Sumatran Politics and Poetics: Gayo History, 1900-1989.

• Author: Roskies, D.M.E.

The Gayo are one of the principal ethnic groups of the isolated lacustrine plains and riverine valleys of Central Acer district in north Sumatra, in the vicinity of Lake Tawar. Sundered by topography from contact with Europeans until the first decade of the century, theirs is an alpine land bounded to the west by the Acehnese and to the south by the Batak highlanders. These proto-Malay agriculturalists, late converts to Islam and espousing patrilineage, engage in wet-rice and swidden cultivation, growing in the main tobacco, maize, and tuber crops. They are known, where indeed they are known at all, within Indonesia and without, for their didong choral groups, through whose performances local governments raise funds to subsidize community projects.

John Bowen's new book, an attempt "to elucidate the contribution of a poetic history to historical anthropology," is the first serious investigation of their ways since the great Dutch Islamicist Snouck Hurgronje's classic study of one hundred years ago, and, as an inquiry into the complex cultural experience of this remote and costive Southeast Asian people, is its honorable successor. Copious notes and a quantity of judiciously selected verse, carefully transcribed and sensitively translated (and further vivified in the excellent cassette helpfully accompanying this volume) are the book's distinguishing features. Its tone of deeply felt and unpossessive affection for its human subjects attests to the author's friendship of many years with Gayo folk and his unusual inwardness with their mentalite. That he speaks their language very well indeed goes without saying. Needless to say, too, the author is in complete command of the relevant scholarly literature. His survey, in short, is at once penetrating and cadastral.

An introductory chapter, well supplied with maps and photographs, affords a magisterial view of Gayo history and customs, clan and kinship systems. Successive chapters consider the phases of that history, marked as they were by inspissated political power in the colonial Beamtenstaat and by the effort, on the part of those in charge in a newly independent Indonesia, progressively to mobilize, direct, and co-opt popular consciousness. The cynosure of Bowen's contribution to contemporary anthropology and to Indonesia as a field of study in its own right are the forms of governance and of official rhetoric operating to hegemonic ends, and from the top down, after the terrible upheavals...