Archive for the 'Book review' Category

Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity, from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, a review

Published on February 16, 2008 in historiography, Book review and History. 2 Comments

Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity, from Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971).

The World of Late Antiquity, coverBeautifully illustrated and eminently readable, Peter Brown’s The World of Late Antiquity is a fascinating introductory text to the history of the Late Antique period. In a marvelous twist to dominant historiography, Brown traces the evolution of Late Antique society eastward, closing out the volume not with Charlemagne at Aachen but with Harun al-Rashid in Baghdad. This modification of regional orientation is one of several elements in his argument that allow him to shift historical perception from an account of ‘decline and fall’ to one of resilience and rebirth. The period of Late Antiquity has never felt quite so alive, or the implications of its history, culture, theology and art quite so pertinent to later periods of historical study.

Brown states that “[t]he most blatant feature of the society for both contemporaries and for the historian, was the widening gulf between rich and poor. In the western empire, society and culture were dominated by a senatorial aristocracy five times richer, on the average, than the senators of the first century.” (34) Brown uses several verbs to describe this process of maldistribution and expropriation of wealth: “the prosperity of the Mediterranean world seems to have drained to the top” (34) or “[b]y the fifth century, the wealth of the west had snowballed into the hands of a few great families.” (43) [emphasis supplied] While Brown highlights the growing inequality that characterized Late Antique society (”the most blatant feature”) he nevertheless uses passive verbs to describe the process whereby this was accomplished (”drained,” “snowballed”). G.E.M. de Ste. Croix points out the difficulty with such terms in his magisterial The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981), “If I were in search of a metaphor to describe the great and growing concentration of wealth in the hands of the upper classes, I would not incline towards anything so innocent and so automatic as drainage: I should want to think in terms of something much more purposive and deliberate - perhaps the vampire bat.” (503)

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Stalinism, diaries, and unbelief: a review

Published on January 3, 2008 in soviet union, historiography, Communism, Book review and History. 0 Comments

Igor Halfin, Terror in my Soul: Communist Autobiographies on Trial (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003).

Jochen Hellbeck, “Fashioning of the Stalinist Soul: the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, 1931-1939,” in Stalinism: New Directions, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick (London: Routledge, 1999)

Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck examine the ways in which human beings, through the self-constructing narratives of autobiography and diary, were fashioned as Stalinist individuals. Their works are both situated within the Foucauldian framework of the construction of subjectivity and build upon the work of Stephen Kotkin in Soviet history.

Hellbeck opens his article, “Fashioning the Stalinist Soul,” by presenting ‘three different explanations’ for the impact of ‘the Stalinist system on Soviet society.’ (78) He argues that two of these explanations, the revisionist and totalitarian schools of soviet historiography, rest upon a problematic understanding of the self: both assume the existence of a transcendental, ahistorical ’self.’ This self is then used by these two schools of thought as the basis for the analysis of a supposedly separate ‘private sphere’ counterpoised to the historically specific, Stalinist public sphere.

In contrast to these approaches, Hellbeck chooses a third methodology, which he attributes to Stephen Kotkin. This methodology involves the examination of the nuanced interactions of state and society. Hellbeck attempts to extend Kotkin’s approach to the level of the individual; he examines the ’self’ as immanent and historically specific. It is both constructed by and constructive of Stalinist reality. Hellbeck uses the diary of Stepan Podlubnyi, written in the 1930s, for this undertaking. Hellbeck treats the diary not as a mirror of the social world, but as a process of “self-construction” (78) The act of writing an autobiography or diary is not merely a reflection on the self but is also the process of constructing the self.

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Pilgrimage and Longing:
N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, a review

Published on December 20, 2007 in Book review. 0 Comments

N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain takes the reader on a sojourn, an evocative pilgrimage of memory and longing. The journey through the landscape of the text and of the American west moves the reader in a way that is inexpressible and immeasurable; it moves the reader to long, to linger, and to sigh. Memory for Momaday, the memory embodied in the text, conveys not narrative, but description; not events, but moments, glimpses, feelings, and, above all, longing. Before we read the text, we are unaware of our deficiency, our lack of the ghosts that haunt our landscape; after reading, we are filled with the ache of memories that cannot be ours, memories that run in the blood and are worn like scars.

Momaday tells the story - if it can be called ’story,’ for no action occurs - of his pilgrimage to his grandmother’s grave on the knoll that is known as Rainy Mountain. His pilgrimage retraces the journey of his ancestors the Kiowa from Yellowstone to the Wichita Range. Each step of the journey conveys memories - memories that are not Momaday’s own, but belong to the land and to the Kiowa.

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N. Scott Momaday’s The Way to Rainy Mountain, a review’

convergent ahistoricity

Published on December 3, 2007 in anthropology, Indonesia, Book review and History. 0 Comments

Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth Century Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, Trans. Monika Vizedom and Gabrielle Caffee (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960).

NegaraIn his introduction to Negara, Clifford Geertz argues that Bali’s relative isolation caused it to undergo endogenous historical change; Bali was spared a series of external shocks which dramatically altered the histories of its neighbors, viz., Islamicization and Dutch colonization. Its cultural evolution was thus orthogenetic.

Is this explanation convincing? Is Geertz’ therefore assuming that exogenous contact is the necessary cause of dramatic historical change? What of internal struggles and conflicts? Might not these have dramatically changed the face of Balinese culture? To use Geertz’ biological metaphor against him: allopatric speciation can produce results startlingly different from its progenitors.

Geertz’ protestations of dynamism despite isolation are misleading. Whatever dynamism he claims existed was exceedingly viscous, and it is possible, in his account, to read from the present to the past in an almost transparent manner.

His methodology demonstrates this. He claims that he “will construct … a circumstantial picture of state organization in nineteenth-century Bali and then attempt to draw from that picture a set of broad but substantive guidelines for the ordering of pre- and protohistorical material in Indonesia …” (7) Geertz’ account moves from structure to history and reconstructs that history on the basis of a static set of state organizational principles. He has, from the outset, precluded the possibility of dramatic historical difference.

Continuity and viscous dynamism are thus the necessary conclusions to Geertz’ own methodology.

CladeVan Gennep is not claiming to be presenting us with a diachronic evolution of rites of passage. Rather, he presents us with a taxonomy of cultural practice. His categories seem to be useful heuristic devices. They allow us to read phenomena categorically.

Like all taxonomies, however, when historically situated they become deeply problematic. Either the categories evolve and adapt - become different categories entirely at some point - or they cease to represent history, and thereby, reality.

To wit: Linneaus must be subsumed to Darwin. To read one thousand years of ritual using van Gennep’s unaltered categories is much like attempting to outline the taxon Aves in the Ordovician. It does not work.

Multatuli’s Max Havelaar: a review.

Published on November 28, 2007 in colonialism, Indonesia, Book review and Southeast Asia. 0 Comments

Multatuli [Eduard Douwes Dekker], Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company, trans. Roy Edwards, (London: Penguin, 1987).

[This is a somewhat imitative, tongue-in-cheek review of Max Havelaar which I originally addressed to fellow seminar participants upon our completion of Multatuli’s work.]

Max HavelaarMax Havelaar is an angry bitter indictment of the colonial project in toto and not, as has been claimed, a reformist depiction of the evils of misguided colonial officials. Lies and tomfoolery!

Max Havelaar must be read in its entirety – in its ironic, bitter entirety – without privileging one of the many narrative voices over the others. To take Havelaar/Scarfman and identify him with Dekker/Multatuli would be a tremendous mistake. While it may be granted that Havelaar represents the past experiences of Multatuli, his naivete and his compassionate, paternalistic colonial project no longer represent Dekker’s own beliefs.

The book is deliberately nested in the writings of Droogstoppel, then Stern, then Scarfman and finally Havelaar. The tone of the work is bitingly sardonic. The colonial project, from its capitalist origins – here the merchant ‘Change – to its representative officials – from Verbrugge to Slymering – to its deliberate manipulation of existing elite exploitation, stands up to savage indictment. Havelaar is well-intentioned, yes, but utterly ineffectual.

Is the reader truly left with the hope that William the Third will respond any differently than Slymering? The ethical indictment of the text, like Havelaar’s letter, is reinforced by the silence with which those in power greet it.

Further, are we truly to believe all of the ideas of that ‘half-baked dreamer’ Havelaar? Havelaar, like Droogstoppel or Slymering, is a character type rather than the protagonist with whom we are to identify. He represents the idealist, to their capitalist and colonial official. Witness, Multatuli urges, the ineffectuality of even the best intentioned. If a Havelaar cannot save the colonial venture, no one can.

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Notes on Trawick’s Notes on Love in a Tamil Family

Published on November 20, 2007 in anthropology, south asia and Book review. 1 Comment

Margaret Trawick. Notes on Love in a Tamil Family. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

This post will unmask me as an unrepentant, curmudgeonly modernist. I was annoyed by much of Notes on Love in a Tamil Family.

Notes on Love in a Tamil FamilyMy annoyance had nothing to do with the subject of the research. Love, and its familial and cultural embodiments, is a worthy topic. I also had to admire the years of commitment which Trawick put into her research. Clearly she respected her subjects and she treated her work seriously.

My annoyance, rather, had to do with Trawick’s methodology and was thus a thorough-going and unstinting irritation.

My objection, I suppose, began with my unhesitating answer to a question posed by a classmate of mine: “Is Trawick too present in this book?” – Yes. Beyond a doubt, yes.

There may be some clever, self-consciously awkward ‘twinning’ in Trawick’s narrative, wherein her relationship to her (former) husband Keith is vital to our understanding of anpu. I am unconvinced. Surely there is a way in which our scholarship can avoid falling into the old trap of disguising the existence of the investigator and yet can also avoid slipping into a postmodern solipsistic swamp. Even in very well-intentioned work – and Trawick’s account is clearly well-intentioned – the result still teeters uneasily on the brink of narcissism.

“Abe seems a little more American than Dans a little less androgynous.” (260) There were quite a few short statements in the book like this: grammatically unintelligible. We intuitively understand the gist of the statement, but it does not parse as it should. Was this deliberate? Or was further editing needed?

It was not merely the self-referentiality of the book which bothered me, however. It was playing at language. Trawick playfully attempted to evoke an indissolubly complex fabric of truths. I would rather see a conciseness of language; I would rather “struggle through complexity to simplicity” than evoke an essentialised complexity.

Trawick wrote, on page 242:

These three threads are tightly woven together: the sacred is an ideal manifested ambiguously in experience; it is born in the thought that arises between two separate consciousnesses—male and female, East and West, wild and cultured, human and divine. No one being may hold it within himself. Another name for this exceedingly complex reality may be love.

Human and divine consciousness? Not a consciousness of the divine, but divine consciousness? I will not, in the name of post-secularity or post-enlightenment, relinquish my cherished methodological atheism. It was an epistemic gain, a profound human advance, and, I argue, should be applied universally in our research.

Notes on Ileto’s “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History”

Published on November 19, 2007 in Book review, Southeast Asia, History and Philippines. 2 Comments

Reynaldo Ileto. “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History.” In Reynaldo Ileto. Filipinos and their Revolution: event, discourse and historiography. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998.

I am working on my thesis; it is a critical re-examination of Rey Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution. Looking through my old notes, I found the following ideas. My critique is now much more sharply focused than these criticisms were.

Filipinos and Their RevolutionThis work left me feeling unsettled and critical.

A sentence in Ileto’s concluding paragraph clarified for me the unease that I had felt throughout the article: “These leaders [Lantayug, et. al.] have, until recently at least, always belonged to the ‘dark underside’ of the struggle for independence dominated by such ilustrado notables as Quezon, Roxas and Osmena.” It seems clear to me that the division between an ilustrado led resistance and a ‘dark underside’ is a false dichotomy.

There are a multitude of underside resistances, many of them with a very different self-concept from the one put forward by Ileto. It would appear that in a attempting to ‘retrieve’ history from below, Ileto has manufactured a monolith: a Filipino ‘underclass’ that conceives of power and loób in terms that sound remarkably like those used by Benedict Anderson in his “Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.”

Where in this underside would Ileto fit the Union Obrera Democratica, the first Filipino labor movement, which was forming at this time, was composed entirely of working class Filipinos and whose perceptions were sharply different from that of Ileto’s underclass? Where to put Isabelo de los Reyes’ and Gregorio Aglipay’s Iglesia Filipina Independiente? Do Macario Sakay and the Republika ng Katagalugan really fit Ileto’s description?

It would involve an extensive investigation of sources, but it seems likely that Ileto’s ‘underside to Philippine history’ was actually a minority of lower class resistance movements.

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Notes on Thongchai Winichakul’s Geo-Body

Published on November 17, 2007 in Thailand, Book review and Southeast Asia. 0 Comments

“Maps and the Formation of the Geo-Body of Siam.” In Hans Antlov and Stein Tonnesson, eds. Asian Forms of the Nation. London: Curzon Press, 1996, 67-91.

Asian Forms of the NationFor the imagining of a geographic unit to be possible as the collective imagining of ‘nation,’ more was involved than the demarcations of cartographers - the demarcations had to be experienced as the local, lived reality of boundedness. Here the practical project of enforcing borders was much more important than their inscription.

Thongchai’s account tells of a move from relatively permeable borders to more impermeable ones. Yet, it would seem, from the perspective of European capital that this was hardly the case. Capital migrated more fluidly when the porous indigenous inter-Southeast Asian trade was supplanted by the protectionist mandalas of competing European capital-polities.

For the purely insular Philippines the externality of demarcated boundaries feels alien – we do not experience the friction of external abutting. It is inclusion – the quintessential problem of the imagined community - that is the cartographic shift. Mapping in the Philippines served the interests of colonial commerce, the extension of peninsular polity, and, I believe, the proselytic pretensions of the religious orders; it did not redefine some geographic khetdaen/hangganan. These would almost always have been inscribed by the natural topography of cordillera and Pacific.

Nationalist historiographies have anachronistically retrojected the contemporary spatial fixity on to the past. This contemporary fixity is in truth the product of a lengthy historical evolution and of inter-‘wolf’ negotiation. Yet is Thongchai’s conclusion that the nation emerged from the ‘creative transculturation between the west and the indigenous’ and not “anti-colonial heroism as conventional history usually suggests” (91) justified?

Thongchai has stacked the deck in his favor by using the very loaded term ‘heroism.’ Replace it with resistance, however, and his conclusion is a bit more questionable. Is not anti-colonial resistance in truth an apex of ‘creative transcultural activity,’ rather than its supposed aporia? Surely ‘creative transcultural’ resistance is as vital as the collaborative elite redrawing of the map?

Hagedorn’s Dream Jungle: a response

Published on November 14, 2007 in Philippine literature, Book review and Philippines. 0 Comments

Jessica Hagedorn. Dream Jungle. Penguin Paperbacks, 2004.

Dream JungleDream Jungle could have been titled Dream Country as far as I was concerned. It was an intriguing, fascinating story set in some country I have never been to: the Philippines of the veteran tourist. The lower-class and working-class Filipinos in this book all had the appearance of being Filipino, but this veneer quickly showed itself false. Rizalina, Candelaria, Sputnik, Bong - all spoke in what was to me an unintelligible language.

The Taglish and Tagalog phrases in the novel felt plastered onto the conversations as marks of ‘authenticity.’ The English spoken by the lower class Filipino characters could not have been phrases translated from Tagalog nor would this have been English that the characters would be likely to have known.

While there is certainly the possiblity for vulgarity in Philippine languages, it would not be spoken the way it is depicted in this book. Lina refers to a “piece-of-sh*t boat” (14) or declares “f**k my father;” these are untranslatable phrases - non-existent in Tagalog and not said in Philippine English.

Perhaps Hagedorn is deliberately creating a cliché Philippines and we are intended to recognize it as false, but I do not think so. The dialogue reads as if it was written by a lasallista imagining how her katulong speaks. And I do not believe that I can be anymore scathing than that.

The encounters between social classes feel forced and unreal. Hagedorn cannot convey the sensibility that emerges from sleeping on a banig mat, subsisting on rice and tuyo, and going about your daily life in a shantytown. In the end one feels that the text is the work of someone who goes around her New York apartment shouting “kaliwa, kanan!” therapeutically [1], because her tongue would become tied if she tried shouting “Katarungan ang sigaw ng mga mangagawa, ibagsak ang kasalukuyang mapangaping sistema!“

[1] See the article, Ghost Town by Hagedorn in TIME Asia.

Notes on Rafael’s “Patronage and Pornography”

Published on November 7, 2007 in Marcos, Book review, History and Philippines. 2 Comments

Vicente Rafael, “Patronage and Pornography: Ideology and Spectatorship in the Early Marcos Years,” in Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 32, No. 2. (Apr., 1990), pp. 282-304.

Imelda Romualdez MarcosRafael’s article, “Patronage and Pornography,” is thought-provoking but, ultimately, quite problematic.

Rafael’s idea of a shift in patronage politics occuring with the rise of late modern capitalism - of a commodification of patronage - makes perfect sense. However, to my mind, an important clarification would have made this point far more lucid and relevant to twentieth century Philippine politics.

Patron-Client politics - the guise of the personal over the symbiotic, but inherently unequal, relationship between patron and client - serves, above all, to obscure class relations. Patron client politics shore up Gramsci’s “primordial and gelatinous” early civil society and defend existing relations of production, primarily by disguising exploitation. Whether exercised by the colonial hegemon or the hacendero, patron-client relations serve to manufacture consent among their clientèle and by separating classes into client groupings manage to inhibit the formation of class consciousness.

In this light the “simulation of patronage,” of which Rafael speaks, would be the attempt, by the use of revised tactics, to inhibit the formation of class consciousness. Rafael’s concrete examples do not seem to fit with this idea, nor in some cases do they seem to work at all.

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