Unravelling the Myths
Although the field of Southeast Asian Studies (SEAS) has produced some of the most influential academics in the Social Sciences and Humanities in the last century, the early development of the field was wrought with biases. As SEAS emerged out of the Orientalist approaches of the era of high colonialism, a bias toward ‘scientific evidence’ meant that many of the regions histories were regulated to the status of legends and myths that held not a shred of historical evidence to them. However, traditional Orientalist approaches were slowly refined and the 1961 volume Historians of Southeast Asia, edited by DGE Hall, examined the history of Southeast Asia from a region-wide approach that took specific strides to record this history according to the voices of Southeast Asian peoples. Nevertheless, the volume demonstrated at least two notable trends.
First, there was an emphasis on the role of the written record of Southeast Asian history and second, this history was primarily written according to the chronicles of the state-making peoples such as the Burmese, Malays, Indonesians, and Filipinos or the sources produced by the colonial powers such as the British, French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese and Americans. Nevertheless, the volume presented a clear assertion that Southeast Asian chronicle records were no longer to be regarded as myth.
The notion of myth has frequently been problematic for historians. When faced with any form of history a historian always questions what elements of the story to tell and what elements to critique, to toss away or to disregard as non-factual. Inevitably this process of historical examination is a question of perception and this was the very issue that was undertaken in one of the next major works in the field of SEAS to consider the intellectual history of Southeast Asia, and the way that the past has been perceived in Southeast Asian history. The 1979 volume Perceptions of the Past, edited by Anthony Reid and David Marr, built upon the scholarship of Hall’s volume in at least two ways. First, there was the practical concern of a more rounded approach to the study of the region. Both Cambodia and Vietnam had become more popular as regions of study since the early work of Hall’s volume. Furthermore, new considerations in theoretical approaches by the time of this volume had moved toward accepting myth as an inherent part of history and examining sources that would have normally been considered ‘folklore’ for their historical content. A perfect example of this trend in Reid and Marr (1979) was put forward by both Wang Gungwu’s theoretical introduction to the volume and by James J. Fox’s essay on the structure of time in oral historical narratives amongst the Rotinese.
It has now been nearly three and a half decades since Perceptions of the Past was published and Southeast Asianist’s are still wrestling with the issue of myth and legend as essential elements to Southeast Asian history. One of the most recent and what promises to be one of the standing influential guides to the topic was published in honor of the historian Barend Jan Terwiel in the form of a Festschrift, or a collection of articles that are dedicated to the teacher, traditionally composed by their students on the occasion of a notable anniversary in the scholar’s career. Thus, in recognition of ‘Baas’ Terwiel this collection draws from an impressive twenty one contributors to examine a breadth and a depth of historical topics covered by few others like it in the field.
Looking at the overview of Unravelling the Myths it would be possible to break the collection into essentially three parts based upon the overarching trends of the essays contained within. While all of the essays do address questions about the myths and the nature of Southeast Asian history it would be fair to say that the first collection of essays address the issue of myths in the formation of historiographic traditions more directly and are focused predominantly on Thailand. Meanwhile, the second collection of essays in this volume tend to highlight patterns of interactions that challenge longstanding assumptions regarding the colonial period, trending in a focus that shifts toward the Dutch and the Indonesian archipelago. Finally, the last section of the book moves outward from the initial focus on Thailand further drawing from examples of examinations of nationalist mythos presented in Burmese historiography and in the historiography of Vietnam.
One of the natural challenges of Southeast Asian history is that it would truly be impossible to cover all of the diverse narratives required to present an understanding in a single volume. This task has been viewed as so monumental that, even in the year 2000 the prolific historian of Southeast Asia, Nicholas Tarling, had pointed out that “no Southeast Asian has ever attempted a regional history” (Tarling 2000: 68). Yet to put Nicholas Tarling’s comments into greater context, there are also only a notable few historians whom have ever attempted a regional history of Southeast Asia. For the grand majority of scholars in the field there seem to be enough projects even when faced with the challenge of single country examinations. As Thongchai (this volume) points out there have been a number of attempts to critique the problem of the nationalist mythos to history, through developing new theoretical approaches that address borderlands in Southeast Asia. Others have looked at the interaction between nations, such as Nguyễn Thế Anh (this volume). Still others, such as the essays from Thongchai, Terwiel, Grabowsky, Zollner, Gartner, and Grosheim (in this volume) critique the specific representations of a national narrative in the cases of Thailand (which Thongchai argues has been dominated by a royalist presentation of historiography), Burma, and Vietnam (which is typically critiqued as dominated by a Marxist vision of historiography). Together the approaches in this volume tackle some of the most basic assumptions about the history of Southeast Asia critique, and reassemble them in a way that is accessible.
The myths that are summarized within this volume are often standard assumptions on the part of academics and non-academics alike. Thailand was never colonized. The Ram Khamhaeng inscription was solely regarding the inauguration of a throne and nothing more. Nations were created out of zones dominated by ethnic majorities. Both the contemporary states of Vietnam and Laos represent mosaics of ‘ethnic families’ that have lived together for ages. Europeans were the only colonizers. The uplands and highland places are ‘wild’ and ‘uninhabitable’. There is an inherent break between the discourse of Marxists and the discourse of development. Southeast Asian polities did not engage in modern state-like interactions before the twentieth century. All of these notions are challenged by this volume.
The region of Southeast Asia and the study of its history has posed challenges to all historians who have worked in the field. Weather and wars have conditioned source material to be limited and fragmentary at best. Meanwhile, the constructs of modern nationalist histories have posed other threats and dangers as well. In the end each historian chooses the method that they use to critique the narratives that exist and it just may so happen that the best tool of critique comes from the promotion of the understanding of sources that do not fit so comfortably into the standing narratives of the contemporary states. One difficulty that faces historians then is to convince those who still cling to the threads of dominant historical narratives, of the value of the strands that cannot yet be seen by the naked eye. However, this will be the only way that the understanding of the history of the region can move forward and, ultimately, Unravelling the Myths has worked to quickly fray some of the most thickly woven sinews of Southeast Asian history as readers may be reminded of the words of Wang Gunwu, from his introduction to Perceptions of the Past, “to illuminate such perceptions of the past is to increase the knowledge of the ways in which we make the past relevant to ourselves” (in Reid and Marr 1979: 6)
Hall, DGE (1961) Historians of Southeast Asia. Oxford University Press: London.
Tarling, N. (2000) Historians and Southeast Asian History. New Zealand Asia Institute: Auckland New Zealand
Marr, D. & Reid, A. (1979) Perceptions of the Past in Southeast Asia. Hienemann Ed.: Singapore