Ethnic and Religious Identities and Integration in Southeast Asia ed. by Ooi Keat Gin and Volker Grabowsky (review)

Scholars of Southeast Asia talk often and too easily about the diversity and co-existence characteristic of the region. Such characterization glosses over the actual challenging processes of seeking ways to coexist despite linguistic, cultural, and religious differences, both in the centers and peripheries of states which, to varying degrees, attempt to integrate or assimilate diverse peoples. These issues are as pertinent as ever in the region. This volume addresses these very processes, the dynamics of ethnic and religious identities and national integration, and how the various groups involved struggle and cope with both internal forces such as the state, regional administration, and other groups, as well as external globalizing forces from the past to the present.

The volume is an outcome of a project titled, "Diversity in Southeast Asia: National and Transnational Identities," funded by the European Commission. Contributing authors are from both the region itself and from Europe, and their disciplines range from anthropology to history and literature. Eleven chapters are arranged in three parts.

Part One, "Ethnicity and identities," deals with ethnic minorities. The chapter on the little documented Bru (linguistically Austro-Asiatic) from the Vietnam-Laos border (Vatthana Pholsena) deals with how they have, from French colonial times to the present, engaged with state territoriality to maneuver within state space, crossing over it, making their best use of it, and even causing the state to re-territorialize. In the next chapter from Northern Thailand (Mukdawan Sakboon, Prasit Leepreecha, and Panadda Boonyasaranai), the hill minorities struggle to gain citizenship in the face of demands for documentation and complex procedures in which not even the local officials are well-versed. The authors characterize the situation as a paradox, where top-down national integration promotes national homogeneity while at the same time denies citizenship to ethnic minorities. In Nan Province, some Lua communities affected by the Communist insurgency since the 1960s were resettled. The political process has shaped the ways in which each community faced state national integration and their ethnic as well as political identities (Amalia Rossi). The three chapters deal with minorities in border areas that are contested both territorially and politically. The fourth is on the Pakistani in Penang (Shakila Abdul Manan), a diasporic minority who are, like the majority and favored Malays, Muslim by faith. This religious commonality renders them less visible. The chapter analyses the process of maintaining/transforming their identity through language use. The four chapters discuss how the respective minorities deal with their identities, resisting, contesting, and at times aligning with state integrationist policies.

Of the four papers in Part Two, "Religion and identities," three are on Islam. The first, on the Rohingya (Jack Leider), is a timely and informative exposition of the conflict, examining how the "Rohingya" came about, their position vis-à-vis the state, and the difference between the Rohingya issue from the country's current broader peace-process negotiations and other ethnic situations in Myanmar. The ultimate message for the readers seems to be that in order to enable a dialogue between the concerned parties, the international audience should step back from taking sides. The Thai case (Christopher Joll) is another conflict situation, although the major point here is that it does grave injustice to reality if we understand and categorize the Muslims in the country as a binary of integrationists vs. unassimilated. Introducing the Sufi communities from different parts of the country, the author demonstrates how their identities and networks are never easily categorized, and form and reform as in a kaleidoscope. In the case of Indonesia (Remy Madinier), where Islam constitutes the majority religion, the emphasis is on how the deepening of devotion and Islamization in Indonesian society has ironically taken place alongside the weakening of Islamic political parties. These are cases where religious identity and groups have come face to face with state power. The fourth paper on the Karen minority religion on the Thai-Myanmar...