FOREWORD the Malay Archipelago Revisited

Home , Malay Archipelago, The Malay Archipelago, Wallace Line

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FOREWORD

We necessarily read it not just as we please, but under circum- stances not chosen by ourselves. —Fernando Coronil, 1995, paraphrasing Marx on writing an introduction to a book.1

Prehistory

For more than a century, anthropologists and others have studied, spec- ulated, and debated about the peopling of mainland Southeast Asia, insular Southeast Asia, and the Pacific beyond.2 Ongoing research uses studies of ancient DNA to examine farming expansion and language shifts, study of genetic turnover, and cultural transitions.3 This research suggests that Pleistocene-era hunter-gatherers, Hoàbìnhians, populated insular Southeast Asia some 50,000 years ago. They were followed by Neolithic farming peoples from southern China—Kradai, Austroasiatic, and Austronesian speakers—who spread into mainland Southeast Asia some 5,000–4,500 years ago. The latter two groups reached the Malay archipelago approximately 4,100 years ago. In the current work, J. Stephen Lansing and Murray P. Cox, an anthro- pologist and geneticist respectively, bring a unique perspective to this debate. They too are interested in asking what historical forces shaped the human societies of the Malay archipelago and the wider Pacific; but they abjure a focus on the dramatic sweep of large-scale population movement, culture change, and racial typologies. Much of the postulating regarding historic “migration” merely restates the reality, but does not explain it.

1 F.Coronil. Introduction to Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, by Fernando Ortiz. Duke University Press. 1995. 2 I invoke the title of Alfred Russel Wallace’s (1869) monumental nineteenth century work on the region, in recognition of not just the topics shared by the current volume but also its exuberant intellectual reach. 3 P. Bellwood. 2018. The search for ancient DNA heads east. Science 361(6397): 31–32; M. Lipson, O. Cheronet, S. Mallick, et al. Ancient genomes document multiple waves of migration in Southeast Asian prehistory. Science 361(6397):92–95; H. McColl, F. Racimo, L. Vinner, et al. 2018. The prehistoric peopling of Southeast Asia. Science 361(6397):88–92. 125-76593_Lansing.Cox_Islands.of.Order_ch01_5P — 2019/8/19 — 16:23 — page xvi — #16

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Lansing and Cox seek to explain this history of movement in terms of the social dynamics of the small, persistent communities that have long char- acterized the region. They seek to explain large-scale transformations in terms of mundane, quotidian social practices like post-marital residence and inter-household coordination of labor. They are particularly interested in how languages have moved or not, and replaced others or been replaced themselves, across the archipelago.

Language

Some of the earliest theorizing about the historical connectedness of this region was prompted by the study of language, which is an old topic in the discipline of anthropology. The dominant figure in American anthropology in the early twentieth century, Franz Boas, carried out extensive research on the languages of the Inuit in the circumpolar north and the Native Americans of the northwest coast, and made the study of language into a central focus of the discipline. Antagonistic toward grand nineteenth-century theories on race, culture, and evolution, Boas (1940), in an early anti-essentialist stance, documented the many ways in which biology, language, and culture do not perfectly co-vary.4 The work by Lansing and Cox hearkens back to this tradition, but they bring new tools to bear upon it. They begin and end their volume with observations of the relatedness of languages across the Malay archipelago, beginning with Joseph Banks, who sailed with Cook in the eighteenth century; then Alfred Russel Wallace (1869) in the nineteenth century; and J.P.B. de Josselin de Jong early in the twentieth century at Lei- den University. This relatedness has been much observed and discussed, but with some notable lacunae. It has been attributed to the migration of a homogeneous speech community across the region, but with little explanation of precisely how migrating peoples hang onto, or don’t, common languages. Lansing and Cox examine this question by looking at the relationship between language and genes at the community level, drawing on data sets from a sample of dozens of villages across the archipelago. His- torical linguistics generally looks at changes in language over time, not in the speakers of language. Lansing and Cox flip this prioritization: they look at speech communities as opposed to speech. They look at the way that kinship practices—in particular, rules of descent and post- marital residence—play an active role in channeling language persistence and transmission. But they also show how easily languages can be given

4 F. Boas. Race, Language and Culture. Collier-MacMillan Canada, 1940. 125-76593_Lansing.Cox_Islands.of.Order_ch01_5P — 2019/8/19 — 16:23 — page xvii — #17

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up, even when the language community in question persists. Indeed, they draw the profound and counterintuitive conclusion that communities of language speakers tend to outlast particular languages. This is reflected in the fact that some of the speech communities they study have shared genetic history that is far more ancient than any particular shared language.

Genetics

The application of new tools for studying DNA—paleogenomics—to the study of the peopling of the Indo-Pacific region is not without contro- versy. It has raised questions about race-based essentializing of identity. More generally, it has reenergized old debates over the determinant role in society of biology versus culture. This work by Lansing and Cox makes a powerful contribution to these debates. For example, their village-level study of population genetics demonstrates that Darwinian principles of male dominance rarely explain reproductive success. Indeed, they rein- terpret the human significance of the “Wallace Line” based on spousal selection by women, not men. The “Wallace Line” is the famous boundary that Wallace drew between the flora and fauna and people of the western and eastern partsof the archipelago, the “Indo-Malayan” and “Austro-Malayan divisions.”5 Whereas animals generally could not cross this line, migrating people with boats certainly could, but some didn’t; there is a marked genetic differen- tiation from one side to the other. Lansing and Cox argue that the Wallace Line was a genetic barrier for humans for social, not geographic, reasons. One key factor was a slight tendency for Austronesian-speaking women to accept husbands from neighboring Papuan-speaking communities, which meant that their children would speak their mother’s Austronesian language. Over a timescale of dozens of generations, this seemingly trivial deviation in marriage preferences produced seismic shifts in language, culture, and demography. This helps to explain the oft-noted mystery of why some Papuan groups adopted Austronesian languages. It exemplifies the approach taken by Lansing and Cox, in which social identity is a func- tion of a complex interplay between genetic heritage, history, and social relations and rules.6

5 A. R. Wallace. The Malay Archipelago. The Land of the Orang-utan and the Bird of Paradise: A Narrative of Travel, with Studies of Man and Nature. Periplus, 2000, pp. 7–15 (first published in 1869 by MacMillan). 6 Cf. K. Tallbear. Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Science. University of Minnesota Press, 2013. 125-76593_Lansing.Cox_Islands.of.Order_ch01_5P — 2019/8/19 — 16:23 — page xviii — #18

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Emergent Complexity

The over-arching thesis of Lansing and Cox is that the complex patterns of linguistic and genetic diversity in the Malay archipelago are not random. They note that they began their study at a time when the long-reigning sci- entific paradigm of equilibrium studies was being turned upside down, so that scholars began to problematize not change but its absence. Aided by the development of theoretical tools like complexity theory and molec- ular genetics, Lansing and Cox set themselves the task of explaining not just change, therefore, but also stability. In a nonlinear world, they argue, stable equilibria—like persistent language communities—appear as islands of order in a sea of change, not a sea of order—hence, their title. Lansing and Cox draw heavily on theories of nonlinear dynamics or complexity to explain how such order emerges. One of their case studies is the system of irrigated rice agriculture in Bali. Lansing (1991, 2006) has spent decades studying the rice terraces of Bali, in particular the fun- damental tension between the need for water and the threat of pests.7 The best way to share the scarce resource of water is to stagger the timing of the agricultural calendar, so that all farmers are not demanding water at the same time. But if everyone’s cultivation time is staggered, so too will be the timing of their harvests, which will allow resident pest populations to concentrate on the ripening grain of each farm in turn. The best way to address the threat from pests, therefore, is to synchronize the timing of everyone’s agricultural activities, so that the grain in all farms ripens at the same time, which then spreads resident pest populations thinly over an entire area. But synchronized timing means that everyone must demand irrigation water at the same time. Hence, there is a conundrum between the need to synchronize and the need to not synchronize. Lansing and Cox, in this work, show how the Balinese strike an optimal balance between synchronization and non-synchronization, achieving an acceptable distribution of irrigation water and an acceptable burden from rice pests. This balance is achieved through the deliberation of cross- village irrigation organizations called subak, whose activities are ritually coordinated by a hierarchical complex of water temples. The role of the temples notwithstanding, this remarkable inter-household and inter- village system is not orchestrated top-down, it is locally generated. It

7 J. S. Lansing. Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali. Princeton University Press, 1991; J. S. Lansing. Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali. Princeton University Press, 2012. 125-76593_Lansing.Cox_Islands.of.Order_ch01_5P — 2019/8/19 — 16:23 — page xix — #19

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is an example of what Lansing termed in an earlier work “emergent complexity,” here called “adaptive self-organized criticality” or, felici- tously, “order for free.” Within the Malay archipelago, this system is unique to Bali; it is absent on Java, despite Java’s own deep history of irrigated rice cultivation. Lansing and Cox suggest that the great hydraulic kingdoms of medieval Java provided the high-level control to its system of rice agriculture; whereas the development of bottom-up control of agriculture in Bali helps to explain why its own indigenous kingdoms did not develop to the same extent. This phenomenon of emergent complexity is an apparent logic without an overarching logician, a design without a designer. The overall logic of the irrigation system in Bali is nowhere articulated except symbolically in the system of ritual water temples. In their study of it, Lansing and Cox thus address one of the thorniest problems in the study of social order: how does it arise, and how do we talk about the process by which it arises. The lack of a welcoming niche for such order in the western development mind-set led to the imposition of the green-revolution model of rice cultivation in Bali in the 1970s, forcing the cessation of the coordination of agricultural schedules by the subak and water temples, which quickly led to an explosion of pest populations and a collapse in harvests—a mistake that was eventually recognized by the agricultural development experts. An earlier generation of environmental anthropologists tried to explain such systems of environmental management in terms of an external, etic, or “operational” model, which contrasts with the internal or emic or “cog- nized” one.8 Lansing and Cox greatly improve upon this explanation— unsatisfactory in either an external or internal sense—with their concept of self-organized criticality, which approaches in many respects the native Balinese view of the way that the system operates, at the same time as it can cross the cultural divide to be understood by outsiders.

Summary

Islands of Order is an extraordinary book, based on more than a decade of interdisciplinary research, involving dozens of villages and multiple islands across the Malay archipelago. It is interdisciplinary and inductive, driven not by a preformulated agenda but by intense intellectual curiosity regarding the region’s history. Elegantly spanning a number of different

8 R. A. Rappaport. Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People. Yale University Press, 1968, pp. 237–42. 125-76593_Lansing.Cox_Islands.of.Order_ch01_5P — 2019/8/19 — 16:23 — page xx — #20

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disciplines ranging from paleogenomics to ethnography, it stands alone in linking interest in questions regarding the “deep” past and the “thick” present. Islands of Order will be of keen interest not only to southeast Asianists, but to all students of the history of human societies.

Michael R. Dove Yale University 3 February 2019