What is Southeast Asia?

 

 

 

 

The Superficiality of Scholarship on Premodern Southeast Asian History

I got really depressed this weekend listening to a “senior scholar” in the field of premodern Southeast Asian history give a talk. The speaker is very well published, and has been active for decades, but I found nothing that was new or insightful in anything that he had to say.

Why was this the case? The main problem is that the author does not use primary sources. He cannot read any Asian languages, and bases his scholarship largely on secondary scholarship in English. This places incredible limits on what he can do, and yet it has not stopped him from publishing extensively.

The situation of this one scholar is not unique. The field of premodern Southeast Asian history in the West suffers badly from a lack of scholars who can read primary sources in their original languages.

Sometimes people defend this sad state of affairs by saying that “oh, but there are so many languages. . .”

Yes, there are. But people who work on the classical period in Europe, for instance, have to learn multiple “difficult” languages, such as ancient Greek, Latin and Hebrew, and modern languages like French and German. . . so can’t historians who focus on premodern Southeast Asia learn at least one???

Others say, “oh but there are so few sources for premodern Southeast Asian history.” That is also false. There are thousands of classical Chinese texts and inscriptions in Vietnam that have not been examined closely. There are many palm leaf manuscripts in Northern Thailand, and plenty of manuscripts in the Thai National Library that scholars have not studied. Add to these the materials that exist in Sanskrit, Burmese, Lao, Mon and yes even Malay, and there is no excuse to not make use of indigenous sources.

Why don’t people use these sources? I think the simple answer is because it is difficult to learn to read a classical Chinese text or a Sanskrit inscription or a Northern Thai palm leaf manuscript. It takes many years of work, and rather than do that, many people chose to focus on something like. . . trade, the topic of the talk this weekend. After all, it’s a lot easier to count how many ships arrived in a certain place than it is to try to determine how someone in the past thought.

But the result of this “taking the easy way” was on full display this weekend as this senior scholar talked about. . . nothing.

The first Europeans who studied about Southeast Asia did tend to have good linguistic skills, and they also relied on the assistance of indigenous scholars. Therefore, scholars like Henri Maspero and Georges Coedès were able to produce information based on classical Chinese texts and Sanskrit inscriptions, respectively.

However, people like that just produced what we might call “preliminary knowledge” about the region. Everything they did needs to be revisited. But very few people have done so, because so few people have acquired the linguistic skills to do so.

I think there was some hope when the field of Southeast Asian history took off in the US in the 1960s. People like Craig Reynolds, Reynaldo Ileto and Barbara Andaya did produce work based on indigenous materials at that time, but these efforts did not get sustained.

Instead, we’ve seen the rise of great “synthesizers” who tie together all of the work that has already been produced so far, that is, people like Anthony Reid, Kenneth Hall and Victor Lieberman.

The problem is that they are “synthesizing” work that is still “preliminary.” For many topics we only have a single study. What if that study is not accurate or is biased by a certain perspective? How can one build upon a single study like that?

The result of these developments is that the knowledge that is getting produced about premodern Southeast Asian history is becoming increasingly superficial, and increasingly distant from the sources and past realities.

Making everything even more depressing is that there are now people from the region who likewise do not have the linguistic skills to engage in primary source research, and they are now discovering the “expert knowledge” of the figures who created the field of Southeast Asian studies in the West and are taking this knowledge seriously.

Rather than believing the Anthony Reids and Kenneth Halls, people should do what those scholars can’t do – read primary sources from the region in their original languages – and come up with their own ideas based on what they find in primary sources, and through their critical reading and interpretation of primary sources.

Of course there are some people who do this. This recent work on sources about Sipsong Panna by Foon Ming Liew-Herres, Volker Grabowsky and Renoo Wichasin is a good example. But works like this are far and few between.

Meanwhile, we have many superficial works based on secondary scholarship. And having heard that talk this weekend I can report that one more is on the way.

The “Truth” about the Mandala

Like any field, the field of Southeast Asian history maintains certain “truths” which the people in the field learn and teach others about.

One such “truth” is the idea that states in premodern Southeast Asia were distinct. Supposedly unlike states in the Chinese and European settings, polities in Southeast Asia did not have clearly defined territorial borders and bureaucratic structures, but instead consisted of “powerful centers” which were surrounded by smaller “centers” which served as tributaries.

In the field of Southeast Asian history, this form of state is called a “mandala.” And in 1968, this is what O. W. Wolters, one of the main theorists of the mandala, wrote about this form of polity:

“The mandala conception was an ancient and familiar one in South-East Asia, except among the semi-sinicized Vietnamese. A remarkable illustration, seen from the Javanese point of view, is contained in a 14th-century poem [the Nagara-kertagama], where Java, overlord of the archipelago, is described as ‘ringed’ by many countries ‘protected by the Illustrious Prince’ of Majapahit. The protected countries included the Thai kingdoms, Cambodia, and Champa. The single South-East Asian country of ‘ally’ status in the Javanese mandala was Vietnam, an exception which suggests that Vietnam, with its un-Indian background, was seen as being different from the rest of the region.”

[O. W. Wolters, “Ayudhyā and the Rearward Part of the World,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 3/4 (1968): 174.]

So according to Wolters the mandala was something special to Southeast Asia. However his description of 14th-century Majapahit being surrounded by protected countries could just as easily be used to describe 14th-century Ming Dynasty China, surrounded as it was by tributary kingdoms.

So why make a distinction?

As far as I can tell, there is no good reason to make a distinction because the idea that the form of states in premodern Southeast Asia was different from the form states took in places like China is based not on historical information but on an erroneous imagined idea of what the premodern state was like in China.

In the first millennium BCE, the various kingdoms (guo, 國) in the area that is today China were little more than powerful centers. Yes, they had officials, but there was no bureaucracy which reached out over the land to any clearly-defined borders.

Over time this of course changed, but very slowly. Many borders long remained ill-defined and the court dealt with different peoples in the empire in different ways.

As late as the period of the Qing Dynasty, when the bureaucracy was at its largest, the court still relied on various non-bureaucratic means to rule over their empire.

Rather than following bureaucratic norms, for instance, the Qing dealt with people like the Tibetans and Mongols in very culturally specific ways, and local officials within China proper were as adept at using local spirits to control the population as they were at referring to written legal codes.

So why keep talking about the mandala if it’s supposed distinctness is not true?

I would argue that many of the “truths” that we find in academic fields are upheld not because they are actually true, but because it is easier to do that (and it feels good to think that one’s field is special) than it is to learn enough about other fields to discover the inadequacies of one’s own views and beliefs.

The mandala has made historians of the Southeast Asian past feel special long enough. It’s time to develop a more accurate understanding of premodern polities, one which takes into account their many commonalities.

O. W. Wolters and the “Reading” of Angkor Wat

Academic fields have paradigms or themes which serve to focus scholarship and define the field. For instance, in the middle of the twentieth century, the idea that China had “responded” to the “impact” of the West in the nineteenth century was a central theme for the field of Chinese history in the West.

In the case of Southeast Asian history, an important concept has been that of “localization,” or the idea that people in Southeast Asian have historically adapted foreign ideas and cultural practices to fit their existing ideas and way of life.

This idea initially emerged as part of an effort to “write back” against the ideas of colonial-era scholars who had argued that Southeast Asia had largely been transformed by outside influences, particularly those which came fromIndiaandChina. Here such geographical terms as “Indo-China” and “Further India” reflected this perspective.

One scholar who argued against this view was the late O. W. Wolters. Wolters believed that while there was often ubiquitous evidence of foreign elements in Southeast Asia’s past, these elements could and should be “read” as what he termed “local cultural statements.”

Wolters employed concepts from literary theory to explain a process, which he referred to as “localization,” in which people in Southeast Asia took “fragments” from foreign literary texts or cultures and then used them as “decorations” or “allegories” to make “local cultural statements” about themselves. While these statements appeared in the texts which people in Southeast Asia wrote, Wolters contended that we can also see local cultural statements in cultural practices and architectural structures as well.

In other words, Wolters argued that the Southeast Asian past was like a text which we can read, and that while the language of that text might be Indic or Sinitic, the statements that were made were ultimately local, such as Khmer or Vietnamese.

To give an example of this, Wolters once “read” Angkor Wat. In doing so, he relied heavily (but also selectively) on the work of Eleanor Moron (who later published a revised version of her research on Angkor Wat under the name Eleanor Mannikka – see her Angkor Wat: Time, Space and Kingship).

In 1977, Eleanor Moron published an interpretive essay about Angkor Wat. In this work she argued that Angkor Wat has an incredible amount of “numerical cosmology” to it. In particular, she contends that various distances in the temple complex all break down into numbers which have symbolic meaning.

She came to this conclusion by discovering that all of the distances in the temple complex can be divided by the same number, a basic unit of distance known as a cubit, and which in the case of Angkor Wat is 0.43545 meters. Further, Moron found that the number of cubits along many of the walkways and walls in the temple are significant in terms of Indian mythology.

For example, Moron noted that when one walks from the bridge at the western entrance to the point where one can finally see the main temple clearly at the threshold onto the porch of the second gallery, one traverses a distance of 1,728 cubits. Within the temple itself, Moron found other distances which add up to 1,728 cubits. This is significant because this number relates to concepts of time in Indian mythology.

In Indian mythology, time passes through four ages, the first of which is called the Krta Yuga, and lasts for 1,728,000 years. Hence, with all of these distances in Angkor Wat of 1,728 cubits in length, it appears that the creators of this temple wished to equate it somehow with the Krta Yuga, a period which, significantly, is considered in Indian mythology to have been a “golden age.”

The last of the four ages which time passes through is known as the Kali Yuga. This is the age which we are supposedly living in today, and it began with a great war known as the Battle of Kuruksetra which is famously recounted in the Mahabharata.

There are carved images around the outer walls of Angkor Wat. On the western wall there is a mural of the Battle of Kuruksetra, and on the eastern wall there is a mural of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, an episode from Indian mythology which details how the universe was created.

Moron suggested that since Suryavarman II, the king or ordered the construction of Angkor Wat, had fought his way to power, the depiction of the Battle of Kuruksetra on the western wall “may allude to Suryavarman’s own battle for the throne.” (221)

“May” was a key word here, as Moron did not provide any conclusive evidence to demonstrate that this was in fact the case. Instead, she offered an alternative explanation. She noted, for instance, that each morning the sun rises on the Churning of the Sea of Milk on the eastern wall and sets on the Battle of Kuruksetra on the western wall, and that the two murals might have a symbolic meaning connected to the eternal cycle of creation and destruction.

In any case, Wolters took some of this information from Moron’s study and came to his own conclusion. He argued that the depiction of the Battle of Kuruksetra on the western wall was where the “Khmer statement” was “embodied in Angkor Wat.” (62)

He argued that “This battle in traditional Indian cosmogony introduced the last age of the world [i.e., the Kali Yuga]. . . In Angkor Wat, however, the battle has been localized to introduce the golden age and, in the eyes of those responsible for the monument, the golden age was still in being.” (63)

Wolters’ point here is that Angkor Wat was built to honor Suryavarman II and to glorify his rule as a golden age, or Krta Yuga. Therefore, the mural of the Battle of Kuruksetra could not be indicating the beginning of the final age, or Kali Yuga, as it does in Indian thought.

Wolters then concludes with these points: “The signifiers visible at Angkor Wat are drawn from Indian literature, but they signify a Khmer formulation associated with the Khmer’s expectations of being Suryavarman’s contemporaries. Angkor Wat is an example of a local statement into which Indian conventions of. . . the golden age have retreated so completely that they have become, in a literal sense, decorative.” (63)

Ok, now for some analysis of Wolters’ ideas. First of all we have no proof that the mural of the Battle of Kuruksetra at Angkor Wat is meant to symbolize Suryavarman II’s rise to power. Wolters’ “reading” of Angkor Wat depends on that, and it is not verifiable. So his ideas are quite literally baseless.

On the other hand, let’s suppose that this mural is supposed to represent Suryavarman II’s rise to power. If a Khmer decides that the way in which Suryavarman II’s rise to power should be depicted is by means of the Battle of Kuruksetra, then how is that a “local cultural statement”?

For Wolters it is local because it does not accord with the way in which the battle was depicted in Indian thought. However, how do we know this? Has Wolters or anyone else surveyed everything that was ever written about the Battle of Kuruksetra in order to determine this? Of course not.

This is one of the main weaknesses of Wolters’ approach. Way back in 1933, French scholar Paul Mus wrote that “Working at a great distance from the object of study, one sometimes risks confusing a library with a country.” This is precisely what Wolters did.

In arguing that the “signifiers” on Angkor Wat “signified” something different from their Indic origins, he reduces the “Indian tradition” to something much smaller than even a library. To Wolters, the Battle of Kuruksetra only had one interpretation or meaning in all of Indian history, and that one interpretation or meaning was not the same as what he saw at Angkor Wat.

While I suspect that the Battle of Kuruksetra was referred to for many different purposes throughout time, it may be the case that it is only at Angkor Wat that we find this battle carved in stone. Further, it may be the case that its purpose there is to work together with the mural of the Churning of the Sea of Milk to create a holistic space which contains all of the destructive and regenerative powers of the universe. In which case, Angkor Wat may be unique in some ways within the larger world in which Indic cultural practices and beliefs prevailed, but the uniqueness would come not from the fact that there was something “local” in the temple, but that local people had employed Indic elements in novel ways. Is that “localization”?

To return to Paul Mus, back in 1933 he made the following comment about the Indic influence that we see in things like Cham art: “the Chams certainly imported Indian culture in all its refinements of detail but they were not content simply to copy it. They lived it.”

Whoever created Angkor Wat was also “living” a certain culture. In which case, I find it hard to see how that culture could have “retreated so completely” that it had become “decorative.” Something else was happening.