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REASON AND PASSION: Representations of Gender in Malay Society. By Michael G. Peletz. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 1996. xiii, 402 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$50.00, cloth, ISBN 0-520-20069-1; US$20.00, paper, ISBN 0-520-20070-5.
TOGETHER with Aihwa Ong, Michael Peletz co-edited last year's superb volume on gender in Southeast Asia, Bewitching Women, Pious Men (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). This book presents the detailed ethnographic research which underpins his contribution to that collective effort. Reason and Passion is a classic, nuanced ethnographic work addressing unresolved debates in anthropology and gender studies.
Peletz presents a political economy of gendering as the production of a contested set of symbols, meanings and practices. His case study is set in a community in rural Negeri Sembilan that practices both Islam and matrilineal descent. Thus his analysis explores gender in the ambivalent intersections where "official" Islamic ideology and the Malay practices of...