Acehnese Erotic

The Acehnese occupy the northern tip of Sumatra, the part of Indonesia that juts toward the Andaman Sea and faces the Indian Ocean rather than the rest of the archipelago. That geography matters: Aceh was a port-of-call for Arab, Indian, Persian, and Chinese traders centuries before the Dutch arrived, and it became the first place in Southeast Asia to convert seriously to Islam. The Sultanate of Aceh, at its seventeenth-century peak under Iskandar Muda, was a regional power that fielded a navy, minted its own coinage, and corresponded with the Ottomans. None of this is incidental to how the Acehnese see themselves now. The province is the only one in Indonesia to formally apply Sharia law, and the local identity has long been built around a sense of being more devoutly, and more independently, Muslim than the rest of the country.

Their language is Acehnese, which sits on a slightly odd branch of the Austronesian family — the Chamic group, whose closest relatives are spoken not on Sumatra but across the water in Cambodia and Vietnam, descendants of the old kingdom of Champa. So Acehnese is genealogically more cousin to Cham than to Indonesian or Malay, even though it has absorbed enormous amounts of Malay, Arabic, and Sanskrit vocabulary through trade and religion. The Aneuk Jamee, a smaller sub-group along the western coast, descend from Minangkabau migrants and speak a Malayic language instead, and they form a culturally distinct enclave within Aceh proper.

The modern history is heavy. A thirty-year separatist insurgency by the Free Aceh Movement ended only after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami devastated the coast — the catastrophe killed something like 170,000 people in Aceh alone and pushed both sides into a peace deal the following year. That sequence, war then disaster then autonomy, shapes a lot of contemporary Acehnese life: a generation grew up in conflict, then rebuilt their towns from concrete slabs, then negotiated a degree of self-government no other Indonesian province enjoys. Customs reflect the layering. The traditional Saman dance, performed seated in tight rows with rapid hand-clapping and chest-slapping, is recognizable across Indonesia and abroad; coffee culture in the highland town of Takengon is a serious local institution; and the rumoh Aceh, the elevated wooden longhouse on stilts, still appears in villages even as concrete has replaced most of them.