This wide-ranging collection of essays examines the arts of Southeast Asia in context. Contributors study the creation,
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English Pages 244 [252] Year 2018
Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Stanley J. O'Connor
Maritime Travelers and Tillers of the Soil: Reading the Landscape(s) of Batur
More than a Picture: The Instrumental Quality of the Shadow Puppet
Modem Indonesian Ceramic Art
Memories of a Ceramic Expert
Lucia Hartini, Javanese Painter: Against the Grain, Towards Herself
In the Image of the King: Two Photographs from Nineteenth-Century Siam
Whose Art are We Studying? Writing Vietnamese Art History from Colonialism to the Present
Telling Lives: Narrative Allegory on a Burmese Silver Bowl
Development of Buddhist Traditions in Peninsular Thailand: A Study Based on Votive Tablets (Seventh to Eleventh Centuries)
Chinese Ceramics and Local Cultural Statements in Fourteenth-Century Southeast Asia
Buddhism and the Pre-Islamic Archaeology of Kutei in the Mahakam Valley of East Kalimantan
Works by Stanley J. O'Connor
Contributors
Studies in Southeast Asian Art Essays in Honor of Stanley J. 0' Connor
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Portrait of Stanley J. O'Connor, by Peter Kahn
Nora A. Taylor, editor
Studies in Southeast Asian Art Essays in Honor of Stanley J. 0' Connor
SOUTHEAST ASIA PROGRAM PUBLICATIONS
Southeast Asia Program Cornell University Ithaca, New York 2000
~----------~Hall----------~
Editorial Board Benedict Anderson George Kahin Tamara Loos Stanley J. O'Connor Keith Taylor Oliver Wolters Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications 640 Stewart Avenue, Ithaca, NY 14850-3857 Studies on Southeast Asia No. 29
Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications wishes to expresses its gratitude to theM. F. Hatch Foundation for its generous support in the publication of this book.
© 2000 Cornell Southeast Asia Program All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Cornell Southeast Asia Program. Printed in the United States of America
ISBN 0-87727-728-1
CONTENTS Acknowledgments
7
Introduction Nora A. Taylor
9
Stanley J. O'Connor Oliver Wolters
15
Maritime Travelers and Tillers of the Soil: Reading the Landscape(s) of Batur Knja McGowan
32
More than a Picture: The Instrumental Quality of the Shadow Puppet Jan Mrazek
49
Modem Indonesian Ceramic Art Hilda Soemantri
74
Memories of a Ceramic Expert Barbara Harrisson
86
Lucia Hartini, Javanese Painter: Against the Grain, Towards Herself Astri Wright
93
In the Image of the King: Two Photographs from Nineteenth-Century Siam Caverlee Cary
122
Whose Art are We Studying? Writing Vietnamese Art History from Colonialism to the Present Nora A. Taylor
143
Telling Lives: Narrative Allegory on a Burmese Silver Bowl Robert S. Wicks
158
Development of Buddhist Traditions in Peninsular Thailand: A Study Based on Votive Tablets (Seventh to Eleventh Centuries) M. L. Pattaratorn Chirapravati
172
6
Studies in Southeast Asian Art
Chinese Ceramics and Local Cultural Statements in Fourteenth-Century Southeast Asia John N. Miksic
194
Buddhism and the Pre-Islamic Archaeology of Kutei in the Mahakam Valley of East Kalimantan E. Edwards McKinnon
217
Works by Stanley J. O'Connor
241
Contributors
244
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been in the making for some time. It began while I was still a student at Cornell University during what would be Stanley O'Connor's last year of teaching in 1995. I am indebted to a number of people without whom this book would not have been possible. Naturally, it would have been inconceivable without Stanley J. O'Connor himself and the inspiration that he has given to his students and colleagues. His influence and our debt are apparent in every page of this book. The Southeast Asian Program at Cornell University has helped us all conduct our research and complete our degrees and has sustained us in other ways during our years as students at Cornell, but I thank them here for providing support for the completion of the manuscript. I thank the editorial board of the SEAP Publications series for their endorsement and publication of the manuscript. I am especially grateful to George MeT. Kahin for suggesting the volume in the first place and to Oliver W. Wolters for his support and encouragement of the project from the beginning. Audrey Kahin has been equally encouraging and offered valuable editorial assistance during the initial stages of the manuscript. Of course, the whole process would not have been possible without the professional editorial wisdom and talent of Deborah Hamsher, editorial manager of SEAP Publications, who provided the momentum necessary to get the manuscript completed. She was assisted at various stages by Erick White, who is to be congratulated on his meticulous copyediting. And finally, I wish to thank all the contributors who embarked on this project at my initiative but acted as true collaborators on this collective enterprise of feting Stan. It is testimony to their admiration of their professor that they put so much effort and care into writing these essays, and I thank them for their imaginative, scholarly, and original contributions. They are proof that Southeast Asian art history thrives as a field, and I am grateful for their participation. Nora Taylor
INTRODUCTION Nora A. Taylor
An academic generation ago, when Stanley J. O'Connor was starting his career, studies of Southeast Asian art were still considered a sub-division of South Asian art. Surveys of Asian Art always included Southeast Asia as an afterthought and tended to restrict topics to those time periods and artifacts that related to India. A brief glance at the table of contents of this volume will immediately show how far the field has come in less than a half century. Some readers who are unfamiliar with Southeast Asian art or for whom Southeast Asian art is synonymous with Khmer temple carvings or Javanese Hindu shrines will be surprised to find discussions of such topics as the paintings of the contemporary artist Lucia Hartini, the instrumental qualities of wayang, or nineteenth-century Siamese photography. This is a good thing. For this books aims to show how greatly and permanently Stanley O'Connor has altered the landscape of Southeast Asian art historical studies. It is his influence that has enabled art historians to view the art of Southeast Asia with such wide eyes. He has encompassed all objects, all landscapes, all rituals, and all structures as art. This openness is what has enabled students to widen the field and offer significantly new and radical ways to look at art history, not just of Southeast Asia, but of the world in general. We are all indebted to him, and this book is a tribute to the work he has pursued over more than three decades to make Southeast Asian art history a field of serious research. The essays contained in this volume were written on the occasion of Stanley J. O'Connor's retirement from his position as professor of Southeast Asian Art History at Cornell University. Contributors include his former doctoral students and close colleagues. All were written in the spirit of celebrating Professor O'Connor's contributions to the field of Southeast Asian art history over the past thirty years. His influence on the current generation of scholars of Southeast Asia is immediately apparent in the diversity, originality, and depth of the essays presented here. More importantly, they were written to challenge current practices in Asian art history which tend to compartmentalize artifacts and time periods without attempting to incorporate discussions from other disciplines. The essays in this volume intend to prove the degree to which Southeast Asian art history, thanks in part to Stanley O'Connor's pioneering work and commitment to his students, draws from other disciplines but also stands on its own. When Stanley O'Connor began to study Southeast Asian art, the field was relatively unexplored
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by scholars other than archaeologists working, for the most part, from research conducted by colonial historians, epigraphers, and explorers. The field now includes anthropologists, modernists and postmodernists, feminists, artists, iconographers, and cultural theorists. This volume does not reflect the entire scope of Southeast Asian art. Rather, it is, we hope, a contribution toward understanding Southeast Asian art from a scholarly perspective and giving it the attention it deserves as an independent field. It also aims to stimulate further discussions among art historians and Southeast Asianists and encourage an interdisciplinary approach to Asian studies, in the spirit of O'Connor's 1995 essay "Humane Literacy and Southeast Asian Art."l The volume begins appropriately with a biographical essay by one of Professor O'Connor's closest colleagues, an eminent Southeast Asian historian at Cornell University, Oliver Wolters. Wolters's essay recounts Stanley O'Connor's journey to and through Southeast Asian Art History both personally and professionally. It aptly rejoins Stanley O'Connor, the man, with Stanley O'Connor, the scholar, and provides insight into the origins of such seminal articles as "Art Critics, Connoisseurs and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in CrossCultural Art theory," 2 and "Metallurgy and Immortality at Cal)cji Sukuh, Central Java.''3 For many of us who stumble into a field sometimes serendipitously, reading how O'Connor metamorphosed and matured as a scholar of Southeast Asia provides reassurance that one does not necessarily have to be born in Southeast Asia to be a Southeast Asian scholar. It is also clear that his experiences in Southeast Asia, as described by Wolters, confirmed his belief in the necessity of fieldwork. While I was his student at Cornell, he repeatedly told students that our success as scholars depended on two things: our ability to learn at least one Southeast Asian language and our time spent in Southeast Asia. At a time when area studies have been undergoing a period of rethinking and restructuring, it would serve area specialists well to learn about Stanley O'Connor's trajectory as a scholar and his influence on future generations of scholars. His belief in learning from the field, from local texts in local languages, gave his students firm grounding in an area that is often considered "merely" an area. He gave them the power to prove that Southeast Asia is not only a "real" place and a site for "serious" research but is an area that can teach students about other places and about how to work in an interdisciplinary way because Southeast Asia is a quintessentially multicultural place. 4 O'Connor taught his students that Southeast Asia was a place where art was part of everyday life, and his lectures always included slides of market places, landscapes, rituals, ceremonies, and food in addition to buildings, temples, sculptures, and paintings. He made connections between life and art in a way that opened up numerous and creative possibilities for art historians to explore. Students O'Connor, "Humane Literacy and Southeast Asian Art," journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26,1 (1995): 147-158. 2 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Art Critics, Connoisseurs and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest: A Study in Cross-Cultural Art Theory," journal of Southeast Asian Studies 14,2 {1983):
1 Stanley J.
400-408. 3
Stanley J. O'Connor, "Metallurgy and Immortality at Cal)qi Sukuh, Central Java," Indonesia
39 (April 1985): 53-70. 4 See Oliver W. Wolters, "Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study," Indonesia 58 (October 1994): 1-17.
Introduction
11
studying Renaissance Italy would sometimes come to his lectures and begin to think about ways in which to incorporate economic anthropology with visual studies. The interdisciplinary approach to art history championed by O'Connor is apparent in the essays included in this volume. Kaja McGowan's essay on Balinese landscape owes as much to semiotics, literary theory, and geography as it does to art history. Art history in O'Connor's classes was a protean term, and the wide range in areas of specializations of his students demonstrates this. This is also evident in the contrast between the topics chosen by such students as E. Edwards McKinnon-one of O'Connor's earliest students-writing about early Indonesian maritime material culture, and Jan Mrazek-a more recent student-who wrote about the non-pictorial qualities of wayang. Although the terms "art" and "history" were often stretched to cover new concepts and disciplines in his classes, O'Connor never lost sight of them. He had his students read widely on aesthetic theory, visual studies, and ideas about taste and connoisseurship. These terms were applied in his own work on ceramics, and his influence is evident in the fact that three of the essays included here discuss ceramics. It should be noted, however, that the authors approach the topic in very different ways. John Miksic's essay on Chinese ceramics found in Southeast Asia discusses how the study of ceramics helps us to understand relationships between Southeast Asia and China. Relying also on Wolters's concept of localization,s Miksic explains how Chinese ceramics found in Singapore illuminate the life of Southeast Asian Chinese in the fourteenth century. His essay is based on his own first hand-and hands-on-experiences as a trained archaeologist and possibly the only excavator in Singapore. Miksic's ability to combine archaeology with cultural and art history owes much to O'Connor's encouragement for interdisciplinary approaches to art in general and ceramics in particular, but is also influenced by O'Connor's belief in field work. This is reinforced in Barbara Harrisson's essay. After spending years as a primatologist in Borneo, Harrisson obtained her degree from Cornell and went on to become curator of ceramics at the Princesshof Museum in Holland. Her essay highlights O'Connor's love affair with ceramics and his gift for teaching students to love the objects they studied. This personal essay provides an interesting history of Southeast Asian ceramics and shows us how they stand in their local context separate from Chinese ceramics and their history. Until recently the field of Southeast Asian ceramics had been little studied. Collectors did not particularly prize them. They were seen as "lesser" wares, imperfect and ordinary compared to the great Chinese porcelains. But students and collectors of Southeast Asian ceramics have recognized their personality and charm. The Japanese have long used them for tea ceremonies, and people of the rainforest used them in rituals. Harrisson has greatly contributed toward altering the common perception of these wares as inferior by emphasizing their local usage. As her essay explains, this perspective is a legacy that she has kept from her days as a student with O'Connor. The varied backgrounds and trajectories of O'Connor's students give further evidence of the many ways that O'Connor promoted diversity in his classroom. His reputation also attracted students from various fields to come study with him in a more open and creative environment than that offered by most graduate programs 5 Oliver W. Wolters, History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, revised edition (Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999).
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in Asian art history. One such student is Hilda Soernantri, an established ceramic artist from Java, who carne to study the terra-cotta sculptures of Majapahit. Her essay in this volume, like Harrisson's, merges her own professional background with a historical overview of an isolated area of Southeast Asian art, in this case, modern Indonesian ceramic art. Her essay links the past with the present in showing how contemporary ceramic artists in Indonesia work in touch with the past. Contemporary art in Southeast Asia has only recently been recognized as field of study, and it is fitting that O'Connor's students were among the first to chose modern Southeast Asia art as their dissertation topics. Astri Wright has written authoritatively for over a decade on contemporary Indonesian artists,6 and here she contributes an essay on the painter Lucia Hartini as part of a project on women artists of Southeast Asia. If contemporary art in Southeast Asia is only beginning to receive recognition, issues of gender and sexuality have been even slower corning to the field. Yet this situation is rapidly changing, and an increasingly large number of students studying Southeast Asian art in other parts of the country are choosing to work on individual artists, suggesting that the study of Southeast Asian art will continue to expand. This is in part a result of the pioneering work of O'Connor's students. Where previous art historical treatments of Southeast Asia have tended to concentrate on religious monuments and statuary, this volume should stand out for the virtual absence of any reference to stone structures and large temple complexes. O'Connor's students were encouraged to search in new places for "art." This emphasis has made the field of Southeast Asian art more diverse and, at the same time, changed it so that it no longer seems frozen or ossified in comparison with other areas of current art historical study. Caverlee Cary's essay on two photographs from Siam proves this. She has taken two nineteenth-century photographs of Siamese monarchs and read them for their visual and historical content. In doing so, she has shown how images can be read universally. Like Caverlee Cary, several other contributors to this volume examine how art history has been written; a number challenge and question traditional art historical methodology. This is true of Jan Mrazek's essay. Mrazek contests conventional approaches to Javanese puppet theatre-wayang-that tend to perceive it as an exclusively pictorial art. Mrazek studies the wayang puppet as an instrument. He analyzes the puppets' theatrical roles, their behavior as actors, rather than as flat images against a screen or as collectible art objects. In doing so, he questions the very essence of many art historical studies which tend to focus on static, mounted objects rather than on functional things that move and respond to human agents in their own world; That O'Connor has encouraged students to explore non-traditional subjects within Southeast Asian art history is apparent in all the essays, but is more immediately striking in Mrazek's essay. It is also visible in Kaja McGowan's essay on Balinese perceptions of landscape. Many scholars have studied Bali, yet McGowan's approach is decisively singular. In looking at Balinese perceptions of the landscape she addresses a key issue in the study of the art of any region: whose definition of art should we privilege? What are the local definitions of art? How do Southeast Asians speak about art? What is art to a Balinese? A Vietnamese? A 6 Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters (Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press, 1994).
Introduction
13
Thai? Essentially the same questions are addressed in my own essay. In recounting the origins of art historical writing during the colonial period in Indochina and contrasting them to current art historical writing in contemporary Vietnam, I hope to raise questions about how art is viewed locally and abroad and to show how the practice of art history has altered perceptions about art and identity in Southeast Asia. Questions about how art history is written and how art historical writing influences and is influenced by local definitions of "art" and "history" underlie all the essays in this volume. Although studies of large religious complexes are conspicuously absent in this volume, religious artifacts are not neglected. Three essays focus on Buddhist objects. All bring novel perspectives to bear on their discussions. E. Edwards McKinnon's essay on Buddhist and pre-Islamic artifacts in Borneo sheds light on a relatively ignored aspect of early Southeast Asian history and geography. Archaeologists have focused their attention on the shores of Malaysian Borneo or Sarawak and the areas surrounding Kuching where the Chinese ceramic trade thrived. Rare are the archaeologists who ventured into Indonesian Borneo or Kalimantan. McKinnon's study is a significant contribution toward understanding the material culture of the early inhabitants of the island. Both John Miksic and E. Edwards McKinnon work with archaeological material but do not make distinctions between art history and archaeology. Rather than providing endless charts and tables of excavated material, both give meaning and context to the objects they study. In Edwards McKinnon's essay we learn that the presence of Buddhist objects in Kalimantan proves that Buddhism thrived as a religion in an area that is traditionally considered to be off the Buddhist map by most Southeast Asian historians. His essay shows that regional artifacts offer crucial evidence for the spread of religions. Additionally, Pattaratorn Chirapravati's essay examines the use and spread of Buddhist votive tablets in Thailand. Art historians of Asia tend to shy away from small art objects, preferring to concentrate on larger statues or monuments; they leave the study of clay figurines and coins to archaeologists. But Chirapravati demonstrates how informative clay terra-cotta tablets and amulets are to the study of Buddhism in Southeast Asia, for they testify to meditative practices and allow us to date the spread of Mahayana versus Hinayana Buddhism in Thailand. Robert Wicks, working from a Burmese silver bowl, offers a perspective from narrative theory applied to a small Buddhist object. Examining the iconography of the relief carvings on the bowl, Wicks is able to recount the tales of the Buddha and their significance for this particular piece. A privately commissioned object, the bowl was created to enhance the meditation practices of an individual patron. It captures the life of lay Buddhists and the spirit of gift giving among practitioners of Buddhism. Rather than elaborate further on the content of the essays included in this volume, I will conclude here and allow readers to enjoy the essays for themselves. But first I wish to emphasize that this volume has a purpose. It is meant to engage readers in a dialogue between art historians, Southeast Asianists, and humanities specialists. Contributors to this volume hope that art historians of all kinds might be stimulated by the interdisciplinary approach utilized in these essays. We trust that art history need not be confined to the study of pictorial images but can expand to include the study of the life of art as it is seen, practiced, worshipped, written about, and excavated. Southeast Asianists may find in these essays reasons to
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incorporate visual studies to their perception of the region. Art historians and humanities experts may find that Southeast Asia is a region that illuminates how art is made and lived by people today. Southeast Asianists may discover that art is as much a part of geography, economy, and history as politics, customs, and kinship. The point is that we hope this discussion will continue. In the words of Stanley O'Connor: "knowing art works cannot be divorced from encounter."7 Let us continue to encounter works of art fully in order to know them, study them, and write about them. 7 5. J. O'Connor, "Humane Literacy," p. 149
STANLEY J. O'CONNOR Oliver Wolters
He was born in Des Moines, Iowa, on July 1, 1926. 1 When he was about eight years old, his parents moved to Washington DC, where, in good time, he attended the Western High School, ran the quarter-mile with distinction, and is suitably recorded in the School Year Book. He has never abandoned his enthusiasm for athletics and always attends Cornell's football matches. On both sides of his family Stan is of frontier stock. His father's ancestors were Irish and migrated to Canada, perhaps during the famine of the mid-nineteenth century, and thence to the Northern Dakota Territories, where Stan's grandfather was a sheriff. His father, an executive with a paper corporation and recipient of the Silver Star medal during World War I, was an enthusiastic outdoorsman, and Stan has followed his example. His mother's forebears had lived in the Interlaken area of the Finger Lakes region from the time of the Revolutionary Wars, and this beautiful land of woods, hills, slopes, trails, and lakes has never ceased to excite him since his boyhood holidays. Even today he may suddenly escape into the wilderness to spend a few days with his tent, stove, and canoe. He was born with a naturalist's sharpness of vision. A birdwatcher by instinct, he has enjoyed this special focus in his outdoor activities. He celebrated a certain day in March 1996 with an early morning visit to the Sapsucker Woods Bird Sanctuary; the reason was that arrangements for appointing his successor-a matter close to his heart-seemed finally guaranteed. 2 There, too, a few days later he attended a lecture on a new species of thrush, recently identified high up in the Adirondacks. After leaving school he did his military service, and this included a tour of duty in Japan with the Counter Intelligence Corps and his first exposure to Asia. He once told me that, among other things, the Army taught him how to drive a tank. 3 His 1 I have received valuable assistance from Janet O'Connor, of course, and also Benedict Anderson, the late Scott Elledge, George Kahin, the late Peter Kahn, and Craig Reynolds. 2 One summer morning I happened to catch up with him in my car when he was walking to the campus and appeared to be gesticulating violently. He explained that he had just seen buzzards in the treetops. I chose to suggest that he was suffering from heat stroke and offered to drive him home to sleep it off. He politely declined the offer. 3 The information puzzled me because I knew that he had always eschewed typewriters, let alone computers.
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ambition had been to enter West Point, but, fortunately for art history, his shortsighted eyes prevented his admission. In 1947 his family background and youthful familiarity with the Ithaca area made it likely that he should enter Cornell, where he became a government major. He took courses in art and, in a sculpture studio, met Janet Raleigh, a student whom he married in 1952. Janet's own artistic interests were to make her feel at home when her husband eventually became an art historian. Her father, Profe&sor George Raleigh, was a Cornell Professor in the Department of Vegetable Crops, and thus Stan's ties to the Ithaca area were further strengthened. No more information is available to me about his undergraduate career other than that he was a member of the Alpha Delta Phi fraternity, though he once admitted to me that, from the age of nine into his undergraduate days, he was rarely without a baseball glove on his hand.4 At the end of his junior year he traveled to Europe and attended summer school at Balliol College, Oxford; he remembers the experience with joy. Then, after graduating from Cornell in 1951, he entered the University of Virginia and received an MA degree in government in 1954. In 1952, however, he began to work with the Central Intelligence Agency as an analyst. It was then that he learned the virtue of writing succinct prose at a moment's notice. The discipline later helped him overcome the timidity that sometimes affects those in academia. His first visit to Southeast Asia was in 1958, when he traveled through the mainland countries and saw their monuments and museums. He returned home marveling and became determined to bring new perspectives to his official work and provide local "space" behind the political scene. Things now began to happen swiftly. In 1959-1960 the Agency granted him nine months' leave to study in Ithaca under the auspices of the Cornell Southeast Asia Program, founded in 1950 and whose Data Papers had already reached his desk in Washington and alerted him to the amount of regional research underway. The possibility began to occur to him of fundamental studies linking the region's past and present. Hitherto he had worked on contemporary Southeast Asia, but in 1959-1960, with George Kahin's encouragement, he seized the opportunity of learning about other aspects of the region and of testing the library's rich resources. The consequence of his leave was that he became excited by a region whose traditions were practically unknown and rarely taught in the United States. Today we take the aging Southeast Asia Program for granted, but it may be salutary to bear in mind that, when still a youthful adventure, it could already inspire someone who had come to it from a very different environment. Stan, in return, was to give back to the Program's students the benefit of an exposure to Southeast Asian art history. In 1961 he enrolled as a graduate student in the Cornell Art History Department. He was the Department's first doctoral candidate. His decision was a bold one and entirely to his credit, for he now had three children. Not many people abandon a promising career in their mid-thirties. I met him when I gave my first history course at Cornell in the Fall of 1962. The Program had scraped the barrel, as it were, to recruit those who could monitor my performance, and Stan was practically lost in a sea of faces. I eventually became a member of his doctoral committee. In 1963 he did 4 Morris Bishop's History of Cornell, page 601, notes that these were serious years for students. The Korea War broke out in 1950. Most students seem to have been more critical of their own academiC efforts than of their courses and teachers. See Morris Bishop:- History of Cornell (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Unversity Press, 1962).
Stanley f. O'Connor
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field research on the Peninsula of Siam. His intention was to study the art of Srivijaya, and the Peninsula was a limb of that maritime polity which was attracting scholarly interest. In 1965 he successfully defended his thesis: The Brahmanical Statuary of Peninsular Siam. In 1972 it was published, to warm reviews, as Hindu Gods of Peninsula Siam and as an Artibus Asiae Supplementum. Stan's doctoral dissertation was an unusually auspicious beginning to his career as an art historian. At Chaiya on the Peninsula he encountered a mitred image of the god Vi:?QU and was able to identify it as the product of an early phase of Indian iconography and style. He dated that image and several similar sculptures as not later than about AD 400 and thereby revised the chronology of mitred Vi:?QU images found so far in early Southeast Asia. The Cambodian images of Phnom Da were instantly dislodged from their status as the oldest such images in the region. Further and important consequences of Stan's research were to come more than twenty years later, when French scholars were able to attribute to the second half of the sixth century four Vi:?QU images from Kota Kapur on the island of Bangka off the southeast coast of Sumatra. They had belonged to a sanctuary. The stage was now set for a considerably improved understanding of the significance of the famous Srivijayan inscription of Kota Kapur, dated 686, with its threats against "Java." It is likely that the Buddhist polity of Srivijaya in Palembang had destroyed an earlier Vai:?Qava commercial center on Bangka and was threatening to destroy now datable Vai:?Qava centers around the Bay of Jakarta. Thus, as a result of Stan's 1972 study, a cosmopolitan and chronologically definable network of trading communities has recently been thrown into bold relief.S It was Stan's doctoral fieldwork that first enabled him to flex his muscles and begin a career that in one sense, though by no means the only one, can be defined as the study of the art of countries on the shores of the South China Sea. I suspect that his earlier work in Washington had given him a feel for the Peninsula's strategic geographical location in early times and the role it played in promoting far-flung commercial and cultural exchanges. He has never ceased to be fascinated by the vision of "a cosmopolitan world threaded together by the great web of regional and international sea-borne Asian trade."6 Not surprising, he is an enthusiastic reader of Conrad; Almayer's Folly appears in his class reading lists. A rapid sequence of monographs reveals that, between 1964 and 1968, he visited and studied various sites on the shores of the South China Sea: Songkhla, Satingphra, Si Chon, and elsewhere. By 1966 he had traveled as far afield as Sarawak on the Borneo coast, a region which, as we shall see, came to hold a special attraction for him. I picture him jeeping or busing his way to the Peninsular monasteries and museums as adventurously as he, a backwoodsman, would head out towards the Raquette, Blue Mountain, and Indian lakes in the Adirondacks. The language of travel comes easily to him. Reviewing a collection of essays on early Southeast Asia, 5 Nadine Dalsheimer and Pierre-Yves Manguin, "Vi(>l)U mitres et reseaux marchands en Asie du Sud-Est: nouvelles donnees archeologiques sur le Ier millenaire apr. J.-C," Bulletin de I' Ecole Franfaise d'Extreme-Orient 85 (1998): 87-123. Another long-term result of Stan's well-grounded research is that these scholars hold out the possibility that Vai(>l)ava influences-religious, social, and political-represented an important stage in the region's "lndianizing" processes. 6 Stanley J. O'Connor, The Archaeology of Peninsular Siam: Collected articles from the Journal of the Siam Society, 1905-1983 (Bangkok: The Siam Society, 1986), p. 2. Several of Stan's articles have been reprinted in this volume. See page 138 for the expression "arc around the Gulf of Siam" and, on page 147, "a flow of reciprocal influences around the Gulf of Siam."
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he summed it up by observing that, "like all thoughtful and enriching travel, we deepen our understanding by experiencing things from many perspectives, looking at them in different light and weather." 7 Whether in the Adirondacks or along the shores of the South China Sea, I am confident that he would always be found pushing ahead, eyes open, beyond the next corner to an ever more extensive neighborhood where the scene of each site-camp or monastery-could disclose familiar and also special features. 8 His accounts of artifacts from Peninsular sites mention instances of "consonance" or "family resemblances" but also "variants" or "local inflections." The result of his travels was, of course, that an art historian's inventory was at his disposal: Vi~l}U images, lirigas, ritual deposit boxes, votive tablets, ceramics, textiles, and metalware. Stan, as we shall see, is also the art historian of minerals. Some members of his department are believed to have thought that he resembled some kind of scavenger because he was interested in such heterogeneous objects. Yet this far-reaching geographical span did not make him less eager to absorb perspectives belonging to particular sites, camp sites if I may return to my backwoodsman analogy. In upstate New York he has always been glad to return to Ithacan neighborhoods in order to recover, as he would put it, "the sense of place." One of his most vivid pieces of descriptive writing, worth quoting because it brings those who know him into his presence, concerns sites dominated by Sivalingas. In splendid and almost excited language, we are invited to think of villagers, their wellworn footpaths leading to the temple hut, and the wreathing of and loving attention to the liriga. "Add to this the flux, commotion and social contagion of crowded festival days with music, bells, entertainments, and gorgeous costumes and we have some echo, however faint, of the vibrant religious enthusiasm which a liriga once focussed." 9 But Stan is a conscientious art historian and careful to stress the fact that the numerous lirigas or their fragments found in Peninsular Siam attest to the prominence of the Siva cult in an area whose Visi).u and Buddhist images have attracted much more interest simply because of their visibility-a commonsensical observation but no less important for that reason. Stan's awareness that particular "places" possess an identity of their own, and therefore a history, has meant that he is alert to signs of a site's cultural continuities. Thus, he could propose an extended chronology for the cultural history of Satingphra.10 He did likewise with respect to Tambralirtga and on a much more ambitious scale.1 1 This is a study of enormous proportion, with a wealth of materials that recovers the varying fortunes of this Peninsular site during seven or more centuries. Tambralirtga's name, he exclaims, "drifts like an elusive memory across 7
Review of D. G. Marr and A. C. Milner, "Southeast Asia in the 9th to the 14th Centuries,"
Indonesia 45 (1988): 133.
Is it a coincidence that at least two of his graduate students have studied landscape? The Archaeology of Peninsular Siam, p. 160. 10 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Satingphra: An Expanded Chronology," Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS) 39,1 0966): 137-144. 11 O'Connor, The Archaeology of Peninsular Siam, pp. 135-149.
8
9 O'Connor,
Stanley f. O'Connor
19
ancient Chinese records," 12 though these and other types of records give "only a dim and shadowed existence to this once thronged and fractious state."13 Nowhere did Stan's vision of the South China Sea's extensive commercial and cultural sweep merge more profitably with his imaginative awareness of what participation in such an environment could mean to a particular locality than at Santubong in Sarawak, where he worked in the summer months of 1966. This phase in his life is especially colorful because his companion, Tom Harrisson, was an unusual figure whom he had met a year earlier when Tom, responding to George Kahin's invitation, visited Cornell and lectured there. Stan had already collaborated with Tom in writing for The Sarawak Museum fourna/. 14 Tom Harrisson was an Englishman who parachuted into Sarawak during World War II and remained there to become the curator of the Sarawak Museum until his retirement in 1967. In the words of a Sarawak colleague, "in the outside world [he was] probably the best known man in Sarawak." 15 The same colleague also describes him as an "extraordinarily gifted, imaginative, wayward egocentric ... " Someone, assigning Tom a place in the galaxy of British writers of the 1930's, describes him as a "professional enfont terrible with some experience of exploring foreign parts."16 One would not have supposed that Harrisson was a man with whom a prolonged and relaxed relationship could be maintained, and yet Tom and Stan succeeded in doing so not only with mutual respect but productively as well. 17 Here was an odd couple if ever there was one: a readily irascible Englishmanthe man on the spot always reluctant to share his turf with an outsider-and an invariably tranquil and even-tempered American professor.18 Their collaboration in 1966 tells us a great deal about Tom's good judgment and the influence of Stan's personality. Tom was able to recognize not only Stan's civility but also his professional skills and familiarity with Asian cultures in general, for Stan had trained himself to teach the arts of India, China (including Chinese ceramics), Japan, and the 12
Ibid., p. 135.
13 Ibid. Or again, "This very area is mantled with the debris of ancient civilization." I cannot
refrain from quoting what Stan writes of the famous but notoriously ambiguous Ligor 775 and mentions the illustrious toponym of Srlvijaya. Stan's remark will strike a sympathetic chord among some historians: "It is as if the undoubted bright and clear light [of the inscription) has become a false beacon" Ibid., p. 148. 14 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Western Peninsular Thailand and West Sarawak: Ceramic and Statuary Comparisons," The Sarawak Museum fourna/1,23-24 (1964): 562-566. 15 Alastair Morrison, Fair Land Sarawak: Some Recollections of an Expatriate Officer (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1995), p. 96. l6 Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 333. Cunningham praised Tom for his share of the "Mass Observation" project and for his brilliant innovation in bringing "anthropology 'home' to Britain, to treat Britain as though it were no different in kind from any other savage civilization." Ibid., p. 337. 17 For a photograph of them-Tom and a youthful Stan-working together at their bench, see Plate 2 facing page 4 in Stanley J. O'Connor, "Tom Harrisson and the Ancient Iron Industry of the Sarawak River Delta," JMBRAS 50,1 (1977). For a photograph of Santubong village, see Stanley J. O'Connor, "Critics, Connoisseurs, and Collectors in the Southeast Asian Rain Forest," Asian Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Washington, DC (Fal11991): 53. 18 I was listening to a lecture on some very ancient food debris found in a cave on mainland Southeast Asia when I heard Tom's perfectly audible whisper behind me: "All that this proves is that people used to eat long ago." inscription, whose first face is dated AD
20
Oliver Wolters
Middle East in addition to those of Southeast Asia.l 9 He was also trained to situate Sarawak "in a region of cultural exchange comprising the shores of the South China Sea."20 For me Stan's finest hour in Sarawak was late one afternoon at Santubong in July 1966. Tom and he had spent an exhausting day in shifting massive heaps of iron slag, and then, no doubt when the hour for sundowners was beckoning, Tom announced that he had had enough. Stan thought otherwise and made it clear that he intended to carry on a little longer. It was now that what I have come to regard as something fey in his personality showed itself. He can see things which most of us cannot. The consequence was spectacular; almost immediately he unearthed a small tantric shrine with a ritual deposit chamber that contained a golden linga; 141 gold objects in sand were associated with the chamber. 21 Stan could interpret his discovery within two overlapping cultural contexts: one, ritual deposits found elsewhere in Southeast Asia and belonging to an esoteric Mahayana tradition, perhaps especially that of Majapahit in Java, and two, local burial practices. In addition, an abundant import of Chinese ceramics found in the slag situated Santubong comfortably within the orbit of the South China Sea. The iron was sent to people living in the interior in exchange for forest products. The open-cast iron was smelted on the spot and came either from Santubong or from the neighborhood. Insights furnished by his Santubong experiences were to bear fruit in the reports he published with Tom22 and also, and surely even more importantly, in his later studies mentioned below. Stan may have a fey quality, but I do not wish to neglect another side to his career. He has been an administrator. His fieldwork was usually packed into summer vacations, and the reason was that, not long after his first Cornell appointment in 1964, he became increasingly involved in the business of the College of Arts and Science. His was the first university-level appointment in Southeast Asian art history in the United States. His loyalty to Cornell has been absolute. He was Chairman of the Department of Asian Studies from 1966 to 1970, Chairman of the Department of the History of Art from 1971 to 1976, and Director of the Southeast Asia Program from 1979 to 1984. Of his first twenty years as a member of the Cornell faculty, he spent no less than fourteen as an administrator with responsibilities over l9 I have often benefited from his erudition. For example, in respect to the do arts of Zen in Japan, see note 137 on page 144 in Oliver Wolters, Two Essays on Dqi-Viet in the Fourteenth Century, The ~c-Viet Series, no. 9 (New Haven, CT: Yale Southeast Asia Studies, 1988). 20 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Note on an Ekamukhalinga from Western Borneo," Artibus Asiae 29
(1967): 96.
21 Tom Harrisson and Stanley J. O'Connor, Gold and Megalithic Activity in Prehistoric and Recent
West Borneo, Data Paper No. 77 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1970), pp. 150171. Several recent publications indicate that this study continues to attract interest. In her book Power and Gold, Susan Rodgers notes on p. 50 that a number of insights provided by Harrisson and O'Connor illuminate a great deal of the ethnography involved in the BarbierMiiller collection of gold ornaments. See Susan Rodgers, Power and Gold (Geneva: BarbierMiiller Museum, 1985). Again, in his authoritative book, Old Javanese Gold, John Miksic based much of his discussion (pp. 56-57) of Preclassic jewelry on the work of Harrisson and O'Connor. See John Miksic, Old Javanese Gold (Singapore: Ideation, 1989). See also the discussion of the gold foil pieces from Santubong and elsewhere in Himanshu Prabha Ray's work, The Winds of Change: Buddhism and the Maritime Links of Early South Asia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994). 22 See the bibliography included in this volume.
Stanley f. O'Connor
21
and beyond his work as a teacher and scholar. 23 Finally, and on the eve of his retirement, he helped to produce for public television an hour-long film on "Great Tales in Asian Art." I shall permit myself only a few glimpses by way of describing his years in office. As Southeast Asia Program Director, he was responsible for negotiating two innovative appointments to the Program's faculty. The first was that of Charles Hirschman, a sociologist. The other was Martin Hatch, an ethnomusicologist. And it was Stan who, in 1982, decided that the time had come for the Program to give an annual account of itself in the form of a Bulletin. 24 He was the one who created the concepts for designing this handsome house journal, and also, with the collaboration of Ben Anderson, the Program's elegant new publications. He, too, decided which photographs and books from the library he wanted and also the fonts to be used and layout matters in general. For all these ideas he sought expert executors. One vivid memory of his Directorship comes back to me. Always anxious to strengthen the Program's association with the humanities, 25 he wanted to organize a Johnson Museum exhibition of Southeast Asian art. For this purpose a modest subsidy from the Program would be needed, but some of his normally accommodating colleagues caviled when he proposed a motion to that effect. They were taken aback by Stan's quiet determination to get his own way; the din died down and the subsidy was granted. It was as though one had simply to behold his unperturbed expression to be silenced. At the time I likened him to a bomber pilot, flying serenely through bursts of flak. His colleagues became familiar with his calm public demeanor, but he was also capable of indignation when, for example, he believed that a defenseless colleague had been savaged or a student's problem had been mishandled. On such occasions disgust would show on his face. His standards have always been high. He would criticize what he regarded as "mindless" research.26 He once observed with some irritation that a recent collection of theoretical essays on art, "needless to say, lacked illustrations." Stan's Directorship was a sunny period in the Program's history, and his grateful colleagues wanted to throw a party in his honor when he retired from it in 1984. Suitable speeches were made and photographs taken, and then we solemnly presented him with a carefully selected bottle of wine. With infallible judgment in such matters, he immediately identified the label and was deeply moved by our He was tenured in 1967 and promoted to full professor in 1971. He also shouldered national responsibilities on the Southeast Asia Regional Council of the AAS (1979-1982), was elected twice to the Board of Directors of the American Committee for South Asian Art (1981-1985 and 1989-92), and served as a member of the Advisory Committee of the Asia Society Galleries, New York City (1989-92). 24 The first issue gave him the opportunity of publishing a tribute to Lauriston Sharp, the Program's recently retired founder. Stan noted Lauri's "almost fathomless curiosity about people." 25 For example, he invited Professors M. C. Subhadradis Diskul, an art historian, and Srisakra Vallibhotama, an archaeologist, to visit the Program and lecture to its students. 26 I am sure that he would agree with Kingsley Amis's characterization of such research: "the article's niggling mindlessness, [an expression Stan favors) its funereal parade of yawnenforcing facts, the pseudo-light it threw upon non-problems." Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim (New York: Viking Press, 1958), p. 16. 23
22
Oliver Wolters
gesture of affection. All he could do was splutter: "''ll drink the whole bottle myself!" We had come to respect an able, cultivated, genial, and also easily identifiable figure in our midst, a habitual walker and one whom we could expect to be carefully attired.27 One friend has even described him as being "buttoned down." We were familiar with both his patrician-like courtesy and his difficulty in suppressing friendly smiles. Laughter comes easily to him. We were also familiar with the chuckle or discreet cough that called our attention to something about us that was not quite as it should be. His taste seemed perfect. He was known for his sudden acts of kindness. His conversation could be so lively, and sometimes quite animated, that I occasionally had difficulty keeping up with him. He is a fine raconteur. Most of his stories must, perforce, remain unrecorded, but here are two. When a literary fad swept the campus a decade ago, he would joyously tell us that the fashionable volume in question was conspicuously tucked under his arm by way of gently caricaturing trendy colleagues. Or again, I was once present when, through no fault of his own, he found that he would have to present a slide show in broad sunlight, surely an art historian's worst nightmare. He remained calm and would laugh about the incident thereafter. Some colleagues have surprised me by considering him to be a rather private and almost reserved person. Something else and more restless certainly lies behind his calm appearance. Over the years, he has increasingly defined, sometimes with a degree, perhaps, of fervor or even passion, what he considers to be a Southeast Asian art historian's vocation and therefore his own responsibility. Thus, in 1985, a year after relinquishing the Directorship, he published the final version of a valuable study and thereby established himself as a Southeast Asian art historian who wanted to persuade scholars to address themselves to a crucial question: whose art was being studied? 28 Naturally, his disciplinary perspectives were not defined overnight. A number of years before 1985 he had published an unusual essay for which I like to take partial credit.29 With my encouragement, he decided to discuss a sculpture that few art historians would deem worthy of notice. Headless and armless, it was, in Stan's words, "clumsy and stunted," with legs that were "especially awkward." Stan could not even identify the divinity represented by the mutilated image. He then asked questions about what "this quite inelegant object" meant to its craftsman and patron. He was raising an issue that was to become his constant concern. What was the original meaning of something "now so like a dead star?''30 "What is revealed by this 2? He has jokingly claimed that his first major decision each day is to choose his attire and that this could take him anything up to half an hour. 28 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Metallurgy and Immortality at Cal)cH Sukuh, Central Java," Indonesia 39 (1985): 53-70. In 1995 he was interested in the same question when he criticized the standard textbook treatment of Southeast Asian art. "One has only to scan the illustrations in them to find that viewer and viewed are uncoupled." See Stanley J. O'Connor, "Humane Literacy and Southeast Asian Art," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26,1 (1995): 157. 29 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Reflections on a Problem Sculpture from Jaiya in Peninsular Siam," Southeast Asian History and Historiography: Essays Presented to D. G. E. Hall, ed. C. D. Cowan and 0. W. Wolters (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). Stan was initially reluctant to contribute because he thought that he had nothing to say. The volume was published in 1976, but I recall that, as tends to happen withfrstschrifts, there was delay in getting it out. 30 Ibid., p. 105.
Stanley f. O'Connor
23
radical deformation of the image of the divine?" Thereupon Stan proceeded to declare his faith as an art historian. Conventional formalist analysis, he insisted, must "falter and fall silent before the meaning of [the statue's] intention." Instead, there should be "some surrender to the power of the work rather than the direct assault of a method ... " 31 Before 1976 when this article was eventually published, Stan, though never neglecting the obligations of formalist analysis and the need to address conventional questions pertaining to chronology and the flow of influences, had already become anxious to define and communicate the aim and scope of art historical research in the field of Southeast Asia. This concern, a philosophical one and dominating his publications from 1985 onwards, was bound to make him ask: whose art is being studied? The same question has also required him to develop a language different from what is needed for stylistic and typological classification. For example, he invokes "imaginative universe," "fields of force," "the local imagination," "frame of thought," and "local connoisseurship." At the same time, his research has sought to recuperate the cultural horizons of the Southeast Asian elite and non-elite alike. This is the very stuff of Southeast Asian history, and herein lies the interest of his 1985 study of the fifteenth-century Javanese temple of Cal)qi Sukoh in central Java.32 The monograph is an abundantly documented and sophisticated exercise in intertextuality. It represents a "reading" of the temple's bas-relief and especially of the meaning of the iron smithy depicted on the bas-relief. The discussion takes us into secrets of Old-Javanese metallurgy comprising not only its physical aspects but its metaphysical ones as well whereby the Javanese understood the transforming processes involved in the smelting of metals as a metaphor for the "natural energies and rhythms for those spiritual transformations believed to govern the career of the soul after death." The smith's ritual was the key to the means of spiritual transcendence. 33 The smith turns out to be the god Bhima who knows the path that leads to perfection. The ritual signified by the bas-relief would be an appropriate backdrop to the enactment of deliverance rites in the temple, and Stan goes further and argues convincingly that the relief supplies what J. L. Austin famously described as a "performative utterance" in speech.34 The "words" are in the form of stone and "perform" the transformation of the dead person's spirit. In the context of the bas-relief is an exquisitely crafted passage, even more powerful than the one about the linga-centered community. Stan wants to convey the relief's meaning as it becomes "wreathed in memory, a pressure of feeling, something more gossamer than a set of propositions." Vivid images of what takes place in a smithy are brought to the reading of the relief to illustrate how it would 31 Ibid., p. 106. I am reminded of what Paul Klee said about formalism. It leads to "the impoverishment that can come from rules." Jurg Spiller, ed., The Documents of Modern Art, Vol. 15. Paul Klee: the thinking eye. The notebooks of Paul Klee, 2nd edition (New York: G. Wittenborn, 1961), p. 42. I wish to thank Peter Kahn for recommending that I read this volume. 32 This article does not represent his only impact on Javanese cultural studies. In 1975 Dr. Soekmono invoked his name on the subject of ritual reliquary boxes in mainland Southeast Asia in order to establish that they were also found in Javanese temples and did not contain mortal remains of rulers as had been believed for many years. Soekmono, "Car:l(:j.i, fungsi dan pengertiannya .. ."Bulletin de /'Ecole Fran~aise d'Extreme-Orient 62 (1975): 448. 33 O'Connor, "Metallurgy and Immortality," p. 53. 34 Ibid., p. 65, note 34.
24
Oliver Wolters
have been experienced. Every word matters: the rising gorge of fire, the splintered roasting ore glowing in the reeking smoke, a pod of orange-white bloom bulging in the hearth, steady trickles of blood-red threads of slag, the phased rhythm of the bellows with its pulse of spurting air, the granite hammer-stone ringing on chilled steel, the searing hiss of white-hot iron plunged in water. Verbs and verb forms are mobilized to conjure up the heat, color, sound, and energy associated with a smithy. The passage concludes with a fearful climax: "All this and more-the dangers faced by miners intruding the living earth ... "35 Every word has to be exact when one tries to wrest meaning from a text such as the relief surely is. Stan has given us a masterly exposition of the hermeneutic analysis in his discussion of the bas-relief. In this article he teaches what Southeast Asian art could mean to its Southeast Asian beholders. In other articles during the next decade he was to develop the same idea and address a related question: how and why should those who are outside of Southeast Asian cultures study Southeast Asian art? Again, thoughts did not suddenly come to him. They are adumbrated in a Cornell address he gave in 1978 and in a short article published in 1983.36 In a 1991 publication he challenges the relevance of current modernist assumptions about art in a Southeast Asian context, and he distances himself from the point of view, to which Kant had subscribed as long ago as 1790, that art should be viewed "disinterestedly."37 According to this perspective, "art" should not be confused with "craft." "Art" was not of use but an embodiment of "an internal and autonomous order."38 Stan went on to insist that this radical skepticism could make no sense to those who studied village or tribal art in Southeast Asia. The Southeast Asian art historian's aim should be to help his students re-experience the life represented by art objects and, above all else, the villagers' own critical assumptions about their art. By way of illustrating this perspective, he examines the part played by ceramics in most of life's important occasions in Southeast Asia. Unraveling layer after layer of meaning, he identifies an important belief in the divine agency of pottery and ceramics because they contain centers of vital power. Such values are the norms of local "connoisseurship," and they are light years away from those of western museum curators and visitors. Stan observes how there is a "consonance" (a favorite expression) in various modes of thinking to sustain so reverent an approach towards ceramics in Southeast Asia. One mode of thought concerns jar burial, accompanied by death rites for the purpose of marking the transition to "the ultimate spiritual release of the soul and its integration into the realm of the perfected ancestors." 39 Ceramics play a part in this drama of transformation which was Stan's preoccupation at Cal)qi Sukoh. Ceramics and iron in these societies always signify more than natural phenomena. Such an ambitious conception of what needs to be studied, something no less subtle than the reflection of supernatural forces, can only mean that the discipline of art history must always look beyond such immediate concerns as typology and lead its practitioners, instead, to a complex interdisciplinary perspective. 35 Ibid., p. 56-57. 36 An address at Cornell in 1978 and O'Connor, "Humane Literacy," pp. 147-158. 37 O'Connor, "Critics, Connoisseurs and Collectors." 38 Ibid., p. 53. 39 Ibid., p. 64.
Stanley f. O'Connor
25
Having reminded us of whose art in Southeast Asia is being studied-the art of Southeast Asians themselves~he is poised to raise the further question: why and how should those who are not Southeast Asians study it? This art, he declares, should be much more than a matter of exhibitions in western museums. His language now resonates with the word "classroom." The product of this extension of concern is an article published as recently as 1995, quite the most defiant piece he has written and one that reads like a manifesto on behalf of his discipline's contribution to a liberal undergraduate education.40 Stan had told me that he intended to spend the summer of 1993 writing an article on undergraduate education for the twenty-fifth anniversary volume of the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, and for this purpose, he added, he had identified about two hundred library items. The article's footnotes reflect his extraordinary range of library research and his resourcefulness in drawing on insights from research outside his field to enrich his own work.41 In his 1991 article on Southeast Asian connoisseurship, he had called into question the "modern" way of talking about art in the Southeast Asian context. In the 1995 article, a systematic bid to define his discipline, he repudiates some recent theories because they keep art at arm's length, and he cites George Steiner's reminder that "commentary breeds commentary, not new poems." In D. G. E. Hall's festschrift of 1976 he was beginning to teach that meaning in art always exceeds formal properties. Artifacts need to be attributed to a place, time, and artist in order, with the assistance of an art historian's best efforts, to recover the artist's practice and "an understanding of what is socially and culturally possible in a given place and time." Yet, in the wake of a century of modernism, museums have succumbed to the notion of art as a specialized activity to be studied for its own sake. In 1995 Stan, who is wont to appeal to the "force" or "power" of art, 42 defined an artifact as "a center of experience" and "a primary source of energy and power" and attributed to art the "power to grip life, to order life, to act in and on daily life." The collections in the museums are likely to include objects of "extraordinary potency." Here, then, lies the teacher's challenge. "We need to restore the works [of art] to life as it is lived rather than merely contemplated." He now returns to the pedagogical role of the humanities and to the educational status of Southeast Asian art history. The classroom must be where the forces that created Southeast Asian art can operate again. Such an exposure to other human experiences by means of the exceptionally rich and varied art forms to be found in this region should improve the students' understanding of themselves on lines defined by Gadamer as a "fusion of horizons."43 This objective seems to be close to what Paul Klee meant by "setting ourselves in motion.'' 44 Stan is confident that such encounters could engage the interest of the common reader. There is no need for students to be latter-day Almayers, "always on the outside of others' deepest 40 O'Connor, "Humane Literacy." 41 In this study he invokes three of his favorite authors: George Steiner, H.-G. Gadamer, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. See O'Connor, "Humane Literacy."
42 For example, O'Connor, "Reflections on a Problem Sculpture," p. 106.
43 O'Connor, "Humane literacy," p. 156. 44 Klee writes: "We investigate the methods by which another has created his work in order to
get ourselves in motion." Paul Klee: the thinking eye, p. 99.
26
Oliver Wolters
experiences."45 He does not disguise his respect for "an ever lengthening literature on hermeneutic interpretation." Much earlier than I have been able to establish, Stan became convinced that the teaching of art history was a privileged educational vocation, though he would never be so foolish as to claim that his was the superior discipline on campus. Furthermore, it was never his business to try to establish a canon of superior Southeast Asian art. All art was there to be understood and only then enjoyed. Lest, however, one may suppose, from his bold assertion of his discipline's educational function, that he has been in danger of aiming his sights too high, yet another facet of his personality needs to be borne in mind. This is the value he has always attached to common sense and sound practical judgment. Ever since I have known him, he has not ceased to preach this virtue. Even his 1995 article is by no means innocent of practical concerns, for he was aware that a number of Southeast Asian specialists in the United States were worried about the difficulty in competing with colleagues in other fields. He was also aware of the overriding priority given at the present time to undergraduate education. Other instances of his common sense and practical bent occur to me. He has mastered the scientific processes of metal working, and his study of iron smelting in connection with the Cal)qi Sukoh bas-relief required him to investigate the history of alchemy. He is familiar, as is his wife Janet, with textile-weaving processes, and his aptitude in this respect has enhanced his feel for traditional crafts. 46 Similarly, when studying an image bereft of any archaeological context, he is able to pause and reflect that it would probably have weighed three or four hundred pounds and was therefore unlikely "to have done much casual journeying since leaving the workshop where it was made."47 45 O'Connor, "Critics, Connoisseurs and Collectors," p. 52. 46 In 1985 he helped to organize a Johnson Museum exhibition of Indonesian textiles: "Dyer's Art. Weaver's Hand." An illustrated catalogue described in great and, for a layman, almost baffling detail elaborate techniques involved in creating "a stunning visual impact": warp threads, weft threads, complex dye-resistant wraps, heated wax, loose stitching or tying off entire sections of cloth. An even more striking example of his technological expertise is provided by his contribution to a festschrift in honor of Jean Boisselier. See Stanley J. O'Connor, "Tuyenes and the scale of the Santubong Iron Industry," in Living a Life in Accord with Dhamma: Papers in honor of Professor Jean Boisselier, ed. Robert Brown, Natasha Eilenberg, and M. C. Subhadradis Diskul (Bangkok: Silpakorn University Press, 1997), pp. 410-420. He shows beyond all possible doubt-and to the exclusion of several flawed suggestions to the contrary-that the Santubong debris, excavated by Harrisson and himself, contained "quite unexpectedly heavy quantities of tuyeres" for iron smelting, or pipes or nozzles through which air is forced into a blast furnace or forge. By a feat of empathy, comparable with his accounts of a 1iriga-dominated neighborhood or the smithy's associations, this eminently practical scholar describes how the tuyeres were made: "They were not formed by pushing the hand outward from the inside of a cylinder of clay and shaped by beating a paddle against an anvil but, instead, they were either formed as a tapering cylinder around a slightly tapering rod which was ultimately withdrawn, or a rod was stuck into a cylinder of clay and later removed." This hypothetical reconstruction was almost immediately confirmed by an experimental reconstruction of the Santubong iron working process. See Plate X in Joseph Ingai Gasing and William Davenport, "New Data on the Early Smelting of Iron in Warawak," Sarawak Museum Journal, LI, no. 72 (December 1997): 21-33. The authors conclude that iron production at Santubong was on an industrial scale. 47 O'Connor, The Archaeology of Peninsular Siam, p. 7.
Stanley j. O'Connor
27
I, too, have benefited from his common sense. When the case for Srivijaya's location at Palembang in southern Sumatra preoccupied me, Stan made two pertinent comments. He suggested that the sheer weight of stone sculpture in the Musi valley was in itself sufficient to indicate that the region had been a prominent cultural zone. Again, when about four hundred unbaked Buddhist votive stiipas were excavated in the eastern suburbs of Palembang city, he drew the sensible conclusion that the site had been an important pilgrimage center and that the stiipas had not been redeposited there, as had been proposed. 48 From time to time he refers in his work to "the art of Srivijaya," a concept about which he is skeptical, and I sometimes wish that he would make a frontal assault on this field and employ the "more supple language" needed when "considering the imprint of cultural contacts than source and imitation, original and copy." 49 His call for a more supple language comes as close as anything he may have written to an explicit rejection of modernism and "neoclassical" art history and their insistence on exclusively defined "canons of great art." In Southeast Asia a categorical distinction between "original" and "copy" makes no sense. Yet, when I reflect on the fortunes of Srivijayan studies, I should not chide my friend too ungenerously. In 1930 the art historian, F. D. K. Bosch, had concluded that the available remains in southern Sumatra made it unlikely that it could have contained the center of the great Srivijayan empire, and his argument was influential enough that no serious work was done at the Palembang sites for another two generations. 50 It is ironic that Stan, his disciplinary successor, viewing the monuments in a much more open and sympathetic spirit, was among those who set the stage for the scholarly reinstatement of southern Sumatra to its true historical and cultural position. The same practical side to his character enables him to offer informed commentary on what the presence of art objects implies when evaluating the significance of sites where they are found. I noted above his interest in such matters as local workshops, artisans, and patrons and the implications of scattered liriga fragments for the cultural history of Peninsular Siam.SI His commentary on Satingphra suggests that it "had reached a rather complex state of development by the eighth century at the latest" if one takes into account "the demand for stone sculptures of considerable size, which is in itself a luxury and a sign of cultural development."52 These matter-of-fact observations require us to hesitate before supposing that the lofty demands he makes on his discipline border on the unreal. I have delineated aspects of Stan's life as I have been able to observe them, but I have provided no more than a brief sketch and nothing approaching a well-rounded 48
45.
0. W. Wolters, "Landfall on the Palembang Coast in Medieval Times," Indonesia 20 (1975):
49 O'Connor, The Archaeology of Peninsular Siam, p. 7. 50 F. D. K. Bosch, "Verslag van een Reis door Sumatra," Oudheidkundig Verslag uitgegeven door het Koninklijk Bataviaasch Genootschap van Kunsten en Wetenchappen, 1930, p. 156. 51 Apropos of the "Dongson" bronze culture in Peninsular Siam and Vietnam he writes: "Wealth from surplus production was available to acquire prestige goods of a monumental character and, judging from the elaborate iconography on the drums, intellectual life was rich with things to think on and with." O'Connor, The Archaeology of Peninsular Siam, p. 3. He identifies "a thoroughly skilled artisan" from "his assured handling and composition in subtly modulated convex planes." Ibid., p. 109. 52 Ibid., p. 152.
28
Oliver Wolters
biography. I have presented, rather than discussed and analyzed, him. Those who read what I have written should remember that I, a historian, have long welcomed Stan as a close professional ally as well as a good friend. I can talk with him on almost every subject. Objectivity is out of the question, and I expect that, in this respect, my mood resembles that of the other contributors to the volume. But I have not forgotten that the volume is the gift of former graduate students who are anxious to express their admiration and gratitude by offering him tribute, as it were, in the form of their research. 53 Those who have passed through Stan's hands cannot help remembering their guru's numerous acts of kindness in the form of scholarly advice or hospitality. His generosity, as well as Janet's, is famous in Ithaca. A convincing sign of his achievement as a teacher is that Cornell University did not hesitate to retain Southeast Asian art history as a course offering after he retired. This is a very proper acknowledgement of his success as not only the first to establish his subject as part of an American university's curriculum but as a scholar capable of attracting gifted students and demonstrating the subject's educational value. His undergraduate classes have always been well attended. From time to time he would receive an ovation. He succeeded as a teacher because he set himself standards that matched the importance he attached to undergraduate education. His lectures frequently contained moments of merriment. As an example of how he could bring to life for a class what appeared to be the dullest slide, a former student recalls that pictures of Mohenjo Daro, where there seemed to be only rubble, would be accompanied by comments about its scintillating sights, and a town ablaze with neon lights and joyous laughter. Another student remembers vividly how he could simulate the ferocious expression on a riik$asa's face or mimic its grotesque body. The quality of his graduate students has become proverbial, and some statistics will explain why. His students have won five Social Science Research Council Fellowships and seven Fulbright-Hayes Doctoral Dissertation Research Grants; two won both. Six have won Lauriston Sharp prizes for scholarly excellence, a prize established in 1975. Only nine anthropology and seven history students have done so. The first prize winner in 1975 was Barbara Harrisson, Tom's former wife, who had already been awarded a honorary doctorate from Tulane University for her research on primate conservation. Her award probably creates a rare situation in any Graduate School. Finally, and to cap this remarkable record, most of his students completed doctoral theses that were subsequently published. A colleague who frequently served with Stan on doctoral committees has remarked that his great talent was not so much that he seemed to know the totality of the details of Southeast Asian art history but that he had a rare-and maybe unique-capacity for articulating his knowledge in such a way that he could highlight its meaning and significance within the larger picture of artistic sensibility. As another colleague has put it, Stan has shown a singular breadth of vision. These encomia account for a substantial part of his value to his students. Some of them attended my lectures. They were a breath of fresh air. I had a special regard for them because they would bring with them materials and ideas that pointed to interesting byways in early Southeast Asian experience while also opening up original lines of enquiry. They were authentic products of Stan's success in endowing art history with a wide interdisciplinary outreach. One of them See Asian Art & Culture, Winter 1995 for a sample list of the wide range of subjects his students are interested in.
53
Stanley f. O'Connor
29
introduced my class to aerial photographs of sacred tanks in the Vat Phu area, once northern Cambodia. His explanations, based on astronomical calculations, helped me attempt what every historian delights to do: plot happenings in a specific tract of territory over a specific stretch of time, in this case about 1500 years, in order to comment on early Southeast Asia. One aspect of Stan's teaching career, lying outside his specialty as a Southeast Asian art historian, deserves to be mentioned. He has organized a series of seminars on art criticism and theory that were intended to contribute to the liberal education of students by introducing them to intellectual giants such as Diderot, Baudelaire, Ruskin, Pater, and Fry. Another of his seminars has focussed on the Geneva School of critics, with their phenomenological concerns and an insistence on the need to study an author's "personal mode of awareness and feeling."5 4 Stan himself has, in tum, responded to such influences and sought to share them with others. A friend, remarking that well into his teaching career Stan began to attract students committed to the study of contemporary Southeast Asia and its relation to the past, explained this development by suggesting, in my opinion shrewdly, that his unease with modernism as an approach to Southeast Asian art history was a congenial influence on students who in more recent times had grown up to take post-modernism in their stride. In Stan they could find a teacher who actually enjoyed the playfulness of post-modernism. What this explanation implies is that an important aspect of Stan's achievement has been his ability to grow young-even in appearance-soon enough to attract those born late enough to be ready to respond to him. Whether he would be prepared to regard himself as a post-modernist is another matter, but post-modernism would have opened a space in which he would begin to engage contemporary Southeast Asian art. Were I, however, asked what this brief sketch of our friend might tell us about his career, my reply would be that it revealed his determination to annex the discipline of art history instead of allowing it to annex him, cripple his imagination, and stunt his ebullient style. None of these alarming things has ever happened, and the reason has been his resolve to study only what he thought genuinely needed to be studied and taught. But as for his personality, I cannot explore it more closely than by reflecting on some passages in his writing. The first is the final part of an affectionate memorial notice in honor of Tom Harrisson, who died in a road accident in Thailand in 1976: "His interests encompassed almost all aspects of the landscape, both cultural and natural. He had earned a kind of 'expertise' for which there is no substitute, and for which there are no explicit rules. It came from wakeful attentiveness to experience."55 Stan had Tom under close observation and knew what he was talking about. And elsewhere in another comment on Tom, he writes: "He translated life into words as he lived it with warmth, humor, and a watchful attentiveness to what is 54 For an account of the Geneva critics, seeM. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6th ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1993), pp. 256-258. A further instance of Stan's catholicity is his lecture on "The Life of the Buddha and the Jataka Tales," given under the auspices of the Southeast Asia Program's Outreach activities a few days prior to his retirement. The lecture was part of a two-day seminar on traditional stories and literature as a context for understanding Southeast Asia today. Stan inspired the enterprise. 55 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Tom Harrisson and the Ancient Iron Industry of the Sarawak River Delta," Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, vol. 50, part 1 (1977): 7.
30
Oliver Wolters
most marvelous in the common stuff of experience." 56 But Tom Harrisson does not provide the only context in which the expression "wakeful" appears in Stan's writing. He continues to value the same quality nearly twenty years later when he justifies the undergraduate study of the arts of remote peoples. This study is necessary so "that we may live in a more wakeful, mindful, and composed way in the adventive57 present of a world we are actually making." He is thinking of an increasingly cosmopolitan world in which we should challenge and revise our own life-world. 58 "A wakeful, mindful way" is the equivalence of Tom Harrisson's "wakeful" or "watchful attentiveness." Thus, the notion of "wakefulness" appears in two significant contexts: a scholar's specially endowed and altogether admirable "expertise" and also the student's quality of mind needed when a new and challenging civilization is dawning. There need be little doubt that being "wakeful," meaning vigilant and alert, is no ordinary attribute when Stan invokes it. In Tom Harrisson's case it may even be close to being "reverent." Tom's interests encompassed almost all aspects of the landscape, both cultural and natural, and therefore approached something close to creation itself. In fact, Stan says of him: "His delight in adventure, his readiness to be amazed, to celebrate the sheer plentitude of existence never dimmed."59 The association of wakefulness with a reverent attitude of mind-a wondering and marveling one-is not entirely fanciful when we remember the scale of the challenge Stan has in mind for his undergraduates if they engage "alien texts or artworks" with their "subjective experience." Could one be anything but reverent when, as Stan puts it, one is "risking the self so that it may be broadened and deepened, so that it will be rooted fully in its time and place in a way that is effective, responsible, and imaginatively rich?"60 I have come to believe that the reason Stan holds "wakefulness" in high esteem is simply that it happens to be a personal quality which he has always been at pains to cultivate, a quality which, therefore, he is prompt to recognize in others. Over many years, whether in the woods or on the trails, lakes, and slopes of upstate New Yorkand always birdwatching as Tom, another energetic and observant backwoodsman, once did-and later on the shores of the South China Sea, where, out of curiosity and with resolve, he has always been pushing ahead towards the next corner or preparing to hang in a few more minutes as he did at the slag heap in Santubong, Stan has made a virtue of keeping his eyes open in order to live every moment to the fullest and to share with others the meaning of whatever he beholds.61 His wakefulness and attentiveness may even account for what I referred to above as his "fey" quality. Being "fey" means that one is able to keep one's eyes open, be 56 Stanley J. O'Connor, "Tom Harrisson and the Literature of Place," Borneo Research Builletin 8,2 (1976): 80.
5? ie. not native to the environment, rarely or imperfectly naturalized. 58 O'Connor, "Humane Literacy," p. 156 59 O'Connor, "Tom Harrisson and the Literature of Place," p. 77. 60 O'Connor, " Humane Literacy," p. 156. 61 I believe that Stan's purpose may not be all that different from what has been attributed by Giulio Carlo Argan to Paul Klee: training the machine to function with feeling. Paul Klee: the thinking eye, page 31. I am grateful to Peter Kahn for suggesting that I consider possible similarities between Stan's vision of things and Klee's "thinking eye."
Stanley f. O'Connor
31
watchful and awake, and be aware that everything in creation is precious, deserving to be seen and celebrated. Be these reflections as they may, what Stan honored in Tom Harrisson has helped me to understand better why he has been no ordinary teacher and friend, and why he is one of the happiest persons I know. I have reached the limit of what it is proper for me to explore, and it only remains for me, on behalf of all his students, both those represented in this volume and all the rest, and on behalf of myself, to wish Janet and him a happy retirement. Oliver Wolters
MARITIME TRAVELERS AND TILLERS OF THE SOIL: READING THE LANDSCAPE(S) OF BATUR Kaja McGowan
In 1935, Walter Benjamin wrote an essay entitled "The Storyteller." In it he distinguishes between two traditional types of storyteller: that of the peasant, the local "tiller of the soil," and that of the maritime traveler, whose experiences, often having preceeded him, are never entirely his own. 1 Benjamin argues that the storyteller gains his full "corporeality" only from those listeners who can envision him as both the one who has stayed at home on the land and the one who has come from afar. Anyone undergoing fieldwork should attempt to attain a similar synthesis in their work between proximity and distance, but what happens when the material gathered in the field, mired in the richness of storytelling, requires the necessary analysis for the would-be science of academe? According to Benjamin, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. The most extraordinary things, marvelous things are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.2 Lake Batur and her companion mountain are the source of many Balinese myths and stories, and they have in tandem become a "repository for human striving": not only for the indigenous inhabitants-Benjamin's tillers of the soil-who surround the lake, live under the volcano, and eke out their precarious subsistence, but also, though less directly, for all Balinese and anyone outside of Bali who has made the maritime pilgrimage.3 1 Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller," in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), pp. 84-85. 2 Ibid., p. 89. 3 Yi-Fu Tuan, "Geography, Phenomenology and the Study of Human Nature," Le Geographe Canadien 5,15 (1971): 184.
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Color Plate. A framed photograph of Batur's Caldera displayed at Sanur Foto, Jalen Sanur, Bali, Indonesia, 1991
My decision to do research in the area of Batur in the central and northern mountainous region of Bali evolved initially out of a visit there in 1984 on invitation from the late Ni Ketut Reneng, a famous Legong classical dancer and teacher from Banjar Kedaton in Denpasar. I had been asked to perform a Balinese dance at Balai Seni Toyabungkah, an experimental Center for the Arts, founded in 1973 by Sutan Takdir Alisjahbana and located in Toyabungkah, at the foot of Mount Batur, by the hot springs on the edge of the crater lake. I had come to Batur wanting to read the surrounding landscape as a text. Applying ideas derived from phenomenology and semiotics, Stanley J. O'Connor has been instrumental in developing the notion that inhabitants of an environment can "read" their surroundings. Responding to natural features or signs in the landscape, the inhabitants of Batur may add their own contributions by erecting natural objects
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Kaja McGowan
or structures in wood and stone near caves and springs, both within the caldera and around its rim, thereby enlarging the significance of their lived world.4 While climbing the mountains, walking from village to village around the lake, visiting temples, and observing ceremonies which synthesized what appeared to be unique amalgams of megalithic Hindu, Buddhist, Indonesian bureaucratic, and touristic influences, I was struck by the strong predilection on the part of Balinese men and women toward visualizing (often in dreams) and then finding for themselves (or more commonly their particular ancestor group) distinctively shaped, and what were believed to be divinely fashioned, natural stone objects from their surroundings. The seemingly miraculous appearances of these objects were almost always made possible by auspicious water sources-rain, springs, streams, mudslides-or they were taken from the lake herself. Their sudden arrival would invariably be construed by the community as a sign from some long forgotten ancestor to build or reactivate a certain temple or shrine. Some stones were said to be inhabited by spirits who would emerge to possess villagers and ask for offerings in order to reacquaint the village with forgotten dances or neglected ritual ingredients for ceremonies. A particular rock was described to me as containing within it a smaller stone, which would rattle when shaken. The owner added that it had other properties as well; namely, that it could float and even shed tears. Some stones were set into rings while still others were enshrined in wooden structures; being "alive," they would notoriously fall out of their bezels or grow so large that, according to some members of the community, they would force their way through the wooden roofs of their enclosures. These rocks and stones, with their fluid faculties and often quite distinct personalities, appeared to serve simultaneously as personalized objects and receptacles, potentially powerful (and sometimes pocketable) excretions, and miniaturized evocations of the surrounding landscape. An enduring theme throughout Asia, historically, has been the effect of cosmology on built forms, the belief that there exists a magical relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the human world and the universe. This has produced awe-inspiring attempts on the part of social groups to achieve harmony by integrating courts, governments, customs, and kingdoms into conformity with the laws of nature.S An equally engaging and interrelated theme has 4 SeeS. J. O'Connor, "Buddhist Votive Tablets and Caves in Peninsular Thailand," in Art and Archaeology in Thailand (Bangkok: Fine Arts Department, 1974), pp. 71, 82-84. See also an article inspired by O'Connor: L. Gesick, "'Reading the Landscape': Reflections on a Sacred Site in South Thailand," journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 73 (1985): 157-164. J. James demonstrates the significance of topography in a fascinating study of geometrical appraisals in temple orientations. See J. James, "Sacred Geometry on the Island of Bali," journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 2 (1973): 140-155. And Boechari, "Candi and Lingkungannya," Pertemuan llmiah Arkeologi I, Cibulan, Pusat Penelitian Purbakala dan Peninggolan Nasional (Jakarta: P. T. "Rora Karya," 1980), pp. 319-341, encourages scholars to study inscriptions in relation to archaeological evidence found in the vicinity of temples for clues to reading the religious topography of sites. 5 Nowhere has this concept been more powerfully conceived than in the inspiration behind the great architectural creations of the Khmer at Angkor Wat in present day Cambodia. Thought to have been erected in the first half of the twelfth century, Angkor is not simply a group of buildings, but is, rather, a replica in miniature of a legendary world in Hindu cosmology. For a discussion of these themes, see G. Coedes's chapter on architectural symbolism in Angkor: An Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 39-53. In connection with this, see R. von Heine-Geldern's "Weltbild und Bauform in Sudostasien," Wiener Beitrage zur Kunst und Kulturgeschichte Asiens (1930) and "Zwei alte Weltanschauungen
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35
involved the pilgrim's impulse to pocket the land. Whether in Europe, through procuring a phial of holy water from the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, or in China, where miniature landscapes made from tiny stones in bowls can evoke the protection and fertility of a particular site (often composed of a mountain and stretch of water) sacred to the holy mother (sheng-mu), objects as containers can evoke in miniature the monumentality and magical potency of sacred places.6 In Batur, I became particularly intrigued by the distinctive ways in which parts of the sexualized bodies of men and women became symbolically mapped onto not only natural stone objects, but awe-inspiring locations in the landscape as well. Certainly this sexualized, symbolic integration of the land and the human body is not peculiar to Batur, nor to Bali for that matter, but it is the particular spatial and visual choices made within this general scheme that would suggest a specific cultural system of practices and symbols implicating both Balinese men and women? What do these particular spatial and visual choices reveal about Balinese conceptions with regard to the relationships between sexuality and power? Erving Goffman argues that the "divisions and hierarchies of social structure are depicted microecologically, that is, through the use of small-scale spatial metaphors.'' 8 An environment like Batur's greatly shapes the range of possible choices for its inhabitants, but then the inhabitants themselves reshape their surroundings in response to these choices. Each reshaping of the environment suggests a new possibility for cultural reproduction. My intention here is to locate a nature that is within history, for only by so doing can we "find communities which are inside rather than outside nature.'' 9 During my first visit to Batur in 1984, I was introduced to what I later discovered to be a pervasive microecological metaphor for the Balinese-the concept of manik ring cupu (jewels in a cup). In Sanskrit, manik means precious jewel. In Bali, however, its combined meanings of "essence," "kernel," and "life energy" suggest the inherent mutability of the natural forces and creative processes that generate the life of objects, not just the objects themselves. Manik ring cupu is a contained, miniaturized evocation of the land (the cosmos encapsulated). Simultaneously, it is perceived to be a source of unbridled power, symbolically evoking the sexual act between a man and a woman at the very und ihre kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung," Anzeiger der Phil.-Hist.Kl. der Osterr. Akademie der Wissenschaften 17 (1957): 251-262 in which the author clarifies the ideological basis of the megalithic complex, primarily as demonstrated in Southeast Asian megalithic cultures. In this latter article, though he admits some mixtures occurred, Heine-Geldern makes an important distinction between "genealogic megalthic" cultures and what he argues is the distinct "cosmomagic" concepts of the world as evident at Angkor and reflective of "higher civilizations." 6 Rolf Stein, in The World in Miniature: Container Gardens and Dwellings in Far Eastern Religious Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), includes a wealth of material that he has collected from China, Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Japan, all of which speaks to ancient conceptions about the nature of space and time and humanity's position within them, as well as the pervasive tendency to create miniature, contained, and holy intimate worlds, imbued with powerful energy and psychic integrity due to their enclosure. 7 Shelly Errington, "Recasting Sex, Gender, and Power: A Theoretical and Regional Overview," in Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, ed. Jane Monnig Atkinson and Shelly Errington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), p. 3. 8 E. Coffman, Gender Advertisements (New York: Harper and Row, 1979), p. 1. 9 W. Cronan, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983), pp. 13-15.
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Kilja McGowan
moment of consummation, when male and female fluids meet (the active container here being the woman's womb).10 Orthodox Indic models of renunciation tend to view wombs as potential failures, dark places to be avoided at all costs, and unpleasant distractions from the central goal of any ascetic's life: namely, release through monastic means. It has been argued elsewhere that Western historical and philological approaches to literate cultures are themselves "monastic." 11 These observations, combined with current Indonesian reformist efforts to redefine Balinese religion in terms of Hindu orthodoxy, thus enabling it to compete with monotheistic faiths like Islam and Christianity, would suggest a deliberate desire to obscure the pervasively feminine register of Bali's rituals, denying in the process her appeal for womb-like spaces as sites for complementary sexuality. Much anthropological research on Bali has focused on how cultural knowledge within some specified area is patterned, and how those patterns are addressed in concrete form. Rarely, however, has there been an emphasis on how cultural and social realities are generated. This essay outlines a preliminary approach to reading the Batur landscape based on an initial encounter with just some of the crucial processes that generate the life of objects. By so doing, this reading will serve to question in particular the cosmological and topographical metaphors most often applied to historically Indic-influenced islands in Southeast Asia; especially, the metaphor of mountains as northerly sites for Hindu male purity and ascetic power in marked contrast to the chaotic southerly sea, rife with its feminine impurities. This powerful axial metaphor of the mountain further serves to divide what, by Western conceptual design, has been deemed the mutually exclusive categories of religion and reproduction. I have selected the symbolically procreative and sexually complementary location of the Batur Caldera precisely because of the dilemmas and conflicts it poses for the application of orthodox Indic cosmological and topographical interpretations, particularly those that argue for a centralized system of monarchical coordination and power. In fact, exploring just some of the complex and interrelated visualizations of manik argues significantly for a dual conception of power in Bali. The force of manik as a pervasive concept among the Balinese sheds light on a contrast which has been a subject of concern for scholars writing on Bali; namely, the tension between the multiple centered (rather than centralized) system of coordination, relying on a holy, priestly figure with a hand on the largely uncontrollable pulse of the land and its fertility, as independent and somewhat in conflict with a kingly monopoly of power at the center.1 2 Dutch historian, Dr. V. E. Korn, responsible for compiling his comprehensive Het Adatrecht van Bali, discerned "the lack of a powerful government over the whole realm" as a great weakness on the part of Bali's rulers.13 Henk Schulte Nordholt has likewise argued that " ... the Balinese negara had not even the 10 Andrew Duff-Cooper, Shapes and Images: Aspects of the Aesthetics of Balinese Rice-Growing (Denpasar: Udayana University Press, 1990), pp. 6-8. 11 J. Boon, Other Tribes, Other Scribes: Symbolic Anthropology in the Comparative Study of Cultures, Histories, Religions, and Texts (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 203. 12 Valerio Valeri, from his "Afterword" in J. Stephen Lansing, Priests and Programmers: Technologies of Power in the Engineered Landscape of Bali (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1991), p. 139.
13 Dr. V. E. Kom, Het Adatrecht van Bali
(Gravenhage: G. Naeff, 1932), p. 307.
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37
vaguest signs of things like a bureaucracy, uniformity in regulations or government, nor a monopoly of power at the center." 14 Stephen Lansing, in his book Priests and Programmers, defies the very notion of a monopoly of power at the center when he discusses the relationship in Bali between the cult of irrigation water and the cult of the king, arguing convincingly that the ritualized organization of irrigation and its symbolic priestly center (the Jero Gede at Batur's temple, Ulun Danu) have, for the most part, avoided encompassment by kingship altogether.15 Finally, James Boon has suggested that Bali combines both the dualism of eastern Indonesia and the centrism of the lndic states, maintaining that the two systems are transformations of each other. 16 With these observations and arguments in mind, this first encounter will examine the power of manik as it enlivens objects that become enmeshed in these two systems, simultaneously hierarchic and dualistic. My argument, in line with a similar claim by Shelly Errington, is that the "fracture of ancestral potency created difference of two kinds: hierarchy and complementarity." 17 It is possible that this fracture of ancestral potency in Bali reveals the persistence of a pre-lndic, Indonesian ideological substratum. My intention, therefore, is to attempt to locate manik in this pre-Indic substratum by examining megalithic remains and contemporary "survivals" of things megalithic, particularly in the Batur area, in order to observe how prehistory and history exist in a curious dialogue with one another. Glyn Daniel, misquoting Engels, has remarked: "Men make their own prehistory."18 Currently in Bali, and most significantly in Batur, this phenomenon can be seen to be occurring, encouraged both by religious reform and the potential economic gains of tourism. In many cultures, including Bali, the discipline of archaeology can be seen to have developed largely out of the colonial structure. Curiously, with the making of Bali's prehistory now in the hands of the Indonesians themselves, it is intriguing to observe how colonial art historical perceptions of lndic Bali serve only to strengthen and affirm current re-Hinduizing and re-Indicizing processes. Naturally, it is concepts like manik, as well as the womb-like boxes and containers perceived as sites for complementarity, which are increasingly being designated as "megalithic survivals." In tourism, this tendency reveals itself in the willingness to commoditize concepts like archaeology (purbaka/a) but not religion (agama), while gingerly seeking their location between cultural preserves (eagar budaya) and tourist attractions (objek wisata).19 It is essential now to describe the particular circumstances in 1984 that led to my first encounter with manik. The phenomena described in the encounter are not necessarily meant to cohere in a logical way; neither should they be construed as 14 Henk Schulte Nordholt, Bali: Colonial Conceptions and Political Change 1700-1940 (Rotterdam: CASP, 1986), p. 20. 15 Valeri, "Afterword," in Lansing, Priests and Programmers, p. 139. Here Valeri summarizes Lansing's arguments. 16 J. Boon, "Balinese Twins Times Two: Gender, Birth Order and 'Househood' in Indonesia/ Indo-Europe," in Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia, ed. Jane Monnig Atkinson and Shelly Errington (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), pp. 209-222. 1? Errington, "Recasting Sex, Gender and Power," p. 47. 18 G. Daniel and C. Renfrew, The Idea of Prehistory (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), p. 114. 19 See my article, "Balancing on Bamboo: Women in Balinese Art," in Asian Art and Culture 7,1 (Winter 1995): 74-95.
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Kaja McGowan
essentially contradictory. What I hope will become obvious is how the culturally constructed, and continually negotiated, reality of manik shifts and alters with each encounter-initially in 1984, then in 1990-91 when I returned to Batur on a Fulbright Haysgrant to study sacred landscape, and, no doubt, it would happen again if I were to travel there tomorrow or sometime in the near future. It is this very mutability of localized concerns in an historically real context, the ebbs and flows of information and its indeterminacy, that is meant to be felt within (and between) the lines of this text. It suggests that reality construction for any culture reflects a series of, not always conscious, choices. Often these choices are initiated by those in power and carried out-either consciously, subconsciously, defiantly, unwittingly (or through any mixture of the above)-by members of a community. In fact, the Bali Mula (called the "original Balinese") communities which surround Lake Batur have been cited time and again for their strategies of passive resistance to repeated efforts to Hinduize them. These lakeside communities are known to accept innovations superficially, while continuing to maintain their own traditions in solemn defiance of the powers that be. This particular reading of the Batur landscape as "text" was introduced to me by my teacher, Bu Reneng, called "Grandmother Batur" by many of the local inhabitants. An extraordinary dancer and storyteller, Bu Reneng gained her "corporeality" from her enraptured audience who could envision in her every gesture and word both the woman who had stayed at home on the land and the woman who had come from a great distance. It is with her eyes that I first began to decipher Batur's sacred landscape, but like all successful teacher I student relationships, it is with my eyes that I ultimately bring this series of initial encounters to light. There must surely be as many ways of seeing and feeling the landscape of Batur as there are pairs of embodied eyes to experience it. From the ensuing description of my first encounter with manik, it can be discerned that women are not men socially just as they are not men physiologically. In their actions and opinions, women affect history quite differently from the way men do, and history in turn affects them differently from the way it does men. As the feminine register of Balinese ritual with its emphasis on sexual complementarity and mutuality, or what has been called its "Tantric persuasions," 20 is being increasingly denied, dispensed with, or relegated to prehistory by Hindu authorities in the interest of arguing for Balinese Hinduism as a monotheistic faith, I feel the necessity to become a storyteller like Bu Reneng. As a student, who has surrounded herself with many creative, active, and spiritually empowered Balinese women (in the Balinese sense of spiritual empowerment in Bali, which is not necessarily culturally equivalent with western concepts of feminine empowerment), I am reminded of the character of Ola in Alice Walker's The Temple of my Familiar who urged: "Keep in mind always the present you are constructing. It should be the future you want." ENCOUNTERING MANIK: 0 F SPIT, STONES, SPRINGS, AND SYLLABLES
Each morning before sunrise, Bu Reneng and I would make our way with flashlights down past the lime groves to the hotsprings on the edge of the crater lake
J. Boon, Affinities and Extremes: Crisscrossing the Bittersweet Ethnology of East Indies History, Hindu-Balinese Culture, and Indo-European Allure (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990),
20
p. 160.
Maritime Travelers and Tillers of the Soil
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for a morning bath. Given the early hour, there would already be a small gathering of people from Toyabungkah and the neighboring village of Songan, sitting half submerged in the steaming water and talking with one another in soft voices, the men in one area and the women a bit removed beyond some protruding rocks that had been set up as a makeshift barrier. While the steam rose outof the bowl of the caldera under the star-filled sky, the gurgling life of underwater springs could be felt forcing their way up from the depths. Here and there, small rocks and pebbles would shift in the steaming water, nudging gently against skin, and buoyed up by the sheer force of the submerged springs. One morning, while sitting in the steaming water, Bu Reneng spoke of the dance that had been performed the night before, Werda Kerti, translated in the program notes as "New Life on the Batur Lake." She remarked that she had choreographed the dance as an offering and to make peace with herself over her loss many years ago of a stillborn baby girl. She compared the process of teaching children Balinese dance and creating choreography to that of giving new life. Bu Reneng reflected that Lake Batur had inspired the dance because various springs in the lake were sources of the goddess Dewi Danu, who was born along with her male counterpart, the god of Mount Agung, from an erupting volcano. Dewi Danu in tum gave birth to Mount Batur, which loomed behind us in the darkness, like a giant pestle set into the mortar of Batur's caldera. A woman bathing near us, who had a food-stall at the hot springs, said Balinese couples, unable to conceive, often come to Batur to ask Dewi Danu for children. A friend of Bu Reneng, a temple priest (pemangku) from Toyabungkah, then said that the particular goddess (bhatari) who resided at these springs had a special shrine in the Temple of the Crater Lake (Pura Ulun Danu), and that her name was Ida Ratu Ayu Manik Bungkah ("Ratu" is a royal title, and "ayu" has feminine connotations meaning beautiful). "What does Manik Bungkah mean?," I asked, already making the connection in my mind with Toyabungkah, "toya" meaning water in High Balinese. The pemangku thought that the Indonesian word for Balinese "bungkah" was "membongkar," meaning to break out or crash through something, as in opening a door forcefully. But Bu Reneng thought "bungkah" meant stones or lumplike objects and that the water from springs sometimes emerged as small chunks or rough jewels called manik. The name Ida Ratu Ayu Manik Bungkah, then, means something like "Beautiful Goddess of Jewel-Essence Opening." The pemangku's friend, moreover, spoke of a water ruby (mirah banyu) that her father had found near Lake Batur years ago and which he had used for protecting his livestock. It was then that Bu Reneng extended her hand out of the water and said that her ring contained a Batur stone.21 I had already noticed the ring that Bu Reneng always wore on her ring finger. Set in copper, the stone had a red-orange crackled center, emanating like a flame from 21 Actually, "bungkah" in Indonesian is a numeral classifier for lumps or chunks of anything, as in a nugget of gold, sebungkah emas. The goddess Manik Bungkah also has a shrine in what is believed to be the oldest part of the Besakih Temple Complex on Mount Agung in the temple Batu Madeg ("Standing Stone"), a seat for Wisnu, god of the waters. An informant from Batur told me that all the shrines in Batu Madeg Temple on Besakih are in fact built evocations of a series of natural locations in the Batur area. Temples, then, are not only the abodes of gods with distinct personalities, but also a way of enshrining in miniature a series of awe-inspiring natural landscapes as "seats" for these deities. Batu Madeg is in fact a natural stone outcropping, perched on the rim of the Batur caldera, above the village of Trunyan, and said to hold a distinct imprint of Wisnu's foot.
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Ktlja McGowan
the depths of a clear pool. I had commented on it once when we had first met, and she had told me that the stone was "alive" (enu hidup) and that her husband, Made Kerontong, now deceased, had found it at the base of a tree on the slopes of Batur Mountain after a heavy rain. Given the Balinese penchant for gold, I had assumed that the choice of copper as a setting had been purely an economic one. I was to discover some days later, however, that this was not the case. One evening, after a dance performance at the art center, Bu Reneng led me to a cement-block structure near the lake. There she introduced me to Pak Badung, who had been a friend of her husband. During our conversation, which centered on Balinese music and dance, Bu Reneng mentioned my interest in Batur stones. Immediately, Pak Badung produced a tiny cardboard box from an inner pocket of his coat. He opened the box and drew out a number of lumps wrapped in cotton and newspaper. Each lump contained a cabochon jewel, oblong and of varying sizes. The first was opaque, white with smoldering spots of yellow in it, named after a yellow flower (cempaka kuning). The second was completely clear, crackled like a baked marble, and given the apparently exalted title "Thousand Cracks" (pecahan seribu). The third emerged, russet-red and condensed in texture like sliced salami. Pak Badung referred to this stone, appropriately, as "Meat or Liver Ruby" (mirah daging! mirah hati), and he boasted that anyone carrying this stone would be safe from dog or snakebites. The fourth stone was gray-green with black flecks and striations running through it