The above video is meant to introduce a new book – Erica Fox Brindley’s Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BCE-50 CE (Cambridge, 2015) – but it is also an audio-visual reflection on how scholarship and academic ideas change and develop over time.
As I see it, Ancient China and the Yue is the best study to date on the Yue/Việt, the earliest known inhabitants of the area of what is today southern China and northern Vietnam.
This books is good in that it synthesizes, and builds upon, existing scholarship, but it is also good in that, unlike some earlier scholarship, it tries to avoid supporting any agenda or politics, and merely endeavors to put forth a rational argument about the past.
That said, historians are always influenced to some extent by their times and their societies. And the general public can adopt and transform ideas from the academic world. Much of this can only be seen clearly once we can stand at a distance and look back at an earlier era.
This video is meant to be a reflection on these topics. It recalls how the field of Southeast Asian history in the US began in the post-World War II era with European scholars lecturing at American universities, and how the identity politics of the 1960s and 1970s both advanced and distorted scholarship on Southeast Asia.
And as for what came after that. . . well that’s hard to say, as we probably do not have enough distance to view it clearly yet, but it did lead to the solid study that we can enjoy today: Ancient China and the Yue.
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I’ve gotten through episode 1.3 of your SE Asia Survey and I’m on the edge my seat waiting for you come up with the answer. Thanks to the above video and your discursion on SE Asia I’m coming to a new appreciation of the importance of “making things up” in the study and creation of history. Isn’t “making things up” just a synonym for theory?
It sounds like SE Asia is a primarily a figment of the Western academic imagination. I am intrigued by the opposition between the possession of people and the possession of land. Who has put that idea forth? It would imply of a very inter-mixed population. In China, I guess that assimilation to a dominant culture came about administratively. In this theory of SE Asia assimilation to a dominant culture would come about because of displacement, but I would think that displaced people could also have the ability to influence the dominant culture.
I guess it’s the difference between missionaries coming in and using a belief system + coercion to convert people under one’s control (interestingly the approach taken by Vietnamese from the North in the South after 1975) or more of a melting pot approach where you have not yet assimilated people arriving within your borders who have to figure out how to cope in their new world by altering some of their behaviors (language, livelihood, values), but at the same the dominant culture gets to come to know and enjoy their music and cuisine and is alright with them holding on to some of their customs and beliefs.
“Isn’t ‘making things up’ just a synonym for theory?” Haha, yes, you’re probably right. It’s a theory until it stops making sense, and then someone has to make up something new.
I’m not sure where the possession of people vs. possession of land idea originated, but it’s one of the “core ideas” of Southeast Asian Studies, or at least of the North American version that came out of Cornell in the 70s and 80s.
The points you make about culture are very much in line with the ideas of Bryce Beemer who recently completed a dissertation on that very topic:
http://dissertationreviews.org/archives/9944
I think Beemer’s use of the concept of creolization is very useful. In ethnomusicology they often used the term syncreticism to reflect the happy union of traits of different origins. Creolization / syncreticism definitely works against the idea of a pure, essential notion of race or culture.
I beg to differ about the comparison between missionaries bent on conquering or / and converting and N Vietnamese seizure of South VN .
The North VN were’nt foreigners ; besides , they just actuated societal change and did no forced cultural or religious assimilation . The fitting analogy should be US civil war or French Gaullists throwing out a Quisling regime
You’re right, missionary is not accurate in this instance. I guess crusader would be a better choice – according to the OED one definition of a crusade is “An aggressive movement or enterprise against some public evil, or some institution or class of persons considered as evil.”