Rebellion and repression in the Philippines. By Richard J. Kessler. pp. xii, 227. New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1989. US $30.00, £22.50.

Abstract

Moreover, either in principle or in practice, houses or clans in eastern Indonesia may sometimes be involved in symmetrical marital exchanges. In consequence, I find figures 1 and 5b a gross over-simplification, in places technically incorrect, and probably very misleading. Finally, there is the assertion of methodological integrity. This "is an essay about 'Us ' meeting 'Them'" (p. 26), in which the author is mercifully happy to seek accuracy, while abhorring objectivity. Given such lofty claims, the vagueness of some of the statements and the mis-use of the comparative method is surprising. The book opens, for example, with a description of birth ritual which, while incorporating the device of direct selective quotation from fieldnotes which one supposes is deemed to confer privileged authority then proceeds to generalise and interpolate commentary. What are we to make of this? Are the generalisations derived from the extracts presented? Are there other notes on the same subject of which this is a distillation, or have secondary sources been employed? Is there garbling going-on? I am not sure. I mention these things only because the author herself has made a virtue of a particular kind of integrity: the claim to inside knowledge. Surprising also, in view of this, is the selfconscious stylishness of the text. We must "not import alien ideas" (p. 238) says Professor Errington, while all the while "snorkeling" texts (p. 12) and making much of elaborate ethnocentric culinary metaphors involving souffle pans and cookie trays. If even this author errs, perhaps there is no alternative. Behind all the pretension we have here in literary terms an undeniably well-written book by an author with a lively imagination, who is clearly nobody's fool and much taken to meditating with effect on the seminal ideas of others. There are important insights, and no doubt her confident models of "centrist" and "Eastern Indonesian" societies will get some mileage. But as ethnography it is fatally partial and inconsistent in terms set by the author herself. At the general level, at which it purports to have some relevance, it repeats a number of anthropological commonplaces while actually telling us little that is new.