Dynamics of religion in Southeast Asia

For so many individuals “…what is modern today is backward tomorrow…” and that “…to be modern implies keeping pace with the times and anticipating tomorrow’s trends today…” (p. 11) In other words, in many conceptions, to be ‘modern’ is also to be a futurist. One would then think, that if Weber’s claims were true, that modernity might also cast off some of the ‘mythos’ of the past, as societies become ‘disenchanted.’ In the case of Southeast Asia, Gottowick argues, and this volumes seems to prove, this was not the case. Rather “…modernity and religion turned out not to be separate domains, but rather intertwined or entangled spheres…” (p. 13) as there has also been a “re-enchantment” of religion, particularly in the cases of Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. Peter Braunlein highlights that “New Religious Movements” appeared in Southeast Asia as in other locations across the world in the 1960s (p. 37).

To many Southeast Asianists, and even Asianists at large, the central argument of this text will not be surprising. We are used to discussing various interpretations of Marxist-Leninist ‘modernization’ compared to discourses of Buddhist or Islamic ‘modernism’(s). But this volume does provide some rich details of further case studies. For example, according to Peter Braunlein’s contribution, in the case of Vietnamese interpretations of Marxist-Leninist thought, spirit possessions were “vilified as superstitions and ‘socially harmful’” (p. 43). Therefore, before the Đổi Mới era (mid-1980s) reforms, these practices were only carried on at night. Meanwhile, as time passed, and many Southeast Asian societies increasingly had to negotiate the transitions of those who passed during events such as the My Lai massacre, where now “…the dead occupied an uneasy middle ground somewhere between harmful revenant and ancestor spirits…” (p. 45; see also: Hoenik Kwon). The accession of civilian dead to the status of ancestor spirits over the course of two generations is not necessarily ‘normal’ in Southeast Asia, but it is also not uncommon, and as a result it is also the case that many people “…don’t believe in spirits but on the other hand must pay tribute to them in order to avoid damage…” (p. 50). This is because angry or ignored spirits may behave in nasty ways, attacking individuals, slaughtering livestock, or carrying out other vengeful acts (p. 84). For the Kmeet ethnic group in upland Laos, the solution is a complex one. The dead are kept in their own villages. Their graves are built as model wooden houses, complete with gardens, paddy land and fish ponds in some cases. Their world is separated out, though, and the only place that they can meet the living is at the ‘spirit market’ – a place where mediums arrive to communicate with those in otherworldly states (p. 82).

In many ways, Gottowick’s volume demonstrates that academics are still unable to cast off some of the inherent prejudices that are present among English language scholars. Buddhism is a peaceful religion, Islam is equated with being backward, and still, secularism is equated with ‘the appropriate state-model.’ Here, secularism is understood to be characterized by 1) the distinction between the religious and secular sphere; 2) the decline of religious convictions and 3) the restriction of religion to the private sphere (p. 16). Furthermore, ‘the West’ is taken on as a non-complicated universal identity, without a thought toward the complexities of its meaning, and a consideration that for many European thinkers ‘modernity’ was intended to have a quite different result than in the minds of certain Americans. Regardless, Gottowick’s work takes up these problems with vigor, drawing, for example, on the prejudice of the sartorial hijab which is characterized as a “…symbol of backwardness and misogyny in the West…” (p. 14) but also became a symbol of enlightened thinking and modernity in Indonesia and Malaysia. However, in Indonesia, ‘modernism’ took on a number of interpretations, even within an Islamic context. For example, for the group Al-Irsyad, twentieth century ‘modernity’ could still be connected with islah reformism, even as it was characterized by an emphasis on egalitarianism and educational reform (p. 114). Consequentially, like many other groups in Indonesia, Al-Irsyad supported a reformation of the school system so that the new schools were different from madrasah and pesantren educational centers in that students “…were divided into classes, sat at desks and used modern textbooks…” (p. 117). Although the movement eventually declined with the spread of Muhammadiya influence (p. 130), Al-Irsyad remains a symbol of ‘modernist Islam’ were-in the move to ‘modernize’ is simultaneously coupled with the move to reform. In this setting, and in general in Indonesia, there have been broader critiques of ‘religion’ as a whole, such as a workshop that was organized to promote dialogue across a local Christian/Islam divide, called “Building Peace: Learning from the Failure of Religions” that was held in 2006 (p. 208). Promoting unity across religious groups has been difficult in Indonesia, massacres in Bali following the September 30, 1965 coup were among the highest death tolls in Indonesia at the time [80,000 – 100,000; 5% of the Balinese total population] and were hence quite disproportionate, likely a result of targeting the distinctly Hindu Balinese (p. 217), and the tensions show later in the volume.

Throughout the collection it can be said that Islam is always approached analytically, from a scholarly perspective, however, there are certain authors in this collections that read with distinctly, though not necessarily intentional, pro-Christian bias. Nevertheless, in Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia, Gottowick has collected a vibrant sample of case studies from across the region that will interest a broad audience of students, teachers and scholars alike.

William B Noseworthy, University of Wisconsin-Madison (noseworthy@wisc.edu)