Poetic Duels and Political Change in the Gayo Highlands of Sumatra

Bibliographic Data

ID2458646
AuthorsJohn R Bowen (corresponding author)
Year1989
Volume91
Issue1
Pages25-40
Publication date1989-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Anthropologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7294 • E-ISSN: 1548-1433
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/aa.1989.91.1.02a00020
OpenAlexW2000302196
LanguageEN
Citations received13
References cited23

Discourse, and particularly discourse in dialogue form, recently has been proposed as a privileged arena for the interaction of language and society. This article examines the process by which performances of public dialogue have been structured and restructured in Gayo society, Indonesia, from 1900 to 1945. I trace changes in the formal, semantic, and contextual features of Gayo poetic duels. The integration of Gayo society into colonial and postcolonial sociopolitical frameworks is shown to have opened up performance to competing political voices, in Bakhtin's sense. Implications are drawn for current research on dialogues as models for social relations

Colonialism · Linguistics · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · TRACE (psycholinguistics) · Discourse Analysis in Language Studies · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philosophy

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