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Poetic Duels and Political Change in the Gayo Highlands of Sumatra
Author(s) -
BOWEN JOHN R.
Publication year - 1989
Publication title -
american anthropologist
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.51
H-Index - 85
eISSN - 1548-1433
pISSN - 0002-7294
DOI - 10.1525/aa.1989.91.1.02a00020
Subject(s) - poetry , politics , trace (psycholinguistics) , colonialism , sociology , linguistics , political science , philosophy , law
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.