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Small Sacrifices: Religious Change and Cultural Identity among the Ngaju of Indonesia. By Anne Schiller. (New York: Oxford University Press, z997. xii + r78 pp., introduction, maps, illustrations, bibliography, index. $45.0o cloth, $18.95 paper.)
Small Sacrifices combines an ethnographic depiction of secondary burial practices and the costs of the ritual sacrifices associated with them, along with a discussion of how these practices have become a focus for contested issues of identity among the Ngaju as a result of the Indonesian New Order that emerged during the Suharto administration. The "small" in the book's title is intended to express the irony of the situation. The "sacrifices" are costly, in terms of material goods, for the participants. The new bureaucratic council that has been put in charge of religious affairs for the Ngaju has declared that this practice should be stopped, because "now we live in an era of small sacrifices" (I24). Anne Schiller poses the question, in her examination of the situation, whether the funerary ritual itself will disappear in the future, becoming "a small sacrifice on the road to development" (I46).
One of the book's strengths is its dual insistence on in-depth ethnography and an awareness, paralleled by that of the author's major informants, of historical change. Tiwah, the elaborate forms of secondary burial among the Ngaju that have been described by Douglas Miles and Hans Scharer, have recently been inserted into the context of a...