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Book reviews

Niels Mulder, Southeast Asian images; Towards civil society? Chiang Mai: Silkworm Books, 2003, ix + 253 pp. ISBN 974.9575.03.2. Price: USD 14.97 (paperback).

MONIKA ARNEZ

Niels Mulder has conducted research in the field of civil society for decades. This book, which concludes his Images series, introduces the reader to the way modern urban middle classes conceive of their public world, and how they think about current problems affecting the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia. Mulder draws on school teaching materials, as well as the writings of intellectuals and novelists, to point out social and cultural similarities among the three nations. In schoolbooks, he finds, reality is often distorted, important facts are suppressed, and autonomous individuals are absent. Problems actually arising from the instability of social structures are blamed instead on the shortcomings of individuals, but at the same time pupils are not taught to develop individual creativity or critical thinking. In intellectual circles, by contrast, social problems are clearly identified and widely discussed. Mulder reviews recent debates on the necessity of a strong civil society, focusing on the place of women’s issues, Islam, educa- tion and the military in those debates. He also discusses several fictional texts that either incorporate strong social criticism, or demonstrate the rather new phenomenon of women writing freely about sexuality. In this way Mulder intends to make the reader aware of attempts to deal with problems such as the repression of women and the dominance of state ideologies. The book is a good introduction to the topic of civil society in Southeast Asia, and is suited for a general readership because of the way it points out similarities between the three countries considered and tries to track the most prominent themes in debates about civil society. However, Mulder’s attempt to meet the expectations of both general and academic readerships is a balancing act that does not succeed. Letting the written materials speak for themselves, giving practically no references, and commenting only briefly on important problems, is not scientific. The book does not refer to research conducted by other scholars. Another problem is that in Section III Mulder aims at providing the reader with information about the present, but the Philippine short story ‘Cadena de amor’ which is treated in that section was drafted in 1979. It is hard to imagine how this story can be compared with the other, more recent works Mulder has chosen here.

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A lack of coherence is also evident in Section II, where school materials are presented in the cases of Thailand and the Philippines, whereas for Indonesia intellectual debates and ﬁctional texts are taken as illustrations. The author seems to regard the intellectual debates, the textbooks and the novels as parts of one whole which can be compared with one another at random. In my view this is like comparing apples and oranges. Despite these shortcomings, I would recommend Southeast Asian images; Towards civil society? to a general readership and to undergraduates studying Southeast Asia.

Connie Carter, Eyes on the prize; Law and economic development in Singapore. The Hague: Kluwer Law International, xviii + 307 pp. [The London-Leiden Series on Law, Administration and Development 7.] ISBN 90.411.1728.8. Price: USD 162.00 (hardback).

ADRIAAN BEDNER

Connie Carter’s Eyes on the prize provides an excellent overview of the legal dimension of the successful Singaporean route to economic development. Although much has already been written on this subject, Carter’s account stands out for its comprehensiveness and clarity of argument. This is in large part due to her approach which is to analyse the genesis, and to a lesser extent the implementation, of the key legislation underlying economic development. The core of the book consists of two parts. The first is a chronologically ordered ‘macro-level analysis’ which provides a thorough account of the roots and structure of Singapore’s legal system, and of the various phases of the city-state’s economic development policies in their political context. The second, labelled ‘micro-level analysis’, looks in more detail at three fields of law and government that have been at the centre of the developmental effort: labour law and industrial relations, land law and housing, and intellectual property law. The main conclusion, briefly summarized, is that the government managed to avoid labour unrest by redistributing social welfare in the field of housing, and that the ensuing stability helped Singapore to attract foreign investment. Carter convincingly undermines the neo-liberal position of spurning state intervention on the road towards economic development – although it is unlikely that she will actually convince any remaining ‘believers’ here as she is not the first to present such evidence. More original is her analysis of the

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 145 conditions favouring an ‘Asian’ model of state intervention, which identifies the elements of Singapore’s success that can potentially be transplanted to other countries. However, the author’s ambitions go beyond the significant achievements mentioned above, and here – in my opinion – she is less successful. ‘The purpose of this study’, she states on page 2, is to discover whether key law and development (LAD) predictions about the relationship between law and economic development proved viable in the practice of economic development in Singapore from 1959 to 1999’. Carter goes on to state that these predictions are not part of a clearly outlined theoretical position because there is ‘no rigorous theory of law and development’: what she examines is ‘the abundance of rhetoric, which is made compelling by the status of some law and development protagonists like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund’. In this way she somewhat reduces her enemy before starting the attack. During the ensuing discussion of much LAD literature of the past thirty years – certainly not all of it mere rhetoric, to my mind – it gradually becomes clear that Carter also circumscribes the target of her criticism in another, much more significant way: whereas much of the LAD literature deals with legal institutions, she looks only at laws, more specifically those laws which are expressions of what she calls ‘law as “mature policy”’ (p. 38). As a result the book offers little real critique of LAD positions on the relation between development and the rule of law, but confines itself largely to the economic sphere and the use of economic developmental policy in the form of law. The main deficiency of Eyes on the prize from an LAD perspective follows directly from this choice: nowhere does the author discuss the role of the Singaporean judiciary, which – like the Singaporan civil service – stands out for its incorruptability and may well have been an important factor in decision-making by foreign investors. Neither does the author make the point that Singapore laws were stable, predictable and general in their application, or discuss the controls on government discre- tion, or explore the significance of Singapore’s questionable human rights record. As a result of this limited approach, Carter has very little ammunition to shoot at the positions of her intellectual opponents. In fact in the end she concludes only that ‘the rule of law can and does serve to entrench and consolidate the power of the state, and that it does not always exalt the protection of individual rights above the state and the public interest’ (p. 260) – not a very revolutionary finding. Nonetheless, Eyes on the prize is a significant contribution to the historiography of Singapore’s road to prosperity, offering well-written and comprehensive information about the legislation underpinning its economic

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J.R. van Diessen and F.J. Ormeling (editors, with the collaboration of R.C.M. Braam, W. Leijnse, P.A. Levi, J.J. Reijnders, R.P.G.A. Voskuil and M.P.B. Ziellemans), Grote atlas van Nederlands Oost- Indië/Comprehensive atlas of the Netherlands East Indies. Zierikzee: Asia Maior, Utrecht: Koninklijk Nederlands Aardrijkskundig Genootschap (KNAG), 2004, 480 pp. ISBN 90.74861.22.9. Price: EUR 265.00.

AMRIT GOMPERTS

This is the most comprehensive atlas of the Indonesian archipelago as it was at the end of the Dutch period. The editors are leading experts on cartography in the Netherlands who have a special interest in maps of the former Netherlands East Indies. In the Grote atlas they have compiled material from the former Dutch colonial survey (Topograﬁsche Dienst in Nederlandsch-Indië, TDNI), the Royal Dutch Geographical Society (KNAG), the Allied forces during the Second World War, and a wide variety of other sources. The second (2004) edition of the atlas includes a supplement that is also separately available for owners of the ﬁrst edition (2003). For non-Dutch readers, the bilingual (Dutch and English) text provides easy access to original Dutch colonial cartography. Nearly all maps from the Atlas van tropisch Nederland (1938) which deal with (parts of) Indonesia have been reprinted in the Grote atlas. In addition, the new atlas contains facsimiles of thematic maps on history, physical geography, geology (by J.J. Reijnders), social geography, economy, colonial administration, and transport. The editors have also paid attention to the insular character of the archipelago. There are many maps of commercial and navy harbours, coastal types and shipping lanes, and a few hydrographical charts. Brief, factual historical outlines accompany the maps. The graphic quality of the reproduced maps is high. Despite the limited amount of original cartographic material which is available for areas outside Java and Sumatra, the numbers of maps reproduced here are in balance with the demographic, economic and administrative importance of the regions which they cover: 139 pages for Sumatra, 147 for Java, and 79 for the rest of the Indonesian archipelago west of Papua. The 15 pages of maps and city plans of Papua (Irian, West New Guinea) are particularly interesting because this region was mapped later (1932-1960)

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 147 than the rest of Indonesia and in fact never completely surveyed. The editors deserve praise for their thorough search through Dutch archives and private collections for better and more detailed maps than those which are most readily available. The abundance of elaborate city maps and plain town plans provide lively cartographic images of a colonial world that has vanished. The atlas includes several maps of Jakarta, Surabaya and a few other cities from successive periods, revealing the historical expansion of today’s metropoles. The legends referring to the main buildings and streets on the city maps are either original, or in some cases the result of meticulously detailed research by the editors. Contemporary Indonesian city maps are seldom so accurate. Van Diessen and Voskuil wrote the chapter on the allied military cartography of the Indonesian archipelago in the period 1942-1946 (pp. 14-5). Maps produced by British, American and Australian forces help fill in the gaps in the (surviving) Dutch material. The editors justifiably adopted spellings of Indonesian place-names which are in agreement with the original sources. The consistency of the original spellings in the respective maps is maintained in the large index of 20,000 toponyms. Ormeling’s introductory chapter on the history of cartography in the Indonesian archipelago is a long-needed and important contribution in the field (pp. 6-14), at last providing some counterpart to Matthew Edney’s (1997) monograph on British colonial mapping in India. Some topics, nevertheless, could have been given more attention. One is the role of Jean A.C. Oudemans, whose depreciatory attitude to the mathematical capabilities of Indonesians caused them to be denied any role in the geodetic surveying of their own lands. Another individual who might have figured more prominently in Ormeling’s story is Colin Mackenzie, the first Surveyor General of India (1815-1821) and Raffles’ expert on mapping during the British interregnum on Java (1811-1816). Mackenzie insisted on obtaining copies of every Dutch map of Java that he considered important. And then there is Lambertus F. van Gent, an interesting figure in the history of the TDNI. In two important articles on toponyms in Java in the annual reports of the TDNI in 1915 and 1917, Van Gent stressed that topographers within the service should pay attention to the proper spelling of place names, many of which had become lĕmĕs or phonologically adapted to the spoken language. In order to understand their meanings, it was necessary to read the epics and historical sources. Van Gent also encouraged topographical surveyors to listen to local histories and attend performances by dhalang during their fieldwork. Ormeling rightly stresses the high quality of TDNI maps and the international recognition which the service enjoyed. The TDNI’s topographic sheets (1:25,000 and 1:50,000) are in fact richer in detail than the current (1:25,000)

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 148 Book reviews maps issued by the contracting company Blom-Narcon and printed by the national Indonesian survey, Bakorsurtanal. The TDNI’s sheets retain their cartographic value for archaeological and historical research. It is interesting to see, for example, that in the first half of the nineteenth century what is now the East Javanese city of Situbondo was a small place called Dhawuhan, a Javanese word meaning ‘dam’. The modern name Situbondo originates from the Sanskrit compound setu-bandha ‘constructing a bridge, dam or dike’ in the Rāmāyaņa epic. On the reproduced TDNI topographic map in the Grote atlas we see the dam along the Sampean river which was built for irrigating the area (p. 340, upper left). The numerical grids on the original maps are often very accurate. In Java, the coordinates of a particular point on a large-scale TDNI map (1:50,000 or larger) can be used to trace that point in the field using a consumer GPS receiver with an accuracy of about 50 meters. In a few of the reproduced maps, unfortunately, the numbers have been omitted. Moreover, the grids are not explained in the atlas. There are maps of the Japanese attack in 1941-1942, the Japanese internment camps for Dutch civilians and prisoners of war (1942-1945), and the two Dutch ‘police actions’ in 1947-1948 (pp. 57, 60-2). The editors have also composed a new chart of the administrative division of Indonesia in 1941, which is not shown in any contemporary map. The overall selection of cartographic material and the subject – Dutch maps of the former Netherlands East Indies – may suggest that the editors designed the atlas very much from a Dutch historical perspective. The inclusion of material on Indonesia in the Second World War, however, does something to relieve this impression. There are also many references to Indonesian nationalism and the stuggle for independence: a Dutch intelligence map of the Republic’s Blitar stronghold during the second ‘police action’ in 1948 (p. 312), for instance, and maps of Bandanaira and Tanahmerah (Boven Digul) where Hatta and Sjahrir respectively were detained (pp. 406, 430-1). Moreover the inclusion of information (statistical as well as cartographic) on agriculture and plantations underlines the close link between the (cadastral) activities of the TDNI and taxation (p. 11). Scholars of the economic history of Indonesia in this period will find much useful data in the atlas. It is my personal view that a few maps and descriptions referring to Indonesia’s cultural and historical heritage would have added even more appeal to the atlas. One attractive addition might have been a larger part of the TDNI sheet covering the surroundings of the Borobudur – together, perhaps, with a summary of Theo van Erp’s classic 1931 description of its topography. In the Old Javanese Deśawarņana or ‘Depiction of the Districts’ (otherwise known as the Nāgarakŗtāgama), the poet Prapañca relates a journey of King Hayam Wuruk through the countryside of East Java in 1359. In 1913, J.F. Niermeyer composed a map of the reconstructed route of the royal

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 149 train. In the atlas (p. 339, lower right) we see, northeast of the city of Besuki, the cape of Ketah where the king stayed for ﬁve nights and at pleasure nar- rated of the sea, having found there a pier or a pavilion built into the water. It would have been nice to make something in the atlas of this and other historical coincidences of place. However, these are all minor points of criticism and Van Diessen and Ormeling’s Grote atlas is truly an impressive work. Since the Republic of Indonesia corresponds geographically to the former Netherlands East Indies, what this atlas shows is Indonesia on the eve of its independence as well as Netherlands India on the eve of its downfall. Compiled accord- ing to the best academic traditions of Dutch cartography, it is a very useful tool for reference and research and a must for every library in the ﬁeld of Indonesian studies. The Koninklijk Instituut voor de Tropen (KIT, Royal Tropical Institute) in Amsterdam now intends to make all its Indonesian cartographic material from before 1950, in all some 10,000 maps, available online via a digital map viewer on its institutional website (www.kit.nl). Nevertheless the Grote atlas will retain its value not only as a small-scale overview of the online material, but also as an aesthetic achievement. For individual readers, this beautiful publication is worth the price.

Adriaan Bedner and Nicole Niessen, Towards integrated environmental law in Indonesia? Leiden: Research School CNWS, School of Asian, African and Amerindian Studies, 2003, 161 pp. [CNWS Publications 127.] ISBN 90.5789.091.7. Price: EUR 20.00 (paperback).

STUART R. HARROP

This is an edited book with a coherent theme and direction rather than a set of disparate and loosely related essays. It deals with the integration of environmental law and enforcement approaches in a state, Indonesia, which has a full set of challenges in this respect because of its complex geography, its delicately balanced ecosystems, its extreme biodiversity, the complexity of its social structures and the turbulence of its politics. The laws that are examined here have been created ‘from scratch’ (p. 9) and inevitably suffer from a number of problems which frustrate efﬁcient integration. The result, as described by Bedner in the introductory chapter, is a constellation of ‘vague, overlapping, incoherent, and “soft” rules, which are difﬁcult to implement’ (p. 10). This short description of the laws in question epitomizes the themes examined in detail in the remaining chapters of the book.

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Following the introduction, the book analyses the conceptual basis for the need for integration, and then examines self-regulation. An oddly chosen comparator for this latter theme is the EU experience. However, the conclu- sions are useful and would certainly inform Indonesian legal engineers. The next chapter lucidly describes the history of environmental policy development in Indonesia and bravely makes the point that effective environmental policy implementation was one incident of Soeharto’s authoritarian administration (p. 48). Following on from this there is an analysis of the problems of policy integration. Here the key challenge appears to derive from the recur- rent problem of disempowered actors. Next the issue of spatial planning is examined. This automatically raises the issue of conﬂicts between development priorities and environmental protection, and also hints at corruption within the regulatory system. The next two chapters look at, in turn, the substance and (aspects of) the enforcement of Indonesia’s key piece of environmental legislation: the Environmental Management Act of 1997. One problem with this law is that the drafting style emulates the inappropriate language of some international instruments, thus creating imprecise obligations reminiscent of soft law rather than clear legal prescriptions. Another problem is that harmonization of enforcement of the Act’s requirements appears to be abysmal. The book completes its comprehensive analysis with more optimistic examinations of two disparate topics: environmental public interest litiga- tion, and forestry laws. For those interested in legal and social policy issues within Indonesia, this book provides useful research and perspectives. For those interested in the wider issues arising from the development/environmental debate, the book provides a useful case study of attempts to develop and integrate environmental law in a situation where almost all of the conceivable social, geographical and ecological challenges are present.

Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt (eds), Locating Southeast Asia; Geographies of knowledge and politics of space. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005, xii + 326 pp. ISBN 90.6718.247.8. Price: SGD 45.00 (paperback).

DAVID HENLEY

This interesting anthology originated as papers at a workshop in honour of Professor Heather Sutherland, a scholar always much concerned with the pitfalls of classiﬁcation. Its guiding questions are what, if anything, Southeast

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Asia is, and what it has been held to be, and by whom, and why. Contributors deal with Southeast Asia as seen from Europe, the United States, Singapore, China, Japan, Thailand, the Philippines, and from the boats of Southeast Asian sea nomads; with the origins of borders within the region; and with commercial, political and communications networks transcending it. In an edited volume of this kind much depends on the quality of the editors’ introduction, and here the opening essay by Kratoska, Raben and Schulte Nordholt is readable and informative. In it they succinctly trace the history of Southeast Asian studies from modest beginnings in the work of early twentieth-century German and American scholars working outside the then dominant colonial frameworks, through a peak of popularity and fund- ing during the Cold War, to an uncertain future in an era of ‘globalization’. There are two problems with this introductory piece, however. The first is that despite paying repeated lip service to the importance of geography, the authors do not mention or discuss any of the geographical works dealing with Southeast Asia as a region. The classics in this field are E.H.G. Dobby’s Southeast Asia (1950) and C.A. Fisher’s South-East Asia; A social, economic and political geography (1964). More recent works in the same tradition include: J. Rigg, Southeast Asia; A region in transition (1991); T.R. Leinbach and R. Ulack (eds), Southeast Asia; Diversity and development (2000); and R.D. Hill, Southeast Asia; People, land and economy (2002). In a book bearing the subtitle ‘Geographies of knowledge and politics of space’, it seems immodest as well as unwise to ignore the discipline which has given greatest attention to the old (and, frankly, overexplored) question of what constitutes a region. The second problem is that before concluding that Southeast Asia ‘persists as little more than a way to identify a certain portion of the earth’s surface’ (p. 14), the editors could have given more serious consideration to the attempts made over the years to find positive traits, more concrete than ‘diversity’ or ‘openness’, which can be said – at least in combination – to characterize the region. Examples include, in the environmental sphere: forests and water dominating the natural landscape and determining transport problems and possibilities; problems of soil infertility to which the three possible solutions give three characteristic farming systems: irrigation, shifting cultivation, and arboriculture. In agriculture: rice as preferred foodcrop, with water buffalo for ploughing and fish for protein. In social structure: female autonomy; debt as a basis for social relations; hierarchical orientation in paradoxical combination with social mobility; economically dominant but politically con- strained ethnic Chinese trading minorities. In culture: binary classification systems, pronounced politeness forms, and a persistent religious underlay of pragmatic, sacrificial paganism. In demography: lower average population densities (and growth rates) than in China, South Asia, or Europe. In recent history: extremely (almost uniquely) high rates of economic growth, urbani-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 152 Book reviews zation and industrialization wherever capitalist forces are not suppressed by war or by predatory states. The individual chapters of Locating Southeast Asia, on the whole, do not disappoint. Heather Sutherland herself is as thoughtful and knowledgeable as ever in an essay on regions (and states, and cities) as ‘contingent devices’. So is Wang Gungwu in his comparison between Singaporean and Chinese perspectives on Southeast Asia. Thongchai Winichakul is on good form in a modest and entertaining essay on Thai attitudes to neighbouring countries. Willem Wolters may be exaggerating when he describes agricultural seasonality as the main reason for the economic integration of Southeast Asia with East and South Asia in the past, but his histories of the currency systems linking the three regions are certainly fascinating. Howard Dick is lucid and interesting in his related essay on Southeast Asia as an economic ‘open system’. Ruth McVey draws the threads robustly together in a concluding chapter which predicts, and welcomes, an increasing indigenization of Southeast Asian studies as educational standards in the region continue to rise, a ‘Southeast Asian version of global consumer culture’ (p. 316) emerges, and national political elites consolidate the regional cooperation already institutionalized in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). Not all of the chapters, inevitably, are equally impressive. It is ironic that the most geographically informed piece in the collection is Willem van Schendel’s ‘Geographies of knowing, geographies of ignorance: jump- ing scale in Southeast Asia’. Although well written and entertaining, this polemical critique of Southeast Asia as a field of study contains, like most polemic, a good deal of facile exaggeration. An important part of it, for instance, is devoted to explaining why a hypothetical region called ‘Zomia’ has not become an Area with its own Area Studies community. Comprising the Himalayas together with the other mountain ranges along the southern borders of China, Zomia allegedly went unrecognized because it ‘straddled the communist and capitalist spheres of influence’ (but isn’t that exactly what Southeast Asia did?), because it ‘did not cover important states’ (indeed, and we might well add: or large populations, or major economies, or big cities, or significant trade routes within the last 500 years...), and because it lacked the ‘colonial experts’ who, in Southeast Asia, slyly managed to reinvent themselves in the postcolonial era as area specialists. For these reasons, Van Schendel claims, ‘prospective Zomianists lost out in the scramble for the area after World War II’ (p. 286). The truth, of course, is simpler: there were never any ‘prospective Zomianists’ except in Van Schendel’s imagination. Even as a purely counterfactual exercise, his argument would be a lot stronger if his alternative regionalization had the effect of splitting up Southeast Asia – or South Asia, or East Asia – in a radical new way. But it does not: with respect to the existing Area Studies communities ‘Zomia’, even if it had any pro-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 153 ponents, would not amount to more than a minor border dispute – and all academic disciplines, even the most rigorous, are subject to those. Actually the whole business of ‘problematizing’ Southeast Asia as a region often has a dubious ring of sophistry about it. The truth is that if you travel through Southeast Asia it is obvious that this is one region: similar-looking people, landscapes, plants and animals, villages, markets, urban neighbour- hoods, and means of transport, not to mention similar manners and similar food. Nor is it only visitors from other parts of the world who notice these similarities. Southeast Asians themselves also tend to appreciate them, and have been made more aware of them by travel, the media, and the success of ASEAN as a regional political organization. At a time when the ﬁeld of Southeast Asian studies is under methodological and ﬁnancial attack, it is a little sad that not all Southeast Asianists share that awareness.

Anthony J. Langlois, The politics of justice and human rights; Southeast Asia and universalist theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001, xi + 214 pp. [Cambridge Asia-Paciﬁc Studies.] ISBN 0.521.80785.9, price USD 75.00 (hardback); 0.521.00347.4, USD 25.99 (paperback).

GERRY VAN KLINKEN

Reading this book had the unintended effect of making me realize how much both Southeast Asia and the West have changed in the last ﬁve years. Soeharto, Lee Kuan Yew, and Mahathir, the conservative trio who do excellent service in this book as spokespersons for ‘Asian values’, have all retired. Indonesia is now the world’s second largest democracy, after India. More Indonesians voted in its 2004 presidential election than did Americans in theirs. And perhaps they voted more intelligently. Meanwhile Americans voted back George Bush mainly because he professes religious values instead of enlightenment ones. His attorney general is a man who as White House counsel declared provisions of the Geneva Convention ‘quaint’. The very term ‘human rights’ is almost an American invention, deﬁned in Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms following the outbreak of World War II, but Bush has done much to undermine that legacy. ‘Nine-eleven’ will mark the end of an era in writing about human rights, one in which the main problem lay outside the West. From now on the problem lies as much within the West. Langlois’ book was written before the old era ended. It strives for the noble goal of a ‘theoretical understanding of human rights that might act as a common framework in the context of pluralism’ (p. 73). But it reads

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 154 Book reviews oddly like a Western discussion, in which Asians appear only as a kind of foil who contest the notion that human rights are universal. The list of icons of human rights theory on pages 163-4 is entirely Western. The movement is from Dworkin and Rawls, now regarded as outdated because they fail to recognize the historicity of Western rationality, to thinkers like Mouffe, Sunstein, MacIntyre, Rorty, and Taylor, who promote more narrational, contextual and relational views. The number of Southeast Asian names in the book’s index is only a third of the number of Western names. And that includes the now-retired Lee-Soeharto-Mahathir trio, and others who sound like them, mostly ofﬁcials. We look in vain here for non-regime intellectuals like Gunawan Mohamed, Yap Thiam Hien, Renato Constantino, Syed Husin Ali, Vitit Muntarbhorn, or Aung San Suu Kyi. These human rights practitioners who are also theorists have far less trouble with universalism. They would have pointed out that victims have an interest in universalism. If this book comes from an era when Western smugness seemed not out of place, what might such a book look like after the reversal of roles implied by the American reaction to 9/11 and Asian democratization? We now des- perately need a book on universal human rights theory by an Asian theorist/ practitioner. More than ever, the world needs a muscular understanding of human rights.

Jurrien van Goor, Prelude to colonialism; The Dutch in Asia. Hilversum: Verloren, 2004, 127 pp. ISBN 90.6550.806.6. Price: EUR 13.00 (paperback).

KOH KENG WE

Prelude to colonialism questions a historiographic divide implicit in works on Dutch colonialism and imperialism in Asia: the divide between the VOC period which ended with the Company’s bankruptcy in 1799, and the subsequent period of the Dutch colonial state. This divide, the author argues, arose from the tendency, especially after the 1960s, to focus on the VOC and the Dutch East Indies state as commercial and political-territorial institutions respectively. To demonstrate what he sees as the real continuity between the two institutions and periods, Van Goor highlights the ‘political’ dimensions of the VOC, especially its diplomatic activities, and the multiple roles of its representatives as merchants, diplo- mats and administrators. This ambiguity, he shows, resulted from a combination of European politics, the Asian environment in which the VOC operated,

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 155 and elements of the Portuguese legacy which the Dutch adopted. Van Goor examines the ‘colonial career’ of J.P. Coen, who laid the foundations of the Dutch empire in Asia and embodied the VOC’s combination of statesman- ship and merchant acumen. Continuities between the VOC and the colonial state, Van Goor shows, also existed in terms of political and economic structures, and in ideologies and personnel, despite the changes and attempts at liberal reform between 1780 and 1830. Moreover the stereotypical vision of Asian societies and rulers which we now call ‘Orientalism’, and which is seen as an important corollary to imperialism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was already part of the VOC encounter with Asia before 1800. Finally Prelude to colonialism focuses on one of the key institutions of the nineteenth- and twentieth- century Dutch colonial state, the Binnenlands Bestuur (BB), arguing that the functions and outlook of this service, and its attitudes towards Asian societies, had their origins in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Van Goor’s own analysis also shows how the colonial state differed from the VOC in several fundamental respects. Under the Cultivation System, for instance, the scale of state-sponsored production was much larger than in VOC days, so that the System, ‘intended as a return to VOC days, ultimately became an innovative element in Javanese society’ (p. 98). Moreover Dutch colonial ideologies and perceptions of Asian societies, although at ﬁrst they displayed much continuity with the VOC period, underwent major changes after the 1870s. The argument of Prelude to colonialism bears on a wide range of histo- riographical and methodological issues concerning Dutch colonialism and imperialism in the East Indies. Van Goor traces, for example, how changes in the political and ideological environment contributed to shifts in Dutch historiography of the VOC and of Dutch colonialism. He looks at debates over the use of the term ‘imperialism’, and over how the Dutch colonial project compared to that of other European powers. The chapter on Coen is an attempt to assess different approaches to biography, and to highlight the dangers posed by ideological and theoretical positions in the interpretation of primary sources and the reconstruction of past lives. While some might criticize Van Goor’s Dutch, rather than Asian, perspective on the history of Dutch colonialism in Asia, it is equally fair to point out that his primary concern, as deﬁned from the outset, was ‘the Dutch in Asia’. In practice, though, even this is too broad a description of what he is doing in this book. Actually his main concern seems to be with the Dutch (rather than international) literature on Dutch colonialism, imperialism and the VOC. Prelude to colonialism does not engage with broader and more recent work on Dutch colonialism by such authors as Jan Breman, Elsbeth Locher- Scholten, Frances Gouda, Anne Stoler, James Siegel, and John Pemberton, or

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 156 Book reviews with the innovative work on early modern European-Asian encounters by Leonard and Barbara Andaya, Timothy Barnard, Dhiravat na Pombejra, and J. Kathirithamby-Wells (to name but a few). Van Goor’s analysis is also restricted in large part to Dutch colonialism before 1870 – that is, before the Liberal and Ethical policies – and to the geographical conﬁnes of Java. Ultimately, Prelude to colonialism succeeds in highlighting the inadvis- ability of drawing any sharp divide between the VOC and colonial periods in Dutch expansion in the Indonesian archipelago, or of presupposing a uni- lineal development from a commercial empire to a political-territorial one. Instead it emphasizes the continuities and parallels between the two periods, and the importance during the transition of oscillations and dialectical ten- sions between old and new forces and pressures.

Thomas H. Slone, Prokem; An analysis of a Jakartan slang. Oakland: Masalai Press, 2003, 95 pp. ISBN 0.9714127.5.8. Price: USD 9.95 (paperback).

LIM BENG SOON

This short text by T.H. Slone provides some interesting insights into the phenomenon of ‘ludlings’ or ‘play languages’ (Don Laycock, 1972, ‘Towards a typology of ludlings, or play languages’, Linguistic Communications; Working Papers of the Linguistic Society of Australia 6:61-113). Prokem is a play language created through a series of transformations acting regularly on ordinary vocabulary items to reorder their form. Prokem has developed from under- world origins to become widely used by youths at all levels of the Jakarta population. The intrinsic fluidity of its use amongst all social strata has been captured by the author through a multi-dimensional analysis of three types of information: previously published works, a collection of unpublished data, and a summary and discussion of the categories of ludling. The author proceeds to compare Prokem with other ludlings in Indonesia and neighbouring Malaysia and Brunei. He gives a convincing account of its probable origins based on sociolinguistic and historical developments in Indonesia. Slone explains that in colonial times, Jakarta was at the centre of the Dutch Indies directly under the influence of the colonizer. Although located on Java, it was a magnetic melting pot for all ethnic groups in Indonesia, and in the city the Malay language held sway: hence Prokem’s close connection with modern Indonesian. The author argues convincingly that another major influence is that of the Minangkabau, who migrated to

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Jakarta in large numbers after independence and by 1971 constituted 10 per cent of Jakarta’s population. Always keen to quantify, Slone claims that 96.5 per cent of Prokem words are derived from Indonesian and less than 1.5 per cent from Sundanese or Javanese, the two big indigenous languages of Java. His observation on the appeal of punning to an ethnically diverse population in Jakarta in the postcolonial age is thought-provoking. Slone argues that in a multilingual and multicultural Indonesia, most Indonesians are in a sense exiles within their own country, since they speak both Indonesian and a local language and have a split perspective on their own culture and their adopted culture. Under these circumstances, punning offers the exiles an outlet for their need to say two things at once. The author analyses the development of Prokem as a ludling via its puns, criminal slang, and references to sex and violence, as in words like lipem and sorot. Some of these words are included in tabular appendices listing Indonesian and English equivalents. Slone estimates that roughly one fifth of the Prokem vocabulary can be classified as crime-related or related to sex and violence. He admits that his categories are sometimes porous: there is much interchangeability, for instance, between the sex- and violence-related vocabularies. This, however, begs the question of how Slone’s categories were chosen in the first place. Slone provides insightful comments on how Prokem’s puns and obsceni- ties, once directly related to criminality, have gradually become outlets for frustrations with the corruption, cynical politics, and excessive religiosity current in Indonesia. I find that this volume would have been worth expanding quite a bit, as it offers a valuable new approach to the study of ludlings. Slone could, for instance, have provided more in-depth comparison with the other examples of ludlings in Indonesia and Malaysia, such as the cakap balik (literally ‘back- wards talk’) of Negri Sembilan and the informal dialects of the Eurasian communities in Penang and Malacca.

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Neil Khor Jin Keong and Khoo Keat Siew, The Penang Po Leung Kuk; Chinese women, prostitution and a welfare organisation. Kuala Lumpur: The Malaysian Branch of The Royal Asiatic Society (MBRAS), 2004, VII +181 pp. ISBN 967.9948.32.3. Price MYR 40.00 (hardback).

LIM BENG SOON

This monograph gives a thorough description of the development of the Penang Po Leung Kuk (PLK), a welfare organization founded at the end of the nineteenth century and dedicated to the protection of Chinese women. The story of the PLK home from its foundation in 1888 until its closure in 1977 is set against the backdrop of the changing political and social landscape of Penang. The authors provide a general history of Penang from its establishment in 1786 until the late 1870s, setting the scene for the founding of the PLK. The chapters of the book are arranged in a way that facilitates the reader’s understanding of the need for such a home within the philosophical and cultural milieu of colonial Penang. The ﬁrst two chapters give the reader a wealth of information on Chinese society and its leaders in Penang before the twentieth century, and depict how winds of change sweeping through the Chinese community at large, and the Peranakan Chinese community in particular, led to the foundation and growth of this welfare organization. This volume demonstrates the dedication, benevolence and perseverance of Penang’s early Chinese millionaires in ensuring that the island’s booming economy and seemingly prosperous Chinese community did not forget those who had fallen by the wayside. This volume is indeed an original work of social history: not many academic publications have explored the topic of social welfare amongst the immigrant Chinese in Southeast Asia, and nor has much previous work been done on the string of Po Leung Kuk missions in Penang, Singapore, Batavia and Hong Kong. More information, even an additional chapter, could have been incor- porated on the daily lives of the inmates of the home in different eras. The book has extensive appendices, providing a rich storehouse of information that could however have been exploited better in the main text. The impact of the PLK in changing the course of the lives of its inmates could have been showcased by tracing the life histories of some inmates from the point of their admission to their ﬁnal discharge. The last chapter of the book draws to a close with a vivid description of the twilight years of the home. Here one can sense a tinge of regret and desperation as the authors recount the closure of the home in the face of a frustrating chain of events in the 1970s. Ironically, fate intervened to shut down the home in the prime of its existence. It was in the 1960s and 70s that

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 159 the home started to expand its services to single mothers, and was visited by several fact-finding missions on welfare services sent from the other states of newly-formed Malaysia with a view to learning how an efficient and successful welfare organization should be run. The reader is left not only sad, but also baffled as to how an organization that had successfully saved so many women from a lifetime of servitude and abuse could meet its end in such an unfortunate way. I would highly recommend this book to both the anthro- pologist and the casual reader, in fact to anyone with an interest in Penang and its people.

J. Thomas Lindblad and Willem van der Molen (eds), Macht en majesteit; Opstellen voor Cees Fasseur bij zijn afscheid als hoogleraar in de geschiedenis van Indonesië aan de Universiteit Leiden. Leiden: Opleiding Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost-Azië en Oceanië, Universiteit Leiden, 2002, xviii + 328 pp. [Semaian 22.] ISBN 90.73084.22.9. Price: EUR 23.18 (paperback).

DICK VAN DER MEIJ

On January 1, 2002, before reaching the age of 65, Professor Cees Fasseur retired from the chair of the ‘History of Southeast Asia, especially of Indonesia and its relationship with the Netherlands’, at Leiden University to continue his career as Judge at the Court of Appeal in Amsterdam. Professor Fasseur had occupied this chair since 1986 and his departure was cause for 18 pro- movendi, colleagues, and fellow historians to present him with this liber amicorum. And a token of respect and friendship indeed it is. The book is a pleasure to read and contains a wealth of interesting and well-written articles, many of which are concise gems. If we take into account that the authors of the articles only had six months at their disposal to deliver their work, we may only marvel at the result. Most contributions, however, are in Dutch and so I fear inaccessible to many. Fasseur was not only a historian of Southeast Asia and its links with the Netherlands. He was also interested in Dutch history itself and especially in Queen Wilhelmina, about whose life he wrote two thick volumes. Among the Dutch general public it is mainly for these books that he is known. His academic career is the subject of the ﬁrst contribution to the book, ‘Cees Fasseur; Tussen geschiedenis en gerechtigheid’, written by his long- time colleague H.L. Wesseling, who provides a concise portrait of Fasseur. This is preceded by a bibliography of Fasseur’s writings, often books con- taining hundreds of pages. The second contribution is by H.W. van den

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Doel: ‘Logen en laster, gesteund door geld en onbeschaamdheid; Landheer, ambtenaar en koning in de Tjiomas-affaire’. This traces the reasons for a violent clash between the colonial masters and their indigenous subjects in Buitenzorg (present-day Bogor) in the late 1880s. The next contribution, ‘Een moordgeschiedenis; Koloniale oorlogvoering en militaire ethiek rond 1900’ by Petra Groen, discusses the way atrocities committed during the Aceh War were seen by contemporaries in the light of international laws on warfare. Groen pays attention to the discussion on the way the Dutch colonial army should behave in cases of conﬂict with indigenous peoples. In ‘De echo van de boerenoorlog in Nederlands-Indië’, Kees van Dijk, basing himself mainly on news bulletins in the daily De Locomotief, discusses the reverberations of the Boer War in the Dutch East Indies and the distrust displayed by the European community towards the English during the conﬂict. Freek Colombijn rightly notes that during the infamous Cultivation System, getting produce produced was not enough: it also needed to be transported. How transportation was organized in Sumatra is related in his ‘Hoe de Nederlanders op Sumatra aan de weg timmerden; De ontwikkeling van het wegennet op Midden-Sumatra, 1600-1870’. Discussing a small Javanese book published by the colonial printing house Balai Pustaka, Willem van der Molen offers an explanation of the text Kontrolir Sadiman. B. Bouman tells about illegal weapon smuggling to Indonesia during the revolution in his ‘Operatie Mariam Bee; Een geslaagde Republikeinse wapensmokkelactie vanuit Singapore in 1946’. That politics and economics walked hand in hand even during the decolonization of Indonesia is shown by J. Thomas Lindblad in his ‘Politieke economie en de dekolonisatie in Indonesië’. By pointing to the role played by Sumitro Djojohadikusumo, he also demonstrates that individuals should not be overlooked. In ‘Spitsvinnighe warvogels; Vier juristen en de totstandkoming van de eerste politiewetten in Nederlandsch Indië’, Leonard Blussé tells us the story of four learned jurists sent to Batavia to be employed by the VOC and the disastrous results their sending had for their employers. A sketch of life in eighteenth-century Mauritius is the subject of Paul van der Velde’s ‘Isle de France: in het land van de walgvogel en de Javaanse appelvink; Jacob Haafners schets van Mauritius 1786-1787’. G. Roger Knight points to the connections between sugar lords in the Dutch East Indies and improvements in European sugar manufacturing tech- nology in ‘The contractor as suikerlord and entrepreneur’, while Minister Bot’s years in the tropics are described in ‘De tropenjaren van Minister Bot’ by L. van Poelgeest. Thoughts on monarchy or republic in the Renaissance are the topic of M.E.H.N. Mout’s ‘Tussen hoop en vrees; Bezwaren tegen de monarchie in de Renaissance’. Koningin Wilhelmina’s feelings towards the Indies, and the question to what extent the Indies were part of the Dutch kingdom, are the subjects of Arjen Taselaar’s ‘Koningin Wilhelmina als

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 161 symbool van de rijkseenheidsgedachte’. Hans Teeuw draws our attention to pertinent examples of the demise of European superiority in the eyes of Indonesians by looking at their changing ideas about Koningin Wilhelmina in his ‘Een beeld vergruizeld’. That Javanese literature included an erotic component is shown by Edwin Wieringa in ‘De “Serat Pustaka Rasa Jarwa” van Sie Tjien Lok; Een erotische interpretatie van de Javaanse historiograﬁe’. The question of what to do with the study of colonial history more than half a century after the independence of the colony is answered by Vincent J. Houben in ‘Koloniale geschiedenis van Indonesië in de 21e eeuw’. The book ends with R.E. Elson’s ‘The Americans and the 1965 “coup attempt” in Indonesia: new insights?’. It has been said that Fasseur’s approach to the history of the Dutch East Indies was rather European-centred. This is equally applicable to many of the contributors to this book. Another feature of Fasseur’s historical approach is his clear interest in the individual in relation to history (Wesseling, p. 9). This feature too is well represented in the volume as most contributions concern individuals, ranging from Jacob Haafner (Van der Velde), kontrolir Sadiman (Van der Molen), Otto Carel Holmberg (Knight), Minister Th.H. Bot (Van Poelgeest), and Queen Wilhelmina (Tasselaar) to the four ‘Spitsvinnighe Warvogels’ of Blussé’s chapter: Martinus Sonck, Pieter Nuyts, Pieter Vlack and Antonio van den Heuvel. The personal touch comes most to the fore in the beautiful piece by Blussé, especially in his – perhaps sentimental, but heart-rending – consideration for the ‘kleine’ Laurens Nuyts who, after having been taken by his father to Batavia in 1626 and on to Formosa and Japan, dies at the age of seven as a captive of the Japanese in Omura prison where his father has left him behind as a hostage.

Renato Rosaldo (ed.), Cultural citizenship in island Southeast Asia; Nation and belonging in the hinterlands. Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2003, x + 228 pp. ISBN 0.520.22747.6, price USD 60.00 (hardback); ISBN 0.520.22748.4, USD 24.95 (paperback).

DICK VAN DER MEIJ

The contributions in this volume, which is dedicated to Clifford Geertz, deal with modern Southeast Asian nation-states and explore ‘the perspectives of hinterland ethnic minorities as they deﬁne the terms of their national belonging and struggle with coercive deﬁnitions of citizenship that emanate from state centers of power’ (p. 1). These power centres strive to draw minority groups into nation-building projects that are driven by ideas

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 162 Book reviews of development, modernity, assimilation, and nationalism. Essentially, Cultural citizenship in island Southeast Asia deals with how states cope with the cultural diversity found within their borders and how hinterland peoples try to counteract the efforts made to incorporate them into national policies and ideologies. Variations in cultural, religious, and historical identities have always existed within what are now national frontiers, but the ways in which those variations are perceived by elites have changed with the rise of nationalism. This book aims to show that ‘notions of nation- hood and citizenship are not given, but created, through dialogue between local communities and the state’. In it Rosaldo discusses the relationships between metropolitan elites and hinterland groups in three Southeast Asian states: the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The introduction is provided by Renato Rosaldo and addresses the theoretical framework applied in the volume, highlighting the seminal role of Clifford Geertz in introducing the subject. The Philippines form the subject of the contribution by Patricia Horvatich, entitled ‘The martyr and the mayor: on the politics of identity in the southern Philippines’. ‘The creation of homogeneity out of heterogeneity’, Horvatich observes, ‘is intrinsic to the nation building process’ (p. 17). Her article elaborates on this idea by describing the attitudes of successive metropolitan leaders (American and Filipino) towards the Muslim population of the Philippines, especially in view of the emergence of Moro sub-nationalism. More or less the same issue is addressed by Lanfranco Blanchetti-Revelli in his contribution, ‘Moro, Muslim, or Filipino? Cultural citizenship as practice and process’. He points to the fact that the notion of ‘Moro’ and ‘Muslim’ are not quite the same and that they have been created, recreated, used, and misused at will by Moros themselves as well as by metropolitan political leaders, past and present. J. Peter Brosius’ contribution is entitled ‘The forest and the nation; Negotiating citizenship in Sarawak, East Malaysia’. It discusses how the Penan hunter-gath- erers of North Borneo have reacted to the deforestation of their homelands, with the support of the Malaysian government, since the early 1980s. The reaction of the international community to the same logging is also addressed. International environmental and biodiversity concerns mean that the issue of citizenship in Northern Borneo is no longer just a domestic matter. ‘Who appears in the family album? Writing the history of Indonesia’s revolutionary struggle’ is the title of the contribution by Jane Monnig Atkinson. This examines how the status of national hero is conferred in post-colonial Indonesia. Was Raja Tanjumbulu a nationalist leader, as Indonesian government researchers claim, or merely a protagonist in the dynastic politics of a small Central Sulawesi chiefdom? ‘Citizens as spectators; Citizenship as a communicative practice on the eastern Indonesian island of Sumba’ is written by Joel C. Kuipers. He focuses

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 163 on citizenship as an activity, especially in the form of communication, rather than as an institution or a consciousness. Empirically his topic is ritual speech as a voice of response to authority, rather than as a voice of authority. The bulk of the chapter deals with how this response evolved and changed from colonial times through to the present. ‘The news in the provinces’, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, concludes the volume. Tsing deﬁnes news as ‘the information we need in order to be par- ticipants in public groups and political issues’ (p. 192), and she describes her contribution as an argument for ‘a cautionary appreciation of interpretive dis- junctions and political asymmetries instated as varied social groups partici- pate in producing and consuming the news’ (p. 192). The piece elaborates on how news is perceived and used by the Meratus Dayaks of Central Borneo. The chapters of this book are versions of selected papers from a conference on ‘Cultural Citizenship in Southeast Asia’ held at the East-West Center in Honolulu in March 1993. A decade, then, elapsed between the conference and the publication of the book based on it, making some of the observa- tions and papers perhaps somewhat outdated. This notwithstanding, I think the book deserves a wide readership, wider than only those concerned with Southeast Asian issues. The ideas elaborated upon in the volume transcend the region, and certainly are not limited to hinterland peoples. Politicians and intellectuals trying to understand, for instance, the attitudes of Muslims and non-Muslims in contemporary Europe may beneﬁt greatly from reading it, especially the contributions dealing with the southern Philippines.

Sjoerd R. Jaarsma (ed.), Handle with care; Ownership and control of ethnographic materials. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002, x + 264 pp. [ASAO Monograph Series 20.] ISBN 0.8229.5777.9. Price: USD 22.95 (paperback).

LISA MIGO

The possession of ethnographic materials gathered by academics during ﬁeldwork is increasingly controversial, as ownership of such materials would appear to overlap with ownership of the research output based on them. Anthropologists studying past or existing cultures bring a translated form of knowledge back to their own culture, and so can claim rediscovery. Then there is the equally valid claim of the indigenous population, from whom knowledge has been taken. These conﬂicts of ownership have become a subject of study in their own right, particularly in an age when ethnographic materials are travelling around the world faster than ever before. Consequently, con-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 164 Book reviews temporary anthropologists are more aware of the impact that their work will have both within the cultures studied and further afield. This volume is concerned with the repatriation of materials: the return of ethnographic materials to the communities studied. It is a balanced study, looking at the situation from theoretical and practical perspectives. It also uses specific case studies to consider the ethics of repatriation, given the sensitivity of the information and the possibility of misuse, and to question whether some materials should be returned, either complete or effectively censored. ‘Issues of access’, the first part, is a series of reflections on approaches to repatriation, an issue which is growing in importance as ethnographic dis- coveries are not solely confined to the academic sphere. Dorothy and David Counts discuss the reception of their work outside the academic sphere and the effects of large-scale media attention. The rise of the Internet has altered the intellectual landscape, enabling Alan Howard to create an electronic ‘home’ for his texts and making his research (and other resources) available to a widely-scattered community. Jaarsma discusses the ethics of repatriation and the importance of analysing the impact of returning data to the field. Lastly, Mary McCutcheon reveals the difficulties facing archivists as they deal with the legal and moral complexities that arise when ethnographic records are stored in archives. ‘Managing the collected past’, the second part of the book, is a set of case studies focusing on previously archived materials. David Arkin and Kathryn Creely explain how the Roger Keesing bequest was handled at the Melanesian Archive in San Diego. The archive shares its holdings with fifteen libraries in Melanesia, but access to much of the material had to be restricted so as to be sympathetic to the entire Kwaio community, some members of which would have suffered if certain materials were made freely accessible. Suzanne Falgout looks at the issue of restricted access. Some researchers take care to protect the anonymity of their sources and the context in which knowledge is passed down within communities. Falgout concludes that these restrictions remain necessary, as a form of protection, many years after they were established. Karen Peacock discovered controversies at the Trust Territory Archives, an organization which aimed to preserve materials at the University of Hawaii and provide archives in the region with copies. This caused many people to feel that their history had been taken from them. Amy Stillman concludes this section with an overview of the issues facing the collections of hula repertoires as interest in hula grows and questions of ownership and future control become dominant. The third part, ‘Transformation, interpretation and ownership’, changes perspective, discussing the indigenous responses to repatriated materials. It quickly becomes clear that with repatriation, the issues only become more complex. Keith S. Chambers and Anne Chambers study the implications of

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 165 returning materials to contemporary society. Although what is returned may be a valuable record of local traditions, it is also a fixed, written version of those traditions, originating from outside the society concerned and potentially interfering with the usual practice of maintaining a number of different versions. Bryan Oles reflects on the reception of ethnographic accounts in the Mokil Atoll. Here, the return of a written – or as the Mokilese see it, an indel- ible – version is not always welcome. Oles suggests that repatriated material is not necessarily a gift, but a version of tradition in its own right, which the subjects can use as they see fit. Nancy Guy’s essay reveals the need to be aware of copyright law, using the legal fight between the Western music industry and Aboriginal Taiwanese singers as a warning to all academics in the field. As this thought-provoking volume proves, it is not always easy to give back to the community. Whatever path the researcher takes, it is clear that the issue of sympathetic repatriation is one that must be borne in mind. All ethnographic materials discovered need to be handled with the greatest care, and with thought given to their future use. While concluding with a series of suggestions for further research, the critical consensus which this book expresses is that the solution is to manage the impact of returning materials in such a way as to further knowledge while doing no harm – a somewhat utopian ideal at the centre of a complex debate.

Priyambudi Sulistiyanto, Thailand, Indonesia and Burma in comparative perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002, xiv + 308 pp. [The International Political Economy of New Regionalisms Series.] ISBN 0.7546.1932.X. Price: GBP 60.00 (hardback).

JONATHAN H. PING

This is an exceptional scholarly work. It is the first study of Southeast Asia which accepts that the economic development achieved during the 1980s and 1990s can be analysed and understood best through a comparative study which places the region in the context of common international political and economic influences. By accepting that the international political economy has had a homogenizing influence on the region, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto is able to find that the different development outcomes in Thailand, Indonesia and Burma can be understood as the consequence of specific internal political, social and economic reforms. The result is an understanding of the international political economy which allows for a presentation of the alternative policies and consequences that arise from the interaction of middle-sized (Indonesia and Thailand) and small economies (Burma) with global actors

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 166 Book reviews such as the larger states, multinational corporations and non-governmental organizations. Another reason why this qualifies as a pioneering work is that its innovative comparative approach is employed to analyse the economic crisis of 1997 and 1998, and the subsequent political and social turmoil in the region. The numerous explanations put forward to account for the collapse of the Asian Miracle are presented here in association with a detailed factual account of the most serious economic crisis that the region has suffered. Sulistiyanto’s use of comparative methodology is practical and correct. It presents the statistics on economic development in direct relation to the accompanying policies, and as a result can identify the outcomes of the policy choices of the three Southeast Asian states under consideration. The development of these three states is also considered in relation to the main political figures and their interests. The role and impact of the International Monetary Fund and its policies are explored, and the responses of the three states to those policies considered. Sulistiyanto’s text provides access to information and analysis of subjects that have hitherto been missing from the study of Southeast Asia. The author’s extensive use of primary sources – including interviews with government officials, bankers and domestic political commentators – from inside the three states yields invaluable insights into how the events of the crisis were understood, interpreted and responded to within each country. This unique information, otherwise often only found in ‘airport-style’ texts by journalists and other non-academics, is then combined with theoretical and historical knowledge from the magnificent academic mind of the author. This book is original in both method and content. It confronts the extant studies with a regionally based analysis which has been provided to us by an academic who has an intimate knowledge of Southeast Asia. Country-based scholars pursuing their passions for Thailand, Indonesia or Burma should read it. Southeast Asianists must either adopt the author’s method, and the implications of his study, or provide a convincing critique of both. Policy- makers need to absorb this book’s clear identification of the links between global events and actors, regional political economy, and domestic economic and political reforms that have social consequences.

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Amitav Acharya, Constructing a security community in Southeast Asia; ASEAN and the problem of regional order. London: Routledge, 2001, xx + 234 pp. ISBN 0.415.15762.5, price GBP 65.00 (hardback); 0.415.15763.3, GBP 19.99 (paperback).

ANTHONY L. SMITH

In his introduction to Amitav Acharya’s book on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the late Michael Leifer states that this work is the first to apply the concept of a security community outside of Europe and North America. For this reason alone the volume would already be a very important addition to theoretical literature which is so often informed by experiences in the West. But Acharya’s work is also an important means to understand ASEAN, past and present. Acharya takes a constructivist approach to ASEAN (as Leifer also notes in his introduction) and combines a superb initial discussion on international relations concepts with a very thorough empirical analysis of regional organization in Southeast Asia. ASEAN, founded in 1967, is often cited as the foremost example of regional organization in a developing world context. This volume seeks to answer the question as to whether or not ASEAN can be considered a ‘security community’, as it is clearly not a formal alliance or a collective security agreement. ASEAN members have, after all, avoided recourse to war despite ongoing territorial claims and disputes of many kinds. This volume includes rich and well-weighted studies on the emergence of ASEAN norms, ASEAN and the Cambodian conflict, the expansion of ASEAN, managing intra-regional conflicts, and ASEAN in the wider context of Asia-Pacific security. Acharya concludes, under a section that poses the question of whether ASEAN is now a ‘sunset’ organization, that the grouping could be seen as a ‘nascent’ security community (p. 208). He also concludes that this process is not necessarily ‘linear’, and that ASEAN may be less mature in this sense than it was in the early 1990s. Not only has ASEAN faced a number of new challenges since the late 1990s, but the expansion of ASEAN’s membership and the democratization of some members has caused ideological divisions of various kinds (p. 207). There are some minor quibbles with this work. Perhaps more could have been made of the ASEAN, and ASEAN country, response(s) to the 1999 East Timor crisis. Also, the Agreement on Mutual Security (AMS) signed between Australia and Indonesia, which was discarded by Indonesia after the East Timor crisis, cannot really be described as an alliance despite the loose talk of the Australian sources cited (p. 181, p. 192 note 73). Former Australian prime minister, Paul Keating, makes it clear in his remarks after leaving office that Indonesia watered down the AMS precisely so it would not be seen as

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 168 Book reviews a ‘pact’. This is important because it means that Indonesia has remained for- mally a non-aligned state, although the point remains that the AMS was the ﬁrst such agreement that Indonesia had signed with an outside power. Overall, however, this is a superb study of ASEAN and the main issues that it faces. Acharya provides great insight into key episodes in ASEAN’s development with thorough research and cogent analysis. No doubt there will be an ongoing discussion amongst ASEAN watchers about the theoretical implications of ASEAN’s development, and not all will agree with this author’s constructivist approach. Nonetheless this book must now be considered the authoritative text on the subject of regional organization in Southeast Asia. One hopes the author will consider a second edition in the not too distant future.

Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Peter Rietbergen (eds), Hof en handel; Aziatische vorsten en de VOC 1620-1720. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2004, x + 350 pp. [Verhandelingen 223.] ISBN 90.6718.231.1. Price: EUR 35.00.

ACHMAD SUNJAYADI

In this book, presented to Jurrien van Goor on his retirement from Utrecht University, twelve international authorities write (in Dutch and English) about the relationship between the Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) and Asian rulers in the seventeenth century. The editors have divided the essays into two sections, the first dealing with the ‘Indonesian Archipelago’ and the second with the rest of Asia, from Persia to Japan. All of the essays have a common theme: the VOC’s relations with Asian courts in the period from 1620 to 1720. After an introduction by the editors, the first section begins with a piece by Leonard Blussé on early VOC diplomacy and a visit by Chinese envoys to Batavia in 1624. An essay by Gerrit Knaap then deals with the relationship between the VOC and the sultanate of Ternate in the Ambonese islands during the same period. Leonard Andaya, by re-examining the contemporary sources closely, places the Aceh-VOC relationship in a wider context. He demonstrates that the Acehnese queen Sultanah Taj al-Alam had an effective approach to government, blending mellowness of temperament with firm resolve. Heather Sutherland considers the relationship between the VOC and Makassar, the dominant local power in eastern Indonesia. Comparing the situation before and after the conquest of Makassar by the Company in 1669, she concludes that contrary to common wisdom this dramatic event did not

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 169 mark the end of the port’s pivotal role. When Makassar’s place within the Asian commercial arena is examined over the whole period 1625-1720, it becomes clear that although 1669 was a very important turning point, it was by no means fatal. Johan Talens presents the results of research on the relationship between the sultanate of Banten and the VOC during the period 1680-1720. In this article we ﬁnd analysis of the court-Company relationship as it impinged on military activities, and on the sphere of culture and religion, as well as on economic trafﬁc. The essay by Mason Hoadley argues that the Cirebon court’s collaboration with the VOC was a crucial factor in institutional change. Change came about through local responses to new circumstances. The second section begins with an essay by Peter Rietbergen concerning merchants employed by the VOC and their relations with the Persian court. Om Prakash’s paper analyses some issues in relation to the interface between the VOC on the one hand, and on the other the Mughal Indian authorities and maritime merchants from Mughal regions such as Gujarat and Bengal. Hugo s’Jacob writes about Hendrik van Reede, a VOC employee and informant at the court of Cochin. The relationship between the Company and Kandy court in the period of Governor Cornelis Jan Simon (1703-1707) is the topic of Lodewijk Wagenaar’s article. In ‘Ayutthaya, King Petracha and the world’, Remco Raben discusses the Dutch presence at the Ayutthaya court in the seventeenth century. The relations of the Japanese shogunate in Edo with the ‘red-haired barbarians’ (the Dutch) are described in a second piece by Peter Rietbergen. This section closes with a brief biography and historiography of Jurrien van Goor by Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Luc Nagtegaal. The book is also provided with a short bibliography of Jurrien van Goor’s works. In their introduction the editors emphasize the long duration of the relationships between the VOC and many Asian polities. This long interaction changed both the Asian and the European parties involved, and in some areas its effects continue to be felt today. For anyone interested in the theme of Asian-European interactions, Hof en handel is a rich and fascinating source of information and ideas.

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Marieke Bloembergen, De koloniale vertoning; Nederland en Indië op de wereldtentoonstellingen (1880-1931). Amsterdam: Wereld- bibliotheek, 2002, 463 pp. ISBN 90.284.1925.X. Prijs: EUR 39.50 (paperback).

Marieke Bloembergen, Koloniale inspiratie; Frankrijk, Nederland, Indië en de wereldtentoonstellingen 1883-1931. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 2004, 256 pp. ISBN 90.6718.236.2. Prijs: EUR 12.50 (paperback).

GERARD TERMORSHUIZEN

In de dissertatie van Marieke Bloembergen staan de koloniale tentoonstellingen (ofwel ‘vertoningen’) waarmee Nederland zich presenteerde op de wereldtentoonstellingen van 1883 (Amsterdam), 1889 (Parijs), 1900 (Parijs), 1910 (Brussel) en 1931 (Parijs) centraal. Die vertoningen hebben naar we mogen aannemen – het is een van de in het proefschrift onderzochte hoofd- motieven – een bijdrage geleverd aan de ontwikkeling van het ‘nationaal besef’ (p. 22) in Nederland. Hoe stond het eigenlijk – een verleidelijke vraag en daarom stel ik haar maar – met dat besef, althans voorzover Indië daarin een aandeel had, voordat Nederland met zijn kolonie op die wereldtentoonstellingen aan de weg ging timmeren? Op een van de eerste bladzijden van haar boek refereert Bloembergen aan het ook haar inspirerende Imagined communities van Benedict Anderson, waarin onder meer wordt betoogd dat het bij uitstek de musealisering, de landkaart en de volkstelling zijn geweest die het koloniaal bezit concretiseerden voor ‘de mensen thuis’, en aldus bij hen nationalistische gevoelens opwekten dan wel versterkten. Dat ook verrichtingen op het koloniale slagveld een dergelijk effect kon- den bewerkstelligen, blijft hier echter buiten beschouwing. Het opmerkelijke nu is dat het wat Nederland betreft juist oorlogshandelingen zijn geweest, die voor het eerst op niet mis te verstane wijze duidelijk maakten welke belangrijke plaats Indië al in de jaren zeventig van de negentiende eeuw in de harten van de burgers innam. En dat terwijl in allerlei bronnen uit die tijd bitter wordt geklaagd over het in het moederland heersende gebrek aan ken- nis van en belangstelling voor ‘de Oost’. Dat was ook zo: in het alledaagse leven van de gemiddelde Nederlander speelde Indië nauwelijks een rol. Dat dit echter niet betekende dat het voor hem niet bestond, bleek uitgerekend op die momenten dat Nederlands koloniale suprematie werd bedreigd. Ik doel hier op het als een mokerslag aankomende ﬁasco van de in maart/april 1873 ondernomen expeditie naar Atjeh. Hevig betrokken was de burger ineens bij Indië; gekrenkt voelde hij zich in zijn nationale trots. De spes patriae werd aangespoord dienst te nemen in het Indische leger en in diezelfde dagen ont-

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 171 stond het ‘Militair Atchinlied’ (‘Roeit uit dat gebroedsel, verneder die klant: Met Nederlands driekleur “beschaving” geplant’). Nationalistisch getinte opwinding was er eveneens ruim een decennium daarna met de succesvolle aﬂoop van de Lombok-oorlog: chauvinistische gevoelens werden gestreeld en gesterkt; men wist het nu weer zeker: Nederland was groot door zijn kolonie en een grootse missie lag daar nog te wachten. Spoedig daarna zou het ‘ethische denken’ in de koloniale politiek doorbreken. Wat het bovenstaande ook duidelijk maakt, is dat Indië wel de aanleiding vormde, maar dat de (door bepaalde gebeurtenissen daar) gewekte nationale sentimenten vooral vertellen over Nederland, over de (ver)houding van het moederland ten opzichte van zijn koloniaal bezit. Op een weliswaar heel ander vlak zien we hetzelfde bij de Nederlandse koloniale vertoningen. Het is de essentie van Bloembergens boeiende boek. Het is ‘het Nederlandse per- spectief in het koloniale verhaal’ dat zij op de voorgrond plaatst; het perspec- tief van de overheerser dat zich, kan men ook zeggen, als het ware vanzelf naar de voorgrond dringt: ‘Uiteindelijk vertellen de koloniale vertoningen vooral iets over Nederland, of over het Nederlandse zelfbeeld.’ (p. 18). De ondertitel van haar boek verwijst daar ook naar: ‘Nederland en Indië op de wereldtentoonstellingen […]’. Indië, hebben we gezien, vormde in de laatste decennia van de negentiende eeuw terdege onderdeel van de nationale identiteit. Dit koloniale zelfbewustzijn diende te worden onderhouden en gestimuleerd. De trots op het rijk van overzee appelleerde aan de wens van bestuurders en particulieren de kolonie te tonen aan een zo groot mogelijk publiek. De wereldtentoonstellingen waren daarvoor het aangewezen podium. Al op de wereldtentoonstel- ling in Parijs in 1878 was Nederland vertegenwoordigd met een inzending uit Indië, maar het was pas vanaf 1883 dat het royaal en imposant met zijn kolonie uitpakte. In 1883 was dat in Amsterdam, op wat tegenwoordig het Museumplein heet, achter het toen net voltooide Rijksmuseum. Het was een zeker voor Nederlandse begrippen ongekend spektakel. Nog nooit was de kolonie zo dichtbij geweest. Van alle koloniale vertoningen is het onge- twijfeld die in Amsterdam geweest, die het nationale zelfbewustzijn het meest heeft beroerd en versterkt. Er kwamen 1,5 miljoen bezoekers, voor het (mogen we aannemen) merendeel Nederlanders, uit alle lagen van de bevol- king, die van heinde en ver gekomen zich vergaapten aan een wereld waarmee ze nog nauwelijks of niet hadden kennisgemaakt. Een ‘antropologische sensatie’ (p. 13) vormde de nagebouwde kampong met als bewoners echte Javanen en Soendanezen. Zo groot was het succes dat het op de wereldten- toonstelling van 1889 in Parijs met le village Javanais nog eens dunnetjes werd overgedaan. Een scherper contrast tussen deze ‘primitieve’ bedoening en in de onmid- dellijke nabijheid getoonde staaltjes van technische vernuft was nauwelijks

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 172 Book reviews denkbaar – waren de wereldtentoonstellingen immers niet primair bedoeld als uitingen en boodschappers van het westerse vooruitgangsgeloof! Het is juist op dat contrast dat Bloembergen de vinger legt, en opmerkt dat er (tegen de bedoelingen van de organisatoren in) heel wat bezoekers geweest moeten zijn – het receptiemateriaal geeft daarvoor duidelijke aanwijzingen – bij wie het simpel-natuurlijke van het Javaanse dorp en zijn bewoners iets van een relativerende reﬂectie op gang bracht op hun eigen snel veranderende en met traditionele verworvenheden afrekenende tijd. We stuiten hier op wat Bloembergen formuleert als ‘het probleem van beschaving’ (p. 17). Indië moest worden vertoond, en dat uiteraard op een zo voordelig mogelijke wijze. De economische presentatie – heel belangrijk vanzelfsprekend – mocht dan organisatorisch een hels karwei zijn, het was in feite het ‘gemak- kelijkste’ onderdeel. Heel wat meer hoofdbrekens, en dat voor elke vertoning weer opnieuw, kostte de beslissing over de manier waarop de inheemse wereld en cultuur in beeld moesten worden gebracht. Dat beeld was op elke tentoon- stelling weer anders. Waren in 1883 en 1889 de kampong en het Javaanse dorp de blikvangers, in 1900 was dat een reproductie van een boeddhistische tempel, in 1910 de inheemse kunstnijverheid en in 1931 de Balinese bouw- en danskunst: een ontwikkeling in beeldvorming, kort gezegd, van primitief naar beschaafd. Die ontwikkeling reﬂecteerde de in de periode tussen 1880 en 1930 veranderende kijk van Nederland op zijn kolonie, de zich in de loop van die jaren wijzigende – vaak met elkaar strijdige – opvattingen die er bij de kolo- nisator leefden over de manier waarop zijn inheemse onderdanen moesten worden bestuurd. Moest (hoe? En in hoeverre?) – de kernvraag bij voortduring – de inlander worden ‘opgeheven’ naar het niveau van de westerse beschaving of was het juist beter (wederom: hoe? En in hoeverre?) de inheemse cultuur en instituties in hun waarde te laten? Assimilatie of associatie? Of iets er tussenin? Het was (wederom) het ‘probleem van beschaving’ waarmee Nederland – elke koloniale mogendheid trouwens – zich opgescheept wist. Het is het hoofd- thema van Bloembergens boek. Uiterst secuur beschrijft zij de veranderingen in de wijze waarop de inheemse cultuur tijdens de respectieve koloniale vertoningen werd verbeeld en duidt zij de betekenissen hiervan ‘in het licht van de koloniale verhouding en het Nederlandse zelfbeeld’ (p. 17). Uiteindelijk, concludeert zij in de haar boek afsluitende ‘Spiegelbeelden’, ‘waren de koloniale vertoningen […] een vorm van zelfbespiegeling’ (p. 317). Was het voor de organisatoren van de tentoonstellingen elke keer weer een ‘zoektocht’ (pp. 318-20) naar een zo verantwoord mogelijke verbeelding van de kolonie, een zoektocht, maar nu naar de duidingen in een complexe materie, was het ook voor Bloembergen. Het weerspiegelt zich in de manier waarop zij haar bevindingen naar buiten brengt. Door middel van korte paragrafen, vaak ingeleid door een vraagstel- ling – een verhelderend structuurelement mijns inziens – baant zij zich stap

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 173 voor stap een weg over een niet gemakkelijk begaanbaar terrein. Eenduidige uitspraken waren daarom niet altijd mogelijk en sommige vraagtekens bleven staan. Hoe lastig bijvoorbeeld blijkt het een antwoord te geven op de vraag hoe het komt dat verlies en winst op het koloniale strijdtoneel – zie het begin van mijn bespreking – in Nederland tot uitbarstingen van nationaal zelfgevoel leidden, terwijl ‘militair pronkvertoon’ op de Nederland vertegenwoordi- gende koloniale tentoonstellingen volstrekt afwezig bleef! (pp. 321-2). Een belangrijke doelstelling van Bloembergens onderzoek was te laten zien welke betekenis de Nederlandse koloniale vertoningen hebben gehad voor de ontwikkeling van een koloniaal nationalisme in Nederland. Wat mij betreft is de schrijfster daarin geslaagd. Haar boek is een waardevolle bijdrage aan het onderzoek naar de vorming en aard van het Nederlandse nationale zelfbewustzijn in de periode tussen 1880 en 1930. Drie van de vijf door Marieke Bloembergen in haar boek bestudeerde koloniale vertoningen vonden plaats in Parijs. Het Franse publiek, maar ook wetenschappers, journalisten, schrijvers (zoals Emile Zola en Edmond de Goncourt) en andere kunstenaars toonden een opvallend grote belangstelling en bewondering voor de Nederlandse presentaties. Zowel in het algemeen (bijvoorbeeld wat de inrichting van de Franse koloniale vertoningen betreft) als individueel (zo lieten Claude Debussy en Francis Poulenc zich inspireren door respectievelijk de Javaanse en Balinese gamelan) hebben die presentaties ook invloed uitgeoefend. Er is in Frankrijk bovendien heel veel over geschreven. De boekenweek van 2004 had Frankrijk als thema. Het bood Bloembergen de mogelijkheid een bloemlezing te maken uit het over de Nederlandse koloniale vertoningen handelende receptiemateriaal – met de nadruk op het Franse aandeel daarin. Het materiaal varieert van congresverslagen en dagbladartikelen tot foto’s, dagboeken en brieven. De 38 tekstfragmenten en 53 afbeeldingen die zij – chronologisch en thematisch geordend – selec- teerde, geven een mooi beeld van hoe er in geschrifte door (in dit geval vooral) Fransen en Nederlanders werd gereageerd op de beeldvorming van Nederlands-Indië op de achtereenvolgende wereldtentoonstellingen. Koloniale inspiratie, de titel die Bloembergen meegaf aan dit boek, is tegelijker- tijd een afgeleide van en een welkome aanvulling op haar proefschrift.

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Philip Taylor, Goddess on the rise; Pilgrimage and popular religion in Vietnam. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004, x + 332 pp. ISBN 0.8248.2801.1, price USD 25.00 (paperback).

JOJANNEKE VAN DER TOORN

Attracted by her reputation as efficacious protector, business consultant, relationship advisor, healer and mother, each year over a million visitors flock into the shrine of The Lady of the Realm (Ba Chua Xu) in Vietnam. Since the economic reforms of the mid-1980s (doi moi), she has been a magnet for devotees from all walks of life and from all corners of rural and urban society. Situated in Chau Doc, on the fringes of the Vietnamese state, her popularity is illustrative of the thriving spiritual life of contemporary Vietnam. The country is characterized by an ever-increasing pilgrimage to religious sites and the Lady’s is the most frequented one in the southern Vietnamese Mekong Delta. This recent increase in popularity is explained by her alleged responsiveness to prayer. The Lady’s support, however, has its conditions; you have to truly believe in her, deal with her in a correct manner, remain faithful to her, and pay her back. A reciprocal relationship thus unfolds between the goddess and her worshippers. During several field trips between 1995 and 1998, Philip Taylor accom- panied pilgrims on their travels, joined in festivities, witnessed rituals, and spoke to devotees in their homes, at markets and in the streets. His interpretation of the popularity of the Lady of the Realm and other goddesses in the region is substantiated by his lively portrayal of these activities. Goddess on the rise opens with a discussion of the spiritualized definition of borders. While physically located near the Cambodian border, the Lady’s shrine emblematically represents southern Vietnam’s rural folk culture. Her emergence as a symbol of national significance shows that official concep- tions of identity have apparently shifted. The goddess’s ethnicity is a second topic taken up by the author. Popular ideas about the Lady’s identity, in contrast to official views, illustrate the coexistence of multiple ethnic groups in the region sharing different cultural outlooks on the world. It is significant that a large majority of those venerating the Lady are female. Taylor found that ‘[s]he is an associate for those who […] are at the forefront of market relations in Vietnamese society’ (p. 276). Amongst these women and other believers, opinions on the Lady of the Realm and the rituals performed in her veneration differ between rural and urban populations. Taylor’s analysis extends our understanding of pilgrimage by indicating that Turner’s notion of pilgrimage as anti-structure is not sufficient. He gives examples illustrating the consolidation and reproduction of gender inequality through the veneration of the Lady. Existing social dependency relations are thus reflected

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 175 and reproduced by the pilgrimage in general, and by the rituals performed at the annual festival of Via Ba. An especially convincing argument is made regarding the mystery sur- rounding the Lady of the Realm, a characteristic she shares with other goddesses in the region. Her obscure origins, lack of specificity and weak ties to a specific local, social, cultural or political identity allow her to become the locus of diffused meaning and the focus of an extensive following. This makes the Lady relevant to a wide array of this-worldly concerns. In response to Vietnamese scholastic claims to view the Lady of the Realm as a symbol of female autonomy, Taylor again points at this amenability of female deities to different interpretations, illustrating women’s diverse concerns and ideas of femininity. Another strong point of Taylor’s study is his discussion of the often noted incorporation of Buddhist elements into popular religious spirit worship. He indicates the ethics of reciprocity and mutual obligation characterizing both. Taylor’s solid research and his detailed and vivid descriptions allow for a look at the matter from many angles. Yet, the lack of a clear theoretical framework gives his arguments at times a fragmented flavor, resulting in an uneven balance between empirical description and analysis. It is not until the epilogue, in which the author elaborates on the popularity of the Lady of the Realm in the context of Vietnam’s late socialism, that Taylor’s thoughts are easily differentiated from the opinions of his informants. Despite these shortcomings, Goddess on the rise is a valuable contribution to the study of religion. Philip Taylor invites the reader to join him on a journey, not only along the pilgrims’ trail to the shrine in Chau Doc, but also through the rapidly changing social and cultural landscape of present-day Vietnam. This makes his work indispensable on the bookshelf of anyone wishing to understand Vietnamese society and religion in general.

Azyumardi Azra, The origins of Islamic reformism in Southeast Asia; Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern ‘ulamå’ in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004, ix + 253 pp. ISBN 9067182281. Price: EUR 25.00 (paperback).

HOLGER WARNK

This book is a revised version of a PhD thesis defended at Columbia University in 1992, and published in Indonesian translation in 1994. In the early 1990s many scholars looked at Islam predominantly from a Middle Eastern perspective, ignoring the centuries-long Islamic traditions of maritime Southeast

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Asia and the fact that Indonesia now has a larger Muslim population than any other nation-state. Among scholars of Southeast Asia itself (Richard Winstedt and Clifford Geertz, for example), Islam had long been seen as diasporic, peripheral or syncretic, lacking a strong foundation in the indigenous societies. Maritime Southeast Asia was – and to some degree still is – excluded from discussions on theological, political or philosophical developments in Islam. Therefore the publication of Azyumardi Azra’s thesis in English is a welcome addition to our knowledge of Islam in the Malay Archipelago for those who are not able or willing to read his book in Indonesian. Azra’s book reflects the lack of research on Southeast Asian Islam up to the 1990s and must be read against that background. His bibliography is impressive but could have been updated more. Especially striking is the omission of several works of Abd as-Samad al-Palembani, Syeikh Muhammad Arshad al- Banjari and Syeikh Daud Abdullah al-Fatani, edited by Wan Mohd. Shaghir Abdullah and others, which have been published in Malaysia and Singapore since the mid-1990s. However, the list of manuscript and printed materials in Arab, Malay-Indonesian, English, French and Dutch presented in Azra’s 34-page bibliography is a useful tool for further research on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Southeast Asian Islam. The author describes in great detail theological, rather than political, networks linking Muslim scholars in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The study is divided into an introduction, seven chapters and an epilogue. The first two chapters describe the intellectual climate and diverse schools of theological or philosophical thought in the Middle East, especially in the Hijaz. Azra pays great attention to the diverse relations between scholars, using (chiefly) Arab sources to demonstrate their mutual links and interde- pendence. Chapters 3 to 5 discuss the seventeenth-century Malay-Indonesian networks. Here the focus lies on such well-known Muslim thinkers as Hamzah Fansuri, Shamsuddin al-Samatrani, Nuruddin al-Raniri, Abdul- Rauf al-Singkeli, and Syeikh Yusuf al-Maqassari. Most of them were working at, or in the vicinity of, important Southeast Asian courts such as Aceh or Banten. Their dependence on royal patronage should not obscure their manifold relations with Middle Eastern scholars, which are meticulously demonstrated by Azra. The last two chapters deal with networks of Southeast Asian Muslim scholars in the eighteenth century. Azra acknowledges that the ulama of the eighteenth century and their writings have been studied much less than their predecessors (p. 111). So it is disappointing that he himself does not write on these scholars in the same exhaustive way as he did in the previous chapters when considering al-Raniri or al-Singkeli. His discussion of al-Palembani, al- Banjari and others is much shorter and does not go far beyond the writings of Anthony Johns or G.W.J. Drewes, probably due to lack of supportive Arab

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 177 sources from the Middle East. However, this book remains important as it covers many facets of Southeast Asian Islam which became research foci in the last decade, not only in Western countries but also, indeed especially, in Indonesia and Malaysia. Two slight causes for unease remain. Azra often (for example in his introduction to Chapter 6, p. 109) uses the term ‘Islamic renewal’. This term implies the existence of a kind of ‘pure’ or ‘original’ Islam in maritime Southeast Asia prior to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when the faith implicitly became corrupted, syncretized or even decayed. Do the sources really support this view – which Azra heavily criticizes himself in his introduction – or should we speak of new developments in Southeast Asian Islam rather than of a ‘renewal’? It should be mentioned that in the title of the book the word ‘renewal’ is avoided, ‘reformism’ being used instead. The second problem is related to the issue of literacy levels in the period covered by the book. Azra wants to demonstrate a ‘larger impact of the networks on the course of Islam in the Malay-Indonesian world’ (p. 5). But how deep an impact could the scholars and writings discussed here have had in a mainly illiterate social environment? Royal courts and the associated religious schools can be seen as centres of literacy in the Malay world. The writings of al-Raniri, in particular, circulated in manuscript copies throughout the western part of the Indonesian archipelago. But in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the literate proportion of the population was probably under five percent, so that doubts must remain regarding the practical influence of the religious networks on the lives of peasants, fishermen and craftsmen.

Gregory Forth, Beneath the volcano; Religion, cosmology and spirit classiﬁcation among the Nage of eastern Indonesia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998, xi + 369 pp. [Verhandelingen 117.] ISBN 90.6718.120. X. Price: EUR 28.30 (paperback).

ROBERT WESSING

This book analyses the ideas about spirits held by the Catholic Nage of central Flores in eastern Indonesia. Its primary aim is to show how these spirits are classified and how different categories of them relate to categories of humans, especially as expressed in rituals of buffalo sacrifice. Central to these ideas is a symmetric inversion in which people are the spirits’ sacrificial buffalo and the Nage’s sacrificial buffalo are in fact inhabitants of the spirit domain. In sacrificing buffalo, then, both parties inevitably kill members of the others’ domain.

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Chapter 1 is an overview of Nage culture and social organization that discusses a number of elements that become important later in the book, but did leave this reader uncertain about their immediate relevance. Chapter 2 introduces the central myth about the origin of this mutual slaughter: a man about to sacrifice a buffalo meets a spirit preparing to do the same. The name of the spirit’s buffalo and that of the man are identical as are the names of the man’s buffalo and that of the spirit. The man preempts the spirit by sacrificing first and thus saves his own life. Chapters 3 through 9 introduce many spirit entities, starting with the notion of soul and progressing through witch spirits, general spirits (nitu) and their relations with humans, specific instances like the logo lia, the spirit of a woman who died in childbirth, or snakes with the heads of birds, earth spirits, ‘evil’ spirits (bapu), power-granting spirits, to divinities and the supreme being. Taking a brief break from these spirits, Chapter 10 explores Nage ideas about creation and cosmogony, including a discussion of ancestors and the relation of mythology to geography. This is continued in Chapter 11 with a detailed analysis of ancestors and the rituals through which the dead are transformed into benevolent guardians. Chapters 12 and 13 relate all these concepts to the village social structure, in which founders and their descendants play primary roles in the creation and maintenance of the village’s central post and in the buffalo sacrifice that takes place there. Chapter 14, finally, attempts a general classification of all these entities. Throughout my reading of the book two interrelated questions kept arising. First, to what extent are many of the named entities only general spirits with a specific function? Second, are the malevolent ones indeed as nefarious as they are often portrayed here, or might this be the result of the adoption of Catholicism, similar to the demonization of certain spirits in Islamic Java? There are, of course, dangerous spirits, like the logo lia, who died a bad death causing her to be vengeful. Even the spirits of people who die ‘good’ deaths are ambivalent until they are ritually transformed into benevolent ancestors (pp. 252-3). Many bapu spirits, especially, seem to be entities that punish. Indeed, the contrasting categories of nitu and bapu often seem to have identical origins (pp. 156, 285) and might thus be seen as different faces of the same thing (pp. 145, 310): nitu who become fierce in certain circumstances (p. 327). Thus the blood of a sacrificial buffalo replenishes the land while its spirit guards the house, a task for which it would need to be fierce (p. 147). The sacrifice is also an act that ‘creates or recreates the world’ (p. 315) and is an arena in which social positions may be confirmed or contested (pp. 269, 282, 296). Similarly, the spirit of the central village post (peo) is a guardian aspect of the tutelary house spirit that punishes transgressors (pp. 162-3). Furthermore, spirits are the autochthonous element in Nage society (pp. 27, 310) whom humans transformed into guardians (pp. 119, 136), giving the spirits certain

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access Book reviews 179 prerogatives. As F.K. Lehman pointed out to me about Burmese spirits, they are Lords: touchy, temperamental, and likely suddenly to become angry. Among the Nage this anger occurs especially when people violate the rules (pp. 152-3). That mountain spirits slaughter buffalo and thus kill people is indeed unpleasant, but this is reciprocated by the Nage’s slaughter of spirits in the form of their own buffalo, creating an inverse relationship that, while it is the source of future welfare, accounts for illness and death (p. 318). Thus the Nage are wary of becoming their next victim and speak of these spirits with a degree of fear. It is, of course, impossible to know whether the spirits speak of the Nage in the same way.

Dauril Alden (assisted by James S. Cummins and Michael Cooper), Charles R. Boxer; An uncommon life: soldier, historian, teacher, collector, traveller. Lisboa: Fundação Oriente, 2001, 616 pp. ISBN 972.78502305 (paperback).

EDWIN WIERINGA

Charles Ralph Boxer (1904-2000) most certainly had, as the subtitle of this monumental biography – weighing in at a hefty two kilos – dryly asserts, ‘an uncommon life’. One of Britain’s most illustrious historians, his list of some 335 publications on the history of the Dutch and Portuguese empires testi- fies to Boxer’s imposing stature in the field. The Fundação Oriente in Lisbon, which has published this biography, is also bringing out an edition of Boxer’s complete works, which are now in their fourth volume. Trained as a professional soldier, Boxer never attended college, but retiring early from the army in his forties with the rank of major, he was appointed on the strength of his publications to a professorship of Portuguese at King’s College, London, in 1947. Resigning twenty years later, he continued lecturing, especially at several American universities, only finishing his teaching days when he was nearly eighty. The second subtitle duly enumerates Boxer’s roles as soldier, historian, teacher, collector and traveller, but in his early years he was perhaps better known in the public eye as bon vivant and spy. In the 1930s and early 1940s, Boxer led a life of exciting adventures in Japan and Hong Kong where his exploits in the latter two roles (in Hong Kong) became publicly known through the 1944 kiss-and-tell bestseller China to me; a partial autobiography by the American journalist Emily Hahn (1905-1997), his lover, mother of his two daughters, and after the war his (second) wife for some fifty years. Both were prolific authors, but they had an informal pact never to read each

Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 04:14:53PM via free access 180 Book reviews other’s writings (p. 297). Shortly after Boxer’s death, the British newspaper The Guardian published wild accusations against him, implying that his trea- chery in a Japanese POW camp had led to the execution of fellow officers. In a detailed rebuttal in the same paper Alden proved that these charges were unfounded, but this squalid episode happened just after Alden had finished An uncommon life. From the outset, Boxer’s interesting life already provides a firm guarantee that his biography will be an entertaining story. Alden’s account is a narrative history retelling the life of a remarkable ‘gentleman and a scholar’, as his admiring biographer calls him in the retrospective closing chapter (p. 523). What makes this book such an enjoyable read is the conversational, resolutely anecdotal, style in which Boxer’s life story is presented. In this, the author adheres to his subject’s own maxim, which was first and foremost to entertain and to inform his readers. The thrilling Hong Kong years occupy an important place in this biography (Part II, pp. 83-281), but the description of Boxer’s rather mundane postwar life in academe inevitably reads more like an exten- ded, sympathetic obituary, not always avoiding some unnecessary repetiti- ons. In the King’s College years (Part III, pp. 285-423) and the final ‘peripatetic years’ (Part IV, pp. 427-519) the soldier and spy turned history professor was to have his adventures mainly behind his writing desk, enjoying the good life of a bibliophile in a well-to-do home, and as Alden tells us, with a tinge of understandable envy in his tone, profiting handsomely from his scholarship in the form of frequent ‘first-class transportations to many parts of the world where he was comfortably housed and universally esteemed’ (p. 571). Dutch readers will easily recognize and correct the misspelling of such Dutch names and words as ‘Dirk van Hopendorp’ (p. 503) or ‘profitjt’ (in a book title, p. 537, note 1), and may be amused to find a reference in which a street name has been mistaken for a personal name (’P.S. Gerbrandyweg to CRB, 10 Oct. 1969’, p. 538 note 24). Not exactly knowing to which journal Boxer sent his disclaimer that he was not responsible for a Dutch translation of his ‘old and outdated work’ The Dutch in Brazil 1624-1654 (p. 573, note 23), Alden claims that it appeared in print in a ‘Dutch occasional bulletin’ called Bijdragen (p. 570). In fact, however, Boxer voiced his discontent in a letter to the editors of the Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (BMGN), a professional periodical for scholars of Dutch history brought out by the Royal Dutch Historical Society. Boxer’s reaction was briefly mentioned in a short review which appeared in BMGN 93 (1978), pp. 544-5.

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