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Genealogy as Historical Right in the Bataklands and its Malayan Diaspora, c.1870-1925

Sun, March 19, 8:30 to 10:30am, Sheraton Centre Toronto Hotel, Floor: Mezzanine, Birchwood Ballroom

Abstract

Disputes over land and water today often involve determining who holds historical rights and traditionally use the resource. This paper asks - what did historical rights mean in the Malay world and how did this change with the onset of colonialism-led globalization? I examine these questions by looking towards the North Sumatran highlands in the late 19th century where independent Batak chiefs clashed with Malay coastal rulers over land concessions to European plantations and claimed a historical right to land based on genealogy or tarombo. While it can be loosely translated as 'family tree', the tarombo does not function merely as a simple record of patrilineal descent but captures a network of alliances and reciprocal obligations to other clans (marga). In the absence of a centralized state, the tarombo helped to organize Batak society into a social web with a sense of shared history. I argue that pre-colonial tarombo had facilitated sharing of resources, challenging the colonial notion of alienation for exclusive use. Land disputes later catalyzed the writing and publication of tarambo, in the Dutch East Indies during the 19th century. Using family histories of Batak migrants to Malaya, I further show that written tarombo, however, became a portable tool for claiming and delineating land as migrants to British Malaya through the legal system. Migration is thus crucial to entrenching the logic of claiming exclusive rights to resources by authenticating family.

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