A review of the Adyar Library and Research Centre (Chennai, India).

The Adyar Library and Research Centre, housed within the idyllic grounds of the Theosophical Society in Chennai’s Adyar neighborhood, is a gem of a research institute, both for its scenic landscape as well as its extensive archival holdings. Stealing a glance at the lotus pond in the enclosed courtyard or the acres of flowering foliage surrounding the library, one can easily forget the bustle of one of India’s largest metropolises. Fortunately, the Adyar Library’s holdings make a trip well worth the effort. For the Sanskritist in particular, Adyar is not to be missed on a research tour of India, with its extensive collection of palm-leaf and paper manuscripts, as well as a collection of rare printed material scarcely rivaled by any institution on the Indian subcontinent.

A smooth arrival at the library rarely presents any major logistical problems, as most rickshaw drivers in Chennai know how to find the Theosophical Society – although it may take a few tries to flag down a driver who recognizes it by its English name. When traveling by rickshaw, be sure to ask for the library entrance to the Theosophical Society; the security guard at the gate will point you in the right direction if you have arrived at the wrong entrance. For those familiar with the city, the library is reachable on foot from the Adyar Signal intersection, serviced by numerous bus routes. If you wish to remain on site for the entire day, you will need to bring a lunch or travel on foot or by rickshaw to the Adyar Signal area, as few facilities for shopping or dining are available in the library’s immediate vicinity.

Library hours of operation are 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, Tuesday through Sunday. Occasional unexpected closures occur, however, due the unique calendar of holidays observed by the Theosophical Society, which are posted on the library’s website (although not current for this calendar year). If possible, it pays to arrive promptly at 9:00 am, as staff members are most available to fill requests for manuscripts immediately following the library’s opening. Manuscripts may be requested only between 9:00 am and 11:00 am, and between 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm daily. To access the library for the first time, you will be required to purchase a membership for the price of Rs 250. A further annual fee of Rs 50 for reader privileges, or Rs 100 for borrower privileges for those residing in Chennai, will be assessed at the beginning of each calendar year. Do save your membership card for return visits to India to avoid paying for a new membership.

For those wishing to view or photograph Sanskrit manuscripts on site, manuscript catalogues must be consulted prior to arriving at the library. Astonishingly, it is often impossible to locate a copy of the library’s own catalogues within the library’s holdings. Please note, moreover, that recording the Adyar catalogue numbers for Sanskrit manuscripts from the New Catalogus Catalogorum (NCC) is not sufficient. You will need, rather, an accession number for each individual manuscript you wish to consult. These may be found only in the Adyar library’s own catalogues, and staff will generally be unable to procure these numbers if you do not provide them. If you have not recorded the accession numbers of manuscripts you wish to view at your home institution, the Adyar catalogues may currently be accessed within Chennai itself at the Sanskrit Department at the University of Madras, where an exhaustive collection of manuscript catalogues has been assembled in service of the New Catalogus Catalogorum project. Other neighboring institutions, such as the library of the Institut français de Pondichéry, also maintain holdings of Adyar catalogues. Collections do include a number of manuscripts in languages besides Sanskrit, but holdings are rather limited compared to neighboring libraries.

Once you have accessed the manuscript you wish to consult, you may take unlimited photographs at a price of Rs 10 per exposure. Staff will attend to you while photographing to record the total number of exposures taken, and are generally quite willing to facilitate you in any way possible. Upon request, they will assist in moving a table outside into the courtyard adjacent to the circulation desk to maximize access to natural sunlight, which is at a premium within the walls of the library reading room. Palm-leaf and paper manuscripts housed at Adyar are generally kept in impeccable condition, well above par as compared to neighboring archives. Damaged manuscripts are treated with a great degree of solicitousness, however, and photographing these documents may present logistical difficulties as a result. Staff will generally not permit you to handle these manuscripts independently, or to remove the rope that binds manuscript leaves together. Approach these situations with patience and caution and you should be able to obtain usable photographs of most manuscripts.

Beyond the manuscript collection itself, Adyar’s holdings of rare books are one of the lesser-known treasures of Sanskrit archival material. The library maintains numerous early editions of popular Sanskrit works, dating as early as the mid-nineteenth century, as well as works not generally known by contemporary scholars to have been published at all. Many of these volumes are printed in Grantha or Telugu scripts, released before Devanagari was adopted as the standard medium for Sanskrit editions across the subcontinent. No online catalogue has yet been launched to publicize the extent of the holdings; one must instead consult the classic card catalogues on site, located inside of the library’s reading room. Early printings of Tamil or other vernacular language works are generally not available here; one would be better served by visiting the Roja Muthiah Research Library on the nearby CPT Campus to locate rare Tamil publications. Publications of the Adyar Library and Research Centre, including the journal Brahmavidyā, are available for purchase nearby within the grounds of the Theological Society.

Most printed books may be photocopied quite expediently at a rate of Rs 2 per page. Those designated as rare publications generally cannot be photocopied, and must instead be photographed as per palm-leaf manuscripts if you wish to obtain reproductions. As of 2011, library protocol permitted the photocopying of the numerous paper transcripts of palm leaf manuscripts prepared by on-site scholars throughout the twentieth century. This policy has witnessed substantial flux over the years, however; one can save quite a bit of money on reproductions of these transcripts, or “TR volumes,” as they are called, during periods when library regulations permit their photocopying. For any photocopying request, staff will ask you to complete a worksheet detailing the exact pages required, and will complete your order in one to two business days.

Generally speaking, the experience of conducting research at the Adyar Library a delight, as staff are generally well organized, courteous, and more than willing to facilitate the research efforts of foreign scholars. For the archival experience as well as the manuscripts the library maintains, Adyar will certainly repay any Sanskritist who visits the facilities.

Elaine Fisher
Columbia University
emf2127@columbia.edu

Image: Adyar Library Reading Room [library website]

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org

A review of Sexual Figures of Kerala: 
Cultural Practices, Regionality and the Politics of Sexuality, by Navaneetha Mokkil Maruthur.

Navaneetha Mokkil’s dissertation brings together a range of sources to look at non-normative sexualities in Kerala, South India, a subject that has received little attention. This is a fresh piece of work – well written, accessible and clear. It focuses on two figures which have disrupted the normative image of women in the region: the sex worker/ prostitute and the lesbian. In particular, her study is a departure from a long preoccupation with the somewhat exoticised Nair matriliny and women’s sexuality. Discussions on sexuality in Kerala then have tended to be focused on ‘upper’ caste women and have predominantly assumed heterosexual desire. Non-monogamous relationships, if at all addressed, have been within the context of Nair matriliny.

One of the frames of Navaneetha’s work is the much touted ‘Kerala model’, which described Kerala’s high human development indicators achieved with a comparatively low income and what is considered low economic development. The human development indicators show, for example, a high sex ratio, low level of infant mortality, high life expectancy for women and men, and high levels of literacy among women and men. Critiques of the Kerala model point to issues of gender in the state: high rates of domestic violence and sexual harassment, and an ideal of domesticity. Navaneetha engages with the work of scholars like J. Devika, Praveena Kodoth, Sharmila Sreekumar, Rekha Raj and Jenny Rowena, and adds to this debate very significantly by building on the insight that the “domestic woman is foundational to the making of Kerala as a model state” (p. ix).

Further, she points out that non-dominant women (both in terms of sexuality and caste) have been absent from the Kerala Model picture. Instead, it is the image of the emancipated women that has been centre stage. It is this focus on empowerment and progress that she seeks to move away from. In looking then at the figures of women who have been marginalized – the sex worker and the lesbian – she examines claims to subject positions that were made in the post-1990s within the cultural context of the region. This shifts the focus to, as she says, “locate forms of resistance that are tenuous, tactical and marked by affective excess” (p. ix). Navaneetha engages with a range of scholarship on sexuality written from multiple locations, such as the work of Judith Butler, Laura Kang, Gayatri Gopinath and Nivedita Menon. She also engages interestingly with the arguments made by Avery Gordon (1997) to frame her argument that exclusions and invisibilities produce material effects.

The dissertation is divided into six chapters. The Introduction lays out the background to the dissertation and its framing in relation to the Kerala Model and non-normative sexualities. Of the three central figures in Navaneetha’s work – the sex worker, the lesbian and the domestic woman – the first two are the focus of two chapters each, while the ‘domestic woman’ is discussed as their ‘other’. In Chapter 2 Navaneetha looks at the representation of the figure of the prostitute in Malayalam cinema through a detailed discussion of two films, one from the late 1970s and one from the late 1980s. In Chapter 3 she discusses two autobiographies by a sex worker Nalini Jamila that were published in the mid 2000s. She explores the critique of a normative sexuality that emerges from these, particularly in relation to the NGO focus on health – particularly the fear of AIDS.

Chapter 4 brings together a discussion of two films – one from the 1990s and the other a film from 2004 heralded as the first lesbian film set in Kerala – in order to disrupt a linear understanding of change from “silence to speech” (p. 16). Thus, although the 1990s was a period that marked a break in terms of issues of sexuality, she argues that what needs to be challenged is the idea that the post-1990s marked a period that was more progressive. Chapter 5 looks at the narrative tropes through which the figure of the lesbian enters the Kerala public sphere. Navaneetha engages with the discourses on lesbian suicides in Kerala to “complicate dominant modes of thinking about sexuality, representation and subjectivity” (p. 189). In each of these chapters she pays special attention to the narrative forms through which discussions and debates on these non-normative figures enter the public sphere in Kerala. This nuanced attention to the aesthetic form deployed in the films, posters, and autobiographies, as well as the form of the protest march, is what makes this research rich and textured.

Navaneetha’s work is important for its critique of a body of scholarship in cultural studies in which “the text itself is presented as if it exists in a vacuum” (p. 233). Navaneetha distinguishes herself by bringing together a range of sources such as film, autobiography, press reportage, and a fact finding report on lesbian suicides brought out by an independent activist group that supports lesbian and bisexual women in Kerala. With these she weaves together “a thick description of the regional public sphere” (p.233). It is through this that she draws out the way “the contingencies of a region determine the imagination of sexuality and subjectivity” (p. 233). The work is simultaneously valuable for her analytic style that refuses closure. Again as she writes in the conclusion: “The labor of this dissertation has been to forge reading practices that retain the tensions and incompleteness of technologies of subjectification. I insist on the need to be wary of the longing for closure and worked-out strategies of political action” (p. 234).

Finally, Navaneetha’s work draws from a now rapidly expanding body of literature on gender and sexuality in Kerala, such as the work of J. Devika, G. Arunima, Praveena Kodoth, Sharmila Sreekumar, Jenny Rowena, and T. Muraleedharan. The dissertation advances our understanding of the region of south India, and Kerala in particular, and moves the terms of debate and discussion out into areas that have until recently received little attention.

Janaki Abraham
Department of Sociology
Delhi School of Economics
Delhi University
janaki.abraham@gmail.com

Primary Sources

Malayalam language films
Media reports
Autobiographies
Interviews
Fact finding report

Dissertation Information

University of Michigan. 2010. 265pp. Primary Advisors: Anne C. Herrmann and Maria Sarita See.

Image: Red Ribbon Express AIDS awareness campaign in Calicut railway station on July 9, 2008 (Kerala, India) (Photograph by Navaneetha Mokkil Maruthur).

A review of Hidden Waters: Groundwater Histories of Iran and the Mediterranean, by Abigail E. Schade.

Abigail Schade’s dissertation is an examination of different techniques of accessing and using groundwater in different regions, and also of past literatures that have examined these techniques from various standpoints and with diverse underlying assumptions. The thesis is presented in five chapters, and each deals with a markedly different situation, varying across literature, space and time, and giving us a wide and thorough overview of different methods in, and changing perceptions of, the exploitation of groundwater resources. The dissertation thus examines historical practices relating to human exploitation of physical spaces, but also with the perception and projection of those spaces, opening with a careful consideration of the geographer Paul Ward English’s work on the spread of qanats in the old world. There is also a substantial appendix giving an English translation of a crucial eleventh-century Arabic text on extracting groundwater, and there are a good number of images and maps throughout the thesis where visual illustration is required.

In the first chapter, Abigail Schade introduces us to the subject, inviting us to imagine the underground and to understand ancient Persian methods of accessing and using groundwater resources through systems of tunnels and wells, known as qanats. Drawing on and critiquing materials from environmental history, geography, archaeology, and area studies, Schade also makes it clear that this is not only an examination of different historical techniques and different ways they have been studied, but also a consideration of what this means in the modern world. In the mid-twentieth century, Western development programs intended to alleviate famine and poverty in less developed areas by introducing, for example, intensive agricultural practices, saw local groundwater as a valuable resource. However, these programs brought Western geological approaches to groundwater extraction, often without any consideration of local knowledge, customs or practices. The different status accorded this supposedly universal scientific knowledge over the craft practices of local farmers — this perception of groundwater without situating it in its own space and taking it on its own terms — is the key thread that runs through the dissertation, and has vital importance for the future as well as the past.

In the second chapter these points are illustrated as we move from Iran to the Western desert of Egypt, where we consider the groundwater that lies deep under the Kharga Oasis. This is a crucially different type of resource from the annual snowmelt gathered through the qanats of Iran, for it is a non-renewable resource which accumulated in a previous geological era, and which is no longer supplemented through rainfall. Humans could not, therefore, hope to rely on this supply to sustain intensive agriculture for even a few generations, yet some commentators have treated both historical indigenous use and proposed future uses of this water in a similar way to examinations of the Persian qanats, even suggesting that the expertise of these various ancient craftsmen is comparable, and indeed must have originated in Persia and been transferred to the oases of the desert, despite the manifestly different working conditions.

The third chapter takes us to the mountains of the island of Mallorca, where we consider, historically and archaeologically, the systems used there by peasants to gather snowmelt and runoff for irrigation. Again, past commentators have suggested that this knowledge must have been derived from the Persian expertise in qanat building and carried west by Arab conquerors, but Schade draws on the work of a group of archaeologists, led by Helena Kirchner, from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, who have asked detailed questions about the origins of the technical aspects of local water extraction systems. These archaeologists have concluded that centralized and imperially organized diffusion of Persian qanat building techniques did not occur, and that peasant-farmers on small mountainous Mallorcan plots used techniques that worked in the local area, though they themselves may have been Muslim settlers. Schade then goes beyond this, turning to the work of Thomas Glick to assist her analysis, in which she concludes that the very question of the origins of irrigation systems is a false one, and something of a hangover from colonial perspectives, which led to the conclusion that only the state can build something as large and complex as an irrigation system.

The fourth chapter is of a slightly different type, though similar in final outcome, being an analysis of the vital eleventh-century text, Treatise on the Extraction of Hidden Waters, by Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Karaji, an English translation of which Schade provides in the appendix (translated herself from the French version). As well as considering the text itself, and tackling questions regarding the purpose and audience of the work, Schade also leads us in the examination of work on al-Karaji by recent historical commentators. It seems that this particular text, though translated into French from the original Arabic in the 1970s, has received relatively little attention except at particular moments in the study of Arabic science, and perhaps not enough from historians of mathematics. This is an important point because not only does it itself contain a substantial amount of mathematical technique related to surveying land in preparation for qanat building, but apparently this Persian author al-Karaji is the same writer as the Arabic mathematician widely known as al-Kharki, the name having been incorrectly transliterated in the 1860s, an error which persisted through several generations of scholars. Part of the reason that this error did persist, according to Schade, is the belief that a supposed Arabic mathematician could not be the same author as that of a text on the Persian craft of groundwater extraction, a belief founded in historical and contemporary assumptions regarding different types of knowledge, and this brings us back to the overall aim of the dissertation.

The fifth chapter is the conclusion, or epilogue, and reinforces the main points regarding varying historical practices in groundwater extraction and use in different regions and contexts, as well as revisiting the central questions of the status of different kinds of knowledge and the assumptions behind both historical analyses and future projections, asking what value there may be in “expertise from afar”, the title of chapter 5. Abigail Schade also connects this with imperial and colonial discourses, drawing on the work of, among others, Timothy Mitchell and James Scott. This work should be of interest to a wide audience, touching as it does on the fields of history of science, archaeology, historical geography, regional and area studies, and, of course, environmental history, not to mention its relevance in parts to particular specialists such as historians of mathematics, agricultural historians, Cold War historians and diplomatic historians. Its most crucial relevance, however, should be to those analysts and policymakers who look to future developments and envisage further exploitation of underground resources.

Leucha Veneer
Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine
University of Manchester
leucha.veneer@manchester.ac.uk

Primary Sources

Eleventh-century Treatise on the Extraction of Hidden Waters, by Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Karaji (originally in Arabic; translated into English by the author from the French translation by Aly Mazaheri in 1973)
Archaeological evidence from Mallorca, originally gathered by researchers from Barcelona
Twentieth-century interpretations of groundwaters by explorers, geographers, historians, anthropologists and archaeologists

Dissertation Information

Columbia University. 2011. 281 pp. Primary Advisor: Richard W. Bulliet.

Image: Diagrams from the original manuscript of Muhammad ibn Husayn al-Karaji’s Treatise on the Extraction of Hidden Waters (Inbat al-miyah al-khafiya), from Transformation of Knowledge: Early Manuscripts from the Collection of Lawrence J. Schoenberg. Schoenberg Center for Electronic Text and Image, University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

A review of The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the Making of the Modern Brain Sciences in the Nineteenth Century, by Michael Anthony Finn.

“We are all phrenologists today,” observed James Crichton-Browne (1840-1938) in 1924 in his monograph The Story of the Brain. “We have come to accept all the cardinal principles upon which the phrenologists insisted” (p. 199). It was an extraordinary remark made by an extraordinary man – one whose long life spanned an equally extraordinary century of discovery in the mind and brain sciences. In that century, intellectual, institutional and social changes had swept through Victorian medical psychology, asylum medicine, psychiatry, and neurology. Those changes had, as Crichton-Browne astutely observed, seemingly fixed a phrenological argument into the cultural tissue of the brain by the close of the nineteenth century. Such had not always been the case. In 1826, while studying medicine at Edinburgh University, Charles Darwin had witnessed first-hand the drab Professor of Anatomy, Alexander Monro (1773-1859), and the Regius Chair of Civil History, William Hamilton (1788-1856), heap scorn on phrenology’s heterodoxies. (Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging: Volume 1 of a Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995, pp. 59-61.) But a half-century later as Darwin prepared his Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals, it was he who would nurture an intimate correspondence with Crichton-Browne, then Director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum and a man who, like his father W.A.F. Browne (1805-1885), transformed but never abandoned his phrenological suppositions.

Crichton-Browne’s tenure as Director of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in Wakefield spanned the period from 1866 to 1876. Growing up in the household of a phrenological father cum medical practitioner who was well-versed in the vanguard modes of Paris Medicine (Chapter 1), Crichton-Browne had trained in medicine at Edinburgh under such luminaries from medical history as Joseph Lister (1827-1912) and Thomas Laycock (1812-1876), and then spent a wanderjahr in Paris from 1862 to 1863. He very much matched the profile of a rising member of the elite medical establishment (Chapter 2). Like many of those often-to-become elite young medical men who came to Wakefield during his tenure as Director, Crichton-Browne ardently advocated research and publication, and thereby slowly he built a “research school” in the unlikely environment of a Yorkshire asylum (Chapters 3-4). From Wakefield for a brief moment in mid-century, numerous figures central to the history of neurology and psychiatry began their young careers; from there the famous West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports appeared from 1871 to 1876; and thus from there many historians have subsequently traced the slow division of neurology from psychiatry in Britain (Chapter 5).

It is this story that Michael Finn tells in his marvelous, empirically  rich and highly sophisticated dissertation, The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the Making of the Modern Brain Sciences in the Nineteenth Century. The subtlety with which Finn moves in his story between medical legislation governing pauper lunatics and trends in scientific research, the spaces of the asylum and the laboratory, and the patient and the doctor is complemented still further by his almost encyclopedic grasp of the historiography of medicine and science. Through his careful archival analysis of institutional sources, his nuanced reading and interpretation of patient records, exhaustive prosopographic research, and diligent reading of the medical literature, Finn reveals the “historical splendor” of the daily world that Crichton-Browne and others inhabited at Wakefield. He makes clear those doctors’ and Clinical Clerks’ daily struggles and frustrations there, their dogged determination to catalog and organize their records, their almost heroic aspirations to engage in novel lines of research and inquiry, and their often controversial emphasis that mental diseases originated from physical bases. Finn furthermore shows the important role Wakefield played in the story of the rise of the doctrine of cerebral localization. He explains moreover that phrenology, localization studies, and later histological research conducted at the asylum aimed always towards the ends of improved patient care and ultimately the dream of those patients’ deinstitutionalization – an event it seems that happened but rarely. It was thus almost an afterthought that much of the research there should have formed a basis for clinical and scientific neurology – a fact that numerous historians have apprehended without much consideration of the context in which that knowledge was made. But in his most important contribution, Michael Finn demonstrates fully that while Crichton-Browne was not always comfortable with the conclusions and inferences about human nature that were drawn from all of that research, he was nevertheless central in the making of a school that ultimately made modern the brain sciences.

Hitherto the West Riding Lunatic Asylum has always figured as a parenthetical afterthought in the works of other scholars. Thus numerous authors writing on the history of Victorian medicine and science have made passing reference to Wakefield. Historians of neurology, psychiatry, psychology and physiology have briefly mentioned the institution’s legacy in their own intellectual and social histories. James Crichton-Browne, too, has long-occupied mere cameo appearances in any number of short or longer studies of shattered nerves, hysteric patients, tales of asylum horrors, and histories of British eugenics and degeneration. But for all of those studies, no one has ever actually investigated Wakefield properly. No one has set out to give a full-length analysis of Crichton-Browne’s contributions to asylum medicine, medical psychology, and the emergence of neurology. Wakefield and Crichton-Browne have existed, as it were, as ethereal specters haunting a historiography about other things – e.g. the biographies of David Ferrier (1843-1928) or John Hughlings Jackson (1835-1911), the origins of the journals Mind and Brain, the emergence of London neurology, the tension between British psychiatrists and neurologists, the English response to vivisection, or the relations between gender and medicine. Finn in short had ample opportunity to do that which no scholar had really done before, namely explain any number of enigmatic questions about Wakefield’s place in the history of Victorian medicine. This he does elegantly, even as he generously passes on what were too many easy opportunities to mention in asides how wrong the rest of us sometimes were about the West Riding Lunatic Asylum.

The West Riding Lunatic Asylum and the Making of the Modern Brain Sciences in the Nineteenth Century is a masterful, important contribution to the history of medicine. It is an engaging, beautifully written, and highly original dissertation.  No one who works on the history of modern psychiatry or neurology should miss it.

Stephen T. Casper
Assistant Professor
Humanities and Social Sciences
Clarkson University
scasper@clarkson.edu

Primary Sources

West Yorkshire Archive Service (Wakefield)
Special Collections, Leeds University Library
Special Collections, Liverpool University Library
West Riding Lunatic Asylum Medical Reports

Dissertation Information

University of Leeds. 2012. 225 + xi pp. Primary Advisors: Gregory Radick and Adrian Wilson.

Image: The Pathological Library of the West Riding Lunatic Asylum in the late-nineteenth century. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Wakefield, C85/1388-1438. BSHS Travel Guide.

A review of the Matenadaran Institute Library, Yerevan, Armenia.

Presiding over Mashtots Avenue, Yerevan’s central boulevard and one of its largest, is a square building of dark basalt, rising high above the street level and inviting the reverent gaze of a casual passer-by with its imposing frame. Where the asphalt of the avenue ends, a slope of cobblestone leads you up a steep hill, up several flights of stairs, and up a serpentine walkway that deposits you, now panting, in the small plaza in front of the solemn entrance of Matenadaran. Named for the Old Armenian word for “Depository of Books,” this building houses more than 10,000 ancient Armenian manuscripts and employs several dozen full-time researchers. All or most of these manuscripts are carefully catalogued, and many are studied by scholars of things Armenian worldwide.

For me as an Islamicist, however, this Institute has always been attractive for its lesser-known treasures. Its nearly 2,500 Islamic manuscripts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish ­­– numerous enough to merit a separate building – lie comparatively neglected. They do have a catalogue, to be sure, but a handwritten one made in the 1940s that is incomplete and difficult to use. But there is good news: an edition of the Persian documents of the collection was published some decades ago, and a catalogue of its nearly 500 Persian manuscripts is currently being compiled.

I cannot speak of Matenadaran’s some 300 Ottoman Turkish manuscripts, but I have personally worked with several of its Arabic ones. They run the full gamut of the classical Islamic written tradition, including works on grammar, philosophy, and history, as well dream manuals and works on magic and other assorted sciences. The collection preserves a letter attributed to the Prophet Muḥammad enjoining the good treatment of his Christian subjects (with a counterpart in Persian attributed to his nephew ‘Alī that enjoins the good treatment of his Armenian subjects). And along with several beautifully ornamented copies of the Qur’an, the collection boasts a multivolume copy of Ghazālī’s Iḥyā’ ‘ulūm al-dīn.

Once you are past the arduous labor of finding the manuscript you need and about to embark on the sweet labor of studying it, you will find the working conditions inviting and pleasant. If the work you request is already digitized, you are escorted to a special computer in the main reading room where the scanned images are uploaded for you. Complete with an entire wall of reference works and overseen by portraits of stern-looking sages of the past, it is a peaceful place with huge windows gazing into the distant downtown. (When I last worked there in 2004, there were four rows of wooden desks, each covered with nice green fabric.) If a manuscript is not yet digitized, they will digitize it for you within five days. And no, you cannot copy these directly and take them home, but you may order personal copies at the somewhat steep price of the equivalent of $2.50 per folio image.

For a much more reasonable price, you can also take a break and have a snack in the cozy dining hall, which features hot food and beverages for all visitors; a cup of tea runs a mere 25 cents.

And if you cannot bear to tear yourself away from the manuscripts, Matenadaran stays open, five days a week (Tuesday-Saturday), from 10:00 am to 9:00 pm, far past the closing time of many a manuscript library in the rest of the world!

(I would like to thank Ms. Knarik Sahakyan for kindly sharing with me her unpublished paper “Arabic Manuscripts of the Matenadaran Collection,” to which I owe much of the above information about the Arabic collection. The last time I worked in Matenadaran was in 2004, and many things have changed since then; I would like to thank Dr. Gohar Muradyan for updating me on the working conditions there.)

Mushegh Asatryan
Department of Research and Publications
The Institute of Ismaili Studies, London
MAsatryan@iis.ac.uk

Image:  Enluminure arménienne, fr.academic. ru.

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org.

A review of Performing Embodied Histories: Colonialism, Gender, and Okinawa in Modern Japan, by Valerie Holshouser Barske. 

Divided into six chapters with an Epilogue and Appendix, Valerie Barske’s dissertation examines Okinawa’s postwar history, identity formation, and the politicization of culture and gender through the lens of Okinawan performance culture.

Providing a comprehensive historiography of both Japanese and English secondary sources, the first chapter emphasizes the methodological and theoretical dispositions of the dissertation. A hybridization of cultural history and historical anthropology, the dissertation’s post-colonial analytical framework challenges several orthodoxies. First, by combining archival research with embedded ethnography, where the researcher becomes an active participant, Barske asserts that a more nuanced understanding of Okinawa’s postwar social movements emerges. Taking issue with “objective” accounts based solely on archival research and an emphasis on a top-down political narrative, this dissertation offers a greater sense of agency and an improved understanding of Okinawan resistance and ethnic identity in all their deliberate subjectivity. Second, this approach highlights women’s central role in the anti-base movement and in promoting Okinawa’s pacifist message. Finally, with its “intellectual lineage” firmly rooted in post-colonial studies, the analysis of Okinawan performing arts uses a “semasiological framework for analyzing human movements and action sign systems” (p. 55) to show the extent of political protest and ethnic nationalism embedded in Okinawan cultural performances.

The second chapter covers Okinawa’s early modern and modern history, emphasizing Okinawa’s encounters with Japanese imperialism and challenging the orthodox view that Okinawa has always been an integral part of Japan. Analyzing Ryukyuan performance culture during Japan’s 1872-1945 period of rule, Barske shows how mainland authorities either censored or fully banned traditional performance because they were deemed too foreign and seditious. Japanese authorities imposed an aggressive assimilation program, an effort that found support among many Okinawan elite who equated assimilation with modernity. Despite Okinawans’ efforts to assimilate, Japan continued to view Okinawa as a primitive Other, as seen especially in the infamous 1902 Osaka exhibit depicting Okinawans in a racial hierarchy of Japanese colonial subjects. Yet Barske also highlights Japan’s contradictory understandings of Okinawa with analysis of ethnographers such as Yanagita Kunio (1875-1962) who viewed Okinawa in a more positive fashion and argued for preserving Okinawa’s heritage. Such views represented a form of Japanese Orientalism where Okinawa was depicted nostalgically as a culture untainted by modernity.

The theme of colonization continues in Chapter 3 with examinations of how the US military replaced seventy years of Japanese rule by imposing a military occupation until 1972. While prewar Japanese rule tried to eradicate traditional performance, US officials pursued a policy of nation-building that promoted Ryukyuan performing arts, history, and heritage. American altruism, however, was not the motive for such Ryukyuanization, as military officials hoped to maintain control over the islands by promoting an identity gap with mainland Japan. To illustrate US colonial behavior, the chapter focuses on the 1953 film, Teahouse of the August Moon, which epitomized the Orientalist discourse found in US policies. Barkse argues that the film, based on a novel written by a US military officer stationed in Okinawa, represented Okinawans as the primitive and lazy Other in need of civilizing. The film’s racist undertones also revealed how the US feminized Okinawa, as the prominent role of a geisha reinforced existing Western stereotypes of an exotic and erotic Orient. The chapter concludes that Teahouse “is a collaborative effort between American and Japanese to produce a mocking, often degrading portrayal of Okinawans, a people colonized by both the US and Japan” (p. 166).

Switching from the theme of imperialism, Chapter 4 focuses on Okinawan agency during the US occupation. From the onset of the occupation, Okinawans used their performing arts as a means to resist military rule, to assert an anti-war sentiment, and to promote ethnic solidarity. Traditional dance in particular served as “cultural tools” to “grapple with past and present colonial realities” (p. 184). While the San Francisco Peace Treaty ended the occupation of Japan, the same treaty, with Japan’s support, allowed the US military to control Okinawa indefinitely. Okinawans’ frustrations over the US military takeover of Okinawan land for bases, the occupation’s inherent authoritarianism, and the separation from Japan led to massive resistance during the 1950s with calls for immediate reversion to Japan and just payment for land acquisition. Okinawan performing artists used their skills to add their voices in protest. A 1956 Eisa (a form of traditional Okinawan line dancing) competition held in Koza, Okinawa’s largest military camp town, became a site of contestation against US rule as the “intensification of the dancing… may be understood as an embodied engagement with the political realities of the Occupation in which many young Okinawans were disempowered and emasculated”  (p. 213). In addition, Okinawan artists performed acts that showed the innate cultural link between the Ryukyus and Japan, which, for the Reversion Movement, provided evidence of the occupation’s illegitimacy.

The final two chapters reflect the embedded and activist ethnography that delineates this scholarship from traditional archive-only research. Chapter 5 covers Kodama Kiyoko, an Okinawan performing artist, who consciously used culture and the performing arts to advocate a variety of political causes. After the war, Kodama founded the Okinawa Performing Arts Preservation Society. Performing traditional Okinawan dance in mainland Japan, Kodama and her fellow artists reminded audiences that they were “redefining traditional culture and cultural heritage in the reconstruction of postwar Japan” (p. 232). More importantly, they used culture as a potent political platform as the “preservation society reaffirmed Okinawa as part of Japan” (p. 231) in solidarity with the Okinawa reversion movement. While Kodama wanted to highlight Okinawa’s distinctive culture, she maintained that Okinawa’s folk traditions showed how “we are all Japanese, and all Japanese are the same” (p. 242). After Okinawa’s reversion, Kodama used performance to promote the idea that Okinawans, because of their horrific experience with war and US military occupation, were in a unique position to advocate for peace.

The final chapter brings Okinawa’s performance culture and social movements up to the present with an in-depth account of personal contacts with activist Ginoza Eiko and the Okinawa Women’s Association. Ginoza, a high school teacher, and other women activists use performance to promote a pacifist ideology and to critique the military base problem. After the rape of a twelve-year-old Okinawan girl by three US military personnel in 1995, Okinawa’s third wave of demonstrations confronted not only the military base industrial complex on Okinawa, but Tokyo’s complicity in maintaining this status quo for over fifty years. Ginoza and other women activists saw Okinawa’s performance culture as an effective means to promote an acute Okinawan identity, to reify Okinawa’s claim of possessing an intrinsic pacifist ethos, and to elevate women’s roles in the anti-base movement. The chapter ends with Ginoza’s 2005 group performance in New York to advocate for global peace during a time of US war preparation for the invasion of Iraq.

This dissertation is a welcome addition to the recent historiography on Okinawa, especially those works by Masamichi Inoue, Miyume Tanji, and Linda Isako Angst that combine ethnographic and historical analysis. All of these works have provided a much needed bottom-up and gendered perspective of Okinawa’s troubled modern experience.

David Tobaru Obermiller
History Department & Japanese Studies Program
Gustavus Adolphus College
dobermil@gustavus.edu

Primary Sources

Interviews with Ginoza Eiko and Kodama Kiyoko
Edward Freimuth Collection, Okinawa Prefectural Archives, Haebaru, Okinawa
George H. Kerr Collection, Okinawa Prefectural Archives, Haebaru, Okinawa
Nagako Hateruma, Motofumi Hattori, and Harumi Morishita, Movement Dictionary of Okinawan Dance as a Digital Database of Asia-Pacific Dance Research (2001).

Dissertation Information

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. 2009. 357 pp. Primary Advisor: Karen L. Kelsky.

Image: Esai troupe. Photograph by Kasanui, Wikimedia Commons.

A review of The New Asian Female Ghost Films: Modernity, Gender Politics, and Transnational Transformation, by Hunju Lee.

Hunjun Lee’s dissertation explores the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects of what she calls the New Asian female ghost films, which revolve around prematurely dead women’s revenge and were produced in Japan, South Korean, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Thailand after the release of a Japanese horror film titled Ring (Hideo Nakata, 1998). The monstrous feminine in these Asian films, Lee argues, is a hybrid construction of the generic conventions of Western horror films and the cultural traditions of female ghost stories in these Asian countries. Relating her (inter)textual analyses to the socio-historical context in which these Asian horror films were produced and distributed, Lee further argues that these films are symptoms of the local people’s anxieties about their countries’ drastic transformations resulting from the Asian economic crisis in the late 1990s.

The dissertation includes eight chapters and a conclusion. The Introduction begins with a critique of American media’s stereotypical reading of contemporary Asian horror films. First, regarding almost all Asian horror films as mere imitations of the Japanese horror film Ring (1998), American critics have neglected each Asian country’s particular cultural and cinematic traditions. In addition, overemphasizing the differences between Asian and Western horror films, American critics treat Asian horror films as “authentic” texts and completely deny their ties with Western horror films. What is more important is that American media tends to masculinize Asian horror films by highlighting issues of excessive violence and cruelties, thus appealing to male spectatorship. Highlighting the role of gender and sexuality conspicuous in these films, Lee proposes to adopt a feminist perspective to analyze these films. Lee then further explains the theoretical frameworks used in her dissertation and summarizes the contents of all chapters.

Chapter 2 reviews Western theories on the genre of horror films, especially focusing on issues of monstrosity. Lee first reviews the general anthropological (monstrosity as categorical transgression), psychological (monstrosity as repressed desires), and socio-political approaches (monstrosity as disruption of dominant social norms) to horror films.  Lee then moves to psychoanalytic feminist criticism of horror films, discussing issues of the pre-Oedipal, maternal, abject, gaze, identification, and spectatorship prominent in horror films. However these psychoanalytic feminist criticisms have limitations, such as isolated analyses of gender and ahistorical perspective. Emphasizing issues of culture, society, ideology, history, race, and identity, Lee proposes to use alternative approaches to analyze horror films, such as gender ideology, postcolonial and Post-Freudian studies.

Chapter 3 reviews theories on cross-cultural cinematic remake. Questioning ideas of pure originality and authenticity, Lee advocates using notions of intertextuality and transtextuality to analyze film remaking. Highlighting the impossibility of faithful remaking, Lee argues that film remaking is an endless process of transformation with no clear point of origin and it is actually a product of cultural reciprocity. Lee goes on to point out that more than any other genre, horror film is most frequently remade across different time and space.

Chapter 4 begins with a critique of some problematic ways of defining and categorizing contemporary Asian horror film. After clarifying the miscellaneous terms of Asian horror film, Lee again proposes to use a term she coined to name the genre discussed in her dissertation: New Asian female ghost film. She then discusses the main features of this genre, such as the cinematic hybridity that involves Asian countries’ cultural/cinematic traditions, the American slasher film, and postmodern horror films.  Certain contextual factors also contributed to the formation of the New Asian female ghost film, such as issues of colonialism, postcolonialism, modernization, the rise of feminist discourse in Asian countries, and the pan-Asian popular culture and transnational filmmaking.

Chapter 5 discusses cultural traditions and the socio-historical conditions in which Asian female ghost films were born and developed. For instance, Confucianism is probably the most influential moral system in Asia, regulating the behavior and protocol of family members on a daily basis. Many female ghosts in Asian horror films are usually portrayed as conformists, victims, or transgressors of Confucian ideology.  In addition, Buddhist ideas of life/death cycle, reincarnation, moral judgment and retribution, ghost pacification, and funeral rituals are quite prevalent in Asian female ghost films. Lee continues to argue that Asian countries’ modernity also contributed to the formation of Asian female ghost films. As these countries quickly move forward with modernization projects, their “shameful” historical memories and pre-modernity, such as superstition, shamanism, folktales, legends, and mythologies, were repressed but returned in female ghost films.

Chapter 6 focuses on the impacts of Asian crisis on the emergence of the New Asian female ghost films. Asian countries underwent dramatic social, economic, cultural, and political transmutations resulted from the Asian crisis in the late 1990s. The New Asian female ghost films, Lee argues, were symptoms of local people’s anxieties about the undesirable transformations their countries were struggling with. For instance, the definition of women’s roles was changed in order to better cope with the financial crisis. Because of the high unemployment rate, Asian women were expected to be “strong and wise mothers” devoted to their domestic roles as they were in pre-modern times. This changed social discourse and was embodied in the figure of the monstrous maternal ghost. Lee goes on to argue that during the period of the Asian crisis, local film industries did not decline, but rather flourished. It was in this socio-historical context that the genre of the New Asian female ghost film emerged.

Chapter 7 is a case study of four New Asian female ghost films: Ju-On (2002, Japan), The Eye (2002, Hong Kong/Thailand), A Tale of Two Sisters (2003, South Korea), and Shutter (2004, Thailand). Lee analyzes these films’ prominent textual features and motifs, their intertextual connections with Western horror films, and the social-historical conditions represented in them. Chapter 8 is a case study of the four American remakes of Asian horror films:  The Grudge (2004), Shutter (2008), The Eye (2008), and The Uninvited (2009). Against the popular approach that regards these films as simple distortions or Americanization of their Asian originals, Lee aims to analyze the multidirectional and intertextual nexus in the process of transnational film remaking.

Hunju Lee’s dissertation offers a systematic and nuanced study of what she calls the New Asian female ghost films that flourished in the international market since the late 1990s. Highlighting the textual, intertextual, and contextual aspects of these films, Lee’s dissertation makes significant contributions to feminist theories and transnational film studies.

Daisy Yan Du
Assistant Professor
Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
University of Miami
y.du@miami.edu

Primary Sources

A Tale of Two Sisters, directed by Kim Ji-woon, 2003, South Korea.
Ju-On, directed by Takashi Shimizu, 2002, Japan.
Nang Nak, directed by Nonzee Nimibutr, 1999, Thailand.
Shutter, directed by Banjong Pisanthanakun & Parkpoom Wongpoom, 2004, Thailand.
The Eye, directed by Oxide Pang Chun & Danny Pang, 2002, Hong Kong/Thailand.

Dissertation Information

University of Massachusetts Amherst. 2011. 283 pp. Primary Advisor: Anne T. Ciecko.

Image: Screenshot from Ringu, directed by Hideo Nakata, 1998, Japan.

A review of The Hong Kong Crime Film: Genre and Film Noir from the 1940s to the Present, by Kristof Van den Troost.

Although an impressive amount of scholarship on Hong Kong cinema has been published in the last two decades, crime film as a genre has mostly evaded critical attention. Narrated in a keen, persuasive scholarly voice, Kristof Van den Troost’s Hong Kong Crime Film fills this gap by establishing the general lines of this important Hong Kong genre since its early inception in the 1940s. At the heart of this genre-oriented approach lies the author’s fundamental mistrust of the predominant academic practice in Hong Kong cultural studies, one that privileges the importance of 1997 and its impact on local identities. The single-mindedness of this approach often prompts scholars to find political corollaries in given film productions. Granted that no film can be truly independent of ideology and the dominant mechanism of socio-economic productions, the challenge here is to avoid overreaching, a mission the author suggests many have failed in various degrees. Common problems include “treating a film (or a select group of films) as a direct representation of society” and “singling out one film for a political analysis” (p. 127). As a result, studies on Hong Kong cinema have become “more [focused] on ‘Hong Kong’ than on its cinema,” with many significant aspects of Hong Kong cinema, including the historical study of genres, remaining virtually unexplored (p. 1).

As the author clearly states in a beginning section tellingly titled “What it is not,” The Hong Kong Crime Film is a “reaction against the dominant trends in academic writing on Hong Kong and Chinese cinema” that is “particularly obsessed with identity and ‘name giving’” (p. 1). He cites David Bordwell, who has argued extensively for an alternative perspective: “Instead of reflecting the mood of the moment, popular cinema is better considered as part of an open-ended dialogue with its culture” (Planet Hong Kong p. 37, my emphasis). The author’s own approach involves treating genre historically, which allows for exposure and scrutiny of many themes and concerns that have previously been sidelined. To think of genre as an ongoing process, rather than fixed and self-evident, is also to acknowledge the innate ambiguity and porosity that come along with this complex process. This dialectical attitude is best exemplified by the author’s observations on Hong Kong crime film in the 1980s. To fundamentally question the facile linkage between crime film in this period and the 1997 factor — mostly derived from the dark, cynical characters in a few noirish films — the author convincingly lists other contributing factors that are equally if not more important, such as “the traditions of martial arts cinema (its concepts of heroism and fatalism), local and overseas generic developments (the local resonance of Dirty Harry), the workings of the market (the enormous success of A Better Tomorrow spawning many imitators), the agency of individual producers/directors (a Tsui Hark who tends to explicitly address 1997 in his films), and the feedback from critics and audiences (the Hong Kong critics who … insist that filmmakers ‘depict their social and historical reality’)” (p. 154).

The structure of the dissertation, outlined on the “Contents” page, is coherent and logical. Chapters 1 to 4 chart the generic origin and development of the Hong Kong crime film. Part of each chapter is devoted to film noir, a genre that has been closely related to the Hong Kong crime film category since the 1980s. Chapter 5 places critical focus on director Johnnie To and his Milkyway Image studio, who and which are responsible for many of Hong Kong’s celebrated (crime) films from the last 15 years, and in turn representative of a distinct creative force in today’s Hong Kong cinema. To contextualize each developmental stage, every chapter begins with a description of important events in society, the changes in film industry, and the trends in genre filmmaking (p. 15).

Chapter 1 studies the period from the late 1940s to 1969, when Mandarin and Cantonese cinemas coexisted, and each withstood the vicissitudes of certain types of popular genres. The crime film is further divided into three categories, correlating to Steve Neale’s noted focus on the three major figures in the film: the detective film (the agent of law and order), the suspense thriller (the victim), and the gangster film (the criminal). To account for a highly hybrid and popular subgenre, Van den Troost creates a fourth category, which he calls “the female detective/chivalrous thief action-adventure film,” and which broadly includes elements from the three aforementioned categories. This chapter also identifies the five film noir parameters used in the thesis to investigate the noirish Hong Kong films at the time (mostly in Mandarin and with prominent femme fatale characters) that were contemporaneous with the “classic” era of Hollywood noir.

Chapter 2 introduces the birth of the “modern” Hong Kong crime film in the 1970s. The argument here is that the crime film played an important role in the indigenization of Hong Kong cinema. This statement is significant because, as often argued, the localization of the Hong Kong film industry is largely accredited to the New Wave directors who came to the scene in 1979. What becomes clear in this chapter is another ambition of the dissertation — to create a pantheon of canonical masterworks in the crime genre throughout its history. The author makes unambiguous statements to turn previously obscure films into major milestones in the crime category. For example, by the time one finishes reading this chapter, it is hard not to agree with the author’s claim that The Teahouse (成記茶樓, Kuei Chih-hung, 1974) is “arguably the first real ‘Hong Kong’ crime film” (p. 89).

Chapter 3 examines the Hong Kong New Wave directors, many of whom made their first works in the crime genre and whose arrival “completed the process of indigenization” (p. 23). John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow (1986), a film that ensured the dominance of the crime film genre in the local industry for the next fifteen years, is discussed in great detail. By laying out the various precedents for Woo’s seminal film, the author convincingly argues that it is in fact much more derivative (in terms of themes, generic elements and cinematic techniques) than often assumed (p. 116). Along with the “hero film” subgenre that came into being in the wake of A Better Tomorrow (英雄本色) and the neglected police film of this period, this chapter also includes discussions on two important characters in the Hong Kong crime film — the immigrant gangster and Hong Kong’s own “Dirty-Harry”-style detective. The late 1980s also witnessed the first wave of Hong Kong noir. The author’s argument is that the noir traits already present in many martial arts films during the preceding fifteen years “migrated” into the modern urban crime genre in the late 1970s and early 1980s (p. 142).

Chapter 4 delineates the decline of the Hong Kong crime film from 1990 to 2010. This chapter charts the developments of no less than seven subgenres, cycles, and trends within the crime genre: the Big Timer (梟雄片) cycle and Category III films in the golden era of 1990–94; and the Police film, the Triad Film, the Assassin Film, the Undercover Cop Film, the “International Action” film and the Infernal Affairs 無間道-inspired Thrillers during the industrial depression period (1994–present). The author attributes the decline of the crime film to the complex combination of three factors: changing audience tastes, generic exhaustion, and the industry-wide orientation towards overseas markets in general and to the Mainland in particular (p. 176). The main contribution of this chapter, however, lies in its research on the Hong Kong film industry in the late 1990s and its creative surge in local films — many in the crime genre — that have barely been largely overlooked by English language histories of Hong Kong cinema.

Chapter 5 considers the unique combination of crime film and contemporary noir, a category in which Johnnie To and his Milkyway Image studio have played a central role. This shift away from the historical trajectory delineated by the previous four chapters to a focus on one particular film studio and its central figure(s) is appropriate. Distinctly local, Milkyway Image and its quirky idiosyncrasies are not only pivotal in carrying forward the crime film tradition (and, in no small way, the experimental spirit and creative impulse in the industry in the late 1990s), but are also instrumental to an industry-wide trend towards noirish filmmaking. The author effectively sums up the characteristics — the thematic, visual, narrative and structural elements — that comprise the “Milkyway house style” (p. 231). Finally, in concluding the patterns of development of the crime film, the author is able to persuasively arrive at the conclusion pre-established in the earlier chapters, that Hong Kong film noir is “a viable, recognizable current of Hong Kong cinema” (p. 266).

The Hong Kong Crime Film is an important contribution to the field. Challenging familiar attitudes, the dissertation introduces a new conceptual framework and offers a more flexible understanding of Hong Kong cinema for readers who are willing to abandon certain basic assumptions such as the reflectionist nature of Hong Kong films or noir’s quintessential American connection. The author’s introduction to the crime film genre also attests to genre criticism’s continued validity as an approach to Chinese film studies. A sensible and accessible read, the dissertation further benefits from many scholarly and anecdotal footnotes, an elaborate glossary, and a personal interview with director Johnnie To that contains interesting first-hand information on Milkyway Image films.

Wei Yang
Assistant Professor
Asian Studies Program and Film Studies Program
Sewanee: The University of the South
weiyang@sewanee.edu

Sources

A Better Tomorrow 英雄本色 series (1986-1989)
Long Arm of the Law 省港旗兵 series (1984-1990)
The Young and Dangerous 古惑仔 series (1996- )
Infernal Affairs 無間道 series (2002-2003)
Election 黑社會 (2005)，Election 2 黑社會：以和為貴(2006)

Dissertation Information

Chinese University of Hong Kong. 2010. 334 pp. Primary Advisor: Ann Huss.

Image: Screenshot of Chow Yun-Fat, from A Better Tomorrow 英雄本色 (1986, dir. John Woo). Screen Junkies.

A review of the Harvard Yenching Library Rare Books Collection, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA.

The Harvard-Yenching Library holds more than 1.3 million volumes. This review won’t bore readers with the details of each collection, which are introduced on the library’s website. Instead, my aim is to convince the reader to consider a visit to the library and its world-class rare book collection. Although most of the library’s holdings are listed in fully searchable catalogs, there are many discoveries awaiting even cursory exploration. Our persisting ignorance of the Harvard-Yenching collection is best expressed anecdotally. I will briefly relate two tales of discovery enabled by the library’s eccentric collections before introducing relevant resources for visitors.

On February 27, Min Jung a Harvard Yenching fellow and professor of Korean literature at Hanyang University delivered a fascinating talk entitled, “Cultural Exchanges between Korean and Chinese Literati in the 18th and 19th Centuries: The Fujitsuka Chikashi (1879-1948) Collection in the Harvard-Yenching Library.” Dr. Min Jung arrived at Harvard with a different project, but he quickly discovered that the library had unintentionally bought a large part of the “lost” private collection of the famous Sinologist Fujitsuka Chikashi (1879-1948) during the 1950s. Fujitsuka, a specialist in Sino-Korean-Japanese exchange, bought over 10,000 books in Liulichang in the early 20th century. Although most of his collection burned during the allied bombings of Tokyo, his home collection (his most valued books) survived and was gradually auctioned off after his death.

Until Dr Min Jung’s visit to Harvard, the location of most of his collection remained a mystery. Min Jung began to realize the Yenching held a significant portion of his books when he recognized Fujitsuka’s seal on the inside of a book. Intrigued, he began to identify a significant number of Fujitsuka’s books. He discovered important items scattered through the stacks, the depository, and the rare book room. The most astonishing moment of his talk occurred when he showed us an image of a piece of calligraphy that fell out of a book from the depository. The calligraphy was written by a famous eighteenth century Korean scholar, and Min Jung stated, “This was in the depository. This scrap of paper is worth tens of thousands of dollars in Korea.”

My experiences in the rare book collection have been similarly illuminating. Recently, I discovered that a text ambiguously labeled “Manchu exercise book” was actually a section of Qiying’s previously unknown bilingual Manchu-Chinese diary. Moreover, books are often loaded with the paraphernalia of a book historian’s dreams: marginalia, notes, and unexpected calligraphic treasures. If you are still in doubt, please take a look at this entry I wrote after the Take Note conference held at Harvard last fall. To see more collection highlights presented at that conference you can also check out Kuniko McVey’s online exhibit from the Japanese collection.

If the Harvard-Yenching hold materials useful for your research, there are a few steps you should take before coming to Harvard. First, you should explore the online library catalogs. The library system currently maintains two such catalogs, HOLLIS and HOLLIS Classic. HOLLIS does not support searching in Asian scripts. In other words, you can search by means of romanization systems. HOLLIS Classic (hollisclassic.harvard.edu), which does support Asian script searching, is more useful. Note also that, once you do a few searches, you’ll find that the Harvard-Yenching has already digitized a large number of Asian language rare books, which are available for free through either Google Books or the library. The expanded search feature will allow you to better perform your search and to help you isolate materials in our rare book collection. Also useful are the numerous printed catalogs for the library’s rare book collection. These have the great benefit of holistic organization, allowing you to find materials that may have otherwise been overlooked. Finally, before your visit I recommend making contact with our research librarians. The materials you’d like to see may be unavailable due to digitization. The wonderful library staff will be able to let you know what collections are unavailable and to offer other assistance.

Getting to the library is fairly easy, and there are travel grants available for eligible scholars. While the Yenching is open to anyone holding a university ID (from any university), access to the rare book collection is more restricted. For access to any of the special collections at Harvard, you must register with the university and create a Special Collections Request account. After your account has been created, you’re ready for rare books. Request the materials you would like to see through the online system. You can make requests any time before going to the reading room. The reading room is located on the third floor of the Harvard-Yenching library. It is open from 9:30 am to 12:00 pm and reopens 1:30 pm to 4:00 pm, Monday through Friday. Unfortunately, the library seems to have meetings that regularly conflict with the afternoon opening hours, so don’t be surprised if you lose an afternoon or two. There are no bags allowed in the reading room. You can leave your bag in the rare books office.

Beyond the rare book room, the library has much more to offer. The official library website has information on digital collections as well as area specific research guides.

Devin Fitzgerald
PhD Candidate
East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Harvard University
devinfitz@gmail.com

Image: Qing Han Hua Tiao 淸漢話條 (undated MS), and the Sanhe Bianlan 三合便览 (Manchu-Mongolian-Chinese Dictionary) published in 1792. Photograph by Devin Fitzgerald.

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org

A review of From “Retire Livestock, Restore Rangeland” to the Compensation for Ecological Services: State Interventions into Rangeland Ecosystem and Pastoralism in Tibet, by Yönten Nyima.

In the last decade, circulating narratives considering the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau as degraded and over-exploited, and presenting serious ecological problems as consequences of human interventions have become quite common in academic and non-academic literature. Nevertheless, an accurate analysis of the actual situation of the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau is more difficult to find. The grasslands of the “roof of the world” thus remain in this fuzzy perspective and the questions arising about the extent, the significance and the forms of their degradation are barely answered. Yönten Nyima’s dissertation inserts itself in this field of unanswered questions and produces some concrete analysis based on fieldwork and analysis of government documents. This is the evident merit of this dissertation: to relate concrete materials to the current ecological situation of one specific region of the Tibetan Plateau, Nagchu Prefecture (Tibet Autonomous Region, TAR).

Throughout the dissertation, Yönten Nyima emphasizes two main opposing discourses: the State discourse on the degradation problems of the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau and Tibetan pastoralists’ narratives. Why are these so different? What is behind this discrepancy? The answer that Yönten Nyima offers is based on the assumption that the ecological interventions of any nation-state are essentially political actions over territory and population (see Arun Agrawal, “Environmentality: Community, Intimate Government and Environmental Subjects in Kumaon, India”, Current Anthropology 46, 2005, pp. 161-190; Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: the Making and Unmaking of the Third World, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; James Ferguson, The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). The starting point of this dissertation is thus that the environmental programs promoted by the Chinese government during the last decades are political interventions over the Tibetan Plateau. From this assumption, Yönten Nyima guides us into a study of the overlapping politics promoted by the Chinese government for “protecting” the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau. This approach shows the politics behind the ecological discourses of both State actors and Tibetan pastoralists.

Tibetan pastoralists consider themselves to be living in an environment which is closely interlinked with animals and rangeland. In the dedication of the dissertation, Yönten Nyima quotes a pastoralist as saying that “Pastoralists depend on livestock and livestock on rangeland (mgo nag brten sa spu nag, spu nag brten sa spang spu)” (p. v). According to Yönten Nyima, these are the three elements which should be taken into account when analyzing the conditions of the Tibetan Plateau. Problems arise since the Chinese government does not take into account the livestock element in promoting its policies and programs for recovering or protecting the Tibetan Plateau natural environment. The consequence is that these official analyses miss the pivotal element linking together the other two elements of the system presented by Yönten Nyima. All the programs promoted by the Chinese government for preserving or restoring the environment of the Tibetan Plateau do not take into account livestock. Yet, for the Tibetan pastoralists interviewed by Yönten Nyima, livestock should be central.

From this discrepancy between the State and pastoralists’ discourses, Yönten Nyima considers three common theories about pastoralist societies employed by the Chinese authorities for analyzing the situation and implementing environmental programs on the grasslands. These are the equilibrial ecosystem theory (J.E. Ellis, M.B. Coughenour and D.M. Swift, “Climate Variability, Ecosystem Stability, and the Implication for Range and Livestock Development” in R.H. Behnke et. al. eds., Range Ecology at Disequilibrium: New Models of Natural Variability and Pastoral Adaptation in African Savannas, London: Overseas Development Institute, 1993, pp. 31-41; Nathan F. Sayre, “The Genesis, History, and Limits of Carrying Capacity”, Annals of the Association of American Geography 98, 2008, pp. 120-134), the Tragedy of the Commons theory (Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons”, Science 163, 1968, pp. 1243-1248) and the Cattle Complex theory (M.J. Herskovits, “The Cattle Complex in East Africa”, American Anthropologist 28, 1926, pp. 361-388). According to Yönten Nyima, this theoretical framework within which the environmental programs of the Chinese government are generated is wrong. He argues that these theories are not applicable to the case of the Tibetan Plateau grasslands and that the intentions behind these environmental programs are closely linked to political aims.

Through the example of Nagchu’s grasslands, Yönten Nyima challenges these theories of pastoralism showing their inconsistency in the case of the Tibetan Plateau. Nevertheless, he also argues that these theories and scientific discourses act in these regions as “received wisdoms” and prevent local people from illustrating to the Chinese authorities their suggestions related to grassland management. Yönten Nyima thus applies this theoretical framework to two environmental programs which the Chinese government has introduced during the last decade. The aim is to understand the political logics behind them, their inconsistencies for solving environmental problems and the way in which they are perceived by local pastoralists.

These programs are the “tuimu huancao” 退牧还草 (retire livestock, restore pastures) introduced in 2003, and the “destocking policy under the Compensation for Ecosystem Services (CES)” introduced in 2009. Yönten Nyima analyzes the implementation of these programs in Nagchu. Firstly, he describes pastoralists’ practices and rangeland management before the introduction of the Rangeland Household Responsibility System during the 1980s. He argues that this system was introduced to avoid the logics of the Tragedy of the Commons theory. Nevertheless, official narratives claiming that there was subsequently an extension of degradation problems over the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau led to further environmental programs. Yönten Nyima explains that the elements justifying these claims were not based on scientific data and studies, but on generic assumptions and an institutionalized process of “copy-pasting” language from previous official reports in order to promote new programs within the bureaucratic apparatus of the Chinese government. The consequences, according to the author, are the deeper and deeper discrepancy between the environmental programs introduced by the high hierarchies of Chinese government and the actual ecological situation of the grasslands. Local bureaux of the government, even if they are aware of the actual situation of the grasslands, have to follow national plans and to reproduce the national narratives in order to obtain governmental funds. Yönten Nyima thus illustrates this bureaucratic mechanism which, according to him, is not democratic at all since control over and evaluation of the State’s actions is not enjoyed by the people who live with the results of these policies, but by the higher rungs of government.

This was the case for the implementation of the “tuimu huancao” and CES’s destocking programs. The first, aimed to reduce and recover the rangelands ecosystem from degradation through fencing, seeding grass, grazing and restrictions bans. Yönten Nyima reports that this program has been applied in areas where, according to old pastoralists, rangeland conditions have not changed since they were young, or it has caused important economic damages to pastoralists. The logic leading the “tuimu huancao” was not the protection of the grasslands, but the fulfillment, at a local level, of the central government’s expectations. The CES’s destocking program has been similar. The central government, according to theories such as the Cattle Complex and equilibrial ecosystem, decided to reduce the livestock pressure on the grasslands, imputing to livestock the responsibility of environmental degradation. Yet, Tibetan pastoralists and, according to Yönten Nyima, also local authorities do not agree with this assumption. According to them, livestock reduction will cause greater damage since the livestock is an essential element of the grassland ecosystem, which according to the author is a non-equilibrial ecosystem. Nevertheless, this program has been applied during the last years ignoring local people critiques and suggestions.

Yönten Nyima suggests a “way-out” of this governmental impasse which he refers to as the “middle-way approach.” He argues that the actual plan of the Chinese government is not to protect or restore the grasslands, rather it is to transform traditional pastoralism in accordance with current economic and political aims. The benefits of these environmental programs cannot be analyzed because we lack data on the previous as well as current situation of the grassland ecosystem. Nevertheless, transformations in the lifestyle of local people can already be studied. Tibetan pastoralists, in the areas explored by Yönten Nyima, have changed their practices and developed new “desires” linked to the transformations of their lifestyle brought about by these environmental programs. Yönten Nyima also argues that pastoralists do not reject all the plans that the government wants to implement in their region, but they rather wish that their points of view would be listened to by the Chinese authorities and taken into account in policy-making processes. Yönten Nyima claims that if in some areas these plans have failed, in some others they have actually brought some benefits to the grasslands as well as local people. This has happened when environmental programs have been implemented after negotiations with local pastoralists. The middle-way approach suggested by Yönten Nyima is closely linked to this claim. If the Chinese government elaborates and implements environmental policies taking into account local people’s suggestions and points of view, and combines traditional forms of pastoralism with development strategies, this could be beneficial for the government, which could thus implement its policies without having to manage local people’s resistance. At the same time, it could be beneficial for the pastoralists, who could enjoy better living conditions through development policies that allow them to continue their previous pastoralist practices. Finally, the middle-way approach suggested by Yönten Nyima could be beneficial to the grasslands of the Tibetan Plateau, which could be protected and restored as well as exploited according to the Chinese state plans and the practices and desires of local people.

Elisa Cencetti
Young Scholar of IRIS
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris
elisa.cencetti@ehess.fr

Primary Sources

TAR Counties Bureaux of Agriculture and Animal Husbandry
Grassland Monitoring and Supervision Center
Rangeland Research Center of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences
National Agricultural Technology Extension and Service Center

Dissertation Information

University of Colorado. 2012. 312 pp. Primary Advisor: Emily T. Yeh.

Image: Photograph by Yönten Nyima.

We’re very excited to announce that “Inner Asia Dissertation Reviews” will be expanding to include Central Asia Studies in the 2013-2014 season. Joining forces with Loretta Kim (Hong Kong Baptist University) is Niccolò Pianciola (Lingnan University).

Loretta and Niccolò will bring you friendly, non-critical reviews of recently defended, unpublished dissertations in this newly expanded field. If you are interested in having your dissertation reviewed, please fill out the Review Application Form. Click here if you are interested in being a reviewer. If you wish to help out Dissertation Reviews in some other way, please contact info@dissertationreviews.org.

Our Inner and Central Asia Field Editors can be reached at loretta.kim@dissertationreviews.org and niccolo.pianciola@dissertationreviews.org.

Introducing Our Field Editors

Loretta Kim is Assistant Professor History at Hong Kong Baptist University. She holds AM and PhD degrees from Harvard University, and started her academic career at the State University of New York at Albany. Her primary research interests are Qing-dynasty frontier administration, the history of Northeastern China from 1600 to the present, and ethnicity in contemporary China. In addition to these topics, she has taught graduate and undergraduate courses on 20th century Chinese history in film, Europeans in East Asia during the 15th through 19th centuries, and comparative cases of imperialism and colonialism in Asia. [Website here]

Niccolò Pianciola is Associate Professor of History at Lingnan University, Hong Kong. His field of specialization is twentieth-century Central Asian history. He has published articles in journals such as Cahiers du monde russe and Central Asian Survey. His first book, Stalinismo di frontiera. Colonizzazione agricola, sterminio dei nomadi e costruzione statale in Asia Centrale (1905-1936) (Rome, 2009), focused on the interactions between the state, pastoralists and peasants in the Kazakh steppe during the period of crisis and collapse of the Tsarist Empire and the building of the new Soviet state, until the great famine in Kazakhstan of 1931-33. His second book (co-authored with Antonio Ferrara) is L’età delle migrazioni forzate. Esodi e deportazioni in Europa (1853-1953) (Bologna, 2012), an interpretative survey of the history of forced migrations in East-Central Europe, Anatolia and the Tsarist Empire/Soviet Union from the Crimean War to Stalin’s death. With Paolo Sartori he co-edited a book titled Islam, Society and States across the Qazaq Steppe (18th-early 20th centuries) (Vienna, forthcoming). The volume puts together some of the best recent scholarship about the social history of the Kazakh steppe from the eighteenth century to the early Soviet period, based on sources embedded both in Islamic cultural traditions (from hagiographic literature to the memoirs of Kazakh literati) and in the cultures of documentation of state bureaucracies ruling over the geographical space inhabited by the Kazakhs. [Website here]

Image: Dimitry A. Mottl, Forestry officers in Markakol reserve, Altay Mountains. Wikimedia Commons.

A review of Colonial Copyright and the Photographic Image: Canada in the Frame, by Philip John Hatfield.

Philip Hatfield’s dissertation is an engaging study of a little explored section of the British Library’s Colonial Copyright Collection, namely the eclectic assortment of Canadian photographs originally deposited at the British Museum Library between 1895 and 1924. In seven well-documented chapters, Hatfield reconstructs the socio-historical and institutional contexts which underscored the creation of this visual archive, revealing its multiple geographies and discussing their implications for our understanding of Canada’s past and for museum practice in general.

Chapter 1 highlights the unusual character of the collection, in particular its haphazard content which resulted from the manner in which the archive was created. As Hatfield points out, the photographs were submitted voluntarily by Canadian amateur and professional photographers who wished to have their work registered for colonial copyright; as such, the content of the collection was shaped primarily by the individual aspirations of the photographers rather than a specific curatorial mandate. The Canadian collection was also created against the background of an evolving colonial copyright legislation which encouraged the transfer of significant intellectual property from various parts of the British Empire to institutions in Britain (p. 12). Hatfield emphasizes the hierarchical nature of the colonial copyright system – which ranked material from India, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa as particularly valuable, in contrast to that originating in Hong Kong, Singapore or Africa – and points out that this legislation reinforced the subordinate status of these territories as opposed to sovereign states like Germany and France which were governed by international copyright. This chapter also elaborates the theoretical underpinnings of the dissertation, in particular the concepts of “paper empire” and “visual economy.” Hatfield highlights the diversity of printed matter which constituted the “paper empire” and included maps, paintings, musical scores, photographs, stamps, etc., but argues that the concept of “visual economy” is more useful in understanding how the photographs acquired value and meaning through “commercial process[es], institutional politics and colonial agency” which complemented imperial agency (pp. 28-29).

This theoretical discussion continues in Chapter 2, where Hatfield considers possible approaches to the study of photographical collections. Based on the characteristics of the photographs, in particular their “heterogeneous materiality and dynamics,” and influenced by the work of Roland Barthes (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. London: Vintage Classics, 2009), he ingeniously conceptualizes the Canadian Colonial Copyright Collection as a domestic photographic collection (p. 39) and highlights the duality of the photograph as a documenting tool and potential artistic product. Methodologically, Hatfield examined and recorded each item in the Colonial Copyright Collection, thus contributing to the codification of this material. This thorough work of quantification enables him  to identify important trends in the type and amount of photographs deposited (for example, commercially valuable photographs such as portraits of political elites, the inauguration of civic buildings, etc. were deposited particularly prior to the early 1900s) and the subjects represented in the collection (urban scenes dominated, followed closely by landscape views). Furthermore, Hatfield discusses the role of geography, urbanization and gender in shaping the content of the collection (most photographs originated in the highly urbanized states of Ontario and Quebec and were submitted by male photographers, although the average number of submissions by women was higher), as well as the influence of WWI on photographic production in Canada, in particular due to the shortage of chemicals and solvents produced in Germany and the fact that many Canadian photographers had perished on the European front.

The following four chapters discuss the various thematic foci of the collection. Chapter 3 focuses on urban photography as illustrated by J. W. Jones’ record of the opening of the British Columbia parliament buildings in 1898 and Timothy Eaton Co’s 1901 display book with views of Toronto. Like his naval images, Jones’ official photographs of the opening of Victoria’s parliament buildings were a testimony to Canada’s modernity and technological progress, but also an attempt to define a broader national identity by emphasizing British Columbia’s connections to Britain, against the encroaching influence of the United States. While Jones’ photographs present a view of the city which was essentially official, as reflected in the “privileged” position of the camera and the fact that the images were commissioned by the government, Eaton’s album, with its emphasis on buildings relevant to Timothy Eaton’s commercial empire, is a record of Toronto as seen through the eyes of an extremely successful businessman. As Hatfield points out, “here it was commerce, not politics, that was on view” (p. 83).

Chapter 4 turns to another symbol of modernity par excellence, the railroad. Hatfield’s analysis revolves around two main themes: the role of the railways in the commercial promotion and “taming” of the harsh Canadian landscape and the tragedy of railway accidents, as depicted in early twentieth-century photographs of the Azilda and Enterprise wrecks, both of which took place in the vicinity of Ontario. These photographs, intended for wide circulation, bear testimony to the ambivalent reactions of Canadians to this new technology of communication. Hatfield’s account is a brilliant analysis of the potentialities – for nation-building, for tourism and agriculture – as well as the dangers inherent in this technology, especially as it intersected with the natural environment and the lives of urban dwellers, causing destruction and havoc. On a more general level, this is a reminder, drawing on Paul Virilio’s work (The Original Accident, trans. J. Rose. London: Polity, 2007) that such accidents are not exceptional occurrences but “eventualities” which cannot be separated from the use of technology.

The early twentieth century is often regarded as the “golden period” of postcards and many of the Canadian photographs submitted for colonial copyright were reproduced as postcards, as Chapter 5 shows. Examining aerial photography of urban areas in Ontario, Hatfield emphasizes the role of former WWI military pilots such as Billy Bishop and William Barker in photographic production during the post-war years. According to Hatfield, aerial photography was one of the main avenues of income available to these pilots after the closure of the war and the images were produced for aesthetic enjoyment rather than cartographic purposes, as it was the case during the war (p. 149). Such images also played an important role in the Canadian National Exhibition where, along with displays of formation flying, they helped promote the image of a modern and technologically-advanced Canada.

Chapter 6 focuses on the last case-study of this dissertation, discussing how Native Canadians were represented in photographs submitted to the Colonial Copyright Collection between 1900 and 1910. The analysis focuses on Alfred Rafton-Canning’s images of Blackfoot and Blood Indian tribes, Charles Aylett’s photographs of the famous Onondaga runner Tom Longboat and Geraldine Moodie’s images of Fullerton Bay Inuit. Although these photographs reinforced an image of Canada as a country of white settlers where members of indigenous groups inhabited prescribed spaces and performed prescribed social roles (Tom Longboat being a case in point), Hatfield rightly reminds us that “the visual culture of colonialism did not function as a unified whole and … different colonial projects varied across time-spaces” (p. 170). This is especially visible in the photographs of the Inuit produced by Geraldine Moodie, which stand in sharp contrast with those of fellow expedition member Albert Low, the former belonging more to the genre of intimate portraiture rather than official photography (p. 199).

Having thus mapped and examined the contents of the Colonial Copyright Collection, in the final chapter Hatfield moves on to suggest further directions for research – for example, by extending the framework of analysis to a pan-empire perspective, by examining in more detail the work of individual photographers, as well as the reception of the photographs – and to consider the future of these holdings in a digital age. One of the very practical implications of Hatfield’s work is that it has the potential to facilitate the access of the public to these collections. The data he compiled can be used as the basis for item-level searching of the collection, thus rendering unnecessary the assistance of a curator.

Hatfield’s dissertation is a convincing and multi-faceted account of the life of Canadian photography held at the British Library’s Colonial Copyright Collection. He is particularly successful in demonstrating that imperial agency alone cannot account for the vast diversity of “views” and “imaginations” of Canada during this period and reconstructing the ways in which photography circulated, acquired value and was harnessed for various political and economic projects. The wide use of photographs to illustrate the discussion makes this work useful to scholars, museum curators and, more generally, to everyone with an interest in the history of Canada, photography and copyright.

Amelia Bonea
Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine
University of Oxford
amelia.bonea@wuhmo.ox.ac.uk

Primary Sources

Colonial Copyright Collection, British Library
Geraldine Moodie holdings, British Museum
Copyright deposit photographs, 1895-1924, Library and Archives Canada (Ottawa and Gatineau)
Arthur Rafton-Canning holdings, Galt Museum and Archives, Lethbridge (Alberta)
J. W. Jones holdings, Royal British Columbia Archives, Victoria (British Columbia)

Dissertation Information

Royal Holloway, University of London. 2011. 246pp. Primary Advisors: Felix Driver and Carole Holden.

Image: “Opening of new Parliament buildings at Victoria, British Columbia. February 10, 1898,” J.W. Jones / Library and Archives Canada / PA-028863.

An overview of the primary Persian manuscript collections in the United Kingdom.

We are now approaching what UK-based researchers lovingly call “the season,” meaning the time of year when academics from across the world descend on the British Library en masse and going for a mid-afternoon cup of coffee often results in a series of impromptu reunions. The British Library boasts an extensive collection of Persian and Indo-Persian manuscripts (some of which they are digitizing), but they are not the only show in town. Scholars too often overlook other Persian language archives in London and nearby that possess their own unique manuscript collections and frequently offer more progressive and researcher-friendly photography and reproduction policies. Here is a list to help you get started thinking beyond the BL.

Bodleian Library, Oxford

Special Collections at the Bodleian is a true gem among manuscript archives. Their Persian manuscripts number 2,530. The reading room is open for long hours (weekdays: 9 am-10 pm in term and 9 am-7 pm otherwise; Saturdays 10-4 in term and 10-2 during vacations). All readers must obtain a reader’s card that, depending on one’s institutional affiliation, may cost a small fee. Reproduction is offered at reasonable rates and personal photography is also allowed for hand-held cameras only, subject to staff approval. For Persian manuscripts, Volume 1 and Volume 3 of the catalogue are available online. Special collections have been temporally moved during the construction of the new Bodleian, so e-mail well in advance to reserve your desired manuscripts. For more information, see the more detailed report on the Bodleian available here.

Cambridge University Library, Cambridge

Cambridge University Library holds more than 1,200 Persian manuscripts. These can be viewed in the Manuscripts Reading Room, which is open from 9:00 am-6:50 pm Monday through Friday and 9:00-12:45 on Saturday. All users must obtain an admissions card. Cambridge lists the relevant catalogs and provides links to pdfs on the library website. Hand-held personal photography is allowed, and readers should also note the ongoing project to digitize Islamic manuscripts at Cambridge. Many Persian manuscripts are already available online in the Cambridge Digital Library and high-quality images can be downloaded free of charge.

Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, London

Located just around the corner from Euston station, the Royal Asiatic Society has a fantastic collection of Indian manuscripts acquired from several major Orientalists, perhaps most famously James Tod. All of their Persian manuscripts have been integrated into their online catalog. Library hours are 10 am-5 pm on Tuesday and Friday and 2-5 on Thursday afternoons. Scholars are advised to e-mail before visiting. Current reproduction rates are 1 pound per image for the first 100 images and 50 pence per image thereafter. Personal photography of manuscripts is not allowed but is permitted for printed materials.

Wellcome Library, London

The Wellcome Library holds a number of Persian manuscripts, many of which are scientific works, but the collection also includes literature, religious texts, translations, and more. Researchers should first join the library (no cost). The Wellcome’s catalog of Persian manuscripts is available as a pdf. Manuscripts can be consulted in the Rare Books Room 10 am-6 pm on weekdays (open until 8 pm on Thursday) and 10 am-4 pm on Saturday. The Wellcome allows personal photography and has also put select low-quality images of individual folios online at Wellcome Images. (A detailed review of the Wellcome may be found here.)

And Many More…

For the creative there are plenty of other UK archives that house Persian manuscripts. At both Cambridge and Oxford, some individual colleges maintain their own collections of Oriental Manuscripts. One can also find Persian manuscripts in Manchester, Birmingham (some available online), and other places. Also note the young but growing online catalog for UK manuscripts in Arabic script, Fihrist. Happy hunting!

Audrey Truschke
Gonville and Caius College
University of Cambridge
audrey.truschke@gmail.com

Image: Niẓāmī, Khamsa, MS Browne 1434 p. 267, St John’s College, University of Cambridge.

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org.

My dissertation, Worlds on View: Visual Art Exhibitions and State Identity in the Late Cold War, combines several different methodologies — those identified from the start, mobilized in frustration, or emerged along the way — which all served their purpose in completing the research over a five-year period. The dissertation focuses on a joint USA and USSR visual arts project in the late Cold War, entitled 10+10: Contemporary Soviet and American Painters. This project serves as a lens to review the genealogy of visual arts exhibitions as tools of nationalism, self-promotion and cultural diplomacy — from the French revolutionary practices of Jacques-Louis David and the rise of national festivals and exhibitions, through the nineteenth-century development of the World’s Fair and twentieth-century inter-war international exhibitions on topics ranging from Dada to media and hygiene, to the instrumentalization of bilateral Cold War exhibition exchange agreements beginning shortly after World War II. In this brief article, I will cover the topics of government and private archives, oral histories, and secondary sources, all of which I explored in depth.

Ed. Note: Joshua First’s review of Nicole Holland’s dissertation, Worlds on View, is available here.

My goal at the outset was to research archives of the US Department of State, the United States Information Agency (USIA) and its various sub-agencies (including the US-Soviet Exchange initiative and Arts in America), and the Ministry of Culture of the former USSR. All these departments had given their highest level of support to the exhibition 10+10.  A unique collaboration of the Superpowers in the visual arts domain, the project featured a joint team of American and Soviet curators, a checklist of works by young avant-garde artists of both nations, and a travel schedule including multiple venues in America and Russia. In particular, the inclusion of nonconformist Soviet artists represented a major shift in attitude on the part of the Soviet government. These were artists who, just a year or so prior to the exhibition, worked outside the regime of official art. They were denied access to jobs and exhibitions, and were subject to episodic harassment.

I was certain that the archives of both nation-states would open a valuable vein of information regarding the strategic importance to both nations of this project (and others, I hoped) in breaking down the roadblocks to the end of the Cold War. In the case of the Soviet Union, I was sure that the cataclysmic shift in attitudes of the Soviet Union in this era of glasnost as seen in the Soviet participation in the exhibition, would provide rich detail on Gorbachev’s mindset. I was to be greatly disappointed.

Regarding US archival materials, telephone calls to excellent and very helpful contacts provided by key players in the late Cold War, as well as formal application for information through the Freedom of Information Act yielded the unfathomable discovery that a great portion of the archives of the USIA had not been preserved. Further, despite the fact that the project had received support from the highest levels of the State Department, those archives pertaining to this branch of cultural diplomacy no longer existed. Francis Fuyukama’s “end of history” was in operation! (The USIA was shortly to be terminated as an agency.)  I filed a Freedom of Information Act (FIFA) request anyway, for which I received a response a year and a half after my dissertation defense, stating that no such files could be found. One forward-thinking State Department Foreign Service officer had managed to take some files with him upon the closing of the Soviet desk, and he opened his private archives to me, consisting of official letters and agreements of the US government and museums, as well as news articles. An additional private archive was made available by a US professor who had played a key role in the negotiations for exhibitions during the Cold War.

Regarding Soviet archives, much the same experience prevailed. After having determined that what I sought was not in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Literatury I Isskustva, RGALI), the finding aids for which have been available online for a while, I came to learn from several top sources in Moscow that the archives I was interested in were probably still sitting “in unidentified bags,” in the current Ministry of Culture. During the period of my research, the “end of history” mentality prevailed as well in the Russian Federation, and I could interest no one in Moscow in trying to locate documentation from the final years of the Soviet regime. Events of the Cold War were considered irrelevant in a newly configured nation-state that was grappling with acknowledgment of the falsities of much of their twentieth-century history.

Research plans also included interviews with key actors in the Cold War in both countries, and I spoke with dozens of contacts in Moscow and in the United States, beginning with individuals involved in the 10+10 project.  My list grew as contacts yielded further contacts, including government and embassy officials, artists and other cultural practitioners, cultural critics, museum officials and gallery directors. My experience with these interviews, face-to-face or by telephone, was extremely positive: all persons contacted were eager to tell their stories, and most had not previously discussed their perspectives with a researcher. Working from a script of questions, I found that new narratives, unknown and unexpected to me at the beginning of the research, began to emerge, giving shape to fresh understandings of the nature and context of the late Cold War. The appraisals of historians John C. Welchman and Robert Dallek regarding the rewards and pitfalls of the oral history tool served as cautionary guides (see John C. Welchman, Mike Kelley: Interviews, Conversations, and Chit-Chat (1968-2004), Zurich: JRP Ringler, 2005; and Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power, New York: HarperCollins, 2007). Despite the lack of government archives, these interviews firmly secured my research as providing new information to knowledge of the period.

Finally, close review of secondary sources revealed the importance of tracing a focused genealogy of the instrumentalization of visual arts exhibitions in modern times. Such a history had never been written. Further, theoretical underpinnings for the concept of the usefulness of temporary appositional spaces in cultural diplomacy were provided by multiple sources, in particular, Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, and the film Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. Ours is a world of fast-paced information exchange and epochal shifts, where we must proactively capture history on the ground. When archival information remains scant or inaccessible, oral history can be a rich source — especially for recent history. I count myself lucky to have met those at the forefront of artistic and geopolitical change.

Nicole Holland
University of California, San Diego
nickyholland4@gmail.com

Image: Sergey Shutov, Identity Card, 1988 (with permission of artist).

The views, perspectives, and opinions expressed here and by those providing comments are those of the author(s) and commentator(s) alone, and do not reflect the opinions of Dissertation Reviews, its members, editors, or advisory board members.

A review of Consuming Underwear: Fashioning Female Identity, by Christiana Tsaousi.

The act of putting on underwear is a practice that most of us take part in everyday. Yet as Christiana Tsaousi makes clear in her dissertation, the decisions central to this practice have been largely unexplored by academic studies. Emerging at the intersection between consumption studies, fashion studies and marketing, Tsaousi explores the socio-cultural factors that influence underwear consumption. The thesis focuses on women and considers the role of underwear in the making of femininity. Through focus groups and semi-structured interviews, the research explores the feelings, experiences and tastes of a cross-section of women, including university lecturers, first time mothers, gym clients, rugby players and women over sixty.

In Chapter 1, Tsaousi outlines the context of underwear consumption in the UK. She observes that the media circulate discourses about “correct” underwear practices such as wearing matching sets, replacing “tatty” items and buying imaginative, sexy or special pieces (p. 1). Retailers have capitalized on, and disseminated, these discourses. For example, Tsaousi finds that the market for underwear and lingerie grew in response to demand for different designs and types of underwear, at least before the financial crisis (pp. 2-3). The chapter continues its contextualization through a brief discussion of the history of previous studies of underwear, dress and femininity. The author foregrounds the idea that underwear, as part of dress, “serves as a link between identity and the social” and suggests that, because underwear is hidden, it is even more interesting to explore in terms of identity formation (pp. 10-11). Tsaousi moves on to argue that “underwear, as part of dress, has been […] used to shape the ‘appropriate’ female silhouette” and explores the history of this process (p. 11). The chapter concludes by highlighting a lacuna in other theorizations of underwear, particularly the work of Christian Jantzen et al (Christian Jantzen, Per Ostergaard, and Carla Viera. “Becoming a ‘woman to the backbone’: lingerie consumption and feminine identity” Journal of Consumer Culture 2006 6(2): 177-202), which have tended to focus on eroticism and/or special, sexy underwear. This is the gap that Tsaousi works to fill with her primary research on everyday underwear consumption.

Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical framework utilized in the rest of the thesis.  Discussion is centered on Michel Foucault’s work regarding techniques of the self and Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capitals. Both theorists are chosen because they offer tools that help the author to explore how underwear consumption is part of the “ongoing process of fitting into imperatives around femininity” (p. 23). The discussion of the theories of Michel Foucault highlights the importance of the idea of ‘docile bodies’ and ‘technologies of the self’ to feminist understandings of gender identity and politics. Both concepts offer the author ways of thinking about how self-stylisation practices reflect and contribute to normative femininity. One of the most interesting observations in this section is how underwear is scrutinized in lifestyle television programs and how what is “underneath” becomes a tool for self-improvement and self-confidence (p. 35).

Drawing on Lois McNay (Foucault: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994), Tsaousi suggests that, while the concept of technologies of the self is instructive in regard to how individuals establish identity through self-fashioning, the concept does not help to differentiate between those practices that are “reflexive and self-aware” and those that are a “reproduction of social imperatives” (p. 41). She argues that it is Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and capital that can give us insight into the links between “micro-level practices of the self and the macro level of social context” (p. 42). This allows Tsaousi to analyze how women choose what to wear as well as the ways in which embodied cultural capital can be converted into symbolic capital. The extent to which feminist theorists, particularly those who have focused on consumer culture and fashion, have utilized, adapted and improved the work of these French theorists is the focus of the last part of the chapter and informs Tsaousi’s approach to these concepts.

The discussion of consumer culture and femininity continues in Chapter 3. The chapter historicizes and documents women’s everyday consumption practices, as well as theories of lifestyle. It also explores the idea of underwear as commodity and argues that consumption practices are influenced by women’s feelings about their place, purpose and practices in specific contexts. The discussion of identity creation continues in Chapter 4, where  Tsaousi uses the concept of  identity opseis — derived “from the Greek όψη which means an aspect or side of” (p. 108) — to argue that women’s choices about underwear are influenced by how they feel about their own identities in particular contexts and stages of their life. This chapter also outlines the methodology approach and methods used in thesis.

Chapter 5 contains the primary research findings and analysis. Using the concept of identity opseis, Tsaousi argues that women’s choices about underwear are influenced by how they feel about their own identities in particular contexts. For example, choosing to leave a bra strap showing may be appropriate as a sexual partner, but not as a daughter, mother or professional. The chapter documents the relationship between the physical and psychological feelings experienced by women when consuming underwear. In one of the most interesting sections of the thesis, Tsaousi documents how conceptualizations of comfort and appropriate color differ according to context and social role. The author demonstrates how comfortable underwear works as a technology of self by “conjuring feelings and sensations to manage, enhance or booster one’s self” (p. 194). Tsaousi also finds that certain colors of underwear have strong sexual connotations and women make specific choices according to context. Outfit choice is also central to decisions regarding color and the role of mothers in passing on this embodied cultural capital is central to women’s discussions.

Through its analysis this thesis draws attention to the actors (both material and social) that influence underwear consumption: a complex nexus of social norms, familial relationships, outerwear, and of course underwear itself. The arguments contained in Chapter 5 and the subsequent conclusion are indicative of the strength of the dissertation, which firmly posits underwear practices in the experience of contemporary everyday life. This is a context where, due to the radical dispersal of their labor, women can be required to take on many different roles at different times.

Sarah Elsie Baker
School of Design
Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand
sarah.baker@vuw.ac.nz

Primary Sources

Focus groups and interviews with women in the United Kingdom

Dissertation Information

University of Leicester. 2011. 308 pp. Primary Advisor: Joanna Brewis.

Image: “Modern Bra”, by Steifer with help of Gytha. Wikimedia Commons.

A review of the Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico).

I spent a considerable amount of time doing research in the Archivo General del Estado de Veracruz (AGEV) during 2010 and 2011. I mostly worked with Local Agrarian Commission documents, but have also done some research in the archive section of governor Adalberto Tejeda and of the Veracruzan Ministry of Public Works. The AGEV can be incredibly rewarding, but also utterly frustrating. This, however, can probably be said about any repository in the world.

I narrate here a typical day in the AGEV:

• I get up in my cute little hotel in downtown Xalapa, where I eat their free breakfast and enjoy their wireless Internet. Accommodations in Xalapa range from 10 to 50 USD. Most hotels are small and are located in the downtown area. There are also apartments for rent by day, week, or month, but they are not easy to find. If you are going to do research in Veracruz, it is best to announce your need for lodging through networks such as H-Net or H-LatAm. Knowledgeable colleagues will be able to direct you. You can get to Xalapa on small planes from Mexico City and the Port of Veracruz. There is also a huge network of buses that will get you pretty much anywhere in Mexico for a modest price.

• I walk for 20-30 minutes to the AGEV, which is located in the outer part of downtown, next to the Monte de Piedad. The walk is nice, but smoke from the cars that clutter the small winding streets gives me a headache. I could take a bus to the archive, but they are not particularly pleasant to ride in and I have no idea where they are actually going. Everything in Xalapa, except perhaps the Universidad Veracruzana and some outer neighborhoods, is within walking distance. If you visit the city between the months of May and September, chances are you are going to experience some serious heat in the Archive, since the roof is made of corrugated metal. You will, however, get rain most afternoons. If, however, you visit between October and April, the weather will be much nicer inside the AGEV, but you may be inside a cloud throughout your stay, since the city is pretty high up and winters are humid.

• In the entrance of the building, a very nice and good-humored security guard asks me to write down my name, time of arrival, institution, and the purpose of my visit in the Visitors’ Book. He then tells me to talk directly with the archivist in charge in order to obtain the necessary permission to consult the documents. I have with me a presentation letter, which is required; my digital camera, which I have no problem taking into the building; and paper and pencil.

• The AGEV is really just one big warehouse with some available tables and chairs for researchers in the center, and other desks occupied by the Archive personnel. The documents are held inside another section from which archivists walk in and out.

• Once I find the archivist in charge—apparently the role switches every day—and state the purpose of my visit, I realize very soon that the staff at the AGEV is incredibly nice. They are all super helpful and approachable. They know what is there, what is missing, and what is in another warehouse that is holding millions of documents since the time of the AGEV’s restoration. And this will turn into a big source of frustration during the time I spend in Xalapa. The Archive was remodeled about three or four years ago, but millions of documents are still in warehouses in need of classification. There is really not a set timeline for when those documents are going to be returned to the downtown location, but I am invited to talk to the AGEV’s Director and ask all the necessary questions.

• It becomes immediately clear to me, however, that this is less an invitation and more of a requirement. In the presentation letter I brought from Columbia University, I state the title of my dissertation and the repositories that I intend to consult while in Xalapa. The Director reads it and asks me a series of questions about my project for which there seem to be right and wrong answers. I am as honest and forthcoming as my own self-doubt will allow, and the Director seems satisfied. She instructs the staff that they are to help me with anything I need and that I am allowed to use my digital camera. When you visit, just make sure you have a clear sense of what your project is about and what you are looking for, in case you need to explain it in an impromptu visit to the Director’s office.

• I spend the day taking photos of the documents, chatting with the archivists, eating snacks with the security guard up front, and making notes of what I am finding. Once I am done, tired and hungry, I walk back to my hotel.

• In the evening I write in my dissertation diary and have dinner on my own or with friends in one of the excellent and inexpensive restaurants in downtown Xalapa. You can get a very good meal for less than 10 USD, but the city quiets down fairly early during the week. During the weekends there are numerous artistic and cultural events. I also visit the surrounding areas, where the excellent coffee of the region is produced and where I get to see, first hand, some of the problems that I am studying in the AGEV in their present form. I recommend visiting Coatepec, Xico, Naolinco, and Rancho Nuevo.

Here is a short description of the repositories I had the opportunity to consult:

• The Agrarian Archive, as a number of prominent historians of Veracruz have experienced, is vast and fascinating. It is classified by ejido and its respective municipio, so a useful thing to do before you head to the archive is have a clear sense of the names and locations of the ejidos and the municipio in which they are located, keeping in mind that those names may have changed throughout the years. So, for example, if you don’t know that curmunicipiorent Coatzacoalcos used to be called Puerto México, you are in deep trouble when trying to find the relevant information. There is a printed guide that tells you which ejidos have been the subject of agrarian petitions and in what year, but not much more. So, if you know that you are interested in the history of land disputes in northern Veracruz, you better learn that the state is separated by geographic areas: Huasteca, Totonaca, Centro-Norte, Central, Grandes Montañas, Sotavento, y de Las Selvas. Once you know your area, you should get a sense of the ejidos that are there, because the guide is organized by alphabetical order, so an ejido in Sotavento can very well be next to one in the Totonaca region. Then you ask the archivist in charge to bring you the specific folder. Sometimes, the very nice lady in charge of the Agrarian Archive will come out and help you figure out the guide. Other times you just need to get your map out, ask for the files, and dig in the folders until you find what you need. Each folder contains one agrarian petition case, dating from the very first letter that the petitioners sent to the state governor or the Local Agrarian Commission, say in 1913, to the moment in which such petition was resolved, for example in 1975. You can find documents from the different courts that dealt with the case, the amparo documents, letters from petitioners and owners, and maps of the ejido that is under dispute. Each folder contains hundreds of sheets that will reveal invaluable information about the agrarian history of Veracruz and of Mexico.

• The section of the archive that holds the state governors’ documents is also very well classified and organized. For Adalberto Tejeda, the archivists bring you large bound volumes classified by year, and you can read all of the governor’s correspondence. If you need documents from specific institutions or ministries within the state, you have to consult those depositories. The Ministry of Works, for example, is divided by department so if you need anything about urban housing, you will go directly to that section. The same goes for oil extraction, water distribution, road maintenance, and building permits.

As I said before, there are many documents that are still in the old warehouse, so it is very likely that you will run into that problem sooner or later. Fortunately, staff members are well aware of which documents are available and which are not, so you hardly waste any time waiting to get files that are not there. It is obviously frustrating, however, to find something that looks very promising in the guides and realize that you cannot consult it and that there is no sense of when it will be available to researchers.

This being a general archive, it offers the researcher an opportunity to have constant contact with people who are not there to write doctoral dissertations, which is, in my view, a great thing. While you wait for your documents, you get a chance to talk to those who are trying to solve problems with their rural properties by consulting the agrarian archives. Sometimes they tell you their family history and how it is related to that piece of land, giving you a sense of the depth and complexity of the agrarian problem in Mexico. You also encounter children and teens doing research for their history school projects. They usually consult old newspapers and magazines, which are, by the way, readily available to the user. But then again, a lot of them are still in the warehouse.

In sum, for anyone who is looking into the history of rural Veracruz, the AGEV is a fantastic place to be. You will find all you need there and in the National Archive in Mexico City. Sadly, the repositories of smaller cities in Veracruz are virtually non-existent. There are a few very rich archives for specific organizations, like the one for Section 32 of the National Oil Workers’ Union in Poza Rica, but in general you are bound to the AGEV. The Veracruz Supreme Court Archive is also open to the public and in excellent condition, but the classification is complicated and you need to know your cases very well before you walk in. As in any other archive in any city of the world, be nice to the archivists, talk to people who are not doctoral candidates, and write down the box, file, and page numbers of everything you see. The last thing you need is to get back home and find yourself with 5,000 photographs of individual documents whose origin and location you have already forgotten.

Julia del Palacio Langer
PhD Candidate
Department of History
Columbia University
ajd2128@columbia.edu

Image: Photo by Julia del Palacio Langer.

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org

A review of the Rampur Raza Library and Archives and the ITC Sangeet Research Academy.

My current research focuses on the Imdad Khan gharana, a prominent Hindustani (North Indian classical) instrumental lineage. I examine Hindustani music’s historical development from the 13th century to the present through Persian and Urdu manuscripts, recordings, and ethnographic methods. I am also interested in contemporary performance practices, oral histories, and the economics of Hindustani Music. Both the Rampur Raza Library and Archives and the Sangeet Research Academy provide excellent resources for scholars in a variety of disciplines. The Rampur Raza Library and Archives holds an extensive collection of manuscripts and artwork. The Sangeet Research Academy has a large body of recorded material, a reasonable collection of texts, and additional archival materials. I visited the Rampur Raza Archive on three occasions in 2006, 2008, and 2011, and I spent several weeks in Calcutta at the Sangeet Research Academy.

Rampur Raza Archive

Nawad Faizullah Khan established the Rampur Raza Archive in 1774. His descendants continued to expand the collection until the death of Raza Ali Khan in 1966. Faizullah Khan came from a prestigious ethnically Persian family—many of his ancestors held influential positions within the Mughal Empire. He maintained an abiding passion for Islamic literature, scholarship, and fine arts throughout his life. Faizullah Khan and his descendants were also important patrons of scholarship, music, and the fine arts and supported a number of accomplished refugees from the fall of Delhi in 1857. Several members of this family were also important scholars in the own right. The decision of this dynasty to align with the British during the Sepoy mutiny allowed for both continued patronage of the arts and protection of their holdings. In 1975 the archive was brought under the management of the Indian government and the standing governor of Uttar Pradesh is appointed chairman of the library board. I must mention that there have been occasional periods of neglect of the archive from both secretatian and political motivations—the accessibility and maintenance of the collection can shift with U.P.’s political configuration. For the serious scholar the magnitude of the collection should mitigate potential logistic difficulties.

Getting There and Lodging

The archive is located approximately three hours outside of Delhi in the small town of Rampur, and is easily reached by train or private car from Delhi. If you intend to access the collection, I recommend at setting aside at least three days—frequent holidays and occasionally random closings of the facilities necessitate contingency planning. Rampur has a number of important Sufi shrines, as well as the former Nawab’s residence. I find the town’s atmosphere very conducive for research, and an extended stay can be rewarding. However, outside of the hotel and archive, some fluency in Hindi/Urdu is necessary. I would not recommend this archive for neophyte scholars without the support of a guide or a translator. The Rampur station (station code RMU) can be reached by numerous trains including the Avadh Assam Express, Jammu Tawi-Sealdah Express, and the Kashi Vishwanath Express. There are direct buses available from Delhi, Lucknow, and Agra. I recommend the Modipur Hotel for lodging.

Accessibility

The facility is open from 10am to 5pm all days of the week except Friday. The posted hours of the archive should be taken as an ideal, occasionally achieved in reality. That being said, a letter of introduction and some correspondence with the director will help with access. All email correspondence should be sent to raza-library@nic.in. The address of the archive is Hamid Manzil Qila Rampur, Utter Pradesh, India Pin-244901. The library phone numbers are 91-595-2325045/2325346/2327244, and the fax is 91-595-2340548. As this institute is run by the government of India, there might be particular visa requirements associated with access, but I had no problems in this regard during my visits.

The Collection

The current listed of holdings of printed books number around 75,000 Arabic, Persian, Hindi, Urdu, Turkish, and English on all subjects. Many of these books are very rare and/or out of print. The library has state of the art preservation faciltities, and a restoriation laboratory. This archive is especially notated for its collection of 17,000 manuscripts, including 150 illustrated texts with a total of 4413 paintings, primarily consiting of Persian, Arabic, Turkish and Urdu texts. There are approximatley 3000 samples of Islamic calligraphy, 205 palm leave manuscripts, and an stellar collection of 5000 miniature paintings from the Turko-Mongol, Mughal, Persian, Rajput, Pahari, Awadh and Indo-European traditions. In addition, the collection contains biographical, historical texts and numerous musical compositions from the Rampur gharana. At this time there is an ongoing digitization project that (as of March 2012) includes 1,400,000 pages. These are not currently accessible online. However, the Rampur Raza Library Press has published a series of beautifully illustrated reproductions from its manuscript collection as well as research publications based on the library’s holdings. There are 139 books currently available, which can be viewed here: http://razalibrary.gov.in/Razalibnew/publicationofthelibrary.html. There is also a computerized catalogue of this collection, but it was not running during my visits. I highly recommend making the effort to access this collection, as it is truly world-class.

The Sangeet Reseach Academy, Calcutta

The ITC Sangeet Research Academy (ITC SRA) is India’s premier institution of traditional Hindustani music instruction (guru-shisya parampara). The funding for the institute comes from a foundation set up as a generous private trust by Indian Tobacco Company in 1978. Students are recruited from an early age and study intensively for up to twenty years with some of India’s finest musicians. The academy is located on the grounds of one of Tipu Sultan’s former palaces, allowing a pleasant respite from Calcutta’s congestion and pollution. The address is 1 Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose Road, Tollygunge, Kolkata, India Pin-700040, and can be reached by taxi or bus (for the adventurous) from the airport and Howrah train station. The staff can be contacted at 91-33-23773395/23810559 or via email at info@itcsra.org.in; the website url is http://www.itcsra.org/. I found the director Ravi Mathur to be extremely helpful, and while he is quite busy, he is very supportive of foreign scholars. The library contains books and manuscripts on music in English, Hindi and Bengali. In addition, there is an archive containing press clippings, interviews, and photographs of eminent musicians. The recorded music archives contain thousands of rare recordings, including all performances at held at the academy since its founding. All of the recordings are available for onsite listening in a recording studio located on the premises. Most of the recordings are listed in several binders, but it can take time to sift through the listings. There is a separate scientific library that contains technical books and journals on signal processing, acoustics, phonetics, music processing, and music cognition. In addition, there are data sets from research funded by the Sangeet Research Academy. The onsite acoustic laboratory has a plethora of audio processing equipment. Contact the staff via phone or email prior to your visit. There are also occasionally available research and study grants found on the SRA website, which can provide support for extended research work. For performers, there is currently a program for foreign students that allows for three months study at an all-inclusive rate of $500 a month.

Hans Utter
hansutter.com

Image: Photo by Hans Utter.

Important Note: Dissertation Reviews, its members, and affiliates assume no responsibility for the accuracy of this material. Access, location, times, and other data are subject to change, and readers assume all responsibility for making direct contact with the institutions in question and double-checking all information before any visit. If you discover errors in this description, or changes to the policies or relevant information in one of the sites featured on “Fresh from the Archives,” please contact us at archives@dissertationreviews.org

A review of Quotidian Catastrophes in the Modern City: Fire Hazards and Risk in Mexico’s Capital, 1860-1910, by Anna Rose Alexander.

The last third of the nineteenth century saw sweeping transformations to Mexico’s capital. As the country emerged from decades of political and economic instability, foreign investment began to pour in, spurring the development of Mexican industry and the undertaking of ambitious urban infrastructure projects. Mexican authorities sought to turn the capital into a European-style metropolis with modern factories, gas streetlights, wood-frame buildings and wooden sidewalks, and a network of urban parks. These advances improved the quality of urban life in some sectors of Mexico City, but they also had an unforeseen consequence: increasing the frequency and intensity of fires.

In “Quotidian Catastrophes in the Modern City: Fire Hazards and Risk in Mexico’s Capital, 1860-1910,” Anna Rose Alexander examines how different members of Mexico City society responded to the threat of fire between the Second Empire and the outbreak of the Mexican Revolution in 1910. By studying how non-governmental actors such as engineers, inventors, businessmen, and ordinary citizens sought to mitigate the danger of fire, Alexander reminds us that the Porfiriato — the period, from 1876 to 1910, when Porfirio Díaz dominated Mexican politics — was much more than a political regime. Instead, she shows that it was a time of rapid economic and social change in the country that was driven by both Mexicans and foreigners and people inside and outside of government.

The dissertation makes an important contribution to the emerging field of urban environmental history, using the phenomenon of fire to weave together the academic literatures of disaster, technology, and urban studies. Alexander employs Spanish historian Manuel González de Molina’s framework of social metabolism to understand the interconnectedness of the natural and human worlds in urban environments — that is, how urban dwellers consumed and transformed energy and natural resources to suit their needs.

Applying this conceptual framework to a remarkably diverse set of archival sources, including patent requests, municipal regulations, and medical school curricula, Alexander argues that the threat — and the reality — of fire between 1860 and 1910 spurred the expansion of the fields of science and medicine to prevent, extinguish, and treat the effects of fire. It also led to the creation of new for-profit industries, such as the fire insurance business. Finally, it pushed citizens to demand more and better services from the local government to deal with the problem, making fire prevention a collective, civic responsibility, rather than a purely individual one.

The dissertation is organized into four chapters, with an introduction and a conclusion. The first chapter argues that fire first became a political concern in the 1860s, when an increasing fear of fire among Mexico City residents led to a push for the government to make combating fires a priority. Previously, fire fighting, like many other social services in the city, had been a neighborhood, not a municipal responsibility. After 1860, however, the increasing frequency of fires, from sources such as gas lights and then electric light bulbs and sockets, sparks from street cars, and industrial chemicals, led the government to implement new fire prevention and control policies. These early regulations placed the onus on individual citizens, not the government. The government banned certain flammable substances from homes and businesses and gave specific duties to citizens, based on their occupation, for fighting fires. Residents resisted these impositions and pushed the Ayuntamiento — the municipal government — to establish a fire brigade, as many European and North American cities did in the first half of the nineteenth century. An 1870 fire that ravaged the Volador marketplace, the city’s principal food market, bolstered citizens’ arguments for government intervention by showing the existing policies to be woefully inadequate. After taking office in 1876, President Porfirio Díaz began to provide the city with resources for purchasing fire-fighting equipment and paying professional firemen. Yet the provision of fire services was highly unequal, as the city’s fire stations were concentrated around the Alameda park in the relatively wealthy center of the city, leaving the poorer periphery under-protected. Furthermore, a professional fire brigade was not established in Mexico City until 1888, after decades of halting efforts. Residents were constantly comparing Mexico’s poorly equipped and under-trained firemen to U.S. fire brigades, who became known as the best in the world after a demonstration at the 1900 Paris Olympics.

Chapter 2 examines the role of engineers and scientists in developing new technologies for preventing and fighting fires. During the period Alexander examines, the engineering profession gained increased prominence. In 1868, President Benito Juárez turned the colonial-era College of Mining into the Expert School of Engineering. The school emphasized careers geared at solving the quotidian challenges of economic production in Mexico through the application of science, rather than more lucrative positions in private companies. Fire was an important part of an engineer’s training, and engineers worked to develop and map a citywide hydrant system and improve the capital’s notoriously low water pressure, which impeded firefighters’ ability to extinguish fires. Engineers also worked as municipal fire inspectors, determining the cause of blazes and enforcing regulations designed to prevent them.

The third chapter explores what we might call the private sector response to fires — that is, how lay inventors and insurance agents built businesses that responded to the pervasive fear of fire in late nineteenth-century Mexico City. The re-writing of Mexican patent law in 1890 led to a surge of patent applications for new inventions; many of these, including better matches, fire extinguishers, and automatic sprinkler systems, dealt specifically with fire. These inventors employed the language of Comtean positivism in advocating for their inventions — linking technological innovation to public health and the social and material progress of the nation. The 1874 Municipal Exposition in Mexico City, modeled on London’s 1851 Crystal Palace exhibition, invited inventors from across the country to display their inventions as part of a larger effort to establish Mexico among the ranks of the world’s most technologically progressive nations. The last decades of the nineteenth century also saw the emergence of a substantial fire insurance industry in Mexico. Yet both of these sectors were dominated by foreigners: of the 15 fire insurance companies operating in Mexico in 1897, 14 were foreign-owned. Porfirian authorities attempted to counter this trend by writing laws designed to bolster the Mexican insurance industry. An overwhelming share of patents was also going to foreigners: of the 1,044 patent requests the government processed between 1890 and 1896, only 307 came from Mexicans (433 came from U.S. citizens). This chapter includes fascinating renderings of some of the inventions submitted for patents, taken from the Patentes and Marcas branch of Mexico’s Archivo General de la Nación.

The fourth and final chapter examines the role of public health workers in preventing fires and of physicians in treating fire-related injuries. Just as the increasing threat of fires inspired changes in public policy and advances in technology, it also led the medical community to develop new methods of dealing with this natural hazard. Díaz greatly expanded the powers of Mexico City’s Superior Health Council, giving its officials wide latitude to regulate practices deemed to endanger public health and safety, and fire prevention now came under its auspices. New regulations in the 1880s and 1890s sought to control how businesses and individuals handled flammable materials and turn citizens into whistleblowers who reported dangerous conditions to authorities. Physicians, for their part, experimented with new medical procedures, such as skin grafts, to improve the survival rate of fire victims.

Alexander concludes with an analysis of the Sanborn Fire Insurance Company’s 1905 maps of Mexico City, which show the extent to which Mexico City’s officials and residents had realized their goal of improving the capital’s fire safety infrastructure by the beginning of the twentieth century. Alexander argues that these maps prove that residents had taken the previous decades of fire regulations to heart: wooden structures had been replaced by ones made of tepite — a stone and pumice composite — wood sidewalks had been traded for asphalt ones, and business that dealt with highly combustible materials were largely removed from the city center. Still, the hydrant system did not cover all parts of the city equally, and the Volador marketplace continued to be dangerously unprepared.

This work will provide an important contribution to the study of Mexico City under the Second Empire, Restored Republic, and Porfiriato by demonstrating how different actors responded to the threat of natural disaster. It shifts the focus of the period away from Porfirio Díaz and his inner circle of advisers by examining the contributions of less prominent inventors, doctors, and businessmen. In doing so, it offers a history of the period that smartly shows government officials to be one set of actors among many who contributed to social and economic change. Finally, Alexander reveals one of the fundamental, though under-appreciated tensions of the period: the challenge of developing the Mexican economy while ensuring that the social and economic profits accrued not only to foreign investors but also to Mexican citizens. This preoccupation is not unique to twentieth and twenty-first century historians; it figured prominently in the public policies of the era.

Andrew Konove
PhD Candidate, Department of History
Yale University
andrew.konove@gmail.com

Primary Sources

Archivo General de la Nación
Archivo Histórico del Distrito Federal
Archivo Histórico de la Facultad de Medicina
Archivo Histórico de la Secretaría de Salud

Dissertation Information

University of Arizona. 2012. 256 pp. Primary Advisor: William H. Beezley.

Image: José Guadalupe Posada, “Quemazón en el Baratillo de Tepito,” (Mexico: Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, 1913). The Jean Charlot Collection, University of Hawaii Library.

A review of The Buddhist Boundary Markers of Northeast Thailand and Central Laos, 7th – 12th Centuries CE: Towards an Understanding of the Archaeological, Religious and Artistic Landscapes of The Khorat Plateau, by Stephen A. Murphy.

Stephen Murphy’s dissertation presents an in-depth analysis of the archeological and historic evidence for the earliest form of Buddhist Boundary markers (sema) in Southeast Asia. Following a preliminary discussion concerning existing views concerning sema in Southeast Asia and Northeastern Thailand in particular (Introduction – Chapter 1), he examines in depth the archaeological and historical evidence for the culture, artistic, and political milieu for the kingdom of Dvaravati (Chapter 2). He then defines what sema are and how they function (Chapter 3), which is followed by a comprehensive survey of existing sema taking into consideration their physical and material type, location, distribution by group, by cluster, and artwork (Chapter 4). The sema that have either religious imagery or narrative compositions are examined in light of the sources for the narrative within either Buddhist or Brahmanical texts and their possible meanings and associations are explored (Chapter 5). The sema are divided into types based on the above research and a tentative chronology and sequence of evolution is suggested (Chapter 6). Murphy concludes with a summary of his research and the conclusions that can be derived from it (Chapter 7) and in the appendixes presents databases in table format for the sema studied in the dissertation, a typological database of the sema, and chronological tables. There is also a glossary of terms and bibliography of works cited.

Stephen Murphy departs from the approach in studying the sema of the Khorat Plateau of Northeast Thailand by considering them in a regionally distinct political, religious, and artistic context as opposed to being a regional variation of the Dvaravati culture of Central Thailand. By considering the sema and culture of the Khorat Plateau as the product of a parallel evolution that while sharing many cultural, religious, and artistic elements in common with Central Thailand, while remaining fundamentally separate and distinct, the inherent pitfalls and bias of approaching the study of the region as derivative are avoided and a clearer and unbiased interpretation of the historical and archaeological data can be conducted. The resulting conclusions support the thesis that the culture of the Khorat Plateau was a distinct region independent of the Dvaravati culture of Central Thailand.

In the Introduction, Murphy introduces sema as the markers that mediate sacred space and the earliest archaeological evidence of these boundary markers in Southeast Asia comes from the Khorat Plateau, which today consists of modern Northeastern Thailand and parts of Central and Southern Laos. Dating from the 7th-12th centuries, they fall into the period generally referred by Thai art historians as the Dvaravati Period after the major early civilization in Central Thailand. The author then lists seven points to be covered in his dissertation research:

(1) As no comprehensive database of sema exists, the first task is to create a database containing basic information such as distribution with detailed maps, types, numbers, styles and artwork, if any. The database will then allow the creation of a typology allowing the identification, comparison, and relative dating of the sema.

(2) To remove the academic bias in archaeological and art historic literature with regards to the sema. At present the majority of literature only discusses sema with artwork or sema from a few well known sites and most of the studies conceive of and understand sema only in relation to central Thailand and Dvaravati culture in general. Murphy sets out to shift the focus to the sema of the Khorat Plateau and then to ask how much influence and appropriation is evident from the neighboring Khmer and Dvaravati civilizations. His thesis sets forth the argument that the Khorat Plateau is a distinct region in itself and that its culture, history, and archaeology should be analyzed from this perspective.

(3) The question of whether there are obvious patterns in sema distribution must be addressed, such as: Is it possible to locate any center or centers of the sema culture? What types of sites are they found at? What is the relationship between the distribution of the sema and the art depicted on them? What is the relationship of sema to the landscape, both physical and cognitive?

(4) As there is presently no comprehensive database of sema, the study of the iconography and the artwork has been done on an individual basis with few comparisons between different sites and regions. This thesis analyses the art in conjunction with the distribution analysis of sema throughout the Khorat Plateau and draws its conclusions from this perspective, raising further questions to be addressed in terms of development and relationships between regions.

(5) Several scholars have suggested that sema culture of the Khorat Plateau evolved out of a preexisting megalithic culture. The conclusions drawn from the database created in the preceding section will allow this theory to be placed in proper context and challenged.

(6) The sema represent the most comprehensive surviving evidence of early Buddhism in the region and as they are large and not easily transported any distance, remain for the greater part in their original locations. Because of this the quantitative methods and analysis of the distribution patterns of sema and their relation to settlements, the spread of Buddhism and differences in practice can be studied across the Khorat Plateau.

(7) This thesis seeks to bring together both Thai language site-reports, journal articles and conference proceedings with Western academic sources to provide a bridge towards the integration of Thai and Western scholarship on the sema culture and the Khorat Plateau.

Following the structural outline of his dissertation, he discusses the theoretical approaches underlying his research and the sources that he used to formulate his approaches. The archaeological approach broadly falls under the classification of landscape archaeology, but goes beyond the physical landscape to consider the sema in terms of the religious and cognitive landscapes in which they existed. He then discusses the two types of art historical approaches that he used, one concerned with style and dating, the other concentrating on the motifs and iconography found, with the latter being subdivided into the iconography of narratives and motifs. He concludes his introduction with a description of his fieldwork methodology and the data collected to document each sema stone. He assigned each stone a specific number, recording its current location and original site, if different. Each sema was then measured, sketched, and described, followed by a high resolution digital image. The site was then described as to its type (moated, earthen mound, etc.), along with any associated material, and finally the precise location was recorded using a GPS device. The site could then be further analyzed using Google Earth. The data recorded for each sema was then entered into an ArcGIS software application which allowed for the creation of accurate digital maps. The datasets produced are included as an appendix, the photographs of the sema and site locations are included on a DVD.

Chapter 2 explores the definitions and evidence for the cultural, artistic, political, and archaeological evidence for the culture referred to as Dvaravati in order to provide a backdrop against which to analyze the sema from the Khorat Plateau. As noted earlier, most scholars have analyzed the sema tradition as a peripheral reflection of Dvaravati art and culture. However, it can be concluded that Dvaravati was politically restricted to sites in Central Thailand. As there was no direct political, economic, or religious control exerted by Dvaravati over the Khorat Plateau, while its culture and art spread via trade, economic activity, and the spread of Buddhism, the local population freely appropriated specific elements and reshaped them to meet their own needs. What is important is that the influences that helped shaped and define the sema tradition were not imposed from a central power, but selected and adapted from within the Khorat Plateau region. The major population centers in Central Thailand controlled the immediate area around them and further away by vassal/tributary arrangements that became weaker with distance. The same basic political structure is evident among centers at the Khorat Plateau with large sites such as Muang Fa Daed and Muang Sema having considerable political reach and influence, which also extended into the art of the sema tradition. By defining the distinctive material culture of Dvaravati, the presence of Buddhism, the Dvaravati art style, and oblong sites plans the reference points needed to understand the uniqueness of the sema tradition of the Khorat Plateau can be established. Based on this, the author argues that a shift in perspective is required to fully appreciate these objects as a distinct art separate from that of the Central Thai Dvaravati civilization.

In chapter 3 Stephen Murphy draws upon a range of different types of evidence to reach an understanding of what sema are and how they functioned. Buddhist textural evidence cites a need to separate sacred space within which specific rituals could be carried out. This space was demarcated by objects, nimitta, that defined the boundary. The texts list a variety of natural features and manmade objects that could function as nimitta, but it is never precisely defined or limited to a single type of object. Turning to archaeological evidence from the Khorat Plateau during the 7th through 12th centuries, it is clear that in this region, large carved stones of sandstone, and more rarely laterite, were used to demarcate sacred space.  These stones became known later among the Thai as sema. It is unclear as to what other Buddhist centers outside of the Khorat Plateau used for nimitta, but they probably used natural features or perishable materials. One unique site in Burma has fossilized wood used for sema, at Thaton; another unique structure is surrounded by eight boundary stones.

As no texts concerning sema survive from this early period, scholars have looked to project backwards modern Buddhist practice. In recent times, the Thai have used either eight or sixteen sema to consecrate and demarcate a square or rectangle around an ordination hall and thus create a khandasema or sema defined by the placement of stones. However archaeological evidence from Dvaravati sites show differing usages, configurations and placements suggesting that at this time the function of sema was perhaps not firmly fixed and a degree of flexibility existed. Sema may have functioned to fix sacred space where no buildings were present or built of perishable materials. As there was no monumental architecture, perhaps sema played a primary role in defining the religious landscape. Inscriptional evidence is limited, but it appears that sema consecration ceremonies were sponsored by local dignitaries or rulers and the stone was sometimes donated by royalty. Brahmins may have been employed in the ritual and merit was acquired by those who made the dedications. From this it may be inferred that sema served not just a religious function, but were also served a social and political purpose. Sema have been widely reused in different contexts during the immediate past and are still considered to be important religious objects. As there is a fluidity of meaning associated with the reuse of sema today, it may be suggested that it would be wise not to restrict our understanding of sema to a narrow definition of an object used to create and demarcate sacred space when considering the Dvaravati period. Lastly, by reviewing how modern scholarship has understood and approached sema, it is clear how certain explanations, classifications and theories arose and have remained in use through the present day. With this knowledge their basic assumptions can be tested, especially the viewpoint of seeing sema as the product of Central Thailand as opposed to the Khorat Plateau and the opposing theory that these sema arose from a megalithic cult.

Chapter 4 looks at the sema in terms of the physical and cognitive landscape of the Khorat Plateau by examining the patterns revealed by their relationship to the geography of the region, to settlement patterns, and the distribution of their artwork. By dividing the sema into three distinct groups and eight clusters, a clearer picture emerges of the Khorat Plateau sema culture.

Geographically, the Chi River system has the highest proportion of both sites and sema, and also has the finest examples of carved sema, not only in terms of artistic quality and iconography, but also in terms of aesthetics. Within this region, clusters one and two represent major centers of the sema tradition. Cluster six comprising sites around Vientiane, Loei, Udon Thani, and Nongkhai is an important grouping that demonstrates the role played by the Middle Mekhong River in spreading the tradition beyond the confines of the Central Khorat Plateau. Cluster six further demonstrates that the sema and the Buddhism that they represented were by the seventh-eighth centuries an integral part of the region. This tradition continued in the Middle Mekhong region well into the eleventh and twelfth centuries, gradually displaying influence from Khmer culture. In contrast, the sema tradition of the Mun River system never developed and flourished as strongly as it did in the Chi and Middle Mekhong region. The early presence of Khmer culture and the accompanying Khmer culture meant the sema tradition and the Buddhist religion that it represented never achieved a strong foothold in the region. While Settlement Sites with moats in the Chi River system demonstrate a direct connection with sema locations, this is not the case with all site sema are found.

There are clear patterns in the distribution of motifs. Narrative art is restricted to a handful of key locations, primarily in clusters one, two, and six. In contrast, axial stupa and stupa-kumbha motifs have a much more wide distribution and might be considered to represent the “typical” motifs of the sema tradition. In conclusion, this chapter shows the pattern of distribution of Buddhism within the region. It was well established by the eighth-ninth centuries and proposes that it was centered in particular on cluster one in the Chi River system and that it spread along the major river systems and as a result developed in the lowland alluvial plains.

In chapter 5, Murphy investigates the identification and interpretation of the narrative Buddhist and Brahmanical scenes on the sema stones, following the rich range of aniconic imagery found on sema from the Khorat Plateau such as axial stupas, stupa-kumbha motifs, dharmacakra, lotus petal bands, and “cloud” motifs. Visually the most striking of all the remains of the Dvaravati Period culture of the Khorat Plateau – sema with images of the Buddha or bodhisattvas have received the most attention from both academics and members of the general public. Defining narrative art “as artwork that portrays a specific scene, event, episode or tautological element” (p. 210) he explains that for this tradition, the narrative scenes almost always portray subjects from the Jataka Stories or scenes from the Life of the Buddha. In almost all cases a single direct scene is portrayed, without continuous narration or combined subjects or interpretations.

The style of the figures in sema with narratives and figural representations is close to that of central Thai Dvaravati images, although the arched eyebrows that join at the center are not as prevalent as in central Thailand. Also, the double vitarka mudra of Dvaravati art in central Thailand is found, though it is more common to find just the single right hand raised in vitarka mudra. Another distinctive characteristic of bodhisattva images on the Khorat Plateau is the “drápe-en-poche” handling of the robe, which is unique to the Khorat Plateau and distinct from both central Thai Dvaravati and Khmer practice.

Using an approach which combines changes in style over time with distribution patterns, Murphy has arrived at three major stylistic divisions that correspond to three chronological periods. The first group is centered in the Chi river system and includes Muang Fa Daed. Spanning in time the eighth-ninth centuries, it has strong affinities with the Dvaravati art of central Thailand and there is little or no discernible Khmer influence. The second group corresponds to the tenth-eleventh centuries and is characterized by “…a fusion of Dvaravati and Khmer artistic motifs and conventions…. The drápe-en-poche of the first group gives way to a full Khmer style sampot and the facial features of the protagonists take on a more square appearance, contrasting with the oval faces of the 8th-9th centuries” (p. 213). The third group dating from the eleventh-twelfth centuries is found primarily within cluster 6 sites in the Vientiane province of Laos and Nong Khai, Loei, and Udon Thani provinces of Thailand, as well as one independent site that does not easily fit within any cluster. The style of this group have lost all stylistic characteristics of central Thai Dvaravati art and instead are executed in the style of the figures on provincial Khmer architectural lintels.

In discussing possible textual sources for the Jataka Stories depicted on sema, Murphy looks at existing scholarship regarding the identification of Jatakas in contemporaneous narrative sculpture, not only on the Khorat Plateau and central Thailand, but also sites such as Borobudur in Indonesia. He concludes:

“the idea that there was a homogeneous, uniform type of Buddhism being practiced at this time is also misleading with archaeological and art historic evidence pointing towards a plurality of religions, with Mahayana Buddhism and Brahmanism being practiced alongside Theravada doctrines. The presence and importance of the oral tradition can also not be overlooked and it is possible that many of the jataka scenes found throughout the Khorat Plateau were transmitted by word of mouth as opposed to palm leaf manuscript” (p. 216).

While using as his primary textural reference Cowell’s six volume translation of the Jataka-atthakatha for researching Jataka iconography, he makes it clear that, while there is a close correlation between the text and the Jataka narrative scenes on the sema stones, it cannot be assumed that this was indeed the text that was followed in their creation (E. B. Cowell, The Jataka or Stories of the Buddha’s Former Births. Delhi: Cosmo Publications, 1978.).

After this introduction, Murphy proceeds to discuss each narrative and figurative sema stone that represents or might represent a Jataka Story grouped by subject beginning with the Mahanipata (literally “Great Section,” the Buddha’s last ten re-births as a bodhisattva prior to his re-birth as the historical Buddha) which comprise the majority of the scenes illustrated on the sema and continuing through less common Jataka Stories (unidentified scenes that can be identified as most likely being from a Jataka). Each sema is illustrated with a clear photograph and presented with its provenance (if known); associated Jataka Story with the key identifying iconographic characteristics listed, and discussed if necessary for clarity, textual attributions or non-typical iconography or presentation; and finally a date range determined on stylistic grounds and grouping. The organization makes it possible to compare different renditions of the same subject comparatively, evaluate the attribution, and compare the regional and temporal variations for each subject.

As with the Jataka Stories, the scenes from Life of the Buddha that are depicted on sema stones are drawn from both Pali (Theravada) and Sanskrit (Mahayana) texts, and it is impossible to know precisely which text might have been the inspiration for a specific scene. Ten specific scenes from the Life of the Buddha have been identified with reasonable certainty, and are discussed in the order that they occurred during the Buddha’s life. These are followed by a group of sema stones that most likely illustrated episodes from the Life of the Buddha, although their precise identification is problematic. This portion of the dissertation is fully illustrated and organized like the preceding portion on Jataka Stories.

Many sema stones depict single images of the Buddha or a bodhisattva. These are discussed and presented in same manner as the semas illustration, Jataka Stories, and scenes from the Life of the Buddha next with good photographs, iconographic description, and stylistic analysis and dating – with the exception that sema that stylistically influenced by Khmer art are covered at the end of the section. This leads naturally into a section on sema stones that have Buddhist subjects influenced by Hindu or Brahmanical religious ideas, including images of Lakshmi, Durga, Garuda, Indra, Surya, as well scenes from the Ramayana. Again, each sema is fully illustrated, fully described, and placed in context. At the end of this section sema stones from Cambodia and Burma are also illustrated and discussed comparatively.

Chapter 5 continues with a discussion of aniconic imagery on the sema stones from the Khorat Plateau. As sema with narrative and figurative art make up just ten percent of the existing sema in the region, the discussion of sema with aniconic symbols is extremely important in achieving an overview of the sema culture of the Khorat Plateau. Murphy begins this portion of his dissertation by presenting briefly the major forms of sema stones with axial stupa designs, which are the most common iconographic motif found on sema in the Khorat Plateau. This motif is only depicted on slab type sema stones and may be present on one side only or both the front and rear. It is usually a relatively narrow ridge, perhaps ten centimeters wide bisecting the sema stone down the middle, though sometimes it is broader and more triangular. Occasionally it will rise out of a scene below.

The next most common motif is the “stupa-kumbha,” which is found at thirty-four sites throughout the Khorat Plateau. The kumbha is depicted either as a plain water pot or a more elaborate form that resembles a purnaghata or kalasha pot, which in mythology contained the elixir of life, amrita, and is symbolic of abundance and auspiciousness. On top of the kumbha, a stupa motif is depicted, sometimes with concentric rings that most likely represent the chattravali on actual stupas, or occasionally, an elaborate finial. This motif was very popular and widely distributed in at both central Thai Dvaravati sites and the Khorat Plateau in various mediums. Murphy has identified five general types of the stupa-kumbha motif. The first type is the most basic form of the motif and has no floral decoration and consists only of a plain kumbha with a plain stupa arising from it. It is found at three sites in the Chi river system and Middle Mekong. The second type has increased decoration, with the kumbha surmounted by petals and a plain stupa and is found throughout the Khorat Plateau. The third type is more elaborate and is restricted to two sites in Cluster 4. It has either an elaborate base below the kumbha or a double kumbha design. On top of the kumbha there is an elaborate foliate design which can take several forms, even rising and following the form of the stupa on top of it. The stupa is also more elaborate and has a finial that might take the form of a series of concentric rings, a trident or a four-spoked wheel that might symbolize a dharmacakra. Type four is similar to both types two and three with the exception that it has either a kumbha motif or a dharmacakra placed in the middle or upper part of the stupa, and like type three, also comes from Cluster4. Type five seems to have evolved out of types three and four and the design and depiction of the foliage has Khmer artistic traits.

Type five is restricted to a few sites in Cluster 6 of the Middle Mekhong Group. Murphy has proposed a sequence for the evolution and dating of the stupa-kumbha motif moving from the simple to the more complex, with the additional support of including the relative dating of the narrative sema from the same sites. The first is the basic axial type stupa that evolves into the basic stupa-kumbha design of types one and two, evolving to reach its apogee in types three and four. The overly ornate motifs and strong Khmer influence in type five represents the decline of the form. This is supported by comparison with sema with narrative scenes within the same clusters: “Types one, two, three, and four all come from sites with a date range of 8th-9th centuries. They are therefore contemporary with the narrative art of group one. Furthermore, types two, three, and four all come from Cluster 4. These factors emphasize a lateral relationship between the motifs. It is therefore difficult to maintain that one type of motif may have post-dated or pre-dated another” (p. 323).

The only type where it is possible to make a clear chronological separation from the other types is type five, which is an amalgamation of all four previous types and can be dated through its Khmer style foliate motifs to the late 10th-11th centuries. This would place type five contemporary with the narrative art Group 2. Murphy then presents background research into the stupa-kumbha motifs, focusing on the different interpretations of the kumbha and stupa within the Buddhist textual traditions. He proposes that the stupa-kumbha motif is: “a representation of the Buddha in all of his aspects and meanings… [the axial stupa] too simultaneously represented the image of the axis-mundi as stupa, the stupa as the Buddha, and the Buddha as Dharma. Consciously the Buddhist communities saw the stupa-kumbha and axial stupa motif as aniconic forms of the Buddha…” (p. 327).

The dharmacakra has come in Buddhism to represent the Buddha’s first sermon, the first turning of the Wheel of the Law. Three-dimensional dharmacakra raised on pillars or stambhas is one of the defining artistic and religious characteristics of the Dvaravati culture of central Thailand and has been found at all major sites. Three-dimensional dharmacakra have been found at sites on the Khorat Plateau, but in far fewer numbers than in central Thailand. Three sema in poor condition have also been found with dharmacakra motifs on the Khorat Plateau, coming from one site in Cluster 5 and two sites in Cluster 3. All three depictions are different, though their spokes appear to be stylized lotus leaves. One appears to have a dharmacakra on top of an axial stupa; the others have a dharmacakra on top of a kumbha, as if it is emerging from the it. Five sema with stupa-kumbha motifs have a dharmacakra as the finial of the stupa. Surveys of the sema with dharmacakra from the sites on Phnom Kulen, Cambodia record that there were thirty-two sema of which thirty had a dharmacakra motif on one side and most had stupa motifs on the other. Murphy suggests:

“It appears therefore that the stupa-kumbha and the dharmacakra motif developed alongside each other in the Khorat Plateau from circa 8th century onwards. The examples found at Phnom Kulen would appear to post-date those from the Khorat Plateau as they illustrate a combination of fully formed stupa-kumbha and dharmacakra motifs. They most probably date from the 9^th century onwards” (p. 333).

Many sema, no matter what motifs they depict and with or without narrative scenes, have their bases carved with a lotus band motif. In many cases, the lotus band is the only decorative motif on the sema, a few sema have plain bands at their bases instead. There is a variety of types and styles, with some sema from the 11th-12th centuries having a more angular, Khmer style lotus band. The lotus band is also found on many Dvaravati religious objects from central Thailand, especially dharmacakras and dharmacakra stambhas. Other motifs encountered on sema from the Khorat Plateau, but not common are ornate floral bands around the base, trident motifs, and cloud motifs.

In the conclusion to Chapter 5, Murphy suggests that by associating the sema with dates and locations, it is possible to propose the existence of workshops or schools. The first and most prolific of these was at Muang Fa Daed. Archeological evidence indicates that Muang Fa Daed was one of the most important centers in the region, its economic and agricultural resources would have supported the skilled craftsmen and supplied them with the resources they needed to produce numerous, high quality sema stones. Most of the surviving sema with narrative scenes from the Life of the Buddha and the Jataka Stories were produced there over a period of roughly four hundred years, from the 8th-11th centuries. A second major workshop must have been centered on the site of Bahn Ngong Hang, also located in Cluster 1 and most likely was an offshoot of the workshop at Muang Fa Daed. The sema stones from this site are very similar to those produced at Muang Fa Daed, so close that the same artists might have made them. They both date from the same period of time and only Muang Fa Daed and Bahn Ngong Hang produced a tapered type sema. In Cluster 2, the site of Bahn Kut Ngong was possibly a workshop, but on a much smaller scale and only during the eighth through ninth centuries. A similar time span applies to the site of Bahn Korn Sawan, which was also possibly a workshop. The few sema that were produced here are in lower relief, suggesting a small scale workshop with artisans trained at one of the larger workshops. Cluster 4 had a workshop centered around Bahn Tat Tong and Bahn Kum Ngoen which produced a number of sema stones with the stupa-kumbha motif from the eighth through ninth centuries, but no narrative art or Buddha images. Murphy suggests that, based on the variety and number of well executed stupa-kumbha motifs produced at this site, this was the workshop from which the design originated and spread to other sites in the cluster and beyond. During the tenth or eleventh centuries a workshop appears to have emerged at Bahn Nong Khuem and Bahn Pailom where both the Dvaravati and Khmer artistic traditions were merged into a distinctive and original aesthetic comprising narrative scenes from the Jatakas based on the main sema traditions, but executed with the more stylized and refined forms of the Khmer aesthetic. The site of Wang Sapung also seems to have flourished briefly producing sema with the stupa-kumbha motif of the Chi River system fused with Khmer floral conventions. Murphy concludes that, apart from these six sites, there is little evidence for workshops or schools at other locations, and while sema may have been produced at many other locations, these were most likely centered around local Buddhist monasteries and the artisans may have been the Buddhist monks themselves.

Murphy believes that these six sites, and Muang Fa Daed in particular, may have functioned similarly to the ‘restricted-centers-diffusion rule’ hypothesized by Robert Brown in which a few centers developed and transmitted the art forms throughout the region (Robert Brown, “‘Rules’ for change in the transfer of Indian art to Southeast Asia.” In Ancient Indonesian sculpture, edited by Marijke J. Klokke and Pauline Lunsingh Scheurleer. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994, pp. 10-32, 12-14). This would explain the profusion and spread of the sema tradition from workshops in the Chi river system and Middle Mekhong throughout the Khorat Plateau.

As expressed by the author, Chapter 6 “provides a typology of sema arrived at from the study of their form, style, material, distribution, artwork and epigraphy” (p. 344). The sema are logically organized in the typology by the four major types of sema: slab, pillar, octagonal, and un-fashioned. Each main type is clearly described and defined, with their average range of measurements. The discussion of the pillar and octagonal types of sema are followed by maps showing their distribution. No maps are supplied in this chapter for the distribution of the slab type sema as they are fully mapped in Chapter 4. After each major type is introduced and defined, its dependent subtypes are presented and discussed, with nine subtypes under slab-type sema and four each under pillar- and octagonal-type sema. Each subtype is clearly defined with their geographic distribution and the range of decorative motifs present on them, if any representative photographs of the subtype are supplied. If measurements are significant to the subtype, average measurements, as well as the ratio of the measurements, are listed. The reasons for assigning dates are also clearly described and discussed, as are inter-regional and external influences, and the presence or lack of inscriptions and stylistic associations.

Two categories usually not considered by scholars are also discussed: un-fashioned and unfinished-type sema. Un-fashioned sema are very crude in their shaping, but usually conform to the rough shapes of the slab and pillar types. Some sema in this category might originally have been fashioned but then eroded over the centuries, but there do appear to be a group of sema that were minimally shaped and that span the entire region. No definite conclusions can be drawn concerning them. The unfinished type of sema seem to have been intended primarily to be fully fashioned and decorated slab sema, though a few pillar type sema also fall into this category. They are classified unfinished as the surface design was sketched on them but never fully carved.

The discussion of types concludes with a proposed dating sequence and evolution of each of the different types of sema. This is described for each one of the three major types and is illustrated with a photographic flowchart arranged in a proposed chronological order. A short discussion of the major forms of post-Dvaravati sema follows, briefly looking at sema from Angkor, and the sema of the Thai cities of Ayutthaya, Sukhothai, and Phetchburi.

Murphy then begins a discussion of the theory that a megalithic cult might have given rise to the sema culture of the Khorat Plateau. The idea that the sema of the Khorat Plateau developed from a pre-existing megalithic culture was first introduced in 1969 by Quaritch Wales (H. G Wales Quaritch, Dvaravati: The Earliest Kingdom of Siam [6th to 11th century A.D.]. London, Bernard Quaritch Ltd, 1969, 109-111). This theory was strongly criticized by Piriya Krairiksh in 1974 (Piriya Krairiksh, “Semas with Scenes from the Mahanipata-Jatakas in the National Museum at Khon Kaen” in Art and Archaeology in Thailand. Bangkok, Fine Arts Department, 1974, 35-100, 43), but revived by the artist and newspaper writer Prayuun Uluchada writing under the pen name No Na Paknam in 1981 (No Na Paknam, The Buddhist Boundary Markers of Thailand. Bangkok: Muang Boran Publishing House, 1981, 61) and expanded upon by Srisakara Vallibhotama in 1985 who went on to suggest that the sema culture that evolved on the Khorat Plateau was the result of the transformation of an indigenous megalithic burial cult with the introduction of Buddhism, and that the sema stones were the Buddhist equivalent of the megalithic stones associated with pre-Buddhist funerary practices (Srisakara Vallibhotama, “Sema Stone Boundary Markers from the Northeast: Survey and the Study on the Continuation of Megalithic Culture in the Region,” Muang Boran 11 (4), 1985: 6-33).

In presenting evidence to refute this theory, he briefly examines the colonialist “Diffusionist” theory which held that civilizations spread out from the more advanced to the more primitive, bringing with them more advanced technologies, religions, and other cultural elements. It is this theory that underlies the initial hypothesis presented by Quaritch Wales and then further elaborated upon by Thai scholars. He illustrates how this theory has come under criticism as not always being adequate or applicable to Southeast Asia by scholars such as Ian Glover (Ian C. Glover, “The Archaeological Past of Island Southeast Asia” in Messages in Stone – Statues and Sculptures from Tribal Indonesia in the Collection of the Barbier – Mueller Museum, edited by Jean Paul Barbier and Milan Skira. Geneva, the Barbier-Mueller Museum, 1998, 17-34, 23-25). He further explains that his fieldwork has shown that all of the “megaliths” listed in early archeological surveys of the region were actually sema whose purpose had been misidentified. The closest evidence for the presence of an authentic megalithic culture that has been properly documented is found in the highlands of Laos. These include 150 standing stones in Hua Phan province, which are accompanied with both cist and dolmen type burial that were documented by M. Colani who felt that they might predate the Plain of Jars, giving a date of 300 BCE (M. Colani, “Mégaliths du Haut-Laos,” Publications de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient [PEFEO]. Paris, Les Editions d’Art et d’Histoire XXV-XXIV, 1935.) Additional sites were later found by Kanda Keosphha where standing stone megaliths were clearly associated with burials (Kanda Keosphha, “Standing Stones in Northern Lao PDR” in Uncovering Southeast Asia’s Past-selected papers from the Tenth Biennial Conference of the European Association of Southeast Asian Archaeologists at The British Museum, London, September 2004, , edited by E. Bacus, I. Glover, and V. Pigott. Singapore, National University Press, 2006, 148-153). Murphy then concludes that the closest megalithic predating the sema culture of the Khorat Plateau is restricted to the highland culture of Laos. While Rungroj Piromanukul and Kanda Keosphha both argue that the presence of a megalithic culture in highland Laos is enough to justify the theory that the lowland sema culture of the Khorat Plateau evolved from it (Rungroj Piromanukul, Rungroj, “Les bornes rituelles du nord-est de la Thaïlande” in Dvāravatī : aux sources du bouddhisme en Thaïlande. Paris, Musée Guimet, 2009, 97-104), Murphy counters with the argument that if the megalithic culture of highland Laos influenced the development of the sema culture in the lowland areas of the Khorat Plateau, then one must ask why no comparable megaliths have been found in the Khorat plateau and that the sema culture of the Khorat plateau or a related culture did not evolve in highland Laos to succeed the megalithic culture there.

Discussing archeological evidence concerning megaliths in the immediate vicinity of the Khorat Plateau, the evolution of scholarship concerning megaliths in the region, and the theses linking a pre-existing megalithic cult to the Dvaravati sema culture of the Khorat Plateau, he concludes:

“A combination of misidentification, a rather loose and ambiguous use of the term ‘megalith’, the remnants of a colonial Diffusionist viewpoint and universalist ideas of the evolution of religions have led many scholars to accept the theory that sema evolved out of an indigenous forerunner in the shape of a widespread megalithic cult. However, the archaeological evidence on the ground paints a very different picture. No evidence whatsoever has been found to date for a megalithic culture in the Khorat Plateau with the vast majority of claims of this nature being misidentifications. Instead it appears that the sema tradition arose as a result of Buddhism entering the region and the need to demarcate sacred space. In fact, a counter-argument to the more universal ‘religious fusion/synthesis argument’ can be proposed along the lines that, due to their monumentality and visual impact in the landscape, sema did not represent a tie with the past but instead were employed to represent a clean break with former traditions and situate the new incoming religion in a dominant and permanent manner” (p. 372).

In his summary of Chapter 6, Murphy states that the origins of the sema tradition may not be solved, as evidence from Sri Lanka before the seventh century is inconclusive and there exist sema with solid dates only from after the twelfth century. The evidence for influence from a megalithic culture is inconclusive and appears unlikely. Despite compiling a database of sema stones, it has been impossible to narrow the date range beyond one or two centuries, and in some cases the date range spans two to three centuries. The only thing that is clear is that, by the seventh century, sema had become an important part of the culture of this region. By the eighth-ninth centuries it developed substantially in the Chi river system and could also be found in the Middle Mekong. Both regions were producing sophisticated designs with local characteristics. This tradition would continue to develop and sema would become an important part of Buddhism in the later Thai states of Sukhothai and Ayutthaya.

Chapter 7 is the conclusion of the dissertation which brings together the questions addressed in the study and then outlines the results achieved in the foregoing chapters. This is followed by a discussion of the insights that these results have revealed relative to both the sema tradition and the nature of Buddhism in the Khorat Plateau during the 7th-12th centuries.

To summarize, by organizing the sema into three distinct groups and eight clusters, Murphy reveals that the Chi river system was the most important area relative to the sema tradition, with Clusters 1 and 2 being the most significant centers of sema production. The concentration of sites in Cluster 6 demonstrates the strength of the tradition in this region and the role of the Middle Mekhong as a venue for its spread away from the Chi river system. The sema tradition never took hold to a significant extent in the Mun river system, most likely because of the strong influence of the predominately Hindu Khmer civilization in the region. Clear patterns have emerged regarding the distribution of motifs on sema throughout the Khorat Plateau. Narrative art is restricted to a few locations in Clusters 1, 2, and 6, while axial stupa and stupa-kumbha motifs are spread throughout the region. In identifying the iconography of the narrative scenes, seventy-one identifications are proposed. The possible symbolic significance of the axial stupa and stupa-kumbha motifs are also explored, with the suggestion made that they represent aniconic images of the Buddha and subsequently the Buddha as Dharma. Through the study of the style and evolution of motifs, combined with the distribution analysis presented in Chapter 4 and the typology presented in Chapter 6, the sema were dated. The result suggest that the sema did not evolve in a traditional linear manner, but more “laterally” when important aspects such as location, cultural influences, and settlement patterns were factored in. As a result, narrative art on sema can be divided into three groups by periods corresponding to the 8th-9th, 10th-11th, and 11th-12th centuries; and the stupa-kumbha motifs can be placed into five types dating from two periods: Types 1-4 being contemporary with narrative Group one and dating from the 8th-9th centuries, while Type 5, which demonstrates a fusion of Khmer and Dvaravati art, corresponds to narrative Group 2 dating from the 10th-11th centuries. Finally, the sema demonstrate that the Buddhist religion was present by the 8th and 9th centuries, and most likely centered on Cluster 1 in the Chi river system. It is also clear that Buddhism spread along the major river systems and thus primarily developed in the lowland, alluvial plains.

Murphy’s insights and observations from this thesis are:

Firstly: the tradition of using large stone boundary markers appears to have originated in the Khorat Plateau. This tradition spanned the 7th-12th centuries with the 8th-9th centuries being the period in which the majority of narrative art was created and the tradition began to spread throughout the region.

Secondly: The tradition flourished and reached its apogee in the Chi river system, specifically at the site of Muang Fa Daed during the 8th-9th centuries. The distribution analysis, numbers of sema present, and the study of the artwork confirms this conclusion, though it does not necessarily mean that the tradition originated at the site.

Thirdly: The sema tradition represents a unique phenomenon of the Khorat Plateau. It is clear that the aesthetic of the artwork is not derivative of Khmer or Dvaravati culture, but developed as a distinct form in the region, though it drew at times upon different cultures.

Fourthly: Sema can help illuminate how Buddhism emerged and spread through the region. It is clear that Buddhism spread along the course of the rivers and was primarily restricted to the lowlands. The rivers provided good communication networks and moated city sites supplied the patronage that Buddhism needed to thrive. Sema demonstrate that later Buddhism spread to less populated sites and even suggests the presence of a forest dwelling lineage of monks at Phu Phra Baht.

Finally: The question of which types of Buddhism were being practiced and the texts they employed can be explored, but not definitively answered. The presence of a khakkharaka (an ascetics staff) on some narrative scenes has been interpreted by some to indicate the presence of the Mulasarvastivadin sect of Sanskrit Buddhism, but the khakkharaka is not exclusive to this group alone and thus other lineages could have created one or all of these sema with this symbol. The presence of stupa symbolism on sema has led some scholars to associate it with stupa worship and thus a connection with the Apara-mahavinaseliya sect that was active at Nagarjunakonda from the 3rd century on. However, almost all lineages of Buddhism have the stupa as one of the most important symbols in their religion. While there are close connections between the episodes from the Life of the Buddha depicted on sema from the Khorat Plateau and the Pali-based text of the Nidana-katha, as well as further similarities between the Pali Jatakas and the Jataka scenes found on the sema stones, both the use of oral traditions and different texts cannot be ruled out. While we cannot be sure about the texts and precise Buddhist lineages present on the Khorat Plateau at this point in history, the presence of “Ye Dhamma…” inscriptions at a number of locations, as well as the lack of bodhisattva images carved on sema during the 8th and 9th centuries, indicate that a Pali-based Buddhism was practiced in the region. In the 10th and 11th centuries, bodhisattvas appear on sema as a result of the influence of Khmer Mahayana Buddhist practice.

One other implication emerges from the research in this dissertation, the indication that the local elites and rulers actively supported and patronized the Buddhist order on the Khorat Plateau. The fact that the sema tradition flourished at large moated sites such as Muang Fa Daed indicates that it was integrated into the society of the region. As in other areas, there was most likely a reciprocal arrangement where the rulers and elites patronized the Buddhist order and in turn their positions were legitimized by the Buddhist order.

John A. Listopad
Art Department
Sacramento State University
john.listopad@csus.edu

Dissertation Information

School of Oriental and African Studies. 2010. 479 pp. Primary Advisor: Elizabeth Moore.

Primary Sources

Thai Fine Arts Department Library – published and unpublished survey reports
Silpakorn University Library – published and unpublished reports, theses, and dissertations
Muang Boran Journal
Khon Kaen Museum – a few semas, much more of the material culture of the Khorat Plateau
Muang Fa Daed – archeological site, center of sema culture

Image: Photograph of sema by Stephen Murphy.

A review of Buddhist Medicine in Medieval China: Disease, Healing, and the Body in Cross-cultural Translation (Second to Eighth Centuries C.E.), by C. Pierce Salguero.

Pierce Salguero’s dissertation marks a significant departure from the norms of Chinese medical history, which has focused almost entirely on a received tradition that traces its origins back to the Huangdi neijing 黃帝內經. By introducing a discrete body of medical writings from the Buddhist Canon (Taishō Shinshū Daizōkyō 大正新脩大藏經) and the Dunhuang 敦煌 manuscripts, Salguero brings to bear on these materials new notions of medicine, complex ideas of the body in religion, and a fresh vision of the competitive field in which these doctrines were received, adapted and disseminated. Salguero brings the study of these materials up to the present by introducing methodologies such as translation theory and conceptual metaphor theory, and by contextualizing the Chinese materials within the broader study of global transmission of medicine.

Although it has long been acknowledged that “the lion’s share” of therapeutic activity in medieval China was performed outside the Neijing tradition, little research has been done in this area. Salguero broaches this field by providing future researchers with a useful set of categories and analytical tools, setting up approaches not just for his own later work but for future generations of scholars in this area. In Chapter 1 he identifies the setting within which these doctrines had their greatest purchase as the “religio-medical marketplace” (pp. 108-113). By emphasizing the importance of therapeutics in Chinese religions, this term foregrounds the problems inherent in modern studies which separate them into different activities. Although the combination of these interests was common to many medieval religions, it has been left largely unexamined by studies focused on ritual, syncretism and textual genealogies.

Salguero argues cogently for the importance of translation theory to understand the reception and reconceptualization of different medical texts in their specific contexts. Chapter 2 challenges Paul Demiéville’s and Paul Unschuld’s arguments that poor translations of Indian medical terms into Chinese medical ones set up false equations, and that the ensuing confusion prevented the broad adoption of Indian medical ideas. Salguero maintains that, on the contrary, Buddhist translation terms were intelligently conceived as broadly multivalent, encompassing a range of meanings. These ranges of meaning brought out the comparability between the two systems in new ways that spoke directly to specific target audiences, and demonstrated the comprehensiveness of Buddhism as an entire system of thought.

Chapters 3 and 4 take up other examples of translation strategies in their social context. Using conceptual metaphor theory, Salguero demonstrates how specific metaphors of the body and illness reflect different target audiences. Texts which describe the body as a filthy, decaying, collection of parts and which emphasize austerity and endurance in the face of disease were consistently directed towards monastic communities who advocated practices of asceticism and self-control. The physiological and anatomical treatises found in these texts were often less clinical in conception than philosophical, aimed at constructing an ideology to support a culture of austerity. These texts adopted foreignizing translation strategies such as transliteration of esoteric terms, which served to mark the foreignness and exotic nature of the ideas in the text. In contrast, texts which described healing as a reward for devotion, emphasizing donation, magical rituals such as visualization, invocation, spells, talismans and scriptural recitation were often oriented towards the laity. These practices were important ways in which the Buddhist sangha argued for its relevance to the Chinese populace. Thus, although esoteric ritual terms might have been used, the ritual logic was usually always explained in local, Sinitic terms, which made the basic sense of the rituals familiar and logical to native Chinese readers.

Chapters 5 and 6 discuss the performative elements of representations of the body and healing in different genres of writing. Chapter 5 focuses on the Lives of Eminent Monks (Gaoseng zhuan 高僧傳), and demonstrates the centrality of therapy in narratives of famous, worthy and miraculous Buddhists. Not only was therapy one of, if not the most important means for proselytizing and attracting patronage, its prominence shows how Buddhists responded to the chaotic political, martial and epidemiological conditions of early medieval China. Chapter 6 surveys a broader range of materials including commentaries, meditation manuals, encyclopedias and travelogues, and synthesizes them into an analysis of changing trends in translation strategy in the Sui-Tang period. Salguero argues that “rewriters” in the sixth and seventh centuries used localizing terminology to make Indian ideas seem more familiar, but that by the mid-seventh century, fidelity to Indian texts became increasingly the norm. Salguero posits that while this transition reflects a deepening engagement with Buddhist medicine, it may have eventually contributed to the decreasing impact of Buddhist medicine from the end of the Tang onwards.

This dissertation thus constitutes an argument for the centrality of therapeutic work and medical thought in medieval Chinese Buddhism. It demonstrates how attention to word choices and strategies of translation, rewriting and reconceptualization reveals the underlying intellectual activity involved in making bridges between different cultures, epistemes and social sectors. As such, it is also a methodological proposal for the broader study of the transmission of medicine. Pierce Salguero’s dissertation is already contracted for publication next year in the “Encounters with Asia” series of University of Pennsylvania Press. His further publication plans include a detailed survey of Buddhist medical scriptures throughout the Tripitika as well as a reader of translations from major Buddhist medical scriptures.

Michael Stanley-Baker
Associate, China Centre for Health and Humanity, University College London
Treasurer, International Association for the Study of Traditional Asian Medicine
http://ucl.academia.edu/MichaelStanleyBaker

Primary Sources

Chinese and Indian Medical Literature
Daoist Canon
Dunhuang Manuscripts
Imperial Histories
Pāli and Taishō Canons

Dissertation Information

Johns Hopkins University. 2010. 395 pp. Primary Advisor: Marta Hanson.

Image: Photograph by Pierce Salguero.