Since the earliest days of Western exploration and trade in Southeast Asia, there have been rumors of ferocious cannibals in the interior of northern Sumatra. With the increase in commercial traffic through the Straits of Malacca in the eighteenth century, the reports became more detailed, but also more confusing: it was revealed that these inland people, the Bataks, had their own systems of law and religion, and, more perplexing for many European scholars, their own writing system based on ancient Sanscrit. This apparent paradox was of great philosophical import for these Enlightenment thinkers, for these were not noble savages but rather "lettered cannibals." This paper will briefly review some of the arguments and discussions that arose during this time, and how they were, in a fashion, resolved. More importantly, it will trace the extraordinary persistence of the rumor of cannibalism among one sub-group, the Toba Bataks. By looking at a variety of early travelogues, adventure books, and missionary reports, this paper will show that hearsay and innuendo have far outweighed factual data in the presentation of evidence supporting reports of cannibalism. Contemporary works, such as tourist guidebooks, will be used to show that the power of the rumor has not waned in the twentieth century, despite the fact that the majority of Toba Bataks converted to Christianity in the 1910s and 1920s. The paper will conclude by investigating some of the possible reasons for the tenaciousness of the rumor of cannibalism.

Martin Ramstedt, International Institute for Asian Studies

The paper will present results of the three-year project "Negotiating Identities—‘Hinduism’ in Modern Indonesia," which I have been pursuing as an European Science Foundation research fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden, The Netherlands, since December, 1997. The presentation will focus on the development of "Hinduism" since 1950, when the unitary Indonesian state had finally emerged out of a prolonged anti-colonial struggle. Since the values of the three ideological strands within the Indonesian independence movement (Islam, Secular Nationalism, Communism) were integrated into the "pancasila-philosophy," the "civil religion" of the new nation state, "Belief in the One and Almighty God," "development of a national culture" as the basis of a "national identity" as well as "social justice" achieved by the implementation of a modernist, anti-traditionalist model of "Indonesian society" were to become the core doctrines of the political creed of the Indonesian government. Modern Indonesian "Hinduism" started off as a cultural and religious reform movement in Bali, redefining local tradition along the lines of the national core doctrines. From the mid-1960s onwards, it "spilled over" to other islands: Java (Tengger, kejawen, kebatinan), South Sulawesi (Aluk To Dolo, Ada’ Mappurondo, Tolotang), North Sumatra (Pemena), Central Kalimantan (Kaharingan), and recently also Maluku. The paper will examine whether and how Indonesian reform-"Hinduism" has been successful as an agent of modernity and Indonesianisation vis-à-vis local tradition, ethnicity, and alternative forms of globalized religion.

Melissa J. Pashigian, University of California, Los Angeles

Although infertility is not an integral part of the national family planning program efforts in Vietnam, deficient fertility is equally salient if not more socially significant than excess fertility, particularly in the context of marital relationships. This paper discusses the impact of involuntary childlessness and infertility on marriage in northern Vietnam and explores how, in their quest for a child, infertile couples at times alter rules that order social relationships and that assume reproductive inevitability. The reasons for having children in northern Vietnam combine vestiges of traditional cultural ritual such as ancestor worship and descent practices with personal desire to construct sentiment (tinh cam) and emotion in the conjugal unit for the purpose of creating family stability and harmony. The consequences of involuntary childlessness include disruption of personal relationships that can result in marital disorder such as divorce, and separation among other circumstances. However, some couples find ways of adapting seemingly rigid rituals, social structures and kinship constructs to their personal situations, evocative of the malleability of cultural practice, but still in an effort to conform to a seemingly normative majority.

Robert A. Dayley, Oglethorpe University

The December 1999 scheduled release of Anna and the King (Twentieth Century Fox and Farang Films, Ltd.) will heighten existing controversy surrounding the film and its well-known story. Numerous questions arise in relation to this controversy: What distortions of history will the firm perpetuate or dispel? How will Thai and non-Thai audiences react to its release? How will the film affect Thailand’s international image? Such questions normally surface when new artistic productions of Anna Leonowens’s memoirs are released. Yet other serious questions exist at a more political level: Is the persistent government censorship of this story more insulting to Thais than the story’s historical inaccuracies? Is the issue merely about government censorship or Thailand’s laws of lèse-majesté? Should laws of lèse-majesté exist in modern democracies where sovereign power belongs to the people? This paper seeks to generate discussion on this sensitive topic and explores how Thailand is reconciling the existing principle of lèse-majesté with its deepening practice of democracy under its new constitution. It argues that the significance of the Anna and the King controversy lies beyond the issues of historical interpretation, censorship, and Thailand’s international image, but in the realm of the political legitimization. At stake is the durability of Thai democracy and its new constitution. At issue is whether or not the current regime will ever fully be legitimized, as are the most successful democracies, through the acceptance of democratic political processes rather than on the basis of extra-democratic normative goals, personal authority, performance, or other less durable rationales.

Nitish Jha, Brandeis University

In Bali, Indonesia, wet-rice cultivation is not only an agora-economic process but is also profoundly social and religious. Balinese rice farmers band together in associations called subak. A subak’s complex social organization and corporate nature derive from its members’ control over the water in an irrigation system. Members include landowners, mortgagees, tenant farmers and sharecroppers of plots that lie in the same set of fields. Based on analysis of field data, I assert that there is no homogeneous organization which can be called "the subak" (Geertz 1980, Lansing 1991). Rather, subak is dichotomous in terms of their social organization, being made up of two overlapping but non-isomorphic associations. Work connected with irrigation is usually done by groups of tillers who constitute the "water subak." A separate group, the "ritual subak," prepares for ceremonies in the main irrigation temple. Its membership is determined by several factors: the need to spread financial responsibility equally across subak subdivisions as well as the existence of complex asset and ritual tenure arrangements and their concomitant bundles of rights and duties.