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Updated: May 8, 2025
Everyone has a regard to his race; and the probability of its being extinct is esteemed a great unhappiness. This is what they call tungguan putus, and the expression is used by the lowest member of the community. To have a wife, a family, collateral relations, and a settled place of residence is to have a tungguan, and this they are anxious to support and perpetuate.
When a man dies his effects, in common course, descend to his male children in equal shares; but if one among them is remarkable for his abilities above the rest, though not the eldest, he usually obtains the largest proportion, and becomes the head of the tungguan or house; the others voluntarily yielding him the superiority.
Upon asking the eldest how it happened that the name of distinction passed over him and was conferred on his younger brother, he answered with great naivete, "because I am accounted weak and silly." If no male children are left and a daughter only remains they contrive to get her married by the mode of ambel anak, and thus the tungguan of the father continues.
It is with this view that, when a single female only remains of a family, they marry her by ambel anak; in which mode the husband's consequence is lost in the wife's, and in her children the tungguan of her father is continued. They find her a husband that will menegga tungguan, or, as it is expressed amongst the Rejangs menegga rumah, set up the house again.
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