27.07.2023

History of the Toba Batak Mission

How do different species relate to one another? And where are humans located in these relations? Lubabun Ni'am writes about answers of the Toba Batak to this question. Photo by: Christoph Schwab / AMS

Interspecies relationships among the Toba Batak people of North Sumatra:

This is the topic of Lubabun Ni'am's research at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. The anthropologist began his career in Yogyakarta, Java, did research in the Netherlands, and is now pursuing his PhD studies at the Institute of Anthropology at the University of Heidelberg. His previous research areas include sociological perspectives on eco-tourism in North Sumatra and on disaster management in Central Java. For his dissertation in Heidelberg he is visiting the AMS of the UEM*.

His interest in the holdings of AMS is not personal (as a Javanese Muslim, he is not a member of an Indonesian church), but professional: the then-called Rhenish Mission Society (RMG) was one of the predecessor organisations of today's UEM. It sent missionaries and missionary sisters to North Sumatra. Their reports are of interest to Lubabun Ni'am in order to historically assess the Christian mission in North Sumatra for his research.

We thank Lubabun Ni'am for his interest and wish him all the best and God's blessing for his PhD studies.

*AMS of the UEM = Archive and Museum Foundation of the United Evangelical Mission (German: Archiv- und Museumsstiftung)