Family name important to ethnic groups

Family name important to ethnic groups

The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Government regulations banning the public from using their
family names on their birth certificates must be suspended
immediately as it could affect a community's cultural system,
public figures from the Batak and Manadonese communities say.

Leo Panggabean, a Batak public figure from Bekasi, West Java,
and Victor Rompas, a public figure from the Manado community from
North Sulawesi, said in Jakarta last Friday that surnames played
an important role in their cultures.

"A marga (family name) is very important for Batak as it used
to reveal relationships between individual members of the
community. Therefore, I object to the regulations banning people
from using their surnames on their birth certificates,"
Panggabean told The Jakarta Post.

A Batak marga, usually, has a record of its ancestry from
generation to generation by tracing the offspring through their
surnames.

He said that the Batak cultural system banned people from
marrying if they had the same surname. "A man with the surname of
Panggabean is not allowed to marry a woman with the family name
of Panggabean. Should the couple insist on getting married they
would be expelled from the community," he said.

He said that the Batak cultural system could only function if
the Batak people could maintain the use of their family names. "I
cannot imagine what will happen if the Batak people have no
surnames. If that happens then, I believe, our cultural system
will perish," he said.

Victor said that although the use of the family name for the
Manado people was not as strict as for the Batak community, the
marga still influenced the everyday practices of Manado culture.

He said for example that Manado banned a marriage of a couple
who had the same surname.

He said, however, that the main issue here was that people
should be free to use their surnames as it was their right. The
government should not interfere with a person's choice as to
whether to write their children's surnames on their birth
certificate or not, he said.

"It should be the right of the families to decide whether they
use their family names or not. And it's certainly not for the
government to decide," said the 83-year-old native of Manado.