Book reviews

Michael Goddard, The unseen city; Anthropological perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Pandanus (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University), 2005, 225 pp. ISBN 1740761340. Price: AUD 31.78 (paperback).

CATO BERG University of Bergen [email protected]

The main ethnographical contribution of this work lies in the way Goddard engages contemporary myths about town sociality and reveals how stereo­ types persist, particularly those concerning the social composition of settle­ ments and raskol gangs. The chapters, based on a series of previously published articles, form a coherent whole, ranging in theme from settlements, gangs, local courts, and moneylending, to village courts as ‘the state visible in society’ and restorative justice in relation to generational conflicts. Chapter 1 takes the lead in Goddard’s quest to dispense with urban myths, depicting how ‘squatter settlements’ are rather organized and coher­ ent in relation to lawlessness and employment. Chapter 2 offers a detailed analysis of the (former) village court system, which is now also prevalent in the suburbs of Port Moresby. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the concept of raskols, with the social composition of raskol gangs, and with some interesting sociological data concerning gang members’ educational levels, their ties to the wider social world, and their careers in organized crime. Chapter 5 deals in detail with informal usury, and uses data from court cases to demonstrate the prevalence of this phenomenon in town. Although outlawed by the state and highly problematic according to Melanesian views on reciprocity and exchange, the wide prevalence of informal usury indicates that there may be more to our conventional notions of reciprocity in relation to money than has been assumed. Chapter 6, Reto’s Chance, gives in-depth data on the careers of two different magistrates at a local court in Port Moresby, and is used by Goddard to argue for the presence of a state in society. Chapter 7, framed around the concept of restorative justice, vividly describes how village elders today engage with the wider temptations for their youth in alcohol consump­ tion and the urban lights. In sum, Goddard’s monograph is a valuable contribution to urban anthro­ pology, and has wider comparative value for the themes discussed and the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 299 questions asked. Not least, the chapter on urban settlements reveals how much weight is given to stereotypes and rumours in the construction of a place such as Port Moresby. The discussion on land and squatters can be seen as the local playing out of a social drama that also takes place in areas such as Port Vila and Honiara, where squatting played a major role in the riots and violent conflict from 1999 onwards. Apart from the relevance for discus­ sions of so-called third world towns throughout the world, Goddard argues convincingly for the importance of ethnographic context, and that each town must be seen in its own right. My only criticism is a minor one: the addition of maps of Port Moresby would have greatly assisted the reader, and also made the book more acces­ sible to an audience not intimately familiar with the region. Apart from this minuscule flaw, I believe Goddard’s book is an important contribution to ur­ ban anthropology, both in Port Moresby and elsewhere in Oceania.

R.A. Cramb, Land and longhouse; Agrarian transformation in the uplands­ of Sarawak. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2007, xxii + 422 pp. ISBN 9788776940102. Price: GBP 25.00 (paperback).

HAROLD BROOKFIELD Australian National University [email protected]

Rob Cramb, agricultural economist by profession, has spent a major part of his working life studying agricultural and social change among the western Iban of Sarawak. His involvement began as an Australian volunteer with the Department of Agriculture, then as a doctoral student, and thenceforward as an academic specializing in rural development. In the late 1970s, he selected two longhouses in the hills of the upper Saribas river, and visited them at intervals until 2001. They are the pivot of an historical study of change in rural Sarawak which he has expanded back into the pre-colonial period and forward to the year 2005. The durability of the longhouse territory through all the many colonial and post-colonial changes is a central theme in a remarkable longitudinal analysis of rural adaptation to external forces. Cramb has drawn heavily on the anthropological literature, beginning with Freeman’s pioneer study of the upriver Iban of central Sarawak. Like subsequent writers, he dissents from Freeman’s criticisms of Iban agricul­ tural practice. In going beyond the early anthropological writers, he adopts a diachronic approach through some three centuries to argue – as anthropolo­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 300 Book reviews gist Michael Dove remarks in a Foreword that can itself serve as a laudatory review of Cramb’s book – that their land-use system ‘has been sustainable for this entire period of time’ (p. xii). Noteworthy among Cramb’s sources are the archived court records from the later nineteenth century onward, concerning a great number of land disputes which, once warfare was put down by the early Brooke administration, fell within the purview of a hierarchical legal system. Decisions raised many principles of customary law (adat) to the sta­ tus of case judgements under the English common-law system that has per­ sisted into modern independent Malaysia. Thus, even as recently as 2005, the High Court upheld the principle of common tenure to longhouse territories notwithstanding the fact that a 1930s intention to map and register these ter­ ritories has never been put into practice. The considerable detail in which the more significant of these judgements is presented nowhere becomes tedious and enriches the whole book. This continuity contrasts with major changes in the Iban economy. Until lately, it revolved around hill-rice, with some swamp-rice in wetland pockets and with groves of tree-crops used for their fruit and nuts, as well as tradeable products obtained from the forest and fallow. Rubber, a long-enduring tree crop, was added in the early twentieth century, and cocoa and pepper after mid-century. Emphasis between food and cash crops has varied with the fluc­ tuating prices of the latter, but by the 1990s many farmers had ceased to plant rice, and relied almost entirely on pepper, rubber, and other cash-earning activ­ ities. What looked at mid-century like an emerging shortage of land for rice as population grew had become an abundance of land by 2000. Saribas Iban even sought support to use some of this very unsuitable steep land for oil palm. Around all this was an almost complete reversal of official policy in rela­ tion to indigenous land and enterprise between the protectiveness of the early Brooke administration and the top-down planning under the long-enduring reign of Abdul Taib Mahmud as chief minister of Sarawak within modern Malaysia. Not only was the land code progressively modified to make easier the dispossession of indigenes from the land they claimed but which the state wanted for timber extraction or oil-palm plantations, but successive state agencies progressively detached management from the local to the central. SALCRA (the state equivalent of the federal FELCRA) offered local ownership of managed rural development, but the post-1980 Land Custody and Development Authority organized schemes in collaboration with private enterprise while, at the same time, large areas of land claimed (and in many instances used) by indigenous farmers were alienated to big companies, first in the timber business and then in plantations of pulpwood and oil palm. The long-settled Saribas Iban suffered little loss of land, but the more recently settled Iban and others in the undulating country of northern Sarawak suf­ fered heavily, and were severely penalized for their resistance.

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Cramb discusses these events in Chapters 8 and 9, and does so in a more measured way than did politically engaged Malaysian writers in the high days of conflict between indigenous people and the timber industry - for example, Hong (1987). The speed with which oil palm, and to a lesser extent timber planted for pulpwood, would become dominant as the natural timber resource quickly became exhausted was not appreciated by twentieth-century writers, including this reviewer (Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995). Cramb was more watchful, and in this book it is the state-sponsored drive for mas­ sive palm-oil production that dominates the post-1980s scene. To Cramb this is ‘high modernism’, imposed in a manner that compares in its methods and effects with the ‘enclosures’ of early-modern Europe. The view of the Sarawak government since the 1980s has been that rural development takes place best if it is in the hands of commercial entrepreneurs, operating on a large scale. Cramb notes the close links between the politicians and their clients among the developers. It is all very similar to what has happened over the border in Indonesian Borneo, but instead of developing this comparison he chooses to widen the discussion from the Saribas to cases in Sumatra, Sulawesi, and the Philippines. To this reviewer, the final chapter in which these comparisons are presented is the weakest part of the book. Otherwise, this is a profound and revealing analysis of complex inter­ related events. It offers a combination of depth and painstaking analysis of Iban adaptation to change, sometimes taking advantage of, sometimes resist­ ing external initiatives, but never passively accepting directives from above. The book is an insightful addition to the literature on Southeast Asia, unusual in both its historical depth and its well-balanced analysis of post-1945 change. It is, moreover, a book of profound scholarship that is easy to read.

References

Brookfield, Harold, Lesley Potter and Yvonne Byron 1995 In place of the forest; Environmental and socio-economic transformation in Borneo and the eastern Malay Peninsula. Tokyo: United Nations University Press. Hong, Evelyne 1987 Natives of Sarawak; Survival in Borneo’s vanishing forests. Pulau Pinang (Malaysia): Institut Masyarakat.

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Natasha Stacey, Boats to burn; Bajo fishing activity in the Australian fishing zone. Canberra: The Australian National University E Press, 2007, xix + 222 pp. ISBN 9781920942946. Price: AUD 24.95 (paper­ back).

CYNTHIA CHOU University of Copenhagen [email protected]

Natasha Stacey raises three important questions in her ethnography of the dire consequences faced by the Bajo who fish within the Australian Fishing Zone in the Arafura and Timor seas that link Australia and Indonesia: What is ‘culture’? How should ‘cultural continuity’ be conceptualized? And: what is the notion of ‘tradition’? Stacey answers these questions by providing a thought-provoking discussion about Australian versus Bajo cross-cultural perceptions of maritime cultural traditions. The Bajo are a group of ‘sea nomads’ in Southeast Asia who have been engaged in maritime activities in the seas of Southeast Asia and northern Australia for centuries. Collecting marine resources for personal consump­ tion and international trade has always been their way of life. Today, because of recent Australian maritime territorial expansions and government poli­ cies that impose newly imagined political borders and restricted zones, Bajo migratory and fishing patterns are challenged and severely hampered. Stacey’s ethnography focuses on a group of Bajo who originate from two villages in the Tukang Besi Islands of Southeast Sulawesi, but who have now migrated to the Tanjung Pasir settlement in the village of Pepela on Roti Island. The ethnography begins with a critical gaze at the issue central to the contest for rights of access to marine resources in the Timor and Arafura seas between Indonesian fishermen and the Australian government. The problem pivots on a 1974 Memorandum of Understanding which declares that only ‘Indonesian traditional fishermen using traditional methods and traditional vessels consistent with the tradition over decades of time, which does not include fishing methods or vessels utilizing motors or engines’ (p. 2)are allowed to fish within a limited area. From the start, Stacey points out the Australian authorities’ grave misunderstanding of indigenous peoples’ cul­ tures. Through the Australian government’s lenses, tinged by an evolutionary perspective of understanding the ‘Other’, ‘traditional’ Bajo maritime culture is construed as primitive, untouched, and static. Yet interestingly – and in great contrast – change and dynamism are seen as very well accommodated in Australian ‘culture’. The second, third, and fourth chapters of the book discuss how tradi­ tion and cultural continuity are understood and acted out by the Bajo. The

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 303 ethnographic data presented in these chapters concerning Bajo origins and dispersion throughout the region, their settlement history, world views, and maritime world together make a persuasive argument that Bajo ‘traditional’ culture has through the centuries always explored creative potentials and been imbued with change and dynamism. The latter half of the book is devoted to a detailed discussion of the devel­ opments of Australian maritime expansion and fisheries policies, Australian legislative measures, and Bajo perceptions of these policies. The book con­ cludes with a critical exposition on the concepts of ‘culture’, ‘cultural conti­ nuity’, ‘tradition’, and ‘traditional’. Indeed, it is a challenge for all interested in the study of culture to reconceptualize such terms to arrive at new defi­ nitions informed by indigenous experience. It is somewhat unfortunate that this important discussion of concepts central to the book has been left to the very end. The framework of the book would have been better defined and greatly enhanced if some of this discussion had appeared in the introduc­ tory chapter. What is missing too is a critical explication of the concepts of ‘modern’, ‘modernity’, ‘borders’, and ‘sovereignty’. Illuminating these issues would have deepened the discussion of culture and cultural continuity con­ siderably. However, Stacey should not be too severely criticized for not ex­ ploring these concepts in any substantive manner. She has compensated for these oversights by widening the scope of her discussion in many other ways. This work certainly also brings to our attention many other complex cultural, political, and economic issues. It challenges us to ponder the relationship be­ tween Australia and Southeast Asia, as well as public policy issues in regard to indigenous peoples’ rights of access to resources, management policies, and territorial rights.

Paul d’Arcy, The people of the sea; Environment, identity and history in Oceania. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006, xvii + 292 pp. ISBN 0824829599, price USD 36.00 (hardback); 9780824832971, USD 25.00 (paperback).

H.J.M. CLAESSEN Leiden University [email protected]

In this book Paul d’Arcy, who teaches Pacific and environmental history at the Australian National University, presents a detailed ‘re-evaluation of the sea’s influence in Oceanic history’ (back cover). In practice he limits himself to ‘Remote Oceania’. This label, coined by Roger Green in 1991, encompasses

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Polynesia, Micronesia, and the eastern part of Melanesia, thus superseding the traditional tripartite division devised by Dumont d’Urville in 1831 (on which see Tom Ryan, 2002, in the Journal of Pacific History 22:157-86, especially pp. 184-5). D’Arcy’s book is well documented, including 981 footnotes and a bibliography of 35 pages. One may wonder why D’Arcy first mentions the complete titles of books or journals in the footnotes, and then repeats them all in his bibliography. This seems a little overdone. It soon becomes clear that D’Arcy has left no stone unturned to find data for his discourse. Several quite unknown authors have been unearthed and used (Jaques Arago, 1823; John Davis, 1808; George Keate, 1788), as well as numerous other works hardly known to the general reader, such as the publications of the German Südsee Expedition from 1908 to 1910 (albeit as translated for the Human Relations Area Files). The scope of his reading is impressive, and the mass of data notwithstanding, the author succeeds remarkably well in managing it all. His book is clear and well written. The essence of The people of the sea is a description and analysis of the complex relationship between the island peoples and the surrounding sea. D’Arcy distinguishes between the inhabitants of the large, high islands and those who live on small coral atolls. Although in both cases the sea is dominant and always nearby, for the coral islanders the sea is very near. Their islands are low, and cover but a limited area. From their earliest youth the coral islanders are at home on and in the water. The residents of the high islands often live at a considerable distance from the sea. This difference comes to the fore strongly in the chapters in which seafaring and canoes are discussed. On the small islands every man can steer his canoe, though only a few of them reach the status of navigator – the man who steers his boat safely over long distances. The knowledge of such navigators is impressive. They know by heart the routes to a great number of islands, which means that they are familiar with a great number of star paths, currents, sea birds, and so on. In the large islands, such as Tahiti, Tonga, and Hawai’i, seamanship is lost to many and in fact limited to those who live near the shore; the navigators here are members of noble families. D’Arcy presents detailed discussions of canoe building, sea travel, and naval battles. Interestingly, he then wonders (p. 176) to what extent the findings on the art of navigation in Remote Oceania disprove Andrew Sharp’s theory of ‘accidental voyages’. It is not a matter, however, of proving or disproving; these findings only demonstrate, as might be expected, that Sharp’s theory is not universally valid. Some voyages were accidental, others were deliberate. The coming of the Europeans largely destroyed the traditional art of sea­ faring – although Ben Finney still found a navigator (from Micronesia) who in 1976 was able to use traditional navigation techniques to steer the experi­ mental double canoe Hokule’a from Hawai’i to Tahiti, a distance of over 5,000

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 305 kilometres, in thirty days. D’Arcy’s book is a must for everyone interested in the past of Oceania, and his bibliography is a treasure chest of known and unknown publications.

Russell Jones (general editor), C.D. Grijns, and Jan W. de Vries (eds), Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007, xxxix + 360 pp. ISBN 9789067183048. Price: EUR 59.90 (hard­ back).

NIKOLAOS VAN DAM Ambassador of the Netherlands in Jakarta [email protected]

Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay is the impressive result of decades of painstaking work by various scholars, all specialists in one or more of the languages from which the collected loan-words (some 20,000) originate. It is not a full etymological dictionary, but rather a dictionary of foreign (that is, non-Nusantara) loan-words in Indonesian and Malay. Seven lists, encompassing ten different donor languages, were compiled under the aegis of the Indonesian Etymological Project (started in 1973) by J.G. de Casparis and G.E. Marrison (Sanskrit), Russell Jones (Arabic and Persian), N.G. Phillips (Hindi), John Chipperfield and A. Govindankutty Menon (Tamil), Russell Jones (Chinese), C.D. Grijns, J.W. de Vries and L. Santa Maria (Dutch, English and Portuguese), and Masanori Sato (Japanese). As explained in the introduction, this compilation is not the result of a single homogeneous project. The lists of loan-words from the various source languages were compiled independently at different times, and the material has not always been handled in the same way. Work on some of the lists was substantially completed as much as a decade before publication. Words have been included which were recorded at some time and in some source, but which in many cases are no longer current in modern standard Indonesian and Malay. Many non-standard spellings have been included as they were found in some variety of Malay or Indonesian. This list ‘serve[s] to extend the range of standard dictionaries to a certain extent by including these unconventional spellings’ (p. viii). The authors have tried to include as many words as possible whose origins are obscure to modern readers. They gathered a variety of notes on the separate entries, but for the sake of economy this ‘final’ publication has excluded nearly all of them. ‘When the corpus is set up in a website, it should be possible to edit and re-insert many of these notes. Sometimes they are valuable, for example when they record the occurrence of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 306 Book reviews a rare word in an obscure dictionary, or in a Malay manuscript.’ (pp. viii-ix). No indication is given, however, whether such a website will ever be avail­ able. In a similar vein, Russell Jones refers to making the list of Arabic loan- words available electronically, so as to make it easier for Arabists to identify all the Indonesian words originating from the same Arabic root. Fortunately, however, the latter is already possible to some extent through Russell Jones’s earlier publication on Arabic loan-words in Indonesian (1978). The book focuses on loan-words from languages outside Nusantara, that is non-Austronesian languages. Words deriving from Javanese, Sundanese or Minangkabau, for example, have not been investigated. An exception is made for the many loan-words from Sanskrit which have entered Indonesian via Old Javanese. The authors have tried to identify loan-words as they were in the donor lan­ guage immediately before they passed into Indonesian. The word ‘razzia’ (raid), for example, is clearly of Arabic origin (ghazwa), but it has come into Indonesian via the Dutch ‘razzia’ and is therefore counted as a Dutch loan-word. The authors note that they have always been conscious of the fact that their ‘identification of the provenance of a loan-word is based on probability rather than conclusive evidence’ (p. xii). To enable the interested user to find the original of the loan-word in the source language, the page number in a well-known bilingual dictionary is provided where the source of the word can be found. This is done for six languages (Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Tamil) in which finding the word in a dictionary is less than straightforward. The aim is to enable the reader to examine the word in its own linguistic context. The book provides a useful introduction to the influences of the ten main donor languages on Malay and Indonesian. The earlier published checklists of loan-words from Sanskrit (De Casparis 1997), Arabic and Persian (Russell Jones 1978), and of European origin (Grijns, De Vries, and Santa Maria 1984), have, according to the introduction, been superseded by the present work. Nevertheless, these previous studies remain valuable because they contain information which has - sometimes unfortunately - been omitted in the new collective work. In his previous wordlist (1978) Russell Jones explained that his investigation was focused specifically on root forms. By way of example, syair is included, but not its various derivatives, such as bersyair, menyairkan, kepenyairan. This useful explanation is not included in the introduction to the new book and might have been instructive to those not aware of it. In the introductory section on Arabic and Persian, Stuart Campbell notes that ‘it is clear that a large proportion of Malay/Indonesian words with Arabic cognates arrived not directly from Arabic but via the medium of Persianised Indian languages spoken by the traders and missionaries from India. In more recent times, words have been borrowed directly from Arabic’ (p. xxiii). On

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 307 the other hand, Campbell observes: ‘The Arabic loan-words have been con­ sistently borrowed from the literary forms of Arabic – from Classical Arabic in the case of the earlier loans and from Modern Standard Arabic today’ (p. xxiv). While fully agreeing with the latter claim, I have not yet seen any con­ vincing linguistic evidence to support the former claim about the influence of the spoken Persianized Indian languages, irrespective of whether it is true from a historical perspective. Concerning the collection of Chinese loan-words, Russell Jones notes that his study discloses an important difference between Chinese and other donor languages such as Sanskrit and Arabic: ‘Since the loan-words have come in via the spoken language, and not the Chinese characters, we can identify the Chinese dialects and even minor sub-dialects from which they have come. Thus we find that more than ninety per cent of them derive from the Hokkien (Minnan) dialect which is spoken in the southern part of Fujian Province – although Minnan speakers constitute much less than one percent of the speakers of Chinese as a whole’ (p. xxvii). The vast majority of Japanese loan-words (some hundreds) came into Malay and Indonesian during the Japanese occupation (1942-1945) and dis­ appeared afterwards. Before that, only some five Japanese loan-words could be found. The word tsunami (tidal wave [caused by earthquake]) is one of the most well-known Japanese loan-words used today. There are some obsolete and contemporary words and expressions which have been left out and could usefully be included in a following edition. Missing words can be found in the dictionaries of Teeuw, Stevens and Schmidgall-Tellings or in the Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia. Among the current Dutch loan-words which have not been included are: bril(len) (eye glasses), buis (tube), doorsmeer (greasing) from ‘doorsmeren’, jang- kung (tall) from Jan (Pieterszoon) Coen, voorijder (advance motorcycle escort) from ‘voorrijder’, maag (stomach), mesyes (sprinkles) from ‘(gestampte) muisjes’, pispot (grease gun) being a corruption of vetspuit (only the more common mean­ ing of chamber pot is mentioned), Pit hitam (Black Peter), plakban (adhesive tape) from ‘plakband’, poffertjes, pres as in pres ban (inflating tyres), schokbreker (shock absorber), sekir (to sand down, grind) from ‘schuren’, sleting (zipper) from ‘(rits) sluiting’, slufter and stel (as in stel veleg). Curiously, Holan (Holland, Dutch) is noted as being a loan-word from Amoy Chinese hô lân, instead of from Dutch Holland or Portuguese Holanda. Kakus (lavatory, WC), from Dutch ‘kakhuis’ is one of the very few loan-words marked in the dictionary as obsolete, although it is still known by many people today. This dictionary contains so many obso­ lete words that it might have been better to avoid this label altogether. Minalaidin walfaizin (greeting used at Idul Fitri) is mentioned, but not walmakbulin, which is nowadays occasionally added, particularly in Arab Indonesian circles. Halal bilhalal is also known as halalbihalal, and although

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 308 Book reviews it obviously comes from Arabic, it is not known as such in the Arab world (like some other Indonesian expressions such as mohon maaf lahir dan batin). Russell Jones refers to Hans Wehr’s dictionary, but it does not occur there in the form of halāl bi’l-halāl , but as halāl ibn halāl , which has, as far as its mean­ ing is concerned, no direct relationship with halalbihalal, although it obviously originated from it. Khawasulkhawas is not from hawāsu’lhawās (p. 153) but from khawāss u’lkhawās s . Khulafā’ u’r-rashīdīn (p. 153) should be Khulafā’ u’r-rāshidīn. Loan-words in Indonesian and Malay contains a tremendous wealth of in­ formation and is admirable as a consolidated reference work compiled with great precision, and indispensable for anyone interested in the subject.

Paul W. van der Veur, The lion and the gadfly; Dutch colonialism and the spirit of E.F.E. Douwes Dekker. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2006, xxx + 858 pp. [Verhandelingen 228.] ISBN 9067182427. Price: EUR 45.00 (hardback).

R.E. ELSON The University of Queensland [email protected]

That this massive, deeply researched, highly detailed book should be published not long before the hundredth anniversary of the so-called ‘national awakening’ of Indonesia in May 1908 is perhaps a happy accident. More likely, though, its publication reflects a larger sense of the need to re-examine the foundations of that ‘awakening’, as well its content, its subsequent trajectory, and its implications. In one sense, the book fulfils a longstanding need to give the long- ignored and little-studied figure of E.F.E. Douwes Dekker his due weight in the history of the making of Indonesian national consciousness. In another sense, though, the book’s formidable fixation with its subject and its idiosyncratic style make it less important and arresting than it might otherwise have been. Douwes Dekker led an astoundingly crammed, eventful, and harried life. He fought for the Boers against the British, authored a seemingly never- ending torrent of articles, pamphlets, books, and fiction on subjects ranging from nationalism and imperialism to race, sex, and religion, created a threat­ ening political movement, suffered exile at the hands of the Dutch colonial government, managed to get involved, however distantly, in a fantastic war­ time gun-running plot, played a prominent role in the national movement in the pivotal years around 1920 before turning his attention to dog-breeding and then school teaching in the 1920s and 1930s, suffered imprisonment and then internment in Surinam during World War II, and eventually returned to

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 309 an Indonesia in the violent throes of establishing its political independence, where he played the role of counsellor to Sukarno. Professor van der Veur’s approach to his subject is weighty, forensic, and concentrated. He has mined a vast range of sources in his prodigious effort to piece together the sometimes convoluted course of Douwes Dekker’s life and career. The result serves sometimes to correct long-held misconceptions or errors, and sometimes to provide an unusually crisp, even masterly, sense of political and social life in the colonial Indies and after. But often it serves to give the reader, confronted with a dizzying array of detail on just about every aspect of Douwes Dekker’s busy life (including expansive commentaries on his sometimes erratic writings and thinking), a sense of suffocation. That latter sense arises, I think, because the point and purpose of this huge biographical study is never made clear. One is reminded here of the old quip that it is more interesting to write a biography than to read one; one becomes so enamoured of and entranced by one’s subject that everything one learns of it must be included for its own sake, rather than for some larger purpose. The lack of that larger purpose here, or at least the failure to foreground it sufficiently, and the consequent inability to allow that purpose to discipline the narrative, accounts for the book’s size, its sometimes annoying complexity of composition, its occa­ sional air of irrelevance, and its want of answers to some important questions. Douwes Dekker remains a much underestimated figure in the history of Indonesian nationalism and nationalist thinking. If ever Indonesia enjoyed a ‘national awakening’ – and the trope is so problematic that it should properly be abandoned – it came in 1912, when Douwes Dekker conceptualized for the first time the Indies as an encompassing political community in which race, ethnicity, and religion surrendered their previous shaping significance to the new sovereignty of the modern nation. That idea, which was to become the creative basis of modern Indonesian political identity and expression, did not emerge with full force until it was massaged by Indonesian students in the Netherlands and then popularized by Sukarno. But its origin was in the fertile, febrile mind of Douwes Dekker. Unfortunately, the book’s fascination with its subject distracts from a fuller examination of the dynamics of that crucial process. Cipto Mangunkusumo’s intellectual contribution to Douwes Dekker’s thinking is ignored, as is the influence of Perhimpunan Indonesia, and Suwardi’s decisive importance for that organization. The connections be­ tween Douwes Dekker’s initial precious idea on the one hand, and Sukarno’s later thinking on the other, are proudly proclaimed rather than analysed and explained. This book displays many virtues – fastidiousness, exhaustive re­ search, solid and balanced judgement, stylish writing – but, strangely enough, its punctilious rapture with its hero and his idiosyncrasies in the end does not do justice to Douwes Dekker’s fundamental insight and achievement in the larger scheme of things.

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Eric D. Ramstetter and Fredrik Sjöholm (eds), Multinational cor- porations in Indonesia and Thailand; Wages, productivity and exports. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, xii + 229 pp. ISBN 1403998787. Price: GBP 60.00 (hardback).

AHMAD HELMY FUADY University of Amsterdam [email protected]

Current developments show that the role of multinational corporations (MNCs) in developing countries has increased significantly. In Southeast Asia, this has been associated with liberalization and rapid inflows of foreign direct investment (FDI). However, the presence of MNCs in the developing world is always shadowed by the anti-globalization movement’s concerns about MNCs’ negative effects. In this context the present book, resulting from a project organized by the International Centre for the Study of East Asian Development, Kitakyushu, Japan, becomes the more interesting for dealing with MNCs in Indonesia and Thailand. These are the two largest economies, and most important hosts of MNCs, in Southeast Asia, and both also have long histories of anti-globalization activisim. In the first half of the 1970s, for instance, these two countries experienced major protest movements against the presence of MNCs, particularly from Japan. As indicated by the title, this volume examines three important effects of MNCs, namely on wages, productivity, and exports, in Indonesia and Thailand. Drawing on several plant-level data analyses, the essays in this book show that multinationals pay higher wages than domestic plants, and therefore increase wages for all workers in the host economy; have posi­ tive spillover effects on domestic plants’ productivity (even though - as in Thailand, for example - they do not necessarily have higher levels of produc­ tivity than domestic plants); and have a higher propensity to export than do domestic plants. With an easy-to-follow structure, after the introduction this volume dis­ cusses the three types of impact in respectively the second, third, and fourth parts. In each part, case studies from Indonesia and Thailand are presented separately (except for Chapter 6, which discusses the automobile industry). With a high academic standard and in similar fashion, each article presents the theoretical framework, institutional context, data analysis, and discussion of the issues. The chapters also list very interesting and important literature on the issues discussed. The cross-referencing between chapters and avoid­ ance of redundancy reflect how well organized the volume is. In the introduction, the editors quite spoil the readers by providing an excellent overview of the book, which is very useful for those who do not

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 311 have enough time to read every chapter. Therefore, the claim that this book is designed for a wide audience, not just for academics but also for policy- makers and business professionals, is justifiable. The editors also discuss the pattern of multinational presence in the context of institutional and policy changes in these two countries. Such details about the institutional context give a better insight into manufacturing conditions. Another merit of this book is its careful analysis and the rich quality of the data, which guarantee that this volume will please those who love to play with numbers. Also, with 59 tables and three figures, and a text which as far as pos­ sible avoids the use of mathematical equations, it provides an easy-to-under­ stand quantitative approach. However, readers unfamiliar with quantitative approaches will still feel that some parts of the book are quite technical. I am very impressed with the details of the analyses given on each issue. Chapters 2 and 3, for instance, show not only wage differentials between MNCs and local plants, but also how the differentials declined over time. These chapters also show that white-collar workers have much larger wage differentials than blue-collar workers. In addition, several possible explana­ tions for the differences, such as educational achievement, energy input per worker, plant size, and labour productivity, are pointed out. The finding of positive wage spillovers may also help in assessing the hypothesis of the ‘wage race to the bottom’. The book would be even more interesting if it also discussed the situations of the sub-contracted workers that have become the current trend in MNC operations. Positive spillover effects are important if the host country to gain optimal benefit from the presence of MNCs. In this sense, the book leaves room for further investigation. Chapter 5, for instance, leaves open the question of how productivity spillovers occurred in Thai manufacturing even though the productivity of MNCs is not significantly different from that of local plants. However that may be, I think the conclusion that the presence of MNCs has positive effects should not necessarily be viewed as grounds for further liberalization of the economy. As noted in Chapter 4, ‘MNCs with large for­ eign ownership shares have higher productivity, but create relatively small spillovers’ (p. 110). Larger foreign ownership is not a guarantee for higher spillovers. There are specific preconditions for gaining optimal benefit from the presence of MNCs. The discussion of export propensities leads to unsurprising conclusions. It shows that MNCs have a higher export orientation and greater access to for­ eign markets. However, the question remains whether the presence of MNCs has positive export spillovers for domestic plants. Unlike previous chapters, which show that MNCs have positive spillover effects for domestic wages and productivity, the chapters on exports do not discuss the effect of MNC presence on the ability of domestic plants to export.

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The book concludes that ‘Indonesian and Thai workers, as well as their host economies, would have been substantially worse off in important re­ spects without the presence of the MNCs’ (p. 26). Overall, the statistical analy­ sis in the essays quite convincingly supports that conclusion. This book is a (partial) answer to anti-globalization concerns, and provides good ammuni­ tion for those who want to further enhance the role of MNCs.

Peter Carey, The power of prophecy; Prince Dipanagara and the end of an old order in Java, 1785-1855. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2007, xxx + 964 pp. [Verhandelingen 249.] ISBN 9789067183031. Price: EUR 49.50 (hardback).

AMRIT GOMPERTS Amsterdam [email protected]

This is an impressive publication on the history of Java in the period 1785- 1830. It is a major contribution to the study of Javanese historiography, a field which has expanded prolifically since the 1970s. The author studied Prince Diponegoro’s life (1785-1855), his war against the Dutch colonial authorities (1825-1830), the British interregnum in Java (1811-1816), and the court archives of Yogyakarta (1755-1812) for more than thirty years. In this voluminous book, he interweaves all these subjects with extensive references to both European and Javanese sources. The author describes in detail the perspectives of the key dramatis personae in a nuanced style of historical scholarship. Although he offers his own arguments and conclusions, he also presents his material in a way that allows the reader to reach a different view, by providing elaborate references with quotations and translations of original Javanese and Dutch sources. His source material will inspire scholars. Moreover, the illustrations are well chosen. Because he is not a military historian (p. xix), Carey focuses on the politi­ cal, economic, and social situations that led to the Java War. He argues con­ vincingly that Daendels imposed measures in Java with a Napoleonic vigour which paved the way for state colonialism instead of the more mercantile colonialism of the VOC. The British looting of the Yogyakarta kraton in 1812, the subsequent problems in royal successions, and the enforced impoverishment and humili­ ation of the Yogyakarta court elite left Diponegoro with no other choice but to revolt against the new colonial order and the individual greed of its senior officials. The huge discontent within Javanese society, occasioned by

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 313 the extortionate methods of the post-1816 Dutch colonial regime, catalysed the uprising and secured Diponegoro and his armies a number of important initial victories. In Carey’s words, he ‘presented the Dutch with a formidable foe: a Javanese leader of great personal charisma and an ability to bind many disparate social elements to his cause. If successful, Dipanagara would have spelt the downfall of not only the power of the European government but also of the Javanese kraton’ (p. 590). While Diponegoro drew inspiration from his deep Islamic faith and saw his religion as providing a moral mandate for his uprising, the santri or ‘Islamic clergy’, including a number of prominent officials who fought for him, objected to his attempts to establish a more traditional Javanese court. During the war, Diponegoro’s religious and military leaders increasingly disputed the nature of his leadership. After his major defeat at Gawok just outside Surakarta on 15 October 1826, some of his key commanders began to negotiate with the Dutch to secure their own interests in any post-war settle­ ment. Among these was his principal religious adviser, Kyai Maja, whom the Dutch army subsequently captured on the slopes of Mount Merapi in November 1828. Such internal divisions among his commanders and the wider society of south-central Java resulted in Diponegoro’s losing the sup­ port of the common people. This sealed his fate. Moreover, Diponegoro was fighting against a Dutch army commanded by officers who were drilled in the more efficient style of Napoleonic warfare. He eventually came to realize that any peace settlement would have to involve an arrangement with the Dutch which would allow their continued presence in Java. Contrary to earlier views, Carey portrays Diponegoro neither as a national Indonesian hero nor as a Javanese Hamlet (p. 368), nor even as a ‘Just King’ (pp. 566-71). He describes the oldest son of Sultan Hamengku Buwono III (reigned 1812-1814) as a satriya, a ‘knight’, who attempted to defend the legacy of his ancestors and traditional Javanese society with Islamic values. Carey’s biography includes a detailed description of Diponegoro’s final years in exile in Manado (1830-1833) and Makassar (1833-1855), something lacking in previous Indonesian and Dutch accounts. Carey refers to etymologies of Diponegoro’s adopted title Sultan Èrucakra (p. 586). However, I will put forward a different explanation. The liter­ ary Modern Javanese word èru means ‘arrow’ (Th. Pigeaud, 1938, Javaans- Nederlands woordenboek, p. 110), and the personal battle standard which accompanied Diponegoro onto the field of battle consisted of a three-cor­ nered green pennant with a black cakra or ‘discus’ in the centre (pp. 153, 628). Indeed, in Carey’s book (p. 598, Plate 65, left), the reproduction of a Javanese drawing depicting skirmishes between Diponegoro’s forces and the Dutch at Selarong in September-October 1825, from the Javanese manuscript Buku Kĕdhung Kĕbo, clearly shows Diponegoro’s battle banner, which has

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 314 Book reviews two crossed arrows and a discus. By taking up, in August 1825, the epithet of Èrucakra (literally, ‘arrows and discus’), Diponegoro may have intended to underline the belligerent nature of his proclaimed kingship (pp. 151, 251, 492, 635). In conclusion, Carey has produced an outstanding and authoritative study on the background of the Java War and Diponegoro’s life. His attrac­ tive and often thrilling style of writing will hold the reader’s attention until the last page.

Diponegoro’s battle banner, from Buku Kĕdhung Kĕbo (ms KITLV Or 13, f. 136r, copyright KITLV).

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Webb Keane, Christian moderns; Freedom and fetish in the mis- sion encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007, xiii + 323 pp. ISBN 9780520246515, price USD 55.00 (hardback); 9780520246522, USD 21.95 (paperback).

MENNO HEKKER The Hague [email protected]

To convert to Christianity means to adopt a different world view. Webb Keane’s book is a treatise on Christianization with special attention to Sumba, Indonesia, where missionary activities started in the early twentieth century. As far as ethnography goes, the book is partly based on fieldwork in Sumba in 1985-1987 and in 1993. Part of the book has been published before (between 1995 and 2002). In fact, only the first four of the ten chapters are new; these provide a more general theoretical context for the remaining six. Keane applies a semiotic approach, based on the relationship between signs and the world and the way this relationship influences man as an act­ ing being. Keane focuses on the relationship between abstract concepts and objects in the world. A specific set of relationships between signs and objects Keane calls a semiotic ideology. A semiotic ideology is a cultural system of ideas or assumptions about reality. This semiotic ideology is the context of agency, the actions of individual human beings. To the general semiotic approach Keane adds materiality. He explicitly adds that a sign is not only an abstract or virtual element, but may also be a material object. In this respect he differs from De Saussure’s abstract approach, in which the sign is restricted to the abstract linguistic level. Secondly, Keane adds time. The relationship between signs and the world is a relative one and is subject to historical change. Especially this dimension of change is a central theme in the book. Keywords in Keane’s argument are modernization, purification, and fetishism. Modernization is the acceptance of modern Western culture, economics, and the Christian religion. In using the concept of purification, Keane draws on Latour and his ideas of an ongo­ ing historical process of separating humans from non-humans, nature from society, and in general signs from things. Purification results in dematerialization of signs. Fetishism is the result of purification. It is the imputation to others of a false belief in objects being ani­ mated by spirits. Modernism, purification, and fetishism are all consequences of Christianization. Part One of the book is dedicated to a general analysis of Protestant Christianity and its relationship with modernization. Here Keane presents his ideas on modernity, the globalization of Christianity, and postcolonial

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 316 Book reviews consciousness as a larger framework for the parts of the book that follow. Dutch Protestant – or Calvinist, as Keane prefers to call it – Christianity was brought to Sumba within the context of colonialism and modernization. By becoming Christians, Sumbanese became part of global Christendom. Also, modernization meant a break from the traditional past, which called for the Sumbanese to act upon their history, as Keane puts it. Protestantism meant a shift in religion as far as agency is concerned. Priests and material objects as mediators gave way to a direct relationship between man and God. The Bible became central in religion. Ritual as such no longer had a real effect because Protestantism was based upon the belief of its adherents, not upon institu­ tions. Protestant Christianization meant a dematerialization and a purifica­ tion; it meant a shift in semiotic ideology. Also, religion became a separate category in society, as it is in Western secularized society. However, this poses a problem when global Christianity has to come to terms with local – in this case, Sumbanese – culture. Among the missionaries themselves, this led to discussion on how local culture could be taken into account in their missionary practices. The mission was oriented towards culture, not only religion. Then again, this local culture was also subject to change, which has to be taken into account. Conversion is social change. In Keane’s words, conversion is a historical process in which the his­ torical perspective or the consciousness of the convert changes. Conversion means a rupture with the past which converts have to come to terms with. The past persists in the present, and converts have to combine global Christianity with local culture. In Part Two, Keane focuses on the Christian missionary activities in Sumba and the encounter with ancestor worship and ancestral ritual. From the early twentieth century, Sumba was missionized by what Keane calls the neo-orthodox Reformed Churches of the Netherlands. In the 1940s, the mis­ sion was succeeded by the Christian Church of Sumba. In the last quarter of the twentieth century, Keane notes that a Christian majority was emerging in Sumba. Keane focuses on fetishism as he analyses the relationships between people, words, and things in the religious context of the Christianization of Sumba. Conversion meant accepting a new semiotic ideology and different conceptual and practical relations among words, things, and persons. The relationship with the supernatural world changed. Christianity meant restor­ ing agency to humans, while ritual activity in the eyes of the missionaries was no longer agentive. In the missionary perspective, fetishism meant the attri­ bution of agency, responsibility, and desires to objects which in reality were dead and inanimate matter. The mission entailed liberating the natives and restoring agency to them. Language played an important role in this respect, since it is connected with the concepts of the speaking subject and the nature of action. Keane deals with sincerity in the sense of the purity of the relation­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 317 ship between thoughts and words or language. Finally, he discusses the rela­ tionship between religion and material objects, in particular the differences between Christian ideas about payments to the church and the traditional Sumbanese perspective on offerings to the ancestors. Part Three contains two chapters on the relationship between signs and the world in a non-religious context, where relationships change as a result of Christianization. Ritual texts, which originally were connected to the indigenous ancestor cult, can be recited and used within a modern, Christian context to present a Christian message. Also, money in the Sumbanese cul­ ture can have a modern financial value at the same time as a symbolic and ceremonial value. This is not an easy book to get to grips with. One has to be familiar with the semiotic approach, and with Keane’s terminology and style of writing. The book is in fact a compilation of separate and previously published texts, albeit on related subjects. As a result, more or less the same ideas show up repeatedly in the various chapters, but in reading one does not easily perceive a systematic and coherent whole. The book is a general theoretical treatise on religious change, and in par­ ticular on Christianization. The specific description of Christianization on Sumba appears to be rather subordinated to this broader aim. Keane’s book seems to cover the whole subject, but I wonder whether that is really the case. Keane’s semiotic approach is a formalized and standardized approach which operates on a high level of abstraction. It is a rather uncomplicated model which can be easily applied in different circumstances. However, for that very reason, there is a risk of this model simply confirming itself; the analysis which results from applying this model is valid only within the context of the model. There is also the risk of excluding or neglecting relevant phenomena, espe­ cially as far as the specific characteristics or ‘content’ of the subject under study are concerned. In my opinion, when dealing with Christianization, especially the Protestant variety, one cannot ignore the religious concept of sin. The concept of sinfulness, and the idea of salvation through Christ’s death on the cross, are the central tenets of Protestant Christianity which converts abso­ lutely must internalize in order to become Christians. This is especially the case for missionary Christianity. In a traditional society in which ancestor cult and spirit worship prevail, the way this internalization is achieved needs to be analysed and explained. Unfortunately, this topic is absent in Keane’s book. Keane is right in his analysis of change in world view as a result of Christianization, and of the resulting change in ‘agency’ - that is, the posi­ tion of man as an acting individual. However, his semiotic approach seems to complicate the analysis unnecessarily, creating a feeling of being led on a detour. So while Keane presents a general theory of Christianization, I have

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 318 Book reviews my doubts about whether his approach is really efficient, as well as whether it fully covers the subject. In conclusion, the reader of Christian moderns should not expect a system­ atic historical and ethnographic description and analysis of Sumbanese Chris­ tianity or Christianization. The book offers a general theoretical treatise on several aspects of religious change, especially Christianization, from a semi­ otic perspective, which may stimulate discussion and thinking about the im­ pact of Christianization and the relationship between the Christian faith and indigenous religious beliefs.

Saw Swee Hock and John Wong (eds), Southeast Asian studies in China. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2007, xii + 204 pp. ISBN 9789812304049. Price: SGD 39.90 (hardback).

HUANG JIANLI National University of Singapore [email protected]

Published jointly by Singapore’s two leading think-tanks, this volume pursues an explicit agenda of wishing to ‘promote a better understanding between the people of the two regions as China continues to exert a dominant political and economic presence in Southeast Asia’ (back cover). The underlying impetus is that, while many universities and research institutes in member countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are already conducting research on various aspects of China and making their studies fairly widely known through a variety of platforms such as conferences and publications, not enough is being disseminated about the state of Southeast Asian studies in scholarly institutions of China. Hence, a conference was convened in Singapore from 12 to 14 January 2006 by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) to discuss ‘Southeast Asian Studies in China: Challenges and Prospects’, under the rubric of its larger ASEAN-China Study Programme launched in 2003. Those presentations written in English have been revised and published as collected essays in this volume, and one wishes that the range of the Chinese- language papers had also been mentioned. The nine substantive papers, written by a slate of scholars from mainland China, Taiwan, and Singapore (with representatives from other Southeast Asian countries notably absent), are strung together under a unifying theme and augmented with an introduc­ tory review chapter which essentially is a duplicate of the first essay. That first major piece, penned by John Wong and Lai Hongyi, provides a useful over­ view of the state of the field in different time periods, offering special insight

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 319 into the 1990s and 2000s, and based on the range of articles which appeared in the two leading Southeast Asian journals published in China. Leo Suryadinata puts a human face on the studies by profiling three generations of Southeast Asianists in China in the last thirty years of schol­ arship. Tang Shiping and Zhang Jie complement this with an examination from institutional angles, delineating the major Chinese universities, research institutes, and government organs which have been contributing to Southeast Asian studies. Zhang Xizhen goes to the heart of assessing the promotion of an understanding of Southeast Asia among the Chinese people by probing the teaching programme and curriculum development. Calling his approach humbly but rather awkwardly ‘a sporadic review’, Ho Khai Leong selects four particular books and uses them to illustrate the shift of scholarly empha­ sis from ‘Sino-centricity’ to ‘autonomous narrative’. Wang Shilu outlines a perspective from the margin by looking at the situation of Southeast Asian studies in the Chinese frontier province of Yunnan. Samuel C.Y. Ku provides a much needed balance to the volume by looking at Southeast Asian studies in Taiwan as a comparison to those of mainland China. The Nationalist Party (Kuomintang) in Taiwan was after all a pioneer in the mobilization of Chinese overseas communities, way ahead of the Chinese Communist Party. Liu Hong republishes here the introductory chapter in his four-volume compilation The overseas Chinese (London: Routledge, 2006) and offers a good review of the changing themes and approaches in studies on Chinese overseas both inside and outside of China, including substantive pioneering works by Western scholars. The concluding piece is by Zou Keyuan, who focuses on the legal tussles between China and several Southeast Asian nations over the Spratly Islands in the South China Sea. Due to the fact that each essay is contributed by a different author, and yet all authors are writing on a fairly specific single theme, there is inevitably a fair degree of repetition of information here - including in their honest high­ lighting of shortcomings in terms of staffing, library resources, and language training. Fortunately there are no glaring contradictions in facts or interpreta­ tions. Indeed, in terms of the different angles the various authors have taken in approaching the topic, this has turned out to be a handsome volume of es­ says. It is especially useful for general scholars and lay readers looking for an ‘entry-level’ book to help them understand how Southeast Asian studies have been taught and researched in China, from 1906 (when Jinan University was established in Nanjing) up to the present day.

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M.C. Ricklefs, Mystic synthesis in Java; A history of Islamization from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Norwalk, Connec­ti­ cut: EastBridge, 2006, xvi + 263 pp. ISBN 1891936611. Price: USD 29.95 (paperback).

NICO J.G. KAPTEIN Leiden University [email protected]

This excellent book is the first volume of a trilogy dealing with Islam in Java from the coming of Islam until the present.1 This first volume discusses the early history of Islam in Java, from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. It links up with previous research by others, such as D.A. Rinkes, H.J. de Graaf, Peter Carey, and Professor Ricklefs himself, but differs from previous research in that the primary focus here is on Islam – or, to put it more accurately, on the process of Islamization, as this became manifest in the contest between Javanese identity, with its Hindu-Buddhist notions and its local and regional features, and Islamic identity. This process is recorded chronologically in six chapters, starting with the earliest evidence of the presence of Islam in Java, the gravestone of Trawulan in East Java dated 1368/69, and ending in the early nineteenth century, when the advance of Dutch colonial rule resulted in dramatically new social and political realities. In a fascinating and extremely well-documented narrative, the author leads the reader through this long period of time, demonstrating that the Islamization of Java was not a simple linear process of ever-growing presence and visibility of Islam in Javanese life and culture, but rather a series of fluctua­ tions with its ups (under Sultan Agung and Pakubuwana II) and its downs. In his interesting conclusion (pp. 221-35), entitled ‘Achieving mystic synthesis’, Ricklefs states that by the start of the nineteenth century the dominant mode of religious identity in Java was basically Islamic, both in terms of ideas and in terms of customs, but that at the same time elements of non-Islamic origin within this identity were acknowledged. Because in this fusion mysticism (in the philosophical sense, thus applicable both to Islamic and to Javanese culture) played a central role, the author speaks of ‘mystic synthesis’. In reading the book, I had my doubts about just one particular point. Throughout the work the author uses particular practices as markers of Islamic identity – for instance, the recitation of the creed of the Muslim faith (the shahâda), Islamic burial (instead of cremation), and (male) circumcision (pp. 15, 223). In some historical contexts, circumcision was definitely such a marker: after the VOC garrison was defeated at Kartasura in 1741, for

1 On 9 July 2007, the second volume, entitled Polarizing Javanese society: Islamic and other visions (c. 1830 – 1930), was published by NUS Press in Singapore.

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 321 instance, those Europeans taken prisoner were forced to convert to Islam, and this entailed circumcision (pp. 130-32). In other cases, however, it may be more problematic to regard circumcision as a marker of Muslim identity, because the same custom is attested to for Java before the coming of Islam. This point, however, does not diminish the force of the central argument of the book, which I find entirely convincing. Clearly structured and well written, Mystic synthesis in Java is a pleasure to read. Despite its use of a large number of Javanese terms and names, which may at first discourage readers unfamiliar with Javanese culture, the book is remarkably accessible. Moreover, the many well-chosen illustrations (and four maps) make it even more appealing, even if the way in which these illustrations have been reproduced unfortunately does not match the high standards of the narrative. The book includes a lot of new sources - in many cases, unpublished sources. It also demonstrates an impressive and unrivalled command of the relevant Javanese and Dutch archival sources, a command which is the fruit of an active scholarly life in Javanese history covering more than 30 years. All in all, this book is definitely a must for specialists on Java and Indone­ sia. Moreover, in view of the synthesis theory that the author develops, it is certainly also of interest to a wider audience of scholars working on the com­ parative analysis of Muslim societies, and to students of comparative religion who are interested in the relationship between Islam and local culture.

Rebecca Sue Jenkins, Language contact and composite structures in New Ireland. Dallas, Texas: SIL International, 2005, 253 pp. [Publications in Language Use and Education 4.] ISBN 1556711565. Price: USD 24.95 (paperback).

MARIAN KLAMER Leiden University [email protected]

Papua New Guinea (PNG), with over 800 languages (Gordon 2005), is probably the country with the greatest linguistic diversity in the world. Most of the indigenous minority languages of PNG have fewer than 1,000 speakers (Kulick 1992) and are threatened with extinction. Several lingua francas have developed in this small nation, including Tok Pisin, a pidgin based on English, and Hiri Motu, a pidgin based on Motu, an indigenous Oceanic language spoken in southeastern New Guinea. In addition, the Australian administration after World War I reintroduced English. As a result, most of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 322 Book reviews the four million inhabitants of PNG speak three or more languages. This book (a 2002 PhD dissertation at the University of South Carolina, Columbia) takes the multilingual situation of PNG as its departure point, and studies the effects it has had on the structure of two languages, Tok Pisin and Tigak. Tigak is an indigenous Western Oceanic language spoken on the north­ western tip of New Ireland and on smaller offshore islands east of the New Guinea mainland. The author has studied Tigak herself and a brief grammati­ cal sketch of the language (25 pages) makes up Chapter 4 of the book. One of the major claims in this study is that the vernacular languages of New Ireland and East New Britain formed an ‘Austronesian’ substrate that provided the morphosyntactic structure of Tok Pisin. In other words, although 75% or more of the words in Tok Pisin are from English (Laycock 1970; Ross 1992 among others), the grammatical structure that combines these words into constituents and sentences derives from the structure of the local ‘Austronesian’ languages. This is not a new claim; Wolfers (1971:413), for exam­ ple, noted that Tok Pisin’s grammatical structure varies ‘under the influence of the particular traditional local languages’. Specific evidence for the central claim of this book is discussed in Chapter 5, ‘Is Tok Pisin an Austronesian language?’, which describes the history of Tok Pisin and compares its struc­ ture with Tigak, as one of the ‘Austronesian’ languages that influenced Tok Pisin. The author shows that the variety of Tok Pisin spoken on the islands of New Britain and New Ireland indeed employs structures that are parallel with those of Tigak. Examples include the order of constituents -- both lan­ guages have clauses with subject-verb-object order, and the corresponding head-initial constituent structure. Other parallel structures are the transitive markers on certain verbs, the ellipsis of third-person object pronouns, and the alternative noun-adjective order. In sum, the socio-economically dominant lingua franca Tok Pisin is structured on the morphosyntactic patterns of its substrate languages, the Oceanic languages spoken in the area. The book discusses more than just this central issue. Chapter 1, ‘The lin­ guistic situation in Papua New Guinea’, provides an interesting overview of the area, and of many of the major sources. Chapter 2, ‘A review of literature on language contact phenomena’, and Chapter 3, ‘Theory, methodology and hypothesis’, provide the background for the heart of the study, which is to analyse how the languages of PNG have influenced each other. Chapter 4, ‘Tigak, a typical Austronesian language’, gives a brief grammatical sketch of Tigak, so that it can be used as a representative of the Oceanic languages that have influenced Tok Pisin. The visible outcome of its influence on Tok Pisin are discussed in Chapter 5. In Chapter 6, ‘Convergence and renewed influence’, the author points out that nowadays, the direction of influence is no longer Tigak>Tok Pisin, but rather the other way round: Tok Pisin is now effecting changes in Tigak and other local vernaculars. Some of the influences that Tok

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Pisin has had on the structure of Tigak are discussed. In general, the claim is that the shared features show that Tigak ‘converged’ with Tok Pisin, although the author also points out that because Tok Pisin and Tigak resemble each other so closely in both structure and semantics, the evidence for this is hard to find (p. 192). Indeed, the examples of ‘convergence’ mentioned in this chapter are not entirely convincing. For example, one feature discussed is the loss of the distinction between the indefinite quantity marking of mass nouns versus count nouns. ‘Standard Tigak’ distinguishes between count nouns (‘fish’) and mass nouns (‘gasoline’) by using different words to express indefinite quanti­ ties of such objects: ta mamanam ien ‘some fish’ versustang rin bensin ‘some gas­ oline’. In ‘Modern Tigak’, spoken by the young urban generation, this distinc­ tion is lost, and only one quantifier (rin) is now used for both count and mass nouns. Because Tok Pisin has only one indefinite quantifier too (pp. 192-3), the loss of the distinction in Tigak is claimed to be a sign that Tigak is ‘converging’ with Tok Pisin. Another example is the loss of the lexical distinction between words for cold: lip-lipuk ‘cold (sea or bath water)’, mal-malakup ‘cold (drinking water)’, and votung ‘cold (person)’. Many young Tigaks now use mal-malakup for all the meanings of cold, ‘converging to the lexical-conceptual pattern of Tok Pisin’ (p. 193) – because in Tok Pisin there is only one word kolpela ‘cold’. The question is, of course, how we can be so sure that facts like these point to convergence with Tok Pisin, since the loss of such lexical semantic distinctions is more generally a sign of language attrition. That is, young Tigak speakers are indeed losing features of their language, but it is not a priori clear that this is caused by structural pressure to converge with Tok Pisin. Apart from Tok Pisin influencing local languages, there is also the renewed impact of English on Tok Pisin, as English is the language of higher educa­ tion as well as the language of the expatriates living in the urban centres who hold access to the wage-paying jobs in business and government (p. 201). The author claims that under this influence of English, Tok Pisin is also ‘converg­ ing’ with English. Examples include the replacement of rural Tok Pisin numer­ als with English forms in urban Tok Pisin (wanpela ten wan ‘eleven’ becomes eleven (pela) ‘eleven’, p. 202), and the replacement of the original trialis pro­ noun form tripela by the use of general plural pronoun forms. English is also said to affect local languages like Tigak in similar ways, for example when the distinction between dualis and trialis in the pronominal system is replaced by a general plural. The data discussed in Chapter 6 indeed indicate that there are a number of similarities between English, Tok Pisin and Tigak. But the evidence is thin: to show convergence between three languages in different directions, one would like to see more detailed evidence than the superficial facts presented here – sixteen pages with fewer than 25 examples. This book suffers from a few shortcomings that could have been avoided with a little more editorial assistance. First, although the title of the book is

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‘language contact and composite structures’, and ‘its primary purpose is to demonstrate the connection between Tok Pisin and the Austronesian substra­ tum’ (p. xvii), this main topic is only really introduced in Chapter 3, halfway through the book. Second, because many useful details on the linguistic situation and the grammatical properties of the local languages are scattered throughout the book, a subject index would have been useful. Third, anyone interested in details about the structure of Tigak will be disappointed by Chapter 4: it contains too few data, and the analysis is superficial. Close read­ ing of this chapter will raise more questions than it answers. For example, why are three of the 25 pages of the sketch spent on ‘subordinate clauses’, while at the same time it is claimed that their structure does not differ from main clauses (p. 123)? Finally, the typical features of the Western Oceanic substrate languages of Tok Pisin are systematically (and dozens of times!) referred to as ‘Austronesian’ features (as in the quotes above). But many of the features found in the Oceanic languages discussed in this book (such as the existence of trialis pronouns, and the distinction between alienable and inalienable nouns), are not at all typical of ‘Austronesian’ languages in gen­ eral (Klamer 2002; Himmelmann 2005). To refer to features of the Oceanic languages of PNG as having ‘typically Austronesian’ features is as misguided as referring to features of English as ‘typically Indo-European’. Despite its shortcomings, however, this book is a valuable introduction to the complex linguistic situation of the eastern part of New Guinea and its off­ shore islands, and it will be useful for anyone interested in this area. The book also contains many useful references to more general linguistic literature and theoretical models on language contact. The main topic, to describe in some detail how a local language like Tigak has influenced Tok Pisin, adds valu­ able information to our knowledge of the history of Tok Pisin, and it would be a good idea to expand the empirical data on Tigak in future publications. Finally, although the claim that today Tigak is converging with Tok Pisin, and Tok Pisin with English, will need to be more carefully investigated, this book gives arguments for why such hypotheses are plausible.

References

Gordon, Raymond G., Jr. (ed.) 2005 Ethnologue; Languages of the world. Fifteenth edition. Dallas: SIL Interna­ tional. [First edition 1951.] Online version: http://www.ethnologue.com. Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 2005 ‘The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar; Typological characteristics’, in: K. Alexander Adelaar and Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (eds), The Austronesian languages of Asia and Madagascar, pp. 110-81. Lon­ don: RoutledgeCurzon.

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Klamer, Marian 2002 ‘Typical features of Austronesian languages in central/eastern Indone­ sia’, Oceanic Linguistics 41:363-83. Kulick, Don 1992 Language shift and cultural reproduction; Socialization, self, and syncretism in a Papua New Guinean village. New York: Cambridge University Press. Laycock, Donald C. 1970 Materials in New Guinea pidgin (coastal and lowlands). Canberra: Austra­ lian National University. Ross, Malcolm 1992 ‘The sources of Austronesian lexical items in Tok Pisin’, in: Tom Dut­ ton, Malcolm Ross and Darrell Tryon (eds), The language game; Papers in memory of Donald C. Laycock, pp. 361-84. Canberra: Department of Lin­ guistics, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National Univer­ sity. [Pacific Linguistics C 110.] Wolfers, Edward 1971 ‘A report on Neo-Melanesian’, in: Dell Hymes (ed.), Pidginization and creolization of languages, pp. 168-86. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Adrian Vickers, A history of modern Indonesia. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2005, xiv + 291 pp. ISBN 9780521834933, price GBP 43.00 (hardback); 9780521542623, GBP 15.99 (paper­ back).

R.E. Elson, The idea of Indonesia: a history. Cambridge: Cam­bridge University Press, 2008, xxvi + 365 pp. ISBN 9780521876483. Price: GBP 55.00 (hardback).

GERRY VAN KLINKEN KITLV Leiden [email protected]

These two new histories of twentieth-century Indonesia, both published by Cambridge University Press, take surprisingly similar stances on many details of the story, but they use different methods and diverge radically in their overall assessments. Vickers’ history is aimed at junior undergraduates beginning their study of Indonesia. It is meant to be read, not used as a reference or a workbook. There is no jargon, and so little Indonesian that even a name like Darul Islam (the 1950s Islamic rebellion) is given only as House of Islam. Contemporary cartoons and even postage stamps make attractive illustrations. Evocative

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 326 Book reviews vignettes keep the pace racy – such as the paedophilia scandal of 1938 and 1939, and a CIA porn film about Sukarno. Elson’s book, nearly 100 pages lon­ ger, is more demanding. The documentation is meticulous. One fascinating source Elson lays bare is the collection of interviews with Indonesian politi­ cal prominents found in the personal archive of the late American scholar George Kahin. In fact the two books agree on many things. Both divide the century into the conventional five periods: (1) a late-colonial period of rapid social change and rising hopes for modernity and independence; (2) a violent, chaotic Japanese occupation followed by a war of national liberation against the Dutch; (3) a period of stumbling democratic contestation amidst grinding poverty; (4) growing authoritarianism under Sukarno followed by the milita­ ristic but prosperous New Order 1966-1998; and (5) the once more democratic post-New Order decade to the present. In the national revolution of 1945- 1949, neither sees romance and both see mainly blood and confusion. Elson describes the authoritarian constitution-mongering of 1945, Vickers focuses on leaders who create bad precedents by projecting charisma rather than building institutions. Both see in the years from 1950 to 1959 the struggles of a new class of political leaders to legitimate themselves before a public they hardly understood. Elson gives a moving description of their growing determination to stop the communist party PKI, the only real political party in touch with the grassroots and not hooked on state rents. It led them to shut down the entire political process and opt for Guided Democracy by 1959. Both describe the repression of the New Order, the political prisoners (Vickers), the ‘integralist’ ideology (Elson, drawing on David Bourchier). Both agree that at least the electricity did work under Suharto. Both sketch the many hope-giving reforms that followed Suharto’s resignation in 1998. Both books were conceived in the anxious period shortly after the end of the New Order, when Indonesia was democratizing but also seemed to many to be in danger of a Yugoslav-style violent breakup. Both authors responded to the general alarm about Indonesia’s future by remembering the emancipa­ tory impulses in Indonesia’s anticolonial struggle. But precisely at that point, the two diverge. Vickers retells his story by looking over the shoulder of Indonesia’s novel­ ist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, whose work spans the most important periods of the twentieth century. This brilliant innovation gives his history a literary, humanist breadth of sympathy, though sometimes at the cost of clear expla­ nation (and once or twice of accuracy). Pramoedya’s writings echo his bitter life experiences, showing what so many millions of Indonesians went through as Indonesia turned from a par­ liamentary democracy, to a semi-dictatorship under Sukarno, and then an authoritarian regime Suharto called his New Order […]. Any history writing

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 327 involves leaving out most of ‘what happened’, and by selecting a series of themes about culture and society, Pramoedya’s writings provide an alternative historical agenda, one concerned with power and everyday experience (p. 5.) The resulting story is filled with tragedy but at the same time bursts with hopeful struggle against great odds. It is not a single narrative; indeed, Indonesia is ‘a country of paradoxes [that] does not have a single narrative’ (pp. 2-3). One strength of the book is its feel for social change. Urbanization fed the nationalist movement in the 1930s. Poverty was the real obstacle to the achievement of social justice in the 1950s. Globalization had gradually softened the hard edges of militant nationalism by the 1990s. Elson does adopt a single narrative – ‘the idea of Indonesia’ – and this potentially gives his account real explanatory power. Writing history through the lens of a country’s founding myth – the faith of the Pilgrims, Paine’s Rights of Man, Jefferson’s republicanism, Mazzini’s patriotism – is often done. The myth becomes a ruler by which to measure historical reality. In this case, though, the founding myth itself is seen to be flawed. This casts a dark pall over Elson’s narrative. A tiny group of Indonesians studying in the Netherlands around the time of World War I first hit upon the idea that the word ‘Indonesia’, hitherto used only by foreign ethnographers, could be used to refer to a free, modern nation inhabiting the territory of the Netherlands Indies. It would be broadly national, not ethnic; democratic, not aristocratic. Still, they were unsure about race (the Chinese) and religion (Islam). Elson finds their thinking ‘immature, sparse and confused’, and does not seem surprised that it made ‘little impres­ sion at high levels of government, either in the Indies or in the Hague’ (p. 38). Back in the Indies in the 1920s and 1930s, hounded by repressive colo­ nial police and culturally isolated from the great mass of uneducated rural Indonesians, their thinking developed in undemocratic directions. Communal conservatism inspired them more than did liberal democracy. Poor listening skills prevented creative dialogue. This led to failure even before the great national experiment got off the ground:

[Colonial oppression] masked a much deeper problem, the elite, rarefied and ar­ rogant self-importance of most Indonesian political organizations. Partly because of pressure from colonial authorities […] but partly, too, because of an exaggerated sense of leaders’ own capacities and indispensability, parties made little effort to connect in satisfying ways with any particular constituency. (p. 76.)

The only thing all these Indonesians could agree on was that the state must be ‘large, intrusive and bureaucratic’ (p. 88). Thus Indonesia’s leaders continually failed their people. The tiny group of late colonial thinkers never sorted out their differences about what Indonesia ought to be, setting the stage for confusion to follow. Leaders stifled the 1945

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 328 Book reviews revolution with their personal ambitions; they killed democracy in 1959 by their refusal to compromise; they (read: Sukarno) then reverted to a vacu­ ous nativism while ratcheting up the polarization; and after 1966 they (read: Suharto) built a mind-numbing regime of ‘integralism’. Leadership failure was a common theme in the post-1998 years during which this book was conceived. Elson contributed a chapter to an edited volume in 2001 in which he asks: ‘Why has Indonesia’s recent past been so replete with recurring tragedy?’ Ricklefs, in the same volume, states: ‘The list of leadership groups who have failed the nation […] is discouragingly long and comprehensive’ (Lloyd and Smith 2001:71, 243). Many Indonesians at the time were similarly dismayed about the ‘disintegration’ they saw occurring before their eyes – massive inflation, cynical elite cronyism, urban violence, surging separatist movements, and communal strife in the outer islands. At the end of the book, Elson underlines his profoundly pessimistic conclusion once more:

At one level, Indonesia’s erratic course has been a tale of continuing failure, of an inability to harness and direct the potencies of its people towards achieving the aims of justice and prosperity for all […]. The problem was not ‘Indonesia’ as such, but what Indonesian leaders, characteristically self-serving, inflexible, arrogant and unwilling to take the people into their confidence, did – or failed to do – with the idea. (p. 318.)

Where Vickers almost does not want to see the establishment because he is looking through the eyes of that most anti-establishment of writers, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Elson sees nothing but an Indonesian establishment, and he does not like what he sees. We might say that his book is the first historical study of the Indonesian establishment, which has exercised such consistent hegemony even without strong institutions. Elson makes an important observation about the extraordinary self-assertiveness, often in the face of strategic good sense, that lies at the heart of Indonesian political culture. This reminds me of O.W. Wolters’ (1982:6-18) idea of the ‘man of prowess’ as the archetypal Southeast Asian political leader. Yet, without wanting to argue that Indonesia’s establishment is a thing of beauty, I suspect Elson’s pessimism is excessive. His book does not prepare us well for its last chapter, on the unexpected emergence of democracy and ideological modesty after the New Order. Elson’s pessimism is misplaced for two reasons. One is that he sets his stan­ dards of national cohesion too high. A nation is not a church, and national iden­ tity not systematic theology. Does any nation exhibit the degree of ‘clarity and focus’ (p. xxiv) which Indonesians are expected to show about their identity? I think of Australia’s inane bush and beach mythology. Debate is ultimately more productive than consensus. Vickers’ narrative of unresolved struggle – perhaps an eschatological version of Elson’s more priestly idea of the nation

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– opens paths to the future. The other reason why Elson’s conclusions are too pessimistic is that he takes his leaders too much at face value. If they are indeed so ‘characteristically self-serving’ (and by the way, is that fair to Syahrir, Hatta, SBY?), we want to know why they are like that. Perhaps some of the prevailing historical circumstances have favoured inflexible leaders (colonial repression? a tiny middle class? a factionalized bureaucracy? fear of war? unqualified superpower support?), whereas consultative leaders could only have thrived under different conditions (prosperity? weak ruling coalitions? declining faith in the nation-state?). In order to open up history to a sense that things could have gone differently, as indeed they did after 1998, it is necessary to take into consideration social processes which are not thought out in leaders’ heads.

References

Lloyd, Grayson and Shannon Smith (eds) 2001 Indonesia today: challenges of history. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. Wolters, O.W. 1982 History, culture, and region in Southeast Asian perspectives. Singapore: In­ stitute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Timothy Lindsey and Helen Pausacker (eds), Chinese Indonesians; Remembering, distorting, forgetting. Singapore: Institute of South- east Asian Studies, 2005, xvii + 215 pp. ISBN 9789812303035, price SGD 69.90 (hardback); 9789812302861, SGD 39.90 (paper­ back).

Jemma Purdey, Anti-Chinese violence in Indonesia, 1996-1999. Singa­ pore: Singapore University Press, 2006, 352 pp. ISBN 9971693321. Price: SGD 36.00 (paperback).

KWEE HUI KIAN University of Toronto [email protected]

Both of these books deal with the Chinese in Indonesia. The first is a Festschrift for Charles Coppel by his friends and former students. The second is by Jemma Purdey, who has also contributed a chapter to Coppel’s Festschrift. Her book is based on her doctoral thesis, supervised by Coppel. The Festschrift for Coppel covers a range of subjects, from patterns of courtship and marriage in the peranakan Chinese world in Indonesia from

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1939 to 1942, through laws affecting and discrimination against Chinese dur­ ing the New Order period, and Chinese involvement in traditional Javanese wayang, to specific monuments and institutions relating to the Chinese in various Indonesian cities. The writing and research in the various chapters of the Festschrift is uneven, which is unavoidable since they are contributed by scholars at various stages in their careers. Those by Coppel’s former students take an activist stance, not unlike Coppel’s own works. Their choice of subjects and their tone convey an obvious attempt to counter some stereotypes of Chinese Indonesians. Pausacker, for instance, celebrates cases of accultura­ tion or assimilation, and argues that policies initiated during the New Order period diminished inter-ethnic interaction and syncretism as evidenced in the Javanese wayang of earlier decades. Purdey probes the accountability of perpetrators of violence against Chinese in 1998 and 1999. Lindsey’s chapter is a good source comprehensively covering the 1945 Constitution, statutes pertaining to the Chinese in Indonesia, as well as presi­ dential instructions, and decisions and instructions by various Indonesian ministries, during the past half century. It reveals anomalies and inconsisten­ cies among the various decisions and regulations, as well as a fundamentally anti-Chinese tendency. This begs the question, however, of to what extent the laws and regulations in question are actually implemented. Purdey’s chapter shows that although Habibie issued a presidential instruction in 1999 stipu­ lating that the Indonesian citizenship certificate (SBKRI) would no longer be necessary and that the identity card (KTP) was sufficient proof of citizenship, this decree was ineffectual; in practice, ethnic Chinese continued to be forced to pay extra for the processing of immigration documents, passports, and so on. Legal changes may mean nothing if they are not properly carried out. Especially commendable in the Festschrift are the very detailed studies on topics relating to specific institutions or places: for instance, activities sur­ rounding the Confucian temple in Surabaya (Claudine Salmon), or historical memories of the monument of Makam Juang in Mandor, West Kalimantan (Mary Somers Heidhues). Salmon’s contribution is particularly valuable, involving very painstaking name-tracing work and using an interesting combination of materials from temple inscriptions, newspapers (including pro-peranakan Chinese dailies like Bintang Soerabaja as well as colonial govern­ ment organs like the Javasche Courant), observations by contemporary writers, Japanese materials, and Qing imperial archives. Somers Heidhues is arguably the author who sticks closest to the book’s theme of ‘Remembering, distorting, forgetting’, with her excellent account of the various versions of history sur­ rounding the Makam Juang monument. Purdey’s book traces the story of the violent attacks on the Chinese in Indonesia between 1997 and 1999. Her great efforts in piecing together so

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 331 many reports from newspapers, magazines, periodicals, NGO reports, and other materials are highly laudable. Purdey’s main concern here is to argue for the centrality of ethnicity as the causal factor of these instances of violence, in contrast to most other existing accounts which in her view ‘skirt around ethnicity as a causal factor in its own right’, instead highlighting economic competition and racialized state terrorism (p. x). There are several problems with her argument here, though. First, it is a tautology: she first selects cases of violence which involved attacks on Chinese, and then argues that these were caused by racist sentiments. Moreover, the evidence she presents also shows that ethnicity is just one factor, and is not in itself sufficient to lead to violence. In all of the instances she discusses, the violence broke out in a context of economic hardship and political instability. Moreover, despite her assertion that the violence was targeted at things Chinese, her evidence shows that there were also other targets, including government offices, police stations, and Tommy Suharto’s Timor Car showrooms. A related problem concerns the sources which Purdey uses. Her account relies mainly on newspapers, together with a few NGO reports. Very few interviews were conducted with ordinary people, although such interviews would appear to be essential in order to prove that the violence was caused by racism. It seems to me that Purdey would have done better to focus on a few specific cases of violence, and to spend an extended period observ­ ing ethnic relations and doing close anthropological analysis in those places where they occurred. Her work points to two issues that could profitably be pursued in future. First, there appears to be a connection between Islamic movements and the intensifying anti-Chinese sentiments of the last twenty years. In almost every instance of violence recounted, the activities of Islamic groups were impor­ tant. A ‘perceived denigration or abuse of Islam’, and a sense of injustice done to fellow Muslims, featured consistently in newspaper reports as reasons for the attacks. In many cases the attacks were aimed at‘non-Muslim’, rather than specifically Chinese, targets. It would be interesting to study how far preachers (khatib), in their Friday sermons, generated antagonism and intoler­ ance toward anything perceived to harm Islam and Muslims, from economic marginalization to the flourishing of other religions. Second, it is worthwhile to examine interethnic relations and antagonisms more closely. Purdey is right to say that interethnic antagonism featured as a factor causing the violence. While many scholars have pointed out that feelings of racial antagonism were fostered by government regulations dur­ ing the New Order period and before, the fact remains that such sentiments do exist among Indonesians. This is very clear from some of the quotations Purdey cites. A 38-year-old resident of Gresik, for instance, declares:

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Our blood will never mix with Chinese blood […]. Actually we hate the Chinese, but we couldn’t do anything about them before, because they were protected by Suharto. But I don’t think they will be protected anymore. (p. 171.)

To explore the extent of this animosity, more extensive interviewing should be done to examine racial relations and perceptions among ethnic groups in Indonesia, of all classes, and all groups, along the lines of the work of Studs Terkel on racial relations in America.

Mark Sedgwick, Saints and sons; The making and remaking of the Rashīdi Ahmadi Sufi order, 1799-2000. Leiden: Brill, 2005, xiv + 255 pp. [Social, Economic and Political Studies of the Middle East and Asia 97.] ISBN 9004140131. Price: EUR 113.00 (hardback).

Ian Richard Netton (ed.), Encyclopedia of Islamic civilisation and reli- gion. London: Routledge, 2008, xxiv + 846 pp. ISBN 9780700715886. Price: GBP 155.00 (hardback).

MICHAEL LAFFAN Princeton University [email protected]

Southeast Asia has featured on the fringes of the cartographic imagination for as long as Islam has had adherents. Indeed, interoceanic trade with the distant isles predates the commencement of what Marshall Hodgson once called a great ‘venture’ in world history. Still, it was not until significant numbers of Southeast Asians converted to that faith around the thirteenth century – or, put another way, it was not until significant Southeast Asians became Muslims – that the region began to be incorporated into the most widespread of global civilizations. From this time too it became a zone to be included in the itineraries of traders, some of whom may well have donned the hats of holy wanderers and local state-builders with equal panache. At least, that is how many founder saints are remembered today by peoples who claim some sort of inheritance derived from their activities. For the investiture of sanctity is as much found­ ed upon the communal memory and the expectations of the followers as the actual claims and acts of those followed. In Saints and sons, Mark Sedgwick has adapted his doctoral thesis, defended at Bergen in 1999, into a fascinating and detailed study of how the seemingly stable entity known as a Sufi ‘order’ (tarīqa) is constantly being remade by its

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 333 interpreters as they, and thus it, move across time and space. In fact Sedgwick follows the path of his own mentor, Sean Rex O’Fahey, and shows how a part of the tradition established by Ahmad ibn Idris (1760-1837) was reshaped in Africa and Asia. In particular he follows the activities of Ibrahim al-Rashid (d. 1874) in Egypt and the Sudan in the nineteenth century that were being reformatted there by the Egyptian Muhammad al-Dandarawi (1839-1911), who in turn stimulated remakings in Syria and, perhaps most interesting for our purposes, the Malay Peninsula. Sedgwick shows in each area how the scholarly and pietistic path established by Ibn Idris and al-Rashid, a path which emphasized ‘the Muhammadan way’ over and above the ritualistic transmission of knowledge through the pact of obedience between master and pupil, was often remade by its interpreters in anti-scholarly and often ecstatic ways. In so doing, Sedgwick also takes the lead of O’Fahey and Bernd Radtke in deconstructing the ideas of Sufi orders as stable bodies, or yet as instigators of increasingly reformist orthodoxy from the eighteenth century. His chap­ ters on the spread of the Dandarawi branch of the Ahmadiyya order into the Malay world from Mecca (Chapter 7), its institutionalization in Serembuan, Negeri Sembilan (Chapter 9), and the subsequent question of the modernity of any order in Singapore (Chapter 10) will most likely be of primary interest to Southeast Asianists, but they should be read against the very global back­ ground that Sedgwick sketches. In this way it is easier to understand how the Ahmadiyya path, represented at the court of Kelantan by such scholarly figures as Wan Musa (1874-1939), was disputed after the arrival of another, far less scholarly and utterly ecstatic, interpreter of al-Dandarawi’s teachings, Muhammad Sa`id al-Linggi (1874-1926). In similar ways, Sedgwick’s treatment of the subsequent remakings of the Malay Ahmadiyya in other centres of mainland Southeast Asia in the twenti­ eth century, including in Thailand and Cambodia, may be read against devel­ opments in Cairo and Beirut, which were as much influenced by the political climate in which they operated as the expectations of the followers, many of whom attributed powers to the shaykhs (or their descendants) which they themselves denied. Overall too, Sedgwick’s main contentions are well argued, being that there is ‘a roughly cyclical process whereby an order rises under a great scholar or saint, then splits as it spreads, and stabilizes’ and that, together with periods of decline, one also sees how ‘a new great scholar or saint emerges to revive the order, and the cycle begins again’ (pp. 2-3, 230). Of course, there are areas where one might have preferred to see even broader contextualization, if only by drawing on the secondary literature. For while the Malay Peninsula is nicely connected to the Hijaz, and largely through the use of interviews, one could argue for greater attention to paral­ lel developments within neighbouring Indonesia, whose absence is some­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 334 Book reviews what remarkable in this study. By attending to this (often Naqshbandi) story Sedgwick might have avoided some of the pitfalls of his geographical and disciplinary focus, made noticeable at times by his using such antiquated terms as ‘Javan’ for Javanese, and full diacritics for the names of his Malay dramatis personae. With this in mind, readers should be aware that the founder of ‘the Javan Qādiriyya-Naqshbandiyya’ (p. 126) is, of course, Ahmad Khatib of Sambas, not Samba; whose followers were active well beyond Java in any case. And if one really wants full diacritics, then Ahmad al-Fathāni (p. 123) is better rendered as al-Fattānī. As a note to a footnote too, one might also have preferred more elaboration on, rather than unalloyed praise for, the insights of Catherine Lim’s The serpent’s tooth, in which Malays apparently ‘appear as drunken servants with a tendency towards incest’ (p. 190). Still, these are but minor quibbles regarding a study that does so much to treat a part of Southeast Asia within the larger field of movement and religious change it has long been a part of. Sedgwick’s study deserves to be on the reading list of all scholars of Islam in Southeast Asia, and it certainly opens up new ways of thinking about what exactly a tariqa is in so many global contexts. Alas, the same cannot be said of the most recent offering under the edito­ rial guidance of Ian Richard Netton, at least as far as Southeast Asia is con­ cerned. Despite affirming that ‘we all need to be aware that Islam flourishes powerfully outside the cockpit of the Near and Middle East’ and that ‘the salient statistic here is that the country with the largest Muslim population in the world is Indonesia, not Arabia’ (p. viii), that is about the last we hear of the economy seats (or yet the baggage hold). For a work that focuses on ‘a whole civilisation and culture rather than just religion or theology’ this is ut­ terly amazing, all the more so given the editor’s previous work on pilgrimages and travel in the Muslim world. The closest approximation I can readily find to recognition of Southeast Asia in all 846 pages of this reference work is the mention on page 205 (sv. ‘Hadramawt’) that ‘[m]any Hadramawtis migrated to southeast Asia and helped to spread Islam into Indonesia and Malaysia’. Well, yes. But there is more to be said, quite a bit more actually.

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Aurel Croissant and Beate Martin (eds), Between consolidation and crisis; Elections and democracy in five nations in Southeast Asia. Münster: LIT, 2006, 392 pp. [Southeast Asian Modernities 3.] ISBN 3825888592. Price: EUR 29.90 (paperback).

MARCUS MIETZNER Australian National University [email protected]

The study of elections in Southeast Asia is a complex and, compared to other political issues in the region, under-researched field. Most observers have limited themselves to analysing the outcome of elections, and what they mean for the power constellation in various countries. Similarly, the tiny minority of scholars who actually have made an effort to examine the details of electoral systems in Southeast Asia, have mostly done so by focusing on their country of expertise only. Accordingly, Aurel Croissant and Beate Martin’s volume is a welcome contribution to the debate on the significance of electoral regimes for the quality of democracies in general, and on the state of democracy in Southeast Asia in particular. Most importantly, their volume presents five case studies from the region (Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines and Thailand), thus providing useful comparative insights. Croissant and Martin’s book is especially valuable because the editors have given the contributors clear analytical guidelines for their chapters. Most edited volumes these days suffer from the extremely wide range of the themes explored in them, reducing the relevance of the collection as a single publication. This book, however, contains articles that evaluate the problem of elections in Southeast Asia based on a coherent, well-defined research guide. Authors were asked to describe the institutional framework of elec­ tions in their respective countries, and subsequently assess various aspects of their conduct: for instance, their openness, fairness and correctness. In addi­ tion, contributors were instructed to discuss the inevitable tensions between principles of democratic governance that influence electoral systems, such as the apparent contradictions between conflict and compromise, representativ­ ity and governability, and inclusiveness and effectiveness. Laudably, the con­ tributors were also required to consider social, economic and international contexts when making their judgements. For the most part, this uniformity in the methodological approach works well. It allows readers to compare in detail the electoral systems of the researched countries, and to appraise the status of their democratic development. Although there are many analytically interesting findings in this volume, the most intriguing one highlights the crucial importance of elections for all five researched states. This should not be taken for granted. In recent years,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 336 Book reviews a growing body of literature in democracy studies has downplayed the role of electoral contests for the establishment and consolidation of democratic systems. Many theorists have increasingly adopted the view that elections play only a minor role in the development of new and consolidating democ­ racies, and that civil liberties, rule of law, and social equality are much more fundamental preconditions for their progress. This book, however, shows that elections remain the most essential (and thus indispensable) element of any democratic state. Interestingly, the volume shows that even so-called ‘semi- democracies’ like Malaysia and Cambodia are greatly concerned about their popular legitimacy, and that both of these countries pay considerable attention to lobbying voters and obtaining their endorsement at the ballot box. While manipulation clearly did take place before, during and after the elections in Malaysia and Cambodia, both regimes have reacted anxiously to declining or stagnating electoral support by their populations. The indisputable relevance of elections for the Malaysian regime has recently been demonstrated by the dramatic losses it suffered in the parliamentary polls in March 2008. With voters expressing their general discontent by backing opposition candidates, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi has come under intense pressure to resign from office. Obviously, the verdict of the electorate matters even to such a dominant, long-ruling, and ‘semi-democratic’ regime as Malaysia’s. While the standardization of the book’s methodological approach gener­ ally delivers impressive results, not all authors have made the most of the analytical guidance given to them. There are considerable discrepancies in the quality of the contributions, which ultimately affect the usefulness of the book as a whole. The researchers focusing on Malaysia, the Philippines and Thailand have succeeded in presenting their narrative and analysis in a readable yet methodologically consistent way, using their research guidelines with great flexibility and creativity. The writers on Cambodia and Indonesia, on the other hand, apparently followed the directives given by their editors in a much too literal and rigid manner. As a result, their texts lack the fluency and insightfulness of those produced by their colleagues. The overly rigid application of the research framework is not the only problem in the chapter on Indonesia, however. Unfortunately, the contribu­ tion by Bob S. Hadiwinata is riddled with inaccuracies that distract from his otherwise sound analysis. The errors in the chapter relate to the history of elections in Indonesia, technical details of their conduct, and descriptions of their political context. To be fair, it has been difficult to keep track of the rapidly changing electoral rules in Indonesia. The 1999 and 2004 ballots were held under different election laws, and the 2009 polls will yet again usea new institutional framework. But this fluidity in laws and procedures is insufficient to explain the frequency of factual errors in Hadiwinata’s article. For instance, he misleadingly claims that Indonesia’s Election Commission,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 337 or KPU, is tasked with ‘drafting election laws [and] determining the elec­ toral system […].’ (p. 100). The electoral laws in Indonesia are typically drafted by the Ministry of Home Affairs, and are subsequently deliberated between the government and the legislature. It is in these deliberations that the electoral laws and the electoral system are then hammered out. The Election Commission, for its part, conducts the election based on the laws passed by parliament. Consequently, the KPU could not have ‘decided that [the election] should be held in three stages’ (p. 101). This staggering of the elections was prescribed by the election laws. Hadiwanata also asserts that electoral disputes are handled by the Majelis Konstitusi (Constitutional Assembly). In fact, no such Majelis Konstitusi exists; it is the Constitutional Court (Mahkamah Konstitusi) that deals with electoral complaints. There are plenty of similar slips in Hadiwinata’s account, including the description of Indonesia’s parliament as the ‘upper house’ and the MPR as ‘lower house’ (p. 94), the dating of the New Order’s fusion of political parties to ‘the late 1970s’ (p. 126), and the incorrect suggestion that members of the Regional Representatives Council, or DPD, are members of parliament (p. 140). Such instances of editorial inattention point to more general problems in the editing process. Indeed, while the editors deserve praise for their strong academic leadership of the project, the quality of the language and copy edit­ ing is poor. Most disturbingly, the introduction and conclusion – both by Au­ rel Croissant – contain a large number of typographical mistakes, grammatical errors, and duplicated and wrong words, as well as awkward expressions. It is difficult to comprehend how a major academic publisher in Germany man­ aged to overlook so many linguistic flaws. By way of illustration, an example from page 351: ‘Have the past the past elections contributed to a stabilization of the pattern of competition between the political parties or have the pro­ duced significant change?’ Although academic reviewers certainly should try to concentrate on the scholarly content of the book under review, this does not relieve the publisher of its obligation to turn out a readable and stylistically coherent product. While Croissant and Martin’s book is a scientifically valu­ able addition to the political science literature on elections and democracy in Asia, its formal presentation leaves much to be desired.

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Karl-Heinz Golzio, Chronologie der Inschriften Kambojas; Verifizierung und Umrechnung von Datumsangaben der Śaka-Ära. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006, xxvii + 240 pp. [Deutsche Morgenländische Gesellschaft, Abhandlungen für die Kunde des Morgenlandes, Band 57,1.] ISBN 3447052953. Price: EUR 58.00 (paperback).

IAN PROUDFOOT Australian National University [email protected]

This book aims to do for classical Cambodia what Damais did for Java and Bali in his ‘Études d’épigraphie indonésienne’, published in the 1950s. In both cases, the inscriptions studied give dates in the Śaka calendar, but these are sometimes difficult to read because they are poorly preserved, or their epigraphy is unclear. The Javanese and Balinese dates habitually included information about the 210-day wuku cycle as well. Damais found the wuku data to have a high degree of internal consistency and to provide a consistently good match with calendrical dates that could be clearly read. Thus he had a simple lever by which he could confirm and correct the part of the date given in the Indic Śaka calendar. Through this process he was able to make some definitive findings about the Indonesian Indic calendar: for instance that it invariably numbered elapsed years, began years in the month Caitra, and began months with the new moon. When Indian calendrical theory became better understood, particularly through the work of Billard, de Casparis was able to point out that these elements fitted the form of the calendar typically found in Indian astronomical handbooks. Even so, minor details of how the Śaka calendar was applied in Java remain unsettled. The Khmer dates, instead of the wuku cycle, often provide horoscopes. Golzio’s task is thus to use the horoscopes to disambiguate the doubtful Khmer Śaka dates. But astrology does not provide the simple lever Damais had in the wuku. To calculate where the sun and five planets lie in the signs of the zodiac and in which lunar mansion the moon stands, is not simple; nor are the methods used by Khmer chronologists known. Golzio faces the task of checking a calendar whose detailed workings are not known against an astrology whose detailed workings are also not known. This is not daunting for Golzio. He proceeds to consider one date after another, but without developing a sense of the calendrical landscape. He does not suppose that the Khmer had a consistent way of running their cal­ endar, nor that the calendar or astrology might have been localized. This not only slights the Khmers, but ignores the last half-century of research on the implementation of Indian astronomy and calendrics. Golzio, without expla­ nation, uses calculation tables published by Jacobi in Epigraphia Indica nearly

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 339 a century ago, seemingly unaware of safer modern computer programs that will run on any desktop. Rather than trying to find patterns in the Angkorian dates, Golzio turns back to Jacobi again, to his even older sketch of diverse local practices across India. Golzio seems happy to assume that any dish from this smorgasbord of calendrical practice could turn up in Cambodia. This leads to some curious results: for instance, Golzio’s proposition that years beginning at the spring and autumn equinoxes have both been used for dates found in the same inscription (K221-S). In his expert review of Golzio’s book, Eade (2008) points to other similar oddities. Golzio is ready to emend hard readings without reference to the clarity of the underlying epigraphy. Each date is treated more or less in isolation, and no general picture emerges. And without that general picture, we can hardly have confidence that Golzio has stepped the right way in resolving any difficult date. There is much that is puzzling here: why Golzio turns always to Jacobi, and not to more recent (and more sophisticated) studies of Indian chronol­ ogy; why he ignores other research on calendrical practice in Cambodia and the rest of Southeast Asia; and why he implies that there was little consistency in Cambodian practice. The contrast with Damais’s disciplined and thought­ ful work on dates in early Indonesian epigraphy is marked.

References

Damais, L-C. 1951-58 ‘Etudes d’épigraphie indonésienne’, Bulletin de l’École française d’Extrême- Orient 45 (1951):3-41, 42-63; 46 (1952):20-103; 47 (1955):7-290; 49 (1958):1- 239. Eade, J.C. 2008 ‘Computers vs tables, Billard vs Golzio: Two new date-lists of the in­ scriptions of Kamboja’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesell- schaft 158:73-104.

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Vatthana Pholsena and Ruth Banomyong, Laos: from buffer state to crossroads? Translated by Michael Smithies. Chiang Mai: Mekong Press, 2006, 215 pp. ISBN 9749480503. Price: THB 525.00 (paper­ back).

JONATHAN RIGG University of Durham [email protected]

This short book was first published in French in 2004 by the Bangkok-based Research Institute on Contemporary Southeast Asia (IRASEC), with the title Le Laos au XXI siècle: les défis de l’intégration régionale. It is a handy, easily digested historical account of the evolution of the place of Laos in mainland Southeast Asia. The approach taken is descriptive rather than analytical and I can imagine that a thoughtful visitor wishing to understand the country might pick this up as a very good starting point. It is wide-ranging in scope, touching on history, politics and economy in a ‘lively and accessible’ manner, as the back cover blurb puts it. Indeed, the book is almost like a traditional regional geog­ raphy in the authors’ concern to provide an integrated view of the country. Thus, in addition to history and politics (Chapters 1, 2 and 3), we also get a summary of Laos’s economic situation and prospects (Chapter 4), the chal­ lenges of transport, tourism, migration and regional integration (Chapters 5 and 6), and a background summary of society and culture (Chapter 7). Useful tables and boxed case studies add to the user-friendly and comprehensive style of the volume. The theme that weaves its way through the book is the progressive inte­ gration of Laos into the wider regional context. From being a buffer state between Vietnam and Siam/Thailand, the country has increasingly become a crossroads, given political rapprochement between the players in mainland Southeast Asia and, even more so, since the initiation of the ‘Greater Mekong Sub-region’ (GMS) project in the early 1990s. Much as Andrew Walker did in his book The legend of the golden boat (1999), the authors challenge the ‘myth of isolation’ that is so often applied to Laos (where Laos is paired with the word ‘forgotten’), and note the degree to which the country has always been integrated, albeit at a lower level of intensity, into regional trade networks. From being a buffer state, and then cocooned for a short while before the political divisions in mainland Southeast Asia dissolved in the 1990s, Laos is now an economically ‘weak’ and technologically ‘backward’ country (p. 181) which has fervently embraced the development project but with relatively meagre resources to hand. A longer, stronger and more integrative conclud­ ing chapter would have helped to round this handy book off. The value of the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 341 volume, nonetheless, lies in the authors’ largely successful attempt to sum­ marize in a tight and readable manner the historical legacies, the current de­ ficiencies, and the future prospects that Laos faces as it enters the twenty-first century.

Harold E. Smith, Gayla S. Nieminen and May Kyi Wim, Historical dictionary of Thailand. Second edition. Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2005, 416 pp. [Historical Dictionaries of Asia 55.] ISBN 0810853965. Price: USD 77.00 (hardback).

JEROEN RIKKERINK Bangkok [email protected]

This second edition of the Historical dictionary of Thailand (the first edition appeared in 1995) presents important persons, places, institutions and events in Thai history. Hundreds of alphabetically arranged entries cover economics, culture, history, geography and politics. Recent events are discussed, such as the economic crisis of 1997 and the growing role of the Thai business class and middle class in the country’s politics. In a series of appendixes statistical information is provided on topics such as population growth, urbanization, and agricultural crops. Lists of Sukhothai kings as well as the rulers of Chang Mai and Lan Na, a concise overview of Thai history, and a solid bibliography make this a useful reference work on Thailand. But as useful as the book may be, it also has some serious flaws. In com­ piling a volume like this, choices have to be made. The selection of topics is always debatable, but in this case the authors have made some strange deci­ sions. Take, for example, Thailand’s most recent history. One striking omis­ sion here is the absence of an entry on the Tak Bai incident. In April 2004, a demonstration of Thai Muslims from the southern provinces was brutally put down and some 78 demonstrators died of suffocation after being arrested and pushed into the back of police trucks. As far as the ongoing insurgency in Thailand’s southern provinces is concerned, Tak Bai was a defining moment. It created much bad blood and served as a catalyst for further violence in Thailand’s Muslim-dominated provinces, where over 3,000 people have since lost their lives. Another example of the authors’ puzzling sense of priorities is the absence of any reference to the ‘war on drugs’ proclaimed by Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawata in 2003. Some 2,500 people died in this operation. Most were small-time dealers and drug addicts. They became victims of death squads made up of army and police personnel. Both the Tak Bai incident and

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 342 Book reviews the ‘war on drugs’ reveal worrying aspects of modern Thai politics that cannot be overlooked if one wants to understand contemporary Thailand. The entries on the royal family echo the biased view of the monarchy por­ trayed in the Thai media and historiography. Nowhere do we find information on the political role that the king and queen have played in recent Thai his­ tory. No mention is made of the partnership between the palace and a series of corrupt military-led regimes during the 1960s and 1970s. The fact that the king supported increasingly brutal counterinsurgency operations against an exaggerated communist threat during this period is not mentioned either. Is it true that Sirikit, as queen of Thailand, ‘has acted with dedication and character’, as the authors claim? Are these the words of scholars, or is this royalist propaganda? Do we need to know about the queen’s many awards for her humanitarian work? Or would it be more interesting to learn about her personal connections to the village scouts, a mass rural patriotic fascist-style organization whose members swore personal allegiance to the royal family? Choices, to repeat, must inevitably be made. But this volume shows a clear lack of the kind of knowledge of Thai history that goes beyond the nationalist/ royalist discourse that is fed to the Thai people. Any student using this book must be warned: the Historical dictionary of Thailand must be treated with cau­ tion. For in-depth knowledge, students are advised to look somewhere else.

Ryuto Shimada, The intra-Asian trade in Japanese copper by the Dutch East India Company during the eighteenth century. Leiden: Brill, 2006, xvi + 225 pp. [TANAP Monographs on the History of the Asian-European Interaction 4.] ISBN 9004150927. Price: EUR 77.00 (hardback).

SHIGERU SATO University of Newcastle, Australia [email protected]

Ryuto Shimada was in the first batch of young scholars trained in the TANAP (Towards a New Age of Partnership) program that the Dutch National Archive and Leiden University set up in commemoration of the four hundredth anniversary of the creation of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company) in 1602 and the two hundredth anniversary of its demise in 1800. TANAP has trained PhD candidates from ten countries along the Indian Ocean rim and in East Asia, stretching from South Africa to Japan, where the VOC was active. These scholars make use of the extensive VOC archives in The Hague. Shimada completed his thesis after eight years of research and published it

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 343 almost immediately in book form. Consequently the book exhibits some of the characteristics common to PhD theses. Its main strength lies in the extensive perusal of primary and secondary sources in several languages (mostly Dutch, Japanese, and English), and in careful support of the arguments presented with data. This strength is accompanied by some limitations, the first of which is the readership the author probably had in mind. PhD candidates must first and foremost please their supervisors and potential thesis examiners. These supervisors and examiners, particularly in the case of the TANAP program, are specialists in the field. One of the most common strategies candidates adopt is to focus narrowly on a specific issue and come out with some new arguments. Shimada has done just that. This reviewer considers this to be a limitation because in my view, books in the humanities and social sciences ought to be aimed at a readership broader than just a handful of specialists. I found the book a tedious read because of its style of writing. Granted, it uses neither jargon nor complex mathematical equations, and the text is expertly polished. Nonetheless, reading the book required much persever­ ance. This is because much of it is spent on presenting factual information on one commodity, because the style of writing is descriptive rather than ana­ lytical, and because the relationship between each statement and the overall theme of the book is often unclear. The author probably spent much of his period of candidature overcoming the language barriers, wading through the primary and the secondary materials, and collecting a large enough body of data to fill the ten chapters while staying within the narrowly defined topic. Such an exercise is an impressive achievement in itself, but readers (other than those who are trained to find numbers inherently fascinating) may get the impression that the author has not adequately digested the materials or integrated them into a coherently structured understanding. This said, however, Shimada’s book can be considered an important groundwork for further studies of this potentially fascinating topic. I recom­ mend that those who wish to read the book start from its final chapter. Called a conclusion, that chapter is also descriptive; although it is not altogether clear or insightful, it was here that I began to understand the rationale for the thesis and the author’s understanding of the theme. In this chapter he reiter­ ates that the VOC exported Japanese copper via Batavia to India (particularly Coromandel), where it was apparently used for buying Indian cotton textiles for export, and that copper was minted into small-denomination coins that were circulated for daily use among ordinary people. Shimada argues that an adequate supply of copper was a precondition for the growth of the mod­ ern economy, and that there was a moment of crisis at the beginning of the eighteenth century when Japan dramatically reduced its copper exports. He also draws three further conclusions. First, the VOC faced competition in the 1760s when the English East India Company began to export copper to South

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Asia from Britain, where the industrial revolution had just begun – although because the quality of Japanese copper was superior, the VOC continued to derive steady profits from its copper trade. Second, the production of copper did not increase much in Japan during the eighteenth century because cop­ per export was a deficit trade. The Japanese authorities exported the metal at lower prices than those they had paid the mines for the metal; the deficits were eventually transferred back to the miners, and therefore the copper mines did not have any strong incentive to raise productivity by develop­ ing new technologies, as was the case in Britain at that time. Third, the VOC played a key role in Asian economic development by connecting East, Southeast, and South Asia through intra-Asian trading – and, by so doing, promoting an international division of production. Shimada ends the book with the following statement: ‘This seems to point in the direction of a conclusion that an adequate supply of Japanese copper was a prerequisite for sustaining stability in the Asian economy, but that nei­ ther Japan nor the VOC ever did succeed in providing the Asian economy with an adequate volume of Japanese copper’ (p. 173). Those readers who start from the concluding chapter, and find it interesting, can then read the preceding nine chapters. Reading the conclusion first will make it easier for them to maintain their interest in Japanese copper and to appreciate the many tables and graphs in the book. At the same time they will probably find the book’s focus on one commodity and one dealer too narrow to draw any grand conclusion on the Asian economy. Completion of a PhD is, however, meant to be the starting point of one’s academic career. The roles played by Japanese copper, Indian textiles, and the VOC in the economic changes in Asia during the precolonial era certainly constitute a fascinating field for further investiga­ tion. With more freedom of thought, imagination, and movement now as an independent researcher, Shimada will be better placed for conducting more insightful works on this fertile ground.

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Daniel Veidlinger, Spreading the dhamma; Writing, orality, and textu- al transmission in Buddhist northern Thailand. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2006, xii + 259 pp. [Southeast Asia; Politics, Meaning and Memory Series 8.] ISBN 9780824830243. Price: USD 52.00 (hardback).

BROOKE SCHEDNECK Arizona State University [email protected]

This meticulously researched book examines the oral and textual transmission of the dhamma between the fourteenth and nineteenth centuries in the kingdom of Lan Na (premodern northern Thailand). The book originated as a doctoral dissertation in the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago in 2002. Daniel Veidlinger argues that the differences between oral and textual cultures are not binary, nor do they represent a rupture in history. Instead, both cultures coexisted and interacted in a fluid manner. In this way, his book chronicles the development from a primarily oral culture of transmission of Theravada Buddhist teachings to an increasingly literate one. Veidlinger proceeds mainly chronologically, detailing the periods of north­ ern Thai history and how the texts in each stage relate to both oral and literate culture. Veidlinger’s main methodology is to examine every aspect of the texts – the marginal writings, corrections, handwriting, as well as the text’s intended purpose and role. His sources include Lan Na texts in Pali and Thai, as well as epigraphical and archaeological evidence, mainly in the form of inscriptions. The introduction presents media theory and its applications for reading Buddhist texts. The author argues that little attention has been paid to how com­ munications technologies of the time affect the ways texts are transmitted and received, and that this is a significant lens through which to view the Buddhist world of northern Thailand. Unfortunately, Veidlinger does not return to these important theoretical concerns later in the book. In Chapter 1 he uses mainly the Pali chronicles of northern Thai provenance to discern the state of oral tradition and its relationship to literate culture in this part of the early Theravadin world. Chapter 2 continues the story, looking for clues regarding early Thai encounters with literacy and how these ushered in a new era for literate culture in northern Thailand. Together, these chapters illustrate the relationship between textuality and orality in Lan Na before the Golden Age, in a time which was dominated by oral tradition, but in which writing was not unknown. Chapter 3 looks at the Golden Age in Lan Na, which Veidlinger dates as beginning in the early fifteenth century and lasting over a hundred years (p. 63). In this chapter he outlines the further flowering of literate culture, which

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 346 Book reviews was enhanced by the introduction of a new forest lineage sect from Sri Lanka. Veidlinger’s tentative thesis here is that this new sect of Lan Na represented the most technologically advanced group, which gave a prominent role to writing. He suggests that this Sinhalese forest lineage did not focus only on meditation, as would be expected of forest monks, but was also engaged in the study and preservation of texts (p. 44). This argument is well supported in the book, and it would have been beneficial to see more analysis of the effect which the sect had on Lan Na. Chapter 4 takes a closer look at the text in the world – the ways in which texts were produced, stored, and retrieved, and even the remuneration given to the scribes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The author gives snapshots of the lives of a scribe, a donor, and a reader of the manuscripts, successfully portraying many of the details that surround the texts. Chapter 5 moves forward in time again, through the occupation of Lan Na by the Burmese and the subsequent independence after alliance with the central Tai. Veidlinger concludes that manuscripts increased in importance in the course of the nineteenth century because of a number of factors: the influence of the Burmese, increased contact with Bangkok and the Western world, and domestic developments. Chapter 6 brings the historical trajectory to a close in order to investigate attitudes and approaches towards writing in Buddhist Lan Na. By looking at the colophons of manuscripts, Veidlinger discusses how they were read and used, and why they were made. He finds that the motivation of those who cre­ ated the texts was more often a concern to gain merit than to study Buddhist teachings. In his conclusion, Veidlinger categorizes this book as one of the first steps to initiate inquiry into textuality in the context of Lan Na. He also argues that his method of using communications technologies will aid in fur­ ther understanding other parts of the Buddhist world. Indeed, in this book the reader has successfully been able to ‘see the strings’ (p. 204) behind how liter­ ate culture in northern Thailand was created, maintained, and handed down. This book will be of interest to students and scholars seeking knowledge about the history and culture of Thailand, the Theravada Buddhist world, and more generally, premodern manuscript production. Veidlinger rightly argues that looking at the transition from memorization of texts to writing and copy­ ing them represents a window into an important part of the Buddhist world. He acknowledges that little scholarly attention has been paid to premodern Buddhist texts, and his work on Lan Na is one part of this larger project. His book is an important contribution to the understanding of Buddhist texts, their use and transmission. His scholarship will be much appreciated by scholars interested in Buddhist, and other, manuscript cultures, and it provides par­ ticularly rich insights into the development of literary culture in the Lan Na region of Thailand.

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Nicholas Thieberger, A grammar of South Efate; An Oceanic lan- guage of Vanuatu. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, xxviii + 384 pp. (with DVD). [Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication 33.] ISBN 9780824830618. Price: USD 39.00 (paperback).

HANS SCHMIDT Universität Hamburg [email protected]

This book is the published version of Nick Thieberger’s dissertation, submitted to the University of Melbourne in 2004. It is based on fieldwork carried out between 1995 and 2000, which he began while working as a volunteer at the Vanuatu Cultural Centre. Thieberger’s grammar describes the Erakor dialect of a language that has no indigenous name – a situation not unusual in Vanuatu. The language is spoken in several villages along the southeast coast of Efate, the largest ones being Pango and Erakor, now suburbs of the capital of Vanuatu. This includes the area (Teouma) where the earliest signs of human settlement of Vanuatu were recently discovered. Places like Vila and Eratap are mentioned on p. v and p. 1, but the map listing these place names is not found until p. 13. I would have preferred to have a general map of the province or the island placed first, and the more detailed ones with all the hamlets later on. On p. 30 the author states that South Efate (SEF) is spoken from Epau to Devil’s Point, but on the language map (p. 32) only Ifira-Mele is shown as being spoken all the way to Devil’s Point. The preface claims that ‘there has been no previous grammatical description of the language’; South Efate religious texts, however, have been published for 150 years. South Efate is the southernmost member of the North-Central Vanuatu subgroup of the Oceanic language family. As Lynch (2004) has shown, it also shares certain features with southern Vanuatu languages. The ‘South Efate dialects are innovative compared to those on the north of the island’ (p. 33), which are their closest relatives. One of these innovations (loss of final short vowels) has now spread to the north, a loss not yet observed by Facey (1988) and Schütz (1969). Almost all SEF speakers are also fluent in Bislama, the national lingua franca. Thieberger often mentions the considerable and con­ spicuous lexical influence of Bislama on SEF, but what about possible influ­ ence of Bislama on SEF grammar? Or vice versa? A key feature of the language is said to be the ‘grammaticization of a bene­ factive phrase in pre-verbal position’ (p. xv; the same term is spelt grammati­ calisation on p. 223). In a table of contents over ten pages long, the descrip­ tion of this construction is hard to find. There is no subject index, although an electronic version of the dissertation is available for downloading which

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 348 Book reviews allows fast searching. An expanded treatment of benefactives was published in a separate article (Thieberger 2006). The other remarkable feature of the language is a lack of serial verb con­ structions (SVC), so common in languages further north. The author concedes that SEF ‘has relics of SVC’ (p. 221), which he analyses as verbs combined with auxiliaries, adverbs or directional particles. It may be no more than a difference in labelling when, in Chapter 9, he subdivides verb combinations into two categories – verbal compounds and auxiliary verbs. When writing about word classes in Chapter 4, he helpfully gives the size of each class, thus putting things in perspective. Thieberger is to be lauded for setting a new standard for Oceanic language descriptions with regard to user-friendliness. He presents his material as open source. The accompanying DVD contains a dictionary of the language and audio files of most of the example sentences and example texts; there are even two short video clips. Unfortunately, the dictionary files on the DVD are labelled with numbers. So you have to guess that file 13, for example, is the one that contains all the lexemes beginning with S. Many of the author’s language consultants are shown on photographs. Examples taken from normal speech are distinguished from elicited ones. But why does the DVD include audio recordings of ungrammatical sentences like 10b and 10c (p. 247)? Although a non-native speaker myself, I object to some of the author’s English usage. Is there a need for a verb ‘to keyboard’ (pp. 6, 38) when English already has ‘to type’? ‘Borrowing’ is an awkward term, but is ‘recruiting’ (p. 158) or ‘sourcing’ (p. 199) better? Why use the verb ‘encode’ instead of ‘say’ or ‘express’? Is there really a need for newspeak vocabulary like dispreference (p. 87), pre-stopped (p. 52), and a singular form ‘themself’ (p. 263)? On the other hand, I liked the coining of a word for ‘nose’ by nominalizing the verb ‘to grunt with’. How can a language be spoken ‘into the future’ (p. xv), how can a city be ‘experiencing high rates of urbanisation’ (p. 43)? Isn’t there a tautology in ‘current productivity’ (p. 74) and ‘underived stem’ (p. 184)? Some inconsistencies caught my attention. Verbs are sometimes glossed as infinitives with ‘to’ or ‘to be’, but not always: ‘live, alive’ vs. ‘sick, be’ and ‘piled, to be heaped’ (Table 7.3 on p. 178 and p. 194). The spelling of loan­ words in SEF is inconsistent: on p. 197 he writes government’ and on p. 361 ‘kafman’. Why are ‘someone’ and ‘something’ abbreviated differently as ‘s/ one’ and ‘sthg.’ (p. 206)? Why are some terms abbreviated and others are not (‘the subject or O occurring’, p. 274, when both S and O can be found in the list of abbreviations)? In Table 5.1 (p. 104) kineu/neu is listed next to (nig)neu – why use two different ways to indicate variants? The verb piatlak (pp. 268, 288) is introduced and then the example sentence has pitlak, but no explana­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 349 tion is given why one form is used rather than the other. Similarly, the nega­ tive particle ta is written tap in all the example sentences (p. 288). In Table 6.4 (p. 155) an empty cell represents the same content as the cell above, whereas in Table 6.6 (p. 157) this is represented by quotation marks (“). Why is the lin­ guistic data in Table 7.6 (p. 186) arranged into a table of four columns, while on the facing page the data is presented as example (44) in four columns of text? In Table 6.5 (p. 154) ‘Numbers indicate the number of occurrences’. But later in the same section ‘Numbers in the columns refer to example sentences in this chapter’. Why is p˜ ur ‘full, big’ called a quantifier (p. 95), while ‘dimen­ sion’ is a semantic domain for adjectives (p. 86)? The ‘incorporated object of an intransitive verb’ is defined as ‘typically generic and non-specific’ (p. 176), but right in the second example the object is ‘eel sp.’ Emeromen is listed as Ngunese (p. 68), but this is not correct; it is probably Namakir. We are told that ‘Efate was formed from a Pliocene volcano’ (p. 12), but also that ‘Efate is not volcanic’ (p. 14). What is the difference between ‘text format’ and ‘plain text format’ (p. 8)? Why are census figures of 1989 used (p. 17) when there was a more recent census in 1999? Lack of careful proofreading has resulted in annoying typesetting errors. The tilde above m and p is often in a much smaller font and hard to discern (pp. 51, 181, 201 and Tables 3.3 to 3.6, 7.2). The bottom part of the letters in the second column of Tables 3.4 and 3.5 is not printed (p. 61 and further). Three pages (pp. 84, 348, 362) are half empty even though the text continues on the next page. Sometimes a space is inserted after the first letter of a word: ‘m ilo’ (p. 85), ‘i ntonation’ (p. 102), ‘c lan’ (p. 125); also in the examples ‘lag –a-r’ > ‘lag–a-r’ and ‘tfag –i-Ø’ > ‘tfag–i-Ø’ (both on p. 206). On the other hand, a space should be inserted in ‘HogHaba’ > ‘Hog Haba’ (p. 288) and ‘see§” > “see §’ (pp. 196, 301). The pronoun ag in example 2a (p. 106) should be in bold, and the s in ‘shit’ (p. 207) should be in italics. It seems to be a reviewer’s duty to point out typographical errors like hunting trophies or to show that one has read the book thoroughly. So here is a sampling, using the symbol > for ‘should be’: Map 1 is on p. xxiii not xxii (p. xiv); the asterisk * is missing before POC –akini (p. 218); bracket ) missing behind verbs (p. 79); controled > controlled (p. 7); postion > position (p.16), Wislon > Wilson (p. 33); supe > suþe (p. 34); currenty > currently (p. 40); lat­ erial > lateral (p. 52); Namakira > Namakir (p. 54); tree p. > tree sp. (p. 60); purposes > purpose (pp. 63,106); modifers > modifiers (p. 95); cover > over (p. 97); entitites > entities (p. 108); post nominal > postnominal (p. 142); utterence > utterance (p. 168); copular > copula (p. 172); p˜ ir; p˜ ko > þir; þko (table 7.5 on p. 180,); table 7.5 > table 7.3 (middle of p. 181); peopl > people (p. 183; ex.32:); * missing before POC -akini (p. 218); part > parts (p. 229); po fo > po and fo (p. 245); proclitc > proclitic (p. 272); provide > provides (p. 274). This book is a very useful addition to the small collection of grammars of

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Vanuatu languages; with its wealth of detail it ranks among the most elaborate ones. It fulfils its promise in presenting material for a deeper analysis of the relationship between Central and South Vanuatu languages. Truly outstanding is the open data format and the combination with audio and video files.

References

Facey, Ellen 1988 Nguna voices; Text and culture from Central Vanuatu. Calgary: University of Calgary Press. Lynch, John 2004 ‘The Efate-Erromango problem in Vanuatu subgrouping’, Oceanic Lin- guistics 43:311-38. Schütz, Albert 1969a Nguna texts. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. [Oceanic Linguis­ tics Special Publication 4.] 1969b Nguna grammar. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press. [Oceanic Lin­ guistics Special Publication 5.] Thieberger, Nick 2006 ‘The benefactive construction in South Efate’, Oceanic Linguistics 45:297- 310.

Hiram Woodward, The art and architecture of Thailand; From prehistoric times through the thirteenth century. Second edition. Leiden: Brill, 2005, xix + 277 pp. [Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 3, Southeast Asia, Volume 14.] ISBN 9004144404. Price: EUR 116.00 (hardback).

MICHAEL SMITHIES [email protected]

Hiram Woodward, until recently Curator of Asian Art at the Walters Art Gallery (later, Museum) has gathered together in a single volume much information contained in his numerous articles on early art in Thailand. But the title on the cover only appears in the short form, without drawing attention to the time limitation. This second edition of the work, following quickly on the first, contains no serious changes in content, corrects some typos and some mis-numbered footnotes, and has a better illustration of Plate 70B. The overall plan remains, as one would expect, the same: the first chapter deals with the geographic and prehistoric setting, the second covers the first millennium A.D., the third the Cambodian expansion, and the last, ‘Creating

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 351 a New Order’, attempts to delineate the Thainess of the thirteenth century. Many of the criticisms one could level at the work derive from the imposed format of other books in the series. These list the plates, followed by the text, then by maps, black and white plates, a huge bibliography, and an index. Unfortunately the discussion of the images requires a great deal of page turn­ ing to compare them, and unless a point seems particularly interesting one is inclined to give up in advance. As the list of plates is separated from the plates themselves by the text, readers have to refer back for dimensions and whereabouts of objects. There is, in addition, no indication of the translitera­ tion system used, which involves generous use of circumflexes, both standard and inverted, and plenty of sub-linear dots. Chapter 1, after the prehistoric setting, considers artefacts in the transition from the Bronze to the Iron Age, rock paintings, and a tentative attempt at ethnic identification, with a nod to Indian and Vietnamese connections. The first millennium covers the thorny question of Indianization, Roman finds, Funanese art, the concept of cakravatin, and a generous section on Dvaravarti, its appearance, its art (the Dharmacakra, the first sermon socle, the standing image in stone, the reliefs of Chunla Pathon), and considers the difficulty of integrating Srivijaya finds in the peninsula, and the apparently eccentric Si Thep, seen as a staging post for the northeast, at Prakhon Chai, and the Chi region generally. The third chapter, dealing with the period 900 to 1300, brought about ‘the establishment of enduring iconic forms’, and largely concentrates on the northeast, especially Phimai, considered to be a Tantric Buddhist temple. In relation to the Khmer expansion into central Siam, Woodward, acutely observes that the naga-protected Buddha, because ‘it became so firmly con­ nected with Cambodian cultural hegemony, may account for its eventual disappearance in the period after the thirteenth century’. The somewhat diffuse final chapter ranges wide over the territory of present-day Thailand, and includes Dvaravati Haripunjaya, Sukhothai, the Peninsula, a long section on Angkor itself, another on the imperial order in the provinces, central Siam and Lopburi, and developments in sculpture in the period. Woodward’s wide-ranging scholarship is here most clearly apparent. Woodward categorizes the schools of Buddhism, not just as Hinayana/ Thervada and Mahayana, but logically adds Tantric, less obviously Vajrayana, and above all Ariya: post-Jayavarman VII Buddhism “characterized by a bun­ dle of iconographic traits I shall call Ariya (‘Noble’)” (p. 166). What emerges less clearly is the belief variants of Ariya Buddhism. This book ranges far and wide; there can hardly be a temple or site in the country that Woodward has not visited, even the multitude of little known shrines in the northeast. If one gets lost at times, it is perhaps that one is over­ whelmed by the detail, and fails to see the forest for all the trees.

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Woodward makes no attempt to distinguish between Tai and Thai, and this leads to difficulties; at p. 173 for example, we read of the Thai warrior king Meng Rai whereas he should probably be designated Tai; similarly on p. 184 there is a reference to the Thai on the upper Mekong in relation to the Tai Lao of Luang Prabang. Woodward draws attention to the comments of B.-P. Groslier and Michael Vickery dismissing the Thai/Tai origins of the ‘Syam Kok’ warriors depicted at Angkor Wat (‘the term Syam or Siam should be taken as a geographical rather than an ethnic identification’ p. 217), which may worry a few histori­ cally-minded nationalists. Not all typos have been eliminated. Phasook also appears as Phasuk (pp. 37 and 253), indefinite articles are sometimes omitted (pp. 121, 139), onp. 151 note 128 has ‘dur’ for ‘sur’, p. 210 lacks a verb at line 10, and at p. 215 there is an astonishing repeat: lines 6-7 read: ‘The laterite hospital chapels of the Northeast had no stucco decoration’ and on the same page para 2, lines 4-5 one reads: ‘The laterite hospital chapels of northeastern Thailand never received any stucco ornament’. Brill’s editors must have been overwhelmed. It is a perhaps a matter of style that split infinitives appear (for example p. 213, ‘to explicitly convey’) and conversational contractions are tolerated (p. 61 ‘doesn’t’), but in a work so supremely academic, where one is expected to have a good knowledge of the meaning of ‘re-entrant angles’, of ‘reserves’ on a statue, of ‘dentils’, and appreciate the difference between ‘porches’ and ‘porticoed niches’, it is strange that these are tolerated. This book is certainly not for the novice to the subject, and many profes­ sionals might find the threads sometimes hard to follow. There is no conclu­ sion per se, and one ends on the threshold of new avenues yet to be explored. Perhaps this is Woodard’s next project, post-thirteenth century Thai art; it will certainly have a sound scholarly base in this. What a pity the price puts the present volume out of the reach of ordinary mortals.

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Herman Smit, Gezag is gezag… Kanttekeningen bij de houding van de gereformeerden in de Indonesische kwestie. Hilversum: Verloren, 2006, 463 pp. ISBN 9065509194. Price: EUR 35.00 (paperback).

Hans van de Wal, Een aanvechtbare en onzekere situatie; De Nederlands Hervormde Kerk en Nieuw-Guinea 1949-1962. Hilversum: Verloren, 2006, 384 pp. ISBN 9065509054. Price: EUR 29.00 (paperback).

KAREL STEENBRINK Utrecht University [email protected]

After the Indonesian declaration of independence, on 17 August 1945, more than four years of debate and battle had to pass until this independence was accepted by the Dutch government and society. A new debate started in the late 1950s about the western section of New Guinea, which did not become part of Indonesia until the late 1960s. The process of decolonization caused intense debates in Dutch society. The two books under review here discuss aspects of this debate. Herman Smit concentrates on a segment of the Dutch Protestants: the so-called gereformeerden, a group which was the result of several schisms in the larger Dutch Reformed Church, and which united at the end of the nine­ teenth century to form the GKN or Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland. Colonial administrators and Dutch politicians like Idenburg and Colijn were promi­ nent members of this church. It is very difficult to give a short summary of the decolonization debate among the gereformeerden and Smit’s book, to be frank, does not make it any easier. Smit examines the political position of some 350 individuals in a detailed chronological account. The deepest difference was between the gereformeerd missionaries in the colony, who nearly all supported the independence of Indonesia, and the leaders of Anti-Revolutionary Party (ARP), a party related to the GKN in the Netherlands, who were strongly opposed to independence. For Smit the great hero among the missionaries was Johan Herman Bavinck, who returned from the Dutch East Indies in 1939 and became quite influential in the Netherlands as a professor at the theological school of Kampen and at the Free University of Amsterdam. He remained faithful to his missionary background and defended Indonesian independence, even while teaching in Europe and while Dutch politicians, as well as quite a few among the gereformeerd church leaders, continued to talk about a Christian and divine duty to lead the Indonesian nation towards adulthood. Smit tells a story about Dutch national politics, but in practice the Indonesian question was decided by the international platform of the United Nations in New

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York, and on the local battlefields of Indonesia itself. Indonesians, whether Christian or not, do not play a role in Smit’s book. About a decade later than the 1945-1949 period described by Smit, there was a renewed debate in the Netherlands about the status of the last rem­ nant of the Dutch East Indies, the western section of New Guinea, later also known by the names Irian Jaya and West Papua. Hans van der Wal has writ­ ten a detailed study of the position in this debate of the mainstream Dutch Reformed Church and its mission council. In 1956, church and council pro­ duced a Call for reflection (Oproep tot bezinning) on the political situation in New Guinea. This was, as one would expect, a rather vague document, with­ out a clear political stance, but was understood as supporting the surrender of West Papua to Indonesia. This time it was the missionaries in the colony itself who, in defiance of church leaders in the homeland, defended the continuation of the Dutch administration. The Call for reflection was a major moment in a long and intense debate that was, again, decided in the interna­ tional forum, mostly at the United Nations. Van der Wal ably describes the positions of all major players, not only in the Netherlands, but also in West Papua, both foreign missionaries and native Christians. He also pays atten­ tion to the Indonesian churches, who mostly supported the Indonesian posi­ tion against the Papua Christians. Both books were written as academic dissertations by retired people. Smit has worked as a teacher of religion, and as mayor of several small towns in the Netherlands. Hans van der Wal was a missionary in West Papua, and later a Protestant minister in the Netherlands. Both books have been written not pri­ marily for lay readers, nor even for other researchers, but more as intellectual exercises. Both are very detailed, and outsiders to the Dutch political scene will probably find them quite complicated. Both books, finally, describe the role of Christianity in the aftermath of colonial relations. They show that the presence of Christians as a strong minority in modern Indonesia is one of the most important long-term consequences of the colonial period.

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Martine Julia van Ittersum, Profit and principle; Hugo Grotius, natu- ral rights theories and the rise of Dutch power in the East Indies, 1595- 1615. Leiden: Brill, 2006, lxii + 538 pp. [Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History 139.] ISBN 9004149791. Price: EUR 125.00 (hardback).

BRYAN S. TURNER Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore [email protected]

Profit and principle is a splendid piece of serious scholarship – comprehensive, magisterial and definitive. Lavishly illustrated, it is probably the most complete account we have of the legal theories of Hugo Grotius in the context of expanding Dutch commercial capitalism, and specifically in the context of the activities of the Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie (VOC, Dutch East India Company). The book opens with the capture of the Santa Catarina by Jacob van Heemskerck in the Straits of Singapore in February 1603, and its justification in Grotius’s De Jure Praedae, and closes with the truce negotiations between Spain and the United Provinces. Van Ittersum’s work has in fact two interconnected objectives. The first is to understand and explain the inherently contradictory features of Grotius’s legal theory. Grotius attempted to justify Dutch aggression towards Portugal and Spain in Asia in terms of theories of natural law and freedom of trade, and at the same time to protect a Dutch monopoly in the Spice Islands. The second objective of the book is to provide a critique of the Cambridge School of the history of political thought. In both objectives, Profit and principle is successful. This study will be indispensable reading for scholars working on the history of Southeast Asian trade, as well as for historians of legal thought. Hugo Grotius was born in Delft in 1583 to a patrician family that had been involved in local government since the thirteenth century. A student at Leiden University, in 1598 he joined a Dutch mission to France and purchased a doc­ torate of law from the University of Orleans. Having written apologies for the pirate campaign of the VOC in the East Indies, he went on to become the Solicitor General (Advocaat-Fiscaal) of Holland in 1607 and in 1613 he became Pensionary (legal adviser) to the town of Rotterdam, thereby automatically joining the Estates General. During the political crisis of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609-1621), Grotius was banished to Loevestein castle, where he wrote one of his most important works, De jure belli ac pacis (‘On the law of war and peace’), in 1625. Escaping from Loevestein, he was exiled to Paris and Hamburg, and eventually found employment as an envoy of the Swedish chancellor Oxenstierna. Grotius’s adventurous life came to an end when he was shipwrecked off the German port of Rostock on 28 August 1645.

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Grotius is regarded as one of the most significant seventeenth-century political and legal philosophers. His importance rests not on his theory of state sovereignty, but on his conception of law regulating relations between states. Given the break-up of Christian unity and the erosion of Christian authority, Grotius was forced to consider natural law in antiquity. Because a peaceful social order is a good in itself, he argued, private individuals should be bound by contractual obligations, fair trade, and secure property rights. Before John Locke (who was born in 1632), Grotius argued that pri­ vate property in land arose from its cultivation. This became the classical legal justification for both English and Dutch colonialism. Grotius went on to argue that indigenous people could forgo their subjective rights by entering into contracts with colonialists. As a result, Dutch traders had every right to enforce contracts by violence if necessary against indigenous peoples, once they had freely entered into such contracts. Because the lands outside Europe resembled a state of nature, Dutch traders had every right to enforce contracts. Grotius’s theory involved a notion of divisible sovereignty in which European powers (Britain and the United Provinces) could also engage local elites as intermediaries to run local affairs. Grotius’s natural law arguments were not examples of abstract, armchair theorizing. The principal argument developed by Van Ittersum is that Grotius wrote De jure praedae (‘On the law of prize and booty’), and published its twelfth chapter as Mare liberum (‘The free sea’), in response to a number of practical political problems faced by the VOC. By studying the intimate rela­ tionship between politics and political theory, the author is able to grasp the political and ideological foundations of the Dutch seaborne empire. In par­ ticular, Grotius’s juridical legitimation of Dutch interventions in the colonial empires of Spain and Portugal assisted the dramatic ascendancy of the VOC in the Malay Archipelago in the early decades of the seventeenth century. Although Grotius was highly successful as a political lobbyist, his natural rights theories were inherently contradictory. On the one hand, he affirmed the validity of the Company’s contracts with infidel rulers in Asia, quoting the natural law principle of pacta sunt servanda whereby treaties must be hon­ oured. Contracts were valid when applied to free and rational human beings regardless of their religious convictions. On the other hand, while he sup­ ported the idea of freedom of trade and navigation, he was happy to defend the Company’s monopoly in the Spice Islands during the Anglo-Dutch con­ ferences of 1613 and 1615. The Truce Negotiations raised acute problems for the VOC, especially since Dutch politics were divided between a peace party and a war party. The Company feared that a Dutch withdrawal from the East Indies would have disastrous economic consequences. Furthermore, a withdrawal of the VOC would leave native elites at the mercy of the Spanish and the Portuguese. The

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VOC, with the support of Grotius’s political philosophy, argued that it could not accept anything short of complete freedom of trade and navigation. This message was warmly received by the war party pamphleteers. Dutch politics were divided, however, because while Zeeland depended on foreign trade, other provinces did not. Nevertheless, the publication of Mare liberum in April 1609 proved useful to both the Estates General and the VOC directors in pro­ tecting Dutch commercial interests. These rights justified continuing Dutch conflict against Spain and Portugal in Southeast Asia, as for example when the Company resumed attacks on the Spanish in the Moluccas in April 1612. Grotius’s theories received considerable support from the so-called ‘Spanish Black Legend’ which circulated in Holland at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Its characteristic themes were the cruelty and barbarism of Spanish imperial rule, the aspiration of the Habsburgs towards a universal monarchy, and the material and religious bondage of their subject peoples. Since the Dutch had also been subjected to Spanish power, it was natural to draw a parallel between their own plight, and Spain’s barbarity in its American and Asian colonies. On the basis of his humanistic and Stoical val­ ues, Grotius accepted a notion of the fellowship of mankind, which meant in practice that it was virtuous for the VOC to come to the assistance of foreign­ ers – the Pangoran of Bantam, the Sultan of Johore, or the King of Kandy – regardless of their religious or ethnic identities. Against Portuguese treachery, it was important for VOC officers to support indigenous allies to whom they had contractual obligations. This interpretation of the contract theories of Grotius, Hobbes and Locke as a defence of European colonialism has been developed by the Cambridge School of Political Thought. Grotius’s argument that private persons have a right to punish transgression of the natural law in the absence of an in­ dependent and effective judge was crucial in justifying the actions of Dutch and English trading companies. This view of ‘the dark side of rights theories’ has been promoted by writers such as Richard Tuck, James Tully, and David Armstrong. The Cambridge School, under the leadership of Quentin Skin­ ner and John Pocock, has attempted to create a dialogue between historians and political theorists in order to understand better such notions as classical citizenship, the aim being to write the history of political thought. Against such an approach, Van Ittersum complains that the Cambridge historians re­ main ‘preoccupied with the canon of Western philosophy’ (p. xli) and that ‘the most serious methodological shortcoming of the Cambridge School is the mistaken assumption that the historical context of any given political trea­ tise must be yet another text’ (p. xliii). In short, the inter-textual approach of the Cambridge School fails to address the economic, social and political set­ ting of the historicity of political thought. One might add that what the Cam­ bridge School requires is a robust sociology of knowledge. Profit and principle

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 358 Book reviews is important, therefore, not only because it offers a painstaking analysis of the evolution of Grotius’s thought in the context of VOC political needs, but also because it offers a methodology that corrects the text-bound assumptions of the Cambridge School.

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DICK VAN DER MEIJ

Recent catalogues of Indonesian manuscripts

Sri Ratna Saktimulya (ed.), Katalog naskah-naskah perpustakaan Pura Pakualaman. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia and the Toyota Foundation, 2005, xix + 314 pp. ISBN 9794615234. Paperback.

Achadiati Ikram (ed.), Katalog naskah Palembang/Catalogue of Palem- bang manuscripts. Tokyo: Centre for Documentation and Area- Transcultural Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2004, 324 pp. ISBN 492524308X. Paperback.

M. Yusuf (ed.), Katalogus manuskrip dan skriptorium Minangkabau. Tokyo: Centre for Documentation and Area-Transcultural Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2006, ix + 295 pp. ISBN 4925243209. Paperback.

Oman Fathurahman and Munawar Holil (eds), Katalog naskah Ali Hasjmy Aceh/Catalogue of Aceh manuscripts: Ali Hasjmy Collection. Tokyo: Centre for Documentation and Area-Transcultural Studies, Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 2007, xv + 304 pp. ISBN 4925243285. Paperback.

Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah, Jakarta [email protected]

Indonesian manuscript collections are scattered over libraries and museums around the globe and a good number of them have been catalogued in the past or are in the process of being catalogued.1 Manuscripts in many Indonesian public libraries and semi-public collections have also been catalogued, some of them through an extensive project funded by the Ford Foundation in the

1 For a detailed overview of collections of Indonesian manuscripts in the world, see Chamber- Loir and Fathurahman 1999.

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1980s and 1990s. As for collections outside Indonesia, catalogues have in many cases been published by well-known publishers, making them easy to come by. Catalogues published in Indonesia, though, are usually available for only a short time in local bookshops and thereafter disappear from bookstore shelves forever. It is therefore advisable to purchase these catalogues as soon as they see the light. In addition to catalogues, many small collections and at times even single manuscripts have been described in scholarly journals. Sometimes they appear in unexpected journals and are therefore in danger of escaping the notice of researchers (for instance: Yamamoto and Lingga 1990). In the last couple of years four catalogues of semi-public and private col­ lections in Java and Sumatra have been published with grants from Japan. The Pakualaman catalogue was sponsored by the Toyota Foundation, whereas the other three on Sumatran collections were sponsored by the 21st Century Centre of Excellence Programme of the Centre for Documentation and Area- Transcultural Studies of Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. It is easy to see that Indonesian catalogue productions are indeed international matters: after the Dutch took the first steps during the Dutch East Indies era and well beyond, other Europeans followed; the task was subsequently taken up by Americans, mostly through the Ford Foundation, while at present efforts are increasingly undertaken by Japanese institutions. The catalogues produced in all these projects more and more often result from intensive cooperation between Indonesian and foreign experts. It is extremely important to have semi-public and private collections catalogued and their contents made available to a wide audience of scholars and interested students of culture and literature. Many conclusions about manuscripts and literary competencies in Indonesian areas are based on studies restricted to public manuscript collections (whether outside or inside Indonesia). These conclusions are sometimes highly speculative, as the situa­ tion in which, in many areas, manuscripts are/were made and how they are/ were used is often unknown due to lack of in-depth research into the matter. The importance of the fact that many manuscripts are kept in collections by people in their own private surroundings cannot be underestimated. Knowledge about these private collections adds enormously to our under­ standing of the significance and popularity of texts now and in the past. Taking private collections into consideration adds to our quantitative knowl­ edge about the materials collected and preserved in public collections. Another issue is that browsing public collections alone may provide a distorted picture of the manuscript reality in Indonesian areas. It is very hard to tell whether or not a collection is representative of the local situation. Scholars have insufficient information at their disposal as to why people who donated their collections to public libraries themselves collected the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 361 manuscripts they had and when and how they were acquired. We also have little understanding of the purchasing dynamics of libraries and the reasons why certain manuscripts were deemed fit for acquisition and not others. It is not hard to predict what will be purchased when a library is faced with the choice between a beautifully written, probably complete manuscript and an ugly and seemingly incomplete one. Even though the second may be much more interesting for scholars than the first, few libraries will be able to resist buying the first instead of the second, especially if no in-depth research on the texts contained in them has been conducted. Personal relationships and preferences may have been more decisive in the buying process than the care­ ful building up of a representative collection. In the past, when conservators of manuscripts were themselves scholars, they of course brought their own preferences to the job and tended to acquire those manuscripts they wanted to study themselves or those that reflected their scholarly tastes. Tastes and interests, however, change over time and we usually do not have adequate insight into particular purchases or, much more interesting, the number and kind of manuscripts that were rejected by individuals and institutions and therefore returned to obscurity. Private collections abound all over Indonesia. This is the case in Bali, where manuscripts continue to be written to this day and important col­ lections are preserved in the palaces and houses of nobles and high priests, not to mention smaller and larger collections belonging to other private individuals. This is also the case among the Sasak and Balinese communities in Lombok (Van der Meij 1994; 2002:166-170); in South Sulawesi among the Buginese and Makassarese (Mukhlis Paeni 2003); in Buton (Achadiati Ikram 2002); and among the various peoples of Sumatra; while on Java and Madura manuscripts in palace and private hands are preserved in great numbers as well. Unlike the situation in other parts of the world, it may very well be that in Indonesia significantly more manuscripts are privately owned rather than kept in public and semi-public collections, the most important of which are the Perpustakaan Nasional in Jakarta, Universitas Indonesia, British and other European collections, the various palaces and residences of princes and nobles in Java and Bali, and the Leiden collections, which for many Indonesians have attained legendary status. Before going into detail about each of the catalogues under review, some remarks pertaining to all the catalogues may be useful. Firstly, all the catalogues contain many photos of manuscripts. However, why these par­ ticular photos are included and not photos of other manuscripts is nowhere explained. Sometimes this leads to such questions as: on page 144 of the Palembang catalogue, why was the sword not portrayed? I was surprised to see a sword being considered a manuscript, so it would have interested me to see an illustration of it. The notion of ‘manuscript’ in this collection

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 362 Book reviews evidently extends to artefacts that are not usually regarded as manuscripts at all. Secondly, the physical condition of the manuscripts is described in a vari­ ety of terms ranging from ‘good’ to ‘extremely bad’. Indonesian codicology needs to explain terms more carefully, and to use standardized terminology to describe physical conditions so that these may be more accurately gleaned from the description. For instance, in the Aceh catalogue, manuscripts that have been eaten by woodworm, contain holes, or have suffered wear and tear are variously called tidak terlalu baik (not too good, p. 77), kurang baik (poor, pp. 39, 43), rusak (damaged, p. 29), or rusak parah (extremely damaged, p. 16), even though the general descriptions of the condition of the manuscripts do not differ much. The Minangkabau catalogue uses slightly different vocabu­ lary for this (apart from rusak, which is found in all the catalogues), such as cukup baik (reasonably good, p. 57), mulai rusak (starting to get damaged, p. 61), sangat buruk (very bad, p. 35), rusak berat (extremely damaged, p. 70), and, the most revealing designations, masih bagus (still OK, p. 80), masih cukup baik (still reasonably good, p. 73), and masih baik (still good, p. 87). By using the word masih (still), the editor seems to suggest that deterioration may happen at any time, and since the other catalogues also use the expression they evi­ dently share this point of view. Curiously, the catalogue of the Pakualaman collection does not mention the condition of manuscripts at all, probably for diplomatic and deferential reasons. It is a pity, though, that the condition of the manuscripts at the palace, where one would expect standards of preserva­ tion to be higher, cannot be compared to that of manuscripts preserved in far less favourable conditions. The evaluation of the condition of a manuscript is of course subjective and may depend on one’s mood and one’s overall assessment of a collection. It may moreover change over time, as one gains more experience in a specific kind of manuscript and as one becomes more tolerant. A better idea might be to indicate the consequences of the extent of damage and deterioration in terms of the manuscript’s suitability for a possible text edition. If an indica­ tion could be given of the amount of text that has become illegible or lost, a prospective editor would have some idea as to whether it is worthwhile to take the trouble of consulting the manuscript at all. A more standardized and less impressionistic assessment of condition might also be useful for restora­ tion purposes and result in suggestions for improved preservation, an issue not addressed in any of the catalogues discussed here. The editors of the Aceh catalogue seem to see a relationship between the physical condition of a manuscript and the number of empty pages found in it (for example, pp. 34, 63, 101) which I fail to see. We do not know precisely how manuscripts were made, so the empty pages may be there for a reason we do not yet grasp and may therefore have no relevance for an assessment of the manuscript’s condition. The editor of the Palembang catalogue confuses

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 363 the condition of a manuscript and the loss of pages. A manuscript may be in excellent condition even though half of it is gone. And a manuscript may be crucial for an understanding of codicological and other scriptorial features while being completely worthless for a text edition. Since collections and scriptoria have become more and more of a focus in manuscript studies, it is a pity that so little information about the owners and the way they collected their manuscripts, and how they preserve and use them, is offered in the present books. Only minimal information is provided about the scriptoria in Minangkabau and the surau (prayer houses) in which they are preserved up to the present, and information is completely lacking about the owners of the manuscripts catalogued. The fifty manuscripts found, for example, in surau Paseban in Kecamatan Koto Tangah, Kota Padang, are mentioned, but only the number of manuscripts preserved there is indicated, and none of their titles, so that the information is rather useless at this stage. The same holds for the other surau mentioned. No biographical information is given about Ali Hasjmy, even though he was himself interested in manu­ scripts and wrote about Acehnese and Malay literature (for example: Hasjmy 1976, 1977, 1984). He was, moreover, a member of the Pujangga Baru literary circle, and has no fewer than forty titles to his name. Information about the owners in Palembang is minimal. The Pura Pakualaman is apparently consid­ ered to be so well known that no information on it is provided. I think this is a missed opportunity, and may be due to too little time spent on reflecting on the projects’ expected outcomes.

Perpustakaan Pura Pakualaman

In 1931, Ki Hadjar Dewantara wrote the following about literature and the literary tradition in the Pakualaman court:

If up to now the general public has been left unaware of this beautiful tradition, this has to be understood, in my view, as reflecting the high level of religious de­ votion among the people belonging to the Pakualaman court. They would have considered it profane to publish the texts passed down to them, and none would have dared to take responsibility for this. 2

Apparently the people of the Pakualaman palace have subsequently shed their shyness, and opened up their literary heritage for the benefit of the interested public.3

2 Dewantara 1967:284. Translated from the Dutch; originally published in an anniversary bro­ chure dedicated to H.H. Kangjeng Gusti Pangeran Adipati Arya Paku Alam VII. 3 The present catalogue does not describe all the manuscripts belonging to the Pakualaman library. The reasons for selecting some for cataloguing, and not others, are not mentioned.

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When Girardet (1983) inventoried the manuscripts in the library of the Pakualaman palace in Yogyakarta in the 1980s, he encountered 195 manu­ scripts. The present catalogue of the same collection contains not 195, but 251 manuscripts, since many that were in the hands of the extended Pakualaman family have since been deposited in the library. However, other manuscripts he found have not been rediscovered and are therefore not included in the present catalogue, the material for which was assembled between December 2002 and November 2003. This phenomenon - a listed manuscript that is no longer to be found in a private or semi-public collection - is a recurrent one in Indonesia. It is usually seen as negative (as if outsiders have any right to make demands on private collections to begin with!), but I suggest viewing it from a different angle. Perhaps the manuscript is not lost at all, but was not present in the collection at the time the catalogue was compiled because it was being used. This would point to a continuation of a living text tradition, and should therefore be viewed positively. In the catalogue the manuscripts have been categorized as follows: Babad (historical and legendary texts), Islam, Piwulang (suluk and texts containing lessons and instruction), Primbon (divination), Sastra (stories derived from Islamic and pre-Islamic times), and Lain-lain (others, including texts on dance and music, customs and language, and so on). The catalogue follows a tested scheme and mentions title, shelf number, language and script, prose or poetry, number of pages and lines per page, dimensions, and writing materi­ als used. If a manuscript contains a poetic text, the names of the verse forms and the first two lines of each verse form are provided. Each description also offers a summary of the content, and information about the time of writing and the history of the manuscript, if available. The catalogue is a sound piece of work, offers photos of stunningly beautiful manuscripts, and provides researchers with the initial information required for planning a future study. It also gives a useful overview of the contents of the collection as a whole. What is unfortunately lacking is some information about how the collection was put together over the years.

The C-DATS-TUFS catalogues

The three catalogues that follow are the result of projects by the Centre for Documentation and Area-Transcultural Studies of the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies (C-DATS-TUFS), founded in 2002. TUFS has the largest collection of historical materials in Asian and African languages in Japan. It aspires to collect and preserve materials in Asian and African languages and to make them available to the whole world through computer networks. In preparing catalogues of Indonesian collections it cooperates with the

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Yayasan Naskah Nusantara (YANASSA) and the Masyarakat Naskah Nusantara (MANASSA). Apart from cataloguing efforts, the manuscripts are also digitalized. The website (www.tufs.ac.jp/21coe/area) mentions that the digitalization has resulted in 175 CD-ROMS. In addition to the Indonesian title, the catalogues have also been provided with an English title, even though the books are written in Indonesian without accompanying English translation.

Katalog Naskah Palembang

This is the first catalogue to be published in the framework of the C-DATS-TUFS projects. Its main editor is Achadiati Ikram, one of Indonesia’s outstanding philologists and chairperson of YANASSA. In this project she was assisted by no fewer than thirteen people, all of whom are involved in manuscript studies at various universities and at the Indonesian National Library. The catalogue proper is preceded by an introduction that mentions that the core team members of the project visited Palembang in July 2003 to con­ sult the collections that had been selected for inclusion in the project before their arrival. Apparently more collections are available than the ones chosen. What other collections there are and why some collections were chosen and not others are not explained, unfortunately. The book gives some information about the individuals who own the man­ uscripts. Three of them are related to descendants of the Palembang Sultans; one of them, R.H. Mas Syafei Prabu Diraja, is the inheritor of the Sultanate. Owners of religious manuscripts are usually of Arab descent, work as religious instructors (guru mengaji), and have very few resources to properly store man­ uscripts. The names and addresses of thirteen owners are mentioned, leaving the reader to imagine who the others - who are only referred to as ‘lain-lain’, ‘others’ - might be. This is followed by brief information on the personalities and collections of ten of the thirteen individuals. Unfortunately, here again, the reader is left to wonder who the others are and what their collections are about. Some photos showing how manuscripts are stored, and portraits of thirteen of the owners, enliven the catalogue and provide the collections with a human face: manuscripts are human-made and human-owned. For each manuscript is listed: title, language and script, prose or poetry, number of pages and number of lines per page, dimensions, and kind of paper used. Each manuscript has been given two codes. One code indicates the collection and the number of the manuscript in that collection. The manu­ scripts are not listed by owner but rather by category. The second code thus starts with an abbreviation of the category of the manuscript, the number in that category, and an abbreviation of the name of the owner. Seventeen cate­ gories have been used: Astronomi (astronomy, As), Bahasa (language, Bh), Doa (prayers, Do), Fikih (jurisprudence, Fk), Hadis (Hadith, Hd), Hikayat (prose

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 366 Book reviews fiction, Hk), Ilmu Kalam (theology, IK), Lain-lain (others, LL), Obat-Obatan (medicine, OB), Primbon (divination, Pr), Qur’an (Qr), Sejarah (history, Sj), Silsilah (genealogy, Sl), Surat (letters, Sy), Syair (poetry, Sr), Tasawuf (Sufism, Ts), and Wayang (shadow theatre, Wy). In the catalogue individual letters have been treated as full manuscripts. Because of this rather complicated system, putting together the collections of each individual owner is a puzzle, since no lists are provided of manuscripts preserved in the same collection. This makes the catalogue inconvenient for scholars interested in collections rather than in specific manuscripts. The last part of the introduction deals with writers, scribes and scriptoria and is a useful place to start. As with so many writing traditions in the archi­ pelago, we still have enormous gaps in our knowledge, so that any informa­ tion is welcome.

Katalogus manuskrip dan skriptorium Minangkabau

In West Sumatra there are still hundreds of manuscripts in private hands, and no fewer than 26 private and semi-private collections are catalogued in this book. Some general information about ownership and ways of transmission is provided. Previously it was thought that the literary tradition of Minangkabau was overwhelmingly oral and that there were only 371 extant manuscripts, which were kept in Europe (mainly in Leiden) and in the Indonesian National Library (p. 3), and that no others existed. In the present book 280 more manuscripts have been added to that number, letters being regarded as full manuscripts. Most of the letters are in the possession of private individuals, whereas other manuscripts are usually owned by descendants of princely families in the Minangkabau area. The manuscripts are usually written by people connected to prayer houses or by teachers of mystic brotherhoods, tarekat (p. 21). The manuscripts in the collections catalogued are overwhelm­ ingly of an Islamic nature (90 per cent of them are in the hands of religious teachers and prayer houses of mystic brotherhoods, p. 21) and the manu­ scripts have been categorized as follows: Qur’an, Tafsir Qur’an (Quranic exe­ gesis), Kitab Tasauf dan Tauhid (Sufism and doctrine of the unity of God), Fiqih (jurisprudence), Undang-undang (Tambo Adat) Minangkabau (Minangkabau laws and regulations), Sejarah dan Silsilah (history and genealogy), Surat-surat (letters), Perobatan, Adzimat, dan Ramalan (medicine, amulets and divination), Bahasa Arab (Arabic language), and Khotbah (sermons). Apparently, nowadays manuscripts of a religious nature are seldom opened again, whereas letters and lists of genealogies still are, and the number of people still engaged in copying and writing manuscripts can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Photos of Surau Paseban, Surau Bintungan Tinggi, Surau Batang Kapet,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 367 and the Istana Made Rubiah di Lunang are included, in addition to a very long manuscript from Inderapura and its owner. Many manuscripts have been photographed as well, and many photos illustrate the descriptions. Unfortunately, there are no photos of the owners. The listing of manuscripts uses a numbering system devised specifi­ cally for this catalogue. The numbers contain the code MM for Manuskrip Minangkabau, a code for the classification of the manuscripts as mentioned above, the name of the owner, and a number indicating the place of the man­ uscript in the collection. For each manuscript is given: title, content, owner, scribe, colophon, watermark, and the beginning and end of the text.

Katalog naskah Ali Hasjmy Aceh

If the Leiden collections are legendary among Indonesians, it is safe to say that the collection put together by Prof. Tengku H. Ali Hasjmy (1914-1998) is legendary among Acehnese. The collection is preserved in the Yayasan Pendidikan dan Museum Ali Hasjmy (YPAH) in Banda Aceh. 314 manuscripts were collected in a very short time, between 1992 and 1995 (p. vii). The editors’ introduction discusses the effect the 26 December 2004 earth­ quake and subsequent tsunami had on the manuscript collections preserved in Aceh. The collections of the Pusat Dokumentasi dan Informasi Aceh (PDIA) and the Balai Kajian Sejarah dan Nilai Tradisional and those kept in private col­ lections in the area destroyed by the tsunami were completely and irretriev­ ably lost. This means that the collections of the Museum Negeri Propinsi and the YPAH are still extant. How many manuscripts were lost due to this single catastrophic event is anyone’s guess, but I fear they are many. This tragic event shows clearly and unequivocally that manuscripts are vulnerable. Certainly a large part of the written Acehnese tradition has been lost. As a result of the tsunami, the TUFS Aceh Project for the Preservation of Cultural Heritage was set up in March 2005 to catalogue private collections of manuscripts in Aceh which were not easily accessible to a wider public. The present catalogue is the first catalogue of Acehnese manuscripts to see the light and others are planned. The manuscripts are categorized as follows: Qur’an, Hadis, Tafsir (exege­ sis), Tauhid (doctrine of God’s unity), Fikih (jurisprudence), Tasawuf (Sufism), Tatabahasa (grammar), Zikir dan Doa (prayers), Hikayat (prose fiction), and Lain-lain (others), and are grouped in this way in the catalogue. The intro­ duction is excellent and provides a detailed description of how the catalogue was put together. The information provided for each manuscript is: title, shelf number, language, number of pages, kind of paper used, prose or poetry, dimensions, and number of lines per page. Information on condition and authorship is sometimes given, and for a number of manuscripts content

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 368 Book reviews summaries are added. The book ends with photos of the late Mr Ali Hasjmy and his institute. One thing I find curious is unfortunately not explained. All the manu­ scripts have been assigned a new code to replace the code they had in the YPAH. Why? In general I am not in favour of replacing an existing number­ ing system. It usually gives rise to enormous problems of identification, for instance, when numbers are lost in the manuscript for whatever reason, when lists of old numbers and corresponding new ones are lost, or when the new numbers do not adequately match up with the old numbering system. This has been catastrophic, for instance, for the collection in the Museum NTB (Nusa Tenggara Barat) in Ampenan-Mataram, Lombok, and there are other instances as well. Luckily, in the present catalogue, both numbers have been included so that matching should not be a problem. In the case of the YPAH collection, many manuscripts apparently had no number at all (curiously, none of the Quranic ones had) and it would be interesting to know why. Another point of interest not addressed is how the collection was acquired. The editors note that most of the manuscripts are of a religious nature, but may this perhaps simply be due to the fact that Mr Hasjmy was more inter­ ested in those? The reader is left with many questions unanswered, whereas answers might have been found if the right questions had been posed during the investigative part of the cataloguing process. Jajat Burhanudin provided the chapter ‘Naskah dan Tradisi Intelektual- Keagamaan di Aceh’ (‘Manuscripts and the religio-intellectual tradition in Aceh’). It is a useful initial introduction, but I fear he has downplayed the role of fiction and other texts in favour of those of a religious character. I cannot believe that the entire Acehnese literary corpus was solely Islamic inspired, which is more or less suggested here. Much more research is needed to understand the exact nature of this literary tradition.

Conclusion

The catalogues reviewed here are useful and beautifully produced tools for further research in philology, codicology, and of course textual studies. They show admirably that many manuscripts are still ‘out there’ and that the knowledge we have of collections, collectors, and scriptoria is still in its infancy. If similar catalogues of manuscripts in private hands in Bali and Lombok, for instance, were to be compiled, they would need to be printed in multiple volumes, because thousands and thousands of manuscripts in hundreds and hundreds of collections are there waiting to be covered. For Bali alone, we need only think of the valuable information provided in the transliterations of Balinese manuscripts in the famous ‘Proyek Tik’ collection initiated by C.

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Hooykaas and continued by Hedi Hinzler in close cooperation with the late I Gusti Ngurah Ketut Sangka and presently with I Dewa Gede Catra. The number of collections and owners covered in this project is astounding, yet it forms only a small part of the collections existing on the island. It makes one ponder once more the richness of Indonesia’s literary traditions. The descriptions of the manuscripts are interesting for a number of rea­ sons apart from the obvious ones. They reveal the way manuscripts are treat­ ed and preserved, and indicate most alarmingly that many of the manuscripts are seriously damaged or otherwise in very poor condition and are preserved in unfavourable circumstances. This means that action is needed to ensure that the manuscripts survive. Edwin Wieringa’s remark, in the introduction to the Aceh catalogue (p. v), that the next step should be to photograph the manuscripts in their entirety is therefore pertinent and ought to be taken up by the Indonesian and international community as a priority. However, in all our efforts to catalogue, preserve and conserve manuscripts, we should not forget to edit, translate, and explain them as well. This too should be a prior­ ity for the Indonesian and international communities. The fact that in the compilation of these catalogues many local scholars, from Universitas Gadjah Mada Yogyakarta, Universitas Sriwijaya (Palembang), Universitas Andalas (Padang, Minangkabau), IAIN Imam Bonjol (Padang, Minangkabau) and IAIN Al-Raniri (Aceh), cooperated with scholars from the Universitas Indonesia and the Pusat Pengkajian Islam dan Masyarakat (PPIM) Universitas Islam Negeri Syarif Hidayatullah, and from MANASSA and YANASSA, offers hope for increasing understanding and appreciation of the Indonesian scriptural heritage, and for future text editions.

References

Chambert-Loir, Henri and Oman Fathurahman 1999 Khazanah naskah; Panduan koleksi naskah Indonesia sedunia/World guide to Indonesian manuscript collections. Jakarta: Yayasan Obor Indonesia and EFEO. Dewantara, Ki Hadjar 1967 ‘Beoefening van letteren en kunst in het Pakoealamsche geslacht’, in: Karya Ki Hadjar Dewantara, bagian II A: Kebudajaan. Jogjakarta: Madjelis- Luhur Persatuan Taman-Siswa. Girardet, N. 1983 Descriptive catalogue of the Javanese manuscripts and printed books in the main libraries of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Hasjmy, A. 1976 Syarah Ruba’i Hamzah Fansuri oleh Syamsuddin al-Sumatrani. Kuala Lum­ pur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.

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1977 Apa sebab rakyat Aceh sanggup berperang puluhan tahun melawan agressi Belanda. Jakarta: Bulan Bintang. [Edition of the Acehnese Syair Perang Sabil.] 1984 ‘Hamzah Fansuri sastrawan Sufi abad XVII’, in: Abdul Hadi W.M. and L.K. Ara (eds), Hamzah Fansuri penyair Sufi Aceh; Buku peringatan Malam Hamzah Fansuri 22 Ogos di Taman Ismail Marzuki, pp. 5-11. Jakarta: Lot­ kala. Ikram, Achadiati 2002 Katalog naskah Buton koleksi Abdul Mulku Zahari. Jakarta: Manassa. Meij, Th.C. van der 1994 ‘Proyek pendataan/pemetaan keberadaan naskah Lontar Lombok; Gen­ eral report’. Unpublished report for the Indonesian National Library. 2002 Puspakrema; A Javanese romance from Lombok. Leiden: Research School of Asian, African, and Amerindian Studies, Universiteit Leiden. Mukhlis Paeni 2003 Katalog induk naskah-naskah Nusantara: Sulawesi Selatan. Jakarta: Arsip Nasional. Yamamoto, Haruki, and Andareas S. Lingga 1990 ‘Catalogue of the Batak manuscripts in the Simalungun Museum’, Nam- po-Bunka; Tenri Bulletin of South Asian Studies 17 (November):1-18.

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Ethnicity, state and nation in Southeast Asia

Lian Kwen Fe (ed.), Race, ethnicity and the state in Malaysia and Singapore. Leiden: Brill, 2006, viii + 242 pp. [Social Sciences in Asia 7.] ISBN 9789004150966. Price: EUR 64.00 (paperback).

Kusuma Snitwongse and W. Scott Thompson (eds), Ethnic con- flicts in Southeast Asia.Singapore: ISEAS, 2005, xii + 173 pp. ISBN 9789812303400, price SGD 29.90 (paperback); 9789812303370, SGD 35.90 (hardback).

Wang Gungwu (ed.), Nation-building: five Southeast Asian histories. Singapore: ISEAS, 2005, xi + 288 pp. ISBN 9789812303172, price SGD 39.90 (paperback); 9789812303202, SGD 59.90 (hardback).

University of Malaya [email protected]

In their introduction to Ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia, Snitwongse and Thompson observe that in Southeast Asia, ‘ethnic diversity, social stability and national unity, have all presented challenges with which all the countries have had to cope from the time of their independence’ (p. vii). The three publications reviewed here each deal with these challenges by utilizing different trajectories – sociological, political, and historical. While each publication is independent of the others, it may be useful for researchers to acquire all three, as each provides an alternative perspective and a deeper understanding of the challenges. Although the order in which to read the three is not important, Race, ethnicity and the state in Malaysia and Singapore will provide a useful and pro­ found introduction to ethnic identity formation from a sociological perspec­ tive. Issues discussed in this volume are crucial factors in both conflict and nation-building, and also come up in the other two volumes reviewed here. Edited by Lian Kwen Fe, the book is a compilation of nine previously pub­ lished articles. Eight of these articles appeared in the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science’s special issues on ethnicity – ‘Ethnicity in Southeast Asia’ in

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1982, and ‘Transformations of Ethnic Identity in Malaysia and Singapore’ in 1997. Lian’s own work on the Tamils in Malaysia appeared in the 2002 edition of the Asian Studies Review. The book’s main focus is on the formation of ethnic identities through the interaction between the state and its multicultural citizenry. The main asser­ tion made here is that this interaction often leads to a damaging construction of ethnic identities. The editor does not indicate the reasons for focusing only on two countries, Malayia and Singapore, or for selecting the nine articles featured in the volume. But this quibble aside, he does to some extent achieve his goal of shifting attention from a theoretical – or, as he calls it, ‘definitional and conceptual’ (p. 2) – discourse of race and ethnicity to a problematic dis­ course using the dichotomy of the state and ethnic groups as analytical focal points. Attention is paid to the contentious relationship between the state and its citizenry, which produces racialization, to the imposition of ethnic catego­ ries on groups by those in power ‘for the purpose of exclusion on the basis of phenotypical features’ (p. 1), and to the self-identification of groups, which contributes to cultural identity. Alexius Pereira, in his article on the formation of Eurasian identity in Singapore, offers an alternative term, ‘essentializa­ tion’, a post-colonial theoretical construction which describes the discounting of social realities in favour of the oversimplification of characteristics (p. 7). The volume is most valuable in reflecting the tensions between primor­ dialism and civic nationalism. The former is the preoccupation of ethnic groups, while the latter reflects an all-inclusive notion of a nation which in principle should be the concern of the state. The idea of primordialism, made famous by Clifford Geertz and Walker Connor, implies that the attachment of individuals to their cultural group is in direct opposition to civic nation­ alism, which is rooted in territory and citizenship. Herein lies the tension. Nation-building and national policies formulated by the state should be void of ethnic bias and should be based on a philosophy of inclusive citizenship. This volume succeeds in illustrating that the state sometimes behaves like a primordialist, promoting the culture of a dominant ethnie. At the end of the read my initial question about the choice of countries for comparative analysis can perhaps be answered. Malaysia and Singapore are in some ways uncanny mirror images of each other. While both countries are supposedly semi-authoritarian in nature, Singapore is usually seen as more successful in maintaining a civil nationalism, while the Malaysian state is usually condemned as promoting ethno-nationalism. Yet the writers in Race, ethnicity and the state in Malaysia and Singapore show that the state in both countries has been guilty of promoting the culture of the dominant ethnie at the expense of the marginalization of minority groups; that both states have been guilty of essentialization of ethnic groups; and that neither state has been successful in formulating an all-inclusive national identity. The articles’ some­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 373 times conflicting accounts of the character of the state serve to further illustrate these tensions. For example, Pereira’s rosy reflection on the state in Singapore as the promotor of an inclusive national culture and equal rights of citizen­ ship in a multicultural environment is contradicted by Stimpfl’s account of the same state as promoting the culture of the dominant ethnie via policies such as the promotion of the Mandarin language and Confucian ethics. Race, ethnicity and the state in Malaysia and Singapore provides an analytical focus which inspires, and facilitates, reflection on the following dichotomies: nation/ethnie, state/citizen, minority/majority, self-identification/imposed cat­ egorization. Within each dichotomy, the features and characteristics of the countries concerned vary depending on the perspective taken. The idea of focusing on the state-citizenry relationship in Malaysia and Singapore, never­ theless, is relevant for other Southeast Asian countries. The contentious rela­ tionship between the state and its citizenry is a general feature of all states. On a less positive note, the writers in this publication do not seem to con­ tribute anything new to the discourse on ethnic issues in the two countries. There also seems to be a general perception that history and the social con­ struction of ethnic identities began with colonialism. There are no attempts to offer new perspectives that delve deeper into the history and socio-political dynamics of the process of racialization. Ethnic conflicts in Southeast Asia offers a socio-political perspective on the challenges of ‘ethnic diversity, social stability and national unity’. The volume examines conflicts in Southeast Asia which are rooted in ethnic differences, while taking the discourse further into the dynamic causes of conflict and possible formulations for conflict prevention, management and resolution. Being the result of a conference held in Thailand by the Institute of Security and International Studies (ISIS) and sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, the writers’ analyses are not merely a product of individual analysis but are also based on a dynamic discussion of the individual conflicts. Another merit of the publication is that the writers, except for Suzaina Kadir who is a Singaporean writing in Malaysia, are also nationals of the countries being analysed. The analytical trajectories provided by the writers do not just focus nar­ rowly on ethnic fault lines, but also include in-depth analysis of socio-eco­ nomic and political differences. The writers provide a logical assessment of ethnic conflict in the region and seem to foresee a less bleak future for conflict management and resolution, at least if honest good intentions inspire earnest efforts spearheaded by responsible states. In short, the common thread in the articles is the importance of the political will of the state, whether it is pre­ venting, managing, or resolving a conflict. The article by Rizal Sukma utilizes an analytical trajectory very widely used by those in the field of peace studies. His analysis provides a methodi­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 374 Book reviews cal logic for understanding Indonesia’s dynamic and multi-level conflicts. Miriam Ferrer’s analysis of the conflict in Mindanao highlights the combina­ tion of accumulated grievances and ethnic movements led by ethnic elites. The study on Thailand by Chayan does not focus on the conflict in the south, but instead concentrates on problems in the north. However, those who are familiar with the southern Thai problem will realize the dynamics are similar. Chayan points to selective citizenship as the problem in the north; the prob­ lem in the south has similar roots. Tin Maung Maung Than’s examination of the conflict in Myanmar sees this conflict as an almost inevitable result of the violent tendencies of the political regime governing the state itself. In all of the above case studies, it is suggested that although conflicts persist partly due to ethnic dynamics, a large proportion of them can potentially be sub­ dued by a responsible state. As in Lian Kwen Fe’s volume, an ever-present theme is the tension between the state’s primordialist tendencies and its responsibility to maintain a civic form of nationhood. The writers here try to provide some prescriptions for resolving the conflicts concerned by recommending alternative forms of governmental structure rooted in democracy. In the cases of Indonesia and the Philippines, for example, a change from a unitary state to a federal form of government is recommended. But the underlying question still remains: will a change in structure change the intention and political will of the state? This problem is mentioned by Rizal when he stresses that the change towards a more devolved structure in Indonesia has not yet devolved any power to the citizens, but has only expanded the elite circle. While four of the five chapters in this volume look at existing conflicts, the chapter by Zakaria Haji Ahmad and Suzaina Kadir reflects on successful conflict prevention and the successful management of ethnic politics. At the time of writing, the recent demonstrations organized by certain factions of the ethnic Indian community in Malaysia had not yet taken place and were presumably not expected. Given these recent events, Zakaria and Suzaina provide a too optimistic picture of Malaysia’s success in conflict management. They highlight ethnic power sharing as the reason for this alleged success. The weakness in the argument here is its failure to highlight the fact that the so-called power-sharing arrangement is sustained by the successful mainte­ nance of a consociational democracy based on a dominant party which is based on a coalition of communal-based parties. An important question which should have been raised is: what will happen when this party can no longer maintain its supremacy? While ethnic rights are somewhat protected, Malaysia’s consti­ tution does not automatically provide for a method of sharing power. For a more complete picture of the challenges arising from ethnic diversity in Malaysia, and in Southeast Asia in general, Nation-building: five Southeast Asian histories, edited by Wang Gungwu, provides a historical narrative of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 375 the region’s nation-building processes. Through an examination of this his­ tory, some questions broached in the other two volumes are clarified. Nation- building began as an idea initiated at the International Conference of Historians of Asia (IAHA) in Bangkok in 1996, and is part of a larger effort to record the contemporary history of nation-building in the region. The 1996 IAHA con­ ference resulted in a commitment from five historians to translate the idea into five in-depth historical writings, respectively by Cheah Boon Kheng on Malaysia, Reynaldo C. Ileto on the Philippines, Edwin Lee on Singapore, Taufik Abdullah on Indonesia, and Charnvit Kasetsiri on Thailand. The project as a whole is a most valuable one for the region, for sev­ eral reasons. Firstly, the five countries chosen are the first five members of ASEAN. It was agreed that whatever their achievements, these countries are still struggling with nation-building. Secondly, very little literature on nation-building in the region offers profound historical insights. Thirdly, the writing of contemporary history is a positive development in the histo­ riography the region. Fourth, the five scholars selected for the task are all renowned national historians of their own countries. Finally, unlike many works on contemporary history, this project provides an analysis of its own analytical framework and trajectory in the form of the volume reviewed here. Nation-building: five Southeast Asian histories serves both as a guideline and as a critical commentary on the work of the five scholars writing on Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines. Independent of the separate works to be written on each country, the writers in this book provide valuable cautionary advice for those intending to study, research or write about the region’s contemporary history. The value of caution is indeed illustrated in practice, as only one of the five planned works has so far been published, Cheah’s Malaysia: the making of a nation. The scholars contributing to this volume were well chosen to both provide critical commentaries on the works of the five historians assigned to writing the nation-building histories of the five countries and to meet the goal of the volume. The goal is twofold: to highlight the general challenges of writing the history of the region and of the countries concerned, and to highlight the specific challenges of writing the contemporary history of the region. Apart from Cheah himself, the other contributors, Wang Gungwu, Anthony Milner, Anthony Reid, Craig Reynolds, Anthony Stockwell, Albert Lau, Lee Kam Hing, and Carol Hau are all preeminent scholars of the countries’ histories and have confronted the challenge of writing contemporary histories in their careers. In his introduction Professor Wang argues that, far from borrowing from established Western foundations, both contemporary historical writing and nation-building have traditions rooted in the region itself. Echoing the post-modernist philosophy in Southeast Asian studies itself, the volume is resolute about the specificity of nation-building in each of the countries. It

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 376 Book reviews argues that nation-building in the countries of the region cannot and should not be analysed based on a general pattern, because each country has dynam­ ics unique to itself. An analysis based on a general pattern and a search for common factors between these countries would only provide a false picture. However, the volume is neither simplistic nor nihilistic. The importance of the colonial past is embraced, but it is established that nation-building was not merely a colonial by-product. Carol Hau’s and Craig Reynold’s contributions on the Philippines and Thailand respectively, whether intentionally or not, share a profound per­ spective that nation-building is an ongoing process. Hau’s commentary on Ileto’s insistence that a historical account of nation-building in the Philippines should be an all-inclusive analysis of discourses in the Philippines seems to offer a promising approach. Anthony Reid, on writing the history of indepen­ dent Indonesia, stresses discontinuities that make it difficult for the historian to capture the whole picture. Five of the ten chapters in the volume are devoted to Malaysia and Singapore. The reason for this given by the editor is that among the five coun­ tries under study, these two inherited the strongest administrative structure, and there is considerable continuity from the old British Malaya to the nations as they are now. Cheah’s chapter here is a reflection of his book Malaysia: the making of a nation where he focuses on the issue of ethnicity. Although this provides a crucial dynamic in Malaysia’s nation-building, Cheah’s chapter reflects a common oversight in mainstream discourse. Ethnic contest and the formulation of a Malaysian national identity have been in continual dis­ course. Yet as Cheah illustrated, this same discourse tends to be exclusivist in that it tends to focus specifically on contest between the Malays and the Chinese. A successful discourse on the challenge of Malaysian nation-build­ ing should move away from this dominant discourse and be more inclusivist by acknowledging the complexities of consolidating other ethnic identities as well as other sources of identity in Malaysia. Milner’s chapter provides exactly that, as he probes deeper into the chal­ lenges of Malaysian nation-building by examining possible alternative formu­ lations of national identity. Lee Kam Hing’s chapter deals with crucial issues in writing Malaysian contemporary history. His cautious approach, however, is relevant to any writing of contemporary history. Lee seems to recognize the fluidity of the concept ‘contemporary’. Referring to contemporary history as transitory, his chapter cautions against writing a contemporary history in which too much permanence is assigned to selected points in this transitory phase. Another valuable contribution here is Albert Lau’s problematization of the politicization of history in Singapore, which in a wider perspective is a problem not unique to Singapore. Nation-building: five Southeast Asian histories provides a retrospective out­

Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 377 look on contemporary nation-building. Nation-building is an unfinished and unfinishable process. One may not need to be overly aggrieved about conflicts and ethnic issues, as when all is said and done they may turn out to be no more than specks in the nation’s history. At the same time, leading on from Lau’s politicization of history, some questions are brought to the surface. How much of the historian’s interpretation is non-political? To what extent do historians politicize history in order to colour it the same hue as their own rose-tinted glasses? A final note on the three volumes reviewed here is that the issues discussed and highlighted illustrate, whether explicitly or implicitly, the clear tension which exists between primordialism and civic nationalism within the nations of Southeast Asia. The biggest problems of these nations, in my opinion, are civic in nature - that is, they are mainly concerned with the rights, needs and demands of citizens. Unfortunately, as these volumes illustrate, the trend in academic discourse in the region is to emphasize ‘primordial’ factors – differ­ ences in race, ethnicity, culture, language, religion – rather than civic factors in national politics.

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