Historiography

South East Asian Historiography

Not long ago I finished William Southworth’s two volume dissertation on Champa. Since there is very little written in English about Champa I was excited to find it, and I was not disappointed, really, or at least, I had no right to be. I have also just finished reading Georges Maspero’s (1872-1942) The Champa Kingdom.

The Champa Kingdom : the history of an extinct Vietnamese culture

Georges Maspero ; translated by Walter E.J. Tips.

Bangkok : White Lotus Press, c2002.

x, 226 p. : ill., map ; 30 cm.

http://www.whitelotuspress.com/bookdetail.php?id=E22285

The book is the only available general history of Champa, at least in English, and it is badly outdated. But outdated as it is, there are long passages based on Vietnamese and Chinese history that make exciting reading, where the glimmer of the blood and steel flashing on fields of battle, of junks laden down with gold and rhinoceros horn, of court intrigue come alive. Almost all of Southworth’s dissertation is dedicated to establishing that histories like Maspero’s are virtually useless. He goes through every argument advanced by every historian of Champa, narrates their disputes with each other, advances and then debunks or revises their theories. He has done a great, post-modern demolition job. The problem is when he goes on to write his own history of events. The fact is there isn’t much to narrate, because you are restricted to Vietnamese and Chinese histories, and these are what Maspero bases his history on. After that, it’s archaeology, art history and paleography. These are where the disputes lie. The inscriptions, and the temples, are among the oldest on peninsular South East Asia. Southworth’s main thesis is that Champa wasn’t a kingdom at all, and that most of the dating, based on styles of script and decorative motif’s, combined with a suspect theory of Indianization, was erroneous. He does reconstruct sequences of temple complexes, and by jettisoning the timelines of dynasties and the succession of capitals of kingdoms he can reevaluate when monuments were built. All of this is valuable. But he does not do what Wolters expressly set out to do: reconstruct a mentality related to a material culture, in this case, what it was like to live in Champa, whatever, wherever, and whenever that was. What I am looking for and not finding is an Annales style history. Southworth cannot be blamed for this, and as I re-read sections I can see he really does address matters of history and development, or change. But because of the paucity of contemporary scholarship, he must necessarily be tentative and inconclusive about everything except his assertion that prior scholarship is faulty, and give the reasons why. Of course, before you can write a synthetic, narrative history of a place and a people you do need to establish and analyze the material facts at hand. Before Wolters wrote about culture he spent enormous time on the proper translation of words, the meaning of toponyms and the nature of products being traded. The deconstruction business in history is tedious, necessary work, at least when it restricts itself to the writings of other historians (as opposed to the more usual deconstructive work of destabilizing meanings and calling into question the possibility of history itself: the inane hall of mirrors students of former acid heads so gleefully build). 

This situation has been going on for a long time. There is a multi-volume set of papers published in 1961 by the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, entitled Historical Writings on the Peoples of Asia. DGE Hall edited volume 2, Historians of South East Asia. The last article in the book is The Application of a South East Asia-Centric Conception of History to Mainland South East Asia, by A. W. MacDonald. I’m going to quote at length from this paper, with the idea that you can compare some of MacDonald’s statements with Michael Vickery’s research proposal linked to below, as well as the links to the Ohio Universities Library SEA Blog, and some other texts. Mind, this was 2 years before Wolters’ published Early Indonesian Commerce (which was a doctoral dissertation written at SOAS) and around the time of Wheatley’s The Golden Khersonese, nearly 50 years ago. Vickery’s proposal was written in 2005.

“Professor D.G.E. Hall in his recent work, A History of South East Asia, remarks that European scholars concerned with these regions feel today that their previous approach to their subject ‘has been too much influenced by certain preoccupations inherent in their own training and outlook’ (pp. vi-vii). He quotes with approval M. de Casparis’ criticism of a ‘Europe-centric’ approach to these studies and notes that ‘Indian writers who, largely through the work of the French and the Dutch have come to discover Greater India may be accused of an India-centric approach.’ Professor Hall himself has sought ‘first and foremost to present South East Asia historically as an area worthy of consideration in its own right, and not merely when brought into contact with China, India or the West.’ I do not intend to discuss here the extent to which Professor Hall has succeeded in his task. [there is a footnote: I must, however, note that professor Hall has been accused in turn of an ‘Anglo-centric’ approach to his material by F.N. Trager….] His book, despite its popular character, marks a date in our studies inasmuch as it is the first full-scale History of South East Asia in the English language….

“Those interested in the civilization of China, like those interested in present-day tribal cosmologies, know that self-centered conceptions of history are as common in the Far East as in the West and are certainly as ancient as these latter. Cultural superiority in all latitudes is defined primarily by disparaging comparisons with the habits of each civilization’s barbarians. But the first point to be made is that the kind of overall vision of South East Asian history implicit in Professor Halls book is itself a product of Western thinking, although not entirely based on results achieved by Western scholars….It is interesting to note that professor Hall, in his own words ‘came to realize the need for some such book’ as his ‘through contacts with students and teachers in South east Asia.’ In fact there exists no book by a South East Asian national, either in a local or a foreign language, which covers the field. This fact is obviously not the consequence of a lack of general education among South East Asians….

“In the West we have certainly tended to write South East Asian history as we see our own. Perhaps I should say as we used to see our own. For we are still, in the South East Asian field, concerned primarily with the correct determination of genealogies in the ruling families, with the life of the court and palace, the tenure of office and the policies of important ministers of state, the aesthetic or museum value of religious architecture and other works of art, the big battles, etc. The structure of society, of the very many different societies in the past and present of South East Asia, has not yet been analyzed….Archaeological interest having been centred mainly up to now on town-sites, we know deplorably little about life in the past of South East Asia, outside of its towns and small villages. And until we know more of present-day conditions in the country-areas all serious social or economic analysis, of mainland South East Asia as a whole, seems frankly impossible. It goes without saying that in the West only those who have written, whether on manuscript, fibre, wood, or stone, or have erected durable monuments, occupy an important place in the history books….Because, in the past, they have not made use of solid building materials nor employed writing to extol their exploits or explain their political and religious systems, we tend to ignore their history. But the fact that it is very difficult for us to get to know their history does not mean that they have none. For instance, the historical role of the Karens, Kachins, Chins, Nagas, Kukis, and other groups of more or less illiterate inhabitants of North Burma was, during the 1939-1945 war, of considerable importance. It is not mere supposition to state that the role of mountain-dwellers in the past history of these regions has been underestimated….

“….But if we can never fully free ourselves from the influences exercised on us by our own background and training, and if, despite all that anthropologists may say, we must persist in the West in subscribing to a linear, evolutionist concept of history, it is none the less possible, by studying our source materials in their particular cultural contexts to improve our understanding of their value….

“I certainly do not for a moment think that we should abandon the study of South East Asian history, envisaged en bloc, ‘in its own right’. We cannot have too many well-documented synthetic class-books, and I would like to see many more, written by South East Asians. For they would tell us more about what a South East Asian-centric conception of history really means. But if we are going to make real scientific progress in this field, if we are to deepen our knowledge of particular problems in their cultural contexts…we must abandon any hope of covering the whole field. The range of knowledge required to use at first hand all the sources which concern South East Asian history is in any case beyond the ambition of the most gifted and laborious among us…For there are other ‘preoccupations in our training and outlook’ than those which result from our purely geographical position. If South East Asia was first divided between three main colonial powers, Britain, Holland, and France, it has suffered a further dismemberment at the hands of Historians, Anthropologists, Linguists, Philologists, Epigraphists, etc., which has not always resulted in a corresponding and manifest increase in our general knowledge of the whole area….”

MacDonald makes clear that, as of 1961, there was a need both for detailed, empirical studies of specific times and places that are conversant with contemporary theory (psychological, anthropological, sociological, economic, etc, a stew of social science speculation), and for general synthetic works of narrative history. He, or she, has some hope that good scholars will be able to balance the twin extremes of tunnel vision and meaningless generality and, through a modicum of self-awareness, avoid or reduce cultural bias.

This is a quote from a fascinating series of blog posts I found on the Ohio Universities Library SEA Blog:

“It is not hard to imagine why Western scholars find it temptingly easy to ignore or gloss over Southeast Asia in their surveys of world history. For one thing, the history of Southeast Asia is still little known in the West. Other standard explanations include good old-fashioned Euro-Americo-centrism, which persists, in no small measure, up to the present-day (Lockard noted this in his Occasional Paper, The Rise and Changing Status of the Southeast Asian History Field in the United States: an Analytical Study, 1989). This being the case, what can we say about world histories published in Southeast Asia? That is, if Southeast Asia has been largely neglected in Western-language world histories, how is it presented in world histories written by Southeast Asians? How do Southeast Asian scholars view their history in the broader  global context? With these questions in mind, I retired to my office, dusted off a copy of  volume one of Luang Wichit Wathakan’s Prawattisat Sakon (Phranakhon: Samnakphim Phloenchit, 1932), and sat down to read. It was illuminating, and troubling.”

Follow these 4 links to the complete posts:

 

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=494, http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=553,

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=607,

http://www.library.ohiou.edu/sea/blog/?p=630

Now, here’s an excerpt from a proposed research project, written by Michael Vickery (to read his entire research proposal go here: http://www.iias.nl/vickery-michael) :

“Both for Angkor and Champa my project starts from the presupposition that their histories as written are defective, and that even when the important sources, the local inscriptions, have been competently translated (in the case of Cambodia) their information has been interpreted and synthesized with other sources of information based on assumptions which are no longer acceptable.

“Revisions of the standard history depend very much on new ancillary work in archaeology, prehistory, historical ethnology, linguistics, and historical interpretations of ancient South and Southeast Asia, which, living in Thailand and Cambodia for several years, I have not been able to access, and for which my time at IIAS, with the libraries of Leiden and Amsterdam, will be particularly valuable. For Champa, the situation is worse than for Angkor, because serious historical work on Champa ended, with one significant exception, before 1930, and the Cham-language inscriptions have never been subjected to expert translations like the work of George Coedès for Khmer. That particular problem will not be solved in my work either, for I am not a Chamist, and so far as I have been able to determine, there is no competent translator of Old Cham working today. Nevertheless, the translations which were done between 1904 and 1915 by Louis Finot and very recently on the inscriptions of the Po Nagar temple in Nha Trang, are probably 80-90% reliable and may be confronted with the interpretations of other sources which are gaining currency.

“In addition to trying for better understanding of the inscriptions, further work on Champa must take into account certain new conceptions about the history of the Champa-Cambodia region (and indeed of all of Southeast Asia). First is awareness that from late prehistoric times until into the second millennium AD, the great navigators in the region were neither Indians nor Chinese, but Southeast Asians, in particular those belonging to the Austronesian language family, whose distribution from Taiwan to the Philippines and Indonesia and from the Pacific Ocean (Polynesia) to Madagascar proves their seagoing skills. Among these Austronesians were the Cham, and it is now accepted by interested scholars that contrary to the standard conception of the time of Maspero and Coedès, the Cham were not one of the hypothesized ‘waves’ of overland population movement out of China and through the mainland peninsula to Nusantara, but latecomers from Nusantara, probably Kalimantan, arriving by sea on the eastern and southeastern coasts of Indochina in the last centuries B.C.

“The main purpose of my paper, “Champa Revised”, cited above, was a critical analysis of Georges Maspero’s Le royaume de Champa (1928), which was accepted literally by George Coedès in his Etats hindouisés, and thereafter was a dominant component of all discussions of Champa. I show in that paper, which will be revised and extended at IIAS, that Maspero’s history of Champa was faulty both in conception and detail, and his syntheses of Champa inscriptions with Chinese and Vietnamese sources led to inaccurate conclusions about major events throughout, in particular, the 10th to 15th centuries after Champa was faced with an independent Viet Nam and an aggressive Cambodia. The history of those 500 years must be completely rewritten, for Champa internally, and for its relations with both Viet Nam and Cambodia.

“The new consensus on the Austronesians and their maritime skills suggests that it was probably Southeast Asian Austronesians, and not people from India, who were responsible for the first imports from the latter to Southeast Asia, such as beads, pottery, and small luxuries, which long antedated any signs of Hinduism/Indianization. As Pierre Manguin has written, “The archaeological research of the last 30 years has proved that this ‘Indianization’ [of Southeast Asia] during the first centuries A.D. happened after about a millennium of steady exchanges with India, in which certain populations of Southeast Asia, who were beginning to organize themselves within political systems of increasing complexity, played a decisive role, particularly in the setting up of seafaring merchant networks exporting gold and tin” [to India]. Accepting this makes it easier to explain the rapidity with which new developments in India, such as styles of script, sculpture, and cult conceptions were transmitted almost immediately to Southeast Asia. It was because Southeast Asians had long been in maritime contact with India, and they immediately took home whatever novelties appeared. Once this much is admitted, the next logical supposition is that it would have been Southeast Asians, and not Indians, who brought the first elements of Hinduization/Indianization to Southeast Asia, integrating them selectively, and with adaptations, into their own structures of complex societies. I believe this idea is quite new among historians, and I intend to argue strongly for it with support from the new work in ancillary fields noted above.” Michael Vickery, Research Proposal, International Institute for Asian Studies

The situation, at least for Champa, doesn’t appear to have changed much in 45 years. Things move slowly. But note too that he says the theory that Austronesians were in control of shipping through the straights and were responsible for bringing Indian religion, script and statecraft to the region is new. Wolters towards the end of Early Indonesian Commerce suggests as much, and I have certainly read versions of this thesis in books published in the 80’s, so I’m not sure what’s so new about it. Perhaps it is a question of degree. But at this point, ‘Indianization’ is hardly a controversial subject, it is rather a matter of complexity. Undoubtedly Hindu and Buddhist culture came to the region. If it wasn’t through direct colonization, and it wasn’t a case of parallel, autochtonous duplication, then clearly there was an ongoing process of cultural exchange. I am more interested in reading the details of that exchange rather than polemics as to whether it occurred or not and what it means about you as a scholar and person if you believe it occurred in one way as opposed to another. I suppose in 500 years scholars will wonder how it came about that the dominant religion among American poets of the 20^th century was Buddhism, or why Americans came to cook Chinese food in their homes when people of Chinese descent represent such a small proportion of the population. But the potato, the chili pepper and the tomato are all new world crops that spread around the globe much faster than the people from these places. Has anyone suggested that the Incas colonized Ireland? I remember once eating in a little Chinese takeout joint in Port Huron, MI with my then little children. We were starving and furiously tucked into our Lo Mein with chopsticks. The woman who gave us our food stared at us with astonishment. When we were done she asked, “You are from New York?”

Everyone who makes their mark in SEA history does so by denouncing previous efforts. Many of the established historians working in the field today, Vickery not excepted, cut their teeth on the Cold War, its politics, its distortions. They are given to polemic, if not diatribe, and they have the habit of moral superiority and indignation. While engage and en garde this is exciting, but it can distract.

This is from Robert Brown’s 1996 The Dvaravati Wheels of the Law and the Indianization of South East Asia (Volume 18 of Studies in Asian Art and Archaeology, Jan Fontein ed., E.J Brill, 1996) http://www.amazon.com/Dvaravati-Wheels-Indianization-Studies-Archaeology/dp/9004104356 :

“Dvaravati is a culture that lasted some 400 years, from the seventh through the tenth century C.E. It encompassed most of present day Thailand and is associated with extensive artistic and architectural remains. Yet, it is almost totally without a history. Not one monument or art object is dated. There are no indigenous texts associated with Dvaravati. While there are a few Dvaravati, these are almost exclusively religious, consisting mostly of quotations from standard Indian texts. The only other written information regarding the culture comes from some brief references in Chinese histories….”

“The way in which Indian culture moved into South East Asia and the process by which it was adopted and changed by the local population has been the focus of extensive research for a century. This scholarship lies at the very heart of our understanding of South East Asian civilization, particularly up to 1000 C.E. The general shift over this period of scholarship has been from regarding South East Asia as an extension of Indian culture to viewing it as strongly autonomous, with its own indigenous and well-developed, pre-Indianized culture. I will argue that it is both and thus neither. Indian culture was not transplanted to grow uninfluenced by the South East Asian soil in which it was planted. Nor is it quite right to envision India as supplying the forms in which South East Asian concepts could be clothed, new wine in old bottles. The distinction between form and content was never that distinct. There was almost always a mixing of both Indian form and content with indigenous form and content….”

“….My assumption that early South East Asian culture is best understood in interdisciplinary and intercultural terms leads me to cross disciplinary borders—history, urban and state development, textual and inscriptional analysis, religious studies—using these not as subsidiary areas to that of art history, but as central arguments….

“Two themes that arise consistently in my analysis are a blurring of categories and an attempt to define a non-Western psychology. Both themes are reactions to typical Western reductive or universalizing analysis based on dichotomous polarities. Interdisciplinary and intercultural understanding is rather in the direction of honoring otherness rather than in universalizing and totalizing narratives. Otherness here means either pre-Indian influenced or localized (local meanings formed using Indic notions) South East Asian meanings.

I’ve just started to poke around this book. It was written 9 years before Vickery’s research proposal, and his project seems to be dictated by the concerns expressed by MacDonald back in 1961. The literature is replete with such musings. It is what interests me I suppose. This territory, so well-charted by all the world’s empires, is still terra incognito. But if I may be permitted a personal plea (and I mean NO disrespect): Messrs. Southworth and Vickery, and all you others, please, write a work of general, detailed history about the lives and languages of the areas you study. Not just wars and lists of ‘Indianized’ Kings, of course; but not just revised sequences of pottery shards and petrified pollen either. What goop was in the bowl? Were there markets? Why did the Rhade crown the King? Who rode the war elephants? Why did the Chinese Emperor release the parrot? Why the hell are some of those pottery shards Graeco-Roman? Were Graeco-Romans hanging out with the Possu and the Arabs in Zabag? Did they stop off at Oc Eo, visit Funan, dine with the Dons of Champa? If they weren’t this then what were they? Were they That? It is a general problem: the problem of antithesis. It is not enough to end with what things were not.