Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities

Civilizing the Margins: Southeast Asian Government Policies for the Development of Minorities is a comprehensive survey of minority policies amongst contemporary Southeast Asian governments, primarily from an anthropological point of view. The nine chapters cover the issue of producing modernity amongst the minority and ethnically marginalized communities embedded within Southeast Asian states, the assimilation (and paradoxically further marginalization) of the Orang Asli peoples of Malaysia, the issues of land tenure and autonomy amongst Philippine minorities, changing Indonesian state policies towards its indigenous minorities, the ambiguous social and citizenship status of the so-called “hill tribes” of northern Thailand, the role of the military in the “development” of the border regions of Burma, the problem of the social and political location of ethnic minorities in socialist Vietnam and the parallel position of minorities in neighboring Laos and the status of ethnic minorities in Cambodia.

Many of the papers that constitute the book were originally presented at a panel at the 1998 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, and have clearly been carefully and thoroughly revised for the present volume, there being none of the patchiness which often mars books that have begun their life as conference proceedings. On the contrary, the quality of the papers is uniformly high, and while the book does not purport to be an encyclopedia of ethnic issues in Southeast Asia (the particular problems of East Malaysia, the Indians of Singapore and Malaysia, the Chinese in Brunei for example are not addressed), within its self-defined scope the book provides an authoritative, very well documented and uniformly well written volume that should be in every library dealing with Southeast Asia, ethnic relations, and state-minority problems. A major strength of the book as a whole is that it manages to combine up to date ethnographic reportage with a high level of theorization of state-minority issues, without, fortunately, allowing the theoretical apparatus to obscure the facts on the ground as it were.