Abstract
This chapter considers implications of population ageing as it may impact on normative gender preferences for old age care in three major Indonesian ethnic groups. The Asian literature on gender is well known for the strong preference for sons characteristic of patrilineal family systems in major mainland cultures. Elsewhere, however, the situation can be very different, of which the most striking is the powerful preference for daughters, and the eminent role that women play in the family economy and society of Southeast Asia’s largest matrilineal population, the Minangkabau of Sumatra. Javanese and Sundanese family systems are also often remarked for women’s influential roles, and people commonly state preferences for support and personal care from daughters. Comparative analysis drawing on ethnographic and systematic local survey data for rural Javanese, Sundanese, and Minangkabau communities is used to illuminate gendered support in relation to differing patterns of inter-generational exchange, socio-economic status, migration and the availability of children. Networks, and the differences in socio-economic status they maintain, introduce considerable heterogeneity into support arrangements, revealing considerable old age vulnerability and inability to observe gender norms in lower socio-economic strata. This structured diversity is compared to the approaches of two prevailing demographic models of intergenerational transfers and the standard survey methodologies on which they commonly rely. Major forms of population heterogeneity, including gendered relationships, are systematically excluded from these approaches, which in consequence give an unrealistic picture of social and demographic adaptation.
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Notes
- 1.
In the field research that will be described, below, in-depth interviewing repeatedly showed that different members of a network would give different accounts of events, relationships and the importance of different members of a network; taking any one person’s account of its membership and functions over time is thus likely to contain biases; specifying the composition and structure of a network needs to rely on several accounts, and thus a network, as a small population, is an empirically driven analytical construct.
- 2.
The model has been adopted by major international agencies, notably UNFPA, but remains controversial as its success as a policy instrument presumes countries can readily achieve low unemployment and under-employment, together with high levels of productivity per worker – none of which appear likely in much of the developing world. These aspects of the model are not considered here, however see Pool (2007).
- 3.
Village data presented in this paper were collected in Ageing in Indonesia, 1999–2007, with the generous support of the Wellcome Trust, the Economic and Social Research Council, and the British Academy. The second phase of this research is being carried out under Australian Research Council Discovery Grant DP170101044 ‘Understanding Social, Economic and Health Vulnerabilities in Indonesia’, for which we are also grateful. In the first phase, Edi Indrizal and Haryono made major contributions to the field studies in Sumatra and West Java, respectively. The methodology of the project as a whole entails extended fieldwork of up to a year’s duration, together with repeat return visits. Semi-structured interviewing in the first phase achieved substantial coverage of the elderly, between 80% and 97% in the communities; repeated in-depth interviews were conducted with between 20 and 60 elderly in each site, complemented by in-depth interviews with one or more other adult family members in most cases. Collection of life histories enabled mapping of kin networks, checked by observation of exchanges over time. Fieldwork also made possible observation of local events, and enabled familiarity with problems and adjustments to changing circumstances that make up much of people’s daily lives. Randomised surveys of household economy and inter-household exchanges with 50 ‘young’ households and 50 ‘elderly’ households in each of the three communities then served two important functions: they substantiated differences in social and economic status within and between networks which shape family and community responses to older people’s needs; and they enabled quantitative analysis of the role of support from absent network members. Two survey rounds, in 2000 and 2005, were accompanied by in-depth follow-up interviews. Randomised health surveys were also carried out in both rounds. This combined qualitative and quantitative methodology means that data were collected for many elderly respondents and younger family members in several forms (observation, surveys, semi-structured and in-depth interviews), enabling quality checks on data and the identification and exploration of network member’s differing interpretations of events and relations.
- 4.
Pseudonyms are used both for the communities and for individuals’ names in the case studies later in this chapter. In view of the similarity of Javanese and Sundanese family patterns, and for ease of reference, both communities on Java will here be referred to simply as Javanese.
- 5.
The anthropological demography of reproduction is the subject of the papers collected in Kreager and Bochow (2017); the intellectual background to compositional demography, and many of its uses across the human sciences, are the subject of Kreager et al. (2015); its potential importance for understanding aspects of climate and other environmental changes is sketched in Kreager (2011).
- 6.
Socio-economic strata in the three sites were defined by aligning economic differences revealed in the surveys with local terms of reference that people used in the course of in-depth interviews to describe their own and others’ relative social position. No explicit scheme of social classification is normative in the communities, but four distinctions recur in everyday speech: (1) wealthy; (2) comfortable; (3) getting by; and (4) poor. A more detailed account of the strata is given in Kreager (2006: 8–9).
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
Employing non-family members to provide care for elderly parents is considered shameful, although bringing in poorer, more distant kin to provide services (and quietly providing the material incentives to do so) is an option available for some better-off families.
- 10.
The contrast to patrilineal family systems lacking heirs underscores the prescriptive nature of matrilineal descent. Men without sons in a patrilineage may take further wives, either by divorcing the current wife or (where permitted) via polygyny, in order to obtain male offspring. A Minangkabau woman who may be fertile, but is unable to bear daughters, generally has no parallel option of obtaining daughters via remarriage. In contrast to Java, adoption is also not considered an acceptable solution (cf. Schröder-Butterfill and Kreager 2005).
- 11.
Between 66% and 93% of Minangkabau migrants contribute remittances or other support to their elders, depending on strata; the lower figure, which refers to the wealthiest strata, reflects the fact that at any one point in time only some children may be contributing; percentages for the other three strata are at least 87.5% (Kreager 2006).
- 12.
However, it should be noted that older Minangkabau men without wives, where they have reached physical disability that restricts carrying out basic life tasks, will express a preference for male personal care on account of cross-gender intimate care being taboo (Schröder-Butterfill and Fithry 2014).
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Schröder-Butterfill, E., Dewi, V.P., Fithry, T.S., Kreager, P. (2018). Gendered Support for Older People in Indonesia: A Comparative Analysis. In: Riley, N., Brunson, J. (eds) International Handbook on Gender and Demographic Processes. International Handbooks of Population, vol 8. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-024-1290-1_17
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