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259 Four Short Studies in Time and Space + the month before i defended the dissertation that led to this book, the holiday 2005 version of The Economist landed on my breakfast table. the lead paragraph of its cover story mentioned the ancient volcano that had created the crater now containing Bapak, oma, and my entire village research site and discussed “the effect of toba” on the human population of the time.1 in recent biological anthropology, north sumatra has become the focus of deliberation about the spread of humans through the prehistoric world. occurring seventy-four thousand years ago, the explosion was a devastating geological event, spewing ash that can still be found as far away as northern Pakistan. a group of scholars from the university of oxford have argued that the volcanic eruption of toba was directly responsible for the genetic and cultural diversity in the human race. their theory suggests that the population of homo sapiens, having just migrated en masse from north africa, was divided into small disjunct groups by the violent aftermath of the explosion.2 From these sites the groups eventually repopulated the world, but not before millennia of isolation produced certain biological and cultural differences. the oxford view was contested by a group of scholars from the university of cambridge (naturally),3 but both agree that the toba explosion was a monumental event. For an area that has long been “off the map” geographically and culturally, toba’s debut within the contemporary world of ideas is a stunning one. the cultural scattering and drawing together that defined later millennia —one instance resulting in the mapping of the Waq-waq islands and the description of its denizens, another in the presence of american motifs in folk songs from half the globe away, a third in the Kulturkreis theories of austrian ethnologists—is also reflected in the multidirectional histories of the toba people. the tarombo genealogies, distilled from centuries of toba families and events, portray a people gradually moving away from a central point to investigate and eventually become a part of other cultural tradi- antiphonal histories / 260 tions. non-toba histories mark the sites where foreign traditions have met these people and their stories, violently or nonviolently and with varying consequences. the frontier of cultural interaction is characterized by the foreign, yet also by an unexpected familiarity with intimations of the universal . travelers who arrived in sumatra from south asia likely carried the dust of toba on their feet. i have used the rubric “antiphonal histories” to describe the ways these diverse historical legacies of the toba are present in musical performance. the linguistic implication of the word “antiphony,” which in Greek translates as “voices in opposition,” does not inspire my use of the word, though it may accurately describe other representations. indeed, many scholars, native and foreign alike, have portrayed the cultural strata evident in toba cultural history as brittle and discrete. the evidence of this layering within toba musical life suggests a different interpretation, in which these histories, made manifest in the outdoor sarune and the male/female gondang drums, resonate simultaneously and produce effects both harmonious and discordant . the different sites and genres of toba musical performance, divided to fill the different chapters of this book, actually prove resistant to such a taxonomy. traditional gondang melodies are played on the guitar in the lapo tuak; tom Jones makes a sonic appearance during a rehearsal of sacred choir music; and the members and the music of all of these spheres come together to honor the life of a late friend and family member. When seen in an integrated way, the formal divisions i apply to my interpretation of toba musical life also collapses—partially. the chapters in the tarombo section detail the broad strokes of the toba past; the chapters in the partuturan section demonstrate how this received legacy is applied in the present. yet the two sections cover the same territory, from the Medan streets to the shores of lake toba, and both are illuminated by examples from past and present and by the words of informants and scholars. this convergence corresponds with the complementary nature of the two processes . Genealogical history is based on past day-to-day interactions; contemporary positioning is rooted in an understanding of the past. + seven months after erika’s funeral, after my return to Michigan, i stood at the deathbed of my own Beppe, the Frisian grandmother about whom i had told stories to erika and...

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