The project aims to document the traditional bamboo and wooden watermill of Minangkabau culture in West Sumatra, Indonesia. For hundreds of years, the local people have developed and used three types of watermill, each has a different physical form and function, i.e. the 5-7 meters diameter bamboo watermill for irrigating rice fields, the wooden 2-4 meters diameter watermill for pounding rice, and the wooden one-meter diameter watermill for generating electricity. These watermills are now becoming extinct due to deforestation and industrialization, in which more and more local people prefer to use modern machines for irrigating the field or pounding the food, also subscribing to a government-based electrical company once this option is possible. This project will apply a participatory documentation approach in which the local communities will be actively involved from the beginning (the planning step) to the end of the project (the dissemination step), including taking a role in the documentation processes. With this participatory approach, this project will rebuild the watermills and document such re-erection processes. The rebuilt watermill will be used by the locals in their everyday lives for irrigating the field, pounding food, generating electricity, and possibly for a tourist attraction, integrated into the existing community-based tourism business. The targeted goals of this project are to rebuild these endangered traditional watermills, to reintegrate them into the daily lives of the locals, and to document the processes of making, assembling, and operating these watermills. Furthermore, in the current modern context, the watermills built by this project are very likely to gain additional functions as a tourist attraction that can provide education regarding local culture and a more sustainable and pollution-free environment. In this sense, this project can also encourage the younger generation to continue the mastery of watermill technology from the Minangkabau community itself. Thus, this project will allow the mastery of specific endangered knowledge which previously only known by a few elders to be mastered and developed by the younger generations and wider communities.
Principal Investigator:
Marjito Iskandar Tri Gunawan
Collaborators:
Budhi Hermanto, Fitri Noveri, and Herman Felani
Location of Research:
Nagari Harau, Lima Puluh Kota Ragency and Nagari Tandikat, Padang Pariman Regency, Indonesia
Host Institution:
Yayasan Umar Kayam, Indonesia
Top Banner Image: Rain-fed rice fields in Nagari Harau, Sub-district fo Harau. Photo credit: Noveri Fitri.