Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning

Abstract

American Anthropologist • Vol. 106, No. 4 • December 2004 (in Hong Kong); and origami, tea ceremony, and festivals (in France). Again, the treatment often has a twist. For exam- ple, Sabine Fr¨ uhst¨ uck and Wolfram Manzenreiter, tracing the history of judo in Austria, conclude that it has become impossible to identify any clear center or national essence of this martial art. World judo no longer belongs to Japan; instead, as they put it, judo now belongs to the world— including Japan. Other chapters enter more unfamiliar and sometimes eye-opening territory. Gordon Mathews assesses the incom- patible perspectives of Japanese visitors and Hong Kong citizens during the city’s turbulent 1996 demonstrations over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands. Roger Goodman surveys the invocation of the Japanese “welfare model” in British political debates of the late 20th century. Seung-Mi Han shows the effect of Koreans’ “bifurcated perception” of Japan—as a conduit for Western modernity and as a colo- nial oppressor—on recent debates over the importation of Japanese consumer and media products. Chih-huei Huang presents riveting, at times hair-raising, excerpts from oral narratives of the Takasago volunteers, Taiwanese Austrone- sians who served in the Japanese army during World War II. To this day, many of the veterans assert, with a mixture of fervor, pride, and bitterness, that they are “truer Japanese than the Japanese” (p. 235). The provocative case studies in Globalizing Japan ultimately raise an important general question. To what degree does approaching globalization in terms of nations narrow our vision? Is it “Japan,” or “Hong Kong,” or “Korea” that is doing, or experiencing, the globalizing? The issue, obliquely addressed in a number of the chapters, surfaces most overtly in the book’s keenest chapter, Julia Adeney Thomas’s discussion of contemporary Japanese photography as received in the United States. In her inci- sive treatment of four distinctive Japanese photographers and their work, Thomas strongly criticizes the curatorial and critical view that “Japanese essence precedes an artist’s existence” (p. 141). Thomas distrusts the notion that expressive creations carry national trademarks. Although she focuses on high art, her main point, that a theory of globalization must question hackneyed categories through attention to ethnographic particularities, historical con- tingencies, ideational crosscurrents, and even personal idiosyncrasies, has wide relevance. This absorbing book is an invitation to further studies that heed her prescription. Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropol- ogy of Public Reasoning. John R. Bowen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 289 pp. BILL MAURER University of California, Irvine In the context of today’s U.S. political and religious debates over whether the institution of marriage demands two op- posite sex partners, it is refreshing to read an account of the complex interplay of individual strategy and multiple and overlapping normative orders. These factors are continu- ally ungrounding and revising marriage, gender, and family in what is perhaps the United States’s contemporary dop- pelganger: Indonesia. Multiethnic; multireligious; multicul- tural; linguistically diverse; grappling with the limits of plu- ralism, tolerance, and civic inclusion; and rife with political corruption, Indonesia presents to the United States a mirror reflecting a majority-Muslim, instead of majority-Christian, face. Indeed, what strikes the reader of John Bowen’s lu- cid, informative, and richly illustrated account of the emer- gence of a public and Islamic justice is the unending and cacophonous character of contemporary legal debate there. Shot through with shifting conceptions of reasonableness, consensus, and a notion of jurisprudence as living, not static, the Indonesian scene described by Bowen contrasts sharply with the tired polarizations and unreflective “argu- ments” that often pass for legal reasoning here. This is not to romanticize the Indonesian situation—Bowen’s text is filled with injustices, inequalities, the histories of colonialism and dictatorship followed by ethnic and sectarian violence, and the centripetal tendencies of the post–New Order state— but, rather, to reflect on what can be gained, still, from an ethnographic inquiry into legal reasoning someplace else. Bowen has a related project in mind: Although the book explicitly engages Western political theory—specifically, theories of liberal pluralism and multicultural democracy— it is more centrally concerned with challenging a prevailing image of Islamic law in the West (p. 19). Bowen wants to demonstrate “the breadth of Islamic sociolegal reasoning” (p. 146). Far from portraying Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) as static and fixed, Bowen emphasizes the muddle, the falli- bility, and the thickly interpretative work involved in ne- gotiating the multiple sources of law in Islam (p. 15). At another level of scale, this muddle and multiple sources reflect the Indonesian legal scene, in which colonial crys- tallizations of “customary law,” or adat, intertwine with Islamic and national law as resources for reasoning and ar- gument. At still another level of scale, Bowen shows how Indonesia and anthropology both trouble multicultural lib- eralism, not merely by pointing to its culture-bound char- acter but by introducing these problems of perspective and scale. Indonesian pluralism is after all “internalized”: Among the constituent peoples that make it up, “a con- sciousness of other societies [is] at the core of each society’s self-definition” (p. 12). The same could be said of anthropol- ogy, of course. If there is a recursivity to Bowen’s argument, it is because it reflects the recursivity of both its object of study—“Indonesia”—and its disciplinary formation within which the argument is made—“anthropology.” This is a rich story of Indonesian legal history. Bowen charts the Dutch colonial state’s definition of adat as a coun- terweight to Islam, and the Indonesian state’s efforts to limit Islamic law to those instances in which it has been “re- ceived into” adat (p. 48–51). Islamic law fell into a temporal contradiction: To be considered local custom, Islamic law had to “become the general way of doing things,” which would require its being upheld by local courts, which were