Book Reviews

[...]van Baal analyses modern western civilization. lts development has been conditioned by four main motives, to wit a passionate interest in things, the pursuit of personal happiness, and the ideas of freedom of the individual and the equality of all men. [...]the young men offered the victim a way out he might offer them money or buy them drinks to secure his reintegration into the community. [...]popular belief has it that the noise of the charivari is necessary to chase away the spirit or soul of the first wife and thus to definitively annul the first marriage. Unfortunately,- however, the broader the definition, the harder it becomes to compare individual instances subsumed under the same heading. [...]where Occitan young men traditionally bang on doors at night either to be asked in for drinks or to be chased away (Robert and Valire), where the abuse of power by a member of the Sardinian village elite is punished by placing the offender back to front on a donkey and subsequently expelling him (Gallini), or where Roumanian village youths exhort young women to get married by suspending an effigy and a poster with satirical verses in a tree (Lesourd), there are certain similarities between these customs, but not enough for all three to be placed in the same category. The following sentence is an apt example of this tendency: " . . . great variations exist in the post-pre-capitalist, capitalist-dominated but in themselves non-capitalist and [politico-economically] extremely hybrid zones of the Third World" (p.129). [...]the literalness of the translation sometimes seems slightly exaggerated, as witness the often complicated and lengthy sentences. 192 Boekbesprekingen In short, this book forms a useful addition to the literature on Southeast Asia. lts socio-political and historical emphases set it apart from works in the prevailing ecological paradigm.