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Southeast Asia: The Human Landscape of Modernization and Development. By Jonathan Rigg. London: Routledge, 1997. Pp.xxv + 326.45 and 14.99. ISBN 0 415 139201 and 13921 X
The importance of economic change in Southeast Asia to broader debades about development cannot be exaggerated. Home to the `NIC phenomena', it is a region whose shifting economic fortunes have been scrutinised by countless policy advisers, scholars and activists. Mostly, attention has centred on explaining why and how Southeast Asia's `miracle economies' (Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia) developed as they did. The debate was transformed after July 1997 as the region's erstwhile 'tigers' suffered a traumatic economic crisis that jeopardises decades of development. Yet much of this discussion is weak, paradoxically, due to the lack of detailed knowledge about the livelihoods and lifestyles of Southeast Asians themselves.
In Southeast Asia The Human Landscape of Modernization and Development, Jonathan Rigg has written an important work that helps to redress this deficiency. At first glance, the book's date of publication on the eve of the current economic crisis appears inauspicious. It is true that the upbeat tone about the prospect for continued development 'success' (p.273) jars with the present context of economic contraction, political upheaval and intensified poverty. Yet, to dismiss this book for this reason would be to miss...