Issue 57 Spring 2015

NEWSLETTER OF THE ASSOCIATION OF

SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES IN THE

UNITED KINGDOM

N0. 57

SPRING 2015

NEWS

ASEASUK EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE

Chair: Professor Matthew Cohen Royal Holloway, University of London Email:[email protected] Secretary: Dr Janet Cochrane Leeds Beckett University Email: [email protected] Treasurer: Ian Scholey SOAS, University of London Email: [email protected] Membership Secretary: Manuel Jimenez SOAS, University of London Email: [email protected] Dr Margaret Coldiron University of Essex Email:[email protected] Dr Alan Collins University of Swansea Email: [email protected] Ms Jana Igunma British Library South East Asia Library Group (SEALG) Email:[email protected] Dr Deirdre McKay Keele University Email:[email protected] Claudia Merli University of Durham Email:[email protected]

Co-opted members

Professor Graeme Barker University of Cambridge Email:[email protected] Dr Michael Charney SOAS, University of London Email: [email protected] Dr Kirsten Schulze London School of Economics and Political Science Email: [email protected] Dr Matthew Walton University of Oxford Email:[email protected] PG Liaison: Tito Imanda Goldsmiths, University of London Email:[email protected]

Newsletter editors

Tamara Aberle and V.T. King Email: [email protected]

Aseasuk website

Content editor: Manuel Jimenez (SOAS) Email: [email protected]

Institutional host

SOAS, University of London. Contact:Professor Elizabeth Moore, Department of South East Asia, Faculty of Languages and Cultures, SOAS, Thornhaugh St/Russell Sq., London WC1H 0XG, UK

ASEASUK RESEARCH GRANTS SUB-COMMITTEE

Chair: Professor V.T. King SOAS; University of Leeds Email: [email protected] Secretary: Dr Deirdre McKay Keele University Email: [email protected]

Professor Matthew Isaac Cohen Royal Holloway, University of London Email: [email protected]

Membership by subscription

Aseasuk News, an electronic and bi-annual publication emailed to members and posted on ASEASUK website. For membership information and renewal of subscriptions contact Manuel Jimenez - [email protected] or check the Aseasuk website <http://aseasuk.org.uk/v2/membershipapplcn>

Cover: Image provided by Indonesian documentary filmer Rhino Ariefiansyah, whose current research interest is in the impact of commodities in Indonesia

Aseasuk News no. 57 Spring 2015 2

Contents

NEWS ______________________________ 2

UK Southeast Asianists _________________ 2

ANNOUNCEMENT: OXFORD CENTRE FOR ISLAMIC STUDIES ___________________________ 5 EXHIBITIONS ________________________________ 6 FILM ANNOUNCEMENT ____________________ 6 REPORT

4th

Southeast Asian Studies Symposium ___ 7

RECENT PUBLICATIONS ____________________ 9 BOOK REVIEWS ____________________________ 10

• Vietnam’s New Middle Classes.

Gender, Career, City.

• Burma/Myanmar – Where Now?.

• Liem Sioe Liong’s Salim Group: The

Business Pillar of Suharto’s Indonesia

• The Malaysian Islamic Party PAS

1951-2013: Islamism in a Mottled

Nation • ‘Archaeologizing’ Heritage?:

Transcultural Entanglements

between Local Social Practices and

Global Virtual Realities.

• Dynamics of religion in Southeast

Asia: magic and modernity.

NEWS

UK Southeast Asianists

Dr Sébastien Penmellen Boret (Tohoku

University (Japan) and University of

Oxford) is currently working as co-leader of DATA Project (Digital Archives of Tsunamis in Aceh) at the Tsunami Museum Aceh in Indonesia. His research is on remembering disasters. The project ‘Remembering Disasters’ is an anthro-pological investigation of the process and role of memorialisation of disasters and their victims during the aftermath of catastrophes in Japan and Indonesia. His latest trip covered the 10 year anniversary ceremonies of the 2004 Sumatra earthquake and tsunami in Aceh [for more information see Sébastien’s website: rememberingdisasters.com]. In May 2014, Sébastien gave a paper titled ‘Remembering Disasters: Memorial monuments, empowerment and sustain-ability’ at the International Union of Anthropology and Ethnology Society (IUAES) in Japan. In November 2014, he talked about ‘Mainstreaming Memorialisation into Disaster Recovery: Lessons learned from the Indian Ocean and Great East Japan Tsunamis’ at Syaih Kuala University in Indonesia and in December 2014, he presented another paper with the title ‘Anthropology and Disaster Risk Reduction’ at Cambridge University, UK. In March 2015, Sébastien participated in the roundtable at the World Conference for Disaster Risk Reduction, organized by the Society for Applied Anthropology, American Association of Anthropology at Pittsburgh University, USA. In the same month, he also conducted the International Workshop Disaster Archives and Memorials at the UN World Conference on Disaster Risk Reduction at Tohoku University, Japan.

3 Aseasuk News no. 57 Spring 2015

Professor William G. Clarence-Smith’s (SOAS, University of London) research interests include Middle Easterners in the colonial Philippines , mules in early modern global history, c1400-1850 CE, equids, bovids, and camels in the First World War, Nazareth in the First World War as well as rubber in the Second World War. He gave the following papers and presentations: • ‘Hadhrami Arab migrants in the colonial Philippines,’ Hadhrami Research Centre inaugural conference ‘Rediscovering Hadhramaut,’ SOAS, University of London, 7 March 2015 • ‘Horses, mules and donkeys: neglected factors in the economic development of Africa?’ Centre of African Studies seminar, SOAS, University of London, 24 February 2015. • ‘Animals of war in the Middle East Theatre, 1914-1918,’ Occasional seminar, History Department, University of Kent, Canterbury, 10 February 2015. • ‘Nazareth at war, 1914-1918,’ Middle East History Seminar, SOAS, London, 19 January 1915. • ‘Overview and concluding remarks on the Hadhrami diaspora’, LUCIS Symposium, ‘Islam and the Hadrami diaspora in the eastern and western Indian Ocean,’ Leiden University, 16 December 2014. • ‘Nazareth in World War I, through the eyes of British Protestant women missionaries,’ Christian missions in global history seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London, 19 November 2014 • ‘Jerusalem and the “Syrian” diaspora in the Philippines, 1860s to 1950s,’ Conference, ‘Remembering Jerusalem: imagination, memory, and the city,’ King’s College London, 6-7 November 2014. • ‘Equids in Sub-Saharan Africa: the transport dimension,’ Conference ‘New frontiers in African economic history: African economic development over the long run,’ London School of Economics and Political Science, 25-26 October 2014.

Professor Roy Ellen (University of Kent) delivered the six following presentations and workshops: a plenary address at ‘Botanical ontologies: a cross-disciplinary forum on human-plant relationships’, 16-17 May, Oxford, Research Centre in the Humanities with the title ‘Is there a role for ontologies in understanding “plant knowledge systems”’; ‘What does current work on ethnobiological knowledge and its management tell us about the deep history of human cultural cognition?’ at ASA Decennial Conference on ‘Anthropology and Enlightenment’, 19-22 June, Edinburgh; ‘Cognitive and linguistic ethnobiology’ a the Eastern European Summer School in Ethnobiology, Saaremaa, Estonia, 28 June - 4 July; ‘Tools and living things: some observations on the interconnection between concepts and categories’ as part of the workshop: Von der Klassifikation zum Konzept: Interdisziplinäre Heuristiken zur Konzeptualisierung von

Flora, Fauna, Mensch und Landschaft at Johannes Gutenberg Universität, Mainz, 21-22 November; ‘Conceptualising natural objects: some issues arising from recent work in cognitive anthropology and ethnobiological classification’ as part of the same workshop, and finally ‘Pragmatism, identity and the state: how the Nuaulu of Seram have re-invented their beliefs and practices as “religion”’ at the Royal Anthropological Institute on 28 January 2015. Dr Annabel Teh Gallop (British Library) completed the digitisation of a collection of 120 Malay manuscripts in the British Library, with the support of William and Judith Bollinger and in collaboration with the National Library of Singapore. All the manuscripts are fully accessible via the British Library website. On 6 November 2014, Annabel gave a lecture on ‘Illuminating


the Word: The art of the Qur’an in Southeast Asia’ at the Centre for the Study of Manuscript Cultures, Hamburg University. At the workshop on ‘Changing Praxis in the 19th-century Malay manuscript ecology’ at Hamburg University (7-8 November 2014) she presented a paper on ‘Illumination in Malay literary manuscripts’. Dr Helen Godfrey (independent researcher) is currently researching commodity trade in Southeast Asia in the colonial era, 19th-century Borneo economic history, and telegraphy and its commercial impact. Professor Victor T. (Terry) King (Leeds University and the School of Oriental and African

Studies) presented a seminar on ‘Southeast Asian Studies: the Conundrum of Area Studies and Methodology’ at the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam (UBD)(18 February, 2015) and a public lecture at UBD on ‘ASEAN and Tourism: Regionalism, Perspectives and Encounters’ (2 March 2015), which received coverage in The Brunei Times and The Borneo

Bulletin. He then delivered the opening address entitled ‘Development Studies: the Deep Past, the Complex Present and the Problematical Future’ at the conference on ‘Rethinking Development Studies in Southeast Asia: State of Knowledge and Challenges’ organised by the Center for ASEAN Studies and the Regional Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development at Chiang Mai University (7-8 March 2015). He presented a keynote address on ‘Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Studies: Issues in Multidisciplinary Studies and Methodology’ at the International Conference of the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies, Busan University of Foreign Studies, Republic of Korea entitled ‘Regional Characteristics of Southeast Asia and its Comparisons with Others (and) Approaches to Southeast Asian Studies: Methodological Quests’ (23-24 April 2015). He then delivered a special lecture at ISEAS on ‘An Engagement with the Sociology of Southeast Asia and Future Directions’ (27 April 2015). Presentations on ‘Southeast Asian Studies: the Conundrum of Area Studies and Methodology’ were also delivered at the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University (30 April 2015) and at Rikkyo University, Tokyo organised by the College of Arts and College of Tourism (2 May 2015). Dr Robert McKenzie (Northumbria University) undertook research fieldwork in February/March 2015 into the spread and university students’ perception of English in Thailand at Payap University and Chiang Mai University, Chiang Mai, Thailand. In March 2015, Dr Laura Noszlopy (Royal Holloway, University of London) became the copy editor of the journal Copenhagen Journal of Asian Studies, in addition to her ongoing role as assistant editor of Indonesia and the Malay World. She is currently finalizing the MS for her introduction to a new and updated edition of John Coast’s 1953 classic Recruit to Revolution:

Adventure and Politics in Indonesia, featuring a foreword by Professor Adrian Vickers. This candid political memoir is being published by Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, Copenhagen, in June 2015. It will be available in time to celebrate the 70th anniversary of Indonesian independence. Laura is also reviving her previous research into Balinese street art and youth culture and plans to publish an article about the history of ogoh-ogoh later this year. She gave a paper on ‘John Coast and Kroncong on the Kwai: From POW to Agent of Transnational Performance’ at the ASEASUK conference, University of Brighton, 12-14


September 2014. She is still available to take on new Asia-related projects via her editorial consultancy at www.katakata.co.uk. Abroad

Dr Sin Yee Koh (City University of Hong Kong) co-organised a workshop on ‘Cities and the Super-Rich’, 15-16 Jan 2015, City University of Hong Kong (with Ray Forrest and Bart Wissink). She also presented two papers: ‘Kampong Kirkby: Living (and Invoking) 1950s Malaya across Space and Time’ at the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Annual Conference 2015, Chicago, USA, 26-29 Mar 2015 and ‘Unpacking Race: Tackling the Ethnicity Bias through the Cases of Malaysian-Chinese Skilled Migrants in Singapore and London’ at The Eighth Global Social Science Conference: Trans-disciplinary Approaches to Global Social Sciences, Hong Kong Baptist University (HKBU), 11-12 Dec 2014.

ANNOUNCEMENT: OXFORD CENTRE FOR ISLAMIC STUDIES

The library of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies (a recognised independent centre of the University of Oxford) has recently acquired several dozen books related to the Muslim community of Myanmar. These books, all in Burmese, range from recently published monographs from the Islamic Society of Myanmar to facsimile reproductions of Islamic books published in Burmese as early as the 1920s, and one facsimile of a hand-written treatise on Islam from the 1890s. Topics include biographies of prominent Muslims in Burma, histories of Islam, theological treatises on the Qur’an and on the hadith of the Prophet, and materials on interreligious relations in Yangon.

The older books and facsimiles in the collection are made up of donations from Khalifa U Thein Win Aung (a.k.a. Gulam Siddiq), who is the head of the Chishti order (a branch of Sufism) in Mandalay, whilst the more recent publications are purchases made by OCIS fellow Dr Kevin Fogg while in Yangon and Mandalay in September 2014. The library is now completing the cataloguing, in which it was assisted by Myat Ko of the Yangon School of Political Science, a Burmese Muslim who came to the Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, as the Charles Wallace Burma Trust visiting research fellow in autumn 2014. The library also hopes the collection will continue to grow in coming years.

Those wishing to find out more about the collection, or to gain access to read it, can contact Dr Kevin Fogg ([email protected]) or the assistant librarian of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, Dr MariaLuisa Langella ([email protected]).

Dr Fogg met with Khalifa U Thein Win Aung in September

2014 and received the donation of books.


EXHIBITIONS

Hackney Museum (free) Cambodian Recollections – An exhibition of oral histories

16 Juni – 14 November 2015 <www.hackney.gov.uk/cm-museum.htm>

FILM ANNOUNCEMENT

Every year, more than 150,000 Indonesian Muslims make a pilgrimage to Mecca to accomplish Hajj. Meanwhile, outside the Hajj schedule more than half a million more of them go there to perform Umrah. Since kindergarten age, children are taught to practice performing the rituals of the Hajj procession. This film portrays the main events and the atmosphere of the exercise.

Director: Rhino Ariefiansyah, Duration: 19 minutes

For more information please contact the director under [email protected].

REPORT

4th Southeast Asian Studies Symposium

Organised by the University of Oxford, UK Hosted by Sunway University and the Jeffrey Cheah Institute on Southeast Asia, at Sunway University, Malaysia, 20 – 24 March 2015 For the first time, the University of Oxford brought its flagship Southeast Asian Studies Symposium to Southeast Asia. It was held between 20 – 24 March 2015 at Sunway University, Malaysia. The world’s largest annual Southeast Asian Studies conference, it was organised by


Project Southeast Asia, with the theme of ‘The Year of ASEAN: Integrating Southeast Asia’. The Symposium was attended by over 700 participants from 25 countries, and featured panels on subjects ranging from ‘Art and Society in Southeast Asia’ to ‘Understanding the Reformed ASEAN’. Sixteen thematic roundtables saw academics engaging with politicians, civil society activists, diplomats, and business leaders. DYMM Sultan of Perak Nazrin Shah opened the Symposium. A graduate of the University of Oxford (Worcester, 1975), in his Royal Keynote he declared ASEAN as absolutely essential for the peace and prosperity of its people and nations. Where ethnic and religious divisions give rise to social and security challenges, “neighbours can assist to mediate in the process as in the case with the Philippines and Thailand,” he said, alluding to the role of Malaysia, which is the current chairman of ASEAN, in peace efforts in the two countries. As member economies became more integrated, and a stronger common identity was cultivated, the Sultan said, authority over some decision-making may be usefully transferred to ASEAN bodies. “ASEAN should also relax the requirement of consensus in decision-making,” he said, adding that the flexibility that came with it would make for a more dynamic entity and facilitating nimbler responses to challenges. Prof Wang Gungwu delivered the Symposium keynote, in which he proposed a unified way of understanding the giant arc of history. He argued that world history can be understood as the gradual shift of power from the Eurasian core to its western and eastern edges, that the contest between the nomadic societies of Central Asia and the agrarian states of Europe and China led to the emergence of Western and Chinese civilizations, and that maritime power eventually enabled continental powers to achieve global dominance. This, he argued, provided a framework for making sense of seemingly disconnected historical phenomena. Thanks to this trend, Southeast Asia now had a vital role to play in world history. It is the only region which is both continental and maritime, both Western and Eastern due to its history of colonialism, and highly interconnected. However, its influence depended on its own ability to unify and integrate. Highlights of the conference included:

Eight roundtables and panels on governance and politics, including ‘Jokowi Six Months On: Has the Promise Been Fulfilled?’ featuring Grace Leksana (Indonesian Institute of Social History), Mohtar Masoed (Universitas Gadjah Mada), and AE Priyono (LP3ES), and chaired by Peter

Carey (University of Oxford); ‘Breaking the Cycle of Coups: The Future of Thai Democracy’, featuring Patrick Jory (University of Queensland); Paul Chambers (Chiang Mai University); Pavin Chachavalpongpun (Kyoto University); Claudio Sopranzetti (University of Oxford); and Wimonsiri Hemtanon (Universität Passau); and a series of roundtables on democratisation, values, identity, and race in Singapore and Malaysia, including ‘Can we have Race without Racialisation in Singapore?’, ‘The Role of Democratic Media in Malaysia and Singapore’, ‘The Future of Singapore Values and Identity’, and ‘Neoliberal Governmentality: The Singaporean Context’. Ten panels addressing natural resource and environmental issues, including a three-part panel on ‘Natural Resources, Environment and Landscape Management’. Part 1 dealt with institutions and policies; part 2 with land use systems; and part 3 with communities and networks. Speakers


included Constance McDermott (University of Oxford), Gillian Petrokofsky (University of Oxford), Mohd. Nor Salleh, (former Director General, FRIM), Tomi Haryadi (RECOFTC), Amy

Ickowitz and Christine Padoch (both of CIFOR, Indonesia), and Roger Montgomery (LSE). A roundtable on ‘Achieving Transparency and Accountability in Natural Resource Development’ was also very well received. Nine panels on public health, including a two part panel on historical and contemporary ‘Philippine Narratives of Public Health’, ‘Genomics in the Understanding of Human Origins and Disease in Southeast Asia’, ‘Social and Genetic Challenges to Effective Malaria Treatment in Southeast Asia’ and ‘Public Health Challenges in Southeast Asia’. Panels dealt with a wide variety of factors and issues, including genetics, lifestyle, reproductive health, rights, historical factors, and interdisciplinary challenges. Many speakers came from Oxford’s massive public health and tropical medicine research programmes, including Stephen Oppenheimer, Mark Harrison,

Gerry Bodeker, Iqbal Elyazar, Ari W. Satyagraha, Lenny Ekawati, Dewi Ismajani

Puradiredja, and Alexander Mentzer. Other speakers included Soobitha Subenthiran (Institute of Medical Research, Malaysia), Pascale Allotey & Daniel Reidpath (Monash University Malaysia), and Sean Eng (Universiti Sains Malaysia). A roundtable and workshop on ‘State-Society Interactions in Southeast Asia’. Chaired by Phyllis

Ferguson (University of Oxford), a roundtable of civil society leaders and academics set the stage by suggesting various questions and issues facing civil society common to all Southeast Asian countries. Through a lively discussion, ideas were exchanged and challenges facing civil society in Southeast Asia discussed, generating an agenda for later workshops. In the workshop, participants discussed issues related specifically to effective civil society organisation and more effective engagement with the public and with the state. Solutions were debated and best practices exchanged. A report will soon be available at www.projectsoutheastasia.com. Twenty panels on economics and sustainable development, organised in conjunction with the Asian Economic Panel conference, including ‘Key Challenges for Asia in the 21st Century’, ‘Slower Growth in Southeast Asia: What is to be done?’, ‘Are the Benefits from ASEAN Integration Sustainable?’, and ‘Malaysia’s Past Successes and Uncertain Future: Graduating from the Middle or Caught in the Middle?’. A series of documentaries, including ‘The Look of Silence’, Joshua Oppenheimer's sequel to his Academy Award-nominated ‘The Act of Killing’, followed by a roundtable on the film featuring the celebrated Indonesian poet, writer, and former detainee Putu Oka Sukanta; ‘Diwalwal: Cursed Gold of the Philippines’, followed by a roundtable featuring film-maker Philippe Couture, Yuyun Ismawati (Balifokus) and chaired by Aurelia Gomez (University of the Philippines, Mindanao); and ‘Sunset over Selungo’ and ‘Save Sarawak: Stop the Dams’, followed by a roundtable with Peter Kallang (SAVE Rivers); Lukas Straumann (Bruno Manser Fund); Sia

Ngedau (Penan Peace Park); chaired by Awang Hasmadi Awang Mois (International Islamic University Malaysia). Three public lectures by Nick Rawlins (University of Oxford); Barry Eichengreen (University of California Berkeley); and a lecture by Jeffrey Sachs on ‘The Age of Sustainable Development’, which closed the five days of events.


Videos of the sessions and photos will be available at www.projectsoutheastasia.com and fb.com/projectsoutheastasia. The 5th Symposium will return to Oxford in March 2016. RECENT PUBLICATIONS

BORET, SÉBASTIENPENMELLEN • 2014. Japanese Tree Burials: Kinship, Ecology and the Culture of Death, London: Routledge. • 2014. Review of Couderc, P. and Sillander, N. (eds) (2012) Ancestors in Borneo Societies: Death, Transformation, and Social Immortality. Sojourn: Journal of Social

Issues in Southeast Asia. 29 (2), pp. 498-501.

GALLOP, ANNABEL TEH • 2015. (with A.C.S. Peacock, eds.) From Anatolia to Aceh: Ottomans, Turks and Southeast

Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015 (Proceedings of the British Academy; 200). • 2015. Note sur un sceau malais du Cambodge (1844), Grégory Mikaelian, Annabel Teh Gallop & Bernard Dupaigne. Péninsule, 2015, 68 (1): 155-172. GODFREY, HELEN • 2014. Trade and Transformation on the Borneo Frontier: towards a study of the Baram region of Sarawak in the late nineteenth century, Borneo Research Bulletin, Vol. 45. KOH, SIN YEE • 2015. Temporalities of Citizenship: Malaysian-Chinese Skilled Migrants in Singapore and Returnees to Malaysia. Asian and Pacific Migration Journal, 24(1), pp. 3-27. • 2015. Unpacking ‘Malaysia’ and ‘Malaysian Citizenship’: Perspectives of Malaysian- Chinese Skilled Diasporas. In A. Christou & E. Mavroudi (Eds.), Dismantling Diasporas:

Rethinking the Geographies of Diasporic Identity, Connection and Development. Ashgate, pp. 129-143. LARSSON, TOMAS • 2015. Monkish politics in Southeast Asia: Religious disenfranchisement in comparative and theoretical perspective. Modern Asian Studies 49(01), pp. 40-82. • 2015. The rise of the organic foods movement as a transnational phenomenon. In Ronald J Herring (ed), The Oxford handbook of food, politics, and society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp 739-754. • 2015. Agricultural biotechnology in Southeast Asia. Patterns of inclusion and exclusion SEATIDE Online Paper 7. McKENZIE, ROBERT M. • 2015. The sociolinguistics of variety identification and categorisation: Free classification of varieties of spoken English amongst non-linguist listeners. Language Awareness

(Routledge), pp. 1-19.


NOSZLOPY, LAURA • 2014. An introduction to John Coast’s Railroad of Death. Myrmidon Books, Newcastle. • 2014. The ‘little legong dancers’ of Bali: child stars in Indonesian dance theatre. In G. Arrighi & V. Emeljanow (eds.) Entertaining children: the participation of youth in the

entertainment industry. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. pp. 167-184. TAYLOR, ROBERT H. • 2015. General Ne Win: A Political Biography. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2015. • 2015. The Armed Forces in Myanmar Politics: A Terminating Role? Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Trends in Southeast Asia, No. 2. • 2015. Refighting Old Battles, Compounding Misconceptions: The Politics of Ethnicity in

Myanmar Today. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, ISEAS Perspectives, No. 2.

BOOK REVIEWS

CATHERINE EARL

Vietnam’s New Middle Classes. Gender, Career, City

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, Gendering Asia # 9, 2014

Vii + 312pp. ISBN 978-87-7694-145-1 (hbk) £50; ISBN 978-87-7694-146-8 (pbk) £17.99

Reviewed by Victor T. King

University of Leeds and School of Oriental and African Studies

The concept, practices and lifestyles of the middle class in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia have commanded an increasingly high profile. The new middle class is one of the major features and consequences of capitalist modernization and it has contrived to secure our attention ever since the publication of Richard Robison’s and David S.G. Goodman’s The New Rich in Asia:

Mobile Phones, McDonald’s and Middle-class Revolution (1996), followed closely by Michael Pinches’ Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia (1999). Interestingly, in Robison’s and Goodman’s tripartite sub-title the emphasis is on consumption, lifestyle and rapid transformation and in the main title, newness and wealth. In this recent contribution to our understanding of the middle class in post-reform Vietnam, Catherine Earl draws attention, again, in three key words in her sub-title, to the gendered dimension of class as well as to production and work (career) and the ‘urban’ location of middle class activities, though again stressing that the emergence of the middle class is a relatively new phenomenon. This observation nevertheless requires some qualification because what Earl demonstrates is that in fact ‘the new’ in her title is a post-reform re-emergence of the middle classes from its earlier roots in the movement of large numbers of the urban middle class, Catholics, former colonial civil servants and intellectuals from North Vietnam to the South prior to 1975, in addition to a migration of large numbers of rural people to Saigon from the surrounding countryside during the Vietnam war to seek employment in the war time service industry; some of these rural migrants also prospered and moved up the social ladder.


Earl has accessed some of the experiences and character of this earlier urban-based middle class from published memoirs, eleven autobiographies and one biography (p. 5, 50-86). So, in some sense, and this is an important observation, the middle class is not new, but instead reconstituted and demonstrates continuities and transformations between 1955-75 and the post-reform period. The book can also be located in a developing comparative literature on the middle classes in Asia, dominated by the series of edited books by Michael Hsiao Hsin-Huang from the late 1990s-early 2000s, in addition to the percipient interventions of Abdul Rahman Embong. One of Earl’s main arguments and indeed the strength of the book is that it focuses on a frequently neglected element of social class, namely gender. Her subject matter comprises ‘the lifeworlds of educated urban migrant women - women who are young, unmarried, university educated, professionally employed, and living away from their natal homes ....’ (p. 2). Their location is the conurbation of Ho Chi Minh City and the neighbouring provinces of Dong Nai and Binh Duong in south-eastern Vietnam. This is primarily an ethnographic study, the methods of data collection based on participation observation with the major field research conducted in one year in 2000-2001; the fieldwork comprised a process of living and socialising among young ‘aspirational’ middle class women in the city but also accompanying them on visits to their families and friends, whether locally or outside the conurbation. Though these young women, through education, career advancement and migration have managed to secure some independence from their families, they continue to be connected to them, providing support and fulfilling a range of familial obligations. But they demonstrate this independence in deciding on late marriage and childbirth, accumulating cultural capital, taking advantage of the opportunities which education provides them, and engaging in ‘urban leisure culture’, including culinary delights, snacking, café culture and ‘imported popular culture’ (p. 165). Earl draws on detailed social material from particular individuals as well (‘a person-centred approach’), again an ethnographic strength of this study; she tracked 37 individuals but singled out a small number of individuals for intensive study: Lien, Cuc, Hanh, Nghia, Tuyet, Thu, Thao and Diem. The conceptual framework has been adopted from Pierre Bourdieu’s work with ‘important modifications’ taken from feminist analysis, and migration and cultural studies (clarifying the concept of cultural capital; its gender-blindness; and the extension beyond a national culture ‘to an increasingly globalized and an increasingly digitized world’, p. 32). In this connection the book has emerged from a doctoral thesis submitted to Victoria University in 2008 some five years after the primary research was completed. But Earl also undertook a further six separate visits to her field locations from 2004 through to 2012 comprising periods of one to six months (p. 42). This enriches the historical depth and contextualisation of the study. The author also indicates that some of the research findings have already been presented in a different form before and included in chapters 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 (of the eight chapters in the book). Aside from chapters which contextualise the young middle class historically the volume addresses the extent to which young middle class Vietnamese women experience and address change in post-reform Vietnam; the nature and construction of the middle class; and the


relationship between postcolonial middle class experiences prior to 1975 with those of the recent post-reform re-emergence of a new middle class formation. But what is gender if it is not constituted of males and females? Young middle class men are not part of the gendered middle class in Vietnam in this study. Therefore, the title of the study is misleading; ‘gender blindness’ refers to the neglect of young middle class women in research agendas. Therefore, it is not gender that we are addressing, if we understand by this term the relationships and distinctions between women and men; the focus is on young females, and therefore gender is an inappropriate term. Young women are the subject of study, not gender. The significant feminization of the middle class in Vietnam is acknowledged, but this study excludes young men, and therefore it is partial and not a gendered study; it is a feminized study. Moreover, the Weberian relationships and discriminations between class, status groups and power are also not clearly articulated; they remain fuzzy (see pp. 260-262). But leaving aside these minor quibbles, this study is a fine example of the contribution which detailed ethnographic studies can make to a socially and culturally nuanced understanding of how certain social groupings (in this case young urban-based professional, middle class women) respond to the challenges and opportunities of capitalist and market-oriented transformations in a politically centralised, socialist and rapidly internationalising economy in Southeast Asia. The concluding comment in the book certainly requires further exploration and points to a whole host of problems in addressing middle classness: with regard to Vietnam Earl concludes that ‘middle classes are diverse and their dispositions are characterized by cultural dissonance’ (p. 270). This is certainly an agenda for future research. MIKAEL GRAVERS and FLEMMING YTZEN (EDS.)

Burma/Myanmar – Where Now?.

Copenhagen: NIAS Press, 2014.

462pp., ISBN 978 87 7694 113 0, £18.99

Reviewed by Robert H. Taylor

SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies

This timely volume, nicely illustrated and with useful bibliographies attached to many of the entries, is the product of contributions by twenty-one different authors. Some are familiar names to those interested in research on Myanmar, including editors Gravers, Bertil Lintner, Mandy Sadan, Ashley South, and Ardeth Maung Thawngmung. Others are more recent additions to limited number of writers on their topics, such as Sean Turnell, or journalists and aid and development workers less well known to the scholarly community. Some are political activists with little understanding of the country, while others, such as Alan Saw U and Lian H. Sakhong, are long time indigenous participants in the effort to change Myanmar’s politics and society. With such a diverse range of knowledge and experience, it is not surprising that the contributions are of a highly varying quality. In all there are about twenty-seven substantive contributions divided into four parts. They deal, seriatim, with political and social change, including the transition from military rule; ethnicity, communalism and insurgency; and the economy, development and the environment. The


conclusion, a brief look to the future, rounds off the volume. Keeping with our age of short attention spans, none is longer than thirty pages and most are appreciatively shorter. A number of the substantive contributions have one to three page appendices attached on related topics. These are occasionally redundant. The authors mainly try to be objective and give credit and blame equally to the government and other actors. However, the overall tenure of most of the chapters is in keeping with the prevailing criticism of the army and the current army-generated and army dominated regime of President Thein Sein. With such a range of talent, one would not be surprised that the level of confidence one can place in reliability of the contributions is greatly varied. Charles Petrie’s and Ashley South’s essay on ‘peace building’, based on a much larger research report, is an outstanding example of participant analysis. Others are of a lower quality, some become little more than special pleading. Some are highly personal. Exaggeration is a feature of a number, often exaggeration based on little or no evidence or analysis. Nonetheless, the authors have by and large striven to objectivity. However, sometimes they rush to judgement without first checking the accuracy of their contentions. For example, the Union Solidarity and Development Association did not sit in the national convention that approved the guiding principles of the 2008 constitution (p. 58); the two houses of the hluttaw (parliament) elected in 2012 are not ‘still largely constituted of former generals’ (p. 60); or ‘One Nation/Race, One Language, One Religion’ was never part of the ideology of the State Peace and Development Council (p. 63). The author is confusing Dr. Ba Maw’s Second World War government with the recent past; one can guess the unattributed source for such an error. There are a number of contentious statements which are of doubtful validity, at least in the bald manner stated, such as that the President cannot control the army, or that state owned economic enterprises are all inefficient. At several points in the text the Dobama Asiayon is confused for the Burma Independence Army. The contributor who claimed that the 1948 Citizenship Act refers to 144 ethnic groups eligible for citizenship or the 1982 Citizenship Act refers to 135 similar groups clearly has never read either law (p. 330). Aside from these errors and other deficiencies, which any person knowledgeable on the history of Myanmar and with a critical mind will easily recognise, the volume has its uses, particularly for those for whom it is apparently intended – those going to Myanmar to join the cavalcade of aid and development workers funded by Western governments, international financial institutions, and international non-governmental organisations. The past repeats itself. As Gordon Luce once wrote about the 1950s, “Burma was then flooded with advisors from foreign parts, who knew little or nothing about Burma, but had a Nostrum that had worked elsewhere.” As the politics of Myanmar have demonstrated since the return of a form of political pluralism and remarkably free and open press and public discussion, the old issues of ethnicity and religion, and the problems of economic development, continue to dominate political life. The volume could have been titled “Burma/Myanmar: Back to the Future” rather than “Where Now?” History is always with us. It is a pity that many of the contributors to this volume know so little of it.


RICHARD BORSUK and NANCY CHNG

Liem Sioe Liong’s Salim Group: The Business Pillar of Suharto’s Indonesia

Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2014

pp. xiv + 574 ISBN 978-981-4459-57-0 pb S$65.90/US$52.90

Reviewed by Anne Booth

SOAS, School of Oriental and African Studies

Suharto’s New Order in Indonesia lasted for over three decades during which time the former Dutch colony recovered from the economic chaos of the last years of Sukarno’s presidency and embarked on a period of sustained economic growth. Over these years a small number of businessmen descended from migrants from southern China became immensely rich. The richest of these businessmen, often referred to as cukong, was Liem Sioe Liong, whose Salim group became the largest and most analysed business group in Indonesia during the Suharto era. This book written by two journalists with long experience in Indonesia is both a biography of Liem and a history of his varied business activities from the early 1950s until his death in Singapore in June 2012. But its length and scope make it more than just the story of the life and times of one man; the book is a fascinating study of the evolution of government-business relations in Indonesia from the late colonial era until the present day. Liem was born to a poor farming family in Fujian province in coastal southern China in 1917. As the authors point out, there was nothing in his family background or childhood experiences to suggest how illustrious his future would be. He seems to have received little in the way of formal education, although he did study with a tutor hired by his parents and gained the rudiments of literacy and numeracy. After the death of his father in 1937, Liem realized that his future in a China controlled by the Japanese army would be bleak, and he used the money sent by a brother already in Java to book a passage to Surabaya where he arrived in 1938. By then the Dutch authorities were quite hostile to Chinese immigrants, and when no family member showed up to meet him at the port he was placed in a holding centre. He would have been deported back to China, but luckily a brother-in-law did arrive after a few days, and he was taken to the town of Kudus in Central Java. Like many other Hokchia migrants, he became a peddler, selling a variety of products in the towns of Central Java. He worked hard and benefited from the tight clan links among the Hokchia in Java; by the time the Japanese arrived in 1942 he was doing quite well and had amassed savings of several thousand guilders. The Japanese occupation was a bad time for the Chinese in Indonesia but Liem and his brothers kept a low profile and survived by trading food and rice wine. Liem also married the Indonesian-born daughter of a Chinese batik trader; he never told his wife that he had already contracted a marriage back in his native village. His wife only learnt of the first marriage when she visited China in the 1960s. But the second marriage was a durable one, and the couple celebrated their 60th anniversary in 2004. They were to have three sons and a daughter. Liem spent the years from 1945 to 1952 in Kudus, and travelled frequently to Semarang to source supplies for his trading operations. In 1952 he moved to Jakarta to take advantage of what were perceived to be better business opportunities in the national capital. But he was just


one of many struggling Hokchia businessmen in the capital, and did not stand out from the crowd. He maintained his trading interests in Semarang where among other activities he supplied rice to the military. Although Liem had first met Suharto in 1949, the two do not seem to have had much contact until the late 1960s, by which time Sukarno was deposed and Suharto was acting president. According to Borsuk and Chng, Liem’s links to Suharto and other powerful military figures were forged through the so-called financial generals, who ran the army’s various business operations. His closest link was to Major General Suryo who was a key supporter of Suharto in the early days of the New Order. Another important supporter was Sujono Humardani. In the late 1960s Liem obtained two important licenses. His company P.T. Mega was one of two given exclusive rights to import cloves for kretek cigarettes; the other was P.T .Mercu Buana established by Suharto’s half-brother, Probosutedjo. The second license was to import flour. Together these two licences generated the cash flow which allowed Liem to build up his business conglomerate with amazing speed through the 1970s. He formed a crucial partnership with three other businessmen. One was Suharto’s cousin, Sudwikatmono, who emerged into prominence after a undistinguished career in a state trading company. He provided the essential link to the first family. The other two were a Hokchia businessman, Djuhar Sutanto whom Liem had known in Semarang and an Achenese, Ibrahim Risjad. Together they built up the conglomerate which became known as the Salim Group. The core businesses were, and remained, flour milling, construction materials and banking. The exclusive right to mill flour in Java granted to Liem’s company, P.T. Bogosari was hugely lucrative, and led to the establishment of a noodle factory in the late 1970s. Borsuk and Chng give much fascinating detail on Liem’s emergence as Asia’s ‘noodle king”’ as well as his forays into cement production and banking where his flagship enterprise, Bank Central Asia was managed by Mochtar Riady. Riady subsequently left to take over his family’s financial empire, the Lippo Group, but Bank Central Asia developed rapidly into a major player in the Indonesian banking sector, especially after the financial liberalisation of the late 1980s. The Salim Group also developed interests in other parts of Asia, especially through the Hong Kong Company, First Pacific, which was intended to be a financial services company, managed by a Filipino with investment banking experience, and Liem’s son, Anthony. None of these ventures was without problems, and all relied, to a greater or lesser extent, on favours granted by Suharto and some key advisers. But Suharto also relied on Liem to help him sort out problems which his technocratic advisers were either unwilling or unable to cope with. Borsuk and Chng give some fascinating information on Liem’s role in dealing with the fallout from the Pertamina debacle in the 1970s, especially his dealings with the Israeli financier, Bruce Rappoport, over the tanker leases. The Salim Group also played an important role in bailing out Bank Duta, a prominent bank linked to several Suharto foundations which ran into massive problems in 1990 as a result of speculation in the foreign exchange markets. Liem had always made sure that Suharto foundations (yayasan) and family members were beneficiaries from his successful business ventures. Several children were shareholders in Bank Central Asia, and his foundations had, since the 1970s, been granted a share of the profits from P.T. Bogasari and other lucrative monopolies.


In the early 1990s many observers, both at home and abroad, were confident that this complex system of favours granted and favours returned would continue into the new millennium. After all it had generated rapid GDP growth, and rising living standards for many millions of Indonesians. If there was a downside in terms of a lack of transparency in government-business relations, perhaps that was a small price to pay for the economic benefits which the Suharto years had brought about. But Borsuk and Chng make clear that by the early 1990s, criticism of the Suharto model was growing among the burgeoning ranks of Indonesia’s educated middle class, most of whom were not Chinese. They were angry at the favours granted to first family enterprises such as Tommy Suharto’s “national car” project. And they were furious about what was seen as government favours granted to a few extremely rich Chinese of whom Liem was the most egregious example. Suharto tried to counter this anger by forcing the leading Chinese conglomerates to contribute more of their profits to government supported “co-operatives” which were supposed to use their funds to help the poor. In fact, most of these cooperatives were controlled by the Suharto family, and the use of their funds was opaque, to say the least. Increasingly the first family used the funds to bail out failing family enterprises. There is very little evidence that any of the money was used to help the poor. The last part of the book discusses the Götterdämmerung of the New Order and the consequences for the Liem empire. Much of this will be familiar to students of Indonesia’s recent history, but Borsuk and Chng were eye witnesses to Suharto’s downfall and to its devastating aftermath, and tell the story in graphic terms. Liem himself was in the USA having eye surgery when the riots in May 1998 destroyed both his own home in Jakarta and many BCA branches. That probably saved his life. After 1998 he lived mainly in Singapore; his son Anthony was left to salvage what he could of the Liem enterprises in Indonesia. He displayed considerable skill in dealing with the Indonesian government agencies which were set up to deal with the fallout from the 1997/98 crisis. In the end it was the food pillar which he managed to keep, and that, together with assets in the property and telecommunications sectors were enough to propel him back into number three position in the Forbes list of rich Indonesians in 2014. Perhaps one criticism can be made of this otherwise well researched and illuminating account of the Salim Group and its close links with Suharto. The authors do not really address the question of who benefited from, and who was damaged by, the Salim group, and by implication other large conglomerates in Suharto’s Indonesia, whether owned by Chinese or pribumi business people. Were all these groups simply vehicles for collecting rents through monopolies and other advantages granted by government regulation? Did they contribute any net benefits to the Indonesian economy? Would economic growth actually have been faster if they had been forced to compete with other enterprises, whether from within Indonesia or from abroad? The authors quote, apparently with approval, from an interview with Lee Kuan Yew to the effect that Suharto, whatever his faults, brought about rapid growth in Indonesia. So what if a few billion dollars were siphoned off by cronies along the way? It could have been much worse. This is still a widely held view both in Indonesia and abroad. At times the authors of this book appear to want to challenge this argument; it is a pity that they did not develop their case in more explicit terms.


FARISH A. NOOR

The Malaysian Islamic Party PAS 1951-2013: Islamism in a Mottled Nation

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014

260pp. ISBN 978 90 04 8964 576 0 €89

Reviewed by Kevin W. Fogg

University of Oxford

At a moment of much hemming and hawing about a possible future where the Malaysian opposition will come to power, about growing Islamic conservatism in Southeast Asia, and about networks of Islamist parties around the world, it is vitally important to understand the position and history of the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia (PAS, Pan-Malaysian Islamic Party). This book by Farish A. Noor of the Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore is the right place to start. Noor has provided us with a beautifully-written overview of the history of PAS, from its humble beginnings as a spin-off of UMNO in the 1950s through the 13th General Election in 2013. Throughout, he has framed the development of the party around its engagement with three key ideological poles: Islamic socialism, Malay-centred ethno-nationalism, and internationally-oriented Islamism. These also correspond roughly to key periods in the party’s history. Growing out of several ulama conferences and Malay concerns—some of them in support of or in imitation of neighbouring Indonesia—the Parti Islam Se-Malaysia found its footing around the time of the country’s independence. From 1956 until 1969, the party leaned towards Islamic socialism under the leadership of Dr Burhanuddin al-Helmy. Islamic socialism also reflected broader trends in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Pakistan, and Burhanuddin navigated this policy line between the Scylla of the Communist menace and Charybdis of the government’s bland Malay nationalism. When he was jailed and his deputy passed away in a tragic accident, however, the party struggled to find its direction for a few years. In the early 1970s under the leadership of Asri Muda, PAS redefined itself. This period saw PAS turn fully to the issue of Malay rights and pursue an alliance with the UMNO-led government to that end. Although Asri’s choices produced some early, positive results for the party, internal struggles and the collapse of the coalition left PAS isolated and again in need of rebuilding by 1980. Since 1982, the ulama (rather than lay politicians) have taken direct leadership of the party, and they have prioritized moral and theological issues. This is demonstrated most famously in their efforts to implement Islamic law in Kelantan and Terengganu under PAS administrations. This period also saw increasing international rhetoric and connections, as leaders like Yusof Rawa, Fadzil Mohd Noor, Abdul Hadi Awang, and Nik Aziz Nik Mat imitated Arab leaders, praised the Taliban, and occasionally paid the price at the polls. Yet since 1999, Noor describes PAS as entering a new phase: it is still under ulama leadership, but with a newly emerged reformist faction trying to assert itself, inspired more by the AKP of Turkey than by the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt. Both sides, though, have embraced the rhetoric of democracy, the medium of the internet, and the pragmatism of an interethnic rainbow coalition to seek electoral victory—remaining disappointed that despite its long


history PAS remains the smallest of the opposition parties in parliament today. In the chapter on this most recent period, Farish Noor reports from his own direct experiences: the PAS protest at the US embassy in 2001, the German seminar for PAS leaders in 2006, the 2009 PAS general assembly, the general election in 2013—each with the inside stories of someone present to observe. Throughout the book, Noor is attentive to international parallels and connections, making this book useful to those interested in Islam and politics well beyond Southeast Asia. He also provides insightful biographies of each of the party’s major leaders, juicy quotations from party activists, and parallel developments in Malaysian government and other opposition parties to contextualize the institutional history that structures this study. The book provides a starting place but not the final word on PAS. This is not only because the party continues to be active today, but also because this is neither the most ambitious nor most exhaustive study of the group. The text, at less than 240 pages, is barely over one-fourth of the length of Noor’s own previous two-volume history of the party up to 2004. Here we read neither Noor the activist nor Noor the theorist; only the final fifteen pages turn to broader epistemological questions about the nature and direction of Islamism. Instead, this is a book of well-written, uncontroversial history presenting a mainstream narrative. One might even call it conservative; the most difficult or contentious moments in Malaysian history are consistently sidelined. The race riots of 1969, for example, that have loomed over interethnic relations of the last half-century receive only two sentences of attention. The allegations of massive, systematic, and structural fraud (to borrow the Indonesian terms) in several recent elections in Malaysia are relegated to footnotes, and there placed only in the mouths of PAS politicians rather than in the well-documented papers of respected academics. Oddly, the ‘invasion’ of Sabah by militants connected to the Sultan of Sulu gets a chapter sub-heading, while the Perak constitutional crisis of 2009 is nowhere to be found in the book. There is also plenty more to be read—particularly in Noor’s own oeuvre—and even more to be researched. Some of the fascinating stories of PAS in Kelantan (pp. 92-94) remind of us the need to better understand how PAS has functioned in individual states, both in and out of power. The contention that PAS’s hands were sometimes tied in terms of policy options because of its membership in a global network of Islamist parties (pp. 178-79) would be a promising prompt for research on the exact nature of the relationships between major Islamist groups. This is a book I would recommend to students and academics interested in Islam and politics, or in Malaysia, or in Southeast Asian religious history broadly, but it also contains much of value for the general public, even those who do not usually read academic books. Nowhere else can one easily find a clear, engaging, and relatively concise approach to the history of Malaysia’s oldest opposition party.


MICHAEL FALSER & MONICA JUNEJA (EDS.)

‘Archaeologizing’ Heritage?: Transcultural Entanglements between Local Social Practices and Global

Virtual Realities. Springer, 2013.

287pp. ISBN 978-3-642-35870-8,€103.99; eBook €83.29.

Reviewed by Keiko Miura

Waseda University, Tokyo

This book was developed out of the proceedings from the international and interdisciplinary workshop held in 2010 which aimed ‘to initiate a discussion on the historical formation of the notion of “archaeological heritage” and the contemporary challenges it faces as it negotiates the space between local social practices and virtual global realities’ (p. 2). This is an ambitious undertaking of demonstrating the appropriation of the past through studying the ‘archaeologization’ of heritage beyond spatiotemporal boundaries. In particular, it has illustrated how historically there have been a variety of ways to ‘archaeologize’ heritage both by Europeans and the natives. A variety of ways used includes producing maps, conservation manuals, picturesque photography, drawings, plaster casts, guidebooks, virtual geo-referenced 3D data, museums, memorials, or reconstruction of prominent buildings. The motivations behind such production were dominantly for conservation, interpretation, tourism, and sometimes colonialism or nationalism. The heritage sites concerned are mainly in India (colonial presentation), and Cambodia (Angkor, and memorials of Khmer Rouge genocides) besides Afghanistan (Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by Taliban) and Myanmar (Pagan reconstructed by the military regime) et al. The periods under study range from the colonial period of the nineteenth century to the global transnational present. Part I covers colonial India; Part II is about colonial Angkor. Part III and Part IV concern virtualizing heritage with Bamiyan, Angkor, Tucume in Peru, and Antalya in Turkey. Part V deals with restoration and interpretation in Angkor that involve local communities. Part VI is related to memorializing archaeology and archaeologizing memory in Pagan, Angkor and Khmer Rouge mass graves. The disciplines and standpoints of the respective contributors are varied, comprising art history, history of urbanization, conservation, anthropology, architecture, museum curation, heritage planning, urban planning, photogrammetry, and remote sensing. In the concept of ‘archaeologizing’ heritage, the distinction between ‘dead’ monuments versus ‘living’ monuments first appears in Senguputa’s chapter. The concept was described in the Conservation Manual produced by Sir John Marshall in India in 1923. Here ‘dead’ monuments were to be historicized or their authenticity maintained, thus not to be renewed, but to be preserved. ‘Living’ monuments are defined as those that are still in use for the purpose for which they were originally designed. The term ‘living’ heritage has resurged in recent years and is renegotiated in modern conservation sciences. The editors are cautious with such binary oppositions that they ‘attempt to understand the world as a complex of transcultural entanglements by paying closer attention to the multiple layers and hierarchies built within these relationships, and by finding a language to define the morphologies of interaction, appropriation, and transformation’ (p. 17). Following Sengupta’s chapter readers are to learn first the ‘archaeologizing’ heritage of the colonial period. Weiler demonstrates Indian heritage under the British Empire with photography and paintings oriented towards picturesque pleasure of ruins. Baptist does it with the case of the French ‘contribution’ to the world of art


history and museums by setting up the Indochinese Museum in Paris with a collection of art objects, plaster casts, photographs, and drawings related to Angkor monuments. Falser discusses the spatiotemporal formation of the Angkor Archaeological Park, tourist guides, and colonial maps as the powerful control tool of the colonial authorities for tourism purposes. While all the chapters demonstrate some forms of ‘archaeologizing’ heritage, several chapters, especially technical ones such as 3D computer models and conservation and restoration related ones, tend to describe their projects with technical details and have somewhat weak connection to the main theme. They nonetheless are informative on how they provide the world the virtual reality of heritage. One can recognize the usefulness of using 3D computer to understand and conserve the physical structures of religious icons and buildings. Their undertakings however at the same time remind readers of another regime of ‘archaeologizing’ heritage – a different method with much the same aim pursued during the colonial period. In this regard it is helpful that Gruen and Cunin show not just their excellence or usefulness, but also the limitations of what some models can represent. When this digital technology is used with a more non-technological and non-material dimension of heritage in mind as discussed by Sanday, Chermayeff, Toubekis and Jansen, it escapes from freezing the past or producing ‘the mythical notion of a culture as single, unique, and bounded’(p. 2). These chapters are nevertheless complemented by the following chapters that integrate the ‘living heritage’ approach for conservation. The chapter of Warrack that concerns conservation of an important religious statue in Angkor Wat is eye-opening. It shows a clear shift of the conservation approach from just ‘archaeologizing heritage’ to ‘living heritage’ conservation. The conservation methodology of the statue took into consideration the wishes of the Neak Ta spirit dwelling in the statue that had been worshipped by local villagers and wider Khmer communities. Pichard’s chapter on the conservation of Pagan in Mynamar by the army generals challenges the international standard of ‘archaeologizing heritage’ that denies beautification and reconstruction. The reconstruction and beautification of Pagan temples was conducted based on the Buddhist tradition of reconstruction as merit-making. Furthermore, Pichard argues that ‘Pagan is primarily a sacred Buddhist place of worship, a field of potential merit’ (p. 247). The notion of ‘living heritage’ has actively been promoted by the international conservation circle these days, however, the situation here demonstrates to readers the contradiction and dilemmas about how much and in what ways it may be pursued. Luco’s chapter on the people living in Angkor demonstrates the case as the reverse from that of Myanmar. While she emphasizes the importance of paying attention to the living culture of the Angkor heritage site, international heritage developers are advocating the re-creation of an ancient idealized space (‘archaeologizing heritage’) where restrictions on living have been exercised. Guillou’s chapter on the living archaeology of Khmer Rouge mass graves has a parallel with that of Warrack. Some local villagers of mass graves try to fulfil the wishes of the murdered dead, who were contacted by the dead in their dreams to move their remains from the state established memorial to another locale. The actions of these villagers are also based on their traditional belief of ‘powerful places’ and ‘the rationale of the earth as a living element “nurtured” by fragments of Angkorean statues and corpses buried during various times’ (p. 263). All in all, the chapters in Part V and Part VI show the shift of the early conservation approach of ‘archaeologizing’ heritage into more contested notions and practices of ‘living heritage’.


Different disciplinary approaches and technical details of chapters sometimes tend to distract readers away from the main theme, but the editors have made great efforts to be objective of the contents and approaches of the respective chapters and have sewn them through with common theoretical threads to produce a comprehensive textile made of a wide span of space, time and academic fields. A number of coloured illustrations and editors’ additional comments in footnotes and cross-references in the texts also facilitate our understanding of the respective chapters. In sum, this book has successfully articulated the theoretical and empirical issues of ‘archaeologizing’ heritage beyond specific time and place; at the same time it stimulates readers to consider the importance of intangible or spiritual and socio-economic dimensions of the ‘living heritage’ approach and reminds us of the existence of a fertile ground for debates on the notion and practice of heritage. VOLKER GOTTOWIK (ED.)

Dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia: magic and modernity

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014

225 pp., hb ISBN 978 90 8964 424 4 € 79 / £64, e-ISBN 978 90 4851 627 8

Reviewed by Michael Hitchcock

ICCE

Goldsmiths, University of London

This volume is a testament to the vigour of Southeast Asian Studies in Germany as nearly all the contributors to this edited book are based in Germany with one having an Austrian affiliation and another having an Australian one. It is even more remarkable that unlike some other European centres of Southeast Asian research, which have a colonial history to draw on with attendant resources, Germany was never a colonial power in the region. That said, what should be not overlooked is the important role played by Germans in the region not least because many worked in the Netherlands East Indies in a variety of occupations ranging from soldiers to medics and scientists to artists. Also, there is a long established history of German Anthropology, which suffered badly in the Third Reich, with some global figures in the discipline originating in this country, notably Franz Boas the so-called ‘father of American Anthropology’. Germany is also home to some of the world’s leading ethnographic museums, which delighted this reviewer when he lived there as a child. This volume is all the more noteworthy because it is set in a profoundly modern context with the volume divided into three sections: Modern Spirits, Modern Muslims and Modern Traditions. In fact all the chapters are fascinating documents of religious experience in contemporary Southeast Asia, covering roughly the period from the 1980s to the present. What makes the volume so engaging and likeable is that all the chapters are written in a sympathetic fashion with often witty titles such as ‘Where the Dead go to Market’ (Sprenger) and ‘Good Girls’ (Klenke). So much for the popularly held view in Britain that Germans are often lacking when it comes to humour, a perspective that this reviewer has always strongly rejected. This book has a delightfully mellow tone that raises a smile but scrupulously avoids causing offence, made all the more remarkable by the fact that many if not all of the authors are writing in what is presumably a second language.


The book does an excellent job in capturing the way in which religion is conceived of and expressed in a popular context. The volume may be heavily slanted to Indonesia but since three religions are covered in this context, it does not deter from the essential message of the book which can be found in the dust jacket blub: ‘Modernity is surrounded by an almost magical aura that casts a spell over people all over the world’. Given that the book lacks a Conclusion, which would be almost impossible to write given the ethnographic detail of the constituent chapters, perhaps the blurb is all that is needed. In reviewing this book, this reviewer set about constructing what a Conclusion might look like, but failed in this self-appointed task as the religious outlooks and world views contained within its covers are so diverse. Despite being essentially ethnographic, the authors are well aware of the theoretical debates that precede their individual studies and they often acknowledge them and sometimes they overturn them. In this respect readers should turn to Gottowick’s chapter on Bali which opens with a polite but firm rebuttal of some of the earlier writings on the island and provides a kind of mini history of ideas. It also shows how Western scholars can become a little fixated on certain cultural forms such as zoomorphic Barong figures while largely ignoring other equally relevant aspects of the culture such as anthropomorphic ones. Not only is this mission accomplished, but the author provides a rare portrait of how outsider groups can be incorporated into local ritual performances, which in this case refers to the Chinese. Having recently returned from teaching in Macau, this reviewer is aware of a widely held view among Chinese students and academics that the Chinese experience in Indonesia can only be understood through the prism of racism and inter-ethnic conflict. For that reason alone, Gottowick makes an important and badly needed contribution. It would take up too much space in this publication to go through the coverage of each of the authors one by one, but it can be stated that all the constituent parts of this volume are of a high quality in terms of content and readability. Together these papers really do show – as it says in the blurb – that ‘religion and modernity are no longer perceived as contradictory’ and that ‘a revision of the western notion of religion is required to understand the complexity of ‘multiple modernities’ in a globalised world’. This reviewer agrees wholeheartedly.

Documents

Issue 57 Spring 2015