Symbolic Power of Sasak Women as Reflected in the Sasak Marriage Processes

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-21-3_33How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Power; Women; Role; Marriage; Sasak

Abstract

The position of women in the Sasak community is often assumed to be weak by most people inside and outside of that community. A number of social and cultural events have been cited as evidence, ranging from soft voice, slow movement to a passive role in the family and domestic sphere. Wedding and its processes are the site in which women’s personal and domestic roles symbolically represent women’s actual position in the community. In the Sasak community, the wedding processes are labelled as merarik [elopement] and its stages have resulted in conflicting views on women’s position. With more rights for groom-to-be to enact the elopement, women are seen as being deprived of their rights to stay single or to choose the grooms. Being eloped without the consent of woman and her parents led to the view that woman is being stolen, downgrading their level to non-human materials and prone to domestic violence. Closer, in-depth investigation to the core cultural ideology always reveals new inside perspectives. This is the merit of the article, investigating the actual position of Sasak women in their own cultural tradition. This paper revisits and reviews the true meaning and processes of merarik and how they have actually framed cultural expectations that they have to achieve in the course of life. Ethnography is used for data collection where Sasak weddings are observed and key informants are interviewed. With content and ethnographic analyses, the study shows convincing evidence that Sasak women have strong bargaining positions, stronger than generally assumed.

Copyright

© 2023 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Sary Wisudawati
AU  - Kamaludin Yusra
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/09
TI  - Symbolic Power of Sasak Women as Reflected in the Sasak Marriage Processes
BT  - Proceedings of the 3rd Annual Conference of Education and Social Sciences (ACCESS 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 303
EP  - 313
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-21-3_33
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-21-3_33
ID  - Wisudawati2022
ER  -