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  • Everyday Life in Southeast Asia by Kathleen Adams and Kathleen Gillogly
  • Eric C. Thompson (bio)
Everyday Life in Southeast Asia. By Kathleen Adams and Kathleen Gillogly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011. 364 pp.

Ethnographers and cultural anthropologists spend long periods of fieldwork getting to know the intimate, complex and at times conflicted lives of the people about whom they write. They are, as a result, loath to simplify the world, and, as a collection of essays written mainly by anthropologists and ethnographers, Everyday Life in Southeast Asia has no single, simple take-home point. Rather, it tells us much about the world in which we live and about people from across Southeast Asia who live in it with us. It is a superb introduction to the diverse lives and cultures of the region, as well as an excellent example of contemporary anthropology.

While the essays in Everyday Life in Southeast Asia do not explicitly adopt a common disciplinary perspective, the book is largely situated within the American tradition of sociocultural anthropology. Well over half of the contributors are either American anthropologists or anthropologists employed at American institutions. Several are Australians. Of the three from Southeast Asia, one earned his doctorate in anthropology in the United States and another in Australia. Perhaps for this reason, the volume highlights the enduring strengths, and also some of the weaknesses, of social and cultural anthropology.

One minor but unfortunate feature of the book is that the editors and several of the contributors pitch their work explicitly to an American or “Western” audience. The introduction opens by stating, “Southeast Asia is one of the most dynamic, complex, and fascinating areas of the world. And yet, for most Americans, it also remains one of the world’s least understood regions” (p. 1). Similarly, an [End Page 572] otherwise insightful essay on Toba Batak senses of self insistently contrasts them to senses of self that “we in the West” have (p. 35). To encounter such unnecessary, rhetorical parochialism is a shame in a book that can certainly be engaging and insightful for a global English-reading audience.

Despite these minor lapses into neo-Orientalism, the volume draws strengths from the modern anthropological tradition of cultural comparativism and from more recent concerns with reflexivity and positionality. The chapters by Pattana Kitiarsa and by Juli Edo and Anthony Williams-Hunt (co-authored with Robert Knox Dentan) demonstrate the combined passion and analytical perceptiveness that flourish when scholars from Southeast Asia engage in “anthropology at home”. Pattana was an anthropologist originally from Northeast Thailand. Juli Edo, an anthropologist, and Anthony Williams-Hunt, a lawyer and scholar, are both Semai from Malaysia. Most of the other authors demonstrate the practice of anthropology in a more traditional mode of “strangers abroad”. Their long-term fieldwork has necessarily entailed a degree of productive, cross-cultural comparison between their American or other “outsider” worldviews and the worldviews of those whom they have come to know through work with peoples and societies across the region.

The greatest strength of the book is the intimate portraits of individuals whose stories and experiences inform the contributors’ understandings of their subject. Over the past twenty or more years, anthropologists have struggled to place a meaningful label on the people from whom we learn. The terms “informants”, “subjects”, “interlocutors”, “collaborators” and “respondents” all fall short in one way or another. Cultural anthropology maintains a tradition of “participant observation” and “ethnographic interviewing” — or, in less ostentatious terms, hanging out with people, spending time doing with them what they do, asking questions, observing and above all listening. This book is a terrific example of the pay-off of these methods. The people about whom we learn as individuals in the book, the anthropologists’ “informants”, are at the heart of the rich “thick description” on display across all the chapters. Equally [End Page 573] striking, these rich accounts are conveyed in a mere ten or so pages in each case. We read about Ambena Ladang, a Torajan woodcarver who strives to produce art and peaceful social relations; Ta Kam, a Khmer elder whose past haunts his tenuous relationship with his village community in the present; Mama’, Saleh and Dadong, South...

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