Brushed in light: calligraphy in East Asian cinema Markus Nornes. University of Michigan Press, 2021. 174 pages. Hardback, $45.00, ISBN: 978-0-472-13255-3. Ebook, Open Access, 978-0-472-90243-9

categories in terms of authenticity (culture as being unchanged from the past), and the question of alienated ownership of knowledge in capitalistic frameworks through intellectual property rights. The tension between cultural change through indigenous agency and cultural authenticity imposed by the colonial gaze remains unresolved in the monograph. In attempting to present multiple antithetical perspectives between local and colonial (academic and state) ways of knowing, Cai is ambivalent on the positive role that certain brokers play and the impossibility of representing the depth of indigenous cultures and traditions to outsiders or audience misinformed by the colonial lens. Positively, brokers create webs of relations and responsibilities between themselves, indigenous community groups, and external stakeholders. There are negative cases when these relations and responsibilities break down, especially when prioritizing capitalist, private, and state interests over local responsibilities. A similar ambivalence on the role of brokers and the tension between indigenous agency and the colonial lens is played out in the case of Anne Lasimbang. Anne Lasimbang works as a broker to position indigenous peoples in Sabah as “ecologically noble savages” in order to gain cultural and land rights from the Malaysian state. She talked about her choice to wear a “loincloth” as her act to reclaim her pride in being both indigenous and educated (in Western sciences). Cai interprets this as an act of strategic essentialism that “consciously maintains the construction of difference between indigenous and non-indigenous people, recasting the former as backward and undeveloped” (p. 143). Within this tension, it remains unclear if Anne Lasimbang’s fight for indigenous rights is co-opted into a colonial discourse of the “primitive native” or that the Malaysian Forestry Department has failed to ethically collaborate with different indigenous communities to come up with a respectful definition of adat (native customary rights). In conclusion, Staging Indigenous Heritage is filled with detailed ethnographic notes on various rituals and cultural practices within the four case studies that will be of interest to scholars interested in learning more about the dynamics within indigenous community groups in Malaysia. It also serves to inform future Asia development studies projects on the issues on the brokerage system.