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Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde Vol. 166, no. 2-3 (2012), pp. 337-375 URL: http://www.kitlv-journals.nl/index.php/btlv URN:NBN:NL:UI:10-1-101739 Copyright: content is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License ISSN: 0006-2294 Book reviews

� Andrea Acri, Helen Creese, and Arlo Griffiths (eds), From Lankā Eastwards: The Rāmāyan�a in the literature and visual arts of Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, xviii + 259 pp. [Verhandelingen 247.] ISBN 9789067183848. Price EUR 29.90 (paperback).

DICK VAN DER MEIJ Center for the Study of Religion and Culture Syarif Hidayatullah State Islamic University, Jakarta [email protected]

The 10 papers published in this book are a selection of the contributions to the workshop ‘The Old Javanese Rāmāyān�a: Text, history, culture’ held in Jakarta from 26 to 28 May 2009. The book is split into two parts, Part I: Old Javanese Kakawin and the Kakawin Rāmāyān�a, followed by Part II: The Rāmāyān�a at Can�d�i Prambanan and Can�d�i Panataran. After an introduction by Andrea Acri, the book starts with a piece by Stuart Robson entitled ‘Hymns of praise in Kakawins: The Rāmāyan�a and other examples’ and is not only about the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a but of a general nature. It follows Zoetmulder’s idea that composing and writing Old Javanese kakawin poems is a kind of yogi exercise. I have some reservations with this idea. There is a tendency to consider all kakawins in the same way but I wonder whether all kakawin poets in the past (or indeed today) can be called yogis, and if the composition of each kakawin was or is truly an act of religious fervour? When I met the modern kakawin author I Wayan Pamit (also mentioned in the article by Creese in this book), he did not look or act like a yogi and also did not make the impression of being a particularly religious individual. We should be careful not to make overall statements we cannot substantiate. The next article by the hand of Wesley Michel is entitled ‘Poetic conventions as opposed to conventional poetry? A place for kavisamaya-ādi in com- parative Kāvya/Kakawin studies’. It concerns poetic conventions used in kakawin composition (as in kāvya composition in India). It is rather technical but makes some illuminating observations – for instance, that the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a does not use the kavisamaya (poetic conventions) as used in India, but rather adds conventions all of its own. The third article by Thomas Hunter, ‘Figures of repetition (yamaka) in the Bhat�t�ikāvya, the Raghuvam�śa, the Śiwagr�a inscription and the Kakawin Rāmāyān�a’ is a well documented masterpiece. It deals with yamaka which, in

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the words of Gerow (1971:25) he quotes here, are figures ‘[...] in which a part of a verse, specified either as to length or position or both, is repeated within the confines of the same verse, usually in such a way that the meaning of the two readings is different.’ There are many different kinds of yamaka. These sometimes misunderstood and ill-appreciated poetical devices are, however, crucial for a balanced evaluation of the poetic qualities of a text. That they are also met with ‘strong displeasure’ may become clear from the quote Hunter presents on page 28. ‘These stanzas are utter doggerel; the Old Javanese is scarcely susceptible of translation into sensible English. This is because in each stanza lines a and b, c and d are the mirror-image of each other, a feat that could only be achieved at the cost of sense’ (Robson 1995:150-1). Happily, Hunter does not fall into a similar trap of his own making. The book continues with ‘More on birds, ascetics and kings in Central Java: Rāmāyān�a, 24.111-115 and 25.19-22’ by Andrea Acri, which is a con- tinuation of his previous article published in the BKI of 2010. It examines the way the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a portrays birds, ascetics, and kings and suggests allegorical readings. He thus looks at the text in a completely different and refreshing way and shows that the Kakawin Rāmāyan�a can be read on a novel level altogether. The spelling of the word kakavin rather than kakawin is intentional and will be dealt with below. As usual, Helen Creese is very detailed and extremely well informed in her contribution, ‘Rāmāyān�a traditions in Bali’. It aptly shows that the tradition of kakawin composition using Rāmāyan�a material has not stopped and is alive in Bali up to this day. She presents a number of Rāmāyan�a-inspired kakawin from Bali (the latest being the Kakawin Rāwan�a by I Wayan Pamit of 2002) and provides synopses and other information on each of them. She introduces the term Rāmāyan�a ‘corpus’ and I am glad that she put the word corpus between quotation marks. I may add however that the Rāmāyan�a in Bali is not at the far end of the chain of transmission (p. 93). The Rāmāyan�a version in macapat verse in modern Javanese from Lombok may be considered to be slightly farther removed to the east. The first part of the book ends with an article by Adrian Vickers, ‘The Old Javanese Kapiparwa and a Recent Balinese Painting’. It again shows that we should not forget to incorporate the many paintings and other visual expressions using Rāmāyan�a material into our explorations. As expected, Adrian’s superb knowledge of Balinese paintings and texts and their relations are a welcome addition to philological expertise. The second part of the book starts with an article by Arlo Griffiths, � ‘Imagine Lankapura at Prambanan’. Griffiths tries to make it plausible that � the original name of Prambanan was Lankapura. Despite his presentation of a wealth of detail and sources, I have to confess that I am not wholly convinced of his ideas if only because he makes no effort to explain why this name for

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 339 this temple complex would have been totally forgotten. Cecelia Levin continues the book with her article: ‘The grand final; The Uttarakān�d�a of the Loro Jonggrang temple complex’. In short, Levin tries to explain reliefs on the Brāhma temple of the Loro Jonggrang complex from a variety of sources, most pertinent among them the Uttarakān�d�a, and reiterates the importance of later texts like the Malay Hikayat Sri Rama in order to interpret temple reliefs. At the end of her paper she makes the very important remark that the ‘epics may have been transmitted to Southeast Asia by means of episodic outlines as well as full texts [...]’ (p. 167). Roy Jordaan’s article is entitled ‘The causeway episode of the Prambanan: Rāmāyan�a reexamined’. Interpreting reliefs is hazardous and I fear people are prone to see what they want to see. I agree with Jordaan that we have to be careful not to be selective and arbitrary (p. 186). For instance, the way I look at it, I do not see any of the fish in the relief presented here actually swallowing stones (Jordaan, p. 202). Apart from the difficulty of portraying such a thing, I only see them having the stones in their mouths. We should not forget that the artisans who made the reliefs probably had ideas of their own and did not follow texts one hundred per cent. I also feel that we might consider a situation where two or more texts concur and thus any one of them might have been the basis for the reliefs. Jordaan seems to be not very well informed about Malay texts in general. It’s rather unconvincing, for instance, to con- clude that the ‘narration of the causeway episode was not altogether clear to the redactors of the H[ikayat] S[ri] R[ama] as demonstrated by the exempting endnote that says ‘and Allah knows best (whether) this story ... (is true)’ (p. 202). Many texts in Malay end in the phrase ‘wallāhu ‘alam’ (‘And Allāh knows best’) because in the Muslim tradition Allāh is the source of all knowing. It may even be that this phrase was only put there to add a Muslim hue to the manuscript, much like many manuscripts containing non-Islamic stories in Lombok, which start with the Basmalah to circumvent Muslim criticism. The book concludes with Lydia Kieven’s article entitled ‘The symbolism of the Rāmāyan�a reliefs at the main temple of Can�d�i Panataran’. It presents the plausible thesis that the main character in these reliefs is the monkey Hanuman rather than Rāma and his wife Sītā. It is well written and nicely balances the attention devoted to the Loro Jonggrang temple. Of course, my quibbles above do not address the book’s strengths. It is pro- vocative and original, and shows that interpreting old textual and visual materials is a richly challenging endeavour that’s rewarding, if inherently fraught with uncertainty. I was, however, appalled to read Jordaan’s statement of ‘semi-literate artisans and sculptors’ using ‘a sort of relief scenario, offering an outline of the story in the form of drawings with notes specifying the exact contents and sequential arrangements of the Rāma reliefs’ (p. 201). I would have thought that by now we would have left such degrading sentiments behind.

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Spelling

My main critique is a practical one and concerns the spelling of Old Javanese which is inconsistent throughout the book. For no reasons provided, Acri and Griffiths deviate from the spelling Zoetmulder (1982) uses in his Old Javanese- English dictionary. Griffiths proposes a spelling that adheres ‘strictly to international norms for the transliteration of Indic script types’ (p. 133, note 1) without explaining what these norms are and he does not adhere to his own rules. Both Acri and Griffiths fail to provide reasons why they should deviate from Zoetmulder’s spelling. I see no reason why students of Indonesian lit- eratures and manuscripts need to turn to India for inspiration for transliteration systems of Indonesian scripts. Now, of all things, we see the word kakavin (Acri) where in Bali and Java the spelling has been kakawin for ages. There is no /v/ in Old Javanese, or in Balinese for that matter! In my view, these spelling alterations are ludicrous and rather than being an expression of sound scholarship, degrade the book. More importantly, I fear that these spelling changes herald a return to the deplorable situation where Indonesian cultural phenomena are not considered in their own rights but rather in those of a so- called ‘Sanskrit Cosmopolis’. It is clear that the last words on the Rāmāyan�a in Indonesia have not yet been said. It is to be hoped that these scholars continue their work but please, do not complicate matters unnecessarily. It is difficult enough.

References

Acri, Andrea 2010 ‘On birds, ascetics, and kings in Central Java: Rāmāyan�a Kakawin, 24.95-126 and 25’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 167:475-506. Gerow, Edwin 1971 A glossary of Indian figures of speech. The Hague: Mouton. [Columbia Uni- versity, Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 16.] Robson, Stuart 1995 Deśawarn�ana (Nāgarakr�tāgama) by Mpu Prapañca. Leiden: KITLV Press. [Verhandelingen 169.] Zoetmulder, P.J. 1982 Old Javanese-English dictionary. With the collaboration of S.O. Robson. The Hague: Nijhoff. Two vols. [KITLV.]

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Michael Arthur Aung-Thwin and Kenneth R. Hall (eds), New perspectives on the history and historiography of Southeast Asia: Continuing explorations. London: Routledge, 2011, xvi + 276 pp. ISBN 9780415600835. Price: GBP 85.00 (hardback).

DAVID HENLEY Leiden University [email protected]

This is a Festschrift in honour of influential Vietnam scholar John K. Whit- more, compiled by colleagues and former students on the occasion of his re- tirement from the University of Michigan in 2009. For the benefit of those readers who are less familiar with Whitmore’s work, the second chapter con- sists of a very useful short essay by Victor Lieberman on the significance of Whitmore’s contribution to Vietnamese and Southeast Asian Studies. Not surprisingly given Whitmore’s own expertise, six of the twelve chapters deal either mainly or entirely with Vietnam. Nevertheless, New perspectives on the history and historiography of Southeast Asia is, as its title promises, more than a book about Vietnam. Besides also containing chapters on Burma, Cambodia, and the southern frontiers of China, in relation to Vietnam itself the volume features a consistent emphasis on international and maritime aspects of the history of what has usually been regarded as a rather closed, agrarian, self- sufficient country by Southeast Asian standards. In this vein Sun Laichen and Li Tana, in two breathtakingly erudite essays, explore the impact on Vietnamese history respectively of Chinese firearms and firearm technology, which came into wide use in Vietnam well before the introduction of European guns, and of Chinese printed books, which flooded into Vietnam from the Yangzi delta area in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, fuelling an upsurge in Vietnamese literary and Confucian scholarship. Charles Wheeler, in a chapter entitled ‘Maritime subversions and socio-political formations in Vietnamese history’, describes the persistent role of itinerant Sino-Vietnamese traders and pirates ‒ the Minh Huong ‒ as political allies suc- cessively of the Nguyen lords of southern Vietnam, and of the Tay Son rebels who took over the whole country in the late eighteenth century. Co-editor Kenneth R. Hall, in ‘Sojourning communities, ports-of-trade, and commercial networking in Southeast Asia’s eastern regions, c.1000-1400’, sums up recent scholarship on China’s trade with Indonesia and the Philippines during the Song and Yuan eras, stressing the role of Champa (in what is now central Vietnam) and Brunei as nodal points in a trade network supplying China with spices and other luxury products from island Southeast Asia. A large part of the volume, in fact, represents a particular and rather intriguing geographical perspective on Southeast Asia, one that may be novel

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 342 Book reviews to many readers. In this perspective it is the South China Sea, rather than the Indonesian archipelago or the mighty peninsula with Thailand at its core, which occupies centre-stage, while Southeast Asia’s historical relations with China ‒ political and cultural as well as economic ‒ receive more attention than do its better-known interactions with South Asia, the Middle East, and Europe. It is perhaps something of a pity that this is not how the collection was con- ceived by its editors, who instead structure their introduction around a rather contrived debate between ‘senior’ and ‘junior’ scholars over the nature and attribution of ‘agency’ (a term always flanked here by embarrassed quotation marks) in Southeast Asian history. But then, the challenge of structuring and introducing a Festschrift is one that is seldom met to every reader’s satisfac- tion. Few readers, on the other hand, will fail to find something to interest them in this thoughtful and informative collection of essays.

Steven Farram, A short-lived enthusiasm: The Australian consulate in Portuguese Timor. Darwin: Charles Darwin University Press 2010, 89 pp. ISBN 9780980665055. Price: AUD 20.00 (paperback).

HANS HÄGERDAL Linnaeus University [email protected]

Portuguese Timor was seldom in the headlines before the cataclysmic events of 1975. The tiny relic of a once far-flung colonial realm seemed to live its own life, governed in a less than efficient way by a very small stratum of officials and being badly under-funded by Lisbon. However, the experiences before and during World War II gave the colony a certain strategic importance in the eyes of Australia. Already by late 1930s, Japanese interest in East Timor was visible, to the concern of the British Foreign Office. In December 1941, in the face of the Japanese onslaught in Southeast Asia, a Dutch-Australian force was sent to East Timor as a preventive measure, against the wishes of the Portuguese colonial administration. As a result, East Timor shared the fate of the Dutch half of the island, being invaded and occupied in spite of a spirited Australian resistance, which was supported by the locals. The experiences of the war gave rise to a spate of Australian diplomatic enthusiasm in the years following Japan’s capitulation, since Timor could obviously serve as a stepping-stone for future foreign aggression. This short-lived enthusiasm is the topic of Steven Farram’s slim volume. Based on the dispatches of the first two consuls in Dili, Charles Eaton and Douglas White, Farram follows in detail the vicissitudes of the consulate up to 1950, with a brief discussion of the following years until the closing

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 343 of the consulate in 1971. His main question is why the strategic interest in East Timor by the Australian Foreign Office died down around 1950. The contents of the dispatches are, of course, written from an official point of view, which lends the account a somewhat dry and matter-of-fact style. But in spite of the rather narrow scope, the study is far from uninteresting. A considerable bonus of the volume is a number of rare photographs deriving mostly from Charles Eaton. From the dispatches the very basic living conditions in the Portuguese colony are highlighted. Ordinary consumer goods were almost unavailable in the years after the war even in Dili, and large deliveries of canned meat, whisky, beer, etc. had to be sent from Australia to ensure at least a mini- mum of comfort for the consular staff. Considering the frugal circumstances, the years of the first consul Charles Eaton were comparatively fruitful. Being an old RAAF officer who had participated in bombing raids against Japanese installations on Timor during the war, he seems to have got on well with most people. His successor, Douglas White, stands out as less amicable and held a low opinion about the Portuguese on Timor. After he was recalled in 1950, it took a while before a new consul was appointed which marks the loss of interest among Australian politicians. Farram mentions several reasons for this. There was never a whole-hearted interest from the Australian government institutions. The internal Timorese situation hardly warranted the costs of a consular service; there were very few Australian entrepreneurs there, and what they did was hardly lucrative – such as running a movie theatre that showed dated movies with lengthy intervals. The emergence of a unitary Indonesian state in 1949-50 with Australia’s support also detracted from the strategic value initially placed in Timor, which vanished altogether after the mid-1950s. At a later stage, as Farram explains, Australian politicians tacitly accepted the idea that an Indo- nesian takeover of the colony was inevitable – the same opinion was privately held by their British counterparts. The eventual withdrawal of the consulate in 1971 can therefore be seen as tactical: when the invasion would finally come, Australia would be watching the unfolding of events from a safe distance. This, of course, is exactly what occurred.

R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly and Anthony Reid (eds), Mapping the Acehnese past. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, xvi + 292 pp. ISBN 9789067183659. [Verhandelingen 268]. Price: EUR 34.90 (paperback).

WILLIAM BRADLEY HORTON Waseda University, School of Social Sciences [email protected]

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The 2004 earthquake and tsunami affected every aspect of Acehnese life, going far beyond the immediate loss of life and livelihood which was broadcast throughout the world, and provided the will to end the seemingly endless political conflict. One of the important but far less known results was the loss of material evidence of the past in Aceh, as well as the loss of important historians of Aceh. In the immediate aftermath of this natural disaster, a global community of scholars embarked on an effort to assist the Acehnese, including a search for new materials and new ways to illuminate their past. A panel on histories of Aceh was subsequently included in the February 2007 International Conference on Aceh and Indian Ocean Studies, leading directly to this volume. The 10 articles in this collection seek to present and utilize newly discovered or rediscovered materials related to Aceh and its interactions with the world. Appropriately, the book opens with Michael Feener’s engaging and useful survey of the state of the field of Acehnese history, which he provides in the process of introducing and contextualizing the articles in this collection. He also connects the span of Acehnese history to the present, and as a result he is surprisingly the only author to discuss the revolutionary period or even mention the Japanese occupation. The focus of the rest of the book is pre-1940s. Far from stiffly narrating histories of Aceh, several of the authors present their research in a very personal and engaging manner. Annabel Teh Gallop’s article, for example, shows the excitement of discovery in narrating her discovery of the sole remaining illuminated letter from Sultan Iskandar Thani in P.J. Veth’s materials held at Leiden University. The inclusion of colour pictures of some of the letters, maps, and other materials heightens the thrill of discovery, and provides a better understanding of these materials. In his own article and a second co-written piece, İsmail Hakkı Göksoy similarly provides an exciting new set of sources related to Aceh relations with Turkey during the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, including detailed information about efforts to provide Aceh with a fleet of warships and a picture of diplomatic relations. In fact, this volume is filled with references to newly re-discovered rare or unique historical materials. Another highly engaging article is Sher Banu A.L. Khan’s exploration of the Dutch problems with the varying royal taste and need for jewels in seventeenth century Aceh. Mapping the Acehnese past also includes two appendixes containing the transliterated texts and translations of three illuminated letters, as well as the transliterations and translations of letters, maps, and other materials related to the nineteenth century embassy of Aceh to Istanbul. While the three letters had been published in the late nineteenth century, their reproduction in this context adds depth to the articles, and makes them easily available to researchers. The inclusion of the other letters and materials are even more welcome, being heretofore unknown materials. In another important article, Jean Taylor addresses the collection of images

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 345 in the KITLV archive. Taylor found 1,053 items with a keyword of Aceh out of a total of 43,841 items in the archive. Largely photographs, these items were produced between 1873-1939. Both to assess their significance to new scholarship, and to provide a context for the images, she surveys the literature on Aceh, as well as the use of photographs from Aceh and other areas of Indonesia during this period, in which war has become the favoured subject for Aceh, in contrast to the images of beauty dominating the use and interpretation of images from Bali. By presenting this survey, she opens up space for utilizing this rich collection of photographic images from Aceh outside of the grim framework of Aceh as a place of war and death. Available online, the digitized collection in this archive continues to expand, with a total of 128,694 images, 1766 items with Atjeh as a keyword, and 3601 items with Aceh as a keyword in June 2012. Other articles also present significant information. Daniel Perret combines an examination of archaeological and written evidence to reconstruct the settlements in the Aceh area from the ninth to the fifteenth centuries. Teuku Iskandar discusses early Malay literature in connection with the Aceh-Pasai area, tracing Persian influences, epigraphic evidence, and descriptions of Aceh. Other articles deal with Acehnese understandings of ‘jihad’ in the context of the anti-Dutch resistance and Portuguese sources for Acehnese history. Perhaps the most important impact of Mapping the Acehnese past will be its opening the door to further scholarship on Aceh. Where in the past an extremely limited set of subjects were explored, most frequently the Dutch- Aceh wars and the golden period of Aceh’s past, the urgency to find new subjects to research has led these scholars to explore and present readers with ‘new’ materials. The combination of discovery and reconception of Aceh’s history opens the door to new scholarship on Aceh, and will hopefully lead to a renaissance in Indonesian historical studies as well. In keeping with the political mood during the period in which this book was produced, the authors are generally optimistic about the future of Aceh studies. Feener, for example, notes that ‘new sources for the history of the Aceh War continue to be brought to light’, a statement which seems to capture the mood of the entire book. We must hope that additional materials will be discovered and, following the suggestions provided in this volume, that new scholarly works will appear. However, even if in the future this volume is re- placed in its role of introducing new materials on Acehnese history to the academic community, it has already established a valuable place in the development of the field. As this book represents a starting point in the reconstruction of Acehnese historiography, it will long remain of interest to specialists, while the generally good quality and wide scope of the articles will also reward and encourage readers who are not experts on ancient or early modern Aceh.

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Geoffrey C. Gunn, History without borders: The making of an Asian world region, 1000-1800. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011, xvi + 416 pp. ISBN 9789888083343. Price: USD 60.00 (hardback).

CRAIG A. LOCKARD University of Wisconsin-Green Bay [email protected]

For over five decades a diverse group of historians have been, as the title of a landmark survey text from the 1970s suggests, ‘in search of Southeast Asia’. They have sought to elucidate the structures and dynamics, continuities and changes, of the region as a whole as well as of the individual states that rose and fell over the centuries. These studies have fostered lively debates, such as the ongoing exchanges, initiated by Anthony Reid and Victor Lieberman, over an Early Modern ‘age of commerce’. Most studies focus largely on particular societies, states, and nations rather than transcending these borders. However, in recent years some scholars have begun to go beyond borders to situate Southeast Asia in the broader context of interregional and global history, a quest now joined by Geoffrey Gunn. Gunn’s important and wide-ranging study is not a general survey of Southeast Asian history between 1000 and 1800 C.E. Paying only cursory attention to political, social, cultural, and religious developments, it analyses the region chiefly in terms of its economic dynamics, especially trade, over these seven centuries while also connecting it to the wider world, particularly of East Asia. Hence, the reader will also learn something of Chinese, Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean economic histories and their relationships to Southeast Asia. The author, a truly ‘globalized’ Australian, is well-placed to undertake such a project. Gunn has taught or done research in Australia, Laos, Thailand, Libya, Singapore, Brunei, Macau, and most recently Japan (where he teaches at Nagasaki University), and has published books and monographs on Laos, Brunei, East Timor, Macau, and Nagasaki as well as an innovative world history of the two-way Eurasian cultural exchange between 1500 and 1800. In Gunn’s view, Southeast Asia from early times, but especially after 1000, can best be viewed not only as a collection of diverse societies, but also as defined and shaped by connections between these societies and with China, Japan, Korea, the Ryukyus, India, Sri Lanka and beyond, with long distance trade in Asian commodities lubricating this vast exchange. Gunn finds the controversial notion of an Asian or Oriental ‘Mediterranean’ stretching from the East China Sea to the Straits of Melaka and the Indian Ocean useful for understanding a region of shifting frontiers rather than fixed nation-states. Indeed, his narrative is almost Braudelian in scope. The author has consulted

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 347 and synthesized hundreds of sources (his 53 page bibliography provides an extremely valuable resource). He also has a good knowledge of the recent writing not only on Southeast Asia and East Asia but also on world history. Although the bulk of his sources are Western, Gunn seeks to avoid a Eurocentric approach and has, with considerable success, written a decentred history of Asia. The story he presents, influenced by scholars such as Lieberman, Reid, Leonard Blussé, J.C. van Leur, Denys Lombard, Kenneth Hall, and Janet Abu-Lughod, will be generally familiar to historians of Southeast Asia. But even specialists can read this book with profit since Gunn provides an excellent summary of current knowledge and recent scholarship, integrating their contributions into an innovative framework. Gunn proposes that Asian maritime trade became the chief boundary-transcending nexus through which most cultural, commercial, cultural, and technical exchange took place between diverse societies. Hence, located along the maritime trading routes linking India to China, Southeast Asia was a global region connected to many Eurasian societies and a changing world economy over many centuries. As a borderland zone with shifting identities and contested boundaries, Southeast Asia challenges state and nation-centric narratives. The stimulating Introduction sets out Gunn’s global and transregional approach, which stresses the fluidity and ambiguity of boundaries (physical and cultural), especially prior to the modern nation-states. Like various other Asian and world historians, he posits an early Asian economic precocity built by trade but notes that the dynamism diminished by 1800, in part due to the rise of the West, fostering what scholars like Kenneth Pomeranz term ‘the great divergence’ between China and Western Europe. However, between 1400 and 1800 China did not stagnate or withdraw from global commerce; instead China helped dynamize the region through participation in a thriving bullion trade, just as Chinese immigrants and sojourners brought unprecedented commerce to Southeast Asia. Gunn places less stress than some scholars on the East Asian Confucian heritage and more on interdependencies and interactions between contiguous countries, with China at the centre of an interstate system. Gunn cautiously accepts Japanese scholar Hamashita Takeshi’s doubts about the existence of a bounded Southeast Asia separate from East Asia. Ten chapters explore various aspects of the Southeast Asia-East Asia region and its maritime trade networks. Hence, what he terms the Southeast Asian ‘charter kingdoms’ (such as Angkor and Majapahit) are examined in terms of an Asian tributary trade system. Gunn incorporates and evaluates much revi- sionist literature on topics such as the Southeast Asian use of firearms prior to 1500 and the state and trading systems of Champa, Vietnam, and Srivijaya. Gunn’s chapters on China’s tribute system and the Chinese and Japanese dia- sporas are particularly interesting. He argues that the Zheng He voyages of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 348 Book reviews the early fifteenth century enlarged the tribute system into the Indian Ocean zone as far as East Africa without dislodging age-old Asian maritime trade networks. Gunn identifies what he terms the Wang Gungwu-Hamashita Takeshi debate over the history, nature, and operational aspects of the tribute system. While both scholars share a regional order view of Eastern Eurasia, Wang stresses Southeast Asia, the Chinese diaspora, and Confucian ideology, while Hamashita describes (in opposition to Immanuel Wallerstein) a China- centred world economy in Eastern Eurasia as a unified system of internation- alized tribute-trade relations with a periphery formed by Southeast, Central, and Northeast Asia, the system connected with the adjacent India trade area. Gunn also surveys the small and important but neglected seventeenth century Japanese diaspora communities all over Southeast Asia that were eventually beleaguered by the Tokugawa shogun’s seclusion order (1633-1636), which led many to assimilate into local societies. Five chapters discuss commerce, currencies, and commodities (including commodity chains); the European interlopers (Iberian, Dutch, English) and their participation in intra-Asian trade; the thriving bullion and ceramic trades that oiled the wheels of commerce all around the region; and knowledge transfers including the diffusion of Chinese technologies. The intra-Asian bullion and global ceramic trades loom large in Gunn’s narrative, allowing him to fluently discuss, for example, Japanese silver, Manila galleons, Chinese ceramic production at Jingdezhen, and discoveries in shipwrecks. The reader will also learn much about port cities such as Melaka, Ayutthaya, Banten, Batavia, Manila, Quanzhou, Macau, Hirado, and Nagasaki. Gunn concludes that a coherent East-Southeast Asian community was assembled from diverse Indianized, Islamized, Sinicized, indigenous, and later European influences. Following historians like Geoff Wade, he perceives an interregional age of commerce long predating 1400. His arguments are also in line with the seminal Dutch scholar J.C. van Leur, stressing continuity of Southeast Asian dynamism. Rather than what Reid described as a retreat by 1700 from the Early Modern world economy that resulted in a lack of national coherence and technology to overcome the Western onslaught, Gunn sees proximity to China and the Chinese diasporic communities and networks rescuing Southeast Asia from complete retreat. But more than Van Leur, Gunn concedes the eventual subordination of the Southeast Asian econ- omies to European capital. Now Southeast Asia seems to be moving toward a new interregional Eastern Eurasian economic community, promoted by China and Japan, with some parallels to the Early Modern Era. Any study this ambitious is bound to have a few flaws. The four maps are insufficient; non-specialist readers need more details on such features as Indo- nesian islands and Indian Ocean ports. There are some typos and occasional misinformation such as confusing Indonesian Chinese totok (newer arrivals)

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 349 with peranakan (acculturated Chinese). Among other issues, I also question whether, as he claims, the Chinese in Spanish Manila were the first Chinese to establish fixed multigenerational communities in Southeast Asia; such communities probably developed by the 1400s in several places, including Java and Sumatra. The coverage of states and commodities can sometimes seem encyclopedic rather than analytical. Some topics receive insufficient coverage, including the Indian, Arab and Persian trading communities; South Asia as part of the transregional system; Song China’s manufacturing, technological prowess, and even perhaps, according to some scholars, incipient capitalism; and what some historians term a ‘Chinese century’ of trade and commerce in Southeast Asia from around 1700 to the mid 1800s. And the author does not always fully answer the probing questions he poses. Nonetheless, this well- written and pioneering study succeeds on many levels in perceiving South- east Asia as part of a larger, maritime trade-linked eastern Eurasia region. History beyond borders should become a standard text of much value to both historians and the general reader interested in pre-modern Southeast Asia and its connections to the wider world.

Andrew Hardy, Mauro Cucarzi and Patrizia Zolese, (eds), Champa and the archaeology of Mỹ Sơn (Vietnam). Singapore: NUS, 2009, xxxiv + 440 pp. ISBN 9789971694517. Price: USD 35.00 (paperback).

WILLIAM A. SOUTHWORTH Curator of Southeast Asian Art, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam [email protected]

Although less celebrated than the ancient Hindu-Buddhist civilizations of Cambodia or Java, the rich material heritage of the Champa culture of central Vietnam first began to be recognized and studied in the late nineteenth century, during the course of French economic and political expansion in main- land Southeast Asia. It was only by accident however, that its most famous site became known to the outside world. Surrounded by a ring of hills and mountain peaks in the interior of Quảng Nam province, the brick temples and sandstone sculptures of Mỹ Sơn were first viewed by soldiers and mis- sionaries before being officially – and excitedly – reported to the French colonial authorities by the explorer Camille Paris, in a letter written from Tourane (modern Đà Nẵng) on 23 June 1894 (Paris 1895). The subsequent investiga- tions and conservation of the site are recorded in the introductory essays to this fascinating but complex volume. The first major survey and excavation of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 350 Book reviews the temples by the Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient in 1903-1904 are recorded in the notes of Henri Parmentier and Charles Carpeaux, many of whose photographs are preserved at the Musée Guimet in Paris. Parmentier divided the site into groups (listed from A to H) and numbered the buildings con- secutively within each group, beginning with the largest surviving structure, A1. The site later suffered considerable damage as a result of the conflicts in Indochina from 1940 onwards, including high-level bombing in 1969. The subsequent work of clearance and restoration was begun in the 1980s as part of a Polish-Vietnamese mission headed by the late Kazimierz Kwiatkowski – to whom the book is dedicated. In 1997, an Italian team was sent to Mỹ Sơn to assess the condition of the surviving buildings and to advise on future work. Much of the content of this book is drawn from the conservation project that immediately followed their report and the formal recognition of Mỹ Sơn as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1999. In order to contextualize the detailed work at Mỹ Sơn, the book has been divided into two sections: the first contains essays on the Champa culture in general, and the second covers the scientific analyses of the conservation project at Mỹ Sơn. One obvious criticism is that these two parts do not fit easily together, but as Andrew Hardy notes in his introduction: ‘One might say that the book operates on the principle of a camera fitted with two lenses – a wide-angled and a zoom – used to take the photographs presented between the two sections’ (p. 10). Among the essays presented in the first section is an overview and revision of the history of Champa by Michael Vickery (Chapter 1), which challenges early twentieth century interpretations of Champa as an integral kingdom or nation state; and an analysis of temple architecture in ancient Champa by Trần Kỳ Phương (Chapter 6), which includes evidence for early timber and tile-roofed structures as the natural precursors of the later brick tower-temple tradition. These chapters are important for understanding the wider context of the later conservation reports, but one of the best essays is perhaps the least connected to Mỹ Sơn. Rie Nakamura examines the role of two complementary concepts, Awar and Ahier, for understanding the identity and world view of the modern Cham community in Ninh Thuận province, based in part on her PhD research there in the 1990s (Chapter 3). As Nakamura explains, the relationship of the modern Cham community to the ancient Champa culture remains both archaeologically and anthropologically complex. The second section presents the detailed scientific reports of the Mỹ Sơn Conservation Project, a joint Italian-Vietnamese programme under the auspices of UNESCO and headed by the Lerici Foundation and Department of Structural Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano in co-operation with the Institute for Conservation of Monuments, Hanoi. The first essay by Patrizia Zolese (Chapter 7), presents the results of archaeological excavations at the site from 1997 to 2007, in particular around the five brick structures classi-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 351 fied as group G. This is followed by specialist reports on the recording of structural and biological damage, construction techniques, materials, and conservation design. All are based on meticulous observation and laboratory analysis, with the aim of providing detailed information for the conservation of group G. Further chapters cover specific aspects of the restoration, the geology and geomorphology of the site, the results of thermoluminescence dating and geophysical prospection and the establishment of a Geographic Information System for effective mapping of the site and its surroundings. Although expertly presented with abundant illustration, often in colour, the technical nature of these chapters inevitably makes them less accessible for the general reader. In addition, the concentration of analysis on group G also raises doubts as to the general applicability of the scientific findings, not only in respect to the wider Champa culture, but also in regard to the site of Mỹ Sơn as a whole. For example, one of the major findings of the research is the identification of a thin organic layer in the joints between the bricks, which was used to bind the bricks together without the use of mortar. Although suggested in the past, this is the first time that a binding substance has been scientifically isolated from the brick itself. However, it is clear from the report on materials (Chapter 10) that the brick samples analysed were predominantly taken either from the G group or from the remains of A1 (pp. 285-301). Patrizia Zolese has rightly argued in her chapter on archaeology (Chapter 7) that the G group as a whole can probably be dated to the third quarter of the twelfth century CE (p. 218), towards the end of the site’s architectural development, while A1 (together with A13, B9, D4, E4, E5 and E7) probably dates to the eleventh century CE and not to the seventh century as stated in the report (p. 292). Moreover, many of the construction techniques described, including the structural use of laterite and the predominance of terracotta rather than stone ornamentation, appear to be unique to the G group. However, in this respect at least the choice of group G as the focus of restoration and analysis was remarkably fortuitous, even if it was initially chosen for more practical reasons. The relative isolation of the group on the top of a low hill, the consistency of its architectural design and construction, and the presence of two large stone stelae of a single king – Harivarmadeva – describing and dating the foundation of the temple are a unique combination at Mỹ Sơn. Indeed, the great French art historian Philippe Stern (1942:105-7) considered it to be not only the best dated group of buildings at the site, but possibly the only temple group in the whole of the Champa culture where a secure historical connection could be made with the surviving inscriptions. As such, the meticulous analyses presented in this volume provide an essential key for our understanding of the history and structural development of temple architecture in Champa and the editors deserve great credit for bring- ing this information to a wider public readership.

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References

Paris, Camille 1895 ‘Correspondance: Ruines tjames de Tây-Loc’, Bulletin de Géographie His- torique et Descriptive 10:234-6. Stern, Philippe 1942 L’art du Champa (ancien Annam) et son évolution. Toulouse: Les Frères Douladoure.

Jac. Hoogerbrugge, Asmat: Arts, crafts and people; A photographic diary, 1969-1974. With an introduction by Raymond Corbey and Nick Stanley. Leiden: Zwartenkot Art Books, 2011, 336 pp. ISBN 9789054500001. Price: EUR 45.00 (hardback).

KAREN JACOBS University of East Anglia [email protected]

The art of the Asmat region is one of the most renowned arts of Papua, the western part of New Guinea. Intricately carved shields, tall mbis (ancestral) poles, ancestral figures, masks and story boards feature in museum collections and galleries around the world. But how did these objects circulate and drive such a wide international art movement? The answer lies partially in the cultural production of Asmat art and this book illustrates one of the crucial phases in the history of its commoditisation and circulation. Hoogerbrugge’s photographic diary assembles circa 730 images with 56 black and white drawings – all produced between 1969 and 1974 in the framework of the Asmat Art Project. Jointly organised by the United Nations and the Indonesian Govern- ment, the aim of the Asmat Art Project was to use artefacts as tools for successful economic development in the Asmat region. As the project’s supervisor, Jac Hoogerbrugge was responsible for selecting, collecting, and shipping As- mat artefacts to Rotterdam, from where they were distributed more widely. Prior to the start of this project, during Dutch colonial administration and the early years of Indonesian governance, cultural expressions in the Asmat region had been banned due to the association with headhunting and war- fare. However, under the auspices of the Asmat Art Project, Asmat carvings began to be marketed as ‘art’. Emphasising the aesthetic character, rather than the ethnographic content of the objects, was essential if these carvings were to be allowed to be marketed and, in turn, provide Asmat carvers with an income. Hoogerbrugge’s photographs and captions document the various journeys he made to Asmat villages to collect art. Simultaneously, the photo-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 353 graphs and captions reveal the distinct value systems that were at play during this collecting process. For example, Hoogerbrugge did not necessarily value bamboo horns for their sound, but for their decoration – the intricacy of carv- ing and clarity of design were more important than the sound, which is what the Asmat people preferred to emphasise (p. 156). Similarly, Hoogerbrugge remarks about another horn: ‘Fura shows how good the sound is. Meanwhile we admire the adornments’ (p. 205). Once aestheticized, Asmat art was promoted rather than relegated, since it was in harmony with the government’s aim of promoting economic development. Therefore, Hoogerbrugge’s photographs inform us about quality control by chopping off seemingly unneces- sary parts of carvings or on the introduction of new forms. The Asmat Art Project initiated a process of art patronage that is still important in the region. The last photograph of the book, taken in 1996, is of a concrete mbis ancestor pole standing outside Soekarno-Hatta International Airport. This photograph is provided as evidence of the wide regard and esteem in which Asmat art is held. The use of concrete instead of wood ren- ders the pole a permanent reminder that Asmat art could be used as a tool to promote Indonesia. However, this concrete pole was not made by Asmat carvers and is therefore equally evidence of the subsequent appropriation of Asmat art throughout Indonesia. The Asmat Art Project took place at a crucial time when Papua was trans- ferred to Indonesian administration and when the area had to be integrated into the national Indonesian policy. Papua received the status of masyarakat terasing, ‘isolated community’. The perception of these masyarakat terasing as ‘feudal’ or ‘tribalist’ structures and the belief that these communities were a potential threat to national unity and economic development led to the implementation of projects to improve and develop Papua and enable the province to enter Indonesian society. The complex political situation is only briefly hinted at in the introduction when discussing Hoogerbrugge’s nationality in the Project. While it is not the focus of the book, it would have been interesting to place the project deeper into its socio-political context – providing the photographs and carvings with a rigorous historical framework. Knowing these details would have helped to understand and situate the Project’s focus on art. This approach necessarily means that some photographs and captions leave questions unanswered, merely piquing the reader’s curiosity. The inability to record information is also mentioned by the photographer himself. When Hoogerbrugge arrived in Sinegar where people were ‘frantically dancing’, he mentioned: ‘No idea what was going on: no interpreter, no guru as an intermediary (Jerry was in Agats and Marwan had fallen ill in Basim). Thus no information’ (p. 241). However, the photographs do provide us with information on manufacturing processes, with the making of nose ornaments, red pigment, carvings, and fibre string well recorded.

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It is commendable that this book has been published at a time when photographs are considered too costly in publications. This photographic diary is indeed a diary, wonderfully filled with personal comments, ordeals, frustra- tions, and achievements. Carvers are named, relationships established and documented. The human aspect detectable throughout the book is engaging: some Asmat artists chose to hide behind their art when Hoogerbrugge recorded them (p. 36), others requested to be photographed (p. 77). There are glimpses of Asmat agency in the patronage project: the introduction mentions how the Asmat people tried to sell low-quality work to Hoogerbrugge (p. 14). The bilingual character of the book (English-Indonesian) means that this is one of the few photography books that is accessible not only to anyone interested in Asmat art but also to Asmat carvers themselves. I hope that this book will be widely available among the Asmat people, giving them access to that part of their cultural heritage. As much as Rockefeller’s book is shown to be enjoyed by Asmat people (pp. 142, 218), this book can enthuse and inspire Asmat people.

Felicia Katz-Harris,Inside the puppet box: A performance of wayang kulit at the Museum of International Folk Art. Seattle/London: University of Washington Press, 2010, 200 pps. ISBN 9780295990743. Price: USD 45.00 (paperback).

SADIAH BOONSTRA VU University, Amsterdam [email protected]

Wayang kulit has received scholarly attention for over 150 years, but not many overviews of wayang kulit collections exist, the extensive catalogue of the ex- traordinary private collection of Walter Angst aside. In 2007, curator of the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA) Felicia Katz-Harris spent three months on Java to gather information and material for an exhibition on the performance tradition. Unexpectedly, the curator got the chance to purchase a full performance set – some 230 pieces – of wayang figures. The figures are made in contemporary court-based Surakarta style that has become the most widely spread form of wayang both within and outside Indonesia. The set was acquired mainly from one dalang Ki [The Honourable] Purbo Asmoro from Surakarta and complemented with individual figures from the collection of Ki Enthus Susmono based in Tegal, two of the few superstar dalang (puppe- teer) in contemporary Indonesia. With this book Katz-Harris follows current trends in museology that tend towards an anthropologisation of heritage. She brought the wayang perfor-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 355 mance tradition into the museum with the acquisition of this performance set. In the book, the performance practice is mirrored in the structure of the book, which is a novel and interesting approach. Simpingan refers to the relatively standard arrangement of wayang kulit figures during a wayang performance on the gedebog (banana log). They are lined up to the left (simpingan kiri) and to the right (simpingan kanan) from the center of the screen that is the dalang’s playground. The figures, facing outward, ascend in size order with the smallest lined up closest to the dalang and the largest at the far ends. Katz-Harris takes the simpingan as part of the wayang performance practice as starting- point in the presentation of the newly acquired collection wayang kulit. This means that the collection in the book is presented from right to left, beginning with the largest puppet at the far right that also faces to the right on to the smallest closest to the dalang. Then the simpingan kiri is presented in the same way, but now from left to right, with the puppets facing to the left. Of great value is the documentation provided for each figure by Purbo Asmoro. The dalang provided Katz-Harris with a character list, basic description of the characters, special notes on individual wayang figures, place and date of manufacture, commentary on special characteristics, and examples of lakon in which a particular character would appear. The combination of a full set of wayang figures with this extensive information for each character from a practicing dalang is enormously valuable for a museum collection. Wayang puppets have usually entered museum collections in a fragmented way, either donated individually or in small numbers often by private individuals. This often provides problems for the documentation of wayang kulit figures as thorough knowledge of individual wayang characters often lacks in museums, which is problematic for the understanding of the object. Nowadays, it is not an uncommon practice for practicing dalang to sell their performance sets after having it used after a couple of years, as selling a set adds to their prestige and status. But when performance objects are taken out of their performance context and enter the exhibition space or storage rooms of a museum, their meaning shifts dramatically. From a museological point of view, a curatorial reflection on this phenomenon would have given more depth and context to the book and to the remark by Dr. Suyanto in the preface about wayang being proclaimed a UNESCO Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage. The extensive documentation of the magnificently photographed wayang figures stands in contrast to the introduction that contains one third of the book. The introduction provides extensive general information on the wayang kulit performance performance setting, and on the technical aspects of making the wayang figures. However, the list of consulted literature is both limited and selective, and reflects an uncritical traditional perspective on wayang, with the welcome exception of the excellent work of Jan Mrázek

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(1999, 2000, 2002) on wayang kulit as a performance tradition between theater and popular culture. The critical work on colonial influences on wayang by Laurie J. Sears (1996) is a notable absentee in the list ‒ although other work by this historian was consulted ‒ as is Andrew N. Weintraub’s work (2004) on the impact of mass media and power relations on wayang. The traditional approach is partly compensated by the lively pictures of the author that mirror the contemporary performance setting very well, and the information Katz-Harris gained through interviews with various well-known dalang. The performance practice would truly have entered the book when the dalang themselves were heard from through quoting or taking up paraphrases of their statements in the text. Despite the disappointing introduction, the book’s approach of integrating the performance practice in the museum collections and book deserves praise and can serve very well as a starting-point for further research.

References

Mrázek, Jan 1999 ‘Javanese wayang kulit in the times of comedy: Clown scenes, innova- tion, and the performance’s being in the present world’, Indonesia 68:38- 128. 2000 ‘More than a picture: The instrumental quality of the shadow puppet’, in: Nora A. Taylor (ed.), Studies in Southeast Asian art: Essays in honor of Stanley J. O’Connor, pp. 49-73. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cor- nell University. [Studies on Southeast Asia 29.] 2002 Puppet theater in contemporary Indonesia: New approaches to performance events. [Ann Arbor, MI]: Centers for South and Southeast Asian Studies, University of Michigan. [Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia 50.] Sears, Laurie J. 1996 Shadows of empire: Colonial discourse and Javanese tales. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Weintraub, Andrew N. 2004 Power plays: Wayang golek puppet theater of West Java. Athens, OH: Insti- tute of South East Asian Studies. [Ohio University Research in Interna- tional Studies, Southeast Asia Series 110.]

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Douglas Lewis, The Stranger-Kings of Sikka. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2010, xxviii + 433 pp. ISBN 9789067183284. [Verhandelingen 257.] Price: EUR 39.50 (paperback).

KENG WE KOH Seoul National University [email protected]

The Stranger-Kings of Sikka is a rather unique study of a vernacular historical text from the collation of its major manuscript versions. It is not just an annotated translation of this text, nor a study of its literary structure. The main theme, as the title suggests, would be the concept of the stranger-king. Embodied with this theme would be the questions of foreignness and autoch- thony, sovereignty, and the practices underlying the political institutions and practices in the ‘rajadom’ of Sikka, and its environs. It is also a study of the colonial foundations of post-colonial and present- day knowledge-formation in Eastern Indonesia. In this sense, it can be read as a post-colonial inquiry delving into the making of historical knowledge during the late colonial period, and a methodological inquiry into the use of such texts, which had been collated and converted from oral traditions to written histories. The book is divided into two parts. The first part provides the background and interpretation of the Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka, discussing its provenance and form, as well as creation. It goes on to discuss its major themes, namely the stranger-king, sovereignty, and the place of marriages and kinship in such conceptions, as well as stranger-autochthone relations in the region. It also maps the stranger-king myths in the broader Lesser Sunda islands. The second part provides the text of the integrated Hikayat Kerajaan Sikka based on the Kondi and Pareira texts, as well as an additional section on the ‘rajadom’ of Sikka in the early twentieth century composed by the author. The section on provenance is a detailed study of colonial knowledge-formation and education, and the ways they influenced local historical knowledge production in the Lesser Sunda islands. The authors of the manuscript straddled the colonial administrative and the traditional Sikka socio-political hierarchies. Educated in new Dutch schools that had been established in eastern Indonesia in the late nineteenth century, exposed to ideas of history, and working with officials also keen on collecting such materials, they were inspired to write and record the history of their societies, which had hitherto been in the form of oral traditions. Another important contribution of Lewis’ book is in the way he engages and builds on the seminal work by Marshall Sahlins on the Stranger-King. Lewis discusses the dynamics underlying the sovereignty of the stranger-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 358 Book reviews kings, namely the strangeness and ties with a place to the west (in India), marriages, and gifts or ‘paths’ of ivory that was connected to the marriage ties and bride wealth exchanges associated with marriage. The ivory signified not only marriage, but also ‘evoke[d] remembrance of the rajadom, the role of the old rajas in Sikka’s society, the origins of its rulers in South Asia, and the links of Sikka’s culture to distant court societies to the west’ (p. 134, Fig. 22). He also discusses the occurrences (and absences) of stranger-kingship myths in the eastern Lesser Sunda Islands, as well as their variations. He notes how stranger-king myths seem to be missing from western Flores and the island of Sumba, as well as Pantar and Alor, while they were found in eastern Flores and Timor island. In short, it was found in ‘areas of continuous Portuguese contact whereas no stranger-king are found in areas where Portuguese contact was absent or only intermittent’ (p. 197). Lewis also seeks to relate the Stranger-King issue to the question of sovereignty in Sikkanese society. While acknowledging the difficulties and dangers of using a concept developed in the context of European historical traditions and the modern state, he nevertheless emphasizes the importance of sovereignty as a framework for thinking about power and authority across cultures, focusing, in particular, on the relations between secular and ritual sources of power/authority. Noting the differences between the European model and the Indic models, he poses the question, ‘what about the rulers on the margins of the margins of Indic influence, and those who eventually came under the colonial regime of a European power, such as the people of Sikka?’ Taking this further, he argues that contrary to assumptions commonly held for the Lesser Sunda Islands, there was no diarchy (of the ritual and secular) in Sikka society, and this institution and practice would not have been a common feature of societies in the Lesser Sunda islands. This, in his opinion, had important consequences for understanding the stranger-king concept and its operation in Sikka, for sovereignty of the newcomers came not from ‘usurpation’, but was ‘inherent in the newcomers’, as ‘firstly strangers, and secondly persons from some civilization to the west to which Flores and its native peoples were relatively peripheral’. In this sense, the Ata Sikka’s belief that their rulers had come from the Indic state to the west would mean that sovereignty would have derived from this foreign place and group. This book is also important for our understanding of the dynamics between ‘myth’ and ‘history’, not only in present-day Sikka and the Lesser Sundas, but also in Southeast Asia as a whole. The author poses important questions about epistemology and historiography surrounding the compila- tion of these texts, as well as the backgrounds of the individual authors and the historical contexts in which they wrote. It is also a case study in how we can use such texts created in a move ‘from myth to history’, and their possibilities and limits, to further our understanding of the histories and historical

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 359 imaginations of these societies. Ultimately, readers will draw from this book a deeper understanding of history and historiography not only in Sikkanese and eastern Lesser Sunda, but also in Southeast Asia, especially in terms of local and colonial knowledge formations, and of the methods and methodologies of working with texts derived from oral traditions. The book also contributes to the understanding of the Stranger-King phenomenon in Southeast Asia.

Jennifer Lindsay and Maya H.T. Liem (eds), Heirs to world culture: Being Indonesian 1950-1965. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2012, xvii + 529 pp. [Verhandelingen 274.] ISBN 978967183796. Price: EUR 39.50 (paperback).

MANNEKE BUDIMAN Faculty of Humanities, University of Indonesia [email protected]

When Indonesia in the 1950s-1960s is invoked, our first association is most likely with conflict and chaos. This was the time when danger lurked on every corner of people’s everyday lives, which Soekarno aptly referred to as the age of vivere pericoloso. Our knowledge of this period is largely shaped by the existing literary and political discourses, which mostly portray Indonesia as a heavily polarized nation that was torn apart by ideological rifts and political conflicts. Heirs to world culture: Being Indonesian 1950-1965 offers a new perspective of Indonesia through a lens that looks into a less explored and more complex side of Indonesia. Drawing attention to vibrant cultural activities in various domains both at the national and international levels, the book presents a different way of understanding Indonesia, challenging the dominant image inculcated by mainstream history textbooks and previous writings. As stated in the Introduction, the book‘s primary intent is to establish the centrality of culture as an avenue toward a more profound understanding of Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s, especially since culture has been sidelined in the dominant discourse on the era. The book also takes us beyond the politics of polarity, which has often become the primary signifier of that age, by suggesting that the demarcation lines separating the opposing camps were much less rigid than what people might have imagined. Conflict remains a keyword, yet it is not something that can be adequately explored using bina- ry oppositions. In this book, conflict is understood as the internal dynamics within and between groups involved in the cultural formation of that period.

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Reading this book may bring forth a nostalgic image of the 1950s and 1960s as the most lively and intense era of cultural activism in the history of postcolonial Indonesia. There seemed to be a concerted effort to explore and construct Indonesia-ness involving various social and cultural groups. Local traditions were rethought and modified, whereas ideas and models offered by the outside world were absorbed and re-contextualized in order to pave the way toward the formation of national culture. Two distinct lines of inquiry may be pursued. First, did the cultural hype taking place in the 1950s and 1960s serve as a symptom of an identity crisis or, on the contrary, as an expression of ‘national’ confidence with regard to Indonesian identity? If the former is the case, then what appears as enthusiasm on the surface might actually be an expression of angst. However, if the latter is true, some kind of cultural renaissance indeed was happening. In Jennifer Linday’s words, the 1950s were ‘a time of promise’ as ‘the future seemed full of possibilities’ (p. 22). Even the Cold War was viewed positively as providing ‘access to new networks, new ideas, and new worlds’. Second, did the outburst of cultural activities happen because of the political turmoil that was tearing the country apart or despite the prolonged crisis? If it was merely the result of a political tension, it is true then that politics should become a keyword to understand the age, as mainstream Indonesian historiography has shown. But if this ‘cultural renaissance’ occurred regard- less of the dire political circumstances, this book contributes a new vantage to efforts to better understand what was going on in Indonesia in the 1950s and 1960s. The answers to both questions are scattered in the chapters of the book. Some contributors keen to represent the age as a cultural era when explorations of national identity and culture reached a pinnacle, and diverse cultural activities took place independently from the political catastrophe at the national level. During the parliamentary crisis in the 1950s, which was followed by a crisis of democracy, artists and intellectuals continued their search for a format and content of Indonesian-ness that would catapult the nation towards its future. It appears that such a quest helped cultural activities to remain relatively intact from the political pitfalls of the era, which was marked by uncertainty and pessimism. Keith Foulcher suggests there were feelings of ‘optimism’ and ‘confidence’ among artists and intellectuals. Even if anxieties occurred, they had more to do with a pressing sense of urgency lest the soaring creative endeavour would soon diminish rather than with lack of confidence. Indonesian culture was perceived as a process and result of interactions between what the nation already possessed and what more could be learned from encounters with the outside world. There was trust in modernity as a model of progress, yet artists had differing stances vis-à-vis Western modernity, as apparent in their ambiguous responses to STICUSA, whose objective was to work together

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 361 with Indonesia towards a ‘new Indonesia’ with a Western outlook, as discussed by Liesbeth Dolk. The same ambiguity is explored by Tony Day, who addresses Indonesian critical views of the US as a dominating power during the Cold War. Through his critique of Hollywood films, Soekarno, for instance, lashed the ways in which racial hierarchy was established in those films. Els Bogaerts also writes about the early debate on modernity and progress among intellectuals, arguing that the main issue was how their sense of progress could be exorcised from colonial demons. This is also why the search for a model and inspiration took place outside the West. Hairus Salim describes how Muslim intellectuals such as Hamka, Usmar Ismail, and Bahrum Rangkuti looked to Egypt as an ideal model of convergence between Islam and modernity. For them, Egypt represented a strategic point of reference since it was actively involved in anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist movements, while at the same time articulating a strong anti-communist stance. Domestically, Islamic artists were also searching for national identity through institutions such as HSBI and LESBUMI, in an attempt to position Islam as both a partner of modern culture and part of that culture. Translation activities and cultural missions also played a significant role in making Indonesia part of the global community. Maya Liem discusses how translators took initiatives in searching for models of expression of Indonesian- ness without any support from the government. There was a strong desire for voicing the idea that, outside the national boundaries, there was a rich invento- ry of thoughts weaved together by a universal spirit of humanity. International cultural missions that visited Indonesia made their contributions as well to an understanding of what it meant to be an ‘Indonesian person’. These missions, according to Jennifer Lindsay, were an inseparable element of the formation of a national identity that was local and cosmopolitan at the same time. Although there were gaps between what was showcased abroad and what was desired to be the expression of national culture, there was a consensus to make local cultures a shared asset rather than an exclusive right of individual cultural communities, as visible in Irawati Ardjo’s testimony on her personal experience as a dancer involved in a project of integrating local dance elements into new kinds of art that reflected a nationalistic flavour. Vibrant cultural activities also occurred outside Jakarta. Melani Budianta notes how the social-cultural network of the peranakan-Chinese communities in Malang was founded on both Dutch and Malay legacies. Thus, despite the often bitter ideological polarization among themselves, such hybridity served as a check to ideological disputes among Peranakan-Chinese groups in Malang. In Medan, there was an air of ‘indifference’ with regard to what was going on in the capital, as pointed out by Marije Plomp. The most popular forms of culture in Medan imported from Singapore. Hence, the centrality

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 362 Book reviews of Singapore as a cultural Mecca instead of Jakarta, which resulted in more relaxed responses to the ongoing debate on national culture. Whereas, in Makassar, according to Barbara Hatley, artists continued to hold on to their commitment to Indonesian-ness despite the armed rebellions against the central government that broke out in the region. Elsewhere, in Bali, the fasci- nation with national issues caused the space for Balinese cultural expressions to shrink, according to I Nyoman Darma Putra, as artists split in two opposing parties, namely, that which focused on nationalist issues and that which considered the issue of people’s struggle an utmost importance. Across the water, in Malaya Peninsula, artists keenly observed the intense cultural debate that took place in Indonesia. Budiawan suggests that they drew inspirations from their Indonesian counterpart’s enthusiasm in giving meaning to independence and searching for national identity. For Malay artists, looking to Indonesia was a strategic step toward distancing themselves from the Malay elite who had fallen victim to the hegemonic British colonial education system and considered the West as their cultural beacon. LEKRA remains a dominant player in many of the essays, and its por- trayal is still largely framed by its aggressive image as an art community that was always at odds with the rest because of its Communist leaning. However, the last two chapters of the book try to reveal a rather different face of the organization that can destabilize the negative stereotyping. Rhoma Dewi Yuliantri shows how LEKRA artists made their contributions to the search of national identity by exploring the existing local inventories. Meanwhile, Michael Bodden addresses the complex relationship between LEKRA and the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) to argue that LEKRA artists were able to maintain their independence by resisting the party’s attempts to assert control over them, and that LEKRA actually had many commonalities with their opponents in terms of aesthetic ideology. The arrival of this book signifies a renewed interest in knowledge production about Indonesia at the moment when studies about Indonesia are wan- ing. We can learn through the Indonesian experience about the ways in which global-local relations between nations and the world can be fostered. Despite the fact that the majority of the contributors are non-Indonesian scholars, the book is shaped by a sympathetic outlook about the country and its cultural struggle to be part of the international community, undaunted by the ideological war that threatened to divide the world in two blocs.

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Trần Kỳ Phương and Bruce M. Lockhart, The Cham of Vietnam: History, society and art. Singapore: NUS Press, 2011, xx + 460 pp. ISBN 9789971694593. Price: USD 30.00 (paperback).

ARLO GRIFFITHS École française d’Extrême-Orient, Jakarta [email protected]

This volume contains the papers presented at a conference held at the Asia Research Institute (ARI) in Singapore in 2004, and which attracted a very diverse group of scholars. For anyone familiar with the history of research on the ‘Cham of Vietnam’, one of the most striking features of this volume will be the total absence among the contributors of any scholars based at a French institution. Compared to collective publications of just twenty years ago, this amounts to a sea change. The apparent diversification of the backgrounds of scholars working on the past and present of this ethnic minority in Vietnam is very welcome indeed, and many contributing scholars who are not French do show the intimate familiarity with French secondary literature, both past and present, that is required for serious work in this field. By contrast, some other papers are rather disappointing in this regard. In his introductory essay, ‘Colonial and post-colonial constructions of “Champa”’, co-editor Bruce Lockhart explains that ‘the collection is anchored by two larger essays’, his own and Michael Vickery’s ‘Champa Revised’.1 Lockhart himself gives an excellent overview of about 130 years of evolution in how scholars ‒ Western (that is almost exclusively French) and Vietnamese, and, among the latter, in rare cases, ethnic Cams ‒ have viewed Campā. It is especially valuable for its elaborate treatment of the secondary literature in Vietnamese, which is not accessible to all scholars in this field. Some sublimi- nal bias on the part of the author did draw my attention: ‘the fact remains that the present-day Cham are a mere remnant of what was once a regional power’ (p. 2, my emphasis); ‘A historical Cham presence in the highlands is attested by archaeological evidence and by the oral traditions of several ethnic groups’ (p. 37). Strictly speaking, if we accept, as Lockhart seems to do (see pp. 23, 38), the possibility that ancient Campā was more than a nation of ethnic Cams, there is no reason to assume that modern Cams are a ‘mere remnant’; we must be mindful of the corollary that the direct forefathers of the Cams of Phan Rang may never have occupied more than a small part of

1 The present reviewer, because of his Indological background, prefers the spellings Cam and Campā, as these reflect the way indigenous Cam script would normally be romanized. The scholarly belief alluded to on p. 29 that the ethnonym Cam would be a creation of Western scholarship is patently incorrect. Besides the data from modern languages adduced by Vickery (p. 372), this ethnonym is attested in the Old Cam inscriptions C. 140 and C. 213, both still unpublished.

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Campā, and of the possible difference between culturally and ethnically Cam remains in the highlands. Vickery’s paper, which closes the volume, has been available since 2005 in the format of an even longer (and less well-edited) working paper published online by ARI. It is very good for Campā scholarship that it is now available in print in a more streamlined format free of typographical blemishes. It is an excellent and often convincing deconstruction of some of the fundamental flaws in the received views of ancient Campā, namely (1) ‘that it was predominantly Cham in its ethnicity’, (2) ‘that it remained essentially a single kingdom throughout its history’, and (3) that this history ended with the fall of Vijaya in 1471 (summary taken from Lockhart’s paper, p. 9). But with all the criticism of his historian predecessors, it seems to me that Vickery still fails to strike at the heart of the problem of ancient Campā history: its direct dependence on the outdated results of pre-1930s epigraphical scholarship on texts in Cam language. The results produced before the 1930s were of modest quantity and quality. And due to the loss of interest in epigraphical research among French scholars in the rest of the twentieth century, many inscriptions in Cam language remain unedited, or are edited but untranslated; and many of those which have been studied have not been studied well. The result is that Vickery’s revisionistic effort relies almost entirely on the same set of data that has been available for a century, a set that is heavily skewed in favor of the Sanskrit inscriptions of Campā. Vickery’s most important conclusion, namely that ‘there was never a unified Champa’, as well as the corollary that Campā territories in what is now the Vietnamese province of Quảng Nam were ‘always quite separate from the South (Nha Trang and Phan Rang)’ (pp. 405, 408), appears to me untenable — at least in Vickery’s bold unqualified form — in the light of published and unpublished Cam inscriptions ignored by Vickery (see also the Chinese evidence cautiously treated by G. Wade, p. 141). This is not just a matter of ‘details’ (p. 368). There are two contributions that present Chinese sources relevant to Campā history. The title of Momoki Shiro’s ‘“Mandala Champa” Seen from Chinese Sources’ raises the question of what benefit the author finds in creat- ing pseudo-indigenous terms like ‘Mandala Champa’, which do not exist in any original source. It seems that this author — and he is not the only one — has gotten carried away by some of the tremendously influential work of O.W. Wolters. In my opinion, the dissemination of the very simple Sanskrit word man�d�ala and the political model of Kaut�ilya’s Arthaśāstra as an analytic model for ancient Southeast Asian studies is not one of the elements in Wolters’ work that most deserves to be perpetuated. If an indigenous concept is to be used, why not the ubiquitous nagara Campā? Momoki Shiro’s concept of ‘self-Indianization’ (pp. 123-4) is also rather problematic, for it seems to imply a special case of ‘Indianization’ which would be more autonomous

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than the contemporary processes of acculturation elsewhere in (South and) Southeast Asia. At the empirical level, the author seems to go farther than the data allow in identifying place names in Chinese sources with items of topog- raphy in the Cam inscriptions, for he connects places that seem to have been important to Chinese authors with places that figure only once, and with no particular preeminence, in the corpus of inscriptions (p. 129). I found more successful Geoff Wade’s Sinological contribution focusing on ‘The “Account of Champa” in the Song Huiyao Jigao’. It is based on one particular Chinese source that was finally redacted only as late as the early nineteenth century, but which nevertheless contains a wealth of data on Song-period Campā history, which Wade places at the Chinese-illiterate historian’s disposal. In the useful list of names of Campā rulers who sent missions to China, where Wade provides possible reconstructions of their Cam names, it seems likely that the first two syllables of the name of the wife of the ruler listed for 963, named Bo-liang-pu-mao, represented the Cam title � pu lyan. The reconstruction of the name Śrī Harivarmadeva as responsible for missions in 1010 and 1018, and that of the name Śrī Vikrāntavarmadeva immediately succeeding to him, provides exciting support to the proposal made in BEFEO 95-96, p. 487, to remove the Harivarmadeva placed between Indravarman and Vikrāntavarman in the eighth śaka century and to place the same Harivarmadeva with his son Vikrāntavarman in the tenth century, where the commonly accepted chronology thus far showed a gap. The volume contains some other excellent papers, among which I would like to single out Danny Wong’s lucidly written study of ‘Vietnam-Champa relations during the seventeenth and eighteenth century’, based on a wealth of different primary sources, which illustrate vividly the political continuity of a Campā long after the year 1471 that old-school scholars had declared the end. Of the remaining studies, I cannot mention all, but note that quality is rather variable. A stricter editorial policy might have led to the rejection of some papers, and the careful rewriting of others. Among the somewhat disappointing contributions is that by J.K. Whitmore, entitled ‘The last great king of classical Southeast Asia’. This article appears flawed both by its reli- ance on the problematic (undefinable) category of ‘great king’, and by its complete failure to take into account any other publication of the epigraphical data than Majumdar’s 1927 representation of French research, which was outdated when it appeared. The ‘Chế Bồng Nga’ of Vietnamese sources to which his title alludes was manifestly not the last king of Campā, and it seems a maneuver of unmitigated audacity to proclaim this figure greater than any king known to indigenous sources, which are certainly not lacking, despite this author’s assumption to the contrary (pp. 170, 186). The papers in this volume are carefully copy-edited, but it would have been welcome if the editors had done more to get the contributing authors to

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 366 Book reviews read each other’s papers, so that internal contradictions within the volume ‒ to the extent that they are based on ignorance or misunderstanding of other authors’ work ‒ could have been avoided. Momoki Shiro’s statement on p. 121 about recent archaeological findings and the location of ancient Linyi do not seem to be supported by either of the two archaeological contributions in the volume, Chapters 2 and 3. For that matter, these chapters written by three archaeologists who have carried out field work together, Ian Glover & Nguyễn Kim Dung and Yamagata Mariko, share the presupposition that the early settlement in Quảng Nam can be associated with the name Linyi, known from Chinese sources. Yet this presupposition seems dubious given that ‘the precise location of the capital of Linyi […] remains unknown, but the literary evidence suggests somewhere in the region of modern Huế’ (p. 62); and Michael Vickery agues at length for a different interpretation of Linyi. These two archaeological papers are rich in new data, but there is a degree of overlap in contents, and information is repeated. Also, there is remarkable slippage in the handling of ancient toponymy by some contributors. Note for instance how Indrapura, the ancient site unquestionably identifiable as the Đồng Dương temple in Quảng Nam, is situated by J. Whitmore in ‘Quảng Bình, Quảng Trị, Thừa Thiên’, while it is identified by D. Wong (p. 240) as Trà Kiệu, a wholly different place. Furthermore, Whitmore suggests a North- South relation between Indrapura and Amarāvatī (p. 171), whereas the few occurrences of these names in the sources occur several centuries apart and allow no conclusion with regard to the relative positions of the places they denoted. Better coordination on the part of the editors with regard tothe contributions of the respective authors, and more intervention with regard to such inconsistencies, repetitions, and errors, would have been in order. Authors might also have been encouraged to take better account of publications that have appeared since 2004. All in all, one notes that this volume is much more about the history of Campā, than the ‘Cham of Vietnam’ themselves, and the problematic corre- spondence between ethnic and political categories will no doubt remain the subject of scholarly debate in the coming years, a debate in which French scholars will no doubt have their role to play, but which should certainly take place at the diversely international forum that this volume has opened.

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Krishna Sen and David T. Hill (eds), Politics and the media in twenty-first century Indonesia: Decade of democracy. London and New York: Routledge, 2011, xiii + 204 pp. [Media, Culture and Social Change in Asia 21]. ISBN 9780415476522. Price: GBP 85.00 (hardback).

E.P. WIERINGA University of Cologne [email protected]

The post-Soeharto period since 1998 has seen significant advances in freedom of expression in Indonesia. Yet, as this well-informed and clearly written volume amply demonstrates, intuitive assumptions about a clear positive corre- lation between the slackening of government censorship in tandem with the inexorable expansion of the mediascape and the creation of an open, pluralist democracy are not self-evident truths. This collection of case studies addresses a range of different topics, all dealing with the complicated connection between media and the democratization process in twenty-first century Indonesia. Krishna Sen provides a cogent introduction to the ten subsequent essays, after which Rachmah Ida outlines reorganized patterns of media ownership since the fall of Soeharto, paying special attention to the Jawa Pos Group which has its origins in East Java, but which meanwhile has acquired nation- wide clout via diversified ‘local media’ throughout the archipelago. David T. Hill probes into a most local, if not ephemeral, kind of media as it exists in Papua, asking astute questions about the notion of locality. The issue of local culture is also addressed by Mario Antonius Birowo in his discussion of community radio in Yogyakarta. By contrast, the polyphonic Islamic press in contemporary Indonesia is imbued with national and even global aspirations, but as Budi Irawanto shows, it is hampered in practice by poor fund- ing and amateurish incompetence. The chapters by Janet Steele and Ignatius Haryanto are concerned with practical matters about making the news, and both articles in their own ways are quite revealing about the cynicism of market-driven journalism. Birgit Bräuchler describes media practices, which may have either inflaming or pacifying effects in conflicts, focusing upon the bloody interreligious violence in the Moluccas. Using the term ‘meta-journalism’, Edwin Jurriëns looks at the critical discussion on media in several media-watch formats. Hapsari Dwiningtyas Sulistyani is the only contribu- tor examining entertainment media, discussing the way in which women are represented in the films Pasir Berbisik (2001) and Berbagi Suami (2006). Although she applauds both films for criticizing reigning patriarchal values, she nonetheless contends that contemporary Indonesian women’s films still contain what she calls ‘residual influences’ of New Order gender ideology.

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Arguably saving the best for last, the final essay by Jennifer Lindsay carefully analyses the debates over pornography, which have attracted quite some attention, both nationally and internationally, due to the highly controversial anti-pornography bill, which was endorsed by parliament in 2008. Whereas during Soeharto’s dictatorial New Order the media were heavily censored while the armed forces effectively controlled the ballot boxes, in the post-authoritarian era ambitious politicos are keenly seeking the favours of the media, hoping to turn media support into votes from the masses. The fact is that meanwhile media tycoons have become high-profile politicians themselves: for example, media mogul Aburizal Bakrie (repeatedly referred to in this book) served as Coordinating Minister for Economy and Coordi- nating Minister for People’s Welfare, respectively, from 2004 until 2009, and since 2009 has been Chairman of Golkar, the country’s second largest political party. Several chapters in this book do not cast the erstwhile CEO of the Jawa Pos Group, Dahlan Iskan, in a particularly favourable light. He is accused of having been involved in electoral money politics (p. 20), and is described as a shrewd businessman who puts profit above all else (p. 95; compare p. 123 about his establishment of the Muslim mouthpiece Ambon Ekspres at the time of the Moluccan conflict). However, in October 2011, not very long after this book went into print, the media baron was appointed as Minister of State-Owned Enterprizes. This, then, is a timely book with a diverse array of valuable contributions exploring issues very much in the forefront of contemporary Indonesian politics and media.

Andrew N. Weintraub (ed.), Islam and popular culture in Indonesia and Malaysia, London: Routledge, 2011, xv + 259 pp. ISBN 9780415565189. (hardback); 9780203829004 (ebook). Price: USD 90.00.

ANDY FULLER International Institute of Asian Studies, Leiden [email protected]

Weintraub’s edited volume on Islam and popular culture explores films, music, essays in popular newspapers, and the internet, showing some of the ways Islam is referenced and reproduced in Indonesia and Malaysia today. The survey of material is not complete, but the approaches show a broad range of studies – this may be typical of an emerging area of research. Though fragmentary, Weintraub and contributors do show the range with which the subject is approached, and highlight some of the trends in production and

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 369 consumption of popular culture. The book explores the dynamics of Islamic and Muslim identities in the political economy of popular culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. As a theme, ‘Islam and popular culture’ makes sense, but in practice, it is rather dubious to set formal boundaries for what is and what is not ‘Islamic’ or even ‘popular’. For instance, pesantren are seemingly popular and attended by students who actively consume Western pop songs; they refer to popular films, they are knowledgeable and active users of Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and whichever other popular website or platform. But, perhaps because the institutions of pesantren are largely tied up with theology, tradition, and religious authority, these vast sites of contention, debate, and consumption are largely excluded from this study of ‘Islam and Popular Culture in Indonesia and Malaysia’. Weintraub draws the limits of the book’s scope by arguing that ‘Islam in popular culture is particularly powerful in Southeast Asia where localized, flexible, and widespread forms of “popular Islam” have existed for centuries’ (p. 1). Rather than focusing on the centuries old forms of popular Islam, however, the book focuses on more recent manifestations. This book is divided into four parts. The first deals with institutions, with chapters by Ishadi S.K., Raju, and Heryanto. Part two addresses ‘social processes of media production’ with chapters by Sutton, Ali, and Krier. Part three is titled ‘Islamic perspectives on film, music, and literature’, with chapters by Dan, Omar, Berg, and Irama. The final part looks at ‘representations, values and meanings’ in chapters by Khoo, Brenner, and Barendregt. In the introduction, Weintraub states that ‘popular culture and Islam have become mutually constitutive as sites for defining Muslim lives in the Malay world’ (p. 3). This seems a stretch: surely, many Muslims see their identity also closely aligned with theology (which the book doesn’t ‘focus on per se’) than with popular culture. That the particular kinds of popular culture studied in this book are prevalent and ubiquitous, however, may suggest that Islamic theology in the Malay world is somewhat accommodating the many aspects of everyday life the book addresses. The editor and contributors to the volume reveal many of the ways in which Islam is appropriated and how Muslim identity is shaped and negoti- ated; nevertheless, some readers may be left with an empty feeling: is this all there is? While it is a relief not to be confronted with a text that is strict on defining where Islam is heading or how Muslim intellectuals are interpreting the Qur’an, this book could have benefitted from a more thorough engagement with such issues rather than ignoring the contentious state of Islam within contemporary Indonesia and Malaysia. These debates, too, are part of popular culture, but perhaps are not as fashionable as some of the works cited throughout the volume. Berg’s chapter is one of the few that looks at regional Indonesia. Her chapter explores the multi-layered meanings that are

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 370 Book reviews applied to orkes gambus performance. She concludes ‘adopting Arab music and aesthetics to fit their needs, Arab Indonesians use global cultural symbols to define what it is to be Muslim in Indonesia today’ (p. 181). Muhammad Ali’s chapter gives an analysis of the discourses developed by the Jaringan Islam Liberal (JIL, Liberal Islamic Network). He shows how a liberal Islamic identity is handled and debated through online discussions. This chapter is clearly and lightly written (without the jargon, frequent self- referencing, and over-punctuation of some other chapters), but some of its rea- soning seems flawed. For example, Ali comes up with this curious statement: ‘Before the Internet, Muslim thinkers and activists could only meet face-to-face to express and discuss their views’ (p. 102). Books, journals, newspapers, radio and the telephone had already been carrying out this seemingly Internet- only function for quite some time. Nonetheless, Ali’s chapter combines mild enthusiasm for the opportunities of online debate with the caution that it also provides new arenas for particular cliques to communicate with each another. That is, the JIL discussion group and website merely preaches to the converted. Ali’s chapter provides a balance of an analysis of popular culture with that of a study of interpretation. The volume benefits from the contribution by Rhoma Irama – a dangdut legend in Indonesia. Irama was steadfastly critical of such pop stars as Inul Daratista, whom he accused of cheapening and betraying dangdut. In his chapter, Irama, gives a long description about how he struggled to uphold the legitimacy of combining Islamic faith with popular music, but fails to acknowledge his responsibility in censoring other aspiring performers who have become his competition. Popular culture in Irama’s case cannot be separated from particular interpretations of Islam. Not wanting to address theology, however, the book pays little attention to such crossovers. It is troubling that politicized or politically critical popular culture has been excluded from this volume. The book eschews a popular culture that shows young, emerging, and self-avowedly Muslim youths and middle- classes actively embracing a critical and combative understanding of Islam. The sample of popular culture appears thin, a reduced and caricatured Islam. ‘Popular culture’ is a blurry category, but Weintraub seems to have a narrow but unstated idea of what does and does not pertain. The film and book, Ayat-ayat cinta, are discussed several times, yet other forms of popular Islamic culture in Indonesia barely rate a mention. Thursday morning prayer groups for women are indeed popular. MTQ (Qur’an-Reading Contests) are popular and seemingly ubiquitous. The Majelis Rassullah draws tens of thousands of people to the national event on the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday. Is this not popular culture? What about the weekly sermons that provide quotations and discussions of the Qur’an? These are also elements of Islamic popular culture in Indonesia, yet they receive short shrift from the editor and his contributors. They overcompensate for the familiar problem of conflating Islam

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 371 with Islamism, violence, and aggression by going to the other extreme and ignoring the potential for Islam’s political expression. It is ironic that some chapters in this book on popular culture are laden with academic jargon and obfuscation. Popular culture is loose, moves fast, and transfers easily. Popular culture with ‘mutually constitutive’ Islam clearly takes many forms: this book focuses on some of them. The recent cancellation of Lady Gaga’s concert in Jakarta shows how difficult it is to separate popular culture from trends in theology, interpretation, and politics. This case shows the complex and porous political and social dynamics of Islam and popular culture in Indonesia and Malaysia. That this book excludes such phenomena shows its limitations, but the material it does cover has a useful place in contemporary debates.

Meredith L. Weiss, Student activism in Malaysia: Crucible, mirror, sideshow. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, and Singapore: NUS Press, 2011, 302 pp. ISBN 9780877277842. Price: USD 46.95 (hardback), 9780877277545, 23.95 (paperback).

RICHARD BAXSTROM University of Edinburgh Richard. [email protected]

In light of the recent protests that have been taking place in Malaysia over electoral reform and the seemingly intractable problem of government cor- ruption and mismanagement, Meredith L. Weiss’ book Student activism in Malaysia: Crucible, mirror, sideshow (2011) has the rare distinction of being a truly timely piece of scholarship. The book, largely historical in its approach, is organized as a chronological unfolding of the saga of student activism and the formation of institutions of higher education in Malaysia (and, to some degree, Singapore) from the last half of the twentieth century and into the present. While the sheer density of the story Weiss has to tell may be daunting to non-specialists, her prose is sharp and the book has a clear utility for anyone wishing to gain a better understanding of Malaysian educational institutions, the shifting subjectivity of ‘the student’, and some general appreciation of the wider forces at work in the formation of post-independence Malaysia. Weiss’ basic argument is that the Malaysian state, after a period of uneven but very active engagement in the period immediately following the independence of Malaya from Britain, (roughly 1957-1974) the Malaysian state has pursued a coordinated, active policy of ‘intellectual containment’ in regard to university students and lecturers (1974-present). This dynamic, coercive strat-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access 372 Book reviews egy has in turn hampered political expression on university campuses and has, over time, produced an environment of passivity and acquiescence in Malaysian institutions of higher education. The general arc of this argument is convincing in Weiss’ telling and she is very effective in demonstrating its validity through the citation of a wealth of archival and interview materials. Thus, as a historical guide, the book has an unsurpassed value as a critical reference for those interested in Malaysian political activism and governance. If anything, however, Weiss’ skill in linking the history of institutions to the forms of life they in turn work to produce has rendered the stated title of the book somewhat misleading, as what the book really offers is a very complete account of the formation and workings of state educational institutions rather than a more personalized or tightly focused narrative of student radicalism or activism as such. Correctly noting that the subject position of ‘the student’ is highly complex, Weiss seeks to give analytic definition to this category in the first chapter. Her detailed attention to the multiplicity of this category is clear and functions effectively to support the argument that the Malaysian state begins to aggres- sively pursue tactics of ‘intellectual containment’ in response to campus activism from the 1970s. Surprisingly, however, Weiss gives almost no sustained attention to the related difficulty of defining ‘activism’ as a distinct practice. Largely working from an implied definition that autonomous, oppositional, loosely humanist activities around issues of poverty, justice, and rights is what constitutes ‘activism’, this somewhat taken-for-granted position has consequences for what Weiss argues later in the text. At times this lack of definition regarding activism as an identifiable practice hampers our understanding of the specific groups that are discussed; in my view, this is particularly true of the myriad dakwah oriented groups that have been active since the 1970s. While Weiss does pay careful attention to protests and the other activities of such groups that broadly conform to her implied definition, it is arguably the case that the truly radical forms of activism practiced by such groups are to be found in the study groups, marriage classes, and efforts to transform the ‘backward’ or ‘un-Islamic’ adat-based practices of the student’s parents and grandparents back home. Such activities, although largely missing from the narrative, are relevant to the story Weiss wishes to tell, as these efforts often originated from campus organizing in some form. Furthermore, the Malaysian state (and by extension Malaysian universities) have made a transformed version of the logic, tactics, and aspirations of these student dakwah groups central to their own efforts to create a cohesive (albeit racialized and exclusiv- ist) Malaysian national subject. Arguably, dakwah-inspired activist groups are therefore the most successful of this type in the history of the nation; limited to Weiss’ unstated limit of what ‘activism’ constitutes, however, these groups only appear as one of a multitude of others in her narrative.

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There are larger issues in Weiss’ normative understanding of activism. In particular, by ascribing the possibility of ‘being activist’ by default to ‘the student’, Weiss misses the fact that the most actively radical force in postcolonial Malaysia is the state itself, which is somewhat puzzling given the wealth of empirical data to this effect that is cited in the book. Although contrary to the liberal ideal asserted in Europe and North America (an ideal I generally share with the author), the anti-democratic and coercive form of ‘the university’ that has been created in Malaysia nevertheless ‘works’ (effectively, but imperfectly, as the aforementioned protests demonstrate) to the extent that it produces a particular kind of student/subject in relation to broader ideals associated with Islam, citizenship, and governance. Weiss recognizes this, but cannot say much more about how it operates to not only produce the intellectual containment she argues for but also to form the very subjects that she takes as the focus of her book. As the state most often appears to be solely a reactive and oppressive force in her analysis, Weiss misses the opportunity to understand in scholarly terms precisely how ‘activist’ the Malaysian state really is (particularly true during the years Mahathir Mohamad was Prime Minister 1981-2003) and how intellectual containment on university campuses is itself derived from a set of radical strategies rather than simply out of violent elite conservatism or static bureaucratic inertia. In light of Weiss’ own practical demonstration of how wide-reaching and complex this process is, the almost throwaway summary analysis of ‘[i]n a Gramscian sense, [the students] are complicit in their own subordination’ (p. 278) seems inadequate to the rigorous historical account that constitutes the heart of the work. My criticism of these elements of Weiss’ analysis should not obscure my admiration for the book as a whole; nor should the frankly sobering conclu- sions that Weiss offers deter the positive value of the work for specialists and general readers alike. Seeing in detail how generations of university students have been severely circumscribed in their political expression and pulled in conflicting directions by an activist and radical style of governance is illuminating and Weiss has made a great contribution to our understanding of this crucial aspect of Malaysian public life. By offering this rigorous and well-written account of how intellectual containment operates on Malaysian university campuses, Weiss helps us to think more decisively in making sense of the suppression, exclusion, and silencing of some of the most able minds Malaysia has seen, both the recognizable (Jomo K.S.; P Ramasamy) and the lesser-known (Hishamuddin Rais – truly one of the most creative and daring intellectuals in Malaysia’s young history). Student activism in Malaysia: Cruci- ble, mirror, sideshow provides an avenue to gain a deeper understanding of a situation that demands more than the frequently justified but intellectually limiting anger, disbelief, and incomprehension that it often provokes from scholars, journalists, and activists both inside and outside of Malaysia.

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Widjojo Nitisastro, The Indonesian development experience: A collection of writings and speeches of Widjojo Nitisastro. Singapore: ISEAS, 2011, xxxii + 343 pp. ISBN 9789814311755. Price: USD 49.00 (paperback).

J. THOMAS LINDBLAD Leiden University [email protected]

Widjojo Nitisastro passed away on 9 March 2012 at the age of 84. On various occasions colleagues and friends celebrated him as the dalang of Indone- sia’s rapid growth under Soeharto, but strangely, until the current volume appeared in its Indonesian version in 2010,1 his own ideas and opinions had not yet been presented in a comprehensive or systematic fashion. For that reason alone, this book is of great value for all students of Indonesia’s recent economic history. Widjojo received his PhD in economics at the University of California at Berkeley in 1961. Not accidentally, the team of former class mates that became key economic advisers in Indonesia under Soeharto was colloquially desig- nated as the ‘Berkeley Mafia’. In 1962, Widjojo was appointed professor at the young Faculty of Economics at the University of Indonesia, Jakarta; the current publication opens with his inaugural lecture. During the dramatic shift from Soekarno’s Old Order (Orde Lama) to Soeharto’s New Order (Orde Baru) regime in 1966, Widjojo in a seminar organized by students told the public what was going wrong in the Indonesian economy. This talk forms the second contribution to the volume. In 1967, Widjojo became head of the powerful Badan Perencanaan Pembangunan Nasional, (Bappenas, National Development Planning Board) and from 1971 he held various key ministerial posts in the field of economic policy. Also after retiring from an official cabinet post in 1983, he continued to serve as President Soeharto’s chief economic adviser. No other policymaker has been so strongly involved in shaping Indonesia’s impressive economic performance from the late 1960s to the late 1990s. The book is divided into six parts. The first part, ‘Planning of Indonesia’s development’, is largely chronologically arranged with several comments on legislative texts in 1966 following the two pieces mentioned above. Then the chronology is abandoned with the oldest of the remaining 28 documents, dating from 1969, bearing number 20 and the youngest one, from 1997, bearing number 13. For readers interested in the consistency of Widjojo’s thinking over time, a stricter chronological arrangement might have been more useful. The second part of the volume is framed in as general terms as the pre- ceding one and carries the heading ‘Implementation of Indonesia’s develop-

1 Nitisastro 2010. This book is discussed in a review article by McCawley 2011.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 10:55:51PM via free access Book reviews 375 ment’. It contains scattered points on policy issues playing a role in the late 1980s and the 1990s, including reactions to changes in the oil prices and how to take hard but necessary decisions. Things grow more specific in the third part, labelled ‘Facing various economic crises’. The dangers of excessive foreign debt and the repercussions of falling oil prices are dealt with in detail, as is the scandal of the Pertamina crisis in 1975. Readers will be surprised to see no reference here to the financial crisis that struck Indonesia in 1997. At seventy, looking back on three decades of intimate involvement in economic policy-making, Widjojo surely must have had ideas about what was happening but he kept them to himself. The fourth, fifth, and sixth parts focus on more specific topics, respectively ‘Settlement of foreign debt’, ‘Equitable development’, and ‘Indonesia and the world’. His viewpoints are well articulated and interesting, not least because of the key position he occupied. Despite what the label may suggest, the final part is not so much about Indonesia and the current period of globalization, but instead explores Indonesia’s role in the world of developing countries, a perspective that for a historian brings to mind the Asia-Africa Conference in Bandung in 1955. Widjojo Nitisastro was an enormously effective economic policymaker rather than an eminent scholar. His contributions to theory remained limited and no reader should shy away from this book out of fear of complicated jargon or complex math. Here lies, I think, an important lesson that we can draw from this book. Good economic policy is a matter of common sense, clever judgement, caution, and consistency. In short, these 30 documents in this source publication underscore the essential pragmatism of Widjojo and his team of technocrats. Widjojo was a man of style and discretion. Above all, he was Javanese. One need not expect any embarrassing disclosures in this book about his relationship with the general with whom he co-operated for so long in shaping the future of the Indonesian economy.

References

McCawley, Peter 2011 ‘Widjojo Nitisastro and Indonesian development’, Bulletin of Indonesian Economic Studies 47:1:87-103. Nitisastro, Widjojo 2010 Pengalaman pembangunan Indonesia: Kumpulan tulisan dan uraian Widjojo Nitisastro. Jakarta: Buku Penerbit Kompas.

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