Comparative Perspectives on Kinship and Cultural Identity in Negeri Sembilan

The central contention of this paper is that important contrasts in the kinship systems of the Malays of Negeri Sembilan and the Malays of other parts of the Malay Peninsula (Malaya)1 have been overemphasized in the literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and that striking similarities in kinship and other areas of culture have been either glossed over or altogether ignored. This situation reflects both the normative, jurai emphases of the colonial-era (1874-1957) ethnographic literature on Negeri Sembilan and Malaya more generally, and the descent bias of the literature, particularly the material on Negeri Sembilan. These emphases and biases have obscured our understanding of Negeri Sembilan and have hindered our awareness of social and cultural commonalities in the Malay world; no less significant, as we will see, is that they have also had a profound impact on the ways in which Malays in Negeri Sembilan view themselves and their traditions as well as Malays in other regions of the Peninsula. Background The state of Negeri Sembilan covers an area of 2,566 square miles and has a (1980) population of about 573,500 people (Government of Malaysia, 1983). The census divides the population into four major ethnic categories: Malays,2 who make up 46.2 per cent of the total; Chinese, who comprise 36.6 per cent; Indians, who amount to about 16.9 per cent; and Others, who account for the remaining 0.3 per cent. The Malays, who are the focus of this paper, reside mostly in ethnically homogenous rural areas. Their economic activities include the subsistence cultivation of wet-rice, the collection and sale of forest products, the production of rubber for the world market, and, in the case