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Title: Census, Map, Museum
Author: Benedict Anderson
Excerpt from: Imagined Communities. Verso: London, 1991
Census, Map, Museum
Benedict Anderson
In the original edition of
Imagined Communities I wrote that "so
often in the nation-building policies of the new states one sees both a genuine,
popular nationalist enthusiasm, and a systematic, even Machiavellian, instilling
of nationalist ideology through the mass media, the educational system, administrative
regulations, and so forth." My short-sighted assumption then was that
official nationalism in the colonized worlds of Asia and Africa was modelled
directly on that of the dynastic states of nineteenth-century Europe. Subsequent
reflection has persuaded me that this view was hasty and superficial, and
that the immediate genealogy should be traced to the imaginings of the colonial
state. At first sight, this conclusion may seem surprising, since colonial
states were typically
anti-nationalist, and often violently so. But
if one looks beneath colonial ideologies and policies to the grammar in which,
from the mid nineteenth century, they were deployed, the lineage becomes decidedly
more clear.
Few things bring this grammar into more visible relief than three institutions
of power which, although invented before the mid nineteenth century, changed
their form and function as the colonized zones entered the age of mechanical
reproduction. These three institutions were the census, the map, and the museum:
together, they profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined
its dominion – the nature of the human beings it ruled, the geography
of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry. To explore the character
of this nexus I shall, in this chapter, confine my attention to Southeast
Asia, since my conclusions are tentative, and my claims to serious specialization
limited to that region. Southeast Asia does, however, offer those with comparative
historical interests special advantages, since it includes territories colonized
by almost all the "white" imperial powers – Britain, France,
Spain, Portugal, The Netherlands, and the United States – as well as
uncolonized Siam. Readers with greater knowledge of other parts of Asia and
Africa than mine will be better positioned to judge if my argument is sustainable
on a wider historical and geographical stage.
The Census
In two valuable recent papers the sociologist Charles Hirschman has begun
the study of the
of the British colonial census-makers for the Straits
Settlements and peninsular Malaya, and their successors working for the independent
conglomerate state of Malaysia.(1) Hirschmans facsimiles of the "identity
categories" of successive censuses from the late nineteenth century up
to the recent present show an extraordinarily rapid, superficially arbitrary,
series of changes, in which categories are continuously agglomerated, disaggregated,
recombined, intermixed, and reordered (but the politically powerful identity
categories always lead the list). From these censuses he draws two principal
conclusions. The first is that, as the colonial period wore on, the census
categories became more visibly and exclusively racial.(2) Religious identity,
on the other hand, gradually disappeared as a primary census classification.
"Hindoos" – ranked alongside "Klings," and "Bengalees"
– vanished after the first census of 1871. "Parsecs" lasted
until the census of 1901, where they still appeared – packed in with
"Bengalis, " "Burmese," and "Tamils" –
under the broad category "Tamils and Other Natives of India." His
second conclusion is that, on the whole, the large racial categories were
retained and even concentrated after independence, but now redesignated and
reranked as "Malaysian," "Chinese ", "Indian,"
and "Other." Yet anomalies continued up into the 1980s. In the 1980
census "Sikh" still appeared nervously as a pseudoethnic subcategory
– alongside "Malayah" and "Telegu," "Pakistani"
and "Bangladeshi," "Sri Lankan Tamil," and "Other
Sri Lankan,"– under the general heading "Indian."
But Hirschmans wonderful facsimiles encourage one to go beyond his immediate
analytical concerns. Take, for example, the 1911 Federated Malay States Census,
which lists under "Malay Population by Race" the following: "Malay,"
"Javanese," "Sakai," "Banjarese," "Boyanese,"
"Mendeling" (sic), "Krinchi" (sic), "Jambi,"
"Achinese," "Bugis," and "Other." Of these "groups"
all but (most) "Malay" and "Sakai" originated from the
islands of Sumatra, Java, Southern Borneo, and the Celebes, all parts of the
huge neighboring colony of the Netherlands East Indies. But these extra-FMS
origins receive no recognition from the census-makers who, in constructing
their "Malays," keep their eyes modestly lowered to their own colonial
borders. (Needless to say, across the waters, Dutch census-makers were constructing
a different imagining of "Malays," as a minor ethnicity alongside,
not above, "Achinese," "Javanese," and the like.) "Jambi"
and "Krinchi" refer to places, rather than to anything remotely
identifiable as ethnolinguistic. It is extremely unlikely that, in 1911, more
than a tiny fraction of those categorized and subcategorized would have recognized
themselves under such labels. These "identities," imagined by the
(confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state, still awaited a reification
which imperial administrative penetration would soon make possible. One notices,
in addition, the census-makers passion for completeness and unambiguity. Hence
their intolerance of multiple, politically "transvestite," blurred,
or changing identifications. Hence the weird subcategory, tinder each racial
group, of "Others" – who, nonetheless, are absolutely not to
be confused with
other "Others." The fiction of the census
is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one – and only one –
extremely clear place. No fractions.
This mode of imagining by the colonial state had origins much older than the
censuses of the 1870s, so that, in order fully to understand why the late-nineteenth-century
censuses are yet profoundly novel, it is useful to look back to the earliest
days of European penetration of Southeast Asia. Two examples, drawn from the
Philippine and Indonesian archipelagoes, are instructive. In an important
recent book, William Henry Scott has attempted meticulously to reconstruct
the class structure of the pre-Hispanic Philippines, on the basis of the earliest
Spanish records.(3) As a professional historian Scott is perfectly aware that
the Philippines owes its name to Felipe II of "Spain," and bat,
but for mischance or luck, the archipelago might have fallen into Dutch or
English hands, become politically segmented, or been recombined with further
conquests.(4) It is tempting therefore to attribute his curious choice of
topic to his long residence in the Philippines and his strong sympathy with
a Filipino nationalism that has been, for a century now, on the trail of an
aboriginial Eden. But the chances are good that the deeper basis for the shaping
of his imagination was the sources on which he was compelled to rely. For
the fact is that wherever in the islands the earliest clerics and conquistadors
ventured they espied, on shore,
principales, hidalgos, pecheros, and
esclavos (princes, noblemen, commoners and slaves) – quasi-estates
adapted from the social classifications of late mediaeval Iberia. The documents
they left behind offer plenty of incidental evidence that the "
hidalgos"
were mostly unaware of one anothers existence in the huge, scattered, and
sparsely populated archipelago, and, where aware, usually saw one another
not as hidalgos, but as enemies or potential slaves. But the power of the
grid is so great that such evidence is marginalized in Scotts imagination,
and therefore it is hard for him to see that the "class structure"
of the precolonial period is a "census" imagining created from the
poops of Spanish galleons. Wherever
they went,
hidalgos and
esclavos loomed up, who could only be aggregated as such, that is "structurally,"
by an incipient colonial state.
For Indonesia we have, thanks to the research of Mason Hoadley, a detailed
account of an important judicial case decided in the coastal port of Cirebon,
Java, at the end of the seventeenth century.(5) By luck, the Dutch (VOC) and
local Cirebonese records are still available. If the Cirebonese account only
had survived, we would know the accused murderer as a high official of the
Cirebonese court, and only by his title Ki Aria Marta Ningrat, not a personal
name. The VOC records, however, angrily identify him as a
Chinees –
indeed that is the single most important piece of information about him that
they convey. It is clear then that the Cirebonese court classified people
by rank and status, while the Company did so by something like "race."
There is no reason whatever to think that the accused murderer – whose
high status attests to his and his ancestors long integration into Cirebonese
society, no matter what their origins – thought of himself as "a"
Chinees. How then did the VOC arrive at this classification? From what
poops was it possible to imagine
Chinees? Surely only those ferociously
mercantile poops which, under centralized command, roved ceaselessly from
port to port between the Gulf of Mergui and the mouth of the Yangtze-kiang.
Oblivious of the heterogeneous populations of the Middle Kingdom; of the mutual
incomprehensibility of many of their spoken languages; and of the peculiar
social and geographic origins of their diaspora across coastal Southeast Asia,
the Company imagined, with its trans-oceanic eye, an endless series of
Chinezen,
as the conquistadors had seen an endless series of
hidalgos. And on
the basis of this inventive census it began to insist that those under its
control whom it categorized as Chinezen dress, reside, marry, be buried, and
bequeath property according to that census. it is striking that the much less
far-faring and commercially minded Iberians in the Philippines imagined a
quite different census category: what they called
sangley. Sangley
was an incorporation into Spanish of the Hokkien
sengli – meaning
"trader." (6) One can imagine Spanish proto-census men asking the
traders drawn to Manila by the galleon trade: "Who are you?", and
being sensibly told: "We are traders." (7) Not sailing the seven
Asian seas, for two centuries the Iberians remained in a comfortably provincial
conceptual fog. Only very slowly did the
sangley turn into "Chinese"
– until the word disappeared in the early nineteenth century to make
way for a VOC-style
chino.
The real innovation of the census-takers of the 1870s was, therefore, not
in the
construction of ethnic-racial classifications, but rather in
their systematic
quantification. Precolonial rulers in the Malayo-Javanese
world had attempted enumerations of the populations under their control, but
these took the form of tax-rolls and levy-lists. Their purposes were concrete
and specific: to keep track of those on whom taxes and military conscription
could effectively be imposed – for these rulers were interested solely
in economic surplus and armable manpower. Early European regimes in the region
did not, in this respect, differ markedly from their predecessors. But after
1850 colonial authorities were using increasingly sophisticated administrative
means to enumerate populations, including the women and children (whom the
ancient rulers had always ignored), according to a maze of grids which had
no immediate financial or military purpose. In the old days, those subjects
liable for taxes and conscription were usually well aware of their numerability;
ruler and ruled understood each other very well, if antagonistically, on the
matter. But by 1870, a non-taxpaying, unlevyable "Cochin-Chinese"
woman could live out her life, happily or unhappily, in the Straits Settlements,
without the slightest awareness that this was how she was being mapped from
on high. Here the peculiarity of the new census becomes apparent. It tried
carefully to count the objects of its feverish imagining. Given the exclusive
nature of the classificatory system, and the logic of quantification itself,
a "Cochin-Chinese" had to be understood as one digit in an aggregable
series of replicable "Cochin-Chinese" – within, of course,
the states domain. The new demographic topography put down deep social and
institutional roots as the colonial state multiplied its size and functions.
Guided by its imagined map it organized the new educational, juridical, publichealth,
police, and immigration bureaucracies it was building on the principle of
ethno-racial hierarchies which were, however, always understood in terms of
parallel series. The flow of subject populations through the mesh of differential
schools, courts, clinics, police stations and immigration offices created
"traffic-habits" which in time gave real social life to the states
earlier fantasies.
Needless to say, it was not always plain sailing, and the state frequently
bumped into discomforting realities. Far and away the most important of these
was religious affiliation, which served as the basis of very old, very stable
imagined communities not in the least aligned with the secular states authoritarian
grid-map. To different degrees, in different Southeast Asian colonies, the
rulers were compelled to make messy accommodations, especially to Islam and
Buddhism. In particular, religious shrines, schools, and courts – access
to which was determined by individual popular self-choice, not the census
– continued to flourish. The state could rarely do more than try to regulate,
constrict, count, standardize, and hierarchically subordinate these institutions
to its own.(8) It was precisely because temples, mosques, schools and courts
were topographically anomalous that they were understood as zones of freedom
and – in time – fortresses from which religious, later nationalist,
anticolonials could go forth to battle. At the same time, there were frequent
endeavours to force a better alignment of census with religious communities
by – so far as was possible – politically and juridically ethnicizing
the latter. In the Federated States of colonial Malaya, this task was relatively
easy. Those whom the regime regarded as being in the series "Malay"
were hustled off to the courts of "their" castrated Sultans, which
were in substantial part administered according to Islamic law.(9) "Islamic"
was thus treated as really just another name for "Malay." (Only
after independence in 1957 were efforts made by certain political groups to
reverse this logic by reading "Malay" as really another name for
"Islamic"). In the vast, heterogeneous Netherlands Indies, where
by the end of the colonial era an array of quarrelling missionary organizations
had made substantial conversions in widely scattered zones, a parallel drive
faced much more substantial obstacles. Yet even there, the 1920s and 1930s
saw the growth of "ethnic" Christianities (the Batak Church, the
Karo Church, later the Dayak Church, and so on) which developed in part because
the state allocated proselytizing zones to different missionary groups according
to its own census-topography. With Islam Batavia had no comparable success.
It did not dare to prohibit the pilgrimage to Mecca, though it tried to inhibit
the growth of the pilgrims numbers, policed their travels, and spied on them
from an outpost at Jiddah set up just for this purpose. None of these measures
sufficed to prevent the intensification of Indies Muslim contacts with the
vast world of Islam outside, and especially the new currents of thought emanating
from Cairo.(10)
The Map
In the meantime, however, Cairo and Mecca were beginning to be visualized
in a strange new way, no longer simply as sites in a sacred Muslim geography,
but also as dots on paper sheets which included dots for Paris, Moscow, Manila
and Caracas; and the plane relationship between these indifferently profane
and sacred dots was determined by nothing beyond the mathematically calculated
flight of the crow. The Mercatorian map, brought in by the European colonizers,
was beginning, via print, to shape the imagination of Southeast Asians.
In a recent, brilliant thesis the Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul has
traced the complex processes by which a bordered "Siam" came into
being between 1850 and 1910.(11) His account is instructive precisely because
Siam was not colonized, though what in the end, came to be its borders were
colonially determined. in the Thai case, therefore, one can see unusually
clearly the emergence of a new state-mind within a "traditional"
structure of political power.
Up until the accession, in 1851, of the intelligent Rama IV (the Mongkut of
The King and I), only two types of map existed in Siam, and both were
hand-made: the age of mechanical reproduction had not yet there dawned. One
was what could be called a "cosmograph," a formal, symbolic representation
of the Three Worlds of traditional Buddhist cosmology. The cosmograph was
not organized horizontally, like our own maps; rather a series of supraterrestrial
heavens and subterrestrial hells wedged in the visible world along a single
vertical axis. It was useless for any journey save that in search of merit
and salvation. The second type, wholly profane, consisted of diagrammatic
guides for military campaigns and coastal shipping. Organized roughly by the
quadrant, their main features were written-in notes on marching and sailing
times, required because the mapmakers had no technical conception of scale.
Covering only terrestrial, profane space, they were usually drawn in a queer
oblique perspective or mixture of perspectives, as if the drawers eyes, accustomed
from daily life to see the landscape horizontally, at eye-level, nonetheless
were influenced subliminally by the verticality of the cosmograph. Thongchai
points out that these guide-maps, always local, were never situated in a larger,
stable geographic context, and that the birds-eye view convention of modern
maps was wholly foreign to them.
Neither type of map marked borders. Their makers would have found incomprehensible
the following elegant formulation of Richard Muir:(12)
Located at the interfaces between adjacent state territories, international
boundaries have a special significance in determining the limits of sovereign
authority and defining the spatial form of the contained political regions....
Boundaries. . occur where the vertical interfaces between state sovereignties
intersect the surface of the earth .... As vertical interfaces, boundaries
have no horizontal extent ....
Boundary-stones and similar markers did exist, and indeed multiplied along
the western fringes of the realm as the British pressed in from Lower Burma.
But these stones were set up discontinuously at strategic mountain passes
and fords, and were often substantial distances from corresponding stones
set up by the adversary. They were understood horizontally, at eye level,
as extension points of royal power; not "from the air." Only in
the 1870s did Thai leaders begin thinking of boundaries as segments of a continuous
map-line corresponding to nothing visible on the ground, but demarcating an
exclusive sovereignty wedged between other sovereignties. In 1874 appeared
the first geographical textbook, by the American missionary J.W. Van Dyke
– an early product of the print-capitalism that was by then sweeping
into Siam. In 1882, Rama V established a special mapping school in Bangkok.
In 1892, Minister of Education Prince Damrong Rajanuphab, inaugurating a modern-style
school system for the country, made geography a compulsory subject at the
junior secondary level. in 1900, or thereabouts, was published
Phumisat
Sayam (Geography of Siam) by W.G. Johnson, the model for all printed geographies
of the country from that time onwards.(13) Thongchai notes that the vectoral
convergence of print-capitalism with the new conception of spatial reality
presented by these maps had an immediate impact on the vocabulary of Thai
politics. Between 1900 and 1915, the traditional words
krung and
muang
largely disappeared, because they imaged dominion in terms of sacred capitals
and visible, discontinuous population centers.(14) In their place came
prathet,
"country," which imaged it in the invisible terms of bounded territorial
space.(15)
Like censuses, European-style maps worked on the basis of a totalizing classification,
and led their bureaucratic producers and consumers towards policies with revolutionary
consequences. Ever since John Harrisons 1761 invention of the chronometer,
which made possible the precise calculation of longitudes, the entire planets
curved surface had been subjected to a geometrical grid which squared off
empty seas and unexplored regions in measured boxes.(16) The task of, as it
were, "filling in" the boxes was to be accomplished by explorers,
surveyors, and military forces. In Southeast Asia, the second half of the
nineteenth century was the golden age of military surveyors – colonial
and, a little later, Thai. They were on the march to put space under the same
surveillance which the census-makers were trying to impose on persons. Triangulation
by triangulation, war by war, treaty by treaty, the alignment of map and power
proceeded. In the apt words of Thongchai:(17)
In terms of most communication theories and common sense, a map is a scientific
abstraction of reality. A map merely represents something which already exists
objectively "there." In the history I have described, this relationship was
reversed. A map anticipated spatial reality, not vice versa. in other words,
a map was a model for, rather than a model of, what it purported to represent....
It had become a real instrument to concretize projections on the earths surface.
A map was now necessary for the new administrative mechanisms and for the troops
to back up their claims.... The discourse of mapping was the paradigm which
both administrative and military operations worked within and served.
By the turn of the century, with Prince Damrongs reforms at the Ministry of
the Interior (a fine mapping name), the administration of the realm was finally
put on a wholly territorial-cartographic basis, following earlier practice
in the neighboring colonies.
It would be unwise to overlook the crucial intersection between map and census.
For the new map served firmly to break off the infinite series of "Hakkas,"
"Non-Tamil Sri Lankans," and "Javanese" that the formal
apparatus of the census conjured up, by delimiting territorially where, for
political purposes, they ended. Conversely, by a sort of demographic triangulation,
the census filled in politically the formal topography of the map.
Out of these changes emerged two final avatars of the map (both instituted
by the late colonial state) which official nationalisms of twentieth century
directly prefigure the Southeast Asia. Fully aware of their interloper status
in the distant tropics, but arriving from a civilization in which the legal
inheritance and the legal transferability of geographic space had long been
established, (18) the Europeans frequently attempted to legitimize the spread
of their power by quasi-legal methods. Among the more popular of these was
their "inheritance" of the putative sovereignties of native rulers
whom the Europeans had eliminated or subjected. Either way, the usurpers were
in the business, especially vis-à-vis other Europeans, of reconstructing
the property-history of their new possessions. Hence the appearance, late
in the nineteenth century especially, of "historical maps," designed
to demonstrate, in the new cartographic discourse, the antiquity of specific,
tightly bounded territorial units. Through chronologically arranged sequences
of such maps, a sort of political-biographical narrative of the realm came
into being, sometimes with vast historical depth.(19) In turn, this narrative
was adopted, if often adapted, by the nation-states which, in the twentieth
century, became the colonial states legatees.(20)
The second avatar was the map-as-logo, Its origins were reasonably innocent
– the practice of the imperial states of coloring their colonies on maps
with an imperial dye. In Londons imperial maps, British colonies were usually
pink-red, French purple-blue, Dutch yellow-brown, and so on. Dyed this way,
each colony appeared like a detachable piece of a jigsaw puzzle. As this "jigsaw"
effect became normal, each "piece" could be wholly detached from
its geographic context. In its final form all explanatory glosses could be
summarily removed: lines of longitude and latitude, place names, signs for
rivers, seas, and mountains,
neighbours. Pure sign, no longer compass
to the world. In this shape, the map entered an infinitely reproducible series,
available for transfer to posters, official seals, letterheads, magazine and
textbook covers, tablecloths, and hotel walls. Instantly recognizable, everywhere
visible, the logo-map penetrated deep into the popular imagination, forming
a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms being born.(21)
Modern Indonesia offers us a fine, painful example of this process. In 1828
the first fever-ridden Dutch settlement was made on the island of New Guinea.
Although the settlement had to be abandoned in 1836, the Dutch Crown proclaimed
sovereignty over that part of the island lying west of 141 degrees longitude
(an invisible line which corresponded to nothing on the ground, but boxed
in Conrads diminishing white spaces), with the exception of some coastal stretches
regarded as under the sovereignty of the Sultan of Tidore. Only in 1901 did
The Hague buy out the Sultan, and incorporate West New Guinea into the Netherlands
Indies – just in time for logoization. Large parts of the region remained
Conrad-white until after World War II; the handful of Dutchmen there were
mostly missionaries, mineral-prospectors – and wardens of special prison-camps
for diehard radical Indonesian nationalists. The swamps north of Merauke,
at the extreme southeastern edge of Dutch New Guinea, were selected as the
site of these facilities precisely because the region was regarded as utterly
remote from the rest of the colony, and the "stoneage" local population
as wholly uncontaminated by nationalist thinking. (22)
The internment, and often interment, there of nationalist martyrs gave West
New Guinea a central place in the folklore of the anticolonial struggle, and
made it a sacred site in the national imagining: Indonesia Free, from Sabang
(at the northwestern tip of Sumatra) to – where else but? – Merauke.
It made no difference at all that, aside from the few hundred internees, no
nationalists ever saw New Guinea with their own eyes until the 1960s. But
Dutch colonial logo-maps sped across in the colony, showing a West New Guinea
with nothing to its East, unconsciously reinforced the developing imagined
ties. When, in the aftermath of the bitter anticolonial wars of 1945-49, the
Dutch were forced to cede sovereignty of the archipelago to a United States
of Indonesia, they attempted (for reasons that need not detain us here) to
separate West New Guinea once again, keep it temporarily under colonial rule,
and prepare it for independent nationhood. Not until 1963 was this enterprise
abandoned, as a result of heavy American diplomatic pressure and Indonesian
military raids. Only then did President Sukarno visit for the first time,
at the age of sixty-two, a region about which he had tirelessly orated for
four decades. The subsequent painful relations between the populations of
West New Guinea and the emissaries of the independent Indonesian state can
be attributed to the fact that Indonesians more or less sincerely regard these
populations as "brothers and sisters," while the populations themselves,
for the most part, see things very differently.(23)
This difference owes much to census and map, New Guineas remoteness and rugged
terrain created over the millennia an extraordinary linguistic fragmentation.
When the Dutch left the region in 1963 they estimated that within the 700,000
population there existed well over 200 mostly mutually unintelligible languages.(24)
Many of the remoter "tribal" groups were not even aware of one anothers
existence. But, especially after 1950, Dutch missionaries and Dutch officials
for the first time made serious efforts to "unify" them by taking
censuses, expanding communications networks, establishing schools, and erecting
supra-"tribal" governmental structures. This effort was launched
by a colonial state which, as we noted earlier, was unique in that it had
governed the Indies, not primarily via a European language, but through "administrative
Malay." (25) Hence West New Guinea was "brought up" in the
same language in which Indonesia had earlier been raised (and which became
the national language in due course). The irony is that
bahasa Indonesia
thus became the lingua franca of a burgeoning West New Guinean, West Papuan
nationalism.(26)
But what brought the often quarrelling young West Papuan nationalists together,
especially after 1963, was the map. Though the Indonesian state changed the
region"s name from West Nieuw Guinea, first to Irian Barat (West Irian)
and then to Irian Jaya, it read its local reality from the colonial-era birds-eye
atlas. A scattering of anthropologists, missionaries and local officials might
know and think about the Ndanis, the Asmats, and the Baudis. But the state
itself, and through it the Indonesian population as a whole, saw only a phantom
"Irianese" (
orang Irian) named
after the map; because
phantom, to be imagined in quasi-logo form: "negroid" features,
penis-sheaths, and so on. In a way that reminds us how Indonesia came first
to be imagined within the racist structures of the early-twentieth-century
Netherlands East Indies, an embryo "Irianese" national community,
bounded by Meridian 141 and the neighboring provinces of North and South Moluccas,
emerged. At the time when its most prominent and attractive spokesman, Arnold
Ap, was murdered by the state in 1984, he was curator of a state-built museum
devoted to "Irianese" (provincial) culture.
The Museum
The link between Aps occupation and assassination is not at all accidental.
For museums, and the museumizing imagination, are both profoundly political.
That his museum was instituted by a distant Jakarta shows us how the new nation-state
of Indonesia learned from its immediate ancestor, the colonial Netherlands
East Indies. The present proliferation of museums around Southeast Asia suggests
a general process of political inheriting at work. Any understanding of this
process requires a consideration of the novel nineteenth-century colonial
archaeology that made such museums possible.
Up until the early nineteenth century the colonial rulers in Southeast Asia
exhibited very little interest in the antique monuments of the civilizations
they had subjected. Thomas Stamford Raffles, ominous emissary from William
Joness Calcutta, was the first prominent colonial official not merely to amass
a large personal collection of local
objets dart, but systematically
to study their history.(27) Thereafter, with increasing speed, the grandeurs
of the Borobudur, of Angkor, of Pagan, and of other ancient sites were successively
disinterred, unjungled, measured, photographed, reconstructed, fenced off,
analysed, and displayed.(28) Colonial Archaeological Services became powerful
and prestigious institutions, calling on the services of some exceptionally
capable scholar officials.(29)
To explore fully why this happened, when it happened, would take us too far
afield. It may be enough here to suggest that the change was associated with
the eclipse of the commercial-colonial regimes of the two great East India
Companies, and the rise of the true modern colony, directly attached to the
metropole.(30) The prestige of the colonial state was accordingly now intimately
linked to that of its homeland superior. It is noticeable how heavily concentrated
archaeological efforts were on the restoration of imposing monuments (and
how these monuments began to be plotted on maps for public distribution and
edification: a kind of necrological census was under way). No doubt this emphasis
reflected general Orientalist fashions. But the substantial funds invested
allow us to suspect that the state had its own, non-scientific reasons. Three
immediately suggest themselves, of which the last is surely the most important.
In the first place, the timing of the archaeological push coincided with the
first political struggle over the states educational policies.(31) "Progressives"
– colonials as well as natives – were urging major investments in
modern schooling. Against them were arrayed conservatives who feared the long-term
consequences of such schooling, and preferred the natives to stay native.
In this light, archaeological restorations – soon followed by state-sponsored
printed editions of traditional literary texts – can be seen as a sort
of conservative educational program, which also served as a pretext for resisting
the pressure of the progressives. Second, the formal ideological programme
of the reconstructions always placed the builders of the monuments and the
colonial natives in a certain hierarchy. In some cases, as in the Dutch East
Indies up until the 1930s, the idea was entertained that the builders were
actually not of the same "race" as the natives (they were "really"
Indian immigrants).(32) In other cases, as in Burma, what was imagined was
a secular decadence, such that contemporary natives were no longer capable
of their putative ancestors achievements. Seen in this light, the reconstructed
monuments, juxtaposed with the surrounding rural poverty, said to the natives:
Our very presence shows that you have always been, or have long become, incapable
of either greatness or self-rule.
The third reason takes us deeper, and closer to the map. We have seen earlier,
in our discussion of the "historical map," how colonial regimes
began attaching themself to antiquity as much as conquest, originally for
quite straightforward Machiavellian-legalistic reasons. As time passed, however,
there was less and less openly brutal talk about right of conquest, and more
and more effort to create alternative legitimacies. More and more Europeans
were being born in Southeast Asia, and being tempted to make it their home.
Monumental archaeology, increasingly linked to tourism, allowed the state
to appear as the guardian of a generalized, but also local, Tradition. The
old sacred sites were to be incorporated into the map of the colony, and their
ancient prestige (which, if this had disappeared, as it often had, the state
would attempt to revive) draped around the mappers. This paradoxical situation
is nicely illustrated by the fact that the reconstructed monuments often had
smartly laid-out lawns around them, and always explanatory tablets, complete
with datings, planted here and there. Moreover, they were to be kept empty
of people, except for perambulatory tourists (no religious ceremonies or pilgrimages,
so far as possible). Museumized this way, they were repositioned as regalia
for a
secular colonial state.
But, as noted above, a characteristic feature of the instrumentalities of
this profane state was infinite reproducibility, a reproducibility made technically
possible by print and photography, but politicoculturally by the disbelief
of the rulers themselves in the real sacredness of local sites. A sort of
progression is detectable everywhere: massive, technically sophisticated archaeological
reports, complete with dozens of photographs, recording the process of reconstruction
of particular, distinct ruins; Lavishly illustrated books for public consumption,
including exemplary plates of all the major sites reconstructed
within
the colony (so much the better if, as in the Netherlands Indies, Hindu-Buddhist
shrines could be juxtaposed to restored Islamic mosques).(33) Thanks to print-capitalism,
a sort of pictorial census of the states patrimony becomes available, even
if at high cost, to the states subjects; A general logoization, made possible
by the profaning processes outlined above. Postage stamps, with their characteristic
series – tropical birds, fruits, fauna, why not monuments as well? –
are exemplary of this stage. But postcards and schoolroom textbooks follow
the same logic. From there it is only a step into the market: Hotel Pagan,
Borobudur Fried Chicken, and so on.
While this kind of archaeology, maturing in the age of mechanical reproduction,
was profoundly political, it was political at such a deep level that almost
everyone, including the personnel of the colonial state (who, by the 1930s,
were in most of Southeast Asia 90 per cent native) was unconscious of the
fact. It had all become normal and everyday. it was precisely the infinite
quotidian reproducibility of its regalia that revealed the real power of the
state.
It is probably not too surprising that post-independence states, which exhibited
marked continuities with their colonial predecessors, inherited this form
of political museumizing. For example, on 9 November 1968, as part of the
celebrations commemorating the 15th anniversary of Cambodias independence,
Norodom Sihanouk had a large wood and papier-maché replica of the great
Bayon temple of Angkor displayed in the national sports stadium in Phnom Penh.
(34) The replica was exceptionally coarse and crude, but it served its purpose
– instant recognizability via a history of colonial-era logoization.
"Ali, our Bayon" – but with the memory of French colonial restorers
wholly banished. French-reconstructed Angkor Wat, again in "jigsaw"
form, became the central symbol of the successive flags of Sihanouks royalist,
Lon Nols militarist, and Pol Pots Jacobin regimes.
More striking still is evidence of inheritance at a more popular level. One
revealing example is a series of paintings of episodes in the national history
commissioned by Indonesias Ministry of Education in the 1950s. The paintings
were to be mass-produced and distributed throughout the primary-school system;
young Indonesians were to have on the walls of their classrooms – everywhere
– visual representations of their countrys past. Most of the backgrounds
were done in the predictable sentimental-naturalist style of early-twentieth-century
commercial art, and the human figures taken either from colonial-era museum
dioramas or from the popular
wayang orang pseudohistorical folk-drama.
The most interesting of the series, however, offered children a representation
of the Borobudur. In reality, this colossal monument, with its 504 Buddha
images, 1,460 pictorial and 1,212 decorative stone panels, is a fantastic
storehouse of ancient Javanese sculpture. But the well-regarded artist imagines
the marvel in its ninth century A.D. heyday with instructive perversity. The
Borobudur is painted completely white, with not a trace of sculpture visible.
Surrounded by well-trimmed lawns and tidy treelined avenues,
not a single
human being is in sight.(35) One might argue that this emptiness reflects
the unease of a contemporary Muslim painter in the face of an ancient Buddhist
reality. But I suspect that what we are really seeing is an unselfconscious
lineal descendant of colonial archaeology: the Borobudur as state regalia,
and as "of course, thats it" logo. A Borobudur all the more powerful
as a sign for national identity because of everyones awareness of its location
in an infinite series of identical Borobudurs.
Interlinked with one another, then, the census, the map and the museum illuminate
the late colonial states style of thinking about its domain. The "warp"
of this thinking was a totalizing classificatory grid, which could be applied
with endless flexibility to anything under the states real or contemplated
control: peoples, regions, religions, languages, products, monuments, and
so forth. The effect of the grid was always to be able to my of anything that
it was this, not that; it belonged here, not there. It was bounded, determinate,
and therefore – in principle – countable. (The comic classificatory
and subclassificatory census boxes entitled "Other" concealed all
reallife anomalies by a splendid bureaucratic
trompe loeil). The "weft"
was what one could call serialization: the assumption that the world was made
up of replicable plurals. The particular always stood as a provisional representative
of a series, and was to be handled in this light. This is why the colonial
state imagined a Chinese series before any Chinese, and a nationalist series
before the appearance of any nationalists.
No one has found a better metaphor for this frame of mind than the great Indonesian
novelist Pramoedya Ananta Toer, who entitled the final volume of his tetralogy
on the colonial period
Rumah Kaca – the Class House. It is an
image, as powerful as Benthams Panopticon, of total surveyability. For the
colonial state did not merely aspire to create, under its control, a human
landscape of perfect visibility; the condition of this "visibility"
was that everyone, everything, had (as it were) a serial number.(36) This
style of imagining did not come out of thin air. It was the product of the
technologies of navigation, astronomy, horology, surveying, photography and
print, to say nothing of thedeep driving power of capitalism.
Map and census thus shaped the grammar which would in due course make possible
"Burma" and "Burmese," "Indonesia" and "Indonesians."
But the concretization of these possibilities – concretizations which
have a powerful life today, long after the colonial state has disappeared
– owed much to the colonial states peculiar imagining of history and
power. Archaeology was an unimaginable enterprise in precolonial Southeast
Asia; it was adopted in uncolonized Siam late in the game, and after the colonial
states manner. It created the series "ancient niontiments," segmented
within the classificatory, geographic-demographic box "Netherlands Indies,"
and "British Burma." Conceived within this profane series, each
ruin became available for surveillance and infinite replication. As the colonial
states archaeological service made it technically possible to assemble the
series in mapped and photographed form, the state itself could regard the
series, up historical time, as an album of its ancestors. The key thing was
never the specific Borobudur, nor the specific Pagan, in which the state had
no substantial interest and with which it had only archaeological connections.
The replicable series, however, created a historical depth of field which
was easily inherited by the states postcolonial successor. The final logical
outcome was the logo – of "Pagan" or "The Philippines,"
it made little difference – which by its emptiness, contextlessness,
visual memorableness, and infinite reproducibility in every direction brought
census-and map, warp and woof, into an inerasable embrace.
(footnotes)