It’s been a busy fortnight of explorations:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then yesterday along comes email from John the Son with this challenge:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On the subject of cats in Sarawak, have you read [Paolo Bacigalupi’s] ‘the windup girl<\/a>‘ it’s very evocative and the GMO cats are everpresent. I’m very curious of your perspective on this vision of southeast Asia in the somewhat near future<\/strong>. And of the tensions between the Malay and Chinese immigrants that are cited as a brutal(future) history in the book.
I remember you saying that each of the four groups thought the others were disgusting for different reasons: the Muslims, the Chinese, the Malay and the westerners\u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\ninto the answer of which is packed a vast morass of entangled Information. I did read The Windup Girl when it first came out, then passed the book along to my (much-missed since 2016) friend Hutch (whose Thai connections were deep), so I snagged it via Kindle and am reading it again to see what I might have thought before and what I think now.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
John’s question dropped me right into Professor mode, to wrangling what I “know” and\/or what I have thought I knew over a broad canvas, thinking about what I’d have to weave into any \u2026explication\u2026 of the dimensions of a satisfying answer<\/em> to the question. That’s great sport, in which I’ve lived for a good 55+ years\u2014and which I should<\/em> have lived in those 60 years ago days of Harvard \/opportunities\/, but needed then to (a) invent for myself, and (b) develop the requisite background to begin to practise. And of course I’m still learning how to do those things, and how to think about them.
<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s true for all of my Entanglements with subject matter<\/p>\n\n\n\n
- photography<\/li>
- music<\/li>
- geography\/landscape<\/li>
- words<\/li>
- The Computer<\/li>
- food<\/li>
- curiosity [about things not already listed…]<\/li><\/ul>\n\n\n\n
\u2026and so I’ve been exploring the Southeast Asia territory of my mental and bibliographic Catalog, to figure out how<\/em> to set about providing enough of the relevant background to make a sensible<\/em> answer (i.e., to Inform the Others Against Their Will). There’s a sequence to the exposition, starting with physical geography, ecology, at least a millennium of human demography, and then finally history\u2026 covering the whole of what JOM Broek has summarized as<\/p>\n\n\n\n
an area of transit and transition \u2026 [with a long history of] foreign intrusions \u2026 culturally a low-pressure area \u2026 recipients rather than donors of culture \u2026 ethnic and political fragmentation\u2014a kind of Asian Balkans.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
There’s plenty to quibble over in that summary, but it serves to indicate the diversity that has to be accounted for, understood, and fairly characterized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That’s a term-long class to even contemplate. But wouldn’t it be fun to \u2026 no, it wouldn’t, or rather YES it would but only in the imagination. No names, no pack drill, no papers to write and read, no grades to turn in.
<\/p>\n\n\n\nSo here’s the first page I wrote:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first thing I’d say is how arbitrary the national boundaries of Southeast Asia are [essentially colonial legacy] and how complex ethnic identities are within each of the current-day nations. Labels like ‘Chinese’, ‘Malay’, ‘Thai’, ‘Burmese’, ‘Indonesian’ project an image of homogeneity within the labels that is at best false-by-oversimplification. There’s an interesting analogy to explore in the shadow theatre so widespread across Southeast Asia; another is the music of gongs, present everywhere as shimmering sound, but in both cases built on illusion<\/strong>: the shadows of the puppets are insubstantial, flickering, turned into narrative by the words of the puppet-master storytellers; the striking of gongs rendered musical and comprehensible as evanescent layers each of which is a pretty simple repetition of a pattern. Somewhere under those visual and aural realizations is a profound syncretism of \u2026 Hindu and Buddhist influences, Muslim notions, a Western European and Colonial imposition of “order”, bits of Chinese high and low traditions \u2026 and all of that overlaid on a persisting base of indigenous animisms\u2014enormously complex worlds of spirits and ghosts and shamanic manipulations. Add a murky history<\/em> of trade and gene flows, and natural and anthropogenic ecologies, and human entanglement with plant and animal life, and rising falling seas. And make it equatorial, and subject to annual monsoon\/dry cycles\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And there you have the stage set. For next class, please read\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n(at least two classes on rice\u2026 and there’s rubber\u2026 and oil palm\u2026 and and and)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n