Few modern Americans would claim a comprehensive understanding of their kinship system. People seem to take their relatives for granted, as if kinship were based upon objective realities with little need for elucidation. But among the Malays of the rural inland district of Sik, Kedah (West Malaysia), there is a much more clearly articulated understanding of kinship and its moral, social, and intellectual traditions.
Rural Malays can deliver concise definitions of their kinship vocabulary and the social relationships connected to its terms. They can also contrast kinship relations with other kinds of social ties in a clearer and more consistent way than one encounters in the West. The usual interpretation is that kinship constitutes a way of making the best of the difficult human situation, smoothing over the often thorny surface of human nature.
The influence of Islam and Islamic ideas is apparent throughout this kinship system. Malays are Sunni Muslims of the Shafi'i school, and many of their ideas are intimately connected to this religion and its legal system. Islam came to Malacca, a port city on the southern west coast, around the early fifteenth century and seems to have spread to the rest of the Malay kingdoms in the next century or two. The coastal regions of Kedah, close to the royal capitals on the Muda and Kedah Rivers and to the trade routes of the Strait of Malacca, were objects of constant missionary activity from the years before British colonial expansion until independence in 1957. The coastal regions had Muslim advisers, tutors, and religious schools. The upland regions were targets of only sporadic missionary efforts, however, and thus present a more visible syncretism of Islamic and pre-Islamic ideas. In upland areas like Sik, settled sometime around the middle of the nineteenth century, many pre-Islamic animistic ideas, and even cults related to spirit demons and were-animals, were tolerated. Coastal areas tended more toward strict scripturalism.
Yet the character of pre-Islamic Malay culture and its influence on modern kinship ideas is difficult to determine. Archeological remains of kingdoms in Kedah with Buddhist, Saivite, and Vishnu images suggest the influence of Buddhist and Hindu ideas. Malay folk ideas include a wealth of names and ideas that are shared with Buddhist and Hindu peoples, but it is difficult to know whether these ideas represent survivals of a Malay Hindu-Buddhist past. They are quite possibly the result of borrowings from such neighboring peoples as the Thais to the north. Some writers have even suggested the influence on Malay kinship of a folk cultural substratum centered around locality spirit cults, such as those found in part of the linguistically related Oceanian region.
Darah, biological kinship
Malays see their kinship system as a set of ideas and rules that enable people to live harmoniously in households and larger groupings, and by so doing, to move closer to God. Every man and woman in society is closer to some people than to others. There are three types of recognized closeness: close blood relationship, close or intimate cooperation, and close spiritual relationship between souls. To develop these ideas, Malays define the human place in nature, and contrast the nonhuman behavior of natural species with human behavior, and moral with immoral conduct.
Malay
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