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Reviewed by:
  • Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities
  • Daromir Rudnyckyj
Christopher R. Duncan (ed.), Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004, 278 pp.

The contributors to this important and provocative collection of essays address the role of development policies in peripheral regions of Southeast Asian countries in bringing minority populations under state control. In so doing, they complement previous studies of Southeast Asia and beyond that critically examine the role of development in the process of producing citizens in modern nation-states. What is at stake, as scholars of Southeast Asia from James Furnivall to Thongchai Winichakul have argued in other contexts, is the process which Furnivall described as "the fashioning of Leviathan" (Furnivall 1939). That is to say, the techniques through which modern forms of centralized state administration are introduced into regions that were previously characterized by more localized political relations. Thus, this collection of essays is likely of interest to anyone concerned with the role of modern-nation states in stabilizing the Herderian isomorphism between territory, blood, and language. However, it is likely most suited to those who are interested in the anthropologies of the state, the anthropology of development, cultural politics, and questions of race and comparative multiculturalisms.

The real strength of the book is the case studies themselves, which offer compelling, sometimes surprising contrasts and comparisons. The editor is to [End Page 283] be commended for assembling engaging papers from all countries conventionally identified as part of Southeast Asia, save Brunei and Singapore. The reciprocal themes that emerge demonstrate that, in a collection of this nature, the whole is indeed greater than the sum of the parts. Thus, the comparative and contrastive features of the essays create a project in which the collection raises themes that resonate far more resoundingly than the individual essays read in isolation. A surprising number of commonalities among interventions among minority populations emerge as development policies shift historically from Cold War counter-insurgencies to resettlement, rural welfare, and environmental protection.

One critical theme that the volume raises is that the minority ethnic groups discussed are not assumed to be objects in and of themselves, but are rather constructed historically through colonial and post-colonial projects of rule. Thus, the authors demonstrate how minorities are construed as objects through the specific interventions of state-directed development projects. In the essay by Kirk Endicott and Robert Knox Denton, the Orang Asli of Malaysia are not depicted as a primordial group that has persisted unchanged since time immemorial. Instead, they are shown to be in a continual process of reformation both through the optic of the development programs of the Malaysian state and their own responses to these interventions through the formation of associations to advance their rights. Pamela McElwee's essay on Vietnam depicts the role of Ho Chi Minh himself in the formation of a government ethnological institute intended to classify minorities and evaluate their social and economic welfare. Anthropology as a knowledge practice is implicated not only in colonial projects of rule, but in enhancing the capacity of post-colonial states as well.

Furthermore, the collection examines the work that concepts like ethnicity and race do in the project of fashioning state control. Thus, they suggest that these concepts are informed by modern knowledge practices and realized in various projects of state intervention. As Kathleen Gillogly's essay on Thailand points out, particular groups are identified by the state as minorities. They are then denoted as either a security or development problem and acted upon, first to exclude them from the nation and later, to incorporate them as citizens. This does bring up a question, perhaps outside the scope of this volume, of how concepts of difference prior to the formation of modern states might have varied.

Another argument that the essays suggest when read comparatively is that state control is not shown to be strictly dependent on repressive force and violence. Thus, projects under the guise of charity, care, and benevolence toward minority populations are means through which state control is enhanced. In the [End Page 284] wake of the immediate post-colonial...

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