The last decade has witnessed a steady growth of ethnographic and historical studies of border regions between nation-states in Southeast Asia. Within anthropology this shift of focus has followed from the increasing concern with transnationalism, as border regions have become exemplary ethnographic sites for considering regional and global transformations while retaining methodological ideals of long-term fieldwork in particular localities. Within history, a concern with the emergence of the colonial borderlands that came to form the basis for nation-states has proven to be a productive starting point for considering nation-state formation and capitalist expansion, most notably through Eric Tagliacozzo's masterful account of the emergence of the Anglo-Dutch border (Secret trades, porous borders: Smuggling and states along a Southeast Asian frontier, 2005).
Noboru Ishikawa's carefully researched book, Between frontiers, builds on these two bodies of scholarship and is unique in the equal care that it pays to ethnographic and historical perspectives. Empirically, Ishikawa focuses on one part of the borderlands that Tagliacozzo describes, namely the rural areas located between Malaysian Sarawak and Indonesian Kalimantan in southwestern Borneo. Conceptually, he attempts to understand state and society, not as separate entities, but as forms that take shape through a dialectical process. Between frontiers is divided into two parts; the first is a historical account of the borderlands since the colonial era, the second is an ethnographic account of Telok Melano, a village located in Lundu district near the Indonesian border. In an interesting methodological interlude (pp. 98–100), Ishikawa describes the nested structure of the book, in which there is a temporal and spatial ethnographic extension. In temporal terms his archival work connects with the oral histories of the villagers with whom he conducted fieldwork, while in spatial terms his grasp of regional historical change allows him to more clearly conceptualise the local history of Telok Melano and surrounding areas.
In my mind, the first half of the book is more impressive. Ishikawa shows clearly how during the reign of Charles Brooke the colonialisation of space and the mobilisation of labour created ethnically segmented Malay, Dayak and Chinese economies, which became integrated in a broader regional system centred on the expansion of the Singapore commodity market after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Malays, in particular, suffered, as nakoda trading networks were disrupted. With the rise of the rubber economy in the 1920s, international regulation through production quotas and restriction schemes quickly created incentives for smuggling, as bounded states developed in tandem with the deconstruction of the state border through mobility. In this process local border inhabitants increasingly found their place as smugglers rather than planters in the new economy. Later, during the postcolonial era, Konfrontasi and the communist insurgency led to the entrance of state actors into the borderland area, thus disturbing the borderland economy while expanding the presence of both the Indonesian and Malaysian nation-states.
In the ethnographic part of the book, Ishikawa initially retains his historical focus to describe the transformation of Telok Melano and the continuing marginalisation of the coastal Malays — in both economic and cultural terms — in relation to the urban Kuching Malays in the context of the emerging narrative of the Malaysian nation. Furthermore, he considers how local identity has taken shape as the space of the village and the nation often come to overlap in the border region. In this process, and in relation to cross-border interactions, Ishikawa shows how the nation, as opposed to locally based identities, has become increasingly valued. This is particularly the case in relationships between Malaysian and Indonesian villagers, who are bound together not only in economic terms, but also through kinship relations and various forms of ritual gatherings. In economic terms there is a clear hierarchy, as labour, goods and wives move from Indonesia to Malaysia, but in cultural terms it is clear that Telok Melano villagers recognise the superiority of villagers on the Indonesian side of the border — for their competence with regards to magic, their abilities in Koranic recitation, their strong spirit, and through the great appreciation for Indonesian popular music. This opposition between economic and cultural value is fascinating, but Ishikawa does not offer a model for helping us understand this process in historical terms, thus highlighting how the primary strength of the book lies in the lucid and broad-ranging historical account, rather than contemporary cultural landscape of the region. Ishikawa finishes the book with a chapter on the changing economy of labour, trade, and smuggling in the region after the economic crisis of 1997 and the first years of the new century, thus returning to his analytical strength, a lucid description of the emerging dialectics between state and society.
Between the frontiers is an extremely ambitious book in its attempt to combine ethnographic and historical approaches. Ishikawa's writing and analysis are exceedingly clear as he works with complex empirical material. In some ways, however, he is a victim of his own ambition and success since it is nearly impossible to match the scope of the historical perspective with a more limited ethnographic account. In any case, this is an excellent book that deserves to be read by specialists of Southeast Asia as well as scholars interested in border regions in other parts of the world.
