https://englishkyoto-seas.org/<Book Review>
Laura Gibbs

Madoka Fukuoka, ed. Ramayana Theater in Contemporary Southeast Asia.
Singapore: Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2023.
Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2, August 2024, pp. 392-395.

How to Cite: Gibbs, Laura. Review of Ramayana Theater in Contemporary
Southeast Asia edited by Madoka Fukuoka. Southeast Asian Studies, Vol. 13, No. 2,August 2024, pp. 392-395. DOI: 10.20495/seas.13.2_392.
Link to this book review:https://englishkyoto-seas.org/2024/08/vol-13-no-2-book-reviews-laura-gibbs/

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Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University

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democratization, its subjection to problematically nationalist, elitist, religious, partisan, conservative, and even right-wing and counterrevolutionary pursuits. Who has the right to say anddetermine what democracy is and what determines its course? The authenticity expert? The
religious cleric? Art curators and critics? Government bureaucrats? Old elites seeping into newpolitics, displaying their revanchism in the public sphere? Strassler’s book is a perceptive studyof the visual in a time of neoliberal democracy, and we hold our breath for more of her work.
JPaul S. Manzanilla
The Integrative Center for Humanities Innovation,
Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University

Ramayana Theater in Contemporary Southeast Asia
Madoka Fukuoka, ed.
Singapore: Jenny Stanford Publishing, 2023.
Ramayana Theater in Contemporary Southeast Asia provides an introduction to Ramayana performances across contemporary Southeast Asia, with chapters on Cambodia (Sam-Ang Sam on a rangeof Khmer art forms inspired by the Reamker), Thailand (Hinata Shinsuke on Khon masked danceand Hiramatsu Hideki on Ramayana-inspired films by Chaiyo Studio), Indonesia (Umeda Hideharu
on Wayang puppet theater in Bali and Fukuoka Madoka on Sendratari dance drama in Java), Singapore(Takemura Yoshiaki on dance performance in the Indian diaspora community of Singapore), andJapan (Fukuoka Shota on Ramayana displays at the National Museum of Ethnology in Japan).
Each of the contributors has taken care to make their work accessible to non-specialists, sothe book should be of interest not only to Ramayana scholars but also to scholars working inSoutheast Asian media studies more generally. While the title refers to Ramayana “theater,” thechapters actually cover a wide range of performance media including dance, song, film, animation,comic books—what the editor calls “dramatic art forms”—along with other visual arts as well as
cultural practices such as astrology. For readers unfamiliar with the Indian Ramayana, there is anappendix with a summary of Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, which is an important point of reference
for all the performance traditions discussed in the book.
The chapters are written such that they can be read independently. This results in someredundancy, as historical background about the Ramayana is provided repeatedly. However, eachtime the writers present the specific literary and performance history in a way that is most relevantto their own national context, providing a kind of crash course in the many centuries of Ramayana
literature and performances throughout Southeast Asia.
Because the chapters are introductory overviews, they do not engage in detailed critical orBook Reviews393

theoretical analysis, although they do provide hints about the approaches that would be mostrelevant within each context. For example, globalization and cultural heritage preservation areimportant themes in Sam-Ang Sam’s chapter about Khmer arts both in Cambodia and in theCambodian diaspora. Government cultural policies play a key role in Takemura Yoshiaki’s chapter
about the Singapore government’s involvement in Ramayana preservation efforts and also inFukuoka Shota’s chapter about the evolving presentation of Ramayana-related materials at theNational Museum of Ethnology in Japan. Tourism culture and “tourist gaze” is another recurrent
theme, as in Umeda Hideharu’s discussion of Kecak performances in Bali which date back to the1930s and Fukuoka Madoka’s chapter on Sendratari dance drama in Java.
Each chapter references the political contexts that shaped the meaning of the Ramayana in
different places at different times throughout Southeast Asia. In her introduction to the book,Fukuoka Madoka discusses Suharto’s support for Ramayana puppet theater performances during
the economic crisis in Indonesia in the late 1990s. Hiramatsu Hideki situates Chaiyo Studio’s
Hanuman vs. 7 Ultraman in the context of strained Japanese-Thai relations in the early 1970s,
with the Thai hero Hanuman fighting side by side with Ultraman, a Japanese hero, retelling astory from the Thai Ramakien in the tokusatsu style of Japanese film. Writing about Ramayana
theater in Cambodia, Sam-Ang Sam discusses the teaching of traditional arts to the second generationof Khmer-Americans whose parents fled the Khmer Rouge regime. Hinata Shinsuke discusses
more recent events, describing tensions between Thailand and Cambodia regarding the origin andownership of Ramayana performance traditions in light of the 2018 UNESCO decision to include
Ramayana art forms from both Thailand and Cambodia on the Intangible Cultural Heritage list.
Several studies in the book demonstrate how media such as film and comic books have popularized elite performance art forms to reach new audiences. New technologies also play a role.
For example, Takemura Yoshiaki looks at how Facebook can make performances available to global
audiences, as with Singapore’s Indian Heritage Center’s CultureFest 2020 (Digital Edition)—a“festival focused on the richness of Indian arts, culture, and heritage as seen through the lens ofthe Ramayana” (p. 125)—which reached well over a million people in Singapore and beyond via
Facebook.
The book itself takes advantage of a new technology platform as well: thanks to the power ofYouTube, it is possible to enjoy three brand-new Ramayana performances by Indonesian artists thatwere commissioned as part of this project. These commissioned artworks are accessible at theeditor’s YouTube channel via QR codes and URLs supplied in the book. The descriptions of theseartworks appear in the final part of the book, along with supplementary materials from the artists:• Didik Nini Thowok, an internationally renowned cross-gender dancer, plays the role of Hanuman’slover, Urang Rayung, in a new performance that he created, inspired by both Indonesian andCambodian sources.
• Nanang Ananto Wicaksono, a “post-traditional” shadow puppet artist and animator, has created394Book Reviews

a new animated film that depicts Rama’s despair when he loses Sita despite his victory overRavana.
• Ken Steven, a choral music composer, uses both song and dance to tell the story of Sita’s trial
by fire, with a chorus of performers from Voice of Bali (who also have their own YouTubechannel).

These three works of art provide a kind of portal through which one can see many of the themes
discussed in the chapters come to life in actual performance. For example, consider the theme ofgender, which is central to the plot tensions of the Ramayana story. Didik Nini Thowok wears amask when he dances, with exquisite beauty, as the sea goddess, and then in the book he is seen
posing for a photograph after the performance, holding the mask in his hands—what does that
juxtaposition tell us about gender as performance? In Nanang Ananto Wicaksono’s animated film,
the character of Ravana appears in traditional wayang style, but then his heads begin to multiply:
one pops up out of his head, and then another, and then the heads start popping out of other partsof his body until one sees the ten heads of Ravana, although depicted emerging from his body in away that is different from any traditional style of representation. Then those heads separate
from Ravana’s body and participate independently in the fight with Rama, a visual drama that is
possible only through the new medium of animated film. It is a perfect example of the blending ofold and new which is a recurrent theme in the chapters of the book. So too with globalizationand disparate cultural influences: just listen to the unexpected harmonies of Ken Steven’s Sinta
Obong that are used to depict the traditional drama of Sita’s trial by fire (pati obong); one can evensee how the harmonies are arranged, because Steven’s musical score is also included in the book.
In addition to the artworks commissioned for the book, one of the chapters—“Death ofKumbhakarna: Interpretation of the Story by Dalang of Balinese Wayang”—comes from an
ethnomusicologist, Umeda, who is also a Japanese dalang puppeteer. Thus, his scholarship is
informed by his own experience as a performer of the Kumbhakarna story, based on a script helearned in the 1990s from I Nyoman Sumandi, a puppeteer from Tunjuk, Tabanan in Bali.
Each chapter is accompanied by a detailed bibliography for both primary sources and secondary
scholarship. While the focus of the chapters is on performance traditions, there is also much useful
information regarding written Ramayana traditions; for example, Hinata’s chapter on Khon performance in Thailand includes a detailed account of the Ramakien textual tradition, and Fukuoka
Shota’s chapter on the Ramayana in Japan provides a fascinating version of the Ramayana story
from the Hobutsushu, a twelfth-century Japanese Buddhist text. The religious diversity of Southeast
Asia is another important theme throughout the book, including both the Buddhist elements invarious Southeast Asian Ramayana traditions and Islamic elements in Indonesia.
In sum, this volume is a welcome addition to what might be called the “many Ramayanas”
genre that began with Paula Richman’s edited volume Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative
Tradition in South Asia (University of California Press, 1991), which included A. K. Ramanujan’s

Book Reviews395

1987 essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.”Thanks to Fukuoka Madoka and her collaborators, the many Ramayanas of Southeast Asia havenow been made more accessible not just to scholars and specialists but also to a general audienceof all readers who want to learn more about one of the world’s greatest epic traditions.
Laura Gibbs
University of Oklahoma (retired); LauraGibbs.net

In the Shadow of the Palms: More-Than-Human-Becomings in West Papua
Sophie Chao
Durham: Duke University Press, 2022.
Nausea. Anger. Grief. With these three words, Sophie Chao introduces the reader to the feelings
that overwhelm her whenever she drives through the vast, monotonous fields of monocrop oil
palm that blanket Marind lands in West Papua. Two years after I first read Chao’s book, I am still
viscerally affected by her powerful portrayals of Marind communities and the devastation towhich they have been subjected. They make me shudder.
Nausea. Chao’s poetic and poignant style of writing enables the reader to feel revulsion at
the destruction of Marind lifeworlds, which comprise human and more-than-human kin, mostespecially the generous, nurturing sago palm. Marind people are also nauseous: they retch withthe fumes of agricultural chemicals and choking smoke from corporate forest clearing. They
recoiled when Chao offered to show them drone footage of the surrounding plantations: the sightof tens of thousands of hectares of decimated forest was too distressing. Anger. Chao explores
the corporate greed and the false promises of development and jobs that government officials rollout to justify the ruin that plantations cause. Marind people are angry, but they must be careful
about expressing anger in a context of repression and retribution. Grief. Chao clarifies that what
has been lost is gone forever. Marind people know there is no way to reconstitute their multispecies
lifeworlds or the memories, stories, and dreams that anchored them to particular landscapes andevents. They survive, but they are not healthy: shorn of access to sago palms and the plants andanimals that sustained them, they eat white rice and instant noodles, if they can afford them.
Cassowaries that belong in the forest wander into hamlets confused and lost, unsure where they
are supposed to be. Dreams are nightmares that bring no rest. Skin dries up and loses its shine.
Rivers cease to flow. Everything is out of kilter.
Together with Pujo Semedi, I have studied West Kalimantan’s oil palm plantation zone andthe particular form of domination to which customary communities are subjected when their landis occupied by corporations (Li and Semedi 2021). The violence we witnessed in West Kalimantan