While she was conducting research in Biak, located in the Papuan borderlands that mark the easternmost reaches of the Indonesian nation, Danilyn Rutherford often found herself in the odd position of being welcomed back by people whom she had never met, as if her arrival had been long expected. The people of Biak, she learned, were no strangers to the foreign. After centuries during which they had successively paid tribute to distant sultans, fallen under the Netherlands' colonial rule, been subjected to Japanese occupation and the battles of World War II, and been forcibly incorporated by the Indonesian state, the foreign had become as much a part of their society as any home-grown cultural forms. Biaks prided themselves on their cosmopolitanism, boasting of high literacy rates and fluency in Indonesian, the national language; Christianity had become thoroughly entrenched in local life.

It is their relationship to the idea of the foreign, and how it shaped Biaks' responses to Indonesian rule and other sources of external authority, that forms the backbone of this book. A remarkable ethnography of a remarkable place, Raiding the Land of the Foreigners challenges the idea that political integration into the nation-state inevitably leads to the hegemony of national ideologies and identities. Despite the apparent enthusiasm with which many Biaks participated in the institutions of the Indonesian nation-state under the long-lived Suharto regime, Rutherford argues that a distinctive relationship with the foreign as a source of prestige, power, and value allowed Biaks to engage fully in these institutions without subscribing to what might be called an Indonesian national consciousness. The value of such participation lay in its ability to enhance the status of Biak individuals (and, by extension, their kin) who could claim the status of "foreigners" through their visible roles as representatives of the Indonesian state or other "foreign" sources of power. A resident of Biak, then, could proudly wear the uniform of a civil servant and at the same time express contempt for national ideologies. The failure of Indonesian hegemony may also help to explain the support for the Papuan nationalist movement that has swept the region since the fall of the Suharto regime in 1998.

Rutherford does not simply assert the lack of fit between the borders of the nation-state and the reach of its cultural domination; neither does she leave the category of "the foreign" as an abstract idea. She elucidates in detail how this category, as a distinctly Biak concept, has been produced through the interaction of particular historical trajectories and sociocultural dynamics. The strength of this book lies in its deep, nuanced investigation of the discursive logics that underlie Biak society and ways of life, and of the historical processes that led to what Rutherford calls "the fetishization of the foreign." Based on an extended period of fieldwork in the 1990s, several return visits, and a year of archival research and interviews conducted in the Netherlands, the author weaves together an intricate but coherent study that encompasses Biak kinship and exchange relations, millenarian movements, Christianization, local myths and genres of performance, prestige systems, and political culture. These diverse social fields are shown to be linked to each other in a larger "sociocultural economy," that is, "an interconnected series of spaces of representation, appropriation, and production, whose reproduction rests on a dialectic in which social action is both oriented by and recreates cultural values" (p. 4).

Ethnography and theory go hand in hand here; the book is as theoretically rigorous, well informed, and insightful—often brilliant—as it is ethnographically rich. Through the details of ethnography (enhanced, I might add, by moments of warmth and humor), readers come to understand the significance of Rutherford's theoretical treatment of her subject. She offers a provocative critique of the notion that modernity and the processes associated with it (such as nationalism, bureaucratization, or Christianization) necessarily usher in a radical rupture in local subjectivities and understandings. Where she might have expected to find rupture in Biak, she often found continuity, but those continuities were more the product of a long-standing engagement with the outside world than of any stubborn adherence to an autochthonous tradition. The ability of Biaks to domesticate the foreign—including the national—by imbuing it with local meanings should be taken as an example of a larger set of possibilities that must be considered by those who study the transformations of modernity and national integration.

This is, in short, an original, masterful book that will be of great value not only to scholars of Southeast Asia and Melanesia but also to the discipline of anthropology as a whole.