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Review Author(s): Norman G. Owen Review by: Norman G. Owen Source: The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May, 1994), pp. 619-621Published by: Association for Asian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2059918Accessed: 17-03-2015 04:56 UTC

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BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 619

However, the next chapter shows that even the Muslims are organized into the water-management associations the Balinese call subaks. We're encouraged, nonetheless, to focus on the ways in which these villages are unlike, since the existence of such differences is supposed to underscore the dangers of essentialism. The same argument is repeated with a brief account of two "Bali Aga" villages on the North Coast, Sembiran and Jullah. These villages will be familiar to those who continue to read the scholarly literature on Bali as the site of Wayan Ardika's recent archaeological discoveries of Indian trade goods and early rice.

Barth's choice of villages seems a little odd given what he's trying to demonstrate. The people of Pagetapan regard themselves as the descendants of Javanese colonists, yet they seem remarkably Balinese in all but their religion. Jullah and Sembiran introduce more complicated issues: with minor variations, their social organization is remarkably unchanged since it was delineated a thousand years ago in royal inscriptions addressed to both villages. The persistence of these ancient patterns was treated as a historical question by Dutch scholars. For Barth, however, historical analysis is irrelevant since we should expect all cultures to exhibit much local variation.

Throughout the book, Barth urges his readers to adopt an approach to culture that centers on the experience of individuals. This method is exemplified by stories from the lives of several Balinese, especially Muslim villagers. The book ends with a renewed call for an actor-focused view of culture, and a capsule summary of a "set of orientations that tend to be salient in Balinese interaction," such as "a pervasive fear of making an error or mistake . . . a strong obligation to cooperate . . . a concern to be humble." Barth acknowledges that these "compelling concerns show a very close family relationship" to Mead and Bateson's concept of an (ahistorical) Balinese "ethos." This reviewer draws a different conclusion from Barth's ethnography: the need for a better ethnohistorical understanding of the Muslim communities of north Bali, focusing on the question of why they seem so very Balinese.

J. STEPHEN LANSING University of Southern California

The Philippines. The Political Economy of Growth and Impoverishment in the Marcos Era. By JAMES K. BOYCE. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993. xv, 405 pp. $32.95 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).

In the subtitle of this book, James K. Boyce nails his colors to the mast: it is a study in "political economy" (in explicit contradistinction to "orthodox" economics), and its purpose is to demonstrate the intimate interconnection between growth and impoverishment in the Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos. By citing such writers as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Paul Baran, and William J. Pomeroy, Boyce further flaunts his leftist views and thus ensures that the book will not be taken seriously by the establishment economists and politicians who might benefit from it most. This is unfortunate, for at his best Boyce transforms "political economy" from an ideological stance to a practical analytical tool, as when he shows just how power relationships affect the implementation of new agricultural technologies or distort the significance of foreign loans.

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620 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

What the title does not make clear is that this is a very selective study covering just three topics: the green revolution, the expansion of export agriculture and forestry, and foreign borrowing. These are obviously important, but not everyone would agree that they were "the three pillars of Philippine development strategy" (p. 9) and represented all important economic trends within the era. Only in passing does Boyce note what others might regard as the single most striking development in these years: the rise of manufacturing and construction from under 7 percent to over 30 percent of the Philippine GDP between 1962 and the early 1980s (pp. 7, 16- 18). He also offers little or nothing on mining, services, export processing zones, urbanization, the economic significance of American military bases and direct aid grants, the role of the Chinese (though "Binondo bankers" are mentioned [pp. 283, 2981), or remittances from Filipinos overseas. Readers in search of an overview of the Philippine economy in the Marcos era will have to seek elsewhere.

Within the sectors he has chosen to analyze, the basic critique Boyce offers will come as no surprise to readers familiar with the writings of Walden Bello, Robin Broad, Randolf David, Ernest Feder, Gary Hawes, Mahar Mangahas, Cheryl Payer, and others of that ilk. The green revolution benefited rich rather than poor farmers; the rise of export agriculture and forestry was at the expense of the poor, cultural minorities, and the environment; foreign borrowing led to capital flight and the "debt trap," in which repayments of capital and interest eventually created an actual outflow of wealth from the indebted and impoverished country. Not only did the gap between rich and poor widen-which most establishment economists admit- but in absolute terms the poor became even poorer. And the policies of the Marcos government, abetted, if not actually instigated, by his international sponsors, were directly responsible for this shameful state of affairs.

What Boyce principally adds to these conclusions is systematic quantification, as he has gathered (and adjusted, as necessary) data for several plausible time series covering the quarter century from 1962, the pre-Marcos devaluation of the peso, to 1986, when Marcos departed. This is particularly useful for the notoriously erratic figures on foreign debt and capital flight (pp. 262, 295), but anyone who has tried to make sense of any of the numbers emanating from, or pertaining to, the contemporary Philippines will be grateful for Boyce's endeavors in this area. Not everyone will be totally convinced by all the assumptions and statistical manipulations he has made in order to approximate the reality behind the official data-e.g., "compensating" shifts over time toward greater income understatement for the rich and less for the poor (pp. 36, 43), or the significance of the correlation between external debt and capital flight (p. 311; cf. pp. 325-28)-but everything is out in the open and readers can make their own adjustments, if they wish.

The other major contribution of Boyce is his documentation of the intellectual bankruptcy of World Bank developmentalism, at least as it pertained to the Philippines. In 1973 the Bank suggested that martial law offered "an opportunity for a more serious attack on . . . social and economic problems" (p. 1) and urged even greater forest exploitation (pp. 235-36); in 1976 they felt it would be "unfortunate" if the Philippines failed to borrow more (p. 255); in 1979 they applauded "the Government's remarkable success in raising the level of public investment," ignoring the fact that much of this "public" spending wound up in private pockets (p. 329); and in the late 1980s they were still juggling the figures to try to prove that poverty had actually decreased since 1971 (pp. 39-42; cf. pp. 47-50). Without assuming some sinister capitalist plot, Boyce shows again and again how these and

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BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 621

other foreign "experts" contributed to the demise of the Philippine economy by ignoring the realities of Philippine politics.

This book is reasonably well presented except for a cumbersome combination of chapter endnotes and author-date references that requires a reader interested in Boyce's sources to keep at least two bookmarks in the volume at all times. The volume should prove useful-although probably not necessary and certainly not sufficient-to anyone concerned with the precarious state of the Philippine economy, or with issues of agriculture and foreign borrowing in general.

NORMAN G. OWEN University of Hong Kong

Fields from the Sea. Chinese Junk Trade with Siam during the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries. By JENNIFER WAYNE CUSHMAN. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1993. ix, 206 pp.

Fields from the Sea is Cushman's 1976 Ph.D. dissertation. Before her untimely death in 1989, she had intended to update and revise the manuscript. She was a modest and meticulous scholar whose caution delayed the early publication of the thesis. She would surely have augmented the book with more recent scholarship on Chinese and Southeast Asian maritime history, particularly that of Japanese scholars. Unfortunately, she never had the opportunity, and the work is somewhat dated.

Those familiar with Sarasin Viraphol's more comprehensive Tribute and Profit. Sino-Siamese Trade 1652-1853 (Harvard, 1977) will find that the two authors have made use of many of the same source materials. During the early 1970s, both Viraphol and Cushman, he at Harvard and she at Cornell, were among the first generation of scholars to rely heavily on Asian-language sources in treating nineteenth- century Chinese trade. Their books, however, differ considerably in approach. Viraphol's is a chronologically structured history of the Sino-Thai trade during the first 200 years of the Qing period with a clear focus on developments in Siam. Cushman, in contrast, chose to focus more specifically on the Chinese and on the trade itself. Her study treats first the nature of the Qing maritime trade administration and then moves on to examine the goods which Siam and China exchanged, the men who were involved in the trade, and, finally, the attitudes and policies of the Qing government toward Siamese trade and foreign trade in general. It is, in fact, more properly a book about China rather than Southeast Asia; however, there is much here for the Southeast Asianist.

Cushman's work is a major contribution to our understanding of the relationship between China and Southeast Asia and its place in Asia's economic development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before the 1970s, most scholarship gave the impression that virtually all of China's foreign trade involved tea and opium, and was conducted by the East India Company through the Cohong in Guangzhou. Today, such a Europe-centered view is no longer possible. During the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Chinese junk traders were the major economic actors in Southeast Asia. They facilitated the exchange of Southeast Asia's raw materials for China's manufactures, and in many respects laid the foundations for the economic prosperity that is the region's legacy at the present time.

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Article Contentsp. 619p. 620p. 621

Issue Table of ContentsThe Journal of Asian Studies, Vol. 53, No. 2 (May, 1994) pp. i-vii+343-678Front Matter [pp. ]Rethinking Modernization and Modernity in Japanese History: A Focus on State-Society Relations [pp. 346-366]Tragedy and Salvation in the Floating World: Chikamatsu's Double Suicide Drama as Millenarian Discourse [pp. 367-393]Traditional Chinese Fiction--The State of the Field [pp. 394-426]A Uyghur Muslim in Qianlong's Court: The Meaning of the Fragant Concubine [pp. 427-458]The Soviet Union's Secret Diplomacy Concerning the Chinese Eastern Railway, 1924-1925 [pp. 459-486]The Interpretation of Thunder [pp. 487-503]Book ReviewsAsia GeneralReview: untitled [pp. 505-506]Review: untitled [pp. 506-508]Review: untitled [pp. 508-509]Review: untitled [pp. 509-510]Review: untitled [pp. 511-512]Review: untitled [pp. 512-514]Review: untitled [pp. 514-516]Review: untitled [pp. 516-517]Review: untitled [pp. 517-518]Review: untitled [pp. 518-520]Review: untitled [pp. 520-521]Review: untitled [pp. 522-523]Review: untitled [pp. 523-524]

China and Inner AsiaReview: untitled [pp. 525-526]Review: untitled [pp. 527-528]Review: untitled [pp. 528-529]Review: untitled [pp. 529-530]Review: untitled [pp. 530-531]Review: untitled [pp. 532-533]Review: untitled [pp. 533-534]Review: untitled [pp. 534-536]Review: untitled [pp. 536-537]Review: untitled [pp. 537-538]Review: untitled [pp. 539-540]Review: untitled [pp. 540-541]Review: untitled [pp. 541-543]Review: untitled [pp. 543-544]Review: untitled [pp. 544-545]Review: untitled [pp. 545-547]Review: untitled [pp. 547-548]Review: untitled [pp. 548-550]Review: untitled [pp. 550-551]

JapanReview: untitled [pp. 551-552]Review: untitled [pp. 552-554]Review: untitled [pp. 554-556]Review: untitled [pp. 556-557]Review: untitled [pp. 557-559]Review: untitled [pp. 559-560]Review: untitled [pp. 560-561]Review: untitled [pp. 561-563]Review: untitled [pp. 563-564]Review: untitled [pp. 564-565]Review: untitled [pp. 566-567]Review: untitled [pp. 567-568]Review: untitled [pp. 569-570]Review: untitled [pp. 570-572]Review: untitled [pp. 572-573]Review: untitled [pp. 573-576]Review: untitled [pp. 576-577]

KoreaReview: untitled [pp. 578-579]Review: untitled [pp. 580-581]Review: untitled [pp. 581-582]

South AsiaReview: untitled [pp. 583-584]Review: untitled [pp. 584-586]Review: untitled [pp. 586-587]Review: untitled [pp. 587-589]Review: untitled [pp. 589-590]Review: untitled [pp. 590-591]Review: untitled [pp. 591-593]Review: untitled [pp. 593-595]Review: untitled [pp. 596-597]Review: untitled [pp. 597-600]Review: untitled [pp. 600-602]Review: untitled [pp. 602-603]Review: untitled [pp. 603-605]Review: untitled [pp. 605-607]Review: untitled [pp. 607-610]Review: untitled [pp. 610-611]Review: untitled [pp. 611-612]Review: untitled [pp. 613-614]Review: untitled [pp. 614-615]Review: untitled [pp. 615-616]

Southeast AsiaReview: untitled [pp. 616-618]Review: untitled [pp. 618-619]Review: untitled [pp. 619-621]Review: untitled [pp. 621-622]Review: untitled [pp. 622-623]Review: untitled [pp. 624-625]Review: untitled [pp. 625-626]Review: untitled [pp. 626-627]Review: untitled [pp. 628-629]Review: untitled [pp. 629-630]Review: untitled [pp. 631-632]Review: untitled [pp. 632-633]Review: untitled [pp. 633-634]Review: untitled [pp. 635-636]Review: untitled [pp. 636-638]Review: untitled [pp. 638-639]Review: untitled [pp. 639-641]Review: untitled [pp. 641-642]Review: untitled [pp. 642-645]Review: untitled [pp. 645-646]Review: untitled [pp. 646-648]Review: untitled [pp. 648-649]Review: untitled [pp. 649-651]Review: untitled [pp. 651-652]Review: untitled [pp. 652-653]Review: untitled [pp. 653-657]Review: untitled [pp. 658-660]Review: untitled [pp. 661-662]Review: untitled [pp. 662-663]Review: untitled [pp. 663-665]Review: untitled [pp. 665-666]

Film and Video ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 667-668]Review: untitled [pp. 668-669]

Other Books Received [pp. 670-674]

Obituary: Peter Ananda (1926-1993) [pp. 675]Communication to the Editor [pp. 676-678]Back Matter [pp. ]