Abstract
MR. DE MOUBRAY'S book on the matriarchate in the Malay Peninsula illustrates a serious difficulty. Changes are taking place with such rapidity in modern conditions of contact between European and non-European civilisations that it is almost impossible for the inquirer to ascertain the truth in respect of many customs. The apparent inconsistency or inaccuracy may be due merely to recent changes; it is even possible that this statement of custom may never have been more than a semblance of the truth—in fact, it may resemble the idea laid up in Heaven in the Platonic sense. Thus, among the people of Negri Sembilan, with whom the author was more intimately concerned, inheritance was in the female line, and no male could hold land. Now, however, owing to the development of the rubber industry, land cleared and cultivated by the individual has come to be regarded as in the nature of any other form of personal property, and so may be held by the male.
Matriarchy in the Malay Peninsula and neighbouring Countries.
By G. A. de C. de Moubray. Pp. ix + 292. (London: George Routledge and Sons, Ltd., 1931.) 15s. net.
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Anthropology and Ethnology. Nature 128, 624 (1931). https://doi.org/10.1038/128624b0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/128624b0