And the Sun Pursued the Moon: Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority Among the Makassar.

AND THE SUN PURSUED THE MOON: Symbolic Knowledge and Traditional Authority Among the Makassar. By Thomas Gibson. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press. 2005. xi, 262 pp. (Maps, figures.) US$52.00, cloth. ISBN 0-8248-2685-8.

How adequate are anthropological approaches, based on knowledge acquired in fieldwork, for the understanding of traditional systems of knowledge, especially in contexts of complex historical origins, including indigenous written traditions and engagement with cosmopolitan knowledge forms (in this case Islam)? Gibson explores this issue through his analysis of symbolic forms of knowledge and traditional authority of the people of Ara in South Sulawesi, Indonesia, famous for their traditions of boatbuilding: for centuries they have supplied finely crafted wooden boats for long-distance trade in global markets. Beginning from his fieldwork, which included the extensive collection of oral and written traditions (including lontara, Islamic and colonial texts), Gibson embarked on an ambitious translation and interpretation process. Contemporary forms of symbolic knowledge, expressed through ritual performance, can only be understood within a long historical frame and, drawing on the Levi-Straussian assumption, elements of local traditions can be understood as expressing bodies of knowledge and intellectual preoccupations that are revealed through a regional perspective, which identifies a larger pattern over a wider geographical area.

Gibson discerns the structural parameters of Ara mythology through a comparative analysis that draws on cognate myths from other parts of Sulawesi and the Indonesian archipelago. The elements he identifies reflect fundamental Austronesian binary contrasts of male/sky/sun/Upperworld and female /water/moon/Underworld. While this symbolic opposition is fundamental to marriage systems, symbolism and social practice are transformed in the context of new waves of political hegemony, and new knowledge forms, from the traditions of Srivijaya, the Kediri tradition of the ruler as an avatar of Visnu, Madjaphit patterns of political alliance through marriage, and coastal-inland alliances associated with the political dominance of Luwu. Islam and colonial domination bring further involvement in global circuits of knowledge exchange. The complex symbolic system valorizes land/sea boundaries, vertical (otherworldly) and horizontal (worldly) links, and the role of women as links between Upperworld and Underworld, and between polities. Gibson argues that "myth and ritual link practical forms of knowledge such as boatbuilding, navigation, agriculture and warfare to basic social categories such as gender and hereditary rank to basic cosmological categories" (p. 4). Women's business is agriculture and the land; men's business is the forest and the sea.

The book provides a fresh perspective on the ethnographic analysis of the region which draws on anthropological structuralist traditions but interestingly reflects the conventions of indigenous anthropological scholarship in South Sulawesi (scholars such as Mattulada, Abu Hamid, Mukhlis Paeni and most recently Nurul Ilmi Idrus Idrus), whose interpretive strategies have relied on the indigenous textual tradition and its exegesis, as well as ethnographic data.

Gibson ends with an ethnographic account of spirit possession, which in contemporary Ara is women's business. This brings him back to the concern with embodied forms of knowledge in ritual practice. The book covers a wide scope of materials and provides a framework within which (for me) many aspects of everyday social practice in South Sulawesi became "legible." I would have liked to see more discussion of contemporary practices expressing forms of symbolic knowledge, for example, everyday Islamic practice, but perhaps this is the subject of another project. I look forward to further instalments in which the current historical conditions of regional autonomy, local pride and recently legislated "local content" in school curricula provide a new context in which indigenous knowledge traditions are expressed.

This volume will be of interest to the growing number of foreign and indigenous scholars studying Sulawesi and adds to discussions of Austronesian societies. It should also attract a broader audience of those concerned with the longstanding debates over forms of power and symbolic knowledge relating to indigenous political forms in Southeast Asia.

KATHRYN ROBINSON

Australian National University, Canberra, Australia