Kenneth R. Hall - Explorations in Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft

THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN CENTER FOR SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

MICHIGAN PAPERS ON SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

Editorial Board

Alton A. Becker

John K. Musgrave

George B. Simmons

Thomas R. Trautmann, chm.

Ann Arbor, Michigan

EXPLORATIONS IN EARLY SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY: THE ORIGINS OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STATECRAFT

Edited by: Kenneth R. Hall and John K. Whitmore

Ann Arbor

Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies

The University of Michigan

1976

Michigan Papers on South and Southeast Asia, 11

Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities/Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Humanities Open Book Program.

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-6836

International Standard Book Number: 0-89148-052-8

Copyright

by

The Center for South and Southeast Asian Studies

The University of Michigan

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-0-89148-011-2 (paper)
ISBN 978-0-472-12799-3 (ebook)
ISBN 978-0-472-90195-1 (open access)

The text of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

To our Southeast Asian friends

Contents

Kenneth R. Hall

Keith Taylor

Kenneth R. Hall

Nidhi Aeusrivongse

Keith Taylor

John K. Whitmore

Michael Aung Thwin

Keith Taylor

.

Kenneth R. Hall and John K. Whitmore

.

Charts

NIDHI AEUSRIVONGSE is a recent Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan, having completed a dissertation entitled The Intellectual Elite and Modern Literature in Indonesia. He was awarded a B.A. and M.A. by Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, and is a member of the history faculty at Chiengmai University.

MICHAEL AUNG THWIN was born in Burma, but was brought up in India. His education has taken him to Doane College for a B.A., the University of Illinois for an M.A., and he is currently working toward his doctorate in Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan. During 1973-74, he studied in London, South India, and Southeast Asia under a John D. Rockefeller 3rd Fund Research Grant. His dissertation, The Nature of State and Society in Pagan (12001300 A.D.): Sagha- State Relations and the Dynamics of Burmese Institutional History, expands on the essay he has contributed to this volume. Publications: The Problem of Ceylonese-Burmese Relations in the 12th Century and the Question of an Interregnum in Pagan: 11651174 A.D., Journal of the Siam Society (January, 1976).

KENNETH R. HALL, born in Niles, Michigan, received a B.A. from Albion College, an M.A. from Northern Illinois University, and completed a Ph.D. in pre-modern South and Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan. He is currently a Lecturer in the University of Michigans Department of Asian Studies. Hall has conducted field research in Southeast Asia and southern India, and participated in the 1974 Sumatra Expedition of the Indonesian Archeological Institute. Publications: Toward an Analysis of Dynastic Hinterlands: The Imperial Cholas of 11th Century South India (with George W. Spencer), Asian Profile (February, 1974); Khmer Commercial Development and Foreign Contacts under Sryavarman I, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (Fall, 1975).

KEITH TAYLOR comes from Cadilac, Michigan. He studied as an undergraduate at Hope College and was graduated from George Washington University. After serving with the United States Army in Vietnam, he began a Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan in 1972. His dissertation is entitled The Birth of Vietnam: Sino-Vietnamese Relations to the 10th Century and the Origins of Vietnamese Nationhood. Taylor has reviewed several books on Vietnamese history for the Journal of Asian Studies.

JOHN K. WHITMORE completed a B.A. at Wesleyan University and received an M. A. and a Ph.D. in Southeast Asian History from Cornell University. He is Assistant Professor of Early Southeast Asian History at the University of Michigan and a specialist in the history of Vietnam. His book, The Transformation of Vietnam: Politics and Confucianism in the 15th Century, is forthcoming.

While following the probes of foreign individuals into various obscure parts of Southeast Asia over the centuries is a diverting and entertaining pastime, the purpose of this volume is to investigate this past with the mind, to question and postulate upon the historical patterns that have developed from earlier study of the area, and to bring concepts from other areas and disciplines to bear on the existing information. The product of this effort, as it is encompassed in this volume, is not an attempt at the definitive study of any of the topics. It is rather a series of speculations on the directions feasible for the further study of the Southeast Asian past. As such, the answers proposed in these essays are really questions. Are the ideas presented here true within the specific historical contexts for which they have been developed? If so, can we use these ideas, or variations of them, to interpret the history of other parts of Southeast Asia? If not, what other ideas may be brought to bear on these situations in order to understand them? The ultimate aim of this volume is thus a challenge to the profession at large not only to criticize what we have done, but also to go beyond our postulations and create new ones.

The studies included here have not been based on the primary source materials in their original forms, with one exception (Aung Thwin). The authors have utilized a variety of available materials, generally in translation (in both European and modern Southeast Asian languages), and have applied certain concepts derived from a number of different directions to put forward their proposals. Both Taylor and Hall, in the second and third essays, operate by careful analogy from 19th and 20th century ethnological data in order to provide a cultural framework of understanding for the earlier material. As Hall shows, epigraphic and ethnological detail can be fitted together to construct a viable model for the indigenous political structure of the times. In the second essay, Taylor also brings to bear linguistic theories in the attempt to gauge patterns of change and continuity. In both this essay and the fifth one, he makes a fundamental use of mythological material to gain a generic sense of local development and to see how this sense presents insights into the historical events.

This resurrection of what might be called the folklorist approach of French scholars in the first decades of this century, when combined with other source material, proves itself to be a most fruitful form of inquiry.

In the same way, Aeusrivongse has utilized theories of religion developed by earlier Dutch archeologists and art historians for the distant past of Java and Bali in his attempt to penetrate the mysteries of the Devarja cult and thereby explore the indigenous belief system which formed its core. Aung Thwin, on the other hand, draws on the more modern anthropological theories of Polanyi and Sahlins, Leach and Spiro to propose a dynamic structure for the state of Pagan which involves economic, social, religious, and political patterns. His basic questions, which must now be applied to the other classical states, are: what occurred socially and economically, with the formation of an empire? was it more of the same? or did a totally new structure emerge? Taylor, in the seventh essay, brings a Southeast Asian historical frame of analysis to bear on Ceylon and additionally uses a genealogical approach to understand its political events. The other pieces, my own Note and the essay by Hall and myself, attempt to fill in areas of historical investigation that have heretofore been generally ignored, while Halls Introductory Essay both sets the stage for the following explorations and integrates the latters finding into a general discussion of the classical Southeast Asian state and its form.