Webs of Power: Women, Kin, and Community in a Sumatran Village. By Evelyn Blackwood. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 1990. xvi, 219 p., biblio., index. Reviewed by James Hoesterey (Univ. of Wisconsin).

Evelyn Blackwood’s Webs Of Power: Women, Kin, and Community in a Sumatran Village is a provocative ethnographic exploration through the theoretical terrain of power, gender, and kinship in a Minangkabau village. Blackwood convincingly argues that Minangkabau women, especially senior elite women able to direct land and labor, are indeed actors who carefully navigate alternative discourses of male hegemony, rooted in a colonial past, religious doctrine, and Indonesian models of family. As a pedagogical tool, Indonesianists would find this book an insightful examination of how state discourses are both rejected and reproduced at the local level. Beyond Indonesianists, this book uses careful ethnography to examine some of the most recent theoretical developments in gender, power, and kinship, and would thus be resourceful for any undergraduate or graduate class in those fields.

Blackwood proposes that “individuals are situated within webs of socially produced identities that empower or disable them in any given context.... I envision power residing in a multiplicity of nodes and interlinkages that together constitute the processes and practices of social life” (p. 14). Blackwood’s ethnography extends theories of practice, arguing for a definition of power which “sees power invested in the ability to constitute and reconstitute (create and shape) social practice” (p. 189). Arguing against hegemony as a superstructure, she maintains “Minangkabau women constitute and reconstitute themselves as heirs and heads of households despite the circulation of alternative discourses of male hegemony” (p. 6). Blackwood explores the complexity of hegemony as a theoretical tool, suggesting that a “dynamic concept of hegemony recognizes that any one relation or subjective identity is multiply constructed and constantly shifting” (p. 5).

Rich ethnography informs Blackwood’s understandings of the layers and multiple terrains of power. At the village level, Blackwood weaves a web of relations intersecting class, gender, and the Indonesian state. In this analysis, power is context dependent, “where terms such as ‘dominant’ and ‘subordinate’ fail to convey the complexity of power” (p. 189). The final chapter provides a diagram detailing the complexity of kin relationships and connecting multiple terrains of power relations through which individuals maneuver. Blackwood’s web represents a sophisticated understanding of power, gender, and kinship. While men might be heads of household according to Indonesian census, senior elite women enjoy multiple spheres of authority in kin, land, and labor relations. Understanding the household from a Minangkabau perspective, women are actually more central to the house, whereas the men of an out-migrant people are resigned to the periphery of both house and village.

Blackwood’s web of power, however, does not link this gendered pattern of out-migration with village power relations, despite the data that 19% of the village were out-migrants who, from afar, still contributed to the political economy of the village. A Minangkabau couplet states: Merantau bujang dahulu/ di kampung berguna belum , roughly translated as: “Until a young bachelor goes abroad, he is not yet of value in the village.” Out-migration provides another possible trajectory towards power. With no land or capital, young men are expected to out-migrate. Success abroad provides legitimacy in the village. A young man’s worth is generally calculated not in individualistic terms of personal income, but rather in terms of how much money he has sent to his mother and family in the village (see Mochtar Naim, Merantau: Pola Migrasi Suku Minangkabau. Yogyakarta: Gadja Mada University Press, 1979). Blackwood mentions, but does not incporporate, the importance of a son’s cooperation with his mother, noting that one out-migrant generally contributes up to half of his income to his mother in the village (p. 63). I am reminded of Radjab’s autobiography Village Childhood where he writes that when a “young man had been abroad in the rantau two or three years, and had sent back lots of money and clothes back home to his mother, and the villagers had gotten wind of this, without fail some mothers and fathers would want to come propose marriage” (Susan Rodgers, Telling Lives, Telling History: Autobiographical and Historical Imagination in Modern Indonesia., Berkely: University of California Press, 1995). Minangkabau sociologist Mochtar Naim argues that the village must be understood in relation to the rantau (ibid.). Blackwood’s analysis locates power in the village, whereas perhaps Minangkabau men think about power more in relation to success in the rantau rather than lineage and land control in the village.

Weaving these insights in theoretical terms, it seems that theorists of practice and power must look more closely at gendered ideas about power. Strauss and Quinn argue that practice theory will become even more nuanced when we seriously consider Bordieu’s concept of “embodied knowledge” and begin understand the mental models which internalize contradictory discourses and motivate multiple practices (see Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn, A Cognitive Theory of Cultural Meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997; p. 44). Blackwood’s ethnographic analysis illuminates the complexities of previously misunderstood power relations among Minangkabau. I would not weave a different web, but instead uncover new threads with these further cultural and theoretical considerations among village and rantau, gender and knowledge, power and practice.

(This review was uploaded to www.antarakita.net on September 26, 2003)