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  • The Fighting Art of Pencak Silat and Its Music: From Southeast Asian Village to Global Movement ed. by Uwe U. Paetzold and Paul H. Mason
  • Christina Sunardi (bio)
The Fighting Art of Pencak Silat and Its Music: From Southeast Asian Village to Global Movement. Edited by Uwe U. Paetzold and Paul H. Mason. Brill's Southeast Asian Library, vol. 5. Leiden: Brill, 2016. xxx + 438 pp., bibliographies, glossary, index of names, index of terms and expressions. ISBN 978-90-04-30874-9 (hardcover), $184.00.

The Fighting Art of Pencak Silat and Its Music: From Southeast Asian Village to Global Movement offers detailed explorations of a type of martial art and related dance forms practiced in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and beyond. In their introduction, the editors, Uwe U. Paetzold and Paul H. Mason, identify a tendency of neglecting "[f]ighting, self-defense and physical aggression … in [End Page 126] studies of aesthetics," arguing that, "when distilled into performance arts, activities correlated with fighting, self-defense, and physical aggression are able to offer highly meaningful anthropological insights into cultural life" (1). To this end, they have compiled 13 essays from an international roster of scholars from ethnomusicological, anthropological, and theater studies backgrounds who draw on ethnography and analysis of music and movement. Their essays taken together explore a variety of issues, including assertions of local identity, processes and effects of standardization, the influence of pencak silat in other forms of dance and theater, the relationships between music and movement, the cultural impact of Muslim cultures in Southeast Asia, and the exportation of pencak silat and related forms outside the region.

The book is organized into an introduction and four parts. The first part, "The Development of Pencak Silat," comprises two chapters, one by Jean-Marc de Grave and one by Uwe U. Paetzold. De Grave and Paetzold usefully analyze ways that the art form has transformed over time, thereby providing a contextualizing historical overview, albeit one that, like the volume as a whole, centers largely on pencak silat in Indonesia.

Broadening the scope, however, in part 2, "Regional Studies on Pencak Silat and Its Music," the five chapters survey the art form in Thailand and Malaysia, as well as Indonesia, providing detailed snapshots of silat in various local contexts. In chapter 3, Bussakorn Binson offers a particularly fascinating description of silat as a Muslim art form in southern Thailand, discussing "its knowledge transfer and the related rites and beliefs in both practice and performance" as well as its "multifaceted role in traditional ceremonies, healing rites, Governmental occasions and sporting events within the Thai-Muslim community" (125). No less of a contribution are Gisa Jähnichen's observations from Kelantan and Sabah, Malaysia, in chapter 4, which center on musical communication, silat drumming, and the relationships between music and movement. Chapters 5–7 return to Indonesia as Margaret Kartomi delves into the Riau Islands (chapter 5) and Paul H. Mason spotlights West Sumatra (chapter 6) as well as West Java (chapter 7), offering to studies of Indonesian performing arts information regarding traditions largely understudied in English-language scholarship.

Continuing the focus on local cultures in Indonesia, the four chapters of part 3, "Studies on Movement Arts Based on or Related to Silat and Their Music," recognize the important influence of pencak silat. Zahara Kamal and Indija Mahjoeddin analyze "the conjunctions between social and performance ritual" and "between corporeal movement and sonic text" (281) in a Minangkabau performing tradition called luambek. Ako Mashino analyzes a type of male group dance related to silat in Bali called rudat as a means of exploring how Muslim Balinese assert, represent, and negotiate their [End Page 127] religio-cultural identities with each other and the Hindu majority of the island (292). Henry Spiller considers the production of masculinity in West Java through his engaging comparison of the music that accompanies penca silat (as it is known locally) and a type of dance called ketuk tilu linked to roots in fertility rituals. He also explores relationships between music and movement in these two forms of performance and concludes "that movement traditions grounded in both agricultural fertility rituals and self defense training have roots in a very...

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