fact, adopted a narrowly legalistic, black-andwhite, conservative position regarding Islam" (p. 224). I find Baharuddin's judgment in this regard too sweeping, for I believe that one should distinguish between the scientific method (which does not necessarily lead to the position Baharuddin describes) and the way science is taught in Muslim countries. Peletz focuses the reader's attention on the notion of ambivalence in exploring the way ordinary Muslims have related to Islamic resurgence. He argues that Islam is central to the identities of Malaysia's ordinary Muslims, although these same people are "extremely ambivalent and hostile toward the [resurgence] movement" (p. 265). This ambivalence is more intense in rural Malaysia, where some long-established rituals have been discredited by Islamists while the beliefs informing these rituals still retain their influence. In their chapters, McKenna and Horvatich treat issues of Muslim identity and reform in the Philippines. McKenna argues that the development of a Philippine Muslim identity transcending ethnolinguistic and geographical boundaries was stimulated and nurtured by the U.S. colonial state. This uniform identity was appropriated by elite politicians, the armed Muslim separatist movement, and the ulama (religious scholars). Meanwhile, ordinary Muslims resist a homogenized Islam. In dealing with Islamic reform, Horvatich takes readers to a rural setting where she explores Islam among the Sama of Simunul Island. She grapples with the issue of reform through the activity of the Ahmadiyya, a heterodox reformist group founded in the late 19th century in India. Despite their persecution in the Muslim world, the Ahmadis have worked tirelessly to propagate their brand of Islam. Those Sama who joined the Ahmadis were attracted by the group's modernist appeal. Horvatich underscores the important role education plays in promoting Islamic reform by providing college-educated groups with ideological weapons to contest traditional Islamic understandings and practices. In sum, this volume is an important and timely contribution to Southeast Asian and Islamic studies. The authors provide rich portraits of complex relationships in which Islam and the nation-state play crucial roles. I found the book's most important contribution in how it highlights the discourses of ordinary Muslims who tend to be neglected in discussions on Islam.
The Chiapas Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy. NEIL HARVEY. Durham, IMC: Duke University Press, 1998. xviii + 292 pp., tables, maps, photographs, appendix, notes, bibliography, index. NORA IIAENN Arizona State University In January 1994, the Ejercito Zapatista de Liberacion Nacional, a peasant army in Mexico's southern State of Chiapas, chose the first day of the implementation of NAFTA to protest various abuses perpetuated by the federal government. The Zapa-
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tistas captured a number of radio stations and occupied government buildings, surprising much of the world and not a few anthropologists. After reading Neil Harvey's Chiapas Rebellion, I wondered why anyone was surprised. Beginning in the 1960s, Harvey details decades of painstaking peasant organizing in Chiapas that contributed to the Zapatista's formation as a response to both acute agrarian problems and a refusal by state authorities to commit to peaceful resolutions to these problems. In recounting these problems and highlighting struggles marked by repeated betrayals and assassinations, Harvey makes sense of the Zapatista uprising and examines what the uprising might suggest for future relations between Mexico's government and civil society. In the months following January, 1994, the Zapatistas showed a sophisticated handling of the news media and formed alliances with a number of civic organizations. In time, their military activities became secondary to a civilian strategy. Harvey argues that these events present an innovation in Mexican politics, and he uses a history of peasant organizing in Chiapas to make his point. Organizing of the 1960s and 1970s was aimed at gaining concessions from the state, especially in the form of land grants and agricultural credit; and Harvey specifies pressure tactics that included marches on the state and national capital, hunger strikes, land occupations, and negotiations with government officials. Throughout this time, independent peasant groups struggled with possible co-optation of their leaders by government agents as well as co-optation of a whole sector of the farming population organized within a government-sponsored peasant organization. Groups independent of the government bore the brunt of governmental repression. Throughout the 1980s, governors of Chiapas were cited by human rights groups as tolerating, if not encouraging, human rights abuses. In this atmosphere, the Zapatistas originally formed as a self-defense group. The group's organizers drew on lessons of past repression by establishing a diffuse power structure in which no single leader might become identifiable as a target for assassination. They also drew on the organizational tactics of peasant groups and political consciousness raising sponsored by the Catholic Church (see chapter 2). In a general way, Harvey describes how members in base communities met to discuss community problems and to direct the actions of Zapatista leadership. In a significant departure from previous peasant groups, women held prominent positions of authority within the Zapatistas, and the group provided a space for women "to demand equal participation in their homes, communities, organizations, and nation" (p. 223). In 1992, Zapatista communities began to voice support for military action. They did not press for a military solution because, as Harvey notes, one of the Zapatistas' innovations is that, rather than advocating a particular political ideology, they have demanded a space in which a variety of ideologies might find expression. In particular, the Zapatistas have pressed the federal government for recognition of indigenous rights and respect for different political traditions. Harvey describes how these
positions threaten authoritarian and neocolonial tendencies in Mexico's governing structures. Government responses to the Zapatistas have included an increased military presence in the State of Chiapas and weak support for peace negotiations. A stalemate in peace negotiations coincided with increasing agrarian problems as many farmers took advantage of the Zapatista uprising to conduct land invasions. These farmers have been attacked by private paramilitary groups sponsored by the owners of large estates, paramilitary groups which often act in the company of state police. Following these events, government funds to buy land for redistribution tended to end up in the bank accounts of the elite, including those of the head of the State Department of Agrarian Affairs. Considering these problems, Harvey's conclusions are not optimistic; but he does view the Zapatistas as a voice for political inclusiveness in these days of a changing Mexican political system. Anthropologists unfamiliar with Harvey's base in political science might have a few reservations about the book. I would have liked greater elaboration of his methodology to elucidate the circumstances under which the author interviewed peasant leaders on sensitive topics. Also, Harvey's account of the Zapatista uprising and internal organization draws largely on the group's own publications. This approach limits his interrogation of the Zapatistas's self-presentation and affects his treatment of ethnicity. The Zapatistas claim their success has a cultural basis in the adoption of indigenous views of history and politics, as well as the fact that they "emerged out of la montaha [uninhabited forest], that magical world inhabited by the whole of Mayan history" (p. 166). Harvey's institutional approach limits his ability to explore the content of these views and how they contribute to the Zapatistas' innovations. In general, the role of ethnicity in Chiapas's agrarian politics remains underanalyzed. Harvey mainly focuses on the life-threatening work of grassroots political organizers as well as the institutional histories of various peasant groups. One marvels at the persistence of these organizers in the face of overwhelming odds. Readers will take from Harvey's book stories of great personal courage, as in the actions of a prison guard who organized protection for jailed peasant leaders against police who tried to beat the prisoners. The Chiapas Rebellion provides a localized picture of events that continue to frame Mexico's national politics as well as reform movements elsewhere in the Americas. As such, it makes important reading for those interested in Latin America, new social movements, and agrarian issues.
The Temple of Memories: History, Power, and Morality In a Chinese Village. JUN JING. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. vili + 217 pp., notes, references, character list, index. China's Catholics: Tragedy and Hope in an Emerging Civil Society. RICHARD MADSEN. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. xii + 183 pp., illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.
SHARON A. CARSTENS Portland State University These two studies, the first involving China's oldest religion—ancestor worship—and the second on Catholicism, share certain common themes. The two also provide interesting contrasts in their interpretations of religious practices and social transformations in contemporary China. Both authors seek to understand, among other things, the causes and effects of the resurgent interest in religion in China since the end of Mao Zedon's rule in 1976. Yet, their studies lead to rather different conclusions. While Jun Jing portrays the reconstruction of a Confucian tomple in a Gansu village as a valuable social instrument for reclaiming local memories in a state that has insisted on its own historical interpretation, Richard Madsen concludes that rural Chinese Catholicism breeds factionalism and antimodern attitudes that hamper the construction of civil society in China. Although these two views are, to a large extent, products of the two authors' approaches and the particularities of their research topics, the broader scope and scholarly maturity that Madsen brings to his discussion of Chinese Catholicism makes his interpretation particularly compelling. In The Temple of Memories, Jing, a native of the People's Republic of China and a Harvard-trained anthropologist, weaves his ethnographic account of the reconstruction of a Confucian temple in Gansu around the theme of social memory. Several features of his research site, Dachuan, make this approach particularly fruitful. A large majority (85 percent) of Dachuan residents are surnamed Kong, and like other Kongs in China, consider themselves descendants of Confucius. In making claims to this status, they have compiled genealogies, performed complex rituals of ancestor worship, and constructed their own Confucian temple. Jing explores how each activity constructs and conveys a particular type of social memory. As elsewhere in rural China, the recurring sociopolitical campaigns of the Mao years significantly altered local social relationships, creating personal memories that have been difficult to deal with publicly. This situation was aggravated in Dachuan by the loss of village lands, properties, and ancestral graves to floods unleashed by large-scale dam construclion in the early 1960s. For resettled Dachuan villagers, memories ,ire all that survive of their former homes. Jing interprets the rebuilding of Dachuan's Confucian temple as a means for Kong villagers to make sense of their troubled experience under Mao Zedong's rule and the social changes of the post-Mao era (p. 12).
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