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Book reviews
Everyday Geography of the Global South Jonathan Rigg. Routledge, London and New
York, 2007, 231 pages (ISBN 978-0-415-37609-9) (pbk).

Making Development Geography. Human Geography in the Making Victoria A.

Lawson. Hodder Arnold, London and New York, 2007, 256 pages (ISBN 13: 978-0-340-80964-8)
(pbk).

This review was co-written by a group of students and their instructor in a graduate
seminar class on development geography. The reviewed texts formed the core read-
ings for the course, and both provided a welcome and extensive review of contribu-
tions by geographers to development studies. Confronting arguments about the death
of geography in An Everyday Geography of the Global South, Jonathan Rigg makes a
strong case for the growing significance of localities and localism, difference and com-
plexity (pp. 10–11). In his rich text, Rigg shows how globalization has ‘reenergized’
the local and the everyday (p. 11). He takes this nonstructuralist tack in response to
more commonplace treatments of development that emphasize unfair trade policies,
IMF actions and structural adjustment, which, he argues, are in themselves insuffi-
cient for understanding why individuals, households and localities are poor. Following
Brettell (2002: 439, cited on p. 29), Rigg uses life histories ‘not to find a typical or
representative individual but to assess how individuals interpret and understand their
own lived experiences’.
An Everyday Geography is a well-structured book. Each chapter is well set up, building
on the previous one and introducing a new dimension to illuminate the ‘everyday
geographies’. By the end of the book, students could better relate to the situation of Mrs
Chandaeng – the Laotian mother of migrant children – who is introduced in a vignette
at the opening of the book. A strength of the book is the use of many case studies to
illustrate key points, often highlighting different aspects of a common issue. The book’s
treatment is not region specific, but moves across many geographical contexts, providing
relevant histories of specific countries. It reveals surprises and unintended conse-
quences, such as unexpected opportunities in post-tsunami Thailand for otherwise
disadvantaged people (p. 91). By focusing on the everyday and local scale, Rigg draws
attention to how individual actions can have major implications at a societal level, such
as the case of the ‘missing millions’ of girls in Asia and Africa owing to sex-selective
abortion or neglect of female infants (p. 46).
Rigg’s book serves to undermine some ingrained assumptions about the global south
such as the immobile/sedentarist peasant paradigm, showing instead how people in the
global south are not isolated from innovations and information from elsewhere. Rigg
also upturns assumptions that urban, industrial workers in China are more ‘modern’
than people working on family farms (p. 96). And he argues that modernization is not
about being assimilated but refashioned. In this regard, he highlights the reworking of
networks that link urban residents with their rural villages, and the processes of
rescaling development: ‘the links, networks, connectivities and associations between
different forms, types and levels of spatiality . . . [that] are growing and intensifying and
rendering scale increasingly problematic as an organizing principle’ (pp. 20–21).
Rigg notes that structural analyses of market inequalities and the political economy
of farming often present bleak outlooks regarding the impacts of agro-industrialization

Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 31 (2010) 401–411

© 2010 The Authors
Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography © 2010 Department of Geography, National University of Singapore and
Blackwell Publishing Asia Pty Ltd
402 Book reviews

on producers in the global south. In contrast, he finds that studies focusing on producers
themselves often have a more optimistic outlook about livelihood opportunities. Indeed,
structuralist and critical development scholars may feel that Rigg presents too positive
an interpretation of development, but it is also refreshing to have issues presented in a
nonideological manner – for example, highlighting resistance for not only resistance
against globalization and modernization. A hallmark of Rigg’s past and current work is
how he communicates people’s aspirations for development, progress and modernity.
An Everyday Geography provides a valuable treatment of what people do in specific
situations and why, often bringing macro policies and programmes down to the indi-
vidual level. One theme that is particularly well-presented is that of migration. Rigg
shows the multiple dimensions of migration, as linked to modernity, gender and reli-
gion, and highlights the truly everyday experience. Everyday experiences are also
well-portrayed through a livelihood lens, which reflects people’s decision making and
activities. The role of women and gender issues is also commendable, highlighting the
implications of macroeconomic policies for households, and the women and men within
them.
Overall, Rigg’s text is very readable and informative even though the concepts are
sophisticated: structure and agency, life course, modernity, resistance, social capital,
participatory exclusions, de-agrarianization, de facto urbanization and territorialization.
We also appreciated Rigg’s use of tables to summarize key positions (such as in debates
over contract farming). But there are two areas of omission that we would like to have
seen discussed. One is the livelihoods of less able-bodied people or orphans, to reveal
how structures in society affect them and the trajectories of their livelihoods over time.
The other, environmental concerns, could have been woven into many of the book’s
existing themes such as mobility in context of environmental degradation, or into
parallels in environmental and agricultural change.
By helping students to think of development and livelihood in different ways, An
Everyday Geography provides useful background for doing fieldwork or preparing a term
paper on a range of topics related to development geography that may be appropriate for
upper-level undergraduate students. It is best used in combination with other readings,
particularly since it does not provide a lot of theoretical context. With this in mind, our
graduate seminar in development geography paired Rigg’s text with Making Development
Geography, written by the past president of the Association of American Geographers,
Victoria Lawson.
The focus of Lawson’s well-written and (for the most part) accessible text is ‘devel-
opment as situated knowledge’. She offers a valuable review of the evolving field of
development geography, paralleling the evolution of development theory, and portrays
geographers’ contributions to mainstream and alternative development thinking over the
past 50 years. Lawson identifies the key contributions by development geographers to be
their attention to the spatiality of development processes and discourses. This includes
emphasizing the spatially uneven character of economic growth, critiquing the institu-
tions, practices and discourses of the development industry, and revealing the multiple
unfoldings of capitalist economic and political processes across the globe (pp. 26–27).
As for the level of this text, it is a challenging read for upper-level undergraduate
students, but it can work at this level. It is certainly appropriate at the graduate level,
particularly given Lawson’s emphasis on theory and critique. A merit of her book is that
it does not present theory in isolation but does a good job of situating critical develop-
ment geography in the context of global political, economic, cultural and intellectual
shifts. Each body of theory, in each chapter, ‘explains the dynamics and actors involved
Book reviews 403

in these issues of governance, economic growth, social redistribution, and well-being in

quite different ways’ (p. 30). Lawson’s text presented feminist perspectives particularly
well, in combination with the lenses of poststructuralism and Marxism, to comprise a
critical development studies approach. Another asset of this text is the way that Lawson
underscores the connections between economic policies or social movements in the
global north with parallel policies and movements in the south.
Tracing postdevelopment’s ‘overly romantic engagement with social movements at
the local scale’ (pp. 174–75), Lawson favours a socially and politically accountable
poststructural approach that ‘continues to engage with (rather than refuse) structural
processes as they work out in relation to concrete contexts, meanings, histories and
cultural productions’ (p. 163). Lawson’s analysis and critiques are driven by her per-
sonal experience of and reflections on the production of meaning, authority, power,
resistance and identity formation (some members of our class felt there was an over-
emphasis on critique, though most found it useful).
Lawson’s focus on situated knowledge leads to an emphasis on discourse. Her analysis
reveals the interplay of political-economy forces with discursive and cultural construc-
tions of gender, race, ethnicity and development. In one example of export processing
zones (pp. 18–19), she shows how discourses devalue women and absolve officials and
co-owners of their responsibility to act. Other cases critique the essentialization of third
world inhabitants and the homogenizing impacts of development industry discourses. We
collectively appreciated how Lawson challenged her own students to shift debates and
discourses about overpopulation in the global south – typically construed as a technical
problem – to overconsumption in the north. Lawson also provides a valuable summary of
the rethinking of the nation-state as the main frame of reference for development
thought, in the face of new coalitions and the emergence of new geographies.
While the chapters were generally well-written, some of us found the conclusion to
be a let-down. It summarized but did not really conclude. Nor did it identify ways
forward or programmatic advice drawing from the author’s collective experiences and
reflections, which would have been more welcome than the predominant emphasis on
critiques. Making Development Geography often provides helpful illustrations of linking
theory to practice through text boxes, but could also have had summary tables to help
distil and contrast different theories. (As a class, we sometimes drew on tables from
Nederveen Pieterse’s (2001) Development Theory text to visually highlight the evolution
of ideas that Lawson discussed in her pithy chapters.)
As for other omissions, like Rigg’s text, Lawson’s book also fell short on environ-
mental issues, which was particularly disappointing since the theme of environmental
justice (e.g. as linked to waste and health concerns) would have been a good fit with the
way Lawson approached other issues. Her treatment of political ecology was very brief.
The text draws more on experiences in Latin America and Africa than on Asia or the
Middle East, but disappointingly falls short in analyzing the fall of the socialist bloc or
the emerging economies of China, India, Brazil and Russia.
Taken together, the two books complement each other well, although neither
provides much treatment of development policy or mainstream economic development,
the contributions of agriculture to industry, explanations of East Asian development
growth, the geopolitics of international financial institutions, or methods for develop-
ment research. Both texts do nevertheless make extremely valuable contributions in
illuminating the distinctiveness of contributions and approaches of geographers, in
comparison to other disciplines that also deal with issues of development, social justice
and inequality in the global south.
404 Book reviews

References

Brettell C (2002) The individual/agent and culture/structure in the history of the social sciences.
Social Science History 26 (3), 429–45.
Pieterse N (2001) Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions. Sage, Thousand Oaks.

Jose Abad-Puelles,1 Natalie Beckford,1 Dan Bustillo1 and Steffanie Scott2

1
Local Economic Development Program and
2
Department of Geography & Environmental Management, University of Waterloo

Hidden Hands and Divided Landscapes: A Penal History of Singapore’s Plural Society
Anoma Pieris. University of Hawai’i Press, Honolulu, 2009, 354 pages (ISBN 978-0-8248-3354-1)
(pbk).

Singapore is famous as an urban planning success. Walking in the swanky downtown

city centre, beside glass towers overlooking the well-paved pedestrian streets and
well-controlled traffic, one can be forgiven for thinking that everything was created on
a blank slate. Except that the developmental state remains resolutely postcolonial,
preserving so-called heritage buildings in the civic centre and the old ethnic enclaves
(‘Little India’, ‘Chinatown’ and Kampong Glam) to serve up to tourists and to remind
Singaporeans of their shared ‘plural’ heritage. Remnants of the colonial city form the
cultural unconscious of the modern global city.
Brenda Yeoh’s (1996) Foucault-inspired Contesting Space remains the defining work
on colonial urbanism in Singapore. However, Yeoh’s theoretical terms are explicitly
dialectical – state domination and vernacular resistance – and do not tackle the produc-
tion of split racialized subjects through a ‘multiracial’ urbanism. How does one begin to
study colonial Singapore and make out its split personality carried forward into the
postcolonial era? Anoma Pieris ingeniously uses the forgotten penal colony origins of
Singapore to decipher the cultural unconscious of the city. This is not a book on the
evolution of the colonial prison, a topic popular in postcolonial studies, or an alternative
history of Singapore’s origin. Using spatiality as a key register, Pieris relates the devel-
opment of the penal system and the building of Singapore by Indian convict labour to
the growth of an immigrant plural society and the British authorities’ invention of new
modes of government to contain the rising native tide.
The prison began not so much as a system as the island itself, on which convict
labour gangs moved between town and countryside with relative freedom, with only
their chains to distinguish them from the free population. As the colonial prison was
built by the convict labourers themselves, a system of regulation emerged. This part
recalls Michel Foucault’s (1975) Discipline and Punish, but Pieris takes pains to make the
distinction between the metropolitan prison and the colonial prison. The latter was
shaped by the general imperatives of racial divide and rule, and the specific conditions
of each colonial site rather than the ‘humanizing’ and equalizing technologies of
reforming criminals into productive citizens. Pieris demonstrates this in two ways. First,
she offers gems of comparisons between the different penal architecture and systems of
Malacca, Penang and Singapore, and between that of the Straits Settlements and other
Asian colonies. Second, she zooms into the penal subculture and economy to provide a
glimpse of the dialectical struggle between the authorities and the prisoners, which
proves not to be one concerned with the reform of body and soul but with labour and
property.
Book reviews 405

The result was a regime of variegated classifications, segmentations and hierarchies

inflected with racial meanings and calibrated with technologies of regulation then
deployed for the system of penal labour to construct the segregated city. The penal
regime shaped the colonial state’s approach to governing the larger colony as a plural
society. Pieris shows that this became an embattled approach after the 1867 Penang riots
and 1871–72 Singapore riots that saw native groups transgressing urban segregation in
their fights against each other. In the post-riots era of modern governmentality, the new
prison at Pearl’s Hill acted as a key component in the line of urban defences against
native populations – seen as primordially racial and prone to mob anarchy when normal
interethnic interaction in the marketplace collapses. Pieris therefore cleverly inverts J.S.
Furnivall’s (1948) famous formulation on the creation of the plural society in Colonial
Policy and Practice, showing it to be a historical construction born out of the colonial state
besieged by restless natives.
There is much more work to be done to connect the cultural unconscious formed out
of Singapore’s nascent urbanism to the effervescent urbanism of global city Singapore
more than a century later. Pieris is careful not to make leaps of implications in her
conclusion, though she does stretch too far in her references to the import of foreign
construction workers, many from South Asia, with symbolic chains and limited mobili-
ties to build the global city.
The more problematic aspect of the work is her emphasis on the dialogic over the
dialectic in the production of space. As it turns out, in her empirical analyses, the
dialectic emerges from the dialogic interplay of needs, desires and agencies. In other
words, the dialogic is productive of the dialectic and does not offer a theoretical
counterpoint to find that elusive subaltern agency. The dialogic, much like Mikhail
Bakhtin’s carnival, is over-romanticized. On this note, Pieris’s description of the Penang
riots as ‘the Muharram riots of 1867’ (p. 187), attributing the cause to the carnivalesque
transgressions of that important Shia festival, stretches history. (A trifling quarrel broke
out between rival Malay gangs during the festival in May and exploded into street
fighting involving already-warring Chinese secret societies in July: the festival was just
the spark in a powder keg.)
Pieris differentiates her work too strongly from Foucault, which is evident when she
lumps Foucault with Weber as Eurocentric theorists of rationalization (p. 130). The
dialectic of property and labour at the heart of Pieris’s argument is something that
Foucault deals with at length in Discipline and Punish and in his work on governmentality.
Foucault’s point that this dialectical economy was then traced into disciplinary regimes
and disappeared from conscious material view is in line with Pieris’s documentation of the
disappearance of the industrial prison and an empty city park taking its place amidst civic
buildings. Instead of engaging with Foucault, Pieris relies too heavily on Robbie Goh’s
(2005) textual reading of contemporary Singapore cityscapes in Contours of Culture.
Nevertheless, this book is a very important contribution to postcolonial and urban
studies. But as I read it, I could not help recalling Franz Kafka’s (1995) mercurial In the
Penal Colony, specifically the inscription ‘Be Just!’ on the body of the condemned man by
the machine, in what was to become an aborted execution and a botched suicide. The
dialogic is very much bound up with the dialectic, and both eventually fail at the
intersections of the body and the machine, the city and the text.

References

Foucault M (1975) Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Random House, New York.
406 Book reviews

Furnivall JS (1948) Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India.
Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Goh RBH (2005) Contours of Culture: Space and Social Difference in Singapore. Hong Kong University
Press, Hong Kong.
Kafka F (1995 [1914]) In the penal colony. In The Metamorphosis, In the Penal Colony, and Other
Stories, trans. Joachim Neugroschel, 189–232. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Yeoh BSA (1996) Contesting Space: Power Relationships and the Urban Built Environment in Colonial
Singapore. Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur.

Daniel P.S. Goh

Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore

Travel, Space, Architecture Jilly Traganou and Miodrag Mitrašinović (eds). Ashgate,
Farnham, 2009, 346 pages (ISBN 978-0-7546-4827-7) (hbk).

The material conditions of architectural production, and the cultural and educational
apparatus that supports it have long been recognized to be on the move, mobile,
extensive across space. As Jilly Traganou notes, ‘architects have conducted their work
from a variety of subject positions: as physical or imaginary traveller, as tourists, or as
immigrants, conforming to the requirements of a regime or the stance of the critical
thinker’ (p. 25). There are a lot of well-known stories of how the ‘Grand Tour’ of the
sites of classical or renaissance Europe were important elements in the formation of
architectural careers in the early modern era, a tradition which continues to this day and
which helps to generate a canon of architectural styles. Here, travel becomes an essential
component of becoming an architect, which at times unproblematically empowers
(usually western) architects with both a scopic power over the lands they survey and the
professional comfort of having their home in close proximity to the centres of economic
wealth (and affluent clients).
But there is a growing literature that seeks to dislocate these readings of architectural
autonomy and professionalism, mixing and bringing them into dialogue with the wider
social forces that structure building production and architectural education. This book
contributes to the field, containing 17 diverse papers that chart the significance of travel
and spatiality for, particularly, architects and critics. The academic terrain is set out in
Traganou’s opening chapter, ‘For a theory of travel in architectural studies’, a crisp
synthesis of the diverse literatures from architectural theory, tourism, geography, soci-
ology and anthropology that help make this field so dynamic (and wrest it from the
sometimes hefty burden of architectural history).
The papers are arranged into three sections. The first, ‘New vision and a new world
order’, contains five papers that focus on early modernity, when international travel was
still a relatively new phenomenon. The second section, ‘Questioning origins, searching
for alternatives’, explores a range of areas where architectural design was inspired by
the act of travel, whether this be an interest in the vernacular styles of Mediterranean
hill towns or the canonical examples of Rome as a source of inspiration, and the
influence of travelling to the US on European architects. The third section, ‘Global
mobilities’, takes an interesting direction by including two transcribed interviews with
architects that seek to problematize the fixity and flow that often surround the design
process. The section also includes papers on how particular social groups, especially
immigrants, reuse and hence remap particular spaces in cities. For example, Eleni
Book reviews 407

Tzirtzilaki’s account of the reception camps and gathering places of displaced individuals
in Greece provides a sobering antidote to the big ‘A’ architecture that sometimes
dominates both public discourse and scholarly literature.
This is a far-reaching and extensive survey, then, which is difficult to easily do justice
to in a short review. If one thing can be said to define the collection, it is that it draws
attention to the importance of the tension between mobility and immobility that
characterizes contemporary society more generally, and architectural form and practice
in particular. The papers included here highlight the importance of architectural dis-
course, whether it be the travel diaries of architects (such as Le Corbusier’s notoriously
orientalist accounts of travel in Turkey), or the publicity-conscious statements made by
architects who accept commissions in ‘foreign’ lands (as in Spanish architect Santiago
Calatrava’s claims to Greek lineage in his designs for the 2004 Athens Olympics). The
book as a whole offers many examples of how architectural ideas are transmitted in
material form, via an apparatus of visual technologies (diagrams, maps, panoramas, and
the teaching materials which make the world’s professionals) that enables architectural
production to proceed rapidly, without major technical problems, and at an achievable
cost. The significance of these travel narratives are an important subtheme to the book,
underlining that it is not just the travelling that is important, but also the ‘moments’ that
are recorded and brought back, whether these be observations (sketches or photo-
graphs) or the modes of doing things.
The materiality of representation is thus an important element here, and the book is
an important marker of how architectural scholarship is being enriched by the insights
of other theoretical traditions in the humanities and social sciences. This extends to the
modes by which architectural research is conducted. For example, Traganou suggests
that ethnographic methods – all too rarely used in the study of architecture – would be
important contributions to understanding such mobilities.
This is an excellent volume, which will greatly interest those working in
urban studies, anthropology and human geography, especially those who seek works
that avoid the grand narratives that sometimes dominate the field of architectural
studies. While most of the book addresses European or American examples, the
critical theoretical approaches adopted will transfer fruitfully to debates concerning
appropriate architectural style in tropical areas. It is handsomely produced and
clearly organized, and would make a very useful contribution to a range of courses
on how the built environment is shaped by globalization, cultural identity and
transnationalism.

Donald McNeill
Urban Research Centre, University of Western Sydney

Women, Gender and Disasters: Global Issues and Initiatives Elaine Enarson and P.G.
Dhar Chakrabarti (eds). Sage Publications India, 2009, 380 pages (ISBN 978-81-321-0148-2)
(hbk).

The gender and disaster literature has been largely descriptive and partial in represent-
ing women’s greater vulnerabilities and increased hardships in post-disaster contexts
across the world to the neglect of the experiences of marginalized men, or of the
intersection of gender with other axes of societal inequalities in the production of
differential vulnerabilities to disasters in different societies. Though women do face
408 Book reviews

greater threats of sexual violence, and increased domestic and productive workloads in
post-disaster situations in some cultural contexts, it is crucial, and necessary, to recog-
nize that the lives of both women and men are encircled in a series of power relations
embedding the state and civil society, and within their own communities, making it
pertinent to unpack the processes of power and resistance operating at various levels of
response in post-disaster contexts.
Women, Gender and Disaster: Global Issues and Initiatives, with its stated aim of exam-
ining gender roles and relationships that put men and women in differentially vul-
nerable positions during and after disasters, clearly attempts to advance the limited
body of literature on the subject. In the preface, Elaine Enarson sets out that ‘sex and
gender are never automatically the primary social facts on the ground nor are these
ever in play in isolation from other facts of life. But gender is also never irrelevant
and must be examined and reflected in practice, for men and boys as much as women
and girls’ (p. xvi). The 25 case studies that follow examine the construction of gen-
dered vulnerabilities, responses and resiliencies in disaster situations in both the
so-called majority and minority worlds, and covering a range of events and sociocul-
tural contexts. The book is divided into four relevant parts: ‘Understanding gender
relations in disaster’, ‘Gendered challenges and responses in disasters’, ‘Women’s
organized initiatives’ and ‘Gender-sensitive disaster risk reduction’, and includes con-
tributions from academics, practitioners, government and international organization
personnel.
Unfortunately, not all chapters live up to the editorial promise, and some authors
still replicate the traditional bias of equating gender issues with women’s issues. For
example, in the very first chapter, Madhavi Ariyabandu spells out all the possible
biological, social, cultural and economic factors that account for women’s greater
vulnerabilities, reflecting that gender-blind state policies further add to women’s
disadvantages without considering the interwoven nature of their lives and those of
the marginalized men in their households. In short, the men/women binary evident
in some chapters fail to recognize that spheres of production and reproduction are
interlinked and need to be studied inclusively to mitigate post-disaster gender dis-
parities. In contrast, Prafulla Mishra (Chap. 3) draws attention to this aspect, arguing
that the media and aid agency coverage of women’s miseries are obsessed with por-
traying them as ‘agents of change’ at the cost of excluding men from
discourses of disaster risk reduction and management, and post-disaster gender
consultations.
In Part 2 of the book on gendered responses, Manjari Mehta (Chap. 5) and Samia
Saad (Chap. 7) respectively highlight the particular vulnerabilities and hardships of
women in the patriarchal sociocultural milieu of Islamic communities affected by the
October 2005 Kashmir earthquake and in the disaster-prone (e.g. droughts, flash
floods, earthquakes, land slides, desertification) Middle East, where women’s subor-
dinate status excludes them from management efforts. Sarah Bradshaw and Brian
Linneker (Chap. 6) provide evidence that in post-Hurricane Mitch Nicaragua, women
who headed households had better access to NGO programmes and income generat-
ing avenues than women in male-headed ones. Lori Peek and Alice Fothergill’s
(Chap. 9) study of post-disaster parenting problems suggest that conflicts between
parents increased in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Azra Sayeed (Chap. 11) takes a
larger view of patriarchal societal gender relations and includes the ‘elite’ Pakistani
state as complicit in the oppression of disaster-affected women – their veiling, con-
finement and absence from public space that inhibited their direct access to relief in
Book reviews 409

general – after the 2005 earthquake in the then North West Frontier Province (now
renamed Khyber Pakhtunkhwa).
Part 3 deals with women’s organized initiatives in the management of disasters. The
case studies in this section provide clear insights into how women’s groups and orga-
nizations (such as the rural Swayam Shikshsan Prayog and Self-Employed Women’s
Association in India, and the Women’s Coalition for Disaster Management in Sri Lanka)
address issues of violence, livelihoods, childcare and health in the event of a disaster.
Adelia Branco (Chap. 20) explains how rural–urban migration is a key response of men
and women to drought conditions in Brazil, and distinguishes between the disaster
experiences of the women who stay back and mobilize themselves in rural action groups
to negotiate development, and the women who migrate to improve their status through
waged employment.
The emphasis on mainstreaming gender concerns in disaster risk management in
Part 4 highlights women’s inclusion as risk managers. For example, the chapters by
Enarson (Chap. 24) and Dhar Chakrabarty and Ajinder Walia (Chap. 25) position the
categories of men and women in binary opposition to each other and call for making
post-disaster situations easier for women in terms of access to cash, materials, shelter,
sanitation and health care. However, Cecilia Garcia and Luisa Zuniga (Chap. 21)
emphasize gender as a relational concept and that men and women should not be
considered in isolation (p. 281) in their case study of disaster risk management in
Mexico.
In sum, the book advances the descriptive and simple man/woman binary analytics
of the existing literature to one incorporating gender relations in the scope of analysis.
This could, however, have been enriched with more emphasis on the intersectionality
of gender with other axes of social identity including ethnicity and class (and caste).
Moreover, it would also have benefitted if it had included some examination of the
larger, complex and embedded power structures of the state and civil society within
which disaster management takes place, as well as how negotiation practices by com-
munities and individuals relate to such wider processes.

Kanchan Gandhi
Department of Geography, National University of Singapore

Multiethnic Malaysia: Past, Present and Future Lim Teck Ghee, Alberto Gomes, Azly
Rahman (eds). SIRD (The Strategic Information and Research Development Centre) and MiDAS
(The Malaysian Institute of Development and Asian Studies), Petaling Jaya, 2009, 530 pages
(ISBN 978-983-3782-78-9) (pbk).

This volume offers diverse perspectives on the making of a multiethnic Malaysia from
the colonial to the present era. It represents an independent response from Malaysian
scholars to a government commissioned textbook for an ethnic relations module that is
being introduced at Malaysian universities (p. 1). The volume, the editors’ explain, is
intended as ‘a “counter-hegemonic” body of writing’ on ‘Malaysian history and devel-
opment’ targeted at ‘students, concerned individuals and for Malaysian society as a
whole’ (pp. 1, 2). Such an effort is indeed admirable and appropriate at a time of
heightened ethnoreligious tensions and fierce contestations over interpretations of
ethnic relations in Malaysia today.
410 Book reviews

The volume’s 25 chapters are divided into five parts. Part I, ‘Historical roots of
identity in Malaysia’, focuses on the formation of plural politics during the British
colonial and early Independence eras. Using historical events, the chapters explore how
the foundations of the Malay–non-Malay divide were established, and challenged, by
colonial and local political actors during these earlier eras. Part II, ‘Politics, Economic,
Culture and Identity’, examines the nexus between politics, capitalist economy and
ethnic competition in the postcolonial era. Discussions revolve centrally around the
effects of the New Economic Policy on class and ethnic politics, and cultural anxieties in
Malaysian society. Part III, ‘Education, Culture and Identity’, offers critiques of the
Malaysian schooling and university systems as well as Islamic orthodoxy. Here, con-
tributors take issue with the school curriculum, the University Colleges Act 1971, the
‘Pledge of Loyalty’ (compulsory for all civil servants, including academics) and the
expansion of Islamic law, criticizing them for entrenching ethnic divisions, Malay
supremacy (ketuanan Melayu) and curbing individual rights and freedom. Part IV, ‘Mar-
ginalized Communities, Marginalized Identities’, draws attention to the plight of the
indigenous peoples – the so-called orang asli in Peninsular Malaysia and the ‘natives’ of
Sarawak and Sabah – as well as of foreign workers, who have become the ‘new
economic underclass’ and the country’s new ‘bogeyman’ (p. 407). Part V, ‘Future
Prospects’, speculates on promises as well as challenges ahead as the ideology of Malay
supremacy, Islam and conventional ethnic-based party politics come under increasing
scrutiny by ordinary Malaysians.
Because the volume has taken upon itself the task of offering critical interpreta-
tions of and alternatives to the making of a multiethnic Malaysia, it must therefore be
evaluated on the delivery of this promise. Overall, the volume does well in terms of
putting together a diversity of critical ideas which examine the roots of ethnic divi-
sions and deconstruct conservative and hegemonic ethnic imaginaries and practices in
Malaysia. However, due to a preoccupation with challenging dominant ideologies, the
book misses out on aspects of interethnic cohesion in the course of Malaysian history.
It is only in Part I that we are presented with concrete examples of alternative trans-
ethnic visions such as in the cases of the PUTERA-AMCJA1 Alliance and its ‘People’s
Constitution Proposals’ in the late 1940s (p. 51), and the formation of the Indepen-
dence of Malaya Party (IMP) in 1950, the first multiethnic political party (p. 59).
These two political projects may have failed, but they are important reminders that
there are alternative ways of defining a Malaysian nation which can better include,
integrate and forge common identifications and aspirations amongst all ethnic groups.
Also missing in this volume are the more heartening aspects of interethnic coopera-
tion in everyday Malaysian life. Accounts of such assistance and protection during
major ethnic conflicts such as the May 1969 riots or the more recent Kampung
Medan incident2 could have been commissioned for the volume. Recovering lived
experiences of interethnic conviviality and compassion, and disseminating these nar-
ratives to the Malaysian public can effectively undermine bureaucratic definitions of
ethnic difference, segregation and distrust.
What would also have made this volume stronger is a tight overarching framework
to pull the five different sections together and provide cogent explications of central
problems and viable alternatives to multiethnic integration in Malaysian society. The
looseness in compilation, however, was apparently not unintended. As part of a ‘com-
mitment to diversity and independence in scholarship’ (p. 2), we are told, contributors
had been given complete freedom in deciding on their topics and the contents of their
chapters (p. 1). The result of such liberty is a volume rich in diversity but weaker in
 Book reviews 411

succinct arguments. The difficulty of pulling together such a wide array of themes and
perspectives is evident in the partition of the book into five parts, each with a separate
introduction. A volume with an avowed purpose to promote alternative understandings
of ethnic relations for future generations must provide cogent analyses and visions to
attract and effectively steer its intended audience away from hegemonic and conserva-
tive interpretations. In sacrificing coherence to diversity, the book may have lost an
opportunity to make an efficient intervention.

Endnotes

1 PUTERA refers to Pusat Tenaga Rakyat and AMCJA to the All Malaya Council for Joint
Action.
2 In 2006, for example, a public controversy erupted over representations of the March 2001
Kampung Medan incident in an ethnic relations module which was taught at University Putra
Malaysia – see further at http://www.bernama.com.my/bernama/v3/printable.php?id=209345
(last accessed September 2010).

Goh Beng Lan

Southeast Asian Studies Programme, University of Singapore

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