Endangered Peoples of Southeast & East Asia: Struggles to Survive and Thrive

Sponsel, Leslie E. (ed.). Endangered Peoples of Southeast & East Asia: Struggles to Survive and Thrive. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000. 282 pp.

This volume brings together articles by anthropologists and researchers, including the editor herself, in an attempt to shed light upon the condition of a number of peoples whose long-term physical or cultural survival is considered to be in question. Peoples considered range from small ethnically distinct groups such as the Batak of Palawan Island in the Philippines, numbering only in the hundreds, to the Okinawans of the Ryukyu Islands, Japan, and the Uyghur or China, who are not in danger of disappearing but whose cultures are currently being transformed in the face of changes brought about by political and economic realities of modernity.

This book is a sad but necessary book, in the sense that it confirms, in painful detail what many already know, that indigenous peoples the globe over are facing unprecedented threats to continued existence. Chapter content is organized in five sections: Cultural Overview provides a general outline of the recent living conditions and worldview of the people in question, while Threats to Survival deals with specific ways the group's cultural integrity is being compromised, and in some cases their actual physical survival. Response: Struggles to Survive Culturally is an attempt to chronicle the effectiveness of groups' efforts to resist or in many cases adapt to overwhelming changes in their environment in a relatively short period of time. The section Food for Thought, which includes questions that may be useful to students or others, provides a forum for chapter authors to reflect on some of the wider implications of the struggle of the ethnic group they have discussed to maintain their ancestral cultural distinctness; finally, the Resource Guide includes useful bibliographical and video information, as well as lists of organizations and Websites.

One of the strengths of this book is, ironically, its repetitiveness, in the sense that a number of the chapters chronicle in painful detail the global epidemic of "ethnicide" that promises to reduce still further cultural and linguistic diversity, and in specific terms entails the suffering of peoples who are not strong or influential enough to defend themselves. Not surprisingly, in addition to the assumption common to anthropologists that societies are worth studying simply for their cultural uniqueness and what we can learn from them, an underlying premise of the book and perhaps its raison d'être, is the belief that such minority ethnicities should be preserved simply for the sake of human diversity, which has been on the decline for some thousands of years. Another undercurrent of the book, and one worth taking seriously, is the fact that widespread ecological devastation has gone hand in hand with the destruction of native people's habitats and ways of life. All of this adds up to the realization that the condition and health of native peoples is in some sense a barometer of modernity's interaction with the world we have inherited from our ancestors.

Though in general Endangered Peoples of Southeast a East Asia is written in the moderately scientific and objective voice of anthropological literature, hovering just beneath the surface is the caring and even at points sorrow of researchers who have had to watch the people they are studying slowly destroyed by governments and societies that view indigenous populations as little more than impediments to economic development or cultural consolidation. In a more positive vein, however, it should be mentioned that the book's chapters devote portions of their discussion to strategies used by native peoples to adapt to changing conditions and the attempts to preserve, to whatever extent possible, traditional ways of life. As the book shows some groups such as the Ainu of Japan, Kubu of Central Sumatra, Indonesia, and the Rungus of Sabah, Malaysia, have been more successful than others, though all groups discussed have had to make adjustments in their manner of living. One issue that arises is the question what can be considered successful adaptation to the influence of an encroaching majority society. Few, for instance, among a minority population would consider complete assimilation a successful resolution of their problems, though most, it seems, accept the fact that some level of cultural accommodation is necessary if they are to remain viable.

Endangered Peoples of Southeast & East Asia: Struggles to Survive and Thrive is an informative and useful book, though as I mentioned earlier some of the information conveyed is disturbing. A reasonable response to this fact, however, is that the chapter authors are simply chronicling realities they encountered during their time living with and studying endangered peoples. It might further be argued that getting knowledge of these peoples to the wider world may, in some instances, be the only chance they have for survival, since the countries where they live are to varying extents responsive to international pressure. Overall, then, Endangered Peoples is worth reading, and is an education in the condition of minority populations in Asia.