Burmese Puppets.

• Author: Keeler, Ward

By NOEL F. SINGER. Images of Asia. Singapore: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 1992. Pp. xii + 98, 20 color plates, 25 black and white. $16.95.

Puppets fascinate pretty much everybody: it is by no means only children who look with delight upon figures that transcend the boundary between things and beings so ambiguously. Westerners are somewhat anomalous in relegating puppets to the status of children's entertainment, and it takes very little to dispel that prejudice when one is confronted with any of South-, East-, and Southeast Asia's many puppet traditions. Burmese puppets, Southeast Asia's only marionette tradition, are particularly enticing: they are beautiful to look at, and when manipulated by an expert, they create stunningly lifelike effects. This handsome and informative little book provides an excellent guide to the genre, and can only heighten a sense of loss as the genre descends, apparently irretrievably, to the status of tourist entertainment.

Historical and scholarly sources on Burmese puppets are thin, unreliable, and frustrating. Singer has examined them meticulously. Rather than claiming to be able to discern the real origins of the genre or the vagaries of its development - as his predecessors have done - Singer points out the lacunae and inconsistencies in their accounts. His concern for historical accuracy means that he can give us only a sketchy chronicle of the genre's development, but that is preferable to the unsubstantiated claims others have put forward.

What is clear is that while puppets were long present in Burma (that is, among Burmese speakers living in the lowlands of contemporary Burma), they became particularly popular starting in the late eighteenth century, and reached an apogee of technical development, fame, and influence in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. In the course of the twentieth century, they have lost their sponsors and audiences, and today the very few elderly practitioners of the art still alive find no one interested in learning their skills.

At their height, Burmese puppets enjoyed royal patronage and its corollary, royal regulation. A Minister for the Performing Arts was appointed in the 1770s and the first person to hold the title systematized much about the content and the circumstances for puppet performances. His successors elaborated and refined those rules. The stage had to be...