Book Reviews

J. A. Robertson.

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pine materials, most of which were copied from Spanish archives under the direction of For those interested in the anthropological content of manuscript and other rare documentary sources on the Philippines, two other recent indices should be also consulted: Doris Varner Welshs Checklist of Philippine Linguistics i n the Newberry Librury (176 pp., The Newberry Library, Chicago, 1950), and Frank Lynchs The Jesuit Letters of Mindanao as a Source of Anthropological Data (Philippine Studies, Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 247-272, Manila, 1956).

Seczlring Aquatic Products in Siaton Municipality, Negros Oriental Province, Philippines. DONN HART. V. Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1956. iii, 84pp., 22 figures, 8 plates. n.p. Reviewed by GORDON HEWES, W. University of Colorado
This is a study of fresh- and salt-water fishing in a municipality a t the south end of Negros Island, Central Philippines, where Hart worked in 1951. Philippine fishing, especially the commercial marine industry, has often been described, although largely by fisheries specialists rather than by ethnographers. Some readers will therefore be disappointed to find that Harts monograph does not cover the same ground as, for example, Firths Malay Fishermelt (1946). Instead, he provides an abundance of detail on traps, nets, piscicides, and other techniques, but devotes only a page to marketing of the catch, and hardly more to the role of aquatic foods in the local diet. Presumably, the social anthropology of Siaton fishing will receive more extensive treatment in Harts report on rural Filipino culture contours, which was the focus of his fieldwork. To be sure, there is scattered information on folklore, divination, costs of gear, prices of fish, and other nontechnical matters. The book contains full data for anyone making practical investigations of Philippines fisheries, or for cross-cultural study of particular fishing techniques, despite the dearth of material on the socioeconomic matrix. The reviewer found i t difficult to follow the many passages in which native terms were used without their English equivalents. A fairly representative example suffices: From the center pamuerta osok shoreward another osok is pushed at the end of the togdon (p. 41). There is no glossary of native terms; Hart must be added to the list of American ethnologists who require the reader to construct a glossary as he goes along, as Ralph Beak remarked recently (AA 59:716-717, 1957).

A Preliminary Description of the Javanese Kinship System. RADENMAS KOENTJARANINGRAT.

(Cultural Report Series.) New Haven: Yale University, Southeast Asia Studies, 1957. 1 1 1 pp., appendix, 4 tables, n.p.

Reviewed by CORA u BOIS,Harvard University D

In a sense, this is a field document. The author is a central Javanese aristocrat, ail objective and careful reporter who speaks from a background of personal recall. Raden Mas Koentjaraningrat is therefore the first to recognize that his contribution is preliminary. We are nevertheless indebted to him for new data, for different formulations, and also for stressing again that kinship usage and terminology in Java is in part a function of social status. It is precisely social status and its definition that are crucial. The author proposes a status gradient summarized below. (1) Wong tjiliq (literally, little people) who comprise the peasants of the country-side and the lower class people of towns and cities. Within

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the wong tjiliq there are occupational and property variations which suggest that even the little people are far from egalitarian. (2) Prijaji comprise, on the whole, theliterati but in an ascending order of the civil service, the administrative o5cials and the intellectuals. That this ascending order is related to both the precolonial and the Dutch bureaucracies is certain, but it is far from clear to what degree the intra-prijaji gradient is solely a product of bureaucracy. (3) Ndara, or the nobility, are those who are able to demonstrate kinship with any of the four rulers of the principalities of central Java, which are fragmented remnants of the Mataram kingdom encountered by the early European mercantilists and preserved as museum pieces by the Dutch. Cutting across the status gradient is a value dichotomy, the abalzgalz and sankri. Ahngan are defined as those who do not live according to Islamic basic principles (p. 2), although they may officially profess Islam. The santri are people who follow Islamic principles seriously (p. 2). I t would appear from this authors material that the animisticand Hinduized mode on the one hand, and the Islamic on the other are major foci of Indonesian social life, but that they have no simple one-to-one relationship with social status or class. This does not coincide precisely with the formulations of the Geertzs and Jay, based on their field studies in central Java, but the coincidence is close enough to suggest that any disagreements could easily be ironed out. Three general points on status are either implicit or explicit in Koentjaraningrats material. First and explicitly, he believes that status, a t least in the recent past, depended less on wealth than on association with authority. Second and implicitly, i t would appear that status groups in Indonesia are not rigid and impermeable but must be envisaged as ideals to which only part of the people conform in reality. Many individuals and families appear to fall into interstitial bands of both upward and downward mobility between the ideals of both status and values. Third, although very few Javanese comprehend the total picture of Javanese social stratification, everybody knows the levels above and below him and has to view every relationship in terms of higher, similar and lower and adjust his behavior accordingly (p. 13). Kinship data clearly indicate that (1) the nuclear family with preferred neolocal residence is the mode; (2) the age rank of siblings is stressed; (3) collateral kin terms are more strongly classificatory than lineal and are based on generation; (4)kin interaction centers in the nuclear families of orientation or procreation; (5) kinship is ego centered; (6) neighbors and neighborhood obligations seem to compensate for the narrowness of kin ties. This picture of family and kinship is familiar to anyone who has studied social organization in Southeast Asia. In terms of the high cultures, the loose Javanese family and kinship patterns have echos in Burma and Thailand. In terms of simple cultures, the Iban offer a close parallel. I n this connection, a recent study by J. D. Freeman (The Family System of the Iban of Borneo. Mimeo. Australia National University, 1957) raises an important and illuminating point. While the Iban manifest the same shallowness of kin affiliation, the same freedom of residence choice, etc., as the Javanese, Freeman nevertheless claims for this nuclear family a corporate structure symbolized by the inheritance of certain family property including rice, lands, and treasures. This last is reminiscent of the emphasis on pusaka or hereditary and symbolic family treasures in Java. I t seems clear that definitive work on Javanese kinship awaits new and sharper formulation of status gradients and value systems. Further, until adequate comparative

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data for other parts of Southeast Asia are available, and systematically marshalled, Javanese data will remain only inadequately understood.
ARCHEOLOGY

Archaeology o/ New Jersey: The Abbott Farm. (Vol. 2.) DOROTHY CROSS. Trenton: The Archeological Society of New Jersey and The New Jersey State Museum, 1956. xii, 215 pp., 17 figures, 1 graph, 14 plans, 91 plates, 21 tables. $7.00 cloth, $8.00 deluxe. Reviewed by FREDERICK JOHNSON, R. S. Peabody Foundation, Andover, Massachusetts
For eighty-three years the Abbott Farm has been one of the most controversial archaeological sites in the East. Charles Abbott initiated the lengthy and often heated discussions by claiming that crude argillite implements, which only superficially resembled European Paleolithic implements, were the work of ancient or glacial man, Arguments filled more than one hundred books and papers and were the subject of numerous symposia and conferences. The long awaited publication of this book resolves these debates. No evidence of glacial man was found during excavation a t the site, begun in 1936 and carried on continuously for three years or more. This is not the end, however; the old problems and questions have been replaced by new ones. These, fortunately, are more restricted in scope and many of them will concern only the meticulous specialist in the archeology of the region. The hope that this would be a final account is dashed by the discovery that all of the material excavated, particularly some 30,000 potsherds from one section of the site, have not been processed. Perhaps analysis of this material will result in no major changes in the general conclusions, but careful students of eastern problems would rest easier if the results of adequate testing of these data had been included. The volume includes a great deal of much needed and useful information. The Introduction describes in detail the course of the debates concerning Abbotts contentions, and this sets the stage for the modern work. There follows a discussion of the physiography and geology of the locality, which is most important because the deposition of the various soils has been a complex process. The somewhat brief but probably adequate account explains for the first time all the known or inferred processes involved. Although the whole region had been occupied for a long time, occupation was apparently concentrated in two major areas on the site. The bluff, some forty feet above the Delaware River, exhibits a normal profile of humus and yellow sand lying on Trenton Gravel which overlies Pensauken Sand and Gravel. Differences in thickness of the Yellow Sand and irregularities in the elevations of surface of the Trenton Gravels in large measure account for the presently untenable hypotheses concerning association of occupation with the Trenton Gravels.The location of artifacts in the Yellow Sand, most frequently without any other evidence of occupation, is sometimes difficult to explain. The situation is familiar to any eastern archeologist. Wind erosion, trampling of the site, and the formation and leveling of hummocks on the surface are inevitable, obvious, and probably accurate explanations. However, they leave much to be desired, for their effect on the association of types a t various depths cannot be measured. The second section of the site lay in a lowland bordering the bluff and along Watsons Creek. Here occupation was concentrated in four humus layers separated by layers of soil. These latter accumulated under varying conditions by slope wash off the bluff, deposition of wind blown materials, and sediments laid down during periods of high water. The humus levels, together with numerous associated pits, provide a frame-