Hew Cheng Sim, ed., 2015, For Better or Worse: Marriage and Family in Sarawak.

Sather, Clifford

Hew Cheng Sim, ed., 2015, For Better or Worse: Marriage and Family in Sarawak. London: Whiting & Birch Ltd. ISBN 9781861770912. pp. 218 + x, index.

For Better or Worse is a timely collection of eleven essays dealing with changing patterns of marriage and family life in Sarawak, edited by Professor Hew Cheng Sim, a prolific Malaysian writer on matters of urban migration, marriage, and the working lives of Sarawak women.

Professor Hew opens the volume with an extended introduction. In it she offers an overview of what she calls "courtship, marriage and divorce Sarawak style," in which she stresses the significance of diversity. Sarawak has a multicultural population and patterns of marriage, kinship, and family structure are correspondingly varied. By stressing diversity from the outset, Hew skillfully guides discussion away from the oversimplifications that plague much of the literature on the "contemporary Malaysian family." While noting the existence of common forces at work transforming marriage, kinship and domestic relations--for example, increased levels of formal education, rural-to-urban migration, and wage-work outside the household--different groups have experienced and responded to these forces in different ways, and it is the contributors' sensitivity to this diversity and their ability to observe and document these differences that give this volume its special value.

By way of historical background, Professor Hew notes that Sarawak has a rich history of anthropological research, going back into the colonial era, much of which focused on kinship and family relations. In recent decades, however, the volume of anthropological research has lagged, and, as she rightly notes, there is now a long-overdue need for a reassessment of our understanding of family, marriage and kinship in light of the rapidly changing constitution of Sarawakian society. There is also a need to broaden the field of inquiry to include the work of demographers, economists, legal scholars, and others. For Better or Worse is primarily a work of sociology, drawing on survey and questionnaire research as its prime source of data. Several chapters, however, deal additionally with public policy issues.

In Chapter 2, for example, Aishah Edris, in her essay on divorce and marriage, addresses these issues directly. Rates of divorce are highest, she notes, among Muslim groups in Sarawak, lowest among Chinese and indigenous Christians, and somewhere in between for other indigenous communities. For all groups, divorce rates seem to be increasing. However, precise data are, in some cases, hard to come by. This is particularly so for indigenous, non-Muslim groups in Sarawak, for whom there is no single agency responsible for registering marriages and divorces. To rectify this, she calls for legal reform and more systematic data collection. She also notes that low income universally correlates with higher rates of divorce. Financial security is therefore a key to family stability; hence, measures that reduce poverty especially benefit those who are most vulnerable in society.

Chapter 3 by Professor Hew and Dr. Goy Siew Ching reports the results of a survey of marital satisfaction. Most couples, they found, described themselves as satisfied with their marriage, although levels of satisfaction were generally higher among men than women. Although Chinese have the lowest divorce rate, Chinese women were notably less satisfied with their marriage than other women. On the other hand, when asked to compare their own marriage to that of their parents, Chinese women tended to rate their own marriage as more satisfying, while, for non-Muslim, indigenous women, the reverse was the case. They tended to rate their parents' marriage as more satisfying than their own. The difference may reflect, the authors suggest, the parity that indigenous women formerly enjoyed in traditional adat and their high social standing as food producers.

The two chapters that follow deal with gender issues, notably, how domestic work is shared and the role of husbands and wives in the management of money. In Chapter 4, Goy Siew Ching shows that the entry of women into the labor market has not emancipated them from housework and even when both husbands and wives work equal hours, women tend to do most domestic chores. The disparity appears to be greatest in Chinese marriages and this, the author suggests, may account for why Chinese wives expressed a higher level of marital dissatisfaction. Lynn Wee's study of managing "family money" is particularly interesting. In contrast to Western countries, the majority of urban married couples in Sarawak maintain separate bank accounts. Each partner prefers to contribute independently to family expenditures, paying a certain part of the total, with whatever remains over being considered that partner's "personal money." This independent management system, Wee argues, highlights the central value placed on financial autonomy and personal security, especially by women, who. Wee finds, typically have a more accurate grasp of both partners' income and expenditures than do their husbands.

In Chapter 6, Lucy Scbli, writing on the Iban, echoes Aishah Edris' call for legal reform. However, the logic of her conclusion that Iban adat itself is to blame for increasing levels of marital instability is harder to follow. The problem would seem to rest not so much with adat, as with the fact that many Iban families now live outside their home areas, often in cities, and so are separated from the community elders, headmen and regional chiefs who traditionally administered adat, and from the sanctioning power of the local communities in which families were formerly embedded.

Chapter 7, Elena Chai's essay, "Young Wives in a Chinese Hakka Village," is an ethnographic gem. Engagingly written, it presents a closely-observed account of two Hakka families, focusing in particular on two young wives and how their relationships with other family members change as a result of the entry of additional brides into the family, motherhood, children, and the founding of new nuclear family units. The "village" of the paper's title refers to a resettlement community created in 1965 during "Operation Hammer," in which rural Chinese families suspected of communist sympathies were gathered together and forcibly relocated in resettlement "villages." While originally places of concentration camp-like confinement, these villages, ironically, are now remarkably cohesive, close-knit communities. Although their main economic support comes from outside the community, with many villagers working in urban areas, notably Singapore, those who leave remain in constant contact, sending money home and returning whenever they can, seeing "their future," as the author puts it, "as being rooted in the village" (p. 112).

In Chapter 8, Dayang Asmah bt. Awang Hamdan looks at changing patterns of courtship, including the use of social media, for young Malay women in Kuching. Dr. Elizabeth Elliott Baylor's essay that follows is something of a fish out of water. Its primary subject is food symbolism in Malay culture. For Malays and other Southeast Asians, rice, prepared in various ways, constitutes the primary basis of virtually every family meal. The argument, now familiar in the anthropological literature, is that the sharing of rice-based meals creates bonds of kinship. However, while doing fieldwork in a rural Malay community in Sarawak, the author discovered that local foodways are being changed by the introduction of mass-marketed processed foods. In particular, mothers, rather than preparing a meal of rice porridge, now frequently give their children commercially processed and packaged snack foods to eat ("crisps and chips"). The author's conclusion that these new foods function as symbolic "child identity" markers appears unconvincing and inconsistent, given, in particular, her earlier argument about the importance of rice in generating ties of kinship. One senses here a missed opportunity. Although the author tells us that her work was carried out as part of a larger study of childhood malnutrition, regrettably, nowhere in her essay does she explore the nutritional consequences of the introduction of processed food on the diet of rural Malay children. A pity, as the situation appears reminiscent of the debate a generation ago concerning breast-feeding and the aggressive marketing of baby formulas by a multinational food industry, particularly in developing countries.

Chapter 10, "Speaking in Tongues," takes the linguistic diversity of Sarawak as its point of departure to argue that marriage, particularly between partners who speak different mother tongues, necessitates that the couple make what the authors describe as "a decision on mutual language use" (p. 161). This decision is interpreted here as a "battle" for language survival. Among Sarawak Chinese, Mandarin appears to be winning out in this battle over "ethnic mother tongues" (Foochow, Hakka, etc.), while among indigenous groups, Bahasa Malaysia appears to be winning out over minority languages. However, the indigenous language with the largest number of native speakers in Sarawak, Iban, does not appear to be in danger because of its widespread use as a second language and because of efforts being made within the community itself to modernize and promote its use.

The last chapter, while, again, only slightly related to the book's earlier chapters, presents a fascinating case study, following the life-histories, beginning in 1966, of 33 of the initial 38 graduates of the Lawas Secondary School in northern Sarawak. Traced over three generations to the present, these life-trajectories give the reader a vivid picture of the enormity of social change that has occurred since the first years of independence, highlighting in particular the important role that secondary education has played in this transformation. The author of the chapter, Richard Schatz, has a personal connection with the families he writes about, having been, as a Peace Corps Volunteer, one of the three initial teachers at the Lawas school.

(Clifford Sather, Professor Emeritus, University of Helsinki)