The importance of proper names: Language and ''national'' identity in colonial Karoland

The seemingly natural association of language and local identity is one of anthropology's most durable and perhaps necessary assumptions. This article interrogates that association through an examination of the linguistic policies and vernacular education program of the Dutch Missionary Society among the Karo Bataks of colonial East Sumatra. I argue that the politically inflected ''coalition of Protestantism and print-capitalism'' (B. Anderson 1991[1983]:40) in East Sumatra contributed to the formation of bounded collective and individual political subjects at the level both of local ''nationalities'' (i.e., ethnic groups) and of the grander national community-in-the-making of Indonesia. Although missionaries cannot be credited with the ''invention'' of Karo identity, their programs of linguistic standardization, vernacular education, and Bible translation nevertheless produced around that identity a set of linguistic resources for rule and resistance.