Southeast Asian Lives: Personal Narratives and Historical Experience (review)

"Anniversary … Anniversary … Do men so distrust their own memory?" So remarks Rolain, in Henri Fauconnier's novel, The Soul of Malaya. The anniversary Rolain refers to is the armistice that ended the First World War, one of the most destructive conflicts in European history, that also drew into its ambit non-European peoples from the colonies. To someone like Rolain who has experienced first-hand the horror of slaughter at the trenches, the historical memory that the anniversary of the armistice sought to evoke seemed surreal and condescending. Rolain's remark highlights the potential tension between constructions and experience of the past according to diverging, sometimes overlapping, logics and discursive frames.

This tension is one of the main issues that are explored in the volume, Southeast Asian Lives, edited by Roxana Waterson, with contributions from seven anthropologists who have conducted extensive fieldwork in Southeast Asia. Eschewing anniversaries, the authors collectively stand on the side of Rolain, not so much in trusting uncritically the memory of their collaborators on past events, but in recognizing the importance of paying attention to the collaborators' narrations of their life story as a means to gain a richer understanding of historical transformations in the region. In the vein of works such as Bernard Cohn's An Anthropologist among the Historians that seek to initiate cross-fertilization of methodological insights between anthropology and historiography, Southeast Asian Lives draws on the memory of individuals in various parts of the region to offer a wide-ranging theoretical reflection on the importance of life history as a viable method for historical and cultural interpretations.

The book opens with a masterful introduction by the editor, tackling head-on the various methodological problems associated with the life history method through a thorough literature review on the topic. While acknowledging that the life history method has often been utilized by anthropologists in their quest to document the diversity of human experience, Waterson argues that its possibilities for research have not been fully explored. The ambition of the introduction chapter consists of showing the fruitfulness of the life history approach not just for anthropology, but also for all other disciplines that are concerned with the interpretation of the past and its relevance to the present, such as history, sociology, and literary studies. On the question of why we should take interest in the stories of the "obscure" and non-famous, Waterson situates the volume squarely in the tradition of the work of E.P. Thomson and those of Subaltern Studies: "part of a democratizing urge to listen to the voices of the non-famous" (p. 5). Since all the contributors seem to reject the modernist historiographic assumptions of "objectivity" and "neutrality", Waterson could have elaborated more on the politics of historical writing by explaining further why there is a need to "democratize" historical narration. Another thorny problem relates to the representativeness of the experiences of narrators. Here, invoking the literature on the ethnography of personhood, Waterson argues that since life stories "present us with the intersection between a self and the social context", narratives of the self invariably reveal the broader social structures and transformations within which the self is embedded.

Seven subsequent chapters, divided into two parts, explore in greater depths the themes brought out in the introduction. The first part, "Singular Lives", comprises three chapters on Indonesia, each dealing with the life story of an individual who has lived an exceptional life. The "interesting times" that are the focus of this section span a large part of the twentieth century: Dutch colonialism, the two World Wars, the nationalist movement that created Indonesia, and Suharto's New Order.

In Chapter Two, Carol Warren presents the life history of Made Lebah (1905–96), a highly accomplished performer and teacher of Balinese music. Born into the descent group of the Batu Nginte, or Royal Guardian, Made Lebah had experienced life in the royal court of Peliatan, where his...