The Distribution and Decline of Divorce

In chapter 2 we noted that nineteenth-century divorce resulted in the immediate and permanent rupture of affinal exchange between the kin of estranged husband and wife. A man's divorce effectively canceled his rights

both to the house he likely built and provisioned himself and to all land that he and his wife prepared for residential or agricultural purposes. Additionally, upon divorce the husband had to leave his wife's compound and also sever his relations with his own children. Divorce was perhaps less disruptive for women, for they neither relocated nor lost contact with their offspring as a consequence. Nonetheless, even though divorcées bore no particular stigma and could remarry easily enough, a woman's divorce could also be traumatic and regrettable.^[5] Most of these generalizations hold at present as well. Why, then, are divorce rates so high, especially since Malays strive for harmony with everyone in their social universe?

Divorce accounts for over 65 percent of all terminated unions in which current female residents of the village have been involved, and 73 percent in the case of males (see table 18, above). Such data constitute incontrovertible evidence as to the prevalence of this phenomenon. As we shall see presently, the ease of obtaining divorce clearly contributes to its high incidence. So, too, do numerous other factors, including relatively mild social and economic implications of divorce as compared with other societies. In the final analysis, however, divorce rates in Bogang and Negeri Sembilan as a whole are best approached by focusing on the problematic position of married men in relation to their affines, and on affinal demands on male productivity in particular.

Although I am concerned here with divorce (cerai [hidup ]) in its most final form, I should point out that divorce as a process comprises three distinct stages. Each stage is effected by a husband reciting the divorce formula, "I repudiate you," to his wife. One such repudiation, or talak , is not irreversible so long as it is revoked within one hundred days. The same holds for the second talak. Three repudiations, however, constitute an irrevocable divorce; persons thus separated are no longer considered husband and wife. Should they resolve their differences and decide to resume cohabitation or sexual relations, they are required to marry again, which can in turn occur only if the woman has been married and irrevocably divorced in the meantime, and has in each case also observed the one-hundred-day-long edah restrictions (see Taylor [1929] 1970, 113–114; Djamour 1959, 110–113).

Divorce is primarily a male prerogative so far as Islamic doctrine and village ideology are concerned, especially since males alone are entitled to utter formal repudiations.^[6] A woman may, however, given proper grounds,

request a decree of divorce from the local kadi. If she convinces the kadi that her husband has abused her or failed to provide her with financial maintenance (nafkah ) for over four months, for example, her marriage will be judged irrevocably terminated. But since female initiative of this sort occurs relatively infrequently, the majority of those who appear before the kadi to pursue or simply register divorce are males.

Even though women enjoy fewer jural prerogatives with regard to divorce than do men, other, more cathartic strategies exist that are virtually guaranteed to result in divorce should they so desire. One such strategy involves a woman leaving her husband and returning to her mother's home. Aside from conveying the unambiguous message that she no longer seeks her spouse's company or partnership, this action causes the husband extreme embarrassment and shame. As a general rule, the only face-saving alternative available to a man so abandoned and humiliated is to fully repudiate his wife. Thus, tactics of shaming are both widespread and highly effective.

It should be evident that divorces are rather easily procured. Equally important, the cash expenditures involved in divorce are usually negligible—a minor registration fee. For that matter, the financial responsibilities of divorcés are frequently nominal, since it is virtually impossible for women to obtain child support from former husbands who fail to cooperate and in any case typically relocate to other villages. The legal and economic requirements of divorce, then, do not necessarily hinder its occurrence. But neither do they actually encourage divorce, for they are really relevant only in situations where marriage bonds or affinal roles are strained or marked by antagonism. We are left, then, with questions concerning the manifestations and structural origins of these tensions.

Throughout Bogang I encountered remarkable consensus regarding the divisive issues in marriage and the assignment of "fault" in divorce—that is, that husbands feel the tensions of marriage more acutely than wives, and that the husband's, rather than the wife's, behavior is usually the major cause of divorce. More generally, marital difficulties and divorce derive from a man's being insufficiently attentive to his obligations as husband and son-in-law. These points are well illustrated by the comments of two current residents of Bogang.

Musa, a man in his early forties, said that divorce arose because many married men simply "don't follow the established rules" (tak ikut per -

aturan ): they're lazy, too quick to sell off household possessions, and basically expect to "eat for free." Male pride and self-righteousness figure in as well, Musa observed, particularly since men commonly refuse to acknowledge any of their faults or poor decisions.

A slightly older man named Abdul Ghani, who served for twenty-five years as a clerk at the office of Rembau's Islamic magistrate, which certifies all local marriages and divorces and attempts conjugal reconciliations wherever possible, expressed similar views. In Abdul Ghani's experience, men are usually to blame in situations of divorce because they are not straightforward in their dealings with their wives. The basic problem is that too many men like "the good life"; they enjoy gambling and alcohol^[7] and are overly inclined to purchase on credit. Aside from wasting their earnings instead of handing them over to their wives, men often run up debts and then falsely tell their wives that the outstanding debts have been paid off.

The other side of the coin, in Abdul Ghani's view, is interference by the wife's mother and her other close kin. By virtue of residential proximity alone, a woman's immediate relatives usually know what goes on within her household and how her husband behaves both in and outside of the home. Fundamentally, the pressures from a man's in-laws can be overbearing at times, especially since affinal kin nowadays often goad in-marrying males into buying their wives Western-style consumer goods, such as radios, televisions, and refrigerators, that are frequently beyond the men's means.

Of course, such affinal demands are nothing new. Contested rights over the productivity of in-marrying males have always marked affinal relations and social reproduction, as well as been a major cause of divorce. What is new is that today's married men share a much narrower range of social and economic interests with their enates. Accordingly, the contested rights no longer involve two groups of enates linked through marriage; instead, they typically involve a solitary man's strivings to maintain his personal and economic autonomy, and to a lesser extent the autonomy of his household, in the face of countervailing pressures from his wife's kin.

A more general theme running throughout the data on divorce is that a man's prerogatives and obligations as a father are rarely at issue in divorce, whereas his role as a husband and in-law is frequently the source of major contention. Essentially, then, a man's ties with his children are not felt to

be especially problematic, from either his own perspective or that of his wife or her kin. (This should come as no surprise, since a man's wife and immediate affines assume the bulk of childrearing and socialization responsibilities, and since a man's role as father is not nearly so socially necessary or culturally valued as that of a woman as mother.) Interests and privileges regarding children, then, do not seem to exert any destabilizing effects on marriage. But neither do they work in the opposite direction, for if they did we would expect far fewer divorces subsequent to the birth or adoption of a couple's first child than in fact occur; we would also encounter more concern with rights over the children of individuals contemplating or actually party to divorce.

Instead, we find a situation in which tensions focusing on married men's productivity as husbands and in-laws are the dynamic and determining factors in the relative durability of marriage bonds. Such tensions can, if present in any scope or force, go a long way toward destroying a marriage; if relatively absent, however, they can generate the conditions under which a marital union will likely endure until one spouse dies. My references to degrees or levels of tension, antagonism, and the like, are admittedly rather imprecise, being based on villagers' after-the-fact reconstructions of their own subjective experiences. Nonetheless, as we shall see, the data suggest that such tensions vary significantly, and are at the highest pitch—or at least most acutely felt—in the case of in-marrying males of low economic standing or promise. In these men's lives, the discrepancies between affinal demands and their own successes as household entrepreneurs are most pronounced. For that matter, because married men judged to be poor providers usually lack proprietary rights to rubber land, concerns with property loss through divorce cannot exert any stabilizing influence on their marriages.

The situation is strikingly different for village men who are considered "good providers," men with impressive incomes from rubber acreage they themselves acquired (and work or lease out), from government pensions, or both. A wealthy man, or one who displays economic promise, is best situated to satisfy affinal demands for household commodities and other emblems of prestige. Moreover, a man with substantial capital investments either in his wife's home or in land within her village has much to lose as a result of divorce. So, too, does his wife. On both sides, then, the incentives and satisfactions of economics and prestige contribute to the durability of the marriage.

These arguments are consistent with a striking feature of divorce data that has eluded previous observers, that is, the inverse correlation between monthly household income and the number of divorces per ever-married resident. Specifically, we find a marked concentration of divorce among households at the lowest end of the income scale, and a generally progressive decline in the divorce rate as income increases (see table 21). These associations exist for persons of both sexes, although they are more uniform for women. Among households earning less than M$100 per month, for instance, the female divorce rate is 83.3 percent (15 of 18). This figure diminishes to 53.3 percent (16 of 30) for women of households with monthly incomes in the M$100–199 range and continues to decrease at a moderate rate as monthly household earnings rise from M$200 to M$499. In the next income bracket the rate drops to 0.0 percent (0 of 15); there-

after it is a mere 8.3 percent (1 of 12). Questions of causality aside, this means that women living in the poorest households are likely to have experienced at least one divorce, whereas their female counterparts in the richest segment of the community have effectively avoided divorce altogether. Since I have indicated that the same directional trends can be discerned for the males in the sample, these latter generalizations may be applied to Bogang's population of ever-married men as well.

The data in table 21 reveal associations rather than causality, but they do support my argument that conjugal and affinal tensions are at their highest pitch—or the least likely to be resolved within the confines of marriage—among households with the lowest incomes. As for Bogang's wealthiest residents, and the ever-married men among them especially, such tensions either are less severe or are dealt with in the context of marriage, rather than at its expense. One partial explanation for this circumstance is that most male members of Bogang's socioeconomic elite enjoy positions of privilege thanks to their long careers in government employ. Their salaries and pensions then enabled them to purchase commercially valuable rubber acreage, which in turn generated additional wealth over the years. Also, civil service employment has usually involved considerable geographic mobility, as in the Federated Malay States Railways or a branch of Singapore's armed forces, which could easily postpone a newly wed government servant's uxorilocal residence for up to twenty years, after which time he would retire with a pension and settle in his wife's natal compound. This is not to imply that these men had no contact with their wives or affines during the course of government service. It is to suggest that their domestic circumstances largely precluded the progressive buildup of antagonisms and hostilities between married men and their residentially proximate in-laws, tensions that are especially disruptive during the first six or so years of marriage.

Of further interest here is the fact that many of Bogang's socioeconomic elite are married to women of the Hill lineage of the Lelahmaharaja clan, which is the descent unit at the top of Bogang's status hierarchy as well as the core around which the local political structure revolves. The privileged economic standing of the households associated with this lineage, together with the lineage's low rate of female divorce (the lowest in the village, with 0.18 divorces per ever-married female, as compared with the village mean of 0.44), derives from productive resources obtained not

through inheritance but through the efforts of in-marrying males still alive, many of whom draw handsome government pensions. Simply stated, the wives of these men married very well. That they did so can be explained largely by the prestige of their own lineage as measured by its residential origins and untainted pedigree, and by its having among its members a number of highly placed political luminaries. For these women and their husbands, the prospect of property and prestige loss upon divorce works effectively to control any conjugal and affinal antagonisms that may arise in the course of marriage. Also, such stresses would be less prevalent in the upper-income brackets in any case, since in-marrying males of impressive economic standing can satisfy affinal demands on their productivity. Historically increased concerns with status-group endogamy and the resultant concentrations of wealth within the elite stratum, then, lead me to expect that low rates of divorce will prevail within this lineage in the future.

Not surprisingly, the exceedingly marginal Biduanda Dagang clan records the highest divorce rate in the village (0.76 divorces per ever-married female). This clan, having always occupied the bottom rung of the prestige ladder owing to its comparatively recent migration to the village and to its ancestors including Meccan-born slaves and other non-Malays, has been extremely limited in its ability to obtain productive or high-ranking males as husbands. It has therefore had to settle for itinerant Javanese or unrelated men affiliated with other lines of the (non-exogamous) clan, who tend to be of inferior economic standing and potential—otherwise they would find wives elsewhere. Thus, when conjugal or affinal tensions arise, these men have relatively little incentive to maintain the bonds with their wives, and vice versa. This is especially true given the usual absence here of jointly acquired land over which each partner to a union would stand to lose rights (that is, a half-claim) in consequence of divorce. The constraints working against divorce are thus very weak; moreover, this situation will likely prevail into the future, for the dynamics in operation here tend to reproduce themselves from one generation to the next.

The interpretations presented thus far have dealt with marriage durability more or less synchronically, and in terms of a single nexus of structural entailments whose refractions differ according to socioeconomic and prestige variables. This approach allows, I believe, insights far more powerful than those offered by earlier observers such as Swift (1958; 1965, 133

et passim), who explained the distribution of divorce in the Jelebu district of Negeri Sembilan with reference to factors of psychology and personality.^[8] I would also contend that the analyses presented here are relevant to historical trends that have been misconstrued by Swift (1965, 132–134) and other investigators (e.g., DeMoubray 1931, 205; de Josselin de Jong 1951, 162).

It has been widely assumed that the weakening of enatic bonds would cause divorce rates to rise, since disgruntled spouses would be less susceptible to pressures from enates and affines, who, according to this perspective, generally strive to effect reconciliation and in any event exert an ultimately stabilizing influence on marriage. In my view, this position rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of enatic and affinal ties, and also be-speaks a failure to grasp certain of the most critical dynamics and tensions in the system of property and social relations. Of more immediate concern, though, is the fact that divorce rates have actually diminished quite radically in recent decades, a change that is consistent with historical processes discussed here and in previous chapters.

The phenomenal decline in state- and district-level rates of divorce (measured in terms of divorces recorded each year as a percentage of marriages registered over the same period of time) can be seen from table 22. The earliest figures, which pertain to the 1940s, indicate a state-level divorce rate of 65 percent. The corresponding rate for the 1950s is much lower, and is approximately 51.5 percent. Statewide data for the 1960s are not available, but the figures for the 1970s point to a further decline, and to a state-level rate of divorce of 14.7 percent.^[9]

This trend, I would argue, is by no means confined to the post-1940 era; rather, it probably dates from the earliest decades of colonial rule. Moreover, the same set of factors that accounts for divorce patterns in contemporary Bogang is at work here: the historically variable, but nearly always problematic, structural ties between in-marrying males and their affines, and the tensions arising from affinal demands on men's productivity. In other words, the issue is a married man's relative autonomy among his wife's kin. And it is precisely in this area that married men have made such enormous advances in this century, and during the postindependence era especially, even though these gains—if they are in fact to be regarded as such—are quite unevenly distributed throughout present-day villages.

More generally, enatic kin have lost much of the social control they once

exercised over in-marrying males and their labor power, owing to the infusion of cash into the village and other processes of economic development. Hence, significant reductions in divorce rates would be expected, insofar as the more encompassing trend—the emergence of progressively individualistic atomized household units—has occurred at the expense of siblingship and other matrilineal ties linking spouses with their respective enates. These ties appear increasingly incapable of seriously disrupting marriages, even though they still do cause stress and antagonism and, of course, continue to contribute to divorce.