In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

2 Toba Batak Selves: Personal, Spiritual, Collective Andrew Causey Who is “me”? For the Toba Bataks of North Sumatra, Indonesia, probing that question might take a lifetime. My first experience with the complexity of a Toba Batak notion of self occurred when I was listening to my carving teacher’s wife, Ito, talk about one of their sons, a young man who had serious learning difficulties and who was recalcitrant and mischievous. Their son always played with children much younger than himself, or played by himself ; he spent hours toying with kittens, often chatting with them. The other children liked him, but it was clear that he was unlike the others. When Ito spoke about him, she had a kindly and bemused tone, and once told me, “Yes, he is different, but we have to be careful because his spirit is very strong.” I was not certain what she meant, so she gave me an example. She told me that some years earlier he had repeatedly asked her for a red plastic toy car from the market. The only toys her eight children owned were homemade, constructed out of drinking straws or rubber bands, and Ito explained that the family could not afford such an extravagance, especially not for a young man who was too old for such things. He persisted, not begging or cajoling, but simply stating over and over that he wanted the toy car. She refused. He persisted. After a month of this, she told me, he fell out of a tree and broke his arm in such a way that required an expensive trip to a specialist. They had to ask her husband Partoho’s sister to sell her only gold necklace and then they borrowed the money she received. “After that,” Ito continued, “it was clear I had to buy the toy for him.” Her husband Partoho nodded his head in agreement as she stated the conclusion to the story. I did not understand the tale, and wondered if I had misunderstood something along the way. Perhaps sensing the confusion in my face, Partoho said, “That’s the way it is! After that, we could see that in the days to come, we should not resist his will—we must give in to it. Such is the strength of his spirit.” Still confused, I asked about the connection between the toy car and the son’s fall. It seemed hard for either of them to clarify something so patently obvious, but they tried to find words to explain it. Ito said, “You 28 / Andrew Causey see, his spirit had menjatuhkan him . . .” (that is, it had “felled” him—caused him to fall) “because it was not being treated as it wished; his spirit is so strong it can make him fall.” To make sense of this story, we need to try understanding Bataks’ notion of “self,” a complex conflation of individual personality, the particular spirit, and the collective group. Understanding how other cultures construct their notions of the self has been of interest to social scientists since the beginnings of the discipline of anthropology. In the early years of the twentieth century, scholars investigated connections between the self and society, from Freud’s (1918) and Frazer’s (1910) work on totemism1 to Levy-Bruhl’s on the “soul” (1966 [1922]), which unfortunately seemed to imply that people from non-Western cultures possessed only a group identity. Other scholars, such as Ruth Benedict (1934), Margaret Mead (1937), and Cora DuBois (1944), proposed that personality and culture were inextricably bound, creating a culturally shared identity called the “modal personality” (DuBois 1944:2); some critics rejected these concepts as being too mechanistic and difficult to support. Anthropological research on differential constructions and notions of the self continue, ranging from works on the philosophical explorations of “technologies of the self” (Foucault 1988) to those that introduce notions of a cyborg self that is postgender, polymorphic, and disembodied (Haraway 1991). This chapter presents information about Toba Bataks’ senses of self not to support a theoretical position but rather to help illuminate some of the complexities of everyday life in this part of Southeast Asia. The Bataks are one of Indonesia’s many ethnic groups, and are divided into six subgroups, of which the Toba are among the most numerous (about two million). Although they have migrated widely across Indonesia’s islands, they consider their homeland to be the North Sumatran lands that surround Lake Toba, including the island in the center...

Share