| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Jean Debernardi. Rites of Belonging: Memory, Modernity, and Identity in a Malaysian Chinese Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 2004. Pp. xvi, 318. $55.00.
Jean Debernardi has written a very suggestive book about history and memory in Chinese ritual in Penang. Each chapter develops a different theme, from social history to the symbolic analysis of rites, but it is largely left to the reader to build on the suggested links and tie them all together. Provocative historical connections are suggested but not fully documented. Intriguing theoretical and historiographical problems are suggested but not elaborated. Most of the suggestions are insightful and creative, but their very ability to stimulate results in proportionally high frustration over the loose ends.	1
The most well-developed arguments are the most conventional. Rituals and initiations help define local, ethnic, religious, and national communities. These rituals change along with political and social circumstances, in this case the shift from a colonial polity to a postcolonial nation shaped by ethnic politics. Through adaptation, rituals retain a vital role in modern society, and one important function is to create a sense of continuity by transmitting a memory of the past. Excellent citations from the anthropological literature on ritual are scattered throughout the book, but there is little engagement with the complex debates behind these citations. Analytic creativity is, instead, lavished on the empirical themes and speculations.	. . .

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