul Razak, 2006), there are pockets of rural areas where the mean age of first marriage is still very low. It would appear that little has changed, as Rousseau (1973) reported that Baluy Kayan girls marry from 13-18 and men from between 18-30 when he conducted fieldwork amongst them in the early 1970s. Armstrong (1991:84) found that adolescent marriages were the norm in the Kenyah Badeng communities in the mid 1980s and similarly, amongst the Penan, girls marry at 14 or a little older and boys marry at around 17 or 18 (Brosius, 1992:308).

In most instances, the couple chooses each other. Only when a young man is unable to find a wife, will his parents and elders step in to help. There is also a strong preference for endogamy. In a stratified society like the Kayan, they marry within the same class (Rousseau, 1973). However, marriage is forbidden up to second cousins amongst the Kayan (ibid), while the Iban allow marriages between first cousins if they are from different households (Freeman, 1970: 71). Indeed, Brosius (1992: 309) noted the prevalence of first cousin marriages amongst the Penan that he studied. As both women and men can marry out of their natal households, parents are eager to keep their children within the same village. The Penan considers post-marital residence as a matter of grave concern which sometimes warrant parental interference in marriage. To overcome stress and conflict, newly wedded couples often practise reciprocal residence where they move between the natal villages of each other over a period of several years. Eventually, they will have to settle in one or the other. Men marrying into the households of their wives (uxorilocal residence) are common amongst the Kayan and the Penan (Rousseau, 1973, Brosius, 1992). However, there is no distinct preference amongst the Iban and the Kenyah (Rousseau, 1973: 59). Although Rousseau does not give an explanation for this amongst the Kayan, Brosius argues that Penan women are perceived to be less able to adapt to the husband’s family (Brosius, 1992: 314).

In present day Sarawak, women and men continue to choose their own marriage partners. In our Kuching study, 94 per cent of the 203 people we interviewed said that they chose their own partners. More than half of our participants also started married lives in the homes of their parents or parents-in-law. This is a continuation of past practice. When a newly married couple joins a household, it is merely a transitional stage. Eventually they move out to live on their own when they have children and become full members of the longhouse community. In the rural areas, one married child (usually the youngest) will remain in his/her natal household in order to look after the aged parents, and, in return, inherit the household properties. Freeman reports that it is extremely rare to have married siblings with adult children still living together in the same bilik⁶. Only one married child will remain in the natal bilik while the rest will set up their own bilik (1970: 43). In a reversal of this, in urban areas such as Kuching, aged parents move in with their married children when they are too old to care for themselves. The notion that children should take care of their aged parents instead of institutionalizing them remain strong (Wan Hashim Wan Jaffar, 2007). In a national study (ibid), it was found that children frequently visited their parents and gave money and material support if they were not living together.

Although there has been much debate as to the family form in Europe, when discussing the industrial revolutions, Seccombe (1993) argues that there is a close connection between the mode of production and the family form. He postulates that the capitalist mode of production transformed the extended family into a nuclear family as the individuated wage could not sustain anything more than a conjugal couple and their children⁷. In the context of Sarawak, the transformation of the rural agrarian economy through the increasing penetration of a monetized economy, and individualization of landholdings through cash cropping has led to the fragmentation of extended households into nuclear households. In the early 1950s, the extended family was the prevalent family form amongst the Bidayuh and the Iban (Geddes, 1954, Freeman, 1970). Geddes (1954) found that the majority of families in Mentu Tapuh in the 1950s consisted of aunts, uncles, in-laws, spouses of siblings and grandchildren of the conjugal couple. Within four decades, this changed to nuclear families (Gerrits, 1994:111). The nuclear family (conjugal couple and their children) is now the prevalent family form in Sarawak. The percentage of nuclear families in Sarawak is 61.1 per cent and 70.3 per cent in the Peninsula (Jariah Masud, 1998).

Although the nuclear family exists in the village, the male breadwinner and the dependent female housewife is a new family form for many rural migrants in the city. In the village, women combine productive work in the fields with the reproductive work of child-rearing. They work flexible hours on the farm, carry their babies on their backs while they toil in the fields and nurse them in the farm huts. Even when they are not in the fields, they will be looking after the children while drying, collecting and storing the harvested paddy grains. In other words, they could control the time and pace of productive work and incorporate child-care at the same time. They could also draw on the assistance of kin in the village. Thus, for village women, there is no clear separation between domestic reproductive work at home and productive work outside. In the city, without affordable child-care and the support network of kin, women are now dependent housewives while men are in wage work. Thus, the dichotomous separation of male breadwinner and female housewife emerge and is a new form of family for rural migrants in the city. As housewives, they are financially totally dependent on their husbands. Thus, they are vulnerable to divorce and abandonment. It is therefore not surprising that urban women in the lower socio-economic strata are more likely to try harder to save an unhappy marriage than their rural counterparts (Hew, 2003b).

Married women’s migration to the city together with their husbands has yet another consequence on the longhouses and village communities. In the past, Iban men migrate (bejalai) in order to secure prestige goods or employment in urban centres while women remained to manage village farms. Women are the custodians of the sacred paddy (padi pun) and the rites and rituals associated with rice cultivation. The immediate impact of the outward migration of matured, married women is that there is now no one left to manage family farms. In Soda Ryoji’s (2007) study of Rantau Kemiding, an Iban community, almost half of the population of males and females has migrated out of the longhouse. The decline of agricultural activities as a result of the outward migration of married women with their husbands has led to a loosening of the longhouse community as subsistence farming is the glue holding the social fabric of the village together. The Iban land inheritance system has also been deeply affected by the wholesale migration of families from the longhouse. The inheritance of land by bilik family members is often left open depending on who will reside in the bilik to look after the aged parents and who will set up their own independent bilik in the same longhouse (kediri). Children who marry and move to stay in their spouses’ longhouse (ngugi/nguai) lose access to their parents’ land. Traditionally, this would have been long settled as children marry and start their own families. However, the commercialization of agriculture through State development policies and the conversion of customary rights land to individual titled land have made land a valuable resource and in Soda Ryoji’s study (ibid), the migrants in Sibu continue to invest in both their parents’ and spouses’ bilik in the longhouse in order to keep their options open. This has resulted in disputes amongst bilik members concerning bilik succession and land inheritance and many longhouse communities are fractured by these changes.

Married women who remain behind in the villages when their husbands migrate elsewhere for work are beset by a different set of problems which results in a different family form. Elsewhere, Lucy Sebli (2008) discussed the emergence of "indai blue amongst rural women. Indai means mother in Iban and blue" has the connotation of illicit sexual activities. Taken together, indai blue refers to mothers (married or sole parent) who are involved in illicit relationships with older, affluent and frequently married men in order to support themselves and their children given irregular and non-existent remittance from their husbands. If in the 1980s, some Iban women migrate to towns to become sex workers⁸, in the 2000s, other rural women left behind become indai blue.

Marriages of old were simple affairs. Geddes reports that there are no religious rites accompanying a Bidayuh marriage (Geddes, 1954: 46). Friends and relatives of the bride and bridegroom will gather in the household where they will be