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Poetic duels and political change in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra

Article: English. Bibliographic reference
Author(s)
Bowen, John R.
Title
Poetic duels and political change in the Gayo highlands of Sumatra
In
American anthropologist, 91, 1, 1989, 25-40
Subjects
Didong ; Sumatra
Type of material
Article
ISBN / ISSN
1548-1433
Discourse, and particularly discourse in dialogue form, recently has been proposed as a privileged arena for the interaction of language and society. This article examines the process by which performances of public dialogue have been structured and restructured in Gayo society, Indonesia, from 1900 to 1945. I trace changes in the formal, semantic, and contextual features of Gayo poetic duels. The integration of Gayo society into colonial and postcolonial sociopolitical frameworks is shown to have opened up performance to competing political voices, in Bakhtin's sense. Implications are drawn for current research on dialogues as models for social relations.