Book Reviews

ANGEL  M RABASA. Political Islam in Southeast Asia: Moderates, Radicals and Terrorists. Oxford: Oxford University Press for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2003. 82 pp. ISBN 0-19-852911-2 pb £15 plus p&p. Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Michael Hitchcock, London Metropolitan University

The security environment in Southeast Asia has changed dramatically since 11 September 2001. Terrorism networks with local agendas that converge with those of al-Qaeda have surfaced with the arrests in Malaysia and Singapore of militants associated with Jemaah Islamiyah, an organisation that may also be linked to the Bali bombings of 12 October 2002. Southeast Asia has thus emerged as a major battleground in the war on terrorism, but the issues raised by political Islam are much broader and more complex than the problem of terrorism alone.

Angel Rabasa's Adelphi paper provides a succinct, but well-considered overview of the rise of political Islam in Southeast Asia and its implications for security and governance within the region. The paper opens with a consideration of the external and domestic sources of radical Islam, and then moves on to consider Islam's diversity within the region. He looks at the complexity of Islam in Indonesia, the fusion of Islam and ethnicity in Malaysia, and the position of Muslims in Singapore, Cambodia and Myanmar. He discusses the relation between the Sultan and Islam in Brunei, Muslim separatism in Thailand and Islam as a unifying element in Moro identity in the Philippines. In this broad sweep the author also makes space for an account of the shi'ites, who rarely feature in accounts of Islam in this region.

Rabasa then moves on to more in-depth analyses of Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and the Philippines, before broadening out again to embrace the ASEAN perspective on Islam. With regard to Indonesia, what this reviewer found especially useful was the account of Islam under the New Order and how Suharto, when he began to lose support among the military, sought to cultivate Muslims as a countervailing force. Although written well before the elections in Malaysia, Rabasa also describes how the Islamic Party of Malaysia’s (PAS) attempts to adopt a more radical agenda were frightening off moderate Muslims.  He argues that even if the PAS were to win every seat in the northern Malay belt of Malaysia, it would still fall well short of a majority; subsequent events show that he was on the right track. It was, however, a bit too early to write about the waning of Muslim separatism in Thailand, though Rabasa hedged his bets by saying that it was too soon to conclude that armed separatism had come to an end. The book is also particularly good on the historical context of the insurgency in Mindanao and the rise and fall of Abu Sayyaf and its loosening grip on the people of Basilan Island.

Towards the end of the book the author attempts to identify linkages between these conflicts and reproduces a diagram, with the source given as RAND, that shows how the various terrorist networks can be linked to al-Qaeda. In view of the shadowy nature of some of the groups mentioned, it remains unclear how strong these links are and how they work, and it might be better to improve on the diagram by using lines of different thickness to indicate the strength of these bonds. Is it a weak and dotted line that links al-Qaeda to Hambali or a broad one indicating important flows of power, money and ideology? Overall, the author provides a first rate overview of a rapidly changing subject and it is the hope of this reviewer that he can be persuaded to return to the subject in the near future, not least because of the recent outcomes of elections in Malaysia and Indonesia.

TIMO KIVIMÄKI (ed). War or Peace in the South China Sea.  Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2002. 160 pp. ISBN 8791114012 pb £15.99.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Jürgen Haacke, LSE, University of London

This book provides a multi-dimensional analysis of the South China Sea dispute. Geographically, the book covers not only the Spratly Islands, but also extends to the Paracels and the Gulf of Thailand.  It is divided into three parts. The first part discusses conflict in the South China Sea in the context of wider historical and strategic developments. It also provides an overview of the divergent territorial claims. The second part covers the environmental, economic, military and political dimensions of the conflict. The third discusses prospects for peace in the South China Sea.

The book starts off with one of its best chapters, Stein Tønnesson’s insightful discussion of the many historical aspects of the South China Sea conflict that generally find at best little mention in related works. Tønnesson’s chapter is especially strong at contextualising and explaining the various rationales underlying key strategic and political decisions of the main players to the conflict. Next Ramses Amer focuses on what he calls the ‘complex conflict situation’ prevailing in the South China Sea. He sets out the likely basis of the variant claims and proceeds to point out how the latter overlap. Whilst informative, the data provided in this chapter is necessarily limited so that the reader ultimately may still find it somewhat difficult to untangle how and where the claims overlap. To deal with this issue, it might have been worthwhile considering including further relevant cartographic material.

Part II of the book begins with a discussion by Tom Næss of the environmental challenges relating to the South China Sea, including over-fishing and the destruction of mangroves and coral reefs. Næss effectively shows the difficulties if not a considerable level of obstruction encountered in drawing in China into relevant remedial action. Examining further the economic dimension of the South China Sea conflict, Stein Tønnesson then explores the challenges faced in relation to natural resources, such as fish, oil and gas, and the importance of sea-lanes of communication. This is again an effective chapter, but the final section on piracy could perhaps have been slightly extended.

The military aspects of the South China Sea conflict are analysed by Bjørn Møller. He argues that reading claimants’ relevant intentions off regional military expenditure and arms acquisitions is not straightforward. On some - usually minor - points this chapter is not always entirely accurate or persuasive. The author for example refers to a ZOPFAN treaty (p. 73, my emphasis), which does not exist.  He also contends, despite providing seeming evidence to the contrary, that the US is averse to playing the role of external balancer (p. 76). It is also not quite clear what precisely the author is saying when he concludes that ‘ASEAN nations have wisely presented a united front … by standing firm on procedural matters, maintaining that disputes should be solved without recourse to military force, preferably through international and binding legal adjudication’ (p.79). Indeed, this analysis sits somewhat uneasily with other chapters of the book in which contributors emphasise precisely the intramural ASEAN strains with respect to arriving at a consensus on how to deal with the South China Sea conflict.

That said, the greatest number of controversial and problematic assertions is arguably found in the chapter on the political dimension of the conflict, authored by Ramses Amer and Timo Kivimäki (especially pp. 87-95). Most relate to the character of ASEAN and the nature of its cooperation. The authors suggest, for example, that ASEAN was from the outset an association for conflict management. It is moreover not clear why the chapter fails to note the rules of procedure agreed in relation to the ASEAN High Council by mid-2001.

Part III opens with a chapter by Ramses Amer on ongoing efforts in conflict management. For Amer, the resolution of the conflicts is essentially one of political will. He points to successful border delimitation exercises in the Gulf of Thailand as a possible way forward. More complex arguments are advanced in what is the final substantive chapter. Here, Timo Kivimäki, Liselotte Odgaard and Stein Tønesson, under the heading of ‘what could be done’, discuss deterrence, the use of codes of conduct and possible further steps to resolve the dispute. The authors end on a relatively positive note as regards the conflict transformation potential, not least because of growing economic interaction between China and other claimants.

The book lacks a list of abbreviations and acronyms. The index is not very detailed. As regards the bibliography, it is disconcerting to see that so many articles published in The Pacific Review are considered to have appeared in the Pacifica Review. Irrespective of these weaknesses, those who seek a book that highlights and discusses the multidimensional nature of the South China Sea conflict will probably find this title useful.

JOHN MIKSIC (ed). Earthenware in Southeast Asia. Proceedings of the Singapore Symposium on Premodern Southeast Asian Earthenwares. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003. xxiii & 370 pp. ISBN 9971-69-271-6 hb £37.50.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Jan W Christie, University of Hull

This well-illustrated volume brings together for the first time a series of studies of the early domestic earthenwares produced both in mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. The collected articles cross the linguistic and historical boundaries that have acted as impediments to communication amongst the nine nations of the region, and bring together both established and younger scholars from the region and from outside. The volume provides a basis for the construction of a general framework upon which students of the archaeology of Southeast Asia can build. The separate studies range from broad overviews to more focused analyses of specific traditions. An attempt has been made to be as inclusive as possible, and to balance studies of the pottery of the mainland and maritime regions.

The volume begins with two chapters by WG Solheim on the history of pottery studies in Southeast Asia, focused largely upon the maritime region. Chapters 3-5, on the Philippines, comprise surveys of the early prehistoric period (W Ronquillo), and late prehistoric and protohistoric periods (E Bacus), along with a more focused study of the anthropomorphic secondary burial jars of Mindanao (EZ Dizon). Chapters 6-11, devoted to the pottery of Indonesia, include a general survey of the prehistoric earthenwares of the islands (Santoso S), and more focused studies of the historic pottery of Macassar (D Bulbeck and G Clune), the pre-sixteenth century pottery of Central Maluku (DK Latinus and K Stark), the early historic pottery of eighth-tenth century Central Java (Mundarjito, Ingrid HE Pojoh and Wiwin DR), the terracotta sculpture of Majapahit-period East Java (Hilda Soemarti), and the historic-period earthenware of Sumatra (EE McKinnon). It is to be hoped that future studies will include comparisons of the earthenwares found at the early second millennium AD sites of Kota Cina in Sumatra and of south Kedah on the Malay Peninsula.

Three chapters are devoted largely to the earthenware of the parts of the peninsula and islands now forming provinces of Malaysia and southern Thailand. These begin with a survey of the Neolithic tripod pottery distributed from west-central Thailand down into Peninsular Malaysia (Leong SH). This is followed by chapters on the Neolithic pottery of Sabah in northeast Borneo (S Chia), and on the earthenware from the important protohistoric site of Kuala Selinsing on the west coast of Peninsular Malaysia (Nik Hassan Shuhaimi and Asyaari bin Muhamad).

The first 14 chapters, which are focused largely upon the earthenwares of the maritime region, are supplemented by five further chapters devoted to the earthenwares of the mainland. These comprise a useful and analytical survey of the pottery produced in Cambodia from about 3000 BC to about 1300 AD (MT Stark), a well-illustrated discussion of the earthenwares of prehistoric central and northeast Thailand (B Vincent), and a broader survey of the protohistoric and early historic pottery vessels and sculptures found at sites in peninsular Thailand (Amara Srisuchat), along with a detailed study of the late prehistoric and early historic pottery of Central Vietnam, which link the Sa Huynh period to later developments in the Cham region (R Prior and IC Glover), and a survey of the ceramics, both unglazed and glazed, produced up to the 15th century in Myanmar (Myo Thant Tyn and U Thaw Kaung).

The three final chapters focus upon modern pottery-making traditions in the region - mainland Southeast Asia as a whole (L Lefferts and LA Cort), modern Myanmar (C Reith), and the bordering region of Assam (DK Medhi).

Although few of the contributors were in a position to provide comparisons between the specific earthenware traditions they have studied and those of neighbouring regions, these collected articles, and the substantial bibliography attached to them, provide a useful basis for future integrated studies of the earthenwares of Southeast Asia.

MARIO RUTTEN.  Rural Capitalists in Asia:  A Comparative Analysis of India, Indonesia and Malaysia. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 288 pp. ISBN 0700716262 hb £65; pb 0700716270 £19.99. Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Martin Gainsborough, SOAS

In his book, Mario Rutten compares what he generally refers to as ‘entrepreneurs’ in three locations:  rural industrialists in central Gujarat, iron founders in central Java, and combine harvester owners in northern peninsula Malaysia.  Each location is given a chapter in which the author explores a series of themes, including business management, investment patterns, socio-political behaviour, and lifestyle. The text is interspersed with short case studies.  The breadth and depth of the fieldwork is impressive.  From my own experience, I know how difficult it can be to obtain consistent data across cases.  Rutten does this well.  He has clearly spent a lot of time with the entrepreneurs, often accompanying them in their work.  However, he maintains a critical stance towards his subjects and skilfully juxtaposes rival interpretations of events.

Rutten has two main theoretical concerns or gripes.  Firstly, he says that because scholars working on entrepreneurs usually look at a single country they have tended to talk past each other.  That is, scholars on Indian entrepreneurs argue about whether small-scale industrialists represent a ‘productive class’.  Scholars working on Malaysia and Indonesia are more interested, Rutten says, in explaining the success of ethnic Chinese business people or the relative weakness of indigenous entrepreneurs, often with reference to cultural arguments.  While I would be the first to admit I do not know the literature on business elites in Malaysia and Indonesia as well as I should, I did wonder whether this was a fair characterisation of it.  Also, my sense is that the literature is quite sceptical of cultural arguments.

Rutten shows that there are actually quite a lot of similarities in economic and social behaviour between entrepreneurs across Asia regardless of ethnic or religious background.  This point is well taken and Rutten nicely counteracts any tendency to see indigenous business people as necessarily second-rate, or suggestions that ethnic Chinese have a monopoly on exploiting kinship or other networks.  Malays do it too, the author points out.  Rutten is striving for a comparative framework that can explain entrepreneurial behaviour across cases and his efforts are to be applauded in this regard.

I liked Rutten’s depiction of the changing lifestyle of successful entrepreneurial families.  Here one very much got the sense of a ‘new class’ in the making:  moving both metaphorically and spatially away from the villages from whence they had come.  As a political scientist, I wanted to know more about the nature of relations between the entrepreneurs and the state.  There were details in this regard but when I was told that some of the entrepreneurs were no longer involved in local politics, I felt something was missing.  For me, this speaks of a certain political confidence – less that politics does not matter – but I wanted to know more about the basis of this confidence.

The book’s second main theoretical focus – at least for this reviewer – concerns the long-standing tendency to view economic take-off in Asia as somehow phoney – ersatz capitalism or a miracle.  At the heart of this is a tendency to question the nature of Asian entrepreneurialism by saying that business success is dependent more on political contacts (‘close relations between state and business’) than on genuine business talent.  Rutten’s point is that such arguments are based on false assumptions about how industrialisation, or capitalist take-off, occurred in Europe in the 18th and 19th century.  That is, where has the emergent business class ever been cut off from the state?  I welcome such arguments.  This kind of thinking is hinted at in lots of writing (Fforde in Drumond and Thomas 2003, Khan and Jomo 2000, Nolan and Xiaoqiang 1998, Thanh-Dam Truong 1999, Steinfield 2002) but no one to my knowledge has pursued these ideas to the extent deserved.  If Rutten is arguing for more collaborative work between historians and social scientists looking at the nature of capitalism – and the state – across historical time periods and between developed and developing countries, I would welcome this too. 

Rutten asserts that the reason misplaced assumptions about capitalist take-off in Europe live on is not just because of ignorance but rather is ideologically driven.  While this may be true in some cases, to characterise it thus is I think to underestimate the extent which assertions that ‘state and society’ or ‘state and business’ should be separate – and that this is normal – represent one of the ways in power is exercised in the international realm, particularly but not exclusively by the West over the East.  That is, when we hold in our heads such idealised views about state and market we often do so not wilfully but rather because such ideas exert a hold over us.

GERARD A PERSOON, DINY ME van EST & PERCY E SAJISE (eds.). Co-Management of Natural Resources in Asia: Comparative Perspectives. Copenhagen: NIAS Press; London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 303 pp. ISBN 87-91114-13-6 £45.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Mike Parnwell, University of Leeds

The challenge of advancing ‘sustainable development’ beyond the somewhat idealised concept it has represented since the mid-1980s towards a practical and pragmatic action agenda for the 21st century centres, in part, on building bridges between a complex array of actors and their divergent sets of interests. Multiple and serial polarisations have long stood in the way of progress. ‘Development’ itself is viewed quite differently by the purveyors of mainstream or alternative visions for the future. Pathways to ‘sustainability’ must negotiate ecocentric red lights, anthropocentric green lights and the amber glare of ‘caring capitalism’. ‘Sustainable development’ must rationalise futurism against ‘nowism’, whilst being receptive to myriad calls for multiple channels towards manifold conclusions.

In East, South and Southeast Asia, much progress has been made in the last couple of decades in constructing an albeit makeshift stage on which principal and supporting actors might ad lib a final act for the latest Asian Drama, that of environmental degradation, resource depletion and uneven development. There is little scope for soliloquy. Whereas in the past the players of the state, civil society, business and international development, occasionally abetted by choruses of stakeholders, may have sought to drown each other out with the shrillness of their respective messages and the superiority of their claims to developmental pre-eminence, today there is more harmony, better orchestration, smoother dialogue, clearer reception. Co-management is in the round. The state and the people are entering into partnerships, often with civil society backing, in rising to sustainability challenges across the region.  Top-down and bottom-up directionalities are coalescing around a middle path; localism is being drawn into national strategies for local sustainable development, and drawn upon for albeit romanticised inspiration for a re-make or fresh take on ‘back to the future’.

This book is the first volume to place such outside-inside partnerships for sustainable development in Asia within the literary spotlight. The product of a dedicated Europe-Asia workshop held in the Philippines in 1998, and the latest in a sequence of meetings organised by a loose network of scholars and practitioners which operates under the moniker of East West Environmental Linkages (which also yielded, via the same publisher, the valuable Environmental Movements in Asia), the volume presents a collection of case studies on co-management arrangements from the four corners of Asia (principally Vietnam, the Philippines, Japan, China, Indonesia and India). The case studies deal with such diverse topics as the co-management of national parks, forest management and forest rehabilitation, marine ecosystem and fisheries co-management, livestock and pasture management, and community based resource management. Whilst most of the case studies are selected to draw attention to the potential for co-management arrangements to help slow down the process of resource depletion and assist in environmental rehabilitation, mainly by giving power to and drawing on the knowledge banks of local communities, all of the chapters draw attention to the shortcomings as well as the achievements of the co-management of natural resources. The former include an over-reliance on the romanticised assumption, professed by many post-developmentalists and sometimes reinforced by environmental anthropologists, that local communities have a greater interest in, commitment to and capability of managing their local resources and ecosystems when compared with external agents that covet, claim or co-operate in the exploitation of the same resources. Some of the warts-and-all chapters urge caution as the pendulum swings from grand to small, and national to local, although collectively they help construct a view that appropriately fine-tuned co-management arrangements must surely represent a way forward to more sustainable forms of local development.

This book consists of 12 case study chapters sandwiched between a very useful introductory chapter by Gerard Persoon and Diny van Est which clearly and concisely maps out the concept of co-management and presents its potential and pitfalls as a means of promoting sustainable resource management. It has an equally valuable concluding overview chapter by Roy Ellen which draws out key findings from the case studies and uses these to re-engage some of the ideas and constructs introduced at the outset. These include a critical appraisal of the notion of ‘community’ in community-based resource management, which is a pivotal ingredient of the process of co-management, and also the idea and process of ‘management’ itself. The case studies are provided by an eclectic range of contributors from both Asia and Europe, all of whom appear to have had some direct involvement in the projects on which they report. This generally helps yield insight and strong empirical data, although, on balance, one feels occasionally that some of the authors are a little too committed to the co-management ideal to be sufficiently critical of and detached from the cases they communicate. Nonetheless, the practice of participatory co-management must surely represent an appropriate path for future policy and praxis, and this volume on co-management in Asia is an important and valuable first contribution to the literature on sustainable development in the region.

STEPHEN SPARKES & SIGNE HOWELL (eds.).  The House in Southeast Asia:  A Changing Social, Economic and Political Domain.  London:  RoutledgeCurzon, NIAS Studies in Asian Topics, No. 28, 2003.   xiv & 271 pp. ISBN 0-7007-1157-0.

Reviewed by RH Barnes, University of Oxford

This collection presents a series of mostly solid and interesting ethnographic reports on a variety of Southeast Asian societies, focusing on the imagery and social use of houses.  The communities covered include an aboriginal group (Chewong) and a mixed Malay/Chinese group (Baba) of Peninsular Malaysia, one (Kelabit) of Sarawak, six (Lio of Flores, Toraja, Malays of Jambi, Pipikoro, Toba Batak and Borgo) of Indonesia, two (Tai Yong and Isan) of Thailand, as well as one on the South Ryukyus.  The authors broach several comparative themes, which they pursue with varying degrees of persistence, among them the relation between domestic design and social and ritual practices, the house as expression of cosmological order, the house as an image of social groups, the house used to convey political messages, the house as a vehicle for claims to status, the relation between the house and the temple, the relation between the house and the granary, the relation between the house and the conceptions of soul, the relation between the house and body (human or animal), the relation  between  the  house  and plants,  the

relation between the house and the boat, the relationship between the house and life cycles, the relation between the house and coffins and tombs, the relation between the house and gender or the sexual division of labour, the relation between the house and the ancestors, symbolic structuring of space, placing items conveying spirit (metal, etc.) in or under structural members of the house, the house and danger, the house and identity, longhouses and leadership competition, house orientation, opposition and inversion in physical structure, and so on.  Any of these themes could easily be expanded into an extensive comparative study exceeding the scope of this particular collection.

None of the contributors has referred to Lord Raglan’s The Temple and the House, although some at least would have benefited by doing so.

One or two of the essays are written with a curious abstraction, as though the author does not want to concede too much significance to facts.  Those authors who do not subject themselves to such fastidiousness sometimes provide quite rewarding empirical discussions, suggestive of richer accounts to come in situations where the author may not be restricted by space limitations inherent in projects of this kind.  Some authors have even given the works of earlier generations a careful reading, thus enriching their comparative observations.  I should say therefore, that this is a very worthy book, which will repay repeated reference when working on any of a very wide range of topics.

A problem which has troubled the editors is the question whether there is any unity or coherence to the topic of the house?  The short answer surely is to respond with the question, why should there be?  The house, dwelling, hut, what have you, does not have the same significance in each community.  There are, however, frequent analogies from one context to another, as indeed the authors have shown.  Sparkes asks, is ‘the house more of a descriptive tool than an analytic concept?’  His answer is, ‘It seems to fuse elements of both’.  For Howell, however, the house is not an abstract concept, but a physical entity.  Physical entities can be compared both in respect of techniques and designs of construction and in terms of use, utilitarian and symbolic.  Some such physical entities may be houses.  The truth is that ‘the house’ is not an analytic concept at all.  Dwellings of various kinds are comparable in a variety of ways.  The use of houses, boats, animals, plants, stones, spirits and what have you as metaphors, symbols and vehicles of communication can also be compared.  They are not, however, analytic concepts.

It seems that any anthropologist who wants to talk about houses today feels compelled to refer to Lévi-Strauss and his writing on ‘house-based societies’. This book accordingly is liberally sprinkled with such references.  Thus we hear that the idea that the house can be a model of social organisation can be traced to Lévi-Strauss (Sparkes).  ‘It was Lévi-Strauss who made the house a new theoretical focus within kinship studies’, characterised by ‘illuminating insights’; ‘he started what has become a fruitful anthropological quest’ (Howell).   Some comments are more temporising, such as the reference to ‘his sketchy but powerfully suggestive proposal of the “House Society”’ (Waterson).  On the other hand the authors speak of his ‘defective argumentation and a cavalier use of empirical material’ and tell us that his category ‘leads to more confusion than illumination’ (Howell).  ‘This rather Euro-centric notion of the house as fixed, non-movable property - which seems also to lie behind Lévi-Strauss’s original, sketchy formulations about “house-based societies”  sits somewhat uneasily with the reality of many Southeast Asian societies’ (Trankell).  Incidentally, two recent books on the house in Southeast Asian societies have cover photographs of a Malay house being moved, and many Europeans and Americans have resided in trailer houses (caravans).  The Bedouin tent also comes to mind.

In 1960, Lévi-Strauss demolished the idea of totemism, something which had been done adequately in 1910 by Alexander Goldenweiser.  A decade and a half later, he invented another false category, as though he had not learned his own lesson.  Anthropologists, attracted by Lévi-Strauss’s bandwagon, dutifully began writing about house-based societies, only to be embarrassed by the discovery that no more is there such a category than is there a category of totemism.  At least McLennan, who invented totemism, had the excuse of inexperience.  All Lévi Strauss has demonstrated is his ability as an attractor of adulation.  Lévi-Strauss was trying in the mid-1970s to solve a late 19th or early 20th century problem, which by then the profession had long since moved beyond.  He defined his house-based societies in opposition to those with unilineal descent (as noted by Howell), but then blithely included in the category well known examples like the Karo Batak and the Atoni whose descent groups are defined unilineally.  As Howell tells us, the (unilineal) Lio have those features Lévi-Strauss excluded from his category of house-based societies, but the house is just as important as in any other society.  Indeed, in Southeast Asia, the distribution of the house as a symbol of a group does not distinguish in any way between cognatically organised and unilineally organised peoples.  Nor is there any other metaphorical use of the idea of the house that makes that distinction.  Despite their claims to the contrary, I do not see that a single contribution to this book has benefited in any positive way by Lévi-Strauss’s retrograde notion.

SAKHONG LIAN H. In Search of Chin Identity. A Study in Religion, Politics and Ethnic Identity in Burma. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003. 280 pp. ISBN 0-7007-1764-1  hb £50.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Konstantinos Retsikas, University of Sussex

The book is a revised and expanded version of a thesis in theology written by the former secretary-general of the Chin National League for Democracy, an organisation now operating in exile, that is committed to establishing a federal union under a democratic system in Burma while representing broad Chin interests. However, it is written for a wide audience interested in issues of ethnicity, religion and historical change. It is mainly concerned with the Chin,

a hill peoples in western Burma, and their historical transformation from a loose collection of autonomous chiefdoms into a more clearly defined ethnic cum political group. Such a transformation is intimately related to the impact of the British annexation and administration of the Chin Hills and the advent of Christianity in the area in the form of the American Baptist Mission, which culminated in the slow but steady conversion of the vast majority of Chin to Christianity.

The book is arranged in three parts. The first part deals with traditional religion and political structure. It presents us with a succinct account of the close correspondence between communities of worship focused on sacrificing to place-bound guardian spirits, and political units whose boundaries rarely extended beyond the level of the village. The account adopts a functionalist approach, which means that it also shares its pitfalls. Pre-colonial, pre-Christian traditions are represented as timeless and unchanging while the groups involved are portrayed to exist in total isolation from each other, forming bounded, self-regulated wholes. Such a picture is significantly at odds with the first chapter of the book which pays due attention to intense demographic movements that have shaped the ethnic landscape of the area and attests to contact and interaction not only amongst diverse groups of Chin, but also between Chin and other ethnicities.

The second part opens with the history of the British annexation of the Chin Hills in 1896 and the administrative structures the British put in place. It also charts the fortunes of the American Baptist Mission, its establishment and expansion, educational and social welfare work, as well as, the slow success in converting locals. The book relies heavily on archival sources and as a result, in this and the following part, the ‘Chin point of view’ recedes into the background. With the exception of some stories involving conversion, which are, however, narrated from the missionaries’ perspective, we come to know very little about how different persons that belong to this ethnic category construed both the British and the missionaries and their relationships with them. The situation is rectified, to a certain extent in Chapter 7 as it deals with the Anglo-Chin War (1917-19) and the revolt certain Chin groups staged after refusing to join in the empire’s World War I effort.

Part three deals with the impacts of the Burma Act and India Act of 1935 that divided the Chin into two separate countries (Burma, and India) and the politics both at the international and national level that led to the establishment of the Union of Burma as an independent state in 1948. With regards to these issues, the author claims that ‘the Chin were manipulated by both the British and the Burman and ended up without a separate nation-state’ (p. 213). The remainder of the third part focuses on the continued successes of the American Baptist Mission and, at times, paints a rather dramatic and simplistic picture of what conversion to Christianity entailed, mainly because of the uncritical adoption of accounts originating in diaries and reports written by missionaries. However, the author is more successful in emphasising the ways that Christianity both transformed and was transformed by traditional Chin ritual practices and in particular, the manner in which a common ecclesiastical structure gave rise to rituals that became focal points for the articulation of a pan-Chin identity that transcended previous identities based on kinship and residence. 

The most important criticism to be made of this book refers to the inconsistency between the ‘primordialist’ position the author adopts in the introduction and the historical evidence presented. Theoretically, the author argues for an approach to ethnicity that follows Anthony Smith’s writings. He thus, construes the Chin as having existed throughout history with fixed membership and boundaries. In other words, he takes Chin ethnic unity as given and inquires into the ways that an awareness of it was developed through conversion and participation to Christian rituals. This is, however, at odds with a more ‘constructivist’ or ‘inventionist’ interpretation that the data presented could afford us. I feel that one could readily construe the Chin as having emerged as an ethnic group only in the context of colonial policies of ethnonym use, demarcation of administrative territories and possibly also of regulation of control over resources, as well as, missionary activities that map fields of exclusive operation, and most importantly, relations with the Chin’s significant Other, the Burmese, an aspect the book does not dwell upon adequately. Such a view though, rarely lends itself to legitimating any kind of politics of national emancipation.

GERHARD VAN DEN TOP. The Social Dynamics of Deforestation in the Philippines: Actions, Options and Motivations. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003. 389 pp. ISBN 87-91114-14-4

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by VT King, University of Hull

Gerhard van den Top had the good fortune to spend several years in the Philippines as the co-ordinator of the Cagayan Valley Programme on Environment and Development. The programme was a joint venture between Leiden University and Isabela State University and ran from December 1989 to January 1995.    

Van den Top’s long contact with the Cagayan Valley region in northern Luzon, and particularly the northern Sierra Madre, where a substantial part of the country’s remaining old-growth forests can be found, yielded a wealth of empirical material on human-environment interactions. The book is based on the author’s doctoral thesis, which was completed in 1998, provides a thoroughly absorbing yet depressing account of the unsustainable exploitation of forest resources. Specifically, van de Top describes and analyses the context and reasons for ‘the Philippines’ massive loss of forest stock and cover during the logging boom from the 1950s to the 1990s (p. xiii). Over half of the country’s forest cover, which comprised almost 15 million hectares of ‘well stocked dipterocarp forest’ in 1950, had been lost by 2000. The tragedy which unfolded in the space of some 40 years was that the Philippines as ‘the first major log-producing country in Asia went full circle from being a major timber exporter to reaching the point of near depletion in the late 1980s’ (p. 65).  Van den Top explores meticulously the underlying processes which have undermined any attempts to manage the forest resources of the Sierra Madre in a sustainable manner.  The weight of historical and ethnographic detail is lightened by the insertion of the author’s personal observations and experiences into the narrative at various strategic points. It serves to bring alive what is a relatively closely argued, dense and technical analysis of forest exploitation in the Philippines. There is also a skilful and impressive use of maps which plot changes in forest cover from the 1950s.

Van den Top eschews theory, though he refers to his use of the ‘problem in context’ approach to environmental science.  He focuses on the interactions between the key actors in large-scale corporate logging, forest migrants, indigenous forest peoples, various categories of middlemen, contractors and entrepreneurs, politicians and government personnel to demonstrate how these relationships have conspired to degrade and remove the remaining forests. He confirms the inadequacy of the broad categories ‘people’ and ‘the state’ in understanding dynamic social processes involved in resource use and exploitation. He also builds admirably on the authoritative work of David Kummer on post-war deforestation in the Philippines.

In the Philippines there has been  a process at work by which mechanised logging, which  served to open up old-growth forests,  is then replaced by local, mostly small-scale clearing (referred to by van den Top as carabao  logging), and ultimately the conversion of forests into permanently cultivated land. However, the Philippines reached the critical stage of environmental unsustainability well before other countries in the region. A similar story can be told from research in Malaysia and Indonesia on logging and deforestation, and these countries are rapidly reaching the stage which the Philippines reached in the 1980s. The mainland states of Myanmar, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam are the next in line.

Van den Top attempts to strike a balanced view of the contributions of the main actors in the exploitation of the forests and argues that the destruction of the country’s resources is the result of ‘a combination of local social dynamics and national policies’. Although van den Top does not ally himself with any particular theoretical or ideological position in development studies, those of an anti-developmentalist, underdevelopment and dependency persuasion would have considerable ammunition to argue for the rapaciousness of global capitalism, the distorting effects of Western colonialism, the unevenness of capitalist development and the lack of regard by  policy-makers of  local resource use practices, values and perspectives. Van den Top seems to draw back from any outright condemnation, and searches for more subtle interpretations of actor-based motives and actions.

Yet clearly the Philippines was increasingly locked into a global economic system dominated very directly by the United States from the beginning of the 20th century. Van den Top traces the historical development of corporate, commercial logging and forest management under the Americans and the founding of the Bureau of Forestry and the College of Forestry at the University of the Philippines, which laid the ‘scientific’ foundations for large-scale mechanised logging after the Pacific War. The perspectives of forest management and exploitation (the creation of a ‘forestry tradition’) disseminated during the colonial period continued to dominate the approach to the use of the forests after independence. The recent post-Marcos introduction of more participatory, democratic, community forms of local forest management seems to have come too late to achieve conservation and sustainability objectives, though van den Top strikes a cautionary note in his concluding chapter. He says, that at the end of the 1990s ‘[f]or the first time in the history of the Philippines, forest migrants and indigenous forest communities now have an opportunity to reverse the trends of the past’ (p. 348). I am rather more pessimistic.

This is an excellent book, marvellously detailed and closely argued, supported with a wealth of evidence. It demonstrates in all its complexities what happens when natural resource exploitation is driven by short-term, profit-obsessed motives rather than by policies and practices which address the longer term public interest. The forces of modernisation seem to be inexorable, and all the arguments about biodiversity, ecological balance and sustainability, and the importance of rainforests as regulators of the global climate have had very little impact. Van den Top’s study is a worthy addition to the NIAS Man and Nature in Asia series.

ANDREW HARDY. Red Hills: Migrants and the State in the Highlands of Vietnam. xxiv & 359 pp. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003. ISBN 0-7007-1677-7 hb £50.

Email:  [email protected]

Reviewed by Jonathan Rigg, University of Durham

There is no doubting the scholarship – or the sheer effort – reflected in this book. Andrew Hardy has coupled a thorough dissection of the Vietnamese, French and English language written sources with in-depth ethnographic work. Long days in the archives in Vietnam and France are enlightened by interviews with more than 200 informants. Abundant footnotes are complemented by a profusion of endnotes. More than 25 pages of references nestle next to a biographical survey. A long statistical essay is book-ended with the index. In all, there are 77 pages from the end of the final chapter to the final end of the book. In those terms alone, this is a volume with attitude. But, as I explain below, it is far from being an intimidating book. The narrative style is approachable and Hardy also manages to engage the reader through the way that he has chosen to tell his story.

The essence of Hardy’s efforts is best encapsulated in his own words:

This book is a political economy of internal migration in twentieth-century Vietnam. It describes the resettlement of the Viet people from the Red River Delta to highland areas, a movement which transformed Vietnam’s demographic and political map (p. xi).

In constructing his argument, Hardy deftly shifts from the wider historical debates over Vietnam’s migration and settlement policies to the minutiae of everyday life. We are informed of every twist and turn, every captured conversation, every passing thought as migrants tell of their struggles to carve a living from the forest. Ideological fervour battles against the threat of malaria. French colonial policies are mired in the incomprehension and intransigence of peasant outlooks. Against such details are wider reflections on the intentions and actions of the French colonial government, the policies that informed migration and settlement following the division of the country in 1954, and finally the ‘free’ migration that has characterised the doi moi era from the mid-1980s. In addition to recounting the chequered personal migration experiences of some 200 individuals, Hardy describes his own intellectual journey from a Masters degree at the University of Paris to his PhD at the ANU in Canberra. In this book Hardy manages to combine the very best of French and Australian scholarly traditions.

This is far from being a dry book filled with faceless demographic data. Hardy injects a shot of humanity into the cauldron of explanation. There is a real sense that the reader is following migrants as individuals, each with their own personal baggage of hopes and expectations, difficulties and challenges. Finally the book benefits from the way in which Hardy puts a metaphorical arm around the shoulder of the reader and leads him or her through the author’s own intellectual journey. All these things are good – indeed, excellent. In many respects this book is a model of its kind and one to which scholars should aspire.

But, and in the spirit of constructive criticism, in one respect the book could, I felt, have gone rather further. Namely, Hardy might have reflected on the wider literature, both empirical and conceptual. In this way, he would have brought his work and reflections to a wider audience. Instead the discussion, after opening with a modest attempt to view Vietnam’s experience in wider context, remains resolutely Vietnamese in its focus with Hardy barely looking up from the field, forests and villages of the country. (Perhaps this also reflects the scholarly traditions of the places where he has worked?) Debates and discussions from other countries get short shrift. There is little attempt to link the work here with broader discussions of migration and mobility, whether in terms of methodologies, policy debates, or more conceptual reflections. Admittedly, here and there Hardy casts side-ways glances at these questions and challenges but never in the detail necessary for his work to inform, and to be informed by, debates elsewhere. This is a shame for two reasons. Firstly, because it limits the degree to which his book will be read by scholars interested in parallel debates in other parts of the world. And secondly, because he has perhaps missed a trick in challenging accepted wisdoms and contributing to such wider debates.

That caveat aside, I am sure this book will become an essential source for generations of scholars wishing to understand migration, demography and resettlement in Vietnam.

LEO SURYADINATA, EVI NURVIDYA ARIFIN & ARIS ANANTA. Indonesia’s Population: Ethnicity and Religion in a Changing Political Landscape. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2003. 197 pp. ISBN 981-230-218-2 hb US$29.90; 981-230-212-3 pb US$19.90 plus p&p.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Susan Giblin, University of Leeds

Leo Suryadinata, who has published widely on Indonesian politics, has teamed up with social statistician, Evi Nurvidya Arifin and population economist, Aris Ananta to provide this analysis of the 31 volumes of the Indonesian population census of 2000 published by Indonesia’s Central Board of Statistics. The book grew out of a seminar held at the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in September 2002, entitled, ‘Ethnic and Religious Composition of Indonesia in the 21st Century: Findings from the Recently Published 2000 Population Census Data’. As well as providing the most up-to-date statistical information about Indonesian society, the population census of 2000 is particularly important because it is the first census since 1930 to include data on ethnic background. This book provides lots of valuable statistical information and is a very useful first study of the 2000 census. The book also raises many questions and by setting out recent statistical information it will provide guidance for researchers on potential areas of study.

The statistical material is presented in a very clear and organised manner. The book begins with a comparison of ethnic group composition between the 2000 and the 1930 censuses. The percentage population of 101 ethnic groups ‘recovered’ from the 2000 census material are presented. There are also tables providing information about the ethnic composition of each of the 30 provinces. Chapter Two provides information on the size, growth and composition, by age, sex and geography, of the 11 largest ethnic groups in Indonesia — Javanese, Sundanese, Malay, Madurese, Batak, Minangkabau, Betawi, Buginese, Bantenese, Banjarese and Balinese. It is a particular point of interest that, based on their analysis, the authors place the Malay as the third largest ethnic group  on  the  archipelago, whereas, the data

published by the Central Board of Statistics place the Madurese as the third largest group. There are also chapters which provide statistical information on the five main religions — Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, Buddhism and Confucianism, and which profile 12 provinces selected on the basis of what the authors consider to be their ethnic and political significance — Jakarta, Maluku and North Maluku, Riau and Riau Archipelago, Nanggroe Aceh Darussalam, Papua, Central Java, West Java, Bali, Central Sulawesi and West Kalimantan.

The authors look in detail at the data relating to Chinese Indonesians. One of the significant features of the 2000 census is that the percentage of ethnic Chinese, at 1.5 percent of the population, is much lower than previously thought. In fact, this is a lower percentage than declared themselves to be Chinese in the 1930 census. A number of possible reasons are promulgated by the authors to explain the low numbers of people identifying themselves as Chinese Indonesian. One possibility is that some ethnic Chinese do not identify themselves as such any longer and instead affiliate themselves with other Indonesian ethnic groups. This leads to a situation where people identified as Chinese Indonesian by others may not identify themselves in that way. Other possible explanations for the low percentage of ethnic Chinese include low fertility and a possible exodus of ethnic Chinese from Indonesia due to violence against them, although the authors caution against the latter explanation. This gap between the statistical information and the reasons behind it leads Leo Suryadinata to suggest   that   more   qualitative   analysis   is

necessary to learn about how the ethnic Chinese identify themselves in post-Suharto Indonesia.

One of the drawbacks of the book is that the 31 volumes published by Indonesia’s Central Board of Statistics only contain data about the eight largest ethnic groups in each province. This ensures that there may be small ethnic groups not mentioned at all in the published data. It also leads to estimations of population numbers.

The main strength of the book is its wealth of statistical information. However, this book has the hallmarks of a ‘work-in-progress’. Since the authors spend so much of their time setting out the statistical information, the analysis of the material can be scant in places. There are, however, lots of pointers given for areas of further research and projects which would draw out the findings of the authors. One of the main hypotheses introduced by Leo Suryadinata only in the final chapter suggests that there is a high degree of ‘ethnic loyalty’ and that ‘Indonesian political parties are influenced by ethnicity’. He concedes that more research is needed (indeed, this is a very short chapter) and more independent variables, other than ethnic affiliation, are needed. However, he suggests that ‘to ignore the ethnic factor may lead us to misunderstand Indonesian politics’. During an election year in Indonesia this may be a fruitful area for further research.

STEFAN EKLÖF. Review of Power and Political Culture in Suharto's Indonesia: The Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI) and Decline of the New Order (1986-98). Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003. 340 pp. ISBN 87-91114-18-7 hb £50, €80.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Janet Cochrane, Leeds Metropolitan University

The fall of General Suharto from the presidency of Indonesia in 1998 was preceded (and followed) by economic and political turmoil. In this book, Stefan Eklöf views the period up to May 1998 from the standpoint of the Indonesian Democratic Party (PDI). He examines the party’s existence and role from its roots, covering its origins and earliest years in the first quarter of the book. The remainder is devoted to a detailed study of how the PDI was shaped by the much stronger political forces amidst which it managed to survive and how, later, it contributed to the fall of the New Order government. In his blow-by-blow account (sometimes literally) of the struggles of the PDI to create and maintain an identity in the face of government interference, Eklöf presents a remarkable picture of the day-to-day machinations of Indonesian politics. As he says, ‘there were few rewards in the system for politicians who tried to advocate independent and critical policies’, and as a result many politicians ‘appeared to be lacking in skills and knowledge as well as in ethical principles and personal integrity’ (p. 298). The development of the PDI is, in part, the story of how politicians with greater principles and integrity finally triumphed over the excessively corrupt Suharto regime. An underlying theme of his examination is that the centralisation of power under Suharto, which is readily accepted by most commentators, gives no framework for understanding the rapid unravelling of the regime in 1998.

The PDI was founded in 1973 from a forced merger of nationalist and Christian parties brought about by the government as part of its attempt to ‘simplify’ politics. In the two decades before this, Indonesia experienced the inability of Sukarno to work with the nascent parliamentary democracy which arose in the 1950s, the economic chaos and political polarisation of the early 1960s, the massacre of actual and supposed Communists in 1965-66, the accession to power of Suharto in 1967, and the establishment of the New Order government. These first 25 years of the Republic of Indonesia are usefully covered in the book and set the context for the weakness and fragmentation of political activity over the next 25 years.

The disparate nature of the elements encompassed within the PDI and the consequent internal dissent resulted in the near disappearance of the party by 1986. The nominal existence of opposition parties was important to the government, however, as a way of conferring legitimacy on its actions, and from time to time it gave support to various elements within the PDI in order to ensure that it remained in existence, after a fashion. The only other formal opposition grouping permitted was the PPP (United Development Party), which was an amalgam of previously antagonistic Muslim streams. The two parties did at least offer a home to people who wished to show a degree of opposition to the government, but since they were not allowed to express any ideological differences or to criticise the government their operational space was extremely restricted. Eklöf demonstrates how, under this repression, the PDI members turned more often to squabbling amongst themselves than to constructive attempts to tackle the government. Even attempts to formulate some kind of political debate within the terms set by the government, such as that initiated by Kwik Kan Gie in the lead-up to the 1987 general election, were not supported by PDI leaders.

Eventually, however, as the government’s economic policies began to appear increasingly unsound and the presidential family became more closely identified with the high levels of graft and corruption which had tainted the New Order since its inception, the PDI began, at last, to seem like a more convincing vehicle for opposition. Although the party’s leadership remained dithering and compliant throughout the 1980s, its weakness and amorphous nature could be used to some extent by other forces critical of the government. For instance, in the lead-up to the 1993 presidential election the military drew closer to the PDI (and to the PPP) in order to persuade both parties to nominate their candidate, Try Sutrisno, as Vice-President in opposition to Suharto’s wish to have his protégé Habibie nominated. This move coincided with the growing profile of Megawati Sukarnoputri and with a revival of a more convincing intellectual element within the party, again led by Kwik Kan Gie: both, of course, went on to play key roles after 1998.

The discussion of Megawati’s position within the party and within Indonesian politics generally is particularly interesting, in the light of her accession to the presidency in 2001. Eklöf argues convincingly that she was by no means as weak and naïve as she was sometimes portrayed, but showed a strong degree of astuteness in creating a support base for herself amongst the military and other influential players while at the same time managing to retain - and project - a position of calm and good sense above the commotion of party infighting. Her identification with her father’s famous name and image, of course, did nothing to harm her position. The events of 1996-97, when Megawati headed a breakaway faction from the official PDI, are well described.

Although any book which deals with the minutiae of current affairs is bound to be overtaken by events from the minute it is sent to the publishers, Eklöf’s work makes an extremely valuable contribution to the understanding of Indonesian politics on several levels. In the first place, his exhaustive reading of press and party documents concerning the PDI has allowed him to give a detailed account of the internal manoeuvres of PDI members which exemplifies the ineffectual, unethical and self-serving nature of many New Order politicians. Secondly, he reveals the excessively paternalistic nature of the Suharto government and its inability to respond to changing domestic socio-cultural circumstances, as new generations grew up with no direct experience of the struggle for Indonesian independence or of the traumatic events of the mid-1960s. Thirdly, he documents the unpleasant ‘hoodlum’ element of Indonesian politics, whereby coercion and persuasion by bribery and veiled threats are supplemented by physical violence if the ‘gentler’ methods fail to bring about the desired results.

Finally, he brings out some general characteristics of Indonesian politics, in particular their murky, opaque and ambiguous nature, where meaning has to be inferred rather than directly understood, and the general tendency within Indonesian society to emphasise form rather than substance. In part, this manifests itself in an elaborate pretence of well-being, even though beneath the surface there may be disorder or completely different circumstances than are apparent. In the context of this book, elements which were intended to prove that a genuine political culture existed, such as the 1945 Constitution or the state philosophy of Pancasila, were wielded in an entirely superficial way as national icons which were invoked to reject any criticism or suggestion of reform.

In summary, then, this book maps a previously under-researched area of modern Indonesian politics and is certain to stand as the definitive history of the PDI under Suharto.

NATHAN PORATH.  Shamanic Therapy and the Maintenance of Worldly Boundaries among an Indigenous People of Riau (Sumatra).  Leiden: Research School CNWS, Leiden University, 2003. 258 pp. ISBN 90-5789-088-7 pb €29. Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by WD Wilder, Darlington

The people Porath calls Orang Sakai (or Sakai Asli) number between 5,000 and 7,000 (estimates vary) in the upper Mandau river region of southeast Sumatra. They are similar to the downriver Malays but distinguishable from them in not being Muslims and in subsisting not on rice but on cassava. Their shamanistic healing practices, as the subject-matter of this monograph, draw on a lively tradition of spirit-beliefs, soul-concepts, spells, lore, and collective rituals called dikei and kelonkap. The work of the shaman (kemantat, lit. bride, bridegroom, by extension lover, occasionally ajo, ruler, king) is to ‘recapture’ or ‘re-embody’ the lost, wandering soul (semanget) of a person (mem’awo semanget balek p. 100, see p. 67).  This is done by consulting the distant spirits (called, in formal ritual context, d’eo, deities, and in everyday form antu, spirits).

Shamans have a special affinity with spirits because shamans possess ilmu kebatinan or ‘inner knowledge’. To quote Porath’s not always graceful prose, ‘Shamans/medicine wo/men have exceptional batin’ (p. 77). They are able to get sight of spirits with their ‘inner eye’ (mato batin, p. 72). Using this inner consciousness the shaman ‘heals the patient’s experience of the [alien] spirit’s sensuality with a controlled and corresponding sensuality of spirit-otherness [alap lain] that emerges through his [or her] manipulation of images, metaphors and kinetic-energy [sic]’ (p. 94).  Porath thus agrees by and large with Lévi-Strauss’s ‘effectiveness of symbols’ argument (p. 227-28; see also pp. 128-29 and Chapter 5, pp. 84-98).

There is moreover a symbolic potential in the shaman’s work which ramifies beyond the directly curative, and indeed the shaman’s analogic construction of power and cosmos is more fully discussed by Porath than healing in the strict psychomedical sense. The shamanic performances are community activities and carry elaborate messages for the community. In a successful dikei session the patient’s soul returns to his or her body, but the various other participants are, with the help of the shaman, also changed for the better: they are elevated to another world, that of the imaginary Malay court (p. 124, passim). The Sakai community becomes for a moment ‘the cosmic kerajaan of the settlement of siblings’ in which the ‘shaman becomes the raja’ and the holder-together of the centred cosmos (p. 212). The shaman vicariously goes abroad to conduct treaties, forge alliances, make negotiations with the beyond, The Other (see pp. 13, 121). Through its rituals, therefore, the Sakai community poses as a power to be reckoned with. ‘The shamanic complex gave people of the [upstream Mandau] area a particular frame of self-reference of cosmic dimensions: a universal that Islam, until recently, could not fully challenge’ (p. 226).

There is in this book an enormous wealth of field data on the major traditional concepts and activities of Sakai shamans today, traditions which presumably have survived until now (at least until Porath’s fieldwork in 1997) because of the relative isolation of the upper Mandau river people from the ruling Malays and more lately the Indonesian state. But they also survive, as Porath rightly stresses, because of their own built-in creativity (pp. 228-29). Sakai traditions are ‘dynamically adaptive’ in responding to late 20th century global influences. Further to his credit Porath has included valuable data on the rise of Sakai ethnic awareness, for example in the founding of a Sakai heritage village by an enterprising batin (p. 219), as well as perils of development, such as loss of land rights. In all of this, Sakai shamans have a role.

I looked forward in this book, through the author’s careful (if slightly repetitious) working-out of Sakai ethnographical data, to an adventurous and absorbing journey with a shaman, and Nathan Porath certainly delivers an abundance of well-observed data to make it possible. But there is a problem, one which is, in my view, not just serious but fatal. Porath’s book is sound enough as a work of scholarship but, as packaged in this CNWS edition, is barely readable and only slightly more intelligible. It is riddled with hundreds upon hundreds of editorial mistakes, misprints and grammatical faults. Its pages are peppered with superfluous commas, hyphens and apostrophes. The bibliography is a complete shambles, with many citations missing and, where printed, seriously garbled. The index is inaccurate and inadequate. There is no glossary.

In short, this is a fine study which, as I see it, has been comprehensively sabotaged by its publisher. Only the excellent photographs can be commended unreservedly. I wrote to CNWS’s then Editor-in-Chief with these concerns and in his reply he confirms that the book was neither copy-edited nor proof-read. He points out that CNWS Publications is a ‘shoestring operation’ and acknowledges that this particular volume slipped through the PhD vetting process (Dutch theses are printed for examination) with much less than adequate checks on its preparation. Since a new edition seems unlikely, I hereby recommend to CNWS Publications that the present edition be withdrawn from sale. At the very most it could be offered free of charge with a strong reader’s health warning.

WD Wilder    ?

Darlington

LYN PARKER. From Subjects to Citizens: Balinese Villagers in the Indonesian Nation-state. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003. 297pp. ISBN 87-91114-04-7 hb £45.

Email:  [email protected]

Reviewed by Laura Noszlopy, University of Central England

These days one is rarely offered the opportunity to read a village-based ethnography. In Lyn Parker’s analysis of Brassika (a pseudonym), a village located in Klungkung regency in the east of Bali, is framed in relation to the discourses and interventions of the New Order regime (1965/6 – 1998). Parker sites her study within the village boundaries to track the historical, social and psychological transition of its populace from their status as foedal (feudal) subjects of the palace (puri) to citizens of the Indonesian nation-state. From the outset, she distinguishes between what she describes as ‘hard-nosed’ studies of wider Indonesian issues, which usually have a political or an economic focus, and the more typical ‘introverted cultural studies’ focusing on the exoticised arts and ritual of the island of Bali (p. 123). Parker is pretty successful in straddling these two extremes. Largely ‘hard-nosed’, by her own definition, the ethnography is also interspersed with sensitive and amusing anecdote and detail, which adds a richness, if not a ‘softness’, to the prose. Nonetheless, compared with many Balinese studies, there is certainly nothing romanticised or romanticising about this book, as demonstrated in the critical handling of the official ‘ritual’ of Saraswati Day (a celebration of the Hindu goddess of learning) at the local primary school as the meagre ‘high point of the Balinization of the school system’, which is an otherwise wholly Indonesianised institution (p. 257).

The contents of the book are very broad in scope, as might well be expected of a village ethnography. Structurally, it is divided into six sections, the first five of which each contain two chapters. Section I opens with a critical assessment of different approaches to the field. It also introduces the key point that all of the issues broached in the monograph are ultimately and intimately tied to two major forces; the personalities and machinations of power and status played out in Brassika’s puri (which was also the author’s home base in the field between 1980-81); and the pervasive nation-building ‘development’ projects of the New Order state.

In Section II, this introduction is followed by an analysis of the importance of land, its use, and ownership in establishing social status in the village. Also drawing on the theme of caste status, Chapter Four, ‘Memories of Massacre’, offers an account of local impacts of the 1965-66 violence, again in relation to the power plays surrounding long-standing land rights and reform issues and unresolved class/caste conflict. This is presented as the pivotal moment that informs the subject matter of the rest of the book; namely the transition of Balinese villagers from feudal subjects to New Order citizens. The chapters in Section III explicate the intricacies of this process through an analysis of the inter-reaction between local systems of patronage and nationally implemented projects.

Of particular interest are the in-depth analyses of gender roles and relations presented in Section IV, specifically in relation to reproductive health, the national policy of KB (Keluarga Berencana or Family Planning), and government interventions in child-birth and parenting. The discussion of the uneasy coexistence of traditional techniques of midwifery and the more ‘ordered’ birthing styles encouraged in government hospitals and clinics is especially informative in elucidating the ambivalence inherent in the drive towards ‘modernisation’ in every aspect of life. Section V, which deals with ‘schooling the child citizen’ is exceptionally useful as background for anthropologists working in Bali. The detailed accounts of rote-learning, parading and patriotic indoctrination are a partial explanation for some of the ways in which village adults typically deal with power and authority later in life. Indeed, one of Parker’s key, and most controversial, points is that while ideal Indonesian citizens were not just born but, rather, were made or moulded by the pervasive state apparatus, ‘village citizens did not, generally speaking, experience the state as a repressive or coercive force, nor did they see themselves as in opposition to it’ (p. 90).

One of the strongest features of the book is the way in which it addresses the ‘classic’ themes of Balinese anthropology (such as caste, power, hierarchy and ritual) and re-assesses and re-works them in relation to the idiosyncratic historical specificities of the field site. Moreover, it undermines relatively unchallenged assumptions that have been made about the repressive nature of the New Order regime. Judging by the damning conclusions of the majority of recent publications that deal with Suharto’s 32-year reign, one could be forgiven for assuming that to distinguish the ‘goodies’ from the ‘baddies’ would be a fairly clear-cut exercise. However, ‘the book argues against the assumed opposition of society and state and shows that we can only understand the longevity of the Suharto regime by understanding that villagers wanted to participate in the version of modernity offered by the Indonesian nation-state’ (p. 1). As such, this account is both critical and unbiased in the way it portrays the villagers of Brassika not only as subjects, but also as agents, of the state, and also of more localised, historically grounded centres of power. Focusing, as it does, on everyday, local, politics and the workings of both established and emerging social institutions, this book goes a long way towards breaking down the kinds of stereotypes and easy generalisations that can arise when the state is viewed as a monolithic power in opposition to society.

From subjects to citizens seems very tightly packed and, although the structure is coherent, I occasionally had the sense that there was more than a single book’s worth of material presented here. Nonetheless, it contains a wealth of invaluable information and citable case studies (including some very useful reports on the goings on in rural Indonesian classrooms), and it is written in a clear and uncluttered style. In noting the villagers’ enthusiastic patriotism and collusion with government development projects, often regardless of their perceived relevance or benefit, it also has the quality of challenging some of the less accurate and more liberally biased generalisations that have been made vis-à-vis local responses to the Indonesian state. In short, this is a welcome and very usable contribution to the anthropology of modern Bali, not Bali as a ‘paradise island’, but Bali as a province of Indonesia.

JÖRGEN HELLMAN, Performing the Nation: Cultural Politics in New Order Indonesia. Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2003. 198 pp. ISBN 0-7007-1483-9 hb £45.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Matthew Isaac Cohen, University of Glasgow

In retrospect, researching and studying the arts in the ‘culture, not politics’ milieu of New Order Indonesia was a mixed boon, at best. Indonesian proponents of the arts were extraordinarily invested in cultural activities, and were often passionate in discussions with foreign researchers about the aesthetic accomplishments, societal importance and philosophical significance of their artistic activities. Such enthusiasm is contagious. Students of the arts, attracted by relaxed visa regulations, the low cost of living and stable political conditions, were drawn to the artistic centres of Yogyakarta, Surakarta and Ubud. Gamelan clubs boomed in the US, Britain, Japan and countries around the world. We sat at the feet of master improvisers, storytellers, movers, draftsmen and tunesmiths. We marvelled at virtuosity, furiously scribbled notes, imitated actions to the best of our abilities. Political discussions were muted during Suharto’s dictatorship, and on-the-ground resistance to the military dictatorship was minimal, but this didn’t bother us overly much. The dominant anthropological paradigm for much of the New Order period was, after all, Geertz’s take on Milton Singer’s ‘cultural performance,’ in which performers told stories to themselves about themselves through their arts and spectacles, and all researchers had to do was watch, notate, describe and ‘interpret’ in terms of ‘webs of significance.’ An oft-espoused counter position was a form of postmodernism: meaning is what you make of it, and any interpretation is as valid as another. Down with grand narratives!

The question that arises for all of us now is what to make of our ‘data,’ such as it is, collected under conditions of censorship and informed by theories that in effect colluded with a don’t ask-don’t tell political regime. Jörgen Hellman’s judicious response is to inquire into the arts of quietus and the cultural politics of hegemony through a panoptic view of performance in West Java combining ethnography and cultural criticism.

Hellman’s principal research interest is in a student theatre known as Longser Antar Pulau (Longser Among the Islands), a tradition-based performance ensemble associated with Akademi Seni Tari Indonesia (Indonesian Academy for the Arts, or ASTI), a tertiary-level conservatory for the arts located in Bandung which is now known as Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia. His ethnographic account of this group is framed within a larger narrative of official cultural policy, referring to government documents, the 1995 celebrations of the 50th anniversary of Indonesia’s independence, and national cultural monuments such as the Taman Mini Indonesia Indah theme park and the National Monument in Jakarta.

Longser Antar Pulau, as Hellman ably demonstrates, is concordant with the basic New Order ideology that the traditional arts are in need of ‘development’ if they are to be appreciated by audiences today. The student theatre takes as its basis a marginal Sundanese folk drama known as Longser, represented in Bandung by a single, tokenistic performance group and remoulds it to fit contemporary sensibilities. The Sundanese language of the original is replaced by Indonesian, figures such as Michael Jackson, football players, Superman, factory workers, fashion models, gladiators, security guards, bikers, and Tarzan replace the agrarian referents of the ‘original’ Longser. In the end, little is left of the ‘original’ Longser, in fact, except the oncor, ‘a pole with candles or a kerosene lamp on the top,’ which provides illumination and defines the performance space.

The group was officially established in 1992, and had about 20 active members by 1995, all ASTI students, who came from predominately middle income families. (Hellman points out that they are not properly ‘middle class’ - Indonesia does not have a politically viable middle class.) It received the sanction of ASTI’s teachers and administrations, and active input from Saini KM, a well-known playwright and a New Order bureaucrat. This group performed semi-improvised political allegories and oblique comical critiques of authority oppression  -  the sort of student antics that were barely permissible to the New Order as a way for youth to vent steam. The group fostered a sense of intimacy among the group members, and allowed them to believe that they were being radical  -  particularly when they refused to follow the well-intended suggestions of Saini and other senior figures. Some of the members harboured a hope that Longer Antar Pulau would provide them with a means to media celebrity, until a private television station actually shot a couple of television episodes of deracinated versions of the group’s stage plays. Nobody was satisfied with the results, and the group was not invited back to do more. The group subsequently fell into a creative rut, reproducing versions of early plays, and losing what sense of political ‘edge’ it possessed with the fall of the New Order. A Google internet search reveals that it is still alive as of 2003  -  and now performing in Sundanese.

There is much in Hellman’s book to recommend it to readers interested in Southeast Asian performance, education, and cultural policy. Longser Antar Pulau might be a performance group with little recognition outside the ASTI campus. But the hopes and beliefs it fostered in its student members is an instructive lesson in the power of cultural hegemony.

SUSAN M MARTIN. The UP Saga. Copenhagen:  NIAS Press, 2003. 356 pp. ISBN 87-91114-33-0 hb £50; 87-91114-20-9 pb.

Email:  [email protected]

Reviewed by William King, London Metropolitan University

Without Dr Susan Martin this book would never have been written. It tells the fascinating story of United Plantations (UP), a European firm founded in early colonial Malaya and its success and industrial growth based on tropical agricultural foundations. It is expertly researched and is therefore a radically different history of the plantation industry. It offers the reader an authoritative and quite remarkable study. It traces the imperial economic history and development of oil palm production and its unique pages have been crafted and authenticated by the personal experiences of many recognised international experts in this field.   

Special thanks for the scholarship and authenticity of this work must rest with Tan Sri Dato’ Seri Borge Bek-Nielsen, who granted the author full access to the Company’s archives both in Malaysia and in Denmark.

It records the many difficulties of replacing virgin jungle with young plantations that were encountered by the Danish palm oil pioneers in their early search for land, which had to be flat, fertile and available for cultivation and their struggle in those early years to overcome the jungle, labour difficulties, tropical diseases and all manner of native pests from crocodiles to snakes and rats.

There is explanation of the circumstances surrounding the invasion of Malaya and how senior Danes fell out with the occupying Japanese and became prisoners of war. It traces the trials and experiences of post war reconstruction and replanting, and the rapid move into a more radical process of innovation in the production of palm oil.

It highlights the early experiments with the Tenera Palm, as well as the development of the ‘Unipress’ which illustrates the qualities of perfectionism with which Bek-Nielsen built on Axel Linquist’s legacy and underlines the point that the pursuit of higher quality at lower cost is never-ending. Through the introduction of this press, producers throughout Malaysia’s palm oil industry became able to exploit the cost cutting potential of the Tenera palm to the full.

Bek Nielsen believed strongly that that the quest for quality should not only be continuous but also co-operative.  He never lost sight of the fact that all of Malaysia’s palm oil needed to be of demonstrably high quality if it were to sell in bulk at high prices on the world market.

The lifting of the Indian import ban in 1977, taught the Malaysians one extremely valuable lesson: in marketing to Asia it was essential to maintain the ability to switch quickly between countries as some markets closed and new ones opened.

The book illustrates how this commodity built bridges between nations - how the Malaysian refiners hedged the risks implied in their dependence on volatile emerging markets by revitalising their trade with Western Europe and  how they achieved this through a further series of product and market developments and in particular from the mid-1980s the Malaysian refiners exploration of the options of oleochemical and speciality fats production. The spectacular success of Malaysia’s palm oil industry since 1970 is therefore, not least a story of pro-active product and market development.

Bek Nielsen and his colleagues at United Plantations have been at the centre of this remarkable story. The continued ability of United Plantations to make a positive contribution to the Malaysian development process, together with the ability of other European and Japanese firms to help build a palm-oil-based oleochemicals industry from the 1980s onwards, highlights Malaysia’s overall success in the field of export- led industrialisation.

Bek’s honours were recognised both in Malaysia and in Denmark.  In 1972 the Sultan of Perak awarded him the decoration Ahli Mahkota Perak that was followed in 1976 by the title of Dato.  HRH Queen Margrethe II of Denmark made him a Knight of Dannebrog the following year. Further royal recognition came in 1983, when the King of Malaysia awarded Bek the decoration Johan Setia Mahkota. In 1989 he became Y.B. Dato’ Seri B. Bek-Nielsen, and in 1996 he was awarded the highest honour open to a non-royal, the title of Tan Sri.   In 1990 he was raised to the rank of Knight of first grade of the Royal Danish Dannebrogordenen and in March 2002 Queen Margrethe awarded him the Commanders Cross of the same order. The citation for Bek’s Commander aptly sums up the twin foundations of this remarkable businessman.  Bek’s honours are a fitting reward, not only for his positive achievements but also for his generosity of spirit, his courage, his energy and loyalty and his magnificent contribution to a nation emerging from colonial rule.

Through her work on The UP Saga Susan Martin has produced a work of historic importance and great interest to all those interested in the development of the global palm oil industry.

William King   ?

London Metropolitan University

VIRGINIA HOOKER & NORANI OTHMAN (eds.). Malaysia: Islam, Society and Politics. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2003. 284 pp. ISBN 981-230-161-5 hb US$39.90; 981-230-156-9 pb US$24.90.

ARSKAL SALIM & AZYUMARDI AZRA (eds.). Shari’a and Politics in Modern Indonesia. Singapore: Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, 2003. 363 pp. ISBN 981-230-188-7 hb; US$39.90; 981-230-187-9 pb; US$29.90.

Email: [email protected]

Reviewed by Peter Riddell, Centre for Islamic Studies, London Bible College

Both these edited volumes mix contributions by Southeast Asian and Western scholars. Both mainly focus on issues internal to Malaysia and Indonesia respectively, rather than looking out to the wider Muslim world. And both works virtually ignore the other’s Southeast Asian context, as can be seen from a perusal of the respective indexes. However, this is not a major point of criticism; the vast detail of topics covered means that country-specific studies are necessary. Nevertheless, it is helpful to read these two works together in order to engage with the bigger Southeast Asian picture.

The study of Malaysia by Hooker and Othman is a festschrift in honour of Clive S Kessler, Professor of Sociology at the University of New South Wales. The essays are divided into three sections, focussing on Islam, Society and Politics. Each essay draws on aspects of Kessler’s published research, taking his insights as points of departure for new studies.

The volume edited by Azra and Salim addresses the increasing efforts by certain groups of Muslims to have Islamic Shari’a Law implemented by the Indonesian state, spanning the period from 1945 to the present day. This is a cause of tension within the Indonesian Muslim community, as well as between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Azra and Salim explain in their editors’ introduction that there are five dimensions to Shari’a Law, a legal system which sees itself as all-encompassing. Given the over-riding concern of both works with political Islam, these five dimensions provide us with a useful framework for engaging with the papers from the two volumes in an integrated fashion.

The first dimension of Shari’a Law pertains to matters of personal status, such as marriage, divorce, waqf or charitable endowments, and inheritance. Azyumardi Azra’s paper on the 1974 Marriage Law in Indonesia provides some crucial insights, not only in terms of the struggle to have the law promulgated, but also in terms of the evidence that it has accelerated social change in Indonesia. He explores various area of impact of the law: better family health, control of population growth, a considerable decrease in divorce and polygamy, and the rise in the average age of marriage.

Maila Stivens considers women's rights in Malaysia. She focuses on the activities of various women’s groups striving to shape women’s roles in the context of a rapidly changing society and emerging government policy. She gives special attention to Sisters in Islam, arguably the most dynamic women’s group challenging traditional views on women’s roles in Malaysia today.

The second dimension of Shari’a Law relates to economic regulation, in terms of banking and business practice. Robert Hefner focuses on the founding of Indonesia’s first Islamic Bank, the Bank Muamalat Indonesia (BMI). He traces the roots of Islamic renewal in Indonesia back to the 1970s, and points out that the change in New Order government attitude towards Islamic renewal which brought about the founding of BMI was due in part to the forces for renewal emphasising Islam more in the cultural than political arena.

The third dimension of Shari’a Law identified by Azra and Salim relates to religious practice. In addition to ritualistic duty, this also encompasses matters relating to certain prohibitions: restrictions on women’s clothing, alcohol, gambling and so forth.

Arskal Salim considers the institut-ionalisation of zakat in Indonesia, in the context of tensions over matters such as the Jakarta Charter. He shows that the New Order regime restricted itself to supervising zakat administration to prevent abuse, rather than proactively seeking to enforce and expand its administration. Hence the New Order approach did not lead to an identifiable increase in Islamic commitment.

William Roff addresses the question as to how non-Muslims can really understand the significance of the Hajj ritual. He considers various Western scholarly theories of ritual, allowing the sociology of ritual to intersect with the actual stages of the Hajj, He presents some important methodological principles to facilitate scholarly interaction between Muslims and non-Muslims in the study of Islam, saying that ‘what is important … is to listen carefully to what people say, while attending with equally close attention to the texts according to which they claim to act’ (p. 38).

The fourth dimension to Shari’a Law relates to crime and punishment, and discussion of this area generates much heat in the Malay-Indonesian region, as elsewhere in the Muslim world. MB Hooker examines the Kelantan Shari’a Criminal Code (II) 1993 in a most interesting paper. The Islamic Party of Malaysia (PAS) state government in Kelantan was prevented from implementing this Code by the Federal Government which has jurisdiction in criminal matters. Hooker challenges the Code, commenting that ‘… the Code … is seriously deficient and almost certainly unworkable … the contents are debatable given the lack of criteria; the formal drafting is poor; and the rationale is non-existent or weak. Sociological implications are not even considered’ (p. 96).

The final dimension to Shari’a Law relates to Islam as a guide for governance. Several papers can be considered under this heading. Nadirsyah Hosen considers the engagement of Fatwa and Politics in Indonesia. He shows how fatwas were issued addressing both non-religious issues of daily life and as a response to government policies on religious life. Some fatwas supported government policy and had a considerable effect, for example in matters to do with family planning. Some fatwas opposed government claims to be ultimate authority in decisions regarding Muslim attendance at Christmas celebrations and setting the date for the Idul Fitri fasting festivities.

In the introductory paper to the Indonesian volume by Arskal Salim and Azyumardi Azra, the authors consider the interrelation between State and Shari’a under the New Order. They point out that five laws were promulgated which contained strong Shari’a influences: marriage law, waqf/charitable foundation legislation, religious court law, a law facilitating Islamic banking, and family law regarding inheritance. This served a range of purposes for the state, from streamlining the law and eliminating inconsistencies across the Indonesian archipelago to increasing the legitimacy of the regime.

Ratno Lukito considers both Religious and Adat Courts in Indonesia, and Mark Cammack explores Indonesia’s 1989 Religious Judicature Act. Cammack points out that a key reason for promulgation of the Act was that three different jurisdictions had applied beforehand; the new law unified various judicial systems, though it only applied to Muslim citizens. He also points out that those aspects of private Islamic law that were covered by the 1989 Act still allowed Muslims to opt out in various ways if they so wished.

Further papers on various aspects of the State and Shari’a in Indonesia are contributed by Hooker, Nur Ahmad Fadhil Lubis and Ahmad Imam Mawardi, with both Hooker and Mawardi considering the rationale, content and impact of the Kompilasi Hukum Islam issued by Presidential Decree in 1991.

Kikue Hamayotsu considers the Malaysian context, starting with the post-colonial judicial system, and what she refers to as the ‘inferior’ status of the Shari’a courts. She focuses on Mahathir government efforts to reform the Shari’a courts in Malaysia, leading to the 1988 amendment to the Federal Constitution ‘to give more jurisdictional leverage to the Syariah court’ (p. 61). Ten years later witnessed the establishment of the Department of Shari’a Judiciary (Jabatan Kehakiman Syariah Malaysia) under the Office of the Prime Minister. Hamayotsu argues that the Shari’a reform reflected the political concerns of the ruling elite, especially to combat PAS.

Other papers in the two volumes address a range of factors. Anthony Milner conducts a diachronic study of the Malay monarchy, comparing the political culture in pre-colonial times with the present day. He concludes that the Malay monarchy presents itself as traditional but has in fact adapted itself to modern circumstances and contexts.

Howard Federspiel considers differing responses to Shari’a in Indonesia, comparing those of Government, non-Muslims and Islamists. He points out that the majority of Indonesians consider Indonesian culture to be a key element for positive consideration in discussions about the place of Shari’a. Federspiel’s paper includes a helpful comparative discussion about other Muslim countries: Turkey, Iran and Pakistan.

Two papers explore various angles on PAS. In what for me was the most interesting paper in both volumes, Farish Noor argues for the localisation of Islamist Discourse in the Tafsir of Nik Aziz Nik Mat, the spiritual leader of PAS, but at the same time points out how this discourse assumes international dimensions. In recognition of the originality of this particular religious scholar’s approach, Noor comments that ‘few contemporary scholars have been concerned with examining the constant process of adaptation and localisation, which continues still, perpetuated by later generations of ulama in the present age’ (p. 197)

Amrita Malhi undertakes a valuable analysis of the conflict between PAS and the ruling National Front coalition in the 1990s. Joel S Kahn considers Malaysian responses to modernity, with particular reference to the acting and musical scene in Malaysia. Shamsul AB addresses the changing understanding of what it means to be Malay, pointing out the significant role played by colonial   figures   in   this  process,  and  how

some Malays have been undertaking a re-definition of Malay identity.

Azra and Salim admit to a weakness in their volume from the outset, namely that some of the chapters do not reflect recent developments.    Indeed,    most    of    the contributions represent reprints of journal articles or book chapters published in the 1990s. Nevertheless, the bringing together of these writings from disparate sources is an invaluable contribution in itself, and will stimulate further reflection from the scholarly community which will offset the weakness identified by the editors. The assumption of Ahmad Badawi as Prime Minister in Malaysia and the dramatic 2004 election results mean that the Hooker and Othman volume is similarly marginally off the pace. But this is the nature of scholarship into the Islamic scene in Southeast Asia, which is changing so rapidly that that any published volume will be somewhat dated before it reaches the bookshops.

These two works provide evidence of the continuing excellent quality of scholarly research focusing on various manifestations of political Islam in the Southeast Asian region.