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161 Orientation + history should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play. claw it, chew it, rearrange it and at bedtime it’s still a ball of string full of knots. nobody should mind . . . it’s an all-purpose rainy day pursuit, this reducing of stories called history. —Jeanette Winterson1 With each new interaction, toba people choose how to define themselves. the resulting association depends on the definition chosen and on how the situation plays out. although each interaction is based on something true about the person, most toba subjects inhabit so many different truths that the possibilities are almost endless. the closest translation of this process is “positioning.” as the word suggests, positioning predicates relativity. it is impossible to position yourself without some knowledge of your new terrain . in toba the process of investigating this new terrain, and ascertaining the positions of its other inhabitants, is called partuturan. as an illustration of how partuturan works in a toba social context, imagine two women—a customer and a vendor—meeting at a market stall. the boundaries of their interaction is already prescribed by its location, and the women could conclude the transaction without engaging in partuturan . however, if accent or physiognomy suggested that the two were both toba, they would almost certainly begin to ask each other questions about parents, husbands, and children. as the questioning progressed, the kinship possibilities would diminish until both agreed on the most fitting term of address and its corresponding rules of interaction. and that understanding could then be used to leverage a better price on a kilo of carrots or tofu, although whether the price benefited the vendor or the customer would depend on their partuturan and their skill in applying it. antiphonal histories / 162 the toba social world is full of variations on this meeting, which takes place in church, at an adat festival or at the lapo tuak. a young woman, for example , might have an easier time convincing her parents to support a love relationship if her boyfriend is “the right kind of cousin”: teenagers who feel a mutual attraction must quickly determine their partuturan to make sure that they are not of the same marga and thus restricted to brotherly or sisterly feelings. altercations can be soothed by an appeal to kinship. in other cases, nascent friendships can be destroyed by a generations-old feud, regardless of whether the principals know or care about the original problem.2 the theoretical promise of partuturan lies in its ability to illuminate the process by which larger historical legacies are sifted through and applied within everyday life. the tarombo stories—genealogical histories describing the precise connections between the entire marga system—are the primary source of the kinship knowledge on which partuturan is based. yet the interpretations of this history are multiple and mutable. For example, the sitohang and situmorang family marga are both a subset of the same larger clan, si Pitu ama (the seven Fathers). if my toba sibling senida were to meet a woman two years younger who was introduced as a boru situmorang , she would immediately recognize her as a younger sister and treat her in precisely the same manner she would treat her own biological (or adopted) sister. using tarombo knowledge—in this case, that situmorang and sitohang perch on the same branch of the family tree—she would construct an appropriate relationship for her new friend. the friend could use a different piece of information to turn the relationship around—within the family of the seven Fathers margas, the situmorang progenitor was older than the sitohang ancestor. if she wished to, the friend could actually claim the right to be addressed as “older sister” by accessing the details of the tarombo history. Whether this ploy would change the social interaction would depend on their knowledge of and adherence to the tarombo stories . although senida might technically be the “younger sister” from the perspective of an older rubric, she could invoke any number of modern precedents to retain the advantage of her age—she could ignore the tarombo detail altogether or even deny that it was true. this type of genealogical wrangling may be unlikely in a casual acquaintanceship between young toba people, yet such details make up the bulk of formal adat discussions, marking the places where tarombo history is contested. small differences in opinion and interpretation in the present have a way of working themselves backward and can create substantial...

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