Modern social structure and social organization in Upper Mandailing, Sumatra

Abstract

Mandailing is in the south of what Dutch scholars call the Gayo-Alas-Batak law area of Indonesia. This law area was characterised by the presence of patriclans inhabiting their won territory, small self-governing communities - sometimes single villages, sometimes a group of villages - a dominant clan in the community which supplied the community head (radja), and immigrant clans with representatives on the village council. Among the Batak matrilateral cross cousin marriage was preferred, the clans being asymmetrically organised so that each clan was related to a wife-giving clan on the one hand and a wife-receiving clan on the other. There was a division of society into nobles (radjas), commoners and slaves. Warfare was endemic, but not very destructive of persons or property. Religion and magic were Hindu in origin, belief in the tondi (m) or soul being a prominent feature. The Batak were divided linguistically into Karo, Dairi, Timur, Toba and Angkola-Mandailing speakers. It is likely that the Mandailingers spread southward from Lake Toba. They met the northward moving Menangkabau at the southern border of Mandailing, and subsequently some 100,000 Mandailingers, in a total of about one million Bataks, were converted to Islam. ( First paragraph of chapter 1.)