A Modern Batak Horja
Innovation in Sipirok Adat Ceremonial
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7297069 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Susan Rodgers Siregar (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1979 |
| Volume | 27 |
| Pages | 103-103 |
| Publication date | 1979-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Indonesia (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0019-7289 • E-ISSN: 2164-8654 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3350818 |
| OpenAlex | W2324479521 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 4 |
The Batak peoples of North Sumatra have an almost alchemic knack for reshaping their traditional cultural patterns to adjust to social conditions in today's urban-centered, multi-ethnic Indonesia.Institu tions and ideologies built up over centuries in the homeland farming villages of Tapanuli have in many cases made the transition to town and rantau life with striking success.The anthropologist Edward Bruner has, for instance, described the traditional Batak kinship sys tem's ability to help many Tapanuli villagers adapt to life in large Sumatran cities.* 1 Bruner found that these new "city Batak" do not abandon their village patterns of asymmetrical cross cousin marriage and firm clan loyalties.Rather, they use these forms of traditional social alliance as very modern mechanisms for easing the transition to urban life.Yet, not surprisingly, Batak kinship has changed consid erably in the process, to the point that this basic idiom of local village sociality has been stretched to accommodate such outlandish new kinsmen as Javanese in-laws and Balinese daughters-in-law.2Village adat is another Batak domain that has survived in modern "national" society in sturdy hybrid form.Far from being static and hidebound (as the usual translation of adat as "customary law" might im ply) , Batak adat has actually proven to be extremely adaptive and creative over the past forty years.Yet, like kinship, it has served recent generations of villagers and townsmen as a sort of cultural gyroscope allowing them to keep their balance in their society's truly headlong rush into modernity.(If the Batak today are rightly stereo typed as an education-minded, rantau-directed population set on launch ing at least one son or daughter per family into white-collar work beyond the village, in the middle of the nineteenth century Batak society was village-bound, xenophobic, subsistence-oriented, and largely illiterate.3That so many Batak have emerged from this period *This article is based on anthropological research on adat and oral literature conducted by the author in Sipirok, South Tapanuli, from 1974 to 1977
| Unique citing works | 4 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.1 |
| Citation span | 1984 - 1988 (5) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |