Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, State University of New York Press, 1987; available from Alibris and other sources.
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RATING: 90
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Buy this book?
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Yes
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Here is a curious case - a book that is a landmark publication, of more relevance today than ever, but one whose originality and significance have been almost entirely misread. To anticipate, it can now be recognised as an unequivocally path-breaking study of the symbiosis of 'production' and 'social reproduction' in what was virtually a laboratory setting of the abrupt introduction of factory work targeting young single women recruited from a rural environment. In other words, it is a classic of gendered political economy. First published in 1987 and re-issued in 2010, it explored the transition to the market economy and industrial wage labour in Sungai Jawa (pseudonym), Kuala Langat, Selangor, south-west of the Malaysian capital, Kuala Lumpur, a process in which young Malay women were drawn abruptly from kampung (village) society dominated by small-holding and cash-cropping into Japanese electronics factories producing for the international market. Ong's account was firmly grounded on the antecedents to this process, the general context from which it emerged, and the impact it had on social and family relations, as successive chapter titles reflect: 'Malay Peasants from Subsistence to Commodity Production', 'Tropical Confluences: Rural Society, Capital, and the State', 'Sungai Jawa: Differentiation and Dispersal', 'Domestic Relations: The Reconfiguration of Family Life', and 'Marriage Strategies: Negotiating the Future'. This analysis took up two thirds of the book, and in the final third the focus turned to the range of workplace mechanisms of control aimed at instilling capitalist discipline among 'neophyte factory women' (Chapter Seven: 'The Modern Corporation: Manufacturing Gender Hierarchy'), the emergence of social attitudes critical of the behaviour and morals of the factory women (Chapter Eight: 'Neophyte Factory Women and the Negative Image'), and, finally, the phenomenon of 'spirit possession' among the young female factory workers in Sungai Jawa and elsewhere in Malaysia (Chapter Nine: 'Spirits of Resistance').
While foregrounding factory women 'as historical subjects and in terms of their subjective experiences' (xiii), the study gave due weight to the local specificity of the industrialization process, and provided a comprehensive account of the context, at the same time addressing a universal requirement of capitalist development - the imperative need on the part of capital to secure a labour force on terms that will make for profitable enterprise. In addition, the study was pathbreaking in giving as much attention to the household as to the industrial context. I begin with Ong's own initial summary:
'As productive activities on the land give way to the sale of labour by household members, the power configuration of domestic relations is continually realigned, both in cooperation and in conflict. In this transition to industrial labour, special pressures are brought to bear on women, but especially daughters, in the Malay kampung family' (6).
'In daily life, it is often only young girls who are supervised, if at all, in their domestic tasks by female relatives. Thus, I would argue, the trauma of industrial labour for village women is in the rigidity of the work routine, continual male supervision, and devaluation of their labour in the factory. Spirit possession episodes, in which women become violent and scream abuses, are to be deciphered not so much as a noncapitalist critique of abstract exchange values (Taussig 1980) but as a protest against the loss of autonomy/humanity in work' (7-8).
Drawing on Foucault's insights, I argue that in the labour process young women are being reconstituted as instruments of labour and as new sexual personalities ... The elaboration of a culture of consumption or a cult of purity by different groups of Malay factory women must be seen in [the] light of differentiated resistance and cultural maneuvers in changing power domains' (8).
'For the Malaysian public, the sexuality of these new working women in transnational factories becomes the focus of anxiety over the social effects of capitalist development. This study therefore seeks to understand the industrial transformation of rural Malay society by looking at the predicament of young kampung women. In the public eye, neophyte factory women have become the mediating images of truth, the currency of discourse for parents, brothers, factory managers, male workers, politicians, Islamic revivalists, and themselves. I will talk about the varied coinage of sexuality in the home, the workplace, and the public forum, alternating between external representations of gender roles and sexual meanings and the self-constitution of identity by the neophyte factory women.
In the rural household, the cash-earning unmarried daughter becomes a challenge to the local ideology of male protection: what are the changed perceptions of fathers, brothers, and "boyfriends" (a new category) to the working-girl woman no longer accommodated under a unified concept of "maiden"? How do factory woman handle the contradictory experiences of economic autonomy from kinsmen and political coercion by men in the corporation and the wider society?' (8-9).
In the title of the book, then, and in the way in which the argument was set out, the emphasis was placed on spirit possession, viewed through a Foucauldian lens (the primary sources being Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I). And this is very much the way the book has been received: introducing the second edition in 2010, Carla Freeman presented it in the following terms: 'In a significant departure, Ong shifts from Marxian class struggle to Foucauldian analytics of power to illuminate power dynamics on and off the shop floor. ... [her] ethnographic findings challenge socialist feminists' claim that factory work will unambiguously liberate women from patriarchal power' (2nd edition, State University of New York Press, 2010, pp. xv, xvii-xviii); and her general discussion and only direct references to the text (p. 180 and twice p. 207) pointed readers directly to its final sections and the phenomenon of spirit possession. Virtually every Google Scholar reference from 2018-19 that I was able to access (there are close on 100, of over 2,100 in all, attesting to the standing of the text) also addresses the themes of possession and resistance.
Further evidence of how the book has been read comes from the copy I used, borrowed from the University of Manchester library. You can tell a great deal about reading strategies by closing a library book and looking at the bottom edge of the inner pages, where sections that have been read many times show up clearly, then opening it to look at the regrettable but revealing evidence from underlining and other anti-social forms of marking. Readers in this case have concentrated exclusively on the introductory material outlined above (up to page 10), and the third section, 'Neophyte Factory Women in Late Capitalism' (pages 141-221, if we include the conclusion). Despite the fact that the author took care to point to the importance of the local historical context and the significance of connections between village households and factories, without which the forms of discipline and resistance she examines cannot be understood, there is no evidence that anyone has read the intervening chapters, as the pages are unmarked and pristine. On the positive side, one person has marked one footnote (of 113, over 14 pages). These readers, who may or may not be representative, have voluntarily made themselves powerless to resist the notion that this is fundamentally a Foucauldian analysis of spirit possession as a form of resistance, and at the same time a critique of political economy approaches, Marxism included. They have deprived themselves of an understanding of the connections Ong has been at pains to tease out, and chosen for themselves to divorce 'production' from 'social reproduction', and culture from political economy. As a result, they have risked over-generalising what she has to say about these particular female factory workers, and missed the opportunity to build up knowledge of the history and development of Malaya/Malaysia.
Well, the book is a classic, but not on account of its treatment of spirit possession. First, its principal systematic source for kampung life, in addition to observation over the greater part of what was a fourteen-month period of fieldwork, was an on-the-ground census of 242 households in Sungai Jawa, conducted in 1978, along with time budget studies and nutritional information from 40 of them, each with children aged six and above (Ch. 4, ft. 1, pp. 227-8, ft. 3, p. 228). Second, Ong spent two months interviewing managerial and supervisory staff in the three electronics factories (Ch. 7, ft. 18, p. 233). Third, she conducted 35 structured interviews with female operators and some male technicians in their homes (Ch. 7, ft. 22, p. 234). Some of her informants had observed episodes of spirit possession, but none had experienced it. Her account of spirit possession itself occupied only eight pages of the book (203-10), and was based on a handful of second-hand accounts. In these, drawn from the two electronics factories, factory managers and workers offered contrasting interpretations (205): managers and supervisors variously identified lack of sleep or food, or 'hysteria', and suggested that either 'new girls' or those working in the microscope section were particularly vulnerable; one worker attributed it to 'spiritual weakness', but another was inclined to accept that hunger played a part. There appears to have been a consensus among workers that the spirit (hantu) had originally dwelt in the jungle and burial ground that had been cleared to set up the Free Trade Zone (207, 208-9). But in contrast to the meticulous analysis in the rest of the book, Ong made no attempt to quantify the extent of spirit possession overall, or to map it systematically, or to establish its evolution over time. Neither did she attempt to explore the work situations or personal circumstances of women who proved susceptible - the material on spirit possession in the short section 'In Their Own Voices' (207-10), as noted above, does not include a single person who experienced possession.
Too great and at the same time too narrow a focus on spirit possession, on Ong's part and in the reception of the text, has led to a misinterpretation of its content. On the basis of the evidence, the most that could be said is that it was a response, on the part of a minority of workers, to the circumstances of their sudden introduction to factory discipline, intelligible in terms of local beliefs. This is broadly the view Ong adopted at the outset, both in the preface (xii-xv), and in the first chapter. But although she took direct issue with Taussig's then recent monograph, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1980), there was no evidence or argument presented to defend the claim, cited above, that spirit possession episodes were to be deciphered not so much as a noncapitalist critique of abstract exchange values as a protest against the loss of autonomy or humanity at work (8, cf. 141, 196, 202). Two further instances illustrate the tenacity with which this theme is pursued:
'I wish to discover, in the vocabulary of spirit possession, the unconscious beginnings of an idiom of protest against labour discipline and male control in the modern industrial situation ... In the following cases, spirit imageries reveal not only a mode of unconscious retaliation against male authority but fundamentally a sense of dislocation in human relations and a need for greater spiritual vigilance in domains reconstituted by capitalist relations of production' (207).
'Caught up in the problematics of labour and the problematics of self, resistance within the institutional contraints of capitalist production called forth images of social dislocation, draining of their essence, and violation of their humanity. ... The hantu symbolism, shifting in and out of their consciousness, spoke not of an ideology of class struggle but of the right to be treated as human beings' (220).
This counterposing of class struggle and human dignity actually distorts and impoverishes the rich ethnographic material. But it was reinforced in what are were essentially brief and scattered asides that challenged 'Marxist' approaches, and strengthened the impression that Ong's 'Foucauldian' approach displaced a Marxist alternative. In particular, she questioned, without illustration or close examination, Burawoy's assumption that capitalist relations of production have a determining inherent logic, and Engels' rather hasty assertion, as she put it, that 'the first condition for the liberation of women from their oppressed status was to bring the whole female sex into public industry' (195). On her own evidence, though, these judgements were themselves over-hasty. Ong took her appraisal of a Marxist account of production no further than a reference to the separation of manual from intellectual work. But she provided much more evidence of manifold sources of discipline that were indeed inherent in the production process and labour market themselves: the subjection of the worker to the machine, the decomposition of tasks, the constant labour-displacing investment in new technology, the speeding up and intensification of the rhythm of work, the persistent use of temporary workers alongside those on regular contracts, high turnover, a rigorous regime of monitoring of productivity and the ruthless weeding out of less productive workers, and, crucially for its disciplining effect, a supply of labour that was for all practical purposes infinite:
'The recruitment of these women for industrial work was not a problem because of their relative oversupply and the eagerness of peasants, village elders, and local institutions to send otherwise non-cash-earning village women to the FTZ [Free Trade Zone]. ... Managers at the three factories reported no problems in getting the labour they needed, even if an immediate intake of one to three hundred female operators was required. ... Unlike urban-based industrial estates ... the Telok factories had easy and immediate access to low-grade female labour' (153).
Equally, when Ong countered Engels with the reflection that 'it was the particular insertion of Japanese industrial organization into the kampung milieu which has preserved female compliance with male authority and slowed individuation from the fabric of rural society' (195), she went directly against her own material. Not only was the raising of the normal age of marriage from 19 to 22 an immediate consequence of the availability of factory work, but many young kampung women were quick to adopt new consumer habits and modes of dress, and used their new financial independence to insist upon their right to see and marry whoever they pleased: 'Indeed, kampung women increasingly sought rights previously limited to men ... Most young women I interviewed would not let their parents pick their future spouses, the usual retort being "What if I don't like him?"' (199). If we recall that these observations date from well within the first decade of factory production, it is hard to dismiss the claims advanced by Engels (and, of course, by Marx himself), and equally hard to agree with Freeman's appraisal of the text.
To grasp the true merit of this study, then, it is necessary to resist both its treatment of spirit possession and its injudicious framing of Marxist and Foucauldian approaches. These aspects hinder appreciation of the way in which the study, precisely because it gave due weight to material as well as institutional, social and cultural factors, brought 'production' and 'social reproduction' into a single frame. Not only that - it did it superbly well, and it did it by teasing out the specificity of their symbiosis at a particular moment in which the planting of electronics factories in a rural setting created what were effectively laboratory conditions for the investigation of its effects. So in fact, as indicated in the run of chapters listed at the beginning of this review, Ong set her analysis in the specific context of '(i) an expanding state bureaucracy for the integrating fractions of the peasantry loosened from the land, and (ii) global corporate strategies based upon the fragmentation of the labour force dispersed throughout the world system' (5), while still maintaining a firm primary focus on household and gender relations. She explored over more than a century of changing conditions of production and reproduction, commanded over until the 1950s by the British colonial state in conjunction with local elites, and after independence by the state apparatus and increasingly by global capital, in which the 'centralization of bureaucratic control over local reproduction processes [was] not limited to the production of exchange values but [extended] to the production of cultural values as well' (5). The particular process of industrialization around Japanese electronics factories followed upon an equally particular local history and colonial political economy, and emerged at a specific moment in the development of the world market - the first wave of the transnationalisation of capital in the NICs (newly industrialized countries) of Asia in particular.
The period from 1870 to 1960 is crucial in terms of the general development of the world market, labour regimes and labour mobility (a.k.a. 'globalization'), and Ong's succinct account of her own study area brings out a multitude of connections. In Selangor, British colonial officers promoted tin mining and plantation agriculture, importing Tamil labourers from South India for the latter, while seeking to 'protect' Malay peasant land as a source of food and other crops. The planting of rubber and the mining of tin, by the way, displaced production in Brazil and Bolivia respectively - around the world, this was a period of intense dislocation. Here, the 'cumulative effect of colonial policies governing Malay settlers, land and cultivation was to reconstitute rural Malays into petty commodity producers dependent on the market for their survival and long-term reproduction. ... Most critically, colonial legislation of land as private property set into motion differential access to land, enforcing the peasant transition from the production of use values to the production of exchange values (commodities and labour-power) destined for capitalist circuits of exchange' (23-4). The manner in which the process developed was shaped by the interaction of Islamic inheritance law; colonial efforts to 'balance' petty commodity production, mining and plantation agriculture; and the capacity of peasants to produce small amounts of rubber and coconuts at very low cost alongside food crops by mobilising family labour across a range of activities. A British field officer reported in 1936 that 'one very often comes across an isolated house in charge of a little girl aged eight or nine. The father and mother are away at work during the day. She scarcely moves from the house until the parents return at night. She cooks and washes for three or four younger brothers and sisters, their only food being rice and sauce and occasionally a bit of dried fish or a few green vegetables' (Selangor Annual Reports, 1936, cited p. 26). In this context, the accumulation of land by a minority of peasant families took a specific political form in late colonial society:
'Although the vast majority of Malay peasants continued to operate holdings of under five acres ... a very small group of Malay civil servants had become medium-sized (over ten-acre lot) landowners in village society. Their special connections to the state bureaucracy enabled this salaried elite - teachers, health inspectors, policemen, and a few businessmen - to participate in land speculation and live off rent as absentee landlords. ... This emergent Malay bureaucratic elite, basking in the glow cast by official and landowner status, did not invest capital to increase labour productivity on village land. ... In effect, land speculation and absentee landlordism led to poor cultivation techniques and low quality in village rubber output' (30).
In these circumstances, 'village households evolved multiple-occupational strategies to spread risks and minimize loss; few were able to accumulate wealth' (34). And after independence, the well-connected local bureaucrats became the mainstay of the ruling UMNO (United Malays National Organization), thereby reinforcing their political salience. It was in this context that the Free Trade Zone was created in 'Sungai Jawa', and Japanese electronics companies made their appearance in 1972. The entry into them of some 2000 young Malay women was just one aspect of the changing 'domestic deployment of labour' (61-8), but it produced a situation in which landless and land-poor families relied primarily on wage labour, with men as likely to be engaged in casual as in 'steady' work, while women were much more likely to have 'steady' jobs - overwhelmingly, in electronics factories. In Ong's survey of time budgets in forty households, women in landless and land-poor families averaged 4.71 and 2.4 hours of steady work per day, compared to 3.97 and 2.28 hours for men; men did much more casual work, but the 4.26 and 4.61 hours respectively that women devoted to household chores meant that they worked longer days - 10.3 versus 8.39 hours in landless families, and 8.16 versus 7.42 hours in land-poor families. Women, in short tended to combine domestic labour with factory work: 'Young women from the poorest households have the longest working day' (64, 66); and later, 'In total, factory women exceed by 3.5 hours the daily labour time of ordinary village women not engaged in regular wage work' (97).
Ong' exploration of the manner in which these developments reconfigured family life and impacted upon the marriage choices of young women was prefaced as follows: 'The cultural and structural reconfiguration of relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, male and female is fraught with new needs and conflicts. As it will be shown, the social reproduction of the reconstituted kampung society, now firmly situated in the circuit of capitalist development, is more discontinuous than one may assume' (84). With the sudden creation of the opportunity for factory work for young single women, a culture in which the emphasis was upon sheltering such women was thrown into disarray. Alongside commitment to Islamic principles (such as the responsibility of the father to provide for the shelter, food and clothing of his wife and their children, meaning that a wife's earnings are her own), customary belief saw young woman as weak in spiritual essence (lemah semangat), and vulnerable to possession by evil spirits, especially hantu (86-90). At the same time, secondary schooling was recently available locally (from 1972, in fact), leading to a pattern of almost universal entry to secondary level. Some girls, often the eldest, left at 12 (Standard Six) to take up domestic duties; the majority left at 16 (Form Three), and a few stayed on to Form Five. All girls over twelve took on increased domestic responsibilities, and most of those entering the factories had failed the Form Three certificate. But at the same time, in a 'significant shift from past attitudes, village parents prefer their daughters not to marry straight out of school now that there are factory jobs close to home and daughters can be induced to earn an extra source of income' (96-7). Once married, they will no longer contribute to the family budget; in the meantime, they do not hand over their whole wage, but contribute according to family circumstances, and 'the rerooting of their labour power in capitalist structures poses an unmistakable challenge to domestic male authority, a challenge negotiated and deflected through appeals to emotional bonds and sentiments' (99). The resulting conflicts, negotiations and outcomes were illustrated through seven illuminating individual cases (100-108). The short version is that sons were often reluctant to share earnings, or even to work, while daughters contributed more and gain 'critical leverage to realign domestic power relations' (107):
'The changing content of daughter-parent, sister-brother relationships is displayed in refusal of money to parents who remarry, criticism of brothers, more daring enjoyment of premarital sex, power over younger siblings who ask for money, and decisions to hand earnings over to the mother. While the edifice of male authority is maintained, male honour is in a fundamental sense undermined as the father's farm income steadily declines, unemployed brothers accept doles from working sisters, and the household budget derives increasingly from female wages. In many cases, it is the mother who prods daughters to begin factory work, who extracts their regular contributions, punishes but tolerates their sexual adventures, and persuades them to delay marriage' (107-8).
The complementary chapter on marriage strategies that followed, illustrated with a further nine individual cases, offered revealing insights into the dynamics of family relations, which were generally far from rigidly patriarchal, and reflected neither fundamentalism nor conservatism in religious terms. Ong registered significant changes in relative power relations as young women began to command the highest wage in the family, despite the fact that the phenomenon was relatively recent, showing that material developments quickly gave rise to social and cultural change.
All this, then, was the composite context for the phenomenon of recruitment of young village women into electronics factories in one of Malaysia's nine Free Trade Zones - factories in which automation was already beginning to displace the cheap female labour on which they relied, leading to an increased pace of work as single operatives were asked to tend multiple machines, and the machines set the pace (161-4). As suggested above, patterns of round-the-clock shift work, elaborate systems of finely graded productivity-based incentives and pressure towards overtime work produced a regime that meant that workers generally spent no more than three to four years in factory, and those engaged in closeup work with microscopes were subject to deterioration of their eyesight over an even shorter period. At the same time, the companies engaged systematically in building close relationships with communities, community leaders and parents, presented themselves as 'guardians' of the 'maidens' entrusted to them by local families, and ran 'company unions' or similar internal schemes to neutralize the potential for dissent.
Overall, Ong argued: 'The modern corporation in Kuala Langat thus introduced a whole network of power relations which operate in different local situations: state agencies, unions, corporate structures, industrial workshops, factory meetings, kampung groups, and village households', amounting to 'a multiplicity of overlapping disciplinary techniques which produce biological objects, docile bodies, and sexualised subjects in transnational companies' (177-8). This appraisal, right at the end of Chapter Seven, captures the true import of the study. It follows that spirit possession, which of course was a significant phenomenon, itself stemmed from a multiplicity of overlapping tensions that had their origins equally in kampung society and the electronics factory, and the relations between them. Unequivocally, one for the classic bookshelf.
While foregrounding factory women 'as historical subjects and in terms of their subjective experiences' (xiii), the study gave due weight to the local specificity of the industrialization process, and provided a comprehensive account of the context, at the same time addressing a universal requirement of capitalist development - the imperative need on the part of capital to secure a labour force on terms that will make for profitable enterprise. In addition, the study was pathbreaking in giving as much attention to the household as to the industrial context. I begin with Ong's own initial summary:
'As productive activities on the land give way to the sale of labour by household members, the power configuration of domestic relations is continually realigned, both in cooperation and in conflict. In this transition to industrial labour, special pressures are brought to bear on women, but especially daughters, in the Malay kampung family' (6).
'In daily life, it is often only young girls who are supervised, if at all, in their domestic tasks by female relatives. Thus, I would argue, the trauma of industrial labour for village women is in the rigidity of the work routine, continual male supervision, and devaluation of their labour in the factory. Spirit possession episodes, in which women become violent and scream abuses, are to be deciphered not so much as a noncapitalist critique of abstract exchange values (Taussig 1980) but as a protest against the loss of autonomy/humanity in work' (7-8).
Drawing on Foucault's insights, I argue that in the labour process young women are being reconstituted as instruments of labour and as new sexual personalities ... The elaboration of a culture of consumption or a cult of purity by different groups of Malay factory women must be seen in [the] light of differentiated resistance and cultural maneuvers in changing power domains' (8).
'For the Malaysian public, the sexuality of these new working women in transnational factories becomes the focus of anxiety over the social effects of capitalist development. This study therefore seeks to understand the industrial transformation of rural Malay society by looking at the predicament of young kampung women. In the public eye, neophyte factory women have become the mediating images of truth, the currency of discourse for parents, brothers, factory managers, male workers, politicians, Islamic revivalists, and themselves. I will talk about the varied coinage of sexuality in the home, the workplace, and the public forum, alternating between external representations of gender roles and sexual meanings and the self-constitution of identity by the neophyte factory women.
In the rural household, the cash-earning unmarried daughter becomes a challenge to the local ideology of male protection: what are the changed perceptions of fathers, brothers, and "boyfriends" (a new category) to the working-girl woman no longer accommodated under a unified concept of "maiden"? How do factory woman handle the contradictory experiences of economic autonomy from kinsmen and political coercion by men in the corporation and the wider society?' (8-9).
In the title of the book, then, and in the way in which the argument was set out, the emphasis was placed on spirit possession, viewed through a Foucauldian lens (the primary sources being Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, Volume I). And this is very much the way the book has been received: introducing the second edition in 2010, Carla Freeman presented it in the following terms: 'In a significant departure, Ong shifts from Marxian class struggle to Foucauldian analytics of power to illuminate power dynamics on and off the shop floor. ... [her] ethnographic findings challenge socialist feminists' claim that factory work will unambiguously liberate women from patriarchal power' (2nd edition, State University of New York Press, 2010, pp. xv, xvii-xviii); and her general discussion and only direct references to the text (p. 180 and twice p. 207) pointed readers directly to its final sections and the phenomenon of spirit possession. Virtually every Google Scholar reference from 2018-19 that I was able to access (there are close on 100, of over 2,100 in all, attesting to the standing of the text) also addresses the themes of possession and resistance.
Further evidence of how the book has been read comes from the copy I used, borrowed from the University of Manchester library. You can tell a great deal about reading strategies by closing a library book and looking at the bottom edge of the inner pages, where sections that have been read many times show up clearly, then opening it to look at the regrettable but revealing evidence from underlining and other anti-social forms of marking. Readers in this case have concentrated exclusively on the introductory material outlined above (up to page 10), and the third section, 'Neophyte Factory Women in Late Capitalism' (pages 141-221, if we include the conclusion). Despite the fact that the author took care to point to the importance of the local historical context and the significance of connections between village households and factories, without which the forms of discipline and resistance she examines cannot be understood, there is no evidence that anyone has read the intervening chapters, as the pages are unmarked and pristine. On the positive side, one person has marked one footnote (of 113, over 14 pages). These readers, who may or may not be representative, have voluntarily made themselves powerless to resist the notion that this is fundamentally a Foucauldian analysis of spirit possession as a form of resistance, and at the same time a critique of political economy approaches, Marxism included. They have deprived themselves of an understanding of the connections Ong has been at pains to tease out, and chosen for themselves to divorce 'production' from 'social reproduction', and culture from political economy. As a result, they have risked over-generalising what she has to say about these particular female factory workers, and missed the opportunity to build up knowledge of the history and development of Malaya/Malaysia.
Well, the book is a classic, but not on account of its treatment of spirit possession. First, its principal systematic source for kampung life, in addition to observation over the greater part of what was a fourteen-month period of fieldwork, was an on-the-ground census of 242 households in Sungai Jawa, conducted in 1978, along with time budget studies and nutritional information from 40 of them, each with children aged six and above (Ch. 4, ft. 1, pp. 227-8, ft. 3, p. 228). Second, Ong spent two months interviewing managerial and supervisory staff in the three electronics factories (Ch. 7, ft. 18, p. 233). Third, she conducted 35 structured interviews with female operators and some male technicians in their homes (Ch. 7, ft. 22, p. 234). Some of her informants had observed episodes of spirit possession, but none had experienced it. Her account of spirit possession itself occupied only eight pages of the book (203-10), and was based on a handful of second-hand accounts. In these, drawn from the two electronics factories, factory managers and workers offered contrasting interpretations (205): managers and supervisors variously identified lack of sleep or food, or 'hysteria', and suggested that either 'new girls' or those working in the microscope section were particularly vulnerable; one worker attributed it to 'spiritual weakness', but another was inclined to accept that hunger played a part. There appears to have been a consensus among workers that the spirit (hantu) had originally dwelt in the jungle and burial ground that had been cleared to set up the Free Trade Zone (207, 208-9). But in contrast to the meticulous analysis in the rest of the book, Ong made no attempt to quantify the extent of spirit possession overall, or to map it systematically, or to establish its evolution over time. Neither did she attempt to explore the work situations or personal circumstances of women who proved susceptible - the material on spirit possession in the short section 'In Their Own Voices' (207-10), as noted above, does not include a single person who experienced possession.
Too great and at the same time too narrow a focus on spirit possession, on Ong's part and in the reception of the text, has led to a misinterpretation of its content. On the basis of the evidence, the most that could be said is that it was a response, on the part of a minority of workers, to the circumstances of their sudden introduction to factory discipline, intelligible in terms of local beliefs. This is broadly the view Ong adopted at the outset, both in the preface (xii-xv), and in the first chapter. But although she took direct issue with Taussig's then recent monograph, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in Latin America (University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1980), there was no evidence or argument presented to defend the claim, cited above, that spirit possession episodes were to be deciphered not so much as a noncapitalist critique of abstract exchange values as a protest against the loss of autonomy or humanity at work (8, cf. 141, 196, 202). Two further instances illustrate the tenacity with which this theme is pursued:
'I wish to discover, in the vocabulary of spirit possession, the unconscious beginnings of an idiom of protest against labour discipline and male control in the modern industrial situation ... In the following cases, spirit imageries reveal not only a mode of unconscious retaliation against male authority but fundamentally a sense of dislocation in human relations and a need for greater spiritual vigilance in domains reconstituted by capitalist relations of production' (207).
'Caught up in the problematics of labour and the problematics of self, resistance within the institutional contraints of capitalist production called forth images of social dislocation, draining of their essence, and violation of their humanity. ... The hantu symbolism, shifting in and out of their consciousness, spoke not of an ideology of class struggle but of the right to be treated as human beings' (220).
This counterposing of class struggle and human dignity actually distorts and impoverishes the rich ethnographic material. But it was reinforced in what are were essentially brief and scattered asides that challenged 'Marxist' approaches, and strengthened the impression that Ong's 'Foucauldian' approach displaced a Marxist alternative. In particular, she questioned, without illustration or close examination, Burawoy's assumption that capitalist relations of production have a determining inherent logic, and Engels' rather hasty assertion, as she put it, that 'the first condition for the liberation of women from their oppressed status was to bring the whole female sex into public industry' (195). On her own evidence, though, these judgements were themselves over-hasty. Ong took her appraisal of a Marxist account of production no further than a reference to the separation of manual from intellectual work. But she provided much more evidence of manifold sources of discipline that were indeed inherent in the production process and labour market themselves: the subjection of the worker to the machine, the decomposition of tasks, the constant labour-displacing investment in new technology, the speeding up and intensification of the rhythm of work, the persistent use of temporary workers alongside those on regular contracts, high turnover, a rigorous regime of monitoring of productivity and the ruthless weeding out of less productive workers, and, crucially for its disciplining effect, a supply of labour that was for all practical purposes infinite:
'The recruitment of these women for industrial work was not a problem because of their relative oversupply and the eagerness of peasants, village elders, and local institutions to send otherwise non-cash-earning village women to the FTZ [Free Trade Zone]. ... Managers at the three factories reported no problems in getting the labour they needed, even if an immediate intake of one to three hundred female operators was required. ... Unlike urban-based industrial estates ... the Telok factories had easy and immediate access to low-grade female labour' (153).
Equally, when Ong countered Engels with the reflection that 'it was the particular insertion of Japanese industrial organization into the kampung milieu which has preserved female compliance with male authority and slowed individuation from the fabric of rural society' (195), she went directly against her own material. Not only was the raising of the normal age of marriage from 19 to 22 an immediate consequence of the availability of factory work, but many young kampung women were quick to adopt new consumer habits and modes of dress, and used their new financial independence to insist upon their right to see and marry whoever they pleased: 'Indeed, kampung women increasingly sought rights previously limited to men ... Most young women I interviewed would not let their parents pick their future spouses, the usual retort being "What if I don't like him?"' (199). If we recall that these observations date from well within the first decade of factory production, it is hard to dismiss the claims advanced by Engels (and, of course, by Marx himself), and equally hard to agree with Freeman's appraisal of the text.
To grasp the true merit of this study, then, it is necessary to resist both its treatment of spirit possession and its injudicious framing of Marxist and Foucauldian approaches. These aspects hinder appreciation of the way in which the study, precisely because it gave due weight to material as well as institutional, social and cultural factors, brought 'production' and 'social reproduction' into a single frame. Not only that - it did it superbly well, and it did it by teasing out the specificity of their symbiosis at a particular moment in which the planting of electronics factories in a rural setting created what were effectively laboratory conditions for the investigation of its effects. So in fact, as indicated in the run of chapters listed at the beginning of this review, Ong set her analysis in the specific context of '(i) an expanding state bureaucracy for the integrating fractions of the peasantry loosened from the land, and (ii) global corporate strategies based upon the fragmentation of the labour force dispersed throughout the world system' (5), while still maintaining a firm primary focus on household and gender relations. She explored over more than a century of changing conditions of production and reproduction, commanded over until the 1950s by the British colonial state in conjunction with local elites, and after independence by the state apparatus and increasingly by global capital, in which the 'centralization of bureaucratic control over local reproduction processes [was] not limited to the production of exchange values but [extended] to the production of cultural values as well' (5). The particular process of industrialization around Japanese electronics factories followed upon an equally particular local history and colonial political economy, and emerged at a specific moment in the development of the world market - the first wave of the transnationalisation of capital in the NICs (newly industrialized countries) of Asia in particular.
The period from 1870 to 1960 is crucial in terms of the general development of the world market, labour regimes and labour mobility (a.k.a. 'globalization'), and Ong's succinct account of her own study area brings out a multitude of connections. In Selangor, British colonial officers promoted tin mining and plantation agriculture, importing Tamil labourers from South India for the latter, while seeking to 'protect' Malay peasant land as a source of food and other crops. The planting of rubber and the mining of tin, by the way, displaced production in Brazil and Bolivia respectively - around the world, this was a period of intense dislocation. Here, the 'cumulative effect of colonial policies governing Malay settlers, land and cultivation was to reconstitute rural Malays into petty commodity producers dependent on the market for their survival and long-term reproduction. ... Most critically, colonial legislation of land as private property set into motion differential access to land, enforcing the peasant transition from the production of use values to the production of exchange values (commodities and labour-power) destined for capitalist circuits of exchange' (23-4). The manner in which the process developed was shaped by the interaction of Islamic inheritance law; colonial efforts to 'balance' petty commodity production, mining and plantation agriculture; and the capacity of peasants to produce small amounts of rubber and coconuts at very low cost alongside food crops by mobilising family labour across a range of activities. A British field officer reported in 1936 that 'one very often comes across an isolated house in charge of a little girl aged eight or nine. The father and mother are away at work during the day. She scarcely moves from the house until the parents return at night. She cooks and washes for three or four younger brothers and sisters, their only food being rice and sauce and occasionally a bit of dried fish or a few green vegetables' (Selangor Annual Reports, 1936, cited p. 26). In this context, the accumulation of land by a minority of peasant families took a specific political form in late colonial society:
'Although the vast majority of Malay peasants continued to operate holdings of under five acres ... a very small group of Malay civil servants had become medium-sized (over ten-acre lot) landowners in village society. Their special connections to the state bureaucracy enabled this salaried elite - teachers, health inspectors, policemen, and a few businessmen - to participate in land speculation and live off rent as absentee landlords. ... This emergent Malay bureaucratic elite, basking in the glow cast by official and landowner status, did not invest capital to increase labour productivity on village land. ... In effect, land speculation and absentee landlordism led to poor cultivation techniques and low quality in village rubber output' (30).
In these circumstances, 'village households evolved multiple-occupational strategies to spread risks and minimize loss; few were able to accumulate wealth' (34). And after independence, the well-connected local bureaucrats became the mainstay of the ruling UMNO (United Malays National Organization), thereby reinforcing their political salience. It was in this context that the Free Trade Zone was created in 'Sungai Jawa', and Japanese electronics companies made their appearance in 1972. The entry into them of some 2000 young Malay women was just one aspect of the changing 'domestic deployment of labour' (61-8), but it produced a situation in which landless and land-poor families relied primarily on wage labour, with men as likely to be engaged in casual as in 'steady' work, while women were much more likely to have 'steady' jobs - overwhelmingly, in electronics factories. In Ong's survey of time budgets in forty households, women in landless and land-poor families averaged 4.71 and 2.4 hours of steady work per day, compared to 3.97 and 2.28 hours for men; men did much more casual work, but the 4.26 and 4.61 hours respectively that women devoted to household chores meant that they worked longer days - 10.3 versus 8.39 hours in landless families, and 8.16 versus 7.42 hours in land-poor families. Women, in short tended to combine domestic labour with factory work: 'Young women from the poorest households have the longest working day' (64, 66); and later, 'In total, factory women exceed by 3.5 hours the daily labour time of ordinary village women not engaged in regular wage work' (97).
Ong' exploration of the manner in which these developments reconfigured family life and impacted upon the marriage choices of young women was prefaced as follows: 'The cultural and structural reconfiguration of relationships between parents and children, brothers and sisters, male and female is fraught with new needs and conflicts. As it will be shown, the social reproduction of the reconstituted kampung society, now firmly situated in the circuit of capitalist development, is more discontinuous than one may assume' (84). With the sudden creation of the opportunity for factory work for young single women, a culture in which the emphasis was upon sheltering such women was thrown into disarray. Alongside commitment to Islamic principles (such as the responsibility of the father to provide for the shelter, food and clothing of his wife and their children, meaning that a wife's earnings are her own), customary belief saw young woman as weak in spiritual essence (lemah semangat), and vulnerable to possession by evil spirits, especially hantu (86-90). At the same time, secondary schooling was recently available locally (from 1972, in fact), leading to a pattern of almost universal entry to secondary level. Some girls, often the eldest, left at 12 (Standard Six) to take up domestic duties; the majority left at 16 (Form Three), and a few stayed on to Form Five. All girls over twelve took on increased domestic responsibilities, and most of those entering the factories had failed the Form Three certificate. But at the same time, in a 'significant shift from past attitudes, village parents prefer their daughters not to marry straight out of school now that there are factory jobs close to home and daughters can be induced to earn an extra source of income' (96-7). Once married, they will no longer contribute to the family budget; in the meantime, they do not hand over their whole wage, but contribute according to family circumstances, and 'the rerooting of their labour power in capitalist structures poses an unmistakable challenge to domestic male authority, a challenge negotiated and deflected through appeals to emotional bonds and sentiments' (99). The resulting conflicts, negotiations and outcomes were illustrated through seven illuminating individual cases (100-108). The short version is that sons were often reluctant to share earnings, or even to work, while daughters contributed more and gain 'critical leverage to realign domestic power relations' (107):
'The changing content of daughter-parent, sister-brother relationships is displayed in refusal of money to parents who remarry, criticism of brothers, more daring enjoyment of premarital sex, power over younger siblings who ask for money, and decisions to hand earnings over to the mother. While the edifice of male authority is maintained, male honour is in a fundamental sense undermined as the father's farm income steadily declines, unemployed brothers accept doles from working sisters, and the household budget derives increasingly from female wages. In many cases, it is the mother who prods daughters to begin factory work, who extracts their regular contributions, punishes but tolerates their sexual adventures, and persuades them to delay marriage' (107-8).
The complementary chapter on marriage strategies that followed, illustrated with a further nine individual cases, offered revealing insights into the dynamics of family relations, which were generally far from rigidly patriarchal, and reflected neither fundamentalism nor conservatism in religious terms. Ong registered significant changes in relative power relations as young women began to command the highest wage in the family, despite the fact that the phenomenon was relatively recent, showing that material developments quickly gave rise to social and cultural change.
All this, then, was the composite context for the phenomenon of recruitment of young village women into electronics factories in one of Malaysia's nine Free Trade Zones - factories in which automation was already beginning to displace the cheap female labour on which they relied, leading to an increased pace of work as single operatives were asked to tend multiple machines, and the machines set the pace (161-4). As suggested above, patterns of round-the-clock shift work, elaborate systems of finely graded productivity-based incentives and pressure towards overtime work produced a regime that meant that workers generally spent no more than three to four years in factory, and those engaged in closeup work with microscopes were subject to deterioration of their eyesight over an even shorter period. At the same time, the companies engaged systematically in building close relationships with communities, community leaders and parents, presented themselves as 'guardians' of the 'maidens' entrusted to them by local families, and ran 'company unions' or similar internal schemes to neutralize the potential for dissent.
Overall, Ong argued: 'The modern corporation in Kuala Langat thus introduced a whole network of power relations which operate in different local situations: state agencies, unions, corporate structures, industrial workshops, factory meetings, kampung groups, and village households', amounting to 'a multiplicity of overlapping disciplinary techniques which produce biological objects, docile bodies, and sexualised subjects in transnational companies' (177-8). This appraisal, right at the end of Chapter Seven, captures the true import of the study. It follows that spirit possession, which of course was a significant phenomenon, itself stemmed from a multiplicity of overlapping tensions that had their origins equally in kampung society and the electronics factory, and the relations between them. Unequivocally, one for the classic bookshelf.