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Song in the Sumatran Highlands

Resource: Abdullah. 1999. "Tambo, Kaba, and History"

Abdullah, Taufik. 1999. "Tambo, Kaba, and History: Tradition and the Historical Consciousness of the Minangkabau." In Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau, ed. A. Summerfield, J. Summerfield. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. 334-339

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Term: Kaba 5 Kaba are Minangkabau epics plain 2021-07-01T00:55:09+00:00
Kaba are Minangkabau epics or stories. As Minang historian Taufik Abdullah writes kaba rely
on an imaginatively constructed narrative to present the social and personal consequences of either ignoring or observing ethical teachings and the norms embodied in the adat system of action. (1999: 336)
They can also incorporate stories about social change and recent events (Abdullah; Yampolsky). Junus (1994) makes the argument that historically kaba were set in the remote past, but their publication in print in the 1920s, along with their proliferation on cassette recordings in the 1980s, has meant that kaba are presented in novel ways today. Newly-composed kaba, such as one that documents the large 2009 earthquake in West Sumatra, introduce an immediate past, rather than deal with the remote past (Fraser 2013).

The manner of presentation can range from live storytelling to theatrical production, print publication, or sound recording. As narratives, kaba become texts for a number of performance genres, including sijobang, rabab Pasisia, rabab Pariaman, dendang Pauah, and randai. As Yampolsky and Hanefi write in the linter notes to an album involving recordings of two forms--rabab Pariaman and dendang Pauah.
In randai the kaba is partly sung and partly enacted; in the others it is sung, to the accompaniment of a single instrument...When kaba are sung, the medium is usually rhythmic lines, without rhyme schemes or stanza forms (1994).
The poetic form means that most of the genres drawing on kaba have quite a different feel than those (see Abdullah 1999: 337 for an excerpt from Johns (1958)), like saluang, that draw on the pantun form.

Related Resources
- Abdullah, Taufik. 1999. "Tambo, Kaba, and History: Tradition and the Historical Consciousness of the Minangkabau." In Walk in Splendor: Ceremonial Dress and the Minangkabau, ed. A. Summerfield, J. Summerfield. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History. 334-339.
- Johns, Anthony, editor and translator. 1958. Rantjak diLabueh: A Minangkabau Kaba. Southeast Asia Program. Department of Far Eastern Studies. Cornell University., Ithaca., New York.
- Junus, Umar. 1994. ‘Kaba: An Untold (His-)Story’. South East Asian Studies 32(3): 399-415.
- Phillips, Nigel. [1981] 2009. Sijobang: Sung Narrative Poetry of West Sumatra. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.