UC San Diego

This is an ethnographic study of moral personhood among Minangkabau people in the city of Bukittinggi, West Sumatra, Indonesia. The ethnography is based on field research carried out between January 2002 and November 2003. Data was gathered through participant-observation and through recorded and transcribed interviews, most of which employed a person-centered approach: a small number of respondents were interviewed repeatedly over a period of months, using a loosely-structured interview schedule that allowed their answers to shape the direction of the conversation. Thirteen people - nine men and four women, of varying ages and backgrounds - completed a full series of such interviews. In part, this dissertation reflects an interest, extending back to Mauss, in public representations of personhood. However, also drawing from an interest in the experience of self that can be traced to Hallowell, the dissertation suggests that such representations can best be understood as moral arguments that people take up in the management of fundamental tensions in the experience of self. This ethnography argues that Minangkabau moral personhood is characterized by a tension between a moral orientation that imagines human beings as fundamentally and most properly integrated with others, and one that imagines human beings as fundamentally and most properly autonomous individuals. It suggests that this tension, manifest in a particular engagement with Islam, grows out of both a complex social system as well as the multidimensional nature of the human self. The ethnography is presented in six chapters, organized around the following themes: 1) the historical and socioeconomic context of life in Bukittinggi; 2) Minangkabau ethnic identity, expressed through traditional culture and conceptions of character; 3) expressions and experiences of social integration in everyday interactions in Bukittinggi; 4) the ways that (im)morality is understood to move in and out of persons; 5) "personal" spaces of autonomy as an arena of creative self formation; and 6) the role of Islam as a site for elaboration and crystallization of tensions in Minangkabau moral personhood, with special attention to the role of belief and the practice of prayer. A concluding chapter assesses the ethnographic and theoretical perspectives offered in the dissertation