Tulila: Muzik Bujukan Mandailing by Edi Nasution (review)

Tulila: Muzik Bujukan Mandailing (Tulila: Mandailing seduction music) is Edi Nasution’s Indonesian-language study of markusip, a disappearing, late-night, rural courtship tradition among West Sumatra’s Mandailing. In markusip, a love-struck pemuda (young man) braves nocturnal risks of the jungle to sneak up to a young woman’s dormitory (bagas podoman), where he leans his shoulder against its thin outer wall, and tries to rouse an anak gadis (young woman) from sleep with faint melodies played on a slender, fourhole, bamboo, reed instrument called tulila, sung quatrains of ende-ende, and prods from a palm-leaf stem through a small hole in the wall called a lubang markusip. His hope is that the anak gadis will awaken and engage him in whispered conversation, the very meaning of markusip.

Readers of Indonesian will welcome this contribution by an indigenous author to the small but growing body of ethnomusicological literature on Southeast Asia’s lesser-known musical practices. Tulila’s scope is broader than its title suggests. Its five chapters unite tulila performance with various facets of aposoan (the idealized life of Mandailing youths in their premarriage years), broader markusip courtship traditions, and post-courtship engagement rituals (patobang hata). Nasution is a Mandailing ethnomusicologist, native to the region, and an insider to the society he describes, though we do not learn much about his personal connection to markusip or the communities in which this study is based. Mandailing lands are comprised of two regions, and their political subdivisions, called huta, are linked by the northward-flowing Batang Anak Gadis River. They have traditionally been dominated by two principal marga “clans”: the Lubis marga of the mountainous, upper Mandailing Julu to the south, and the Nasution marga of the swampy lowlands and foothills of lower Mandailing Godang to the north. Nasution’s fieldwork took place in the former, his native Julu, as it was the only area where he encountered extant tulila activity. His methodologies include interviewing numbers of Mandailing (including tulila players, community leaders, cultural guardians, and young people), learning how to construct and play tulila, transcribing and analyzing his field recordings, and writing ethnographic descriptions that are rich and replete with local terms and concepts, and which comprise a significant portion of this book.

Chapter 2 introduces Mandailing history, territory and culture, touching upon its origin myths, premodern alphabet and texts, surviving antiquities, legends, traditional rulers, and clan system, as well as its performance genres, instruments, ensembles, songs, and dances: much of what constitutes a Mandailing identity. A central undertaking of this book, advanced in this chapter and later in chapter 5, is to correlate tulila to dalian na tolu, a canon of Mandailing concepts and practices governing kinship relations, gender roles, and social stratification—glossed in Indonesian as tumpuan yang tiga, or “three pillars.” According to Nasution, the “pillars” symbolize roles performed by three clan-based groups who interact in a traditional wedding engagement, and meanings they embody. He uses a triangular paradigm to illustrate their relationships; clockwise from the vertex are the mora who “give away” the young woman, the anak boru who “receive” her, and the kahanggi who deal with the arrangements.

Chapter 3 covers a diverse range of topics, and contains an abundance of ethnographic information, though its organization is not particularly coherent. It begins with a rich description of a markusip outing and texts showing how pemuda and anak gadis interact through ende-ende. This is followed by a hodgepodge of explorations of tulila: what it expresses and communicates, how it entertains, its relationships to Mandailing language, poetry, traditions, symbols, and beliefs, and comparisons between markusip in different historical eras. In a section on tulila and si pelebegu, Nasution shows how a pre-Islamic belief system that still guides Muslim Mandailing society informs tulila construction and playing techniques. Through si pelebegu, the pemuda imbues his instrument with love magic in order to stir sadness in the anak gadis when...