Toba Batak Erotic

Ask a Toba Batak their name and the conversation that follows is really about the second half of it. The surname is a marga, a patrilineal clan, and every marga traces its line through genealogies called tarombo back to Si Raja Batak, the ancestor whose story begins at Pusuk Buhit, a volcanic peak above the western shore of Lake Toba. Two Batak meeting for the first time will work out how their clans connect before they settle on how to address each other. That habit, more than any dish or garment, is what marks someone as Toba Batak, whether they grew up on Samosir Island or in a Jakarta suburb.

The homeland is the highland country around the lake in North Sumatra, Indonesia, traditionally split into Samosir, Toba Holbung on the southern shore, Humbang, and the Silindung valley around Tarutung. The language, Batak Toba, is Austronesian and belongs to the southern branch of the Batak languages alongside Angkola and Mandailing, set clearly apart from Karo and Pakpak to the north. It has its own script, historically used by datu, ritual specialists who wrote divination and medicine into folding bark books called pustaha.

Social life runs on Dalihan Na Tolu, literally the three stones of the hearth: your own clanmates, the clan that gives wives, and the clans that take them. Every wedding, funeral and housewarming puts people into one of those three positions, with duties to match, and the wife-giving side is owed real deference. The ulos, a handwoven cloth, gives those ties a physical form. It is draped over shoulders at births, marriages and deaths, and it generally passes from elders and wife-givers to the people who owe them respect.

Most Toba Batak are Protestant. German missionaries of the Rhenish Mission, with Ludwig Ingwer Nommensen at the front from the 1860s, built the church that became the HKBP, now one of the largest Protestant churches in Southeast Asia. Armed resistance to Dutch rule held out in the highlands until 1907, when Sisingamangaraja XII was killed. The priest-king is now honored as an Indonesian national hero. Christianity absorbed the older order rather than erasing it. Clan ritual carries on, families still dig up ancestral bones and rebury them in concrete monuments called tugu, and a small community keeps the indigenous faith known as Parmalim. On Sundays the congregations sing hard. On other nights the singing moves to the lapo tuak, the palm wine stalls found from the lakeshore to Medan.