Verhandelingen van het Koninklijk Instituut voor Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde, v. 303. Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2016. xviii, 355 pp. (Illustrations.) US$97.00, cloth. ISBN 978-90-04-31130-5.
Gender Relations in an Indonesian Society is a lovely ethnography written in the classic style of telling stories about people and events. The KITLV should be acknowledged for publishing this book. So often the work of Indonesian academics awarded PhD scholarships in Australia and elsewhere remains unpublished and out of reach of the very people who would be most rewarded by reading it. The book is a pleasure to read and provides a perfect introduction to both ethnography and to the island of Sulawesi in Indonesia. The use of Bugis words and phrases introduces readers to various ways of understanding the world and shows how different languages have different ways of conceptualizing ideas. A welcome contribution the book makes is discussing both women and men, as so many books on gender sideline men.
Gender Relations is divided into eight chapters, including the introduction and conclusion. The chapters cover such topics as honour and shame (siriq), status, marriage, the household, beliefs and sexual manners, divorce, Islam, the state, and domestic violence. The book also includes a number of appendices, including certificates of marriage and divorce which are usefully translated into English.
Based on the author’s PhD fieldwork in Sulawesi, Indonesia in the early 2000s, the book provides a rich account of gender relations among Bugis, an ethnic group living predominantly in Sulawesi. The book is based on thirteen months of fieldwork, which is a long time for anyone to conduct fieldwork but when the author herself is Bugis and was born and raised in Sulawesi, the period provides a wonderful insight into the navigation of love, marriage, and divorce.
Bugis are well known for many things: Bugis Street in Singapore is just one example of how early Bugis traders managed to have influence in the wider world. Bugis also attracted attention after Robert Wilson directed a play staged in Milan, Paris, and Singapore, to name just a few cities, based on the Bugis origin narrative text La Galigo. While there is a solid body of work on Bugis by scholars such as Mattulada, Nurhayati Rahman, Muhlis Hadrawi, Greg Acciaioli, Campbell MacKnight, and Kathryn Robinson, Idrus’ book is the first to really come to grips with the nitty gritty of actual heterosexual gender and sexual relations. The book offers much new information as well as providing a good review of existing literature.
One of the most valuable contributions of the book is its discussion of what are for many taboo topics, especially marital sexual relations and domestic violence. Only a skilled ethnographer can collect such intimate stories. For instance the discussion of malam pertama (the first night) is an intricate insight into the experiences of newly-wed couples negotiating first sexual encounters. Most of Idrus’ interlocutors described their first sexual encounter as painful. And indeed, understanding of the cultural context justifies and even glorifies the sensation of pain: “a successful bride” is one “who cries and gets hurt in the first night of her sexual intercourse” because “it indicates that she is a pure virgin and is automatically regarded as having had no previous experience of intercourse” (177). The imperative of bleeding on the first night of intercourse with one’s husband means young women refuse to use tampons (60). Indeed, chapter 5, “Beliefs and Sexual Manners,” is amongst the most interesting. This chapter discusses what makes good sex, revealing that a dry vagina is sexually desirable (e.g., 176). This finding is interesting for a number of reasons, not least in understanding why women go to great lengths to cultivate dry vaginas. Penis has its own index entry, although sadly not the vagina. Another topic very rarely discussed in books about Indonesia is abortion and it is a credit to the author that she includes this topic (e.g., 59). There are also interesting ethnographic insights into love, such as the idea of “passport photo love,” where a couple can only touch parts of their partner’s body that would appear in a passport photo.
As with any book, there are always places where critique can be offered. Some of the sources could have been updated, as there are few references to works published after 2009. The ease of ethnographic reading is achieved at the cost of critical discussion. For instance, it is mentioned that women are money managers and men are income providers (137), but the reality is of course much more nuanced than this simple divide would suggest. The book would have also benefitted from a critical discussion of larger questions facing society, such as equity and equality in gender relations.
This book makes a great contribution to understanding gender relations among Bugis and it is a book that both scholars and a general audience will enjoy, given the numerous rich accounts of personal journeys navigating sexuality and marriage.
Sharyn Graham Davies
Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand