The island of Savu, located in eastern Indonesia between Sumba and Timor, is perhaps less well known than its larger neighbours. With a land area of just 460 square kilometres, including the small adjacent islands of Raijua and Dana, it is also considerably smaller, once even described by a nineteenth-century Dutch visitor as ‘a lump of stone in a vast sea’. Yet as Geneviève Duggan and Hans Hägerdal demonstrate, Savu has much to offer scholars, particularly those with an interest in comparative Austronesian studies, oral tradition and the history of Island Southeast Asia. The book is also unusual in that it is a major collaborative and interdisciplinary study by an anthropologist (Duggan) and historian (Hägerdal) who have combined their talents and knowledge to present us with a detailed history of Savu over the last five centuries, based on local oral sources and European records and accounts, and a detailed ethnographic picture and analysis of indigenous institutions and traditions.

Savu's bilineal kinship system and extensive oral genealogies are fundamental to the book and to understanding Savuese society. Patrilineal clans and matrilineal moieties coexist in this system and descent is traced comprehensively, but separately, from both, although it is worth noting that those traced through women are perhaps older and more secretive. All Savuese belong to one of a number of male clans (udu) through the father, and to one of two exogamous female moieties (hubi) through the mother, called ‘Greater Blossom’ and ‘Lesser Blossom’. Membership of both is fixed from birth and does not change through marriage. The clans are further divided into lineages (kerogo) and the moieties into subgroups, called ‘seeds’ (wini).

Genealogical identity derived from these matrilineal and patrilineal lines is central to life in Savu and there is ‘incredible depth of genealogical memory’ (p. 425). Detailed genealogies are not uncommon in Austronesian societies, but as James Fox notes in the book's Foreword, the sheer level of elaboration in these Savu genealogies appears greater than anywhere else in the Austronesian-speaking world. This gives remarkable depth to the Savuese past. Unlike some Austronesian societies, such as the Bugis and Toraja, these genealogies are not the prerogative of the aristocracy. Most individuals can recall their own paternal and maternal genealogy ‘over a dozen generations’ (p. 5) and there are specialists who can recite entire genealogies. It is these genealogies that form the nucleus of the island's social and collective memories and any chronology of the past is essentially genealogical. The Savuese have also developed various other ‘genealogical constructs’ that serve as ‘mnemonic devices and as stable references for various aspects of their society’ (p. 7). We find not only established Austronesian notions, such as topogenies (an ordered succession of place names), but several new concepts identified by the authors: domogenies (genealogy of houses) and textilgenies (genealogies of patterns). Savu's cosmogony is also remembered as a genealogy.

The book is arranged chronologically, allowing the material to be placed within the broader context of Indonesian and Southeast Asian history. The first three chapters are mainly ethnographic and based on the rich oral material collected by Duggan. They mainly focus on origins, the early ancestors and the genesis of territorial divisions and clans. Unlike most genealogies, those that trace the early ancestors are in a poetic and coded language kept by the priests of Savu's ancestral religion, Jingi Tiu, which continues to have adherents despite large-scale conversion to Christianity in the 1970s.

Using mainly oral narratives, chapter 4 explores possible links with Majapahit and Portuguese contact and influence in the sixteenth century. The two following chapters focus on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and Savu's relations with the Dutch, including VOC's incorporation of the island's long-established domains into its network, the slave trade and Savu military service to the Dutch in which they formed ‘the backbone’ of the strike force in campaigns in Eastern Indonesia. For these and later centuries detailed European accounts are used together with the island's genealogies and other oral sources to tell Savu's story from both an indigenous and colonial perspective. These foreign and local sources mostly complement, corroborate and sometimes correct one another, particularly the more detailed VOC records where the ‘ample information about the succession of local leaders and the details usually fit precisely with the inherited genealogies’ (p. 10). Chapters 7 to 10 take us from the nineteenth through to the twenty-first centuries, focusing on Christian missionary activity that is considered in the broader context of eastern Indonesia, Savu's incorporation into the new colonial Dutch state, Savuese exploitation of new opportunities in the larger neighbouring islands of Timor and Sumba, the Japanese Occupation and Indonesia's struggle for independence. The post-New Order period is also covered, including more recent times such as the struggles the resource-poor island faces, partly because of decentralisation.

The book is well-illustrated throughout with relevant maps, photographs, numerous genealogies and other figures that enhance the book's quality. There are also six appendixes covering some 125 pages, some of which provide important supporting data. These include translations and commentaries of oral narratives, detailed information on the lunar calendar of ceremonial domains, the traditional system of exchange, lists of rajas and statistics. This is followed by an extensive and useful glossary of selected Savuese words. The book is also an impressive physical production for which NUS Press deserves credit.

Savu: History and oral tradition on an island of Indonesia is an impressive work of scholarship and a first-rate example of what can be achieved when two scholars from different disciplines work together. It is essential reading for anyone with an interest in comparative Austronesian studies, to which the book makes a major contribution, the island of Savu and Eastern Indonesia in general. It will also interest ethnographers and historians of Indonesia and beyond, and those with a broader interest in oral tradition and the value of oral sources for understanding a society and its past.