Abstract
Family networks are widely assumed to be a key source of support for older people in Indonesia and Southeast Asia more generally, although empirical study of their composition and functioning is in its infancy. This paper draws on ethnographic and survey data collected in longitudinal research of ageing in three rural Indonesian communities, in order to identify demographic and social factors limiting the size of elders’ networks. Gaps in networks commonly emerge as a result of childlessness, migration and alienation, but their implications for older people’s vulnerability are shaped by socio-economic status, reputation and cultural norms.
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Notes
A typical example in the three communities is one in which children, who have left the village and succeeded in finding employment in the modern sector, then contribute regular but modest amounts to their parents’ income (usually the gift of small sums at visits to the village for annual religious festivals). The majority of day-to-day support for the elderly comes from their own labour, supplemented to a greater or lesser degree by care and food given by relatively poorer children still in the community. When, for example, a health crisis involving hospitalisation occurs, this distribution of support may shift radically, some distant children paying large hospital bills, while others perhaps return to the village to assist in care. It may be noted, at least in the Javanese case, that monetary support, even when regular, is generally small.
Terms like orang kaya, lumayan, cukup-cukupan, and kurang mampu do not comprise a classificatory system. They are informal terms and phrases observed in daily speech, without their functioning as a set of pigeon-holes.
As divorce and remarriage are common in the older generation, spouses often have different numbers of children. For this reason we collected data on the availability of children for men and women separately. If only women are considered, then 19% have never given birth and 27% have no surviving child in Kidul; equivalent figures for Citengah are 9.3 and 11.6%, respectively, and for Rao-Rao 6.7 and 6.7%, respectively.
The levels of childlessness in East Java are comparable to childlessness among elderly people in contemporary developed countries (e.g., 18% among Americans, 23% among Hungarians, see Wenger, 2001), where voluntary childlessness and non-marriage play some role in explaining the lack of children. They are also found in societies affected by high levels of pathological sterility, such as in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa (see Frank, 1983; Kreager, 2004).
As noted in the introduction, the Minangkabau of West Sumatra are matrilineal. For reasons of lineage continuity and inheritance of ancestral properties, it is crucial to have daughters. As sons cannot pass on ancestral property, couples consider themselves childless if they have no daughters; thus, gender specific availability of children needs to be taken into account. Although only 7% of elderly people in Rao-Rao have no children, as many as 17% have no daughters.
In the case of Kidul, the majority (43%) of children ‘away’ live between 10 and 100 km from their parents—thus, at a distance where visits are still easily accomplished—but more than a third live on a different island or even abroad; the remaining 20% live on Java, but more than 100 km away. For Citengah, two-thirds of children ‘away’ are no further than 100 km away, and 28% are on a different island or abroad. For Rao-Rao the picture is rather different, here movement involves greater distances, typically to other parts of Sumatra (46% of those ‘away’), to Java or another of Indonesia’s many islands (44%), or even abroad (8%). For discussion see Kreager (2006).
The estimates of outmigration presented in Figure 1 are conservative, as they include coresident children in the denominator, many of whom will eventually move away when they marry or embark on labour migration.
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Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Edi Indrizal, Tengku Syawila Fithry, Vita Priantina Dewi and Tri Budi Rahardjo for their invaluable assistance with accumulating and interpreting the data presented here. Alis Oancea solved very neatly the technical problems of representing and formatting the kin diagrams. We are very grateful to the Wellcome Trust and the British Academy for generous support of the research.
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An erratum to this article can be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10823-007-9034-6
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Kreager, P., Schröder-Butterfill, E. Gaps in the Family Networks of Older People in Three Indonesian Communities. J Cross Cult Gerontol 22, 1–25 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-006-9013-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10823-006-9013-3