Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013, c2014. xvi, 302 pp. (Map, B&W photos.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3741-9.
This book presents a series of fascinating snapshots of a variety of people from all over Southeast Asia who—together—constitute a collective picture of the anxieties of modernity in contemporary Southeast Asia. No less than 90 people from the nine major countries of Southeast Asia are portrayed in short essays of two to three pages, while each country is also briefly introduced. In the introduction, the editors emphasize that the portraits are based on ethnographic research and refer explicitly to wider political and socio-economic contexts. As such the snapshots are not simply portraits, not do they represent typologies. Instead, and following Walter Benjamin, they are intended to present “figures,” i.e., “real people who also operate as ‘symbols’ that embody structures of feeling with larger, seemingly impersonal conditions of a particular time” (3), and who “struggle to define their own historical agency” (4). These figures refer to modernity, which is rather loosely defined in terms of “the expansion of capitalism, the waxing and waning influence of the nation-state, the development of and challenge to particular forms of rationality associated with the rise of science and technology, and the transformation of the self” (12). Moreover, emphasis is put on the aspect of ethos, which is “characterized by a reflexive engagement with and embrace of a broader world […] as well as an engagement with the kinds of self-fashioning that pertain to the advent of neoliberalism” (13). In short, figures of modernity are defined as “persons within a given social formation whom others recognize as symbolizing modern life” (1).
What follows is a dazzling variety of figures, including a domestic helper, a call centre agent, a beauty contestant, a prostitute, an aspiring overseas student, a mountain village head, a world musician, Miss Beer Lao, an urban slum leader, a kick boxer, a spirit medium, an activist, a street vendor, a career woman, a gangster, a schoolteacher, a journalist, a political prisoner, to mention but a few, which are complemented in an afterword by Benedict Anderson with the liberal and fanatical Muslim, the gay and the lesbian, the genius, the ironist/caricaturist/satirist, and the criminal. In a thematic index at the end of the book the editors suggest a series of headings under which they have loosely categorized their figures, such as activists, brokers, commodification, media, etc., although they readily admit that alternative categorizations are possible as well.
What I like in this book is the variety of figures, whose contextualized portraits offer a highly original and refreshing perspective on actual people inhabiting different socio-economic and cultural landscapes of contemporary Southeast Asia. The portraits help to undermine superficial generalizations of people that are often based on essentialized cultural typologies (the peasant, the aristocrat, the bureaucrat) with whom mainstream audiences tend to be more familiar. The figures also point at the extent to which people’s lives are nowadays caught in much larger transnational economic webs in which they try to make a living. This book is therefore warmly recommended for introductory courses on Southeast Asia but also as a critical sourcebook for thematic courses on modernity.
There are, however, some drawbacks. The loose way in which modernity is defined allows for a very wide range of people to figure in this book. If modernity is overstretched to the extent that almost everything goes, it is no longer a discriminating device as it includes almost everybody. Taking into account the emphasis on economic conditions and a preference for marginal figures, Figures of transnational capitalism would have covered the same range of persons more precisely. Since modernity refers also to agency in combination with development and progress, people representing the state and development agencies are strikingly underrepresented while the figure of the tourist guide is also conspicuously missing. Even more problematic is the relationship between the figure and the ethnographer. The editors claim that the figures are defined by the fact that other people consider them to symbolize modern life. It is, however, not clear who these “other people” are. My impression is that it was the ethnographer, and not the social environment of the figure, who decided this. The people portrayed in the book do clearly figure in a wider web of capitalist constraints but less so in a specific social environment where we can identify the people who consider them to be meaningful figures. Finally, a more straightforward journalistic description of the figures and a somewhat less contemplative interpretative approach would have made this book into a valuable historical source for future generations, who might wonder what kind of people once lived in Southeast Asia. Now they run the risk of encountering a particular type of ethnographer whose figures tend to overshadow real persons.
Henk Schulte Nordholt
Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), Leiden, Netherlands
pp. 374-376