The seven articles assembled by Roxana Waterson, together with a thought-provoking introduction, testify not only to the fruitful intersection of history and anthropology but also to the difficulties of integrating the particular into the general. Waterson addresses these issues in the first section of the introduction, in which she explains the desire of the authors “to provide a timely contribution not only to Southeast Asian studies, but also to the burgeoning field of research into life history and personal narratives” (p. 2) and “to present some fresh perspectives on the historical transformations which the region has undergone in the twentieth century” (p. 3).
As Waterson notes, the people of Southeast Asia have lived through tremendous changes in the twentieth century. With the exception of Dentan on Malaysia, the articles focus on Indonesia and Thailand. This provides greater cohesion than would have been achieved by a wider geographic scope, but less opportunity to study different kinds of changes and different types of life stories. All of the stories are clearly situated in time (Carol Warren on Bali; Janet Hoskins on Sumba; Roxana Waterson on Sulawesi; Annette Hamilton on Thailand) or space (Hayami on Karen women in northern Thailand), or are still unfolding (Dentan on Malaysia, Dorairajo on southern Thailand).
Waterson raises an issue about the relationship of biography to history that is not fully answered in either her introduction or in the articles in the collection: how much illumination can life stories contribute to history? She refers to the simultaneous excess and incompleteness of such stories (p. 4) stemming from their very specificity; this calls into question the choices that narrators must make about whose lives to tell and how to tell them when they are not of famous historical figures but of ordinary men or women.
Several of the individuals profiled in the volume can be described as marginal: Waterson's Fritz Basiang was a Toraja in Sulawesi; Janet Hoskins's Yosef Malo, a Kodi man from Sumba. Robert Knox Dentan's Arifin was a Semai in Malay Kuala Lumpur. Yoko Hayami explored the stories of Karen women working or studying in Chiangmai; Saroja Dorairajo interviewed Muslim women in a southern Thai fishing village. Only the Balinese men and women in Carol Warren's article and the Hua Hin villagers in Annette Hamilton's lived more or less in the mainstream, if not at the center, of their respective societies.
Stories or aspects of stories that disrupt and unsettle preconceived ideas about a particular culture, as Lila Abu-Lughod advocates, are good for preventing the reification of culture. Still, the question is not whether subalterns can represent themselves but whether they can represent more than themselves. While the discipline of history has been enriched by anthropology, social history is written on a larger scale than individual life stories. This volume thus leaves open the question as to whether biography can be folded into history, the particular into the more general, and, conversely, how can history be written in such a way as not to flatten out the richness of individual lives in a region as diverse as Southeast Asia.
Ever since Clifford Geertz famously asked, “What do ethnographers do?” anthropologists have been self-conscious (and some, critics argue, self-referential) about their roles as interpreters of culture. This role is the focus of the second section of Waterson's introductory essay. As she points out, the life stories of individuals do not come to us directly but are the result of a dialogic process in which ethnographers and their subjects work sometimes together and sometimes in tension with one another to construct the life stories that we get to read. All of the essays in this volume conscientiously describe the methods employed by their authors to gather the information that went into their narratives. Three stand out for the questions they raise about the relationship between ethnographers and their subjects and the way life stories are constructed. In “Who Owns a Life History?” Janet Hoskins describes the many iterations of the life of Yosef Malo, by herself and by Malo's son. The latter was motivated by her writings to produce his own versions of his father's life while offering information to correct what Hoskins wrote about it. Hoskins also explores the differences between oral and written history and the different genres and circumstances, as well as the different purposes for recording or performing life stories.
So, too, does Dorairajo. At first glance, the men and women she describes are downtrodden and powerless. They are Muslims in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country, far away from Bangkok, their livelihood as fisherfolk ruined by mechanized fishing. Yet, they are determined to turn the ethnographer into a conduit for their pleas to the powers that be. They have forged a collective life story from which they are unwilling to depart, yet their refusal to allow Dorairajo to use a recorder or write down their information, while causing her the anxiety of accuracy, also gives her power to shape the narrative. And while her article is available to all, her role is that of scholar rather than social engineer.
Robert Knox Dentan presents another biographical conundrum. In trying to figure out why Arifin stood accused of murdering his employer's children and maid, Dentan relies extensively on police and press reports as Arifin is uncommunicative and unenlightening. He also interprets what he reads and hears through the filter of his understanding of Semai culture and of the problems encountered by Semai individuals attempting to pass for Malay. Dentan's struggle to piece together disparate fragments of information into a coherent narrative highlights the crucial role of the ethnographer writing across culture, especially about people not used to telling or making sense of their own lives.
While the editor might have exerted a stronger editorial hand here and there, individually and collectively, the articles in the volume offer valuable glimpses into Southeast Asian history and raise issues that will be of interest to practitioners of history and anthropology more generally.
