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MINANGKABAU 525
as commercial agricultural production and wage labor, both dominated by males,
increase in importance.
Wherever possible, the Minangkabau are wet rice agriculturalists who farm
permanent, irrigated fields. Women perform most of the tasks of cultivating wet
rice, preparing the soil with hoes, transplanting the rice seedlings and weeding
the fields, which they own. Men usually help with harvesting the rice, and they
plow in the areas where water buffalo are used for that purpose. Both in the
traditional and in the modern economy, the work of men has included extensive
involvement in commerce. This was clearly a major factor in the eighteenthcentury
conquest of Johore, on the Malay peninsula, by the Minangkabau state
of Siak, based in eastern Sumatra, and in the Padri movement of Minangkabau
proper during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, the
traditional agricultural economy, which is dominated by women, is of equal or
greater importance.
Buffalo are kept for their milk, which is consumed as a thin yogurt, and only
infrequently are buffalo slaughtered to provide meat for important feasts. Fish
are a large part of the diet even in inland areas, where they are raised in artificial
ponds and in the rice fields. Market gardening is important in the well-watered
and fertile volcanic soils of the northwestern part of West Sumatra, near Bukit
Tinggi, but much less so in the relatively poor soils farther south, near Batang
Kapas. Land is crowded in the fertile areas of the north, and there is very little
slash-and-burn agriculture. Harvested rice fields are quickly planted in peanuts
and vegetables. In the more thinly populated south, timbered land is still available
for slash-and-burn agriculture, which entails cutting trees and brush and burning
the dried debris (to provide ash fertilizer) before planting. Dry rice, tapioca and
maize are usually planted in the first year, and following the harvest the new
fields are planted in commercial crops, such as rubber, clove or coffee. Rubber
plantations are more important in Negri Sembilan than in any other area of West
Sumatra.
Just as subsistence patterns vary somewhat from region to region in the Minangkabau
realm, so demography and social organization vary. Communities
encourage their young adolescent males to leave home and gain experience. In
all communities, men are thought to be interested in travel because they cannot
own the best established agricultural fields and can only use the fields of their
sisters or must establish their own unirrigated agricultural lands in the least
desirable locations. However, the percentage of men who remain away from
home during long periods of the year varies from area to area.
In villages where the soil is rich, the population dense and the fields and
irrigation system well established, men are scarce except at the time of the rice
harvest, when they return from their rantau (places to which they migrated more
or less temporarily) to help their sisters and mothers and to visit their wives. At
other times of the year, there is an overwhelming presence of women in such
villages. There are children, of course, and a few old men. The women do
virtually all of the work and make the day-to-day practical decisions. When men