Following the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and undersea earthquake off the island of Sumatra, which hit Aceh the hardest, Indonesia's long-troubled westernmost province became the subject of unprecedented international attention. Foreign and Indonesian journalists and development workers descended upon the disaster zone and images of the devastation wrought by the waves were broadcast around the world. This event, combined with the resolution in August 2005 of a protracted armed separatist conflict between Free Aceh Movement rebels and Indonesian security forces, created a set of conditions that inspired a growing number of scholarly writings about what makes Aceh unique, and how other places might learn from its dual experiences of recovery from natural and man-made disasters.
Aceh: History, politics and culture, edited by Arndt Graf, Susanne Schröter and Edwin Wieringa, contributes to this burgeoning body of literature by bringing together scholars and activists who explore various dimensions of Acehnese state and society in contemporary and historical perspective. The seventeen chapters are logically ordered into four parts that offer insights into (i) History, (ii) Contemporary economy and politics, (iii) Foundations of religion and culture, and (iv) Current debates in religion and culture. The overall aim of the collection is to provide an introductory body of knowledge ‘which would benefit expatriate aid workers in their dealings with the Acehnese people’ (p. ix).
Yet upon opening this book this reader felt a nagging sense of foreboding. First, the audience for which this collection of essays is primarily intended — the international development community involved in the large-scale reconstruction effort in post-tsunami, post-conflict Aceh — had already completed their missions and withdrawn from the province by the time the book was published. While authors and publishers are frequently overtaken by events, the phased departure of foreign aid workers from Aceh had begun four years previously and ended in 2009.
The key substantive weakness of this volume, however, is that there is neither an editorial introduction nor a concluding chapter. The editors provide no overarching theoretical or conceptual framework, no contextualisation of the case of Aceh in relation to wider developments, and do not attempt to situate this book within the growing body of scholarship on Aceh. Nor has any serious effort been made to connect the chapters across integrating themes beyond their broad partitioning into four sections. Instead, the editors dismissively justify the diversity of chapters in their two-page preface by employing the metaphor that ‘“a thousand flowers may bloom” is the spirit in which this “bunch of flowers” (bunga rampai) is offered’ (p. xi).
Highly varied chapters could potentially enhance the quality of an edited volume if authors engage with each other's work, but in this case the contributions do not speak strongly to each other, or at all. Moreover, many of the ideas and material presented in this volume have been published in previous academic writings. As a relative latecomer to the expanding collection of edited volumes on Aceh, this book covers much of the same ground as Anthony Reid's widely-cited Verandah of violence (2006) and Post-disaster reconstruction, edited by Matthew Clarke, Ismet Fanany and Sue Kenny (2010).
As with many edited collections, some chapters in this book are more polished than others and the editors would have done well to omit the weaker contributions. Still, the historical essays by Antje Missbach and Anthony Reid, which deal with the influence of Dutch scholar and administrator Christiaan Snouk Hurgonje on the Aceh war against Dutch colonialism (1873–1913) and with Aceh's Turkish connections respectively, are nuanced, informative and thoughtfully written. Some of the chapters on religion and culture also offer important insights that are overlooked or understudied in other works on Aceh. Of these, Susanne Schröter's chapter on the plurality and homogeneity of Acehnese society is especially useful in providing a complementary corrective to the literature on the Aceh conflict that tends to construct the Acehnese as a singular ethnic and cultural entity in the contest over competing nationalisms. Werner Kraus' short history of the Shattariyya Sufi order similarly enriches this picture of internal diversity against a literary backdrop of political discourses about the blanket application of Islamic law in Aceh in recent years.
Despite its shortcomings, this book does contain some essays which will enhance the expanding repertoire of resources available to scholars of Aceh. Due to a lack of editorial work and wide variations in the quality of scholarship in the individual contributions, however, this collection should not be read as a coherent volume as it does fall well short of the sum of its variegated parts.
