Is there a Batak History?

Abstract

The 8-10 million Bataks of northern Sumatra are one of Indonesia's most important and intriguing groups. They have clearly been in Sumatra for thousands of years. They have attracted a large number of studies of religion and missiology, and a few good ethnological and language studies. Yet they remain a people without history. It seems a classic case of Eric Wolf’s argument, in Europe and the People Without history, that the neglect of the history of such stateless people was not just an absence but a distortion.2 Ethnographers and colonial officials of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries created such categories as highlanders, primitives, proto-Malays, and indeed Bataks as ethnic categories, and assumed their unchanging isolation from the currents of world history. But the Bataks, who were forcibly brought into the scholarly world’s consciousness at that stage were, to follow Wolf’s argument, already wholly transformed by international influences – their ‘isolation’ was itself an historical process.