The next cultural guardians

When he was a young boy growing up in North Sumatra, Indonesia, Jakob Siringoringo suffered from a “mental block” of mysterious origin.

Rather than confidently embracing and openly expressing his indigenous Batak identity, he often felt afraid to do so. Looking back, Jakob, now in his mid-30s, recently wondered whether his childhood wariness stemmed in part from a repressive legacy — what medical professionals increasingly refer to as transgenerational trauma — of Christian and Muslim missionaries that had long discouraged the local practice of indigenous knowledge and traditions. That mental inheritance, as well as a formal education system emphasising common national values over ethnic and cultural diversity, led Jakob to suspect that his own well-intentioned…