Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (review)

To conceive a history of Indonesia takes knowledge and courage. To write it from the beginning to the near present requires addressing many problems of proportion, relation, momentum, integrity, and verifiability—not to mention audience. Taylor has the mind and heart for these tasks.

Taylor realizes her subtitle by providing many parallel social histories. She early demonstrates sensitivity to archaeology, paleography, demography, and mythology. She expressly disavows political history, and shows no special grasp of economics or military affairs. But having digested a vast bibliographical diet, she exercises a fine general intelligence to synthesize her materials. Understanding Southeast Asia demands an interdisciplinary orientation. From Taylor's wide perspective, history as change in time appears to be the king of disciplines, and anthropology the queen. In this work they are well married.

The author's structural approach to the project involves dappling, among a dozen well-conceived chapters, a total of ninety-four "capsules"—mini-essays from a single paragraph to a page and a half in length. Five capsules successively introduce the beginner to some key aspects of Indonesian Islam (68-72). The one on jihad accents holy war rather than its generic and essential meaning of struggle between reason and passion. In this rare instance, Taylor may be yielding to contemporary headlines.

Other capsules are valuable condensations of known material, such as "The Zheng He Voyages: Imperial China at Sea," or pungent interpretations, such as "Pemuda: A Legacy of Violence." Delectable as such bits might be, Taylor states in advance that she will focus on "the mobile man"—scholars, traders, porters, princes, theologues, and thugs—whose mobility and interactions with others helped to shape what finally, in revolt against the colonial Netherlands, became Indonesia. Well enough. But how do they make the archipelago a nation?

Taylor's solution appears to be a remarkably frequent recourse to such words as role, space, link, and connect. She writes crisply enough about sailing, trading, and marauding; recruiting, cooperating, and banning; as well as marrying, and making and breaking alliances. But the choice of title for the chapter about the Japanese wartime occupation, "Rearranging Map and Mind," shows a tilt toward abstraction that is not useful. This reader's appetite for specifics of pride, love, yearning, rage, stupidity, greed, and sacrifice is not satisfied. But prudence suggests that such a study would be hard to accomplish with everything else achieved in a work of this length.

A comparison of Sukarno and Suharto picks up a few differences, but overall conflates the two, concluding limply that in both their eras, "opposing forces also battled beneath the surface of homage and apparent acquiescence" (343-344). The author's narrative drive of weldings, knittings, and entwinings among persons, entities, and sub-regional forces is largely satisfactory. A more layered vocabulary of strands, filaments, coils, arcs, and webs might solve the historiographical problem, or might just accentuate it. Taylor is bravely coping on paper with the very problem that the Republic of Indonesia daily faces in fact—how to make, of many, one? To tell this ongoing story may also require a rich language of irony, tragedy, and farce.

As is stands, Indonesia: Peoples and Histories is a valiant and successful endeavor, compressing massive knowledge into knapsack limits.