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Reviews (full reviews below)
DAMIEN KINGSBURY. Power Politics and the Indonesian Military. Review by Michael Hitchcock
JEAN GELMAN TAYLOR. Indonesia: Histories and People. Review by Peter Riddell
CYNTHIA CHOU. Indonesian Sea Nomads: money, magic, and fear of the Orang Laut. Review by WD Wilder
CRISTINA EGHENTER, BERNARD SELLATO and G SIMON DEVUNG (eds.). Social Science Research and Conservation Management in the Interior of Borneo. Unravelling Past and Present Interactions of People and Forests. Review by Terry King
LAKE’ BALING. The Old Kayan Religion and the Bungan Religious Reform. Review by Eva Maria Kershaw
SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE. Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941. Review by John Sidel
JOHN OKELL. Burmese by Ear or Essential Myanmar Review by Robert H. Taylor
Full Reviews
DAMIEN KINGSBURY. Power Politics and the Indonesian Military. London: Routledge Curzon, 2003. 288 pp. ISBN 0415-29729X (hb £65). Email: [email protected] Review by Michael Hitchcock, London Metropolitan University
So pervasive are the armed forces in Indonesia that some background knowledge on them is a prerequisite for almost anybody interested in contemporary Indonesia. Specialist publications on security with their long lists of unfamiliar equipment and baffling acronyms are often hard going for the non-specialist like this reviewer, but this book, which is accessible, deserves a wide audience. Kingsbury’s volume is especially helpful since it can either be read as a book or dipped into via its helpful index and glossary as a kind of encyclopaedia. The chapters are also organised clearly and since they are fairly well contained they can be read as individual essays. This reviewer found the first and fifth chapters particularly informative, not least because they tell you how the Indonesian military became problematic and why they are so closely associated with business.
Within the first chapter there is a succinct but engrossing account of the philosophical origins of the armed forces which focuses on the profound influence of the Japanese during the occupation of the Second World War. For example, in Japan the government was divided into two spheres, one military the other civil, and this lives on in the Indonesian armed forces as dwifungsi. Likewise while civilians were effectively barred from control of the Japanese military, the armed forces were able to extend their influence into the civil arena. Kingsbury argues that the defence minister in Indonesia was essentially subservient to the armed forces commander-in-chief, and that the Indonesian armed forces were only directly answerable to the president, and sometimes only nominally so. In this position the armed forces were able to influence foreign policy, particularly in relation to confrontation with Malaysia, which was not in accordance with the president’s wishes. The armed forces also initiated the intervention in East Timor, which was initially against the president’s wishes, and were implicated in heightening tensions with neighbours, notably Australia in 1986. In the domestic sphere their influence has been even more profound, including involvement in industrial disputes, inter-communal conflict, the suppression of separatism and the media, and in occupying a range of ministerial and provincial government positions. Under Indonesia's New Order government it became acceptable for military officials to hold senior posts in government.
In Chapter Five the author argues that the armed forces involvement in business can be traced back to their origins. First as a self-sufficient guerrilla army, and second to the early years of the establishment of the Republic of Indonesia when funding for military spending was hampered by the general lack of discretionary budgetary power. Business activities in these formative years included not only involvement in illegal activities such as smuggling, but in the development of commercial links with Chinese-Indonesian businessmen, which later became a dominant feature of the Indonesian economy under Suharto’s New Order government. Plans to reduce and professionalise the armed forces in the early 1950s went adrift when many army units found that they could stave off these pressures from the central budget by providing for themselves. So ingrained did these practices become that self-sufficiency was often seen as an accepted part of a local commander's responsibility. Some commanders, notably the then Colonel Suharto, appeared to have embraced these responsibilities with a certain enthusiasm. In 1957 the armed forces received a big boost to their commercial activities when Dutch-owned businesses where nationalised and came directly or indirectly under military control.
The author characterises the involvement of the military in business as one of informal financial success. This is partly due to the army’s higher organisational and logistical skills as compared with non-military businesses, especially during the early years. Under the New Order the military’s business interests accelerated, usually in association with private companies and often as a consequence of being given special business privileges or access. These special concessions enabled the military to avoid close scrutiny of its cash flows and its involvement in unaccountable development projects and questionable security campaigns. Despite such cosy arrangements not all branches of the military, notably the famed special forces Kopassus, showed equal acumen for commerce and Kingsbury provides examples of some spectacular businesses failures when banks had to recall loans from over-stretched retail and wholesale projects as the Asian Crisis worsened.
The book also contains a list, excluding illegal commercial activities in which the military had interests, of the companies in which the armed forces were involved up to 1998. Some of these companies have gone into liquidation or ceased trading since the onset of the crisis, but it does provide a useful indicator of the extent of the military’s involvement in the national economy. Clearly the gap between the military’s spending and its official budget is at the heart of the military’s links with official and unofficial business, but if these linkages were severed in the interests of accountability and efficiency, then the armed forces would not survive in anything like their current form. Kingsbury advocates reducing the military to a professional core under civilian control, and allowing its security functions to be undertaken by a re-trained national police force, but acknowledges that prizing the military away from their lucrative commercial connections is no easy task. The armed forces may argue that they must engage in business in order to survive and thereby defend the Indonesian nation, but Kingsbury maintains that their role in business is more of a problem for the state than of benefit to it. Not only is this system economically inefficient, but it is at the heart of much of Indonesia’s collusion and nepotism. How the reformers in Indonesia’s government will resolve - if they ever will - this seemingly intractable problem remains to be seen.
The book is not solely about business and there are equally interesting chapters on the history of the Indonesian military, its functional structure, prospects for reform and its relations with contemporary politicians. It has been thoroughly researched and professionally written, and it would be churlish to draw attention to the occasional oversight in presentation because they are so few. Security study specialists will doubtless find issues of fact and interpretation to query and criticise, but looked at from the perspective of Southeast Asian studies generally this book has a great deal to commend it.
JEAN GELMAN TAYLOR. Indonesia: Histories and People. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003. 420 pp. ISBN 0-300-09709-3 (hb; £27.50). Email: [email protected] Review by Peter Riddell, Centre for Islamic Studies, London Bible College
Jean Taylor sets out not only to produce a history of Indonesia over several millennia, but also to make visible the human face of Indonesians. ‘My aim in this book is to place Indonesians at the center of their own story. But there is no single story or history, and the principals become Indonesians only in the telling of Indonesian histories.’
Taylor’s sweep of history follows a largely orthodox periodisation. She begins with a survey of the Hindu-Buddhist period, the process of Indianisation, the important role of China, and early empires. She does not merely relate history, but considers the tools of the trade, as it were, by discussing written evidence for early history, drawing on diverse inscriptions in various temples as well as earliest attestable writing materials, such as lontar and tree bark.
From chapter three onwards diverse themes related to Islam appear and serve as a web providing coherence across the volume. Taylor initially provides a useful set of capsules addressing fundamental Islamic topics: Koran, sharia, ulama, mosque, sufism, pilgrimage, jihad. She covers the main episodes in the arrival and establishment of Islam at different points of the archipelago, and strikes a good balance between presenting basic essentials of Islamic belief and practice on the one hand, and application of that to various Indonesian Islamic contexts.
From this point on the chapter divisions broadly co-relate with particular centuries. Chapter four is concerned largely with 14th century Indonesia. Taylor takes a comparative look at the Islamic kingdom of Pasai in North Sumatra and the Hindu-Buddhist kingdom of Majapahit in Java. This period represented the cross-over point between the rising faith of Islam and the established faith which was on the way out.
Taylor then considers the arrival of the first European power, the Portuguese, and their interaction, and competition, with still emerging Islamic communities. Chapter six focuses on the 17th century and its key players: the newly arrived Dutch presence via the VOC, the Javanese Islamic kingdom of Mataram, and the Bugis Kingdom in Sulawesi.
In chapters seven to ten, the European presence looms large. But here as elsewhere in the volume, Taylor is not merely concerned to present facts and figures, but strives to reflect and assess the impact of the European presence on Indonesians. Some of the sense of increasing disorientation and disempowerment felt by Indonesians is captured in the discussion of the expansion of VOC power and the gradual demise of local Sultanates such as Mataram and the Buginese kingdom in Sulawesi.
The takeover of vast regions of Indonesia by the Dutch government from the VOC was accompanied by border making, often cutting across natural linkages. Taylor captures the rising sense of resentment in her treatment of local resistance movements: the Java War, the Paderi movement and the Aceh War among others.
Chapters ten and eleven engage with the gradual change in the power equation between Indonesians and their colonial masters. The emergence of nationalist sentiment is tracked, as is the Japanese occupation and its considerable impact on Indonesian confidence vis-à-vis the Europeans. Taylor then discusses the fall of Japan and the return of Dutch and allied forces, with the ensuing successful struggle for independence
The final chapter addresses Indonesia’s first 50 years as a newly independent state. Taylor surveys the rule of the first two presidents, the experiment in parliamentary democracy, replaced in turn by Sukarno’s guided democracy and Suharto’s New Order regime. Key moments come into focus, such as the rise and fall of the Indonesian Communist Party, resistance in Aceh, and East Timor’s incorporation and eventual independence.
This volume is equipped with just the right number of illustrations and maps to assist the reader, though the use of black and white illustrations somewhat detracts from their impact.
The 12 chapters are interspersed by 94 individual capsules, averaging one page in length, which address relevant micro themes, individuals, works of art and so forth. This works well, allowing the author to unpack in more detail specific ideas which arise in the main discussion, but to set these themes apart so they don’t disrupt the main discussion.
The writing style is accessible throughout; the author is clearly aiming for a broader audience than just scholars and university departments, and she is successful in this regard. One device to achieve this is in the consolidated chapter by chapter bibliography, which is the only referencing system used. No in-text references or footnotes appear to identify sources along the way. While this helps the stylistic flow, it hinders a check of the accuracy of source use as well as a tracking of particular source preferences.
This volume represents an important and welcome contribution to the study of Indonesian history. The author has skilfully engaged with a field of some considerable breadth, and in the process largely achieved her goal of showing the human face of the diverse communities which contributed to Indonesian histories down the ages.
CYNTHIA CHOU. Indonesian Sea Nomads: money, magic, and fear of the Orang Laut. London: RoutledgeCurzon/IIAS Asian Studies Series, 2003. 224 pp. ISBN 0-415-29767-2 (hb £55.00). Email: [email protected]; Review by WD Wilder, Darlington
In her finely-crafted, concise account Cynthia Chou undertakes to locate the Orang Laut way of life in what was until quite recently an economic backwater in the heart of maritime Southeast Asia, the Riau Archipelago. Her monograph is not a synoptic view of ongoing development in that region (for that see Chou’s edited collection in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 1997), but a perspective on the ethnicity of its most exotic and hitherto almost unknown minority people. It is a study of ‘the Orang Laut’s identity as engendered through the exchange of things’ (p. 142), and of how, increasingly today, one exchange-medium, money, ‘is used as a vehicle to distance certain types of things from their owners where they circulate out of Orang Laut communities into non-Orang Laut communities’ (p. 5).
Orang Laut practise mainly gift and barter among themselves. Where cash is used it is subordinated to barter. In their trading relations with Malays and Chinese however, Orang Laut regularly insert cash transactions. Gifts do not flow between Malays and Orang Laut for fear of supernatural harm. Gifts and barter sometimes occur between Chinese and Orang Laut, because Chinese are not seen as enemies. In actuality, exchanges are often mixed, and often disguised, and it is surely an outstanding merit of Chou’s account that this many-layered and elusive fabric of exchanges is elucidated as well as it is.
In many ways, the book is a fine first-hand analysis of a classic Southeast Asian plural society, with several distinct ethnic groups living in a quasi-colonial situation and relating to each other solely through the market place. Thus the humans in the picture belong to ‘a system of social classification’ (p. 4) and are engaged in ‘acts of communicating and negotiating group identities and boundaries’ (p. 142). The system is most explicitly validated by traditional Riau Malays as the ruler-centred ‘Malay World’ or Alam Melayu. All the same, as the wording just quoted shows, the analysis is not written according to the ‘plural society’ rubric, but in a contemporary anthropological discourse-of cultural narratives, symbolisms of power, boundaries, conflicts, and global economic striving.
Its most original part (as is explained in Chapters 1, 4 and 5) is the concept of inalienable possessions, a theoretical input inspired by Annette Weiner’s work on ‘keeping-while-giving’. Inalienable possessions are family treasures, or heirlooms. They have ‘inherent supernatural powers’ and foremost among them is magical knowledge or ilmu. The malign threat of ilmu as a power to ‘poison’ (or alternatively to ‘bewitch’) seems to be the substance of the ‘fear of the Orang Laut’ among Riau Malays. Ilmu gives Orang Laut people, both female and male, what little negotiating power they have in their cultural-ecological situation of petty commodity production and peripheral social status.
If the fear of poisoning by an enemy is one pole of the culture of the plural society in Riau, the other is its eradication through the exchange of things for cash, and accordingly the cultural, rather than economic, uses of money is the subject of the longest chapter in the book (Chapter 7, pp. 108-40).
This book gives a direct and vivid, if narrowly focused, record of the symbolism of exchange in multi-ethnic Riau. The text is sensitively written and is illustrated throughout with excellent photographs. To evoke such an atmosphere of constant role-changing and cultural ambivalence is a formidable task for the fieldworker. All in all, we must be grateful for Cynthia Chou’s perseverance in this project.
And yet, with all its direct surface appeal, and especially with its closely-viewed empirical data-verbatim informants’ statements, colourful recounting of dramatic episodes, its keen insights into, for example, 'everyday resistance’ by the Orang Laut (p. 45), I found the book as a straight read frustrating and full of pitfalls. It is in some ways a disorderly and obscure account, not helped by the absence of an index. Throughout the book there is a systematic lack of corroborative data, particularly socio-economic data. There is no way to assess relative economic standing of the three communities and there are very few data on their internal organization. In particular, the reader is assumed to have a thorough knowledge of Malay society and culture. Editorially, the book suffers. Though mostly free of text misprints (the bibliography is another matter), the text serves up many bulky footnotes, with large amounts of substantive material which should have appeared in the text.
Despite its limitations, Indonesian Sea Nomads is an important and welcome addition to the anthropology of modern Southeast Asia.
CRISTINA EGHENTER, BERNARD SELLATO and G SIMON DEVUNG (eds.). Social Science Research and Conservation Management in the Interior of Borneo. Unravelling Past and Present Interactions of People and Forests. Jakarta: Center for International Forestry Research, WWF Indonesia, UNESCO and Ford Foundation, 2003. 297 pp. Review by Terry King, University of Hull
I have long been of the view that the discipline of anthropology has a practical contribution to make to the processes of social and economic development, both to more general policy-making and to the implementation, management and monitoring of development programmes and projects. The success of development initiatives depends significantly on the support and commitment of the local people involved in them, and on a sympathetic understanding on the part of development practitioners of indigenous perspectives, knowledge, priorities, histories and cultures. However, the case for the usefulness of anthropology, and for social science more generally, has been a rather difficult position to argue for and defend in recent years, especially in the Southeast Asian region. This is for the simple reason that the advice and warnings of anthropologists on a range of issues, from the exploitation of the tropical rainforests to the physical dislocation and resettlement of tribal minorities, have generally gone unheeded by governments. To be sure there have been some modest gains here and there, and, on occasion, anthropologists working with and for NGOs, for example, have managed to ameliorate the situation of those affected by poorly planned and implemented development interventions. There have also been a few cases of successful pressure group activity against ill-conceived projects. But my current view is that, even though anthropology has never occupied a central role in the world of development, the gains it made in the 1980s have been increasingly called into question in the later 1990s.
It is therefore with some enthusiasm and interest that those of us with a commitment to practical anthropology should receive this edited volume by Cristina Eghenter, Bernard Sellato and Simon Devung. What is particularly encouraging is that most contributors to the volume are local researchers. The book has emerged from UNESCO’s Program on Man and the Biosphere, an interdisciplinary and multidimensional research programme bringing together natural and social scientists and focused on ‘the sustainable use and conservation of biological diversity’, and on ‘the relationship between people and their environment globally’ (p. ix). In Indonesia a large research team was assembled between 1991 and 1997 to work on the Culture and Conservation Research Program (C and C), supported by the Ford Foundation as part of the Kayan Mentarang Conservation Project (KMCP) of the WWF Indonesia in the province of East Kalimantan. Eghenter and Sellato inform us, in their editorial introduction, that the Culture and Conservation Program ‘offers a privileged perspective from which to assess the contribution of social science research towards the achievement of the integrated objectives of conservation and social justice’ (p. 1). It is also suggested that the research helps call into question various simplistic assumptions which certain NGOs have made about the relationships between people and their natural environment which in turn have contributed to the formulation of unsatisfactory strategies for the management of conservation projects.
Undoubtedly the Culture and Conservation Program has made a substantial contribution to our knowledge about the culture, social organisation, history and ecology of rainforest-dwellers in eastern Borneo. Indeed, the volume of research and the large number of reports which have been generated by the programme have made the Kayan Mentarang ‘one of the ethnographically best known protected areas in Southeast Asia’ (p. 2). I commend the editorial introduction which gives us a very comprehensive coverage of the contents of the volume and a consideration of the relationships between social science theory and practice.
The volume is packed with detailed ethnography (with supporting statistical data, maps, illustrations and photographs), most of which relates to the Kenyah Dayak of the Pujungan Subdistrict. The subjects addressed comprise biodiversity and knowledge about rice varieties and on the ways in which this knowledge is generated and sustained (Indah Setyawati); the social and technological aspects of swidden agricultural practices (Herculanus Bahari Sindju); the management, processing and uses of rattan (Martua Thomas Sirait); forest product management, collecting and marketing, particularly with regard to eaglewood (gaharu) (Blajan Konradus); customary law and rights over land and natural resources (S Jacobus E Frans. L and Angguk Lamis, Paulus Bunde and Concordius Kanyan); traditional forest use and management (G Simon Devung); history and ethnohistory (Njau Anau; Liman Lawai); archaeological research (Karina Arifin and Bernard Sellato); oral literature (C.Yus Ngabut); and folk songs (Daniel Lawing). The volume examines several important issues which have relevance to development interventions, including, among others, the role of women in rice agriculture; changing patterns of resource use; the continuing resilience of customary law and traditional institutions in regulating the control and use of natural resources, particularly land; and the diversity of forest plants and crop varieties exploited.
Clearly much has been achieved during the past decade in the sheer accumulation of contextual material on the populations residing in the conservation area (42 research reports, 36 edited reports produced in five volumes, two video films, and a selection of 25 abridged and further edited reports published in Indonesian and English). Of very great benefit has been the selection and practical training of Dayak researchers to help identify the priorities of those living in the conservation area, to encourage their collection of and reflection on local cultural materials and to facilitate local debates about conservation and environmental interactions. Those responsible for managing and coordinating the Culture and Conservation Program also hoped that these local researchers would then act as spokespeople for their communities and that there would be active local participation in the development of sound management and conservation practices. There is no doubt that our knowledge of themes and issues which relate very directly to the perceptions, use and control of environmental resources has been enhanced immeasurably by the research conducted under the auspices of the C and C. This volume tells us much of value about indigenous environmental knowledge and resource management systems.
Nevertheless, my recent anxieties concerning the effectiveness of anthropological research in practical terms is also raised by the editors. They argue forcefully for the benefits of C and C in terms of enhancing our store of information and on generating local interest in the programme. But they say ‘it remains unclear’ whether the research findings influenced the development of better management strategies in the Kayan Mentarang Conservation Project (p. 13). They point to ‘a deficient mode of collaboration’ between the staff responsible for the gathering, processing and presentation of research data and the park management staff responsible for the formulation and implementation of conservation strategies. Apparently these two sets of personnel ‘failed to develop a common language and framework of reference’, and, in consequence, ‘some of the research output failed to prove of direct significance to KMCP for the drafting of conservation policies’ (p. 14). ‘[S]ome of the reports, although informative, were by and large embedded in a scholarly mode of writing too distant from the practical and analytical emphasis favoured by project managers’ (ibid.).
It is interesting that in the several contributions to the volume there is very little in the way of policy statements and recommendations for planning and practical work. Emphasis is placed on the social science research materials themselves and the importance of these for informing the development process. But very few of the contributors direct their attention to the relationships between their research and policy formulation and to the operationalisation of their findings; Simon Devung, Angguk Lamis et al, Herculanus Bahari Sindju and Indah Setyawati are exceptions, but even here there is an absence of detailed practical guidance and direction. In my view much more work needs to be devoted to specifying in what ways social science research findings can be actively used by policy-makers and practitioners. This volume takes us part of the way along that road. Its main contribution is to demonstrate what can be achieved in developing a very substantial local research capacity, in coordinating effectively a large team of researchers, and in encouraging cross-disciplinary research. It is an invaluable ethnographic manual and a mine of information. Anyone interested in people-forest interactions in tropical ecosystems should have this volume on their reading list.
LAKE’ BALING. The Old Kayan Religion and the Bungan Religious Reform. Translated and annotated by Jérôme Rousseau. Kota Samarahan: Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 2002. 124 pp. ISBN 983-9257-23-4 (pb RM25/USD8/AUD13 plus p&p). Email: [email protected] Review by Eva Maria Kershaw, Sutherland
This book is the product of collaboration, diachronic and largely uncoordinated, between several persons and institutions. Firstly, an aristocratic Kayan leader who turned his literacy to unique account in recording the origins and content of his modernised religion, Adat Bungan, producing the first original book-length document in Kayan (1961). Secondly a folklore project of the Sarawak Museum under Tom Harrison, which sponsored the manuscript. Thirdly, anthropologist Jérôme Rousseau of McGill, whose fieldwork among the Kayan (1970-) soon established him as an authority on Kayan culture and speaker of the language, and marked him for Harrison (post-Sarawak) as a worthy custodian of the MS (1974). Fourthly, a number of individuals in or close to the UNIMAS Dayak Studies Programme who provided the means and editorial sophistication to bring to publication an exemplary text and annotated English translation.
The late Lake' Baling, believed to have been already 50 when he wrote, wished to create a record of both the old Kayan religion and the new - with the subjective intention not only to inform the younger generation about their ancestral beliefs, but to help them appreciate the value of the reformed religion and its observance. The text is certainly quite propagandistic for the rationalised version. But a reader will guess from the very fact that there had been a ‘reform’ - or rather an individualistic rejection of the tiresome old taboos by one Jok Apui in 1940, which others quickly copied - that economic and social change in neighbouring groups, and the first inroads of Christianity, were beginning to provide alternative, competitive models of thought and behaviour. Such examples were bound to pose challenges to any kind of native religion, even a reformed version conceived as a bulwark against loss of cultural assets. Indeed, Jayl Langub in his Preface notes that today only one Kayan longhouse is wholly practising Adat Bungan. The older system, Adat Dipui, dominated by omens, would seem to have passed into history.
Rousseau warns us that the text, being written for a Kayan audience, takes most of the Kayan milieu for granted. Nevertheless, it offers a mine of important comparative information for anyone already acquainted with a Bornean religion. For instance, the fact that the Adat Dipui, imposed on men against their best interests by the spirit Dipui, is described as a deviation from a more authentic earlier form, brought by two divine guardian/owners of rice - rice being the plant-with-a-human-substance that sprang up when they buried their dead child. (Thus like many another religious reform, Adat Bungan - likewise brought by two deities, but revealed to Jok Apui in a dream - claims legitimacy as a 'return to the original faith’.) There are the calendrical rituals around the rice cycle (the generic name for rituals held in the household being dayong - differing as between aristocrats and commoners); and the headhunting ritual at year’s end on the gallery, for purification. Or one may find special interest in the detail of the omens which dictated - and often frustrated - Kayan activity before the reform: especially the calls of bird species, some of which are acknowledged by other groups.
Of absolutely certain fascination is the fact that the new, simplified religion had its own protective rituals to ward off a vengeful Dipui, who might send her auguries to make trouble for the defectors. Yet basically, one was removed from her thrall (the punishments for infractions) simply by the act of placing oneself under the alternative deities Bungan Malan and Pesilong Luan. The vital thing for human beings, says Baling, is to have a religion and then observe the prescriptions of that one scrupulously. I.e., other people’s religious rules are for them only. One indeed finds such relativism in transcendental matters all around Borneo. But other folk’s beliefs can become applicable if one opts to place oneself under their authority instead of one’s first obedience. Students of Borneo will be familiar with the calculating pragmatism which can guide a switch, where defectors assess the fortunes of adherents of another faith (the power of their deities) before changing allegiance, and then find the wisdom of their choice confirmed if their fortunes improve.
Any criticism of this superb publication would be otiose. But as Rousseau expresses a nominal regret that Baling wrote only for Kayans, one could point out that his annotations take some ethnographic knowledge for granted too. An occasional reader may be unfamiliar with the relationship between Kayan and Kenyah, and might wonder how the great ‘Kayan reform’ came to be revealed to a Kenyah. Should Rousseau’s major study, Kayan Religion (1998), be read first? A glossary of proper names would also be helpful, as some deities have more than one.
Not that there is enough data for Kayans themselves to revive their religion. Rousseau warns that the text is not a manual for religious specialists.
AVM HORTON, ed. IHN Evans Bornean Diaries 1938-1942. Phillips, Maine: Borneo Research Council, 2002. 535 pp. ISBN 1-929900-03-01 (hb US$55). Email: [email protected] Review by Roger Kershaw, Sutherland
This is not the kind of volume one will meet every day of the week. Indeed one may never meet its like again, not because there are no more extant diaries of Malayan officials to be published, but because dedicated, gifted editors who have avoided the trammels of a university appointment, including not only the inevitable constraints of time but pressures to conform to R.A.E.-mediated standards of ‘relevance’ and other disciplinary orthodoxies, are a nearly extinct breed.
Ivor Evans joined British North Borneo Company service in 1910, but soon fled that bureaucracy for a career as ethnographer with the Perak Museum. There, too, he found the bureaucracy constrictive, and took early retirement in 1932. In 1938, however, he returned to Borneo in a private capacity to document the religion and customs of the Dusuns upstream from Kota Belud. Overcoming the appalling vagaries of the Japanese occupation, including his own internment and loss of the first manuscript of his book, he reprised the research after the war and finally published The Religion of the Tempasuk Dusuns of North Borneo, in 1953.
As Evans was keeping separate notes on ritual, and indeed processing them into the first draft of his book as he went along, the Diaries are not exclusively, or even dominantly, ethnographic. Notes on ceremonies are sometimes skimpy and appear as virtual interpolations to a plethora of daily experiences and Evans’s feelings about them - the non-arrival of new cine-film and foolscap paper, impassable rivers which frustrate travel plans, a missing dog, the behaviour of pigs and other animals, poisonous bugs, insufferably noisy households, hangovers from imbibing palm toddy after sundown, falling behind with note-making, unreliable research assistants, etc. Nevertheless, some ceremonies are described in fair detail, filling as much as two pages in the BRC format, while Dr Horton’s annotations provide summaries from Evans 1953 wherever the content and purpose of a particular ceremony is not clear. Still, a page-referenced listing of ceremonies by broad category would have usefully supplemented the Index, where several ceremonies only appear under their Dusun name.
What Evans could never escape, evidently, was the audible presence of daily ritual in the Dusun community, and taboo, a lot of it simply for the warding off of pervasive sickness. At the same time, he appointed ‘spies’ to inform him of pending major ceremonies around the district. Yet even at the point when opportunities of observation begin to multiply, one is struck by the lack of any ‘thoughts in progress’ about the nature of Dusun religion and an appropriate ‘framework’ for its eventual interpretation and presentation. As Professor Terry King remarks in his Foreword, Evans does not respond to inter-Dusun disagreements over the nature of the soul, as a potential source of insight into social structure and change. King cites Evans himself to show the futility - as it began to dawn on him - of collecting material on a Bornean religion through a male ‘Mohammedan’ interpreter, from the Bajau ethnic group. Yet Evans is rather slower to grasp the deficiencies of Dusun male assistants with some command of Malay, as informants about a religion whose repositories are priestesses. One wonders why such an intelligent man with time to spare rushed into the ethnographic fray without learning the language first.
Dr Horton finds a certain other-worldliness in Evans’s apparent lack of interest in the war in Europe. There are just a few references on that subject, and I would not necessarily draw the same conclusion. For me the truly extraordinary lacuna - in the diary of one who is constantly enthralled by the antics and foibles (seen through English eyes) of both humans and beasts - is the total silence on ‘toilet arrangements’. Did the Dusuns build a simple privy next to the house, or would one go to the edge of the jungle when the moment came, er, zijn behoefte te verrichten (as Dutch translations of scatological folktale put it)? How did Evans the Englishman react to the sow waiting below, or following him to the jungle, as the case may be? Was the matter simply too embarrassing in his cultural terms to be mentioned?
As for the considerable reportage of Dusun pre-marital or extra-marital amours, one sees no indication that Evans intended to use this material for an essay on Dusun family dynamics, let alone what today are called ‘gender relations’. He is not in the least censorious, but his motive in recording each ‘escapade’ appears to be that of self-entertainment in the presence of a bucolic idyll.
To the diarist’s set of thumbnail biographies of principal native dramatis personae the Editor adds extensive notes on the expatriates. Perhaps a fuller map could have been provided, to include the south-western part of Evans’s initial itinerary down to Beaufort and Tenom, and Brunei.
SOPHIE QUINN-JUDGE. Ho Chi Minh: The Missing Years, 1919-1941. London: Hurst and Company, 2003. 356 pp. ISBN: 1-85065-658-4 (hb £25.00) Email: [email protected] Review by John Sidel, SOAS
Sophie Quinn-Judge’s new book on Ho Chi Minh makes for a humbling read in at least two ways. First of all, it is humbling to read a book so thoroughly, painstakingly researched, based on thousands of documents in French, Russian, and Vietnamese, and rooted in such a rich, multifaceted understanding of European, Chinese, Comintern, and Southeast Asian history during the interwar years. Ostensibly written to follow the movements of one man, this book opens the eyes of its readers to the highly complex and dynamic context in which Ho Chi Minh operated. Quinn-Judge’s success in tracing the thin thread of Ho’s often nebulous activities and whereabouts through a tangle of competing and often contradictory sources represents a formidable scholarly accomplishment. Her careful cross-checking of sources and her candour with regard to uncertainty of fact and ambiguity of evidence are also commendable. Few other scholars in today’s increasingly superficial academic world could claim such a combination of empirical depth, linguistic versatility, and trans-continental reach.
Secondly, Quinn-Judge’s new book is humbling if not for Ho Chi Minh himself than for the inflated image of his omnipresence, importance, and influence in the world communist movement, his prescience in anticipating major changes in Vietnamese and world history, and his success in organizing and promoting the causes of Vietnamese independence and Communist revolution. Comparing her own findings with those of such earlier Ho biographers as Jean Lacoutre and William Duiker, she notes: ‘On close inspection, it is interesting to see how many times Ho (and later Ho Chi Minh) is credited with deeds which he was not in a position to have accomplished, either because he was not present or was not sufficiently influential (p.3)’.
By contrast, Quinn-Judge’s Ho Chi Minh has a tough time over the two decades of the interwar era. He finds himself in Moscow during especially difficult periods – Lenin’s final years (1923-24), the height of the Stalinist terror (1934-38) – and spends interminable months – even years – there waiting for proper Comintern assignments and instructions. He pens countless letters but receives few, and fewer still positive, responses; his posthumously celebrated interjections at various Communist gatherings are politely applauded but essentially ignored. He is stuck in cramped quarters with bedbugs in Canton, battles tuberculosis in obscure parts of Siam, and works 16-hour days in southern China doing translation work unrelated to the struggle in Vietnam. Writings credited to Ho, we learn, on close reading often turn out to be unoriginal or unimpressive, or not to be his work at all. His connections to – and control over – the ICP’s activities in Indochina are attenuated at best, and he speaks glowingly of Soviet ‘security to prepare the world-wide revolutionary movement’ (p. 250) just weeks before Hitler’s invasion of June 1941. If he is anything, Quinn-Judge’s Ho is human – fallible, physically frail, politically vulnerable – if perhaps no less appealing than his heroic official version.
Just as Quinn-Judge’s book may be humbling for its readers and for the reputation of its protagonist, so may the research conducted for the book have worked to humble the author in at least two ways. For while the originality of Quinn-Judge’s research lies in large part in her unprecedented use of Comintern archives opened to researchers in Moscow in 1992, her most forceful interventions in scholarly debates about Ho’s life are often made in realms far from these newly available documents. Quinn-Judge suggests that formative experiences shaping Ho’s political outlook, orientation, and activities unfolded before his arrival in Paris in 1919 and thus largely escape her documentary trawlings. She takes special care to insist on the close and continuing ties between Ho and older, non-communist Vietnamese anti-colonial figures like Phan Boi Chau and Phan Chu Trinh, and to locate Ho within this distinctly Vietnamese tradition of resistance. She also makes a strong case that key developments within the ICP unfolded largely under the auspices of the Nanyang (South Seas) branch of the Chinese Communist Party or otherwise outside the Comintern’s intervention, Ho’s involvement, or the mountainous paper trail she has so sweepingly surveyed.
Beyond this no doubt excessive modesty as to the strength and significance of her findings, Quinn-Judge is also overly modest in her conclusions, at least for the taste of this reviewer. Reading of Ho Chi Minh’s long years of painstaking, patient, and at times seemingly pointless activity – not to mention inactivity – in support of Vietnamese independence and the Communist struggle, one must marvel at his strength of conviction, commitment, and confidence in the cause. Quinn-Judge’s account of Ho’s long, mostly dry, years might remind at least some readers of left-wing activists in Thailand in the 1970s, the Philippines in the 1980s, or Indonesia in the 1990s, or perhaps of Islamist networks in the region during the same period. Beyond the details of clandestine meetings, forged papers and false identities, secret documents, and conspiratorial undertakings of various kinds lies some kind of ineffable larger secret of a kind, whose significance is still insufficiently understood or appreciated. For us to comprehend the significance of everything Ho did during the years covered in this fine book – significance for Ho and his comrades at the time, and significance for subsequent Vietnamese history – further work needs to be done, and clearly Sophie Quinn-Judge is amply prepared for this task.
JOHN OKELL. Burmese by Ear or Essential Myanmar London: Sussex Publications Ltd., 2002. Email: [email protected] Review by Robert H Taylor, London
Many people believe that 1988 was a defining year in Burma or Myanmar studies. The political consequences of that eventful year returned the country to the attention of the world, thus generating a new generation of scholars to begin to work on what had been a largely ignored area of South East Asian studies. Perhaps that is true but one might argue that the real spur to Myanmar studies came in the following year. Nineteen eighty-nine saw the publication by John Okell of First Steps in Burmese (London: SOAS) including six audio drill tapes. No longer did one have to find a ‘native speaker’ in order to attempt to learn to speak Burmese and no longer did the learner commence his text book drill with questions about how many Japanese were in the next village. Though the text from which I attempted to learn Burmese in the 1960s had slightly improved on the Second World War manuals that preceded it, the gap was not significant.
If 1989 produced a landmark in Burmese language learning, 1994 saw the emergence of a monument in the form of Okell's four-volume, multi-tape Burmese (Myanmar) (Dekalb, Ill.: Northern Illinois University Center of Southeast Asian Studies). Access at all levels of competence to student-oriented, practical language learning materials for Burmese was finally available. Coupled with the publication by the Myanmar Language Commission of a high quality Myanmar-English Dictionary (Yangon, 1993), finally making Adoniram Judson's 1852 Burmese-English Dictionary (Rangoon: Baptist Board of Publications, 11th ed., 1966) redundant, and the publication in 2002 of Okell's and Anna Allott's wonderful Burmese Myanmar Dictionary of Grammatical Forms (Richmond: Curzon Press), Myanmar language studies in little over a decade had been transformed. Sophisticated and accessible learning tools were finally available and not a day too soon. Now students can learn Burmese, if not without effort, at least without the disadvantages of dealing with antiquated and inadequate teaching devices.
Burmese By Ear or Essential Myanmar, John Okell's latest contribution to making Burmese easily available to those who wish to make the effort to learn the language, is another advance in Myanmar studies. With just four tapes and one easy-to-use text, which the author claims is unnecessary for mastering the course, an individual with no previous familiarity with the language, can soon feel confident to handle most of the encounters one would face in negotiating the fundamentals of getting around in modern Yangon or other Myanmar towns and cities.
After a brief account of the history of the language, as well as the refinements of Myanmar etiquette, the text and the accompanying tapes take you straight into learning the fundamentals of the language as well as commonly used expressions. In this way, a sense of confidence is developed in the learner from the start. One could progress through these tapes with their helpful pronunciation guides and explanation reasonably quickly. However, most learners would probably need to repeat some sections several times in order to become comfortable in social encounters in Myanmar. One of the dangers of learning in this way is that your Burmese interlocutors may think you are more competent in the language than you actually are. If this happens, they will race ahead speaking at a speed and with a vocabulary which makes it difficult to keep up.
After getting the learner started with common expressions like ‘it is hot’, counting and simple sentence structures essential for asking directions or for assistance, the tapes move on to a number of everyday situations for the traveller or visitor to Myanmar. There are units on eating and drinking in tea shops and restaurants, getting around in taxis, buying in shops and taking photographs. Especially helpful for the polite visitor are the sections on asking people their names and ages and about their families. The very clear appendices to the volume set out the fundaments of Burmese pronunciation, the script, grammar and numbers. Some users may find the topical vocabularies at the back helpful, but organising them around the sections of the book can be more confusing than simply presenting the lists in Burmese alphabetical order. However, as the texts and tapes are designed for individuals who do not yet know how to read the Burmese script, this is perhaps appropriate.
John Okell's contribution to opening up Myanmar studies to English speakers has been remarkable. His work will not be superseded for many, many years. His clear diction and the clear and precise pronunciation of his ten linguistically talented Burmese collaborators, has set a high standard for future generations to emulate. Thanks to the diligence of Okell, future generations of Southeast Asianists have no excuse for ignoring Myanmar studies.
Previous Reviews
(Full reviews included below)
THOMAS M STEINFATT. Working at the Bar. Sex Work and Health Communication in Thailand. Ablex Publishing, 2002. Review by Dr N Ford, University of Exeter
CLIFFORD SATHER. Seeds of Play, Words of Power: an Ethnographic Study of Iban Shamanic Chants. Maine: Tun Jugah Foundation in cooperation with the Borneo Research Council Inc., 2001. Review by Prof VT King, University of Hull
POLINE BALA. Changing Borders and Identities in the Kelabit Highlands: Anthropological Reflections on Growing up in a Kelabit Village near the International Border. Kota Samarahan: Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 2002. Review by Dr Monica Janowski, University of Greenwich
BERNARD SELLATO. Innermost Borneo. Studies in Dayak Cultures. Paris and Singapore: Seven Orients, Singapore University Press, 2002. Review by VT King
FENELLA CANNELL. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 109, 1999. Review by VT King
LEO HOWE. Hinduism and Hierarchy in Bali. Oxford: James Currey and Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, World Anthropology Series, 2001. Review by VT King
JAMES T SIEGEL. The Rope of God. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 2nd ed. (new preface and two additional chapters). Review by VT King
PETER PELS and OSCAR SALEMINK (eds.) Colonial Subjects. Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. Review by VT King
PARIMAL GHOSH. Brave Men of the Hills. Resistance and Rebellion in Burma, 1825- 1932. London: C Hurst & Co., 2000.
KATHRYN ROBINSON & SHARON BESSELL, eds. Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity and Development. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002.
CJW-L WEE, ed. Local Cultures and the 'New Asia'. The State, Culture and Capitalism in Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002.
CHRISTINE HELLIWELL. 'Never Stand Alone' - A Study of Borneo Sociality. Phillips,
ME: Borneo Reseach Council, 2001.
THOMAS M STEINFATT. Working at the Bar. Sex Work and Health Communication in Thailand. Ablex Publishing, 2002. ISBN 1-56750-567-8 (pb £27.95). 423 pp. Email: [email protected]
Scenes of the 'Go-Go' bars of Patpong comprise some of the most commonly recurring, yet often emotive, media images of Thailand. As well as eliciting strong responses in touristic perspectives, the sex industry of Thailand has stimulated a very considerable body of research. Whilst the HIV/ AIDS epidemic was the major factor contributing to the sheer scale of this research on Thailand, more enduring concerns with tourist guest-host interaction, society, culture and gender, also strongly underlie such research. Working at the Bar is one of those books which will be of real interest to both academic and more popular audiences.
With regard to the more popular audience, places like Patpong have, over the years, become more about voyeurism (and shopping!) than the more directly physical aspects of sexual interaction. Indeed the owner of Patpong mentions in an interview with Steinfatt that the shopping (mainly street vendor) rents are worth more than those of the bars. For the thousands of tourists who pass through these streets this book gives rich detail on what is actually happening (under the surface) in the multitude of different sex outlet formats.
It is important to note that the book is not about the sex industry as a whole in Thailand, but focuses specifically upon that small, but most visible, portion, which caters to a foreign clientele and is found in such highly specific locations as Patpong, Nana, Soi Cowboy and Pattaya among other places. Working at the Bar is a highly comprehensive, thorough and systematic study based upon over 12 years of research (1988-99), involving interviews with over 4,000 sex workers, including nearly 1,600 in-depth interviews. The findings and discussion are thus based upon sustained and rigorous research, set within more discursive concern with the philosophical and moral dimensions of prostitution. The wealth of original data is exhaustively discussed in relation to other research on sex work, mainly in Thailand but also from other countries, when discussing the more general aspects of prostitution.
The chapter contents span the following; numbers and types of workers, routes to bar work, reasons for not working, moral and religious concerns, employment statistics, partner selection and negotiations, AIDS in Thailand, condom use and health communication, hopes and dreams, management and support staff, customer motivation and behaviour, and policy on sex work.
Thomas Steinfatt is a scholar of communications, and communication theory (as reflected in the sub-title) provides the primary prism through which these voluminous observations are considered, although the analyses also draw upon other social and psychological theories where appropriate.
As with most of the better research on sex work in Thailand, Working at the Bar considers the subject within its social, historical and legal context. Its contribution to the field is linked to its nuanced consideration of prostitution within a social fabric, as a nexus of social actions and meanings. I found the book's most original contribution to be the section on the rituals and scripts involved in sex workers' partner selection and negotiations, which link well with the chapter on customer motivations and behaviour. Steinfatt distills the salient characteristics and calculations taking place in the various stages of the selection and approach, social interactional process, in what he calls the dating/exciting model. In this it presents sex workers as independent actors with their own agency, rather than as passive victims. Findings, which combine statistical data with the richness of case studies, indeed highlight many positive attributes of this foreign-oriented sex work in Thailand, and further draws out the non-pecuniary, relationship development aspects.
Even the more descriptive (but never prurient) sections on the range of sex work outlets and practices, and their work and management structures are of considerable value in themselves. Overall it is the sustained quality of the whole range of (interlinked) chapters which will make this a definitive text on foreign-oriented sex work in Thailand. The sheer weight of quantitative and qualitative empirical evidence, reasoned argument and comprehensive coverage create a fairly positive and compassionate view of this form of sex work, always remaining closely focused upon the individuals involved, in terms of their feelings, aspirations and evolving perspectives on their trade. The final chapter on policy in sex work further strengthens the case for legalisation and the extension of workers' rights to sex work in Thailand.
Nick Ford School of Geography and Archaeology University of Exeter
CLIFFORD SATHER. Seeds of Play, Words of Power: an Ethnographic Study of Iban Shamanic Chants. Maine: Tun Jugah Foundation in cooperation with the Borneo Research Council Inc., 2001. 753 pp. ISBN 983-40513-5-2 (pb RM95; hb RM120/USD49 + p & p). Email: [email protected] or [email protected]
It is difficult to comment critically on what is a study of monumental proportions based on sustained and meticulous research on Iban culture extending back a quarter of a century; all I can do is praise Clifford Sather's volume as a major contribution to Iban studies and Borneo ethnography. The subject matter of the book emerged from Sather's extended and fruitful collaboration with the distinguished Iban folklorist, Benedict Sandin, when the latter spent a period of about a year-and-a-half as a Senior Fellow at Universiti Sains Malaysia Penang in 1975-76 where Sather was lecturing in anthropology. It was also in 1976 that Sather began his long association with Sandin's Saribas longhouse community of Kerangan Pinggai in the Ulu Paku area of Sarawak. Through the work of Sandin and Sather Kerangan Pinggai and the neighbouring communities can probably lay claim to being the most studied and written about in the whole of Borneo.
This study brings to fruition Sather's and Sandin's plans which were set down in 1976 to produce a monograph on Iban shamanism and specifically on the chants (leka pelian) delivered in the course of shamanic healing rites (pelian). The sung words are described by the Iban as the 'seeds [or 'gist'] of the performance', and are 'taken to be a major source of the shaman's power, and their singing a necessary condition for the efficacy of the ritual as a whole' (p. xiii); they are 'words of power' and 'words of healing'. We have already seen in print three major collaborative monographs from Sather and Sandin on various aspects of Iban culture (on the Iban bird festival [Gawai Burong], on adat and augury, and on the sources of Iban ethnohistory). However, among other things, Benedict Sandin's deteriorating health and his untimely death in 1982 meant that the project on shamanism was put to one side, though Sather had already gathered considerable material on song performances and, with Sandin's guidance and advice, had begun to translate these in the late 1970s. Sather's interest in the institution of the shaman (manang) was resurrected in the late 1980s when he had the opportunity to pay a return visit to Kerangan Pinggai; this then led to a resumption in earnest of the work of recording and translating the shamanic chants in the early 1990s.
The main focus of the study is the relatively neglected role of poetic language in ritual. Among other matters, Sather examines Iban notions of 'deep' and 'shallow' language (and the associated shamanic ability to move between different speech levels), as well as concepts of place and movement in the context of the shamanic journey. Importantly he argues that the deep language of the chants does not constitute another language but is rather 'a distinctive stylistic tradition' within Iban speech. The significance of the sung words is that they describe the journey, encounters and actions of the shaman's soul, his spirit guide and spirit messengers in the quest for the source of the patient's illness. In this regard the words 'make visible levels of reality that are otherwise unseen' (p. 2), and by this means they also reveal the causes of the malady afflicting the patient and the remedial actions necessary to address it. A crucial observation which Sather makes is that Iban shamanism does not involve spirit possession or mediumship; the shaman remains an independent agent and it is his soul which travels abroad guided by spirit helpers.
In a series of papers on Iban ritual, folklore and symbolism ranging over such cultural particulars as agricultural ceremonies, death rites, shamanism, initiation, and the ritual dimensions of the longhouse, Sather has already acquired a reputation as an insightful, thoughtful and authoritative scholar of Iban society. However, this study surpasses anything that he has accomplished to date. It constitutes his mature reflections on Iban concepts of the cosmos, the body, health and illth, the spirit world, and space, and on other contributions to the study of Iban belief and ritual, including the important work of Robert Barrett, Rodney Lucas, and Penelope Graham.
The book is divided into two major sections, and it is perhaps much more a work of reference rather than a book to be read and absorbed in any sustained way. There is a contextual piece of some 200 pages (chapters 1 to 8) which is a monograph in itself; it describes the shamanic complex including the role and position of the manang within Iban society and culture, his career, the source of his inspiration and the mastery of words, the ritual paraphernalia and techniques used in healing rites, Iban concepts of the person, of health and sickness, as well as conceptions of the unseen spirit world within which the shaman moves and works; there is also a detailed discussion of the curing performance and the types of ritual employed, the ritual use of space, the structure, content and use of words, and the shamanic performance.
The second section (chapters 9 to 17), which constitutes the major part of the study, is the record in the Iban language of several chants (comprising overall some 3,300 lines of text) and their translation into English with associated explanatory introductions and, where necessary, textual commentary. The nine sung texts accompany different pelian, and, although most of the rites focus on the retrieval of lost or captured souls, other tasks which can be undertaken include the slaying of evil, sickness-causing spirits, caring for the patient's spiritual plant counterpart, and erecting an invisible protective barrier around the patient or the patient's living space. The pelian chants recorded in the book comprise: 'to spread a working mat' (pelian anchau bidai: this is an 'overture' or 'stage-setting' rite, and Appendix 1 of the book also provides the musical transcription of this pelian prepared by Dr Patricia Matusky); 'to recover the soul from under the roots of the kara' tree' (pelian ngambi' semengat baruh jerangku kara': this is 'one of the simplest, and from the manang's vantage point, least dangerous' ritual which is intended to recover a lost or captured soul); 'fencing the flower' (pelian ngeraga bunga: a rite to treat the ailing plant image of the patient); 'journey to the otherworld' (pelian nyembayan: in this rite the manang's soul travels to the domain of the dead, 'beyond the borders of this world', in order to retrieve the patient's soul); 'to slay a spirit' (pelian bebunuh antu: this is 'the most dramatic of all the pelian' in which the manang confronts and kills the afflicting spirit); 'severing the flower' (pelian beserara' bunga: the ritual severs members of the deceased's family from contact with the dead); 'taking back the souls in the morning' (pelian nagambi' semengat pagi: this rite focuses on collecting together the souls of the patient's family); 'to erect a ritual barrier' (pelian nganjung pelepa': the manang sets up an invisible ritual barrier to warn spirits and other intruders not to cross it; and finally there is the Gawai Betawai, which is 'the most complex curing ritual in the local shamanic repertoire', usually 'performed for a chronically or gravely ill child, frequently as a last resort after all other means of healing had been exhausted'. In contrast to the other pelian sung narratives which had been recorded in 'live' performances that of the Gawai Betawai had not been performed for some 30 to 40 years in the Saribas-Saratok area. Sather's material, occupying well over 200 pages of this text, had been collected mainly from a very knowledgeable shaman, Jabing, who had learned the chants from his teacher Giri, who had in turn held what was probably the last recorded Gawai Betawai in 1947 in the upper Paku.
The translations of the chants, though they cannot possibly capture everything that the words mean to an Iban audience in specific ritual contexts, at least provide us with something of the power, imagery and beauty of the shamanic poetic language. Sather's study also ensures that this genre of Iban oral tradition is now preserved not only for future generations of Iban to contemplate and enjoy but also as a research resource for those of us who have a scholarly interest in the cultures of Borneo. For a more general anthropological audience Sather's discussions of the shamanic complex in Chapter 2, the concept of the person in Chapter 3, and the structure, content and imagery of the chants in Chapter 7 are especially noteworthy. Above all the book serves as a fitting tribute to and celebration of the life and work of Benedict Sandin and all that he brought to our understanding and appreciation of Iban oral traditions.
Victor T King Centre for South-East Asian Studies University of Hull
POLINE BALA. Changing Borders and Identities in the Kelabit Highlands: Anthropological Reflections on Growing up in a Kelabit Village near the International Border. Kota Samarahan: Institute of East Asian Studies, Universiti Malaysia Sarawak, 2002. 142 pp. ISBN 983-9257-17-X (pb) USD3 + p & p. Email: [email protected]
This is a book written by someone who is Kelabit herself. After giving some background to the Kelabit as a people geographically and historically, Poline Bala focuses on the impact of the creation of the border between Malaysia and Indonesia, which ran along the mountain ridge that separates two watersheds in the highest part of Borneo. The peoples living on the two sides of the border, now known as the Kelabit and Lun Berian, are very closely related, but the creation of the international border has separated them. Ms Bala shows how the border came to cause them to feel themselves to be separate peoples, illustrating this from her own experience and that of her own family.
Ms Bala gives some very interesting data relating to the role of the so-called 'Confrontation' between Malaysia and Indonesia in 1963-66 as a key event which internalised a sense of the existence of the border for the people of the highland area. She brings this out by describing the experiences of her father, who was in charge of the Border Scouts for the area in which he lived during that period.
Running through the book there is a thread of sadness about the out-migration of young people from the Kelabit Highlands which started in the 1960s and 1970s. While much out-migration, particularly if it is for higher education and a professional job, represents success, it has meant that there is a lack of young Kelabit in the Highlands; and for the out-migrants there is a profound sense of loss and nostalgia for the warm and welcoming life in the longhouses in the Highlands. She illustrates this through her own feelings and experiences. Since the settlement from which she comes, Pa'Umor, does not have a primary school of its own, she had to leave her home at a very young age and live in a boarding house in Bario. From that time, she has only lived in her home community during holidays, and since she left school for even shorter periods.
Ms Bala describes how the lack of young people has led to the recruitment of people from the Berian to cultivate wet rice fields, and to an in-migration of people from the same area to settle permanently, often marrying local young men. This has provided opportunities for close interaction between the two groups but has also generated tensions, heightening the sense that they are two different people.
The sense of being different people has been underlined by the different levels of economic development in Malaysia and Indonesia, as Ms Bala shows. This has led to the Kelabit looking down on the Berian and making jokes about them which imply that they are in some way inferior. Ms Bala describes how, as a child, she remembers these jokes being made against people who were, in fact, her own relatives. She describes how she 'detests'the border for what it has done in separating people who should, she feels, be close.
My fieldwork in the community of Pa'Dalih in the southern part of the Highlands (most recently in 1992-3) supports the suggestion that there has been in-migration going on from the other side of the border. In Pa'Dalih this is from the area which is described as the Kerayan, of people called Lun Kerayan, who are closely related in terms of language and culture to the Kelabit and to the Lun Berian, and closely related in terms of kin to the people of Pa'Dalih itself. However, in Pa'Dalih, at least in 1993 when I last carried out fieldwork, there was no employment of Lun Kerayan to cultivate fields for others as was going on already in Bario. The difference is probably to a large extent due to the fact that in Bario, due to the type of soil and drainage conditions, the fields are all wet fields in which the small-grained varieties which can be sold in town for high prices are grown, and there is air transport to get the rice out. This means that it is worth paying outsiders to cultivate rice fields which are not being used. In Pa'Dalih in the late 1980s and early 1990s people were engaged in making more wet rice fields but a very large proportion of the rice fields were swidden fields in which the small-grained varieties cannot be grown, and there is no easy way of getting the rice out for sale.
In the Prologue to the book, Ms Bala discusses her own experience, as a Kelabit, in carrying out research among the Kelabit as an anthropologist and in writing her Masters thesis at Cornell and subsequently the book itself. Central to her description of her own experiences is a discussion of the role and relevance of the 'outsider' and the 'insider' as anthropologist. In this context she criticises my work – specifically a paper which I presented at the First Extraordinary Session of the Borneo Research Council in Kuching in 1990 entitled 'The Kelabit attitude to the Penan: forever children', later published in Ricerca Folklorica. I would like to respond briefly to this criticism.
It seems to me that there are two main points of criticism which Ms Bala is making: firstly, that the basis upon which I construct my analysis, which she takes to be my (mis)understanding of the response to a Kelabit greeting, is unreliable; and secondly that the analysis I make is simplistically dichotomous, drawing unduly on Western modes of thought.
In response to the first point: I did not, as she assumes, base my analysis on answers made in response to the query 'Where are you going?'. I am aware that people might well make the answer which she suggests (I am going to 'play' (raut) in the forest) to this query, due, I would suggest, to a fear of bad luck if they were to admit to going hunting. However, my analysis is not based on hearing this kind of interchange but is based on my observation of attitudes towards forest-based activities more generally over the years during which I lived in Pa'Dalih, and in particular on hearing negative remarks about the behaviour of young men who were already married but were showing reluctance to engage in rice-growing and wanted to continue to go hunting, which they enjoyed much more. Such young men were criticised for continuing to raut rather than taking up lema'ud, rice-growing.
I would respond to the second point of criticism by suggesting that if Ms Bala looks at other articles which I have written, which she does not cite, I hope that she would agree that I am trying to make an analysis which is not simplistic (e.g. my paper in Carsten and Hugh-Jones' edited book About the House: Levi-Strauss and beyond, published in 1995; and that in Soraya Tremayne and Alaine Low's edited book Sacred Custodians of the Earth? Women, Spirituality and the Environment, published in 2001). While I do believe that one has to take into account the existence of dualism(s) in Kelabit thought and cosmology (dualism is thought by many scholars to be characteristic of South East Asian thought) these are not at all simplistic, but very complex and shifting, and I hope that I have succeeded in bringing this out.
Ms Bala's emphasis on the issue of 'outsider' and 'insider' anthropological understandings and analyses is an important one, and it deserves to be given serious attention. There are advantages and drawbacks associated with both positions, and the debate on this issue is very much under full steam still, as it has been for some years. However, I would suggest that it is not really useful, in the context of the debate on this issue, to block discussion of an analysis which is potentially uncomfortable for 'insiders' (whether anthropologists or not) – such as the suggestion that the Kelabit have certain attitudes towards neighbouring ethnic groups – on the grounds that 'insiders know best'.
The argument that raising certain topics could damage ethnic relations, which she also raises, is a much more valid one, and was the reason why I did not publish the paper concerned for some time – until an Italian journal publisher became aware indirectly that I had written it and asked to be allowed to publish it, and I agreed, thinking that it would be unlikely to cause problems published in such a relatively obscure place. In retrospect, perhaps I was wrong to publish it at all.
Monica Janowski University of Greenwich
BERNARD SELLATO. Innermost Borneo. Studies in Dayak Cultures. Paris and Singapore: Seven Orients, Singapore University Press, 2002. 221 pp. ISBN 2-914936-02-8.
Bernard Sellato has undertaken wide-ranging research in interior Borneo during the past thirty years, focusing his attention on forest hunters and gatherers, generally labelled 'Punan' (though there is a bewildering variety of ethnonyms for these groups), and farmers, particularly the Aoheng (or 'Penihing'). There are very few anthropologists currently working on Borneo who command his breadth and depth of experience of these minority cultures. There has also been increasing interest in the indigenous minorities of inner Borneo following the large scale destruction of the tropical rainforests and the severe impacts this has had on their ways of life and indeed their very existence. So, in this sense, the present collection of essays may be said to be topical.
This softcover book comprises previously published papers and articles, translated materials mainly from the French, and some 'new' items based on field notes or unpublished conference and seminar papers. The main ethnographic concern is the Aoheng of the Upper Mahakam and Kapuas, but other nomadic or formerly nomadic groups such as the Bukat also appear. The purpose of bringing together this collection is, in the author's words, 'to provide the reader with a few keys to a better understanding of traditional life in one of our planet's last isolated spots'. He also wishes to present these cultures to the Western reader 'as less foreign and less exotic than they have frequently been depicted' (p. 14). Overall the book is nicely produced with ample illustrations, maps and black-and-white photographs, though, for coherence, an index, glossary, list of ethnic names and a consolidated bibliography, with a consistent foot-noting convention, would have been useful.
For those unfamiliar with Sellato's work there is much to reflect on here; for those who have read his published work, it is useful to have his scattered scholarship brought together conveniently between two covers and placed in something of a logical order. The volume commences with an account of the early European exploration of central Borneo and the first written sources, concentrating on the three expeditions of the Dutch medic, Anton Nieuwenhuis, across Central Borneo between the years 1893 and 1900. The text was originally written in Indonesian as an introduction to an abridged Indonesian translation of Nieuwenhuis's In Centraal Borneo, which appeared in 1994; it was also published in English in the Borneo Research Bulletin in 1993. There are then two introductory chapters on the Upper Kapuas (based on 1995 unpublished field notes) and the Upper Mahakam regions (originally published in English in 1980), mainly providing information on the distribution of ethnic groups. There is also a basic chapter, originally delivered at a seminar in 1993, which tells us of the encounter between on the one hand, two interior communities - the Punan Tabung and the Aoheng - and on the other, government change agents bent on controlling remote communities, settling them down and appropriating their resources. In my view the papers on ethnic distributions and that on resources could well have been brought together in one revised and updated introductory chapter on distributions and the effects on these of social, economic and environmental change.
Two chapters follow on social organisation; the first (Chapter V), published in French in 1987 and which, in its cross-cultural and comparative scope, is a key contribution to the literature, distinguishes four types of organisation: the nomadic band, stratified agricultural societies, non-stratified agricultural societies, and the sultanate. Sellato argues that Levi-Strauss's concept of 'society of the house' applies only to some Borneo societies, and Leach's notion of 'a Bornean type of pattern of organisation' does not hold for all societies. The second chapter, an unpublished conference paper prepared in 1982 for connoisseurs of kinship studies, focuses on the analysis of relationship terminology among nomadic groups and the correlation between a nomadic way of life, utrolocal post-marital residence and a complex affinal terminology. Like Chapter V it is a bold exercise in comparative analysis which deserves our applause.
There is then considerable attention to the character and history of nomadic communities. Chapter VII, a paper published in an edited volume in English in 1993, is an excellent piece of work, ethnohistorical and comparative in scope, examining various hypotheses about the origins of hunter-gatherers in Borneo, and criticising, in particular, the devolutionist and 'partial society' models. Against these revisionist positions Sellato argues for an ancient, common hunting-gathering culture, sharing an ideological system based on 'nomadic values' and, before the adoption of iron, a stone technology which enabled them to make an independent living in the tropical rainforest environment. The next chapter, a journal article in English from 1993, which dissects in some detail a Bukat legend, demonstrates the ways in which historical traditions are manipulated to accommodate changing circumstances; it helps flesh out Sellato's wider ranging examination of the shifts between adjacent ecologies and the depth, sharedness and integrity of foraging culture.
The remaining chapters (IX to XIII) focus on various cultural particulars of the Aoheng, 'a very homogeneous ethnic group, which came into being in the course of the last two centuries from various ethnic constituents [Pin farming groups and hunting-gathering bands] in a complex social and cultural setting' (p. 162). Chapter IX, originally published in French in 1992, examines the relationships between 'traditional religion', ethnic identity and ethnogenesis; Chapter X, a surprisingly brief and succinct excursion into matters of gender and ritual, was given as a conference paper in 1982; Chapter XI, which dwells, again briefly, on a healing ritual involving pig sacrifice, was presented in French at a doctoral seminar in 1986; Chapter XII, from a report in French of 1983, says something briefly about various genres of Aoheng oral tradition; finally, there is a chapter from a paper delivered in French in 1983, on Aoheng geological taxonomies and beliefs to do with stone. With the exception of Chapter IX, the remaining brief papers might have been brought together in a consolidated piece, and might well have benefited from rather more substantial editing and some cross-referencing.
Overall perhaps the opportunity might have been taken to revise and update some of the chapters in the light of more recent writing and thinking. Sellato does this interestingly in his chapter on the social and economic changes affecting the Aoheng and the Punan Tabang, arguing more recently that the proposition that 'traditional cultures' are 'intrinsically, good "keepers" or managers of their natural environment' (p. 65) now needs considerable qualification. External and internal pressures on resources work to undermine conservation practices among indigenous peoples. However, in his overview of the Upper Mahakam area, which first appeared in print in 1980, he notes that the situation has changed significantly over the last twenty years as a result of improvements in transport and the effects of resettlement programmes. But he does not take up the issue of recent change and he uses population statistics for 1979. Furthermore, in his piece on relationship terminologies he indicates that the paper is 'outdated with regard to the published sources cited, the word lists available, the reconstruction of protoforms, and the classification of Borneo languages' (p. 101).
In my view the volume is valuable because it brings together Sellato's work over the last twenty years; obviously a must for Borneo and wider Southeast Asian specialists and of interest to anthropologists with concerns for minority cultures. For me Chapters V to IX are special contributions to the field. The book demonstrates Sellato's commitment to detailed ethnographic engagement, an informed ethnohistorical perspective, and wide ranging, and, in some cases, intriguing and daring comparative analysis. In comparative mode he sensibly warns against the dangers and consequences of a Sarawak-based view of Borneo cultures and argues for the importance of detailed ethnohistorical analysis. But the collection would have been even more valuable had Sellato at least provided postscripts to these papers, revising and contextualising them in relation to his own recent thinking and that of others.
Victor T King Centre for South-East Asian Studies University of Hull
FENELLA CANNELL. Power and Intimacy in the Christian Philippines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 109, 1999. 312 pp. ISBN 0 521 64622 7 (pb).
With a few notable exceptions there has never been much British anthropological interest in the Philippines; the field has been left largely to local Filipino and American scholars. It is therefore especially pleasing that we have now been presented with a meticulous, intricate and thought-provoking ethnographic study from a British Department of Anthropology. Furthermore, despite the fact that the Philippines is decidedly within Southeast Asia culturally, it has tended to be seen as rather marginal to mainstream discussions in the anthropology of the region on such matters as political culture, kinship and identity. Fenella Cannell's monograph helps remedy this sorry state of affairs. The book has been converted from a doctoral thesis submitted at the London School of Economics in 1991 under Maurice Bloch's supervision. Cannell undertook field research in the Bicol region of south-eastern Luzon, and specifically in the rural community of San Ignacio and the neighbouring market town of Calabanga, from March 1988 to December 1989 with a return visit in 1992. She then spent some five years, after completing her thesis, in developing her thinking on the subject with the assistance of an impressive array of advisors, colleagues and reviewers including Benedict Anderson, Alfred Gell, Peter Loizos, Vicente Rafael, James Siegel, John Wolff, Michael Lambek and Thomas Gibson (who also wrote an excellent LSE thesis on a Philippine community). The book has also been published in the Philippines by Ateneo de Manila Press.
Cannell focuses on a seemingly diverse range of cultural particulars: women's stories about arranged marriages primarily in relation to the maintenance of social rank positions; Bicolano spirit-mediumship and the negotiation of relations of power between mediums and spirits; the local Roman Catholic healing and devotional cult of the 'dead Christ' (Amang Hinulid); and finally the Miss Gay Naga City male transvestite beauty-contest, a popular festival held each year in the region's capital. She argues that these several cultural matters are interconnected through the attitudes which rural Bicolanos have to unequal power relations, specifically that the poor and disadvantaged - those who experience 'powerlessness' - can to some extent overcome or at least moderate hierarchy through the process of 'submission' and requests for 'pity'. These attitudes have been shaped in the context of dramatic changes in Bicolano culture as a result of Hispanisation conducted and implemented primarily through Catholic priestly orders, and then secular Americanisation from the turn of the 20th century. Philippine village communities, including those in Bicol, were incorporated variously into state-wide religious and educational institutions, a wider economic system through tax-farming and forced delivery of produce and labour and then commercial agriculture, and a politico-administrative apparatus which depended on the employment of local leaders as intermediaries between the state and ordinary people. As a result of these changes Cannell notes that 'lowland culture was for many years, and often still is, depicted as broken, contentless and insubstantial' (p. 6). This perceived absence of an authentic culture and the negative evaluation of Philippine society found its most direct expression in American post-war functionalist and modernisation literature; lowland cultural values, social organisation and economic attitudes were seen to be in some way inadequate and inappropriate to the task of modernising and developing the country, though it should be said that this particular assessment of Third World potentialities by Western social scientists was not peculiar to the lowland Philippines. Instead Cannell uncovers a rich repertoire of Bicolano religious and secular life expressed in performance and narrative by a people who are 'energetic, resourceful, frequently given to ironic joking about their situation, and capable of a complex range of different kinds of verbal persuasion' (p. 227).
Cannell's analysis draws on the work of Benedict Anderson on the Javanese idea of power and William Henry Scott's identification of the dynamic, fluid and open character of social rank and debt-bondage in Philippine lowland society. The notions of potency and the relational character of power, and of reciprocity, mobility and tension in hierarchical systems were then taken up in Reynaldo Ileto's study of Philippine millenarian movements in his Pasyon and Revolution (1979) and Vicente Rafael's examination of the process of early Spanish religious conversion in Contracting Colonialism (1988), which together demonstrate such processes as the inversion and reinterpretation of relations of social inequality, as well as their ambiguity. Cannell draws on their work - she is especially fulsome in her praise of Rafael's book in concluding that 'Bicolanos construct power relationally through idioms of speech, especially those which elaborate on the varying possible positions of power of two persons in conversation with each other, and idioms of emotion, such as pity, oppression and love' (p. 12). Thus, she argues, Bicolanos subtly alter the character of power and hierarchy, softening it and rendering it more 'equal' and reciprocal. In this process relations of inequality are more than simply political and economic exchanges but are also represented and evaluated culturally in terms of such attitudes, experiences and feelings as shame, dignity, love and pity. It is in this cultural realm that power and inequality are negotiated and can thereby be re-evaluated and re-positioned because 'human value is not entirely measurable by wealth' (p. 24).
In her analysis of the ways in which diverse encounters and interactions are represented, the connecting thread is power and its mutability. A couple's experience of forced marriage moves from 'distance and profound inequality of power, towards gradually increased equality and intimacy' (p. 25), and a woman in an act of obedience and reluctant submission brings other parties to the marriage (her husband and parents) into a relationship of obligation and debt which 'converts into a kind of power' (p. 75). A spirit medium, in securing the support of familiar spirits, is 'simultaneously becoming consumed by them in a form of debt-bondage' (p. 25); spirits then 'enslave' healers and feel 'pity' for their oppressed and difficult lives (p. 89), but they enter into a relationship of intimacy, kinship and mutual support with them. The miracle-working cult of the 'Christ laid out in death' demonstrates the ways in which Bicolanos have 'resisted some of the implications of Christian conversion and the economy of salvation' (p.26), particularly the emphasis on heaven, hell, purgatory, sin and penance, and the attempts to draw close to, identify with and pity Christ whilst seeking his assistance and power of healing. Finally, in their relations with the icons of a distant-and- powerful former colonial power America Bicolano performers through the agency of 'Americanised' female and male transvestite beauty contests, as well as their general preoccupation with 'beautification', translate the distant into the close and intimate through imitation; contests provided an arena for 'feminised mediation' of an 'American-derived notion of glamour which suggests the power and elite cultural codes of the Philippines' colonisers' (p. 225).
Cannell succeeds generally in demonstrating the ways in which seemingly diverse discursive practices can be brought into relationship with each other through the notion of the relative, ambiguous and transformative nature of power. She convinces me that much can be learned about Philippine culture by locating it firmly within the Southeast Asian anthropological literature on power, self and personhood (within which Java looms large), and the emerging literature on 'representations of encounters with others, especially powerful others' (p. 228). Her study sits comfortably within the recent body of work of Anna Tsing, Mary Steedly, John Pemberton and Joel Kahn, among others, on Southeast Asian identities, gender constructions, cultural invention, alterity, and discourses of marginality and displacement, though for Cannell the Bicolanos give expression to their identity in terms of 'ambiguity, irony and irresolution' (p. 254).
The book is densely written, made denser by a PhD feel about it, with copious and in some cases extraordinarily lengthy footnotes. In fact there appear to be several books here jostling with each other for prominence. Cannell admits that she has not constructed 'a seamless and tightly joineried cultural product' (p. 228). Indeed it was not, she says, an exercise which held much interest or had much relevance for Bicolanos. The analysis of transvestite beauty contests, the briefest of the cultural case-studies, seems somewhat strained and less convincing than the excursions into marriage, spirit-mediumship and devotional cults. Nevertheless, there is much of interest here for the cultural anthropology of Southeast Asia and for anthropologists of a post-modernist persuasion interested in the varied cultural responses to modernity.
Victor T King University of Hull
LEO HOWE. Hinduism and Hierarchy in Bali. Oxford: James Currey and Santa Fe, School of American Research Press, World Anthropology Series, 2001. 228 pp. ISBN 0-85255-914-3 (pb), 0-85255-919-4 (hb).
On picking up this book one is tempted to say 'Not another anthropology book on Bali'. In comparison with other parts of Southeast Asia Bali is extraordinarily well represented in the anthropological literature. We are certainly not short of ethnographic presentations and analyses from such international figures as Clifford Geertz, Fredrik Barth, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, as well as detailed explorations of various aspects of Balinese behaviour, organisation, and values from, among others, Stephen Lansing, James Boon, Mark Hobart, Angela Hobart, Adrian Vickers, Philip McKean, Michel Picard, Carol Warren and Henk Schulte Nordholt. This is aside from the substantial corpus of Dutch ethnological work (Grader, Goris, Hooykaas, Korn, Swellengrebel come to mind) and of several members of the international glitterati who sojourned in Bali during the interwar years - Walter Spies, Beryl de Zoete, Jane Belo, Miguel Covarrubias, Colin McPhee and Katharane Mershon. In this literature we learn about everything from religion, dance, drama, art, psychology, political/ritual/social organisation, history and ethnohistory, tourism, identity, conflict, modernity and globalisation. Not only that but Bali-watchers and Balinese scholars and intellectuals have engaged in intense disputes and debates among themselves about the nature of Balinese society and culture and its future trajectories, and, in recent post-modernist mode, about the ways in which Bali has been represented in Western and 'Orientalist' scholarly discourse.
'Is there much more to say?' Clearly there is, and Leo Howe's detailed field research in Bali over some 25 years, with an ethnographic interlude in Northern Ireland in the 1980s, enables him to say it with authority. Some of the material in Chapters 3, 6 and 8 has appeared previously in rather different form, but the book brings to public attention for the first time accumulated field experience in various sites in south Bali from 1978 to 1997, including village communities in Gianyar, Tabanan, and Nusa Penida, and in the capital town, Den Pasar. As the title of the book indicates, its focus is on a subject which hitherto has been relatively neglected in research on Bali, and that is how hierarchical social relations, and more particularly the caste system, have worked and continue to work in post-colonial Bali, specifically with regard to religious, political and indeed economic change. This concern has required Howe to explore the historical dimensions of Balinese religion and traditions and the ways in which relations of status, power and class have responded to, been affected by and implicated in processes of 'identity formation, religious change and the Indonesian state's attempts at creating a national culture' (p. 16). A particularly significant contribution is the examination of the devotional cults of Sai Baba and Hare Krishna. But Howe also takes time to scrutinise and comment critically on, among others, Geertz's concept of the Balinese theatre state, Stanley Tambiah's concept of the Southeast Asian galactic polity, Guermonprez's notion of dual sovereignty, as well as Dumont's conceptualisation of caste and hierarchy in India.
Three themes intertwine in Howe's study: the genesis and development, or as Howe puts it 'invention', of an officially sanctioned version of Balinese Hinduism (agama Hindu) from the 1950s and 1960s with reference to the roots of Balinese religion in the ancient traditions (adat) of the Balinese and in the Hinduism of India. Part of this process of re-working Balinese religion with its concentration on doctrinal and scriptural matters, has been the emergence of new religious movements, including Hindu devotional cults, and increasing religious differentiation; secondly, the processes of delimiting and defining what it is to be Balinese in the context of a modernising Indonesian state which has appropriated, commoditised and promoted Balinese culture; and thirdly the political and ideological conflicts and struggles around the 'traditional', religiously legitimised, Dutch-restructured and -rigidified distinction between elites and commoners.
These themes must be seen in relation to the increasing self-realisation among the Balinese that rather than merely living their culture and straightforwardly defining themselves with reference to its essential attributes, they 'possess' it, and that it is something which requires reflection, debate, justification and criticism. The major overall orientation in the book is, therefore, that 'religion in Bali does not constitute a unitary field so much as an arena in which religious and political struggle is played out' (p. 6). Culture then is contested and provides the very ground over which and for which the Balinese are fighting. Howe notes that the other major contribution to the study of hierarchy in contemporary Bali is that by James Boon. But unlike Boon's study, undertaken some thirty years ago, Howe addresses 'the contested nature of hierarchy' (counter ideologies, commoner denunciations of the hierarchy, the politics of language use and caste, ritual and title inflation, and status competition) in the context of developments since the 1970s. His work draws on that of Boon, but more especially the wider Indonesian post-modernist, post-structuralist literature on the production of national culture, the formation of local ethnic identities, and the invention of tradition.
What is most welcome in Howe's study is the way in which he injects a dynamic quality into his examination of hierarchy - which is still a pervasive feature of modern Bali - and demonstrates through detailed case-studies how individuals and groups manoeuvre and contrive to sustain their ritual status or move up in the hierarchy by trying to convert new found wealth and influence into a higher caste position. Attempts by commoners to address or contest the traditional caste system have also been expressed in their formation of descent group associations campaigning for equal rights with the elite as well as their joining of relatively egalitarian religious movements. Howe therefore focuses on the historically contingent nature of hierarchy and equality. He also overcomes various conceptual and analytical problems posed by the relationships between Brahmana priests and Satria rulers and the wider relations between the sacred and the secular by arguing that there are simultaneously two models of socio-political and religious organisation at work in Bali, a hierarchical model with the Brahmin at the top, and a model based on centrality with the king as its focus.
In what is a relatively succinct and condensed monograph Howe has provided us with a masterpiece of ethnography and historical analysis and has made an especially significant contribution not only to scholarship on Bali but more widely in anthropology. He presents a convincing and well argued case based on detailed empirical material and an admirable command of the relevant literature. The World Anthropology series has produced undeniably high quality contributions, though it is a pity that, in what is a generally well edited and presented book in the series, most of the very interesting black-and-white illustrations appear decidedly murky.
Victor T King Centre for South-East Asian Studies University of Hull
JAMES T SIEGEL. The Rope of God. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000. 2nd ed. (new preface and two additional chapters). 422 pp. ISBN 0-472-08682-0 (pb).
First published in 1969, Siegel's The Rope of God has become a classic in the study of socio-economic and religious change among a major Muslim population of island Southeast Asia and in that regard it has made a substantial and lasting contribution to Indonesian ethnography. It anticipated the later work of American cultural anthropologists on the ways in which Dutch colonialism constituted or constructed specific ethnicities and social forms, and on the responses of dominated populations to the colonial state, and subsequently to the Indonesian state and its nation-building projects. It is therefore especially welcome to have a new edition of Siegel's perceptive and subtle analysis of the Acehnese of northern Sumatra along with the author's recent prefaced thoughts on his 1969 study, and with two additional chapters, one already published as a paper in the journal Glyph on Acehnese curing rites and domestic politics in 1978, and the other, newly written in 1999, which focuses, among other things, on Acehnese aspirations for self-determination through the Movement for an Independent Aceh founded in 1976.
For those students of Indonesian culture and history and Southeast Asian Islam Siegel's authoritative study of Aceh, based on field research in 1962 during the last years of Sukarno's Guided Democracy, with a revisit in 1969 following the establishment of Suharto's New Order, presented a provocative view of structure and process in Acehnese society and religion, particularly with reference to gender relations, and the relationships between social forms and religious reformist ideology and practice. In the first edition Siegel acknowledged the several influences on his work of Clifford Geertz, Benedict Anderson and Victor Turner. His main focus of attention comprised the tensions and interactions between social statuses and roles and 'interior experience' (p. 2), or more broadly between the world and human nature, based on the concepts of akal (reason; the faculty by which one knows God's commands) and hawa nafsu (animality; spontaneity).
Siegel's study drew its inspiration from an earlier classic book on the Acehnese, published in 1906 in two volumes, by the noted Dutch Islamicist, Christian Snouck Hurgronje. Snouck Hurgronje had been sent to Aceh by the Dutch colonial government to advise it how best to counter Acehnese resistance and establish a stable administration in the province, after Dutch-Acehnese hostilities broke out in 1873. One of the fascinations of Aceh is its turbulent history, and Siegel was concerned to explore and explain this restless tradition of resistance and rebellion against the state. He argued contrary to Snouck Hurgronje that the uleebelang ('traditional' or 'customary chieftains') were not feudal lords or officers of the state suffering in competition and rivalry with Muslim reformist teachers (ulama) who were bent on undermining traditional custom (adat) and wresting power from secular officials. Rather, according to Siegel, the position of the uleebeleng depended not on control over peasants and land but over markets and trade in such products as pepper, areca nut, coconut and rice (the uleebelang were in turn financed mainly by Chinese merchants based in Penang). Siegel proposed that the chieftains were largely independent of Acehnese peasant society and the sultanate, whilst the ulama, though having their roots in the village (associated directly with the dominant position of women in the family) had moved beyond village society within the structure of the religious schools (pesantren) where they became part of a male community of Muslims. Subsequently the Dutch, following the pacification of the Acehnese changed this structure and undermined the position of the chieftains, transforming them into dependants of the colonial state.
Siegel's model of traditional Acehnese society as comprising four separate, encapsulated sectors or groups comprising chieftains (and clients), peasants, the sultan (and his retainers), and religious scholars presented an intriguing and insightful perspective on socio-religious organisation. For Siegel these groups did not form a coherent, vertically integrated whole, and each had its own model of society. However, what seemed to bridge these separate institutional complexes was the vision of the Islamic teachers who saw Muslim men in particular as united and interconnected by the 'rope of God'. The social perspective of the ulama therefore united the faithful on the basis of a perceived general human nature rooted in Islam. Siegel's study, with the valuable addition of his 1999 essay on recent developments within Aceh, is richly textured and historically informed, though his view of Acehnese society as comprising encapsulated groups seems to understate the interconnections between institutions, and is reminiscent in some respects of Geertz's representation of Javanese religion, divided into socially and culturally separate sub-types. What is more the additional 1978 essay on curing and domestic politics, despite Siegel's claims for its relevance, seems to me to sit uneasily in this volume and it would have been of much greater value to have had a more detailed exploration of Acehnese identity and their struggles against Suharto's New Order government. Nevertheless, I am certain that all teachers of Southeast Asian anthropology will welcome this new edition. It retains its ethnographic and analytical value, it now relates the Aceh of the 1960s to the Aceh of the 1990s, and in its detailed and sensitive depiction of Acehnese society, culture and history it has not been surpassed.
Victor T King Centre for South-East Asian Studies University of Hull
PETER PELS and OSCAR SALEMINK (eds.) Colonial Subjects. Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999. 364 pp. ISBN 0-472-11017-9.
Ever since Talal Asad's pathbreaking and controversial edited volume Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1973), there has been a growing interest in the relationships between anthropology and colonialism, and the ways in which Western observers, in a colonial context, apprehended, described, constructed and transformed other cultures. This emerging reflexive post-colonial literature on the anthropology of history and the colonial histories of anthropology has also been informed in particular by Edward Said's work on 'Orientalism' and the representation of the colonised, and by the textual analysis of anthropological monographs (specifically the consideration of the contexts, styles and politics of 'writing culture') of, among others, James Clifford, George Marcus, Dan Sperber and Clifford Geertz. These interests come together in a mature form in the current edited volume by Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink, who themselves have been in vigorous pursuit of 'colonial subjects'during the past decade.
We might wonder whether there is room for another volume on colonial anthropologies and the historical textualisation and context-ualisation of ethnographic practice, given the considerable amount of recent attention devoted to the colonial histories of anthropology, the consequences for anthropological theory and practice of the needs and interests of colonial governance, and the contribution of anthropology and ethnology to colonial discourses about those who were conquered, pacified, governed, and changed by the agents of Western capitalism and modernity (the editors refer to the important volumes by Nicholas Dirks, Nicholas Thomas, Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler, and George Stocking in this regard). Having read and re-read Pels's and Salemink's excellent collection I believe there is, but this view requires some qualification. The editors have succeeded in bringing together a set of high quality, well crafted and thought-provoking papers. There is very little unevenness in this book; all the papers deserve to be there, and they each bring something different and informative to the overall enterprise. However, many of the ideas and materials have already been presented elsewhere or comprise reworking, revision and extension, though in some cases substantial, of earlier publications which go back as far as the mid-1980s, but principally to the mid-1990s. The contribution of the volume is that we now have a handy set of closely interrelated papers which have been given added theoretical and thematic coherence by the editors' very detailed introduction and strong editorial guidance. It is abundantly clear that Pels and Salemink knew precisely the direction in which they wished to move and some of the chapters do demonstrate further beneficial and mature reflection on previously published work.
We are told that the book is the result of a process which began at the Amsterdam School for Social Scientific Research in 1992 where the two editors were research students. In 1993 they organised a seminar on 'Colonial Ethnographies'; these papers along with others then appeared as a special issue of History and Anthropology in 1994 under the same title as the seminar. The editors then felt that certain ideas and issues merited further elaboration and dissemination, and for that reason this present volume was prepared. Two papers had appeared in the special issue and are reprinted in slightly modified form: Patrick Wolfe's 'White Man's Flour' in which the author examines Spencer's and Gillen's ethnographies of aboriginal Central Australia in the political-economic context of white settler colonisation; and Henk Schulte Nordholt's 'The Making of Traditional Bali', which focuses on the Dutch construction of a unique and enduring Hindu Balinese society, culture and identity in relation to the colonial policy of protecting Bali from the 'evil influences of nationalism, Islam, Christianity, and Western “decadence”' (p. 267). Schulte Nordholt's chapter is in turn a development of a preliminary attempt on the same theme published in 1986 in the Comparative Asian Studies Programme series of Erasmus University, Rotterdam. There is also Curtis Hinsley's contribution 'Hopi Snakes, Zuni Corn' (on the ways in which the ethnographies of John Bourke and Frank Cushing on the Indians of the American Southwest presented them as timeless, immutable and unchanging), which was first delivered at the 1993 seminar.
What is more Gloria Raheja's chapter 'The Illusion of Consent', which considers oral folklore in relation to Indian caste ideology as it was recorded and re-presented in colonial documents to convey an image of native consensus and harmony, is an extended version of a paper published in American Ethnologist in 1996.
Three further chapters are substantial revisions and elaborations of earlier published work: William Pietz's 'The Fetish of Civilization 'continues 'a line of enquiry begun in two earlier essays' (p. 53) published in Res in 1995 and 1997 on the transformations in European interpretations and perceptions of African fetishism from their earlier situation in hybrid intercultural trading relationships in coastal West Africa to their later location in colonial rule as representing the essence of African society and culture in contrast to that of Western civilisation. Nicholas Dirks's chapter 'The Crimes of Colonialism' has been significantly revised and changed from an earlier version published in an edited volume Culture/Contexture published in 1985. Dirks focuses on Edgar Thurston's Ethnographic Notes in Southern India (1906) and his seven-volume work, The Castes and Tribes of Southern India (1907), and draws attention to the intimate inter-relationships between what was recorded in colonial ethnographies - in this case the criminal characteristics of certain castes - and the colonial need to classify, control and police those governed, as well as the interest of officials in such cultural practices as hookswinging, slavery and torture which they wished to suppress. Finally, Lyn Schumaker's chapter 'Constructing Racial Landscapes' in which she examines the different views of the 'field' (that is, 'the physical space in which they carried out their work') of anthropologists, their African research assistants and colonial administrators in late colonial Northern Rhodesia is also a substantial reworking of earlier materials.
We are told that only three chapters have been especially written for the volume and these by the editors; the long, closely argued editorial introduction by Peter Pels and Oscar Salemink where they introduce the concepts of 'colonial subjects' (to refer to the observers, observed, and 'the rhetorical commonplaces' of colonial discourse), 'fetishism', the 'locations' of ethnographic practice as 'process', and the contextualisation of the texts of 'ethnographic traditions' (the introduction is singled out for special praise in Talal Asad's general commendation on the dust-jacket); Peter Pels's 'The Rise and Fall of the Indian Aborigines' in which we are given some appreciation of the ideas of 'aboriginality' of Brian Houghton Hodgson, an eminent scholar of the 'aboriginal tribes 'of Nepal and India, and George Campbell who, in the later 1860s, was 'the leading ethnologist of the Asiatic Society of Bengal' (p. 84), though this chapter is an extensively revised and enlarged version of a piece published in the Yearbook of the International Institute for Asian Studies in 1994; and finally Oscar Salemink's 'Ethnography as Martial Art' in which he traces the influence on the perceptions of French ethnography of local Indochinese populations in situations of colonial struggle and military conflict. Salemink notes that his contribution presents a new argument, though it is based partly on materials published in the edited volume Imperial Policy and South East Asian Nationalism in 1995. Salemink traces the contexts and processes by which a highland Montagnard identity and culture were constructed by French observers, many of them military men.
One of the central issues which the editors wish to address is by no means a new one - it is to question the 'distinction between academic anthropology and other ethnographic practices and thereby to unsettle the comfortable boundary of professionalism that this distinction maintains around the former' (p. 1). They also wish to argue that 'the image of a “pure” academic anthropology was partly constituted in a direct struggle with nonacademic ethnographic traditions that largely emerged from colonial practice' (p. 7). It is unlikely that professional anthropologists need any more unsettling; the subject's practices within colonialism have been examined in detail during the past two decades or so, and I doubt that most anthropologists would experience deep anxiety about the fuzziness of the boundaries between anthropology and other activities which feed into and off anthropology, or between theory and application. However, where the volume does make a contribution is in the consolidated and detailed examination of the occurrence and interpretations of specific social institutions and cultural particulars which have become 'anthropological commonplaces' but which are located in the writings of colonial observers. What the several papers also do most successfully is to address these matters in the context of the practical relations between colonisers and colonised ('the ethnographic occasion') and to demonstrate how this colonial relationship was translated into the essentialised objects and end-results of anthropological endeavour and the theories and methods of academic anthropology deployed in the construction and constitution of 'the other'.
The volume manages to cover a relatively broad range of colonial experiences - British, Dutch, French, American and Australian - in Africa, India, the American Southwest, Vietnam, Bali, and Australia - and different occasions of colonial encounter (military engagement, administration, missionary endeavour, and settler relations), as well as different subjects of investigation important for colonial intelligence (human sacrifice, fetishism, slavery, virgin birth, caste, village community, property ownership and land occupancy, oral folklore, race, ethnicity and tribalism). The several chapters demonstrate how particular identities, ethnic categories and cultures have been characterised and defined, and how traditions have been constructed and fixed in the context of colonial engagement. In this regard the contributions by Schulte Nordholt on Bali, Salemink on the 'Montagnards' of the Central Highlands of Vietnam, and Raheja on Indian caste are especially worthy of attention. Of more general theoretical interest are Dirks's provocative treatment of the 'crimes of colonialism' and the 'perversity of colonial anthropology' (p. 159), and Pietz's meticulous analysis of the changing meanings of African fetishism.
This volume should certainly prove to be of enduring value for those of us interested in the colonial histories of anthropology and the contexts and occurrences within which certain kinds of ethnographic practices and issues emerged and became incorporated into academic anthropology. There is a judicious mix of reflexive theorising and case materials of particular colonial encounters.
Victor T King Centre for South-East Asian Studies University of Hull
PARIMAL
GHOSH. Brave Men of the Hills. Resistance and
Rebellion in Burma, 1825-1932. London: C Hurst & Co.,
2000. 185 pp. ISBN 1-85065-407-7 (hb £35)
Review below by Dr Mya Than, Institute of Security and International Studies,
Chulalongkorn University
This book is a study of two different types of
uprisings: (a) the nineteenth century resistance which followed the
three wars of conquest - 1825, 1852 and 1885 and (b) the
revolt led by Saya San in 1930-32. Many British scholars and
colonial officers approached the uprisings in the colonial period in
terms of a ' pacification' process . . . in which the critical
role was ascribed to the colonial power, a process which ended with
the establishment of the colonial order, defeating anarchy and
restoring peace'. They paid little attention to true causes and
nature of resistance put up by the people. Some even ignored
the series of resistance movements during the nineteenth century.
Modern scholars such as Michael Adas, James Scott, Emmanuel
Sarkisyanz, etc. have pointed out economic, social, religious and
moral aspects of peasantry as root causes of the uprisings,
particularly, the Saya San-led revolt in 1930-32. Only one British
scholar (Patricia Herbert) and a few Burmese scholars have rightly
attributed the political momentum built up during the 1920s at the
grassroot level as a cause for the Saya San anti-British movement.
Unlike other historians and scholars, Ghosh has
tried to explore 'the actual process whereby peasant militancy was
first generated and then crystallised into an open challenge to the
colonial state' throughout the colonial period stretching from the
first Anglo-Burmese War to 1930-32. In short, the author, has
successfully filled the gap left or ignored by most previous
scholars by digging in a comprehensive way at the nature and root
causes of the resistance movements throughout the colonial period.
This book is divided into four chapters
excluding the introduction and conclusion. The first three chapters
are devoted to the generation of peasant militancy from the
beginning of colonial rule in Lower Burma to the nineteenth century
resistance movements when peasant militancy crystallised and
'gradually but surely subsided'. In
Chapter 1, the author briefly discusses the decentralised nature of
the state structure of the pre-British Burma to the period after the
Second Anglo-Burmese War when the locality was politically
autonomous and economically self-sufficient. This state-formation
structure was complemented by the similar structure of the Buddhist
Sangha (domain of monks) which played an important role in
the daily life of Burmese Buddhists as it earned universal
respect. This chapter gives the reader a brief background on
'the dynamics of resistance as it
unfolded'. Chapter 2 describes the resistance in Upper
Burma following the Third Anglo-Burmese War and the final annexation
of the country. As the Burmese royal government tried to
centralise its effectively decentralised administration in order to
squeeze economic surplus which it had neglected to some extent, the
resultant crisis led to 'the outbreak of lawlessness and even
rebellions by leaders in the locality who had been left alone, and
who now resented this sudden assertion of statist authority'. The
author concluded that this anarchic situation turned into
anti-colonial resistance after the British waded into the
unrest. Along with the annexation of the country,
commercial agriculture was introduced and this created a situation
where most peasants particularly in Lower Burma suffered
indebtedness, land loss, and social instability as the country
entered into the twentieth century. This situation, in turn, changed
the social values such as respect for orderly life into 'an
admiration for [the] outlaw, and then for [the] rebellious'.
At the same time, there was the nationalist and anti-colonialist
political movement led by the YMBA (Young Men's Buddhist
Association), which later changed its name to GCBA (General Council
of Burmese Association). This movement gave birth to village-level
associations, Wunthanu Athin, which fomented political
agitation to promote militancy. Chapter 3 discusses these changes in the
political, economic and social life of the Burmese after the
annexation of Upper Burma which gave ground for the outbreak of the
1930-32 Saya San revolt. The
Saya San revolt is discussed in Chapter 4 - how gradually the
movement was organised, battles were fought and the root causes of
the revolt. The reasons behind the revolt were substantially due to
the deteriorating rural socio-economic conditions owing to the
introduction of commercial agriculture and the gradual build up of
peasant militancy. More importantly, Ghosh refutes the views of some
scholars that Saya San's revolt was 'pre-modern' with its use of
magic and religious practices. The author states, 'The rebels
fighting the colonial state had to take into account the transition
from the days of the autonomous, self-sufficient locality to those
of the pan-Burmese centralised formation. In that sense, Saya
San's was certainly a modern revolt' (p. 15). However, Saya
San did not try to wish away the traditional practice mainly because
his followers were poorly educated and 'pre-modern' from the
hills. Moreover, Saya San's rebellion suggests that it was
more than the personality of the leader and 'what mattered was a
powerful conjunction of circumstances, both economic and
political'. All
four chapters explain to the reader that the causes, forms, methods,
and intensity of revolts and resistance movements depend on time and
space. For example, the Tenasserim and Arakan areas did not have the
same state structure, economic and social impact of colonisation
after the First War and therefore, their 'revolts' and 'resistance
movement' were different. Revolts and resistance in Lower and Upper
Burma were dissimilar during the course of three wars. While
Lower Burma was involved in anti-British movements, Upper Burma was
engaged in resistance against the Burmese kings particularly when
the centre was weak because of power struggles and
repression. Ghosh successfully refutes the concept that Saya San's
movement was 'pre-modern' and that the personality of the leader
played a decisive role by pointing out that the root causes were the
political momentum (including the role of the Sangha) and
deterioration of economic and social stability during the period of
study. However, the author has overlooked an important
point -- that the press freedom at the time of Saya San's revolt
(unfortunately absent in Myanmar today) played a significant role in
creating political militancy. One
other point worth noting is the usage of names. Ghosh took the easy
option as admitted in the introduction by adhering to spellings in
the documents mostly prepared by British colonial officers.
But by doing so he has also subscribed if unwittingly to the
colonial attitude towards Burmese patriots. For example, when the
Burmese patriotic leader U Myat Htun appeared in court he was
addressed as 'nga Myat Htun'. Nga is the term used for
criminals and clearly meant to insult patriots widely respected by
the people. It
would also have been helpful for the reader if discourses on terms
such as 'revolt' and 'resistance' were included in the introduction
rather than in the concluding section. The
above points notwithstanding, the book is a valuable contribution to
the literature on the history of colonial Burma/Myanmar in general,
and the accounts of the Saya San movement in particular. The author
should be congratulated for this well-documented important research
conducted at various national libraries and archives in India and
the India Office Library in London. KATHRYN ROBINSON & SHARON BESSELL, eds. Women in Indonesia: Gender, Equity
and Development. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies, 2002. 280 pp. ISBN 981-230-159-3 (hb S$64.90/US$39.90);
981-230-158-5 (pb S$39.90/US$24.90). Email: [email protected] Review below by Prof VT King, Centre for South-East Asian Studies, University of
Hull This is the ninth volume in the Indonesia
Assessment Series. It is based on the annual, thematically focused
Indonesia Update conference, organised by the Indonesia Project and
the Department of Political and Social Change in the Research School
of Pacific and Asian Studies at The Australian National University
and funded primarily by the Australian Agency for International
Development (AusAID). Most of the contributors to the volume are
Australian and Indonesian academics, researchers, activists, civil
servants, and development practitioners. The Indonesian Ambassador
to Australia, H.E. Mr Sudjadnan Parnohadiningrat, who opened the
conference, also provides a prologue to the volume. The theme of the
relationship between gender and development is a topical one in
current development discourse. It has a special importance in
post-Soeharto Indonesia, given its recent political and economic
crises and the consequences for female livelihoods and the
well-being of the family, the violence which women suffered at the
hands of rioters in the streets of Jakarta, Medan, Solo, Palembang
and Surabaya in May 1998, and the coming to power on 23 July 2001 of
the country's first woman president, Megawati Sukarnoputri.
The
volume, though conscientiously edited, reads rather like conference
proceedings, with a mix of detailed analyses, descriptive updates,
broad overviews, and political and economic commentaries. The
contributions range over Megawati's and Abdurrahman Wahid's
presidencies, women in public life, feminism, women's activism
and grassroots movements, gay and lesbian cultural worlds, the
contributions of women artists and writers, women and the labour
market, international female migration, changing household dynamics,
family planning, women in development projects, and Islam and
the changing status of women. This pot pourri is the book's strength
and weakness. It provides a most valuable compilation of recent data
and some current thinking on the positions and roles of women in
present-day Indonesia, but it tends to lack focus and integration.
Although the editorial introduction is useful as a summary of the
volume's contents it does not really link the main issues and
arguments together, and the concluding sentence of the introduction
might have provided the means to do this when Robinson and Bessell
state that '[t]he rethinking of relations between men and women is
at the very heart of the changes being pursued under the
democratisation agenda of reformasi' (p. 12). The tensions, open
conflicts and contradictions generated by the complex processes of
political, economic and cultural change in post-Soeharto Indonesia
would seem to require a greater degree of contemplation and
analysis. Overall the volume does not carry forward to any
extent - conceptually at least - the study of gender relations
in the region, nor are some of the chapters directly to do with
gender issues as I understand them. But perhaps I am asking for
something which the editors did not
intend. Several papers consider the significance of the accession to
the presidential office of Megawati for changing gender relations
and the various movements struggling on behalf of women's
rights. The conclusions are mixed. Krishna Sen's chapter is probably
one of the most interesting in the volume. She examines Megawati's
presidency through Indonesian media representations (the 'Mega
issue'). The main media focus has been the
president's alleged shortcomings, which tend to be
explained in terms of a 'traditionally' gendered view of Indonesian
women. Megawati lacks education, sophistication, public profile and
presence and she has been symbolically associated with the New Order
ideological representation of women as faithful and devoted mothers,
wives and housewives ('the ideal image of the domesticated woman'
(p. 3).
However, there has been more to
Megawati's presidency than her assumed lack of male attributes, and
this in the context of immense problems of government and private
debt, rural and urban poverty, communal violence, secessionist
struggles, and continuing political and bureaucratic corruption and
patrimonialism. Robinson and Bessell remark, Megawati is 'not .
. . known to be an activist on gender issues' (p. 3), nor has there
been a significant increase in the number of women holding positions
of power and influence within government, the legislature and the
senior bureaucracy (see the chapters by Mayling Oey-Gardiner and
Soedarti Surbakti). And yet, as Krishna Sen indicates, in her
observations on the 'dissonance' between the ideals of democracy
espoused by reformist intellectuals and the politics of the street,
Megawati is 'both the symbolic vehicle (as Sukarno's daughter) and
the product (as the winner of the largest number of votes) of mass
politics' (p. 25; Ed Aspinall in his piece on Abdurrahman Wahid also
dwells in part on the need to transcend 'the binary opposition of
New Order past and idealised democratic future', p. 39).
Aside from the chapters which sketch out the
recent Indonesian political scene, the volume also
provides some useful material on the Indonesian economy
since the 'total crisis' of 1998. Mari Pangestu gives us a
number-crunching economic overview, liberally sprinkled with graphs,
tables and charts, and Mohammad Sadli puts an all-too-brief gender
gloss on recent economic changes. There is considerable
attention to state-directed institutional developments on behalf of
women in the chapters by Khofifah Indar Parawansa and Soedarti
Surbakti, women's groups (Kajian Wanita, the Convention Watch
Working Group and the Stepping Stones project) by Saparinah Sadli,
formal and informal (Muslim) grassroots movements by Lies Marcoes,
women's activism against violence in South Sulawesi by Zohra Baso
and Nurul Ilmi Idrus, and gender-sensitive community development
(Ria Gondowarsito). There is also a more analytical piece by Tom
Boellstorff on the public emergence, as part of debates about
national culture and modernity, of gay and lesbian
perspectives. One
of the major contradictions which surfaces in and across several
chapters is between the uncertainties, difficulties and violence
which women have experienced since 1998 and the increasing evidence
of activism on behalf of women, on 'change and innovation in art
from a women's perspective' (p. 113, Carla Bianpoen) and the 'freer
representation of [female] sexuality in fiction' (p. 131, Barbara
Hatley). The government has devolved various public responsibilities
down to the district level with, at least on the surface, increased
local democracy, but this has led, in certain regions, to the
resurgence of local institutions, including syariah law, and the
reassertion of 'discriminatory measures against women contained in
provincial regulations' (p. 179, Edriana Noerdin). The
economic crisis and changing economic pressures have also had
contradictory effects. There has been an increase in unemployment,
though Lisa Cameron indicates that the impact on the formal sector
in which male labour dominates was more profound, and that women,
'concentrated in agriculture, trade and the services sector . . .
were less severely affected' (p. 147). However, 'women
experience much higher underemployment than men' (p. 149) and the
demands on their income-earning capacities in the informal sector
have also intensified with the problems occasioned by male
unemployment. In an interesting chapter on international female
labour migration, Graeme Hugo argues that 'while for many women
working abroad is a negative and disempowering experience' (p. 158)
and they 'simply exchange one patriarchal structure (in their home
village) for another in the destination country' (p. 175), 'others
gain from it' and overseas contract employment can bring
financial benefits to their families (p. 158).
On
the positive side opportunities have opened up for women in
political, social and cultural movements and their voices, which
remained muted in New Order Indonesia, are now being increasingly
heard. Young women, though not all of them, have also enjoyed rising
educational levels, greater control over the decision to marry, and
increasing labour participation rates (chapter by Gavin Jones), and
women generally have had greater access to primary health care and
family planning services (Terence Hull and Sri Moertiningsih
Adioetomo). Nevertheless, progress has been patchy and changes
highly contradictory so that it is difficult to conclude that the
status of women has improved uniformly in the last few years despite
increased democratisation, the loosening of 'New Order ideological
constructs' and stereotypes (p. 142), and the introduction or
ratification of legislation which recognises, protects and enhances
the rights of women. CJW-L WEE, ed. Local Cultures and the 'New Asia'. The
State, Culture and Capitalism in Southeast Asia.
Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2002. 245
pp. ISBN 981-230-123-2 (hb S$73.90/US$49.90); 981-230-122-4 (pb
S$39.90/US$25.90). Email: [email protected]
Review below by Prof VT King, University of Hull Most of the contributions to this volume are
revised versions of papers delivered at a workshop on 'Embedding
Capitalism in Newer Asian Contexts: Authority Structures and Local
Cultures and Identities in Southeast Asia' held at the Institute of
Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore in March 1999. These comprise
the chapters by Kamal Malhotra, Edilberto C de Jesus, Mark T Berger,
Syed Farid Alatas, CJW-L Wee and Paritta Chalermpow Koanantakool.
The countries covered include Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia,
Singapore and the Philippines; there is nothing much on mainland
Southeast Asia with the exception of Thailand, and, as Wee
indicates, the important issue of overseas Chinese identity and
culture in the context of Southeast Asian capitalism is not
addressed (pp. 15-16). Familiar themes
emerge in what amounts to a further post-modern
exploration into the processes and consequences of globalisation,
the interaction between 'local cultures' and the culture of
international capitalism, and the respective roles of the state and
local communities in this encounter. An important focus of the
volume is the role and position of values - and specifically 'Asian
values' including Confucianism and Islam - in economic development,
and the diversity of cultural responses to modernity. Farid Alatas's
chapter 4 addresses in a direct, succinct and interesting way the
Weber thesis and the state-generated Asian values debate, and throws
some light on the complex interrelationships between religion and
economic development. The volume's general interest in the relations
between the state and the economy also provides an opportunity to
revisit the World Bank's 1993 report, The East Asian Miracle,
but more might have usefully been said about the Asian economic
crisis of the late 1990s. Wee, in his introductory statement on local
cultures and economic development in Southeast Asia, helpfully
orients us to the key concern of the volume, and that is the ways in
which, in Robert Hefner's terms, capitalism becomes culturally
'embedded' in non-Western, and in this case, 'newer Asian contexts'.
Wee also indicates that the activities of the state in economic
development in the region are diverse and complex, but that of
necessity the state has not only had to become involved in the
planning and mobilisation of domestic and international capital and
material resources but also in the 're-tooling' and 're-thinking' of
institutions, values, meanings and practices 'for the purposes of
development'. The agents of capital and the representatives of
the state therefore 'work through the particularities of local
cultures and traditions, and in the process re-constitute them into
a form more amenable to the culture of transnational capital' (p.
8). However, for those of us familiar with Hobsbawm's and
Ranger's 'invention of tradition' thesis and its subsequent
iterations, local people are also able flexibly and creatively to
manoeuvre within processes of globalisation, sometimes absorbing
non-local values and practices, sometimes adapting and re-directing
them, and at other times resisting and rejecting them. These
responses are flexible and diverse, and the contributors to the
volume work with a concept of culture (non-essentialist,
non-reductionist, contingent, variable, contested, relational,
constantly created and re-created) which is now generally accepted
in the post-modern literature. Other significant concerns surface in
the volume, including predictably comments on Huntington's 'clash of
civilisations', Anderson's 'imagined communities' and Arjun
Appadurai's work on the cultural dimensions of
globalisation. Kamal Malhotra's general, rather mechanical, policy-oriented
chapter introduces us to a typology of the different forms of
state economic intervention and regulation in Southeast Asia
(the Anglo-American-style, market-driven capitalist state
[exemplified by the Philippines and some aspects of the Thai
state]; the state-led and controlled, 'strong' capitalist
state [Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and some aspects of the Thai
state]; and the centrally planned 'socialist' or 'communist' state
[Lao PDR, Vietnam, Cambodia, Vietnam and Myanmar]), and the
uneven performance of states in meeting their core responsibilities
in the provision of essential public services and infrastructure. He
focuses on the relationship between neo-liberal values and Asian
cultural values, and argues that 'social values and cultural norms
play a pivotal role in determining the quality of . . . governance'
(p. 37). Mark Berger, in a chapter which links rather nicely
with Malhotra's, demonstrates in what ways states in Southeast Asia
responded to neo-liberal perspectives on Asian capitalism especially
in the context of the Cold War. He provides a concise historical
overview of the expansion of capitalism in the region under
'authoritarian developmentalism' as it was shaped and directed
by American Cold War concerns. To illustrate his argument he
focuses on the experience of the 'strong states' of South Korea and
Indonesia under the umbrella of American policy to buttress the
expansion of Asian communism.
The more country-specific chapters comprise those by De
Jesus, Wee, Goh, Koanatakool and Barker. De Jesus examines the
character of the Philippine state and its fitful attempts to
engineer economic development as an example of
Malhotra's Anglo-American style of capitalist state. For De
Jesus the Philippines is a 'weak state' which has 'muddled through',
principally because of the problems occasioned by the selective
accommodation of Western values and practices (Catholicism,
democracy, English-medium education, and capitalism) and the
creation by the Spanish and Americans of a state apparatus which was
bequeathed to a predatory landed oligarchy (or 'an anarchy of
families', p. 62). Wee shows how the Singaporean elite
have managed, used and transformed culture and ethnicity in order to
sustain the city state's international competitiveness. In this
there has been a move from earlier policies to promote an ethnically
neutral, national, modernised culture congruent with the development
of capitalism to the focus on distinctive Asian values and the
creation of specific racial identities (Chinese, Malay, Indian and
Other). Goh Beng Lan continues her work on the Malaysian city of
Penang. She concentrates on the ways in which local communities
create and re-create cultural identities in their response to
modernisation and in their attempts to negotiate and contest urban
landscapes. The opportunities for invention and negotiation have
also been enhanced with the Malaysian government's more recent
attempts to redefine national identity and sub-national, especially
Malay ethnicities. Paritta Koanatakool provides the only case study
of a mainland Southeast Asian state and shows how 'some fraction' of
the Thai middle class, itself a relatively diverse
constituency and a social category which is difficult to define, is
in the process of defining its identity in part in relation to a
constructed traditionalism focused on 'traditional forms of dance
rooted in court culture'. These members of the middle
class are therefore actively asserting their local credentials
'while never relinquishing their self-consciousness of being
'modern' people' (p. 237). Finally Joshua Barker's historical study of the
development of telephonic communications in the Netherlands East
Indies and post-colonial Indonesia, though interesting and concerned
with the interaction between local cultural identities and
globalisation and the role of technology in this process, seems to
sit rather uneasily in the volume. It appears not to have been
delivered in the original workshop from which the volume emerged.
Nevertheless, I found Barker's material to be the most empirically
interesting in the book. I
have mixed feelings about this volume. Overall the papers are worth
publishing, even though a few of them suffer occasionally from
obfuscating, post-modern expression. But conceptually
they hold no real surprises. It is in the provision of some
interesting new case material that Wee's book usefully
contributes to a rapidly increasing body of literature on the
relationships between Southeast Asian culture, economy and the state
in a globalising world. CHRISTINE HELLIWELL. 'Never Stand Alone' - A Study
of Borneo Sociality. Phillips, ME: Borneo Reseach Council, 2001.
279 pp. ISBN 1-929900-02-3 (hb US$35). Email:
[email protected] Review below by Dr Monica Janowski, University of
Greenwich This is a study of the community of Gerai, a
village of about 700 'Malayic non-Iban' speakers in the district of
Ketapang in the south of the Indonesian province of Kalimantan Barat
on the island of Borneo. The
title of the book refers to the importance both of 'standing',
diri, among the Gerai -- the setting up an independent
ritual hearth by a married couple -- and of the impossibility of
doing so without relying upon others, both practically and
symbolically. Helliwell challenges the view of Borneo
Dayak societies expressed in particular by Freeman (on the Iban)
that the household is the basic social unit, that it is autonomous
and that it is highly discrete, a model derived originally from
study of African unilineal societies. Following Appell's and
Sather's criticisms of this model, which focus on the lack of any
corporate or enduring groups, Helliwell emphasises in particular the
lack of clear boundedness of any groups within Gerai society,
suggesting that there is, rather, a fluid set of relationships and
groups whose nature shifts from context to context and over time,
but which has at its core the importance of relying on and being
relied on, of needing other people. The
central role of rice in setting up relationships between people and
between groups of people is a major theme of the book.
Helliwell identifies what she terms the 'rice group', which
cultivates rice jointly, as one of the key social groupings. This
may be made up of more than one rice production unit, usually
couples at different generational levels, who may live in separate
dwellings outside of the village for part of the year but who plan
their rice production together and own the rice produced
together. Another key social grouping is the ritual hearth
group, the grouping of people associated with a ritual hearth.
A rice group sets up a new ritual hearth when it succeeds in
'standing' on its own. The ritual hearth is under the charge
of the rice group but often encompasses a number of others who are
dependent on it because they have not been able to 'stand' on their
own. The
concept of house, rumah, is an important one among the Gerai.
It is particularly associated with the ritual hearth and the rice
group which possesses it, which lives in a rumah rayo or 'big
house', a house in the village rather than outside it.
However, the term rumah may be applied to different levels:
the rice production unit and the rice group may also be described as
rumah. Because of this, the author argues that the
Levi-Straussian 'house society' approach to understanding Gerai
sociality does not work very well as an alternative to the 'African'
model, since it is difficult to sort out which grouping would be
termed the house, and would consequently be the basic unit of Gerai
sociality. She suggests that there is no need to identify
distinct, unambiguous units which are the building blocks of
society. However, as Helliwell points out, the
hierarchical aspect of the Levi-Straussian notion of 'house-based
society' does provide insights into the nature of relationship
between the social groupings which exist in Gerai. All Gerai
rice groups are tied in to another rice group and all ritual hearths
(except those designated 'original' ritual hearths) are tied in to
another ritual hearth in a hierarchical structure linking source to
origin. Within this system, lower level units are encompassed
by higher level units as well as depending on them as their
source. The leading couple or individual (it seems that it can
be either) of a ritual hearth, described as its 'source',
bungkung, take a very important role in terms of leadership
and responsibility vis-a-vis their dependant rice groups and those
ritual hearths which have 'broken' from them.
In
Gerai, rice groups which decide to 'stand', diri, on their
own, and to set up a new ritual hearth, are able to choose from
which ritual hearth they will choose to 'break' their own, new
ritual hearth. This touches on an area which Helliwell might
perhaps have explored: what might be described as 'optative kinship'
and the implications of this for social mobility. The choice
of one ritual hearth over another as 'source' ritual hearth for a
new ritual hearth is, in effect, a choice of one kin link over
another -- in other words, this kind of kinship (might we describe
this as rice-based kinship, as I have for the Kelabit?) is not
imposed but is optative. The genealogy, or turun, of
the line of bungkung of a ritual hearth is in effect a line
of such choices, rather than a line of biological links (even though
most links are in fact biological links between parents and child
plus child-in-law). Helliwell points out that while there is
political differentiation within the community based on the system
of rice groups and ritual hearths and the relationship between their
bungkung, Gerai society is an 'egalitarian' society since
access to land and labour is not differentiated. On the other
hand, the life stories she has collected show how individual rice
groups and ritual hearths can go through very hard times, and that
they can be strikingly differentiated in terms of their economic
success, largely expressed through rice-growing. This is believed to
express the spiritual 'health' of the 'lives' of its leading couple,
its bungkung; the lives of the bungkung of a rice
group which is unable to cultivate enough rice for its members are
described as 'sick'. Although Helliwell does not say this, it
is also almost certainly the case that some ritual hearth groups do
accumulate enough wealth at times to enable them to buy heirloom
items which display the 'health' of the lives of their ancestral
bungkung. Helliwell does not explore what happens as a
consequence of a rice group or ritual hearth group going through a
very 'healthy' or 'sick' period, particularly if this endures for a
couple of generations, in relation to optative kinship
choices. One imagines that a 'sick' rice group would probably
fail to 'stand'; it seems likely that the son or daughter of a such
a rice group might both find it difficult to marry and when he or
she does marry would be unlikely to choose, with his or her spouse,
to affiliate to his or natal rice group. A successful,
'healthy', rice group, on the other hand, would manage to 'stand' on
its own and set up its own ritual hearth, and the son or daughter of
the bungkung would be likely to choose, with his or her
spouse, to affiliate to his or her natal ritual hearth, which would
help the young couple to 'stand' at a young age if possible. Would
there be an expectation that 'sickness' or 'health' is inherited
(via the line of bungkung) down the generations, creating
what is in effect inherited (and quite possibly self-fulfilling)
expectations of different levels of spiritual 'health' on the part
of individuals of different ancestry? If
this is the case -- if the ability to do well and 'stand'
successfully is believed to be inherited – one wonders what the
relationship is between this ability and position within the
hierarchical system of linkages between rice groups and ritual
hearths, leading back to 'source' ritual hearths. Formally, it
is the ritual hearths which are closest to the 'source' which are of
most consequence and authority within the community, but in practice
those bungkung of ritual hearths which are most successful in
rice-growing, and whose ancestors are also most successful,
are liable also to have authority which could challenge that of the
'source' ritual hearths. It seems possible that there might be
mechanisms to realign the hierarchical system with actual success in
rice-growing. Optative kinship choices made by couples when
they choose to 'break' their new ritual hearth from one or the other
ritual hearth within the community might be one way of achieving
this. All in all, this is a clearly presented and interesting book, which covers valuable ground and includes plenty of good illustrations of the points made through life stories, quotes and anecdotes. |