Review

Reviewed Work(s): The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing
Community by Janet Carsten: The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a
Maritime Fishing Society of South-eastern Sabah by Clifford Sather
Review by: Susan D. Russell
Source: The Journal of Asian Studies , Aug., 1998, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Aug., 1998), pp. 900-
902
Published by: Association for Asian Studies

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2658808

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900 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

such that readers who are not themselves knowledgeable of these events will find the
array of names, dates, and acronyms difficult to follow. A more serious difficulty is
that despite frequent references to Arabic texts and Sunni Muslim theological
concepts, the book does not include a systematic discussion of the doctrinal
foundations of NU. This is a problem because, as all of the authors observe, it is
impossible to fully understand the politics of NU without paying serious attention
to the religious concepts on which the organization is based.

MARK R. WOODWARD
Arizona State University

The Heat of the Hearth: The Process of Kinship in a Malay Fishing Community.
By JANET CARSTEN. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. 314 pp.
$75.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper).

The Bajau Laut: Adaptation, History, and Fate in a Maritime Fishing Society of
South-eastern Sabah. By CLIFFORD SATHER. New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997. 359 pp. $70.00.

Studies of the maritime history of insular Southeast Asian polities have tended to
provide rich cultural insights into the social and political relations that existed
between centers and peripheries. Surprisingly, these trends in historical scholarship
have not been matched by an equally rich set of detailed ethnographic studies of
maritime communities in the region. The two books that are reviewed here, then, are
especially welcome not only because they provide important insights into some of the
unique facets of coastal communities but also because they attempt to link the
particularities of kinship and geographic mobility to the larger maritime historical
literature.
Janet Carsten's analysis of kinship in a fishing community in Langkawi off the
west coast of Malaysia concerns the different ways in which women play a central role
in the domestic politics of everyday life. Based principally on fieldwork in the early
1980s and a briefer study in 1988, her study is concerned with three themes pertaining
to the construction of kinship. First, she shows that kinship is best understood as a
process that enables outsiders to be incorporated as kin through a variety of
mechanisms including feeding, living together in one house, fostering of children,
and marriage. Through these processes, outsiders can become kin and the "difference
which marks the outside world can be negated by subsuming it to, and incorporating
it into, the uniformity and similarity which constitute domestic life" (p. 12). Her
second theme stresses the central role women play in this process of incorporation.
She argues that the symbolic reproduction of the community occurs largely through
the activities in which women dominate, as wider neighborhood and village groupings
are in many ways modeled on an extension of the 'house' (p. 13). Third, she relates
the way that villagers continually assert their similarity and equality, despite their
diverse geographical origins, to larger themes concerning the nature of the Southeast
Asian state. In particular, she argues that the high degree of demographic mobility
among people at the bottom of the social hierarchy or at the periphery interacted to
produce kinship structures that emphasized the creation of new kin ties and the
incorporation of migrants rather than the remembrance of genealogical or geographic

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 BOOK REVIEWS-SOUTHEAST ASIA 901

ancestry (p. 273). In border regions like Langkawi, which lacked an indigenous
aristocracy and where fishing rather than wet-rice agriculture dominated the economy,
the "coercive nature of kinship incorporation" may have encouraged the establishment
of communities of immigrants where homogeneity and equality were valued above
ideas of hierarchy and difference (pp. 274-75).
Clifford Sather's study of a fishing village in Sabah in Malaysia is based on
fieldwork conducted in 1964-65, with brief return visits in 1974 and 1979. His
ethnographic goal is to analyze the structural and cultural premises that structure
daily life among the Bajau Laut, or sea nomads. His research covers a period of time
when a particular group of Bajau Laut abandoned boat nomadism for a sedentary way
of life in the town of Semporna in Sabah. In the process, they became Muslim and
commercialized household fishers. Much of his book is devoted to analyzing the
developmental history of house groups and their relations with the wider community.
While he provides detailed analyses of kinship and marriage, like Janet Carsten, he
also carefully describes the fishing economy, political structure, and many aspects of
indigenous religious beliefs among the Bajau Laut.
Whereas Carsten relates the findings of her study of kinship to general theories
of the nature of Southeast Asian maritime states, Sather discusses the interactions
between the Sulu Sultanate and the sea nomads, thus situating them historically and
regionally in the area of the southern Philippines and northern Kalimantan. The boat
nomads, who possessed no land of their own and who were not Muslim, nonetheless
played critical trading roles that supported the Sulu state throughout the eighteenth
and early-nineteenth centuries (p. 41). Composed of highly fragmented and
geographically dispersed groups, the Sama-Bajau differentiated themselves by place
of origin and by trade-related specializations. These small groups were ill-suited to
larger-scale political integration, but their very flexibility promoted social and
geographic proliferation. The boat nomads, who identified primarily with the sea
itself, had the "most readily transportable identity" of any Sama-Bajau group (p. 36).
Like Carsten, Sather emphasizes how a high degree of geographic mobility meant
that unrelated newcomers to a community or boat anchorage site were welcomed and
easily incorporated over time through intermarriage (p. 59). For both authors, the
preference for marriage between kin or between members of a geographic locality are
interpreted as social processes that enable more distant kin to be reintegrated as close
cognatic kin. However, whereas Carsten (pp. 4-5) argues that women play a critical
role in the incorporation of outsiders into the social community, Sather emphasizes
the skill of a house group leader in attracting and holding together a following (p.
161). Noting that the Bajau Laut house is not a self-perpetuating group from
generation to generation, owing to the lack of inheritable, durable property, he argues
that each house group takes its identity from its leader. Leaders are usually elder men
who represent the household in its relations with the wider community, particularly
in political and ritual affairs. When women are house group leaders, they too play
these same roles.
In contrast to Sather's emphasis on the agency of (usually male) house group
leaders in holding together a stable house unit, Carsten emphasizes the actions of
women in reproducing household and community solidarity. In order to argue that
female-dominated activities have political importance, she posits an opposition
between the house and siblingship, on the one hand, and exchange relations between
houses, such as those that characterize the commercial fishing economy and marital
transactions. Villagers perceive these latter transactions as "potentially threatening to
domestic harmony and unity-particularly among siblings" (p. 251). Men are

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902 THE JOURNAL OF ASIAN STUDIES

associated with the divisiveness of the outside world through their involvement in
competitive, commercialized fishing and marketing, as well as through their
participation in political and religious disputes. Women are associated with domestic
harmony and the house through their involvement in activities that are not only
domestic, but central to the political process, e.g., cooking meals, child care, running
the household, visiting affines and neighbors, organizing rotating credit associations,
attending feasts, arranging marriages, and participating (along with men) in
cooperative subsistence rice agricultural work groups (p. 18). Women are able to
transform or at least neutralize the products of commercial activity precisely because
they are excluded from fishing and marketing-activities which symbolize a negation
of the values with which women are most closely associated (pp. 153-55).
The limits to this kind of oppositional, structuralist interpretation are especially
vivid when Carsten attempts to inscribe these views into the behavior of real men and
women. There are some logical flaws in arguing that men's participation in fishing is
seen as both 'anti-kinship' and 'anti-community' (p. 148) when almost half of the
two- to four-person crews are composed of or contain close kin (p. 147), when boat
owners divide up the catch according to a share system rather than wages (p. 145),
and when fishing provides the critical source of household economic reproduction.
The argument that women's work in rice production is cooperative (even though
landowners pay wages to nonclosely-related kin) while men (even kin) who work in
commercial fishing are competitive, also seems strained since by her own admission
she did virtually no fieldwork with men (pp. 8, 29). Nor does she provide much
commentary from villagers that support her theoretical oppositions. In this respect,
Sather's argument is more persuasive when he notes that marriage is a "form of social
partnership because of the different and essentially complementary ways in which men
and women employ kin ties in relations of work, leadership and support" (p. 216).
Both of these books are well-written and interesting perspectives on coastal
communities. On the whole, Carsten provides a more sensitive and nuanced, not to
mention theoretically engaged, analysis of the political importance of what women
do in many Southeast Asian villages. Sather's work complements her study in that he
provides a more broad-based set of insights into the world of men and the
ethnographic features of village life. Both authors also stress the significance of sib
ties in the construction of communities. That Carsten marginalizes the significant
economic and political contributions of men to the reproduction, both socially and
symbolically, of fishing communities, simply underscores that our difficulties in
conceptualizing gender in Southeast Asia may rest more with the nature and scope of
our fieldwork (and the gendered role restrictions our informants assign us) than with
our theories of gender complementarity.

SUSAN D. RUSSELL
Northern Illinois University

The Politics of Economic Development in Indonesia: Contending Perspectives. Edited

by IAN CHALMERS and VEDI R. HADIZ. London: Routledge, 1997. xxx,
269 pp. $75.00.

This collection of influential writings on economic development in Indonesia will

be of considerable value to students and specialists alike. Ian Chalmers and Vedi Hadiz
have collected together a representative grouping of essays and extracts which were

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