Batak Religion

Batak Religion

BATAK RELIGION. The Batak societies, located around Lake Toba in North Sumatra, are among the more than three hundred ethnic minorities of Indonesia. Batak religion, like Batak culture as a whole, is ethnically diverse, syncretic, changing, and bound at once to both village social organizational patterns and the monotheistic national culture of Indonesia. Like many religious traditions of Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, Batak myths and rituals focus on the yearly cycle of rice cultivation activities and the local kinship system. Batak religions tie these two realms to a larger cosmological order, which is then represented in various religious art forms (traditional house architecture, village spatial layout, and wood sculpture) and ritual activities (dances, oratory, and gift-giving ceremonies). Batak kinship revolves around marriage alliances that link together lineages of patrilineal clans, called marga. This marriage system, which involves ritually superior and "holy" wife-providing lineages and their ritually subordinate, "mundane" wife-receiving lineages, is much celebrated in the indigenous Batak religions. Many village rites of passage, for instance, are largely occasions for eulogizing this asymmetrical marriage alliance system through hours of ritual oratory. Beyond these very localized ethnic patterns, however, Batak religious life extends outward into the world religions: the large majority of homeland Batak and virtually all migrants to cities in Sumatra and Java are Muslim or Christian.

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