The Batak societies, located around Lake Toba in North Sumatra, are among the more than three hundred ethnic minorities of Indonesia. Batak religion, like Batak culture as a whole, is ethnically diverse, syncretic, changing, and bound at once to both village social organizational patterns and the monotheistic national culture of Indonesia. Like many religious traditions of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, Batak myths and rituals focus on the yearly cycle of rice cultivation activities and the local kinship system. Batak religions tie these two realms to a larger cosmological order, which is then represented in various religious art forms (traditional house architecture, village spatial layout, and wood sculpture) and ritual activities (dances, oratory, and gift-giving ceremonies). Batak kinship revolves around marriage alliances that link together lineages of patrilineal clans, called marga. This marriage system, which involves ritually superior and "holy" wife-providing lineages and their ritually subordinate, "mundane" wife-receiving lineages, is much celebrated in the indigenous Batak religions. Many village rites of passage, for instance, are largely occasions for eulogizing this asymmetrical marriage alliance system through hours of ritual oratory. Beyond these very localized ethnic patterns, however, Batak religious life extends outward into the world religions: the large majority of homeland Batak and virtually all migrants to cities in Sumatra and Java are Muslim or Christian. In fact, the Batak are stereotyped in Indonesia as uncommonly pious monotheists; both the southern Batak Muslim pilgrim to Mecca and the Toba Batak Protestant minister are stock characters in the national dramatis personae when members of other ethnic groups think of these Sumatran peoples. In this monotheistic environment, Batak village religion has undeniably lost some of its social and symbolic scope. However, through an inventive reinterpretation of symbols, other sectors of village belief and ritual continue to thrive in new forms.
There are six major Batak societies in the homeland region around Lake Toba. These societies are similar in village social structure and subsistence base (paddy rice farming with some dry field agriculture) but speak different dialects of Batak and have distinct ritual systems. These societies are commonly called the Toba Batak, Karo Batak, Pakpak and Dairi Batak, Simelungun Batak, Angkola and Sipirok Batak, and the Mandailing Batak (although some "Batak" rarely call themselves Batak). Their pre-monotheistic religions are impossible to reconstruct in detail from current evidence because Islam and Christianity have reshaped village ritual and folk memories of the past so thoroughly. It is common, for instance, for committed Muslim and Christian Batak to speak disparagingly of their "pagan" ancestors, who believed in populous spirit worlds before they "discovered that there was only one God." In other words, "traditional Batak religion" is in large part a figment of the contemporary Batak imagination. It is safe to say, however, that the Batak religions practiced before the 1820s (when Islam entered the southern Angkola and Mandailing homelands) and the 1850s and 1860s (when Protestant Christianity was introduced to Angkola and the Toba region by Dutch missionaries and the German Rheinische Mission Gesellschaft) shared many symbolic complexes with the related indigenous religions of Kalimantan's Dayaks, Sulawesi's highland societies, and the people of eastern Indonesia.
In all these regions, certain assumptions about the nature of the universe permeated village religion. Binary oppositions between life and death, humans and animals, the village and the forest, metal and cloth, masculinity and femininity, and warfare and farming were recurrent themes in ritual and myth. Both human and agricultural creativity and fertility were thought to come from the temporary, intensely powerful union of such complementary opposites as life and death, masculinity and femininity, and so on. Also important was the notion that the two opposing categories were aboriginally one. Ritual often endeavored to unite for a moment the binary opposites and then control the resulting release of power from the center. (For instance, at Batak weddings the bride-giving faction bestows ritual textiles on their bride-receivers while the latter bestow counter-gifts of metal and livestock. Such exchanges foster fertility in the marriage.) The Batak societies took these familiar pan-Indonesian concepts and fit them to their particular social structure. Toba origin myths, for instance, tell of a first human, Si Raja Batak, who fathered two sons (Guru Tateabulan and Raja Isumbaon), who in turn fathered the ancestors of the major Toba patrilineal clans. Related myths tell of the origin of farming and weaving and link clan clusters to certain valleys and upland regions. Other Toba myths warn of the consequences of clan incest and marriages that violate the asymmetrical alliance rules (men should not marry women from lineages that serve as their traditional wife-receivers).
All Batak religions had extensive soul concepts and generally posited a personal soul that could fragment when startled and escape from a person's head to wander haplessly in the countryside until recalled to his body in special soul-capture ceremonies. Datu or gurū were diviner-sorcerers who performed such religious cures and also served the village chiefs as "village protection experts" in times of warfare, epidemic, or crop failure. Sacrificial rituals were central to the datu's protective tasks; in a few areas there may have been occasional ritual cannibalism (a point that is hotly debated among Batak today). Common myth images include magic numbers, constellations of stars, the magic colors red, white, and black, the baringin tree (the banyan tree seen as the cosmic tree uniting the layers of the Batak cosmos), the singa (a powerful monster that is part human, part water buffalo, and part crocodile or lizard), the cosmic serpent Naga Padoha, the hornbill, and aboriginal boy-girl twins. In Toba and Karo such images animated an extensive range of art forms, including carved wooden sorcerers' staffs, textiles, funerary masks, and megalithic monuments. These art forms, and the larger religions surrounding them, also drew on Indian beliefs; like many Indonesian cultures the Batak came into contact with Hinduism and Buddhism via possible trading colonies near Barus, a temple community near Portibi, and through influence from the indianized ancient kingdoms of south Sumatra.
Contact with the monotheistic religions varies considerably from Batak society to society. Karo is an area of fairly recent conversions, with many animists. In this mixed Muslim and Protestant region, Christian proselytizing gained some converts in the 1930s, but the major switch to monotheism has come since 1965 as a result of the national government's identification of Indonesian patriotism with belief in a monotheistic religion. Toba is overwhelmingly Protestant; the original, German-sponsored missionary church, the HKBP (Huria Kristen Batak Protestan), has its headquarters in Tarutung. During the Padri Wars in the 1820s Minangkabau Muslims brought their religion to the southern Angkola and Mandailing homelands; today, Mandailing is entirely Muslim while Angkola is about 10 percent Protestant and 90 percent Muslim.
During the Suharto regime, the HKBP church has splintered into the parent church and a number of bickering class- and ethnicity-based new denominations. In religiously mixed areas, members of the churches tend to align themselves with Muslim families along class lines. In Angkola, for instance, where pre-national society was divided into an aristocracy, commoners, and slave descendants, Muslims from noble families often find political allies among highborn Christians. Early conversions in the 1850s and 1860s brought large numbers of slave descendants into the church, while later Dutch colonial policy led to favoritism for village chiefly lineages that became Christian. This policy has left southern Batak Christianity argumentative and faction-ridden.
In Angkola, members of the same social class often emphasize their common heritage "in the adat" (village custom) over their differences in monotheistic religion. Because adat encompasses much village ritual, this leads to much syncretism. In Muslim Mandailing and Christian Toba, by contrast, adat is often seen as conflicting with monotheistic religion. In all Batak societies, the area where adat meets monotheism promises to remain an important growing edge of culture in the coming decades.
Bibliography
There is a large literature in Dutch, English, and Indonesian on the Batak societies. Toenggoel P. Siagian's "Bibliography on the Batak Peoples," Indonesia 2 (October 1966): 161–184, is a valuable guide to the main research before the mid-sixties, and the bibliographies in Beyond Samosir: Recent Studies of the Batak Peoples of Sumatra, edited by Rita Smith Kipp and Richard D. Kipp (Athens, Ohio, 1983), provide references to the mid-1980s, a period of much American anthropological fieldwork in the area. Jacob Cornelis Vergouwen's The Social Organization and Customary Law of the Toba-Batak of Northern Sumatra (1933), translated by Jeune Scott-Kemball (The Hague, 1964), remains the premier descriptive ethnography of a Batak culture, with much information on non-monotheistic rituals and beliefs. Some articles and monographs by anthropologists reflect a shift in research toward Batak symbol systems: Rita Smith Kipp's "The Thread of Three Colors: The Ideology of Kinship in Karo Batak Funerals," in Art, Ritual, and Society in Indonesia, edited by Judith Becker and Edward M. Bruner (Athens, Ohio, 1979), discusses Karo religion in its marriage alliance context; I discuss religious syncretism and change in Adat, Islam, and Christianity in a Batak Homeland (Athens, Ohio, 1981). Two major collections of anthropological essays on similar religious and social systems from other regions of Indonesia provide invaluable comparative material: The Flow of Life: Essays on Eastern Indonesia, edited by James Fox (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), and The Imagination of Reality: Essays in Southeast Asian Coherence Systems, edited by A. L. Becker and Aram A. Yengoyan (Norwood, N.J., 1979).
New Sources
Becker, Dieter, ed. Mit Worten kocht man keinen Reis: Beiträge aus den Batak-Kirchen auf Nordsumatra. Wuppertal, 1987.
Goes, Beatriz van der. "Beru Dayang: The Concept of Female Spirits and the Movement of Fertility in Karo Batak." Culture Asian Folklore Studies 56, no. 2 (1997): 379–405.
Kipp, Rita Smith. Dissociated Identities: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in an Indonesian Society. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1993.
Kipp, Rita Smith, and Susan Rodgers, eds. Indonesian Religions in Transition. Tucson, 1987.
Steedly, Mary Margaret. Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland. Princeton, 1993.
Monday, May 7, 2007
Batak Religion (2)
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Batak Dance and Music
Music of Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines
Spring 2000
Uli Kozok
from The Batak. Achin Sibeth. 1991
Almost sixty years ago an article appeared in the periodical De Indische Gids which discussed, among other things, the music of the Batak. It ended as follows:
"It is a great shame that such [musicological] researches have been neglected hitherto, since now that the Batak lands are accessible and western influence can penetrate to an increasing extent, Batak music will soon degenerate and perhaps even vanish in the long run." (Abas 1931: 916)
Since then Batakland has experienced the Japanese occupation, the disturbances of the revolutionary period and the building of a modern national state - but Batak music still survives, and indeed is even becoming increasingly popular. The University of Medan, with help and support from the Ford Foundation, is training young music ethnologists who are advancing research into the music of the Batak, and researchers from abroad have also studied Batak music closely in recent years. In Germany records of gondang music of the Toba, Angkola and Mandailing and of gendang music of the Karo have even appeared (see discography: Kartomi 1983a,b; Simon 1984, 1987).
The music of each of the individual Batak peoples is quite independent, so it is not possible to speak of a single Batak music. Nevertheless, there are some features in common both as regards the musical instruments and the way the music is used.
The range of instruments used includes percussion, wind and plucked instruments. Percussion and wind are the more important. The complete Toba gondang orchestra consists of a drum set (taganing) consisting of five coordinated drums of various sizes with drumheads of water buffalo, cow or goat skin, the bass drum (gordang), similar to the tataning but much bigger (about 100 cm long with a diameter of about 30 cm), an oboe (sarune), and four gongs (ogung). While the Mandailing gordang, the Simalungun gondang and the Pakpak genderang are very similar to the Toba orchestra, the Karo gendang differs considerably. Its line-up is simpler consisting of a much smaller sarune, one gendang drum and a pair of drums, made up of a drum which resembles the gendang drum, with a second, 10-cm-long drum attached, and lastly a large and a small gun".
The combination of instruments mentioned forms the off~cial gondang or gendang orchestra (for simplicity I shall use the term gondang for the orchestras of the Toba, Mandailing, Simalungun and Pakpak). There is also a large number of local variants and simpler line-ups. There are other musical instruments besides those mentioned which make up the gondang orchestra. The most important of these are the lute (Toba: hasapi; Karo and Pakpak: kulcapi), the bamboo flute (surdam) and the bamboo cane zither (Karo: keteng-keteng; Pakpak: ketuk)
The religious aspect of Batak music has been largely pushed into the background since the conversion of a large part of the Batak to Christianity or Islam, but for the Karo Batak and the Toba Batak who still adhere to the parmalim, the gondang still plays an important part in ritual. Inspired by the music the medium becomes possessed by the spirits of the ancestors who are pleased to have been called and not infrequently ask the medium for their favourite song to be played. Because of the close connection between the music and traditional religion the German missionaries at the beginning of the century forbade the Christian Toba Batak to hold or even attend gondang performances on pain of excommunication. Even today Christian Toba are forbidden to hold a gondang other than a gondang riang-riang (a "happy" gondang for entertainment). A pastor oversees the event and stops it if a participant seems to be about to fall into a trance (Schreiner 1970: 412). Among the Toba Batak in particular it frequently happens that the organizer of a "heathen" ceremony is excommunicated. The "sacred" music at rituals, funerals and marriages, which formerly played such a large role has therefore become rare. As has been mentioned, besides the "sacred" gondang there is also a profane gondang which is used for entertainment. Above all the gondang which accompanies public dances, nowadays held on wide variety of occasions. The harvest festival (kerja tahun) is very popular among the Karo Batak, and for it the young people of the village organize a dance (guro-guro aron) at which the dancers are accompanied by a gendang orchestra'. A guro-guro aron is also sometimes held on Independence Day (17 August). Nowadays youth organizations and the church often organize the dance festivals.
Most of the occasions for holding a gondang are public ones: marriages, funerals, festivities for the naming of a child, the honouring of older family members or the transfer of the bones of an ancestor (Toba: mangongkal hold, Karo: nurun-nurun).
Besides this "public" music there is also "private" music often connected with a ritual. The whole gondang never plays on these occasions, only the hasapi or the surdam are used. One example of such a ritual is the love magic, in which a ritual is used to magically win the heart of a woman.
Batak music has also been influenced by commercialization. Not only are performances of dance and music given specially for tourists, but even more important there is a trade in music cassettes; indeed almost the entire repertoire of Batak music is now available on cassettes. The many new compositions now appearing on the market are evidence that Batak music is not dying out. Most are based on the traditional music, and there are also "pop versions". The music of the Toba Batak has undergone an enormous revival and expansion of its repertoire through the existence of the Opera Batak travelling theatre (Carle 1990). The popular songs written by the composer Jaga Depari from the post-war period up to his death in the early sixties already form part of the traditional music of the Karol Today they are available on cassettes in very different variations, accompanied by the traditional gendang or by Japanese Hammond organs, and they are performed at public festivities such as the guro-guro aron to accompany dances by professional and amateur singers. Another sort of very popular song is the ballad-like song sometimes lasting over an hour with gendang orchestra accompaniment. These katoneng-katoneng, too, are available on cassettes. They are performed ceremonies for the inauguration of houses, the transfer of the bones of an ancestor, and sometimes at ceremonies for invoking spirits, and usually relate the history of the family holding the ceremony. The professional singer (male or female) first gets to know the family history and then has to improvise freely during the performance. Also on the market and very popular are katoneng-katoneng telling of the struggle for independence (Sembiring 1987: 394ff). Lastly, the popular folksongs of the Toba Batak should be mentioned, as well as their church choirs and the brass bands formed by the German missionaries as gondang substitutes.
It is rare for a gondang orchestra to play without dances being performed. Dancing is an almost inseparable constituent of every musical offering. Dances can be divided into three main groups. First there are the adat dances which are part of every ceremony and in which the selfimage of the dalihan na tofu is manifested, the respect which the party giving the feast owes to the guests and in particular to the wife-givers. These dances follow a strict order of precedence which is laid down the day before. As a rule the party giving the feast (suhut) dances as a group one after another with the wife-givers and wife-takers, who stand opposite the suhut while the two groups dancing move slowly towards each other and back again. The adat dances are characterized by slow and considered movements and accompanied by symbolic gestures and the laying of the woven cloths (ulos) on the shoulders of the wife-takers who thereby receive a blessing from the wife-givers.
The dances performed at a ceremony for invoking spirits are quite different in character, although here too the rules of the adat are followed. After these formal dances the actual dance of possession is performed by the medium and by others present who wish to be possessed by a spirit. These dances are improvised and have an extraordinary dynamism and expressive power. The gondang plays a tune which begins slowly but quickens to a breath-taking speed. The dancers, who wear a whit cloth over their shoulders and tied round their heads so that the spirits will see that they are ready to be possessed, gradually lose control over themselves, become ecstatic and stamp on the ground in rhythm with the music so that the house shakes. The female medium, the guru sibaso, takes a leading part in this and spurs her fellow dancers on. Some of the dancers reach the poinl where the spirit enters into their bodies, in a trance which resembles unconsciousness, they suddenly collapse and hit the back of their heads on the concrete floor. This does not bother those present, however. They immediately rush up, shake him and shout "Where are you from?" - they must avoid having an unwanted guest at the ceremony. Slowly the possessed man awakes from his trance. Despite his fall he has sustained no injury and is in no pain. If a malignant spirit has entered the ceremony the guru sibaso will drive it away or kill it with a knife in a dance. Those possessed behave in the manner of the spirit that has possessed them: women possessed by a male spirit spear in a deep voice, smoke and ask for palm wine; someone possessed by the spirit of a child crawls about like an infant. It also happens that people are possessed by the spirits of animals, especially snakes, but also tigers and apes, and so they crawl like a snake or clamber round the room asking for bananas. The mayan dance too sometimes leads to a state of trance (mayan is a form of the art of self defence). The dancers have a shadow fight with concentrated movements gradually increasing in speed, which, on the occasion observed by the author, degenerated into a general happy tumult.2
The third category of dance is the dance, generally accompanied by gondang, that is performed for general entertainment. This includes the dances at the guro-guro aron mentioned above as well as dance performances on a wide variet~ of occasions. As with the adat dances these dances are an expression of beauty and harmony, however the entertainment dances of the young people contain an erotic element, invisible t~ the uninitiated observer, which is expressed through certain gestures of the hand and body arousing loud laughter among the audience.
Wednesday, April 4, 2007
Batak Religion (1)
About a thousand years ago the very best bits of Sumatra were governed by the Srivijaya Empire which was Indian in its origin and Hindu in its following.
In the 1300's the Javanese threw the Srivjayans out and set up their very own empire with the predictable name of the Javanese Empire, but neither of them found the Bataks.
That was because The Bataks had wisely left the best bits of Sumatra to the empire builders and wreckers, and kept themselves hidden in the unexplored north of the island. They had a basic religion of their own, they were happy with it, they understood it and got on with it in their own way.
Although they avoided detection for as long as possible the good times could not last forever. The next conquest of Sumatra was by the Europeans in the 1500's and this proved to be the beginning of the end for the Bataks.
At the time the Europeans were cheerfully running their own invasion business under the name of professional exploration. They found Sumatra, threw out the Javanese and set up business, eventually, as The Dutch East India Company, and not content with just the good bits of the island, the Dutch went off into the hills to look for someone else to conquer. Where they found the Bataks.
The invaders were only truly happy when every member of the newly discovered indigenous population was either killed, raped, enslaved or at the very least converted from their unknown and misunderstood heathen idolatry to the new western idolatry.
It was useless for The Bataks to try to explain their own view of the-true-meaning-of-life because the good Christian missionaries had God (and an invading army) on their side, and saw the destruction of an established culture as a perfectly legitimate way of carrying on. Provided of course, it was the missionaries and the invading army that were doing the destroying.
Before the Batak culture was completely wiped out, someone managed to jot down what the Bataks themselves believed in. The universe according to the Bataks is made up of three distinct parts: Starting at the top they have The Gods. In the middle are men, women and life-as-we-know-it. And in the Underworld lives Naga Padoha, The Dragon!
The power of creation is given to Mula Djadi. He is right at the top of the top world and to keep him company on dull days he has three sons: Batara Guru, Soripada and Mangalabulan.
And the fact that Creation happened at all was the result of a huge, violent and as it turned out, one-sided battle between The Gods and The Dragon.
Gods and Dragons have never really got on together and after much finger and claw pointing from this particular quartet the flaming rows inevitably came to a real stand-up fight.
Batak legend has it that there could never be a fair contest if one or other of the combatants were on his home ground and as there was no convenient battle ground around at the time, and being fair minded sort of chaps, the gods created The World for the purpose of the battle.
The contest was long, noisy and for the newly created world concerned, both creative and destructive. It was also unfair as the dragon was, after all only a dragon and the gods outnumbered and outsmarted it four to one.
Naga Padoha put up a brave fight but as the loser the unhappy dragon was ignominiously chained up in the Underworld. Forever. The Gods, content with their work, moved back to the Upper World to consider their next move. The newly created middle-world was now populated with men, women and enough life to make things both interesting and scary while Naga Padoha was left in his sunless cave to ponder on unfair gods and rigged fights.
Mula Djadi, like any self respecting God, felt he had to do something for all these people that he had so casually created and so he came up with the idea of giving them a Tree. And when Mula Djadi decided to make a tree he was certainly not going to be content with any old pealing bark or leaves that fall off when the weather turns a bit breezy. This was going top be a tree to remember.
This was a tree with a name, Jambubarus. Every leaf on it carried a message in the form of a cryptic clue and every man's soul had to pick one and, with a godly eye to fairness, what a soul picked, the man had to keep.
Not all messages were the sort that brought health, wealth and happiness and with godly fairness there was a fair chance that someone would pick up something very nasty indeed.
Fortunately if that did happen, there was a way out. The destiny of one soul could be changed by simply eating the soul of someone else.
From the moral point of view cannibalism was just their way of transferring souls around and from the nutritional point of view, it was a lot better than chewing on some skinny bird or rodent. For the Bataks the practice of eating the rich (of soul) was seen as being perfectly acceptable and definitely not something to get so upset about.
Unfortunately for the Bataks, this was not a point of view held by the new wave of explorers and missionaries who enthusiastically got to work on the bodies and souls of their new conquests. Especially the bodies.