Volume 36, Number 14 · September 28, 1989
The Not-So-Spiritual East
By James Sterba
God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey
by Ian Buruma
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 267 pp., $18.95
Beside the road that connects Solo to Jogjakarta in central Java, a beautiful village named Begajah was barely beginning its quest for a modern way of life when I arrived in 1971. People there lived under thatched roofs and padded barefooted down dirt paths. Its rice fields were meticulously cultivated. Its palms were laden with coconuts. Bananas and papayas ripened everywhere. Chickens and goats and water buffalo and ducks were tended by small boys who always seemed to be laughing or jumping into the new irrigation ditches. People poured buckets of water over their heads from backyard wells each morning. Tiny oil lamps flickered inside houses at night. Electricity was sixteen years away. But ghosts and spirits, both good and bad, lurked everywhere as they always had in defiance of centuries of teaching by the importers of ideas called Islam and Christianity.
Review, 3555 words
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