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Description: When small-scale societies are integrated into larger spheres of authority, their key cultural forms are often reshaped. 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 and is fluent in their language, 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. As the first fieldwork-based book on the Gayo, 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 content 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.
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