Oral History in Southeast Asia

Memories and Fragments

K. Loh, S. Dobbs, E. Koh, K. Loh, S. Dobbs, E. Koh

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137311665
• eBook ISBN: 9781137311672
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

Using the presence of the past as a point of departure, this books explores three critical themes in Southeast Asian oral history: the relationship between oral history and official histories produced by nation-states; the nature of memories of violence; and intersections between oral history, oral tradition, and heritage discourses.

C H A P T E R 1

Oral History and Fragments in Southeast Asia

Kah Seng Loh, Ernest Koh, and Alistair Thomson

This book offers a view from Southeast Asia, where oral history is embryonic and state led but is also being socially contested and redefined. The book began as a conference in Singapore in 2010, organized by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and the Singapore Heritage Society. ISEAS had hosted a similar event 20 years ago, which resulted in the publication Oral History in Southeast Asia: Theory and Method (1998).¹ The interim years have witnessed significant changes in Southeast Asia that are transforming the practice of oral history.

The book will investigate oral history in Southeast Asia along two intersecting lines of inquiry. First, it explores how, as elsewhere in the world, interdisciplinary approaches are connecting oral history to studies of memory, oral tradition, and heritage. Second, the book pays attention to context and explores the relationship between oral history and the political, economic, and social circumstances in which the narrator speaks.

In bringing together these two approaches, this volume considers oral history as “fragments”—those individual or group accounts of the past that do not fit in with the mainstream or dominant narrative. The term, originating from subaltern/postcolonial studies, refers to perspectives of marginal groups that conflict with the dominant view. Here, it is used more broadly to include different sorts of relationships between oral history and dominant narratives in Southeast Asia. The fragments discussed in the book are diverse and multifaceted: some oppose the accounts of the past produced by Southeast Asian states. Others are more ambivalent and reveal a closer connection between people’s testimonies and official histories.

This complexity partly explains the concentration of papers on Singapore, which account for nearly half the book. Admittedly this was also due to the editors’ personal networks (we work on Singapore)) and the conference being held there. The Singapore papers are useful in highlighting the “reasonable fragments” in oral history—to use a term from one of the editors. In Singapore, memory and speech are shaped by the influence of the authoritarian state, which nevertheless governs through a social consensus derived from robust economic development.² In contrast, most other essays examine how oral history challenges elite perspectives. While we have not been able to cover all the other states in Southeast Asia, we discuss participants’ oral accounts of the violence and suffering that characterize much of the recent history elsewhere in the region. The diversity of fragments points to the various ways that people relate their pasts to the present.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to Oral History

In many English-speaking countries in western Europe and North America, oral history expanded in the 1960s and 1970s as an attempt to uncover the hidden histories of social groups that had been written out of the historical record. The portable tape recorder enabled oral historians to create an acceptable archive record, while the new field of social history legitimized the study of everyday life. When criticisms of the fallibility of memory first emerged, oral history handbooks developed guidelines to assess and enhance its reliability. From social psychology and anthropology, these guides suggested ways to determine bias and retrospection in memory. Early oral historians also adopted methods of representative sampling from sociology, and from documentary history—they borrowed rules for checking the validity and internal consistency of oral texts. These early responses were quintessentially interdisciplinary, although the method remained empiricist.³

That interdisciplinarity expanded from the late 1970s when imaginative oral historians turned the criticisms on their head. They argued that the unreliability of memory made it a useful historical source, in providing clues to the relationships between past and present, between memory and identity, and between individual and collective memory. Italian historian Alessandro Portelli argued that orality, narrative form, subjectivity, and the relationship between interviewer and interviewee were strengths rather than weaknesses of oral history.⁴ Memory became the subject as well as source of oral history, and oral historians and other scholars began to use an exhilarating array of approaches—linguistic, narrative, cultural, psychoanalytic, and ethnographic—in their analysis and use of interviews.⁵

Yet, such theoretically sophisticated work is still largely confined within distinctive academic “tribes” that have separate literatures and networks. This book brings together historians and social scientists in an effort to peer across disciplinary boundaries and find convergences, as well as dissonances, between oral history and neighboring fields. We agree with a wider concern articulated by Paula Hamilton and Linda Shopes that oral historians and social scientists who study historical memory have seldom engaged one another.⁶ Scholars of memory studies approach the subject not usually to reconstruct the past, but to understand the influences on social and cultural memory. Disciplines such as cultural studies, film studies, and literary studies focus chiefly on representations of the past; they often neglect individual experience and memory, or indeed the relationship between memory and public narratives. The focus on representation may overlook the importance of history itself, of using memory to make sense of the past, not least to critique official myths and construct more inclusive accounts. Oral history enables us to challenge distortion and half-truth and to write better histories.

As Lysa Hong noted at the 1990 conference in Singapore, Southeast Asian oral history was theoretically naïve, and many of the papers were still informed by empiricist approaches. Since then, the practice of Southeast Asian oral history has gained from the intervention of social scientists. Anthropologists have drawn attention to cultural specificities in studies of memory, narrative form, and interview relationships. Roxana Waterson observes that oral history, situated at the intersection between personal life and historical process, is “always representative of experience of living in that historical juncture.”⁷ This responds to the frequent critique that oral history only surveys a small fraction of the population in the past. Ann Stoler has also considered the challenges faced by “outsider” interviews in Java, and the importance of listening to the aural and gestural clues within culturally distinctive forms of expression.⁸ This awareness of embodied and sensory memory connects to one of the most exciting recent growth areas across several disciplines, “the sensory turn” in the humanities and social sciences.⁹

The concept of the fragment has usefully guided postcolonial investigations into the histories and memories of marginal communities. Gyanendra Pandey conceptualizes the fragment as a trace of a lost history and a fracture within the dominant narrative. Such fragments are important, he surmises, in challenging the dominant account and uncovering new perspectives. As examples, Pandey refers to people’s diaries and poems about riots in India, and more generally creation myths, folk stories, and songs.¹⁰ However, other scholars have been skeptical about what fragments can accomplish. Gayatri Spivak has suggested that fragments, being partial and even contradictory, will not enable the writing of counternarratives, at least those that conform to the norms of the historical discipline.¹¹ In discussing fragments, scholars have also tended to emphasize silence, as opposed to speech. Shail Mayaram’s interviewees were unwilling to speak on massacres that occurred during the partition of India, because the state had discouraged public discourse on the violence in the name of maintaining ethnic harmony.¹²

While the idea of fragments is open to debate, we take it as a point of departure for understanding oral history in relation to the grand historical narratives that exist in Southeast Asia. Like local songs or individual writings, oral history has an incomplete quality to it—it is personal and subjective, and the narrator’s memory may be distorted or unreliable. In its social role, however, oral history is important in contesting the accounts of elites or national histories that reduce the past to a homogenous set of experiences. In some cases, oral history is a public means to seek justice for past wrongs. In other cases, it is a way for people to reconcile their memories to the dominant account.

In this book, we aim to shed some light on the nature of the relationship between fragments and the whole of which they are necessarily a part. In examining oral history in Southeast Asia, the book problematizes the binaries between fragments and the dominant narrative; silence and speech; compliance and resistance, and state and subaltern. The complexity of Southeast Asian oral history is a result of the region’s history, to which we now turn.

Fragments and Official History

Southeast Asia’s political, economic, social, and cultural diversity has shaped its oral histories. The diversity has provoked scholarly debate over whether the term “Southeast Asia” has any positive attribution other than defining a region between China and India. Others have pondered whether the term, which the Allies used to refer to a theater of war during the Second World War, is meaningful for Southeast Asians.¹³ There is much variation in the histories, polities, and societies both among Southeast Asian states, and within them.¹⁴ Southeast Asian societies have b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• CHAPTER 1   Oral History and Fragments in Southeast Asia
• Part I   Oral History and Official History
• Part II   Memories of Violence
• Part III   Oral Tradition and Heritage
• Notes on Contributors
• Index