Review

Author(s): H. Leedom Lefferts, Jr.

Review by: H. Leedom Lefferts, Jr.
Source: Man, New Series, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Dec., 1992), pp. 887-888
Published by: Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2804188
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 888 BOOK REVIEWS
of these edited volumes and important mono-
graphs has made the study of Indonesian textiles
a vibrant field in South-East Asian studies gener-
ally.
Michael's Hitchcock's volume is not meant
for a specialist audience; rather it is a sumptu-
ously illustrated introduction to Indonesian
textiles. It performs a major service by bringing
many pieces from the University of Hull's
Centre for South-East Asian Studies collection
to our attention. The first half of the volume,
devoted to technology, discusses raw materials,
looms, dyeing methods and weaving and dec-
orative techniques. Especially usefuil is a series of
illustrations of warped looms and weaving tech-
niques. This may be one of the better
presentations of such data, which often require
focused concentration to understand.
However, because the volume is pitched to-
wards the general reader, it suffers seriously in its
second half, which covers the social and cultural
contexts of textile use and design. Its generaliza-
tions remove Indonesian textiles from the
culture-specific contexts which have made their
study so fruitful. Rather than discussing the in-
terrelated uses of certain kinds of textiles across
cultures, either of which would have involved a
case-study approach to deal with the diversity
and complexity of Indonesia, Hitchcock has
covered these themes in two chapters, 'Textiles
in society' and 'Dress, design and colour', with-
out further subdivision. Thus we gain no clear
picture of different uses and meanings.
This lack of specificity is fiurther compounded
by a scarcity of citations within each chapter to
its references, which are grouped by chapter in
the bibliography at the back of the book. Unless
one is already knowledgeable in the field, one
will remain in doubt as to which references
would prove most useful in furthering an inves-
tigation of particular cultures or meanings.
The lack of detail with regard to individual
cultures leads to a further problem, of which
students of South-East Asian cultures are well
aware - tensions between centre and periphery.
Unless a researcher is extremely careful, s/he is
liable to slight significant and interesting
examples coming from peripheral contexts in fa-
vour of better known and more accessible
examples drawn from the centre. This is espe-
cially the case in Indonesia, where examples of
batik printed material are recognized around the
world, while possibly more interesting and in-
tellectually challenging pieces from the Outer
Islands are less well documented. Unfortunately,
Hitchcock has not redressed this imbalance be-
tween well- and less-well-known Indonesian
textiles. The ethnographic illustrations reinforce
the emphasis on centre. Equally inexplicable is
the use of four photographs from what appears
to be the same Balinese ceremony (pp. 27, 87,
125 top, 142-3), for which the captions of three
nearly duplicate one another.
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Despite these weaknesses when viewed from
the perspective of the scholarly literature over
the past decade, however, the volume does per-
form a commendable service for the general
reader. This richly illustrated volume, with its
accessible and attractive format, may well entice
unfimiliar readers towards fascination with the
beauty and grandeur of Indonesian textiles. Such
fascination was, after all, the starting point for
the scholars as well.
H. LEEDOM LEFFERTS, JR
Drew University
KRLGER, NoRmA J. Zimbabwe's guerilla war: peas-
ant voices (Afr. Stud. Ser. 70). x, 301 pp.,
maps, table, bibliogr. Cambridge: Univ.
Press, 1991. C35.00
Political scientist Norma Kriger's long-awaited
book will probably prove as controversial to an-
thropologists as her doctoral thesis was among
historians of Zimbabwe. It seeks to incorporate
'peasant understandings of their experiences' in
the Zimbabwean civil war in order to 'contrib-
ute to existing theories of revolutions on three
issues: the relationship between popular support,
coercion and revolutionary success; peasant mo-
tives for participating in revolutions; and the
linkage between mobilization and revolutionary
outcomes for peasants' (p. 32). Her underlying
project is to 'deromanticize or demythologize
the existing portrait of ZANU's successful pol-
iticization' of the Zimbabwean countryside
during the liberation war (p. 45). Using data
collected in 1981-2 from Mutoko district (mid-
way between David Lan's (Guns and rain) and
Terence Ranger's (Peasant consciousness in Zim-
babwe) respective fieldwork areas of the Dande
valley and Makoni district), she offers an inter-
pretation of both war experiences and post-war
outcomes, based primarily on reported guerrilla
coercion of the peasantry, alternative to those of
Lan, Ranger and others essentially sympathetic
to ZANU and ZANLA.
Specifically she argues that local agendas struc-
tured peasant participation in the conflict. In
unfolding peasant views, Kriger notes that 'peas-
ants with structurally different positions in their
communities had different motives for exploit-
ing their coerced participation to support the
guerrillas' (p. 240), since 'internal peasant griev-
ances and peasant resentments against the
African rural elite were stronger motives to par-
ticipate in the war than was the state's racial
discrimination ... Peasants experienced resent-
ment against those closest to them rather than
the more distant white state ... [and] were much
more concerned with ending hereditary rule
and effecting social change ... than were the
guerrillas' (p. 209).
Often Kriger's review of revolutionary theory
and critique of the existing literature on the Zim-
babwean war are salutary, though her tendency