Chris Ballard, Jeroen A. Overweel, Topics Relating to Netherlands New Guinea in Ternate Residency Memoranda of Transfer and Other Assorted Documents

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Book Reviews - Chris Ballard, Jeroen A. Overweel, Topics relating to Netherlands New Guinea in Ternate Residency memoranda of transfer and other assorted documents. Leiden: DSALCUL, Jakarta: IRIS, 1995, x + 146 pp. [Irian Jaya Source Materials 13.] - Timothy P. Barnard, Daniel Perret, Sejarah Johor-Riau-Lingga sehingga 1914; Sebuah esei bibliografi. Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Pelancongan Malaysia/École Francaise dExtrême Orient, 1998, 460 pp. - Peter Boomgaard, Om Prakash, European commercial enterprise in pre-colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xviii + 377 pp. [The New Cambridge History of India II-5.] - U.T. Bosma, Oliver Kortendick, Drei Schwestern und ihre Kinder; Rekonstruktion von Familiengeschichte und Identitätstransmission bei Indischen Nerlanders mit Hilfe computerunterstützter Inhaltsanalyse. Canterbury: Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1996, viii + 218 pp. [Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing Monograph 12.] - Freek Colombijn, Thomas Psota, Waldgeister und Reisseelen; Die Revitalisierung von Ritualen zur Erhaltung der komplementären Produktion in SüdwestSumatra. Berlin: Reimer, 1996, 203 + 15 pp. [Berner Sumatraforschungen.] - Christine Dobbin, Ann Maxwell Hill, Merchants and migrants; Ethnicity and trade among Yunannese Chinese in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1998, vii + 178 pp. [Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 47.] - Aone van Engelenhoven, Peter Bellwood, The Austronesians; Historical and comparative perspectives. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1995, viii + 359 pp., James J. Fox, Darrell Tryon (eds.) - Aone van Engelenhoven, Wyn D. Laidig, Descriptive studies of languages in Maluku, Part II. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri NUSA and Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya, 1995, xii + 112 pp. [NUSA Linguistic Studies of Indonesian and Other Languages in Indonesia 38.] - Ch. F. van Fraassen, R.Z. Leirissa, Halmahera Timur dan Raja Jailolo; Pergolakan sekitar Laut Seram awal abad 19. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1996, xiv + 256 pp. - Frances Gouda, Denys Lombard, Rêver lAsie; Exotisme et littérature coloniale aux Indes, an Indochine et en Insulinde. Paris: Éditions de lÉcole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1993, 486 pp., Catherine Champion, Henri Chambert-Loir (eds.) - Hans Hägerdal, Timothy Lindsey, The romance of Ktut Tantri and Indonesia; Texts and scripts, history and identity. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997, xix + 362 + 24 pp. - Renee Hagesteijn, Ina E. Slamet-Velsink, Emerging hierarchies; Processes of stratification and

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access early state formation in the Indonesian archipelago: prehistory and the ethnographic present. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995, ix + 279 pp. [VKI 166.] - David Henley, Victor T. King, Environmental challenges in South-East Asia. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998, xviii + 410 pp. [Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Man and Nature in Asia Series 2.] - C. de Jonge, Ton Otto, Cultural dynamics of religious change in Oceania. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997, viii + 144 pp. [VKI 176.], Ad Boorsboom (eds.) - C. de Jonge, Chris Sugden, Seeking the Asian face of Jesus; A critical and comparative study of the practice and theology of Christian social witness in Indonesia and India between 1974 and 1996. Oxford: Regnum, 1997, xix + 496 pp. - John N. Miksic, Roy E. Jordaan, In praise of Prambanan; Dutch essays on the Loro Jonggrang temple complex. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996, xii + 259 pp. [Translation Series 26.] - Marije Plomp, Ann Kumar, Illuminations; The writing traditions of Indonesia; Featuring manuscripts from the National Library of Indonesia. Jakarta: The Lontar Foundation, New York: Weatherhill, 1996., John H. McGlynn (eds.) - Susan de Roode, Eveline Ferretti, Cutting across the lands; An annotated bibliography on natural resource management and community development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1997, 329 pp. [Southeast Asia Program Series 16.] - M.J.C. Schouten, Monika Schlicher, Portugal in Ost-Timor; Eine kritische Untersuchung zur portugiesischen Kolonialgeschichte in Ost-Timor, 1850 bis 1912. Hamburg: Abera-Verlag, 1996, 347 pp. - Karel Steenbrink, Leo Dubbeldam, Values and value education. The Hague: Centre for the Study of Education in Developing Countries (CESO), 1995, 183 pp. [CESO Paperback 25.] - Pamela J. Stewart, Michael Houseman, Naven or the other self; A relational approach to ritual action. Leiden: Brill, 1998, xvi + 325 pp., Carlo Severi (eds.) - Han F. Vermeulen, Pieter ter Keurs, The language of things; Studies in ethnocommunication; In honour of Professor Adrian A. Gerbrands. Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 1990, 208 pp. [Mededelingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde 25.], Dirk Smidt (eds.) In: Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 155 (1999), no: 4, Leiden, 683-736

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Jeroen A. Overweel, Topics relating to Netherlands Neiv Guinea in Ternate Residency memoranda of transfer and other assorted documents. Leiden: DSALCUL, Jakarta: IRIS, 1995, x + 146 pp. [Irian Jaya Source Materials 13.] ISBN 979.8282.00.0.

CHRIS BALLARD

The Irian Jaya Source Materials series is part of a systematic project aimed at bringing primary documentary sources from the Dutch colonial period in West New Guinea, or Irian Jaya, to a wider audience. This is the second of three projected volumes of historical sources compiled by Jeroen Overweel, the other two reproducing archival materials from the Ministry of Colonial Affairs now held at the General State Archives in The Hague. Readers seeking some context for this particular volume should refer to an earlier volume, No. 8, which introduces and lays out a rationale for the series, and also to Overweel's previous contribution to the series, No. 12, which offers very useful notes on the organization of the papers of the Ministry of Colonial Affairs.

Here Overweel provides excerpts from the archive of the Ternate Residency, which oversaw Dutch colonial interests in New Guinea during the nineteenth century. Drawing principally on the Ternate 'memoranda of transfer' (memories van overgave, or MvO), for the period 1857-1895, he has very use- fully extracted all of the substantial references to New Guinea. The first three monthly reports written in New Guinea, from the new district capitals of Manokwari and Fakfak (1898) and Merauke (1902), are also included. The coverage is not entirely complete, the compiler noting that some residents never produced memoranda, while two other memoranda have fallen into the abyss of the Algemene Secretarie (where he also chanced upon one previously unknown MvO). Appendix 1 lists the sultans of Ternate and residents of Tidore together in chronological order, and Appendix 2 provides the governor-general's decision of 1849 which stipulated that residents were required to produce an MvO upon each transfer to a new posting. The result is a fascinating glimpse of the first tentative steps to extend formal control over West New Guinea (after the abortive attempt to install a permanent presence at Fort du Bus in 1828). The Ternate material relates almost exclusively to the Raja Empat Islands, Geelvink Bay and the Vogel-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 684 Book Reviews kop, indicating the effective limits of Dutch knowledge and control of the region. Useful indices provide a meticulous coverage of 'topics', 'places, tribal groups and peoples', 'ship names', and 'persons'. Few Europeans passed through West New Guinea undetected by the Dutch administration, and one can track the movements of, amongst others, naturalists (among them d'Albertis, Beccari, Mikloucho-Maklaij and Von Rosenberg) and mis- sionaries (such as the pioneering Van Hasselt). Census figures from as early as 1863 are reproduced, and smallpox vaccination programmes carefully recorded. The three short monthly reports from the controleurs in New Guinea are of a different quality altogether, providing much closer accounts of local conditions, some hints at the boredom of being posted to this colonial backwater, and the first finely detailed accounts of local communities such as the Tugere of the Merauke District.

An introduction, and helpful footnotes in English (which not only direct the reader to further sources and the locations of other archive material mentioned, but also record pencilled annotations on the original documents), complete the impression that this is a volume compiled by someone well attuned to the needs of historians and other researchers. Indeed, it is a considerable service to his colleagues. Together with the rest of the same series, this volume is further testimony, if any were needed, to the astonishing (and, for Irian Jaya, largely untapped) wealth of the Dutch colonial archives.

Daniel Perret, Sejarah Johor-Riau-Lingga sehingga 1914; Sebuah esei bibliografi. Kuala Lumpur: Kementerian Kebudayaan, Kesenian dan Pelancongan Malaysia/École Francaise d'Extrême Oriënt, 1998, 460 pp. ISBN 967.903.020.2.

TIMOTHY P. BARNARD

Johor, Riau and Lingga constitute the area to which Melakan rulers fled following the f all of their capital to the Portuguese in 1511. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, residents of the region, collectively known at that time as Johor, lived in a vibrant trading centre and played an important role in continuing the legacy of Melaka throughout the Malay world and Southeast Asia. During the nineteenth century, historical circumstances and European treaties led to the region being split into three areas: Johor at the tip of the Malay peninsula, and the Riau and Lingga Archipelagoes to the south. Despite these divisions the area continued, at least in cultural terms, to form a unity. This book is an exhaustive listing of contemporary and historical

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviezvs 685 works written about the history of this important region prior to 1914, the approximate date at which the three sub-regions lost any remaining sover- eignty the British and Dutch colonial governments had not already taken from them. Since the bibliography focuses on the areas of Malay influence at the southern end of the Melaka Straits, Singapore is mostly left out except when a work specifically focuses on a Malay topic, such as the negotiations with neighbouring rulers over the British arrival in 1819. The definition of 'Riau' is also problematic. Riau is traditionally the group of islands located to the south of Singapore. Since the 1960s, however, it has also been a modern Indonesian province that includes not only these islands, but also the Lingga and Tambelan Archipelagoes and a large section of Central Sumatra. Perret includes many works that specifically focus on the Central Sumatran region, such as the traditional states of Siak and Pelalawan: This is not a sin of inclusion, but a reflection of the difficulty of imposing geographical boundaries on a fluid region subject to numerous influences. It is to Perret's credit that he includes works dealing with the whole region according to this expanded definition.

Bibliographies should be judged on how well they serve their users. Are they thorough, and do they simplify the task of searching for sources or works within a selected topic? With regard to these questions, this bibliography is a success. Perret begins with an introduction, in Malay, explaining the organization of the bibliography, which is divided into 23 chapters dealing with individual topics, from local history and literature to relations with the Western powers. Works listed range from rare manuscripts and letters held in archives and libraries throughout the world, to journal articles published in 1998. Also included are maps, six indices, and a list of sources. The thor- oughness of this work becomes evident when looking up a topic such as the nineteenth-century autobiography Hikayat Abdullah, of which 31 different versions are listed. Perret deserves praise for producing a bibliography that is well-organized and easy to access, and would be an excellent addition to any library or personal collection focusing on the Malay world.

Om Prakash, European commercial enterprise in pre-colonial India. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, xviii + 377 pp. [The New Cambridge History of India II-5.] ISBN 0.521.25758.1. Price: GBP 35.00 (hardback).

PETER BOOMGAARD

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It is probably fair to say that the big European trading companies and their exploits in early modern Asia have always fascinated and impressed specialists and other historians (and even many a non-historian) alike. This is a topic, therefore, that attracts quite a number of researchers. The ensuing accumulation of monographs and articles, however, creates its own problems and regularly makes the need feit for new and authoritative textbooks in which these studies are summarized and given their place in the order of things. Regarding India, such a textbook has now been written by Om Prakash, professor of economie history at the Delhi School of Economics (University of Delhi), and it is difficult to think of anyone better qualified to do so. Prakash has made himself a name as a leading expert in the economie history of pre-colonial India in general, and in particular the history of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in India. After a short introduction on India in the Indian Ocean trade c. 1500, the book begins with the Portuguese in India {Estado da India). The bulk of this work, however, consists of a description and analysis of the two centuries between 1600 and 1800. Within this period the main actors are the Dutch and the English East India Companies, with the French company in a supporting role and a number of minor companies (Danish, Swedish, Ostend) as extras. Apart from these companies we also meet individual Indian rulers and merchants, as well as some European merchants, particularly the so-called English country traders. The author uses the following periodization: the phase of Dutch dominance (1600-1680), growing competition from the English and the French (1680-1740), and, finally, the supremacy of the English Company or EIC (1740-1800). The book is rich in quantitative data on silver flowing from Europe to Asia, on silver and goods being traded between Asian countries, and on goods being shipped from Asia to Europe. Regarding the latter, Om Prakash summarizes the main trend as a shift from spices, via textiles and raw silk, to tea, but also goes into much more detail when dealing with the three phases mentioned above. The commodity shifts affected both the role of India as a whole within the trade system, and the relative importance of the main coastal regions of the subcontinent (Gujarat, Malabar, Coromandel, Bengal). Although quite some numbers are crunched in this book, 'qualitative' features, such as institutional changes in commerce, industry, and administration, are not forgotten either. Generally speaking, according to the author, the involvement of European companies and merchants led to 'an expansion in income, output and employment in the subcontinent' (pp. 335-6). Indian merchants, as a rule, were not squeezed out by the Europeans, and as demand often outstripped supply, this was a seller's market to boot. Only in the late eighteenth century,

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 687 when the EIC started to become the paramount political power in parts of India (beginning with Bengal), did coercion and oppression take the place of bargaining.

In my opinion this book is a well-written, balanced, admirably documented and up-to-date summary of the state of play regarding the trade relations between early modern Europe and India. Some readers may complain that the book does not have a full-blown bibliography but I am inclined to find the bibliographical essay with which we are presented instead even more useful, particularly for those who are new to the field. If pressed to find a flaw, I would report a minor one, namely the brief discussion of 'hoarding' (pp. 318-22). Prakash has dealt with this issue in earlier publications (and has not changed his mind as far as I can see), and in fact there are few economie historians dealing with India in that period who have not, one way or another, voiced their opinion on this point. Many Indian historians become a tad defensive when hoarding is mentioned, because Western historians have often regarded this as a backward, irrational form of economie (or rather un-economic) behaviour. I think, therefore, that there are two questions (rather than one) to be answered. Firstly, how important was hoarding? Secondly, did it constitute rational economie behaviour under the prevailing circumstances? What makes this debate perhaps even more ideo- logically charged is that the circumstances under which hoarding may or may not have taken place were (possibly) those of 'Oriental despotism', another unpleasant skeleton in the historiographic closet. So Om Prakash may be forgiven for his less than satisfactory treatment of this complex subject. Perhaps he will eventually find the time to write a book about it, as balanced and as persuasive as the one under review.

Oliver Kortendick, Drei Schwestern und ihre Kinder; Rekonstruktion von Familiengeschichte und Identitatstransmission bei Indischen Nederlanders mit Hilfe computerunterstützter Inhaltsanalyse. Canter- bury: Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing, University of Kent at Canterbury, 1996, viii + 218 pp. [Centre for Social Anthro- pology and Computing Monograph 12.] ISBN 0.904938.98.0.

U.T. BOSMA

This study deserves more attention because of its method than on account of its narrative on three Dutch families which have their roots in colonial Indo- nesia. It is mainly an exercise in the use of a quantitative approach to identity

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 688 Book Reviews discourses in a family context. This methodology is undeniably relevant when migrant communities assimilate succesfully in social and economie terms. Dutch citizens, most of them Eurasians, who returned or migrated to the Netherlands in the course of Indonesia's decolonization are generally considered as role models of perfect integration. This picture was practically unchallenged until the 1970s. Kortendick assumes a reservoir of Indisch belonging which has been preserved by family ties underneath the success story of assimilation. He must have feit vindicated in his assumption through his own MA thesis on the 'Late Lien' show, a television talk show featuring an actress in the role of a true-to-life Indisch (Eurasian) auntie. Her performance resuscitated the intimate Eurasian idiom for a nationwide audience in the 1970s and played an important role in the recognition of an Indisch identity. What exactly constitutes Indisch can be grasped intuitively, but is difficult to define by scholarly means. Kortendick attempts to uncover the Indisch discourse in a more or less pure form, and applies group discussions as a method of excluding the usual stimuli of the interviewer. In the next stage, he excludes his own biases by using quantitative data analysis of the tran- scripts of taped family group discussions of three sisters, their spouses, children and grandchildren. This carefully implemented research scheme, however, yields disappointingly few fresh insights. What we get are the stereotypes of Indisch-ness that are already familiar from a huge stock of books on colonial Indonesia built up in the past three decades. What Kortendick excavates are frozen images from colonial society. The only thing that we know for sure about Indisch is that it will disappear within two generations. This is corroborated by complaints from elderly Indisch people who deplore the fact that their group is disappearing both mentally and physical- ly. The same disappearance has already become a reality for Indisch families who moved to the United States and Australia instead of the Netherlands. In these countries there is not only the loss of colonial context, but also the loss of the language as a carrier of cultural codes from one generation to another. The Indisch discourse is rather irrelevant to the migrants' children, and hard even to imagine for their grandchildren.

We can draw a few conclusions from Kortendick's findings. First, the truism that 'identity transmission' from one generation to another cannot be considered in isolation from the entire social setting of migrant communities. The idea of a 'hidden identity' confined to a family context, which seems to be the implicit assumption of this study, is therefore difficult to accept. A similar critique is applicable to Kortendick's research methodology. The concept of quantative data analysis of group discussions suggests a 'hard science' approach, a type of laboratory research in which scientists take every poss-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 689 ible precautionary measure to avoid pollution of their research biotope. There may be social settings which allow for such an approach. The Indisch biotope, however, has been irreparably damaged by the enormous production of nostalgia books. What constitutes Indisch identity are the artefacts of colönial history, nice to read about but not related to daily life. Less nice to read, but certainly transmitted from the migrant generation to the next, are the scars left by the Japanese occupation, the violent decolonization period, and the chilly recep- tion of many immigrants in Dutch society. After all, the lost hopes of one generation often translate into burdens for the next. The author seems to be surprised that his data do not show negative experiences to be transferred to the next generation, but this surprise should not to be so great. The apparent absence of such transference simply reflects the limitations of a 'hard science' approach based on explicit facts. Since Freud, we know that there are many implicit mechanisms of transmission between generations which stay outside family discourse.

Thomas Psota, Waldgeister und Reisseelen; Die Revitalisierung von Ritualen zur Erhaltung der komplementaren Produktion in Südwest- Sumatra. Berlin: Reimer, 1996, 203 + 15 pp. [Berner Sumatra- Forschungen.] ISBN 3.496.02579.4. Price: DM 38.00.

FREEK COLOMBIJN

Thomas Psota has studied the traditional agricultural rituals of the Rejang in the highland valley of Lebong (province of Bengkulu). Rituals were performed on the occasion of the opening of forest land for slash-and-burn farming (a ritual called kedurai bumai in Rejang) and during the rest of the cycle of rice cultivation (on ladang and sawah). Rituals also accompanied the collection of non-timber forest products, but there were no rituals pertaining to the more recently introduced cultivation of cash crops, notably coffee. The most important ritual, mdundang binea', was performed just before the sowing of rice. On this occasion the rice goddess, Nyang Serai, left the rice and the village and went to heaven in order to take care of the rainfall. The festivities included a dance performed every evening by seven boys and seven girls from different clans as an expression of clan exogamy. Mdundang binea' was an expensive ritual held over seven days, and used to be performed only once every three to seven years. In other years seed was blessed by a smaller ritual, mernbasuh binea'. The ritual cycle ended at the harvest, when Nyang Serai returned to the village and ensured that the rice spirit would not leave

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 690 Book Reviezus the rice being stored in the barns. The ritual cycle strengthened social cohesion in the village and indicated the right time for certain agricultural activities to be carried out. The introduction of high-yielding varieties (HYVs), which give two rice harvests a year, left no time for the collection of forest products or the cultivation of coffee, an activity which Psota calls 'complementary production' (komplementare Produktion). After the introduction of HYVs the rituals were, neglected, social cohesion diminished, and the synchronization of agricultural activities disappeared. A side effect was that fields ripened one after the other, instead of simultaneously, and mice and other pests moved en masse from one field to the next, destroying all yields. After several harvest failures, the peasants in some villages returned to the old rice varieties and revitalized the old rituals. In other villages the revaluation of rice and ritual has remained a disputed topic. The return to ritual after the harvest failures confirms Victor Turner's theoretical notion that rituals are performed as a way of facing crises.

The body of the text is an ethnographic work featuring many emic Rejang terms and long excerpts of ritual texts. The 'classical' character of the book is both its strength and its weakness. Such a work will probably attract few readers now, and particularly in Indonesia it is almost inaccessible because it is written in German. In contrast to more trendy works, however, a well- grounded ethnography remains valuable forever, and Psota will be consult- ed by future anthropologists, yet to be born, who wish to make a diachronic study of Rejang ritual. Psota himself - and this is my main criticism - does not discuss the time dimension explicitly, despite the fact that he repeatedly compares the results of his own fieldwork of 23 months with the work of M.A. Jaspan in the 1960s, the Midden-Sumatra Expeditie of the 1870s, and William Marsden in the 1780s. It remains unclear whether Psota refers to the older works in order to analyse historical change, or to demonstrate a continuation of the ritual praxis. Sometimes I was even in doubt as to whether a ritual under discussion is still prevalent, or a thing of the past. Only in the last two chapters does the author reveal that since Indonesian independence the mdundang binea' ritual has been performed only three times: in 1963 (witnessed by Jaspan), and in December 1987 and January 1988 (observed by Psota himself). The 1987 ritual was a perverted version staged on the initiative of the local state government. There was no proper shaman, HYVs were used instead of the local rice varieties, and the evening dance consisted of a girl, in the role of Nyang Serai, stepping from a fake Rafflesia flower (symbol of the province of Bengkulu). The traditionalists, displeased by the way the state had appropriated their ritual, performed a 'real' ritual the next month, but for want of funds this last-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 691 ed only two days. So at the end of the book it becomes plain that the most important ritual, mdundang binea', is still almost moribund. The revitalization (Revitalisierung) of ritual that figures so prominently in the book's title concerns the smaller kedurai bumai and membasuh binea' rituals. This critical note, however, should not distract from the fact that the book is a valuable and rich piece of documentation.

Ann Maxwell Hill, Merchants and migrants; Ethnicity and trade among Yunnanese Chinese in Southeast Asia. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1998, vii + 178 pp. [Yale Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 47.] ISBN 0.938692.68.2. Price: USD 20.00.

CHRISTINE DOBBIN

This fascinating and original monograph is a welcome addition to the study of the Chinese diaspora, from both an historical and an anthropological perspective. In contrast to the better-known story of the overseas migration of Chinese from the southeast coasts of the empire into island Southeast Asia, Hill's study concentrates on the migration of Chinese from the interior southwest province of Yunnan into the uplands of Burma, Indochina and Thai- land. The study is in two parts. The first concentrates on the early caravan trade from Yunnan into the Southeast Asian uplands and stresses the development of the Yunnanese as an entrepreneurial minority, while the second discusses the thousands of Yunnanese migrants who came to northern Thailand at the end of the Second World War and centres on the author's fieldwork in Chiang Mai, standing as a critique of the prevailing assimilationist model of Chinese accommodation to Thai society.

By the nineteenth century the Yunnanese Chinese dominated a vast trading network which stretched from Tibet down into the Southeast Asian peninsula. Yunnanese mule and pony caravans linked China's southwest commodity markets with commodity production in upland Southeast Asia. Transporting cotton, tea, opium, salt, metal ores and manufactures and silk over long distances, Yunnanese Chinese who could put together a heavily armed caravan and the requisite capital for the trip made huge fortunes on their return to China's market towns. On their trade routes they conducted business with other Yunnanese who had settled in the uplands and who acted as middlemen. Fascinating as this data is, the question arises whether the Yunnanese Chinese were, in Hill's term, 'in many ways a classic ethnic entrepreneurial

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 692 Book Reviews minority' (p. 60). It would seem from the evidence presented that the Yun- nanese Chinese diverged from some of their overseas Chinese counterparts in island Southeast Asia in their possession of entrepreneurial qualities, if not of opportunities, as outlined by the founder of the sociology of entrepreneurship, Joseph Schumpeter. Indeed Hill does not reflect on the major themes in entrepreneurial studies, and concentrates instead upon the legacy of Edmund Leach for the study of complex ethnopolitical configurations in the Southeast Asian uplands. While this is in some senses satisfying, it leaves unanswered the question of why the 'merchants' of the title of the book become transfigured into 'entrepreneurs' during the course of the discussion.

More creative are the chapters of the book based on an ethnographic field study of the Yunnanese Chinese in Chiang Mai. Here the author takes issue with G.W. Skinner and his assimilationist model of Chinese identity in Thai- land. She challenges the very notion of the existence of a 'Sino-Thai' identity and convincingly demonstrates the Yunnanese strong sense of identity as Chinese. Of special interest is her reflection on popular Chinese religious rituals, in particular lavish funeral ceremonies, and the fact that the Yunnanese are willing to channel their wealth into typically 'Chinese' activities acceptable to Thai society. By means of. these public religious activities the Yunnan- ese can claim a position in Chiang Mai society as Chinese, an identity recog- nizable and acceptable to a Thai audience. Hill finishes a stimulating discussion with the conclusion that Chinese assimilation in Thailand is neither simply generational or inevitable. With this book the Yale Southeast Asia Studies series has continued its generally high Standard.

Peter Bellwood, James J. Fox and Darrell Tryon (eds), The Austrone- sians; Historical and comparative perspectives. Canberra: Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University, 1995, viii + 359 pp.. ISBN 0.7315. 2132.3. Price: AUD 35.00.

AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN

Most of the papers in this book were presented at the conference entitled 'The Austronesians in History: Common Origins and Diverse Transformations', held at the Australian National University in 1990. The enigma of the Austronesians has occupied the minds of scientists for more than a century now. The label 'Austronesian' was first promoted with-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 693 in comparative linguistics, and referred to the common origin of most languages in littoral and insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. The evidence for a common ancestry here was not as straightforward, due to the cultural diver- gence among speakers of Austronesian languages. This asymmetry between language and culture has always been the major obstacle to multidisciplinary humanities research on Southeast Asia and Oceania. The introduction of the 'phylogenetic unit', which identifies shared patterns of language and society on the cultural plane (p. 3) and shared configurations of the gene pool on the biological plane (p. 4), does enable us to look for a common source, however. Consequently, this publication is the first ever in which seemingly incompat- ible disciplines like linguistics and biology provide their own evidence and successfully support their respective points of view. The reader is now able to conceptualize the cultural and biological divergences of the Austronesians as different transformations from one origin.

Instead of discussing all seventeen papers separately, I prefer to give an overall view of the two sections of which this volume consists, and discuss the coherence of the contributions. Section 1, entitled 'Origins and dispersals', starts off with three contributions that outline the state-of-the-art of current Austronesian comparative linguistics. The overall view by Tryon (pp. 17-38) adequately sketches the current subgrouping hypotheses. Their implications for Oceanic and Western Malayo-Polynesian languages are subsequently discussed by Pawley and Ross (pp. 39-74) and Adelaar (pp. 75-95). The following archaeological accounts by Bellwood (pp. 96-111) and Spriggs (pp. 112- 33) support the migration theory suggested by comparative linguistics. Bellwood discusses the 'why' (population growth and an agricultural economy) of the early Austronesian colonization of Southeast Asia. Spriggs gives a parallel account for Oceania, elaborating on the subject of Lapita pot- tery. The 'how', sailing techniques and navigational knowledge, already hinted at by Bellwood, is fully elaborated by Horridge (pp. 134-51). His explanation, that the migration into Indonesia and Oceania could only have been directed upwind, thus eastward, by means of a tilting triangular sail on a single-outrigger boat, decisively contradicts Heyerdahl's theory of down- wind (westward) colonization by raft. This conclusion is again supported by Groves' (pp. 152-63) finding that typical Austronesian domesticated and commensal mammals like the dog and the rat originally came from mainland Southeast Asia. The migrations described above took place over a period of 5,000 years. The implication that the language, biology and culture of the Austronesians has not been static over such a long time-span is the major issue of the second section, 'Transformations and interactions'. Biological changes from an evolutionary perspective are addressed successively by Serjeantson and Gao

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(pp. 165-80) and Bhatia, Easteal and Kirk (pp. 181-91). The gist of both papers is that Polynesians ultimately have an East Asian origin, notwithstanding the fact that there has also been an significant gene flow from initially non- Austronesian Melanesians, who have a different genetic origin. Dutton's contribution on language contact and change in Melanesia (pp. 192-213) signals that this region is highly diverse from a linguistic point of view, even among those languages that obviously share their lexical origin. The discussion on cultural differentiation among Austronesians begins with Fox's analysis of how peoples speaking Austronesian languages perceive their origin and reconstruct their past by means of narratives (pp. 214-28). The two formal systems that Fox recognizes show that it makes little sense to propose a single Austronesian prototype of which other systems are deriva- tives. Sather's discussion (pp. 229-68) of the Sea Nomad economy as both agricultural (originally Austronesian) and foraging (pre-Austronesian), and Thomas' account (pp. 269-90) of the striking similarities in exchange systems among Papuan and Austronesian societies in Oceania, lead to a similar conclusion. Supomo (pp. 291-313), Reid (pp. 314-31) and Yengoyan (pp. 332-45) elaborate on how Hinduism, Islam and Christianity have been incorporated into, and consequently transformed, the Austronesian world-view.

This book is the perfect state-of-the-art account of research into the migrations of the Austronesians. That is also the reason why nothing is said about the Taiwanese 'stay-at-homes'. Insiders who might find the contribution from their own discipline a bit shallow should keep in mind that for outsiders it does give a good insight into the prevailing thoughts and ideas. I enthousi- astically recommend this book to everybody interested in the humanities of insular Southeast Asia and Oceania. The KITLV has resolved the problem of its purchasability by becoming the agent for ANU publications in Europe.

Wyn D. Laidig (ed.), Descriptive studies of languages in Maluku, Part II. Jakarta: Badan Penyelenggara Seri NUSA and Universitas Katolik Indonesia Atma Jaya, 1995, xii + 112 pp. [NUSA Linguistic Studies of Indonesian and Other Languages in Indonesia 38.] Price: USD 19.00.

AONE VAN ENGELENHOVEN

This is the second volume in the NUSA series presenting results of linguistic fieldwork in Maluku by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. As in the pre- ceding volume, the contributions differ very much in quality.

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Kotynski's contribution (pp. 1-17) discusses two intriguing questions in the non-Austronesian languages of North-Halmahera: the phonological sta- tus of the glottal stop, and the allomorphy of the nasal prefix. His postulation that the glottal stop is non-phonemic in Proto-North Halmaheran is convinc- ing. From the comparative point of view, this paper satisfactorily predicts the phonological appearance of allomorphs that cannot be explained within the structure of the individual languages. However, Kotynski does not convince me from a descriptive point of view. In the evolution of language it does not come as a surprise that a proto-allophone develops into a phoneme within an individual language, so why not in modern Tabaru? The contribution of Joost and Cheryl Pikkert on the phonology of Tidore (pp. 43-70), another non- Austronesian language of North Maluku, fades completely away against the background of Kotynski's paper. The not very exciting and excessively long list of contrasts, and the absence of phonetic transcriptions, suggest that this is a research report originally intended only for private use among fellow- Halmaheranists of the SIL. Otherwise, the reference to Kotynski's N-prefix, which is not nasal in Tidore (p. 55), makes no sense from the descriptive point of view. This feeling of arbitrariness emerges even more in Severn's com- puter-aided analysis of the phonemic syllable in Sahu (pp. 71-87), the last non-Austronesian language from North Maluku discussed in this volume. The author clearly confuses the goals of two separate (though related) sub- disciplines, phonetics and phonemics. The latter studies the abstraction of sound into linguistic units in which the hearing capacity of the speaker is the major principle. Acoustic phonetics comes in as an auxiliary science, when the perception of the informant and the researcher fails, which is not the case for Sahu. This paper may have aided the promotion of the CECIL equipment, but it definitely did not add anything to our knowledge of the phonemic syllable in Sahu.

The most important contributions to this volume, in my view, are the paper by the Laidigs on Larike phonology and syntax (pp. 19-42) and the one on transitivity in Luang by the Tabers (pp. 89-106). As already indicated by its title, the first of these provides a synopsis of all previous descriptive work on Larike by the present authors. Consequently this is the only paper in the volume that does not tackle one specifïc problem, theoretical elaboration being available in the separate papers to which it refers. The many topics that are mentioned in passing - split intransitivity, nominal subcategorization by means of classifiers and different possessive inflections, a complex deixis - indicate the importance of Larike grammar for the study of Central Malukan linguistics. The importance of Kathy and Mark Taber's contribution lies in the fact that they try to include aspects of the Luang cultural and cognitive framework in their analyses. The topic of their account, transitivity, is indeed

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 696 Book Reviews one of the major issues in Austronesian linguistics in this region of the world, and the Tabers must receive the credit for being the first to tackle it. In summary, the authors propose that the degree of a verb's transitivity determines the choice of the subject agreement marker. Full prefixes occur on verbs of low transitivity, whereas the shortened prefixes appear on highly transitive verbs. The phonotactic or morphotactic make-up of the verb may blur this distinction and evoke full prefixes where shortened prefixes are expected. Although I applaud their approach, the erroneous analyses show that they have been overwhelmed by their intention. The only support for their pro- posal comes from the rather few minimal pairs that display an active-nonact- ive or durative-punctiliar distinction. I therefore want to encourage both authors to re-investigate their data while considering the morphotactics of the respective pronominal prefixes. If, for example, denominalized verbs always feature full prefixes, as in Leti, than this would also explain the full prefix on na-apapnu (< apnu 'belly'). Rather than 'being partially pregnant', the Luang woman referred to would be 'developing a tummy', which is constru- able when one is in the beginning of one's pregnancy. Any publication from a region where all indigenous languages are on the brink of extinction is of course welcome. But then again, the audience must be able to interpret the data, which may not always be the case here. Although the papers may all contain valid information for the fellow-linguist working with the same or similar languages, it is only the interlinearized texts that can be of interest for all linguists.

R.Z. Leirissa, Halmahera Timur dan Raja Jailolo; Pergolakan sekitar Laut Seram awal abad 19. Jakarta: Balai Pustaka, 1996, xiv + 256 pp. ISBN 979.407.715.1.

CH.R VAN FRAASSEN

In 1990 Richard Leirissa won his PhD degree with a dissertation dealing with the so-called Raja Jailolo or 'King of Jailolo', a position which, although created by the Tidorese ruler Nuku, eventually came to lead a political life of its own independent of Tidore. The first Raja Jailolo, Mohamad Arif Bila, came from Tahane on Makian and was vizier to the sultan of Tidore from 1784 to 1797. At that time he already secretly supported Nuku, the rebellious claimant to the throne of Tidore who eventually succeeded in seizing it with British help in 1797. After his accession Nuku conferred the title of Raja Jailolo on Mohamad Arif Bila, thereby suggesting the rebirth of Jailolo, which had been absorbed by Ternate in the sixteenth century, as the fourth realm of

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Revieius 697 the Moluccas. After the death of Nuku in 1805, the Dutch attacked and dev- astated the capital of Tidore in 1806 and the Raja Jailolo fled to Halmahera, where shortly afterwards he died in an accident.

Mohamad Arif Bila was succeeded by his son Mohamad Asgar, who led a peripatetic life in and around eastern Halmahera (1807-1810) until he was taken prisoner there by the British, and kept under arrest in Ambon until 1818. Deemed a threat to law and order in the Moluccas, after the so-called Pattimura War Mohamad Asgar was banished by the Dutch to Japara in Java (1818-1825). During his captivity the title of Raja Jaliolo, with its implicit political claims and pretensions, was taken over by his younger brother Hajudin, also called Kalim-ma-Ngofa. Hajudin managed to stay out of Euro- pean hands and create a realm of his own on the north and northeast coast of Seram, in the area of the so-called Negeri Sembilan or 'Nine Villages' (1811- 1825). His followers came mostly from eastern Halmahera, and the economy of his realm was based mainly on (smuggling) trade and piracy. The Dutch tried in vain to capture him, and when he made a peace offer in 1824, pro- posing that his brother Mohamad Asgar be broüght back to the Moluccas and installed as a vassal ruler on Seram, they decided that this would be prefer- able to the existing situation of effective independence. In order not to offend the sultans of Ternate, Tidore and Bacan, Mohamad Asgar was not recog- nized as Raja Jailolo but given the new title of Sultan of Seram instead, thereby implicity limiting his authority to that island. His residency was located on the north coast of Seram at Hatiling. Because, however, he proved unable to prevent his subjects from engaging in smuggling and piracy, in 1832 he and most of his entourage were once more arrested (by treacherous means) by the Dutch and exiled, this time to West Java. Mohamad Asgar died in 1839 at Cianjur, where his younger brother Hajudin also died in 1846.

Leirissa's study was published by Balai Pustaka six years after he defended his thesis. Perhaps partly because this publisher has little experience with editing scholarly material, the book contains a very large number of printing errors. It nevertheless serves to make an interesting period in Moluccan history accessible to a broad public in Indonesia. Leirissa's subject is a difficult as well as fascinating one. In the first place he has had to deal with problematic sources. Except for some official correspondence, there are no Malay texts originating from or dealing with the Raja Jailolo. The only sources available are reports, correspondence and resolutions of the Dutch and British administrations in Ambon, Ternate and Batavia. Leirissa has nevertheless dug up a wealth of data in the Arsip Nasional, making many new sources accessible for other researchers via the annotations in his text, and demonstrating how much a historian can achieve using material available

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exclusively in Jakarta. Another challenge faced by the author was the great complexity of his subject matter, a confusing tangle of quarrels, intrigues, wars and alliances involving many different parties, from Moluccan rulers and rebels to Philippine pirates and European traders, adventurers and administrators. The period covered by Leirissa (1785-1835) saw the Moluccas transformed from a key field of operations for a mighty global trading company, concerned first and foremost with its own monopoly pron'ts, to a peripheral part of a colonial state which was beginning to show concern for the welfare of its native subjects.

Actual errors are hardly to be found in Leirissa's book. There are, however, a few omissions. It is a pity, for instance, that Leirissa does not mention the claims to the Negeri Sembilan of Seram made by Bacan in the eighteenth century. The Ternatan prince Ibrahim, an adventurer who operated in the same area as the Raja Jailolo and caused much trouble to the British until they caught him in 1813, is mentioned only in passing. Ibrahim was exiled to Japara, together with Mohamad Asgar, in 1818. Leirissa's book, based primarily on 'previously unused archive material, nevertheless makes an important contribution to the broader multidisciplinary study of indigenous state formation in the Indonesian archipelago, a process in which conflict, trade, and political mythology all played important parts. In a society based primarily upon trade and piracy, a strong chief was one who knew how to transform a number of loose groups into a well-organized fleet in which individual interests were subordinated to a common cause. Such a maritime force operated on the principle that strong opponents became trading partners, while weak opponents were robbed. A charismatic adventurer with highly developed political and military skills, if he was lucky enough to have no equally powerful rivals, could grow into a king, either by seizing the throne of an existing realm (Nuku), or by creating a new one (Raja Jailolo). In either case the new de facto situation was legitimated by adjustments to the dominant political ideology. In this way the roaming adventurers of the Moluccas (Old Javanese: kalana) were transformed into crowned monarchs {kolano, the North Moluccan word for 'king' or 'sultan').

Denys Lombard, Catherine Champion and Henri Chambert-Loir (eds), Rever l'Asie; Exotisme et littérature coloniale aux Indes, en Indochine et en Insulinde. Paris: Éditions de 1'École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, 1993, 486 pp. ISBN 2.7132.1002.X.

FRANCES GOUDA

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Twenty years after Edward Said published his controversial book on Orientalism, the fïctional constructions of the Middle East and Asia in the col- lective imagination of the West are emerging yet again as vibrant scholarly topics. This renewed interest in the myths and meanings of Asia in recent years may be due, in part, to the anxieties of the capitalist world about the economie crisis that began to destabilize countries such as Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Korea and Japan. But it is not only cupidity that motiv- ates the current debates about Asian 'values' in Europe and North America. At the same time a dispassionate discussion concerning Asia and its cultural and economie transactions with the West has resurfaced, albeit without the ideological heavy-handedness that Said's work inspired two decades ago.

Hence, at this particular point in time historians, social scientists and literary critics are busily re-examining Asia's role in the mind's eye of European and American observers, who have long since displayed a tendency to project onto the radically different societies on the South Asian subcontinent, in the Far East, or in Southeast Asia a variety of Western yearnings and preoccupa- tions. Two examples of this scholarly revival are Jeffery Paine's Father India; How encounters with an ancient culture transformed the modern West and Jonathan D. Spence's The Chan's great continent; China in Western minds - books that were published in the United States during the late Fall of 1998. With varying degrees of expertise, both authors address the ways in which representations of either India or China were filtered through a uniquely Western prism. Such self-referential perceptions have occasionally reconfig- ured the complexities of ancient civilizations in Asia as experimental terrains - what French writers have called champs d'expérience - that could conceiv- ably provide answers to questions about the nature of Western civilization or its distinct forms of rationality or spirituality. In the process, Asian cultural landscapes began to resemble the cartoon-like Chinese figures on Victorian wallpaper or the Kashmir-inspired fabric designs of William Morris that adorned the curtains and upholstery of many a European household before the outbreak of World War II.

As Denys Lombard argues in Rever l'Asie's introduction, entitled 'Exotic literature as necessary mirror', the new multi-ethnic realities of contemporary Europe have also fuelled the resurgence of interest in Western representations of Asia. With either enthusiasm or trepidation, citizens of countries such as France, Great Britain, or the Netherlands are contemplating in 1999 the creation of a European Union that is still marred by the poignant problems of both overt and covert racism. Hundreds of thousands of non- European residents from territories in Asia and Africa previously colonized by European nations now live in Paris, London, or Amsterdam. Their palp-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 700 Book Reviews able presence has altered the social sensibilities of metropolitan Europeans as they envision a tentatively post-colonial and unified universe in the new millennium. As Lombard suggests, this eerie and unprecedented multi-cultural world surrounding them has prompted a range of scholars in Europe (and an occasional American one) to re-examine in Rever l'Asie the history of the 'exotic' literature produced by writers and novelists during the colonial era who embellished the 'tropical gothic', to summon Benedict Anderson's phrase, of British India, French Indo-China and the Dutch East Indies. In addition, one effective essay by Noel Teodoro focuses on Spanish colonial literature in the Philippines, while another interesting chapter by Rui Simoes provides an overview of Portuguese novels and other texts set in Goa. And the final chapters of the book chronicle literary developments in Vietnam after 1945 and the nostalgia of the 'Raj Revival', as Salman Rushdie has labelled it, in contemporary England. Moreover, in an insightful essay about two Australian novels set in Jakarta in 1965 and 1966, Savitri Scherer decodes the ambiguity and often neo-colonial ethos of Australian writing about modern Indonesia. The result of this endeavour is an eclectic collection that provides unwieldy intellectual insights. It brings together a grand total of 32 chapters that describe or analyse forms of 'exotic fiction', defined as novels and texts that emerged from within the specificity of colonized spaces (and a few post- colonial ones). As Denys Lombard proposes, 'exotic literature' embraces strange and faraway cultures as object and setting; it is a genre, he notes, that should occupy a more conspicuous place in the literary history of the Western world than it is commonly assigned. But the question quickly arises as to what exactly constitutes 'exotic literature'. In general this literary cate- gory treats Western men and women as its central characters; hence the physical adventures, emotional dilemmas, moral qualms and personal resolutions of the novels' protagonists are quintessentially European in origin and nature. Nothing in this style of fiction offers a discernible departure from Western literary conventions regarding novelistic structure or plot development. Instead, in the treatment of most of the contributors to Rever l'Asie, 'exotic literature' seems to represent a touchstone that gauges the unfolding of Western identities in environments that are unfamiliar and therefore daunting. The genre, in others words, embodies a 'mirror' to the Western self as it was challenged, destabilized, and, in most novelistic denouements, reconfirmed in its encounter with bewildering social localities and sultry tropical climates. The 32 chapters of the book are further subdivided into eight sections, bearing titles that are either overly predictable or somewhat elusive. They range from 'Mission civilisatrice or the white man's burden' and 'The image of woman and amorous relationship(s)' to 'The clichés of conquest; Pirates,

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 701 thugs, black pavilions', 'From anxiety to exigency', 'The failure of miscegna- tion' and 'From nostalgia to ridicule'. Each of these sub-sections consists of essays that vary in intellectual substance and style. Many of the chapters have a kind of encyclopedie quality, as if the authors merely wish to provide the reader with a bird's eye view of the multitude of texts and novels produced by Western writers in particular colonial contexts and historical junc- tures. In addition to the two essays on the Philippines and Goa, Rever l'Asie contains, for example, Catherine Champion's 'Dazzling India or the dreams of a colony; The exotic novel at the service of the civilizing mission', Pierre Labrousse's 'The savage Indies and the fantasy of romantic transgression; Insulinde in French fiction, 1712-1939', and Denys Lombard's 'Prelude to Indochinese literature', all of which furnish a useful introduction to a wide range of Western fictional portrayals of three unique but comparable colonial cultures. Other contributors concentrate on distinct themes, such as Gerard Termorshuizen, Pierre Brocheux and Claude Markovits, who decipher the literary representations of the mixed-blood offspring generated by interracial relationships, while Jackie Assayag, Martine van Woerkens, Pierre Labrousse and Bernard Gay investigate the ways in which either French, Dutch, or English 'exotic' novels depict the fraught sexual interactions and asymmetrical gender relations between male colonizers and indigenous women. Yet other contributors to the volume limit themselves to an analysis of a single writer and one significant novel; in fact, their essays constitute the most successful parts of the book. For instance, Henri Chambert-Loir's 'Danger in Java; The hidden force by Louis Couperus (1900)', Jacques Weber's 'Franco- Indian society in peril; Disorder in Pondichery by Georges Delamare (1938)', and Catherine Wienberger-Thomas's 'For the love of Kali; The deceivers by John Masters (1952)' shed light on the often confusing human realities and disorienting cultural complexities of colonial societies by grounding their arguments within the confines of a novelistic setting that is clearly described and delineated.

Nonetheless, despite the regional diversity and thematic inclusiveness of the collection, it conveys a curious, almost solipsistic, aura of Frenchness. It seems as if the authors, with occasional exceptions, are unwilling to tackle the avalanche of scholarship on colonial culture and post-coloniality unleashed in the last two decades by historians, social scientists and literary critics who are located in international intellectual communities outside France. Moreover, some of the essays read a bit like a series of short plot summaries, begging the questions that many Indian, Dutch, or Anglo-American scholars have previously posed and explored. But despite this caveat, Rever l'Asie is a worthwhile book that provides a helpful inventory of the many dif-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 702 Book Reviews ferent kinds of novels and texts Europeans have been inspired to write in the course of engaging, whether in person or in their imagination, the 'exotic' but complicated colonial cultures of South and Southeast Asia.

Timothy Lindsey, The romance ofK'tut Tantri and Indonesia; Texts and scripts, history and identity. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1997, xix + 362 + 24 pp. ISBN 983.56. 0018.X. Price: USD 27.50.

HANS HAGERDAL

In the sixteenth century, a Portuguese adventurer called Fernao Mendes Pinto wrote a lengthy account of his alleged wanderings through East and Southeast Asia, an account filled with marvels and bloodcurdling horror. Pinto's Peregrinacao soon became widely read, and was translated into various Euro- pean languages. The critics, however, were not slow in denouncing Pinto as the most inveterate Har in the history of travel literature. Modern scholarship has had a hard time judging the value of his travelogue and determining the relation between eyewitness account and literary invention in the text. Four hundred years later, a Glasgow-born woman known under a multitude of names travelled in some of the same regions as Pinto, and produced an autobiography which in some respects was a worthy companion to the Portuguese classic. The career of K'tut Tantri, as she preferred to be known, was indeed dramatic. A self-proclaimed 'artist' who claimed to have a Holly- wood background, she arrived in Bali in the 1930s, started a hotel and established close relations with the royal family of the little mountain kingdom of Bangli. Imprisoned and tortured by the Japanese during the war, she subsequently became one of the few Westerners to join the Indonesian revolution, delivering regular radio broadcasts for the insurgents and making the acquaintance of leading revolutioriary figures. Her wildly dramatic and romantic story, as told in her book Revolt in paradise (1960), has caught the fascination of generations of readers. But how is it to be perceived? In spite of her claim in the preface that the stories were all based on genuine reminiscences, the improbabilities and omissions are obvi- ous. The Australian lawyer Timothy Lindsey first read the book as largely fic- titious. When he later came into contact with the ailing lady, then in her 90s, his fascination with the background of the autobiography and the multi- faceted character of its author eventually resulted in the PhD thesis of which The romance ofK'tut Tantri is a reworking. The task of comparing Revolt in paradise with altemative versions of K'tut Tantri's life and personality has demanded intricate detective work. In spite

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 703 of the modest period of time which has passed since her departure from revolutionary Indonesia, the separation of fact and romance is often as hard to make as in the case of Pinto, four centuries earlier. As a matter of fact, such a separation is not always relevant. Images are met by counter-images, and in either case they need to be explained by the circumstances in which they arose. Lindsey gives several examples of this. The anti-colonial, or even anti- Dutch attitude prevalent in K'tut Tantri's book is matched by an idealization of the 'noble native' of Bali and Indonesia in general - a view cultivated, in- cidentally, by the Dutch themselves. As against this, Westerners who stayed in the region in the 1930s and 1940s occasionally depicted the lady as a sexual libertine, a collaborator with the Japanese, and suchlike - views found- ed more on the trauma of violent decolonization than on any 'truths' about K'tut Tantri. Revolt in paradise, then, is truly a romance. A romance may mean a love story or a tale which emphasizes ideals and fantasy at the expense of reality, and this book is both. It is the definitive autobiography of the author, which she stubbornly clung to in the face of enquiries by Lindsey and others in spite of having provided alternative versions of her life in the past. Her determined refusal to allow any changes in the thread of the story when plans were made to have it filmed, in fact, ultimately cost her the opportunity to see her adventures on screen.

In spite of its claim to provide a true story of the time before and during the Revolusi, K'tut Tantri's work has been little used by historians, and Lindsey's investigation hardly encourages any conventional use of it. Though there usually seems to be a kernel of factual truth in the episodes related, distor- tions and omissions of unpleasant facts can be demonstrated easily enough. Her stance during the Japanese occupation, for example, was questioned by many of her contemporaries, who hinted at initial collaboration on her part, an accusation that is not easily dismissed altogether. Lindsey's own accuracy, on the other hand, is also debatable at times. Even from my limited knowledge, it is clear that the first part of his investigation, dealing with K'tut Tantri's relation to Bali, is somewhat flawed. The first half of Revolt in paradise centres around the imposing character of Anak Agung Nura. As the son of the jovial raja of Bangli, he stands between the world of tradition and that of modernity, and becomes the soulmate of K'tut Tantri. Their love, which in the book is no more than platonic, is cut short when Nura, despite his revolutionary sympathies, is killed by overzealous pemuda during the Revolusi. In trying to disentangle the romantic warp of K'tut Tantri's Bali experiences, Lindsey believes that the Nura character is fic- titious as it stands. On misinterpreted interview evidence, he asserts that Nura was not a revolutionary hero, was not killed by pemuda, and actually

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 704 Book Reviews succeeded his father around 1939, dying as late as 1960. This is surely incorrect, for the old raja who received K'tut Tantri around 1932 had no sons at all, and it was he who passed away at about the same time as Revolt in paradise was published (cremation 17 August 1961). His jovial personality, moreover, is confirmed by former Dutch officials. So who was this enigmatic Nura who plays such a prominent role in the book? A figment of the ingenious mind of K'tut Tantri? When I discussed K'tut Tantri with members of the Bangli raja family in 1998, they never hesitated in identifying Nura as Anak Agung Gde Oka, a son or nephew of a previous raja. He was an English-speaking guide connected to the Bali Hotel in Kuta, and he brought K'tut Tantri with him to visit the coffee farmers in Bangli. They also confirm that the lady was, in a sense, adopted by the raja family, referring to her as a 'cousin'. Oka was killed by the pemuda in about 1945/1946 because he was thought to be collaborating with the Dutch. The author, then, merely changed his identity a little. The credibility of oral accounts picked up more than half a century later can be debated, of course. But I have treated this particular example in some detail to illustrate the dangers of drawing conclusions on the reliability of a memoir by deduction. We can never know what words and feelings were actually exchanged between the British-American lady and her Balinese soulmate, or what importance Soekarno and Amir Sjarifuddin actually accorded her during the revolution. But we can at least tracé something of her physical itinerary, and a good first step here is to look up people who met her at the time and are still alive. Lindsey has extracted useful information from celebrities like Bob and Louise Koke, K'tut Tantri's ex-partners in the Bali Hotel at Kuta, but there remain other people in Indonesia who, according to my own experience, could have provided many colourful details.

This is not to say that the research for the book is flawed. On the contrary, I can recommend it to anyone who, like me, was ever fascinated by K'tut Tantri's extraordinary life story, and wishes to know more about her. Although Lindsey warns us that this is not a biography of the author but an analysis of her romance with Indonesia, he has made an able investigation of her life before and after her stay in the Eastern Isles. Through a multitude of newspaper articles, pamphlets, interviews, Dutch archival materials and, not least, discussions with the lady herself, a fascinating picture emerges of her character, headstrong and independent until the very last. The oral versions of her life story that were communicated to Lindsey via interviews turned out to complicate and obscure her past rather than clarify it. 'I began to real- ize that K'tut Tantri has protected her history by deliberately making her past a mystery [...]. Perhaps she could not help it.' (p. 7.)

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Ina E. Slamet-Velsink, Emerging hierarchies; Processes of stratification and early state formation in the Indonesian archipelago: prehistory and the ethnographic present. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1995, ix + 279 pp. [VKI 166.] ISBN 90.6718.086.6. Price: NLG 45,00.

RENEE HAGESTEIJN

This is a synopsis on the proto- and early history of Indonesia, with links to comparable contemporary socio-political structures in the region. The author, a cultural anthropologist by training, uses an interdisciplinary approach combining anthropology and prehistory. The ethnographic data serve to fill the gaps in the prehistorie and proto-historic evidence. The book consists of an overview of Indonesian prehistory from the late palaeolithic onward, followed by data on the bronze-iron age in Southeast Asia, with additional information on megaliths. Subsequently, ethnographic material is presented and compared with data from prehistorie and historie sources. In the final section the findings of the previous ones are analysed form the point of view of stratification and state formation.

Lucidly written, the book contains informative summaries of prehistorie and archaeological excavations and ethnographic and ethnological studies. Part I provides the 'Setting': the development of Hoabinhian culture in demographic, geographical and material respects (Chapters II to IV). A brief summary of contemporary data is added on the subjects of man-land ratios, nutrition, division of labour and material culture (Chapter V). Chapter VI is a theoretical exposé on 'Social relations', with emphasis on kinship ties. Chapter VII gives three contemporary examples of social relations among the Aranda of Central Australia, the Marind Anim and the Asmat of Irian Jaya. Unfortunately, information on political aspect of these relationships, a prerequisite for the analysis of stratification and state formation, is lacking in both chapters. Chapter VIII touches upon the beginnings of agriculture, and contains information which is somewhat contradictory to that in Chapter IV, especially on demographic issues. Part II describes the proto-historic scène. Chapter IX deals with the early metal age in Vietnam (the Dong-son culture), Chapter X with megalithic monuments (walls, stairs, pyramids, urns, menhirs, delmens, statues, seats and the like) in Indonesia, Chapters XI and XII with bronze drums. In Chapters XIII and XIV the subject of trade is touched upon briefly. Part III describes the 'ethnographic present'. Chapter XVI deals with 'processes of stratification among some Kalimantan people' (Iban, Melanau, Kelabit). The emphasis in this chapter is on economie and cultural aspects of stratification. The similarities and differences among the four groups are less

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 706 Book Reviews clearly highlighted than one would have hoped for. Chapter XVII is a description of 'stratification and political organization among megalithic societies elsewhere in the archipelago' (the inhabitants of Nias, the Batak of Sumatra, the Ngada, the Sika, Nita and Kangae of Flores, the inhabitants of eastern Sumba, the Belu of Timor, the Toraja of Sulawesi). In this chapter the information on social and political developments is more prominently presented. The following chapters address the subjects of 'bondage' (XVIII), 'kinship and political organization' (XIX), 'asymmetrical connubial arrangements' (XX), 'non-asymmetric kinship systems' (XXI), and the 'fertility of man and nature in myth and ritual' (XXII), partly on the basis of theoretical exposés and partly using the ethnographic data gathered in the previous chapters. In the final part (IV), a comparison is made between the prehistorie and the contemporary data. In this part the concepts of 'early states' and 'state formation' are brought into the discussion. Ecological circumstances, food production and trade are presented as important issues relating to processes of state formation. The author is somewhat biased in her examples of early states, which are mostly trade-based (Satingpra, Srivijaya, Ternate). The inclusion of Central and East Javanese kindoms like Majapahit would have provided a different perspective.

The notion of development or evolution is not sufficiently used in this study. The term 'processes' in the title is hardly appropriate to the content of the book. Parts of the puzzle are indeed presented, but due to the wide variety of cases and examples the puzzle is only partly put together. Early state systems are presented as more or less separate entities from the less centralized political systems in the book. Also, the author gives the impression that kingdoms or early states can be 'established' instantaneous- ly, even as a result of colonial rule (p. 141). The developmental links between egalitarian hunter-gatherer type organizations and the early states are not treated systematically. The four pages in the section 'From tribe to state' in Chapter XXIV (pp. 228-231) are in this sense rather superficial. The 'Complex Interaction Model' of Claessen and Van de Velde (1987), according to Slamet- Velsink, 'can very neatly be applied to the Indonesian archipelago' (p. 230), but no systematic reference is made here to the historie and ethnographic data presented in the book. In the final section of Chapter XXIV some remarks are made on 'various agents of change', but again without links to the data. Summing up, the book contains a wealth of useful information, but a more systematic approach to describing the stratification and centralization processes would have been welcome: Perhaps narrower geographic (or thematic) choices or limitations might have facilitated this task.

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Victor T. King (ed.), Environmental challenges in South-East Asia. Richmond: Curzon Press, 1998, xviii + 410 pp. [Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Man and Nature in Asia Series 2.] ISBN 0.7007.0615.1.

DAVID HENLEY

Based on a discussion panel entitled 'Human-environment interactions in Southeast Asia' at the first conference of the European Association of South- East Asian Studies in Leiden in 1995, this volume contains 15 essays on various aspects of the relationship between man and nature in the Southeast Asian region. 'No specific empirical problem or theoretical issue', as King acknowledges in his introductory essay, 'was selected for special attention' (p. xviii). The chapter topics, accordingly, are diverse, including lethal diseases, land use changes, deforestation, sustainability of fisheries, and eco- tourism. Eight contributions deal with parts of Indonesia or East Malaysia, two with the Sierra Madre in upland Luzon, and one with part of southern Thailand, while the remaining four have a wider regional scope. The book has quite a strong historical component, six of the fifteen essays being devoted partly or entirely to the past. The authors include historians as well as geographers and anthropologists.

Victor King's introduction provides a clear and useful overview of existing work in the field, stressing the key role played by geographers (the book is dedicated to the memory of the geographer James Jackson) in defining and researching environmental issues in Southeast Asia. Summarizing the conclusions of recent field studies on resource management techniques in the region, King warns that not all indigenous, traditional practices are ecologic- ally sustainable under modern conditions. The generally limited impact of precolonial societies on their environment, in fact, often had more to do with sparse population than with careful stewardship. Some examples of unsus- tainable resource exploitation by traditional methods are described elsewhere in this volume. Norman Backhaus ('Globalisation and marine resource use in Bali'), for instance, shows how the artisanal manufacture of salt, by boiling brine over wood fires, has led to the destruction of mangrove forests, and consequently to accelerated beach erosion, near Denpasar in Bali (p. 181). Several chapters are particularly concerned with the politics of the environment. Raymond Bryant, in his essay on 'Resource politics in colonial South-East Asia', describes how the state policy of restricting local access to managed teak forests became a focus of anticolonial resistance in Burma and Java. Freek Colombijn ('A Dutch polder in the Sumatran mountains') shows how Dutch colonial officials in West Sumatra were obsessed with labour- intensive forms of agriculture, forcing Minangkabau peasants to replace their

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swidden and hedgerow coffee with laboriously regimented and maintained coffee plantations, and to dig canals for the expansion of irrigated rice farming. The explicit model here was the garden island of Java, but behind this, Colombijn argues, 'loomed the model of the Dutch polder' (p. 55). Gerhard van den Top ('Deforestation of the northern Sierra Madre') describes how progressive forest protection policies in the Philippines have been reduced to a dead letter by corruption and the political power of the logging concerns. Zawawi Ibrahim, in his 'Epilogue' to the volume, places environmental issues in the context of the political dialogue between 'North' and 'South', the 'developed' and 'developing' worlds. Some of these political analyses show a certain amount of well-inten- tioned bias. The complexity of contemporary environmental problems, for instance, is hardly encompassed by Ibrahim's declaration that these result from 'a notion of progress, backed by power and class, which still continues to expropriate from mother nature' (p. 348). In his eagerness to portray agricultural intensification as a colonial distortion, Colombijn rather glosses over the fact that Minangkabau rice farming, featuring irrigation, the transplant- ing of seedlings and the use of the plough and water wheel, was already intensive by any standards prior to the Dutch intervention. Nor does Bryant, at least in his contribution to this volume, linger long over the point that in terms of sustainable production, the colonial forestry regimes in Burma and Java were highly successful. In itself, however, the emphasis on political power and conflict in Environmental challenges is clearly realistic, and contrasts favourably with the technical-prescriptive tone of South-East Asia's environmental future; The searchfor sustainability, a comparable anthology edited by Harold Brookfield and Yvonne Byron in 1993.

Among the most interesting chapters are those dealing with population, always one of the most important variables determining the human impact on the natural environment, and at the same time one which is itself affected by environmental factors. In 'Environmental changes and population movements: the Iban of Sarawak', Michael Parnwell and Victor King argue that recent emigration from rural longhouse communities in Sarawak has at least partly been the result of environmental degradation. Commercial logging, population growth, chainsaws, shotguns and poison fishing have combined to reduce the nutritional and economie productivity of the forest environment, making young Iban increasingly susceptible to the lure of the towns. Christiaan Heersink ('Environmental adaptations in southern Sulawesi'), by contrast, describes how in the past, many Indonesians displayed a quite different response to environmental stress. Where foodcrop agriculture was relatively unproductive, as on the dry island of Selayar and in some nearby parts of peninsular South Sulawesi, people reacted not by moving elsewhere,

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 709 but by seeking additional income from commercial activities such as ship- building, trade, or the weaving of cloth for export. Certain cash crops, particularly cotton and coconuts, also lent themselves to cultivation on dry, porous soils. In some cases, Heersink suggests, these commercial strategies were so successful that they led to paradoxical concentrations of population in the most barren localities. In an excellent essay on 'Lethal diseases in the history of Borneo', finally, Han Knapen argues that the small size of the population in precolonial Kalimantan was in the first place a reflection of high disease mortality rather than limited economie opportunity, and that medical factors also help explain some aspects of the population distribution on this island. In contrast to the situation in Java and Sumatra, for instance, malaria on Borneo was mainly a disease of the forested interior, whereas the relatively populous tidal coastlands were malaria-free. While it is rather a pity that none of these three essays takes the conclusions of the others into account, their very diversity means that they provide a thought-provoking introduction to the complex relationships between demography and environment in Southeast Asian history.

Ton Otto and Ad Borsboom (eds), Cultural dynamics of religious change in Oceania. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997, viii + 144 pp. [VKI 176.] ISBN 90.6718.119.6. Price: NLG 45.00.

C. DE JONGE

This volume contains seven articles originally presented at the First European Colloquium on Pacific Studies in Nijmegen (1992), to which Otto and Borsboom have added an introduction and epilogue discussing some methodological questions concerning the study of religious change as an aspect of broader processes of cultural change. Does religious change really bring something new, or is it a way to maintain old traditions in a new situation created by Western colonization and missionization? The contributors tend to draw this last conclusion, interpreting religious change as an indigenous response to the impact of the West upon non-Western societies.

The articles provide valuable descriptions of religious change in several Oceanic societies (Australian Aborigines, and a number of peoples of Papua Niugini). Thomas Widlok analyses 'traveling rituals' among Aborigines in Australia as a way of creating unity among hitherto separate communities. Elisabetta Gnecchi-Ruscone describes church feasts among the Korafe (PNG) which represent the continuation of traditional vasdi ceremonies in a new

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form. Holger Jebens investigates why young Pairundu turn from Roman Catholicism to the Seventh-Day Adventists (but passes over the question why the older generation became Catholic in the first place). Gunter Senft, besides offering interesting observations regarding language change as a result of conversion to Christianity, shows how magie, through the influence of the mission, disappeared from the surface on the Trobriand islands (PNG) but lives on in a new syncretism which combines Christian beliefs with traditional Trobriand eschatology and belief in magie. The last three articles, by Michel Panoff, Sjoerd R. Jaarsma and Elfriede Hermann, all deal with what are traditionally called 'cargo cults'. Panoff, writing on the Maenge (PNG) rejects the view that the emergence of such a cult is a sign of crisis. He considers the cargo cult as a normal Melanesian way to adjust oneself to new circumstances. Jaarsma's article is highly theoretical, discussing ethnographic descriptions of cargo cults, questioning the entire concept and concluding that the term is inadequate to describe religious change. Hermann, finally, also immerses the reader in a theoretical discussion about cargo cults, but at the same time shows how Western discourses on this phenomenon induced the people in Madang Province (PNG) to talk about elements of cargo cults as kastam (custom, tradition) in order to defend themselves against the accusation of manipulating reality by magie rituals. In their epilogue the two editors point to the fact that due to Western influence, 'tradition' and 'modernity' cannot be viewed as completely oppos- ite concepts. The conventional ethnographic view of tradition as something which is unchanging, and which also summarizes the whole past of a society, cannot be maintained because peoples themselves use only parts of their tradition to adapt to modern times, rejecting others which they consider old- fashioned. In this process 'religion', instead of summarizing the entire world- view of indigenous peoples, becomes a separate field in their perception of reality and is hence relegated to a less universal meaning. Religious change, therefore, often also tends to mean the secularization of Oceanic and other indigenous societies.

In the light of conclusions like this, Cultural dynamics of religious change in Oceania offers very valuable observations. One hopes, accordingly, that future research on religious change will not be limited to theoretical discussions about the question of how to describe such change, but will continue to produce ethnographic descriptions in the traditional sense.

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Chris Sugden, Seeking the Asian face ofjesus; A critical and comparative study of the practice and theology of Christian social witness in Indonesia and India between 1974 and 1996. Oxford: Regnum, 1997, xix + 496 pp. ISBN 1.87034.526.6. Price: GBP 29.99.

C. DE JONGE

The first part of Sugden's book (pp. 1-314) consists of his PhD thesis, presented in 1988, in which he compares the theology and missionary practice of the Balinese Protestant theologian I Wayan Mastra and the Indian Anglican theologian Vinay Samuel. It deals with the period 1974-1983. The second part (pp. 317-449) was added when he prepared this thesis for publication, and deals solely with the development of Samuel's theology between 1984 and 1996. The purpose of the book as a whole is clear: Sugden wants to show his fellow-evangelical Anglicans that Samuel's theology, which is both solidly evangelical and contextual, offers a valuable contribution to the development of an evangelical missiology which seriously makes allowance for the particularities and values of non-Western societies.

For readers specialized in anthropology, the first part is certainly the most interesting, since it investigates the way Mastra and Samuel try to apply their Western (Protestant) Christian theology to their respective contexts, Balinese Hindu society and the community of urban slum-dwellers in Bangalore, who also have a Hindu background. In order to evaluate Mastra's and Samuel's efforts to develop a Christian social theology in loco, an analysis of Balinese and Indian Hindu society is given, unfortunately based mainly on secondary literature and not on field research. The second part, besides leaving out Mastra completely (and hence contradicting the subtitle), is entirely theo- logical in nature and contains almost no references to the specific context of Indian Christians. Both Mastra (in his doctoral thesis about Hendrik Kraemer and Bali, and in his work as the moderator of the Balinese Protestant Christian Church) and Samuel lay much stress on the dignity of indigenous people who become the subject of Christian missionary efforts. Mastra critiques the way Kraemer, in his report on Bali, regards the local Hindu culture as sheer idolatry which will disappear once Western education and Christianity are accepted. According to Mastra the Christian church should appreciate the local culture and the way local people search for religious truth. It should promote the Christian faith as the fulfillment of this search and look for ways to express Christianity in forms which are familiar to people who live in a Balinese cultural context. By teaching skills and promoting small entrepreneurship, the Christian social witness should stress the capability of the Balinese, who

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 712 Book Reviews lived until recently in a feudal society, to build their own lives. Samuel, who became a minister in a Bangalore slum area, is much more critical of the way Hinduism, through its theology of caste, sanctifies poverty, social inequality and the dependency of the poor. By stressing the human dignity of each individual and of deprived communities, and by initiating economie programmes for the poor, the church should show Indians 'the Asian face of Jesus' in order to liberate them from the poverty and oppression connected with their own culture.

Sugden's analysis is thorough, detailed, and often rather repetitive. lts weakness is its hidden agenda. Sugden wants to present Mastra's and, even more, Samuel's theology as valuable alternatives to their Western (evangelical) counterparts, which tend to be too individualistic. Their value, he suggests, lies in the fact that they take the context of family and community, so important outside the Western world, into serious account. The reader who is looking for a comparison between these two Asian theologians, and for an evalu- ation of their theologies within their own specific contexts, will therefore be disappointed.

Roy E. Jordaan (ed.), In praise of Prambanan; Dutch essays on the Loro Jonggrang temple complex. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996, xii + 259 pp. [Translation Series 26.] ISBN 90.6718.105.6. Price: NLG 50.00.

JOHN N. MIKSIC

Any contemporary archaeologist studying Indonesia is bound to develop a strong sense of admiration for the Dutch antiquarians who laid the foundation for this field of research. Working under difficult conditions, they formulated methods, theories and historical reconstructions which, albeit relatively late in their inception, compared favourably with other programs of restoration, interpretation and excavation conducted in what were then European colonies. Publications of the Netherlands Indies Archaeological Service give evidence of lively debates in which basic differences of opinion were frankly and meticulously aired. Careful recording and fieldwork were standardized soon after the formation of the Netherlands Indies Oudheid- kundige Dienst (OD) in the early twentieth century. Even during the economie difficulties of the 1930s, much important research was conducted all over the sprawling archipelago. Specialists from other professions, such as doctors and engineers, also made important contributionsto the subject, a fact which suggests that the image fostered by some Dutch authors them-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 713 selves of Dutch colonial society as largely uninterested in anything beyond pron'ts was not entirely accurate. It is therefore worthy of a small celebration that these articles by Dutch scholars are now available in English. World War II brought a sudden halt to their labours; many reports of work in progress were destroyed, and many of the scholars themselves lost their lives. In the early 1950s the successor to the OD, the Dinas Purbakala, was able to conduct some important new projects, but the years between 1955 and 1970 were marked by an almost total cessation of publications on Indonesian archaeology as political and economie conditions in Indonesia reached a nadir. In the mid-1970s the Dinas Purbakala was divided into two separate entities: the National Research Centre for Archaeology, or Pusat Penelitian Arkeologi Nasional (Puslit Arkenas) and the Directorate for the Preservation and Protection of the the National Heritage (Direktorat Perlindungan dan Pembinaan Peninggalan Sejarah dan Purbakala, Ditlit Binjarah), which has the task of historical preservation. One side-effect of this reorganization has been the dilution of communication between excavators, art historians and restorers of historie sites and monuments. Colonial-period scholars had the advantage of close collaboration between these two groups, and the fruits of their labours demonstrate a broad familiarity with several disparate fields, including architecture, sculpture, excavation techniques, philology, Indology and Javanology. The articles translated from Dutch and made available in the work under review here bear abundant evidence of the merits of a seamless fabric of communication among scholars from different fields all brought to bear on common problems. One would love to have been a fly on the wall during the debates among the scholars which are summarized briefly in the Notulen or Minutes of the meetings of the Batavian Society! They must have been quite lively occasions. Their merit was the imposition, not of consensus, but of a common understanding of the problems to be tackled. Such an atmosphere is difficult to replicate even at the present time, with much more favourable tools of communication at our command. A social history of the OD would be an extremely interesting subject for research.

The Lara Jonggrang complex at Prambanan has been relatively neglected by scholars in comparison with that other jewel of ancient Indonesian civilization, Borobudur. One of the many factors responsible for this situation is that Borobudur was discovered in much better condition than Prambanan. The architecture of the Lara Jonggrang complex emphasized tall tapering forms, which came crashing down over a millennium as the result of earthquakes and plant growth. It has taken a century of research and restoration to make it possible once again to witness first-hand the majestic soaring sight of the

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complex's three main towers. Another reason for Lara Jonggrang's relative eclipse may be that Borobudur contains much more narrative art in the form of reliëfs. Lara Jonggrang definitely deserves to be considered much more as an equal to Borobudur than it has yet received credit for. This publication goes part of the way toward rectifying that imbalance. The translation is in general fluent and idiomatic, with only a few mis- steps - for instance, 'appendages' (p. 132) should be 'appurtenances' or 'per- quisites'. Also, on page 133, the plural of talisman is given as 'talismen'; it should be 'talismans', since the '-man' syllable here does not derive from any connection to humans. Similarly, on page 211 'stringboards' should be 'string- walls'. Some problems arise in the translation of Indonesian words too. The •word apit, meaning 'flanking', is translated several times as 'wedged in' or 'hem[med] in'. The translation of the Old Javanese Ramayana (pp. 48-9), on the other hand, is very pleasing and literate and deserves special commendation. Translation One presents J.W. IJzerman's article 'The Prambanan temple pits', taken from his Beschrijving der oudheden nabij de grens der residentie 's Soerakarta en Djogdjakarta (1891). This translation also reproduces some plates from that publication, but since the captions to them have been reduced so greatly as to be nearly illegible, and have been left untranslated, they are decorative rather than informative. The next translation, J.Ph. Vogel's 'The first Prambanan Rama relief' from BKI77 (1921), discusses the relief which depicts a god, identifiable by his many attributes as Visnu, seated on a serpent in the middle of the ocean. To his right is his mount Garuda offering a flower, while to his left are a number of people who have apparently come to request something from Visnu. The fifteenth sarga of the first canto (Balakanda) of Valmiki's Ramayana says that the gods led by Brahma came to Visnu to request his intervention against Ravana. The question then arises as to whether this is the episode depicted on the first relief of Lara Jonggrang. Valmiki portrays Visnu riding Garuda in response to Dasaratha's sacrifice for a son, while Kalidasa in his Raghuwangsa says that the gods went to Visnu, just awakening in the ocean, while Garuda awaited nearby. This suggests that the sculptors of Lara Jonggrang used Kalidasa's version rather than Valmiki's. There is, however, no concrete evidence that the Raghuwangsa was known in Java. Vogel does not resolve this problem completely, contenting himself with the suggestion that the Javanese sculptors perhaps followed an oral tradition rather than any written text. The next translation, 'The Prambanan statues' by N.J. Krom, is taken from this scholar's Inleiding tot de Hindoe-Javaansche kunst. The excerpt translated here deals with the perception that the Durga and Agastya statues in two of the chambers in Lara Jonggrang seem too large for their backrests. This has given rise to the theory that these statues were not the original ones meant for this site. Other, simpler explanations can also be proposed, however - for

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 715 example, a simple lack of teamwork between artisans at the site, or a difference in aesthetic taste between ancient and contemporary viewers. In 'The god Brahma surrounded by Maharsi' by F.D.K. Bosch {Oudheid- kundig Verslag [OV, Archaeological Report] 1922), the images of rsi carved on the outside wall of the Brahma temple come under study. The temple exterior bears 27 such groups in all. Is there any significance in this number? According to the Visnu Purana, every Dvapara era, Visnu, as an 'editor' or vyasa, divides the veda into four. This has happened 28 times, but the first time this occurred, the divisiori was made by Brahma. Thus the rsi on the exterior of the Brahma temple may symbolize the 28 Veda Vyasa, with Brahma as the first. This is an interesting but speculative theory. More research on various examples of possible numerical symbolism on Lara Jonggrang might provide additional support for this idea, but the lack of study of this subject is typical of the relative neglect which has been Lara Jonggrang's lot compared to (for instance) Borobudur. The article by B. de Haan, 'Candi A and Candi B' (OV 1927) is an important work. It shows that the term 'vahana temples' sometimes applied to the two shrines in front of the Brahma and Visnu temples is a misnomer. Despite the fact that this has been known for a very long time, many visitors to Lara Jonggrang still receive this incorrect explanation. There is no evidence that statues of Garuda (Visnu's vahana) or Hamsa (Brahma's vahana) ever stood in Candis A and B, whether at Lara Jonggrang or any other Sivaite complex in Central Java. The prolific archaeologist W.F. Stutterheim receives the honour of a translation of his article on 'The arrangement of the Rama reliëfs of Candi Loro Jonggrang and the course of the sun' (originally published in the BK1 in 1928). Stutterheim too concludes that the Ramayana shown on Lara Jonggrang does not follow the text ascribed to Valmiki. He attempts to show that the distribution of reliëfs is governed by several factors outside the text itself. Rama's rise, on the east, his decline on the west, and second rise, back on the east, coincide with sun's course. (Stutterheim does not deal with the Ramayana reliëfs on the Brahma temple, which was unrestored at the time this article was written.) Stutterheim tries to show that there are 60 scènes on the 24 Rama reliëfs, but is not himself entirely convinced of this. The number 60 would correspond to another astronomical/calendrical unit. He also suggests, among other things, lunar/solar opposition and parallels to a wayang performance. V.R. van Romondt's 'The reconstruction of the Siva temple at Prambanan' (Djawa 20,1940) provides a nice historie account of the project up to that time. This is followed by the best article by far in the collection: A.J. Bernet Kempers' 'Prambanan 1954' (BKI, 1955). This provides a very good chrono- logy of colonial-period antiquarian activities at Lara Jonggrang. Bernet Kern-

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pers supplies invaluable anecdotes of the disruptions which occurred during the 1940s, for example the havoc caused by the Indonesian Revolution, when most maps in the Prambanan office of the Archaeological Service were lost, and the violent battles around Prambanan during the Second Police Action of 1948, when the office as well as the Siva temple itself were hit by artillery fire, and visited by plunderers. He provides a detailed description of Lara Jonggrang in the style of N.J. Krom, which Krom himself could not do because the shrine had not been restored in his time.

More such translations are needed if Indonesian archaeology is to make quicker progress. Old publications contain much invaluable information which, if ignored, lead to incorrect assumptions, wasted effort due to repeti- tion, and plain misunderstanding, which in turn can lead (and sometimes has led) to poor restorations. I shall be happy to have this set of translations, especially the article by Bernet Kempers, available for students. More of the works of Bernet Kempers, in particular his Herstel in eigen waarde, should also be translated. He was the most important modern author who wrote prolific- ally in Dutch. Modern Indonesian archaeological students, although required to study Dutch, are increasingly unable to make use of the colonial-period materials. An English (or Indonesian) translation would be of great use to future archaeologists working there.

The translations follow an extended introduction. Some of the works seem to have been selected for inclusion not primarily on the basis of their usefulness in conveying a rounded view of the Lara Jonggrang complex, but because they tend to support certain theories of the introduction's author. Certain articles not found here could have helped to convey a more complete and accurate idea of the complex's history and meaning. The discussion of the derivation of the name 'Prambanan' (p. 11), for instance, does not mention J.G. de Casparis' explanation (Prasasti Indonesia I; Inscripties uit de Qailendra- Tijd, Bandung: Nix, 1950:165), which shows that the name most probably was derived from Pangramwan, the name of a village in the vicinity of the temple which is frequently mentioned in inscriptions in connection with religious authorities. The tendency to neglect De Casparis' work is further exemplified in the discussion of the location of Medang (which is consistently mis-spelled 'Mendang'). The author lacks some information regarding the recent phase of the restoration of Lara Jonggrang. For instance, he 'was often amazed by the presence at the temple of labourers chiseling stone, something I found difficult to reconcile with the demands of an authentic reconstruction' (p. 18). In footnote 6 he adds that 'the OD would have attached a small lead seal to the stone, which I was not able to detect on the stone in question'. The practice of

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adding new stone to replace lost pieces of Javanese temples goes back to Van Erp's restoration of Borobudur. The round stupas on the upper terraces of Borobudur were badly damaged by looters, so Van Erp, in order to reconstruct them, had to replace more than 50 percent of the original stone blocks. True, the practice of chiselling new stone (or brick, in the case of some temples) was then, and still remains, controversial. Many scholars would prefer that little if any new stone be inserted into the old structures. How- ever, the strong pressure from tourism developers to recreate something more 'marketable' with which to attract visitors to temple sites has resulted in a restoration mania all over Indonesia. Whether this actually increases the attraction of the sites is a question which has never been seriously examined. The reason for discontinuing the use of lead seals on new stones from original blocks is that most of the seals were long ago pried out by enterpris- ing young boys to use for fishing weights. Indonesian rèstorers have invent- ed a new substitute, made from plastic, which has no attraction for those in need of materials to re-use for contemporary purposes.

The author advances several theories about Lara Jonggrang which are at variance with the consensus obtaining among scholars. Two of the principal new ideas propounded here concern the dating of the complex and the identity of its builders. Most scholars commonly follow the conclusions of J.G. de Casparis, derived from epigraphy, and J. Dumarc.ay, formulated on the basis of architectural style, that Lara Jonggrang was erected between AD 832 and 856 by a Sivaite noble, Rakai Pikatan, who ruled Central Java during this approximate period in partnership with a Buddhist consort. Dr. Jordaan prefers a founding date in the late eighth century, when the ruling central Javanese elite was strongly devoted to Mahayana Buddhism. The conclusions of De Casparis and Dumargay, while not indisputable, have much circumstantial evidence to recommend them. Dumargay's discussions regarding dating on the basis of architectural techniques are not recounted nor directly refuted here. Dumarc,ay is described (p. 29, footnote 11) as misunderstanding Stutterheim's theory that differences between Indonesian and Indian classical versions of Indian materials (for instance, the Ramayana) were due to the influence of Indian folk traditions on Indonesia, and is quoted as claiming that 'the representation of the Rama story on the Prambanan temples "is not meant to illustrate the Indian text but a Javanese adaptation.'" In fact Dumarc,ay probably developed this theory on his own. Evidence that 'folk versions' of Indian epics were known in Java is exiguous. Dumargay's emphasis on Javanese rather than Indian inspiration is more consonant with known data. The ideas of De Casparis on Javanese elements in Indonesian Buddhism parallel those of Dumarcay, which are based on a different data set.

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Dr. Jordaan's justification for preferring an earlier dating to that of Dumargay and De Casparis is that '[s]ubsequent research [...] has shown that neither the rival theory nor the arguments about style cut much ice, and that both had best be abandoned (Jordaan 1993)' (p. 25). The 1993 source cited is in the I1AS Newsletter. Until further explication of his reasons for disregard- ing De Casparis' and Dumarc.ay's interpretations of the data is available, most scholars will probably remain inclined to accept the later dating for the Lara Jonggrang complex.

Another major theme expounded in this work is that the construction of Lara Jonggrang was significantly aided, if not initiated, by Buddhist Sailendras. Two main lines of argument are adduced to support this theory. One concerns artistic motifs; the second is historically based. In relation to the first argument, the author states that at Lara Jonggrang 'many motifs and diverse figures were so lacking in Saiva spirit' (p. 33). Most art historians feel that the Lara Jonggrang aesthetic is not significantly different from other central Javanese Hindu shrines, although the scale is much larger. For this suggestion to be true, one would have to argue that all other Central Javanese Hindu sites were also Sailendra-assisted or -influenced, a most unlikely proposition. The author of this introduction and the present reviewer have crossed swords over this matter before. To give credit where credit is due, Dr. Jordaan chivalrously cites my review of his previous book, which questions some of his views, in his Introduction ('Imagine Buddha in Prambanan; Reconsider- ing the Buddhist background of the Loro Jonggrang temple complex', Journal ofSoutheast Asian Studies 25 (1994):442-4). Nevertheless, I have not convinced him of the rightness of my views, nor has he convinced me of the superiori- ty of his. One of our fundamental points of disagreement concerns the relationship between Buddhist and Hindu art in Central Java. It is undeniable that there is much similarity between the art of the Hindu complexes and that of their Buddhist rivals. The significance of and reasons for this paral- lelism, however, are major bones of contention between Dr. Jordaan and myself. One of Dr. Jordaan's major arguments in this introduction, as in his previous book, is that the decoration of the Buddhist sanctuaries of Central Java bears so many resemblances to that of Lara Jonggrang that one must con- clude that the Buddhists played a major role in Lara Jonggrang's design. In addition to the countervailing points made in my review of that volume, one can cite the recent publication by Daigoro Chihara, Hindu-Buddhist Architecture in Southeast Asia (Leiden: Brill, 1996). According to Dr. Chihara, although in India, Hindu and Buddhist art 'initially evolved with opposing tendencies',

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[t]he production of large numbers of divine images in Hinduism was influenced by changes in Buddhism as it evolved from Early Buddhism into Tantrism, while Hindu art can also be said to have exerted manifold influences on the making of images in Buddhism. Furthermore, there are both sculptural elements that clearly identify a temple as being either Hindu or Buddhist and also any other forms of decorative sculpture, and in the latter case there is a complete freedom of intellectual exchange between the two religions.

Motifs shared by the two religions are very numerous, including

kala, makara, kinnara, gandharva, garuda, hamsa, naga, apsara, gana, singha, as well as variegated composite designs combining these with animal, foliate and geometri- cal patterns [...] and it is difficult to discern here any reflection of the doctrinal differences between these two religions (p. 45).

In another recent article (Roy E. Jordaan and Robert Wessing, 'Human sacrifice at Prambanan', BKI152 (1996):45-73), Dr. Jordaan and his co-author are inclined to question the validity of some current designations [such] as 'Hinduism' and 'Buddhism' and to wonder whether these terms do full justice to the ideas of the Javanese of the times [...] Both early Hinduism and Buddhism were flexible enough to accommodate and utilize each other's icons.

This formulation is more acceptable than the argument for Buddhist involvement in the construction of Lara Jonggrang. Dr. Jordaan cites ED.K. Bosch to support the assertion that Lara Jonggrang has an 'underlying Buddhist conception'. What the signs of this may be, however, is left unsaid. Is he referring to the mandala-like layout of Lara Jonggrang? Such plans, while identified in Java with Buddhist complexes (Sewu, Plaosan), are not found in Indian Buddhist architecture. The architectural mandala is probably Javanese, rather than Buddhist or Hindu. Dr. Jordaan's statement (p. 92) that 'the overall architectural design of Pram- banan, possibly comprising both Sewu and Loro Jonggrang, was conceived in Indian monasteries', is difficult to accept. He gives much more credence to the possible role of Indians in Indonesian architecture than most contemporary scholars are prepared to allow. This does not prohibit one from agreeing with Dr. Jordaan's statement that 'one would do well to pay more attention to reliëfs that betray precisely non- Javanese influences' (p. 103). This is a line of inquiry which should be followed. Obviously, the nature of the benefits to be derived from such a study would be very different, depending on the original assumptions which one holds; nevertheless such a question holds much merit, and one hopes that Dr. Jordaan will take it up.

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The names Sailendra and Sanjaya play key roles in early Indonesian history, but the precise nature of the kinship units denoted by these terms remains indistinct. They were designated in the inscriptions as wangsa, which can be generally glossed as 'family', but there are of course many different sorts of family structures in the world, and different ways of deciding who belongs to which family. The Javanese family has never been easy to define, since the Javanese lack family names, and do not restrict descent rules to either the paternal or maternal line. Dr. Jordaan, like many other scholars including Prof. De Casparis, has concluded that the Sailendra and Sanjaya were two separate families which espoused two different religions, Buddhism and Hinduism. He further states (p. 30) that the Sailendras were 'expelled' from Java in the early ninth century. Dr. Jordaan notes that. the Hindu Sanjaya group is known to have contributed to several Buddhist religious sanctuaries. He reasons (for instance on p.41) that since Rakai Pikatan, a Hindu of the Sanjaya line, contributed to the expansion of Candi Plaosan, the Sailendra may have helped the Hindus to build Lara Jonggrang. This could only have been the case if Lara Jonggrang had been built before the Sailendra exodus. Dr. Jordaan's main evidence for the conclusion that the Sailendras contributed to Lara Jonggrang is that Lara Jonggrang's construction began according to his calculation during the Sailendra period (p. 43). This argument is both circular and in conflict with the dating of the site advocated by most other scholars. In fact only one person, known as Balaputra, can be identified as a likely Sailendra exile. Although information is vague, one plausible interpretation of several lines of evidence is that Balaputra was a leader of a dissident Sailendra faction who led an unsuccesful revolt in Central Java. He later turns up as the ruler of Srivijaya in Sumatra. This is not proof that a large group left Java, however. A Buddhist queen identified by numerous inscriptions as the daughter of a Sailendra king continued to exercise influence in Central Java, and to sponsor Buddhist religious construction, most notably at Candi Plaosan. Pikatan, not Daksa, is credited by most scholars as the probable founder of Lara Jonggrang. He seems to have been more concerned with unifying various groups in his kingdom, especially the Buddhists, and reconciling their differences, unlike the Buddhist Sailendras, who were more partisan where religion is concerned. Images of Manjusri Yamantaka, although not numerous, are known from Central Java. This figure portrays the bodhisatt- va Manjusri in a ferocious guise which he assumed to kill the Hindu god Siva, whom he subsequently restored to life. This was done in order to con- vert Siva to Buddhism. There is no evidence of a corresponding image of a Hindu slaying a Buddhist deity. Epigraphical evidence also provides several cases in which Hindus contributed to Buddhist monuments (Plaosan,

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Kalasan, Daksa's Gatak inscription), but there is not a single inscription giv- ing evidence of Buddhist sponsorship of a Hindu temple. Finally, one may ask why, if Lara Jonggrang was built during Sailendra times, there are no other Hindu temples in southern Central Java dating from this period? The era from AD 780 to 832 is marked by a seemingly complete absence of Hindu construction. It would seem likely that if Lara Jonggrang, the largest Hindu complex of all, were built during this time, then smaller temples of that faith should also be numerous. Another problem which such a dating would pose is logistical: if Borobudur was also built during this period, as all authorities now believe, then how could enough workers and other resources have been found to create another vast complex simultaneously? Another important aspect of Dr. Jordaan's study of Lara Jonggrang is his consideration of its imagery. He first considers and discards the theory that Javanese temples were royal mausolea. In place of this idea, he advances the idea that the temples were replicas of Mt. Meru. This inference is in tune with much other contemporary scholarship on Javanese temples. He then advances a new and original concept: that the main object of the whole Lara Jonggrang complex was to portray the churning of amrta, using Mt. Mandara as the churning stick. An interesting subsidiary point, which this reviewer is inclined to accept, is Dr. Jordaan's argument that the monstrous faces over Javanese temple doors and niches for statuary may be found referred to in the Old Javanese Ramayana under the name suwuk. He quotes the following passage in support (p. 49): These suwuk were beautifully carved out of gems and candrakanta stones. Their eyes were round, staring and protruding.He (the suwuk) was like Rahu, as it were, who also tried to steal the amrta. But the Visa-Kalakuta (Siva's poison) caused the door suwuk to flee. For he was afraid of the god Sankara, the remover of Sin, who was always present in the temple.

Possibly we should give preference to the term suwuk to the word currently in use, kala, to designate these motifs. It is also possible, however, that the term actually refers to the dvarapala images of door guardians holding clubs, rather than to the monster heads on the walls. Dr. Jordaan's main point here is that he, like Poerbatjaraka before him, believes that the Old Javanese Ramayana was describing a temple like Pram- banan. He believes that we should therefore reinterpret much of Lara Jong- grang's design as part of a great effort to portray the churning of amrta. For him, this suggests that 'the central area [that is, the uppermost terrace of the complex upon which stand the Siva, Brahma, and Visnu shrines, among

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other structures] might have been designed and used as an artificial tank or pool'. He is 'surprised' that the uppermost terrace had only two drainage spouts, and implies that they would have been insufficient to drain away rainwater. The degree to which the overall design of Lara Jonggrang was subordinated to a concept emphasizing the churning of amrta is debatable. At Angkor, where this theme was undeniably central to the plans of the designers, the concept is made unambiguous by such devices as the wide moats and balustrades with sculptures depicting the gods and asuras holding the serpent which was coiled around Mt. Mandara during the churning. At Lara Jonggrang such associated motifs are absent. In East Java, where amrta played a significant role in religious activity, the benefits of amrta are emphasized rather than its original creation. For the Javanese, amrta (or holy water) was constantly available, and constantly created in ceremonies designed for that purpose. The concrete symbolism of this activity focused on the con- tainers for the water, the beakers and kundika, rather than on the abstract idea of the original churning of the ocean of milk in the primordial past. If a pool were constructed at the top of Lara Jonggrang, then no spouts at all would have been required. The logistical problems of getting water to the top of the complex, and the technical problem of keeping it from seeping away through the soil, are not easily dispelled. The idea of Lara Jonggrang as, if not a mandala in the strict sense of the word, a complex with a design fundamentally influenced by concepts associated with mandala patterns, Dr. Jordaan dismisses along with the idea of the Hindu Javanese temple as a royal mausoleum. This does not however result in any satisfactory explanation of the peripih or foundation deposit boxes found in the ruins. Stutterheim had designated the contents of these boxes as 'symbols of those divine principles which correspond with the different elements of the human body', meant to give the deified ruler a 'temporary body' (quoted on p. 47). Even if we no longer take seriously the idea of the temple as a mausoleum, the existence of these deposits must still be accounted for in order to determine the overall symbolism of Lara Jonggrang. The recent work by A. Snodgrass on the Gharbadhatu and Vajradatu mandalas (The matrix and diamond world mandalas in Shingon Buddhism, New Delhi: Sata- Pitaka Series, Indo-Asian Literatures 354, 1988) is basic to any endeavour to understand the function of these foundation deposits. Further students of this subject should acquaint themselves with his work before advancing new arguments on the significance of the central Javanese mandala-like complexes.

Although it does not play an important part in the work under review, the article by Roy E. Jordaan and Robert Wessing on 'Human sacrifice at

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Prambanan' represents another aspect of the author's perspective on Lara Jonggrang and merits brief consideration here. During the colonial period, a human skeleton was found beneath the ruins of the central complex of Lara Jonggrang, in a context which suggests that it was that of an ancient rather than a modern individual. The article suggests that the skeleton was that of a person intentionally sacrificed during the temple's construction. If verified, this finding would throw significant new light on ancient Javanese religion. The authors advanced several other possible examples of human sacrifice in ancient Indonesia in support of their thesis that this is in fact what happened at Lara Jonggrang. These include four other sites where human skel- etons have been found in association with Javanese ruins. In the other cases, the data available for reconstructing the contexts of these finds is less detailed than that for Lara Jonggrang. It is possible that these constitute Islamic-period burials, especially in the instance of Candi Sojiwan. Examples of such re-use of pre-Islamic sites for Muslim burial grounds are quite common in Java and are well-documented at Candi Tikus, Bajang Ratu, Wringin Lawang and Candi Ratna. The authors also cite, as 'the only other example known to us of human sacrifice in Buddhism as practised in Indonesia' (pp. 60-1), Heine-Geldern's study of the worship of the deity Heruka. The quote from Heine-Geldern supplied, however, does not give any concrete evidence that human sacrifice was ever conducted in conjunction with this god in Indonesia. Furthermore, Dr. Jordaan and Dr. Wessing want to challenge the accepted thirteenth-century dating for the site where the Heruka image was found, at Padang Lawas, North Sumatra (p. 61, footnote 13), claiming that only circumstantial evidence and circular reasoning were used to derive this date. In fact the dates for structures at Padang Lawas are mainly inferred from from epigraphy, Chinese ceramics and dated statuary. Another line of argument pursued in support of the theory of human sacrifice at Lara Jonggrang is the Javanese culik ('abduction') rumor syndrome as discussed by R.H. Barnes ('Construction sacrifice, kidnapping and headhunting rumors on Flores and elsewhere in Indonesia', Oceania 64 (1993):146- 58). Barnes seems interested in the reasons for the rumours; he does not seem to claim any basis in reality for them. It would be quite misleading to cite them as evidence for human sacrifice. J. G. de Casparis is criticized (p. 67) for not mentioning IJzerman's discovery of the bones of dog, ant-eater and birds at Prambanan when discussing the possibility that meat might have been offered to raksasa as part of temple founding ceremony. But are these meats of the type which are likely to appease the hunger of spirits? Again, we just do not know. Any conclusions on this subject would be purely subjective. The authors speculate (p. 68) that the human sacrifices were meant to animate the temple. But the inscriptions which desribe temple founding rituals, as well as the mandala ceremonies conducted today, are not concerned

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 724 Book Reviews with animating the temple, but rather with expelling evil from the premises. The animation of the shrine is performed by the descent of the spirit of the deity into the main icon in the central cella. Thus this explanation finds no support from established practice.

In conclusion, one can praise this book for two accomplishments: its excellent translations of basic works on the archaeology of Lara Jonggrang, a shrine which deserves much more attention than it has yet received, and its delin- eation of several lines of inquiry which might be profitably pursued. Although this reviewer regrets that he cannot agree with many of the sup- positions proposed here to account for various aspects of the sitè's structure and significance, nevertheless this work is evidence of much original thought and represents a constructive contribution to the subject of early Javanese culture.

Ann Kumar and John H. McGlynn (eds), Illuminations; The writing traditions of Indonesia; Featuring manuscripts from the National Library of Indonesia. Jakarta: The Lontar Foundation, New York: Weather- hill, 1996. ISBN. 0.8348.0349.6. Price: USD 125.00.

MARIJE PLOMP

After being denied any visual representation for many years, Indonesian manuscripts have been the subject of a series of publications appearing during the last decade. In 1991 a voluminous fascimile edition of a Terengganu manuscript containing the Tuhfat al-Nafis was published in Malaysia, while 1993 saw the birth of a new series of fascimile editions of Indonesian manuscripts, Manuscripta Indonesica, published by the Indonesian Linguistics Development Project in co-operation with the Library of the Universtity of Leiden. Also in 1991, Annabel Teh Gallop and Bernard Arps published Golden letters; Writing traditions of Indonesia, the first work covering several Indone- sian writing traditions in one volume, complemented with beautiful photographs of Indonesian manuscripts. Another work displaying Malay manuscripts, also by the hand of Annabel Teh Gallop, appeared in 1994. This is entitled The legacy of the Malay letter, and deals with the Malay tradition of letter writing. This ongoing interest in Indonesian manuscripts has culminated in the work under review. Illuminations is an illuminating work indeed, throw- ing light on already well-known manuscript traditions and bringing into the spotlight traditions that have received little attention in the past, such as the Acehnëse, South Sumatran, Chinese and Arabic manuscript traditions.

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Lavishly larded with high-quality colour photographs of manuscripts, this book is first of all a visual delight. Beyond its visual pleasures it is also a storehouse of knowledge, as the diverse traditions are dealt with, albeit in different gradations of depth, by outstanding specialists. The chapter on the Arabic manuscript traditions by A.H. Johns, for instance, attests to the wide knowledge of the writer concerning this tradition in Indonesia. Particularly interesting is the way in which he draws attention to the role played by the Islamic educational system in the productions of manuscripts. In Chapter 10, 'A legacy of two homelands: Chinese manuscript literature' by Ann Kumar and lan Proudfoot, another relatively less well-known tradition is discussed, that of the Chinese in Indonesia. Being of dual descent, the Chinese wrote in Chinese as well as Javanese, Malay and even Makasarese. As many Chinese took a Javanese or a Muslim name when they converted to Islam, the exact contribution made by Chinese writers to (for instance) the Malay or Javanese literary traditions remains unknown. The treatmént of different manuscript traditions within one volume offers the reader an opportunity to compare the various literary traditions. Roger Tol, in Chapter 11 on South Sulawesi, states that it was customary to insert precise geographical information in the historical toloq. These geographical elements are hardly ever absent in the passages where a protagonist moves from one place to another, and contrast with the Javanese or Malay practice of so-called 'historical' writing, which is known for its inaccuracy as far as historical and geographical details are concerned.

As it is impossible to pay attention to every chapter of this voluminous work, I will turn to the last chapter, by Alan Feinstein on the preservation of Indonesian manuscripts, which addresses the aim of the complete work. Feinstein makes a plea for trying to answer the question of why Indonesian manuscripts should be preserved. He proposes that they need to be brought out of their present élitist, scholarly, and mostly Western arena and into the immediate field of concern of Indonesians themselves, for instance by making concerted efforts to disseminate the texts in Indonesia and give its citizens the opportunity to read, analyse and ponder upon their own heritage. The acquisition and preservation of manuscripts is a costly affair, as is the publishing of editions of texts contained in the manuscripts. At the beginning of Illuminations, the hope is expressed that the book will stimulate the emergence of a new generation of scholars and a larger, more appreciative audience for 'the heretofore hidden but wondrous worlds that can be found in Indonesian manuscripts'. Although lack of funds is a major obstacle to the preservation of manuscripts and the dissemination of their contents, it is not the only one. Long-term planning, collaboration and good management are also indispensable for the preservation of this fragile heritage.

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One of the most striking features of this book on writing traditions is the attention that it draws in the last chapter to the precarious state of the oral traditions in the archipelago. If thorough measures are to be taken to preserve and to study the written traditions, even greater efforts deserve to be made to record and study the oral stories. Recording oral texts would make it possible to incorporate them into the field of literary studies, which has long been oriented solely towards the written. Apart from some minor flaws, such as printing errors in the first few chapters and the omission of the bibliography of Chapter 14, the contributors and editors have succeeded in presenting a broad view of the different writing traditions in Indonesia. Whether this work will indeed stimulate scholars and laymen alike to preserve the texts contained in the manuscripts remains to be seen, but at least the publication of Illuminations makes known what it is that deserves to be preserved.

Eveline Ferretti (ed.), Cutting across the lands; An annotated bibliography on natural resource management and community development in Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, 1997, 329 pp. [Southeast Asia Program Series 16.] ISBN 0.87727.133.X.

SUSAN DE ROODE

After reading the preface of Cutting across the lands and after critically scan- ning the pages of the separate sections into which the bibliography is divided, I feit rather positive. This bibliography contains as many as 1,167 books, articles, reports and papers from a wide range of disciplines and sources - quite a large number on such a specialized topic as natural resource management and community development. With the notes which Ferretti provides on most of the cited works, this bibliography adds up to a reference work for anyone interested in the complex problem of forest land degradation or closely related subjects. Furthermore, Ferretti has struck a good bal- ance between numbers of citations on natural resource management and on the other main topic, community development, so that the (long forgotten) perspective of different local communities on natural resource management gets its due and proper attention.

A few critical remarks, however, are also in order. One thing that immediately strikes an interested reader is the fact that the title of this bibliography is somewhat misleading. While one expects to find information on natural

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 727 resource management and community development throughout Indonesia, the Philippines and Malaysia, the geographic scope of the study is much more restricted. The editor has focused on Borneo and the Southern Philip- pines (Palawan, Mindanao and Cebu). In the subject index, for example, only two references each are found for the geographic keywords Java, Irian Jaya, Sulawesi and Mindoro. Although in the preface Ferretti immediately tries to explain this restriction (and illustrates it with a map), it does not become clear why the title of the book does not correspond with the actual scope of the bibliography. In the preface Ferretti does not say anything about the linguistic scope of the bibliography. Most of the citations are in English, although the Indonesia section includes about 50 titles in the Indonesian language, and some German and a few French citations are also given. In the Malaysian section I have found four titles I could not read. I presume they are written in Malay, but only one title explicitly confirms this. Ferretti rather inconsistently mentions, in brackets, in which language the citations are published. Every title of a 'foreign' citation, however, is translated in English.

Nor is the preface very clear about the chronological scope of the bibliography. Ferretti explicitly mentions that her book does not have a historical character, and that materials dealing with colonial and pre-colonial history will be included only if they are key works that can direct the reader to a wider range of sources. Leafing through the pages, the emphasis in this bibliography is clearly on works from the 80s and 90s, while there is also a considerable number of citations from the 70s. Possibly this stress on recent works stems from the fact that the bibliography appears to be an update of an earlier version developed by an interdisciplinary group of researchers based at research institutes and universities in the United States and South- east Asia. This group has cooperated since 1991 on the so-called SINULOG (Southeast Asian Network on Upland and Logged-over Areas) research program. However, Ferretti does not explicitly mention the title of this bibliography, nor is it possible to find out who makes up this group of researchers.

Ferretti's summary of the structure of the bibliography and her motivation for choosing it is very clear, and provides the reader with a good manual for using the book. Her choice for a division into only seven sections keeps the bibliography manageable, and citations of interest can quickly be found. The first three sections are organized by country, and for each country one can find about 300 citations, which I think is quite a large number. The fourth section also has a geographical character and is called 'Asia, Southeast Asia, and Global'. As its title suggests, most works included here have a broader scope than the citations in the previous sections. A few citations, however,

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 728 Book Reviews do not seem to fit in. Two titles on Vietnam and Thailand and three on Laos, for example, can be found here. After reading the notes on these publications, the reasons for including them still do not become clear. They do not appear to be indispensable primary or theoretical works, and their titles (for instance:. 'Swiddeners in transition: Lua' farmers in northern Thailand') even suggest that they contain detailed studies referring to a specific geographic area. Luckily only a few of these 'misplaced' citations can be found, because if too many were included they would have blurred the geographical scope of the bibliography. Sections five and six comprise interesting citations of maps and journals respectively, which provide good clues for further searching. Section seven contains the subject index, which corresponds with keywords at the bottom of each reference. These keywords indicate the geographic focus and summarize the main topics covered in each work. Ferretti has elaborated on the keyword system very extensively, which makes it the main instrument for searching for citations in this bibliography. Topics like 'agriculture' or 'indigenous and local communities' are divided into a number of subtopics. These subtopics, however, are not mentioned separately in the subject index. If one is interested in shifting cultivation, for example, one will not find this term as a separate entry in the subject index, but only as sub-entry under 'agriculture'. If subtopics had been listed separately, with reference to the broader lemmas under which they fall, the subject index would have been easier to work with. This remark also applies to the geographic keywords. In the subject index a geographic keyword 'Kalimantan' can be found alongside keywords for the provinces of East, South, West and Central Kalimantan. One expects that many of the citations for West Kalimantan will correspond with citations for Kalimantan, but this is not the case. Again, references to the individual provinces behind the keyword 'Kalimantan' would make the index more complete.

Ferretti appears to have had problems with the geographical classification of the island of Borneo, which consists of the East Malaysian states of Sarawak and Sabah, the Indonesian Kalimantan provinces, and the independent sul- tanate of Brunei. Because a considerable number of works included in the bibliography deal with the island as a whole, they can belong equally to the Indonesian section and the Malaysian section. Ferretti solves this dilemma by reproducing complete identical citations, including annotations and keywords, in both sections - effective, but repetitive, and disconcerting insofar as this strategy is nowhere explicitly announced or explained.

On the one hand, Cutting across the lands shows that a geographical division can be a good way of organizing such a complex research problem as natural

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 729 resource management and local development in a surveyable way. On the other hand, since most of my remarks have related to geographical questions, one questions the chosen set-up at the same time. Perhaps, for instance, it would have been better to find some way of including Borneo as a separate geographical section.

Monika Schlicher, Portugal in Ost-Timor; Eine kritische Untersuchung' zur portugiesischen Kolonialgeschichte in Ost-Timor, 1850 bis 1912. Hamburg: Abera-Verlag, 1996, 347 pp. ISBN 3.931567.08.7. Price: DM 79.90 (paperback).

M.J.C. SCHOUTEN

This handsome book discusses the expansion and consolidation of the Portuguese colonial authority in Timor, interwoven with developments in Portugal. In the 1850s, Portugal and the Netherlands officially agreed on the boundaries between the territories of Timor under their respective influences. In the following decades, the establishment or maintenance of supremacy, by force of arms, dominated the activities of the Portuguese in eastern Timor, while, on the economie front, the cultivation of coffee was greatly expanded. Measures such as the increase of the poll tax and reforms in land tenure were probably the basic motives for the massive uprising of Timorese in 1911-1912. With the suppression of this revolt, the eastern part of Timor and the enclave Oikusi effectively submitted to the authority of Portugal. In Schlicher's study, Timor's (and Portugal's) history is examined over a longer period than the one indicated in the title. Thus, the Portuguese con- tacts with the Timor zone since the early sixteenth century, and events in the late colonial period and during the occupation by Indonesia are dealt with. Unfortunately, the switches to discussions of more recent times are often too abrupt. The diffuse chronological structure, and the sometimes confusing arrangement of chapters and sub-chapters, easily give rise to anachronisms or apparent contradictions. The reader is not helped much here by the end- notes, which do not include the years of publication of the sources; while her or his persistence is further put to the test by the bibliography, which is split into various parts, and by the lack of an index. A constant in Portuguese colonial policy was the ideology that Portugal - a poor country, and since the end of the seventeenth century in a dependency relationship with England - had to fulfill a civilizing mission in its colonies, which were pictured as an integral part of the nation. There were several theories, such as the Integralismo Lusitano, to support these views.

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More recent, and still popular, is the thesis of Lusotropicalism (which, however, is not as closely connected with the Integralismo Lusitano as the author suggests). Considering these ideologies, it is remarkable that in this study no attention is paid to missionary activities in East Timor, and that the schools appear on stage only in the epilogue. Any discussion of colonialism is incomplete without examining cultural influences. These are also relevant to the present situation in East Timor, of which the author, witness her introductory chapter, sought a better understanding through her historical research. Today, Roman Catholicism, and, to a certain degree, the Portuguese language, have a key role in providing an identity for the inhabitants of East Timor. To be sure, as the author also mentions, in 1974 only 30 percent of the population was Christian, and only 15 to 20 percent familiar with Portuguese. As she shows, in the practice (and also in the discourse) of most Portuguese officials, in Timor and other colonies, the bringing of civilization was identical with 'teaching to work' - under constraint, that is. The author rightly reminds us of the defective educational system in Portugal itself. Not surprisingly, the Portuguese had scant respect for the ideas and cus- toms of the colonized peoples, and carried out few ethnographic studies. This is, however, no excuse for the flaws in the present book with respect to its discussion of topics such as ethnic religion and traditional political organization. In broaching these, the author betrays a lack of anthropological background or familiarity with the Southeast Asian cultural context. Although she shows an acquaintance with some good anthropological literature on Timor (such as that by H.G. Schulte Nordholt and Elisabeth Traube), the sources she has plucked from are mainly accounts by officials and travellers, and recent works of a journalistic or political character. In her discussion of warfare-cum-headhunting, the extensive attention paid to Marvin Harris' controversial thesis about war as a form of ecological adaptation seems unjustified. In the epilogue the author comes back to this theme, providing dubious arguments for her statement that the recent ecological degradation of East Timor is partly the result of the cessation of internal warfare since 1912. Leaving the interpretations of the author for what they are, data presented throughout the study reveal the important role of headhunting in the subjugation of East Timor by the Portuguese. The chance to hunt heads raised levels of motivation among the indigenous auxiliary troops, whose Portuguese leaders, in this case, did show a pragmatic respect for tradition. The scale and seriousness of the massacres in this so-called paci- fication process have been depicted in detail by René Pélissier in his recent book Timor en guerre. Schlicher shows that internal developments in Portugal had significant effects on Timor, notwithstanding the huge distance and difficult commun-

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ication. The governor was usually an ally of the groups in power in Lisbon, which changed frequently until 1926. On the other hand that protoype of autocracy Celestino de Silva, was able to remain in office for the exceptional period of fourteen years because of personal bonds with nobody less than King Carlos I; his dismissal followed the regicide in 1908. Regrettably, too little information is given about two (interim) governors of Timor (Pimenta de Castro and Filomeno da Camara) who went on to play important roles in the political life of Lisbon.

The comprehensive and multi-faceted character of the book may help explain the occurrence of several minor errors and incongruities. Some mistakes, such as the use of the designation Joao IV for (the Portuguese king) Joao VI, are recurrent. It is also repeatedly stated that the English naturalist Alfred 'Russel Wallace spent some time in East Timor in 1857. In reality this was 1861, a not unimportant difference because in that year the much-cited governor Afonso de Castro was in office, and the visit coincided with a major revolt. Non-German names and words should have been checked better for correct orthography. Despite its weak points, I enjoyed reading this book. It is a vital and original complement to our knowledge about East Timor, and I would recommend a translation into English or Portuguese. Such a new version might provide the author with an opportunity to make things easier for the readers by reorganizing the text to some extent.

Leo Dubbeldam (ed.), Values and value education. The Hague: Centre for the Study of Education in Developing Countries (CESO), 1995, 183 pp. [CESO Paperback 25.] ISBN 90.6443.220.1. Price: NLG 25,00.

KAREL STEENBRINK

Education is not a goal in itself. For individual people (children and parents alike) it may be seen as an indispensable programme for acquiring a good position in society. For institutions like states or religions, it is an essential prerequisite for providing enculturation within a social system. For the editor of this anthology, it is mainly a problematic means of assuring 'development' without losing cultural identity. In order to reinforce a cultural identity, besides the common subjects of formal schooling, more attention should be given to value education. A problem here is that value education cannot easily be organized or regulated. It starts mostly with informal education, long before children go to school. Value education is not only a matter of the fam-

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 732 Book Reviews ily environment, but has also to do with government ideologies and with the ethical doctrines of religions. This is all complicated enough to produce an intricate study, but this book does not really tackle the general and abstract problems. Instead, it concentrates on a number of case-studies from a great variety of countries. For our readers the two contributions on Southeast Asia are probably the most interesting. Marinde Hurenkamp describes a children's theatre in Thailand (pp. 93-106), while Maaike Jongepier describes the Islamic boarding school or pesantren of Indonesia, taking the school of Cipasung near Tasikmalaya (West Java) as a case study (pp. 109-24). For centuries the pesantren were the main providers of formal education in Indo- nesia, but after the growth of Western-type formal schooling in the early twentieth century, pesantren instruction became a kind of 'alternative' education with much emphasis on the Islamic religion, but also promoting values such as the ability to lead a life devoid of luxury, the pursuit of equality, and a strong feeling of personal responsibility. The book also contains contributions dealing with Tanzania, Mexico, Guatemala and China. This is an interesting and meaningful presentation of several types of alternative education which deserve attention and appreciation. They are all taken from 'non-Western' or 'developing' countries. I therefore expected a discussion about the universality of human rights and basic values, as repeatedly put forward in defence of Malaysian and Indonesian restrictive politics against human rights watchers. In this book there is a rather idealistic emphasis on cultural differences. One of the greatest problems in many developing countries, for instance, is the practice of corruption. If pesantren education is so strong on equality and responsibility, why are many 'pious' Muslim Indonesians so easily seduced to corruption?

Michael Houseman and Carlo Severi, Naven or the other self; A relational approach to ritual action. Leiden: Brill, 1998, xvi + 325 pp. ISBN 90.04.11220.0. Price: NLG 180,50 / USD 106.00.

PAMELA J. STEWART

'Reading' ritual is a central aspect of what we as anthropologists do, whether we are attempting to understand 'traditional' practices, or introduced ones such as those of Christianity. As a contribution to this, Houseman and Severi apply the notion of what they call 'ritual condensation' as an analytical tooi to tease apart and reframe facets of ritual practice. The Iatmul (a people from the Sepik, Papua New Guinea) ritual naven is used as their example and their data core is Gregory Bateson's description of and interpretation of the naven

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 733 ritual (Naven; A survey of the problems suggested by a composite picture of the culture of a New Guinea tribe drawnfrom three points of view, Stanford, Cal.: Stan- ford University Press, 1958) as well as the work of other ethnographers such as Hauser-Schaüblin, Stanek, Weiss and Silverman. The theorizing of others (for example, Lévi-Strauss, Maurice Bloch, Dan Sperber, E.L. Schieffelin and others) on ritual practices is compared and contrasted to the authors' own.

As Roy Rappaport has told us in his posthumously published book Ritual and religion in the making ofhumanity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ritual is the 'social act basic to humanity' (p. 31). The assumption here is that humanity encompasses sociality and therefore the position of what can be termed the 'relational-individual' therein (A. Strathern and P.J. Ste- wart, forthcoming, Arrowtalk; Transaction, transition, and contradiction in New Guinea highlands history, Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press). Houseman and Severi are particularly interested in the question of how naven functions to establish and maintain kinship and gendered relationships between per- formative units. For example, '[a] distinction between ritualized gender imagery and (culturally constructed) gender identities outside the ritual context is one worth making. The former, we have argued, refers us to a condensation, in accordance with an overall formal dynamic, of nominally anti- thetical modes of relationship; the latter, we may suggest, refers us to these relationships themselves.' (p. 217.) The analysis by Houseman and Severi is a resource for examining the involvement of women in rituals in New Guinea. Recently, some writers have used the phase 'the death of masculinity' to frame their ethnographies in the changing arenas of Melanesian rituals (David Tuzin, The Cassowary's revenge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997; David Lipset, Mangrove man, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). But this categorization does not appear to take into consideration the ever shifting, nuanced and gender-charged aspects of the rituals being examined which no more represent 'the death of masculinity' than they do 'the death of femininity', espedal- ly since these hard and fast gender distinctions are conventionally blurred in the ritual context which in its sophistication merges 'culturally defined' distinctions into the cosmological symbolisms of the psyche (see P.J. Stewart and A. Strathern, 1999, 'Female spirit cults as a window on gender relations in the highlands of Papua New Guinea', The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5:345-60). Naven, like other ritual practices in New Guinea, functions in the making of gendered awareness, not in its unmaking. In naven we see the actors in the ritual 'speaking' to each other through performance in ways that they could not in day-to-day contexts. The heightened arena of ritual communication is released from one set of constraints while held in the grip of the ritual's highly coded restrictions.

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Houseman and Severi's re-examination of the naven ritual is an insightful and scholarly work which will prove useful to both students and researchers.

Pieter ter Keurs and Dirk Smidt (eds), The language ofthings; Studies in ethnocommunication; In honour of Professor Adrian A. Gerbrands. Leiden: Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde, 1990, 208 pp. [Medede- lingen van het Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde 25.] ISBN 90.71310. 39.6. Price: NLG 59,00 (paperback).

HAN F. VERMEULEN

This is an important contribution to the anthropology of art and aesthetics, as developed recently by Robert Layton, Sidney Mead, David Washburn and others. The volume is the second Festschrift for Gerbrands, an acknowledged expert on the anthropology of art and professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Leiden from 1966 to 1983.x After Gerbrands' retirement a three-day symposium was organized on the 'Language of Things', a subject which has interested Gerbrands since he accepted his professorship with an inaugural lecture entitled De taal der dingen in 1966. The book contains nine chapters and an introduction to Gerbrands' career. Five of the chapters have a regional orientation; five are of a general or historical nature. The editors each provided a chapter on regional studies, plus an editorial introduction. This is preceded by a foreword by Willem R. van Gulik, former director of the National Museum of Ethnology in Leiden, which acted as host of the symposium. Most of the authors, Gerbrands included, are or were connected to that institution and the book is an exercise in the study of material culture, or museum anthropology, applied to a particular theme: the meanings and functions that material objects have within their cultural context. The first chapter, by G.W. Locher, presents an overview of Gerbrands and his work. Before accepting his professorship Gerbrands was Curator and Deputy Director of the museum (1947-1966), devoting his attention to African and American collections, as well as to large exhibitions and ethnographic films. He came into contact with colleagues from France, Belgium and the USA, wrote his dissertation on Art as an element of culture (1956), and

1 The other Festschrift for Gerbrands is Ad Boeren, Fransje Brinkgreve and Sandy Roels (eds), Teken van leven; Studies in etnocommunicatie (Leiden: Institute of Cultural and Social Studies, 1985). Sandy Roels was also the organizer of the symposium mentioned above. The qüotation from Nelson Graburn at the end of the present review is taken from this earlier Festschrift (p. 57). Both books should ideally be studied alongside each other.

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access Book Reviews 735 started fieldwork (which included filming) among the Asmat of (then) Netherlands New Guinea. His work was in line with the tradition of W.H. Rassers and J.P.B, de Josselin de Jong, the founding fathers of Leiden struc- turalism, but was original in stressing the significance of the 'language of things' and of ethnographic films for documenting human behaviour and cultural communication. To summarize these fields, Gerbrands coined the term 'ethnocommunication' in 1977. As a professor he was influential in stimulating two topics especially: the study of objects and other non-verbal aspects of human communication, and the recording of these aspects by means of photography and of cinematography. His influence was not only feit in the Netherlands, but, due to visiting professorships, also in the USA (Southern Illinois) and in Indonesia (Jakarta, Den Pasar). • Then follow three chapters of a general nature. Locher ('Changing interpretation in the study of art') compares four cases in the study of art, signals changed interpretations in all of them and concludes, partly on the basis of Leonardo da Vinci's polysemantic work, that it is necessary to have 'a plural and open-minded approach to the study of art and culture and to that of the general history of mankind' (pp. 32, 34). F. Allan Hanson ('Deciphering the language of things; Aesthetics and the cultural process') makes a plea for an aesthetic approach to cultural communication. Gerbrands' chapter ('Made by man; Cultural anthropological reflections on the theme of ethnocommunication') is a f ulier version of his farewell lecture, expanding the study and concept of ethnocommunication, which he defined as 'the combining of individual persons into a social group by means of a culturally determined system of signs', or 'the study and analysis of non- verbal communication in non-Western sign systems' (p. 47).

These chapters are followed by five regional contributions. Dirk Smidt ana- lyzes sacred woodcarvings from Kominimung in the Middle Ramu region (Papua New Guinea), which consitute a 'wholly unrecorded, distinct art style', containing a 'large and varied repertory of motifs'. Smidt discusses the religious basis of the art system and concludes that the Kominimung have clan-specific motifs, particularly on their sacred woodcarvings (masks and figures). These motifs play an 'unequivocal role' in daily life, 'associating each carving with a particular clan' (p. 108). Whereas Smidt focuses on the system of visual communication and the teacher-apprentice relationship, Pieter ter Keurs looks at the relationship between trade and the development of Tamistyle art objects in the Siassi trade network (Papua New Guinea). His problem is how the spread of these objects to the Siassi Islands further north may be explained, and what influence this diffusion had on the form, function and meaning of the objects. This pertains particularly to Tami wooden bowls that are not used in daily practice, but form part of the brideprice

Downloaded from Brill.com10/05/2021 01:14:54PM via free access 736 Book Reviews throughout the entire area. Ter Keurs takes a constructivist view on Tami culture and concludes that the diffusion of bowl production to Siassi was probably due to missionary influence in the 1910s. The bowls are now traded for their economie value, as the carved motifs are not essential to the buyers ('the symbolic aspects are of secondary importance', pp. 121, 125). Two further chapters focus on Indonesia. Danielle Geirnaert discussses the kijora, 'an object for lost souls' in Sumba, on the basis of her doctoral dissertation (1992), while Hetty Nooy-Palm writes about the Toraja house in ritual. R. Torn Zuidema contributes a fascinating piece on the royal whip in Cuzco (Peru), while the volume is closed by an interesting chapter by G.D. van Wengen on 'presentation in anthropological museums at the crossroad of cultural anthropology and museology'.

The volume is well-edited and beautifully illustrated. Since the book is already out of print, a reprint should be considered. This work is a tribute to the man who was designated by Nelson Graburn as 'the world's most distin- guished student of the anthropology of art and material culture'.

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