Panel

Panel presentation, EuroSEAS, August 2010.

Tradition, Identity and History-making in Eastern Indonesia.
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The panel addresses the issue of how transmission of knowledge and historical experience takes place in the societies of Eastern Indonesia, and explores the mechanisms that transform such data into meaningful narratives about the past, thereby reifying local identities. From a historical point of view Eastern Indonesia has been affected by continuous waves of immigration and external intrusion over the centuries. At the same time, this area has perpetuated certain defining cultural features, what James J. Fox calls “the flow of life”, with a strong role for belief in ancestors, ritual spatial location, and marital exchange patterns between lineages. Compared to Western and Central Indonesia, societies tend to be smaller in scale, less technologically developed, and less accustomed to the written word. Nevertheless, a number of (colonial and other) texts have emanated from the region over the centuries, which makes for fruitful comparison between written and oral sources. Colonialism, although only fully implemented at a late stage, often in the early twentieth century, had an early start in this area. The Dutch and Portuguese interests in the exploitation of local products since the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries made for extensive written documentation, which in some cases enables us to follow events in to the smallest detail. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, moreover, extensive ethnographic collections and descriptions add to the available materials. All this provides unusually good opportunities to value the processes of local memory and commemoration. The continuous reformulation of historical “knowledge” in societies where oral transmission is the traditional norm, prompts questions about how historians, anthropologists, and other disciplines, may use oral and written data for their purposes – how the one source category may challenge and elucidate the other. By applying interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between oral tradition and history, there are new methodological ways to be explored here. The panel draws together scholars specializing in the various cultures of Eastern Indonesia, ranging from pre-colonial to contemporary times, thereby enabling comparisons of geographical cases.

Organizer:

Hans Hägerdal, Ph.D., Senior Lecturer in History, Växjö University, hans.hagerdal@vxu.se

Further participants:

Robert Barnes, Professor in Anthropology, Oxford University, robert.barnes@anthro.ox.ac.uk
Ruth Barnes, Ph.D., Textile Curator, Oxford University, ruth.barnes@ashmus.ox.ac.uk
James J. Fox, Professor in Anthropology, Australian National University, james.fox@anu.edu.au
Emilie Wellfelt, Research student in History, Växjö University, emilie.wellfelt@vxu.se
Genevieve Duggan, Ph.D., Anthropology, National University of Singapore, gtduggan@singnet.com.sg
Dana Rappoport, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique,
(Centre Asie du Sud-Est, Paris), rappopor@u-paris10.fr