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<body> <p align="center"><font size="6" face="Book Antiqua"><b>Southeast Asian Sources</b></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="4" face="Book Antiqua"><b>Exploratory Essays in Critical Reconstruction</b></font></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><img src="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Pictures/Image226.gif" width="366" height="251"></p> <p align="center"><b>By Hugh M. Lewis</b></p> <p align="center"><a href="#one"><font size="2">Reference Information</font></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#two"><font size="2">Table of Contents</font></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#References.htm">Bibliography</a></p> <p align="center"><font size="1"><b> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></b></font></p> <p align="center"><a name="one">Copyright © 2000, by Hugh M. Lewis</a></p> <p align="center"> 02/19/00</p> <p align="center">(Copies of the this text may be printed for research and educational purposes only. Use of published materials in this text are governed by fair-use policy)</p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><b>This e-publication is produced by:</b></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/Publishing.htm"><font size="5">Lewis Micro-Publishing</font></a></p> <p align="center"><b>For further information about this or any other Lewis publications,</b></p> <p align="center"><b>Please contact:</b></p> <p align="center"><a href="mailto:publishing@www.omniprise.net"><font size="1">Lewis Micro-Publishing</font></a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <hr> <p align="center"><a name="two"><b>Table of Contents</b></a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#four">Preface</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#four">On the "Construction" of the Concept of "Southeast Asia"</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> <b> </b><a href="#five">Introduction</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#five">Critical Reconstruction of the Southeast Asian Context</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center">  <a href="#six">I. The "Waterways Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#six">The Maritime-Coastal-Riverine Cradle</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> <a href="#seven">II. The "Cross-Roads Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#seven">The Historical Complexity and Chaos of Southeast Asian Civilization</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> <a href="#eight">III. The "Autochthony Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#eight">The Promethean Origins of Vietnamese Civilization</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><a href="#nine">IV. The "Marketplace Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#nine">The Organization of Diversity in Southeast Asia</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> <a href="#ten">V. The "Plural-Polity Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#ten">Primitives, Pioneers, Peasants, Pirates, Princes, Prostitutes, Proletarians, Presidents and Pariahs</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><a href="#eleven">VI. The "Circular-Center Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#eleven">Symbolic Ecology in Southeast Asian Civilization</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><a href="#twelve">VII. Conclusion: The "Dialectical Dynamics Hypothesis"</a></p> <p align="center"><a href="#twelve">Synthesis and Synergism of Southeast Asian Civilization</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"> <a href="#Reference">Bibliographic References</a></p> <p align="center"> </p> <hr> <p align="center"> </p> <p align="center"><a name="four"><font size="4"><b>Preface</b></font></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="four"><font size="5"><b>On the "Construction"</b></font></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="four"><font size="5"><b>of the Concept of "Southeast Asia"</b></font></a></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">An elephant is not known by its parts.</font></b></p> <p><font size="3">The term "Southeast Asia" has only recently become stabilized as a conventional term for a region on the world map. "By 'making up' the region out of nations, Americans tended to politicize the idea of "Southeast Asia" as a whole, concentrating on foreign policies, regional organization, and the like, rather than on transnational cultural zones or interactions. By the same token, American researchers who studied nonpolitical subjects tended to do so subnationally. The result was a now-conventional division of academic labor between 'macropolitical science' and 'microanthropology.'" (Donald Emmerson, "'Southeast Asia': What's in a Name?" <u>Jo. Southeast Asian Studies</u>, Vol. 19, pg. 13.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The variations of the name Southeast Asia (South East Asia, South-East Asia, Southeastern Asia etc.) have occurred with differential frequencies in the literature, and have in part reflected varying political relations with the region adopted by the naming country. "Thus in East and West alike the word "Asia" is really an equivoque. It has no fixed meaning--no clear-cut denotation--but it is extraordinarily rich in emotional connotations. Though these make it the despair of the logician, they enhance its value for the poet, the artist--and the politician." (J. Steadman, <u>The Myth of Asia,</u> 1969: 35) "Less ancient than 'Asia' but no less interesting is the first element, 'Southeast,' it implies additional peripheries: south of China, east of India. Westerners used these more 'familiar shapes of India to the West and China to the north' as mammoth landmarks to define the resulting zone in their perceptions--not only 'Southeast Asia' but, by the same logic of adjacency, Malte-Brun's 'Indochina,' Logan's 'Indonesia' and Purcell's less successful 'Indosinesia.' Variations in the rendering of 'Southeast'--it has been spelled a dozen ways in English alone--have even reflected political differences between Western governments." (Donald K. Emmerson, "'Southeast Asia': What's in a Name?" <u>Journal of Southeast Asian Studies</u>, Vol. 19: 3-4)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The term "Southeast Asia" leads to a reification and projection of a spurious sense of homogeneity, unity and boundedness onto the region it delimits on the globe, one that is actually as culturally diverse and complicated as it is historically entangled and unbounded. As the cross-roads of the orient, it has long been a meeting place, and a region of cultural intermingling, between many different kinds of people, such that one will find anywhere one travels in Southeast Asia a profusion of different religions, ethnic identities, and cultural orientations within the same marketplace, within the same city limits, even under the same roof. Southeast Asia, from a regional perspective, becomes a veritable mosaic of human difference and variation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is predictable that alternative hyphenated forms should have given way to a single compound. Such a stabilization of an entire region also represents the ossification of a modern area of imagination. Southeast Asia as a place has become more clearly and conventionally bounded than it was before. We know now to exclude Australia, Melanesia, Taiwan, Southern and Southeastern China, Northeastern India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, if only for reasons of political culture, though all of these areas may have had some more or less distant relationship to the region. It would have made little sense to have called the area East-South Asia, as this would have conflicted with our geographical sense of the cardinal directions of the compass--a sense of direction which lends solidity, and hence credibility, to our region of imagination that we have so labeled.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The inter-regionality and fuzziness of Southeast Asia is reflected in the cross-disciplinary character of its study. If we want to get beyond a simplistic, text-book tour of tropical Southeast Asian exotica, then we must entertain the problem of diversity and the inherent complexity of such diversity. No single point of view is by itself sufficient or comprehensive enough to provide an adequate theoretical basis for understanding the complex historical processes and patterns of Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The diversity in which such a cross-disciplinary approach to Southeast Asian studies is rooted entails that any final or complete picture must be in the final analysis of a "synthetic" character. Perfect agreement between all different points will never be found, and any emergent, general picture must compromise some of the detail. Like the history of its name, Southeast Asian studies begins and ends with the understanding of the place it stands for in our own mind's eye, as a representation we bring to a mystified region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">My objectives in writing this collection of exploratory essays were three-fold. First, it is an attempt to bring to the fore a number of alternative hypothesis regarding the origin, history, dynamics and patterns of Southeast Asian Civilization, with the aim of demonstrating the regional distinctiveness and sui generis continuity of character which makes Southeast Asia more than a mere bastardization of South and East Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Secondly, I wish to critique within the same set of essays certain attitudes, approaches and conventions which underlie or are implicit in many of our theoretical preconceptions about Southeast Asia, as well as our approaches to the study of human history.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Third, I wish to make my critiques constructive by offering what I believe to be serious and viable alternatives to those aspects of our anthropological and areal studies that I seek to "deconstruct." These alternatives are framed as theoretical and procedural examples based upon the evidence derived from research in Southeast Asian studies, in support of the major hypothesis which I offer for consideration in critique of what we know and do not know about Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Any comprehension of Southeast Asia must eventually be polythematic and eclectic in attempting to incorporate many diverse views from very different disciplines. This exploratory essay attempts to weave together in a critical manner several different hypothetical themes to create a tapestry of Southeast Asia as a cultural region. Generally, it is the question of how we go about representing and modeling past life-ways, viewpoints, languages, and worlds. It is a matter of what we select for such representation and what we choose to ignore; and how these "reconstructions" are in part prejudiced by our own preconceptions about the past and models rooted in the present. These themes are offered as alternative hypothesis for critical consideration of their merit in shedding constructive light upon the patterns common to Southeast Asian peoples and their cultures.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The essays I offer in this collection are exploratory not just for their content, but also because they together compose a statement of the place and contribution that cultural anthropology might make in constructive criticism of other studies, especially linguistics, biology and archaeology. Furthermore, they represent a form of polythematic elaboration which are in style, organization, and tonality, unique to the forums of anthropological and Southeast Asian studies, and which contradict in many deliberate ways the canons of good scholarly writing.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Centrally, they treat the general problem that I refer to as "reconstruction" They concern the question of how we go about representing and modeling past life-ways, viewpoints, languages, and worlds; what we select for such representation; what we choose to ignore; and how these "reconstructions" are at least in part prejudiced by our own representations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Because we have little else to work with when we are trying to establish a direct connection to the past, we are left with the challenge of rendering our reconstructions as "close to the ground," as systematically unbiased and value-free as possible--i.e. "objective" in the most scientific of senses. We must pass our models again and again through the wringer of criticism and debate, and ultimately they must withstand the same acid test--the test of time--that judged all previous work as well.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An "ethno-cultural" approach, similar to ethno-historical research, is offered as an alternative research paradigm for the framing of hypothesis in regard to the cultural orientations of people. It shares with ethnohistory the central project of comprehensively embracing all extant documentary sources and the points of view represented by such sources, and the problem of integrating these sources into a single "credible" picture.</font></p> <p><font size="3">I have long identified myself as a cultural anthropologist interested in Southeast Asian studies. From my initial introduction to the area its mystique and mystification has only fascinated me to further inquiry. If I can convey even a little of this fascination and mystery to the reader, I will have more than repaid my growing debt to the field of Southeast Asian studies.</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> <b> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></b></font></p> <p align="center"><a name="five"><b><font size="3">Introduction</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="five"><b><font size="3">Critical Reconstruction</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="five"><b><font size="3">of the Southeast Asian Context</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p><font size="3">Southeast Asia stands out as an internally coherent cultural region. It is characterized by two main features: it's great age and great diversity. Of course, these two aspects are deeply intertwined.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Southeast Asia remains one of the most heterogeneous, long settled, and most culturally, ethically, racially, linguistically and historically complicated regions in the World--evidence in its own right of its great cultural age.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Geographically, it has been divided between insular, or "Island Southeast Asia," including Malaysia, Borneo, Singapore, Brunei, and the vast arc of island archipelagos including Indonesia and the Philippines, and peninsular, or Mainland Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Burma, Kampuchea, Laos and Vietnam. This distinction between insular and peninsular Southeast Asia reflects another important contrast in the region between the maritime orientation of the many miles of shoreline and the 'mountain' orientation of the highlands. Strong culture historical reasons are sometimes given for including Sri Lanka, the Andamans, the Nicobars, Assam, Yunan, Hainan, Formosa and even New Guinea and Madagascar, although these political entities are conventionally peripheral to the region circumscribed by the designation of Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are common themes in Southeast Asian life that confers an overall unity to the diversity of life found there. "Unity in diversity" is the predominant theme of Southeast Asian Studies. A vegetable culture, a bamboo culture, a rice and fish culture, a monsoon culture, a Riverine culture--Southeast Asia can be characterized by its commonly shared traits which have helped to shape its lifeways. But also recurrent in the region are other general themes: the importance of maritime trade, the chameleoness of identity, the dialectical tension between the peoples of the highlands and the peoples of the lowlands, the role that great religions and indigenous spirituality has always played in the daily life of its peoples, the proximity and cultural appreciation of the natural world, the unifying role that the rivers and streams have long played in the integration of its areas, the outward looking orientation of its peoples, the periodic waves of acculturative change that have occasionally swept through the region, and the autochthonous origins and deep sense of cyclical, rhythmical time of ancient, traditional civilizations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Such common themes amount to no more than the reiteration of trite truisms whose substantive basis is not apparent until one has lived and traveled within Southeast Asia among its many peoples. In claiming that the Southeast Asian setting, its nature, its geography, its climate, has had an important shaping influence upon Southeast Asian culture and character is to risk falling back into an old argument about environmental determinism.</font></p> <p><font size="3">But the influence is there, and has been remarked upon in reference to the use of space and geographical orientation among the Balinese; the ritual ecologies of New Guinea highlanders or the Rhade of the Vietnamese highlands; the thematic recurrence of nature symbolism in Vietnamese literature and poetry, art and music; the spiritual animism of the Dayaks of Borneo; in the cultural ecology of highlanders throughout the region; in the ecology of rice among the Thais and the Javanese, etc. Many other examples can be found to attest to the direct symbolic role and value that nature and the natural environment has played in influencing the aesthetic sensitivities and religious sensibilities of the peoples of Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Perhaps it is because nature in this tropical setting is so intrusive in virtually every part of one's life. Whether it is a morning parade of ants through the halls of one's home, a snake in one's kitchen, a resident "chi chak" in one's kitchen sink or six inch long centipede in one's outhouse sink, the encroaching jungle growth that appears in every crack of the sidewalk, the torrents of rain that fall endlessly from the high clouds, or the monitor lizard in the parking lot of a major university, one cannot easily escape the direct contact with nature that living in a Southeast Asian setting brings.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Not all Southeast Asians are equally and unequivocally lovers of nature or conscientious conservationists of the region's natural resources. The region has long been witness to irreversible destruction of many primeval forest habitats continues at a ceaseless and alarming rate. Many people in their daily activities and attitudes evince little concern or appreciation or sense of empathy for their natural environment. And yet many of the most basic cultural patterns that predominate in Southeast Asia can be found to have direct linkages with the natural tropical habitat.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What is commonly referred to in the literature as the traditional, interregional system of Southeast Asian civilization, must be seen as a structurally and socially persistent patterning, constrained by its "ball and chain" mountain backbone, maritime and tropical cultural geography, of the <u>organization of diversity</u>--an intrinsic sense of diversity that is ecological, economic and ethnic.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The style patterning of Southeast Asian Civilization is best characterized by its synthetic nature, and by its synergism in integrating a broad diversity within a common thematic unity. The genius of Southeast Asian Civilization can best be thought of as its capacity for syncretistic creation of new forms based upon the borrowing and modification of previous forms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The complexity of patterning and the broad diversity of its components requires that any Southeast Asianist must adopt a "cross-disciplinary" approach and a synthesizing attitude that allows the dialectical integration of contrasts and contradictions. No single perspective, idea, or fact is by itself sufficient for understanding the history and culture of Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">No one point of view is by itself complete or correct. Multiple points of view tend to cancel out what is incorrect by mutual contradiction. Inferior or false points of view will tend to be selected out. An axial center becomes "robust" which remains highly credible unless refuted by specific counter evidence. Peripheral portions become identifiable as primary research problems. Rather than building theory from the ground up, it attempts its "substantiation" by means of bringing into clearer focus particularistic data of individual lives from the framework of the most comprehensive perspective possible. The credibility of any such construction has depended as much upon its thematic architecture as upon the source of data used as support.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is somewhat misleading to speak of Southeast Asian Civilization as a single, integrated phenomena--there have been and are many different and distinct Southeast Asian civilizations and often the possibility of their comparison is a rather moot point. But all of Southeast Asian peoples and their traditional cultures share certain basic structural themes that are related to: a common Southeast Asian geography; a common Southeast Asian ecology; a common Southeast Asian socio-historical context as a "cross-roads." These themes have been important in the structuring of the long-term patterns of Southeast Asia as distinct and unique in the world. Within these broader outlines we can frame a better understanding of "Southeast Asia."</font></p> <p><font size="3">As a region of exchange, we can say that for the most part contact and acculturation has been extremely creative in giving rise to new forms in the Southeast Asian scene. It can be taken as a mark of the strength of Southeast Asian civilization to be able to successfully adopt and integrate new and foreign forms, to appropriate and modify alien symbols and to successfully reemerge in a vital new way. At the same time, there are long term continuities that survive the onslaught of the different and the distant, threads that link the most modern with the most ancient in Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">These old forms are not merely anachronistic survivals of a bygone era, rather they remain a vigorous substrate and source of vitality for the synthesis itself. In the clash between the new and the very old, the familiar and the foreign, Southeast Asian civilization always emerges as a more complex, more structured and more chaotic form than before. We might speak of the emergent forms of the diachronic processes of civilization and acculturation, caught within a dialectic, producing a hybridization of Southeast Asian Civilization as a mixture and a "mosaic" of cultural patterns.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Two long term structures of dialectical contrast; have always been apparent in Southeast Asian Civilization fostering fundamentally different kinds of adaptations and styles of life--this is the contrast between the highlands and the lowlands, and the contrast between the land and the sea. These sets of contrasts are entangled in one another in virtually every way, and have provided the basis of the civilizational development of Southeast Asian peoples in which the outside world has increasingly intruded upon, and altered one side of their life, while leaving virtually unchanged the other.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can refer to the basic "dialectical dynamics" underlying the rise of human civilization and development of regional integration in Southeast Asia, as the central axis of contrast about which the patterns of history have unfolded from the remotest of times. It provided a regional continuity of character, as an "historical structure of the long run" that has witnessed unchanged the coming and going of many peasants and the rise and fall of many states.</font></p> <p><font size="3">These factors remain in the background as pervasive constraints and limits to the possibilities of human action and development, and have set the stage for the enactment of many Southeast Asian dramas.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Several broad phases, or "stages" of the historical emergence of Southeast Asia can be recognized. These stages did not come to replace one another, so much as one became layered upon the other, with the consequence that with each next layering a growing complexity of patterning resulted.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Early Prehistoric I.</b> First, there is a long and deep early prehistoric stage in which the Southeast Asian Mainland and islands become increasingly peopled until people came to occupy a diverse range of settings across the mountains, valleys and coastlines. Foraging subsistence based upon a bamboo and stone adaptation that grew in sophistication was the basis of this way of life.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Late Prehistoric II.</b> Second, there emerged at the end of this long phase a late prehistoric phase that corresponds with the Neolithic. It is a phase that witnessed the domestication and cultivation of many species of plant and animal, combined with a more sophisticated tool and pottery technology, and which allowed the long distanced extension and "detachment" of culture groupings from their natal homelands.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Early Protohistoric I.</b> Third, there emerged at the end of this phase the technological basis for metallurgy, first bronze, then followed by iron. There was also achieved during this phase the "agricultural revolution" in which cultivating patterns were replaced by sedentary patterns of planting and harvesting. Socio-political organization also emerged in greater "central place" complexity during this phase, which speaks for the importance of controlling markets and long distance trade connections.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Late Protohistoric II.</b> Fourth, early "Mandala" states emerged at the end of this phase with the full use of iron tools and weapons, wet-rice agriculture, long distance trade networks, formal markets, and a "state" religion combining priests and political symbols of "people-hood."</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Early Historic I.</b> Fifth, contact with foreign powers, primarily from the West, ushered in a phase in which written records of these contacts was left, usually by the foreign peoples, but increasing indigenous accounts are found. We can include in this the very early contacts with Chinese, Indians, even Romans, and later by Arabs. This is the phase in which we can speak properly of the emerging "interregional" integration of Southeast Asian civilization in which a completely local orientation gradually began receding from the forefront.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Late Historic II:</b> This phase properly commences with the first contacts by the Europeans, starting with Portugal and the Spanish, and followed by the Dutch, French and English, and ends with the Japanese and the gaining of independence by the newly emergent modern nations of Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Early Modern I:</b> This phase commenced with the rising of Western oriented and anti-colonial nationalistic movements in Southeast Asian colonies, follows the achievement of independence, and then the post-independence eras characterized by chronic problems of poverty, underdevelopment, totalitarianism and non-democratic organization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We might only speculate about what a late modern or "post modern" phase might mean, because if we are there yet, we still don't quite know it. The phases are not clear-cut, and it is obvious that there is a great deal of overlap between them. It is possible that there may have been critical transition periods marking off this overlap--periods that may have actually been quite brief from the longer point of view, during which major structural transformations occurred. What is important to recognize is that the phases were also marked by a gradually emerging process of regional integration and an overlay of complexity of interrelation upon previous patterns.</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> <b> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></b></font></p> <p align="center"><a name="six"><b><font size="3">I</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="six"><b><font size="3">The "Waterways Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="six"><b><font size="3">The Maritime-Coastal-Riverine Cradle of Southeast Asian Civilization</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> <a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAdources.htm#s">The Orthodox Conservatism of Conventional Archaeology</a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#b"><font face="Book Antiqua">The "Waterways" Hypothesis</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#c"><font face="Book Antiqua">The Southeast Asian Maritime Context</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#d"><font face="Book Antiqua">The Analytical Framework</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#e"><font face="Book Antiqua">Phase I--Early Prehistoric</font></a><b><u> </u></b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#f"><font face="Book Antiqua">Phase II--Late Prehistoric (12,000-1,000 BC)</font></a><b><u> </u></b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#g"><font face="Book Antiqua">Phase III-- Early Protohistoric Period (1,500-1 BC)</font></a><b><u> </u></b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#h"><font face="Book Antiqua">Phase IV--Late Protohistoric-Early Historic Period (1 AD-1500 AD)</font></a><b><u> </u></b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#i"><font face="Book Antiqua">Rethinking Culture and Civilization as Historical Process</font></a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p><font size="3">Scientifically conservative continental archaeologists have shied away from synthetic reconstructions of the past, especially those focusing upon human maritime and waterway adaptations. The cumulative consequences of these tendencies toward conservatism are the implicit undervaluing in inductive, "ground-up" reconstructions as well as of the potential human capacity for civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Besides the chronic underestimation of the human capacity for culture implicit in such conservatism, there is also an atheoretical rejection of counter-factuality as a heuristic means of hypothetical reconstruction of the past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Strictly speaking, counterfactual reconstruction of prior events may be logically impossible, but may still be historically plausible. The insufficiency of evidence alone, especially if this insufficiency is due primarily to a lack of research or evidence in an area, is not enough to reject competing alternative hypothesis, as long as the hypothesis: a) can reasonably account for available data; b) provides reasonable alternative conclusions; c) is not explicitly contradicted by any specific counter-evidence.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="a"><b><font size="3">The Orthodox Conservatism of Conventional Archaeology</font></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">The conservatism of conventional archaeology is expressed in several ways: 1) its "nothing but" analytical orientation; 2) its "data-boundness"; 3) its "as late as" evidentiary caution; 4) its spatial "locationalist" and "localistic" bias; 5) its "Great Tradition/little tradition" dichotomization; 6) its lumping/splitting tendencies in categorical constructions; and, finally, 7) its exclusive "territoriality."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The cumulative consequences of these tendencies are its implicit undervaluing of the potential human capacity for civilization in its inductive, "ground-up" reconstructions and the professional devaluation of the logical role of counter-factuality in hypothesis construction. It is argued that the orthodox rage of "scientific" consensus in the professional identification of the field systematically precludes the historical role of Archaeology as a heterodox "humanity."</font></p> <p><font size="3">1) Jaquetta Hawkes delivered a critique of the encroachment of scientific reductionism in archaeology in her 1971 John Danz Lecture "Nothing But or Something More," based upon her sense of distrust in the systematic narrowing of the rational "beyond its true meaning of the reasonable until it excludes subjective experience, a great part of what it means to be a human person..." (p 3). The analytical emphasis of such reductionism represents the single minded extension of a methodology of the physical sciences to more humanly problematic enterprises of anthropology until it becomes a worldview--a "totalitarian ideology," characterized by the reduction of the whole as "nothing but" the sum of its parts. It is a reduction to basics in which humankind is nothing but a complex bio-chemical mechanism, and a reduction to origins in which, if we prefer, "there is nothing in man which was not first in the amoeba." (p. 6)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Against this urge to "nothing but" reductionism, Hawkes poses the "something more" of a "universal reality of hierarchy" in which multiple levels of organization that are "two-faced" and that arestructured both from below by its component elements and above by its relationships with higher levels of integration, and from which new properties emerge at each level not present at lower ones. Furthermore, such universality of hierarchy can be demonstrated experimentally as well as theoretically.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Her critique of reductionism, when applied to "analytical archaeology" that restricts itself to graphs, statics and histograms, is the attempt to define humankind as nothing but technical, material and economic--as next to a "mosquito" in evolutionary terms and without the free will or consciousness which has played such a determining role in history. Left out is the sense of the "human will to meaning" and value that has been such a part of the human creation of civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Hawkes summarizes a trait list of shared characteristics of the independent pristine civilizations of the old and the new worlds, noting that while the Mesoamerican civilizations had developed a ball game with score keeping, mathematics and a calendar, they had not developed technological features of a wheel, an arch or a metallurgy. These are that a materialist hypothesis would logically lead one to suspect as being the point of convergence between civilizations. (ibid.: pg. 25)</font></p> <p><font size="3">2) "Data-boundness" is a general bias of attitude and orientation that I have noted especially among many archaeologists and physical anthropologists whose primary researches are concerned with the minutiae of analysis of bones, teeth, and, in the case of archaeologists, chipped stones and pot sherds. It is an attitude of near exclusive preoccupation with the analysis of the artifact or the physical specimen rather than with the conjecture of the history which these material items may represent. There is an atheoretical, method bound fear of counterfactual conjecture and restrictiveness of interpretation--focus often becomes concentrated on the development of componential analysis aimed at establishing the internal/external provenience and "validity" of the "objet d'homme."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The consequences is that when and if they do generalize, they end up taking a grand leap of faith and falling off into a chasm--they are not very good at doing what they have little practice with. There is a consequence of theoretical naivete' and historical blindness in the superimposition of the researcher's own values and preconceptions upon the "origin" story of the data--the classic case is the interpretation of all "Venus figurines" as cult fetishes and fertility symbols with "pendulous breasts," steatophygic buttocks and pronounced labia. (S. M. Nelson, "Diversity of the Upper Paleolithic 'Venus' Figurines and Archaeological Mythology." in <u>Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropology Association </u>1990 pg. 11-22)</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is a predisposition to view the hidden history behind the material data with the same general sense of material objectivity as is embodied in the data itself. History is firmly rooted to the ground. Perhaps this kind of theoretical caution is safe (especially when it comes to setting confidence limits), perhaps too safe, and therefore perhaps it is also inevitable and unavoidable.</font></p> <p><font size="3">When we hold an ancient flint chopper or scraper in our hands, we can conjecture how its maker may have held and used it. We can turn it over in our hands to find the most suitable grip and the clearest cutting edge. We might even go so far as to try to make one ourselves, or to attempt to use it in various tasks--and if we did this enough we might even become good at it and develop a "feel" for the object that we would not gain through the microscope.</font></p> <p><font size="3">3) "As late as" evidentiary caution, versus "at least by" evidentiary conjecture, has an understandable reason in archaeological interpretation. The peopling of North America can only be as old as the oldest fossils yet discovered, the stratigraphic level of a site can only be as early as the latest artifact found at that level, unless it is known to have percolated from a higher or lower provenience.</font></p> <p><font size="3">From a scientific standpoint this is supremely sensible. We are wed to an empiricist tradition which holds that an unseen, unsounded tree fallen in the forest could not have fallen. It is also extremely safe--let someone else stick their professional neck out on the block to build mansions on ground that is not there. Ever since Piltdown and Lysenko, the scientific community loves to "falsify" and chastise.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The problem with this general attitude and approach is that it is extremely conservative and entangled in a long tradition which wishes to confer upon humankind only the most shallow and recent history possible--perhaps no later than the flood. (Margaret T. Hodgen <u>Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, </u>1964) The general trend of evidence has been to push in unprecedented fashion our sequences and reconstructed trees and dates back further and deeper into the past than anyone would have been daring to admit. It was thought incredible that humankind could have an origin of several hundred thousand, or even a million years, but when Lucy was found to have a tentative history of 3.5 to 4 million years, it all seemed astonishing. Even in the archaeological and paleological record, things eventually fall into place, and dates, sequences and trees eventually "stabilize"--at least enough to permit more confidence and consensus of reconstruction, or at least until something unexpected is dug up.</font></p> <p><font size="3">"At least by" daring should not be so much a mark of professional incompetence, as it should be a measure of the willingness to search beyond what exists to see that even the artifacts themselves must have had precedents and a history other than what we ascribe to them. The human capacity for culture that led to the creation of the artifact must have been in place and preceded its creation and humankind making its own history must have been more of a continuous process than a stratigraphy.</font></p> <p><font size="3">4) The spatial "locationist" bias is the tendency to see cultural processes of the past as self-contained groupings, segregates, as units or as little "culture gardens" that can be clearly demarcated on a map. This bias tends to under emphasize the importance of human movement, migration, trans-cultural communication and transmission and of regions of great cultural overlap, interaction and multiple diffusion.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The consequence of this kind of bias inherited from the gemeinschaft culture area approach is the implicit tendency to see groups as locally rooted and embedded in time, as "fossilized" artifacts standing for distinctive peoples, cultures, phases and horizons whose boundaries are clearly marked and exclusive. (Jacob Pandian <u>The Other in Us: An Essay Concerning the Function of Anthropology in the Western Intellectual Tradition</u> [unpublished manuscript] 1982 )</font></p> <p><font size="3">Time is implicitly frozen in this view of the past as a static, predictable and linear measure of absolute distance from the present--historical and cultural distance is directly translatable into geographical distance. (Johannes Fabian <u>Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object </u>1983)</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can imagine the original owner of this skull, standing here in this place, ten thousand years ago when this place was not a hole but a hill, surveying the boundaries of his property--the same land of his ancestors and of his progeny. History has significance because it is continuously and contiguously linked with the here and the now.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This tendency to isolate "segregates" in time and space on the historical map of the world overlooks both the likelihood that the greater part of Human prehistory must have been marked as much by human movement and people getting around and going places and mixing it all up as by the archaeological stasis implied by stratigraphic provenience, and by the fact that the earth itself, and everything on it, has had its own natural history.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We have no good idea how far "primitive man" must have traveled or the distances spanned during seasonal perigrinations or over a brief life-span of survival, but there seems to be little sound reason for presupposing that the more ancient the people, the more local and homebound their travels and orientation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">5) The "Great Tradition/little tradition" dichotomy is perhaps rooted in the secret desire to discover the last lost pristine civilization of the world, buried somewhere in the vast emptiness of a desert or underneath a tropical forest canopy or in some hidden mountain valley.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We end up with a stratified pyramid of sites hieratically ranked from High to low and from Grand to little. The archaeologist is as local a figure as the site s/he can claim. We tend to see in the stratigraphy the same sense of site stratification--rather than a continuum of process and change, there is a clear spectrum of categories and prototypes ranging between the poles of Grand and local.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Of course, ancient monuments and high art are always crowd pleasers while pot sherds and fragments of bone or stone are at best boring museum pieces, though the latter type of artifact may in fact be more informative about a bygone age than the former.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What can we really say about this "Great Divide" except to see in it the romantic reflection of our own "Core-periphery" prejudices and selective perception, and a tendency to see in the "primitive mind" of the makers of the latter types of artifacts the cultural and civilizational deficit of the "Genius" of the makers of the former type. If this is true, then we must conclude that the original artists of the Lascaux caves constitute the first clear evidence of pristine human civilization that antedates state-development in all other regions by some ten millenium.</font></p> <p><font size="3">6) "Lumping/Splitting" tendencies are perhaps as much the consequence of a spotty and incomplete record, in which the number and size of gaps far outweigh amount of available evidence, as it is our own categorical predisposition to label everything we find. Splitting comes from the tendency to recognize in every newly discovered artifact a new type, a new category, a new species, rather than merely a variant of previously known groups. Thus we get a proliferation of periods and peoples in direct proportion to the number of discoveries and discoverers. Lumping is the reverse tendency to reduce all variation down to a single common theme--to have one basic archetype, one "type-site" for all cases unearthed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The question underlying these tendencies is how much variation of a small sub-sample is enough to be theoretically predictive or historically significant of the true population. Our small sub-sample may be skewed, or else the original population may have been skewed in ways not evident in our sample. What lumping and splitting does indicate is a preoccupation with the relations between the data rather than with the relations between the data and the gaps in the record. Any "gap", of whatever size, can become the basis for "splitting" the sample into two or more sub-samples, or else it can become the basis for filling in between two samples to create a union, for "lumping" differences under a single category.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The gap is either absolute and unbridgeable, or else nonexistent and easily spanned by the imagination. Either way, we tend to systematically exclude the unknown and perhaps the unknowable as well, from our analysis of what is known. This represents a somewhat anal preoccupation with boundaries and a fear of the unknown as something uncertain, to be covered over or cast out.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Lack of evidence should not be counted as "counter evidence" but as space available for plausible hypothetical counterfactuals.</font></p> <p><font size="3">7) Territoriality is perhaps directly proportional to ego--my site, my area, my people, my specialty, my provenience, my phase, my horizon. We seek to monopolize and drive out competition such that our authority can be seen as the final authority. The borders we mark out around the material manifestations of our work the boundaries of our own interest, character, and professional investment. We possess the ideas, the knowledge, the data, the history, the authority, as these things possess us. We must defend them at all cost from any threat that looms upon our horizon. In so doing we seek consensus that comes from perfect order and stability, and drive out all dissonance and difference. A period in history, a place in time, a people becomes our own private preserve.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Perhaps such territoriality is rooted in a need for control, which itself may be rooted in deeper needs and insecurities. Such control manifests itself in two kinds of way--the need to control the site, the type, the data, the artifact, the conclusion, for the sake of "science" and the need for political control over the information, the understanding, the resources of that part of the profession.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The combination of these kinds of biases is symptomatic of a conservatism in archaeological interpretation. Besides the chronic underestimation of the human capacity for culture that is implicit in such conservatism, there is also an atheoretical rejection of counter factuality as a heuristic means of hypothetical reconstruction of the past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A model of rational parsimony of explanation is not necessarily the most reasonable or realistic rationale for representing the phenomenal complexity of human historical patterning--we cannot systematically reduce these complexities to the level of first principles or component parts without a loss of fidelity to the "facts" in place.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Furthermore, general confusion exists between the deterministic strength of historical cause-effect relations and the inference strength of logical conditionality, and underlies the consistent over-rating of material datum and the under-rating of interpretive counter factuality. Modus tollens type fallacy that cannot strictly apply in logical argument--arguing from the consequent to the antecedent--may apply in a known historical relationship. The difference in this case is between strictly deductive inference; and abductive and inductive methods of inference;. The latter types of reasoning are not strictly provable from a logical standpoint, but they are useful ways of deriving inferences when dealing with causal determination (i.e. history).</font></p> <p><font size="3">In inductive inference in which generalization is based upon a limited sub-sample, the conclusion may be falsified by a single contradictory case. In abductive logic, unlike deduction, there may be more than one conflicting inference derived from the consequent, though only one conclusion may actually be true. (James L. Noyes, <u>Artificial Intelligence with Common Lisp: Fundamentals of Symbolic and Numeric Processing</u> 1993: pgs. 296-303.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Strictly speaking, counterfactual reconstruction of prior events may be logically impossible, but may still be historically plausible. The insufficiency of evidence alone, especially if this insufficiency is due primarily to a lack of research or evidence in an area, is not enough to reject competing alternative hypothesis-- as long as the hypothesis: a) can reasonably account for available data; b) provides reasonable alternative conclusions; c) is not explicitly contradicted by any specific counter-evidence. (Giles Fauconnier, <u>Mental Spaces: Aspects of Meaning Construction in Natural Language, </u>1985: pgs.81-142.)</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="b"><b><font size="3">The "Waterways" Hypothesis</font></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">An alternative "waterways" hypothesis is proffered regarding the culture ecological role of human adaptation to marine environments as a "primary mover" and possible interregional catalyst to the systemic development of early human civilization. This hypothesis represents a general extension and revision to Karl Wittfogel's "hydraulic hypothesis" as a prime mover in early despotic states, to encompass the entire range of human relationships to water and its resources as a primary environmental constraint in the multivariate "systemic circumscription" of early civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The paucity of evidence due to the weathering and poor preservation effects of exposure to water, the shifting of coastlines and river-courses, the rising and falling of water levels, and alluvial flooding, have precluded the formulation of any major hypothesis regarding the role of human lacustrian, riverine and marine adaptations in the development of early civilizations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An ethnohistorical reconstruction of human marine adaptations must take into account the vital role which rivers, lakes, coast-lines and seas may have long played in interregional cultural integration as channels of communication, control, and transmission. Such maritime reconstruction must also take into account possible periods and processes of three analytical phases--prehistoric, proto-historic and historic, as well as the interregional "trans-local" character of the processes of contact, acculturation, diffusion, migration and stimulus generation underlying the development of human civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The adaptation to exploitation of aquatic resources may have provided an important resource base in the promotion of population growth and social-environmental circumscription stimulating early human social formation, development and migration. Fishing-Farming cultures have been closely associated in the archaeological record with the beginnings of agricultural development. (Carl O. Sauer <u>Seeds, Spades, Hearths & Herds: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs</u> Cambridge, Mass.: The M.I.T. Press 1952: pgs.24-5.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Bodies of water may have long provided important barriers which may have served as "thresholds of integration" in the early development of human civilization--overcoming the barrier presented by water required optimal levels of social organization and technological sophistication, while mastery of the waterways has always confered a tremendous power and strategic advantage.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The model of the "waterways" hypothesis; is a systemic one in which the relative availability and control of water is both a "resonance dampening" and a "resonance amplification" mechanism in the development of human social organization and integration. (Kent Flannery "The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations" in <u>Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics"</u> 3, 1972: pgs. 399-426, and "Archaeological Systems Theory and Early Mesoamerica" in <u>Anthropological Archaeology in the Americas</u> Washington D. C.: 1971: pgs. 67-87.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The consequence is that the control of water has been a primary mover in the development of human civilization. This model may be summed up by the following set of hypothetical postulates. It has served both as a "first-order" resonance dampening mechanism (A) of social-environmental circumsciption and as a "second-order" resonance amplification mechanism (B) leading to the systemic, interregional organization:</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>A</b>. Waterways have provided an important set of factors contributing to the systemic circumscription of local and regional human populations.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>I. </b>Periods of Glaciation and rising/falling sea levels and accompanying climactic fluctuations may have created the early demographic/environmental circumscription which lead to the evolution of modern humans and their cultural complex.</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. Advancing and retreating coastlines may have had a consequence of facilitating adaptive radiation and then divergent isolation--leading to a "founder effect".</font></p> <p><font size="3">b. Rising water levels and advancing glaciers may have induced intense periods of environmental/social circumscription in some areas, resulting in rapid selection.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>II</b>. Water, its availability or scarcity, has always served as a critical constraining factor in human social patterning.</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. Control of water as a critical resource, as an unpredictable menace, and as a strategic advantage, has long been a primary preoccupation of and impetus for human social organization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Natural precipitation has always been an uncertain and undependable source of water.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. The collection of a stable supply of fresh water, in either natural or artificial reservoirs, has long been a primary social preoccupation of human groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">3. The earliest vessels served the function of containing water.</font></p> <p><font size="3">b. Large bodies of water and concourses have provided an important, relatively stable protein resource pool upon which large and healthy human populations can be supported.</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Specialized adaptations/technologies/techniques in the cultural ecology of aquatic resource exploitation was an early, and important, extension of the human resource base.</font></p> <p><font size="3">c. The production or abundance of a stable supply of food has always depended upon a predictable and stable supply of water.</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Assurance a stable, steady supply of water stimulated the development of artificial water control technologies and techniques.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>III</b>. Large bodies of water and concourses have long been both obstacles to human movement and communication that have always challenged people to overcome.</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. Overcoming the natural obstacles imposed by large bodies of water and concourses have required a minimal degree of technical invention, cooperative social organization and political integration.</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Irrigation and flood control projects required the mobilization and coordination of large numbers of people.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. Shipbuilding, fishing, and trading required craft-role specialization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">b. The challenge of overcoming the obstacles posed by waterways provided a "springboard" for more complex social organization and development.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>B</b>. Mastering the challenges presented by the obstacles of waterways conferred important strategic advantages in transportation, communication, command and mobility that allowed groups to extend their range of exploitation and control to encompass a broader spectrum of environments and resources than otherwise possible.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>I.</b> Gaining control of waterways made possible trans-local, regional integration and interregional contact and diffusion.</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. Waterways provided a fast and efficient route of transportation and communication.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>II</b>. Maintaining control of waterways required the development of "secondary" social institutions to manage and mobilize people in construction projects, in trade and commerce, and to protect the strategic lines of communication afforded by waterway traffic.</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. Control of piracy became a major preoccupation of many states, providing the basis for interstate cooperation, and for the organization and mobilization of navies to protect the waterways.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>III</b>. Development of waterways made possible the growth of a cosmopolitan way of life based upon interregional trade and water-born commerce.</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. There occurred a transformation of cultural adaptations that led to increasing interregional interdependencies upon waterway trade and traffic--in both basic commodities and in sumptuary and symbolic goods and capital.</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Sociocultural institutions were rapidly modified in adaptation and dependency upon access to non-local resources most readily available by waterborne transportation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. There occurred a secondary patterning of competition and conflict that led to a pattern of imperial "rise and fall" development of states, chronic warfare and increasing incorporation of peripheral regions into the nexus of traffic and trade.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>IV. </b>Mastering maritime transportation stimulated and facilitated diffusion and intercultural contact, providing:</font></p> <p><font size="3">a. An escape valve for relieving of population and environmental pressures.</font></p> <p><font size="3">b. A maritime "frontier" for early pioneers.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Early periods of glaciation and the accompanying rising and falling of sea levels, accompanying shifting of coastlines and climactic fluctuations may have created the early demographic/environmental circumscription which stimulating development of modern humans and their cultural complex. Advancing and retreating coastlines may have had a consequence of facilitating adaptive radiation and then divergent isolation--leading to a "founder effect". Rising water levels and advancing glaciers may have induced intense periods of environmental/social circumscription in some areas, resulting in rapid selection.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Water, its availability or scarcity, has always served as a critical constraining factor in human social patterning. The control of water as a critical resource, as an unpredictable menace, and as a strategic advantage, and the collection of a stable supply of fresh water in natural or artificial reservoirs, has long been a primary preoccupation of and impetus for human social organization. Natural precipitation has always been an uncertain and undependable source of water. The earliest "vessels" served the function of containing water.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The production or abundance of a stable supply of food has always depended upon a predictable and stable supply of water. Assurance a stable, steady supply of water stimulated the development of artificial water control technologies and techniques.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Large bodies of water and concourses have provided an important, relatively stable protein resource pool upon which large and healthy human populations can be supported. Specialized cultural adaptations, technologies and techniques in the cultural ecology of aquatic resource exploitation was an early, and important, achievement extending the human resource base.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Large bodies of water and concourses have long been obstacles to human movement and communication. Overcoming the natural obstacles imposed by large bodies of water and concourses have required a minimal degree of technical invention, cooperative social organization and political integration, the challenge of overcoming these obstacles posed by waterways providing a "springboard" for more complex social organization and development. Shipbuilding, fishing, and trading required skill and experience.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Mastering the challenges presented by the obstacles of waterways conferred important strategic advantages in transportation, communication, command and mobility that allowed groups to extend their range of exploitation and control to encompass a broader spectrum of environments and resources than otherwise possible. Gaining control of waterways made possible trans-local, regional integration and interregional contact and diffusion. Waterways provided a fast and efficient route of transportation and communication. Mastering maritime transportation stimulated and facilitated diffusion and intercultural contact, providing an escape valve for relieving of population and environmental pressures and a maritime "frontier" for early pioneers.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Maintaining control of waterways required the development of "secondary" social institutions to manage and mobilize people in construction projects, in trade and commerce, and to protect the strategic lines of communication afforded by waterway traffic.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Control of piracy became a major preoccupation of many states, providing the basis for interstate cooperation, and for the organization and mobilization of navies to protect the waterways.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Development of waterways made possible the growth of a cosmopolitan way of life based upon interregional trade and water-born commerce. There occurred a transformation of cultural adaptations that led to increasing interregional interdependencies upon waterway trade and traffic--in both basic commodities and in sumptuary and symbolic goods and capital. Sociocultural institutions were rapidly modified in adaptation and dependency upon access to non-local resources most readily available by water-born transportation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There occurred a secondary patterning of competition and conflict that led to a pattern of imperial "rise and fall" development of states, chronic warfare and increasing incorporation of peripheral regions into the nexus of traffic and trade.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The net consequence is that the control of water has been a primary mover in the development of human civilization. It has served both as a "first-order" resonance dampening mechanism (A) of social-environmental circumscription and as (B) a "second-order" resonance amplification mechanism leading to the systemic, interregional organization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Many regions are candidates for such an hypothesis. For instance: the circum-Mediterranean region including the reaches of the Nile throughout the early history and prehistory of Europe and Western Asia; the North Atlantic during the period of the "Red Paint Peoples" and later during the era of Viking conquest and settlement; the "Sea of Sunrise"/Tigris-Euphrates region in the early civilizations of Mesopotamia and Dilmun; the Gulf of Mexico/Carribbean region during the periods of the pristine MesoAmerican Civilizations; the central role of lakes in the development of many early civilizations--Olmec/Toltec/Aztec, the Bugandan state in Africa; the role of rivers in others --the Indus-system of Harappa, the Red-River in North Vietnam, the Yang-tse in early China; early maritime-riverine-delta "Mandala" civilizations of protohistorical Southeast Asia, the Niger in the early development of African Nok Civilization; the Nile in the case of Egyptian Civilization; the Northeast Coast complex in native North America extending from Alaska down to the coasts of California, the development of riverine cultural complexes throughout Amazon and Orinoco riverine systems, the Missourian-Mississipian Mound-building complex, the transmigration, trade networks and high Island/low Island tributary complexes of Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia, and the Circum-polar adaptations of the Inuit peoples. Though many early civilizations may not necessarily have developed in such a way, Incan civilization, Aztec Civilization, Southwest Amer-Indian civilization, the very early role of a "single ocean" in the regional and interregional development of Southeast Asian civilization cannot be ignored.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="c"><b><font size="3">The Southeast Asian Maritime Context</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">A few scholars have emphasized the importance of a "maritime" perspective in Southeast Asia--the early work on trade in Southeast Asia by <u>von Leuer</u> deserves recognition for its originality, and the work of E. O. Wolters and his "single ocean" perspective deserves special attention. Donald Emmerson, in his appeal for a Maritime perspective on Southeast Asian civilization, notes the paucity of research in this regard--"The disappearance of the seascapes in the way Westerners view Southeast Asia is more than a curiosity of maps. It is symptomatic of the general invisibility and underestimation of the regions maritime side." (Donald K. Emmerson "The Case for a Maritime Perspective on Southeast Asia" <u>The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies</u> March, 1980 pp. 139-145.) "There are, it seems to me, two subjective impediments to seeing the centripetal role of the seas in Southeast Asia, and both betray the land-mindedness in the observer. The first and most obvious is to think that bodies of water, especially waters as shallow and near land as Southeast Asia's, are obstacles rather than invitations. This misconception still exists....Less generally overcome is a second hindrance: to regard the sea in Southeast Asia as merely a medium for traffic rather than a resource in its own right...these two uses of the sea-- as medium and resource--will not always be compatible."(ibid.; pg. 142)</font></p> <p><font size="3">This maritime perspective of Southeast Asia as a region has been underrepresented in archaeological research, despite evidence that points to the early domestication of rice, agriculture and civilization along coastal perimeters. It is proposed that interregional integration and development via human mastery of surrounding waterways has been a primary impetus behind civilization in this region for a period much deeper in time and to a much greater extent than most pre-historians would generally acknowledge--perhaps as early as 30,000 years B.P.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Southeast Asia has long been referred to as a "crossroads" of interregional trade, migration and acculturative contact between many civilizations of East Asia, the Pacific, South and West Asia, and Europe. Without doubt this region has figured time immemorial in the traffic of certain region specific tropical goods--nutmeg, rhinoceros horn, birds nests, kingfishers, gold, exotic woods, gums and resins. "Trade was a perennial influence in the historical development of Southeast Asia. In association with agricultural and human resources, commercial currents influenced the rise and fall of political units, institutional changes, and the appropriation of alien religious and art forms. Seaborne commerce traditionally followed fixed by arrival and ending of the semiannual monsoon seasons on both sides of the peninsula. The principal commodities included perfumed woods and resins, gold and precious stones, and spices and other condiments from Southeast Asia itself; silken yarns and fabrics, tea, and porcelains from China; high quality textiles from India; glass items, rugs and tapestries from the Near East; and objects of arts from all areas. The volume of the trade varied with market demands, the perils of piracy and shipwreck, the availability of convenient entre'pot centers, and the degree of political stability prevailing throughout the trading arc extending from India to China. It can nevertheless be assumed that the character of the trade itself, intended as it was for princely and patrician consumption, changed but little from century to century. The transient peddlers, the temporary beach and market bazaars, the more permanent shops and warehouses, the eternal haggling of merchants with each other and with peasant producers, plus the activities of wandering adventurers were the universal and timeless characteristics of port centers. The commercial impact of neither India nor China became historically significant until the second century A.D. " (.J. Cady, <u>The Development of Southeast Asian Civilization</u>, 1964:21)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Evidence also points to the suggestion that the patterning of many of its basic exchange networks and interregional contacts may have been as complex in the deeper prehistoric phases as they were in the later proto-historic era. These were relations that have undoubtedly left an indelible mark upon the character of Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="d"><b><font size="3">The Analytical Framework</font></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">This hypothesis requires an analytical framework within a set of broad, overlapping historical periods. Three phases will be considered: the prehistoric phase from the late paleolithic and neolithic, the protohistoric phase, encompassing the rise of early civilizations until the end of the middle ages, and the fully historic phase beginning with the European "Age of Discovery" and the role of Western colonial imperialism in the rise of the capitalist world system.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Several distinct periods will be briefly considered. The first prehistoric period (Phase I & II) is the long presence of early Hominids in the Southeast Asian Archipelago. The second proto-historic period involves the evidence for an extensive "coastal culture" during the Neolithic throughout Southeast Asia, emerging in the later sub-period with the development of early trade networks and local political integration throughout the region based upon riverine-delta "Mandala" kingdoms (Phase III & IV). The third Historic Period (Phase V & VI) includes the trade sojourning patterns of Chinese, Indian, Arabian and European merchants and continuing until today.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The beginning of the next phase did not necessarily signal the end of the previous phases, but rather the embedding of processes and patterns one upon the other, such that today in Southeast Asia it is possible to find the presence of living stone age people next door to people who dwell in sky scrapers--easily spanning the full range of historical and cultural diversity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Generally, the Paleolithic may be divided into several sub-phases. The earliest one is the prehistoric "land-bridge" phase; up to 45,000 B.P. in which population movements of early hominids must have depended for the most part upon the presence of critical "land-bridges" which allowed the crossing from Continent to island, or island to island or Continent to Continent. Such early land bridges may have existed during glacial periods in which there was a significant drop in global sea levels, the Bering Straits in the early peopling of the Americas, the Sundanese Shelf in the paleolithic peopling of the Indonesian Archipelago, Melanesia and Australasia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may speculate that during this formative early period the advance and retreat of glaciers and the corresponding advance and retreat of coastlines and of altering climactic patterns may have been important circumscriptive elements in the emergence of human culture and the evolutionary development of modern Homo saipiens.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A broad and critical transitional phase from the upper-Paleolithic through the Neolithic is hypothesized (45,000-4,000B.C.) during which decisive archaeological evidence for maritime adaptations (fish hooks, harpoon heads, weights, shell middens, and lacustrian habitations and settlements) begins to emerge in increasing complexity and abundance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This period must have witnessed the increasing frequency of contact and migration of peoples across water-barriers and along water-edges by means of preconstructed boat-float devices--that meant the broader extension of habitation along coasts and previously inaccessible insular regions than previously permitted. This phase culminated in a late-prehistoric phase which witnessed the rise of the first pristine civilizations (4,000-1,000 BC).</font></p> <p><font size="3">In all areas, the proto-historic phases might be referred to as the "classic period" of human maritime migration and expansion--the age of Homer during which even European annals of history and Asian history remained for the most part local, home-bound "intra-regional" histories with but few exceptions. Admiral Grand Eunoch Cheng Ho was sent out to pacify and map the distant regions off the shores of China in the mid-15th Century, during the period that the Portuguese were rounding the cape and several decades before Chrisopher Columbus. But the exceptions were significant--Herodotus, Tacitus. Marco Polo was an early example of the European Explorer who presaged the later Age of Discovery by several centuries.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This phase witnessed the growing civilizational linkages throughout the world such that few if any significant barriers of communication or transportation existed except perhaps the oceans separating the New World from the Old world, such that no major region of the earth was without significant, complex human civilization. Few areas were during this phase "absolutely isolated" from outside, ultimately global, or interregional civilizational influences. Practically everywhere on earth a sophisticated riverine-maritime cultural ecological complex of adaptation had taken root. This phase witnessed the peopling of the Pacific, of the Arctic, the migration of Siberian peoples down the coast of the Northwestern and Western North America, the discovery of the New World by the Vikings, and the rise of pristine civilizations upon almost every continent of the world.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The historic phase is better known and well documented, and witnessed the global incorporation of almost all the world's peoples into the world system. The proto-historic and historical phases; did not begin everywhere at the same time. What was significantly historical at fairly early periods (1,500-500 BC) in a few regions, like East Asian, Egyptian, Mesopotamia, Mediterranean, showing patterns of dense, precocious civilizational activity, remained largely prehistoric or proto-historic regions in most of the rest of the world. "History" proper began two thousand years earlier in Europe than it did in the New World, and even a thousand years earlier in the Orient. It is this broad unevenness of the record of historical development across many regions of the world that the phase between the end of the neolithic and the beginning of the "Age of Discovery" is to be construed as "protohistorical" whatever the region, and that the fully historical phase begins with European maritime exploration and colonization of the nonwestern regions of the world.</font></p> <p><a name="e"><b><u><font size="3">Phase I--Early Prehistoric</font></u></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">At the point of maximal drop in sea levels, there existed no land bridge between Australia and New Guinea and the Island mass then referred to as Wallacea. It is therefore most likely that between 50-30,000 BC people ancestral to the Papuan speakers or to the Australian aborigines had crossed the narrow straits separating Sahul from the mainland by means of some kind of water-borne craft--perhaps primitive "boat-float" devices powered by wind or paddle. The only viable alternative explanation to this would have been that people en mass swam across these straits, though this seems less likely because not every individual would have had the same swimming skills. In any case, the ability to swim across these straits must have meant a previous existence alongside of water and extensive contact and swimming experience in the water.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Forging the 65 km. wide straits on a rough raft or crude .i.boat; is the most plausible explanation. Whether this was a well-executed boat design or not, it must have been built well enough to transport a viable community, and probably to have made more than one crossing. If this is the case, then there is no reason not to presume that these people and some of their coastal descendants were using water craft ever since, and that subsequent to this time but still very remote, extensive travel and settlement along coastal and riverine reaches had already occurred.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though it is unlikely that these early craft would have been seaworthy enough to carry people across wide and uncertain expanses of water, they probably did allow short excursionary movements along coasts and up and down streams under suitable conditions. The only extant research done on early Southeast Asian boats is an article by Pierre-Yves Manguin focusing upon the trading craft of the protohistoric period, from which it surmises the Chinese may have inherited certain features in the later designs of its ocean-going junks. (Pierre-Yves Manguin "The Southeast Asian Ship: An Historical Approach" <u>Journal of Southeast Asian Studies</u> Sept., 1980.) He summarizes the early design of these craft: 1. Their large capacity, carrying upwards of 1,000 people and 250-1,000 tons; 2. Their lack of iron in joinery--either pegs or external bindings; 3. A hull consisting of several layers of planks; 4. The use of quarter rudders for navigation; 5. A rigging with multiple masts and sails; 6. A lack of out rigging. (pg. 275-6) I would add to this the possibility of certain unique construction techniques, such as the use of dripping hot-oil and continuous pressure to bend the central hull keel beam at about 3/4-2/3 its length into the appropriate shape described to me by a Vietnamese fisherman.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A very plausible candidate for building material would be bamboo, a vegetable item of culture that was surely already widely used in a number of ways. It is also probable that if they relied on water-bearing craft to transport them in any one direction, they had to have a means of propelling and steering the craft. In shallow waters poles are commonly used. The only other alternatives are by paddling or by wind. Possible early boat designs may have been by wood, bark, hide, clay, rattan or reeds, bamboo. They may have been rather like floats or rafts, or more streamlined. Streamlining yields various prototypical features of boats--maximum length to width, relative flatness to dept of keel in the water, of composite materials or of a single piece, high bow and stern or relative flat profile in the water, single person size or large enough to carry several or many people. People of the early prehistoric were probably playing around with such craft for a long time before a streamlined and prototypical hull design became fully developed, and before a means of locomotion became a standard part of its design. The earliest evidence of boats are hieroglyphic designs of boats at least 6,000 BC. By this time, boat building must have become a stable and common trait of many different cultures throughout the world. Locomotion would have entailed such streamlining, and would have been square sails made of bata material, basketry, skins, and/or rough cut paddles or oars.</font></p> <p><font size="3">At any rate, basic boats and boat-sized trade goods must have quickly become one of the earliest and most widespread characteristics of early prehistoric civilization--perhaps only next to fire in its order of importance. Not only was it a thing that rapidly diffused, but it was a primary vehicle for the diffusion of culture.</font></p> <p><font size="3">How streamlined these boats had become by the time of the recession of the coastline remains impossible to determine, but undoubtedly they would by then have acquired their prototypical hull-like shape, rather than being a raft-like platform, and they would have gained some kind of rudder, keel and sail as a means of stabilizing them in the open seas. By the time the Islands of Indonesia became isolated, humans probably had acquired the capacity for traversing long distances between the islands, and probably did so with great regularity (Maximum rise in sea-level is given as 4,000 BP)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Before this time also, we can speak of the likely integration along the coasts and river accessible interiors via the reliance upon rafts and canoes. Rafts of bamboo can easily be floated down stream, but it would have required a more streamlined design and paddles or poles to manouver a vessel upstream. And if a canoe with paddles had been developed at some early point for traveling up streams, these vessels would have also been carried down stream and out into the open seas.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The early development of dependable and seaworthy boats would have meant several important things. First, areas separated by a relatively short distance as the crow flies but by an unfordable body of water, would have been subject to increasing contact, and integration.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In many cases traveling a few of miles across a body of water would have been much faster and perhaps less hazardous than traveling along the coast or by an inland route. Secondly, extensive areas of coastline, or of inland regions along river routes and tributaries, that would otherwise have been out of reach and effectively cut off, would have become brought within a widening zone of contact and integration. Third, protein rich and dependable resources of the sea that would have otherwise been inaccessible would also have been brought within a zone of increasing exploitation. An important, protein rich, resource base would have been added to the ecological adaptation of not only those people living along the coasts and river-banks, but those peoples inland within a zone of contact and trade. Fourth, the sea afforded new routes of immigration and movements of people that might otherwise have been blocked by either geographical or social obstacles.</font></p> <p><a name="f"><b><u><font size="3">Phase II--Late Prehistoric (12,000-1,000 BC)</font></u></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">How extensive or well developed this form of traffic was by 8,000 BC, at the dawn of the agricultural revolution, we may never know. We can imagine small pockets of such development in protected or bay areas that featured shallow harbors, calm waters with little wave action, few strong currents, and short stretches of shoreline settlement featuring the same or very similar maritime or riverine ecological orientations. We can imagine a much more infrequent and irregular movement of boats along most shorelines.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Archaeological evidence of the "Quynh-Van" cultural sequence consist of coastal shell middens. First discovered in 1963 north of Vinh in the Nghe-An province, the first and earliest evidence of lowland occupation contemporaneous with the Bac-Sonian sequence, marking a cultural sequence distinct and separate from that which gave rise to the Phung-Nguyen sequence. Thirty-one flexed inhumation burials from Quynh Van have been found, with an absence of polished stone implements, and radiocarbon dated to the mid-fourth millenium BC Where these "Proto-Austronesian" peoples originally came from is not well established, though linguistic evidence points to South China. Whatever their direction of movement or rebounding, there is evidence of coastal shell middens of early Neolithic occupations along the coasts of central Vietnam. The people of Quynh-Van ate sea food as well as vegetables and used sea shells as cutting and shaping tools was well as stone implements. The most distinguishing feature of this culture are the shell mounds (also called kitchen middens) which yielded not only the discarded shells of edible molluscs, but also fragments of stone and pottery, animal and fish bones, charcoal and ash. Some of pottery showed crude basketry impression. Beneath the shell mounds were found several human burial sites. (Whitfield, pg. 244-5)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Higham notes the long tradition of coastal archaeology in Vietnam--there are four groupings of such sites--known as Bau Tro, Hoa Loc, Ha Long and Cai Beo "cultures." The earliest sequence at Cai Beo on the island of Cat Bo 40 km. from the shore of the Gulf of Bac Bo is a stone tool assemblage with strong "Hoabinhian affinities," as well as pottery with basketry impressions. Above this is found the shouldered axe of the Hoabinhian variety with cord-marked and incised pottery, dated to about 4545 BC. The final assemblage includes shouldered, polished stone axes and adzes parallel in type to the Ha Long culture. Burials were in a flexed position. The association of axes, adzes and hoes suggests an agricultural orientation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Higham predicts that trends towards the establishment of food production may be found among the growing number of sedentary coastal groups who may have initiated settlement of the Middle Country--"the name given to the lowlands immediately above the confluence of the Red and Black rivers. These sites are ascribed to the Phung Nguyen culture." The obstacle to testing this possibility is the rarity of well-provenanced biological remains and the consideration of inter-site relations through the exchange of goods...a model for a similar situation is available for the Chao Phraya valley" (pg. 45).</font></p> <p><font size="3">These sites are very similar to sites further north in China such as "Ch'eng-Tzu-Yai" which suggests the possiblity of a "fising-shellfish gathering culture" existing along the coastal regions and primarily dependent upon fishing for subsistence. Shellfish and harpoon heads suggest at least partial dependence upon the products of the rivers and seas. Such a fishing-shellfish gathering culture might possess also the polished stone tools of Southeast Asia and the cord and mat-marked pottery of northern Asia. Its conversion to agriculture would lead to movements inland, particularly along the rivers, where fishing would still be a source of supplementary diet. The distribution of cord-marked and mat-marked wares from Siberia to Southeast Asia and Japan indicates a coast route and accordingly material traits for a fishing economy might perhaps be added. (Fairservice, 1959: pg. 97).</font></p> <p><font size="3">Fairservice notes in his "Stage 4B (3,500-2,000 BC) the development of a coastal-riverine culture which depended upon fishing and its economy. "It probably diffused from Southeast Asia and is best represented by a variety of polished and ground stone artifacts, particularly the celt. Rice cultivation, rude handmade pottery, basketry and net making, and possibly pole houses along with such traits as tattooing and canoe-building. (Fairservice, 1959 : pg. 139) These early shell-middens are associated with one of the earliest forms of "cultural sedentarism." "As such, it is felt legitimate to consider their culture within the general framework of complex sedentary and increasingly domesticated hunter-gatherers." (Higham, pg. 84)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Certainly by 3,000 BC, and possibly much earlier if we are to believe the evidence of coastal settlement sites, extensive waterway networks and maritime civilizations had already been developed in many regions of the world. We can suggest the existence of fairly extensive and effective shoreline networks of waterborne traffic and trade that formed the basis for regional/interregional integration that was one of the first precursors to the rise of the pristine states.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Between 4,000 and 2,000 BC, Austronesian speaking peoples; must have begun their "fanning out" upon the seas of Southeast Asia that culminated in their maritime feats of navigational prowess in Polynesia. The point of origin of these peoples is not known. Though linguistic concentration suggests somewhere in the Northeastern Melanesia, it remains strongly plausible that their earlier point of origin may originally have been northeastern Southeast Asia and Southern China. By this time, Chinese civilization had just emerged out of its mythological mists. Undoubtedly a well developed coastal fishing/trade network had been developed stretching from Japan to Southeast Asia. From somewhere along this expanse, Austronesian speaking peoples settled Formosa, the Philippines, Micronesia, Polynesia, the coastal regions of New Guinea, Indonesia, and Malaysia, and even reached across the Indian Ocean to Madagascar.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Excavations by Higham and Bannanurag at Khok Phanom Di (2,000-1,500 BC) in the Gulf of Thailand reveal irrefutable evidence of a well developed, pre-bronze age coastal dwelling culture whose primary diet was from the muddy banks of the sea. Such a region would have been pristine for the cultivation of wet rice, the development of which may have been stimulated by the gradually changing coastline. "It is self-evident that the origins of rice cultivation are of critical importance to an understanding of the processes involved in the massive expansion of human settlement now documented for the period 3,000-1,000 BC. At least two models for the origin of rice cultivation are feasible. One resembles that formulated for the Near East by Binford, followed by Flannery. It has the following principal features: coastal settlement in the few rich coastal/estuarine enclaves was sedentary. The occupants used pottery vessels, maintained cemeteries and exchanged goods with inland communities. Their economic base was the exploitation of marine resources. Sedentarism fostered population expansion, and settlements fissioned at critical population thresholds (a figure of 300-400 people is a common ceiling for autochthonous communities). When all suitable coastal terrain was taken up, new settlements were founded in the more marginal zone behind the seashore. It was in such areas that rice manipulation from a shy-seeding perennial to an annual variety was undertaken, a process which made possible the expansion of the human settlement which has been archaeologically documented.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An alternative model seeks stress in the actual coastal/estuarine sites, particularly as fluctuating sea levels impaired predictable food resources. This stress made the manipulation of rice a highly adaptive strategy, particularly as the sea level fell and coastal resources became increasingly remote. (C. F. W. Higham and R. Bannanurag <u>The Excavation of Khok Phanom Di: A Prehistoric Site in Central Thailand</u> Vol. 1 London: The Society of Antiquaries of London 1990: pg. 10-11).</font></p> <p><font size="3">We should not need to hook the rise of a maritime complex in Southeast and East Asia to the domestication of rice. It is clearly evident that the Polynesians may not have originally had rice as a staple carbohydrate, but relied instead upon what has been referred to as the "Yam-Taro-Sago" complex. The "planting" of root cultigens may have preceded the domestication of cereal grains.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Surely such a complex had been well established throughout the Pacific and, as is evident in the highlands of New Guinea, permitted large, but unstable population densities. "These crops do not in themselves provide a balanced diet for they provide little protein; if, however, the thesis that this early agriculture was developed from a fishing culture is correct, these protein needs would have been supplied by fish and shell fish." (Keith Buchanan 1963:pg. 63)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Associated with this complex are also the domesticated dog, chicken, ducks and geese and pig, all of which are rather small animals (boat-worthy) of the "household" or "farmyard" that are known to have had an early presence in Southeast Asia. (Carl Sauer <u>Agricultural Origins and Dispersals: The Domestication of Animals and Foodstuffs </u>1952: pg. 24-34.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Carl Sauer has suggested the "cradle area" of agriculture lay in the Bay of Bengal area of Southeast Asia, "comprising Burma, the adjoining areas of Siam and Indochina, and parts of the coast plain of eastern India." This region "meets the requirements of high physical and organic diversity, of mild climates with...abundant rainy and dry periods, of many waters inviting to fishing, of location at the hub of the Old World for communication by water or by land. No other area is equally well suited or equally well furnished for the rise of a fishing farming culture.' (Sauer, 1952: pg.24) "Farming and fishing were initially closely associated, and it is here that we can find the beginnings of the domestication of animals, the development of planting techniques and for the improvement of plants for vegetative reproduction." (ibid.: pg 24)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The picture that emerges from this is the previous widespread presence of the "yam-taro-sago" complex throughout Southeast Asia and the Pacific. It is one in which maritime trade networks and maritime resources were an important platform for regional integration, and then the gradual introduction of a new rice-cultivating culture, bringing with it a more stable sedentary settlement pattern, the need for plough-draft animals, larger local population densities, a strain on local protein resources, and the need to extend the range of fishing/trading networks, and the eventual rise of centralized states to control these networks based upon hierarchical exploitation of the rice-cultivating peasant.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This rice-cultivating complex overlaid, and to some extent partially supplanted the previous yam-taro-sago complex, but nowhere totally replacing it. "At the earliest stage of settled agriculture in the region, then, man was dependent on the yam-taro-sago complex of plants with domesticated animals of local origin and fishing to provide his protein needs. The subsequent agricultural history of the area centers around the progressive 'rolling-back' of the northwestern frontier of this early crop-complex as a result of the advance of the rice-complex..... The general picture that emerges is one of a progressive but uneven retreat of the earlier yam-taro-sago complex in the face of the newer wet-rice complex. The beginning o this retreat dates back far into the early history of the region but because of the ecological problems involved the processes by which the earlier cropping system were replaced were extremely slow." (Keith Buchanan <u>The Southeast Asian World: An Introductory Essay</u> London: G. Bell & Sons, Ltd. 1967: pg.65-6, in reference to J. E. Spencer, <u>Shifting Cultivation in Southeastern China </u>1966)</font></p> <p><a name="g"><b><u><font size="3">Phase III-- Early Protohistoric Period (1,500-1 BC)</font></u></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">Though the ecology of rice is old, and we can distinguish, as J. E. Spencer does for "hierarchies of mixed cultivation" (J. E. Spencer, <u>Shifting Cultivation in Southeastern China </u>Berkely and Los Angeles: The University of California Press 1966: pgs. 136-165.) or as Lucien Hanks does, between broadcasting, harvesting, wild-gathering, and lowland cultivation of rice, (Lucien Hanks, <u>Rice and Man: Agricultural Ecology in Southeast Asia</u> Arlington Heights, Ill.: AHM Publishing Corporation. 1972) we must place the development of lowland wet-rice cultivation in Southeast Asia, along with the development of early bronze-iron metallurgy, in the perspective of the rise of the early "Mandala" kingdoms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This development may have been preceded by the rise of a cumulative regional population density and distribution over lowland-coastal areas of Southeast Asia that made the ease of migration to a new uninhabited area a less likely prospect. Wet-rice cultivation; made possible the rise of local population densities and a need for wider, trans-local integration. The form of migration associated with the "agricultural involution" (Clifford Geertz <u>Agricultural Involution</u> Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. 1963,) of wet-rice cultivation was essentially a different, slower, steadier process than earlier inland/highland swidden adaptations or estuary coastal fishing-planting orientations. This adaptation can be associated with the spread of the Thai, the Vietnamese and the Cambodians, which eventually displaced or absorbed numerous local Mandalas within their arc of influence.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Whether or not early Mandalas depended directly or primarily upon rice-agriculture remains open to question. (C. F. W. Higham "Prehistoric Rice Cultivation in Southeast Asia" in <u>Scientific American</u> April, 1984, and <u>The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia </u>Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989.) The Red River delta region of North Vietnam was fairly early incorporated into a more fully historical phase with its colonization by the Chinese in 111 B. C., but rice cultivation and irrigation had already been well-established in the region. (Jennifer Holmgren<u> Chinese Colonization of Northern Vietnam</u> Australia: Australian National University 1980.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Evidence of Mandalas suggest a basis upon yam-taro-sago complex as well. Nevertheless, this must be seen as broadly a transitional period in the rise and development of early state organization, and is reflected in the transitional character of these Mandalas as well. What is apparent is that inland riverine civilizations may have developed relatively early along the Red River Delta of North Vietnam, and that peoples from the inland and peoples along the sea eventually amalgamated and produced a new Southeast Asian synthesis.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This contact was presumably with early "mandala" communities, tribes, chiefdoms and kingdoms across the seas and along adjacent coasts--evidence of Dong Song cultural artifacts is found in South China, Burma, Borneo, Indonesia, Vietnam, and even in New Guinea. These early polities were characterized, as later ones, by the theme of the organization and interdependence of diversity of almost every facet of life. "The mosaic of mainland Southeast Asian variability, especially ethnic and economic, is characterized by complex interdependence rather than discreteness...." (Jean Kennedy, "From Stage to Development in Prehistoric Thailand: An Exploration of the Origins of Growth, Exchange and Variability in Southeast Asia, in <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia</u>, edited by Karl L. Hutterer, 1977:23)</font></p> <p><font size="3">As such early prehistoric Southeast Asian civilizations grew and developed, routes of exchange followed paths of exploration and settlement. Interregional articulation and variation constituted a growing environmental/ecological mosaic, an indigenous framework of reciprocal interdependencies of resource exchange against which later exogenous influence must be configured. Later traders followed already established local and interregional networks of exchange. Indigenous inland commodities were carried down stream to local coastal foci of exchange. The existence of such early loci of exchange stimulated the development of "mutually beneficial exogenous trade" that were probably not the result of external contacts alone. (ibid. pg. 31)</font></p> <p><font size="3">These early littoral "chiefdoms" or "kingdoms" formed " a single hypothetical class of ancient exchange networks, one which involves the control of a drainage basin opening to the sea by a center located at or near the mouth of that basin's major river." (B. Bronson, "Exchange at the Upstream and Downstream Ends: Notes Towards a Functional Model of the Coastal State in Southeast Asia", in <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia</u>, edited by K. Hutterer, 1977: 43) The most important characteristic of these early 'chiefdom/kingdoms' of trade-centered coastal states was their relative ephemeral character.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This early form of civilization is considered quite distinct from what is found in other early instances of the rise of civilization. "...The determining conditions of the Southeast Asian coastal systems include not only a river-interrupted coastline but a relatively unusual, almost neo-colonial, pattern of export trade."(Bronson, 1977: 51-2)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Jean Kennedy recognizes a three phase pattern in the development of these early "river-basin states" that corresponded to three broad zones of ecological exploitation--uplands, piedmont and coastal lowlands--with each zone corresponding to a major shift or 'innovation' in the major mode of production. The rise of newer subsistence patterns did not replace earlier modes of production, but the complementarity of these systems resulted in an overall increase in the diversity and complexity of the system. The early pioneer phase of the opening of each zone is characterized by asymmetrical dependence of the pioneer settlers upon the products of the parent society. Preexisting relations of reciprocal exchange become extended by this early pioneering phase--"by virtue of this exchange, the overall spectrum is broadened." The spectrum becomes not only broadened and diversified, but is marked by a long-term tendency to shift within the framework of the old networks of exchange. "A series of successive steps carries with it the articulation of different modes of production by a proliferating network of exchanges.....The increase in diversity and differentiation of productive modes is conducive not only to further economic specialization, but also to the development of intra- and intergroup controls and to the rise of central place exchange. In such developments, perhaps, lies the origin of the ethnic mosaic of modern Southeast Asia." (Jean Kennedy, 1977: pgs. 35-6)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Nevertheless, prehistoric Southeast Asian civilization may have been marked by comparative isolation of groups with strong local identities, and a gradual pace of communication, exchange and change. "Cognatic kinship, an indifference towards lineage descent, and a preoccupation with the present that came from the need to identify in one's own generation those with abnormal spiritual qualities are, in my opinion, three widely represented cultural features in many parts of early Southeast Asia..." (O. W. Wolters, <u>History, Culture and Relgion in Southeast Asian Perspectives</u> 1982: pgs. 4-9)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Such features produced a cultural focus upon "men of prowess" accompanied by the mobilization of social networks within and between local settlements, and promoted characteristically regional attitudes of common expectation for achievement in public life as a means of acquiring prestige, as well as continuous public competition for pre-eminence which may have led to "adventures into neighboring settlement areas....Finally, and very important in the extension of communications between networks of settlements, leaders in neighboring areas would recognize the higher spiritual status of a man of outstanding prowess and seek to regularize their relations with him by means of alliances that acknowledged the inequalities of the parties." (Wolters, 1982: pgs. 4-9)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The prehistoric map of regional Southeast Asia is considered to have evolved from a complicated network of many small settlements into a hodge-podge patchwork of many overlapping "spheres of power", or 'mandalas' or 'spheres of kings' whose power, spiritually sanctioned, radiated out in concentric rings of lessening degrees of influence and prestige.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Boundaries existed only in the name of the ruler and the minds of his subjects, and peripheral regions, equidistant between two or more such centers, maintained a kind of ambivalent and chameleon identity between them. Identity in such a context is not defined by geo-political boundaries, or by cultural hegemony, but by the relative distance traveled between such centers--identities and loyalties were shifting, contextually relative, and possibly even contradictory. Within each mandala, one king claimed universal authority and personal hegemony over other rulers within his sphere who were his allies and vassals. (ibid, pg. 16-17).</font></p> <p><font size="3">Such early mandala kingdoms were inherently unstable, often expanding and contracting in concertina fashion. Warfare and acculturation failed to define a stable structural core--authority was always in open competition--"The <u>mandala</u> perimeters continued to replicate court situations at the center. Centers of spiritual authority and political power shifted endlessly...(ibid.: pg. 17)"</font></p> <p><font size="3">Wolters explains cultural diversity and regional variation by a consistent process of 'localizations' of exogenous elements to fit endogenous stylizations of meaning--the adaptation of foreign symbols to local needs and interests. "...Materials tended to be fractured and restated and therefore drained of their original significance....the materials had to be localized in different ways before they could fit into various local complexes of religious, social and political systems and belong to new cultural 'wholes'. Only when this had happened would the fragments make sense in their new ambiences, the same ambiences which allowed the rulers and their subjects to believe that their centres were unique..."(ibid. p. 52)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The proto-history of Southeast Asia is marked by a theme of unity provided by a shared, common sense of a 'single ocean' which both facilitated and hindered communication and transportation. The unity of a shared sea provided by the outward looking orientation as well as a corresponding sense of receptiveness, hospitality and tolerance to foreign influence, alien people and their cultures. The need to maintain long distance trade ties brought with it the need to control piracy. The single ocean was a vast zone of neutral water which stable states sought to protect to maintain the mutual freedom of the seas. The linkages throughout Southeast Asia resembled a 'chain which would join together again even if one link were temporarily broken..." (ibid, pg. 39) "The single ocean is a significant fact of Southeast Asian historical geography, and continuous and lively commercial exchanges can be expected to have encouraged cultural communication that left a mark on Southeast Asian History..." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 40)</font></p> <p><font size="3">In general, a regional model of early Southeast Asian state organization and civilization emerges whose boundaries were primarily the radii of its commercial influence and networks of exchange. Such states were numerous and ephemeral, leaving few traces of their history. They developed to meet the need of control of conflict--protection of commercial and cultural interests-- and for more efficient resource acquisition, management and utilization, and the need for "an organized approach" to foreign relations--distant states demanded new local states. "...Thus interstate politics in traditional Southeast Asia were carried out to enhance the state's domestic political philosophy, and the division of the state into village and court components, with broadly different purposes and constituencies, had an important impact in foreign policy." (McCloud, <u>Systems and Process in Southeast Asia: The Evolution of a Region, </u>1986: pg. 93.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The prototypical Southeast Asian State was a kind of dual "regal-ritual" and "mercantile city-state" which was capable of several different directions of development. Such states formed a loose network of commercial-tributary linkages described as a regional interstate system that was traditional to the Southeast Asian setting. These systems were loose, relatively unstructured, without internal recognition as a system as such, and became increasingly economically dependent upon the existence of foreign trade and foreign agents for this trade--externally, such systems were recognizable as "standing on their own." The basic type of Southeast Asian state might be labeled the "subsistence, river delta kingdom." In the rough densely vegetated terrain of much of Southeast Asia, the river systems offered the best and frequently the only method of reaching inland areas. Each river valley also offered a somewhat protected enclosure in which to organize the state--the mountains watershed roughly forming the boundaries. Chieftains, once having established control over the mouths and main trunks of these river systems by force, sustained themselves and their positions by exacting tolls for goods and persons traveling the waterways. Such subsistence kingdoms were largely self-sufficient in food production and were active in international trade and exchange only to the extent of filling for the population needs that could not be met internally. "Referring to the natural drainage system of intermountain water systems as self-contained geographic units, Bronson hypothesized that control of a river artery or of one or more major tributaries provided opportunities to develop the "lord-subordinate" relationships needed to expand kinship ties into political units by providing revenues from controlled commercial and other river traffic. These revenues were the critical economic surplus needed for expansion." (Donald McCloud, 1986: 67-8)</font></p> <p><a name="h"><b><u><font size="3">Phase IV--Late Protohistoric-Early Historic Period (1 AD-1500 AD)</font></u></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">It is at this point that we can begin to consider the 'historical' period proper of Southeast Asia, and can talk about the various records of the "Golden Khersonese," of Roman coins, of Chinese Eunochs and Brahmanic trader/priests. Prehistory and history overlap in an extended protohistorical period of several millenia of sketchy and incomplete records and fragmentary artifacts. History of the region really does not come into its own properly until the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. The Chinese had recorded a history of the region prior to that period, but most of it did not survive the later vicissitudes of Imperial dynastic politics when the Chinese suddenly became, once again, xenophobic to all that lay beyond its borders. Thus the protohistoric period which lasted from around the Birth of Christ even beyond the Portuguese period until the Dutch arrived to take their place, remains patchy and conjectural, indefinite in its time-line except for a few brief, but major, events.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In the main, the process of the regional and interregional integration of Southeast Asia continued with the rise and fall of the maritime oriented Mandala Kingdoms. What is important to note here is the continuing into historical times, until even today, of patterns of a riverine-maritime orientation that are time immemorial in Southeast Asia. We can speak, like Joseph Conrad, of the central importance that the rivers have played in the integration of life of Southeast Asia. "Tribal peoples live along the headwater areas of all the principal rivers of Southeast Asia, but, as the rivers slow down on the plains, the tribes people are located further and further away from the main streams. Transportation follows a gradient of increasing complexity from upstream to downstream. Beginning with the small rafts of bamboo or logs of the upriver people in the shallows and the gorges, we find lower down river hollowed out or plank rowboats, then sailboats, motor boats and, finally, river steamers. Near the estuaries we meet ocean-going steamers docked at the wharves of the bustling port cities. Technology, agriculture, and socio-legal organization also become increasingly complex as we voyage downstream..." (Colin Tweddel and Linda Kimball, <u>Introduction to the Peoples and Cultures of Asia</u> 1985: pg. 279)</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="i"><b><font size="3">Rethinking Culture and Civilization as Historical Process</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">We are left to reconsider, and perhaps redefine, what we mean by "culture" and "civilization" in light of the evidence of the history of Southeast Asian peoples. Culture and "Civilization" stand as "local/Grand" traditions, and suffer the same constraints as this kind of dichotomy. A static, spatial view of culture has always considered it tradition-bound, well defined by its boundaries, primarily endogenous and well-integrated as an historical "isolate" and social "segregate", as primarily conservative in its resistance to change. Implicit in this view has been a paradoxical notion of change and conservatism and a sense of an ideal, non-relative "base-line" from which change and cultural evolution could be measured.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Both culture and civilization must be considered as the differential consequences of the same historical processes. In this regard, civilization as a process has always been occurring along side the development and divergence of many cultures. Ideas were the currency of historical civilization--no society could keep a secret for very long, and thus no human group has ever long maintained an exclusive monopoly upon knowledge. We can speak of the transformational, indeed revolutionary consequences of new ideas and their diffusion from multiple points of origin. Humankind, once having achieved fire, the bow, the boat, the wheel, the arch, was no likely to lose it again.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Civilization as process can be construed as basically a "trans-cultural process" which entailed the transformation of the exogenous cultural contexts in which local cultural developments became constrained and configured. We may find the Hoa Binhian or Dong Song civilization widespread, but occupied or possessed by a wide variety of culturally distinct peoples, just as today the world possesses the artifacts and some of the symbolic accouterments of modern industrial civilization, though the cultural diversity remains great. Once begun, the traffic in ideas and new things was usually, probably irreversible, if only because it was strongly motivated by human factors of interest and unrest. In time, such traffic new few boundaries that could not be overcome. Civilization has always been rooted in an historical "intercultural context." Civilization can be considered to have been a source of background noise or "interference" that was omnipresent for most cultures, no matter how peripheral. The mere awareness of different peoples on the other side of the mountains, of the plains, of the seas, made likely, and therefore historically inevitable, contact, exchange, and exogenous change towards complex regional integration and interregional integration.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Whatever any given culture may have been at any period, it always stood in complementary balance with the cumulative sum of what all other distant cultures were also. Not only has it long been occuppied by very ancient peoples and their cultures, but strong evidence also supports the idea that it has been a seat of sui generus civilization and the point of origin for the peopling of the Pacific.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Evidence also points to the suggestion that the patterning of many of its basic exchange networks and interregional contacts may have been as complex in the deeper prehistoric phases as they remain in the later proto-historic era. These were relations that have undoubtedly left an indelible mark upon the character of Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Civilization has always been rooted in an historical "inter-cultural context." Civilization can be considered to have been a source of background noise or "interference" that was omnipresent for most cultures, no matter how peripheral--the mere awareness of different peoples on the other side of the mountains, of the plains, of the seas, made likely, and therefore historically inevitable, contact, exchange, and exogenous change towards complex regional integration and interregional integration. Whatever any given culture may have been at any period, it always stood in complementary balance with the cumulative sum of what all other distant cultures were also.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This leads to a view of historical processes and patterns of civilization as being not just chaotic but as being also complex. What may have stood as background "noise" in the form of destructive interference for one cultural grouping, may have from the standpoint of other cultural groupings constituted "information" that served as constructive interference.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may consider a "micro-system/macro-system" model in the regional integration and development of Southeast Asian civilization, as a dynamic, dialectical tension between locally oriented, tradition bound cultures and open, regionally defined civilizational complexes.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This brings us to a systemic view of history as "information" and to a basic hypothesis that the historical "structure of the long run" will tend to always follow a "normal distribution" governed by the greatest background probability. If something is possible, no matter how unlikely, it will eventually happen if given a long enough frame of time. A corollary of this is that the most probable course will tend to always outweigh the least probable, and, though events may be interdependent and conditional in probability, the main pathways of historical developments will tend to follow a rather stable and expectable patterning of change, whatever our local intentions or knowledge.</font></p> <p><font size="3">History as regulated by a principle of unintended consequences is only history from a biased point of view that does not know, and therefore cannot take into full account, the many factors and variables that have entered into its production.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Human civilization has time immemorial been a kind of background chaotic possibility in the context of any cultural grouping. For the longest time, it was probably for most peoples a minimal, and therefore negligible source of noise. But its presence was irreversible, and it would not go away. In the long run, it grew such that in came to "incorporate" more and more different peoples and traditions within an increasingly complex web of historical conditionality and entailments, from which few if any peoples could really escape.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The rise of human civilization has been the rise of a critical system of interrelated cultural elements--a "self-organizing" system that has reached and surpassed a critical threshold of systemic stability. "Civilization" at any given period and place has been but a single historical moment of stability in this vast historical system.</font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> <b>  <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></b></font></p> <p align="center"><a name="seven"><b><font size="3">II</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="seven"><b><font size="3">The "Cross-Roads Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="seven"><b><font size="3">The Historical Complexity and Chaos of Southeast Asian Civilization</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#a1"><font face="Book Antiqua">The Taxonomic Tendency</font></a> <a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#b1"><font face="Book Antiqua">The Cross-Roads Hypothesis</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources#c1"><font face="Book Antiqua">Biological Evidence</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#d1"><font face="Book Antiqua">Ethnolinguistic Evidence</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#e1"><font face="Book Antiqua">Archaeological Evidence</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#f1"><font face="Book Antiqua">The "Evolutionary Network"</font></a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p><font size="3">Biological, linguistic and archaeological evidence is considered in the reconstruction of the historical evolution of the "Austric" peoples. The Austric peoples are held to have been the earliest progenitors of Austronesian speaking peoples of the Pacific, as well as the Tai-Kadai and Austro-Asiatic speaking peoples of the Southeast Asian Mainland, who were a culturally related civilizational complex centered in South China and Northeastern Southeast Asia and who fanned out and diverged across the Pacific regions sometime after 10,000 B. C.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This reconstruction will be considered from the point of view of a .i.cross-roads hypothesis; which takes to task some basic biases and fallacies which are intrinsic to our tendency to taxonomically classify and to construct evolutionary trees based upon relative differences within our sample data. An alternative "evolutionary network" is offered as a viable, if non-parsimonious solution to some of the basic problems of taxonomic hierarchy.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="a1"><b><font size="3">The Taxonomic Tendency</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">It is argued that such biases in our evolutionary reconstructions represent oversimplifications of the actual historical complexity of past events and processes, and are largely the product of our own inherent limits of "depth perception."</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are many problems with the construction of evolutionary trees representing human culture historical development. It is clear that our theory or data will precondition the kind of evolutionary tree we construct because of our taxonomic organization of the data and at least tacit labels, and the kind of tree we build will therefore also reflect to some extent our ideas.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Several criticisms of taxonomic reconstruction of evolutionary trees are pertinent:</font></p> <p><font size="3">First, it has no where been proven that there is any necessary or tight linkage between cultural and genetic traits. In fact, more evidence points to the relative independence of language and culture from biological underpinnings. Thus the changes that occur in the patterning of a language or a culture may in no necessary way reflect changes which occur in the genetic composition in a group of people.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Second, unlike speciation in biological evolution, language and cultural change is influenced "phenotypically" by the diffusion of traits across boundaries. These processes and sources of exogenous change; are not well understood and are extremely variegated and complex, such that few simple one-to-one correspondences or simple cause-effect principles hold.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Furthermore, such exogenous influences have been continuously present in language and cultural change, and cannot be simply accounted for or factored out of our equations for such change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Third, "constant" rates of change for language, culture and biology have been presumed but never proven. "Rates" of change in language and culture are likely to be much more variable, and the patterns of divergence much more complicated, than is usually posited for biological evolution. Because of the lack of constancy of historical change, we cannot calibrate our "clocks" by a non-relative standard.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Fourth, and finally, lacking a non-relative standard, we have no common ancestral "baseline" by which we can measure and compare changes in cultures, either through time or across space. The baseline we arbitrarily establish is more likely the reconstruction of our own biases and preconceptions than it is any actually valid representation of the past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Our scientific preference for clear, exclusive taxonomic classification and for direct causal determination, renders problematic and usually biased our interpretation of the past as: 1) a movement from simple to complex; 2) a continuous rate of endogenous divergence; 3) a derivation from a single common ancestor; 4) a de-emphasis of exogenous factors of change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A consequence of such bias is to seek and see in the record a "homogeneous" versus an "heterogeneous" origin--a single, finite, prototypical "baseline" from which all subsequent change is to be traced. There is an underestimation of the possible degree of variance and complexity of patterning of the original ancestral populations as we simply do not have a satisfactory measure or knowledge of the full range of variation in the remote past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Such biases in our evolutionary reconstructions represent oversimplifications of the actual historical complexity of past events and processes, and are largely the product of our own inherent limits of "depth perception."</font></p> <p><font size="3">Different techniques of analysis confer different capacities for calculating time depth. In the case of glottochronology and lexicostatistics, the depth of time that can be inferred for change is not completely known, though few scholars would believe that we could see back in linguistic time much deeper than 6,000 B. P. or at most 10,000 B. P. The depth perception of the genetic record is held to be much greater, and virtually unlimited. Archaeological records seem to be limited only by the paucity and kind of datable material in the deposits.</font></p> <p><font size="3">But the greater the span of time that must be accounted for, the greater the relative paucity of available data and the greater the gap that must be filled--the more inherently uncertain and vague become the outlines of our history. There is a tremendous difference between the amount of change that occurs in one year, ten years, a hundred years, a thousand years, ten thousand years, a hundred thousand years or a million years. With each decrement, we have a corresponding level of the relative improbability such that, whatever our evidence, our knowledge is that much less representative of the time frame it encompasses.</font></p> <p><font size="3">But there also occurs an effect of parallactic "fusion" upon the horizons of our field of view, such that at great distances differences of time of hundreds of thousands of years become equivalent to what in more proximate points may be a matter of hundreds of years. Past that threshold, something that is 1,000,000 years old might just as well be 2,000,000 years old, though the absolute difference is almost twice.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Thus there is also an inherent theoretical limit to our depth perception such that given whatever information that is available governing a period, we must accept its fragmentary character and the greater improbability of seeing accurately and clearly into the distant past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The net consequence of this historical myopia is that it confounds our attempts at taxonomic construction. Lacking a stable basis in knowledge, such trees therefore tend to be unstable and this inherent instability is marked by their great proliferation, theoretical preconditioning, and ephemeral quality. One single piece of new material evidence can overturn or upset years of taxonomic reconstruction.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The depth blindness of our reconstructions renders these trees subject to a critical "taxonomic tendency" and "deterministic fallacy" which precludes either the possibility of alternative complex, multivariate models of change or the possibility of ever capturing the real complexity of the past with any reasonable accuracy.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The taxonomic tendency can be regarded as our proclivity to see things we label in terms of exclusive, non-overlapping categories. The deterministic fallacy follows from this in the tendency to rank order and hierarchically categorize relations--temporally this translates into a linear progression of time in which things that come before predetermine those things which follow. The net outcome of these pre-dispositions is the spatialized diagram of the "Evolutionary Tree" which stands for change in time.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We get a sense of set-piece stability and stasis that is illusory when we consider the real fluidity of time and change. We get Zeno's paradox, and a stratigraphic conflating of temporal depth as a two-dimensional plane surface--a sounding into the well of the past. We get the inevitable convergence of the curve of variation towards a common "ancestor."</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is one thing to reconstruct a prototypical ancestral form from several descended forms. Our depth of view allows this much. It becomes more problematic to reconstruct a "super-prototype" from presumably related prototypes, and even a fourth-order "super-super-prototype". The problem is that we can only push our reconstructions back so far before the evidence upon which we base our reconstructions becomes too flimsy.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can reconstruct part of the prototypical core of a common stock, but not the ancestral form, because it is mostly likely that the languages from which we base our reconstructions did not have a directly ancestral form, but only an indirect ancestral stock. We can reconstruct only from what we know, and not from what we don't know, and what we don't know always outweighs the little we know, such that each time we learn something new, our representation of the past becomes overturned.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is a tendency each time we do this to augment our uncertainty and decrease our empirical foundation. Each time we achieve a "more normal" shaped curve of distribution, but each time the degree of variation in the curve becomes narrower and narrower. The artifact of our effort is that we come up with a strong sense of a shared central tendency, but one that revolves around a narrow axis of only a small subset of invariable forms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Building evolutionary trees from this perspective will always have the same result of yielding a common, narrowly defined ancestor, losing the sense of original variability and the range of variation. Evolutionarily we know that divergence has been a continuous process. It is unlikely that two forms branched off from one another at the same time, though branching occurred through time. Many more offshoots were formed than are available now to our senses. The clean tree with the same point of divergence, the same "ancestor" rather than a related stock, is the deception of our own treelike representations--historically or evolutionarily a highly improbable event.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An evolutionary tree based exclusively upon the principle of irreversible divergence is bound to look symmetrically balanced and uncomplicated in its representation. In human cultural evolution, development has never been only irreversibly divergent, but possible processes of reconvergence related to borrowing has meant that we can speak of an "evolutionary network" of entangled shoots leading away and back to one another.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Finally, in our culture historical reconstructions it is probably unnecessary to try to extend our phylogeny past the "super-family" to some earlier "proto-language." We may say that if Indo-European, Austric and Sino-Tibetan may be remotely related to some ancient ancestor--the original form or root stock is nonexistent except perhaps as the barest shadow on the surface of the sand. By any working definition, we can still maintain that these three language phyla are essentially, for all intents and purposes, unrelated--or rather that their hypothetical relationship is irrelevant because its reconstruction cannot be demonstrated. Another way of putting this is that their relationship, or degree of correspondence, is so indirect as to be meaningless.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is not necessary to belabor the convolutions of the physical relativity of space-time to recognize in such tree construction the gross oversimplification of complexity and simplistic reification of order that is the outcome of reductionism. And yet, we would be very hard pressed indeed to come up with viable and satisfactory alternatives in the modeling of the complexity of our past. There is perhaps only one principle that we can be sure of-- that, whatever period we are talking about, the past had probably never been as orderly as our present representations of it.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="b1"><b><font size="3">The Cross-Roads Hypothesis</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">The attempt to construct an evolutionary model of human cultural biological evolution tends therefore to exclude the problems of historical process. Unlike species, languages, cultures and peoples may mix in productive ways. The borrowing between peoples, languages and cultures has been a constant source of exogenous change upon the historical developments of people.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In an especially complex historical context such as Southeast Asia, that has long served as an interregional "cross-roads" of trade and migration, historical processes may be inherently problematic, especially if we take into account the very plausible hypothesis of repeated "reconvergence" and subsequent "back-borrowing" from distantly related languages, cultures and peoples coming back into contact after a considerable period of separation and divergence.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The hypothesis entertained in this paper is that Southeast Asia has been the origin point of a single "super" family of remotely related languages, cultures and peoples, and the host to the intrusion of a second super family. The "crossing-over" and "back-crossing" between languages, cultures and peoples within this region has resulted in a complex, variegated and virtually unsolvable jigsaw puzzle of what and who are related, and what has been borrowed, lost and returned.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The "Cross-roads" hypothesis that Southeast Asian civilization, though possibly sui generis to somewhere in the Northern reaches of the Southeast Asian Mainland, may have actually had multiple points of origin and many different beginnings, is entertained in terms of a comparison of linguistic and biological and archaeological reconstructions--alternative "time-lines" and "trees" may be considered on the basis of different theoretical interpretations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The cross-roads hypothesis is based upon the notion of the continuous existence of a widespread and relatively stable "root stock" or common civilizational "trunk" in Southeast Asia, from which at various periods separate branches diverged and frequently intertwined and reconverged, and toward which other alien influences intruded.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In considering this model, we must separate processes of linguistic and cultural divergence that represent the limbs and branching structures of the tree, from the more basic processes of "aging" that are affecting the development of the structure of the main trunk (as well as the entire tree) from which all related languages are divergent.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is little reason to presume that the social landscape which existed before 10,000 BC in Southeast Asia was any less inherently complex in terms of its "branching" and variegation, and, from an analytical standpoint, any less problematic than what subsequently emerged during the proto-historical and historical phases.</font></p> <p><font size="3">As a cross-roads region, Southeast Asia has always been a great mixing pot of different peoples, languages and cultures. The capacity for Southeast Asian civilization to absorb the new and the alien and to maintain a sense of cultural continuity and identity with the old and familiar is nothing less than remarkable.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can lay the foundation of our cross-roads hypothesis in positing a "basic core" of civilization, of cultural, biological and linguistic traits which are inherently conservative and highly resistant to substantial change over time, and in the excoriation of multiple outer layers which are more "peripheral" and therefore "ephemeral" products of historical influences.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We must distinguish between exogenous and endogenous sources of change, such that, by definition, we may claim that exogenous change, among other things, tends toward assimilation, or synchronous substitution and replacement, whereas endogenous change tends toward drift--or diachronic modification and alteration. We may further say that whereas exogenous change tends to be disintegrative and random, endogenous change tends to be more nonrandom and integrative.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Replacement of the core will proceed at a much slower and more constant rate and will remain less complete than replacement of the peripheral layers. The likelihood of "survivals" of basically unchanged elements from the very earliest times is highest in the core. Though both the core and the periphery will be subject to "drift", the likelihood remains greatest that remotely related groups will share a few "core" characteristics which are not the result of diffusion, and that the more closely related in time, the greater the likelihood of shared core characteristics. In other words, people of a common heritage will most likely possess a common core.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Core characteristics may be most visible, and most conservative, among those groups that are the most "outside" or isolated the "cross-roads" of historical change and happenstance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Drift can be referred to as natural historical divergence that is the result of endogenous factors of change and alteration. Though drift results in diachronic replacement, such replacement is always one of "homologous" derivation through continuous modification rather than of analogous "conversion." Rates of drift will be variable and partially dependent upon outside influences, such that those groups that are from the exogenous point of view peripheral to the cross-roads, possess cores which are also most peripheral and therefore subject to the greatest amount of drift.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This is the consequence that drift and assimilation are not completely independent processes. The region of their interdependence defines an intermediate zone in which change is definable as "amalgamation"--the fusion process between the new and the old, the familiar and the foreign.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The very factors which contribute to the great external conservation of forms upon the periphery and the rapid assimilation of forms at the cross-roads, tends also to contribute to processes of greatest internal drift at the periphery and greatest internal conservation at the cross-roads. A consequence of this may be something of an evolutionary paradox--peripheral groups may always have "core characteristics" which are more reconstructable, but "cross-road" cores may be more likely to retain "survivals" of characters which do not need to be reconstructed--closer to the original "prototypical" form.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The greatest variation is not likely to be found in the "oldest" core, but in the intermediate region in which those core characters merge with the peripheral. These are the "non-primary" core characters.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Another factor is the saltational nature of the overall process. Short-term stability may belie long term fluctuation, while long-term stability may be based upon short-term transitional periodicity. Another way of seeing this is that a group may not always remain at the cross-roads or the out-lands, and that to some extent, one group's cross-roads may be another group's periphery. Structures of the "long run" are not always predictable by the patterns of the present, and the current unfolding or stability is not always governed or predetermined by the "long term" patterning of change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The problem remains to "locate" the core of a group. In this case of detection and discovery, several minor hypothesis may be presumed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">First, the most basic core (primary core) is common to all groups and all peoples who are related by common definition, no matter how remote the actual relationship. A corollary of this is that if "cores" are discovered which seem basically unrelated, this is evidence of a lack of remote relationship and evidence for a "multi-lineal" evolution of unrelated groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Second, interregional and regional distributions of "cores" may be identified which are unique for one branch of people or another. A corollary of this is that such "secondary cores" may be the diagnostic features of that branch or sub-grouping, and may "locate" that group to a common prototypical form.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A third principle is that two or more "cores" cannot occupy the same "space" at the same time, such that if there is evidence of one core intruding or taking over another, it must be construed as an event of assimilation, possibly involving the ethnocide or even genocide of the previous group, or of amalgamation. A corollary of this is that when two "cores" do come within proximate contact, conflict and "chaos" is likely to ensue--whether destructive or constructive in its consequences.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A fourth principle is that multiple "non-primary" cores may be added over time, and the "historical pathway" of a distinct groups development will be "marked" by the temporal accretion of such "non-primary cores." A corollary of this is that the "history" of a distinct "local" group is embedded in a complex stratigraphy of "layering" of "non-primary cores" about some often hidden "heart".</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may speak of the superceding of old cores by the emergence of newer cores, as the covering over of the older heartwood by the newer sapwood. Though the developmental history of this process may be quite variable for different groups, the capacity ("growth") and course ("age") of embedding, remains equivalent and the same for all groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A corollary of this is that all complexes are at core equally old, though some cores may be more embedded than others, and, regardless of the absolute age, all complexes still have the same capacity for growth. Another way of putting this is that more "primitive forms" though relatively older, may have more relative "potential" whereas more "derivative forms," though relatively young, may have less relative "potential".</font></p> <p><font size="3">We are still left with the problem of "locating" the core of all complexes, and the "cross-roads" hypothesis anchors this common core to those "forms and functions" which are the most basic, prototypical or necessary, and the most shared by correspondence between all groups. Linguistically, we might locate the basic core as those traits that are most basic of the human body, the elements of the environment, those relative markers or dichotomies, and those relationships that are most socially basic. Basic core characters are likely not to be conceptually abstract or based on anything that is able to be "borrowed." They are unmarked, unelaborated and nonspecific concrete referents well-rooted in basic forms of expression, perception and conception.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is a neoteny about these basic core characters. A child's detailed recognition of the forms of animals, faces, natural designs, insects, and basic man-made objects lends credence to the notion of "natural categories," a level of intellectual sophistication preceding the formal acquisition of color terms, of numbers and mathematical manipulations, etc. Similarly, the child's natural language and its structure also reflects this basicness--a "bee" as being the basic form for both a distant bird, a fly, a bee and a spider.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Core characters share a feature that might be referred to as a high rate of "correspondence" of prototypical form and function. Correspondence derives its value from its associational context with the character complex in which it takes part and in which it is embedded. Correspondences can be said to be something more than mere analogues, but not quite completely homologous structures. Correspondence might be taken as the measure of proto-typicality or "basicness" of a trait or trait complex--it is that set of characters for which there is the greatest likelihood of common correspondence with other sets of traits, and therefore the greatest likelihood (or ratio) of genetic, non-convergent relationship.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Correspondence can be taken as an indirect measure of the degree of relatedness between two complexes. More directly, it is a measure related to complexes, or to its constituency, more than to its individual components. It is a measure of the basicness of its constituency structure, a measure of it degree of internal coherence or strength of integration--the linkage between its components is relatively stable and unbroken--and a measure of its "equivalence" of value.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Indirectly, correspondence measures the degree to which similar traits in similar complexes perform similar kinds of functions. Correspondence as an indirect measure of relatedness is rooted in the "structural covariance" of its basic factors, even across different forms of data.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="c1"><b><font size="3">Biological Evidence</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Bones of early modern Homo Saipiens have been found in association with Bac Sonian contexts in Northern Vietnam and Malaya (Burling, 1967:p. 19) But without doubt earlier modern humans ancestral to the Australian Aborigines must have passed through, and perhaps occupied, the regions of Southeast Asia between 50,000 and 30,000 BP, as evidenced by the early remains at Niah Cave in Sarawak. Burling speculates that later mongoloid groups coming from the north pushed back, displaced and partially absorbed the earlier "negritoid" and "Australoid" races that are held to have unique physical features that can be found occassionally among some contemporaneous Southeast Asians. The negritoids survive today as the Semang of Malaysia and the Aeta of the Philippines, and the indigenous peoples of the .Andaman Islands off the tip of Burma. "When these characteristics are shuffled among a large population, an occasional individual is likely to turn up who looks rather Negritoid...." (Burling, 1967: pg.19)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Next in this conjectural sequence are the "Veddoids" resembling the people of South India and Sri Lanka, who are held to have either descended from or mixed with Australoid elements in Southeast Asia. They are held to be represented by the Senoi of Malaya "wavy-haired, narrow headed, dark skinned agriculturalists practicing shifting cultivation. And, as in the case of the Negrito type, this type has varying degrees of dilution over much of Southeast Asia...(Buchanan, 1967: pg. 27)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The "Melanesoids," ancestral to the Melanesians, are held by some to have come next to Southeast Asia, but if so, then they were only a "transitional type." They were succeeded by the "Austronesian" or "Indonesian" type who spread throughout the Western Pacific as well as venturing into peninsular and insular Southeast Asia. Arriving perhaps earlier than 3,000 BC, perhaps concurrently with the arrival of the more "Mongoloid" peoples from the north.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is even held to be an infusion of a "Nesiod" group, or "Brown Race" who were "olive-skinned" with wavy hair and narrow noses and originated in Western Europe, through the Mediterranean and the Middle East to northern India. "The group appears to have diffused into Southeast Asia from the northwest and may have been the bearer of the megalithic culture of Assam and Chota Nagpur. Today its extent is from Southern China (many of the minority peoples are non-Mongoloid and belong to this group) to the Indonesian Islands...." (Buchanan, 1967:pg. 28)</font></p> <p><font size="3">But the latest group held to have arrived in Southeast Asia were the "Alpine-Mongoloid" peoples--broad headed, black straight hair, epicantic folds, prominent cheekbones. They are held to have moved slowly and steadily southward from the second millenium BC, spreading down the river valleys of the Irrawaddy (600 BC), the Chao Praya, the Mekong and the Red River, and down the coastlines, "being deflected from Yunan by the solid group of Nesiot peoples established there." "This southward drift of Mongoloid peoples has continued up to the present time and the migration of Chinese into the area in the last century in response to the demands for plantation and mine labor and the new commercial opporutinites, can be regarded as merely the continuation of this thousand-year old overflow towards the tropics." (Buchanan, 1967: pg. 29)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Constructions of such racial sequences are dubious at best, and unenlightening at worst--they remain essentially "unprovable." The aspect of the genetic and cultural diversity and heterogeneity of Southeast Asia is more informative--we would expect with a deep history of migration and mixing, a broad and pervasive "Southeast Asian base" to have formed characterized by such diversity and heterogeneity, among which exist perhaps isolated pockets of "purer" forms. "The general result of these movements is reflected in the great diversity, racial and cultural, of Southeast Asia's population. Mixing of peoples of the most diverse physical types has been taking place over many many millenium; so, too, has the inter-weaving of many diverse cultural elements. "(ibid.: 27) It would be expected that the range of variance within and between local and regional populations is much greater than the differences separating regions.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One must legitimately ask, when given the lack of complete "objectivity" of such "racial" data and its analytical interpretation, whether the racial sequences inferred about the past in Southeast Asia were not as much the product of our own prejudices about racial progression and superiority rooted in a Great Chain of Being, with the most "primitive" black Australoids and Negritoids coming first, followed by the brown Veddoids and Nesoids, and then by the yellow "Alpine Mongoloids, " and the concommitant advancement of civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One criticism of this approach is that we do not have at any point in time a good idea of the genuine total variance of human populations. We cannot simply assume that at some arbitrary point, 10,000 or even 30,000 years ago, there was less overall genetic variance than there was at some later point, 3,000 BP or even today. Not being able to assume increasing racial variance with time, or the original lack of variance, means that we cannot say with any legitimate certainty which "race" came first, based alone upon extant evidence of "types."</font></p> <p><font size="3">Luigi Cavalli-Sforza has been the most sophisticated proponent of the consociation of genes and culture in history, and he has given us a rough map of the Southeast Asian populations based on relative differences in blood alleles. His work is more interesting and more empirically valid that the previous taxonomies shown, and therefore warrants consideration before building his taxonomic scheme. He has dealt quantitatively and mathematically both with the problem of genotypic distribution and change through time, as well as with the issue of cultural transmission, the Neolithic transition, and the question of the relationship of language, archaeological, cultural and genetic characteristics.</font></p> <p><font size="3">First, Cavalli-Sforza has posited a definite correlation between genetic heritage and cultural heritage, based upon the way that both have depended upon the same factors of isolation and migration, themselves the function of history, ecology and geography. (1986: pg. 14) The main factor of this correlation, beyond isolation and migration, are the adaptive radiations of various groups at various times, and the alleged cultural conservatism "so that people settling in new areas will retain much of their culture even for long periods of time." (ibid.: pg. 14). In this association he emphasizes the role of "demic diffusion" of people who displace others rather than of the cultural diffusion of cultural characters, evidenced by the relatively slow and steady rate of the spread of the Neolithic revolution in Europe from its origin area in the Middle East.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Relying upon "principal component" analysis of genetic composition of various populations, his genetic map of clinal variation almost exactly corresponds to the map of the spread of the Neolithic. The picture that emerges agrees with the prior existence in the area of expansion genetic variation, the capacity of farmers to increase to high densities, a slow migration rate and the assimilation of local hunter-gathers--either by marriage or acculturation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Cavalli-Sforza also deals with the geography of the distribution of cultural complexes, and the "fine clustering" that is related to the greater local versus broader areal or local affinities that are probably nonrandom in distribution if only slightly disturbed by random movements of mobility. Again, assume the inherent conservatism of cultural complexes, such distributions could be achieved by "demic diffusion." "...In the complex history of the settlement of Africa, some groups have expanded much more than others, and inevitably split a number of times in tribes that have occupied different areas, split again, moved again and so on. A highly conserved cultural trait will then spread with the people. Naturally there cannot have occurred only fissions, but also fusions, which will generate greater complexity; but with groups rapidly expanding in relatively unpopulated areas, fissions are likely to have been more numerous than fusions..." (L. Cavalli-Sforza "Diffusion of Cultures and Genes" in <u>On Evolutionary Anthropology: Essays in Honor of Harry Hoijer, 1983</u>. Edited by B. J. Williams 1986: pg. 24)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Cavalli-Sforza correlates demic descent with a certain cultural complex of characters, especially family, kinship and house-building style, which were traits least correlated with environmental adaptations and the complex associated with such adaptation--subsistence strategies, technology and house-building materials. His correlation in this regard is indirect though, because he first correlates language differentiation, as highly conservative, with genetic differentiation, and then language distribution with the previously mentioned trait complexes. The factors of whether these correlations are by demic descent or "reciprocal interaction between the traits" (pg. 27) is not clear, but such correlations provide evidence of slow rates of evolutionary change, either during movement or "fission".</font></p> <p><font size="3">In conclusion, he supports the high correlation between some cultural traits, language, kinship and family, and genetic transmission, because of co-transmission--"that is, people carry both with them. The vagaries of demographic expansions associated with new cultural developments, permitting rapid demographic increase in some groups, can only magnify the geographic variation of genes and culture while retaining their essential associations, i.e. their covariation." (pg. 33)</font></p> <p><font size="3">In another work, (L. L. Cavalli-Sforza and M. W. Feldman <u>Cultural Transmission and Evolution: A Quanti-tative Approach </u>. 1981), Cavalli-Sforza makes the case for the close association between genetic and linguistic transmission, and the relative stability of language change over time. He correlates genetic data derived from the study of 120 alleles (Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza, Alberto Piazza, Paolo Menozzi, and Joanna Mountain "Reconstruction of Human Evolutin: Bringing together Genetic, Archaeological and Linguistic Data" in <u>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA. Vol. 85</u>: pgs. 6006-4, August, 1988) linguistic data based upon evidence for "superfamilies" and Archaeological evidence. He creates an evolutionary tree in which 42 groups are related, showing close association with the linguistic and genetic data for time of splitting and sub-grouping.</font></p> <p><font size="3">His reconstruction of Southeast Asian groups contains an orginal supercluster that splits into mainland and insular southeast asian groups, "a fairly tight cluster of six populations...on bootstrapping, Filipinos are lost 29% of the time, Malaysians 23%, and Indonesians 7%" (1988, pg. 8004) Pacific Islanders clustered into a loose group of three, and New Guineans and Australians which "remain together more than 50% of the time."</font></p> <p><font size="3">His phylogenetic reconstruction of genetic evolution in Southeast Asia records and early split of Southeast Asians with New Guinea and Australian populations at a genetic distance of about .017 at a time estimate greater than or equal to 40,000 BP. A subsequent split separated the New Guineans and Australians 25-30,000 and later Mainland Southeast Asians from Pacific peoples between 15,000 and 30,000. Subsequent divisions of Polynesians and then Micronesians/Melanesians, and later South Chinese, Austro-Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian and Filipino groups, and then finally the Austro-Thai into the Mon Khmer and Thai groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though the linguistic evidence does not exactly fit this model, it is apparent that the Austric superfamily, with a possibly earlier relationship with IndoPacific and Australian familys, supports the view of the grouping of Austronesian languages with Austorasiatic and Daic languages. The only misfit are the South Chinese languages (Miao-Yao) which are grouped with the SinoTibetan but which at least one linguist, Benedict, has associated with Austro-Thai.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="d1"><b><font size="3">Ethnolinguistic Evidence</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Unfortunately, there is very little nonrelative, clear cut stratigraphy in language, and no method as "absolute" as Radiocarbon dating. Linguistics does have a small arsenal of techniques of comparative linguistics, the age-area hypothesis, lexicostatistics and glottochronology, which are of some precise value in determining common genetic relationship and in reconstruction prototypical ancestral languages. Unfortunately, it is the thesis of this paper that such techniques remain relative, cross-linguistically problematic, and of a relatively shallow parallax or depth perception. In general, they are based on some set of presumptions about a constant rate of replacement of basic cognates, the inherent conservatism of language, and the continuous rate of divergent, endogneous morpho-phonological conditioning of words and structural change in syntax.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The ethnolinguistic map of Southeast Asia is as obscure and confusing as the physical evidence, though on firmer ground than the former. I have come across at least five different phylogenetic trees of the historical relationship and classification of the different languages found in Southeast Asia. What this represents is the lack of thorough linguistic description and comparison of the languages. Each tree perhaps rises from and gives rise to a different picture of the historical development and sequences of Southeast Asian peoples. The pattern is confused, because it is not known which pattern of movement, in which direction, obtained for each language group.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are of course, with any classificatory problem based upon the lack of complete evidence, the 'lumpers' and the 'splitters'. Splitters might see as many as eight or more language families. Robbins Burling divides them into eight families--Miao-Yao, Tibeto-Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese-Muong, Mon-Khmer, Malayo-Polynesian, Kadai, and Andamanese. LeBar, Hickey and Musgrave have as many as eleven different language families just for the mainland region, including Mon-Khmer, Viet-Muong, Semang-Senoi, Cham, Malay, Thai, Kadai, Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Karen, Miao-Yao. Shorto lumps the languages of the mainland into five families: Indonesian, Mon-Khmer, Tibeto-Burman, Thai, and Miao-Yao. Buchanan's picture is somewhat different, recognizing three major families--the Austro-Asiatic, including the Mon-Khmer, the Malayo-Polynesian, including Indonesian and Cham, and the Sino-Tibetan, including Vietnamese, Thai and Burmese. Grouping at the next higher level of the superfamily is also variable. Buchanan's Austro-Asiatic and Malayo-Polynesian speakers were the original inhabitants of the region, followed by the Sino-Tibetan Languages which came to predominate and push the others of the Mainland into the highlands of the Annamite Cordillera except for the Lower Mekong region which remained Mon-Khmer.</font></p> <p><font size="3">According to Shorto, Thai is the most recent, widespread and least differentiated language, whose introduction is a matter of historical record, driving like a wedge down the center of the peninsula, shattering the formerly continuous communication network of localized "cognate speech groups", spreading from a point of origin somewhere along the Vietnamese-Chinese border--the area also representative of the greatest linguistic diversity. Burling notes that the Kadai language is found in the same general region, giving credence to the notion that they may be both historically related.</font></p> <p><font size="3">LeBar, Musgrave and Hickey identify four superfamilies--Thai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan, incorporating Chinese, Tibeto-Burman, Karen and Miao-Yao, Austro-Asiatic, including Mon-Khmer, Viet-Muoung and Semang-Senoi, and Malayo-Polynesian including Cham and Malay. Frank M. Lebar, Gerald C. Hickey, and John K. Musgrave <u>Ethnic Groups of Southeast Asia, Vols I & II </u>Human Relations Area Files, 1964)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Tibeto-Burman languages are concentrated in the northwestern region of Southeast Asia and are attributed to a late migration into the region. Because they are much more diverse, they are considered to have had a longer history than the Thai language. Malayo-Polynesian, though highly dialectically differentiated in the insular regions of Indonesia, are represented by only a few languages in South Vietnam, and shows greatest diversity in Melanesia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Mon-Khmer is generally grouped as an Austro-Asiatic language and is held to be the oldest in the region, with age-area correlation supporting a central origin of the Mon-Khmer somewhere in the northern highlands of Thailand and Laos. These languages are related to the Munda languages of India.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Viet-Muong, is widely regarded as a close relative, or "cousin" of Mon-Khmer, though it has been in an especially ambiguous category, assigned by some to the Thai or even the Tibeto-Burman languages.</font></p> <p><font size="3">At an even higher level, some linguists have related the Austro-Asiatic with Austronesian languages. Robbins Burling suggested the possibility of the remotest relationship of all the languages in one great super-family. "Such an hypothesis should probably not be dismissed completely, though it seems more likely that the similarities can be explained by mutual borrowing through out the long course of history of these languages. These languages have long been in close contact, and there has been mass bi-lingualism. In such circumstances, the characteristics of neighboring languages--their vocabularies, pronunciation and even grammar--may affect each other. As a result, languages can come to resemble each other in many ways, even though they go back to different antecedents." (Robbins Burling <u>Hill Farms and Paddi Fields: Life in Mainland Southeast Asia</u>. 1963: pg. 26. )</font></p> <p><font size="3">More recently, linguists have come to believe that Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian were the respective continental and maritime descendants of a common "Austroasian" ancestor. Joseph Greenberg has traced a single ancestor "Austric" for Austro-Asiatic, Austronesian, Daic and Miao-Yao, all of which diverged fairly early. Thai diverged more recently from Austronesian.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Austric Hypothesis was first proposed by Schmidt, and has recently been revitalized by the work of Benedict on Austro-Thai and Headley, and has been more recently picked up by Greenberg and Meritt Ruhlen.( Merrit Ruhlen <u>A Guide to the Languages of the World</u> 1976) Ruhlen does not trace the structure back to the earlier Austric, but has to main families of language--Austro-Asiatic and Austronesian. Austro-Asiatic comprises four brances--Munda, Mon-Khmer, Malaccan and Nicobarese. Mon-Khmer, the most widespread and diverse branch, consists of sub-branches--Palaung-Wa, Monic, Khmuic, Viet-Muong, Katuic, Bahnaric, and Pearic. Proto-Mon-Khmer, from which all the sub-branches descended, is held to have constituted a unified language during the second millenium BC.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Austro-Thai is the hypothetical super-family which embraces all of Kam-Tai and Austronesian languages. Next to Indo-European, it is the most widely dispersed language family in the world. Ruhlen divides Austro-Thai into "Kam-Tai" and "Austronesian" some time before 5,000 BC, and traces its origing to South central China. Kam-Tai is further subdivided into "Tai-Kam-Sui" and Kadai. From Tai-Kam-Sui the Tai language families split off from the Kam-Sui, the former giving rise to Thai in the Southwest, Nung in the Central and Yay in the north, and the latter leading down to Lakkia. Kadai has lead down to Laqua.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Austronesian family is divided into two major branches, the Western or Indonesian, and the Eastern or Oceanic. Austronesian dispersal across the Pacific began sometime after 5,000 BC, with the occupation of Formosa, by which time the Kam-Thai languages had already diverged. Proto-Austronesian speakers found Micronesian and Polynesian Islands unoccupied, occupying the Philippines, and the presence of Melanesian and Indo-Pacific speakers who originally occupied a wide area of the Indonesian Archipelago. Austronesian speakers "obliterated" the Melanesian peoples. The greatest area of diversity today of Austronesian languages is bi-focally situated in Western New Guinea into Eastern Indonesia and Eastern New Guinea until neighboring New Britain. By 3,000 BC the original Austronesians had diverged into several distinct groups. One group constituting the "proto-Oceanic" made its way to the area of east New Guinea-New Britain. The other group went southward to somewhere near the Celebes and became the eastern branch of Austronesian.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is hypothesized that the age-area hypothesis belies the original homeland of Austronesian peoples because of a "backward expansion" during which the original north to south expansion was followed by a south to north movement, obliterating traces of the original languages. The present diversity of these languages is held to represent only a portion of the total diversity that originally prevailed.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Evidence for this "double dispersal" hypothesis lies in the presence of Austronesian of great antiquity lying upon the periphery of the central focal area of Western Austronesian. From here, subsequent to 3,000 BC, these languages spread westward through southwest Indonesia and Borneo and northward back to the Philippines, obliterating the previous Austronesian languages. Formosa today is split into two branches of Austronesian, the ancient Atayal descended from the original proto-Austronesian form, and the rest belonging to the second northward expansion. Indonesian subsequently split into Western Indonesian and "Hesperonesian" which subsequently split into Eastern Indonesian and "Northern Indonesia", comprising the Philippine and Formosan languages.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Eastern Branch of Austronesian began to disintegrate in about 2,500 BC into separate language groups that came to disperse across the entire Pacific region. By 1,500 BC Fiji was occupied by Eastern Oceanic speakers, who several centuries later became the first "Proto-Polynesians" first occupying Tonga. The settlement pattern of Polynesia is a textbook case of historical linguistic methods. Tongans settled Samoa, then Samoas inhabited the Marquesa Islands by 300 AD, as weill as the Tokelau Islands, the Ellice Islands and other Islands in Micronesia and Melanesia. By 500 AD Easter Island and Tahiti were settled by the Marquesans. New Zealand was settled from the Cook Islands by 800 AD, and Hawai from the Marquesas by 1,000 AD.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="e1"><b><font size="3">Archaeological Evidence</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Robert Blust, in his paper on Austronesian Culture History, ( Robert Blust "Austronesian Culture History: Some Linguistic Inferences and Their Relations to the Archaeological Record." in <u>World Archaeology</u>, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 19-43.) uses the comparative method in the corroboration of archaeological evidence in the reconstruction of the culture history of the proto Austronesian peoples. Despite a major disconformity between Archaeological and Linguistic evidence relating to iron and a number of other material items, including rice, which has been attributed to the inherent complexity of the regions involved, there are a number of areas in which both lines of evidence point to similar conclusions.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An early paper by Hendrik Kern (1889) presented lexical evidence of an original Austronesian speech community inhabiting an environment of sugarcane, coconut, bamboo, rattan, cucumber, stinging nettle, deriss root taro, banana, pandanus, yam and such animals of the dark-haired langur were found." He argued that this homeland must have been insular or littoral, otherwise there would not be so many far-flung cognates relating to the sea, marine life and maritime technology. He attributed to these speakers the domestication of the dog, pig and fowl, and knowledge of rice and iron. "In this way he was able to limit the class of possible homelands to the coastal zone of the South-East Asian mainland.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An alternative view was developed by Murdock (George P. Murdock "Genetic Classification of the Austronesian Languages: A Key to Oceanic Culture History" in <u>Ethnology</u> 3.2, pp. 117-26.) who, based on the great concentration of these languages in Eastern New Guinea, believes their presence predates the borrowing of these cultural traits from "peoples of a different language and superior culture" on the South-East Asian mainland. This hypothesis shows remarkable disregard for the wide sharing of basic cognates related to many of these cultural items which would require assignment to Proto-Austronesian of these items.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Blust outlines Proto-Austronesian culture history as follows: they occupied settled villages containing houses and public buildings, "an unwalled or low-walled building where people met, public business was transacted and strangers spent the night,' a "boat house", a "house of retirement for women during menstruation and after childbirth", a yam shed, a small shrine house on poles with only one side of roof only. Houses were made of stilts and entered by a ladder. A gabled roof contained a ridgepole, covered by an inverted log or bamboo rain shield, thatched with sago leaf. A hearth was built on the floor to one corner, with one or more storage shelves for pots, firewood, etc. above it. Inhabitants slept with a wooden head rest or pillow. They had the pig, dog, fowl and hunted, made pottery, plaited mats and baskets, wove true fabrics on a simple back loom, mended torn materials with needle and thread, tattooed themselves, chewed betel, and drank a kind of intoxicating beverage. Some form of native script may have been invented and used on perishable materials. Evidence suggests they possessed a well developed maritime technology, cultivated a variety of root and tree crops, rice and millet which they pounded with a wooden mortar. Bow and sharpened bamboo spikes were used in hunting and warfare, and "headhunting with is associated complex of religious ideas must certainly have existed as early as 2000 B. C., they may have had slavery and some degree of social stratification. Various tropical skin diseases were prevalent. The resulting mixed picture suggests a somewhat "polymorphous economic base incompatible with the somewhat rigid notion of 'progress' from one exclusive level to the next." (pg. 37)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The pig, as evidenced by skeletal and dental remains and by similarity of cognate form, is an example of striking corroboration between linguistic and archaeological evidence.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The disconformities of this picture relate to the apparent cultural loss of iron and rice, supplanted by sago, and the loss and subsequent partial reacquisition of the back loom, as these peoples fanned across the Pacific. The likelihood of distant groups refering to iron and to a "knive/sword" by the same cognate by chance or borrowing remains small, unless the borrowing was simultaneous from the same apparently widespread source. The early origins of Austronesian, dating the separation of the Atayalic from others between 4,500 to before 6,000 BP, makes it unlikely that the original referent of these words were to "iron" or even the earlier "bronze". Later separations of Batak and Iban, 3,500, and the Northern Sarawak languages, 3,000. Other cognates, notably "blacksmithing", "anvil" and "rust" support this picture of a major disconformity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Similar kinds of contradictions appear with rice ("Rice plant, unhusked rice, husked rice, pound rice and cooked rice"), millet/barley, weaving ("Loom, weave, cloth, weavers "sword", 4000 BP), writing systems ("Write, paper, book, letter, write."), headhunting (4,000 BP) and the blowpipe. All show evidence of an early common origin in the language.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Rice, in the form of Oryza sativa, the Asian cultivated species of rice, shows greatest diversity of varieties in a belt "extending from the Assam-Meghalaya region of India to the mountain ranges of Southeast Asia and southwestern China." Early maturing, drought resistant varieties probably emerged between 15,000 and 10,000 BP along the Northern and Southern Slopes of the Himalayas. Annual ancestral forms of O. Sativa emerged along the periphery of wild annual progenitors, in the southern reaches of the Himalyas and "to a lesser extent in southern and southwestern China. Alternating periods of drought and pronounced temperature variation accelerated the development of the annual forms of O. Sativa in northeastern and eastern India, northern Southeast Asia and southern China..." (M. S. Swaminathan "Rice" in <u>Scientific American</u> Jan. 1984..)</font></p> <p><font size="3">While it seems highly unlikely that so many different groups would share by accident or even borrowing the same complexes, it is also highly implausible that a common proto-culture 6,000 B.P. would share an advanced iron working technology and a writing technology. Some other kind of explanation must be sought, either an intrinsic bias in lexicostatistic methods, or a complicated history of simultaneous widespread diffusion and subsequent migration, involving possibly "back migration." This is a clear instance in which the parsimony and logic of our methods is contradicted by the complexity of archaeological and historical evidence.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is in this regard that we can consider the kinds of trees we can build with more substantial archaeological evidence. The evidence from Niah Cave;can be taken as a type-site for the prehistory of the region. Tom Harrison's 1967 progress report (Tom Harrison "Niah Caves: Progress Report to 1967" in <u>The Sarawak Museum Journal</u>. XV, 1967 pp. 95-6.) puts the presence of early stoneage and the earliest modern Homo saipiens saipiens at 40,000 BC, and evidence of occupation until about 30,000 BC. A second "Mesolithic" period evidenced by an extensive burial complex dates "prior to 4,000 BP and not earlier than 20,000 BC. This cultural complex is characterized by presence of advanced flakes, edge-ground pebble tools at the lower levels. In strata prior to 2,025 BP are found Neolithic burials in wooden or bamboo coffins, with pottery, quadrangular adze, mats, nets. By about 1,200 BC there is evidence of bronze, elaborate pottery vessels and urn burials. This is soon replaced by iron technology, import ceramics, glass beads and death ships before 700 AD. Site looting and Malay texts are found at 1400 AD and glass bottles, indicative of whites, by 1860 AD.</font></p> <p><font size="3">By this evidence, and associated evidence from other sites, we may speculate that an early occupation of Southeast Asia occurred around 40-30,000 BC of peoples remotely related to the Australoid peoples. A second clear phase of occupation occurred between 20 and 10,000 BC. We might suggest people remotely related to the Negritos.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A third phase of occupation commences within the fifth millenium BC, and continues until the middle of the second millenium. This Neolithic culture is characterized by round axe, pottery, mats and nets, and undoubtedly reached Borneo by sea. From then on continuous contact by sea lead to successive phases of bronze (1200 BC) and iron technology (500 BC-500 AD?)</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we compare this with .i.Higham's chronological table; for sites of Mainland Southeast Asia, (Charles Higham <u>The Archaeology of Mainland Southeast Asia: From 10,000 BC to the Fall of Angkor.</u> 1988: pgs. xv-xvi ) we see a very similar agreement. Early Hunter-Gatherers, for example at Spirit Cave, before 10,000 BC with a limited range of stone tools, wooden implements for hunting and gathering, fishing and trapping. Shellfish and gathering wild plants were important to these small band sized groups. Between 5,000 and 1,500 BC there is evidence for extensive coastal settlement at Khok Phanom Di that culminated in a complex maritime cultural orientation, rice, exchange, ranking and elaborate mortuary ritual.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is overlap with settlement sites from General Periods A (3,000 BC) and B (2000-500) along the interior regions of the major streams and valleys (Ban Chiang, Phung Nguyen, Samrong Seng) with small settlements and weak ranking, stone implements and shell indicating exchange with coastal communities, and giving way to bronze working sites with mines in the hills, casting in lowlands, ranking in small communities, signified by jewelry and bronze implements and cultivated rice.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is then General period C beginning from 500 BC and characterized by iron-working, interregional contacts with China and Indian Civilizations, social ranking, agriculture. Bronze drums, body plaques, bowls and drinking vessels, and chiefly burials in boat coffins. From AD 200 until AD 1500 General Period D corresponds to the rise of Mandalas in Northeast Thailand, the Chao Phraya valley, coastal Vietnam, the lower Mekong, with court centralization, Indian inspired religions, statecraft and Sanskrit.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="f1"><b><font size="3">The "Evolutionary Network"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Given these alternative trees, what conclusions can be drawn from the data that would allow a viable reconstruction of the long-term history of Southeast Asia? From the standpoint of chronology and sequence, the archaeological data is the most dependable. The problem with it is the lack of knowledge of the total range of variation of the original population--are the samples we possess representative of the full range of variability present at the time of their deposition-- or of what existed in the time periods between our radiocarbon dates.</font></p> <p><font size="3">On the other hand, there is a certain modicum of complementarity of the Linguistic and Genetic record with the Archaeological record. Comparative reconstruction of proto-language families allow us to backtrack and gain some knowledge of the range of linguistic variation during previous periods. The Genetic evidence provides us with some sense of the most conservative rates of change and the degree of "absolute" differences separating current groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Things to be considered in each record:</font></p> <p><font size="3">Genetically, there is always some degree of biological intermixing of gene pools such that the dominant population will tend to absorb the minority population</font></p> <p><font size="3">Population flow will go in the direction of the downward gradient of the asymmetrical power differential. Great radiation of human complexes occurred because of the adaptive advantage that they conferred to those who possess them.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In the Archaeological record, periods of temporal overlap in cultural horizons are those transitional eras of spatial-historical contact which signal the inauguration of a new set of developments in the integration of the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Linguistically, the odds of widely dispersed language families sharing a common set of cognate complexes by accident or simple processes of borrowing are highly unlikely, and thus constitute the analytical basis for the reconstruction of their shared root, but it is also apparent that entire complexes such as iron working, weaving or writing, may be borrowed from a single source at one point in time and subsequently rapidly and widely diffused across the spatial network as part of a common "trade language" that is far-flung. These complexes will become subsequently embedded in the distribution of the families to be indistinguishable in the reconstructions from earlier, original complexes. Such introduced complexes may come to occupy the space of the complexes which they have displaced.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is also apparent that we must take into account certain important discrepancies and occurrences in each of the different kinds of records.</font></p> <p><font size="3">First, we must consider the possibility of "culture loss" considered earlier--the dropping out of a rice complex or a writing complex among the Polynesians such that their basic cognates would be retained though no archaeological evidence may be found. Such cognates would represent anachronistic survivals.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Second, is the notion of the "backtracking" of a culture such that there occurs subsequent reconvergence of previously divergent cultural complexes. This is akin to an evolutionary tree in which the branching may be seen as spatially reversible, if not diachronically reversible.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The consequence is that the long term spatial distributions and patterns may not accurately reflect the complexity of the temporal patterns of diffusion and distribution. Reconvergence is a possibility always to be considered in human cultural evolution, while by definition it is impossible in biological evolution. In this regard, the question of the differential likelihood for reconvergence of different trait complexes must be entertained--such that homologous trait complexes which are similar in form and function may enjoy a higher rate and more complete reconvergence, and it is precisely in these trait complexes that we can expect the highest rate and likelihood of reconvergence to occur.</font></p> <p><font size="3">When reconvergence occurs, we are left with either a telescoping of the history of divergence and the consequent contradictions of the side-by-side presence of very old and newer forms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We end up with a patterning of cultural evolution which resembles more of a directional transition network of interconnecting branches than a "branching tree". We might speculate on what kind of surface patterning such a network would yield:</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. A "shattered" and variegated distribution in which very new and old elements are both peripheral and central, widespread and isolated.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. A pattern in which the greatest distribution of related languages may not be indicative of the greatest age.</font></p> <p><font size="3">3. A pattern in which the nodes with the greatest number of interconnections may be the most derivative, confused and least historically indicative.</font></p> <p><font size="3">4. Boundaries between groups will tend to be "fuzzy" such that the dominant group will be marked by the absorption of the characteristics of the subordinate group, and the subordinate or peripheral groups will become characterized by borrowing from the central groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">5. On borrowing or diffusion, versus "divergence" character complexes will undergo adaptive modification that is similar in form to endogenous processes of divergence.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The primary characteristic of an evolutionary network that distinguishes it from the more conventional tree is that any single offspring may be the actual descendant of more than one ancestral parent. It can be shown that in the cases of multiple genesis, the dominant and proximate parent will be the most apparent and probably associated. The second corollary is that though many languages may show direct divergence from a single common ancestor, and only few will be genuine "creoles," all languages will be, probabilistically, at least indirect offspring of such "mixed marriages." One theoretical consequence of such networks is that, depending upon our primary inferences, alternative trees may be reconstructed for any given set.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are two sets of related theoretical issues that we must deal with in regard to such evolutionary networks. The first is the issue of analogy and homology, which will be taken up in the following section, and the issue of historical dependence and independence, which will be taken up in the next chapter.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">Analogy and Homology in Historical Reconstruction</font></b></p> <p><font size="3">The problem of analogy and homology; has received some debate in anthropological theory, and centrally concerns the problem of comparison and control. (See, for instance, Richard A. Gould and Patty Jo Watson "A dialogue on the meaning and use of analogy in ethnoarchaeological reasoning" in <u>Journal of Anthropological Archaeology</u> I: 355-381, and Alison Wylie, "The Reaction against Analogy" in <u>Advances in Archaeology: Method and Theory, Vol 8</u>, 1985: pp. 63-111.) To what extent can analogy inform us about our past, and what is the role of analogy in reconstruction, and then how much is our science predicated upon the inferences of homology?</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are few textbook cases of an evolutionary tree of unmuddled divergence that would make a classic case for homology--one of the few is the history of Polynesia Proper and the strong congruence between archaeological and lexicostatistical data showing clearly the evolutionary pathways of the human settlement of this area. On the other hand, there are few clear and uncomplicated cases in which the reverse case of analogy in the effect of borrowing upon a single language--one of the few of these that stands out is the history of English and its several successive phases of borrowing from outside langauges.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The historical reality of most languages, cultures and peoples, if we go back far enough, is one of a "mixed" analogical/homological patterning. The further back one traces one's ancestry, the stronger the probability will become of analogical borrowing which created the basis of the root stock of the complex in question. The point is that we can rarely clearly and cleanly separate the problem of convergence by borrowing and divergence by endogenous change, and in most cases of complexes of characters, this is usually the case. Even in cases of individual characters, we may have the dual effect of both borrowing and refashioning that accompanies inheritance and reproduction.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We are left with several basic principles that we must contend with in our model building and reconstructions. The first is that we are always dealing with polythetic sets, assymmetrically stratified samples, fuzzy boundaries and prototypical effects that must always be somehow accounted for in our formulas of relative distances. Second, space and time may not necessarily be directly translated into one another, such that distances in space may not be equivalent to actual temporal distances, and vice versa, spatial proximity may not be the equivalent of temporal shallowness. The consequence of this is that we are dealing with a ratio variable of "space/time". For every quantum of space we are dealing with, there is a corresponding nonequivalent quantum of time that must be inferred. Third, we must deal with the conditionality of "analogous/homologous" relationships such that for any given character, set or complex of characteristics, we have a probabilistic ratio of the relative analogous versus homologous features to contend with. Fourth, neither analogy nor homology are defined clearly in terms of either identity or difference, but also by a ratio of the degree of similarity/difference. Likewise, we can imagine forms of relationship which are inherently intermediate--borrowing is a kind of homology which has analogous implications, and convergent evolution is a kind of analogy that has homologous implications.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though all this seems to run against the grain of simplifying solutions of our science, there may be a measure of sanity in our approach to the inherent chaos and complexity of our history. In modeling our evolutionary networks, we can simulate the consequences and test the effects of various combinations and sets of presumptions and inferences that dictate alternative pathways through the system. Furthermore, we can minimally anchor such a system to a finite data-base derived from "absolute archaeological data" by which we can perform our tests and increase the precision and plausibility and probability of our inferences.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">  <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></font></b></p> <p align="center"><a name="nine"><b><font size="3">III</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="nine"><b><font size="3">The "Autochthony Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="nine"><b><font size="3">The Promethean Origins of Vietnamese Civilization</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#a2"><font face="Book Antiqua">Systematic Corroboration and the Calculus of "Confidence"</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#b2"><font face="Book Antiqua">The Autochthony Hypothesis</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#c2"><font face="Book Antiqua">Corroborative Evidence of the Sui Generis Origins of Vietnamese Civilization</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#d2"><font face="Book Antiqua">Archaeological Evidence</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#e2"><font face="Book Antiqua">Mythological Evidence</font></a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p><font size="3">A more realistic picture of Southeast Asia may eventually emerge from the synthetic corroboration of data from alternative sources, bringing to focus the questions of the ethnohistorical comparability and commensurability of different and alternative data sources.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Two sources of data are considered, archaeological and folkloric or historical, as fitting candidates for the degree of congruence in an hypothesis of the sui-generis origins of Vietnamese civilization in the Red River Valley of North Vietnam.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="a2"><b><font size="3">Systematic Corroboration and the Calculus of "Confidence"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">What we know is always probabilistically conditioned by what we do not know. This relationship between the known and the unknown is not one of a simple dichotomous complementarity--"not known" is not synonymous with the "unknown". Rather the complementarity between known/unknown can be said to be "complex" and governed by dynamic relations of "conditional equivalence". This non-dichotomous relationship underlying our information systems permits us the flexibility to search, construct, simulate and test alternative hypothetical frameworks from the standpoint of a variable calculus of "confidence."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The known and the unknown are not mutually exclusive subsets of the total range of possible knowledge--rather they are intersecting sets with overlapping complementarity and fuzzy edges. Thus there is a chaotic interaction between knowledge and the unknown, and there is a "prototypicality effect" of both the known and the unknown such that some kinds of knowledge are 'better known' and less conditioned by the unknown that others.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A lower level of significance for one set of data may lead to higher corroboration with other sets of data, thus an cumulative optimization and reduction of the net differences between data sets, while a higher level of significance may actually decrease the corroboration with other data sets.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If subsequent trials tend to randomly skew the known sample, this will be an indication of conceptual bias, or symbolic reification of the data. In a random sample, the least likely in a normal curve will be as likely as the most likely. This is because all knowledge is "known" and must therefore follow a normal curve of distribution. The failure of such data to do so will reflect a bias in the primary dimensions of relation rather than in the sample itself.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The presumption of the system of calculating confidence in the corroboration of fundamentally incommensurable data sets presented in this paper rests upon several premises. 1) The subset of the known tends to fall into a normal curve of distribution of variation. 2) The subset of the unknown is a complex set composed of the noise of the "unknowable" that is totally random and follows no normal distribution, and a subset of the knowable "unknown" that will tend to fall into a range of normal distribution--one that tends to be proportionately complementary and skewing of the curve of the known.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The gaps in our record of knowledge, and how we deal with these gaps, have a critical influence upon how we inter-relate our information and construct our hypothesis. There is a biased tendency to deal with such gaps in a "mythological" manner, which will have an affect upon how we conceptually frame and interpret our knowledge. The larger the gaps the more "random" the unknowable and the more skewed the likely relation between the known and the unknown. These gaps between knowledge points can be evaluated as relative "distances" in hypothetical, multidimensional space, upon which we can construct an operator-goal difference table. Plausible alternative hypothesis should work to reduce these differences in a complex, multidimensional way--the most probable set of hypothetical inferences being the optimal composite value that minimizes this distance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This is offered as a viable, systematic substitute to the loose application of "Occam's Razor" The discovery of subsequent data should work to confirm or disconfirm alternative hypothesis by predictably or unpredictably increasing/reducing this net distance. The greater the "skewing" effect of subsequent data, the less plausible the original hypothesis. The smaller the sub-sample, the higher the limits of confidence must be set and the lower the level of significance obtainable.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Corroboration in the lack of empirical evidence does not have to depend upon the researcher's own biased preconceptions, philosophical premises and rationalizations based upon the application of "Occam's razor"--human history has rarely taken the most direct course in its development. When multiple sources of information are available, even if the net cumulative information is insufficient, then a systematic approach based upon the relative distance between cumulative data points for each source will allow a less biased means for the construction and selection of alternative hypothesis.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is apparent that we must separate the issue of the relative arbitrariness and non-arbitrariness and relative/absoluteness of data of data from the related issue of discrete/continuous or qualitative/quantitative scales of description. In general we may say that an arbitrary category is necessarily a relative or non-absolute category, but is not necessarily a qualitative as opposed to quantitative category. In general, quantitative categories may be relatively arbitrary and qualitatively categories may be relatively non-arbitrary.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though this systematic quality suggests that the complexity of the problem of commensurable quantification of alternative sources of data may even be entered into a computer, the problems of counting, sampling, statistical description, and comparability, remains essentially qualitative problems of "confidence" in the normative decision-making and judgement involved in the assignment of discrete, absolute values to continuous, relative data sources. At some point in the decision-making process, a trade-off must be made between the empirical accuracy of the data and the reduction in the inherent complexity of the problem.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This point may be reached when the etic grid of arbitrary "tesserae" of measurement cross-cut the "natural" or basic boundaries of the aggregation of data in a minimally random manner, and this can be represented by a proportional ratio of fit between the grid and the data set. This "measure of confidence" can be used to combine and compare alternative sources of data by means of weighted and ranked averages.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The weighting and ranking of these proportional ratios of confidence may be done paradigmatically and alternatively, and sets up a systematic search-solution space for the comparison of different data sets, by means of the multi-dimensional scaling of the different ratios of confidence--the best choice being the solution set with the minimal net distance, or the maximal proximity, between combined data points, and the range of variation being the best boundary of plausibility for alternative solutions.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Abductive historical logic arguing backwards from the effects to the cause makes possible alternative plausible hypothesis that would not be possible in forward deductive logic. The selection of alternative hypothesis in historical reasoning therefore depends critically upon the estimation of likelihood and weighting of probabilities of alternative antecedent events. Though ultimately a relative procedure, the assignment of values is anchored in the relative availability/paucity of evidence, and in the degree to which alternative, and relatively independent sources reveal consensus or support one hypothesis versus another.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Abductive historical reasoning is a modified version of inductive inference. Such inference is guided by the most likely values available in a given subsample, and permits alternative inferences that are defined by only one basic constraint--as long as a inference is not definitely contradicted by counter evidence--the criterion of falsifiability--that all swans are white until one black swan is discovered. Hence, inductive reasoning is inherently tautological, or internally unfalsifiable. Abductive reasoning is internally false, as it involves a modus tollens fallacy of arguing from the consequent. But both modes of reasoning are very useful and indispensable in scientific and empirical research.</font></p> <p><font size="3">When given gaps in the record, and no firm idea of the total population or the relative size of the sub-sample, we tend to fall back upon internal arguments of non-contradiction and parsimony, i.e. Occam's razor, in construction of our hypothesis. But the chaotic complexity and multi-determination of historical patterns and processes tends to undermine the value of applying "Occam's razor" and tends to obfuscate the "mythological" filling in the gaps with arbitrary and alien frames of reference/inference. A systematic substitute for this process of accounting for the "gaps" in the record is outlined as a way of coming to terms with, rather than implicitly denying, the inherent complexity and problematical quality of the phenomena involved. This method relies upon the development of measures and a calculus of "confidence" that relies upon the relative weighting of alternative sets of data and the cumulative summation of the relative distances of alternative sources of data when plotted in multi-dimensional space.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This method relies upon the observed fact that the curve of distribution of any subsample tends toward a normal Gaussian distribution, whatever the overall skewing of the original population, and with the bayesian conditionality of the relative "cultural consensus" of multiple data points that is robust with even a relatively small sub-sample of elements. This entails that the multidimensional correlation of different sets of data in a common space will tend to reflect the strength of interdependent historical relationship, and that the greater the clustering of these points in multidimensional space, the greater the strength of correlation between them.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Furthermore, on the basis of this kind of scaling, it becomes possible to construct a set of alternative reference/inference frames in which the probable direction of determination is based upon the relative inference strength, or confidence value, of arguing in one direction versus any other plausible direction.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is possible to further systematize this process of "inference frame" construction and exploration by means of setting up a discrimination and "operator-difference" table based upon the probabilistic calculation of the total paradigm of alternative possibilities of inference. The most likely pathways through the resulting N-K network graph can be summarized as an inferential rule, which in turn can be used to build an inference engine for driving a computer based system of knowledge.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The conclusion to be drawn from this combination, if it can be implemented, is that inferential confidence can be probabilistically based upon systemic coherence that is in turn based upon a limited, given set of information, and that relative coherence can be based upon estimations of conditionality and consensus of alternative sets of data.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Such an approach, while complicated and ultimately arbitrary in the determination of its initial values, would permit the systematic exploration, simulation and comparison of alternative hypothetical frameworks that would clarify the process of "filling in the gaps" in the record and that would thus reduce the likelihood of external subjective bias in the construction of frameworks. The success of such a system would depend upon the relative weighting of the initial values, a process which itself can be anchored in empirical data and tests, and rendered systematic in a similar fashion, such that a range of alternative weightings can be calculated and compared.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Each set of initial values will generate a search space of alternative solutions, which can be narrowed to the most probable pathways based upon the presumption of a normal distribution. Alternative sets of inputs will thus generate multiple spaces. It is argued that these spaces will themselves be normally distributed, and that this distribution will constitute a basis for the estimation most plausible values.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An extension of this approach would be to "frame" the gaps and to plug in alternative "additional" evidence to generate alternative "scenarios." This would allow the investigation of the "gaps" that would allow us to make predictions, again based upon the presumption of a normal distribution, about which lines of research should be pursued and which kinds of evidence would support what kinds of hypothesis.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">The Autochthony Hypothesis</font></b></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Archaeological and historic-folkloric sources of evidence are compared for the case of the sui generis origins of Vietnamese civilization. Evidence suggests patterns for a few, successive, gradual and periodic mass-migrations of groups over the Southeast Asian region along a "North-South" axial gradient, overlaid by a greater cumulative frequency of many, omni-directional "mini-migrations" of smaller groups. The net consequence of this pattern of human movement in the region presents a picture of surface complexity overlying and obscuring larger regional and structural continuities.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This suggests a relatively "deeper" history for many Southeast Asian cultures than is apparent when considering its surface character as an historical and interregional cross-roads. We can conclude that Southeast Asian civilization is not so much a hybridization of South, Oceanic and East Asian civilizations, as it consists of its own autochthonous core rooted in its peninsular-insular regional character.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Furthermore, we may speculate that Southeast Asian civilization may have been at least an early source influence upon the development of both South, Oceanic and East Asian civilization as the reverse case.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The notion of autochthony; has certain implications of a long-term continuity and embedded quality of identity in a certain region, a notion of "precedence" that underlies one's sense of attachment, belonging. It might also imply a form of "congruence" of different kinds of data in the confidence of relating divergent or different forms to the same origin point in both time and place. It is a presumption that the degree of cultural ecological integration and adaptation will be high, and will tend to be posited in certain basic and recurrent forms that are highly elaborated.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Autochthony hypothesis; has certain other implications of the originality of Southeast Asian civilization--perhaps a place for the domestication of rice, pigs, dogs, chickens, perhaps one of the first centers of the "Neolithic" revolution, perhaps a place of early origin of boats, perhaps the location of the invention of bronze, and maybe even iron metallurgy. We can legitimately refer to the "original" and "seminal" achievements of Southeast Asian civilization, an hypothesis which looks beyond the more conventional, Western point of view which regards Southeast Asia as largely a passive recipient of foreign influences, a cross-roads of perennial acculturation, and which neglects to consider either the originality nor the deep rooted sense of unity which may characterize Southeast Asian peoples.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What does it mean to be "deeply rooted" as a cultural tradition and as a people to a fixed place time immemorial. What does the claim of autochthony, if genuine, imply for our understanding of such peoples and their culture.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An autochthonous civilization implies sui-generis cultural continuity in a local region from a very early point in time. The question of autochthony may very well be an impossible one to answer because of its inherent relativity--we are forced to ask how old, compared to whom and at what point in time that the "sui generis" birth took place. Probably few extant cultures on earth can claim the prehistorical depth and undisturbed cultural continuity and conservatism as the Aborigines of Australia. We must also always ask who came before. It is clear that before the Polynesians arrived in Hawaii, these Islands were always uninhabited by humans. And yet the depth of the Polynesian presence on these Islands is sufficiently shallow that if we wish to find the "origins" of the Hawaiians. A claim of 1,000 years BP does not have the same magnitude of a claim of 10,000 or 40,000 years, though the sense of local connection may be as deep and as strong in the former as in the latter case.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This is a difficult claim to make in light of the prehistory of movement and settlement of so many peoples. The genetic stability or transitivity of local human populations must always be held in question--replacement of earlier groups by invading peoples may have been total or partial. There should always be presumed some minimal degree of miscegenation between populations. But the question is not one of "racial" identity with the remote past, but rather of cultural continuity--the cultural lifeways, values, customs, folklore and symbology are all connected and interwoven with the region in which it is found. The people may not be of exactly the same genetic frequencies as the original founders of the tradition, but they will be the legitimate "native" inheritors of that tradition.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The linguistic roots may remain somewhat anomalous, as the connection with other far-flung languages may be tenuous and the result of extensive borrowing, or evidence of linguistic dispersion and divergence from a point of origin. The argument for an autochthonous civilization stemming from a deeply rooted cultural tradition would in most cases be a difficult, if not impossible one to make.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Many indigenous populations may in fact have a very shallow history in an area, or else may be the original, but only very recent inhabitants. Another important factor that needs to be taken into account in our formulas for autochthony are the vast cultural changes which have also been continuous time immemorial--just as the present culture-bearers may little resemble their primitive fore-bearers in many physical characteristics, it cannot be expected that the language or the cultural patterns will actually have many deep connections or unaltered survivals. We could not really say that the culture that exists in the same region today is very much similar to its ancestral varieties.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What core features would characterize the peoples of an autochthonous civilization? Several candidates come to mind. A deeply rooted but difficult to pinpoint sense of the people of their connection with a remote past, a firm but unmarked pride in their cultural heritage, a strong connection to a sense of the homeland, an elaborate symbology that is intricately enmeshed with the features of its regional homeland, a deep tradition of mythology and folklore which points to local features, and which are lacking in foreign features, a "mosaic" patterning of different cultural adaptations side-by-side that encompasses a broad spectrum of the very old and the very new. From a linguistic point of view, there is a tendency to view a point of origin as most highly fragmented and dialectically varied--there is a local complexity of patterning that does not exist in surrounding regions, and that is indicative of a long history of local divergence, borrowing, invasion and amalgamation. Peripheral to these "centers" will may exist "pockets" of extremely conservative and changeless "isolates". A recent historical record of dramatic, possibly violent cultural upheaval as the result of strong acculturative and developmental pressures.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The picture of what an autochthonous peoples look like becomes clearer by contrast with peoples whose culture has been definitely dislocated from its point of origin. Local adaptations may be accompanied by the presence of modified core cultural value which were rooted in another place and time. There is likely to be a biological, cultural and linguistic boundary separating it from neighboring groups. But in both cases of clearly autochthonous or non-autochthonous groups we should have some sense of a geographical/historical isolate surrounding in a sea of foreign cultures.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Perhaps the only way of firmly establishing autochthony of a people to a region, as the "birthplace" of an ethno-nation, is by means of the cross-corroboration of multiple lines of evidence all of which may seem to point to the same place, or at least in a similiar direction, and which shows some sort of an emergent picture--a chronic collage-- of the sequences and periods of emergence and development of the people.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Various lines of evidence must "corroborate" in a clear and unambiguous way. We can look to evidence from archaeology, physical anthropology, from language, from cultural values and patterns, cultural ecology, symbology, mythology and folklore, and the more these alternative lines of evidence seem to indicate a similar point of origin, the greater the inference strength of an autochthony hypothesis. Exceptions and discontinuities that appear to occur should not necessarily contraindicate an autochthony hypothesis, but rather should point to the presence of some kind of foreign influence.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can hypothesize for autochthony that: 1) a people have never been entirely supplanted or displaced from their native birthplace. 2) a people have never distantly emigrated from their point of origin. 3) subsequent infusions of foreign peoples and cultures never entirely erased or supplanted their local identity or identification. 4) the culture should be characterized by a very conservative "core" of linguistically, traditionally and culturally embedded values, views, beliefs, and symbolisms, surrounded by a sheath of an extremely flexible "hodge-podge" of characteristics that were the result of cultural amalgamation and acculturative borrowing. 5) the ecological patterns and knowledge of the local region will be detailed, intricate, and deeply interwoven with unique cultural, religious and linguistic patterns. 6) that the people will have culturally a deeply rooted sense of ethno-national identity that is firmly rooted to the local region, expressed through their folklore, mythology, and aesthetic and religious symbolism.</font></p> <p><font size="3">From the standpoint of a definition of civilization as opposed to culture as an inherently "trans-cultural" phenomena, it is perhaps self-contradictory to speak of an "autochthonous civilization" with the implication of the birth of a pristine "High" tradition. We must recognize that an autochthonous civilization may not have had to be an imperialistic one, extending itself in distant directions. An autochthonous civilization may have been a passive "recipient" of foreign influence, imbibing such influence in a creative fashion to produce its own unique concatenation. What marks a "civilization" from a culture is the amount of contact it may have "survived" from other cultures, as the Brits survived and eventually incorporated the Romans, despite the fact that being an Anglo-saxon during the Roman Empire meant being nothing more than a slave-animal. Such contacts provided stimulus for the local development and elaboration of the culture.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We must refer back to Alfred Kroeber's definitions of civilization as being characterized by the relative frequency or presence or absence of unique cultural genius, and of distinctive "style-patterns" which were the tidewater-marks of cultural development. To count as "Civilization" in any significant since, such stylization and realization of the human capacities for culture must have been disproportionate to the average. In archaeology we inevitable associate such civilization with some degree of focal involvement, artistic elaboration or craft-specialization. There is also a sense that socially and historically a people with a shared culture achieve a sense of a "regional" identity as opposed to just a local identity--that local totemism and tribalisms are somehow transcended in the imagination of the people to look to a broader cultural horizon. Such a distant horizon becomes most visible in the worldview of a people only when a since of foreign presence looms largely upon that horizon.</font></p> <p><font size="3">What are the factors that lead to some civilizations becoming "hot" and other cultural traditions remaining "cold." The peoples of the New Guinea highlands are possessors of an autochthonous cultural tradition, but they have never apparently achieved the level of cultural development that we would call a "Grand Tradition" of civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We are left to consider a basic historical dialectic in which civilization as the process and consequence of foreign acculturation comes to interplay either neutrally, destructively or constructively with autochthonous processes of local cultural traditions and ethno-cultural identification to produce a unique synthesis of style patterning.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">Corroborative Evidence of the Sui Generis Origins of Vietnamese Civilization</font></b></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">The hypothesis of Autochthony is evaluated in reference to the hypothetical suigeneris origins of "Dai-Viet" civilization in the Northern Highlands of Southeast Asia and Southern China. Evidence for the autochthonous origin in South China-North Mainland Southeast Asian Highlands will be considered, as possible a contiguous area of settlement for "Austric" speaking peoples; more recent origins in the Highlands of North Vietnam and Laos for the "Dai-Viet" civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Multiple lines of evidence will be reviewed and reconsidered in light of this hypothesis of the autochthonous origins of the Dai-Viet speaking peoples in the Northern Highlands of the Southeast Asian Mainland. The cultural and linguistic map of peninsular Southeast Asia presents a very complicated and confusing picture that suggests an extended history of cross-cultural contact, migration, diffusion and intermingling in the region. Despite this historical complexity, there exists a surprising degree of corroborative evidence suggesting remarkable cultural continuities of indigenous peoples with the remotest past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In trying to interpret the ethno-linguistic mosaic of mainland Southeast Asia, we are left with a number of questions. What are the motive factors that would propel one group, such as the Thai, to suddenly begin to spread out and take over the territories of other groups, when previously its residence among many other groups remained apparently dormant and unobtrusive. We may ask this question not only of the Thai, but of the Burmese, of the Vietnamese, and earlier yet, perhaps of the Malays and "Austronesian" speaking peoples who spread out across the Pacific Ocean. Why do some groups wax while others seem to be on the wan, and why do others seem to maintain a "steady-state" time immemorial.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="d2"><b><font size="3">Archaeological Evidence</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Evidence in the north of Thailand and from Northern Vietnam suggests the presence of early modern humans on the Southeast Asian peninsula. (15,000 BP).<b> </b>Wilhelm Solheim III has written of evidence for an independent Neolithic agricultural revolution in Southeast Asia, possibly as much as 5,000 years before.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In archaeological sites in Northern Thailand and Northern Vietnam, evidence suggests a prehistoric continuity stretching back in time as much as 10,000 BP of a series of cultural sequences anticipating the arrival of the Chinese and the sinicization of the "pre-Vietnamese". Excavations at Spirit Cave, Ban Na Di, Non Nok Khe, Oc Eo and Khok Phanom Di and Angkor Watt reveal the image of a prehistoric process of a gradual emergence of an indigenous Southeast Asian civilization based upon an early "planting-fishing-dog-pig" complex, and later upon the independent domestication and cultivation of rice and the independent invention of metallurgy.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Wilhem Solheim's model of the cultural sequences based upon the Archaeological evidence suggests and early "Lithic;" period, referring to the early use of chipped stone implements, and ending around 40,000 BC The next period he calls "Lignic" (40,000-20,000) and equates with the early "Hoabinhian" sequences. "Hoabinhian" gets its name from the early artifacts first unearthed in the 1920's in the mountains near the town of Hoa Binh in North Vietnam. "It is part of my hypothesis that during this period tools made of wood--particularly those made of bamboo--became more important to peoples of Southeast Asia than tools made of stone...." (Solheim, 1972)</font></p> <p><font size="3">"Hoabinhian" culture is perhaps the earliest cultural sequence yet unearthed in Southeast Asia. It was a very stable cultural complex. Many such sites have been found in the northern mountain reaches of Southeast Asia--"almost always in small caves not far from streams..." These earliest sites between 10,000 and 5,000 BC yield at all the levels from this span a similar pattern of artifacts: simple stone tools "representative of a Southeast Asian hunter's and gatherer's culture" There are found throughout many of the levels of these earliest sites remains of peper, butternut, almond, candle nut, betel nut, cucumber, bottle gourd, Chinese water chestnut, "and certain legumes: the pea (<u>Pisum)</u>, either the beanor the broad bean (<u>Phaseolus</u> or <u>Vica</u>), and possibly also the soybean (<u>Glycine</u>)." Some of these may or may not have been cultivated. "....I suggest that what is called middle Hoabinhian was a culture or cultures whose adherents were experimenting with many different kinds of wild plants for many different reasons. At some point, probably around 13,000 BC, somewhere in the northern reaches of Southeast Asia, such experiments culminated in the domestication of some of these plants and the consequent appearance of horticulture as a new means of food procurement. (Solheim, 1972)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The third period Solheim refers to as the ".i.Crystallitic;" which ended somewhere around 8000 BC. This is the phase when distinctive local cultures began to "crystallize" in Southeast Asia--containing cultural elements still found locally today. "....I suggest that it was the late Hoabinhian culture, as it is represented in these levels, that achieved the transformation from horticulture to generalized plant and animal domestication and that also achieved the invention of pottery. In different parts of the region different plants would have been selected for cultivation. The same was probably true of the animals involved: the pig, the chick, and possibly even the dog..." (Solheim, 1972). This cultural sequence is known as the "Bac Sonian." It derived its name as well from the region in which its vestiges were first uncovered in the Mountains North of the Red River.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This sequence is characterized by grinding and polishing of stone implements, possibly used in the clearly of forest. These bifacial "celts" (axes and adze-heads) are relatively more symmetrical than earlier implements and entirely smooth. They have neatly beveled edges and many have tangs for hafting to a handle. Other noteworthy objects of this sequence include stone rings, ground by bamboo sections (possibly bracelets), square butted "bark cloth beaters", small shell or stone "trinkets", and, last but not least, abundant pottery, characteristically incised, cord-marked or mat-marked designs on the surface. Most of these are wide-mouthed dishes or bowls, some with stands. These traits are usually associated with agricultural peoples and have been found throughout Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are indications of "rudimentary" agricultural development. "Life in the Red River valley must have been that of a primitive agricultural people whose cereal diet was supplemented by hunting and fishing. The valley was still largely jungle, abounding in beasts such as elephants, rhinoceroses and tigers, and the no less dangerous insects that have survived. The rice fields were temporary, won from the jungle by fire, a practice that still survives among the Mois and other mountain people in Vietnam, but the fields already yield two crops a year under the care of a people that was slowly developing the qualities of physical and spiritual endurance characteristic of the peasantry of Asia...." (Joseph Buttinger, <u>The Smaller Dragon: A Political History of Vietnam</u> 1958: pg. 12) There was a practice involving elaborate burial rituals. Numerous skulls have been found portraying "Melanesoid-Australoid" and Indonesian elements. These people settled in caves and grottos of the limestone formations but did not venture near the coast. Bac-Sonian culture is considered "transitional" between Mesolithic and Neolithic eras.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The fourth period Solheim calls "Extensionistic" (lasting from approximately 8,000 BC until the beginning of the Christian Era), referring to a major trend of migration out from the mountain slopes onto the neighboring plans and beyond into the river valleys and deltas. "The Extensionistic trend...led the mountain peoples not only into the many other hospitable habitats of the mainland but also beyond them; the mountain peoples traveled by overland routes or by water in virtually every direction..." These inhabitants of the Sunda Shelf who retreated to the coast of South China and North Vietnam were possibly the ancestors of the Malayo-Polynesian to the sea about 4,000 BC and who eventually settled the entire Oceania.</font></p> <p><font size="3">During this phase, local cultures that were distinct from the earlier Bac Sonian evolved and people began fanning out. Mountain peoples began occupying the adjacent piedmont regions--enough of an environmental difference to lead to a shift in cultural ecological patterns toward a more sedentary settlement pattern. Such a transition is still underway--even peoples in towns and cities collect wild plants and hunt and trap wild animals.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This cultural sequence is associated with the Phung Nguyen sites in Northeastern Thailand--cultural ecological adaptations on the middle courses of small tributary systems. Rice is found cultivated well before 2,000 B. C. on both sides of the Annamite Cordillera. Vietnamese Archaeologists have excavated more than fifty settlement sites in the "middle country upstream of the Red River delta. Three Thai sites in the middle Mekong River Valley, on the western slopes of the mountains, Non Nok Tha, Ban Chiang and Ban Na Di, also have been excavated and all these sites demonstrate the early occupation by agriculturalists, but real no evidence of earlier habitations by hunter-gathering peoples. The earliest of these sites is dated to 2,400 BC, covering only a hectare in areas and estimated to have held no more than a hundred occupants. The economic patterns of all these sites were similar--rice grown seasonally in flooded river valleys; cattle, pigs and dogs, augmented by hunting and fishing. "...The pioneer farmers chose slightly elevated ground for their villages, locales with easy access to low, regularly flooded wetlands. The terrain inland from the Red River delta was ideally suited to such settlement. Numerous low hills command a stream that is tributary to the region's major waterway. The excavations at one of these middle-country sites, Phung Nguyen, show that the settlers combined rice cultivation with animal husbandry and hunting. They were also excellent potters and proficient workers in stone. The site's name has been given to the transitional Neolithic culture of the entire middle country region that extended from about 2500 to 1800 BC Only the most recent layers of a handful of Phung Nguyen sites hold small fragments of metal; they are bronze. (Higham, 1984). The independent development of bronze metallurgy proceeded during this period.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This was superceded by a more advanced cultural complex referred to as the "Dong S'on," characterized by occupation sites that "covered tens of thousands of square meters and accommodated thousands of inhabitants." These larger settlements consisted of the gradual aggregation of hamlets and clans, suggesting a communalistic social arrangement. There occurred a transition of rapid population increases and fissioning of smaller hamlets from larger settlements, the process demonstrated in historical times during the Vietnamese "march south." "In any event, as seems to be the case around the world, the early farmers' settled way of life was followed by a period of population increase, the growth of hamlets into larger villages, and the establishment of additional settlements in a kind of continual fissioning." (Higham, 1984: pg. 143). This period witnessed the development from an earlier social network of semi-autonomous settlements into a system based upon "a few large central places" and the rise of chiefly authority. "....With one possible exception, the various cultures of the region seem to have shared much of the same kind of economic base and to have enjoyed contact with one another but to have remained politically independent. The exception is the culture of the region of what is now North Vietnam and the adjacent parts of China; during the second millenium BC a centralized authority that was quite independent of the imperialistic dynasties of northern China may have arisen in these areas." (Solheim, 1972).</font></p> <p><font size="3">The earlier communalism broke up into a more hierarchically stratified society based on relatively small villages of family groups, culminating in the "Dong Son" which Vietnamese archaeologists date to the 7th to first century A.D. The graves of the elite are rich in bronze burial goods. "They show that the ruling-class people had by this time established a clear distance between themselves and the people they ruled." Bronze plowshares, Bronze drums, bronze weapons such as the "pedi-form" axe, symbolic of royal authority, were found in the graves of these elite.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It appears that the Dong-S'on may have been the result of the synthesis of two peoples, one from the highlands and the other a coastal people. "...Dong-S'on civilization was a cultural synthesis achieved by peoples inhabiting a single geopolitical environment. These peoples came from both the mountains and the sea. The society they shared eventually superseded their mutual differences. We can surmise that the Vietnamese people originated in a concerted human response by diverse peoples to a particular geographical setting, the plains of northern Vietnam. (Keith Taylor <u>The Birth of Vietnam</u>. 1983) The bronze pedi-form axe; is depicted in an Austronesian artistic tradition, the same form which, according to Vietnamese historical tradition, was wielded by a lineage of kings bearing Austro-Asiatic titles.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Evidence suggests that the Dong S'on economy was based upon the development of double-cropping of rice for which the Red-River climate is ideally suited. (Higham, 1984: pg. 145.) It is at this point that we have evidence of legend and history that will be considered in the following sections.</font></p> <p><a name="e2"><b><font size="3">Mythological Evidence</font></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">The origin myths and historical legends of Vietnam are first considered, though it is likely that legends are available from a number cultures that may help to corroborate or test the hypothesis of autochthony. Memories of pre-Chinese Vietnamese civilization survived, along with the language, the two millennium of Chinese domination and acculturation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Vietnamese tradition begins with the 15th Century compilation of lore "<u>Linh-nam chich quai."</u>They begin with the ruler Viem of Xich Qui that was located somewhere south of the Yangtze whose son became Lac Long Quan or "Dragon Lord of the Lac," who retired to "the Palace of the Waters" to leave his kingdom without a leader, and who founded the reign of the Hung Kings of the Van-lang kingdom, after he came to the Hong plain from the sea, teaching civilization, and rice cultivation, and then retiring back to the sea. When invaders from the north came, the people of the Hong plain called for Lac Long Quan's help, whereupon he kidnapped "Au Co" the intruder's wife (or daughter), and took her to the top of Mount Tan-vien. Au Co gave birth to the first of the Hung Kings.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Vietnamese origin myth has the story of the fairy queen, Au Co, of the mountains, and the dragon lord of the sea, Lac Long Quan, who married and gave birth to a sac of flesh containing one hundred eggs, which after five or six days hatched one hundred boys, 50 of whom went to reside with the mother in the mountain, and 50 who went to reside with their father in the kingdom of the Sea in the South. Another legend has it that the dragon, associated with mountains and water, was the procreator of the Vietnamese stock. The dragon is vital symbolism not only of the geo-political integrity of the Vietnamese, but a synthesis of the basic antagonism between the land and the sea.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This mythology is held to reflect a maritime cultural base with political accretions from continental influences. "This idea was later elaborated by Vientamese literati into a genealogy of Lac Long Quan and Au Co that brought together the southern aquatic line and the northern continental line. This basic antagonism between the land and the sea can be found in many Southeast Asian countries.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Yet another legend describes the son of Au Co and Lac Long, known as the Mountain Spirit that dwelled on Mount Tan Vien after returning from the sea. One legend concerning the Tree spirit is held to be virtually identical with a legend from North Borneo. Another legend about a three year old boy, Ong Giong, who grew into a giant after eating hoards of rice, ascending to heaven and returning to succor his people, is similar to a legend told in Indonesian Lore. The battle between the lord of the mountain and the lord of the sea, who were once friends but had a falling out over a Hung princess over which the lord of the Mountain finally prevails and the Water Spirit unsuccessfully attacks the Lord of Mount Tan Vien.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Another legend of "Nhat Da Trach" or "One Night Marsh," comes from the southern part of the Hong River plain, a low swampy area near the sea. A Hung princess named Tien Dung was exploring the deltaic plains when she met a naked young man named Chu Dong Tu. They married and the couple established themselves near the sea with luxuries of sea-borne merchants. The Hung king sent an army against it, but the palace disappeared in a night into the swamp. This legend contains similar elements to the founding myth of what the Chinese called Fu-nan, in the lower Mekong.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Hung Kings of the Van-Lang Kingdom are held to be descendants of the Au Co and Lac Long, and are a cherished tradition. "Hung" is derived from an Austroasiatic title of chieftainship that persists until today in the mountain dwelling Mon-Khmer speaking peoples, as well as among the Muong and even the Munda of northeast India. The name "Van-lang" has been phonetically associated with similar words among the languages of minority peoples throughout the region bounded by the Yangtze and the Mekong which mean "people" and "by extension 'nation'." (Taylor, pg. 2-3) Joseph Buttinger writes that the Muong called their feudal quan-lang, the title of the sons of the legendary king Hong. According to 14th and 15th century Vietnamese Historians, Van-lang was a decentralized feudal state whose inhabitants burned the forests and tilled the soil with hoes, lived on rice, used bronze, were fishermen and seafarers, and tattooed their bodies with pictures of crocodiles, dragons, snakes and sea animals. They chewed betel and blackened their teeth. (Buttinger, 1958: p. 116)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though these legendary sources of the Hung Kings are controversial and unreliable, historical documentation locates Van-lang and its territory in the very heartland of the Phung-Nguyen culture complex (Davidson, pg. 113). The existence of the Hong-Bang and Hung-Vuong dynasties are attributed by Henri Maspero to the Van-Lang Kingdom. According to Maspero, the customs of tattooing sea monsters by fishermen to confer protection against 'crocodiles', the chewing of betel nut, the blackening of teeth, were common customs of the kingdom of Van Lang. A mythical king ordered the fishermen to tattoo sea monsters upon their arms to protect them from crocodiles. Throughout Oceania, fishermen tattoo themselves to achieve magical protection against drowning and sharks is a common trait throughout the Pacific. Vietnamese kings later had dragons, symbols of their royal authority, tattooed on their chests well into the second millenium, A. D.--as late as Tran Anh Tong (1293). The crocodile was the totem of the Chinese and Vietnamese, symbolic of the dragon.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Similarly, in old Vietnam, as until recently in Indonesia and Malaysia, betel nut played an important role in social and religious life. "A marriage proposal was always preceded by presents of betel nuts and leaves." (Buttinger, pg. 115.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The earliest source, <u>Viet su Luoc</u>, reads:</font></p> <p><font size="3">"In the time of King Chuang of Chou [696-682 B. C.] in Gia-ninh, there was an extraordinary man who was able to cause the submission of all the aboriginal tribes by using the magic arts. He styled himself Hung King, established his capital at Van-lang, and named his realm the kingdom of Van-lang. He used simplicity and purity as the basis for customs and knotted cords for government. The realm was handed down through eighteen generations and each ruler styled himself Hung King." (VSL, I, IA, Keith Taylor, 1982: pg. 309)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Gia-ninh was a toponym referring to "the old Me-linh area at the head of the Hong river plain, where the Hong is joined by its three major tributaries." That Van-lang was an ancient Kingdom is attested to by Chinese sources as early as the Tang, and Hung as a royal title occurs as early as Chin in the Historiographies. This "golden-aged" affirmed by 14th century writers was probably based upon well-established, but poorly articulated oral traditions "rooted in the prehistoric culture of the Hong River plain." Ngo Si Lien of the 15th Century gives a much earlier date to the rise of the Hung Kings--2879 BC.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Me-linh; on the Hong River plain is not far from the Vietnamese mountain of mythological origin "Tan-Vien" and "Mount Hung." This culture apparently had a early technique of irrigation--using the ocean tides to affect the water levels in the flat delta. Early irrigation and sedentarism lead to feudal stratification that was rooted in the disposition and control of the arable land, "a power always formalized as right, with a claim to some supernatural sanction.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The authority of the Chiefs of this region was symbolically represented on the famous Dong S'on bronze drums. According to tradition, the Hung Kings directly controlled the Me linh areas. Beyond this they were dependent upon the cooperation of the Lac Lords, whom they protected from invasions from the Mountains, while the Lac Lords supported the Hung kings with their manpower and wealth.</font></p> <p><font size="3">According to Maspero, this was a hierarchical society based on hereditary privilege, mutual obligation and personal loyalty. People lived in small kinship communities under the Lac Lords who enjoyed different levels of privilege and authority, from village headmen up to regional leaders who advised the Hung Kings. The Hung Kings maintained their prestige with a prosperous court life facilitating peaceful relations with neighboring mountain tribes (Taylor, 1983: pgs. 12-13).</font></p> <p><font size="3">The oldest descriptions by Chinese sources of the third and fifth centuries A. D. describing the Hong River plain supported by an economy based upon tidal irrigation of paddy fields known as "Lac fields." Lac Lords designated the ruling class. According to Buttinger, "Lac" was the first ethnic denomination by which the Vietnamese became known to the Chinese. "Lac" is also the name of the "culture hero to whom Vietnamese tradition ascribes the introduction of agriculture." The name "Lac" may be derived from the Vietnamese "lach" or "rach" meaning "ditch, canal, waterway." The construction of drainage ditches was certainly the first step toward making the swampy plains of northern Vietnam suitable for agriculture. Canals and ditches with water gates would have been essential for using the tides for to control water. "The Lac fields, as described in the texts, were surely dependent on some kind of water-control system. We must nevertheless bear in mind that the Chinese texts cite the practice of tidal irrigation by way of explaining the name <u>Lac</u> and that Lac society may well have been based on a diversity of agricultural methods, of which tidal irrigation was but one." (Keith Taylor <u>The Birth of Vietnam</u> 1983: p. 10)</font></p> <p><font size="3">During the time of Lac Society, coastlines would have been inland more than ten miles and tidal influences may have reached much further inland. These influences may have been strongest in the Tay-vu area, downstream and beyond the pathways of the Hong River, between the Cau and Hong rivers "at the foot of Mount Tam-dao." This would have been a fertile region of lakes, rivers, hills and plains, "bounded by moutainous terrain on one side and soggy delta lands on the other; it was heavily populated from a very early time." This area was also accessible to river valleys from the north. "A recent study of the ancient geography of this area suggests that this was where the Lac-field society was based. (Taylor, 1983: pp. 6-8)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Working eastward from the Me-linh area, the Hung kings would have gradually extended their authority over the Tay-vu area and Lac society. The Chinese associated the Vietnamese with the "Hundred Yueh" tribes of Southeastern China. The term "ou," a Chinese pronunciation of the Vietnamese word "au," as found in "au lac" may have designated a "style of leadership" as well as a "borderland." The kingdom of Van Lang was superseded by the Kingdom of Au Lac. The Chinese interpret the expression of "Yueh" roughly as barbarian or "uncivilized" and they applied it to all peoples towards the south who lay upon the perimeter of their Classical civilization. Thus "Nan Yueh" which is the early root of "Nam Viet" can be interpreted as the "Southern Barbarians." "The Chinese Historians referred to the Vietnamese as 'Lac Yueh,' or merely 'Yueh,' or even "Lac is another name for Yueh. The Chinese assumed that the different 'barbarian' peoples who were fortunate enough to have been conquered would eventually be 'civilized'--in other words, would become Chinese. Any name expressing a people's distinctive identity, such as <u>Lac</u>, was diluted with broader terms, such as <u>Yueh</u>, which were employed as synonyms for "barbarian." (Keith Taylor <u>The Birth of Vietnam</u> 1983: pg. 42.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The mythology of Vietnam; reveal themes that recur in the folklore of all Southeast Asian peoples who share a mythology based on basic thematic contrasts between mountain and sea, winged beings versus water beings, men of the mountains versus men of the coast. But the dominant theme is that sovereign power came from the sea, a theme which shares elements found in Island and coastal Southeast Asia, and, according to Taylor, is the first evidence of the Vietnamese as a distinct people or nation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Jean Pryzluski ("La Princesse a l'odeur de poisson et la Nagi dans les traditins de l'Asie oriental" <u>Etudes Asiatque</u>, Publications, E'cole Francaise d'Extreme-Orient, vols, 19-20, 2:265-285. Paris, 1925.) showed the idea that the king's power came from the sea is directly opposed to the continental cultures of the Indo-Aryans and the Chinese and attributed it to a prehistoric maritime civilization of Southeast Asia "whose hearth was not localized but whose force of expansion was considerable," which spread into Southern and Eastern China and into the Indian sub-continent exclusive of the Indus Valley (Keith Taylor "Madagascar in the Ancient Malayo-Polynesian Myths" in <u>Explorations in the Early Southeast Asian History: The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft</u> edited by Kenneth R. Hall and John K.Whitmore, 1976: pg. 27).</font></p> <p><font size="3">Valerio Valeri notes a similar contrast between an autochthonous female authority connected to fertility of the soil, agricultural and natural rhythms, and an immigrant, noble and "male" authority found in many societies in the area, reflecting "a deeper contrast: that between the most fundamental, most unquestionable grounds for social existence (relative to which all are ultimately equal) and the <u>noble</u> values (wealth, military force, ability to attract, generative potency, etc.) that are unequally distributed and which allow those who have them most to weave and reweave around their persons hierarchical networks defined by relationships of client-ship, alliance, descent, debt and even servitude." (Valerio Valeri "Afterword" in J. Stephen Lansing, <u>Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali</u> 1991: pg. 137)</font></p> <p><font size="3">A modification of the same theme dates with the rise of Indo-Aryan and Chinese civilization at their borders with the "central coast of modern Vietnam"--these myths have the theme of the marriage of a powerful newcomer with a local princess, thus founding a royal dynasty. Vestiges of this theme come from the Former Han of China, the "Yueh" of South Cina, the Nan-Choa kingdom of Yunnan, the Viets of the Red River delta, Champa, Fu-nan, the Khmer empire, Laos, the Thai of the Menam basin, the Mons of Pegu and Thaton, the Burmans of the Irrawaddy Basin, the Munda of northeast India, the Pallava and Cola dynasties of South India, the Srivijayan traditions of the island world. Keith Taylor relates similar thematic elements of maritime origin, fertility and sovereignty in the myths of Madagascar and Easter Island.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The picture that emerges from the consideration of the various sources of data are that no single line of evidence is by itself sufficient or without major holes and discrepancies. When taken together, though the picture may be confusing and even at points contradictory, there occurs a process of non-parametric "covariance" which strongly suggests a common origin.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3"> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></font></b></p> <p align="center"><a name="ten"><b><font size="3">IV</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="ten"><b><font size="3">The Marketplace Hypothesis</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="ten"><b><font size="3">Priests and Traders in the Southeast Asian Marketplace</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p><font size="3">The case of the role of traffic and trade in Southeast Asia is considered in relation to a "marketplace" hypothesis in the regional integration of Southeast Asian civilization. More than a cross-roads, many ports and places in Southeast Asia have been the location of trade entrepots that have inter-regionally enmeshed the region in a worldwide network of economic and cultural relations that has long served to embed in local identity an "outward" orientation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Southeast Asian marketplace has long served as a central meeting ground between different ethnocultural groupings--a place for neutral exchange and reciprocities where conflicts are temporally set aside. The role of traffic and trade continues to be a vital intercultural linkage in Southeast Asia today.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The presence of the petty, part-time trader and the full-time, long-distance merchant middleman has played a pivotal role in the economic integration of the region. The role of the early trader, pioneer and enterpreneur, as the early forerunner of the modern capitalist, and the relationship of the trader with the role of religion in the interregional integration of Southeast Asia needs to be given the credit its due.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We like to think that the invention of capitalism was a strictly modern, post-feudal affair, but we might think that there may have been more than one invention of capitalism, and more than one kind of capitalistic enterprise in the world. There may exist in the world today several different forms of capitalism, and different forms of capitalistic interest and involvement.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Corporate forms of organization; along different principles have long been important factors in the trans-local organization of Southeast Asian society. (D. E. Brown<u> Principles of Social Organization: Southeast Asia</u> 1976). Incorporation into groups that are larger than life, that survive beyond one's own lifetime, and that have as a principle concern the protection and maximization of shared group and individual interests. Southeast Asia has long been confronted by the challenge of ethnic diversity--a cauldron of ethnicity, it has always faced a common problem of integration and the organization of diversity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This organization has long been a matter of "self-organizing" systems;, one that has depended perhaps on a few basic and simple mechanisms of "equivalence structures" for reciprocal interchange and transaction, and of "spacing mechanisms" that assured an optimization of resource acquisition and a minimization of conflict and competitive contact. Spacing mechanisms may have taken the form of ecological specialization and phase-transitions between pioneering, semi-sedentary and fully sedentary modes of subsistence, headhunting and warring practices combined with inter-local exchanges and tribal exogamy, formalized social etiquette and ritual, and a "live and let live" ethos of the tolerance and mutual coexistence of difference.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The problem of the organization of diversity of peoples and their differences in time and space begets the research dilemma of the organization of broad diversities of data types and of many different themes into a coherent pattern. The polythematic intertranslation of culture has depended upon achieving a certain presumed level of comprehensivity--a pan-optic perspective.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The likelihood and frequency of different peoples coming into continuous contact or coexisting within a shared context in Southeast Asia must have been great. "Rules of etiquette and engagement" must have, in such circumstances, been long worked out and more-or-less mutually agreed by all parties, which may have permitted a form of mutualistic coexistence and a kind of live and let live world view which dictated tolerance toward and even strategic appreciation of socio-cultural differences. Such a world view would have been rooted in the reciprocities which tie different peoples into obligatory social transactions. A minimal knowledge of the other peoples with whom one can expect to come into contact, a willingness to take risks in contacts with strangers, a common "trade language" and mutually understood terms of agreement. It may also have entailed the rise of "central places"--great marketplaces--where such polyglot meeting and transaction may have taken place. It seems that typically such "central" places were large markets that occurred at some dry location in the delta regions of the mouths of the main rivers.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There may have been many kinds of "equivalence structures" shared in Southeast Asia. Equivalence structures can be defined as those common, socially defined mechanisms that provide a high degree of information and a low level of randomness in interaction and mediation of complex and ever-changing events. They act as general behavioral and symbolic "templates" with which to organize and interpret varieties of data. Among such equivalence structures we can identify alternating linguistic styles, religion, ritualized etiquette and social custom, fictive kinship and surrogate familial relations, shared cultural ecology, economic mechanisms of trade, pricing, and market exchange, technologies, cultural ecological practices and values, food and cooking, and basic divisions of labor. (Murray Leaf <u>Information and Behavior in a Sikh Village </u>1972)</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may make a distinction between sources of information which choice of informational value is high or low and the entropy of alternative information choices is high or low--though high entropy sources do not necessarily produce messages of high informational value, low-entropy messages necessarily produce low-information messages. Different sources of information may vary considerable as to their informational structure, content and capacity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Equivalence structures can be minimally defined as any relationship or set of relationships in which acts by some of its members will entail some predictable degree of expected response on the part of other members. (Anthony F. C. Wallace <u>Culture and Personality 2n. Edition.</u> 1970). Such structures tend to reduce the entropy within the system, at the cost of reducing the informational capacity of the system. In general, within such structures, we may stipulate a tendency towards the "maximization of congruence" in such structures, one that is continuously counteracted by inherent entrophic tendencies.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may also refer to the binding effect and the incorporating and obligatory nature of social relations based upon complementary or mutual interests and at least implicit commitment to maintaining the role-definitions of the relationship, from which emerges the social "contract" which is the foundation of the "organization of diversity." Enmeshed in our webs of reciprocity and equivalence, we become bound to the maintenance of certain roles, standards, codes, customs and values that have greater social significance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Regional integration of Southeast Asia has always depended upon the working out of such equivalence structures across a range of different groups of people. This regional integration has long had a history and distribution much deeper in time and extensive in space and intricacy than we might think.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Religion is one such set of equivalence mechanisms that have served the purpose of regional integration and the organization of diversity in Southeast Asia. The importance and role of religion in Southeast Asia cannot be overemphasized, nor can the part played by religion in the developmental dynamics of the historical processes of human civilization be ignored--civilization is never advanced in the vacuum of religious values, ideas, symbolism, or world views. There are many clear occasions of religious belief providing motivation in the face of uncertain adversity where no other kind of material incentive would prove sufficient.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Foreign traders brought with them important religious beliefs and symbolism that enriched and elaborated the inherently syncretistic orientation of the traditional Southeast Asian interstate system. The role of religion in facilitating and legitimating state organization and stable trade contacts, under the umbrella of a common system of ritual belief and behavior, in providing a rational and motivational system for economic activity, has not yet been adequately studied. Different religious orientations, during different epochs, helped to confer stable, conservative symbolic "forms" sanctioning the "traditionalizing" process of developing Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Religion provides a cultural framework for the "symbolic articulation" of diverse groupings of people, a necessary basis for "ritual communality, cross-cutting ethnic, linguistic and ecological boundaries." It provides a common "ritual language" facilitating growth and diversification of "that very large part of culture which is concerned with economic action." (Edmund Leach, 1954:pg. 279.) People may speak different languages, wear different clothes, live in different kinds of houses, but they universally understand one another's ritual. Ritual acts are ways of saying things about social status, and the "language" in which these things are said is common..." (ibid.: pg. 279) Religious world-view "orients" people around a common set of core values and a common attitude and framework for seeing the world, committing them to a shared course of social action--the introduction of religion into a region has always been a way of interregional consolidation of structural linkages which facilitates transmission across different boundaries.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Models of the rise of state civilization, whether prime mover or multivariate, are generally materialist-structural/functional in orientation. The role of religion is seen to be part of an ideological superstructure that is epiphenomenal, legitimating, reinforcing and, at best, secondary to the principle driving factors of social organization and development of civilization. Similarly, systems models that also tend to be based upon functionalist and structuralist presuppositions, stress political-economic institutions, modes of production and 'social relations' of production as the determining factors of such development.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The role of religion, seen to be dialectically complementary to materialist and functionalist mechanisms in the social construction of reality, has almost never been accorded much causal importance in this general process, in spite of a great deal of historical evidence which might suggest otherwise that such a dialectical complementarity and hence complex interdependency might actually be at the heart of such historical transformations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Wherever we find evidence of trade, we find religious missions, and wherever we find religious missions, we find the encroachments of an alien civilization's values, world-view, a 'colonization' of the soul, and we find the first beginnings of a process of imperial domination.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The proto-historical phase of Southeast Asian history can be divided into several stadial stages which corresponded to the periods in which certain varieties of acculturative influence became predominant throughout the region. These periods are presented generally in order of their appearance, but later periods did not completely replace the influence of earlier periods, but only added further complexity on top of the already diverse region. Furthermore, traces and suggestions of influence from the exogenous sources of later periods are evident during the earlier phases, but remained emergent or sub-critical in their development until their later developmental sequence. In this way, the historical period of Southeast Asia can be divided into the phases of Brahmanization, Buddhization, Islamization, Confucianization, and Christianization, a fully historic period which can be subdivided into Catholization, Dutch Calvinism, and British Protestantism, and finally, Modern Secularization. There is an important and valid reason for dividing and labeling these periods by their religious character--not only does it suggest the primary role which religion has played in the formation of regional Southeast Asian identity, but it also suggests the role religion has had in acculturative expansion and interregional influence of different civilizations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The subsequent phases of Brahmanization, Buddhization, Islamization, Confucianization and Christianization represented but extensions of a basic historical patterning in the Southeast Asian region that overlaid an indigenous animism and inter-linked local, regional and interregional interests into increasingly complex patterns of interdependency and involvement. The arrival of Indian Civilization provided the impetus of potent symbolic forms that mandated and sanctioned the augmentation of state power by an elite. Islam penetrated the hinterlands and conferred a stability to the peasant resource base of these states. Chinese influence had long provided critical economic linkages for the articulation of the entire development process. Christianization helped to provide a stable and dependable administrative machinery and a valuation of capitalistic enterprise.</font></p> <p><font size="3">First evidence of Brahmanization is found in the first and second century AD--though the small trickle of sea-faring Indian merchants; probably had no real beginning, building trade settlements on foreign shores on top of ancient Neolithic sites. This trickle gradually flowered into a major stream of culture contact resulting in the founding of "Indian Kingdoms practicing the arts, customs and religions of India, and using Sanskrit as their sacred language." (George Coedes <u>The Indianized States of Southeast Asia</u> 1968) Indian influence is pervasive throughout Southeast Asia, and has become a basic component of Southeast Asian regional identity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The model of Brahmanization consists of small groups of merchant vessels, either carrying Brahmans or merchants who passed themselves off as priests, mixing with and influencing the local elite, learning the local language, introducing elements of their Hindu civilization, marrying well placed daughters of powerful leaders, who in turn became the best agents for the promotion of Hindu values. Inheriting land or titles of authority, Indianized chiefs then assembled local peoples into a state organization. A Hindu temple might be built on a near by mountain top. "This custom, associated with the original foundation of a kingdom or royal dynasty, is witnessed in all the Indian kingdoms of the Indochinese Peninsula. It reconciled the native cult of the spirits on the heights with the Indian concept of royalty, and gave the population assembled one sovereign, a sort of national god, intimately associated with the monarchy. We have here a typical example of how India, in spreading her civilization to the Indochinese peninsula, knew how to make foreign beliefs and cults her own and assimilate them--an example which illustrates the relative parts played by Indian and native elements in the formation of the ancient Indochinese civilizations and the manner in which these two elements interacted." (George Coedes,<u>The Indianized States of Southeast Asia</u> 1968: pgs. 26-7)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Buddhism appears to have swept through Southeast Asia in several waves--in the first and second centuries A.D., later in the 3rd and Fourth, and then again in the 7th and 9th centuries. Fa Shien was a buddhist monk who traveled from India to China via Southeast Asia, who described the ships of the day as carrying 200 persons, (G. R. G. Worcester, <u>The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze</u> Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press 1971: pg. 22.) left a detailed account of Buddhist Kingdoms he had visited along the way. Buddhist monks and their temples were the principle purveyors of this faith, and the political and economic ramifications of its influence in Southeast Asia are not clear but may have been considerable. Some Buddhist monasteries appear to have accumulated a great deal of wealth and local control, and Buddhism provided another potent symbolic pantheon for the legitimation of state authority. Buddhism in many areas appears to have been implicated in the formation of early cities--providing some of the religious symbolisms of royal authority appropriated by the ruling elites--and this kind of influence is evident in much of the early monumental architecture. (Keith Taylor, <u>The Birth of Vietnam</u> 1983)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Islam spread epidemically from the 7th Century onward, and became well-rooted among the low-land peasant peoples, especially in Malaysia and the Indonesian Archipelago. Carried by Arab traders, Koranic reading and the Jawi script provided the first basis for the spread of literacy. The basic model of Islamization was similar to that of Brahmanization. It was basically an urban civilization--another factor in the generation of the Southeast Asian city-state complex. The urban model of Islamization has five basic components: a citadel or defensive work; a royal quarter containing the royal residence, administrative offices and royal guards; a central urban complex containing mosques, religious schools and markets, with "special places assigned for main groups of craftsmen or traders and the homes of the principal merchant and religious bourgeoisie: a 'core' of residential quarters divided among resident foreign ethnic groups and religious minorities that enjoyed a degree of autonomy; and finally the outer quarters of 'suburbs,' where resided recent immigrants and temporary visitors to the city." (A. H. Johns, "Islam in Southeast Asia" in <u>Southeast Asian History and Historiography</u>, edited by C.D. Cowan and O. W. Wolters, 1976: pg. 310; Colin Renfrew <u>Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins</u>, 1987: pgs. 131-2.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Confucianization represents the casting of the patriarchal Chinese shadow over the Nanyang, as a the basis of tributary-trade relations. Chinese presence in Southeast Asia actually predated the arrival of the grand fleets of Admiral Cheng Ho, and the religion which the earliest Chinese carried with them was undoubtedly the syncretistic Conflation of the Three Teachings that combined Confucian ethos and ethics with Mahayana and Chan Buddhist symbols and attitudes and Taoist rituals and spiritualism. There is little doubt that this religious orientation blended quite well with the local religious orientations--some of its early deities were actually female Goddess Kwan Yin rather than the patriarchal values of Confucianism and Ancestor worship. Confucianism itself was not incompatible with indigenous systems--its official "Mandate of Heaven" and its counterpart "Rectification of Names," its ethic and cosmology provided "an inclusive cult that sacralizes the structure and leadership."</font></p> <p><font size="3">These doctrines, where they were encountered in the Southeast Asian setting, undoubtedly lent credibility to the ruling powers, as well as legitimacy to successful revolutionary parties. It also helps to explain the role of the Chinese in Southeast Asia; who could so facilely and successfully submit to the mandate of local authority of whatever shore he found himself washed up upon. Chinese traditionally practiced humility, subservience, obedience and respect for authority that generalized over to other, non-sinitic regimes under which they found themselves. Chinese influence in Southeast Asia may have had an effect of "opening up"' the hierarchical regimes of Southeast Asian city-states, not only to greater external influence, but to greater internal forces of change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Christianization dates from the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish, and follows the later paths of the Dutch, French and English. Here we find a close alliance between "merchant missionaries" and "missionary merchants," conversion by the Cross accompanied by chastisement by "whips and scorpions," and the introduction of an armaments industry and arms market into the region. Each European nation had its own interests, its own style of imperial colonization, and its own brand of Christianity to promote "in the name of God and King and Country."</font></p> <p><font size="3"> </font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3"> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></font></b></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">V</font></b></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">The "Plural-Polity Hypothesis"</font></b></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3">Primitives, Pioneers, Peasants, Pirates, Princes, Prostitutes, Proletarians, Presidents and Pariahs in Southeast Asian Geography</font></b></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#a3"><font face="Book Antiqua">The "Plural-Polity Hypothesis"</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#b3"><font face="Book Antiqua">Patterns of Migration and Settlement: Primitives, Pioneers and Peasants</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEASources.htm#d3"><font face="Book Antiqua">Pirates and Princes Prostitutes, Pariahs, Presidents and Proletariats</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#e3"><font face="Book Antiqua">Pontianak and the Political Ecology of Human Possiblity</font></a></font></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"> </font></p> <p><font size="3">Inextricably entangled with the problem of such acculturation and the incorporation of diversity, is the problem of "ethnos" as a central organizational principle of Southeast Asian civilization. Ethnicity as the study of ethnic identity and ethnogenesis as the study of ethnic origins, are intrinsic and basic dimensions of Southeast Asian studies in general. "ethnic diversity is so fundamental in Southeast Asia that it is one of the great laboratories for the study of ethnicity." (.D. E. Brown, 1976:99) It was in general reference to Southeast Asia, and in specific relation to the pervasiveness of the Overseas Chinese there, that had led J. S. Furnival to formulate his now classic theory of "radical pluralism"--the social integration of people of many cultures in a common market place and under the aegis of a common political structure.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The principle of ethnos lies at the base of Southeast Asian cultural identity. Social organization based upon such a principle of ethnos, is characteristically of a "plural" and culturally heterogenous society. Indeed, the ethnic concept of "pluralism" was coined by .J. S. Furnival in reference to Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">D. E. Brown (<u>Principles of Social Structure</u>, 1976) notes seven conditions necessary for the maintenance of radically plural societies that are typical of Southeast Asian settings: 1. Continuity of stable economic and ecological conditions (ibid., pp. 82); 2. Relative isolation of the radically plural society from other similar sized but differently structured societies (ibid., p. 85-6); Demographic ratios between ruling and rule should be maintained or change in favor of the ruling elite (ibid., p. 86); Social identities and boundaries are maintained by generalizing differences across all spheres--religious, familial, educational, occupational, economic, etc.--thus restricting inter-group acculturation and mobility (ibid., p 87); Symbiotic relations offering primary compensations for the subordinate minority and religious or ideological orientations offering deferred compensations are encouraged (ibid., p. 88); The corporate exclusiveness, superior organization, solidarity and cohesion of the ruling group should be systematically promoted (ibid., p. 88); Authority should be made sacred and legitimated by an inclusive cult offering compensation in another life or advocating withdrawal from worldly affairs. (ibid., p. 90).</font></p> <p><font size="3">The basic model of corporate social structure based upon the principle of ethnos;implied by this formal paradigm is held to characterize the developmental dynamics of typically Southeast Asian civilization; from its first prehistoric inception perhaps as long ago as several thousands of years until today. It is a model in which numerous, relatively homogenous, local groups came into increasing contact with one another, and with extra-regional peoples, and in the resulting processes of intercultural contact and transmission, there developed increasing levels of heterogeneity and socio-structural complexity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This model is held to be critically linked to the development of the economic exploitation of the entire region, and to the emergence of an increasingly complex "interregional system" based upon commerce and hinterland exploitation, in which local peoples were to become increasingly integrated and more culturally sophisticated and cosmopolitan. "To examine the role of economic exchange in this region, we must be aware of the ways in which international commerce has penetrated Southeast Asia, and come in contact with local societies and economies. My contention is that the process by which this occurred generally intensified through the centuries, that as time went by more and more parts of the region made contact with foreign trade. While there certainly were fluctuations in this development, we must consider that those societies which at onetime had taken part in this trade remained aware of it and interested in it. From this point we may begin to ask about the impact of this commercial involvement on the internal situation...(J. K. Whitmore, "The Opening of Southeast Asia: Trading Patterns Through the Centuries", in <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia</u>, edited by Karl L. Hutterer 1977:134)</font></p> <p><font size="3">"Civilization" is thus also held to be a developmental process of interregional integration, represented by increasing levels of complexity of socio-political organization, increasing economic integration and exploitation, and the increasing influence of religious ideas and orientations upon the social organization. The "political-economic" basis of Southeast Asian civilization is discussed in its structural relation to the phenomena of "plural-polity" role relations between different kinds of peoples. The political-economy of a region during a particular period cannot be simply understood in formal terms, but has a substantive bases rooted in the culture and the ecological-economic underpinnings of a region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Identity in Southeast Asia; has always been of a shifting focus, dependent upon one's geographical distance from alternative centers of influence and power. The chameleon quality of Southeast Asia Identity is even apparent in the hyphenation of "South-East" which the name implies. The chameleoness of identity is of course rooted in an orientation that emphasized the importance of context, both social and natural, in the definition of the self.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This posed a fundamental relationship between time and space, and the forms of constraint imposed upon the temporal-spatial organization of experience. Inconsistency becomes a relative measure in the eye of the beholder. The play between the forces of good and evil that are enacted upon the stage of wayang kulit are the play of forces which tear at and continually threaten to sunder the self.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The hypothesis is held that Southeast Asian identity was "spatially" ordered in a way that contrasts with the "temporal" organization of western historical recounting of biographical experience and historical events. We are left with the question of the role of cultural constraint and the extent and manner in which context must be taken into our account in our formulas for historical patterning.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Status became a matter of negotiation and manipulation of one's own place, a positioning, in relation to others, for strategic advantage. It also entailed constant competition and conflict, coalitions and cross-cutting commitments, as well as "centering" oneself in positions of greater legitimacy and power. As everywhere, power in Southeast Asia, unevenly distributed, created legitimacy, and legitimacy reinforced relations and positions of power.</font></p> <p><font size="3"> </font></p> <p align="center"><a name="a3"><b><font size="3">The "Plural-Polity Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">If we were not the first civilization to actually invent the corporate principles of capitalism, we may also not have been the first peoples to invent the practices of political-economy. Power and wealth have always been the unholiest of unions--the kind of violent force which creates coercive power that states coopt also create the prerequisite and sufficient conditions for the accumulation of wealth that we call today "capital" and that is more generally referred to as "profit". Combining the two in terms of "political economy", we can talk about human exploitation of labor and resources for the sake of private gain.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An alternative "substantivist" model of political economy, or political-ecology, is proffered in within a regional context of multiple modes of production within different patchworks of adaptation, which beget different patterns of social relation and stratification at different levels of articulation and transaction. Each role had its place, and different roles had their different "places" within a larger context in which the payoffs of conflicts always had to be measured against the costs of cooperation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Southeast Asia has been described as an ethnic mosaic, an "cauldron" and a "laboratory" of ethnicity. It has been a region where different groups have coexisted and transacted time immemorial. Identity rooted in ethnic distinction and diversity demanded that people incorporate themselves into groups in the pursuit and protection of their common interests, in competition with some groups, and in complement with others.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The ".plural-polity" hypothesis; holds that "circumscription" in terms of social-environmental relations, were systemic mechanisms in the rise and development of regional integration and of early state civilizations. Stratification occurred as asymmetrical interrelations of dominance-dependency were established between different groups of people, and, by extension, between the different "niches" which they occupied. State structures and the stratification upon which they are based are expectable outcomes of the critical self-organization and interaction of diverse inter-local areas and peoples. This development has depended upon the incorporation of broad resource basis, and organizational mechanisms that permitted the articulation of resources.</font></p> <p><font size="3">While most materialist models of state development are built from the ground up, the plural-polity hypothesis turns Marx "inside out" and focuses upon the self-other defining reference behavior of different kinds and groups of people who are tied to and defined in terms of their main ecological modes of adaptation, as these are articulated within an extra-local social-geographical context. The origin of change of a people, say from a latifundian slave class into a feudal land-bound serfdom or from a hunter-gather or slash and burn "primitive" to a sedentary-farming "peasant," is rooted not so much in the primary modes of production upon which they are held to be based, as they are in the shifting patterns of domestic and extra-domestic social relations/reproduction that arises from assymmetrical relations of dominance/dependence between people. Dominance and dependency are political relations that control change and the differential access and distribution of resources--they are inherently conflictual and social in nature. These relations are inherently unstable and shifting in character, unless they are firmly rooted to culturally defined patterns of ecological adaptation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The internal contradictions that are the source of dialectical transformations in social integration are those asymmetries of power which are rooted within systemic social-environmental inconsistencies ecological adaptation. The development of the "birdman" cult on Easter Island and the subsequent decline of Polynesia civilization upon the island was rooted in the imbalances and eventual failure of the cultural system to work out a more stable, long term relation with its island world.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is in reference to the ".plural-polity" relations in Southeast Asian political ecology that we can consider several sets of factors which underlie Southeast Asian regional integration: 1) the patterns of movement and settlement of different kinds of people; 2) the periodic rise and fall of mandala city-state kingdoms during the proto-historic phase with concentrically diffused spheres of authority and legitimacy, and within which the roles and status-identity of different kinds of people's could be reciprocally defined; the cultural-ecological and economic bases of group-identity and organization of different peoples in Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may refer to enduring, long-term structures of continuity which are rooted in the geographical contexts of Southeast Asia, which have preconditioned and underlay the political economic relations between different peoples of the region, and the resulting patterns of social integration of the region.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="b2"><b><font size="3">Patterns of Migration and Settlement</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="b2"><b><font size="3">Primitives, Pioneers and Peasants</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">"Wherever they settled, there was Vietnam, because Vietnam, as a totality and continuity of human existence, was the Vietnamese Village...(Joseph Buttinger, 1958: pp. 172-3)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The "Great Divide" may have been as much a culture geographical relationship between high and low ain Southeast Asia as much as it has been a culture historical distinction between "primitive and civilized".</font></p> <p><font size="3">Throughout Southeast Asia the distinction between the dwellers in the highlands and the lowlands; remains one of the most basic distinctions. This kind of cultural distinction may have been present even in the remotest of prehistoric times, and may in part account for the confusing complexity of the ethno-linguistic map of Southeast Asia. The highlands have been conservative and isolated. The lowlands have been a source of contact and convergence of different civilizations. Highland-lowland distinctions may have maintained themselves in much earlier times--with isolated pockets of highland groups which today seem anomalous in a cultural surroundings may have been present before the lowland groups, and may have witnessed the successive replacement of several lowland groups.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Different groups were pushed and pulled in different directions. Two separate routes of movement would also have been open--highlanders following the mountain valleys and crests, lowlanders following the flow of rivers and coastlines. The flow of culture would have tended from one direction to another along each route, except when unusual historical circumstances would have dictated a "crossing over" from one to the other. The more widespread traffic would have been lowland--cultures crossing between mountain chains would be less likely than a common origin of a lowland culture diverging into the highlands and becoming subsequently isolated. We historically privilege more complex social patterns as being more advanced developments, rather than a merely alternative forms of adaptation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Ways of life in the mountains were separate from, and in many ways complementary to, ways of life in the valleys and lowlands. The ball and chain configuration of the Southeast Asian landscape permitted each group to have its own mountaintop or lowland delta or plain or river or island. Dense tropical rainforest interiors prohibited the "across the grain" movements of peoples which may have disrupted the formation of this stable pattern. Pioneers proceeded from the direction of greatest population pressure, princes proceeded along the lines of least resistance. Within Southeast Asia, power has always flowed along the lines of least resistance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The patterns of movement that are associated with the lowland rice-cultivating peasant are very different from the patterns that the swidden horticulturalist of the highlands will adopt, although both fit into a ".wave of advance model" in which change is linked to demographic transitions based upon subsistence strategies, while the flow of culture by the transference of an elite, a prince and his court, may be rather dramatic and sudden, as suggested in an "elite-dominance" model in which at least the incoming group must be fairly highly organized. (Colin Renfrew <u>Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins</u>, 1987: pg. 131-2.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">There is also evidence in Southeast Asian demography suggesting the "system collapse model" in which the demise of a small state organization, either due to internal pressures or external forces, may lead to a migration and dispersal of once concentrated people.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we studied the ethnolinguistic map of Southeast Asia (for instance, see the superbly detailed map accompanying the book <u>Ethnic Groups of Mainlands Southeast Asia</u> by Frank Lebar, Gerald Hickey and John Musgrave, New Haven: HRAF Press, 1964) we could probably find evidence of patterning that would fit some variant of all three models. In fact, none of the models are mutually exclusive, and all can be fit within a fourth model of "imperialism" and possibly a fifth one of "colonial enslavement."</font></p> <p><font size="3">Highland population densities are much lower than lowland population densities (130 per square mile compared to densities as high as 500 per square mile). The premium in the highlands that practiced a swidden pattern of slash and burn hoe-cultivation without draft animals is for new fertile land. The premium in the lowlands is for cleared, arable and cultivable land. There is thus a tendency in a shifting cultivation pattern adapted to the highlands towards "marginalization" or movement towards the peripery, and this marginalization will be "pushed" from behind by the increasing densities and population pressures of previously used land in which different methods of cultivation must be adopted to maintain satisfactory productive yields. Movement in and among the highlands region is governed by the "law of the Mountains"--land which is not under settlement is everybody's land, and, there being more people behind than in front of him, he is prepared to keep moving onwards." (William Robert Geddes <u>Migrants of the Mountains: The Cultural Ecology of the Blue Miao (Hmong Njua) of Thailand</u>, 1976: p. 28.) Mountain people are not foot loose. Though they may be "indomitable pioneers" they are not nomads or "driven to travel by an innate compulsion. Our observation suggests that every Miao, if asked, would say that he prefers to be settled. "The people who do follow behind may have a lower range of expectations because they are usually farming land which has already been occupied. Therefore those in the vanguard tend to stay there because they have the greater incentive. Opportunity, too, is greater at the frontier. Those behind may have to adapt to longer periods of settlement, and modify their farming practices accordingly, because of lack of opportunities to better themselves."(Geddes, pg. 28-0)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Evidence suggests that the Miao Mountain people on the move long before they began cultivating opium. Opium has long been opportunistic cash-crop that fit in well with their "cultural incentives" which maximized opportunity and freedom of movement.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Movement of both mountain and lowland groups will tend in similar directions--towards the frontier--and in every case the lowland groups will tend to drive out and displace those groups of the lowlands who are practicing a shifting pattern of cultivation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is suggest that the 'wave' model in which pioneers are replaced by peasants in the opening and settlement of new frontiers, roles in which even "primitive" hunter-gatherers may become specialized "primary foragers" such as the Punan peoples of Borneo. Punan is a broad, loosely applied generic label to peoples specialized in a primary foraging adaptation at the peripheries of civilization and who have long been enmeshed in a larger regional or global network, recapitulates to some extent the pattern of state development and regional integration/stratification in Southeast Asia. The Punan are Austronesian speakers who were at one time rice cultivating farmers who subsequently returned to "commercial hunting-gathering" that is "an adaptation in which the collection of natural commodities for trade forms a major, if not primary motivating for hunting and gathering. (Hoffman, pg. 147)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Jean Kennedy provides a model for the regional development of Southeast Asia based on growing interdependencies between different specialized groups, leading to a diversification of the spectrum of Southeast Asian society. "Systems of exchange, in maintaining links between old and new forms, not only foster innovation by decreasing the risks of specialization or nonconformity; they also, by their areal extension and persistence, are the bridge that leads to growth rather than to simple substitution of the new for the old. The increase in diversity and differentiation of productive modes is conducive not only to further economic specialization, but also to the development of intra- and inter-group controls and tot he rise of central-place exchange. In such developments, perhaps, lies the origin of the ethnic mosaic of modern Southeast Asia." (Jean Kennedy, <u>Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia</u> edited by Karl Hutterer, 1977: pg. 35-6)</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are historical precedents for some of these processes in Southeast Asia. From the period of Chinese domination in North Vietnam from the first century BC, until the 14th Century AD, the expansion of the Vietnamese nation consisted of a slow and steady "march to the south" that was accompanied and punctuated by a series of wars with its Southern Champan and Khmer neighbors, a settlement pattern by pioneering peasants and frontier armies that was not too different from the American westward march.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Part of this process was surely a gradual process of fissioning and dispersal by small peasant villages into outlying hamlets that become strung out along roads and water courses. This fissioning process has been fairly well described. (For Instance, see Joseph Buttinger, Keith Taylor, and Gerald Hickey.) They must also be fit within a larger patterning of north to southward migration that was stimulated in Northern China and in part explains the construction of the Great Wall. A continuous trickle of soldier/peasant/ex-officials/refugees from the Han period, and periodic "waves" fleeing famine, poverty and persecution made their way South, putting pressure upon and ultimately displacing those who come before them.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Vietnamese advance southward replicated the Chinese model by the frontier establishment of pioneering "farmer/soldier" settlements; of exiled persons of the state who could earn their own land and freedom while defending and domesticating the frontier against hostile "barbarians." These settlements eventually became hamlets and villages that added to the hearth count and the tax revenues of the state.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This process must be seen as multi-layered in its patterns of movement. Undoubtedly the resistance and ultimate demise of the Champan state braked, channeled and finally created a vacuum for this process. The Chams themselves were ultimately part of a group of sea-invaders whose numbers could not have been too large, and yet whose cultural presence has left an indelible mark upon the local region. A similar pattern of movement can be detected in the spread of the Thai speaking peoples down into the Chao Praya plains, and the intrusion of Sino-Burman speaking peoples in the Northeast region of the Southeast Asian mainland.</font></p> <p><font size="3">All of these movements into the lowland plains and deltas have an historical time-frame. Court records document the rise and fall of royal potentates, some of whom fled to safety. Most of the time, when these movements were not the result of conflict and conquest, it can be assumed that a certain modicum of acculturation, assimilation and amalgamation between groups was always occurring. It is certain that the patterns of these movements have played an important part in dictating the resulting distributions of peoples in Southeast Asia today.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we want to look at some of the dynamics of this set of processes, the history of Vietnam provides a good example. First Chinese colonization of Vietnam apparently mostly affected the ruling elite, though evidence suggests intermarriage between Chinese men and local wives from a very early time, and the undoubted influence which indigenous Vietnamese women had upon their husbands and their offspring.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The great "stability" and conservatism of the peasant in his nucleated, inbound and impenetrable village, is held to have always outlived the vicissitudes of court intrigues and the instability of dynastic succession. Vietnamese national and cultural sentiment was rooted in the peasant, who survived, from the time of Chinese imperial domination, until even in the most recent era, the violent political forces which have always threatened to destroy them. "Cultural values and social behavioral patterns are shared because the inhabitants have a common tradition, which in this case is the Vietnamese tradition as it exists in Southern Vietnam. It does not necessarily follow that members of village society have strong social bonds or a sense of social solidarity. These qualities are found within the village but cannot be attributed to the village." (Hickey, 1964: pg. 278)</font></p> <p><font size="3">"The single form of Vietnamese settlement duplicated the closed circle of the nation. Hidden from sight behind their high hedges of bamboo, the villages stood like nucleii within their surrounding circle of rice fields." (Fitzgerald, 1972: pg. 11) Indeed, a lesson hard learned by blundering Americans was that it was the very self-sufficiency of the villages that "gave Vietnam hidden powers of resistance." It has also been ethnographically documented that the average peasant, though conservative, is supremely practical and will accept and adapt any innovation if its usefulness can be proven.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Behind the peasant and his village we see the operation of kinship and the political economic role of the family unit--one whose lineage size went from nine ascending generations in the north to five in the central regions to only three in the south. But the family was a corporate productive unit--the minimal community-- and the village was a tight aggregation of families, and the village replaced the clan or lineage organization as the principle unit of organization. "One of the dreads of poverty is that the family may disintegrate as members quit the villages to seek livelihood elsewhere. For the villager, it is extremely important that the family remain together: in addition to the comfort of having kinfolk around, immortality lies in an undying lineage."(Hickey, 1964) In Vietnam, to be exiled from the Village was a fate worse than imprisonment or even death.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Chinese commanderies were at first interested in the villages only for the purposes of hearth-counts, taxation, corvee and conscription and pacification. For the most part, they left the local culture of the Village intact. With independence after the 9 Century A. D., national and court life of the King and subsequent emperors came to intrude more upon the daily lives of the peasant. Yet the Vietnamese Village has always remained a semi-autonomous unit, and the source of much potential conflict--"The laws of the Emperor yield to the custom of the villages."</font></p> <p><font size="3">Annual festivals were held at the village ceremonial center, or Dinh, commemorating the official consecration and founding of the village by the Emperor. Before national government, dinhs referred to local gods of the earth. "In assuming temporal power, the emperors of Vietnam took on the responsibility to perform the rites of the agriculture for all the Vietnamese villages and replaced the local spirits with the spirits of national heroes and geni. Under their reign the <u>dinh</u> contained the imperial character that incorporated the village into the empire, making an elision between the ideas of "land", "emperor" and "Vietnamese" (Fitzgerald, 1972: pg. 14) The dinh was "a symbolic bond between the villages and the emperor." (Hickey, 1964: pg. 6)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The common factor in the stability of lineages was the possession of common land, or huang hoa, as well as the symbolic-ceremonial mechanisms that reinforced lineage solidarity. This links the stability of family units to the possession of property--the peasant should contribute not only to the interests of his/her own offspring, but to the common welfare of the "main stem" of the family. These institutional mechanism reinforced the human relationship to the land at the same time that they reinforced human social solidarity. Hence, we have a triadic interrelationship between the individual's own interests, land and property ownership, and the common interests of the group. The basis for potential conflict was rooted in the structure of village society, familial organization and individual peasant-villagers in possession and usufruct privileges to land, and is critical to understanding the process of southward expansion called "Vietnamization." "...Within the villages as within the nation the amount of arable land was absolutely inelastic. The population of the village remained stable, and so to accumulate wealth meant to deprive the rest of the community of land, to fatten while one's neighbor starved..." The earth took precedence in the definition of society, "for, as the source of life, it was the basis for the social contract between members of the family and members of the village..." (ibid.: pg. 13) Perhaps this explains why graft and corruption at higher levels became so rife--for it meant becoming divorced, physically, socially and psychologically, from the primary symbolic structure of one's psycho-cultural identity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">But village solidarity was never complete or immune from the competition and intrigue of neighbors. "Land breeds no land" and will property was a legitimate source of wealth, poverty meant the disinheritance of property to someone else. "...But strictly speaking, the distinction is not between richness and poverty, but between privilege and non-privilege. (Stover, 1974: pg. 80-1) States could come and go, but the Vietnamese nation, rooted in the village, would remain.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In this regard, it is worthwhile to consider several other important aspects of the general process. The colonial and dynastic history of Vietnam reveals the struggles of a rising state centralization against the divisive tendencies of a feudal social structure. Periods of good and honest administration were followed by the corrupt exploitation of degenerate offspring, setting the stage for feudal divisions and rebellion, and subsequent replacement by a new dynasty. The degree of corruption preceding rebellions is documentable in the tax records.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Also important is the degree to which the state or alternatively a feudal authority intrudes upon the productive relationship between the peasant and the land. Promulgation of state laws encouraging partible inheritance, even sexual equality in the matter, constituted an attempt by the state to prevent and break up large land-holdings which represented a source of resistance to state revenue and power.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In a strictly feudal economy, the relationship between the serf or peasant and the central authority of the state is one that is characterized by social distance and "regal-ritual" symbolism. Otherwise the direct linkages between the royalty and the land are tenuous and easily broken--it is a central economy characterized by the redistribution of levied foods for the maintenance of the court. The move towards a state society entails the bureaucratic and administrative incorporation of the peasant into the orbit of the state--the emphasis is upon the management of markets and greater administrative efficiency in extenuating the linkages between the state and the productivity of the peasant. The peasant cultivating a basic staple remains the primary source of food and economic basis of the state, whose power to extract and requisition this wealth directly from the peasant is the source of centralized authority and power.</font></p> <p><font size="3">An important motivating factor in territorial expansion of Vietnam was the chronic problem of local over population that the cultural ecology of wet-rice cultivation led to. The harvesting and planting of rice are brief but labor intensive seasons that are critical to the success of the crop--they require a reserve labor force that is not needed during the rest of the growing season. Wet rice regions support some of the highest population densities in the world, next to some urban areas, and such densities are in part due to the "agricultural involution" which wet-rice cultivation supplies--renewable or even increased fertility of the same plot over time, and relatively high yields per unit area of land.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Compounding this problem is the need for essential amino acids and balanced proteins which a dependency upon a staple carbohydrate produces. The Vietnamese countryside was characterized by a disease of protein-calorie, nitrogen-protein deficiency; referred to as <u>Boiffoisure d'Annam</u> which seems to have been endemic and which seems to have resulted in a diet based upon strategies of diversification and opportunistic consumption--a wide ranging consumption of almost any protein source available, including carrion, worms, rats, and entrails and the characteristic lack of hoarding. A main part of the Vietnamese diet is "nouc mam" or fish sauce that is high in concentrated proteins.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A country confronted with periodic bouts of overpopulation and malnutrition, almost once every generation, has only two means open to it--in the tradition bound feudal economy of Vietnam only the former one of which was seen as a viable alternative--and this is either the opening of new frontiers or imperialistic expansion and colonization of foreign territories, and the seeking out of new economic sectors in a field of "supply and service industries operated by merchants." Stover talks about these possibilities (<u>The Cultural Ecology of Chinese Civilization: Peasant and Elites in the Last of the Great Agrarian States,</u> 1974) and it is interesting to compare the more tradition bound Vietnamese peasant, and the later Vietnamese refugee in the United States, with very similar or alternative patterns by Chinese immigrants in the Nanyang or Overseas.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Le rulers of the fifteenth century instituted a policy of systematic territorial expansion against the Champan Empire in the south. A series of wars led to the virtual eradication of the Champs of the lowlands by 1471. During the following decades "masses of landless peasants" settled during the following decades southward, penetrating the Mekong delta region which was indefensible by the then declining Cambodian empire. "The Vietnamese reached Saigon shortly before 1700 and annexed the rest of the South during the following sixty years. "(Buttinger, 1958: p.47).</font></p> <p><font size="3">We may look to yet another factor involved in this process, also characteristic of both the Vietnamese and the Chinese, and that is the "oral" pattern of socialization which distinguishes the indulgences and subsequent corruption of the children of the wealthy and the privations and frequent rising of the children of the poor. Wealthy parents unconsciously consider their children's leisure and gratification as indicative of their own prestige and prosperity. The mechanism underlying "father-son" identification among the Chinese (and by inference, the Vietnamese) is similar to the mechanism of romantic identification between husband and wife. Children may be raised in very strict, paternalistic and authoritarian regimes, but be "free from restraint with regard to food."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The children of the poor must tighten their belts not because of the disciplinary compunctions of their parents, but because of adverse circumstances--they are liable to grow up under food restrictions "regardless of parental intentions." "....parents do not merely refrain from imposing restrictions on their children's feeding habits. Those who have no cause to worry about food take great pleasure in seeing their young ones eat freely. The same is true regarding the spending of money. (Hsu, 1967: pg. 278).</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can compare, as Francis Hsu does, two alternative and clearly contraposed "status personality configurations" that are the result of these factors. Poor children grow up hard working, while the children of the rich grow up "to firmly believe that whatever they desire in life will be forthcoming to them simply for the asking or the taking." (Hsu, 1967: pg. 279) The differences between these personalities are that while "the former status group tends to be submissive, careful, rational, frugal, realistic, industrious, and sincere. The personality configuration of the latter group tends to be vain, unsympathetic, licentious, impulsive, unrealistic, extravagant, carefree, insincere and to lack economic and common sense." (ibid.: pg. 280)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Combining these three sets of factors, it is useful to consider this problem in light of Melville Herskovits theory of cultural dynamics that posits that socialization and enculturative conditioning in early childhood and the integration of society and cultural sanctioning, will lead paradoxically both to adaptive 'reconditioning' and relearning and to conservativism in adulthood, and that cultural focus upon certain aspects of culture to the exclusion of others will lead to greater elaboration of those aspects, and subsequently, to "drift." (Melville J. Herskovits <u>Cultural Anthropology</u>, 1955).</font></p> <p><font size="3">It seems as if cultural forces are focused upon the dynamic relationships between people, groups, land and resources of the land, in terms of controlling, channeling or facilitating the "mobility" and "mobilization" of such resources. Such control is mandatory if a society is to achieve adaptive integration. Such mobilization may take many different patterns--we can refer to upward and downward social mobility, to migration and geographic mobility, and to mass mobilization or social movements.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="c2"><b><font size="3">Pirates and Princes</font></b></a></p> <p><font size="3">Piracy, and the attribution of piracy, has always been endemic and widespread in Southeast Asian Historiography as a political ploy and strategy. Pirates have continued to operate up until contemporaneous times, afforded haven and hiding among the many small islands and outlets of the seas. Fishermen and traders in one season may become opportunistic pirates in the next.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Piracy has always added flavor and violence to the daily rhythms of Southeast Asia. We must inquire into what piracy has represented to the region, and how it has influenced the character of Southeast Asian Civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Southeast Asia has had a long and romantic tradition of piracy. The possibilities for adventure and predation have always been there. The mentality of "primitive economics" construes raiding as merely a para-politically expedient extension of trading--why haggle over prices when one can simply take by force what one wants. Some economists have argued that the need for finance and protection on the high sees was one of the main spurs towards government and capitalistic enterprise.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Clearly, the early European trading partners who got together investors to finance long distance trading missions in Further India numbered among the earliest, and perhaps most unscrupulous capitalists western society has produced. For piracy was more than a human possibility of the variegated Southeast Asian landscape--it was a major "off-season" pursuit of peripheral fishermen and traders who regularly plied the pliant, warm seas of the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Protection from pirates, and from interior raiders and brigands who always lurked just beyond the margins of the concourses of civilization, has been perhaps a major impetus behind early state aggregation and formation. Early mandala civilizations surely served, besides a symbolic and possible mercantile function, a "police" function to protect the interests of the elite, if not the peasants or tribes of peoples who came under the umbrella of their control.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There was a perennial need to secure the lucrative linkages of trade and communication with the outside world. The same forces that could police the hinterlands could also be counted on to enforce tributary relations and to subdue other tribes and peoples. The arc of control by one potentate over other petty potentates, was the symbolic measure of the greatness of a people and a political economic measure of their prosperity and security of their resource base. In other words, petty pirates were not the only one's to practice piracy in Southeast Asia, and, despite the romanticism, they have been the only one's without the legal charter or moral mandate to reinforce their institutional prerogatives.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We must recognize that "piracy" was as much an ascriptive label applied especially by the British as a matter of policy in their pacification and colonization of Malaya and Borneo. Piracy was applied to all groups who showed resistance to British colonial procedures and who sought by brute force to gain profit from victims.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This form of piracy was not too much different from the imperialistic policies of the Europeans themselves, whether we talk about the cut-throat and exploitative policies of merchant-mariners or the policies of British administrators and their military henchmen. Such "piracy" policy later became transformed into a policy of "paramountcy." ...This was the theory that the strongest had a legal duty to keep its weaker neighbors in sufficient order to permit trade. ...The roots really lay in a concept of world order that exalted rights of property, of goods in transit or in warehouses, to be free from interference. Since rival claims to sovereign, law-making authority might interfere with rights of property, the "paramount" power assumed the right, even the "duty" to oversea questions of dynamic succession." (Alfred Rubin, <u>Piracy, Paramountcy and Protectorates</u> 1974: p. 54)</font></p> <p><font size="3">British policy became transformed into a matter of "protectionism" in which "the mark of a protected state or people...is that it cannot maintain political intercourse with foreign powers except through or by permission of the protecting state." (ibid.: pg. 66) It is not too difficult to see the implicit "White man's burden" and racial superiority behind this kind of policy.</font></p> <p><font size="3">But the prototypical form of piracy has probably had its place in Southeast Asia long before the Europeans took over. It consisted for the most part of sea-going groups, sometimes numbering in the thousands and in the hundreds of craft, who traveled and marauded ships, coastal settlements, and even raids far inland up rivers. This was a cultural adaptation, and fishing and trading were undoubtedly a part of the complex. Families lived on boats, headed by a male elder and several sons or in-laws. Such fleets could hide among the many islets and bays, or escape inland among the many inlets and deltaic tributaries with which they were familiar. Groups that were displaced from their settlements may become "wandering pirates"--sort of "sea gypsies."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The principle item of trade of such pirates were slaves, many of whom were inducted into the profession of piracy, and most of whom would be resold in another place on the slave market. They might capture slaves on one shore, and sell them on the opposite shore, or take them in the north and sell them in the south.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Princes kept harems of slaves, concubines--some of whom were recorded to have escaped from a Malay prince to seek safety among the Chinese of Singapore after having been tortured. Chinese themselves have long been pirates on the Nanyang--capturing slaves from the coasts of Fukien province, attacking a Spanish settlement at Manila in 1570 under the leadership of Limahon (Charles Robequain <u>Malaya, Indonesia, Borneo and the Philippines: A Geographical, Economic and Political description of Malaya, the East Indies and the Philippines</u>.London: Longman, Green and Co., Ltd., 1958) and even plundering ships in Singapore harbour in the 19th century. Malay pirates were more numerous. They attacked as far as the Gulf of Tonkin in the 8th Century, using poison arrows, throwing darts and slings.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Piracy was no small part of the prosperity of the Indianized states of Southeast Asia, relying as much on control of commerce as upon the exploitation of a sedentary agricultural substratum. We must consider piracy to have been an acceptable form of "primitive economics" in which relations of trading could easily alternate into raiding.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In considering the Mandala states, we must look at the limitations of power yielded by princes who were as much "big men" of prowess as they were "chiefs" whose authority was legitimated by religion. In this we can see certain characteristic patterns that have been identified by Wolters as widely represented features of many parts of early Southeast Asia. Comparative isolation of groups with strong local attachments, cognatic kinship, an indifference towards lineage descent, "and a preoccupation with the present that came from the need to identify in one's own generation those with abnormal spiritual qualities...(1982: pg. 4-9).</font></p> <p><font size="3">These characteristics combined to promote a "big Man" orientation upon "men of prowess" bringing with it the "possibility of mobilizing extended kinship ties within and outside the settlement or network of settlements." This orientation promoted characteristic regional attitudes towards common expectations for achievement in public life, a means of gaining prestige. "...Public life would also be the stage for open competition for pre-eminence. Leaders and followers alike needed to validate their status by continuous achievement, and achievement often involved adventures into neighboring settlement areas..." Leaders regularly bestowed gifts and titles on those of merit. Many Southeast Asian languages came to reflect the differences between the aristocratic and the common people in marked dialectical forms. "Finally, and very important in the extension of communications between networks of settlements, leaders in neighboring areas would recognize the higher spiritual status of a man of outstanding prowess and seek to regularize their relations with him by means of alliances that acknowledged the inequality of the parties. In this way more distant areas would be brought into a closer relationship with one another." (Wolters, 1982: pgs. 4-9)</font></p> <p><font size="3">These overarching themata of proto-historical Southeast Asian civilization resulted in a map of concentrically radiating, overlapping "mandalas" or "circles of kings" whose power would wax and wan like so many ripples upon a pond. Power, spiritually sanctioned, radiated in concentric rings of influence and prestige. The prehistoric map of Southeast Asia evolved from a complicated network of many small settlements into a patchwork of overlapping "spheres of power." Boundaries existed only in the name and influence of the ruler and in the sense of security of the subjects, as "each ruler was acclaimed in his own country as one who had unique claim to "universal" sovereignty. "...In each of these <u>mandalas</u>, one king, identified with divine and "universal" authority, claimed personal hegemony over the other rulers in his <u>mandala</u> who were in theory his obedient allies and vassals..."(Wolters, 1982: pgs. 16-17)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Mandalas were inherently unstable--expanding and contracting in influence in "concertina-like fashion." Chronic warfare or acculturative influence failed to define a stable structural center, while many princes competed for the title of ultimate sovereignty. "The mandala perimeters continued to replicate court situations at the center. Centers of spiritual authority and political power shifted endlessly."(Wolters, 1982: pg. 17).</font></p> <p><font size="3">Cultural diversity and regional variation led to a consistent pattern of "localization" or stylizaion of exogneous acculturative forms in endogenous meanings--foreign symbols were adapted to local contexts and needs. "Foreign materials had to be localized in different ways "before they could fit into various local complexes of religious, social and political systems and belong to new cultural "wholes." Only when this had happened would the fragments make sense in their new ambience, the same ambiences which allowed the rulers and their subjects to believe that their centres were unique." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 52).</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Southeast Asian cross-roads created a shared "outward" and open orientation toward a "single ocean." "The trading connections linked the opposite ends of maritime Asia resemble links in a chain which would join together again even if one link were temporarily broken..."(Wolters, 1982: pg. 39) The single ocean was "a vast zone of neutral water" that all states sought to mutually protect and exploit to maintain the freedom of the seas. It is not surprising then that one of the most important functions of Southeast Asian states was the control of piracy that flourished only upon the peripheries and interstices of Southeast Asian civilization. "The single ocean is a significant fact of Southeast Asian historical geography...." (Wolters, 1982: pg. 40.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">We must consider briefly the "political ecology" of the symbol as this has become representative of Southeast Asian civilization. The type of proto-historic state characteristic of Southeast Asia can be classified as a "regal-ritual" city-state in which central power and wealth was relatively limited and the monopoly of power tended to be decentralized across a feudal region of "subsidiary areas and regents," kinsmen of the ruler, royal appointees with local power bases, or "autonomous self-made magnates" Distances become an important function in the amount of autonomy of local rule and power may be reduplicated in kind or form at many levels throughout the state. The "rural/urban" dichotomy is not a qualitative difference but more quantitative in terms of "simply <u>more </u>wealthy, prestigious and powerful." The political-religious roles of the urban residents provides a model of emulation by the countryside and is the only means of solidarity in an otherwise "weakly cohesive society". Leaders may come and go, but there must always be a contender. Corporate Ideological links survive ties of actual power to be redefined in contexts of new people but the same tradition. The chief inhabitants of the city are the members or associates, artisans, bureaucrats, retainer so the prince and his court. The court consists of family and kin, officials, advisors, servants, concubines and "others whose presence is solely a reflection of the ruler and his court." (Fox, 1977)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Such centers are parasitic consumers--economically dependent upon exploitation and taxation of the surrounding areas. A sumptuous court life provides a model, a style of life, embodied by a ceremonial complex reinforcing the status hierarchy. "The life-style is defined by the calendrical round of state rituals, kingly ceremonies, coronations, funerals, preparations for war, royal feasts, and divine sacrifices, rather than by individualism and secularism...."(ibid.: pg. 54)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Symbolically, the function of the center is that of paramountcy over the surrounding area. Centralization depends heavily upon a shared ideology and emulation of the ruler's prestige. There exists ideological continuity between center and periphery and definition of symbolic forms and elements in the center will "influence the nature of settlement throughout the society" and will be approximated more-or-less throughout. Design motifs, patterns of behavior, speech and symbols will be duplicated and become the basis of status determination at every level of the society. "Emulation of the attributes of the capital cities can continue down to the simplest village and homestead. In ancient Siam, for example, the village headman was lord of the village in a manner similar to the King who was lord of the state.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It follows that the most important function of the regal-ritual center and the court is to preserve, protect and reinforce its symbolic and ideological legitimacy. These states are referred to as "theater states" or "segmentary states" rather than merely "feudal" or "tribal." Segmentary states widely disperse power throughout various sub-units of organization--they rely heavily upon lineage or kin-based or even pseudo-familial paternalism for assuring solidarity. They are "theatre" states because they highlight the symbolic function of legitimation by the ruler and his household, a function replicated through the levels of society, in lieu of real political cohesiveness. "...Even if, in South-East Asia, the old dynasty is deposed, the new ruler who sits in the regal-ritual capital quickly becomes a hitherto unknown reincarnation of the divine. The symbolic aspects of rule thus continue even though the actual leadership of the state society changes. In state societies where centralized power is limited, the ideology of kinship or the divine nature of rule stabilizes the framework of political organization even if its personnel undergoes frequent changes through revolt and usurpation...(Fox, 1977: pg. 21-22)</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="d3"><b><font size="3">Prostitutes, Pariahs, Presidents and Proletariats</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">It is in this context that we can infer an historical phase in the development of the "administrative mercantile" city-state in Southeast Asia, one that largely accompanied the extension of trading empires and the need for the protection and regulation of such commercial activity. In this we can consider the affect of the intrusion of a global market oriented political economy which tended to everywhere upset the earlier, domestic based division of labor upon which society was founded. The tendency was to emphasize the basic difference between the countryside and the urban center. In the third world, at least, it has resulted in the growth of "primate cities" characterized by huge slums of displaced proletarians.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is in regard to these subsequent phases of the regional integration of Southeast Asian civilization that we can make reference to the rise into preeminence of four categories of people whose status-role identity were defined by the new relations established. These four types of people are prostitutes, pariahs, proletariats and presidents.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Prostitution.</b> The status of women in Southeast Asia has everywhere been noted to be relatively high and equal to that of men, at least in traditional definitions. They are active agents and traders in many local markets, virtually monopolizing some sectors of commerce. One common consequence of political-economic intrusion has been the de emphasis and denigration of the domestic mode of production and hence the relegation of the role of women and their participation in the market economy to a "second class position." This is perhaps best represented in Southeast Asia by the rise of the widespread profession of "G.I./tourist prostitution" that has accompanied the poverty of underdevelopment. This form of prostitution was greatest in Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Though .prostitution has had a long history, and though all of these categories have had some precedence time immemorial in Southeast Asia, we must consider the economic place that this particular "profession" has had in a modern setting as a kind of marginal "service" economy and a form of "sexploitation" that has accompanied the lack of sexual repression and alienation upon which developmental organization and socialization has in part depended, and political economic asymmetries that result in such forms of exploitation.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Pariahs.</b> Secondly, the role of pariahs in Southeast Asia is also been, in the colonial and post-colonial eras, a vital one in the political economic organization and mobilization of the entire region. In this Chinese merchant middlemen, the "Asian Jewry" have figured prominently. They are necessary and efficient intermediaries in the long-distance networks that have established the regional integration. Their position as resident aliens is inherently ambiguous and ambivalent in society--often charged with exclusive, usurious and exploitative practices resulting from their superior social organization and money-handling skills, they have also been some of the main agents in the innovation, pioneering and development of Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The British not only used them as a coolie labor force and a merchant-middleman sector, but also as bureaucratic officials who interceded from them in the daily business of colonial administration. Pariah groups thus frequently serve the function in complex societies as one of "intermediary" between potentially hostile and asymmetric social groups, and thus as the convenient "scapegoats" for conflict and targeted aggression by both the elite and the masses.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Brian Foster writes of such an important intermediary role, in which the breakdown of "minority trading mechanisms provide large-scale, inter-group conflict which, in extreme cases, can take the form of genocide. Persecution of minorities who are active in commerce has been known for centuries." Such pariah groups are in an inherently, structurally insecure position. They are symbolic targets for both the machinations of the elite who wish to focus blame upon some convenient out-group, and for the hatred, feelings of failure and insecurity of the masses that is born in the frustration of their own failings, false promises and exploitation. They come to embody, culturally and structurally, the contradictions and conflicts inherent in the integration of the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Political economic asymmetries can become the source of "exchange-generated conflict;" characterized by a mode of "negative solidarity" and by the focal point of strategic relations/transactions negotiated in the market place.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In complex societies, trading specialists emerge who, along with political authorities and property owners, become major foci of conflictual relations, by which compensating effects of other cross-cutting conflicts may be diffused and their relative forces diffused. (B. L. Foster, 1978:pp.10)</font></p> <p><font size="3">There occurs special distancing mechanisms to regulate such conflict--jural mechanisms or ritual proscription regulating and limiting the range of interaction, displacement of conflict upon a third pariah party, and by spatial/social distancing between the parties of the negotiation who come together only in the marketplace. Conflictual relations become focused on these trading out-groups, diminishing other possible conflict and further insulating different communal groups from maintaining potentially conflictual relations between one another. It also "helps relieve the trader from the expectations of fair dealing and generosity that the peasants have among themselves. This change of expectations, as does the market place, constitutes a mechanism for displacement of the exchange-generated conflict by focusing some of the tension on inter-ethnic group relations rather than on the parties to an individual transaction. Such displacement helps explain the remarkable hostility often encountered by minority trading groups. It also helps explain why traders who are the object of such hostility are not readily replaced by traders from the majority group: the latter are destroyed by the conflict inherent in their commercial activities or by the uneconomic behavior required of them if they are to avoid conflict." (Foster, 1978:pp. 14)</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Proletarians</b>. Proletarians can best and most simply be described as "landless peasants" who are destined to become the slum-dwelling poor of Southeast Asia's primate cities. They are, most important, a readily exploitable and cheap source of labor, and resources. Witness the market in some countries for the selling of donor organs. They have high rates of crime, substance abuse, birth, infant mortality, malnutrition, and debt, and low rates of longevity, employment, literacy, education and opportunity. They can be a volatile source of instability and fodder for cannons and machine guns. They are the most despised people on earth, and no one want's to be a part of them--they are the untouchable symbols of the failings of our system.</font></p> <p><font size="3"><b>Presidents</b> are, I maintain, another distinctive feature of the modern political economic order. They too are important national and cultural symbols--they too are inherently ambivalent and insecure. They are rational symbols of the rational, administrative order of the secular state too concerned with balancing budgets and taxes to be concerned with moral-religious precepts. They are thus supremely middle class, suburban symbols whose only religion is the false consciousness of a New Nationalism. They stand for democracy, republicanism, equality, as well as for corruption, violence and stratification. Their administrations come and go faster than the nations they control. They say a lot and accomplish little. Independent or puppets, they are all enmeshed inescapably in a web of political economic entanglements.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="e3"><b><font size="3">Pontianak and the Political Ecology of Human Possiblity</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Pontianak is a Malay story about a beautiful woman who comes out at night at lonely places. Usually she will say she is in trouble so men, and sometimes women will help her. Once she has them in her clutches she changes suddenly into an ugly monstrous woman and kills her victims by sucking their blood, if they do not die by fright. But if one manages to hammer a nail into the nape of her neck, then she will forever remain a beautiful woman, and never become a Pontianak any more.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One time, a young man managed to put a nail into the back of her neck, and they married and had a beautiful daughter. Many years passed and the daughter grew up. One day the daughter was combing her mother's hair, and said "Mother, there is something in the back of your neck". Her mother told her to pull it out, and as soon as she pulled it out, that night following she transformed back into a Pontianak. She did not hurt her husband or her daughter, but ran off into the forest and was never seen again.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The political economy of a people cannot be merely described in terms of "modes of production" and social relations of production. The style of life a people pursue, and the values and interests with which they pursue it, is critically rooted in and constrained by a wider social context in which the values, interests and styles of life of others must be taken into account in formulas and strategies for success. In other words, the political economy by which a broad group or nation of peoples achieve social integration is accomplished by cultural means. The adaptability of Chinese immigrant society in Southeast Asia owes its success as much to the organizational ethos and practical strategies open to a group because of its shared cultural values and orientations, as it does to any notions of "innate" Chinese cunning or business acumen. As sojourning merchant middlemen with extraordinary skills in merciless handling money and in business organization, the Chinese have been able to out compete practically any group they have come into relation with. In a similar vein we can speak of the cultural political economy of the Miao speaking peoples who have a considerable interest in the production of poppies in the highlands of Northern Southeast Asia. The world it seems, must always be short of opium, and the Hmong must understand this very well.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Identity in the world becomes established as a function of our role-relations and place occupied within the world. Within each identity there is possibility for alternation and symbolic subjectivation of meaning that relates the biography of personal experience to the larger streams of social and political history. There is an inherent political-ecological relativity about such identity and of human possibility--we are what we are in relation to others who are what they are in relationship to ourselves. This relationship is dynamic and is always defined in a context that has a sense of space and time, of a geographical history about it. We are actors cast upon a stage not of our own choosing, and however long or short our entrances or exits, we may have many parts to play.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3"> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></font></b></p> <p align="center"><a name="eleven"><b><font size="3">Chapter VI</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="eleven"><b><font size="3">The "Circular Center Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="eleven"><b><font size="3">Symbolic Ecology in Southeast Asian Civilization</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#a4"><font face="Book Antiqua">Thanatophidia and Symbolic Ecology</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#b4"><font face="Book Antiqua">Vietnamese Nature Mythoi</font></a></font></p> <p align="center"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#c4"><font face="Book Antiqua" size="3">Balinese Character and Culture</font></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#d4"><font face="Book Antiqua">Animism and Syncretism</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#e4"><font face="Book Antiqua">The "Circular-Center Hypothesis"</font></a></font></p> <p align="center"> </p> <p><font size="3">Some symbolisms have such an enduring character that they transcend the vicissitudes of time and cultural change. Southeast Asian culture and civilization has always remained closely tied to its natural setting and environment, and this close, often dangerous and unpredictable relationship, is deeply embedded in the cultural symbolizations and symbolic themes recurrent throughout the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The conventional functionalist, materialist and ecological models of cultural-environmental adaptations are contraposed to a "symbolic" model that claims that cultures will draw directly from the symbolism in its environment and utilize these in social institutions, practices and relations. The symbolic structure of its socio-cultural organization will thus be highly "congruent" with its local and trans-local settings. This congruence will extend to the regional character of its civilization in certain basic forms. An animistic Southeast Asian "spirit complex" that is rooted in a basic relationship to nature is held to be a common defining feature of Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A culture has a more direct relationship with nature than most cultural materialists and ecologists would want to admit. People draw readily and directly from nature's cornucopia the symbolisms which they employ in the organization and mobilization of their cultural resources. Totemic relationships did not end or become merely submerged beneath the rise of states. We do not need to speculate upon the protein requirements of a tropical forest or the ecology of rice to understand the impact which the introduction of the cultivation of rice had upon Southeast Asian civilization--rice became a principle means, as well as metaphor, for health and success. We do not need to observe evidence of ancient irrigation works to understand that the harnessing of rivers that brought life and death to peoples was a major source of symbolisms about death, fertility and the renewal of life.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This symbolisms and their "function" did not necessarily take effect only after the "techno-environmental foundations of irrigation" had already been laid--humans had thought about, realized and experienced the potentialities of the rivers long before they figured out how to go about building dikes and irrigation canals. If anything, such symbolisms probably formed the necessary mental connections that paved the way for such invention. The invention of an artificial civilization, if anything, tended to sever the direct human symbolic connection with its natural world. In devising technologies to overcome the forces and harness the power of nature, we began creating mythologies in which this natural connection became reversed and subdued by a human embodied "supernatural" force.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Early Southeast Asian statecraft may always relied upon the promotion of the sacred legitimacy of certain nature symbols as totems of state authority and power. The dragon, the phoenix, the Naga, the crocodile, were all recurrent totemic symbols of Southeast Asian peoples.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A functionalist perspective would maintain such symbols serve a secondary legitimating institutions which serve to provide universal omnipotence and legitimacy, and which serve to nihilate "marginal" episodes or alternative sources which threaten the legitimacy of the "center." A materialist orientation would maintain that these mechanisms are largely epiphenomenal and exist only as secondary feedback mechanisms rather than as "primary determinants" of social change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A socio-structural perspective rooted in Durkheim holds such symbols as the sacred embodiment of the social order. While all of these functions of symbolism are undoubtedly important, the more direct socio-ecological function of symbolisms in mediating the relationship of people to their natural environment must be entertained.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Briefly, it can be said that symbolisms directly mediate the boundary between people and the social group, and their relationship with the natural world. Symbolisms serve to "locate," "mobilize" and "transform" people within natural landscapes. Symbols will also locate nature and the social body or state within the body. Symbols serve to express and to map the relations between the body and the primarily social, humanized world of nature, and then between the world and the cosmos.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In Southeast Asia, these symbols are primarily spatial and a-temporal in orientation. It is this same boundary-mediating mechanism which defines the ecological relationship, the relative equilibrium or imbalance of people within their world, that also defines human social relationship and identity with one another, and which thus serves to bridge the important gap between natural and historical patterns of adaptation and change.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Symbols are both religious and aesthetic, and have been a vital agency in the mobilization and organization of human actions and in providing direction for the development of human civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Ethnographic evidence supports the belief that for the most part "primitive" man was both more environmentally aware as well as aesthetically sensitive to its natural environment than modern humankind, and that they had long ago worked out complex cycles and strategies that were rooted in the natural rhythms of their environmental settings. They knew which plants to eat, and which to avoid, which plants could cure and which could kill. They knew when to burn off the forest underbrush, and where to clear the forest for their new settlements. They knew where they were in the forest, and which direction they wanted to go in. They had a time for peace and a time for war, and even instituted complex ritual and symbolic cycles to help signal and regulate the management of the environment.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is in regard to the "symbolic ecology" of human adaptation in its natural world that various aspects of Southeast Asian civilization will be considered: the role of basic nature symbolism in Southeast Asian cultures and in Southeast Asian statecraft; the transformative and frequently destructive effect of Western Acculturation in the symbolic alienation and redefinition of the basic social-environmental relationship that had been long worked out in Southeast Asian civilization; the rise of revitalization movements in response to Western contact; the symbolic ecological contradictions that are inherent to predominant nation-building policies of development in the modernization of Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Finally, "basic linkages" between symbols and the environment is hypothesized, rooted in "human nature" which entails that similar symbolic forms and functions will be independently adopted by historically unrelated peoples, and that historical relationship will tend towards the convergence of such shared symbolism. Furthermore, "basic differences" that are symbolically defined and ecologically rooted will tend to be positioned between peoples in a predictable and cross-culturally consistent fashion, and will lead to a predictable pattern of status-role identification and boundary-maintenance between peoples.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="a4"><b><font size="3">Thanatophidia and Symbolic Ecology</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Humankind everywhere has had a fascination with snakes. Primates are claimed to have an instinctive fear of snakes, and some have specific calls for snakes. Human fear and horror towards snakes is certainly widespread, if not universal, although many mythological traditions exist that claim great snakes as benefactors, as creators of the land, and as symbols of good and fertility.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The myth of the Serpent in the Garden of Eden; is certain very ancient and probably has its origin in the Gilgamesh era during early Mesopotamian and Sea of Sunrise civilization. Snake skeletons were found buried in pottery jars with pearls, and sometimes other precious stones, in Dilmun. Bibby, in his <u>Looking For Dilmun </u>(1970), describes the discovery of pots at the level contemporaneous with the temple circa 2000 B. C., in which they had found, "coiled up at the bottom, the skeletons of snakes." "...In over half the bowls there was found in addition, loose among the coiled snake-bones, a single bead, in most cases a tiny turquoise....Beyond a doubt we have here clear proof that the legend of Gilgamesh was still a living and integral part of the religion of Bahrain at the time when the palac was built and inhabited. We have since found many more of these snake-burials, beneath the floors of other rooms, and their total must be well up into the forties." (Bibby,1970: pg. 164-5).</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is perhaps fitting in this regard that the beautiful queen Cleopatra should end her life by being bitten in the breast by an adder. The latter Christian mythology that associates the snake with both wisdom, death, the devil and evil, is clearly an elaboration rooted in the earlier Gilgamesh epic, which in turn was probably based upon every earlier myths.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can find mythology, folklore, superstition, magic and religious ritual associated with the snake in practically every major region on earth. In Europe there were Cretan and Danish snake goddesses, Medusa of Greek mythology, the Caduceus, the medieval Danish tradition of burying an adder beneath the threshold to keep out evil spirits. The European style Dragon is clearly a snake-like creature who hoards treasure and steals young maidens. In Indigenous North America the Indians of the Pueblos had a rattlesnake cult-ritual in which costumed men danced and carried the rattle snake that was captured, and latter returned, to the wild. Similar snake rituals have been reported in Meso-America and in South America.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In contemporary North America there is a snake handling cult of Southern White Anabaptists who believe that the handling of venomous, feral snakes is a gift from God, and who also practice trancing, eating of fire, drinking of strychnine. In the American Southwest there are annual rattlesnake roundups where rattlesnake dens are raided, the snakes killed and dressed and sold for meat, and the skins, heads and tails are also sold as souveneirs. From the crowd that these roundups draw, one must wonder about the symbolic character of the great interest and energy people put into this activity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In India, the snake has a different mythological tradition. A Great python is held to have created the land, and is held as a great benefactor. The snake is therefore more positively associated with fertility and annual renewal than in the more Occidental tradition. The lingum itself an eti-phallic symbol, is associated with the raised head of the hooded cobra. It is no wonder that a resident cobra is considered a sign of good luck for an Indian village, that snake charmers abound and form their own caste in India. In Sri Lanka the albino cobra is considered a sacred creature and is the object of many pilgrimages.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In East Asia, among other things, the snake is considered as an aphrodisiac and thus as a source of renewable fertility. In Okinawa, once rife with the habu snake until the introduction of the mongoose, it is still possible to buy saki fermented with snakes as an aphrodisiac and as a rejuvenator of life.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is in Southeast Asia that we might expect, and find, well developed mythology and cultural practices associated with the snake, for snake fauna in this region is perhaps some of the most diverse, representing most of the major genera and all of the forms of venomous snakes, and in which human contact and consociation with the snake is the closest. It is the region with by far the highest number of annual snakebite deaths in the world. And this close association between humans and snakes can be taken as a direct measure of the extent to which nature intrudes upon and surrounds human life and cultural adaptation in the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Thus the overseas Chinese and Thai people of Bangkok regularly eat snake flesh and drink snake blood, sometimes sucking it directly from the snake, as a source of strength and sexual potency. This market has been so thriving that locally it is serving to upset the ecological balance of the snake fauna--leading to an increase in rats, the main prey package of snakes, and to the lose of grain.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In Burma, tribal women capture a king cobra and train it as a dancing partner. During their dance they will kiss the raised snout of the cobra, before releasing it back into the wild. King Cobras, natural "culture fliers" will during courtship in the wild do a kind of mating dance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The snake-temple in Penang, Malaysia, is world renowned for it's lithe green tree adders that are very venomous. The snakes were said to have come on their own to the temple after it was constructed, and this was considered to be a propitious sign. The number of snakes have dwindled there over the years, and now the temple is not as popular a tourist attraction as it once was. Presumably, the snakes have stopped coming on their own to the temple, and the local care-taker/photographer must go out and find fresh snakes.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The ".i.Thanatophidia hypothesis;" holds that the symbolic and ecological relationship between humankind and snakes, as well as other natural forms, are interconnected. It is this common relationship which lies at the core of so many common themes of mythology, religion and folklore, and which can be counted as thematic convergences about a central symbolic complex that does not have to be explained in historical terms of diffusion or common origin. We might refer the "Thanatophidia hypothesis" as a concept of the "symbolic unity" of human experience and culture that is rooted in common thematic relationships with the natural environment. While certain specific thematic motifs, such as the story of Gilgamesh, are likely candidates for diffusion and elaboration, symbolic complexes as a whole that are thematically recurrent do not need to be explained in terms of a common historical connection, but can be used instead as a basis for cross-cultural comparison.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Snakes and serpents as symbols are clearly common, even pan-human motifs. As such, the symbolic associations are inherently ambivalent and ambiguous--they may simultaneously be symbols of death, fear, evil as well as of fertility, rebirth, strength, and benevolence. A part of the "Thanatophidia hypothesis" is that such symbolisms and their thematic complexes are what might be called "marginal symbols" which have the common thematic characteristics of dealing with marginal experiences--death, alienation, asymmetry and separation, of being "universalistic" and "cosmological" in orientation in providing a sense of unity of experience and in serving to "orient" or locate such experience in space and time, they are "organic" in being based upon "natural" forms, and of being dialectically synthetic and "syncretic" We may only speculate upon the connections of such symbolism in the depths of the human psyche. They are "basic" and prototypical and thus might be counted as "collective archetypes" of the pan-human symbolization of experience.</font></p> <p><font size="3">As marginal symbols, they serve a totemic function reinforcing the normal boundaries of cognitive and normative experience that are rooted in human social relations and human relations with the environment. They serve to nihilate and to reincorporate the marginal experience, and shape and modify our expectations of such experiences. Because of their inherent ambivalence, they serve to embody and represent the very existential contradictions of the historicity of our constructions of reality, and thus by their reification serve to cover over the "facticity" and "objectivity" of our constructions.</font></p> <p><font size="3">As .i.marginal symbols;, they can be thought of also as "boundary" symbols which define and demarcate the normal bounds of experience from the marginal, and which help to shape and give substance to our expectations of experience. It is small wonder that they come to express basic divisions such as male and female, life and death, good and evil, and that they often serve as emblematic representations of group identity.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Their functional capacity and versatility is derived from several aspects of their design: their basicness and rootedness to natural motifs and themas; their capacity for the "incorporation of contradiction" and the resolution of opposites by embodying as a single, substantively real referent those dialectical differences which otherwise threaten or undermine the identity and unity of experience; their symbolic structure in which open-ended ".i.symbolic chains" and "complexes;" are built up on the basis of loose associations; their transferability and flexibility in being adapted to a range of alternative experiences and reinterpreted to fit changing circumstances; and their capacity for accreting new symbolic forms and associations, or for accreting to other symbolisms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The question to be answered is the conservatism of such symbolisms, their potential for being carried and diffused across space in some basic form, and how we might readily identify an old from a new form, or a primitive versus a derived form or an original versus borrowed form. Certainly, the connection of the snake with the Gilgamesh epic underlying western mythology and religious cosmology is a very old one, but one which probably would not have been guessed had not the tablets been discovered in which the epics had been inscribed. There seems to be no straightforward way of showing a common thematic origin to stories which have a similar thematic strucure or which employ similar forms of symbolisms.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Finally, it must be emphasized that thematic aspects of design can be borrowed as "ideas" as readily as the actual symbolic elements themselves as the "forms" in which the ideas take shape. Thematic design expresses recurrent patterns of ordered relation between elements that has some form of intentional, symbolic significance that is beyond the significances of the individual components. It is possible that themes may remain pretty much the same, while the elements that compose the design have been replaced.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="b4"><b><font size="3">Vietnamese Nature Mythoi</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">In Vietnamese Mythology, the snake, the crocodile, and the dragon are all closely associated symbolisms which seem to have an inherently ambivalent nature. They are both creatures of the land and the sea, and are thus both symbolic of death and life, male and female, yin and yang. While the dragon is clearly a patriarchal symbol of Kingship and authority, in Vietnamese mythology Kings and men regularly transformed into snakes that dove into the sea.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In Feng Shui, of geomancy, the Mountains are the backs of dragons and the streams the concourses of their movement. Supernatural power is held to originate in the highlands of Tibet and flow through "dragon's veins" along the mountain ranges, branching out and carrying spiritual energy to all corners of the earth. This energy of the earth collects in certain propitious, and inherently dangerous, locations.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In Vietnamese folklore, "Long do" or "Dragon's belly" is the geographical and spiritual center of the Vietnamese realm, and it represented the political center of gravity and stability--in the location of Hanoi--and this position was elaborated by the emperors in a special spirit cult. "Coiled Dragon" was the god of the earth that the Vietnamese Kings who sought to maintain control over the heartland worshiped, and that subsequently became the national symbol of the Vietnamese.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It must be understood that the Dragon-Man-Snake motif is clearly associated with the water, a female element. "In mythology snakes are the Water King's children and announce floods and deluges to come" and are associated with magical amulets and talismans. Lac Long Quan, the dragon king and original father of the Vietnamese, made his home in the sea. The renewed fertility of the sea is unsurprisingly associated with female fertility--and with the power of both giving and taking life.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Thus water symbolism associated with snakes are, in this tradition, symbolisms of darkness and death as well as rebirth. The "water kingdom" is an important netherworld in Vietnamese mythology associated with fertility, death and the female-principle of am, or darkness. In popular folklore, it is often confused with Hell. The way to the underworld and to hell is often through the Water Kingdom--the great womb of Vietnamese mythology from which many of its culture heroes issue with their mandate to rule. In Vietnamese mythology, the tortoise and the lotus are two symbols that are clearly associated with the female, fertility and the water element. The tortoise is a symbol of longevity and perfection that is "usually found with a coral branch in its mouth and a crane on its back." The crane usually has a lotus in its mouth--a Buddhist symbolism of the female principle--the "most popular flower in Vietnam" standing for femininity, sexuality and grace.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The lotus was associated with the floresence of Buddhism in Vietnam, that was linked to the art of rain-making, and Buddha spirit cults of "clouds, rain, thunder and lightening" as well as the worship of trees and aquatic powers. Buddhism became a widespread religion among the common Vietnamese as "a new method of controlling the vagaries of nature in the interests of agriculture"</font></p> <p><font size="3">The moon is another female symbol associated with beauty and fertility, and that is understandably implicated in the calendrical rites associated with the lunar calendar that is so important in the timing of seasons, tides and fishing. (Taylor, 1983:p. 83) Many village temples were founded Buddhist spirits of agricultural fertility.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Water is also associated with death. For Vietnamese, drowning is a particular horrible form of death, associated with errant and wandering ghosts. There are a host of water spirits possessing ambivalent forms of power--"some are inherently wicked, and some occasionally wicked, and others capricious or benevolent."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The Water Goddess, or Ba Thuy is associated with "Noi" or "an irresistible urge to plunge one's face into water." It is not surprising that many legendary culture heros and fallen kings killed themselves by drowning. The T'rung Sisters, or Rain maidens, drown themselves in the Hat-Giang River after their defeat. Lady Trieu rode her elephant into the sea. The Thuch family overthrew the last king of the old dynasty who threw himself into a well, and Thuc Phan himself, subsequently defeated by the Chinese, "walked into the ocean" while his son also jumped into a well. The last of the Tran rulers, Buy Khoach, jumped into the sea from a boat that took him to China; etc." (Buttinger, 1959:p.113) Many Vietnamese culture heros and heroines alike returned to the watery realm in apotheosis, from which their mandate originally derived.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The "Man-Dragon-Mountain-Water" thematic motif provides evidence of "symbol chains" that are found on the early Dong S'ong bronze drums. Apparently these drums were power and status symbols of aboriginal chiefs among the Yueh tribes throughout Southern China--their distribution covered an area embracing many of the sub-cultures of the region, and their symbolic function was closely associated with government, rain-making, fertility rituals, decision-making, justice and war. Frog motifs and a "water-chain" are associated with water animals, the dragon, frogs and fish, and bronze boats. Another motif is that of the ship of the dead, associated with drowning, drowning sacrifices and female shamans.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Finally, it is worthwhile to consider the extent to which nature symbolisms are found in the poetry and the Vietnamese language. Early erotic poetry contain a great many references to nature. The character of the Vietnamese is closely connected to an almost romantic love of nature. The Vietnamese language lends itself, in its tonality and homophonous resonances, to double punning and word play, as well as to a musical quality of speech which can frequently, when the mood is right, erupt into melodious singing.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="c4"><b><font size="3">Balinese Character and Culture</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Bateson described the Balinese as being in a "steady state" in which equilibrium and the balance of the middle ground is valued over extremes. It is said that the Balinese desire a continuing "plateau" of intensity in interactions than the attainment of climactic junctures. This lack of climax is notable in its music, in its art, in trance, in quarrels. Competition and direct conflict are thus avoided, and, under these circumstances, hierarchy is rigid.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Bateson notes several points regarding Balinese ethos: they are a culture of plenty; they are penny-wise but pound -foolish; they are very dependent upon spatial orientation; they value activity for itself, aesthetically, than as goal-oriented or purposive; there is evident enjoyment of doing things in large crowds; many Balinese actions are accounted for sociologically rather than psychologically in terms of individual goals or values; culturally correct actions are acceptable and aesthetically valued, permissible actions are regarded with neutrality, and inappropriate actions are deprecated; postural balance and coordination are highly valued for their correctness of form, such that there is fear of loss of support, there is preoccupation with elevation as a means of asymmetrical support, there is a preoccupation with problems of balance.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In comparing Balinese culture with Von Neuman games, he considers it the primary problem of the Balinese to maintain a complex steady state of the cumulative factors of the system. "In sum it seems that the Balinese extend to human relationships attitudes based upon bodily balance, and that they generalize the idea that motion is essential to balance." (ibid.: pg. 125)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Bateson searches for the self-correcting mechanism which underlies this "nonschismogenic system" and finds it in the balance of opposite poles of turbulence and serenity as is evident in the style of Balinese artwork-- "....The unity and integration of this picture assert that neither of these contrasting poles can be chosen to the exclusion of the other, because the poles are mutually dependent. This profound and general truth is simultaneously asserted for the fields of sex, social organization and death."(ibid.: pg. 152)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Clifford Geertz has writing about the cultural preoccupation and pervasiveness of cockfighting in Bali, and refers to the "migration of the Balinese status hierarchy; into the body of the cockfight." (Clifford Geertz "Deep Play: Notes on a Balinese Cockfight" in <u>The Interpretation of Cultures </u>: pg. 436) He refers to cockfight as the symbolic reenactment of the "status bloodbath" of the participants social matrix. It is fundamentally "a dramatization of status concerns."(ibid.: pg. 437)</font></p> <p><font size="3">"Along with everything else that the Balinese see in fighting cocks--themselves, their social order, abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power--they also see the archetype of status virtue, the arrogant, resolute, honor-mad player with real fire, the ksatria prince."(ibid.: pg. 442)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The cockfights help to render everyday experience more comprehensible in its presentation in forms that are not "really real" but in which forms the basic themes of such experience have been raised to a level where they can be more powerfully articulated. It is a construction, a medium of expression of these basic themes. The aggression of the fight is a reversal of the normal experience of the reticent Balinese--while it shares as a focused microcosm a characteristic of ordinary Balinese life, the "lack of temporal directionality"."...Their life, as they arrange and perceive it, is less a flow, a directional movement out of the past, through the present, toward the future than an on-off pulsation of meaning and vacuity...(ibid.: pg. 446).</font></p> <p><font size="3">For Geertz, the Balinese cockfight does not reinforce the status quo of the Balinese system, so much as it is a cultural text, a meta-social dialogue in which fighting cocks are connected to status--and it effects a transfer of emotions, perception and value from the former onto the latter. Culture is an ensemble of such texts.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In another important text by Geertz which describes Balinese worldview, he lays out a theory of culture and its integration as "significant symbols, clusters of significant symbols, and clusters of clusters of significant symbols-- the material vehicles of perception, emotion, and understanding--and the statement of the underlying regularities of human experience implicit in their formation." He refers to this symbol system as "more variable, less tightly coherent, but nonetheless ordered 'octopoid' systems of them, confluences of partial integrations, partial incongruencies and partial independencies."(ibid.: pg. 66)</font></p> <p><font size="3">He sees Balinese culture as rooted in a tightly integrated system of person perception and identity, conduct and propriety, and conceptions of time. He refers to the ceremonial formalization of interpersonal relations--the contemporizing of relations and identities in shared time but not shared space, to the "stage fright" that accompanies shame, and to the "absence of climax" found in social life and action, as the three main characteristics of Balinese culture. "What binds Balinese symbolic structures for defining persons (names, kin terms, teknonyms, titles, etc.) to their symbolic structures for characterizing time (permutational calendars, etc.), and both of these to their symbolic structures for ordering interpersonal behavior (art, ritual, politesse, etc.), is the interaction of the effects each of these structures has upon the perceptions of those who use them, the way in which their experiential impacts play into and reinforce one another....Yet they <u>are </u>dominant; they <u>do</u> reinforce one another; and they <u>are</u> persisting. And it is to this state of affairs, neither permanent nor perfect, that the concept of 'cultural integration'....can be legitimately applied." (Clifford Geertz <u>Person, Time, and Conduct in Bali: An Essay in Cultural Analysis</u>, Cultural Report Series No. 14: Southeast Asian Studies, Yale Univesity, 1966: pg. 65-66.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Other analysis of Balinese culture and character have yield similar interesting aspects which point to the symbolic spatialization of the culture--the geographical orientation of the Balinese about the central mountain Gunung Agung --the sense of confusion that results from disorientation in relation to the mountain. The Balinese, for instance, are a rather extreme example of a people whose orientation is spatial. (Errington, Shelly <u>Meaning and Power in a Southeast Asian Realm</u>, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press 1989: p. 65.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The phenomenological aspects of Balinese experience, especially in ceremonialism, the trancing, and the religious symbolism. These describe a cultural orientation that is well adapted and integrated to its island homeland.</font></p> <p><font size="3">J. Stephen Lansing describes the Water Temple system of Bali that had been used traditionally to regulate the irrigation system of the island according to the agricultural calendar. This system had eluded Dutch interest, who had established their own separate system of regulation, and its elucidation has figured importantly in the debate between Geertz's argument for the peasant regulation of the irrigation, or for the Wittfogelian hydraulic theory of a despotic centralization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The temple system is enmeshed in a wider temple system, and, like these is hierarchically stratified such that the chief Temple of the Crater Lake devoted to the water goddess that spiritually regulates with holy water the water that flows through the irrigation network. "The entire mandala of the lake forms the center of a much larger mandala, consisting of the island of Bali and the seas that surround it. Priests describe the lake as a freshwater ocean, filled with life-giving water, which contrasts with the salt ocean that encircles it far below. The lake is the home of one of the two supreme deities of Bali, the "Goddess of the Lake," Dewi Danu. Her relationship to the farmers of central Bali is succinctly defined in a manuscript kept in her temple, "Because the Goddess makes the waters flow, those who do not follow here lawas may not possess her rice terraces."</font></p> <p><font size="3">"The 'flow' of holy water from temple to temple establishes hierarchical relations between temples. Thus water temples define the institutional structure--the hierarchy of productive units--that manages the rice terraces as a productive system." (ibid.: pg. 128)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Lansing emphasizes the "sociogenic" aspects of the water temple rituals which "provide a deep reading of what the institution is about--it's specific relationship to a social microcosm. ...Temple rituals literally call into existence the task groups that manage the terraces for economic production. These groups have no separate existence apart from the water temple system. In this sense, the temples provide a vehicle to achieve voluntary social cooperation in the management of the irrigation on which each village--and society as a whole--is utterly dependent. Each village obtains its water from a fragile weir and irrigation works that lie in the territory of other villages upstream. In the absence of a "hydraulic bureaucracy" to manage irrigation, in the temple system itself must contain a kind of "hydraulic solidarity," by persuasively articulating the common interest in watershed management. The symbolisms of temple rituals is driven by a powerful logic..." (J. Stephen Lansing <u>Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali</u>, Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991: p. 52.) In this regard, he considers Marxian theory, retaining its relationships between nature, society and history while transposing its levels of analysis to the symbolic system and its constitutive role, of the "humanizing of nature" as the mapping onto the physical geography and cosmos of the social order, as civilization transforms the landscape it occupies with each succeeding generation and the new generation come to regard the transformed, manmade, reified landscape, as if the embodiment of "society."</font></p> <p><font size="3">The images of society that the Balinese see in their terraced landscape do not reflect the progressive linear order that Marx and Hegel understood as "history." Instead, for the Balinese nonlinear patterns of temporal order emerge from the regular progression of natural cycles, the seasons of growth and change. When Balinese society sees itself reflected in a humanized nature, a natural world transformed by the efforts of previous generations, it sees a pattern of interlocking cycles that mimic these cycles of nature. Whereas Marx looked at nature and saw evolutionary progress, a Balinese farmer may look at nature and see the intricate patterns of the <u>tika </u>calendar or hear the interlocking cyclical melodies of a gamelan orchestra. (p. 133).</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is evident from these illustrations of Balinese culture and character that in many aspects it can be considered prototypical of the degree of symbolic-ecological integration and adaptation of Southeast Asian civilization to its local and regional environments. Symbol systems have a direct part played in the constructive articulation of the social forces of history, in the dynamics that have brought about historical and social change. Such systems can be both conservative and adaptive at the same time.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="d4"><b><font size="3">Animism and Syncretism</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">It is worthwhile to consider in this regard a more basic cultural "substratum" that is widely held to be characteristic of Southeast Asian civilization. This is the common and pervasive spiritual animism and animistic ethos that underlies even Islam, Christianity and Buddhism. It can be called the Dionysian id of the Southeast Asian, over which is laid the Apollonian superego of one or another of the Great Religions traditions. Because animistic beliefs are held to represent the projection of impure beliefs, while beliefs of the later religions are associated with "pure" ideals, the later are much more powerful in commanding social veneration, such that the dialectic between the Great Tradition and local spirit cult is always asymmetrical, with the local animistic beliefs always yielding ground before the Grand traditions.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There are several basic traits that can be expected with this animistic complex: 1. The belief in a supernatural spirit world which interpenetrates the natural order such that a pantheon spirit beings, ghosts, local deities and spirit-familiars may inhabit local sites; 2. The use of a shaman who may go into trance or spirit possession; 3. The use of magic amulets, potions, poisons to affect human beings in certain ways; 4. A belief in the supernatural power which suffuses the natural world and which may come to reside differentially in powerful human beings ; 5. The use of ritual ceremonies in affecting cures, purification, fortune telling.</font></p> <p><font size="3">It can be argued that this kind of animistic complex is to be found wherever a traditional non-hierarchical style of society is found--this is true, but the particular combination and style of this complex is uniquely Southeast Asian. Take for example the widespread practice of the ritual bath in Southeast Asian animism--water is held to be the boundary weakener that allows passage between states of being.</font></p> <p><font size="3">"Power exists, independent of its possible users...In Javanese traditional thinking there is no sharp division between organic and inorganic matter, for everything is sustained by the same invisible power. This conception of the entire cosmos being suffused by a formless, constantly creative energy provides the basic link between the 'animism' of the Javanese villages and the high metaphysical pantheism of the urban centers." (Benedict Anderson "The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture." In <u>Culture and Politics in Indonesia</u> edited by Clare Holt Benedict Anderson, and James Siegel 1972: pgs. 1-69; p. 7)</font></p> <p><font size="3">It is the manner in which this animistic complex has intermeshed itself into the mythos, ethos and pathos of Southeast Asian civilization, and how it has come into a dialectical tension with the organized religions in the areas with which it is associated. Even modern secularism has not gone unaltered by its contact with this spirit animism. The key quality of this complex seems to be in its encompassing and syncretic character, in its capacity to absorb new symbolisms and to coexist with contradiction, and to adapt itself to a wide range of situations and alternative interpretation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">.i.Melford Spiro;, in his ethnographic analysis of .i.Burmese supernaturalism;, emphasizes the expressive, affective, instrumental and mechanical aspects of animistic beliefs, which he contrasts with the repressive and meditative aspects of Buddhism. The two systems are complementary--"Using Buddhist means, they pursue nat like, non-Buddhist ends; cathecting Buddhist goals, they attempt to achieve them by nat like, non-Buddhist means. In short, between the polar extremes of animism and Buddhism, we see a continuum of beliefs and practices which show attributes of both systems." (Melford Spiro <u>Burmese Supernaturalism: A Study in the Explanation and Reduction of Suffering</u>, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Printice-Hall, Inc. 1967: pg. 270-1.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">When viewed as ideal types, Spiro contrasted Buddhism and animism; in terms of the moral, ascetic, rational, serene personality and otherworldly social orientation of the former, against the amoral, libertarian, non-rational, turbulent personality and worldly social orientation of the later. (p. 258) Whereas Buddhists seek wisdom and enlightenment, animists seek the possession of power. This basic conflict is the source of an inner ambivalence of Burmese towards animism.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The animism which is common to Southeast Asia may be accountable for the remarkable religious and symbolic syncretism which has characterized many religious revitalization movements in Southeast Asia. Cao Daism and the Hoa Hao movement in Vietnam were well known examples of such syncretism</font></p> <p><font size="3">Hue-Tam Ho Tai's study of the "Buu Son Ky Huong" (Strange Fragrance from the Precious Mountain) sect which flourished in South Vietnam since its precolonial founding on the very frontiers of Vietnam along its border with Cambodia, is a fitting example of such syncretism combining animism with elements from several religions, that was almost unknown outside of South Vietnam. The prophet named Doan Minh Huyen, or "Buddha Master of Western Peace," began his movement during a great cholera epidemic in 1849 which claimed half a million lives. He practiced shamanistic curing in which he was said to be particularly effective against madness, and legend holds that he soon attracted a large number of pilgrims seeking cure, such that his credibility as a Buddha master grew. He preached salvation and apocalpyse, and provided a powerful spiritual motivation for the early pioneers. This religious tradition, characteristic of South Vietnam, was rooted in the Sino-Vietnamese folk religion.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The contrast between the temple priest in the articulation and mediation of the authority of the state and the interest of the populace, and the shamanistic prophet in being the divine voice, or the direct incarnation of the divine, and the healer and revitalizer of the populace, is a basic, recurrent theme throughout the world</font></p> <p><font size="3">According to the study by Susan Ackerman and Raymond Lee of religious movements in modern Malaysia, animism was the only truly indigenous religion of Southeast Asia. (Susan E. Ackerman and Raymond L. M. Lee <u>Heaven in Transition: Non-Muslim Religious Innovation and Ethnic Identity in Malaysia.</u> Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 1988) Subsequent introduction of different religions created a competition among a number of alternatives. Secularization meant a detachment of political involvement in religion, a greater degree of choice in the selection of religion, and an individual atomization of religion as a personal affair. Such secularization, particularly prominent in urban areas, has brought with it greater experimentation. The presence of a number of alternative religions sets up a relational field between them which define, at various levels of mutual compatibility and incompatibility, define the ways and degrees to which such religions can coexist or become integrated.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="e4"><b><font size="3">The "Circular-Center Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Symbols and the systems they construct, have played an important part in Southeast Asian Civilization and its scholarship. Symbols mediate the boundaries of identity between person, place, experience, the social world, and the supernatural cosmos. In Southeast Asia, such symbolizations are commonly "spatial" in organization, and time is conceived as circular. Power which symbols contain, which pass through symbols, becomes centered in local places, and levels of power are concentric rings from the center. Such centers exist in the thoughts, in the being and body of the individual, in the home, in the public realm, in the state and the nation, and in the world and universe.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In regard to this Southeast Asian spatialization of symbols, several points can be made:</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Symbols come to express and contain a spiritual energy invests the universe and can come to reside in certain places, persons or things which are centers of power.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. Symbols as spatial metaphors of "place" mediate the boundary between the body and person hood and the state and social body, such that the state becomes embodied in the person, and state becomes the embodiment of the person.</font></p> <p><font size="3">3. Symbols as spatial metaphors of "centers" mediate the boundary between the state and the cosmos, such that the "humanized natural" world becomes the mapping of the supernatural world and the supernatural world becomes the projection of the state.</font></p> <p><font size="3">4. Symbols also spatially mediate the boundary between the individual, his/her body and person hood, and the cosmos, such that they orient and locate the individual spiritually in the cosmos and spiritually map the cosmos in the individual.</font></p> <p><font size="3">5. Symbols form multiple overlapping "network hierarchies" of relations that serve to locate power differentially in people, places, social relations and the cosmos.</font></p> <p><font size="3">6. Symbols serve an anti-structural mediating function which allows for the manipulation of power relationships which are otherwise uncontrollable and can be expected to be emphasized or exaggerated when power relationships are inherently, structurally ambiguous.</font></p> <p><font size="3">7. Symbols come to coalesce into chains and complexes, which define topographically uneven regions of a shared, social "symbol scape" that form the multiple network-hierarchies. In these complexes we can recognize core and dominant symbols, distinguished from peripheral and antithetical symbols. We can distinguish as well between "basic" symbols and "elaborated" symbols.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Magic and Animistic religious beliefs were originally held by Western observers to be chaotic. Subsequently scholars have taken notice of an underlying order of such symbol systems, the parallelism between "micro-cosmos" and "macro-cosmos."</font></p> <p><font size="3">...According to this belief humanity is constantly under the influence of forces emanating from the directions of the compass and from stars and planets. These forces may produce welfare and prosperity or work havoc, according to whether or not individuals and social groups, above all the state, succeed in bringing their lives and activities in harmony with the universe. Individuals may attain such harmony by following the indications offered by astrology, the lore of lucky and unlucky days and many other minor rules. Harmony between the empire and the universe is achieved by organizing the former as an image of the latter, as a universe on a smaller scale. (Robert Heine-Geldern; <u>Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia</u> Southeast Asia Program, Ithaca, New York 1958: p. 1)</font></p> <p><font size="3">This parallelism between the state and the cosmos, occurs also between the macrocosm of the universe and microcosm of the person, as well as between the macro-cosmos of the state and the microcosm of the person. Symbolism mediates the relationships between spirit and matter, and their ritual manipulation as "receptacles of spirit" is a means of manipulating and regulating these boundaries. The manipulation and management of symbols through religious ritual and magic, is a form of power, or a "playing with power" that is supernatural.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Clive Kesseler notes a similar parallelism between "the body personal and the body politic" which is evident in the ritual performances of the Malay bomoh--"....the body is a realm, at once unitary and multiplex. Its various components are ideally coordinated and integrated, subordinated to a governing center, the palace of personality, the head. Since this conception of the body as a realm is not merely abstract and static, it permits illness or disorder within the person to be presented in political terms. Sickness...is regarded as the result of some imbalance or lack of regulation...and the fundamental political image of such disorder is anarchy or civil war--the absence of effective rule." (Clive Kesseler "Conflict and Sovereignty in Kelantanese Malay Spirit Seances" in <u>Case Studies in Spirit Possession</u>, edited by Vincent Crapanzano and Vivian: pg 319)</font></p> <p><font size="3">According to Kesseler, this parallelism is not simply a dualism, but a parallelism between the body, the state and the cosmos, and in this matter the state is the political embodiment and mediator of the power--"Hence, mediating between person and cosmos, the state, in its concretized conceptual form as the <u>balai,</u> provides the appropriately potent instrument or receptacle...for ritually manipulating and transferring powerful, and therefore potentially dangerous, spiritual essences."(p. 321)</font></p> <p><font size="3">And if the social body constrains how we define the human body, as Mary Douglas would have it, it might also happen that the human body may become the metaphor for the state. The political idioms shared by a variety of symbolic complexes becomes the fundamental organizing idea or design of a culture.</font></p> <p><font size="3">To what extent do symbolic complexes, as partially integrated networks in the patterning of culture, overlap or are congruent with the ecological patterns of adaptation, as well as the historical patterns of borrowing and alteration. For instance, if we compare two cultures known to be historically related, that nonetheless diverged in different environments, would we be able on the basis of their comparison to select those aspects of symbolic complexes that remain basically unchanged. Alternatively, if we compare cultures that are known not to be related but which seem to share similar kinds of environments, or cultures which are distantly related and which share similar kinds of environments, though they presumably have never been in contact.</font></p> <p><font size="3">As J. S. van Leur quotes in full the working method of Werner Sombart in culture history as it applies to economic history (J. C. van Leur <u>Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History</u>, The Hague, Bandung: W. van Hoeve, Ltd. 1955: pp. 42-3.), there is no reason that such a method could not be applied as well to other topical aspects of cultural symbolism. There are different analytical levels of complexes of meaning--the more primary the complex in which concrete individual phenomena are given a place, the more available it is to our senses and our understandings and the less equivocal in interpretation. But the more the complexity of meaning is removed in terms of its inferable connotations, the more it will depend upon its appropriate placement within a systemic framework, such that lower order complexes become subsumed within higher order complexes.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Symbols also have an ecology about them, about their use and their meaning, one that was well described, if in somewhat overly functionalistic terms, by Roy Rappaport. ( <u>Pigs For the Ancestors, </u>Yale University Press, 1968)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The connection between symbols and the human world does not need to depend upon a functionalist, materialist or ecologist account. Symbols are "direct metaphors" of experience which allow both apperceptive disembodiment of the experience through the symbols incorporation and representation of that experience. It is therefore no great surprise that symbols should be widely employed by human beings to for the expression of relationships and significances which are either not directly available to experience, or for one reason for another, must be repressed from experience. Among all other things, symbols can stand for other symbols as well as for themselves--because they may mean so many different things, they may mean no one thing at all.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Georges Condominas has built upon the notion of the symbolic significance of production, or work, in social life, and the use of symbol systems in the regulation and expressive reiteration of the value of such production. (George Condominas <u>We Have Eaten the Forest: The Story of a Montagnard Village in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.</u> New York: Hill and Wang, Inc., 1977) thus agricultural ritual becomes an integral component of the technology of farming, which in turn becomes an intrinsically "social" as well as technical productive process, "..it is a meaningful series of interactions between social groups and the natural world. The field rituals that accompany each stage of agricultural labor form a kind of commentary on the productive process. Moreover, the rituals of work in the fields may be "performative," in that they call forth particular social groups to engage in activities such as planting and harvesting." J. Stephen Lansing <u>Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali</u> (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1991) p. 6.</font></p> <p><font size="3">A common theme shared by symbolism in Southeast Asian civilization is the belief that all beings are hierarchically ranked according to relative proximity to the sacred. The higher one's rank, the more sacred "power" one possessed in one's being and one's place. Status was legitimized by one's sacred power and rank. Because of this rank, higher status people were regarded as more efficacious channels in tapping spiritual and supernatural powers, which could be distributed to the followers. This belief therefore defined leadership and the expectations that surrounded it in traditional Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Linked to this belief is a "circular conception of space in which potently charged centers were thought to radiate power outward and downward toward less-charged peripheries. Not surprisingly, higher-status people were found in centers--were, in fact, conceived to <u>be</u> centers--and were surrounded by people declining in proximity to power and hence in status as one moved outward." (Lorraine Gesick, editor. <u>Centers, Symbols and Hierarchies: Essays on the Classical States of Southeast Asia</u> Monograph Series No. 26: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1983 pp. 1-2).</font></p> <p><font size="3">This preoccupation with a certain "style of leadership" that animated Southeast Asian politics, statecraft and hierarchy, can be thought of as the distinctive pattern of stylization and genius of traditional Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p align="center"><b><font size="3"> <img src="line5.gif" width="575" height="11"></font></b></p> <p align="center"><a name="twelve"><b><font size="3">VII</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="twelve"><b><font size="3">The "Dialectical Dynamics Hypothesis"</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><a name="twelve"><b><font size="3">Synthesis and Synergism of Southeast Asian Civilization</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3"><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#a5"><font face="Book Antiqua">Sources and Conclusions</font></a><b> </b><a href="http://www.omniprise.net/SEAsources.htm#b5"><font face="Book Antiqua">Hypothetical Reconstruction</font></a></font></p> <p><font size="3">A "culture historical" approach is revived to explain a central principle of "Southeast Asian" civilization that is at the unchanging center of so much change, that is at the hub of a wheel composed of many different spokes. A multi-disciplinary approach is demanded for such an approach, because the kind of integrative synthesis underlying the historical "synergy" of Southeast Asian civilization cannot be approach analytically from any single standpoint or methodological strategy alone.</font></p> <p><font size="3">We can refer to the basic "dialectical dynamics" underlying the rise of human civilization and development of regional integration in Southeast Asia, as the central axis of contrast about which the patterns of history have unfolded from the remotest of times. This dynamic provides a regional continuity of character, as an "historical structure of the long run" which has witnessed unchanged the coming and going of many peasants and the rise and fall of many states.</font></p> <p><font size="3">These factors remain in the background as pervasive constraints and limits to the possibilities of human action and development, and have set the stage for the enactment of many Southeast Asian dramas.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="a5"><b><font size="3">Sources and Conclusions</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">It is from this analytical schema that we can identify different levels of integration, and that we can summarize with certain basic conclusions drawn from the themes explored within these essays.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Broadly speaking, because we are dealing with models tied to the reconstruction of past events in Southeast Asia, we are dealing with a form of history in its most general sense. Such a perspective forces us to adopt a notion of "Southeast Asia" and "Southeast Asian Civilization" as if these were preexisting, coherent and possible to define entities that actually existed out in the world. Many scholars would reject the notion that there is such a thing amongst all the diversities present in the region, while others have argued for a larger unity, either underlying the region as a substratum or as a theme of "unity in diversity." (For instance, see J. C. van Leur's <u>Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History</u> (1955) for an early thesis of broader regional continuities and unity; George Coedes' <u>Indianized States of Southeast Asia</u> for the substratum hypothesis and Lea Wiliams <u>Southeast Asia: Its History</u> for the development of the theme of "unity in diversity", on the otherhand, see Nicolas Tarling's <u>A Concise History of Southeast Asia</u> (1966) and John Cady's <u>The History of Post-War Southeast Asia</u> for an emphasis upon the intrinsic diversity of the region.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">Without a doubt, the subject matter of Southeast Asia lends itself to certain broad thematic outlines, outlines that have been a source of dilemma and of dialectic. (For instance, Neil L. Jamieson "Toward a Paradigm for Paradox: Observations on the Study of Social Organization in Southeast Asia." <u>Journal of Southeast Asian Studies )</u></font></p> <p><font size="3">There are several summary points in regard to the study of Southeast Asia which deserve to be pointed out:</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. Though the areal studies of Southeast Asia are multi-thematic and dialectical, a survey of the literature would reveal that certain themes and thesis of the dialectic have been emphasized more than others. Donald Emmerson, in a review of the History of the region, notes several basic dialectical themes that he organizes into a rectangular cube--historicism versus modernism, continuity versus change, diversity versus unity, originality of Southeast Asian civilization versus dependence on exogenous influence, and macro-system versus micro-system. While some combination of these themes are recurrent throughout the literature, there has been an overall emphasis upon the historicism and modernism, change, diversity and unity, and dependence, and much less emphasis upon continuity, originality, macro-system and micro-system approaches to understanding Southeast Asian History. (Donald Emmerson "Issues in Southeast Asian History: Room for Interpretation: A Reveiw Article," <u>Journal of Asian Studies</u> Vol. XL, No. 1, November, 1980: pg. 43-68.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">In general, we may say that a perspective that deals with the originality of Southeast Asian civilization, with a systemic perspective at both a broader global and local analysis, and with the problems of change and continuity in the region, have been under-emphasized.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. .i.Southeast Asian Scholarship;, written in a western idiom; largely reflects the implicit Western values and worldviews of its scholars. (for instance, Joseph Fischer, <u>Foreign Values and Southeast Asian Scholarship</u> Research Monograph No. 11, Center for South & Southeast Asian Studies. University of Calif., Berkeley, 1973) Thus such regional studies and histories often failed to critique or move beyond the role which Western colonialism has played in the modern historical development of the region. (Hugh Tinker "The Search for the History of Southeast Asia" in <u>The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies</u> Sept. 1980.)</font></p> <p><font size="3">3. The point of view of the .i.exogenous/endogenous dynamics; of Southeast Asian social history in terms of social stratification and class-ethnic struggle remains to be fully synthesized.</font></p> <p><font size="3">From these points, it is fitting that I should briefly offer a thematic outline of some of the broader perspectives. First, Southeast Asia as a coherent region can only be approached from a cross-disciplinary perspective that combines in balanced proportion history, folklore, geography, ecology, sociology, archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and the understandings derived from a miscellany of other fields of study.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Not wanting to leave out of the picture a statement about the modern era and the role which Western imperialism, colonialism, and subsequent modernization has played in Southeast Asia, it is worthwhile to briefly highlight some of the more salient milestones--a review I will undertake in reverse of chronological ordering of history.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Contemporary Southeast Asia suffers the blights of underdevelopment shared by all third world nations. Except for the tiny little city state of Singapore and perhaps the small principality of Brunei, all of Southeast Asia can be characterized by certain broad features--radical pluralism, ethnic competition, strife and conflict, political corruption, diminishing democratic institutions, a large and rapidly growing poor population, and a thoroughly self-interested elite, continuing neo-colonial dependency and domination by Western interests, the growing role of the Japanese and the shrinking role of the Overseas Chinese. Many of the distortions and imbalances which remain to be worked out were a direct or indirect consequence of colonialism.</font></p> <p><font size="3">If we take one step back, we can see the period of late colonialism in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a thoroughly destructive and tragic historical accident which brought out the worst racist values of Americans and which lead to the systematic genocide, ecocide and ethnocide of the Vietnamese--and the Vietnamese eventually won their struggle for independence from foreign domination.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One step further back, we can see the chain of retreat from the colonial political domination; of Southeast Asian countries and the struggles which took place--the Americans in Vietnam and the Philippines, the French in Indo-China, the British in Burma, Malaysia, and Sarawak, and the Dutch in Indonesia and Kalimantan. Though this period is too recent to characterize in terms of its net outcomes, it is safe to claim that the communist insurrections that were common place during this period can be seen historically as the rational, political counter movements to capitalistic colonial domination.</font></p> <p><font size="3">One step further back, there is the period of .colonialism proper in which racially biased European powers conquered and political-economically encapsulated and exploited Southeast Asia as a zone of primary resource acquisition, cheap labor, and as dumping grounds for cheap industrial commodities produced in the West.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Before this era, we can talk about the early phases of colonialism before the process of Western imperialist expansion became industrially driven. This period deserves broader treatment, like that by Eric Wolf. (<u>Europe and the People's Without History</u>, 1982: pgs. 231-262.) But it also deserves a more detail survey of the local events, encounters and patterns of response that occurred as the result of contact, trade and the unscrupulous efforts of Western agents of imperialism to establish political and economic control of the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Before this era, we reach the phase of the late proto-history and early history of the region, and the more creative influences of Indian, Chinese and Arabian acculturation upon Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">To summarize this very brief history in reverse of Southeast Asia, I wish to stress an important dialectical dynamism of the development of Southeast Asian civilization as a continuous historical process of emerging critical complexity in its intra/inter-regional integration. With each subsequent phase of contact in which exogenous forces came into interplay with endogenous factors, there arose a broader and more complex level of integration. Such interplay between internal and external forces was more creative in the earlier phases, and became more destructive in the later phases, until we get the final horror of the Vietnam war. With increasing integration there has been the opportunity for both increased constructive and destructive patterns to have an effect upon the region.</font></p> <p><font size="3">In summary, if we wish to seek a common style pattern and "genius" that we can characterize as inherent and distinctive to .Southeast Asian civilization, we can claim that its genius has been in its syncretistic and creative capacity to respond adaptively and deal with complexity and the entropic consequences of external contact. It can be seen in the consistent capacity to maintain a "core" sense of "Southeast Asianess" that is both an animistic and nature-oriented substratum and a social-symbolic and syncretic synthesis of this dynamic interplay and complexity. (Alfred Kroeber <u>An Anthropologist Looks at History</u>, 1963 and <u>Style and Civilization</u>, 1957)</font></p> <p><font size="3">The style pattern of its civilization is evident in its "mosaic" and in its organization of diversity which has more often than not precluded conflict and violence and has promoted an outward looking attitude of openness and a live and let live tolerance of human difference. Furthermore, this style pattern is evident in the way that the symbolic cosmography of Southeast Asian consciousness is symmetrical and reflective of its geography, and in how the metaphor of the body and the metaphor of the social state interpenetrate and resonate with one another, such that the boundaries between these realms are everywhere fluid, dynamic, fuzzy and shifting in focus.</font></p> <p align="center"><a name="b5"><b><font size="3">Hypothetical Reconstruction</font></b></a></p> <p align="center"><font size="3">Several broad hypothesis have been presented in this work. Briefly, they may be summarized:</font></p> <p><font size="3">1. The "Waterways" hypothesis focuses upon the systemic, circumscriptive, consequences of a maritime-riverine-coastal orientation which is predominant in Southeast Asia as a "single ocean" in the developmental integration and adaptation of Southeast Asian civilization.</font></p> <p><font size="3">2. The ".Cross-roads" hypothesis considers the role of intercultural contact and transmission in reconstruction of the process of the historical evolution of a region and its people, from the standpoint of a sui-generis ".Austric" origin in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam for the Austro-Asiatic, Austro-Thai and Austronesian speaking peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.</font></p> <p><font size="3">3. The "Autochthony Hypothesis" reconsiders the evidence for the autochthonous origins of Southeast Asian civilization in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam, So. China, Northern Thailand and Laos.</font></p> <p><font size="3">4. The "Market-place Hypothesis" considers the role of trade and traffic in the regional integration and rise of ".i.central places;" throughout the proto-historical period, focusing upon the long-term structures and network patterns that may have been in place time-immemorial, especially in Borneo.</font></p> <p><font size="3">5. The "Plural-Polity" hypothesis focuses upon the characteristic Southeast Asian "organization of diversity" in which the sense of "person-hood" is defined "political-ecologically" in relation to a Southeast Asian landscape, as this landscape is integrated into the current political-economy of the region. Such local-regional-global integration has long relied upon the appropriation of symbols of identity and "equivalence structures" by which such potentially disruptive and conflictual diversities could be rendered mutualistic in interrelation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This was accomplished by shared religion which defined the relation between the individual and the group, and between groups, and by status-role identities which defined the appropriate and expected behaviors of a variety of peoples, and which were defined spatially and temporally in terms of the political economic/ecological positionality or "place" the individual occupied, both geographically and cosmographically.</font></p> <p><font size="3">6. The "Thanatophidia Hypothesis" and the "Circular-Center Hypthesis look at the "congruence" of certain basic symbolisms and the structure of symbolism in Southeast Asia, as this served to coordinate and orient the individual in relation to both the world and to the social group. These symbolically mediated relationships have been more direct and more consequential in the historical style patterning and genius of Southeast Asian civilization than materialists and functionalists would presuppose.</font></p> <p><font size="3">7. The "Dialectical Dynamism" hypothesis looks at the polythematic representation of Southeast Asian civilization as a complex dialect around certain central axis of diversity and unity, continuity and change, micro-dynamism and macro-systemics, endogenous origination and exogenous dependency and acculturation.</font></p> <p><font size="3">At certain periods and places, these processes combined to create very constructive and very destructive patterns.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The inherent complexity of these polythetic dialectical dynamics makes necessary a systematic and organized cross-disciplinary approach that attempts to comprehend all the available information and understanding relating to Southeast Asia.</font></p> <p><font size="3">This perspective is rooted in the problem of reconstruction which attempts to combine "ethno-cultural" with "ethno-historical" methods at several levels of analysis--local, regional and global--and in a way such that these levels are mutually coordinate and informative. The approach requires a critical, open attitude toward all forms of evidence and varieties of experience. Least this seem like a resurrection of the archaic Culture Historical methodology, it is, with the proviso that this methodology is divorced from ideological Spiritism and is anchored empirically and historically in the scientific approaches to analysis and in the data discovered from such systematic and controlled analysis. Synthesis rests upon and gives rise to analysis. Finally this approach demands a self-critical, reflexive and self-corrective approach to reconstruction--we must always take into account in our reconstructive formulas the relativities of our own limited knowledge.</font></p> <p><font size="3">There have been several critiques of methodological orientations implicit in this work--these have been to argue for an expanded role of counterfactuality in hypothesis construction, a critique of the "taxonomic tendency" which uncover a central "root" underlying homologically related patterns and elements, and a suggestion of an alternative "network" which does not implicitly deny the inherent complexities of the remoter past and which allows for the possibility of reconvergence and "reversibility" of cultural process of development, a network pattern which is rooted in an hypothesized "correspondence/covariance structures" between polythetic sets of characteris that is rooted in basic, prototypical "cores", and alternative systematic methodology for inference formulation, testing and decision-making regarding the confidence of diverse sources of different kinds of data, the problem of "inter-translation" and credibility and the use of dynamic "equivalence structures" in explaining the organization of diversity in processes of constructive integration, and the problem of congruence and correspondence of the mechanisms and structure of symbolic mediation which are rooted in basic thematic contrasts.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Finally, in closing, it is worth reconsidering the productive, textual "depetrification" that is possible with the deliberate attempt to develop in essay form a transcendent dialectic which achieves a "metalogue" between the text and its theme.</font></p> <p><font size="3">Each one of the themes presented in this manuscript could be easily developed into a manuscript of its own. The point of the work has been in part to bring to the fore and to investigate certain basic and recurrent themes in Southeast Asian studies that usually remain only in the background, for their implications both for such regional studies and for how we go about reconstructing the past.</font></p> <p><font size="3">The value of the synoptic perspective provided here is to seek the deeper sense of order and meaning behind the complexities of the problem. It is tempting to carry this synthesis one step further and to offer a basic "model" of Southeast Asian civilization, locating in the process the "primary factors" or "ultimate causes" which define its coherence and basic contiguities. Such a model will be left to another time and place, to another person (perhaps, an indigenous Southeast Asian) to develop.</font></p> <font FACE="Book Antiqua"> <p ALIGN="JUSTIFY"> </p> </font> <p align="center"><font face="Times,Times New Roman" size="4"><a href="http://www.lewismicropublishing.com/Publications/SoutheastAsianSources/">Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction</a></font></p> <font FACE="Times"> <font FACE="News Gothic MT" SIZE="3"> <p align="center"><font face="Times,Times New Roman" size="2">2001</font></p> <font FACE="Times,Times New Roman" SIZE="2"> <p align="center">Hugh M. Lewis</p> <hr> <p><a name="Copyright">Blanket Copyright</a>, Hugh M. Lewis, © 2005. Use of this text governed by fair use policy--permission to make copies of this text is granted for purposes of research and non-profit instruction only.</p> <p>Last Updated: 08/17/06 </p> <hr> <p> </p> </font></font> <p> </p> </font> <p> </p> <p align="center"> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> s="na";c="na";j="na";f=""+escape(document.referrer) </script> <script language="javascript1.2" type="text/javascript"> s=screen.width;v=navigator.appName if (v != "Netscape") {c=screen.colorDepth} else {c=screen.pixelDepth} j=navigator.javaEnabled() </script> <script language="javascript" type="text/javascript"> function pr(n) {document.write(n,"\n");} NS2Ch=0 if (navigator.appName == "Netscape" && navigator.appVersion.charAt(0) == "2") {NS2Ch=1} if (NS2Ch == 0) { r="&size="+s+"&colors="+c+"&referer="+f+"&java="+j+"" pr("<A HREF=\"http://www.TheCounter.com\" TARGET=\"_top\"><IMG"+ " BORDER=0 SRC=\"http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383"+r+"\"><\/A>")} </script> <NOSCRIPT> <a HREF="http://www.TheCounter.com" TARGET="_top"><img SRC="http://c1.thecounter.com/id=515383" ALT="TC" BORDER="0" width="88" height="31"></a> </NOSCRIPT>  </body>