Adat Sopan Santun: Concepts of Propriety in Minangkabau
The 1922 guidebook, Kitab 'Adat Sopan Santoen Orang Minangkabau, was an autoethnographic account of ethics and behavior. It reflected a need to think comparatively across cultures that had recently reached down to the level of the village. This presentation examines this text and the transformations of the late 19th and early 20th century from the vantage of the Minangkabau people. New transportation and media technologies required villagers, and not just cosmopolitan elites, to situate themselves globally. The Minangkabau were especially active in publishing books about adab, adat, and the tensions between Islamic and local ways of behaving.
Biography
Jeffrey Hadler first lived with a Minangkabau family as a high school exchange student in 1985. He studied comparative literature and Southeast Asia as an undergraduate at Yale and then Southeast Asian History as a graduate student at Cornell. He taught at the State Islamic University in Jakarta in 2000 before joining the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley, where he is currently an Associate Professor. He has served as Chair of both the Center for Southeast Asia Studies and the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley. His book, Muslims and Matriarchs: Cultural Resilience in Indonesia through Jihad and Colonialism, won the 2011 Benda Prize from the Association for Asian Studies.