Content area
Full Text
Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Edited by AIHWA ONG and MICHAEL G. PELETZ. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 309 pp. $16.00.
Scholars of Southeast Asia often describe gender relations in the region as relatively equal or complementary, but the introduction to this fine collection of essays asserts that this premise should be explored rather than presumed. The editors array these explorations in three tiers according to whether the focus remains at the local level, moves to consider the impact of the state, or expands further to take in transnational forces such as migration and political movements. In none of these tiers are the dimensions of gender hierarchy easy to discern. For one thing, as Peletz avers, "gender as a distinctive subject of study 'in and of itself is altogether untenable" (p. 79). Contributors to this volume describe gender as hopelessly entangled at the local level with kinship, household norms, class and prestige, and at wider levels with state policies, religious orthodoxies, and a world economy. They describe gender as an unfinished process rather than a social structure. Pat conclusions about gender hierarchy and the status of women elude us, as the details of the ethnography reveal instead only the "indeterminacy and ambivalent nature of gendering processes" (p. 10).
Even local ideologies of gender can be contradictory. Two essays (by Jennifer Krier and Evelyn Blackwood) deal with Indonesia's Minangkabau, the world's largest matrilineal society. Blackwood suggests that the state's (and Islam's) recognition of men as household heads is...