6 7 0 A M E R I C A N A N T H R O P O L O G I S T • V O L . 9 9 , N o . 3 • S E P T E M B E R 1 9 9 7

practically, but to find the means to live better, morewisely, and less violently within it. •

Dutch Culture Overseas: Colonial Practice in the Neth-erlands Indies 1900-1942. Frances Gouda Amsterdam:Amsterdam University Press, 1995. 304 pp.

DANILYN RUTHERFORD

University of London

In 1938, the Dutch government rejected a modestproposal for limited self-rule in the Netherlands In-dies. It was thought that the Indies would not be readyfor independence for another 300 years. Roughly tenyears later, scarred by the hardships of World War II,many in the Netherlands responded to the Indonesianrevolution with surprise, outrage, and a deep sense ofbetrayal. To this day, studies of Dutch colonialism stillreceive wide coverage in Holland, often arousing acri-monious debate.

Unable to recognize the future during the twilightof empire, it seems that the Dutch public cannot es-cape the past. Frances Gouda's engaging book sug-gests why. In a critical survey of colonial ideology,Gouda examines what made Dutch supremacy seemso natural, so rational, and so ethically justified to itssupporters in the Indies and Holland. She richly de-picts a distinctive conjuncture between national iden-tity and colonial rule.

In the first chapter, Gouda offers an account ofthe "vagaries" of Dutch memories of colonialism. Asthe daughter of a Dutch couple who resided briefly inthe Indies, Gouda takes as her starting point her ownfailure to call into question the absence of "brownfaces" in the photographs that her parents saved fromtheir stint in tropics. Inequality was simply taken forgranted by the author's family, as by many Dutch colo-nials, despite their pride in a national ideology stress-ing tolerance, pluralism, and fairness for all.

What was at stake in this failure to question thelegitimacy of colonial rule becomes clear in the sec-ond and sixth chapters. There, Gouda describes howDutch colonials conceived of the Netherlands as a"cunning David among the Goliaths of empire" (p. 39).Unlike the Portuguese and the Spanish, the Dutchcould not take pride for having brought Christianity tothe Indies; nor did they resemble the French, who, asGouda puts it, "wielded not only the sword but a firmfaith in the superiority of French civilization" (p. 21).Rather, the portrait the Dutch presented to the worldwas one of efficient and enlightened administration. Inthe 19th century, an English admirer wrote Java, OrHow to Manage a Colony, a book that so impressedthe king of Belgium that he decided to procure a col-ony of his own. In the 20th century, the focus of Dutchpride turned from the colonial government's ability to

line investors' pockets to its capacity to "uplift" thenatives without disrupting their distinctive cultures.This image of Holland as the guardian of native tradi-tion was lavishly staged at the Indies pavilion duringthe colonial exhibition of 1930. Although the spotlightwas trained on native artists and dancers, the show'sreal stars were colonial scholars and the administra-tors who supported their work.

Where chapters 2 and 6 show how Dutch colonialssought to distinguish themselves from their Europeanpeers, chapters 3, 4, and 5 depict local translations ofmore widely shared discourses on colonial identity.Chapter 4 traces the fate of a range of evolutionaryparadigms in the colonial rhetoric that defined the na-tive "other." In chapter 5, Gouda draws on Dutch colo-nial literature to illustrate fantasies and fears relatingto race, gender, and sexuality. Surveying the long his-tory of concubinage in the Indies and its fall from re-spectability in the 20th century, chapter 5 ties intochapter 3, where Gouda describes late colonial proj-ects designed to "reform" mixed-blooded native girls.

Each of these chapters raises issues that warrantan entire study. While Gouda might be criticized forcasting her net too broadly, she has taken an impor-tant step in calling attention to the politics of memoryin Holland. The next step might entail a closer study ofthe phenomenon of which Gouda's book is self-avowedly a part. The Indies, long lost, lives on in theDutch imagination. The Dutch colonial regime holds adifferent place in the memory of its heirs. But whilefor many Indonesians, the colonial past "does not ex-ist" (p. 35), the Indonesian government still reliesheavily on the conceptual apparatus that Gouda de-scribes. A fuller analysis of postcolonial nostalgiamight focus on this irony. Gouda has provided a placefor such a project to begin. •

The Little Czech and the Great Czech Nation: NationalIdentity and the Post-Communist Transformation ofSociety. Ladislav Holy. New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996. 226 pp.

REBECCA NASH

University of Virginia

Ladislav Holy provides a much needed anthropol-ogy of the events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia and aninterpretation of how the "undoing" of the experienceof socialism relates to prominent narratives of 17th-and 19th-century national crises in the Czech lands(pp. 118-137). His analysis of public discussions ofnational tradition, myth, and symbols reveals what isspecifically "Czech" about the changes that continueto take place in today's Czech Republic. This perspec-tive opposes that of social scientists who interpret na-tionalist ideologies simply as convenient collectivist

BOOK R E V I E W S 6 7 1

replacements for communism in the late 1980s. Holyargues instead that Czech national identity is morethan an ideological construct and "was itself the basisfor the opposition to communism which culminated inits overthrow" (p. 48). His critique provides examplesof different configurations of collective and individualunits, as well as the continued opposition of totalitari-anism and freedom. Rather than presume the inherentfutility of the communist state, Holy asks why thisparticular one came to represent the opposite of free-dom, a value that links individual rights to the rights ofthe nation.

Drawing on ethnography, historical sources, andthe press, Holy draws parallels between opposition toa communist state and the opposition to the Austro-Hungarian Empire which culminated in the treatiesending World War I. Although he argues that Czechsymbols of the nation are made meaningful in the pres-ent, Holy finds that there are aspects of Czech nation-alism that have remained continuous over time. This isbecause Czech national movements, whether in reac-tion to the Austro-Hungarian or Soviet empires, sharea common resistance to what is perceived to be analien state, as well as the belief in the well-educated,highly cultured, and freedom-loving Czech people.

National memorializations of "Czech culturalmeanings" (p. 4) are the contents of public discourse.These national contents are the subject of Holy'sstudy, and memorials to them are treated as sociallypowerful tools with which the campaigns of November1989 were charted. For example, dates, places, stat-ues, martyrs, and literary and political figures servedas maps for antistate demonstrations. The meaningsassociated with national symbols are not unequivocal,however, as, following the transition to a multipartysystem, debates internal to the culturally diverseCzechoslovakia have redefined what are considered tobe national priorities. For example, Slovakia, once con-figured in nationalist discourse as primary to Czechinternational survival, was subtracted from composi-tions of Czech national identity in late 1992.

The contrast between negative self-definition ofCzechs, "the little Czech," and more glorifying portray-als of Czech history, "the great Czech nation," is per-haps the most interesting aspect of Holy's study. Nega-tive individual characterizations and positive nationalcharacterizations pose questions to analyses of nation-alism that find that nations are often constructed bothas a collective individual and a collection of individu-als. Holy provides evidence of the contradiction be-tween individual and national images, or a collectiveindividual that does not contain individual replicas ofitself. Still, ambivalent representations are renegoti-ated, as are national symbols, when the Czechs as anational whole are juxtaposed to Slovaks, in particu-

lar. The positive national definitions predominate inlocal imaginations when individual and nation arecompared to non-Czechs.

Just as the existence of the Czech nation is takenfor granted in public discussions about Czech society,there is no significant questioning of the category byHoly, who argues that national culture is "an area ofreality on which anthropologists should have some-thing useful to say" (p. 15). This allows for the contin-ued comparison of the "natural" nation to the imposed,or artificial, state. As it challenges recent under-standings of central and eastern European economicand political developments as "natural" in themselves,the material within The Little Czech and the GreatCzech Nation will be extremely useful to anthropolo-gists who work in the region. •

What Was Socialism, and What Comes Next? KatherineVerdery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996.298 pp.

ANDREW LASS

Mount Holyoke College

To those of us familiar with Katherine Verdery'swork on socialist Romania, it will come as no surpriseto learn that this volume represents scholarship at itsbest. Every single one of the chapters (they are, actu-ally, individual papers written between 1988 and 1994)offers a carefully crafted argument (or two) on a par-ticular theme (or two). The author's imaginative use oftheory helps draw the reader into a rich and oftencomplex assortment of data from Eastern Europe(mostly Romania).

The result is enviable: Verdery succeeds in enrich-ing the heuristic value of the former while contributingto a better understanding of the latter (without trivial-izing either). Those not yet familiar with Verdery'swork would be well advised to become so. If you areinterested in an ethnography of globalization or theshady sides of postmodemity, this collection will addpostsocialism to your list of case studies in genderpolitics, ethnic identity, civil society, pyramid schemesor the etatization of time, and the changing notions ofproperty, to mention just some of the themes. And donot be put off by the cheap (or was it meant to betrendy?) title. Certainly this book sheds interestinglight on that thing called "socialism," its demise, andits legacies. But it also brings all of that back home to"Western" (capitalist) thought by showing how thevery values, central to our conceptual frameworks aswell as our everyday lives (e.g., property, money,democracy), are being forced back upon us, warpedby the realities of the postsocialist transformation.

Verdery builds on the work of other authors, suchas Janos Kornai (on socialist economy) and David