Dynamics of Religion in Southeast Asia: Magic and ModernityVolker Gottowik, ed.Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2014, 338p.This edited volume is an integrated and carefully edited collection of informed and ethnographically rich chapters on relationships between and modernity. For me strength of volume rests in its detailed ethnographies of spirituality and ritual action. The several chapters emerged from a scientific network of early career researchers focusing on theme of Religious Dynamics in Southeast Asia. It was supported initially by German Research Foundation over a period of four years, and then from 2011 project was continued, expanded, and translated into a competence network financed by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). The book gives expression to scholarly work undertaken by primarily German-based researchers from universities of Frankfurt am Main (Birgit Brauchler, Volker Gottowik), Freiburg (Melanie V. Nertz, Judith Schlehe), Gottingen (Peter J. Braunlein, Paul Christensen, Michael Dickhardt), Heidelberg (Susanne Rodemeier, Guido Sprenger), and Ruprecht-Karls- Universitat, Heidelberg (Annette Hornbacher), along with coordinator of BMBF-funded network, Karin Klenke, Thomas A. Reuter at University of Melbourne, and Martin Slama at Austrian Academy of Sciences.The research, in part at least, refers back to pioneering Weberian-inspired studies of Clifford Geertz on Java and Bali and his conceptualization of as a cultural system, and appropriately in a German context, to Max Weber's masterpieces in sociology of religion. In this connection Volker Gottowik's book grapples with a major issue which engaged Geertz and Weber and that is relationship and interaction between and modernity. These issues were taken up in various conceptually differentiated ways by Talal Asad in his Genealogies of Religion (1993), and in an Indonesian context by among others Andrew Beatty (1999), John R. Bowen (2003), Robert W. Hefner (1985), Webb Keane (1997), and Mark R. Woodward (1989; 2011). The volume investigates the specific forms that modernity is assuming in Southeast Asia through creative adaptations, which pertain not least to religion (p. 13), but it confirms that West is a symbol but not a model of modernity (p. 172).All chapters, in various intriguing ways, examine religious or spiritual responses to processes which are generating multiple, plural, regional, parallel, or modernities and in particular reactions to generalized processes of commodification, secularization, rationalization, homogenization, and standardization. There is also a clear concern with exercise of agency and forms and patterns of interaction between human and non-human or supernatural world.The volume demonstrates in ample ethnographic detail that there has been a range of spiritual responses in Southeast Asia which engage with, resist, negotiate, and transform Weberian modernization-religion prospectus; these counterpoints embrace what volume collectively refers to as covering such beliefs and practices as witchcraft, sorcery, possession, trance, faith-healing, and ancestor and spirit worship. These magical responses give expression to ambiguity, but also serve to subvert and resist processes of modernization (p. 22); they also act to defend, reinterpret, rejuvenate, and revitalize what is referred to, perhaps somewhat misleadingly, as tradition. In addition to magic other set of responses to modernization are embodied in variants of Islamic reformism which perceives modernity as multilayered, contradictory and contested (p. 26). Several of chapters also examine ways in which state intervenes in and attempts to control and direct religious life. …