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524 MINANGKABAU
important characteristics of social organization (see Malays). Unlike Malays and
unlike most other Islamic peoples, the Minangkabau are matrilineal, organized
into kinship groups according to the principle of descent through women. Folk
explanations of their name refer symbolically to this fact. For example, one such
folk etymology of the term minangkabau is based upon its resemblance to the
words menang (winning) and kerbau (water buffalo). This similarity has been
elaborated into a story about an ancient time in which an unweaned and starving
female calf owned by the Minangkabau unwittingly castrated and thereby defeated
a champion Javanese bull. The incident is supposed to have given the
Minangkabau their name ("buffalo victory"). Another folk etymology notes that
minang refers to the harness that prevents a calf from nursing, and yet another
notes that minang refers to the ceremony before marriage in which engagement
gifts are offered, both noting the importance of water buffalo for milk, capital
and labor in the settled agriculture of the Minangkabau.
Among themselves, the Minangkabau usually subdivide their ethnic identity
according to particular areas within the Minangkabau realm. The Orang Padang,
for example, are the people of Padang Panjang, which is the capital of West
Sumatra; the Orang Batang Kapas are the people of the Batang Kapas River
valley, which lies south of the Padang Panjang area. There are as many such
sub-ethnic identities as there are named areas within the traditional homeland in
the highlands of west central Sumatra.
Approximately one-half of the 6 million Minangkabau live in the Indonesia
province of West Sumatra, where they comprise more than 80 percent of the
population. Hundreds of thousands have migrated to other provinces of Sumatra
(especially Riau, Djambi and North Sumatra), and they are usually a conspicuous
minority in cities throughout Indonesia because of their success in commerce
and their high positions in government. Altogether, they account for more than
4 percent of the population of Indonesia.
More than 125,000 Minangkabau live in the peninsular Malaysian state of
Negri Sembilan, an island area near Melaka. The first immigrants from Minangkabau
lands in Sumatra settled there in the fourteenth or fifteenth century.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century they established a royal court in Sri
Menanti by inviting a prince of the royal blood from Pagar Ruyong, one of the
three traditional capitals of the Minangkabau in Sumatra. In the eighteenth,
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more Minangkabau immigrants settled
in the Malaysian states of Perak, Selangor, Johore and Pahang.
Perhaps 500,000 of the descendants of these later immigrants recognize their
Minangkabau ancestry and heritage, but most are more or less assimilated to
Malay culture. Even in Negri Sembilan, where about one-third of the population
is Minangkabau, many descendants of the Sumatran immigrants have become
Malays. Their assimilation into Malay ethnicity has been easy because of similar
customs and the mutual intelligibility of Malay and Minangkabau dialects. Matrilineal
institutions survive in Negri Sembilan but are becoming less relevant