INDONESIANS AND THEIR NEIGHBORS. Festschrift E. V. Revunenkova and A. K. Ogloblin. Editor's note. and comp. by M. V. Stanyukovich, St. Petersburg: MAE RAS, 2008. 432 p.; 16 figs. (Maklaevsky collection. Issue 1)

An important event for those who have devoted themselves to the study of the countries of Southeast Asia and Oceania was the celebration in January 2009 of the 70th anniversary of two outstanding scientists-Doctor of Historical Sciences E. V. Revunenkova and Doctor of Physical Sciences A. K. Ogloblin. A few years ago, their friends and colleagues from St. Petersburg, Moscow, Jakarta, and Paris already celebrated the 40th anniversary of their scientific activities at the annual conference of the St. Petersburg Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. Peter the Great (Kunstkamera) - "Maklai readings". The reviewed collection is based on the reports read at this conference, as well as a number of articles by its "correspondence" participants.

For obvious reasons, the number of specialists engaged in studying such a vast region in our country is relatively small and is mainly limited to Moscow and St. Petersburg. However, it was this fact that became the key to the cohesion of scientists, formed the basis for their desire for a comprehensive, interdisciplinary approach to the study of the widest range of humanitarian problems in the region under study. This trend can be easily traced in the material of such ongoing publications as " Malay-Indonesian Studies "(Moscow) and "Maklaevsky Readings", now published in a new format under the name "Maklaevsky collection" (St. Petersburg). A peer-reviewed book is no exception in this sense, and its materials cover a wide range of disciplines: history, anthropology, ethnography, linguistics, art studies, philosophy, literature, theater, and religious studies.

The impressive bibliography of the works of E. V. Revunenkova and A. K. Ogloblin, which opens the collection, sets the tone for all subsequent materials: it contains voluminous monographic studies and dozens of articles on separate, more specific issues, side by side with encyclopedic articles, educational and educational publications, materials on the history of Oriental studies and reviews, thus continuing the best traditions of Russian Oriental science. Their addressees are not only narrow specialists, but also students, and those who are usually called "a wide range of readers" in the annotations. The genre and thematic diversity of the jubilee artists ' works is also naturally reflected in the collection dedicated to them.

The section "Languages" opens with N. F. Aliyeva's article " Structural evolution of the Malay language. The relationship between the means of synthetism and analyticism in different texts", in which the author uses the following methods:-

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The method of statistical analysis compares the language of literary classics with the language of modern press, scientific and artistic works and notes the influence of two factors on the process of linguistic convergence of Malay/Indonesian: vernacular Chinese with a predominance of analytical constructions in it, as well as modern English.

S. E. Yakhontov's article "Glottochronology and degrees of politeness in Javanese languages", stated as a commentary on one of the works of A. K. Ogloblin, speaks about the difficulties of the lexicostatistical approach in determining the comparative age of Austronesian languages. According to the author's observation, the stability of the vocabulary in Malay and Tagalog can be explained by their long literary tradition, and the low number of matches of Java languages with other languages of the same group can be explained by the accepted levels of politeness and the corresponding more diverse vocabulary.

Y. A. Lander's work "Word"and" language "in the Nusantara languages" thematically echoes this article, where the importance of cultural, primarily written, traditions in distinguishing these two concepts is noted, as well as the connection of the language's conceptual resources with its grammatical features.

Interesting observations concerning the comparative phonetic parameters of prose texts in Chinese and Burmese are contained in the article by V. B. Kasevich and I. I. Kim "Phonetics and grammar: typological aspects (based on the material of Chinese and Burmese)".

The problems of etymology of terms denoting the countries of the world are described in sufficient detail in a very informative article by Yu. Y. Krylov "Designation of the countries of the world in some languages of Southeast Asia and Oceania", where their semantics and genetic roots are analyzed. Just like the CoE article. Yakhontov, it is written as a response to the work of A. K. Ogloblin. "Names of the countries of the world in the Western Austronesian area "(Countries and peoples of the East. Issue XXI. SPb., 2002, pp. 301-314).

T. V. Dorofeeva's article "Teaching Indonesian/Malay languages in the countries of the world" contains extensive factual material and draws important conclusions concerning the possible prospects of scientific and practical Mala studies.

The article by E. A. Baklanova "Review of works on borrowing in Tagalog" is written in the genre of historical and bibliographic essay. It provides a fairly complete description of the main literature of the issue, but the author hardly identifies the research problems.

In the general series of articles in the section "Languages", the works of the youngest participants of the collection stand out - O. Y. Kraynyuk "Lexical differences between Indonesian and Malaysian languages" and E. V. Shvets "On the translation of Russian Realities into Indonesian (based on the Indonesian translation of A. P. Chekhov's play "The Cherry Orchard")". The small volume of each of these articles, the limited range of examples used by the authors and their theoretical base makes these works more likely to be attributed to the genre of theses or applications for deeper and more grounded future research.

The section "Folklore, Literature, Mythology, religion" is no less diverse thematically. It is opened by M. F. Albedil's article "On the mythological nature of Hinduism", in which Indian mythology appears as a source of models of social and cultural organization of society (both within and outside of Hinduism) and a factor in the formation of the national identity of Indians.

S. V. Banit's work "On the question of the historicity of historical Shairs" is devoted to the artistic refraction of real historical events in the narrative poetry of the Malays. The author managed to show what transformation the genre of shair has undergone throughout its history and how event authenticity (especially in shairs created "in the light of day" at the turn of the XIX-XX centuries) replaced the traditional epic imagery.

Yu. E. Berezkin's article "Pacific and Central Eurasian components of American Indian mythologies" goes far beyond the usual limits of a scientific article in terms of its content, volume of material and fundamental conclusions. Investigating similar folklore motifs that exist among the American Indians and the peoples of the Indo-Pacific group, the author comes to interesting conclusions concerning the ethnic roots of the Aborigines of America and intersecting with the data of genetic studies of these populations.

The polysemantic nature of poetic images in the work of the Batak poet, whose spiritual landmarks were the patriarchal East and the modern West at the same time, is described in the article by M. A. Boldyreva "On the interpretation of a poem by Sitor Situmorang".

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In the informative and informative article of one of the heroes of the day, E. V. Revunenkova, "Boat, stone, mountain in the Malay world", three fundamental cultural symbols of the Nusantara peoples are considered, which have left their mark on all types and forms of their spiritual, creative and social activities without exception. Along with symbols belonging to the natural world ("stone", "mountain"), this triad presents a boat - the oldest attribute of the material culture of the island peoples, acting both as an image of nature (water element), and as an image of a house or other socially ordered unit.

The epic image of the leader in the folklore of the Philippines is described in the article by Nicole Revel "Heroic Characters as Models of Leaders in Philippine Oral Epics", where the example of oral tales of three ethno-cultural groups shows what each of these ethnic groups represents about the functions and properties inherent in their leader.

The Philippine theme is continued by M. V. Stanyukovich's article "The epic tale of Ifugao " Aliguen, son of Binenuahen": plot, characters and place names", which offers an original model for describing and classifying works of narrative folklore based on the nomination of characters and locations and allows us to identify the general and local in the epic traditions of the region.

A. G. Storozhuk's article "The Concept of human souls in a Chinese novel of the 7th-10th centuries" shows how the ideas about souls developed and systematized by Taoist mystics were refracted in Tang literature, primarily by authors who adhere to the Confucian worldview.

The article "Orthodoxy in Indonesia: History and ethnocultural features"by E. A. Cherepneva and N. A. Tolmachev describes the peculiarities of perception of the tradition of Orthodox Christianity in Nusantara and the experience of its implementation and adaptation in a non-cultural and non-confessional environment.

The final section of the collection - "Anthropology, Ethnography, ethnic History" - is the most diverse in thematic terms. The topic of V. R. Atnashev's article "The Kate Cham Festival of Vietnam: Tradition and Modernity" is one of the main calendar holidays of Hindu Chams, which in recent years has lost its ethnic identity and religious sound.

"Essays on the Ethnic History of the Southern Cordillera of Northern Luzon: the Kalanguya people" Patricia Okubo Afable paints a complex ethno-and sociolinguistic portrait of Northern Luzon and examines the peculiarities of the formation of national identity and cultural identity of one of the ethnic groups of this region.

P. L. Belkov in the article "The principle of the "hidden image" in traditional Polynesian art") offers his understanding of the complex system of symbols and meanings inherent in the visual genres of Tongan folklore, and, polemicizing with a number of colleagues, suggests a similar (pictorial) nature of the written language. Easter (kohau rongo-rongo).

A summary of the latest archaeological data that shed light on the processes of the emergence of statehood in Thailand is given in the article by E. V. Ivanova "The Bronze and Iron Age on the territory of Thailand in the light of recent archaeological discoveries".

A. G. Kozintsev's multivariate statistical analysis of craniological data for three ethnic groups, presented in the article "Indonesians, Indians, and protomorphic Mongoloids of Western Siberia", clarified a number of issues related to the processes of race formation in both the Austronesian and West Siberian and American regions.

A detailed description of one of the earliest collections of the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography named after V. I. Abramovich. Peter the Great is suggested in the detailed article-list by V. N. Kislyakov " The early collection fund of the MAHE in New Guinea (before the collections of N. N. Miklukho-Maklay arrived)".

About the tradition of Polynesian navigation and the astronomical methods of orientation adopted there is described in the article by A. A. Lebedeva "On the navigation art of the peoples of Oceania".

A curious parallel between the two comic characters of the Javanese and Russian puppet theater is drawn in the article by A. K. Ogloblin "Javanese Petruk and Russian Petrushka". The author notes the parody-carnival character of the two plays, where Petruk is the main character, and their typological similarity with the Petrushka Theater, although the latter, unlike its Javanese counterpart, does not parody performances of the "high" genre.

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The etymology of ancient Javanese titulature is discussed in the article of St. John the Baptist. The Kullands ("KAHULUNAN-FAMILIA. The Javanese-Latin Parallel", in which he finds similarities between the Old Javanese and Latin names of large-family communities.

The problems of kinship anthropology and various approaches to the development of its typology are discussed in V. A. Popov's article "The Malay Kinship System: the Eternal Problem of kinship studies".

A brief outline of the history of Chinese immigration to Malaya and the peculiarities of their economic and cultural adaptation in the region is offered in the article by A. M. Reshetov "The Chinese community in Malaysia (some aspects of historical development)".

I. N. Solomonik's article "International Conference "Shadow Theater as an Element of Civilization Development" (July 1-2, 2004, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) is devoted to the past and future of traditional Wayang Kulit theater, its philosophical, cognitive and identification components, seen through the eyes of researchers from Southeast Asia and Europe.

The final article of the collection "East Timor During the Independence Crisis of 1999-2001" deals with the recent dramatic events in East Timor, which were directly witnessed by journalist Henny Saptatia.

The general impression of some thematic "diversity" that the reader of the collection may have is quite understandable. The versatility and breadth of research interests of E. V. Revunenkova and A. K. Ogloblin, who work at the junction of a number of humanities disciplines united by the word "Nusantara", naturally resonated in the works of the authors of the collection, many of whom conducted their research as if in dialogue with their teachers. The photos also speak about the scientific continuity, showing how the heroes of the day themselves have grown from students of the Eastern Faculty of LSU to mentors of a new generation of economists, loved and respected both at home and in the countries they have devoted their lives to studying. In this sense, the Maklai Readings in general and the reviewed collection in particular seem to me worthy examples of the St. Petersburg School of Oriental Studies.

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