CHANGE AND CONTINUITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA The Papers of the Distinguished Scholar Series University of Hawall, 1982 edited by Roger A. Long Damarts A. Kirchhofer Southeast Asia Paper No. 23 Center for Southeast Asian Studies School of Hawaiian, Asian and Pacific Studies University of Hawaii at Manoa 1984 Copyright Southeast Asia Papers 1984 Published by the Southeast Asian Studies Program Center for Asian and Pacific Studies University of Hawaii at Manoa Honolulu, Hawaii All Rights Reserved. CONTENTS Acknowledgments v Introduction Roger A. Long vii 1. Prophecies, Omens, and Dialogue: Tools of the Trade in Burmese Historiography, Michael Aung-Thwin 1 2. Sembah-Sumpah (Courtesy and Curses): The Politics of Language and Javanese Culture, Benedict R. Anderson 15 3. Tradition and Modernity: The Nanyang Artists, T. K. Sabapathy 59 4. The Asian Theatre of Communion: A Look at Contemporary Philippine Theatre, Doreen G. Fernandez 69 5. A Heritage of Defeat: Hill Tribes Out of China, Lucien M. Hanks 83 Contributors 103 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The Distinguished Scholars Series is one of many Southeast Asia Studies activities at the University of Hawaii supported, in part, through a grant from the U. S. Office of Education designating the University of Hawaii at Manoa a National Resource Center for Southeast Asian Studies. The National Resource Center grant has been an important part of our Southeast Asia program at Hawaii. We wish to acknowledge the contribution of all of our visiting scholars, each of whom was willing to interrupt teaching and research activities to spend a week lecturing and meeting with Southeast Asia scholars and students on our campus and in our community. Special thanks go to the Southeast Asia Advisory Committee for help in selecting participants in the series, and especially to Belinda Aquino, Benedict Kerkvliet, Truong Buu Lam, Albert Moscotti, and Wilhelm Solheim for helping organize the programs and for generously contributing time and hospitality to the visiting scholars. The Southeast Asia Outreach Coordinator, Florence Lamoureux, deserves special mention for working closely with the Advisory Committee in coordinating the programs, handling travel arrangements and publicity, and providing support services for the series. Thanks are also due to the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, of which the Southeast Asian Studies Program is a part, for providing institutional support and to its affiliated Center for Korean Studies for contributing the use of its lecture auditorium. We appreciate the cooperation of the Southeast Asian Papers Publication Committee for their help in publishing the papers through the Southeast Asia Papers series. Special thanks are due to Francine Uehara for her able and loyal assistance in typing the manuscript and in handling business matters and correspondence for the Southeast Asia Papers series. v INTRODUCTION The Distinguished Scholars Series of the Southeast Asian Studies Program, University of Hawaii, was initiated in 1982 as one of many projects sponsored through our National Resource Center for Southeast Asia, established in 1981 by a grant from the U. S. Office of Education. The Series was created as much by default as by design. The original plan was to bring a Southeast Asia specialist to Hawaii for the spring semester of every year during the course of the grant. Insufficient lead-time hampered recruitment activities that first year, however, and it was decided instead to invite five scholars, representing different disciplines or geographical areas, to join us for one week each during the semester. The visits were to provide Hawaii Southeast Asia scholars, students, and interested members of the community with an opportunity to become acquainted at first hand with the work of our Mainland and Asian colleagues and to exchange ideas with leading scholars in the field. The success of the Distin­ guished Scholars Series was immediate and pronounced, so much so that it remains an integral part of our program and has served as a model for other programs at the University. Each scholar was involved in a variety of activities during his or her stay in Hawaii. Two public lectures were scheduled. The first was the scholarly presentation for the academic community that is included in this volume. The second was a talk on a more general topic that was designed for nonspecialist and community audiences, although the detail of and discussion at these presentations frequently rivaled those of the major paper. In addition to the two lectures, each scholar often gave several classroom presentations in his or her specific discipline, held informal meetings with Southeast Asia faculty members and students on the University of Hawaii campus, and spoke with interested individuals and groups from the community. The combination of lectures, meetings, seminars, consultations, and social gatherings produced a demanding schedule for our guests who had to contend with jet lag but elicited enthusiasm and admiration from those of us who were beneficiaries. We chose a broad, general topic for our first year's visiting scholars--"Continuity and Change in Southeast Asia"--one that could vii provide a unifying theme to accommodate the wide range of academic disciplines and interests we desired and also give each scholar the freedom to draw upon his or her preferred areas of inquiry or current research. The five papers presented here, therefore, do not culminate in any structured conclusion; rather they broaden our insights and contribute to our awareness of the interrelationships within Southeast Asian scholarship. Michael Aung-Thwin's opening lecture set the tone for the entire semester's program. He confronts the problems inherent in cultural conceptions of change and continuity, pointing out that there are fun­ damental differences in the way that Western and non-Western societies record historical change. He shows how the cultural assumptions of Burma can be discovered through an analysis of the Burmese chronicle tradition and emphasizes the value of historical chronicles as cultural statements. Benedict R. Anderson, in a typically provocative and stimulating paper, offers the thesis that Javanese writers have chosen the Indonesian language as a vehicle for much modern Indonesian literature not only because of the need to address the non-Javanese speaking members of Indonesian society but because freedom from the structure of Javanese language also provides a means of escaping the complex patterning of Javanese culture. Paradoxically, Anderson argues. the invisible pres­ ence of Javanese language and literature is, for Javanese writing in Indonesian, like a "black hole." an entity perceived by its absence. And it is this black hole that influences their creativity. T. K. Sabapathy's discussion of tradition and modernity in Southeast Asian art explores the impact of a select group of Chinese artists, referred to as the "Nanyang artists," who innnigrated to Singapore in the 1930s and 1940s and whose innovative work influenced the development of modern art in Singapore and Malaysia. Doreen Fernandez's paper on contemporary Philippine theatre is based on the thesis that the political situation of the past decade has brought about the theatre's return to its origins as a "theatre of cornmunion--community born, centered, and directed." She traces the development of Philippine theatre through periods of Spanish and American colonization up to the present and, citing numerous contempo­ rary plaYWrights and their productions, emphasizes the vitality and significance of modern Philippine drama. Lucien Hanks addresses the phenomenon of a "heritage of defeat"-­ an awareness of defeats both actual and borrowed--among four hill tribes in northern Thailand that is used to protect tradition or promote change that will help insure the survival of the tribe. His thesis, that although change is inevitable it blends with tradition to provide a surviving continuity of culture, is the theme that is touched upon in varying degrees by every contributor to this collection. Roger Long Prophecies, Omens, and Dialogue: Tools of the Trade in Burmese Historiography Michael Aung-Thwin The study of Southeast Asian history presents a special intellectual problem, since our working conceptions of the discipline of history have been shaped almost entirely by Western historians writing about the West. Standards of historical writing are not universal, however. Conceptions of history shaped in the tradition of Herodotus. Thucydides, von Ranke and company. do not fully or automatically apply to the study of Indian, Japanese, or Burmese history. These societies had their own "indigenous conceptual systems," that is, they had a unique and often implicit cri­ teria of right and wrong, a special method of establishing legality, legitimacy, and authority. Until we recognize and understand the unique cultural foundation on which these societies rest, we will not be able to understand their history or write it. How the cultural assumptions of one of these societies, that of Burma, can be discovered by an analy­ sis of its chronicle tradition is the subject of this essay. The problem is challenging. The sources of Burmese history rarely deal explicitly with cultural values and assumptions, because their authors take for granted that the reader is familiar with them. Conse­ quently the scholar must not only turn to a wide range of sources--poems, ballads, myth--but must do so with a special set of interpretive tools. In Burmese history these tools, the technique of document exegesis, can be derived from the rich tradition of historical chronicles. These chronicles, properly interpreted, might yield the crucial cultural "statements" vital to historical understanding--the same as those which might be discovered in other circumstances by structural analysis. From the chronicles, to be more specific, can be extracted the ingredients commonly viewed as essential for intellectual history: conceptions of man, of order and disorder, of the state, leadership, Reprinted by permission of the publisher from Historical Essays in Honor of Kenneth R. Rossman, edited by Kent Newmyer (Crete, Nebraska: Doane College, 1980). Copyright 1980.