Hanging without a Rope

Mary Margaret Steedly

Published by Princeton University Press 1993

Hanging without a Rope

Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland

Mary Margaret Steedly

In the series Princeton Legacy Library

Volume 2 in the series Princeton Studies in Culture/Power/History

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691194639

Overview
Contents

About this book

When Mary Steedly went to North Sumatra, Indonesia, she intended to study the curing practices of Karo Batak spirit mediums, the gurus who keep a community in touch with its ancestors. She became fascinated by the stories these women and men told of their encounters with spirits in the ritual arena and on the borders of the everyday social world. In these stories, Karo mediums conveyed their sense of historical out-of-placeness, which they described as "hanging without a rope," in Indonesia's state-proclaimed Age of Development. Based on the author's three years of fieldwork in urban and rural Karoland, this engaging and sympathetic account focuses on issues of experience, memory, and narrative plausibility. Steedly approaches mediums' stories not simply as reservoirs of information about "what happened" at a particular moment, but as interested efforts to map a pathway across the shifting landscape of historical memory.
Over the past century Karoland has been the scene of colonial conquest, Christian conversion, commercial agricultural development, military occupation, reolution, migration, and modernization. Storeis of spirit encounters, Steedly argues, provide an alternative, "unofficial" perspective on the historical transformation of the Karo social world. In addition to her rich ethnographic material, she draws on feminist theories of subjectivity, William Faulkner's reconstructions of personal and collective memory, and current anthropological explorations of the politics of representation to open the ethnographic imagination to historical eventfulness.
Mary Margaret Steedly is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University.

Originally published in 1993.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Reviews

"Co-Winner of the Chicago Folklore Prize"

"Co-Winner of the 1994 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing, Society for Humanistic Anthropology and American Anthropological Association"

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	VII
Illustrations Publicly Available Download PDF	IX
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	XI
Some Notes on Language, Translation, and Orthography Publicly Available Download PDF	XV
Prologue Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
CHAPTER ONE. Narrative Experience Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	12
CHAPTER Two. The Karo Social World Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	44
CHAPTER THREE. Markets and Money Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
CHAPTER FOUR. On Mount Sibayak Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	119
CHAPTER FIVE. Signs of Habitation Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	144
CHAPTER Six. Someone Else Speaking Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	174
CHAPTER SEVEN. A Storyteller Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	203
CHAPTER EIGHT. An Uncertain Death Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	224
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Glossary Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	297