The Moral World of Minangkabau Adolescents

This seminar engages with the literature on adolescence and the author's ethnography of Minangkabau adolescence to propose an answer to the question that Margaret Mead posed in her book, Coming of Age in Samoa: Is adolescence necessarily and always a time of Sturm und Drang? She wanted to know if the much-touted difficulties of adolescence were "due to being adolescent or to being adolescent in America?" The anthropological question on the nature of adolescence across cultures remains outstanding, and, in the context of globalization, is more significant now than in Mead's day.

The paper proposes that adolescence is not necessarily a time of confusion, turmoil and conflict as teenagers escape the confines of family and reach out to a wider world. Islam and Minangkabau society and culture provide adolescents, especially female adolescents, with the moral and cultural resources and structural support that mean, in general, that Minang adolescents do not experience adolescence as a period of Sturm und Drang. Minangkabau young people are far from lost: they are clear and confident about their sovereign selves, and keen to grow into mature responsible adults, and it is a mark of the strength of local culture and religion that they are so.

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Participation is free - no registration needed.