ARI – Springer Asia Series, v. 3. Dordrecht: Springer, 2013. viii, 247 pp. (Tables, figures, maps, plates.) US$99.00, cloth. ISBN 978-94-007-5481-2.
This is a welcome addition to the literature on rural-urban relations in contemporary Asia. The edited volume brings together 13 chapters written by 16 authors dealing with four countries. In the introduction, the editors contend that most social research is conceived either from an urban or agrarian perspective. To address this issue, the book shows a great deal of coherence in the objective of transcending the analytical limitations that arise from conceptions of urban and rural as “spatially distinct and discrete domains” (5). The originality of this work as a whole certainly lies in its broadly defined aims surrounding the articulation of social, cultural and political relations across the urban and the rural, which reflects how these geographical units are increasingly blurred in a time of heightened mobility.
The book is organized in four parts, one for each country—India, Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand—and the chapters address case studies in many sub-national regions. In this regard, the book appears as an overview of issues relevant to the fields of urban planning, cultural geography, sociology, political science and social anthropology, in Southeast and South Asia. However, as a result of this breadth, it lacks the depth of a more circumscribed account.
The first part addresses how urbanization has provided new opportunities and constraints for both dominant and subaltern groups in India. Chapter 2 explores how rural elites in states such as Maharashtra seek to secure access to capital cities where they can wield power over financial flows. State capitals such as Hyderabad are coveted by dominant castes to gain privileged access to state agencies “with the power to make decisions on contracts, permits, and licenses” (27). Chapter 3 considers the political and institutional situation in India which has led to erratic governance of land. In this context, actors with in-depth local knowledge of land histories and ground-level experience at dealing with complex land governance systems play a central role in land transactions. Chapter 4 addresses the pressure exerted by the expansion of the city of Mumbai on resources in the hinterland, which historically formed the livelihood of forest dwellers. The authors sketch out the impact of successive legislations, both for extraction and conservation purposes, on resource access for indigenous tribes.
Part 2 focuses mainly on new legal frameworks affecting urban-rural interactions in Indonesia. Chapter 5 provides an account on the challenges of urban planning in Greater Yogyakarta, which stretches over three administrative units, two of which are predominantly rural. Although decentralization legislation has fragmented regional governance, a joint secretariat has provided an effective horizontal structure to coordinate infrastructure services at the regional scale. In chapter 6, the authors argue that the war which unfolded in the countryside of Aceh in the postcolonial era exacerbated imbalances between urban and rural areas. However, the post-New Order legislation on regional autonomy and the 2005 Helsinki peace agreement have opened up more possibilities for political and economic cooperation across urban and rural spaces. Chapter 7 addresses the issue of economic development in the medium-sized cities of Java and questions the association of urbanization and improvement of economic welfare. The author highlights that Cirebon is a case of urbanization without development as the city is especially affected by economic reconversion and the end of redistribution mechanisms linked to fiscal decentralization.
Part 3 deals with representations of rural Malaysia, a country which is predominantly urban, with institutionalized ethnic categories. Chapter 8 analyzes the perceptions of Malay inhabitants of a village which has been integrated into a suburban area of Penang Island. Some villagers perceive themselves as “insiders” with a privileged relation to place, while people can be identified as “outsiders” when they are perceived to threaten the cohesion of the imagined village society. In chapter 9, the author explores the gendered dimension of modernization in a village of Negeri Sembilan and warns against essentialist visions of Malay rural societies. Increased mobility linked to work in the service and industrial economy has individualized socioeconomic relations. The agricultural sector, long a sphere dominated by women, is increasingly neglected, although women remain important landowners. And chapter 10 presents an argument about how chauvinistic discourses are mobilized by urban political elites to delegitimize the choice of rural voters in Malaysia as elsewhere. The chapter historicizes this question in regards with class relations within the Malay population and contrasts it with America, China and Thailand, where the same trend is observed.
Part 4 explores meanings taken on by the rural and the urban in Thailand according to different socio-political stances. Chapter 11 explores the perceptions in Thai society on the phua farangphenomenon: intermarriage between Western men and Isan women. In a moralistic fashion, phua farang is condemned by the urban elite, which denies agency to rural women and seeks to ascribe to rural women the role of safeguarding national tradition. Chapter 12 revisits the history of the formation of the Red Shirt movement to highlight the emergence of a distinct political subjectivity emerging from rural areas, but with a broader subaltern base. The Red Shirt movement would have been a response of disadvantaged urban and rural populations to elitist aristocratic urban-based chauvinism and their attempt to take over the state in a coup d’état in 2006. Chapter 13 provides an ethnographic narrative about the city of Chiang Mai envisioned by rural migrants as a place of encounter, of possibilities and danger. The account shows lives unfolding in anxious times of political and economic crisis, times particularly unsettling for newcomers.
The book is an original contribution which succeeds in showing the problematic aspects of rural and urban categories for governance and political imagination. However, the broad disciplinary, geographical and methodological scope undermines the sense of cohesion that derives from the common epistemological aim. Moreover, it seems that organizing the chapters according to dominant themes would have rendered more obvious the convergence of processes and meaning formation across nations. Nevertheless, these flaws do not undermine the overall quality of this contribution, which furthers our understanding of social transformations in Asia.
Jean-François Bissonnette
Université Laval, Québec, Canada