Book: MARRIAGE, GENDER AND ISLAM IN INDONESIA: WOMEN NEGOTIATING INFORMAL MARRIAGE, DIVORCE, AND DESIRE

MARIA PLATT

MARRIAGE, GENDER AND ISLAM IN INDONESIA: WOMEN NEGOTIATING INFORMAL MARRIAGE, DIVORCE, AND DESIRE, NEW YORK: ROUTLEDGE

SETTINGL LOMBOK, WEST NUSA TENGGARA

Marriage in Indonesia is moral and social in nature, and that marriage in Lombok ‘largely remains community-based affairs (pp 5), and is truly a communal institution

Marriage continuum:

·      conceptualization of marital practices as they occur across the span of women lives (p.5);

·      marriage as a fluid, open-ended endeavor which can be circuitous, rather than a fixed state (p 6)

·      reconceptualise both the fast-changing and iterative nature of individuals’ marital trajectories.

Given the local western Lombok, unions tend to be fluid in nature with people moving in and out of marriage, sometimes several times over throughout the course of their lives. This etnography moves beyond simplistic accounts of marriage that prevail in the social imagination, which typically criticize the fluidity of Sasak marriage practices without seeking to understand them in any depth. Pp 5

This book provides an in-depth understanding of what the dynamic nature of marriage actually means for women according to their own perspectives. Pp 5

Concept of Jodoh

Examination of extramarital liaisons shows that it is not only men who are in a position to pursue these relationships. Indeed, by exploring women’s subjectivities through the lens of the marital continuum we can move beyond simple renderings of male marital authority and female subservience to a more complicated reading of women’s power across various stages of the marital continuum.

O’shaughnessy (2009) point out, Indonesian ideas about social and economic development inherent in the Marriage Law were deeply intertwined with the shaping of female legal subjectivities. For example, as O’ Shaughnessy (2009, l 32) points out, the Marriage Law relies upon gendered terminology, distinguishing between as ‘head of households’ and women as ‘managers of households’. She goes onto note that this designation of gender roles reflects ‘gendered legal subjectivities….directed at reshaping the broader social order’. In this case, the Marriage Law sought to reflect Indonesian ideals of modernity, which saw ‘the nuclear family as the basis of [the] nation (Tiwon, 2000, p 73) while simultaneously upholding women as less important than men within the context of household.

O’ Shaughnessy, K. 2009, Gender, state and social power in contemporary Indonesia: Divorce and marriage law, Routledge, London.

Tiwon, S. 2000. ‘Reconstructing boundaries and beyond’, in J.Koning, M.Nolten, J.Rodenburg and R. Saptari (ed), Women and Households in Indonesia: Cultural notions and social practices, Curzon Press, Richmond, pp 68-84

Marriage usually revolve around a person’s distinct marital status, such as single, married, separated or divorced. Such accounts rarely take into consideration the spaces that exist in between these various stages in a person’s often complex marital trajectory

Within marital continuum, women’s agency can transform throughout the course of their lives, women ability to shape their marital destiny is not confined to this first stage of the marital continuum (pp 77)

Marital continuum is not static and consequently women’s agency across the spectrum cannot be rendered in one specific form as a passive wife (pp 111)

c

Marriage law as a project of modernity; Platt argues that it has failed, for instance the practice of extramarital relationships, polygamy only based on Islamic rules, not Indonesian Marriage law.

The divergence between the state-based Marriage Law and community-based marriage laws, which creates ambiguity in women’s legal rights, and concludes that community-based law undermines the smooth implementation of the Marriage Law as a project of modernity *p 141)

The very design of the marriage registration process, I argue, is built upon normative ideas of individual autonomy and free will, thus dispensing with, or at [least] minimizing rituals that promote a more dynamic form of marriage (p 46); state marriage processes simply lack relevance in the lives of many Sasak (pp 149)