Title: Sumatran politics and poetics : Gayo history, 1900-1989 /
Authors: Bowen, John R. 1951-
Publisher: Yale University Press,
Year: 1991
Subjects: Gayo (Indonesian people) History.; Gayo (Indonesian people) Rites and ceremonies.; Gayo (Indonesian people) Politics and government.; Folklore Indonesia Sumatra Performance.; Sumatra (Indonesia) Politics and government.; Sumatra (Indonesia) Social conditions.
Abstract: In this book, an anthropologist analyzes political and cultural change among the Gayo, a Muslim people numbering about 200,000 who live in the highlands of northern Sumatra. John R.Bowen, who has lived among the Gayo shows how their successive absorption into both colonial and post-colonial states has led them to revise their ritual speaking, sung poetry, and historical narrative. Bowen discusses the phases that have characterized Gayo political and cultural history since 1900: the centralization of political structures and political narratives under Dutch colonial rule, the attempt to implement radically new nationalist and Islamic images of social order in the early years of independence, and the increasingly hierarchcial forms of control and discourse in the post-1965 New Order. He then examines the effect of these changes on Gayo poetics, finding that there have been consistent shifts in the forms of narrative, rhyme, and dialogue. Each shift has brought greater continuity in poetic form and has increasingly represented power as centralized. This work contributes to the comparative study of Indonesian societies. As a study in poetics, it deals with the social context for changes in the form and context of several distinct expressive genres. And as a case study in historical anthropology, it examines the changing, open-ended relationship of political processes and cultural forms.
Contents: 1. Introduction -- PART 1. GAYO HISTORY AND ITS REPRESENTATIONS: 2. Gayo society and culture ; 3. Political structure and historical narratives in 1900 ; 4. The creation of colonial hierarchies ; 5. Competing transcendencies: Islam and the Indonesian nation-state ; 6. Politics and culture in the new order -- PART 2. POETICS AND ITS HISTORY: 7. Authoritative maxims and ritual speaking ; 8. Poetry and contest, 1900-1945 ; 9. The poetic mediation of political change, 1945-1989 ; 10. Narrative strategies in the history of Linge ; 11. Islamic reformulations of the past ; 12. Conclusions -- Appendix 1. Analytical glossary of Gayo terms -- Appendix 2. Gayo population data.