Marriage Age for Girls
Mar 30th, 2010, in Asides, by Ross
How young can girls be married, NU issues fatwa allowing for marriage below the age of consent.
[post removed]
183 Comments on “Marriage Age for Girls”
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Odinius says:
Sorry, missed this:
Am I right in guessing that you are not actually living in Indonesia? Because if you have access to a library where you expect to find my book on Weber you are not likely to be there.
Not at the moment, no, though I come and go.
Incidentally, it is in Dutch. My book on Habermas however is in English (The Force of Reason) and I will gladly send you a – free – copy if you so desire.
Looks like we don’t have your book on Habermas, but do have your Dutch-language book on Weber. I can read Dutch, but am afraid that this kind of theoretical stuff might be beyond my skill level. Would love to have my own copy of the Force of Reason, thanks!
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Arie Brand says:
First to practical matters. I can send you two copies of the book and would like you to donate one to the library you regularly use. I am far from happy about the way my publisher (Allen & Unwin) took care of the distribution though there ultimately was a Korean translation.
You can let me know your postal address through Patung.
And now to colonialism. I am afraid this historical phenomenon is still too much looked at in moralistic terms though not by all scholars (you already mentioned Ferguson yourself). I also saw a reference in this context to P.J.Cain & A.G.Hopkins (1993) ‘British Imperialism’, though I haven’t seen the book yet myself.
There are other ways of considering it than just in a moralistic vein. There is the possibility to see it as a concomitant of the transition from agrarian to industrial societies that took place much earlier in the West and the peculiar Western difference from what the Dutch historian Jan Romein used to call the “Common Human Pattern”.
Gellner, who was just about the most intelligent and humane person I have met in academe (he was for a while my supervisor at the London School of Economics where I worked on a thesis of which inter alia this is the remaining published result http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv/article/viewFile/1861/2622) has ironically referred to what he called “this anodyne expression of our shared pieties’ in the writings on colonialism. And as far as institutionalised colonial hierarchies are concerned he asked :
“Was it really imperialism which first imposed rigid classifications on people? Deeply internalized, socially enforced distinctions between categories of people constituted a general characteristic of complex societies. They were only loosened and partly eroded by that modern turbulence which brought in its train, but is not exhausted by, imperialism. Mobility, egalitarianism and free choice of identity have better prospects in the modern world than they had in the past. Should there not … be at least some expression of gratitude towards the process which has made such a free choice so much easier – even if it also for a time engendered an initial disparity of power between early and later beneficiaries of modernity?”
Admittedly he asked this of Said and in relation to the Middle East but I don’t see why this would not hold for other parts of the world as well.
It should also be remarked here that the ideological weapons that were turned against the West in the struggle for decolonisation were originally imported by the West. I must think here of a remark by William Roger Louis, the Editor-in-Chief of the five volume Qxford History of the British Empire: “Indians, as well as French Canadians and Afrikaners quoted John Locke, Lord Durham and John Stuart Mill.”
As far as the depiction of American colonialism in the Philippines is concerned the opinion of Filipino historians is, I think, generally more unfavorable than common opinion. In Indonesia the situation seems to me exactly the reverse. You mentioned Mrazek. Well he provides a good illustration. You must have seen references to the place of exile for Indonesian leaders of nationalist thought in Upper Digul, Papua, as a ‘concentration camp’ and the ‘hell of Upper Digul’. l Mrazek gives a quite different picture of the situation. Sjahrir and Hatta traveled to the place as ordinary passengers on the KPM. “Sometimes it even looks like a pleasure outing” wrote Sjahrir to his Dutch girlfriend in Holland. Hatta had six boxes with books with him and was accommodated in a bungalow by himself where he had a bedroom, a sitting room and a room for his books (and the services of a Papuan servant). There were regular soccer competitions there in which the staff played against the detainees or in which there were mixed teams of staff and detainees. Mrazek doesn’t picture it as a holiday resort but not as a the place that is popularly imagined either (see his “Sjahrir at Boven Digoel: Reflections on Exile in the Dutch East Indies” in Lev and McVey eds. Making Indonesia – Essays on Modern Indonesia in Honor of George McT.Kahin, Cornell UP 1996).
You mentioned Fasseur. i presume you saw his book on the cultivation system – a system that prevailed for about forty years, all in. It seems to me unfair to judge the whole of the Dutch colonial venture in that light – I don’t know whether it was ultimately any more ‘rapacious’ than any other – and there are certainly Dutch scholars who also see it in a different light. I am thinking here of the book ‘Balans van Beleid’ edited by Professors Baudet and Brugman.
Anyway, this letter is already getting far too long so I will call it a day.
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bs says:
There’s this guy Daron Acemoglu who has written several papers on effects of colonialism on long-term (economic) growth. He connects things like climate and its effect on health to the degree of settlement and transplantation of institutions.
His theory explains why Africa is worse off than for instance South East Asia.A while ago (about a year), some European agency in southern France (forgot the name) did research on connectedness in the world. They also made maps of railways for this project.
Turned out the old colonies with a railway system (India, Indonesia) were better off in terms of growth than countries without one. The theory here was that you need advanced institutions to organise such an effort and produce public goods.These people do research based an actual data. When determining effects of colonialism, I’d value this higher than historians writing what they think that other people thought a few hundred years ago. Especially since the people writing then mostly used the same (limited) amount of available knowledge and ideologies of the time and probably also used the same local sources (that local guy who can speak Dutch or the same village head). I find it hard to believe back then they consistently interviewed the whole village instead of just asking the village head or local regent. So many risks of bias.
In my humble opinion robust research based on cross-checked data proves more than subjective stories. Throwing authorities around, how interesting they might be, doesn’t prove much. It ‘s only good for inflating the ego. But thanks for compiling a nice reading list.
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ET says:
bs said
Especially since the people writing then mostly used the same (limited) amount of available knowledge and ideologies of the time and probably also used the same local sources (that local guy who can speak Dutch or the same village head).
This phenomenon isn’t limited to the past. Even now those who are able to convey their stories or ideas in the language of the interrogator – these days mainly English – are the only ones who are heard and taken seriously.
Also here in IM. Threads in Indonesian like Insiden Monas, FPI & AKKBB contain a wealth of direct and indirect information, but how much of it has had a chance to influence the opinions of others? -
“Robust research on cross-checked data” – that sounds good. But I am afraid that you scientists mainly think of hard and tangible things then like railways. Opinions are ‘things’ too. I am almost tempted to quote Durkheim at you but you would resent me ‘inflating my ego’ at your expense – so I won’t.
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Arie, no resentment here. Properly citing research is fine by me. I’m just not convinced by arguments based on authority (Schopenhauer has written a nice booklet on it 😉 ).
I do find history intriguing and interesting. It’s valuable to reflect on things past and try to learn from it. It’s just that no causal relations can be based on it. It’s a best guess and very, very difficult (if not impossible) to prove anything without evidence.
It’s doesn’t have to be tangible evidence. If you go back in your time machine and survey a randomly distributed, representative number of people on a subject and use the outcome in your argument you could convince me.Acemoglu has done something that comes close to it. Although not a randomised trial, but more of a natural experiment (as economists often do). He collected all available numbers on health and deads in former colonies and non-colonies from various, (mostly) independent historical sources. Fortunately, there was enough information for him to do statistics and generalise the results.
Of course this is not always possible, but I do think historians could do a better attempt.The typical historical analysis right now has an external validity of about nothing.
And there is also the difference between data and information. Data only becomes information if you get similar results from two independent sources. That’s why I think Odinius, your humble school teacher, made a very good point when he asked about sources outside of the ruling colonial powers.
Such a remark about the content does more for the discussion than a remark about were you studied and who you met there. -
bs
Data only becomes information if you get similar results from two independent sources.
And before it becomes reliable information the results still have to be examined with care in order to eliminate cultural and Zeitgeist biases.
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Geordie says:
Got absolutely nothing of value to add here but do keep it up, hugely informative and indeed thought provoking.
In terms of the thread, I haven’t, I don’t think, read anything that would lead me to alter my opinion on either the marriage age for girls; that of course is in the context of my extreme good fortune of being born in the UK and benefiting from a whole plethora of advantages.
The colonialism discussion has however made me look again at my opinion of it in general. I haven’t reached any conclusions yet, it would appear I have a shed load of reading to do before I get even close to that. It has, however, brought into much sharper focus what’s happening, or rather, what I thought was happening where I currently am. Not that I’m saying it colonialism per se, but given what I’ve read thus far in this thread, it’s got a lot of the same characteristics.
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BS – no resentment you say. But obviously you can’t stop having a go at me. Your opinion about the value of historical research is, oh well
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@ET:
couldn’t agree more.@Arie:
you are not throwing up your cards in the air because you don’t like the direction in which the game is going are you? -
What game?. As soon as you bother to come up with a coherent argument I will bother to react. You might also quote at me. I would rather read a quote from an “authority” than be served with your own half baked opinions.
Good night.
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Causality, randomised trials, natural experiments and information theory is sort of the unifying theme in almost all academia. My point is that, instead of digging into semi-dependent, but otherwise interesting sources, you could try to learn from what other faculties are doing. I’m sorry if I failed to explain it and you didn’t get the point.
The other, more personal, one, is that the way you comment on others here is somewhat arrogant and impolite. You’ll not learn much looking down on others from your high hill and I’ve rarely met an intelligent scholar with such an attitude. Sorry I failed to explain that too. It seems that studying the colonial way of doing things had quite an impact on you.
Maybe someday someone more intelligent than a simple forum member will do a better job at explaining these things.
Happy stamp collecting and good night too. -
Ross says:
Well said, bs. Never come across a more arrogant and opinionated and, what is worse in my view, totally humourless academic elitist.
And he won’t answer questions he doesn’t like -not a very objective mind, for a scientist. -
BS, if I enter into the question to what extent causal explanation is possible in history (a question to which I have given a good deal of attention, especially in my Ph.D. thesis) I would soon be assailed again by McKay re my ‘mindnumbingly boring’ abstractions. If you are really interested in that question you can find a heap of literature (including, dare I say it, my book on Weber and Habermas which in a Dutch academic library you can easily find- look at chapter 3 ‘Causaliteit en Objectiviteit bij Weber’)). Among philosophers of science who have commented on this problem Karl Popper is the most well known.
My irritated tone is to be explained from the generally dismissive way in which you talk about the social sciences that apparently you only have a very casual acquaintance with.
And another thing. The exchange between us started when you accused me of ‘wooliness’ and declared that was the way social scientists wrote. On further inquiry it turned out that you had picked up this notion from some professor whom you had asked why Geertz wrote ‘in prose’. Well, that was not a very encouraging start even though you sent me, in Dutch, greetings from Vlaardingen (in spite of the circumstances well appreciated). In subsequent posts you came up with more or less sly digs on both Odinius and me: “throwing authorities around” as good for “inflating the ego” etc.. Subsequently you commented disapprovingly on ‘”a remark were (sic) you studied and who you met there” as doing nothing for the discussion. That was no doubt aimed at me.
At any case you have gained yourself a firm friend among the forum members – a friend who has consistently abused me whenever he saw an opportunity. It is ironical that he now joins you in your protest about my ‘impoliteness’. Since he has declared me to be ‘humourless’ he won’t believe me if I t tell him that this now appeals to my sense of humour.
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Let me add this: I don’t know what discipline you are working in but imagine that some outsider came to recommend you there, with an air as if he was the first one to think of it, to look at a problem which had been kicked around in your field of knowledge since the 19th century. Wouldn’t you get irritated? Well, that is exactly the position you have put me in with your remarks about causality and randomised trials and learning ‘from what other faculties are doing.’ The question if and to what extent causal analysis should and can play a role in the historical sciences has been discussed at least since the 1880’s. One of the path breaking publications here was that by Carl Menger “Untersuchungen ueber die Methode der Sozialwissenschaften” that dates from 1883. Via Windelband and Dilthey the problem came to the philosopher Heinrich Rickert who published his book ‘Die Grenzen der naturwissenschafttlichen Begriffsbildung’ in 1913. This was the book that more particularly inspired Weber and that, accordingly, I have given a great deal of attention in my book on him.
You accuse me of arrogance – a bit more modesty in your own approach would not come amiss.
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bs said:
These people do research based an actual data. When determining effects of colonialism, I’d value this higher than historians writing what they think that other people thought a few hundred years ago.
While I generally value your insights on this thread (and suspect you are trained or in training as a political scientist), I think you are stretching your case with this claim. “Actual data,” by which I assume you mean quantitative data, for historical events is as socially constructed and prone to human error and manipulation for political projects as qualitative data.
It also does not give you causality, per se, but rather relationships (which, in tandem with theory, can imply causality), a greater case for generalizability and a more rigorous explanation for variance among cases.
Analysis of historical and ethnographic data, by contrast, doesn’t give you generalizability or robust explanations for variance among cases. But it does give you detail, process and mechanism.
This is why I value both types of research, and think it’s highly problematic to look at one without the other.
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warrior says:
Hi All,
Mind if I rock up this discussion?
I honestly didn’t bother to look up on what the previous posts coz i have got no time to do so. Thus, my apology if someone had already posted similar to this matter before.
To say what I concern about the topic is that the marriage is not simply the same as intercourse.
I guess a person can marry a very young girl even when the girl is not in the age of puberty yet. But when it comes to intercourse in the marriage, I guess both couple has to wait until the girl have reach her puberty then it’s shar’i – my opinion.
For more and better opinion, you can always ask your local imam or ulama who has inherit the knowledge and have devoted their life
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BS a political scientist? Not likely. If he were he couldn’t have escaped knowing that these problems have been discussed for a long time in the social sciences, by a great many people and from different angles. Political science is, after all, a social science. Much more likely that he has been trained in one of the technical disciplines, possibly at the Technical University in Delft where they provide sociology as a (very) minor subject.
But he can tell us of course.
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@Arie
You’re all quite close. my training is in software engineering and what in Dutch is called technische bestuurskunde. This last was indeed at TU Delft and is a mixture of technical/math stuff, policy analysis (there’s the politics) and economics. Those last two are social sciences. I did stay mostly on the economics side (of which some courses were thought by a prof. from Erasmus university).
The “woolliness” however came from a social science course involving anthropology and etnomethodology at Oxford (in the software engineering curriculum).I’m aware that none of this qualifies me as a historian, but I do tend to think that the different disciplines can learn from each other and it’s valuable to (constructively) criticise others. Comments from any critical thinker (including a layman) should be welcome.
I’m not familiar with Weber but have of course heard of Popper. Still I stick to the more generally accepted definition of causality were:
– there is a correlation
– the dependent occurs later in time than the independent variable
– there are no other variables explaining the correlationThis means I do agree that quantitative data alone is not enough, correlation does not imply causation. This does not disqualify case studies. Just have a look at how the medical people use their systematic review of case studies (on soft and hard data, see the Cochrane Collaboration) to increase the validity of results. Wouldn’t it be great to do this with history?
Yes, I do know these problems are discussed over and over again in social sciences. That is definitely not a reason to stop discussing it, or ignore outsiders. To me this signals a problem in methodology. That doesn’t mean you should stop researching, but is does mean you should be careful claiming objective results. You moved to the land of Oz, but I assume you haven’t adopted the ways of the Ostrich.
I got the idea from your posts that you were not willing to accept that your life’s work may not be that objective. Since I’m not an expert in your field, I aimed at the methodology, not the content. You do also have a way of writing that wasn’t very friendly towards others, at least in the posts on this forum. I tried to subtly hint at this, but my techie side makes I’m not really good at subtle. Sorry about that.
About enemy’s and friends, I’d like to think what Lord Palmerston said also applies to persons: “Nations have no permanent friends or allies, they only have permanent interests.”
The “groeten” uit Vlaardingen are still sincere, I don’t consider you an enemy and hope to read your book (and some of the others you suggested here).
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I don’t know what you mean by ‘my life’s work’ ?
May I suggest that you read my book first – particularly chapter 3 ? That saves me a great deal of writing.
I am glad that you now acknowledge that these things have been discussed over and over in the social sciences but it seems that this insight has dawned a bit late on you – at any case it certainly was not clear from your previous posts.
But O.K. we will let that rest. I send you in return greetings from Maitland?
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Oigal says:
I would rather read a quote from an “authority” than be served with your own half baked opinions.
Of course, what is an authority is also at issue here? Who has the arrogance to make such declarations. Its not healthy to wallow in the same hubris that the dodgy and unethical Jones does. All other opinions are invalid or half baked and yet they wonder why people are increasingly dismissive and sceptical of such people.
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I guess a person can marry a very young girl even when the girl is not in the age of puberty yet. But when it comes to intercourse in the marriage, I guess both couple has to wait until the girl have reach her puberty
Or if you were a well adjusted person you could marry someone who has had a chance to enjoy their childhood without some hovering dark creature in the background waiting to strike.
you can always ask your local imam or ulama who has inherit the knowledge and have devoted their life
Well knowledge is not inherited unless you are a hard disc and I doubt my local imam has had the life experience to be able to tell me how to catch a plane to Singapore let alone offer advice of a personal or professional nature. Bit like a Catholic Priest offering marriage couselling..what would he know..and if he does…he shouldn’t
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Oh, for Chrissake. Jones again. He pops up in McKay’s and Oigal’s utterances like King Charles’ head in the conversation of Mr.Dick.
On Jones the verrdict of the House of Commons was that “he had no case to answer”. Basta. End of story.
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Oigal,
I think most Muslims would agree that Islam knows better than you. If the Prophet Muhammad ever have a wife under 15, who are you to criticize. Do you think you know better than the Al-Quran ? Of course, Muslim man can marry a woman at any age if she is single, even 81, and he is eligible too.
The main question surrounds your repeated hostility to Islam and thus relevance to Indonesian Muslims to comment on their country.
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Well despite the fact the House of Commons review had very limited terms of Reference and took just one day of oral evidence before being packed up. Its noted that you also failed to mention
Lawmakers stressed that their report — which was written after only a single day of oral testimony — did not cover all the issues and would not be as in-depth as the two other inquiries into the e-mail scandal that are still pending and which were instigated by the University of East Anglia.
Willis said the lawmakers had been in a rush to publish something before Britain’s next national election, which is widely expected in just over a month’s time.
The culture of non-disclosure at CRU and instances where information may have been deleted to avoid disclosure, particularly to climate change skeptics, we felt was reprehensible,” Willis told reporters
Apparently Ari does not find it reprehensible tho, The point being made is not the validity (or not) or the science but the attitude of self important little men assuming they and they alone have the right to decide what people (us yahoos) should know or have access to.
It amazes me that these so called educated people cannot see the vast damage Jones and his ilk have done to their profession and their tax payer (read yahoo) funded ivory towers.
But to repeat the question posed so often to Ari and yet unanswered..
Do you find it acceptable and ethical for people like Jones to
To berat skeptics in sometimes intensely personal attacks, discuss ways to shield their data from public records laws, and discuss ways to keep skeptics’ research out of peer-reviewed journals
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Dikki/Assamad..
More nonsense..slow day at the corruption court today?
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Arie said
BS a political scientist? Not likely.
You’d be surprised at how widespread quantitative-bias is in political science nowadays. As someone with a foot in each pot, I’ve grown experienced arguing for the merits of qualitative data with the logit set, and the merits of quantitative with the historical and ethnographic set.
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“Oh, for Chrissake. Jones again. He pops up in McKay’s and Oigal’s utterances like King Charles’ head in the conversation of Mr.Dick.”
Yes, AB, and while I can’t speak for Oigal, some of us are eagerly, and ever so impatiently waiting for your splendid ethical judgement on what to make of Jones’ rancid gloating over the fatal heart attack which befell a man whose only offence was to challenge the Climate Panickers’ propaganda.Given your surly contempt for critics, it’s probably the sort of grisly behaviour you yourself are given to.
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Reading back over the AB posts, it seems that the reason he is suddenly pronouncing himself an ‘expert’ on all kinds of things is to promote the books he has written, which he does tend to mention and not infrequently ‘recommend.’
Like me, he has included extracts from his published work, and in all due modesty, I reckon my stuff is more readable! And I just do it for fun…
Comment on “Marriage Age for Girls”.
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I’m not one for the caricatures of colonialism as ‘all bad,’ but I don’t know any serious scholars–other than Niall Ferguson–that think the non-Western world should be thankful for colonialism. That includes the vast majority of Dutch Indonesia experts. Colonialism itself was an exploitative system, and high colonialism one based upon a myth of racial and cultural superiority. Your countryman, Cees Fasseur, is the scholar who has most unambiguously detailed the history of Dutch racialism in the Indies.
That such systems were, rather unfortunately, replaced in many cases by locally-run exploitative systems doesn’t really exculpate the colonialists from responsibility for their exploitation of colonial subjects.
Over to your other point, how to compare colonialisms, I’d say they probably even out in the end. Some, like the British, left more working parts, but also used more violence to pacify territories. The Americans follow that pattern in the Philippines. Not sure any of them were good, but they were better and worse in qualitatively different ways.
The peculiar problem with Dutch colonialism was twofold. First, it was inherently rapacious–the emphasis was on extraction and trade and the human cost was secondary. Second, when reforms were introduced to improve the humaneness of the system, there was rarely any follow-through, and natives had little input or representation. Here Mrazek’s treatment of late colonialism as a series of failed attempts to ‘engineer’ consent is invaluable, and fascinating.
At the end of the day, I would say it’s unfair to blame colonialism solely for Indonesia’s post-independence missteps, as it is to blame the United States for the post-G30S massacres. At the same time, it’s highly problematic to use Indonesian agency in various post-independence events to paper over the fact that histories of Dutch and American presence in Indonesia are, in their own peculiar ways, parts of these broadly Indonesian problems.
The empirical question for me, then, is how, how much and in what ways?