Global Asia (Amsterdam, Netherlands), 2; IIAS Publications Series, Monographs. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, in close collaboration with the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS); Chicago: University of Chicago Press [distributor], 2014. 338 pp. (Illustrations.) US$99.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-8964-424-4.
This book is the outcome of six conferences organized at various German universities.
Comprising thirteen essays and an introduction by European and mostly German anthropologists, the book addresses changes and continuities in the religious life of members of contemporary Southeast Asian societies as they deal with processes of modernization and forces of “modernity.” Chapters concern both the impact of modernity on religion and the impact of religion on modernity. As the editor points out, the inclusion of “magic” in the title reflects a view of “modernity” itself, possessing an “almost magic aura” and therefore has little to do with magic in the conventional anthropological sense. In one respect, however, the book’s title is somewhat misleading, for ten of the thirteen chapters focus exclusively on Indonesia. Like the editor’s introduction, one—Bräunlein’s chapter on spirits—addresses the wider Southeast Asian region, and the other two respectively concern Vietnam and Laos (in the second case, specifically the highlanders called Rmeet, formerly “Lamet”). Of the Indonesia chapters, six are focused on either Java or Bali, while the rest concern developments in some of the “outer islands” (specifically, Sumatra, Sulawesi, the Moluccas).
The focus on Indonesia is perhaps understandable in view of that country’s far greater size in relation to its regional neighbours and perhaps also its greater accessibility.
Superimposed on this qualified diversity is a formal division of chapters into three sections called “Spirits,” “Modern Muslims,” and “Modern Traditions.” The attention given to Islam is obviously consistent with the greater attention given to Indonesia. However, all the chapters included in “Modern Traditions” also relate to Indonesia, more specifically to religious developments in non-Muslim parts of that country (including “Hindu” Bali and Christian north Sumatra).
Religion, including both “world” and local regions, unquestionably continues to play an important part in the lives of Southeast Asians, and all the authors engage this fact to challenge the long-standing (and mostly discredited) view, dating back to Weber and nineteenth-century evolutionary anthropology, that modernization entails “secularization,” meaning both a loss of religious belief and a relegation of surviving belief and practice to the private sphere. By the same token, various authors advance a view of “modernity” as something that comes not only in a single European or Western version but in many forms, including at least one in which religion not only survives but apparently prospers.
At the same time, the chapters reveal how religion has undergone obvious changes in the region, in the case of Indonesia bound up with internal and external political change. Changing government policy towards religion
and spirituality in Vietnam, the topic of Dickhardt’s chapter, is another case in point.
As Reuter notes, while maintaining the constitutional requiring that all Indonesians adhere to a world religion (and enforcing identification of atheism with a despised communism), until his fall in 1998 Suharto kept religion out of the political sphere, and was partly by this means especially effective in countering more fundamentalist brands of Islam. At the same time, practices bound up with local religions, while being denied official status as “religions,” were subjected to a process of folklorization (or “Disneyfication,” as it has sometimes been called) in the interests of promoting tourism (see the chapters by Christensen and Rodemeier). Followed shortly by the attacks on New York in September 2001, the post-Suharto era has largely coincided with a period of deteriorating relations between the West and the Islamic world, including of course Indonesia, and as Nertz and Reuter point out, this has raised questions about how to reconcile a positive value on modernity—for obvious historical reasons still largely identified with the West—and a commitment to Islam. One resolution, according to Reuter, has been sought in a revival of cultural nationalism including Pancasila and the principle of “unity in diversity” associated with the first (and repopularized) Indonesian president, Sukarno.
Illustrating the diversity of the volume, and without meaning to suggest other contributions are without merit, specific mention may be given to the other three chapters that especially drew the present reviewer’s interest. Whereas a Western and especially Christian worldview treats religion and economics—like religion and rationality—as radically opposed, Sprenger’s essay on Rmeet ritual and “ritual money” shows how the model of a market permeates the Rmeet spirit world and relations between this world and the world of humans, facilitating their interrelation, and hence moderating the impact of a modernizing economy on religion in a way that promotes both. Writing on Balinese religion, Hornbacher shows how a recent adoption of Hindu orthodoxy, serving the aim of modernizing Balinese religion to conform to the definition of “religion” required by the Indonesian constitution, is combined with continuing adherence to practices reflecting an indigenous value on ancestor spirits. Focusing on relatively elaborate cremation rituals contrasting with the Hindu conception of cremation as a simple rite of purification, the author then shows how the ultimate Hindu aim of moksa—escape from the cycle of death and rebirth—is contradicted by Balinese rites that aim to transform spirits of the death into ancestors for the benefit of the living.
Not only are religion and modernity not radically opposed in Southeast Asia but in many cases world religions—or in the case of Islam, some purified version of religion—have served as an expression or vehicle of modernity. In his introduction, Gottowik briefly makes this point with regard to the adoption of the veil by middle-class Indonesian women, for whom veiling is “a symbol of an informed … or modern Islam” (14). A more elaborate demonstration is found in Klenke’s article on Protestant Christianity among the Karo of north Sumatra. Also focusing on women, Protestantism, it is shown, offers a way to mediate modern pressures for women to become both public and attractive figures, while at the same time maintaining a necessary modesty.
Despite several qualifications indicated above, this is on the whole an excellent collection of ethnographically and historically well-informed and well-written essays. As indicated by the bibliography, many authors have previously published mostly in languages other than English; hence for many the book will serve as a welcome introduction to non-Anglophone research into Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, however, two other criticisms must be registered. Unaccountably, the chapters are not numbered and the book contains no index, an omission which seriously reduces its value.
Gregory Forth
University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada
pp. 936-939