Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia: Proceedings of the Conference, Leiden, 13-17 October 1997 (review)

Perspectives on the Bird's Head of Irian Jaya, Indonesia: Proceedings of the Conference, Leiden, 13-17 October 1997, edited by Jelle Miedema, Cecilia Odé, and Rien A C Dam. Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Rodopi, 1998. ISBN 90-420-0644-7, xiii + 982 pages, maps, figures, tables, notes, references. $178.50.

The ISIR project (Irian Jaya Studies, a program for Interdisciplinary Research) and its predecessor, the IRIS project, have provided a framework for joint Dutch-Indonesian research in Irian Jaya (West Papua) since 1990. This weighty volume of proceedings from an ISIR-sponsored conference at Leiden University provides a comprehensive overview of current Netherlands-based research on Indonesia's easternmost province. Together with the IRIS project's series of archival materials, this is the most substantial body of work published on Irian Jaya since the similarly region-focused German Mek Project of the 1970s. The prompt publication of some forty-two papers from the Leiden conference is commendable, and the volume is essential reading for anyone interested in the region.

Perhaps inevitably, the quality of contributions is somewhat mixed, ranging from research proposals through preliminary field reports to polished concluding statements. A thousand pages later, it's also hard to avoid the conclusion that the ISIR project's interdisciplinary ambitions--covering anthropology, demography, ethnohistory, history, linguistics, geology, botany, and archaeology--may have owed more to the politics of Dutch research funding than to a clear sense of the need for cross-disciplinary scholarship. An obvious unity is supplied by the focus on a restricted part of Irian Jaya--the Bird's Head at the western tip of the main island of New Guinea--but there is little evidence, at least at this stage, for much successful integration of results from the different disciplines.

A split is apparent among the ethnographic papers, which make up the bulk of the volume, between an older guard of Dutch scholars and their students. Papers by Jelle Miedema, Jan Pouwer, and Paul Haenen address Bird's Head myth from the well-established perspective of Dutch structuralism, albeit with an increasing attention to historical sources and evidence for population movements. Their students, including Dianne van Oosterhout, Jaap Timmer, Louise Thoonen, and Ien Courtens, advance considerably broader and more theoretically eclectic arguments on matters such as indigenous reformulations of Christianity and transformations in concepts of fertility and healing. What all of these papers share is a developing interest in the specific, and not simply diachronic, history of engagement between the indigenous and the external. The section on Bird's Head history, with contributions by F Huizinga, Tom Goodman, Jeroen Overweel, and P J Drooglever, demonstrates clearly the wealth of documentary sources available for such a project, and points the way to a more productive synthesis of its individual components.

Two final sections, on linguistics, and on geology, botany and archaeology, contain individual gems, such as the papers by linguists William Foley and Andrew Pawley, but little evidence of resonance with the rest of the volume. One exception is Ger Reesink's paper proposing a "Sprachbund" of mixed languages extending throughout the Bird's Head and the adjacent Raja Empat and North Molucca areas, which nicely muddies the genetic waters and suggests a means of integrating the archaeological, linguistic, historical, and ethnographical perspectives on the complex process of cultural exchanges across this border-transgressing region.

There are some troubling aspects to this volume, central among them the apparent lack of exchange between Dutch and Indonesian or Irianese scholars. In a remarkably forthright keynote address, E K M Masinambow, of the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), takes his Dutch hosts to task for the project's failure to develop lasting collaborative frameworks for research. Instead, he suggests, "Indonesian participation is mostly confined to sponsorship functions to fulfill official requirement for non-Indonesian researchers to carry out...