Example: religion. The states that comprise Southeast Asia are often classified according to their dominant religious traditions -- Sinic Confucian Southeast Asia (Vietnam), Indic Buddhist Southeast Asia (Burma, Thailand, Cambodia), or Middle Eastern Islamic Southeast Asia (Malaysia, Indonesia) -- and of course, European Christian Southeast Asia (the Philippines). Some of this is genuine religious transfer and ideological exchange; some of this is an institutional feature -- that is to say, there was Indology and Sinology before there was Southeast Asian Studies. The assimilative character of Southeast Asia is clear: despite the ideological and religious exchange between India and China, there is no such thing as Indic China or Sinic India.
In the post-war years, though, Japanese occupation of the region (1942-45) wiped out all the incumbent apparatus of colonial rule, and the ensuing tumult of nationalist struggles, independence and communism sparked a sudden need for scholarly investigation. In America, Cornell and Yale introduced Southeast Asian programs in the 50s and 60s, with Berkeley, Michigan, Ohio, Northern Illinois, Washington and Wisconsin following suit. In the UK, the London School of Oriental and African Studies was formed; St Anthony's College in Oxford gave a special place to graduate study of Asia and Southeast Asia, and specialist departments in Hull, Kent and Sussex sprung up within the decade.
What's interesting (for me, anyway) about all this is that we're seeing and living through, I think, the germination of an idea of 'Southeast Asia' -- one whose young tendrils are snaking slowly backwards into history, shifting the landscape of the past on which our gaze is fixed. We're now writing early histories of Burma, Thailand, Indonesia etc., not as their more natural ethnic, linguistic or cultural entities, but rather as potential nations of the future: nations defined, as Nicholas Tarling puts it, by the 'accidents' of colonial rule. We're writing histories of Southeast Asia when a few hundred years ago (and some say, even under a hundred years ago), Southeast Asia as we understand it today didn't actually exist. The first major histories of the region as a whole, indeed, only appeared in 1954 and 1955 respectively. People in Southeast Asia didn't even sympathize with any overarching 'Southeast Asian' identity until very recently (the advent of the putative 'Asian values' idea is an important milestone in this). In some important respects, then,"Southeast Asia" is really only about half a century old.
Lest we dismiss this as merely a semantic and inconsequential distinction, I want to point out a parallel: 'Europe', as we understand it, is also a relatively modern idea. It replaced 'Christendom' in a complex intellectual process lasting roughly from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century, during which time luminaries like Voltaire, Rousseau and Edmund Burke, waxed lyrical over what this new 'Europe' was and was to become. Through this protracted ferment, a new idea of Europe was hewn roughly from old, familiar soil, and we can see its scope and real consequences today: the European Union and the endless debate about who gets to be in it, the old academic bluster of 'Eurocentrism', the tired thrill of American travellers"doing Europe" -- not to mention just who and what count as European anyway.
I'm not at all suggesting that Southeast Asia is headed towards the grand institutions of a common currency, common regional identity etc. What I am suggesting, though, is that we are starting to see in Southeast Asian historical writing today what was a centuries-long process in Europe in the early modern period: the formation of a concept. The number of journal articles that purport to be 'contesting Southeast Asian pasts' and eking out 'new terrains' in its historiography is truly staggering. It's not surprising to me either that many recent historians of Southeast Asia (though I politely exclude myself) seem to have jumped onto the textual deconstructionist wagon. With so much to disentangle historical truths from -- from modern colonial conceptions of the state right back to ancient epic and court histories and archaeological evidence -- finding meaning amidst these disparate sources seems a pressing matter indeed.
The history of Southeast Asia is literally in the making. And so I think there's a lot that historians in general can learn from peeking in on Southeast Asian historiographical debates now and then -- I think it'll be like watching a tree grow.
And so I never gave much thought to what scholars I now know from across the Atlantic have called its, and I quote,"sordid bureaucracy that is in every way designed to extinguish all my ability and indeed desire to pursue any modicum of scholarly research." Some observations follow.
There is the 10-book, eight-week borrowing limit for graduate students. (To me, that is an enormously munificent endowment; to e.g. the Widener Library clientele, as I now appreciate, it must seem a little like academic strangulation).
There is the somewhat idiosyncratic classification system that groups books by size rather than by topic or subject area. In a library that holds potentially every book in publication, having open shelves sorted topically would yield a kind of browsable cross-section of scholarship on a particular field, so it's rather a tragedy that they are sorted to maximize space, rather than to facilitate research.
There is the bizarre practice of being able to reserve books without actually checking them out of the library. This is achieved by placing a slip of paper with your name on it into the book, and leaving it anywhere in the library, with the result that the book shows up on the catalogue as being available to borrow, but that upon climbing six flights of stairs and negotiating through the shelves of labyrinthine call numbers, it is, actually, nowhere to be found.
There is the tea room, which asserts its premium on basically being the only place to get hot food for about half a mile in every direction, by jacking up its prices to unconscionable and wholly unwarranted proportions.
And then there is the breathtakingly arcane distribution of books amongst not one but over sixty libraries in Cambridge -- a result of the inveterate collegiate system, which does, I admit, have its occasional charms. Most departmental libraries have borrowing periods of two weeks -- often less, if you are trying to borrow outside your department. The Seeley Historical Library has a lavish borrowing period of one day. You can only borrow from your own college library; if you are a historian and your college happens to own an exceedingly exemplary geography collection, tough luck. Trying to read books in other college's libraries is a Herculean task: it involves emailing the librarian of said college library, naming the book sought (which cannot exist in any other library in Cambridge in order to warrant your necessary perusal of their facilities), being escorted (frogmarched) into the library and provided with the hallowed book and a table to take notes on. Borrowing is, of course, not allowed.
Having fashioned this snapshot of Cambridge's library system out of the many tirades I have been subjected to, I must stress again that in comparison to, say, my country's libraries, Cambridge is positively utopian, and I have mostly taken these quaint and arcane practices in my stride. I adored the UL when I came to Cambridge, and still do; and as readers of my Bookporn will know, I treasure the many wonderful and eclectic libraries that have been bred out of our recondite collegiate system. But I now dread the day that I am granted time at a good American university library to do some research; for, from what I have heard from my interlocutors, it will be a terrifyingly wonderful experience. What if returning to Cambridge afterwards will be like being expelled from Eden? How shall I regain my innocence??
I've been thinking more about explanation & causation in history recently. It seems to me that there are structural elements in both film and narrative that are quite similar to the Humean model of causation: that is to say, images or phrases are placed one after the other, and the viewer or reader has a"habit-driven" inclination to infer the (causal) relationship between the two. Examples:
From film: (1) A camera shot shows one person pointing a gun; (2) the camera cuts to another man falling to the ground, accompanied by a gunshot. Post hoc, ergo propter hoc. (2) happened because of (1).
Or in fiction, we might have this passage:
(3) She refused to go to work today. (4) Her head throbbed with almost military vigour.
Reading the two in succession, we tend to assume a causal relationship, even in the absence of any explicit"because". (Post hoc, ergo propter hoc). By the end of it, the second sentence has become an explanation of the first, Interestingly, in this case we do assume causation, whereas in the following case, we would probably, unless context demanded it, not:
She refused to go to work today. Her cat ate some cheese.
The causal relationships are inferred by us; there is no need for an explicit"because". (Furthermore, inserting an explicit"because" between (3) and (4) seems to injure something stylistic about the passage. And is history-writing not, after all, in part a stylistic enterprise?) Narrative in general seems to be a series of individual statements about what-is-the-case, which, taken collectively, may be joined up by habit-driven inference on the reader's part, as above. In historical narrative, then, it seems to me that a series of individual statements about e.g. what happened in the years leading up to 1939 can become, by the last sentence, an explanation of it. And so, the common distinction between a chronicle and a history -- that the latter explains while the former does not -- isn't quite so clear cut, if it seems possible that a chronological series of well-selected statements can, in fact, yield an explanation by the end of it. Which is, I think, the entire value of narrative history.
'Well-selected' here is the key, of course. My dear, long-suffering boyfriend Adam, who puts up heroically with my torturous ruminations (and indeed subjects me to his own), wrote me the following to make the point that an unselective chronicle might, in fact, look nothing like a narrative:
Events of the year X:
The commencement of King Cuthbert the Flatulent's reign. (A)
A rain of frogs in Wessex.
A monkey is hanged as a presumed foreign combatant by a group of Yorkshire villagers.
Pope Pius XXXVII is defenestrated. (B)
Events of the year X+1:
The weeping visage of the Virgin Mary appears in the sky as Carcasonne falls to the Cathars.
It is revealed that Pope Pius XXXVIII is a woman. (C)
Events of the year X+2:
King Cuthbert spontaneously combusts during a battle with King Canute of Denmark. (D)
Lisbon is engulfed by a tidal wave. (E)
The population of Rome is decimated by a terrible pestilence. (F)
Events of the year X+3:
Pope Pius XXXIX is appointed. (G)
Yellow devils on horseback descend on Poland and Hungary, burning Pest and Lvov.
A rain of communist pamphlets falls on Paris. (H)
Events of the year X+4:
The Irish potato crop fails. (I)
Barricades appear on the streets of the French capital. (J)
Events of the year X+5:
Parliament passes legislation permitting Irishmen to eat their babies. (K)
Dostoevsky publishes Crime and Punishment.
Further points about our habits of causal inference, Adam adds:"There are several items in this chronicle that are difficult for us not to link causally: (A) and (D), for instance, or (H) and (J). Why? We perhaps associate (for no very good reason) flatulence (A) with spontaneous combustion (D); we have grounds to suppose that a city's first exposure to communist ideas (H) could lead to a workers' uprising and thus to barricades (J). Many people in the past would have been tempted to infer a causal relationship between (C), (E) and (F). We know better."
And though we might infer an unhappy causal relationship between (I) and (K), the inclusion of those two statements, related or not, seem to cast doubt on the veracity of the whole document. And rightly so, it being a Chronicle of Unfettered Though Amusing Fabrication. But that we have in the past inferred such causal relationship between events that we now know better not to (C, E and F) is a little worrisome: it's where, for example, the issue of standards of justification come into play in history, and it's why I think it's important to wonder now and then: what are historians really doing when they explain things?
Past,n. That part of Eternity with some small fraction of which we have a slight and regrettable acquaintance. A moving line called the Present parts it from an imaginary period known as the Future. These two grand divisions of Eternity, of which the one is continually effacing the other, are entirely unlike. The one is dark with sorrow and disappointment, the other bright with prosperity and joy. The Past is the region of sobs; the Future is the realm of song. In the one crouches memory, clad in sackcloth and ashes, mumbling penitential prayer; in the sunshine of the other Hope flies with a free wing, beckoning to temples of success and bowers of ease. Yet the Past is the Future of yesterday, the Future is the Past of to-morrow. They are one -- the knowledge and the dream.
An unexpectedly sober entry from Ambrose Bierce, The Enlarged Devil's Dictionary: that selfsame tome that deems that Painting, n., is"the art of protecting flat surfaces from the weather and exposing them to the critic", that Cabbage, n., is"a familiar kitchen-garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man's head", and indeed that History, n., is"an account mostly false, of events mostly unimportant, which are brought about by rulers mostly knaves, and soldiers, mostly fools".
Just thought I'd share.
(Crossposted to AHC)
I've had the good fortune (in a manner of speaking) to be back in Malaysia at a time of great tumult. Forget soap operas, B-grade movies and amateur fanfic: the past few weeks in Malaysia have outdone fiction. The ongoing trial concerning the gruesome murder of a Mongolian girl and her alleged (sexual) involvement with our Deputy Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak, his lackeys, and a Russian submarine deal in Paris grows more incredible by the day. Several days ago a private investigator named Balasubramaniam, in capacity as a whistleblower, issued two mutually incompatible Statutory Declarations in rapid succession. The first, issued with his lawyer and the Malaysian opposition party, made explosive and incriminating claims concerning Najib. The second was issued under a new lawyer after he was summoned to the police station, and it entirely reversed the claims of the first statutory declaration, absolving Najib of any involvement. The following day, Balasubramaniam and his family vanished without a trace.
All this comes on the heels of a crazy cavalcade of events.
There were the ludicrous allegations against opposition leader Anwar Ibrahim by a young man widely suspected to be an UMNO and Najib-sponsored 'mole' in the opposition party, who claimed last week that Anwar had forcibly sodomized him. The claims derailed Anwar's intentions to stand for by-elections this month, and caused him to flee momentarily into the Turkish Embassy for sanctuary. Then there was the Statutory Declaration made by the iconoclastic editor of Malaysia Today claiming he had material evidence that Najib's wife Rosmah (widely perceived as the Devil Incarnate the womanly hand behind the whole fracas) had been present at the scene of the Mongolian girl's murder. Food prices are skyrocketing, and last night, 30,000 people amassed in a stadium in Kuala Lumpur to 'Protes' (Protest) the recent withdrawal of an oil subsidy by the government, which had precipitated an overnight 40% increase in the price of petrol.
Watching these tumultuous events as a historian, I can't help but see that in every angered speech, in every opinion column, TV and news report, photograph, in every government directive and opposition pamphlet, in every statutory declaration and police report, sources are being made. Sources are even being made out of the silences: for example, the events that are not being written about in newspapers testify to the government's continuing stranglehold on mainstream media. It's a trivial point to make: that the present is history. Many of today's historians of Malaysia were themselves participants and observers of the periods that they now write historically about, and it has taken some time for me to really understand and appreciate the profound historicity of the present: that we are really, truly living in history, swathed in the stuff of it. And I think it will take me some time yet to really understand how to understand the present as history.
One starts by seeing everywhere, constantly, the sheer poverty of documentation. Every day is an archive assessment; I see everything as a source. I see the sources that won't last, the sources that won't easily be understood out of their contexts, the sources that have already begun the pernicious processes of selection and distillation. I see the vast, spectral penumbra of lived reality outside the sources -- what future historians processing today's historical documentation must somehow get at: the climate of escalation; the palpable frustration of the rakyat (the people); the insistent, whispered gossip that circulates in coffee shops, in social gatherings; the gritty, daily reality of pinched purses and economic hardship; the heartfelt anger that animated the fists that punched the air in protest last night. But equally: the apathy, the cynicism and the fear, all of which paralyze people, or cause them to turn their backs and shrug; the inexorable grind of 28 million lives continuing nonetheless. And this act of comparing lived reality to what is left in textual and primary residue can be -- for me at least -- deeply dispiriting. But it is what we inherit, and it is what we must make do with. Those who know how to study the past need also, I think, to know how to observe the present: for, as one might say, inevitably the twain shall meet.
I read George Eliot's Middlemarch recently, and it is so absolutely wonderful that I wish to coerce everyone into reading it. Consider this, then, a Trojan horse post. In the guise of rough-hewn, wooden ruminations on social history, novels and parliamentary reform, I shall smuggle Middlemarch and its glory into the unguarded citadel of your reading list.Middlemarch is, by admission of its own subtitle, a"Study of Provincial Life", and the fictional town of Middlemarch is widely supposed to be based on the town of Coventry. It is, despite its subtitle, much more than provincial life -- it contains real people, real thoughts and dilemmas and impulses, and real life, mediated by a subtle, omnipresent narrator who dips into each mind and each relationship with all the wisdom and sympathy one might ascribe to the Christian God that George Eliot herself came to reject. And it deals, for me most pertinently, with two characters who want very much to be good people and achieve great things in their lives, but whose stories, as it turns out, don't go as planned, and whose eventual lives are lived out, from the point of view of Great History, provincially and wholly unremarkably.
It is, I think, for them that the novel is wrought into something of a vindication."The growing good of the world," Eliot tells us, gently, in closing,"is partly dependent on unhistoric acts ... That things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs". It is, for instance, Dorothea Brooke, the young female idealist --"foundress of nothing, whose loving heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centering in some long-recognizable deed" -- who is rescued from a history that is simply not equipped to recognize her, or indeed the hordes of others who populate the faceless, provincial crevices between the Great and Notable Historical Deeds. (I suppose, then, you might say that Middlemarch is ... a kind of particularly imaginative social history).
Contrariwise, in Middlemarch, it is Great History instead that resides in the interstices of provincial events. The novel takes place against the specific backdrop of English electoral reform, between the rather precise dates of 30 September 1829 and the end of May 1832. This seems to have been a particularly tumultuous period for England. The Reform Act of 1832, with which the personal histories of Middlemarch denizens are delicately entwined, was a Bill of far-reaching consequence, redressing the most patent inequalities in the system of representation by redistributing members of Parliament to correspond with population centers, and extending electoral rights to more people than ever before in the history of England. It's probably not much of an exaggeration to say that it put England on the long, besieged road to universal suffrage -- but I'm no Victorian expert. Middlemarch also feels the new, unfamiliar touch of those fast-changing nineteenth-century worlds: of science and medicine; of railroads and evolution; of the place of women in society; of the small, sad forebodings of a coming godless world.
In this time of great historical flux, Eliot speaks to us from her own subtle, wonderfully wise moral center: and as in life and in true histories, no person is hero or villain. In Middlemarch, there are only men and women doing as they can in their places and times, whose characters are never" cut in marble, [nor] solid and unalterable", but"living and changing", and so sometimes,"becoming diseased as our bodies do". I even think that, with reflection, and if read with our own careworn repositories of lived experience in mind, Middlemarch might teach us how to be -- and what more could we ask for from any history, great or small? Go forth and read it, and be edified.
NB: We must count it among the many great successes of Middlemarch that it was able to provoke my curiosity about the contemporary events and parliamentary developments that were, it seems, so well known at the time that they needed no introduction or elucidation. Really, there cannot be anyone or anything else that could have made this sorry philistine actively want to inquire into what she has always considered the snore-fest of English constitutional history -- with the sole, glorious exception of Quentin Skinner.
The map has long been seen as gorgeously ornate, but technically crude, lacking in the sophistication that characterizes modern cartography. However, researchers four years ago found that the fanciful swirls and whorls drawn on the map of the seas east of Iceland are potentially much more than just bored artistic license: they correspond with astounding accuracy to thermal satellite imagery of the Iceland-Faroes Front, where the Gulf Stream meets the colder Arctic waters, creating huge eddies - bodies of water up to a hundred kilometers in diameter that spiral lazily as the waters of different temperatures interact.
What I found most interesting was that though the map was reissued in 1572, the new map meticulously reproduced the original Carta Marina down to the last detail except for those swirls and whorls. Thirty years on, it seems that the mapmakers had simply forgotten or not understood the function of the whorls in conveying useful navigational information. These symbols, once laden with content and meaning, faded into mere aesthetics - the fate, I thought then, of careless religious gesture, like prayers uttered without faith, or traditions celebrated without understanding or remembrance. How much of the past is like that to us? - dead or unrecoverable contexts, lost meanings, inexplicable deeds... Well, at least in the absence of meaning, the Carta Marina is still beautiful (best viewed large, scrolling reverentially). One could hardly say that for some history, especially the parts that seem the most devoid of meaning of all.
Being a young student of Southeast Asian history, I came to best know the turmoil of the Japanese Occupation and World War II not through lived experience or by reading memoirs, but through the deep chasm that tears through Southeast Asian archives, hollowing out three years and splitting the twentieth century into two halves: pre-war, post-war. Archives are destroyed quickly in war and conquering: when a new power seeks an erasure of the old, in the upheaval of battle and destruction, in bombings and air raids. Or else they are destroyed slowly by time: crumbling, fading, disintegrating -- the gradual, inevitable entropy of all living things, including memory. But in Cologne, and in other tragedies of this sort, so much vanished in so little time, and in such an absurd, absurdly preventable manner (some think that the Cologne building, state-of-the-art and less than 40 years old, collapsed only because a train line was being built right underneath it -- a claim corroborated, I think, by this photo) that my reaction is more one of bewilderment than anything else. A kind of chasm has opened up in German history now, and time will tell how deeply the loss will be felt.
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