Acting Authoritatively: How Authority Is Expressed through Social Action among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Acting Authoritatively: How Authority Is Expressed through Social Action among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo Reed L. Wadley (bio) Acting Authoritatively: How Authority Is Expressed through Social Action among the Bentian of Indonesian Borneo. By Kenneth Sillander. SSKH Skrifter 17. Finland: Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, 2004. x, 388 pp. As the title suggests, the main focus of this book is on authority among the Bentian, a small Dayak group within the broader "Luangan" ethnic cluster in southeast Kalimantan. The revised version of Sillander's Ph.D. thesis at the University of Helsinki, the book still has that "thesis" feel to it — detail upon detail accompanied by heavy theoretical aims structuring the narrative, with citations and qualifications left and right to cover every conceivable challenge from an examination committee. However, in this case, that is not necessarily a bad thing: the detail concerning this little-known group of people is rich, relevant and well-described, providing an important source for comparative studies in kinship, religion, and politics. In addition, Sillander reminds us of the contribution that studies on Borneo can make to theoretical concerns, as his use of (for example) Pierre Bourdieu and Max Weber reveals. Consonant with his focus on social action, Sillander deals with authority as "a capacity to influence or authorize people's actions or views" (p. 7, original emphasis) and how authority operates through communication between people, with mutual influence being created between the super- and subordinate. Authority does not end there, however, as it is also a process generated by people to enable their own actions, rather than just influence others. Indeed, this "self-authorization" forms an important theme in the book. Sillander's focus thus puts us squarely into the motivations of socially embedded agents producing both "free-floating" and "objectified" authority; that is, authority that is not tied to institutions or personalities and authority that is "consciously perceived as authoritative or authorizing" (p. 13). Following his theory-laden introductory chapter, including the obligatory "description of fieldwork" (which I have always found [End Page 133] useful) with all the standard caveats about representation and representativeness, the author leads us through a morass of comparative ethnographic and historical detail concerning the Bentian and the wider Luangan ethno-linguistic complex. Here we find the Bentian situated regionally and historically, and thereafter described in terms of subsistence and commercial pursuits (particularly regarding the roles of rice and rattan), land tenure, dwellings and settlement patterns. (Here Sillander briefly considers the Bentian as a Levi-Straussian "house" society, another now ubiquitous fixture of Southeast Asian ethnography.) Because of this detail, anyone considering undertaking field research in this area would do well to read this chapter, as Sillander pulls together a host of sometimes hard-to-find material, presenting it in a clear and logical fashion. But at 84 pages long, this chapter could easily have been cut in half, with the historical/regional material in one and the ethnographic in another. In the next three chapters, Sillander gets down to business, dealing with authority from the perspectives of kinship, religion, and politics. It is here that his focus on social action and motivation comes to life, with richly detailed case studies that illustrate his theoretical points. In the chapter on kinship authority (that is, that authority derived from local social relations), the author first provides a basic background on Bentian social and kinship organization, including a list of kin terms in an appendix once standard in ethnographies. (I would, however, caution against such lists — with terms defined according to an explicit "genealogical grid" — as their now fixed structures may derive more from the method used to elicit them than how people actually employ them in social life.) The meat of the chapter revolves around the story of a young Bentian man, his social travails centring on competing obligations to kin and in-laws and the strategies each side used in its push-and-pull struggle to define the man's post-marital residence and thus also lay claim to his labour. Sillander concludes that "notions of relatedness and obligations toward relatives constitute sources of authority which can effectively be used to restrict the autonomy...