Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2013. xi, 221 pp. (Figures, tables.) US$25.00, paper. ISBN 978-0-8248-3800-3.
Catherine Allerton’s book Potent Landscapes is an anthropological study of Manggarai settlements in West Flores in Eastern Indonesia. In many ways it is a classic village ethnography, increasingly the exception within an anthropology that has turned its attention away from the rural towards the urban and transnational. Allerton’s initial fieldwork anxiety in the late 1990s is significant as she wonders whether the village she has chosen is “too remote.” Yet she turns this remoteness to her advantage, using contemporary anthropological theory to conceptualize broad themes such as place and mobility while producing an elegant contrast to the classic models of Eastern Indonesian ethnography, most notably the structuralist tradition of the Leiden School.
The Manggarai settlements that Allerton studied are ostensibly Catholic but people continue to have “animist” beliefs and practices, particularly in the context of rituals aimed at affecting the environment and social relations. Furthermore, through state resettlement programs, the highland village that was at the centre of the study had a site in the lowlands, where political authority and schooling was centred, while ritual authority remained in the highlands. Yet, one of the book’s main goals is to move beyond these forms of dichotomies—between Catholicism and animism, between highlands and lowlands, for instance—and develop a more phenomenologically oriented approach to Manggarai lifeworlds.
Influenced in particular by Tim Ingold’s work on the “fundamental historicity” (4) of the environment as well as Bruno Latour’s concern with non-human agency, Allerton is interested in describing how people in Manggarai “dwell” in—rather than, for instance, symbolically represent—the landscapes they inhabit. In disturbing distinctions between “natural” and “cultural” environments, Allerton highlights how landscapes must be understood as constantly under construction in relation to not only the everyday experiences and practices of individuals and communities, but also the agency of material and physical forms such as rooms and waterways. By way of this perspective, she describes how place and mobility are co-constructed through various literal and figurative “pathways,” for instance marriage, childbirth and migration.
In contrast to the classic tradition of Eastern Indonesian studies—which has focused on the “house”—Allerton begins with the “room” in chapter 1. In particular she notes how the room can be considered in biographical terms, as a space that is transformed with rituals and changing family structures, as well as a critical starting point for considering the ethnography of everyday life. Rooms themselves gain particular characteristics, even agency, that allows for the protection of its inhabitants. Via the room, Allerton returns to the house in chapter 2, which she considers not primarily as an architectural object, but rather as a particular kind of place characterized by permeability—of sounds and smells, in particular—as well as what she calls “liveliness.” Again, this is in stark contrast to earlier structuralist approaches to the house in the region. Chapter 3 furthers this approach by considering marriage “not simply as a set of rules and classifications but as a sequence of place-based, practical actions” (74). In this context Allerton introduces marriage as a “path” that connects dwellings and villages. In other words, marriage is considered as a practical process and form of travel that comes to connect and transform places.
Chapter 4 shifts attention to the environments that surround settlements and are at the centre of agricultural subsistence, for instance, fields, forests and waterways. In this process Allerton highlights how ritual, story-telling and subsistence must be understood together as a form of dwelling. Spirits and subsistence are thus closely integrated and should be not be dichotomized in terms of ritual and labour. Like the rooms described in chapter 1, the broader landscape that people in Manggarai inhabit embodies a form of agency that always remains outside of people’s complete control. Chapter 5 considers the changing relationship between the highland and lowland settlements, and particularly the effects of state resettlement and the definition of the highland village architecture as “authentic” in cultural terms. By following discussions concerning the so-called “drum house” that is only allowed in independant ritual communities, Allerton considers the shifting politics of landscape. The book’s final chapter considers more explicitly the relationship between place and mobility, and movement between the highlands and lowlands, across the region and to other countries such as Malaysia. Once again there is an attempt to break down dichotomies, in this case between mobility and immobility, by highlighting how movement depends upon a form of rooting or dwelling in particular places, most notably the village.
In conclusion, it should be noted that this book is a welcome addition to studies on Eastern Indonesia, in particular, and Southeast Asia, more generally. Characterized by rich ethnographic description and unusual clarity in the face of complex theoretical discussions, Potent Landscapesis an ideal book for undergraduate teaching and introducing students to a world that is both mundane and unfamiliar.
Johan Lindquist
Stockholm University, Stockholm, Sweden
647-649