Nicholas Herriman wrote a valuable doctoral thesis in Anthropology and Asian Studies at the University of Western Australia in 2007 entitled ‘A din of whispers: Community, state control and violence in Indonesia’. This publication of 2012 is based on that thesis, but the material has now been reworked so as to provide a more theoretically political-science-like focus on the concept of ‘the entangled state’. This term does not appear in the original thesis and has not, in my view, enhanced the value of the publication.

In 1988–89, there was a wave of sightings of so-called ninjas — black-clad villains capable of extraordinary physical feats — and of black magic practitioners, particularly in Banyuwangi (southeastern Java), which has long been noted for its belief in sorcery. Many of these people, perhaps up to 200, were killed. Many turned out to be innocent persons with psychiatric conditions. A number of traditionalist religious leaders (kyais) were also murdered. Herriman's thesis is the most comprehensive study of these episodes, based on fieldwork he did in 2000–2002. In this publication, the immediacy of individual stories remains a strength.

It is true, as Herriman says, that writers have been inclined to overestimate the oppressive capacity of the Indonesian state under Soeharto and that central state power was often negotiated and adapted in local circumstances. Rural Banyuwangi offers a useful example, and Herriman's criticism of other publications is often apposite. But the concept of the ‘entangled state’ — defined at the end of the publication (p. 155) as ‘a combined type of society in which the state is adopted and appropriated by the local residents’ — does not seem to me to carry great theoretical force or novelty. As he notes at the end (p. 153) ‘others … have demonstrated that even during the New Order state power was always negotiated rather than simply asserted’. Furthermore, when Herriman takes issue with writers who have focused on Jakarta or Yogyakarta or other major sites, he seems to me not to take sufficient notice of the impact of differential local settings across Java (or Indonesia more generally). Simply, Yogyakarta is not rural Banyuwangi, either with regard to state capacity or local socio-political structures. The state and its ‘entanglements’ differs from place to place.

The original thesis was, I feel, a more significant contribution than this published version, which is a slim volume of 155 pages. It lacks an index, which significantly reduces its utility, and maps, but it does have two photographs and one table (on population of the region from 1720 to 1998, which would be impossible to defend for any period before 1930). In converting his thesis to this monograph, I am not sure that Herriman was well served by his advisors or his publisher.