The Importance of Proper Names

Language and "national" identity in colonial Karoland

Bibliographic Data

ID2467449
AuthorsMary Margaret Steedly (Harvard University Press, corresponding author)
Year1996
Volume23
Issue3
Pages447-475
Publication date1996-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueAmerican Ethnologist (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0094-0496 • E-ISSN: 1548-1425
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1525/ae.1996.23.3.02a00010
OpenAlexW2130431243
LanguageEN
Citations received40
References cited81

The seemingly natural association of language and local identity is one of anthropology's most durable and perhaps necessary assumptions. This article interrogates that association through an examination of the linguistic policies and vernacular education program of the Dutch Missionary Society among the Karo Bataks of colonial East Sumatra. I argue that the politically inflected "coalition of Protestantism and print-capitalism" (B. Anderson 1991[1983]:40) in East Sumatra contributed to the formation of bounded collective and individual political subjects at the level both of local "nationalities" (i.e., ethnic groups) and of the grander national community-in-the-making of Indonesia. Although missionaries cannot be credited with the "invention" of Karo identity, their programs of linguistic standardization, vernacular education, and Bible translation nevertheless produced around that identity a set of linguistic resources for rule and resistance. [Indonesia, Karo Bataks, colonialism, missions, nationalism, language

Aesthetics · Colonialism · Ethnic group · Identity (music · Linguistics · National identity · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Vernacular · Anthropology · Asian Studies and History · Gender Studies · Law · Multilingual Education and Policy · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy

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