Isak is only one of Indonesia's thousands of rural villages, and it has its own particularities: Gayo-speaking, Sumatran, coffee-growing, and so forth. But if Isak does not represent Indonesia as a whole, it can illuminate one set of conflicts and deliberations that one would find in any village in the archipelago. Isak residents are engaged in an internal debate over how one can, and should, weight the competing demands of traditional social norms, state-enforced laws, new ideas about equality and mobility, and religious commands. In these debates the categories of “adat,” “law,” and “Islam,” as well as those referring to broad values such as “consensus” and “fairness,” serve as resources that speakers can mobilize in their efforts to elicit assent from their fellow villagers. Disputes are settled, or at least quelled, less by applying rules than by assembling persuasive tokens of legitimacy.

Technically, Isak is a grouping of five small villages, totaling about one thousand people. It lies in a valley through which flows the Isak, or Jambo Ayer river, right across the main mountain range of Sumatra, the Bukit Barisan, down to the eastern coast of Aceh province. Most Gayo consider the Isak river valley to contain the oldest villages in the highlands. In the 1980s, Isak residents added coffee growing to their list of means of livelihood, a list which already included irrigated rice-farming, tending water buffalo, and cooking palm-sugar. Households began to plant coffee gardens in forested areas to the west and south of Isak.