Book reviews Michael Goddard, The unseen city; Anthropological perspectives on Port Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Canberra: Pandanus (Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University), 2005, 225 pp. ISBN 1740761340. Price: AUD 31.78 (paperback). CATO BERG University of Bergen [email protected] The main ethnographical contribution of this work lies in the way Goddard engages contemporary myths about town sociality and reveals how stereo­ types persist, particularly those concerning the social composition of settle­ ments and raskol gangs. The chapters, based on a series of previously published articles, form a coherent whole, ranging in theme from settlements, gangs, local courts, and moneylending, to village courts as ‘the state visible in society’ and restorative justice in relation to generational conflicts. Chapter 1 takes the lead in Goddard’s quest to dispense with urban myths, depicting how ‘squatter settlements’ are rather organized and coher­ ent in relation to lawlessness and employment. Chapter 2 offers a detailed analysis of the (former) village court system, which is now also prevalent in the suburbs of Port Moresby. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the concept of raskols, with the social composition of raskol gangs, and with some interesting sociological data concerning gang members’ educational levels, their ties to the wider social world, and their careers in organized crime. Chapter 5 deals in detail with informal usury, and uses data from court cases to demonstrate the prevalence of this phenomenon in town. Although outlawed by the state and highly problematic according to Melanesian views on reciprocity and exchange, the wide prevalence of informal usury indicates that there may be more to our conventional notions of reciprocity in relation to money than has been assumed. Chapter 6, Reto’s Chance, gives in­depth data on the careers of two different magistrates at a local court in Port Moresby, and is used by Goddard to argue for the presence of a state in society. Chapter 7, framed around the concept of restorative justice, vividly describes how village elders today engage with the wider temptations for their youth in alcohol consump­ tion and the urban lights. In sum, Goddard’s monograph is a valuable contribution to urban anthro­ pology, and has wider comparative value for the themes discussed and the Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 299 questions asked. Not least, the chapter on urban settlements reveals how much weight is given to stereotypes and rumours in the construction of a place such as Port Moresby. The discussion on land and squatters can be seen as the local playing out of a social drama that also takes place in areas such as Port Vila and Honiara, where squatting played a major role in the riots and violent conflict from 1999 onwards. Apart from the relevance for discus­ sions of so­called third world towns throughout the world, Goddard argues convincingly for the importance of ethnographic context, and that each town must be seen in its own right. My only criticism is a minor one: the addition of maps of Port Moresby would have greatly assisted the reader, and also made the book more acces­ sible to an audience not intimately familiar with the region. Apart from this minuscule flaw, I believe Goddard’s book is an important contribution to ur­ ban anthropology, both in Port Moresby and elsewhere in Oceania. R.A. Cramb, Land and longhouse; Agrarian transformation in the up lands of Sarawak. Copenhagen: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2007, xxii + 422 pp. ISBN 9788776940102. Price: GBP 25.00 (paperback). HAROLD BROOKFIELD Australian National University [email protected] Rob Cramb, agricultural economist by profession, has spent a major part of his working life studying agricultural and social change among the western Iban of Sarawak. His involvement began as an Australian volunteer with the Department of Agriculture, then as a doctoral student, and thenceforward as an academic specializing in rural development. In the late 1970s, he selected two longhouses in the hills of the upper Saribas river, and visited them at intervals until 2001. They are the pivot of an historical study of change in rural Sarawak which he has expanded back into the pre­colonial period and forward to the year 2005. The durability of the longhouse territory through all the many colonial and post­colonial changes is a central theme in a remarkable longitudinal analysis of rural adaptation to external forces. Cramb has drawn heavily on the anthropological literature, beginning with Freeman’s pioneer study of the upriver Iban of central Sarawak. Like subsequent writers, he dissents from Freeman’s criticisms of Iban agricul­ tural practice. In going beyond the early anthropological writers, he adopts a diachronic approach through some three centuries to argue – as anthropolo­ Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access 300 Book reviews gist Michael Dove remarks in a Foreword that can itself serve as a laudatory review of Cramb’s book – that their land­use system ‘has been sustainable for this entire period of time’ (p. xii). Noteworthy among Cramb’s sources are the archived court records from the later nineteenth century onward, concerning a great number of land disputes which, once warfare was put down by the early Brooke administration, fell within the purview of a hierarchical legal system. Decisions raised many principles of customary law (adat) to the sta­ tus of case judgements under the English common­law system that has per­ sisted into modern independent Malaysia. Thus, even as recently as 2005, the High Court upheld the principle of common tenure to longhouse territories notwithstanding the fact that a 1930s intention to map and register these ter­ ritories has never been put into practice. The considerable detail in which the more significant of these judgements is presented nowhere becomes tedious and enriches the whole book. This continuity contrasts with major changes in the Iban economy. Until lately, it revolved around hill­rice, with some swamp­rice in wetland pockets and with groves of tree­crops used for their fruit and nuts, as well as tradeable products obtained from the forest and fallow. Rubber, a long­enduring tree crop, was added in the early twentieth century, and cocoa and pepper after mid­century. Emphasis between food and cash crops has varied with the fluc­ tuating prices of the latter, but by the 1990s many farmers had ceased to plant rice, and relied almost entirely on pepper, rubber, and other cash­earning activ­ ities. What looked at mid­century like an emerging shortage of land for rice as population grew had become an abundance of land by 2000. Saribas Iban even sought support to use some of this very unsuitable steep land for oil palm. Around all this was an almost complete reversal of official policy in rela­ tion to indigenous land and enterprise between the protectiveness of the early Brooke administration and the top­down planning under the long­enduring reign of Abdul Taib Mahmud as chief minister of Sarawak within modern Malaysia. Not only was the land code progressively modified to make easier the dispossession of indigenes from the land they claimed but which the state wanted for timber extraction or oil­palm plantations, but successive state agencies progressively detached management from the local to the central. SALCRA (the state equivalent of the federal FELCRA) offered local ownership of managed rural development, but the post­1980 Land Custody and Development Authority organized schemes in collaboration with private enterprise while, at the same time, large areas of land claimed (and in many instances used) by indigenous farmers were alienated to big companies, first in the timber business and then in plantations of pulpwood and oil palm. The long­settled Saribas Iban suffered little loss of land, but the more recently settled Iban and others in the undulating country of northern Sarawak suf­ fered heavily, and were severely penalized for their resistance. Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 07:23:38PM via free access Book reviews 301 Cramb discusses these events in Chapters 8 and 9, and does so in a more measured way than did politically engaged Malaysian writers in the high days of conflict between indigenous people and the timber industry ­ for example, Hong (1987). The speed with which oil palm, and to a lesser extent timber planted for pulpwood, would become dominant as the natural timber resource quickly became exhausted was not appreciated by twentieth­century writers, including this reviewer (Brookfield, Potter and Byron 1995). Cramb was more watchful, and in this book it is the state­sponsored drive for mas­ sive palm­oil production that dominates the post­1980s scene. To Cramb this is ‘high modernism’, imposed in a manner that compares in its methods and effects with the ‘enclosures’ of early­modern Europe. The view of the Sarawak government since the 1980s has been that rural development takes place best if it is in the hands of commercial entrepreneurs, operating on a large scale. Cramb notes the close links between the politicians and their clients among the developers. It is all very similar to what has happened over the border in Indonesian Borneo, but instead of developing this comparison he chooses to widen the discussion from the Saribas to cases in Sumatra, Sulawesi, and the Philippines. To this reviewer, the final chapter in which these comparisons are presented is the weakest part of the book. Otherwise, this is a profound and revealing analysis of complex inter­ related events. It offers a combination of depth and painstaking analysis of Iban adaptation to change, sometimes taking advantage of, sometimes resist­ ing external initiatives, but never passively accepting directives from above.