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Modernity and the Memory Artist: The Work of Imagination in Highland Sumatra, 1947–1995

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 December 2000

Mary Margaret Steedly
Mary Margaret Steedly*
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

News from afar sometimes seems to bear an uncanny resemblance to one's own remembered past. This is not because of the banal redundancy of events, but because of memory's inclination to refurbish itself in contemporary designs and novel images. In 1994 I was in northern Sumatra collecting stories from Karo veterans of the Indonesian war of national independence. Every night the television news offered more horrifying pictures of ethnic violence from around the world. In central Africa, roadways were filled with thousands of starving, desperate people traveling toward unknown destinations. This made a big impression on my Karo informants. “That's exactly how it was here,” they told me over and over. “I saw it on TV last night. I told the kids, ‘We were just like that during the evacuation.' Nothing to eat. No clothes. We were living like animals.”

Type
Art Work
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , October 2000 , pp. 811 - 846
Copyright
Copyright © Society for Comparative Study of Society and History 2000

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