International Journal of Indonesian Studies Volume 1, Issue 3 | Page 60

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INDONESIAN STUDIES
SPRING 2016
all-embracing classification. Cosmos and human society are organized in the
same way, and through this there emerges the essential interconnection and
similarity of the human and the cosmic. (pp. 2)
The novel insight and ethnographic discovery that launched structuralism in
anthropology before Lévi-Strauss was the asymmetric marriage alliance, or as it is known in
Dutch and French anthropology, the asymmetric connubium of Eastern Indonesia (Fox 1980,
pp. 5). In this article, I will refer to the asymmetric marriage alliance as the asymmetric
marriage system because “system” suggests the degree to which it influences symbolic
meaning and structural patterning beyond marriage alliances. As I have elaborated in my
essay on the household, the basic law of the asymmetric marriage system is that group a
take wives from group b who take wives from group c who take wives from group a
(appendix: figure 2). The discovery of this type of social structure was the most influential
structuralist work in anthropology from the Leiden School (van Wouden 1935; deJong 1951;
Lévi-Strauss 1949) and had a strong influence on Lévi-Strauss.14 Though it is a precursor to a
theory of culture that certain sections of modern anthropology used to analyze culture with
from approximately 1960 to 1985, it originated in what now seems like the archaic attempt
to show the development of patrilineality out of matrilineality in the social evolution of man
(Fox 1980, pp.4). Though the impetus may have been from another epoch, van Wouden’s
structuralism and theory of culture gave creative energy to structuralist studies in this part
of Southeast Asia which is broadly described as Eastern Indonesia. However, what van
Wouden and others describe as “Eastern Indonesia” is more appropriately defined as the
Lesser Sunda Islands and the South Moluccas (appendix: figure 1).15 This being said, I will
continue the tradition of referring to the Lesser Sunda Island and the South Moluccas as
Eastern Indonesia for the sake of simplicity and continuity.
The enthusiasm of van Wouden’s claim that the pivot on which culture turns is
marriage, and thus kinship organization, started a zealous program that at times came close
to a form of ideologically induced apophenia. However, those holding to a unifying theory of
symbols have investigated many forms of Eastern Indonesian culture with interesting results.
I will start by describing the asymmetric marriage system because it is credited with shaping
the other elements of the social world and was the most significant contribution from this
region for the discipline of anthropology as a whole. Next, I will examine how structuralism
has studied the expressions of this ordering in: a) the house; b) the village; c) ritual exchange;
d) language; and e) textiles.

14

I have cited the original dates and not the publication dates of the English translations to show that
asymmetric marriage alliances were the subject of incipient structuralism.
15
Their structural analyses rightfully exclude the complex wet rice societies of the island of Sulawesi and the
Province of West Papua (the Melanesian Zone) that comprise the vast majority of the land and people of
Eastern Indonesia but are not part of the system orientated around asymmetric marriage alliance (see figure
1). Though East Timor is not part politically of Indonesia, it falls in this cultural grouping.

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