Minang

He asked his designer for "oversize and comfortable" and he got it on his seven acres, mostly via a main residence with three traditional Minang rumah gadang (big houses), with thatch roofs and multitiered upswept gables.

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Adat, like conservative Islam, had been eroded by the last thirty years of modernization, but it pulsed under the surface of Minang life like a heartbeat.

Spin 2005

The strength of the Minang, she said, was their flexibility, their deep understanding that the rest of the world was not like home and never would be.

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(She quoted a Minang proverb: "In different fields, different grasshoppers; in different ponds, different fish.")

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All these actions announced him as a secularized man, a businessman, equally disdainful of Muslim sharia and Minang adat.

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A short steel gangway had been emplaced between the main deck and the pier, and the first few Minang were already scurrying across it.

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(Ina called any relative more distant than brother, sister, aunt or uncle her "cousin"; the Minang kinship system used precise words for which there were no simple English equivalents.)

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No noise, except the nervous talk of the Minang villagers and a distant drumming that was the sound of rain on the high metal roof.

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I took one end and Ina called over one of the huskier Minang men to grab the other.

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Then he looked at her and said something in Minang.

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