Wedding ritual

Predictably with an NP-rich product like wine, consumption is accompanied by ritual. Wines are served at official dinners, at weddings, to celebrate births and to show displays of triumph after car racing. Special drinking vessels (wine glasses), special storage containers (wine bottles), special storage racks and wine cellars, all point to wine having a special value in European culture. 

Dress has evolved to become more simplified and sanitised for Toba and Karo as for every other ethnie (suku) of New Order Indonesia, to enable everybody to exhibit their tradition at important ritual occasions, especially weddings. Most of this is simply the modernised Malay costume that spread throughout Indonesia under Dutch and mission impetus in the late nineteenth century, the sarung... 

The key markers of distinctiveness which meet the ritual needs of today s urban Bataks are the handwoven cloth (ulos) worn as a scarf for Tobas, and the cloth worn as a high headdress (tudung) for Karo women. Weddings, as everywhere in Indonesia, became the preeminent site of competitive culture . There people show off their adat, their dress, their music, to an inevitably mixed audience. They will call upon some recognised expert in adat to ensure that things are done in the appropriate manner. 

By the 1970s Batak music was also undergoing its own extension from older forms still played at death feasts and secondary burials, towards commercial, purely secular forms. Batak music and dance now grace every formal occasion where Bataks are in the majority. No wedding or important ritual event is complete without a dance, of one relatively simple form which all can learn and even awkward urban guests can readily participate in. 

Tt is the blood of ritual incisions, mixed and drunk by newly-weds, unites them eternally in the traditions of the Romany gypsies of Central Europe. 

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