Leaving to Remain: Migration, Matriliny, and Membership among the Minangkabau of Indonesia

Abstract

What happens to a society when a large part of its population is somewhere else? For generations, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra have answered that question through merantau—the deeply rooted practice of leaving home to seek livelihood, knowledge, experience, and opportunity elsewhere. Yet departure has not dissolved Minangkabau society. Paradoxically, it has helped sustain it. Leaving to Remain examines how a matrilineal Muslim society reproduces itself across distance. Rather than treating migration as the erosion of tradition, Kamaruzzaman Bustamam Ahmad asks a different question: how can people leave and still remain members of the social world they have left behind? Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in West Sumatra and the Riau Islands, historical sources, Minangkabau manuscripts, colonial records, and contemporary scholarship, the book traces the institutions that make continuity possible. It explores the nagari and the relationship between darek and rantau; the historical accommodation between adat and Islam; Tau Jo Nan Ampek as a portable grammar of cultural knowledge; matrilineal property and pusako; the authority of ninik mamak; the preparation, departure, and return of migrants; diaspora commerce; remittances; and the changing politics of cultural resilience. At the centre of the book is a provocative argument: Minangkabau society has not simply survived dispersal—it has developed institutions organised around absence. Property that cannot simply be liquidated, obligations that can be fulfilled across distance, knowledge designed to travel, and membership grounded in matrilineal descent allow social relations to persist even when people no longer share the same place. Moving beyond romantic accounts of cultural survival, Leaving to Remain also examines the costs, contradictions, and limits of this system: vacant customary offices, pressures on lineage property, changing religious authority, the transformation of the surau, female migration, and the growing distance between cultural knowledge and everyday practice. Written for readers of cultural and social anthropology, migration and diaspora studies, kinship studies, Indonesian and Southeast Asian studies, and the anthropology of Islam, Leaving to Remain offers the Minangkabau case as a larger inquiry into how social worlds survive mobility, distance, and generational change.