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In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place
In this highly original and much-anticipated ethnography, Anna Tsing challenges not only anthropologists and feminists but all those who study culture to reconsider some of their dearest assumptions. By choosing to locate her study among Meratus Dayaks, a marginal and marginalized group in the deep rainforest of South Kalimantan, Indonesia, Tsing deliberately sets into motion the familiar and stubborn urban fantasies of self and other. Unusual encounters with her remarkably creative and unconventional Meratus friends and teachers, however, provide the opportunity to rethink notions of tradition, community, culture, power, and gender--and the doing of anthropology. Tsing's masterful weaving of ethnography and theory, as well as her humor and lucidity, allow for an extraordinary reading experience for students, scholars, and anyone interested in the complexities of culture.
Engaging Meratus in wider conversations involving Indonesian bureaucrats, family planners, experts in international development, Javanese soldiers, American and French feminists, Asian-Americans, right-to-life advocates, and Western intellectuals, Tsing looks not for consensus and coherence in Meratus culture but rather allows individual Meratus men and women to return our gaze. Bearing the fruit from the lively contemporary conversations between anthropology and cultural studies, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen will prove to be a model for thinking and writing about gender, power, and the politics of identity.
Engaging Meratus in wider conversations involving Indonesian bureaucrats, family planners, experts in international development, Javanese soldiers, American and French feminists, Asian-Americans, right-to-life advocates, and Western intellectuals, Tsing looks not for consensus and coherence in Meratus culture but rather allows individual Meratus men and women to return our gaze. Bearing the fruit from the lively contemporary conversations between anthropology and cultural studies, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen will prove to be a model for thinking and writing about gender, power, and the politics of identity.
368 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1993
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About the author
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
24 books472 followersAnna Lowenhaupt Tsing is Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place and coeditor of Uncertain Terms: Negotiating Gender in American Culture.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 31, 2012
Tsing, dalam buku ini membahas tentang konflik antara masyarakat pesisir dan masyarakat pedalaman. Masyarakat pesisir yang notabene lebih modern terus memarjinalkan masyarakat Meratus melalui kebijakan yang dikeluarkan oleh pemerintah. Menariknya, masyarakat pedalaman yang seolah terhegemoni justru tidak merasa termarjinaliasi. Kepatuhan terhadap orang-orang berseragam dan penggunaan Bahasa Indonesia sebagai bahasa ritual menunjukkan bahwa masyarakat Meratus sangat bangga dengan pemerintah yang diharapkan bisa memperbaiki kehidupan mereka. Selain berbicara tentang marjinalisasi masyarakat pedalaman oleh pemerintah dan masyarakat pesisir, Tsing juga berbicara tentang marjinalisasi perempuan Meratus sendiri. Di mana perempuan tidak diperbolehkan melakukan perjalanan seorang diri sebagai bagian dari kehidupan Meratus. Akan tetapi, sosok Umak Adang justru melawan marjinalisasi ini di mana sebagai dukun perempuan dia dianggap dekat dengan sosok yang disebutnya sebagai Ratu Intan.
November 28, 2011
Evocative ethnographic account which takes a story-telling approach to narrative. I kept wanting her to pull back and include some wider socio-political analysis and a closer, factual, focus to sharpen the book's many themes, though this wasn't the kind of book she was trying to write.
November 24, 2009
…By highlighting the contradictions in the notions of citizenship, ‘locality,’ marginality, and self-representation, Tsing challenges the wider conceptions of the ‘Other.’…
(excerpt from a paper critique:)
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen is a difficult one for me to get through. To the extent that a re-reading is an absolute requirement.
In doing so, I was again struck by the elegant complexity and depth of exposition Tsing has laid out in her study of ‘marginalization.’ So much so, in fact, that I had difficulty anchoring on one topic which I could just about attempt to expound on. To understate it, I felt quite…piddling…even from the first few pages of this book. And that did not improve much 100 pages later. I have to confess that I have had to go over a number of segments repeatedly in the hopes of making her argument sink in. In a sense, Diamond Queen is something I feel I could only be relatively equipped to handle after I have had at least 2 years’ worth of being entrenched in ethnographic literature.
…The degree of impression Diamond Queen left on me is particularly suggestive: ‘marginality,’ at first glance, is a ‘feature’ I have taken to be simply straightforward. I considered it as a well-demarcated and -defined product of the intersection of history and the ecology, with the subsequent emergence of a ‘core’ ideology later impacting more distinctively on the existence of this ‘space at the margins.’ In addition, I have understood those at the margins to be in a perpetual conflict or resistance with the center; at most, with a prevailing active animosity over the status quo.
Tsing unflinchingly disabused me of that notion.
As she has shown in the study of the Meratus, marginality is more than an awareness of a territory (with or without physical boundaries) characterized as ‘removed from’ the political, cultural, and economic core. What I used to apprehend as a dialectical relationship actually finds complexity among the Meratus and their association with the state.
By showing how certain Meratus place themselves within and beyond the state’s peripheral and dismissive gaze, Tsing reveals the nuances that underlie Meratus personhood.
Among others is an ostensibly circuitous provenance that bring to mind a sort of Catch-22: the Meratus leaders are clamoring for state recognition and citizenship. The state then informs them to advocate certain ‘civilized’ comportment (like literacy), while retaining formulations of ethnic identity (249) under the auspices of ‘ethnic pluralism.’ But since national ideology compartmentalizes the Meratus as an ‘out-of-the-way’ people, whose (inaccurately) ‘nomadic’ nature (to name a few) suspend them in the static hold of pre-history, they are, as a result, consigned to their current circumstance. They are physically ‘out-of-the-way’ (and figuratively stay that way) because their settlement areas are so far removed from the tolerable reaches of state intervention that hardly any official bothers to look their way long enough to understand their culture or way of thinking. Hence, Meratus claims for consideration of acknowledged citizenship remain overlooked.
Tsing goes on to provide tangible evidence of this ambivalence. And this is where, in my opinion, Diamond Queen subtly but strongly latches onto my rather mystified engagement. Despite the pitiful frequency with which I become entangled in the author’s juxtaposition of Meratus ethnicity and state ideology, I cannot help but appreciate Tsing’s interpretation of Meratus social and political actions as negotiated maneuvers that are invoked to appease national policies of assimilation while simultaneously embedded in traditional or localized ideals of Meratus personhood.
Such performative actions, then, reflect contingent, contradictory, and shifting self-identities which are still strangely effective in maintaining, if not in justifying, ethnic beliefs and traditions. It is in these practices that the Meratus obviates stereotypes of a passive, impotent minority.
...For what it is worth, I have a high regard for the Diamond Queen; but there have also been segments in her narrative that come across as incongruous (like the bulk of her discussion on ‘Conditions of Living’), if not quite superfluous. The interesting thing is that she shows the marginality of the Meratus through largely episodic snapshots experienced by only a handful of people, most of which ‘stand out’ (even if Tsing assiduously claims otherwise) from the ‘average’ Meratus. If this is just another way for her to underscore the highly polemical and irresolute nature of marginality and Meratus identity, then she has succeeded in this regard...
(excerpt from a paper critique:)
In the Realm of the Diamond Queen is a difficult one for me to get through. To the extent that a re-reading is an absolute requirement.
In doing so, I was again struck by the elegant complexity and depth of exposition Tsing has laid out in her study of ‘marginalization.’ So much so, in fact, that I had difficulty anchoring on one topic which I could just about attempt to expound on. To understate it, I felt quite…piddling…even from the first few pages of this book. And that did not improve much 100 pages later. I have to confess that I have had to go over a number of segments repeatedly in the hopes of making her argument sink in. In a sense, Diamond Queen is something I feel I could only be relatively equipped to handle after I have had at least 2 years’ worth of being entrenched in ethnographic literature.
…The degree of impression Diamond Queen left on me is particularly suggestive: ‘marginality,’ at first glance, is a ‘feature’ I have taken to be simply straightforward. I considered it as a well-demarcated and -defined product of the intersection of history and the ecology, with the subsequent emergence of a ‘core’ ideology later impacting more distinctively on the existence of this ‘space at the margins.’ In addition, I have understood those at the margins to be in a perpetual conflict or resistance with the center; at most, with a prevailing active animosity over the status quo.
Tsing unflinchingly disabused me of that notion.
As she has shown in the study of the Meratus, marginality is more than an awareness of a territory (with or without physical boundaries) characterized as ‘removed from’ the political, cultural, and economic core. What I used to apprehend as a dialectical relationship actually finds complexity among the Meratus and their association with the state.
By showing how certain Meratus place themselves within and beyond the state’s peripheral and dismissive gaze, Tsing reveals the nuances that underlie Meratus personhood.
Among others is an ostensibly circuitous provenance that bring to mind a sort of Catch-22: the Meratus leaders are clamoring for state recognition and citizenship. The state then informs them to advocate certain ‘civilized’ comportment (like literacy), while retaining formulations of ethnic identity (249) under the auspices of ‘ethnic pluralism.’ But since national ideology compartmentalizes the Meratus as an ‘out-of-the-way’ people, whose (inaccurately) ‘nomadic’ nature (to name a few) suspend them in the static hold of pre-history, they are, as a result, consigned to their current circumstance. They are physically ‘out-of-the-way’ (and figuratively stay that way) because their settlement areas are so far removed from the tolerable reaches of state intervention that hardly any official bothers to look their way long enough to understand their culture or way of thinking. Hence, Meratus claims for consideration of acknowledged citizenship remain overlooked.
Tsing goes on to provide tangible evidence of this ambivalence. And this is where, in my opinion, Diamond Queen subtly but strongly latches onto my rather mystified engagement. Despite the pitiful frequency with which I become entangled in the author’s juxtaposition of Meratus ethnicity and state ideology, I cannot help but appreciate Tsing’s interpretation of Meratus social and political actions as negotiated maneuvers that are invoked to appease national policies of assimilation while simultaneously embedded in traditional or localized ideals of Meratus personhood.
Such performative actions, then, reflect contingent, contradictory, and shifting self-identities which are still strangely effective in maintaining, if not in justifying, ethnic beliefs and traditions. It is in these practices that the Meratus obviates stereotypes of a passive, impotent minority.
...For what it is worth, I have a high regard for the Diamond Queen; but there have also been segments in her narrative that come across as incongruous (like the bulk of her discussion on ‘Conditions of Living’), if not quite superfluous. The interesting thing is that she shows the marginality of the Meratus through largely episodic snapshots experienced by only a handful of people, most of which ‘stand out’ (even if Tsing assiduously claims otherwise) from the ‘average’ Meratus. If this is just another way for her to underscore the highly polemical and irresolute nature of marginality and Meratus identity, then she has succeeded in this regard...
July 29, 2008
This ethnography challenges readers to unpack the naturalization of motherhood, how indigenous people adapt to modernity and the role of song and poetry can play in an anthropological work.
May 9, 2017
Hard read for a beginning anthropology student, still very interesting to see an ethnographer's take on herself within the book. Need to reread it though.
May 1, 2020
Beautifully written look at agency and politics at the margins of Indonesian society - loved it and knew I would, have wanted to read Tsing for a while!
November 2, 2024
Anna Tsing is perhaps my favorite anthropologist after reading this book. Her style both as a writer and an ethnographer are groundbreaking
January 4, 2024
I heart eyes Anna. One of the greatest of all time.
April 27, 2012
This is one of the worst ethnographies i've read to date. As a Western anthropologist, one hopes to research and report in a way that can somehow veer from the centrism and self-absorbed individualism bred in to Western thought. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing does nothing of the sort. This is a TEDIOUS read that somehow seems to focus more on the researcher than the society. No thanks. Theory needs to be re-hashed. Save yourself from this ethnography. If you're looking for better anthropology/gender issues try Ortner. If you're looking for more interesting theory, try anything else.
November 21, 2007
Hanya versi Indonesia, Di Bawah bayang bayang Ratu Intan, sebuah gambaran kehidupan masyarakat yang hidup di dalam hutan Pengunungan Meratus di Kallimantan Selatan.
huma, katuan larangan, katuan anum, balian, mambuka ladang hingga panen besar semua berkaitan dengan nenek moyang dan alam.
membawa kepada esensi hubungan manusia dengan manusia, manusia dengan alam dan manusia kepada penciptanya.
huma, katuan larangan, katuan anum, balian, mambuka ladang hingga panen besar semua berkaitan dengan nenek moyang dan alam.
membawa kepada esensi hubungan manusia dengan manusia, manusia dengan alam dan manusia kepada penciptanya.
August 17, 2008
A model for ethnography that doesn't suck.
September 22, 2010
A great look at the intersection of the Global and the Local in a small region of Indonesia... anthropology at its most innovative and interesting.
February 6, 2021
challenging read for someone who never has read an ethnography. Good principles and great for essays.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews