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Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 165, no. 1 (2009), pp. 129–189 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-100095 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0006-2294

Book reviews

Johnny Tjia, A grammar of Mualang; An Ibanic language of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Leiden: LOT (Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics), 2007, 438 pp. ISBN 9789078328247. Price: EUR 32.27 (paperback).

ALEXANDER ADELAAR Asia Institute, University of Melbourne [email protected]

The traditional languages in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan Province are predominantly Malayic and Bidayuhic (although some other language groups are also represented). Mualang belongs to the Ibanic branch of the Malayic language group and is spoken in the Belitang Hulu, Belitang Hilir and Belitang districts of Sekadau Regency (formerly part of Sanggau Regency). Based on purely linguistic criteria, it is clearly in a dialect relation with Iban, one of the main languages in Sarawak and a minority language in West Kalimantan. It is probably even more like Iban than some other Ibanic languages, which have not developed the diphthongs that are so typical of Iban and Mualang (for example, datay ‘come’; jalay ‘road’; tikay ‘mat’). Notable differences between the two varieties are that Iban does not exhibit nasal preplosion and postplosion (see below), and that Iban has acquired a transitive suffix –ka, whereas in Mualang this element is still a preposition. According to Tjia, another difference is that in Iban mid vowels are phonemic whereas in Mualang they are allophones of high vowels, but this is just a matter of analysis, as Scott (1957) was able to show that Iban high and mid vowels were still allophones, in spite of the rather non-phonemic Iban spelling conventions. Mualang is perhaps best known as the language of an impressive epic called the Kana Sera (Song of Pregnancy), a masterpiece of oral literature. It was recorded and translated (into Dutch) by Father Dunselman (1955), whose annotations to the Kana Sera contain many comments on the language. Other valuable contributions to the study of Mualang are Sister Pungak’s prelimi- nary structural analysis and lexicon (Pungak 1976a, 1976b). Johnny Tjia’s study of Mualang is the first comprehensive grammatical description of an Ibanic language other than Iban itself. It is much richer than any of the existing Iban linguistic studies, and it is also the most detailed and thorough analysis of any language in West Kalimantan. The first part (306 pages) describes the structure of Mualang; it is followed by 80 pages of texts with interlinear glossing representing several literary genres, a 22-page

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Mualang-English wordlist, and a 16-page English-Mualang finder list. The result of ten months of linguistic fieldwork in 2002, it mainly concentrates on the upstream dialect of Mualang as spoken in Tabuk Hulu village in Belitang Hulu District. Although theoretically open-minded, the author basically follows a functional-typological approach to the phonology and morphosyntax of Mualang predominantly based on the works of Givón (2001a, 2001b) and Payne (1997). Morphosyntactically, Mualang and other Ibanic languages are rather similar to Malay. Typical Mualang features are the occurrence of preplosion of final nasals, postplosion of intervocalic nasals, vowel nasalization, and the absence of suffixes. These features are not unique to Mualang and apply equally to many other (Ibanic and Bidayuhic) languages in the northern parts of West Kalimantan and in West Sarawak. The importance of Tjia’s thorough treatment of these and other features is consequently that it will also greatly help the description of other languages in the area that share these areal features, whether they are genetically directly related to Mualang or not. From a historical linguistic perspective, it is highly relevant for the history of Malay because it describes a language that is closely related to Malay, and yet has developed largely independently of it throughout its history. Finally, comprehensive descriptions of Malayic languages in West Kalimantan such as Tjia’s provide the ultimate testing material for the theory that Borneo is the homeland of Malay. The book covers the main aspects of phonology and grammar with equal care and includes sections on nasal preplosion and postplosion, reduplica- tion, inversion and other aspects of word order, compounding, verb serializa- tion and other clause combinations, referentiality and identifiability. Tjia’s analysis of the voice system is particularly enlightening. Departing from the traditional distinction between active and passive, he introduces an additional ‘inverse’ voice. The difference between these three voices is a matter of transitivity and determines the relative topicality of agent and patient (‘perspectivization’ in Givón’s terms). Active verbs (marked with N-) foreground the agent; inverse verbs (with no voice prefix) foreground the patient (and hence background the agent); passive verbs (marked with da-) demote the agent. This is demonstrated in the following three sentences with transitive verbs:

1. Active: Urang nyuri [N-curi] manuk ku person N-steal chicken 1s ‘Someone stole my chicken.’ (agent and patient present; agent foregrounded)

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2. Inverse: (M’ih nipu kami). Asa pia’, m’ih kami bunuh (You deceive us) therefore 2s.masculine 1p.exclusive kill ‘(You deceive us). Therefore, you’re going to get killed by us.’ (agent and patient present; patient foregrounded)

3. Passive: Manuk ku da-curi chicken 1s passive-steal ‘My chicken was stolen.’ (patient present; agent demoted)

Tjia brings these voice categories into further alignment with a fourth voice category, the antipassive, which has ba- or zero prefixed to a transitive verb and demotes the patient:

4. Antipassive: Urang ba-bunuh person antipassive-kill ‘People kill (that is ‘people are engaged in killing’).’ (agent present; patient demoted)

Tjia concedes that his proposed solution needs further discourse-based research, but his treatment of transitive constructions marked with zero as separate voice constructions is certainly innovative and promising. While this book is a great asset to Bornean linguistics, some critical remarks are in order. The author spends unnecessarily much time explaining linguistic phenomena and terms that are generally known and agreed upon among linguists. This sometimes reduces the pleasure of reading, especially if the data allow for a straightforward analysis. At times he overcategorizes, as, for instance, in the case of intransitive verb roots (p. 137), or of temporal adver- bial clauses (pp. 283-7). The latter are divided into subordinating clauses and other clauses, whereas in fact almost all the clauses under discussion are subordinating clauses. Mualang has preploded nasals. These are not phonemic: in fact, in the Mualang Hilir dialect, they are apparently so negligible that Dunselman (1955) did not mention them (let alone indicate them in his spelling of the Kana Sera). Tjia describes them as nasals preceded by a homorganic ‘short’ voiceless stop, one that is not fully realized but is much weakened and preceded by a quick opening of the velum. He goes on to say that ‘[i]n other words, before the point of articulation of the inserted voiceless stop is reached, a glottal stop may be heard’. However, an unreleased voiceless stop is definitely not a glottal stop, and there is a clear difference between the real- p ization of malam ‘night’ as [mã.la m] or as *[mã.laʔm].

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Related to this is a general lack of attention to the glottal stop. The author acknowledges it as a phoneme, but provides no minimal pairs of glottal stop with k (which is unreleased!) and with ø, although the wordlist includes three-way oppositions like keba ‘all kinds’ vs keba’ ‘therefore’ vs kebak ‘open’. Furthermore, in Tjia’s practical spelling of Mualang, the same symbol (an apostrophe) is used for the glottal stop and the sometimes barely audible voiced stops in postploded nasals, as in am’i’ ‘take (away)’ which is realized b as [am iʔ]. Postploded nasals in section 2.3 (on syllable and root structure) need more attention. On pages 62 and 79 we are told that nyin ‘that (over there)’ cannot be used anaphorically, but page 67 gives an example of just such a usage. On page 70, the author speculates that s-ari ‘one day’ lacks a classifier because concepts like ari ‘day’ do not have ‘physical appearance’, notwithstanding the fact that page 71 has s-uti’ ari, (with classifier uti’), and that page 59 explains that nonphysi- cal things such as lagu ‘song’ and adat ‘custom’ are used with a classifier. The clitical element =m (/m=) remains totally unexplained: this is an awkward omission, not only for its meaning but also for its phonotactic behav- iour, and its frequent occurrence (at least 37 times as a postclitic and seven times as a proclitic) in the book. Given their general use all over West Borneo, the way some words in the book are glossed is underspecified, for example ipar biras ‘siblings-in-law’ (p. 64) refers to the relationship between people married to siblings; ba-pen’ing (burung) ‘be engaged in (bird)-listening’ (p. 166) is correct as a literal translation but probably has a more charged meaning in a society where bird augury plays a central role. In other cases, the glosses seem too specific: akay ‘[exclamation] expressing (unpleasant) surprise or surprise mixed with dis- agreement or dislike’ (p. 260) is in fact used to express any kind of surprise; urat means ‘muscle; nerve; vein’ rather than just ‘blood vessels’, especially in the expression ba-lepa tulang-urat ‘rest oneself’ (literally ‘rest one’s bones and muscles’) on page 163. Some terminology is awkward, such as the use of ‘static’ (intransitive) verbs’ along with ‘stative’ (intransitive) verbs’, the use of Givón’s idiosyn- cratic definition of the dative (‘a conscious participant in the event, typically animate, but not the deliberate initiator’), and the label ‘inchoative’ for verbal derivations with ke- which in fact carry the notion of unexpectedly getting into a state (for example ke-pikir ‘unexpectedly think (about something)’; ke- putus ‘break (unexpectedly)’). The author fails to mention much recent descriptive work on West Kalimantan. As Professor Jim Collins has been pointing out for more than twenty-five years, very little descriptive work has been done on theselan- guages. But not as little as Tjia’s reference list would lead one to believe: although he refers to my recent study of Salako (Adelaar 2005), he fails to list

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 133 a PhD thesis by Sudarsono on Bekati’ (Lara’), various publications by Adelaar on Embaloh (1994, 1995) and on Salako (1991, 1992, 2002), and various publications with descriptive data on Malayic and Bidayuhic (Land Dayak) varieties from the Pusat Bahasa (for example Darmansyah et al. 1994; Thomas et al. 1984; Thomas et al. 1985), not to mention a study on Bidayuhic languages by Rensch et al. (2006), which touches on West Kalimantan varieties. These are, unfortunately, not the only descriptive and editorial shortcomings in the book. Then again, many of the errors are more cosmetic than structural, and they do not prevent the reader from obtaining a good overview of what the language represents. The mistakes are probably due to time pressure and, indirectly, to the Dutch academic custom of printing, or even publishing, PhD theses at the time of their defence, thus not allowing authors to take some distance from the manuscript before giving it a last editorial cleanup. On balance, there is no doubt that Johnny Tjia has made a major contribution to the study of the languages of West Kalimantan. I sincerely hope that he will continue to direct his attention to languages in this region. With scholars of his calibre on board, Bornean linguistics is looking much brighter than before.

References

Adelaar, K. Alexander 1991 ‘A phonological sketch of Salako’, in: R. Harlow (ed.), VICAL 2 Papers from the Fifth International Conference on Austronesian Linguistics, Part I West Austronesian languages, pp. 1-19. Auckland: Linguistic Society of New Zealand. 1992 ‘The relevance of Salako for Proto-Malayic and for Old Malay epi graphy’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 148:382–408. 1994 ‘The classification of the Tamanic languages (West Kalimantan)’, in: T. Dutton and D. Tryon eds), Contact-induced language change in the Austronesian-speaking area, pp. 1-41. Berlin: Mouton-de Gruyter. 1995 ‘Problems of definiteness and ergativity in Embaloh’, Oceanic Linguistics 34/2:375-409. 2002 ‘Salako morphology and the interrelation between voice, mood and aspect’, in: K.A. Adelaar and R. Blust (eds), Between worlds; Linguistic papers in memory of David John Prentice, pp. 1-28. Canberra: Pacific Lin- guistics. 2005 Salako or Badameà; Sketch grammar, texts and lexicon of a Kanayatn language (WestKalimantan). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Darmansyah, Durdje Durasid and Nirmala Sari 1994 Morfologi dan sintaksis bahasa Bedayuh. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa (Departemen Pendidikan dan Kebudayaan).

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Dunselman, Donatus 1955 Kana Sera; Zang der zwangerschap. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff. [KITLV, Ver- handelingen 17.] Givón, T. 2001a Syntax. Vol. I. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 2001b Syntax. Vol. II. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Payne, Thomas E. 1997 Describing morphosyntax; A guide for field linguistics. Cambridge: Cam- bridge University Press. Pungak, S. Lusia 1976a Penelitian struktur bahasa Mualang: laporan hasil penelitian. Bagian I: Anali- sa struktur. Jakarta: Pusat Penelitian dan Pengembangan Bahasa. 1976b Penelitian struktur bahasa Mualang: laporan hasil penelitian. Bagian II: Daf- tar kosa kata. Jakarta: Pusat Penelitian dan Pengembangan Bahasa. Scott, N.C. 1957 ‘Notes on the pronunciation of Sea Dayak’, Bulletin of the School of Orien- tal and African Studies 20:509-12. Sudarsono 2002 Description of Bakatik Dayak language. PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Melbourne. Thomas, Joseph, Hery Suryatman, J.B. Mangunsudarsono and Rusmani Handayani 1984 Morfologi dan sintaksis bahasa Kendayan. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa. Thomas, Joseph, J.B. Mangunsudarsono, Hery Suryatman and Abdussamad 1985 Morfologi kata kerja bahasa Kendayan. Jakarta: Pusat Pembinaan dan Pengembangan Bahasa.

Christopher Moseley (ed.), Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages. London: Routledge, 2007, 688 pp. ISBN 9780700711970. Price: USD 365.00 (hardback).

PETER K. AUSTIN School of Oriental and African Studies, London [email protected]

The last ten years has seen a major growth in interest in the topic of endangered languages, that is, languages no longer being passed on to children and hence in danger of disappearing. Grenoble and Whaley 1998 was an important text for linguists, and then beginning with Crystal’s Language death and Nettle and Romaine’s Vanishing voices in 2000, there has been a stream of publications intended for an educated lay audience (including McWhorter 2001; Dalby 2002; Abley 2003; Grenoble and Whaley 2006; Harrison 2007). Popular interest continues undiminished, as evidenced by the response to my article

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‘Top 10 endangered languages’ published on The Guardian website in August 2008, which attracted thousands of readers and hundreds of comments. There have also been major developments in research as well, with mil- lions of dollars in grant funds being made available for work on endangered languages through the Volkswagen Foundation’s DoBeS project, the NSF- NEH DEL (Documenting Endangered Languages) initiative, and the ELDP (Endangered Languages Documentation Programme) grants of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project based at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London (together these have funded hundreds of new research projects on endangered languages since 2001). There have been a wide range of activities to document, archive and support endangered languages, and a new generation of committed researchers and students has entered the field via training programmes at the Endangered Languages Academic Programme at SOAS, and the University of Hawaii, among others. A number of summer schools have been held, including the 2004 DoBeS summer school at Frankfurt University, InField at the University of California Santa Barbara in 2008, and the annual 3L summer school held in Lyon in 2008 and London in 2009 (the third L is Leiden University). If we add to this conferences, workshops, training courses, books, articles, media coverage, websites, blogs and so on, it is clear that endangered languages have become a ‘hot’ issue. This is the context in which we must place Christopher Moseley’s Encyclopedia of the world’s endangered languages, published in 2007 by Routledge, and at 688 pages an impressive and weighty addition to available information on endangered languages. Moseley has been associated with the charity Foundation for Endangered Languages since its inception in 1995 (and co-edited with Ron Asher the Atlas of the world’s languages in 1993, second edition 2007). He has brought together an impressive collection of specialist colleagues to describe the situation of endangered languages within the geographical regions they are expert in. The authors are: Victor Golla (North America), Mily Crevels (South America), Willem Adelaar (Meso-America), Tapani Salminen (Europe and North Asia), George van Driem (South Asia and Middle East), David Bradley (East and Southeast Asia), Stephen A. Wurm (Australasia and Pacific), Gerrit J. Dimmendaal and F.K. Erhard Voeltz (Africa). Each chapter gives an overview of the language diversity in the region, discussing sociolinguistic and political history, language classification, the reasons for language endangerment, and some discussion of language revival activities. Then a catalogue listing is provided of individual endangered languages with speaker numbers, literacy, and current use (where known). The chapters include one or more large-scale maps showing the location of languages mentioned. The book begins with an introduction by Moseley and concludes with an index of languages mentioned in the text. It is not possible in the space of this review to deal with all

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 136 Book reviews the chapters, so I select for consideration those where I have some personal knowledge of the language situations (Chapters 5 and 6 in particular), as well as the introductory overview. Although the book is dated 2007 on the copyright page, internal evidence suggests it was completed earlier; some of the individual chapters must have been written well before the publication date. On page xii Moseley says:

At the time of writing these lines, one of the worst natural calamities in recorded history is still a fresh memory: the tsunami wave which struck the shorelines of the Indian Ocean, decimating populations in numbers which may never be known. Who knows what the effect on the world’s language stocks will be?

This is a reference to the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami disaster of 26 December 2004, so Moseley was probably writing in early 2005. (Fortunately, the world’s language stocks don’t seem to have been too badly affected; the Andaman islanders mentioned later by Moseley fled to the forests and climbed trees to escape). Strangely, however, there are odd gaps in coverage which even this time lag cannot explain. Thus on page x, in highlighting the fact that ‘[i]n the past decade leading up to the publication of this encyclopedia there have been various initiatives’, no mention is made of DoBeS or DEL or any of the other developments noted above (our project at SOAS is briefly, but inaccurately, noted). The coverage of publications on endangered languages is also spotty: Tsunoda’s 2005 thorough overview of language endangerment and revitalization is nowhere mentioned, for example. More surprisingly still, although Moseley says (page x) ‘[p]erhaps new disciplines within linguistics and in cross-fertilisation with other scientific disciplines will arise in the near future as a result of the academic interest in endangered languages’, there is no mention of the new field of documentary linguistics (also called language documentation) which has grown by leaps and bounds since the seminal work of Himmelmann 1998 (see also Gippert, Himmelmann and Mosel 2006, and the five volumes of Language documentation and description published at SOAS since 2002, for example). Documentary linguistics has emerged as a new sub- field of linguistics concerned with interdisciplinary approaches to developing richly annotated and translated corpora of endangered languages recorded in their social and cultural contexts through new ways of collaborating with communities as active participants and co-researchers. It is odd that Mosely makes no mention of it. Now to consideration of two of the other chapters. Chapter 5 by David Bradley is a very thorough account of 166 endangered and extinct languages of East and Southeast Asia, discussing their sociolinguistic situation and political status, number of speakers, current use, genetic classification, and level of documentation. Bradley’s account is based on a full study of available literature on the region bolstered by his extensive fieldwork in China, Thailand

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 137 and Burma on dozens of (mostly Tibeto-Burman) minority languages. On pp. 393-420 there are descriptions of individual endangered languages organized by genetic subgroup that contain a wealth of valuable and useful data for anyone interested in the languages of this region. One striking omission from Bradley’s chapter, and indeed from all the chapters in the book, is any mention of endangered signed languages, many of which exist in the region. Chapter 6 on Australasia and the Pacific (Chapter 6, pp. 425-578) was written by the late Stephen A. Wurm, who passed away on 24 October 2001, and the contents clearly date from at least six years before the book was published (none of the references to this chapter on pages 464-6 is later than 2001). Since then, there has been a massive amount of research activity on endangered languages of insular Southeast Asia, Papua New Guinea, Australia and the Pacific, which means that this chapter in particular is already very dated. On the other hand, a number of the claims that Wurm makes about our knowledge of languages within this region are rather overstated, such as (p. 456) ‘the Austro-Asiatic languages of the interior of Peninsular Malaysia have been studied by Austro-Asiatic specialists from various countries, and are quite well known’ (to my knowledge there are only a few solid grammatical descriptions of Aslian languages, such as Kruspe 2004, Burenhult 2005, and none can be said to be well documented) or that ‘[m]ost surviv- ing [Australian Aboriginal] languages have now been thoroughly studied largely by Australian linguists, and members of the SIL, and are well known’ (p. 456). In addition, there are some truly surprising gaps in coverage: the work of the late Terry Crowley of the University of Waikato, fieldworker and grammar writer extraordinaire, who documented a dozen endangered languages in Vanuatu, is not even mentioned in the section entitled ‘Current work in languages of Australasia and the Pacific’ (pp. 456-9). Nor is the inde- fatigable Mark Donohue, now at the Australian National University, who has recorded dozens of languages from Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. A full list of such lacunae would be unfortunately long. Wurm’s chapter ends with a detailed ‘Alphabetical list of entries for threatened and extinct languages’ (pp. 467-557) that provides useful, but dated, material on hundreds of languages, followed by a 16-page list (pp. 561-77) of ‘Languages of the Pacific area’ that is simply a sequence of English-language names sorted by country and purported genetic classification (with the names separated by ugly block characters). The value of these 17 pages is unclear to me. It is difficult at any time to prepare encyclopedic materials that are both accurate and timely, and Mosely is to be congratulated for having taken on the task of recording in detail the situation of the world’s endangered languages. Unfortunately, because the study of this particular field has been undergoing rapid change and development recently, a book like this runs the risk of being quickly outdated, and Chapter 6 clearly already is. In fact, given

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 138 Book reviews the amount of sociolinguistic and documentation research currently under way, one wonders if compilation of this kind of information via an interac- tive and editable website rather than a book might not be the best publication option. Certainly the £175 price (in the US $365) puts it well out of range of most individual researchers and definitely beyond the reach of the people whose endangered languages it describes and catalogues.

References

Abley, Mark 2003 Spoken here; Travels among threatened languages. [Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Asher, R.E. and Christopher Moseley (eds) 1993 Atlas of the world’s languages. London: Routledge. [Second edition 2007.] Burenhult, Niclas 2005 A grammar of Jahai. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Australian National University. [Pacific Linguistics 566.] Crystal, David 2000 Language death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dalby, Andrew 2002 Language in danger; How language loss threatens our future. London: Pen- guin. Gippert, Jost, Nikolaus Himmelmann and Ulrike Mosel (eds) 2006 Essentials of language documentation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Grenoble, Lenore A. and Lindsay Whaley (eds) 1998 Endangered languages; Language loss and community response. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grenoble, Lenore A. and Lindsay Whaley 2006 Saving languages; An introduction to language revitalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, K. David 2007 When languages die; The extinction of the world’s languages and the erosion of human knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1998 ‘Documentary and descriptive linguistics’, Linguistics 36-1:161-95. Kruspe, Nicole 2004 A grammar of Semelai. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McWorter, John 2001 The power of Babel. New York: Basic Books. Nettle, Daniel and Suzanne Romaine 2000 Vanishing voices. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tsunoda, Tasaku 2005 Language endangerment and language revitalisation. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.

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Ian Rae and Morgen Witzel, The Overseas Chinese of South East Asia; History, culture, business. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, vi + 171 pp. ISBN 9781403991652. Price: GBP 55.00 (hardback).

CHIN YEE WHAH Universiti Sains Malaysia (USM), Penang [email protected]

This book serves a specific purpose. It is written as a practical handbook on Southeast Asia’s Overseas Chinese for Western professionals and business people who deal with members of that group. The intended readership will find it a very useful text. At a time when most writers in this genre are focused on the economic rise of China itself, Rae and Witzel provide a very personal understanding of the Chinese diaspora in the lands to China’s south. Besides important practical tips for doing business in Southeast Asia, the book provides background information about each country in the region: economic statistics, natural resource endowments, demography, and ethnic composition, including the proportion of ethnic Chinese in each national population. The book is written in a popular but authoritative style and its scope is very broad, the time period covered extending from 600 BC to the 1990s. Southeast Asia was once a confluence of traders from India and Arabia, merchants from Western Europe, Chinese immigrants in search of economic opportunity, and colonial powers. For a time, commerce was dominated by the European powers that came as colonizers competing among themselves, even fighting trade wars for the raw materials needed for industrialization back home. Today, however, the Overseas Chinese are economically domi- nant in the region. Strategically allying themselves with colonial capital, and in the postcolonial era with multinational companies engaged in foreign direct investment, enterprising Southeast Asian Chinese entrepreneurs were able to seize business opportunities and develop the region into an economic powerhouse. Rae and Witzel highlight the continuing connections between Southeast Asia and China, pointing out that Overseas Chinese contributed most of the capital China needed for its economic transformation during the last three decades. As China emerges as the next economic superpower, they argue, the Southeast Asian Chinese will continue to have important roles to play. Many have adapted to local cultures, languages, and politics, and live with the indigenous groups in ‘sustainable tensions’ (albeit sometimes punctuated by conflicts and riots), while also constantly responding to the economic game that China is currently playing.

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The authors exalt the cultural thesis on Chinese capitalism, referring to the influence of Confucian values and to the special characteristics of Chinese social and business networks. Being a popular history, the book oversimpli- fies here ‒ exaggerating, for instance, the extent to which Confucian values among Overseas Chinese in Southeast Asia are implanted through formal education. Actually there are only a few countries in the region where formal education is available in Chinese. A more important sphere of influence for Confucian values is of course the family, the role of which is hardly explored in this book. It is in the family setting that Overseas Chinese are consciously and unconsciously imbued during their childhood with Confucian values. I agree with the authors’ emphasis on the pragmatism of Confucian values in relation to business practices, and this remains relevant in modern liberal capitalism in Southeast Asia. However, as to the alleged predominance of the ‘Chinese family business’, at least in the case of Malaysia, this has become a thing of the past. The constant use in this book of the term ‘Overseas Chinese’ is also questionable, suggesting that all Chinese outside China share similar attributes, which is certainly not the case. Huaqiao is no longer relevant as a term to represent Chinese who have settled down outside China. The term kongsi, finally, means more than just ‘company’; in Malaysia it can refer to anything from a clan association to a temporary squatter community. In an academic sense, The Overseas Chinese of South East Asia breaks no new ground. For those unfamiliar with Southeast Asia and Chinese business culture, however, it is worth reading as a popular reference book.

Ab Massier, The voice of the law in transition; Indonesian jurists and their languages, 1915-2000. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008, xxii + 301 pp. [Verhandelingen 235.] ISBN 9789067182713. Price: EUR 34.90 (paperback).

DWI NOVERINI DJENAR University of Sydney [email protected]

A recent news article in an Indonesian online law publication, hukum online ‘law online’ (12 February 2009), reports the launch of a new law journal, Jentera. The article quotes a senior Indonesian journalist, Karni Ilyas, lament- ing the seeming impossibility of comprehending Indonesian legal language, a language he sees as ‘inherently difficult to understand’ (aslinya memang sudah sulit untuk dimengerti). Journalists are in a particularly precarious position, says Ilyas, because they are the ones who have to ‘translate’ for the public

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 141 laws promulgated by the government. Todung Mulya Lubis, a prominent Indonesian attorney, comments that Indonesian legal language is eksoteris ‘esoteric’, intelligible only to those who study it (referring to students as well as practitioners of law), and adds that even legal practitioners have difficulty deciphering this language due to the ambiguity of many terms. The article also quotes Kurniawan, a Tempo journalist, urging the government to take measures to simplify legal language to render it more intelligible to the general public, because after all, it is the public that is subjected to the law. The challenge, says Kurniawan, is to efface the esotericism from legal language. This debate illustrates the never-ending dissatisfaction among Indonesians with the state of their legal language that Massier’s fascinating book seeks to describe. Massier points out that criticisms of this language come not only from Indonesian linguists but also from jurists themselves, and that, despite efforts by the Indonesian government to address the issue, criticisms have not abated. Massier offers two reasons for this. The first reason is that both the government measures and the criticisms are grounded in an instrumental approach to language which sees language as a mere tool of jurists, separate from their conceptual world. Guignon (1983:118) describes this approach as one which sees our ability to use language as being grounded in some prior grasp of a non-linguistic reality. Language plays an important role in making our world intelligible, but it is itself possible only against the background of that non-linguistic reality. In contrast, a ‘constitutive view’ treats language as something that ‘generates but also makes possible our full-blown sense of the world’ (Guignon 1983:119). The latter view assigns importance to language’s inalienability from its contexts of use, and is represented, for example, in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical investigations (a view which Rudi Keller (1998), perhaps rather confusingly, refers to as ‘Wittgenstein’s instrumental notion of signs’). It is this constitutive view of language that Massier insightfully applies in critiquing the position within the Indonesian legal world that considers words, phrases, and sentences as having fixed, absolute meanings, and which strives to eliminate the possibility of multiple interpretations, itself an impossible endeavour in Massier’s view (see Chapter II). Massier’s reference in arguing for the context-bound nature of language, however, is not Wittgenstein but Bakhtin (though he uses the term ‘law game’, which is reminiscent of Wittgenstein’s ‘language game’). It is Bakhtin’s notion of speech genres that Massier perceptively draws upon to argue that, like speech, which is varied in terms of its producer and the situation in which it is produced, legal language is also far from unitary. What is generally termed bahasa hukum ‘legal language’ in Indonesian may refer to language use per- taining to the teaching and research of law, press articles on law, legislation, notarial deeds, court decisions (verbal and written), and so forth. These are ‘genres’ or ‘social languages’ within legal language. They constitute the vari-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 142 Book reviews ous ways that people do law. Multiple interpretations of legal language are thus an unavoidable consequence of there being different (groups of) individuals who employ this language in different contexts. Attempts to view legal language as being unitary are therefore bound to fail, as the aforementioned debate illustrates. The second reason that criticisms of Indonesian legal language continue unabated is that, for Massier, the decision to eliminate Dutch as a legal language following Indonesia’s independence from the Dutch in 1949 was a hasty one, for it overlooked the significance of the Dutch language in shaping the conceptual world of Indonesian jurists. In Chapter III Massier meticulous- ly describes the significance of Dutch in Indonesia’s legal history. Beginning with the first generation of Indonesian jurists trained in the first law school in Jakarta during the early twentieth century, Indonesian jurists learned to accept Dutch as their professional language. Being taught in Dutch, reading authoritative texts in Dutch, and speaking Dutch in their daily life, jurists learned to breathe and live law in this language. Therefore, more than a mere tool, Dutch was an integral part of their conceptual world. Loss of the Dutch language thus created a disjuncture with far-reaching implications, with gaps in the provision of adequate Indonesian translation of key Dutch texts and terminology remaining inadequately filled up to the present day. In his conclusion, Massier recommends that themes such as bahasa ‘language’ and peristilahan ‘terminology’ be avoided in discussions on the development of legal usage in Indonesia. Instead, he suggests that attention be focused on hukum ‘law’. Having espoused a constitutive view of language throughout the book, and considering the lack of uniformity in Indonesian legal terminology and other language-related problems that Massier under- lines in the book, this recommendation is surprising and ironic. It is anti- thetical to the author’s stance on language and disrupts the coherence of his overall argument. The book certainly derives no benefit from a seemingly practical recommendation such as this. Readers will notice the copious footnotes used in the book. To be exact (and I hope I did not miscount), only 14 of the total 301 pages of the main text are free from footnotes, with the exception of several full pages of photographs, which are also spared from footnotes. Interesting though these footnotes are, their presence on nearly every page tends to disrupt the flow of the reading. Massier provides a disclaimer in the preface, stating that the large number of footnotes is partly due to the heterogeneous readership at which the book is aimed. This includes Indonesian law specialists, legal sociologists, linguists, and historians. I doubt though that readers will all be convinced by this reasoning. In addition to the abundance of footnotes, there is also incon- sistency in the italicization of Dutch and Indonesian terms. Some terms (for example Dutch handelsrecht on p.18, note 58) are italicized, while others are

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 143 written with single quotation marks (see for example, misdrijf on p. 18, note 59). Indonesian perumus (p. 17, note 57) is italicized, while hukum ekonomi and hukum bisnis (p. 18, note 58) are written in single quotation marks. Numerous other examples can be found in the book. Shortcomings aside, Massier’s book is an important contribution to research on Indonesian as a legal language and will serve as a valuable reference for law researchers and practitioners, linguists, as well as historians. Translated from Dutch, this revised version of Massier’s PhD dissertation is a carefully researched work containing thoughtfully presented evidence for the arguments. In some parts the translation is awkward, which could be the result of the translator attempting to be true to the original but ending up compromising the quality of what is otherwise a respectable translation.

References

Guignon, Charles B. 1983 Heidegger and the problem of knowledge. Indianapolis: Hackett Publish- ing. Keller, Rudi 1998 A theory of linguistic signs. Translated by Kimberley Duenwald. New York: Oxford University Press.

Henk Schulte Nordholt and Gerry van Klinken (eds), Renegotiating boundaries; Local politics in post-Suharto Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007, x + 562 pp. [Verhandelingen 238.] ISBN 9789067182834. Price: EUR 35.00 (paperback). MARIBETH ERB National University of Singapore [email protected]

This fascinating collection of essays grew out of a two-year research project funded by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, based at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), and involving 24 international scholars for various lengths of time. The project focused on the political changes unfolding in Indonesia after the end of the long-running New Order government of President Suharto. Although a number of monographs and essay collections have appeared since Suharto’s fall in 1998, this collection distinguishes itself in several ways. Firstly it focuses on the relatively long time period 1998-2004 ‒ starting from the first

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 144 Book reviews hasty efforts at reform, including new legislation on decentralization of power and fiscal autonomy (Laws no. 22/1999 and no. 25/1999), up to preparations for the direct local elections that began in 2005. Coming later than other collections that were written in the midst of the early changes, this anthology allows for a more thorough reflection on the consequences of reform for the social, cultural and physical landscape of Indonesia. Secondly, the papers in this collection, written by economists, political scientists, geographers, and (above all) anthropologists, unashamedly revel in the details of the local ‒ thus taking seriously, the editors tell us, local dynamics in the regions. As they stress in their preface, it is no longer possible to pretend that one can understand Indonesia simply by sitting in Jakarta. Another special focus of this collection also distinguishes it from other volumes on decentralization and democratization in Indonesia after Suharto. This focus, which is a thread that runs through most of the papers, is on what was apparently an unforeseen consequence of decentralization from the point of view of Indonesian lawmakers: the breaking apart of administrative units into new subdivisions. In Indonesian this process of subdivision is called pemekaran or ‘blossoming’, a highly poetic name for something the editors in their introduction refer to, perhaps more accurately, as ‘administrative involution’. This term harks back to Geertz’s ‘agricultural involution’, whereby increasing numbers of people try to live off smaller and smaller pieces of land. In the multiplication of administrative divisions, many in Indonesia, especially members of elite and educated groups in the regions, see hope for the creation of government jobs, which in many regions are the largest source of waged employment. Although this has been touched on in other works that have looked at the recent decentralization process in Indonesia, none has taken such a detailed approach to looking at how pemekaran, touted as a means of promoting good governance by bringing government closer to the people (a major target of decentralization), is intimately associated with money politics, corruption, and ethnic and religious violence. The volume consists of 18 essays, a comprehensive introduction, and an obituary for M. Isa Sulaiman, a chapter writer who died tragically in the Aceh tsunami of December 2004, only days after the last meeting of the project’s participants in Jakarta. The essays are divided into five sections that corre- spond to important themes in the book: the dynamics of ethnicity; the ‘black economy’, ‘shadow states’ and corruption; criminality and security; civil society; and the construction of new identities ‒ all of these things affected by decentralization and pemekaran. The editors’ introduction is an excellent sum- mary of issues important in post-Suharto Indonesia, including a timely critique of retrospective views on the New Order and an overview of what the editors see as insufficiently acknowledged continuities between it (and earlier periods) and the contemporary situation. An important focus of this critique

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 145 is the way in which many writers have come to conceptualize Indonesia as characterized by a split between state and society ‒ a legacy, perhaps, of how New Order government elites tried to separate themselves from wider society and de-politicize the masses. The image of a strong state with ‘a rather well- integrated set of institutions that operated apart from society and facilitated the gradual growth of a free market economy’ (p. 5) needs to be thoroughly re-examined, the editors argue, in the face of the collapse of the New Order. The New Order should be re-conceptualized to recognize the patrimonial patterns that continued from the colonial era, and also the various ways that parallel structures were formed and penetrated down into the regions, and allowed for the interweaving of formal politics and economics with the informal, the illegal and the criminal. Hence ‘the state’ is by no means a monolithic institution as it was conceptualized by analysts during the New Order; what is happening in the era of decentralization makes ‘certain hidden aspects of the state more explicit’ (p. 24), and forces a rethinking of the way that actors try to serve their own interests and what their relationship is to the institutions that facilitate formal and informal means to gain power and profit. Those papers in this volume that specifically look at the effects of the first surge of reform paint an interesting picture of this interpenetration of state and society, the civil and the criminal. In this regard this collection as a whole, but a few noteworthy chapters in particular, put into focus an expression often heard a number of years ago: Indonesia negara hukum, ‘Indonesia is a state governed by the rule of law’. The irony of this expression, and at the same time its accuracy, is well illustrated in John McCarthy’s penetrating chapter on illegal logging in Kalimantan. McCarthy portrays a shifting landscape of resource control, highly affected by the changing laws on resource access, on accountability, and on power to enforce the law. Although he shows how most actors would blithely manipulate the laws or break them to their advantage, he also clearly describes how the laws shaped the framework of operation. Those who legally held the power to enforce the law, or control access to resources, were the ones who reaped the benefit of the bribes offered by illegal operations. When the laws changed, different people gained the power to receive bribes for enforcing or ignoring the laws. Since the national laws, as well as regulations and ordinances in different provinces and districts throughout Indonesia, have been changed a number of times during the post-Suharto era, this paper, as well as several others (such as Erman’s on regulating the tin trade in Bangka Belitung, and Timmer’s on the special autonomy laws in Papua), show how individual actors struggle back and forth trying to manipulate above, beyond, but also within, the boundaries of these regulations and laws. By providing details of how corruption and money politics have worked in different regions in post-Suharto Indonesia, many of these papers paint a

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 146 Book reviews bleak picture of a ‘re-forming’ Indonesia. However, not all the papers are pes- simistic, and indeed even those that are, are not entirely so. Notable are some of the papers in the section on ‘civil society’, especially David Henley, Maria Schouten and Alex Ulaen’s paper on Minahasa, Jim Schiller’s paper on Jepara and Taufiq Tanasaldy’s paper on West Kalimantan, all of which ask why the violent outbreaks in these areas were limited, or eventually contained. What is the formula for ‘civility’ in Indonesia? In fact Henley, Schouten and Ulaen suggest that ‘the level of public order in Indonesia today can actually be described as surprisingly high’ (pp. 325-6), given the difficulties and tensions brought about by changes in the post-Suharto era, while Schiller argues that civil society has been ‘enriched’ by reform movements and non-governmental organizations (p. 347). Tanasaldy suggests that in West Kalimantan, a province once torn by ethnic violence, the consciously ethnic politics pursued in recent years have been ‘part of a new democratic and civil process’ (p. 371). Finally a certain optimism also pervades some of the chapters in the last section, where authors look at the reconstructing and renegotiating of identities against the background of decentralization and shifting district and provincial boundaries. What I find optimistic about these papers isa certain aspect of the idea of ‘ambivalent identities’ that is discussed explicitly by Franz and Keebet von Benda-Beckmann regarding the Minangkabau of Sumatra, but also in some of the other chapters, most notably by Carole Faucher on island Riau, as well as somewhat tangentially by Henk Schulte Nordholt on Bali. This ‘ambivalence’ exists not only in the various local identities that vie for primary importance, be they of religious or cultural/historical/ethnic origin; what these chapters also make clear is that the Indonesian national identity is itself becoming increasingly meaningful in a number of ways to young people in local communities in far-flung parts of Indonesia. Hence, despite the fragmenting process of decentralization and local autonomy, or maybe because of it, a sense of nationalism appears to be growing among the youth of Indonesia. This may potentially hold an important key to working out the multiple problems that Indonesia continues to face in this period after Suharto. For those who have been following the political changes that have taken place in Indonesia since the fall of Suharto, this book is an essential part of the unfolding picture. It will make fascinating reading for any Indonesianist, as well as for those who are interested in comparative politics, or in the processes of democratization and decentralization more generally in the Southeast Asian region.

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Nghia M. Vo, The Vietnamese boat people, 1954 and 1975-1992. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006, viii + 208 pp. ISBN 0786423455. Price: USD 35.00 (paperback).

MARTIN GROSSHEIM Berlin [email protected]

In several interviews in 2005, on the occasion of the thirteenth anniversary of the end of the Vietnam War, the late Vo Van Kiet, former Vietnamese prime minister, commented on Vietnam’s post-war development and admit- ted that the economic crisis in the late 1970s was due partly to the policies of the Vietnamese Communist Party leadership. At the same time, he paid respect to those South Vietnamese who before 1975 had fought against the former Republic of Vietnam, and pleaded for reconciliation with the former enemy. This also implied reconciliation with those hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese who fled South Vietnam in 1975 and in the following years, and since then have lived in the United States, Australia, France, and many other states around the world. Vo Van Kiet’s candid remarks met with much positive reaction, but some ‘hardliners’ in Hanoi continued to insist on the old dichotomy of ‘good Vietnamese’ (the North, the NLF) and ‘bad Vietnamese’ (the South Vietnamese ‘puppet regime’). Nghia M. Vo’s book The Vietnamese boat people, 1954 and 1975-1992 features the opposite interpretation of Vietnam’s contemporary history, one which characterizes the North Vietnamese communists as evil-minded and the South Vietnamese as basically good. In the first part of the book, the author discusses the exodus of 1954 in which around one million people fled from the North to the South. According to Nghia M. Vo this massive exodus was due to several causes: the land reform, the famine, and the war. While the radical land reform campaign of 1954-56 certainly contributed to the tense situation in North Vietnam in the mid-fifties, it remains unclear why Nghia M. regards this as a major cause of the exodus, while downplaying the ‘Catholic factor’ and the effect of CIA pro- paganda in the North. The empirical basis for this part of the book is rather tenuous. The author makes no use, for instance, of standard accounts of the land reform campaign such as Edwin Moise’s book Land reform in China and Vietnam. At the same time he cites publications such as Thu (1989) that are not included in the bibliography, and mentions numbers of refugees without providing any source references (pp. 32, 35). Part 2 of the monograph, which discusses the 1975-1992 diaspora, offers much more useful information, although it is mainly based on a rather small number of published biographical accounts and is not supported by addi-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 148 Book reviews tional evidence such as interviews with refugees. It provides some interesting insights on how the exodus was planned, how official cadres were directly involved, which routes the refugees usually took, and what fatal obstacles (storms, pirates) they faced during their flight. Still, the whole narrative in the second part remains dominated by simplistic Cold War stereotypes. While ‘Ho and his communists’ were aggressors who had ‘decided to conquer the South’ (p. 44), the ‘Saigon nationalists’ stood up for ‘ideas of freedom’ (p. 35) and were ‘more sensitive to moral matters than northerners’ (p. 60). The harsh treatment of many representatives of the former South Vietnamese regime after 1975, and their incarceration in so-called re-education camps, was certainly not in line with the policy of reconciling all Vietnamese that Ho Chi Minh had proposed. However, to maintain that re-education was ‘almost synonymous to extermination’ (p. 102), and that ‘about two to three hundred thousand people’ died in the camps (p. 95) detracts from the credibility of the book as a whole. If the first part of this book downplays the ‘Catholic factor’, the second part downplays the ‘Chinese factor’, paying too little attention to the fact that from 1978 onward, Chinese migrants made up a large proportion of the refugees ‒ a circumstance closely linked with the deterioration of Sino-Vietnamese relations at that time. ‘In order to hasten the Socialist revolution and to get ready for clash with the Chinese’, the author does state at one point, ‘the Ha- noi government decided to get rid of all the Chinese inside Vietnam’ (p. 97). But it would have been more helpful if he had made use of existing in-depth analyses (for example, by Ramses Amer) of the exodus in 1978, and considered the social factors that led many Vietnamese to leave their native country at this time too. The story addressed in this monograph was in reality much more complex than Nghia M. Vo’s narrative suggests.

O.W. Wolters, Early Southeast Asia; Selected essays [edited by Craig J. Reynolds]. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Publications, 2008, xii + 236 pp. [Studies on Southeast Asia 43.] ISBN 9780877277439. Price: USD 23.95 (paperback).

HANS HÄGERDAL Växjö University [email protected]

The present volume is an anthology that introduces the scholarly work of the doyen of early Southeast Asia, the Briton Oliver Wolters (1915-2000). The ideas and methodologies put forward by Wolters were by no means uncontroversial in his time, a fact that surfaces here and there in the respect-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 149 ful biographical essay that opens the book. Nor, apparently, was his role as a teacher and supervisor always beyond debate. Nevertheless, a reading of the eleven essays included in this volume, spanning the period from 1963 to 1999, reveals a flexible mind that was prepared to test new ideas to the very last. In his texts Oliver Wolters was always prepared to admit that his previous ideas might have been unfounded or incomplete, and to suggest new solutions. His framework for identifying historically persistent Southeast Asian cultural features ‒ as discussed in the first of the texts published in the book, ‘Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study’ ‒ is an impressive attempt to sum up the character of a wide geographical region. In general, Craig Reynolds appears to have done a good job in selecting representative texts that highlight Wolters’s research interests. That seminal articles from more or less accessible journals are included in an anthology is only right. What seems a bit stranger is that a few pages from his well-known monograph History, culture, and region in Southeast Asian perspectives, published by Cornell, are also included; taken out of the context of the book, they are not done justice here. A detailed and very valuable professional biography of 38 pages adds substantially to the value of the volume. Wolters belonged to the now almost extinct group of scholars who started their careers as colonial offi- cials, in his case in British Malaya. He played a modest role in British operations during the Emergency, a period regarding which he was later very reticent. His scholarly career started relatively late in his life, in the late 1950s, though this still allowed for four decades of productive work at SOAS and Cornell. The anthology is divided into four sections, dealing respectively with Southeast Asia as a region, with Srivijaya, with the classical mainland kingdoms, and with Vietnamese historiography and literature. As might be expected, most of the texts deal with the pre-1500 history of Southeast Asia. A few pieces, however, have a time perspective which extends into more recent times. That goes for a rather little known piece from 1963, ‘China Irredenta: the South’, on the relations between China and maritime Southeast Asia. Here, Wolters sees interesting parallels (if not necessarily continuities) between the imperial era and the twentieth century as regards Chinese geo- political concern for the lands to the south. Two long articles on the elusive polity of Srivijaya represent Wolters at his best. These studies are fullof interesting, if highly hypothetical, conclusions about the relation between archaeological and geographical observations, and the early Chinese records. At the same time they highlight the problems that make the study of Srivijaya a veritable minefield for researchers. In an article from 1979, Wolters tenta- tively identifies the toponym Mo-ho-hsin, mentioned by the pilgrim I-ching in the seventh century, as a hypothetical Sumatran river estuary, Mukha Asin. In another article from 1986, Wolters presents Mukha Asin without any reser- vations as a fact rather than a theory.

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Towards the end of his long life, Wolters devoted much attention to early Vietnamese history, and at the time of his death he was working on a nov- el on the Tran Dynasty – further testimony to his flexibility as a writer. The scope of his Vietnamese contributions differs radically from that of his work on the Indianized kingdoms of Southeast Asia. Wolters’s writing on Vietnam is concerned with the historiographical and literary structure of the old texts, rather than with the events or processes that they depict – in other words, it represents a move in the post-modern direction. For example, Wolters’s critical reading of a 1272 history by Le Van Huu reveals significant differences in historiographic perception between Huu and Chinese writers, despite common Confucian elements. Wolters’s work on Vietnam is in general not easy reading, but it indicates important ways to move forward with the old texts, including poems. Early Southeast Asia; Selected essays is a handy introduction to the life and work of an important scholar. It is only a pity that the publisher has not cared to compile an index, which would have added considerably to the usefulness of the book.

Michael W. Scott,The severed snake; Matrilineages, making place, and a Melanesian Christianity in Southeast Solomon Islands. Durham, North Carolina: Carolina Academic Press, 2007, xxiv + 379 pp. ISBN 1594601534. Price: USD 45.00 (paperback).

MENNO HEKKER The Hague [email protected]

This book is about social change in the Southeast Solomon Islands as a result of external, colonial influences. Michael Scott did his fieldwork in the Arosi area of the island of Makira in 1992-1993. Arosi society has undergone radical change. In the mid-nineteenth century, Anglican missionaries arrived on the island, which resulted in the Arosi people becoming Christians. In 1893 the Solomon Islands became a British protectorate. In 1978 the islands became independent. Scott describes how the indigenous social structure of localized matrilineages changed, and how Arosi became a culturally fragmented and hybrid society. He aims to analyse this hybrid culture and in particular the problem of locality; he wonders how the Arosi cope with what he calls their problem of ‘heterotopia’. Arosi social structure was based upon localized exogamous matrilineages. The relationship between the matrilineage and a particular area is symbol- ized by ancestral burial sites, shrines, and taboo places. These sacred places

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 151 signify the autochthonous nature of the matrilineage in that particular area. The concept of autochthony, auhenua, appears to be a central theme in Arosi culture and in Scott’s book. There is no comprehensive cosmogonic myth about the creation of the matrilineages and their territories. Each matrilineage has its own narrative describing the relationship between the lineage, its territory, its boundaries, the natural landmarks, the ancestral shrines and other sacred places, and the lineage ancestors. These narratives are proof that the lineage is autochthonous in a particular area. Scott considers the mythic period as one of ‘utopic primordiality’, for in the beginning there were only proto-lineages and proto-places, before lineages settled down and places were defined. Then in the course of time, land was cleared, shrines built, ancestors buried, and the relationship between lineage and territory was established. However, because of the rule of exogamy, these territorial matrilineages became interrelated, and marriages resulted in members of non-autochthonous lineages settling in the territory of a matrilineage. Local burial sites were also used by these non-autochthonous lineages, or else they made their own burial sites and shrines on the territory of their hosts. Ultimately, if the original lineage died out, a non-autochthonous lineage could take over the area and pose as the autochthonous lineage. So in reality there was a trans- fer of land from one lineage to another, although this runs counter to the Arosi ideal. This ‘heterotopia’ was caused by indigenous Arosi socio-spatial dynamics, as Scott formulates it, and it was intensified by the ‘production of socially ambiguous land’ in the recent colonial past. Starting in the early nineteenth century, the colonial era brought diseases, depopulation, and spatial reorganization. At the end of the nineteenth century, administrative districts were organized and internal migration took place. Diseases, colonial policies, and missionary activities resulted in migration to the coastal area and settlement in large villages. In the 1940s, after a United States naval base was established on nearby Guadalcanal, a social movement strove to improve social conditions in Arosi. This movement, called Maasina Rule, promoted continued collectivization and regimentation of villages, a drive to divide and settle the coastal land, and the formalization of instruc- tion in indigenous custom. An important factor was the expectation of an imminent foreign invasion, which motivated the Arosi to concentrate their population along the coast, while the interior was depopulated. Especially in the coastal area, the original localized matrilineages disap- peared, and the connection between matrilineages and territories was lost. This resulted in competing claims on land, and in two or more matrilineages considering themselves autochthonous, auhenua, in the same area. The colonial era led to a perceived return to an imagined primordial condition, according to Scott. In the perception of the colonizer, there was a needto

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 152 Book reviews order the existing primitive chaos. In Arosi perception, the colonial admin- istration replaced chaos by an ordered indigenous system, which meant a return to ‘utopic primordiality’. In present-day Arosi, there are three reactions to this situation. Firstly, some lineages have constructed themselves as the true autochthonous lineage in their area. Physically there is hardly any change, but the lineage narratives concerning land and sacred places are being adapted. Sometimes new shrines are constructed. Lineage narratives are being written down and published, to be used as evidence in disputes over land. Secondly, a few wealthy Arosi have bought land in sparsely populated areas and created new territorial lineages there. Thirdly, there is a shift towards patrilineality, resulting from the rule of patrilocality or virilocality as practised in Arosi. For the Arosi people, matrilineages are fluid and their claims of being autochthonous are disputable, while patrilineages are tied to a certain place. In the final two chapters, Scott describes the influence of Christianization and the way in which Arosi people cope with the ‘polyontology’ of their society. The Christian church transcended the various matrilineages and stressed the community as a whole, spreading ideals of Christian fraternity and unity. Scott focuses on the myth of a cosmogonic severed snake, called Hatoibwari. Christian missionaries regarded this snake myth as a form of primitive monotheism, but it is more likely that the Arosi people used the myth to reconcile Christian monotheism with their indigenous polygenetic cosmogony. The snake myth symbolizes the unity between the lineages and the island of Makira, the purity of each matrilineage, and the lineage’s continuity. Anglican missionaries used this myth as point of entry for Christian thought. The snake myth is to some extent incorporated into what Scott calls the local ‘ethno-the- ology’, the Arosi variety of Christian faith. The Christian church is the succes- sor to the supposedly defunct autochthonous matrilineages. It continues their unifying function and it has become the binding social institution. However, according to Scott, at the moment both representations coexist; the monoge- netic Christian perspective of unity, and the polygenetic Arosi perspective of separate competing lineages, each claiming to be autochthonous. Scott’s book offers a good analysis of changes in social structure resulting from colonial influences, and the phenomena described here are not unique. In his ethnographic descriptions, Scott sketches a lively picture of an every- day reality in which there is not one single truth, but different and sometimes conflicting perceptions among the people involved. The reader obtains an inside picture of the ambiguity in Arosi society, an ambiguity which affects spheres of life as diverse as land ownership, descent, and Christianity. Although the subject is change, the book does not present a full historical narrative. Historical developments and societal changes are sketched in broad outline. Greatest attention is paid to the present situation, which I assume to

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 153 mean that of the early 1990s. The ethnographic descriptions are very readable, although a critical editing of the text would have removed some of the lengthy and repetitious discussions on the interpretation of the ethnographic data. The theoretical arguments are presented in an inaccessible style, using rather too many abstract concepts. The greater part of the book is dedicated to changes in the original system of matrilineages, while only Chapters 8 and 9 look at the influence of Chris- tianity and the relationship between Christianity and indigenous representations. In these final chapters almost all attention is focused on the snake myth, which I see as only one aspect of the relationship between Christianity and indigenous Arosi representations. The influence of Christianity is only partially described. The book seems to waver between two lines of thought: a major argument concerning the transformation of the matrilineages, and a subsidiary argument about Arosi Christianity. The current shift toward patrilineality, finally, is analysed only in the most general terms, although it is a rather remarkable development deserving more attention. This is the more so since many matrilineages nowadays are landless, and ownership of land is apparently connected to the patrilineage. I suspect that current developments could be illuminated with the help of more data and analysis on the increasing importance of bilateral kindred, a process mentioned but hardly examined by Scott. One gets the strong impression that social change in Arosi is not in fact dominated by the dynamics of the relationship between matrilineages and land. In that case, the book leaves the reader with a frustratingly inconclusive ending.

John H. McGlynn, Oscar Motuloh, Suzanne Charlé, Jeffrey Hadler, Bambang Bujono, Margaret Glade Agusta, and Gedsiri Suhartono, Indonesia in the Soeharto years; Issues, incidents and images. Jakarta: The Lontar Foundation, in association with Ridge Books (an imprint of NUS Press, Singapore) and the KITLV Press (Leiden), 2007, xxiv + 493 pp. ISBN 906718263X. Price: EUR 49,90 (hardback).

DAVID HENLEY KITLV Leiden [email protected]

Indonesia in the Soeharto years is an evocative photographic ‘aide-mémoire’ (p. xv) of recent Indonesian history. It was conceived in 1997 when its principal editor, John McGlynn, foresaw Soeharto’s downfall and envisaged the need

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 154 Book reviews for ‒ in McGlynn’s own words ‒ ‘a book made up of images and voices’, a ‘new kind of history book on Indonesia’ that would ‘depict and discuss, in ways not possible during the Soeharto years, many of the leading issues and turning-point events of the country during that time’ (p. 459). More than fifty short essays by government leaders, journalists, activists and scholars are combined here with 500 historic photographs by 125 different photographers, including many of Indonesia’s top photojournalists. The publication of the volume was financed partly by the Asia Foundation and the Open Society Institute. It boasts a preface by former US president Jimmy Carter, and another by former Tempo editor Goenawan Mohamad. Originally published in 2005 by Lontar Foundation alone, its second edition, reviewed here, involves two new co-publishers but appears unchanged in content. Indonesia in the Soeharto years concentrates on the dark, bloody and tur- bulent sides of the New Order: violence, oppression, protest, censorship, corruption. The book’s avalanche of black and white images, many of them authentically blurred, will not fail to trigger strong emotions in anyone who lived in Indonesia during those years, or even just observed the rise and fall of the Soeharto regime from afar. A huge PKI emblem in wood and rattan, burning. Golkar members, marching and saluting. Bespectacled Dharma Wanita ladies, smiling vacuously. Two army officers, conspiratorially lighting each other’s cigarettes. Pramoedya Ananta Toer, with his typewriter in the prison camp on Buru. Protestors, writhing under blows from rifle butts and bamboo batons. The Dili Massacre. Soeharto, smiling, with President Nixon, with President Marcos, with Queen Elizabeth II. Soeharto, fishing. Soeharto, shooting. Soeharto, as a pilgrim in Mecca. Soeharto, riding an overpowered motorcycle with sidecar, Habibie his clownish passenger. Soeharto, voting in one of his managed elections, his sinister black shadow etched like a wayang puppet’s on the white cloth behind the ballot box. The last part of the book is devoted to the fall and aftermath of the New Order, but the images here, now mostly in colour, are no less disturbing: burning forests, burning cars, burning banks, burned-out churches; and in Kalimantan a youth, grinning, holds up by the hair the severed head of a Madurese settler. Soeharto’s chaotic legacy, evidently, was as disastrous as his reign itself. What the uninitiated reader could easily fail to appreciate after leafing through this book is the enormous improvement in living conditions that was experienced by ordinary Indonesians during Soeharto’s three decades in power. Although the statistics are to some extent debated, it appears that between 1970 and 1985 alone more than 50 million people, 40 percent of the national population, escaped for the first time from absolute poverty. Since Soeharto’s downfall the achievements of the New Order in this respect have if anything received increasing recognition, retrospectively, in international development circles. In 1998 the charity Oxfam, on the face of it an

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 155 unlikely champion of authoritarian developmentalism, published a study entitled Economic growth with equity in which Soeharto’s Indonesia was held up as model for equitable development. In the World Bank’s 2006 World Development Report on the theme of Equity and Development, New Order Indonesia is likewise portrayed as a textbook example of ‘pro-poor growth’ and praised in particular for the ‘rural bias’ of its development policies, which gave priority to agriculture, rural infrastructure, and rural public services. Indonesia in the Soeharto years, ironically, mostly depicts the rich and the middle classes, and suffers from a pronounced ‘urban bias’. Except for short features on the controversial transmigration program and the Kedung Ombo dam protests, the countryside, where most Indonesians have always lived, is hardly to be seen in the book’s more than 500 pages. Almost no attention is paid to the policies and institutions that entailed real turning points in the lives of rural Indonesians: the irrigation projects, the schools, the health clin- ics, the fertilizer and fuel subsidies, the roadbuilding, the electrification of the villages. On the fundamental, life-and-death topic of health care, for instance, this book contains just one paragraph of text and two photos. And where economic development is depicted at all here, it tends to be either in ‘showcase’ shots which suggest that only the rich and powerful benefited ‒ an airliner, an oil refinery, confetti at the Jakarta Stock Exchange ‒ or in terms of outright victimization of the poor: becak dumped en masse in Jakarta Bay, urban squat- ters evicted from their homes. The ‘massive development plans’ of the New Order, according to the inside cover flap, were nothing more than a ‘benign facade’. Goenawan Mohamad, in his preface, dismisses the Development (with a capital D) of the New Order period as ‘an epic illusion’ (p. xvi). It says a lot about the passions still stirred up in some quarters by Soeharto and his legacy that almost a decade on, such rhetoric can be used in a book like this to discuss in all seriousness what was, at the time, the biggest, fast- est episode of poverty alleviation in all of human history. The benevolence of the New Order, like its repressiveness, was inspired partly by the ruling elite’s abiding fear of a resurgence of the rural discontent that had given the Indonesian Communist Party, before its destruction in 1965, its mass power base. But that is precisely the paradox. Indonesia in the Soeharto years opens with a quotation from Nietzsche: ‘Three-quarters of all evil done in the world is the result of fear’. But why not turn Nietzsche on his head, and ask: how much good has not also been done in the world out of fear? In their failure to address such disturbing questions, the authors of this book have mostly settled for comforting half-truths rather than admitting doubts that might have complicated their epic morality tale of a ruthless dictator’s rise and fall.

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Hanneke Hollander, Een man met een speurdersneus; Carel Groenevelt (1899-1973), beroepsverzamelaar voor Tropenmuseum en Wereldmuseum in Nieuw-Guinea. Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2007, 118 pp. [Bulletin Tropenmuseum 379.] ISBN 9789068326451. Price: EUR 25.00 (paperback).

ANNA-KARINA HERMKENS Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen [email protected]

De beelden onder het huis van de ondoafi [hoofdman] te Ajappo [een dorp aan het Sentanimeer] zyn onder geen beding te koop, hy beschouwt deze stukken als een erfenis van de voorouders, jammer. Ik heb nog op zyn gevoel gewerkt en gezegd dat een christen toch beter doet om deze dingen weg te doen, maar hy trapte er niet in. (Groenevelt 27 april 1952, in Hollander 2007:78.)

Dit citaat laat een drietal paradoxen zien die het verzamelen van etnogra- fica in de vorige eeuw met zich meebracht: Aan de ene kant de macht en onmacht van de verzamelaar om te kopen wat hij belieft, aan de andere kant zowel de macht als onmacht van de lokale bevolking om zich als een gelijk- waardige handelspartner op te stellen. Aan de ene kant het belang van voor- ouderverering, aan de andere kant de voortschrijdende religieuze bekering en het belang van modernisatie voor de lokale bevolking. Aan de ene kant de gedrevenheid van verzamelaars als Groenevelt om de materiele restanten van een verdwijnende inheemse cultuur te verzamelen, daarbij geen methode onbenut latend, en aan de andere kant de effecten van deze verzameldrang, namelijk er toe bijdragen dat deze cultuur verdwijnt. Een man met een speurdersneus gaat over etnografisch verzamelaar Carel Groenevelt (1899-1973) die in de jaren vijftig en begin jaren zestig van de vorige eeuw voor twee Nederlandse musea werkte: Het Tropenmuseum te Amsterdam en het Museum voor Land- en Volkenkunde in Rotterdam, het huidige Wereldmuseum. Als collectioneur in opdracht verzamelde hij ruim 7000 objecten uit Nederlands Nieuw-Guinea en het aangrenzende Papoea Nieuw Guinea dat indertijd onder Australisch bestuur stond. Voor Groenevelt alsmede de twee opdrachtgevers bestond diens missie uit het ‘vergaren wat er nog te vergaren viel’. Het koloniale bestuur, de missie en de Tweede Wereldoorlog hadden een diepe impact op de culturen van Nieuw-Guinea. Groenevelt hekelt het ‘cultuurverval’ waar de inheemse samenlevingen en hun materiele cultuur aan onderhevig zijn. Hij bekritiseert met name de protestanten in sterke bewoording: ‘wat de zending willens en wetens alleen in het Sentanimeer heeft vernietigd neem ik ze erg kwalyk, dat er nu nog goeroes zijn die b.v. het bezit van oude eetbakken verbieden en in

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 157 het vuur gooien omdat er voorouders op staan is een feit [...]’ (Groenevelt 31 januari 1958, in Hollander 2007:23). Groenevelt reflecteert echter niet op zijn eigen bijdrage aan dit verval. Alhoewel het hem niet lukte om de sacrale beelden onder het huis van de Ayapo hoofdman aan te schaffen, verzamelde hij wel diverse andere sacrale objecten en beelden, en duiken de Ayapo beelden uiteindelijk toch op in Europese en Amerikaanse museale collecties om voorgoed uit het Sentanimeer te verdwijnen. Deze en andere paradoxen van koloniaal verzamelen komen naar voren in de uitvoerige briefwisseling die Groenevelt met beide musea voert en waarop Hanneke Hollander haar werk heeft gebaseerd. Hollanders boek (een vrijwel exacte kopie van haar eindscriptie voor Cultuurwetenschappen uit 1998), is interessant voor zowel leken als academici die geïnteresseerd zijn in verzamelen en museale collecties. Tegelijkertijd vormt deze breedheid ook een probleem, aangezien Een man met een speurdersneus voor beide lezers nogal wat lacunes bevat. Voor leken zou bijvoorbeeld een topografische kaart van Nieuw-Guinea met de verzamelen verblijfplaat- sen van Groenevelt handig zijn geweest. Tevens had het leven van Groenevelt wat inzichtelijker kunnen worden gemaakt door aanvullende biografische gegevens op te nemen, zoals zijn trouwdatum en of hij kinderen had. Pas later in het boek blijkt dat Groenevelt getrouwd was en dat zijn vrouw hem verge- zelde in Nieuw-Guinea en soms ook op zijn verzamelreizen. Voor academici stoort het gebrek aan een meer diepgaandere analyse van Groenevelts verzamelpraktijken alsmede de verzamelvisie van de twee musea. Een analyse van deze onderwerpen in het licht van reeds bestaande antropologische studies over koloniaal verzamelen zou tot een interessante discussie hebben geleid en tot verdergaande conclusies. Een meer algemeen en vaak storend aspect van Hollanders boek is de opbouw en het veelvuldig gebruik van (soms erg) korte paragrafen. De opbouw is niet altijd even logisch, evenals de overgang naar een ander onderwerp/paragraaf. Een ietwat meer beschrijvende in plaats van opsommende schrijfstijl zou de lezer meer aan de hand hebben genomen en de materie levendiger hebben gemaakt. Ondanks deze gebreken is Een man met een speurdersneus een welkome en belangrijke aanvulling op de studies die naar koloniale verzamelpraktijken zijn gedaan. Het ontsluit tot op zekere hoogte de Nieuw-Guineacollecties van het Tropenmuseum en het Wereld Museum en geeft inzicht in de verza- melpraktijk in de jaren vijftig en begin jaren zestig van de vorige eeuw, een roerige periode voor zowel de Nederlandse koloniale overheerser, die zijn laatste oostelijke kolonie kwijtraakte aan Indonesië, alsmede zijn toenmalige onderdanen, de Papoea’s.

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Balk, G.L., F. van Dijk and D.J. Kortlang (with contributions by F.S. Gaastra, Hendrik E. Niemeijer and P. Koenders),The Archives of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) and the local institutions in Batavia (Jakarta). Leiden: Brill, 2007, 571 pp. ISBN 9789004163652. Price: EUR 115.00 (hardback).

TON KAPPELHOF Institute of Netherlands History, The Hague [email protected]

Up until it went bankrupt, the Dutch East India Company (VOC) was the largest trading company operating in Asia. The archives of the VOC are scattered all over the world. The largest section, which covers a length of 2,500 metres, can be found in the Arsip Nasional Republik Indonesia (ANRI) in Jakarta. In addition to this, the National Archive (NA) in The Hague, the Netherlands contains 1,400 metres, South Africa 450 metres, Sri Lanka 310 metres, India 64 metres and, finally, the United Kingdom 15 metres. In 1922, a distinguished inventory of the section stored in The Hague appeared in print. Although a lot was discarded, particularly in and around 1800 by Daendels in Indonesia, as well as in the Netherlands, the part that remains continues to be a treasure trove for countless researchers. For some time now, the NA and the ANRI have been working in close cooperation with each other. In 1997, after a relatively quiet period, both institutions signed a joint agreement to work together. It was agreed that the VOC archives which were situated in Jakarta, along with others belonging to institutions previously linked to the company, would be made more accessible and conserved more effectively. Conservation was urgently needed, as the tropical climate, the poor conditions in which the archive had been kept for such a long period, and the incorrect conservation method that had been employed had all conspired to inflict considerable damage. During the years 2001-2006, three archivists from the National Archive, Louisa Balk, Frans van Dijk and Diederick Kortlang, were sent out to Jakarta from the Netherlands for a considerable length of time to train a large number of Indonesian archivists and to describe and organize the archives more effectively in close collaboration with them. The result was first-rate: a new inventory of 15 archives that replaced the old, obsolete inventory which had been compiled in 1882 by the first national archivist, Van der Chijs. Van der Chijs re-classified items using a principle known in professional circles as the pertinentiebeginsel, which was later abandoned by archivists, whereby the items are classified by subject, irrespective of the archive to which they belong. This leads to archives becoming contaminated with each other, which is extremely undesirable for a variety of reasons. The cross-contamination was partly rectified and the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 159 archive of ‘Higher Level Government’ in Batavia has been reconstructed. Many old inventory descriptions turned out to have mistakes in them which have now been put right. The result was published in book form in 2007. The extensive introduction has been printed in three languages, Indonesian, English and Dutch, to guarantee a wide level of accessibility. In addition to the archive of ‘Higher Level Government’, 14 smaller archives have also been described among which the following should be mentioned: the archives of the local magis- trate’s office (schepenbank), the notaries, and the Protestant Church Council in Batavia. The decision to compile an inventory of these local institutions must be applauded, as thanks to these archives we can now learn a great deal about life in multi-ethnic and multicultural Batavia. The archive of the Opium Society, which was founded in 1745 and generated considerable profits for a small group of people, also deserves to be mentioned here. In this particular case, a classical inventory method was used. Contrary to the claims that are sometimes made in research circles, inventories that have been compiled in strict adherence to the rules of the trade are still appearing. The extensive introduction consists – as it ought to – of a brief account of the main architects of the archives, and of the history of the archives and how they were managed, together with an explanation of the way in which the inventory was compiled. This is followed by brief, compact chapters about the primary and secondary sources, and about the cooperation between the ANRI and the NA. All of the archives that have been described, as is usually the case with early modern government archives, consist of lengthy series. The company adhered to a collegiate system of governance which involved a lot of meet- ings and collective decision-making. The governor general usually made decisions ‘in council’, and this was so at lowers level too. The tradition of the collegiate board continued to exist after 1816, although attempts were made from within the Netherlands under King William I to give the governor general a more independent position and to transform the Council of the Indies (Raad van Indië) into a strictly advisory body. At that time it had already become an art form to make this lengthy series accessible ‒ with all its decisions, reports, and incoming and outgoing correspondence ‒ so that the required information could be quickly retrieved. Indexes were made for this purpose, as well as repertoria in which brief summaries of the contents of the items were provided, called realia within the VOC. The realia were so popular that in 1835, when it became apparent that almost nobody could find their way around the archive of the General Secretariat, Governer General Baud argued that they should be reinstated in all their glory. The main part of the VOC archives can be accessed very easily with this inventory, and directors of both ANRI and the NA have rightly expressed

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 160 Book reviews pride in the work. In the light of the fact that the collaboration between these institutions is set to continue, it is perhaps a good idea to consider whether the archives of the various regional administrators in Indonesia, as far as they still remain in existence, could also be tracked down and opened up to the public. The proverbial ball now rests firmly in the court of the researchers. Researchers can find a digitized version of the inventory, which is slightly different from the paper version and only available in Dutch, on:www.tanap. net/content/activities/inventories/index.cfm.

Gusti Asnan, Memikir ulang regionalisme; Sumatera Barat tahun 1950-an. Jakarta: KITLV, NIOD (Nederlands Instituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie) and Yayasan Obor Indonesia, 2007, xxvi + 264 pp. ISBN 9789794616406 (paperback).

GERRY VAN KLINKEN KITLV Leiden [email protected]

The Indonesian provinces of the 1950s are ‘in’ again. For a long time they were seen only through the lens of their relations with Jakarta, as examples of Indonesia’s supposed centrifugal tendencies. During the New Order, Indonesian historians ignored them because they were too rebellious and chaotic. But the fall of Suharto has stimulated a fresh interest in the 1950s, a decade that was also decentralized and democratic. Now Gusti Asnan has written a fine book on West Sumatra in the 1950s, one that aims to let the province simply be itself. Perhaps inevitably, the PRRI rebellion plays the central role, as in previous studies of 1950s West Sumatra (Amal 1992; Kahin 1999). But this one is written from within. The research for this book was part of the Dutch-sponsored Rethinking Regionalism project, based at the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation (NIOD) in 2003-2005, under the umbrella program Indonesia in Transition. More than half the book is devoted to describing political society in West Sumatra between the end of the national war of liberation in 1950 and the beginning of the PRRI rebellion in 1956. The state during this period was remarkably well embedded, even democratic. The story actually begins on a note that suggests little had changed since colonial times. The division into aristocrats and Islamic leaders (penghulu and alim ulama) that is said to have dominated 1950s civil society dates back to the nineteenth century. But these labels hide a lot of internal movement. Each covered a wide spectrum of opinion, from conservative to modern. The most interesting of the modern aristo-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 161 crats was Datuk Bagindo Basa Nan Kuniang. He redefined the notion adat so radically that he welcomed Christians and non-Minangkabau Bataks into its community. The local political party he started, called the People’s Customary Party (Partai Adat Rakyat), combined an attachment to Minangkabau custom with a militant rejection of ‘colonialism, imperialism and feudalism’. It worked with the communist party PKI and favoured a ‘collectivized’ state-led economy. One of its top executives was a Batak Christian. Later we learn that aristocrats and preachers did not totally dominate civil society. Young people, women, and non-locals were there too. The youth were mainly students and soldiers (the latter strangely deferred to a later chapter). West Sumatra’s extraordinary respect for schools began in late colonial times and resulted in above-average literacy levels. By the early 1950s it had also produced a large student body, energetic young people who came of age in the revolution, had a penchant for organizing, and wanted to work for the state. Women, too, were fascinated with politics. They had their own newspapers and magazines, their own schools. All political parties, whatever their ideology, had affiliated women’s organizations. Particularly Masyumi, the Islamic modernist party that dominated West Sumatra, sent strong female delegates to the national parliament in Jakarta. Transmigrants from Java and the Batak Tapanuli area had a voice as well. The enormous number of organizations discussed in this book – help- fully listed in a glossary – reveals an emerging middle-class society in West Sumatra whose strength lay less in its market agility than in its political skills. Its members were good at debating issues, building coalitions, massaging public opinion, making demands, and, if necessary, sabotaging plans made in far-away places. Even in a small fishing town such as Air Bangis, 326 km from the provincial capital Bukittinggi along practically impassable roads, the citizens were so fired up about the positive potential of politics that the provincial governor told journalists during a rowdy visit there that people became more critical the further out they lived (p. 118). In the celebratory early 1950s, newspapers were filled with national and international news. Students spoke out in solidarity with the Moroccan independence movement. The local newspaper Haluan wrote about Burma, and the Soviet Union. A heterogeneous committee that included everyone from aristocrats to ethnic Chinese traders protested against Soumokil’s South Maluku Republic rebellion in Ambon. They urged people to donate 20% of their salary to help those Ambonese who did not support it. However, as it grew clearer that the new regime in Jakarta was taking West Sumatra hardly more seriously than the colonial Dutch had done, their attention turned increasingly to local issues. These included the absence of an officially recognized provincial parliament, the upcoming elections (held in 1955), and the governor, who was not a local. And then there was the Dewan Banteng that

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 162 Book reviews eventually launched the insurrectionary Revolutionary Government of the Republic of Indonesia (Pemerintah Revolusioner Republik Indonesia, PRRI). Dewan Banteng, the Buffalo Council, started life in November 1956 as a ‘reunion’ of military officers formerly part of the revolutionary Banteng Division. It was led by the young colonel Ahmad Husein. He and his com- rades were losing their privileges as the impecunious republic had begun downsizing its poorly organized revolutionary army. He turned to West Sumatra’s civil society for support, and found a warm reception when he promised quick results on all the issues that bothered them. Ahmad Husein was an excellent orator, but he did not have the civilian politician’s patience for negotiation. With surprising ease he set up an alternative local government on 20 December 1956 that paralysed the constitutional one. Gusti Asnan depicts these soldiers as a ‘social group’ (pp. 161, 202), springing from the bosom of West Sumatran society. The populist appeal of an authoritarian, manipulative young war hero like Ahmad Husein sits uncomfortably with Gusti Asnan’s vision of local democracy – the soldiers are not introduced until the second half of the book (p. 159). The violent legacy of the revolution in this and other regions of Indonesia deserves more attention. At one public meeting after another, nearly every political party, youth group, and women’s group came out in support of his increasingly strident demands to Jakarta. The one exception was the PKI. At first Masyumi, with its ties to Jakarta, was also reluctant to play along. But fearing its communist arch-rival was walking away with the big prize in Jakarta, it also began to support Ahmad Husein. That local backing was so high for a movement that was about to launch a ‘coup d’état against a sovereign state’ (p. 192) is a star- tling new discovery in Indonesian provincial historiography. Proclaimed on 15 February 1958, the PRRI also spread to other parts of Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Kalimantan. It was effectively a military junta. Its civilian members, some of them famous Jakarta politicians and intellectu- als, were there mainly for show (p. 206). Unfortunately, a similar impatience with civil politics infected the military top brass in Jakarta. Although they obviously disagreed with Ahmad Husein’s insubordination, they shared his preference for direct action. After Ahmad Husein upped the ante by insult- ing various visiting civilian ‘fact-finding commissions’ from Jakarta, General A.H. Nasution sent in the troops. They easily overran the rebellion in West Sumatra and reinstalled a civilian government. Ironically, in view of the military’s professional dislike of communists, PKI supporters scored many local government positions, since they had remained loyal to Jakarta. The progres- sive customary leader Datuk Bagindo Basa Nan Kuniang received a new lease of political life because he had not been close to the colonels. The aftermath of this military debacle was the emasculation of civil society in West Sumatra. This becomes especially clear when we leap over the confus-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 163 ing interval between the suppression of PRRI and the rise of the New Order. By the time Suharto’s army and his political machine Golkar were firmly in control, West Sumatra’s political landscape had been transformed. All those who had supported the Dewan Banteng – most of the well-rooted provincial establishment – were out in the cold. The Sukarnoists and communists who had been used to fill vacancies in May 1958 did not last beyond 1967. Datuk Bagindo Basa Nan Kuniang, for example, paid dearly when the tide turned in Jakarta. General Suharto imprisoned him for eleven years without trial for his pro-Sukarno sympathies (p. 74). Javanese military officers arrived to take over most of the top civilian and military positions. As the colonial Dutch had done, Golkar tried to raise its local legitimacy by co-opting religious and customary leaders. But it attracted only ambitious younger people who, according to Gusti Asnan, lacked respect (p. 243). Jakarta bought the grudging loyalty of the emerging provincial middle classes by giving them jobs in an expanding state apparatus. Riau and Jambi, formerly one province with West Sumatra, became provinces in their own right in the aftermath of PRRI. West Sumatra now only produced ‘leaders and citizens who waited for instructions from above’ (p. 247). The book misses the chance to probe deeper into some fundamental questions about the nature of society and the state. The opening chapter on the formation of the colonial state (beginning with the VOC in 1663) might have asked, ‘Was West Sumatra’s Minangkabau culture perhaps a product of that state?’ Joel Kahn (1993) has suggested that the answer may be yes, but unfortunately his book is not discussed. Reading West Sumatran politics in terms of an emerging middle class, as I have done in this review, is also only implicit in Gusti Asnan’s book. However, these are perhaps questions for another book. This one is definitely worth reading as it is.

References

Amal, Ichlasul 1992 Regional and central government in Indonesian politics; West Sumatra and South Sulawesi, 1949-1979. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press. Kahin, Audrey 1999 Rebellion to integration; West Sumatra and the Indonesian polity. Amster- dam: Amsterdam University Press. Kahn, Joel S. 1993 Constituting the Minangkabau; Peasants, culture and modernity in modern Indonesia. Oxford: Berg.

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Lise Lavelle, Amerta Movement of Java 1986-1997; An Asian movement improvisation. Lund: Centre for Languages and Literature, Lund University, Sweden, 2006, xviii + 353 pp. ISBN 9162867717 (paperback).

DICK VAN DER MEIJ Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta. [email protected]

The book takes us to an aspect of contemporary Javanese spiritual culture which, at present, is almost buried under the avalanche of attention given to a spiritual and religious phenomenon of a rather different order, Islam. At the outset of the book we are told that the Amerta Movement (and here I paraphrase) has to be felt by one’s own body. It is a free, spontaneous movement improvisation, both a practice and a concept. Its aim is to engage in a dialogue with life through physical movement, without a fixed form or cho- reography. It is, however, site-specific and person-specific, and intended to be practiced in a well-defined space in nature. It is rooted in what emerges from within the practitioner and her/his dialogue with her/his surroundings. The movement’s expressions or gestures are shaped individually by each practitioner. There is very little structure. A key element is inner feeling or rasa. This is a non-intellectual phenomenon and, more precisely, a tool whereby one receives or experiences all aspects of life, including those beyond one’s conscious mind and five senses. There are three categories: human, temple, and nature. These are intrinsically connected through physical/bodily expression (human) and prayer (temple), aimed at purification (nature). The Amerta Movement is a creation of Javanese movement instructor, Buddhist, and spiritual performance artist, Suprapto Suryodarmo (born 1945), who has explored and developed free bodily movement under a wide variety of conditions. In doing so, Suprapto wishes to create a bridge between one’s inner and outer self, between the traditional and the modern, between the village and the wider world, between the parochial and the cosmopolitan, between Javanese and Indonesian/Asian, and between Indonesia and the West. Javanese values, however, are carefully guarded in the process. Lise Lavelle has been a participant in the ‘movement’, as well as participant observer for this study, over the period 1986-1997. Let me start by saying that the book is not easy to digest. For someone not intimately versed in the subject it will be hard to keep track of the argument, or even to discern what the argument is. Lavelle’s aim is to ascertain whether the Amerta Movement is a form of movement meditation, a type of healing or art, or (most significantly!) ‘something else’ (p. 7). She does so by following the movement’s (mainly Western) participants in the period 1994-1996, and

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 165 by comparing her findings with developments during the 1980s. The study deals primarily with the movement on Java and, to a lesser extent, with its founder Suprapto Suryodarmo. The chapters on Candi Sukuh, Borobudur and Parangtritis, and the attention paid to wayang such as the lakon Murwakala, Sudamala and Dewaruci, and to Suprapto’s interpretation of these stories, gives us a new insight into wayang in the modern world. The description of Suprapto’s school, Lemah Putih, the participants, the programme, new developments, and the international outlook of the ‘movement’ reveal the dynamics of a specific part of Javanese culture in the twenty-first century. The book is important in demonstrating the vitality of present-day Javanese expressions of spirituality and notions of relationships between self and environment, as mediated through bodily expression. In general, too little attention is paid to these kinds of movements. The spiritual life of the Javanese often seems to have been colonized to a large extent by Islam and its modern expressions in movements and politics, but the reality is altogether more complex. There still seem to be places in Java where Islam has not penetrated at all. Readers will look in vain for Islam in this book; the word is not even in the index. Lise Lavelle has done the world of comparative religion and spirituality an immense favour by writing this meticulous descriptive book. The fact that she moves in the fringes of the humanities and art scholarship traditions, while diving into the world of spirituality and the unknown and unseen, shows her courage and stamina. It is a pity, however, that she has not added a conclusion. A book containing this wealth of information and philosophy would be much more easily digestible if the reader could read back from the conclusion to the argument, instead of the other way round. It is a pity, too, that the book has not been produced with the care it deserves. The presentation makes it difficult to handle, and the long list of errata could have been avoided in this computer age if the printing had waited for a careful proof-reader. The table of contents, maps, illustrations and figures is eight pages long, and makes finding one’s way in the book difficult rather than easy. The biographical essay at the end of the book, on the other hand, is interesting and actually a splendid idea. It gives the reader some general insight into the materials used. This is important because with so many printed publications and internet sources now available, choosing what to read threatens to become even more time-consuming than actually reading it. The extensive bibliographies added to the book will also be of enormous help to scholars interested in this particular kind of spiritual and manifestational movement in Java.

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Nicole-Claude Mathieu (ed.), Une maison sans fille est une maison morte; La personne et le genre en sociétés matrilinéaires et/ou uxorilo- cales. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 2007, 503 pp. ISBN 9782735111299. Price: EUR 36.00 (paperback).

JOKE VAN REENEN Darwin [email protected]

This book is a compilation of articles on the concept of person and gender in fourteen matrilineal and/or uxorilocal societies. It is a most valuable contribution to the studies of matriliny and gender as well as structuralism or symbolic anthropology. Apart from the extensive Introduction by the editor Nicole-Claude Mathieu and a Postface by Martine Gestin, the book is divided into sections according to geographical setting, including North America, South America, India, the Indian Ocean and Indonesia, and the Chinese-speaking world. Unfortunately Africa, a continent with a considerable number of matrilineal and uxorilocal societies, is not represented in this volume. The original plan seems to have been to include two African societies, but apparently, in the course of the preparation of the book, things went wrong somewhere. The book is the outcome of an international survey initially conducted among ethnologists who had been working on societies that were matrilineal and uxori-matrilocal. The intention was to examine the notions of female and male person in these societies. Mathieu formulated the hypothesis that, with respect to women, there might be a contrast between their status in patrilineal societies as quasi biological subjects (to be socialized), and in matrilineal societies, where they would be considered as fully social human beings. One could say that patrilineal societies tend to establish a dissociation of culture and nature for female subjects, a dissociation which is resolved by imposing ‘culture’ (identified as masculine) on females, whose perceived identity is biological. On the other hand, in matrilineal societies the female identity would be characterized by a concomitance of biology and culture. Mathieu’s hypothesis about matrilineal and matrilocal societies is that in each type of society the definition of female subject and male subject as social persons could have specific characteristics, including (in short): (1) matriliny engenders an individual and social identity for men as well as women; (2) masculine dominance tends to be less prominent in societies that are not only matrilineal but also matrilocal; (3) motherhood of daughters is more operational in cases of matrilocality as opposed to viri-, patri- or avunculocality. This compound hypothesis forms a common basis for the otherwise diverse contributions, looking at many different issues and topics, which are included in the book. Mathieu

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 167 brings them together in her encompassing analysis in the Introduction. The articles in this volume are interesting not only from a theoretical perspective, but also from the point of view of ethnographic description. The book is about differences as well as similarities. It covers both well-known matrilineal societies, and other groups that have not been widely reported on. Finally, in the Postface by Martine Gestin, the societies concerned are brought together again in a particular theoretical framework. In this case, Levi-Strauss’s postulate on the universal exchange of women by men is re-examined in the light of matriliny/matrilocality.

Henk Schulte Nordholt, Indonesië na Soeharto; Reformasi en restauratie. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2008, 278 pp. ISBN 9789035131354. Price: EUR 22,50 (paperback).

ELSKE SCHOUTEN NRC Handelsblad [email protected]

When I wanted to start reading for my new assignment as Indonesia corre- spondent for the NRC Handelsblad a year ago, I was unpleasantly surprised when I browsed some bookstores in Amsterdam. They offered piles of books on the ‘new superpowers’ China and India, but I couldn’t find any comprehensive book on the recent history of Indonesia. Even the exaggerated public attention to Islam had apparently not led to a renewed interest in the biggest Muslim country in the world. Not long after this, however, Indonesië na Soeharto; Reformasi en restauratie was published. In this book, Henk Schulte Nordholt describes and analyses the most important developments in the ten years that followed the fall of the Suharto regime. In less than 300 pages he offers a detailed but very readable account of this period for a general audience. The book starts with a short description of the New Order, as an aid to understanding what came after. This is followed by chapters on the fall of the Suharto regime and on the political processes that brought the three presidents after Suharto to power, and how all of them failed to deliver on the promises of reformasi. But the book offers more than a chronological description of events. Schulte Nordholt also analyses the three most important broader developments to occur during the democratization. First, the decentralization of the archipelago that led to bloodshed in Kalimantan, Sulawesi and the Maluku Islands. Backed by detailed empirical research, Schulte Nordholt argues that

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 168 Book reviews this regional violence was caused less by ethnic and religious differences than by the struggle for power that followed the decentralization. Local elites saw opportunities in the new situation and tried to tighten their grip on power by mobilizing their supporters and – if necessary – provoking chaos. Besides an explanation, this analysis offers hope that there is little risk that this violence will soon flare up again. In other chapters, Schulte Nordholt describes how Islam is gaining importance in Indonesia and how the military has lost much of its power, although this process is far from concluded. The last chapter can almost be read as an happy ending, wherein the process of democratization that seemed to stagnate during the presidency of Megawati proved to be more resilient than expected, because of a new constitution and successful elections. Although president SBY might be just as imperfect as his predecessors, at least we can expect him to be removed next summer if that is what the Indonesian people decide. For everybody who wants to understand current developments in Indonesia, from the latest developments in the Munir case to the anti-corruption efforts of the Corruption Eradication Commission (KPK), Indonesië na Soeharto will be a great help ‒ not least because many players in Indonesia’s current affairs were also around during reformasi and before. That brings me to one thing I missed in the book: many readers would have been helped by more short flashbacks or flash-forwards, to explain how certain people who seemed finished are still powerful today. For example: when I read this book for the first time, I did not realize that people like Prabowo and Wiranto are still forces to be reckoned with. A simple answer to the question ‘how Indonesia is doing’ is not given in this book. Readers are left to decide for themselves whether ‒ for example ‒ the Islamization of the archipelago must be seen as a threat to civil freedom, or as the emancipation of a religion that was for years the object of repression. Schulte Nordholt does not want to predict how long it will take before Indo- nesia is a modern democracy in which nobody stands above the law. Still, the book may be a source for cautious optimism. Readers who stopped following Indonesia closely after the first troublesome years after Suharto will be especially surprised to read how much progress has been made. Hopefully the book will contribute to a more accurate and up-to-date image of Indonesia in the Netherlands, where many people think they know Indonesia, but much of their knowledge is in fact outdated.

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V.I. Braginsky, … and sails the boat downstream: Malay Sufi poems of the boat. Leiden: Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia and Oceania, University of Leiden, 2007, xviii + 480 pp. [Semaian 24.] ISBN 9789073084247. Price: EUR 60.00 (paperback).

SURYADI Leiden University [email protected]

This book is a long-awaited comprehensive study of symbols of the boat and navigation in traditional Malay Sufi literature. It is based partly on a series of conference papers written by the author – some of which have been published in journals – which have now been completely revised and synthesized into a single work. According to its author, this book – consisting of two large chapters, together totalling 226 pages, preceded by a 109-page prologue and rounded off by a 55-page epilogue – has been shaped from what he calls ‘the twists of the spiral’ (p. xi), which had been left in an unfinished state and dragged on for more than eight years before finally being transformed into this book. However, one part of the book seems to have appeared in print more than thirty-five years ago in the author’s ‘Some remarks on the structure of “Syair Perahu” by Hamzah Fansuri’ in Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 131 (1975:407-26). As I turned the pages of this rather thick book, soon after one of its editors, Willem van der Molen, passed me a copy fresh from the press, my eyes lighted on one chapter that took me back to the spring of 1998. It reminded me of my first visit to Leiden University (and to Europe), to participate in the ‘International Workshop on Malay Manuscripts’ convened by Jan Just Witkam of Leiden University Library. I had flown in from Manila to become the youngest and least-experienced paper presenter at the symposium, and there read Vladimir I. Braginsky’s draft paper entitled ‘On the textual history of Syair Perahu, with special reference to statistical methods of attribution’. I remember how the author demonstrated rarely used statistical methods to analyse the structure and evolution of syair rhyme, for which he was received by the workshop’s participants with great wonder rather than critical com- ment. Now, after eight years, the paper appears, apparently with no major revision, as Chapter 2 of this book. Focusing on the formulations of a comprehensive navigational symbolism among the nations of seafarer Malays, this book provides us with a deep historical analysis of their transformations over a millennium: from archaic Malay folklore to Tantric writings to Sufi works and, finally, to purely religious compositions. The author, highly acclaimed in the field of classical

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Malay literature, sheds comprehensive light on three poems: Syair Bahr an- Nisa (‘Poem of the Sea of Women’) from the sixteenth or early seventeenth century, and two pieces both entitled Syair Perahu (‘Poem of the Boat’), one of which was written in Sumatran réncong syllabary script between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the other in Jawi script from a later period. All three poems are critically edited, commented on, and translated into English. The author also examines the philological and Sufi aspects of the poems, and approaches them as genuine works of art by discussing their poetics. The Prologue (pp. 1-109) looks at precursors of the ‘Poem of the Boat’. The author traces maritime symbolism in the Malay world from the Hindu- Buddhist era as represented in, among other things, the vestiges of Sriwijayan epigraphy of ancient Sumatra and in works of Javanese classical literature such as the kakawin Rāmāyana and Nāgarakretāgama. He follows this with accounts of the Acehnese Sufi Hamzah Fansuri and poets of his circle. The latter two thirds of this section examine the anonymous Syair Bahr an-Nisa (BhNs), which Braginsky regards as an antecedent of the ‘Poem of the Boat’. Nevertheless, after delineating the historical and religious aspects of the poem, and comparing its poetics with some of Hamzah Fansuri’s poems, the author concludes that BhNs, which was dedicated to the Sultan of Aceh, Alauddin Riayat Syah Sayyid al-Mukammal (1589-1604), very possibly origi- nated from one and the same school of Malay ‘poetical Sufism’ as represented by Hamzah Fansuri’s poetry circle (p. 39). Although scholars like H. Kraemer, J. Doorenbos, and particularly Syed Muhammad Naguib al-Attas have assert- ed that the author of BhNs was Hamzah Fansuri himself, there is no clear evidence that explicitly identifies him as the author of the poem. The last 28 pages of the Prologue provide the critical text and the English translation of BhNs (pp. 82-109). Chapter 1 (pp. 111-210) examines the ‘Poem of the Boat’ manuscripts written in réncong syllabary script – the indigenous script older than Jawi script which was previously current in some local communities in Sumatra, such as Aceh, Lampung, and Bengkulu (Rejang). Braginsky calls this tradition Syair Perahu 1 (SP1). In this chapter the author provides a reconstruction of SP1. He states that ‘SP1 is one of the most remarkable works in Malay Sufi literature, unique in a way. Yet, the condition in which the poem has come down to us is so unsatisfactory as to leave us little hope for its final reconstruction by the sole effort of one person’ (p. 111). He offers a reconstruction based on all the related materials currently to hand, with the hope that the concerted efforts of Malayanists will help to remove the inevitable mistakes and preserve this most interesting piece of Malay literature in a form as close to its original as possible. Braginksy mentions that at present four manuscripts of SP1 are known: MS SOAS 41394, MS India Office Library (London) Malay A2, MS No.

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268/242 of the Museum of Ethnology (Leiden), and MS India Office Library (London) EUR C.214 (pp. 111-2). The two former manuscripts were written on tree bark in réncong script from Rejang (Bengkulu). The author examines the characteristics of the language and script of each manuscript and sum- marizes their contents. In Chapter 2 (pp. 211-337), Braginsky elaborates on one of the most famous pieces of traditional Malay literature, the ‘Poem of the Boat’ mis- takenly ascribed to Hamzah Fansuri, Syair Perahu 2, abbreviated SP2. As his bibliographical investigation indicates, there are six manuscripts of SP2 preserved in major libraries: MS London SOAS 168218, MS Jakarta VT 67, MS Leiden Cod.Or. 3374, Cod.Or. 1917, Cod.Or. 12156, and Cod.Or. 8754. They can be grouped into two recensions: long and short. The former is surmised to be the original one, whereas the latter ‘must have developed in the course of the “weathering” of the Sufi semantics of the poem and its evolution in the direction of a religious work per se’ (p. 289). The author provides a trans- literation of this text with apparatus criticus and translation into English. He examines the integral nature of the long recension of SP2, and the formation of its short recension. He also analyses its rhyme as a means of attribution. The time and place of the composition of SP2 and the authorship of the poem are impressively discussed. After examining all these aspects, the author concludes that the tradition ascribing the authorship of SP2 to Hamzah Fansuri appears to be invalid. Rather, he argues, the poem may have been composed by Syaikh Daud of Sunur, a wandering ulama from Pariaman who lived in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century (for more on Syekh Daud Sunur, see Suryadi 2001 and 2004). The author argues that this attribution is supported by the chronology of the sheikh’s life (he fled to Mecca due to conflict with the followers of the Shattārīyyah tarekat [mystical brother- hoods] in his village in Sunur, Pariaman), his Sufi ideas, and the peculiarities of the rhyming that is typical of the Minangkabau poetry school, and which coincides with poems he is known to have composed. In the Epilogue (pp. 338-94), the author looks at the extra-textual dimensions of the boat symbolism found in SP1 and SP2, by discussing boat symbolism in the wider Middle Eastern and Malay-Indonesian traditions. As well, the poems are placed in a broader context, religious, anthropological, and literary, in order to facilitate a deeper understanding of them as complex compositions made up of heterogeneous components integrated by specific Sufi concepts. The author distinguishes three layers in the boat symbolism of SP1 and SP2: the Qur’anic, the Middle Eastern classical Sufi, and the ritual- mythological in the Indonesian and Malay cultural context. These three layers are elaborated by analysing Qur’anic images of ships, and boat symbolism in classical Sufi literature, in archaic Indonesian traditions, and in the shamanis- tic and epic traditions of the Malays. This section closes with an account of the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 172 Book reviews boat symbolism in SP1 and SP2. The author finds that culturally determined associations of the boat with the creative activity of Allah were brought to the fore in SP1, whereas in SP2 the focus shifted to associations with the destiny of the deceased (p. 394). This study thus shows how Sufi boat symbolism demonstrated its various facets in different cultural milieus in the course of its historical development. It also shows how elements of the wide spectrum of meanings initially inherent in the Qur’anic ship either manifested themselves or were radically transformed, depending on conceptual differences between various Sufi schools, especially in Sumatra. Considering the geographical environment of Malay society, which is archipelagic in character, it is no exaggeration when Braginsky says that in traditional Malay culture and literature the Sufi symbolism of the boat coexisted with ritual-mythological boat symbolism of ancient traditions of non-Muslim peoples in the Malay archipelago (p. 338). Actually, boat symbolism was inherent in various aspects of the life of Ma- lay societies. It was represented not only in traditional Malay Sufi literature such as the ‘Poem of the Boat’; it was also represented, for example, in the letter heading used in classical Malay letters, which was usually in the shape of a boat. The boat symbolism visualized in these letter headings may have contained cultural meanings. Similarly, the word sampan (dugout), which is found in many beautiful Minangkabau pantun such as in these two stanzas (quoted from MS Leiden Cod.Or. 5954A; underlined by Suryadi): ‘Putiah ka- siaknyo Pulau Karang / Tampak nan dari Ujuang Batu / Lauik intan bapaga karang / Adokah buliah sampan lalu?’ (The sand on Pulau Karang is white / You can see it from Ujung Batu / A sea of diamonds fenced with coral / Can a dugout make its way through?); ‘Kayu aro di Kampuang Surau / Ikatan ayam biriang jalak / Putiah mato mamandang pulau / Sampan ado pangayuah tidak’ (A fig tree at Kampung Surau / A place to tether a fighting-cock / Gazing at the islands I am dispirited / The dugout is here but has no paddles). The word sampan (dugout) in the second couplets of the pantun quoted above undoubtedly denotes something other than the range of meanings discussed by Braginsky, though exactly what this metaphor means in the context of Minangkabau culture cannot be literally explicated. Considering this, I must say that boat symbolism in traditional Malay culture and literature has had meaning not only in the sacral life of Malay societies, as reflected in the ‘Poem of the Sea of Women’ and the ‘Poem of the Boat’, but also in the profane dimensions of these societies, as reflected in the Minangkabau pantun. Thus the representation of boat symbolism in traditional Malay culture and literature extends far beyond the aspects revealed by the author in this book.

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Gilles Gravelle, Meyah; An east Bird’s Head language of Papua, Indonesia. PhD thesis, Free University of Amsterdam, 2004, xv + 441 pp. Paperback.

IAN TUPPER Summer Institute of Linguistics, Ukarumpa, Papua New Guinea [email protected]

In the past decade, the Bird’s Head Peninsula at the northwestern tip of the island of New Guinea has been increasingly recognized as a region of extraordinary interest to linguists. The peninsula is a patchwork of divergent languages, with as many as five distinct families of Papuan (non-Austronesian) languages, as well as the presence of Austronesian languages. Bird’s Head languages show extensive changes in lexicon and grammar from the pre- sumed proto-languages, such that ‘regular comparative work is hardly possible’ (Reesink 2005). This situation appears to have developed as a consequence of coexistence of Papuan and Austronesian speakers in the peninsula over the past four thousand years, together with trading networks extending to Flores and Halmahera. The Bird’s Head has thus been a zone of unusually high contact between the New Guinea region and insular Southeast Asia. Gravelle’s grammar of the Meyah language supplements a number of recent studies of Bird’s Head languages (K. Berry and C. Berry 1999; Reesink 2002; Dol 2007). This volume, based on Gravelle’s doctoral studies at the Free University of Amsterdam, is the fruit of his work on this language group since 1985. As a result, he is able to illustrate his grammatical points with a multiplicity of examples from a variety of texts, making his analysis convincing. The grammar follows a fairly traditional format, building from phonology up to word classes, phrase level and clause level, with a final chapter on speech acts. This presentation has the merit of being systematic, although at times it means discussions of related topics are widely separated. The main text is followed by four glossed and translated texts of differing types, which illustrate the structures and functions described. Also appended are Meyah- English and English-Meyah wordlists, and an index. Gravelle’s discussion highlights a number of linguistically interesting characteristics. One such feature is the degree to which word classes can be identified by the root-initial phoneme. Thus verb stems always begin with non-high vowels, and most alienable nouns begin with m- (which appears to be a fused prefix). Minor word classes (such as adverbs) all begin with a consonant other than m-. Another such feature is the coexistence in Meyah of numeral classifiers and noun classifiers. As Gravelle notes, numeral classifiers are uncommon among Papuan languages in general, although they

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 174 Book reviews do occur in the Torricelli family and on Bougainville (they are also found in some languages of the Sepik family). Noun classifiers are also found among some Papuan languages; but the combination of both in one noun phrase is quite unusual. Another interesting feature of Meyah is the multiplicity of terms utilizing body parts to express emotional and physical states. Body-part metaphors are found in many Papuan languages, but Meyah seems to be especially rich in those involving the liver to express emotion. For example, odou efeyei ‘worried’ is literally ‘liver very liquid’, odou os (literally ‘liver rub’) expresses ‘desire’, and odou esiri (literally ‘liver fall’) expresses ‘disappointed’. Body parts are also used to express spatial relationships: odou ‘liver’ means ‘in front of’, okumfoj ‘waist’ means ‘beside a flat object’, whileefembra ‘shoulder’ means ‘beside a long, thin object’. A very pleasing feature of this grammar is its extensive interaction with other literature, both descriptions of neighbouring languages and typological works. In addition, Gravelle considers the consequences of his description of Meyah for linguistic theory. Thus he critiques Chafe’s argument that ‘given information’ versus ‘new information’ can only be considered a discrete dichotomy, showing that the anaphoric system in Meyah provides some evidence that topic accessibility must be considered scalar (p. 151). One disappointment is that Gravelle does not extend his analysis beyond the sentence level. Although the grammar as it stands is quite long, it would have been interesting to see an examination of Meyah discourse patterns. Despite this minor criticism, the book is highly recommended. It provides a comprehensive picture of this language, with ample but not excessive numbers of examples. It is clearly written and easy to follow, and will remain the major reference on Meyah for years to come.

References

Berry, Keith and Christine Berry 1999 A description of Abun; A West Papuan language of Irian Jaya. Canberra: Pa- cific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Austra- lian National University. [Pacific Linguistics B-115.] Dol, Philomena 2007 A grammar of Maybrat; A language of the Bird’s Head Peninsula, Papua Prov- ince, Indonesia. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. [Pacific Linguistics 586.] Reesink, Ger P. (ed.) 2002 Languages of the eastern Bird’s Head. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Re- search School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National Univer- sity. [Pacific Linguistics 524.]

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Reesink, Ger P. 2005 ‘West Papuan languages: roots and development’, in: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Jack Golson, and Robin Hide (eds), Papuan pasts; Ccultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples, pp. 185-218. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. [Pacific Linguistics 572.]

Penny Edwards, Cambodge; The cultivation of a nation, 1860-1945. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2007, viii + 349 pp. ISBN 0824829239. Price: USD 62.00 (hardback).

UN LEANG University of Amsterdam [email protected]

The period covered in this book, 1860-1945, spans the interval betwen two key events in Cambodian history. The first is the rediscovery of Angkor Wat by French naturalist Henri Mouhot in 1860, three years before Cambodia became a French protectorate in 1863. The second is Cambodia’s first postcolonial taste of independence, courtesy of the departing Japanese, in March 1945 (although in October of that year, France would come back and continue to rule Cambodia until 1953). As indicated in the subtitle of the book, ‘The cultivation of a nation’, Penny Edwards’ main objective is to explore how the idea of jiet (nation) emerged and was popularized in Cambodia. Contrary to conventional analyses of the emergence of modern nationalism in Cambodia, which focus on sociopoliti- cal repression and economic injustice, Edwards adopts a cultural perspective. It is, she argues, from the awareness of one’s culture as distinct from others that the idea of nationalism emerges. She further claims that in Cambodia, ‘nationalists did not produce a national culture’; rather, ‘the elaboration of a national culture by French and Cambodian literati eventually produced nationalists’ (p. 7). Following this line of argument, Edwards tries throughout her book to answer the question: ‘How, why, and with what effect did people and ideas travel across time and space?’ (p. vii). The people and ideas referred to here are the nationalists and their ideas which, deliberately or not, were shaped by the colonialist project through dissemination of new technology, especially print media. Through this project, which aimed among other things to shield Cambodian social movements ‒ particularly those led by monks ‒ from British influences coming via Siam, colonialism made the language and

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 176 Book reviews religion of Cambodia distinct from those of its neighbours, especially Siam. Cambodians thus came to call them sasana-jiet (the national religion) and piesaa-jiet (the national language). Another key symbol of the jiet-kmae (Khmer nation) is Angkor Wat. The crystallization of Angkor as a national symbol rather than a religiously sacred site was the result of a colonialist project of museums, exhibitions, excava- tions, and the rebuilding a national Khmer art style, both in Phnom Penh and in the metropole, France. It was French promotion of Khmer arts and culture that gave rise to Khmer nationalism, with its familiar anthesis of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Consciousness of religion, language, and the great temple as national belongings, and as constituent elements of Khmer nationhood, was further enhanced when increasing numbers of Cambodian literati and leaders began to travel outside Cambodia. Partly due to incomplete commitment on the part of the French, the project of constructing a Khmer nation was not yet finished at the time of independence. It was continued thereafter by Khmer leaders themselves, who set up their own political agenda for translating the ideal of the jiet (nation) into a real nation-community. The political use of Angkor Wat by Cambodian leaders involves an element of interpretation. Who built the temple, and who owns it? On these question conflicting views already existed in the colonial period, when the royal family, claiming direct descent from the Angkorean king, claimed Angkor for themselves and equated the national project with the regeneration of the monarchy. Others saw the temple as the property of the Cambodian people and as a symbol of national participation as well as pride, arguing that the common people, not the king, had sacrificed their labour and resources to build it. Other debates within Khmer nationalism concern ethnicity (who are the pure Khmer, the original Khmer?) and, to a certain extent, territory. The nation-building task has always been fraught with controversy, involving as it does the tension between modernity and tradition, between (to use Jurgen Habermas’s terms) system and life-world. ‘Until recently’, Edwards writes, ‘Cambodian nationalism was commonly conceived of as a primordial web of memory linking “pre- and postcolonial Cambodia” via an unbroken chain of pride in the golden age of Angkor’ (p. 5). To a greater or lesser degree, the path forward for the nation was always portrayed as some kind of return to the Angkorean past. This introspective, nostalgic quality of Cambodian nationalism, of course, was not without its dangers. In this connection Edwards quotes Ong Thong Hoeung, Cambodian author of the book J’ai cru aux Khmers rouges; Retour sur une illusion: ‘all dic- tators represent themselves as defenders of national sovereignty, but often when one shelters behind his own sovereignty, his own culture, or his own tradition, an injustice is in the making’ (p. 256).

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Actually, there is in principle nothing wrong in rethinking the Angkorean past, or sheltering behind one’s own culture in order to move forwards. The problem remains that of how to translate the idea of jiet (nation) into a real nation-community in the twenty-first century; and whether that task should be carried out only by a political elite, or through the active participation of the Cambodian people.

J. Stephen Lansing, Perfect order; Recognizing complexity in Bali. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2006, xii + 225 pp. ISBN 9780691027272. Price: USD 39.95 (hardback).

CAROL WARREN Murdoch University, Australia [email protected]

Undoubtedly the most contested issue in the ethnographic literature on Bali is the interpretation of the hierarchic and egalitarian features of this indisput- ably complex society. Stephen Lansing’s Perfect order; Recognizing complexity in Bali is a multi-disciplinary and ethnographically rich exploration of this theme. It is an important study, not only for its effort to grasp the dynamics of Balinese society in its ecological context, but more generally for providing insight into the variety of ways that vertical and horizontal relationships articulate in practical adaptation to the vicissitudes of the environment and of community life. The product of several decades of research on Balinese irrigation systems, this book sets out to provide a comprehensive account of what makes one of the world’s most efficient, productive, and (in its traditional form) sustainable agricultural regimes work. Lansing promises from the outset to ‘complicate’ the conventional binaries – traditional/modern, East/West, hierarchy/equality, top-down/bottom-up, theoretical/practical – that pervade much of the debate on political models of the state and of economic development. He draws on a number of disciplines to make the case. Beginning with systems ecology, then working through archaeological and early textual evidence, and culminating in thick descriptive accounts of contemporary subak (irrigation association) decision-making, with close attention to personal rivalries, local power plays, and cooperative accommodations, the study gives a real feeling for the complexities that shape Balinese organizational arrangements. The first question explored in the early chapters of the book is therole of cooperation in the creation and maintenance of the elaborate infrastruc-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 178 Book reviews ture required for wet-rice cultivation. Lansing uses evidence from his long- term collaboration with a systems ecologist and the members of several adjoining subak irrigation associations to argue that Balinese farmers have self-organized to create an effective decentralized and flexible system: The rhizome-like subak network is close enough to the ground to respond to local ecological and social signals, yet sufficiently well integrated with the wider system through the cosmic symbology of sacred water mountains to produce the micro-engineered transformation of Bali’s rugged volcanic terrain and its iconic terraced landscapes. Game-theory models of decision-making revolving around the two most important ecological concerns to upsteam and downstream farmers ‒ water shortage and pest management respectively ‒ show how local information exchange and adaptive learning enable an optimum level of cooperation that over time both maximizes and equalizes harvest yields. The core thesis is that through trial and error rather than grand design, Balinese farmers have managed to negotiate the balance between water sharing and the risks of pest outbreak through the semi-autonomous decision-making processes of these subak associations, sustained by the ritual connections of the parallel water temple network. Lansing argues that Bali was physically and structurally different from most of the heartland areas where divine kingship arose in tandem with intensive wet-rice cultivation. Early state formation in Java and other parts of Southeast Asia took place in geographic areas of broad plains and large rivers, neither of which are found in Bali. In these lowland kingdoms royal powers were used to deploy corvée labour for the massive earthworks needed for irrigation, water storage, and flood control, without the necessity for autonomous inter-community cooperation. Bali’s alternative organizational arrangements evolved in a different ecological context, and adopted a different religio-social solution to the problem of trans-local cooperation in its irrigation network system. Here Indic hierarchy, focused on centres of power, combined with decentred Austronesian ancestral principles to forge the institutional framework for cooperative management of irrigation within a dualistic model of governance. The autonomous place of the Rice Goddess at the apex of the water temple system at Batur indicates the parallel cultural significance of local egalitarian structure and ethos, alongside the counterpoint state temple system centred at Besakih, where caste and hierarchy are celebrated. According to Lansing, the water temple complexes, independent of the state-centred temple system, came to represent nodes in a socio-ecological network, whose flexible and dynamic intersections facilitated information exchange and cooperation among farmers. Royal authority was not an essential component of the expansion of the Balinese irrigation system in this

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 179 interpretation. ‘The water temples derive all the authority they need from their practical success in managing the ecology of the rice terraces and their symbolic association with the gods’ (p. 87). The Balinese alternative model links natural, social and supernatural worlds of the local sphere in relationships of ritual reciprocity and social interdependence. This parallel cultural domain stands in a relation both complementary and counterpoint to the hierarchic state model with which it articulates at other levels and in other dimensions of Balinese political-religious life. This latter aspect of complexity in Bali receives much less attention in Perfect order, with its focus on local cultural dynamics. Lansing argues that there was no need for centralized authority to create and maintain the Balinese irrigation system in the past, and that for similar reasons centralized management policies are no more appropriate to local ecological adaptations in the present. Computer simulation models and survey data are deployed to demonstrate how the complexity of these systems makes top-down management suboptimal for Balinese agriculture. With respect to the applicability of concepts of equality and democracy to local institutions, Lansing is unequivocal: ‘[T]he average Balinese farmer undoubtedly has more experience of direct democratic assemblies than the average Frenchman’ (p. 5). But the extent to which the ideal is reflected in local practice nonetheless varies considerably over time and space. What is most interesting, and of significance beyond the Balinese case, are the conditions under which local concepts of good leadership, accountability, and collective decision-making succeed or fail to realize these cooperative ideals in day-to-day deliberations among the neighbouring subak Lansing studied. Detailed case studies of leadership and decision-making show how constant reinterpretation and efforts to balance finely judged and ultimately ambivalent principles lead to a surprisingly great variation in outcomes despite the shared cultural grounding of local Balinese institutions. Lansing’s argument regarding the self-organizing capacity and degree of autonomy of Balinese subak is a contested one (see, for example, Hauser- Schäublin 2003). It implicates fundamental questions in the ethnographic literature of the integrity and socio-political character of village communities, sources of innovation, processes of state formation, and the nature of power itself. Perfect order will certainly stimulate more debate on these questions that remain of importance for understanding the mechanisms of resource distribution and governance in the present as much as the past. It provides insights that resonate, too, beyond the apparently unique and esoteric aspects of the Balinese case. In Perfect order, the author and editors have opted for a writing and presentation style that has the virtue of making a difficult and potentially dry subject interesting to a wider audience. Specialists, however, may wish for

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 180 Book reviews the more liberal use of referencing, content footnotes, and local terminology of academic convention.

Reference

Hauser-Schäublin, Brigitta 2003 ‘The precolonial Balinese state reconsidered; A critical evaluation of theory construction on the relationship between irrigation, the state and ritual’, Current Anthropology 44-2:153-82.

Roxana Waterson (ed.), Southeast Asian lives; Personal narratives and historical experience. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2007, x + 317 pp. ISBN 109971693445. Price: USD 27.00 (paperback).

C.W. WATSON University of Kent [email protected]

Since Paul Radin’s work, Crashing Thunder (1926) anthropologists have come a long way in their understanding of the use and value of life-histories, and we all now know that the elicitation of the life-history, through prompts and interrogation, not to mention the ultimate framing of the narrative in a published prose form, inevitably filters the memory and the interpretation of the past in a particularly mediated way. The contributors to Southeast Asian Lives acknowledge, and sensitively work through, these theoretical issues of representativeness, but rightly insist that life-histories are invaluable for an understanding of aspects of social change otherwise difficult to describe and define. Most notably for Southeast Asia, as they show, these aspects include: the significance of the passing of time for individuals; the linkage of local developments to national events; the material effects of modernization and change in traditionally ascribed occupational and gender roles within communities. The contributors are all keenly aware, however, that the benefit of the approach through life-histories is matched by the difficulty of actually eliciting the history. In some cases the problem of obtaining the relevant information then to be made up into a chronological account is difficult but possible, in other cases where an informant is a reluctant narrator the difficulties seem insurmountable. Waterson’s useful introduction comprehensively covers the theoretical

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 181 questions which arise from doing research into and making use of life-histories and she refers to several examples not limited to Southeast Asia. This is followed by Warren’s sensitive unravelling of a life-history which illuminates the history of the development of Balinese music, dance and drama in the twentieth century, but also poignantly reveals the ambivalence of a remarkable individual, Madé Lebah, to his own position within that history. Hoskins deals at fascinating length with how she became embroiled in a controversy over her analytical account of the life of a Sumban aristocrat, a cautionary tale, if ever there was one, of how contemporary anthropologists should avoid any impression of being proprietorial. Waterson’s life of the Torajan, Fritz Basaing, is an exemplary account of the vicissitudes experienced by a man who after acquiring a rudimentary medical education went on to make a major contribution to health and welfare under three different regimes, Dutch, Japanese and Indonesian. Dentan’s speculative tale of a Semai executed for murder is movingly written and tells us a lot about Dentan but, despite the drama of the story, is thin on biographical details and a little out of place in this collection. The three contributions which follow deal with Thailand, but they are less about individuals and more about a sense of place and historical change. Hamilton uses material from interviews with four exemplary individuals to give an account of Hua Hin in western Thailand. Yoko Hayami explores the changing position of women among the Karen as a consequence of opportunities opened up by modernization and migration. And finally, Dorairajoo reflects on the impact of development on a small Malay fishing community in southern Thailand using not so much life-history as occasional insightful comments, to allow the reader to infer how changes have been perceived. For readers interested in seeing how life-histories consciously elicited from a variety of sources can push us to give greater weight to individual experience as a subject in its own right, it is the accounts of Warren and Waterson to which they should turn. For those more concerned with the role of the an- thropologist as representing a society and having a responsibility to its individuals Hoskins should be obligatory reading; and for those who appreciate case studies which draw upon the experience of individuals to substantiate the credibility of anthropological analysis, all the contributions are valuable. Let us hope that this new critical redirection of our attention to life-histories will inspire not only those working on Southeast Asia but others in the field elsewhere to be more committed to the collection of such stories.

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Jean DeBernardi, The way that lives in the heart; Chinese popular religion and spirit mediums in Penang, Malaysia. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2006, xvii + 372 pp. ISBN 0804752923. Price: USD 68.00 (hardback).

ROBERT WESSING Leiden [email protected]

In this study Jean DeBernardi depicts spirit mediums in Penang (Malaysia) not just as fortune tellers and healers, but also as persons with a deep understanding of the social milieu in which they function as charismatic teachers and as leaders who show their clients a moral path that often, perhaps coin- cidentally, suits the social context in which both the client and the medium operate. The book begins with a long and detailed introductory chapter that fore- shadows much that is to come, and discusses such matters as the history of Chinese migration into Southeast Asia, colonial views of spirit mediums, the spread of the spirit cult in the Malaysian context, as well as theoretical issues. Chinese religion is depicted as a complex set of relations of deities, saints, Buddhas, and Dao Immortals, divine founders and Bodhisattvas rather than the simple belief in gods, ghosts and ancestors it is often portrayed as being. The book explores the nature of the relationship of spirit mediums to this array of divinities from two angles. The first part of the volume deals with the question of spirit mediumship itself, while the second part focuses on the mediums, detailing the practices and audiences of four such persons and the social context in which they operate. The first chapter of Part I therefore deals with the question of improving one’s luck, primarily in economic matters, since wealth seems to be the primary indicator of a person’s moral worth (pp. 68, 190). Life is seen in terms of cycles of luck interwoven with collisions with the spirit world, which are the focus of Chapter 2. The author analyses things that can go wrong and people’s relationship with the supernatural through dreams and divination. Important here is the role of spirit mediums as inter- mediaries and translators of messages from the gods. The final chapter of Part I discusses trance as a performance deeply imbued with visual and oral references to religious texts, popular religious belief, and popular literature, some of whose characters achieve the reality and status of deities. While I agree that the medium’s actions are indeed dramatic, which adds to their impact and credibility, I question the use of the word ‘performance’ (beginning on p. 121), as well as a lengthy reference to Geertz’s idea of the theatre state (p. 137), because of their implication of artifice. Assuming the spirit mediums not to be rogues and deceivers, we must also assume their possession by gods or

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 183 spirits to be real, at least to themselves and their audience. Presentation might therefore be a better term than performance, in that presentation can encom- pass the dramatic aspects of the activity while also addressing the ‘making- present’ of the possessing entity. This is in fact implied in the author’s state- ment that she interviewed the gods themselves while the mediums were in trance. One might therefore conceive of the god dancing the medium rather than the other way around, although these are not the words of DeBernardi’s informants (p. 123). The second part of the book asks the question what kind of people these spirit mediums are. Chapters 4 through 7 each present the teachings and practices of a different spirit medium, often in the form of a dialogue between the mediums, the researcher and her assistants. She does this to present the voice of her respondents, which, DeBernardi claims (p. 40), has the ‘potential to capture the intersection of structure and process, history and event, through the words and lives of individuals’. While this is indeed possible when judiciously done, in reading these chapters I often wondered what the point was of the many vignettes and histories that did not seem to bring me closer to understanding the author’s insights. What struck me as most interesting about these four spirit mediums is the way that their practice and teachings were keyed to the particular audience niche they served. Thus Datuk Aunt, the subject of Chapter 4, is a female medium who specializes in placating local Malay animist spirits with whom Chinese assimilated to Malay culture are familiar and must deal with. She does not neglect, however, to include the Chinese gods in her sessions. Her main possessing-spirit combines features of both Malay and Chinese culture (p. 185). Master Poh, the focus of Chapter 5, addresses a different audience with his teachings of self-cultivation and his explanations of concepts from Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism, China’s three religions. His teachings form a bridge between China’s literary tradition and his contemporary audiences (p. 41), defining a moral position rooted in the three religions that emphasizes order, filial piety, and the dangers of attachment and desire, stressing that in order to become human one must have known suffering (pp. 208-9, 219). Master Lim’s audience in Chapter 6 is an English-educated elite group for whom the teacher-medium translated and commented upon Daoist texts. Like Master Poh, Lim emphasizes self-cultivation and draws on the three religious traditions, adding to these sources like the Bible, theosophy, and Theravada Buddhism. Unlike the other mediums discussed here, Master Lim does not use costumes and does not go into trance. His practice emphasizes simplicity, which to his audience confirms him as an avatar of the god rather than a possessed receptacle, dif- ferentiating him from other mediums, possessed by lower gods. Master Lim emphasizes order in cosmic and social relations, in which elders and seniors protect and are obeyed by juniors, a vision that fits the social status of his dis-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 184 Book reviews ciples. The final chapter in this section describes Master Ooi, a man possessed by the Vagabond Buddha and medium for a cult whose members are also a sworn brotherhood in Penang’s criminal underground (p. 263). As medium for the criminal element, one of Master Ooi’s credentials is his invulnerability to pain (p. 258). Using symbolic landmarks and an inverted ‘anti-language’ in his teachings, yet using religious references, this medium creates an inverted morality and reality that challenges conventional meanings, and stigmatizes agents of the state while sanctifying the activities of the brotherhood (pp. 287-91). DeBernardi characterizes the spirit mediums as bricoleurs who synthesize various religious doctrines to create a spiritual performance suited to their cli- entele’s circumstances: local combinations of elements and stories are worked out in local presentations. ‘These innovative practices,’ she points out, ‘are founded upon a widely shared cosmology’ found both in performance and in oral and written literature (p. 9). However, citing Kenneth Dean, she considers the medium’s practices too diverse and locally specific ‘to take the form of a doctrine or a set of particular beliefs’. Nevertheless, she perceived ‘echoes of [certain treatises] […] in the teachings of many spirit mediums’ (p. 24). A common thread indeed runs through the various presentations that the author describes. While not identical, these presentations can be seen as forming what Needham (1979:65) calls a polythetic set: a set whose members do not necessarily all ‘share’ a feature in common, yet can be seen as belonging together and being mutually understandable, both to the Chinese participants and to the Malays and Indonesians around them. Indeed, the book would have gained in depth had the author placed the beliefs espoused by her informants in the broader ethnic context in which these informants find themselves. In many places in the text I found echoes of beliefs in the Goddess of the Southern Ocean (p. 189), the Javanese trance- game of Nini Towong (p. 198), and the East Javanese Osing trance-dance called Seblang (p. 48), to name but a few. Also, the Islamic context of Malaysia in which these possessions take place could have received much greater attention. It is mentioned, to be sure, on page 176 that the ancient practice of placating ghosts is ‘forbidden by contemporary Islam’ though still practised nevertheless; but little is told of the tensions that this must bring about between the spirit beliefs and the majority religion of Malaysia that forms a major part of the social context in which mediumship is practised. The minority position of the spirit cult also shows in the mediums’ statements that all religions are the same, all gods are true and all people share a single humanity (pp. 171, 204, 258), a position commonly taken by those in a weak minority position. In her conclusion DeBernardi observes that many educated Chinese these days dismiss the spirit mediums (p. 293), although one might suppose that

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 185 these do not include the followers of Master Lim. They fear that the mediums may be faking, though the fascination with them continues, along with the need to have one’s fate explained and one’s hopes supported. For the medium too, temporarily becoming a god (p. 302) remains attractive and a release from an otherwise humdrum life. Again, the exception to this seems to be Master Lim, who, being an avatar, remains in his role as a god.

Reference

Needham, Rodney 1979 Symbolic classification. Santa Monica, California: Goodyear.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access REVIEW ESSAY

ERIC C. THOMPSON

Environmental and archaeological perspectives on Southeast Asia

Boomgaard, Peter, Southeast Asia; An environmental history. Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2007, xiv + 375 pp. ISBN 9781851094196. Price: USD 42.50 (hardback).

Boomgaard, Peter (ed.), A world of water; Rain, rivers and seas in Southeast Asian histories. Singapore: NUS Press, 2007, viii + 368 pp. ISBN 978906718294X. Price: USD 25.00 (paperback).

Glover, Ian and Peter Bellwood (eds), Southeast Asia; From prehistory to history. London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004, 384 pp. ISBN 9780415391177, price GBP 29.99 (paperback); 9780415297776, GBP 100.00 (hardback).

Gupta, Avijit (ed.),The physical geography of Southeast Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, xxiii + 440 pp. ISBN 0199248028. Price: GBP 161.00 (hardback).

National University of Singapore [email protected]

Studies of Southeast Asia most commonly come from fields of history, arts and social sciences. The four volumes reviewed here demonstrate the rich diversity of social, scientific and environmental research that takes Southeast Asia as a frame of reference. All four are ambitious undertakings, mainly with the aim of presenting ‘state-of-the-field’ compilations on themes of physical geography, archaeology, and environment. Gupta’s The physical geography of Southeast Asia is the most technically challenging of the volumes. Some of its chapters, most notably the first (Hutchinson, pp. 3-23), will be in parts incomprehensible to those who are not disciplinary experts in geology or physical geography. Most other chapters

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 187 are more accessible for a general scholarly audience, but the book is in no way a light read. It is, instead, a remarkable compendium of contributions providing a detailed and comprehensive overview of the physical geography and natural environment of Southeast Asia. The book is divided into three parts of six or more chapters each, moving from seven chapters outlining broad environmental frameworks (describing the region’s landforms, rivers, soils, and the like), to six chapters on specific environments (including volcanic islands, karst lands, and coasts), and concluding with a longer section of eleven chapters on ‘environment and people’, providing detailed case studies of major environmental concerns (such as volcanic hazards, water management and pollution). While the level of accessibility to non-specialists varies, the quality of the contributions is consistently high. It is also the best-structured compilation of essays that I can recall reading. Gupta and his contributors have done a masterful job in pulling together writings by diverse authors into a thorough overview of Southeast Asia’s physical geography. Although it will never be widely read, this book will undoubtedly be a primary reference work for those working on environmental studies, geology, and geography for years to come. In comparison to Gupta’s edited specialist-oriented physical geography, Boomgaard’s single authored Southeast Asia; An environmental history aims to provide readers with a more accessible textbook-style introduction and overview of Southeast Asian history from an environmental perspective. This is an ambitious undertaking in many respects. Boomgaard presents a very long sweep of history and prehistory, starting with the natural environment before the arrival of humans in the region. Boomgaard’s main focus is on population growth, economic growth and activity, and human-environment interactions. At some points, particularly in the middle chapters (on the development of states, for instance), the narrative reads very much like a more conventional social and political history of Southeast Asia with added emphasis on environmental impacts. The latter chapters return to a more detailed attention to specific environmental issues. The book is published as one in a series of parallel volumes on a dozen world regions. For environmental historians, this series may be a very useful, broad benchmark and reference material. (As Boomgaard points out, environmental history is a relatively new field.) Yet on reading this book, my impression was that it is both over- and under- specialized. On the one hand, as an undergraduate textbook (which is the level at which it is pitched), one wonders just how many university courses would adopt a full volume on Southeast Asian environmental history. On the other hand, in contrast to Gupta’s edited volume, I expect that most experts beyond the undergraduate level would find Boomgaard’s book too general to make it an enduring reference text (among other things, Boomgaard does not use intra-textual citation; though one of the book’s strongest features is its

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access 188 Book reviews inclusion of lengthy bibliographic essays at the end of each chapter). A further contribution to environmental approaches within Southeast Asian studies is Boomgaard’s edited volume A World of Water. The contributions to this book are as diverse and eclectic as Boomgaard’s Southeast Asia; An environmental history is a highly structured chronology. Contributions range from an account of the role of cosmological myths in constructing senses of place (Pannell) to a broad, systematic overview of empirical studies of com- munal irrigation (Hunt). Individually, the contributions have a lot to offer; as a collection the theme (or perhaps stream) of ‘water’ holding them together is rather thin. Many experts will find something in the volume of importance to their own work; but very few are likely to find the entire volume compelling (at least with regard to a particular field of investigation). On the other hand, it may be of use for overly specialized (or disciplinarily blinkered) academics to read through such a broad volume as this one. At the very least, the best of these works should be points of reference for a variety of future research from cultural and environmental studies to political economy. Glover and Bellwood’s Southeast Asia; From prehistory to history is another impressive compilation of contributions. In this case, similar to Gupta’s edited volume, the chapters were newly commissioned for this book, lending a strong sense of coherence to the work (less perhaps that Gupta’s highly structured The physical geography of Southeast Asia, but more so than Boomgaard’s A world of water). The focus of the chapters is on human activity rather than environmental concerns, though as a work based on archaeological method- ology, a considerable amount of material on human-environmental interactions can be found throughout the chapters. The way this book is framed, in comparison to Gupta’s, is notable. Gupta and his contributors, insofar as is possible, do not adopt a nation-state framework. Physical geography rarely corresponds to such political territoriality. Gupta’s collaborators draw their frames of reference from the substance of their study rather than containing them within social-political frameworks (except in a few the latter chapters, where attention is given to case studies of municipalities). Glover and Bellwood, by contrast, foreground the nation-state as vessel for archaeological investigation. While they explicitly recognize that ‘modern political boundaries are often of little relevance for an understanding of prehistory or ancient history’, they nevertheless adopt this framework as ‘it is the modern world to which this book is addressed’ (p. 2). As forays into varied aspects of environmental and archaeological perspectives on Southeast Asia, all of these volumes are impressive undertakings. In most respects, they are ‘state-of-the-field’ accounts, collecting and presenting scholars’ knowledge-to-date. In this they display both the breadth and depth of environmental and archaeological knowledge of Southeast Asia. In general, they do not propose radically new frames of reference or

Downloaded from Brill.com09/27/2021 05:58:04PM via free access Book reviews 189 theoretical paradigms to challenge conventional wisdom. There are hints of such an undertaking in some instances. Boomgaard’s Environmental history does provide an account of history that highlights environmental concerns; but the narrative structure and much of the content conforms to a fairly standard history of the region. From prehistory to history succumbs to a nation- state framing of archaeology, thus possibly obscuring patterns of culture and interaction that archaeological investigation might otherwise reveal. A world of water attempts to take a rather unusual thematic approach to the region, though it is not entirely convincing in weaving together a narrative around ‘water’. Gupta’s Physical geography, while also primarily a ‘state-of-the-field’ account, is perhaps the most compelling in providing a framework for think- ing about Southeast Asia differing from those most common in social, political and historical studies of the region. All four books provide important benchmarks for research in Southeast Asia on physical geography, archaeology, and environment. While none of them is likely to appeal to a very broad audience, they deserve the attention of specialists in their respective fields. Gupta’s volume in particular is likely to be an enduring reference text for the current and next generation of physical geographers of Southeast Asia. The prospects for significant impact and enduring legacy of the other volumes will be a matter for history, historians, and perhaps archaeologists to judge.

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