New Southeast Asia: Politics, Meaning, and Memory. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2024. US$68.00, cloth. ISBN 9780824897581.
“French scholarship and expertise in the shape of a long series of brilliant archaeologists, architects, epigraphists, and historians, under the umbrella of the French School of the Far East, had not only excavated and restored a host of the great Angkorian monuments, but had also reconstituted the history and chronology of Cambodia’s glittering Angkorian past.” So recalled Noël St. Clair Deschamps, Australian Ambassador to Cambodia from 1962 to 1969, in a 1990 address to the Australian and Overseas Support Group for Free Elections in Cambodia in Melbourne. As ambassador and a noted Francophile, Deschamps forged a lasting friendship with French-speaking Cambodian Head of State Norodom Sihanouk. The King Father, Deschamps recalled, lauded France for its contributions in the same regard: “During ninety years, France did very little for us, but she did nothing against us, and we owe her our survival as a nation. That is a debt [that] we can never adequately repay.”
The degree and kind of French scholarly contributions to Cambodian history and history-writing is precisely where Epistemologies of the Past by Theara Thun looks to examine critically. The author analyzes this scholarly encounter holistically, with a long-overdue view toward casting Cambodian historiography as dialogic with the colonial equivalent and never passive to its impulses. Thun’s study draws on a range of French- and Khmer-language texts from French School of the Far East (École française d’Extrême-Orient) library, Kyoto University’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies library, and the Buddhist Institute (Institut Bouddhique) in Phnom Penh, among other collections. Chief among his sources are 17 Khmer chronicle manuscripts (baṅsāvtār), which represent “one of the largest original manuscript collection ever…in a single study of Southeast Asian scholarship” (13). Thun’s overarching aim is to recast our understanding of Khmer encounters with colonialism and colonial historiography in such a way that readers identify “a significant historiographical interface” between extant precolonial chronicles and predominantly French-influenced historical epistemologies (11).
The book comprises five incisive, albeit succinct, chapters that explore “a particular knowledge set” that emerged within this period of “historiographical interface,” which was distinguishable for its often-conflictual relationship with colonial historiography (133). Three main aims guide the book’s path forward: 1) an analysis of Khmer scholars’ varied, often competing, engagements with collective historical understanding; 2) an exploration of these scholars’ agentic shift toward predominantly French historiography; and 3) an examination of a hitherto “hidden” “autonomous” history and/or “sequences” through study of “Southeast Asian historiography in transition” (10). In Cambodia, the author contends, “there was never a ‘single’ template of historical consciousness among indigenous scholars throughout the colonial and the postcolonial periods,” but instead “different ‘types’ of scholars…who engaged with both chronicle history making and European archaeological and empirical historical conventions in different ways and to different extents” (8).
The opening chapters situate palace chronicles in the late pre-colonial era to the French Protectorate’s first half century under the lens of analysis. The first chapter identifies important themes of morally upright kingship, mystical influences, and the Khmer court’s engagements with neighbouring powers in Siam and Dai Viet in palace chronicles and religious (Buddhist) texts. As the themes of a collective past evolved into scholarly conceptions of a nation-state, chapter 2 tracks how palace chronicles and colonial history-writing came into direct contact. French influences from colonial history-writing were indeed present and challenged endogenous intellectuals’ conceptions of the Khmer collective past, but an overarching reluctance among them to embrace colonial-era historiography wholesale pervaded their engagements and guided their adaptations of their manuscripts.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 examine the “epistemological transition” in Cambodia’s national historiography among baṅsāvtārscholars who now drew from French colonial and Siamese scholarship and methods to author Khmer history of a new type. Chapter 3, on the late 1920s and early 1930s, tracks the scholarly turn from baṅsāvtārscholarship to French colonial historiography-informed history-writing (pravattisātr) at the peak of French colonial authority in Cambodge(83). Thiounn is the first of Thun’s intellectuals under analysis, followed by French-Khmer translator Choum Mau and “local figure” Krasem, both of whom affiliated with French colonial institutions (Royal Library and Buddhist Institute). Chapter 4 shifts our attention to the emergence of “national” history-writing in the late 1930s and 1940s in exploring the work of Nhuk-Thèm and Krasem, among other scholars. Chapter 5 identifies how and why chronicle scholarship endured in the post-independence era and “remained a dominant stream of collective historical imagination” (111).
Epistemology of the Past is an important book that fits neatly alongside pioneering studies by Penny Edwards (Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation, 2007) and Anne Ruth Hansen (How to Behave: Buddhism and Modernity in Colonial Cambodia, 2011) on Khmer intellectual history and national consciousness, past, or (then) present. It is also, arguably, a helpful primer to understanding how, and why, Khmer intellectuals gravitated toward exogenous historiographies and engaged with them creatively yet critically.
Yet at 138 pages, excluding front matter, notes, bibliography, and index, the book is rather short, and doubly so in light to the topic and historical scope. One wonders if further development might have covered the topic more comprehensively and exhaustively, in particular, expanding on the Khmer intellectuals themselves: genealogies of their lives, studies, influences, and the processes whereby they became scholars-literati of baṅsāvtārand pravattisātr, respectively. Undoubtedly, a shroud of mystery surrounds some of these scholars, and Thun does well to acknowledge this where appropriate.
Aside from this reviewer’s own curiosities as a fellow intellectual historian, one might quibble with the organization and style of the book at times. The opening anecdote on the Sweet Cucumber King, though personable, reads as somewhat of a digression from the book’s purpose and methodology. The reader does not uncover the book’s principal argument until well into page 8, and again mid-page 11. Casual readers might also struggle with the book’s occasional passive style of writing, which at important junctures abrogates to the reader the responsibility of knowing who, or what, oversees key actions.
Certain concepts also provoked a “Spockian eyebrow” for this reviewer simply because the author’s mobilization of them seemed to contravene their overarching aims. Thun’s dependence on the Eurocentric term “Western” read as an odd and dated conceptual word choice. Does Thun mean “French” or “Francophone”? A similar issue arises with “Cambodia.” Does it make sense, or is it historically correct, to refer to the Khmer realm before independence in 1953 as “Cambodia?” Or is it more suitable to refer to these lands under the French Protectorate as Cambodge, as Penny Edwards has done in her work? The reviewer recognizes that “Cambodia” is an anglicization of Cambodge, which is itself a derivation of the Khmer Kampuchea and Sanskrit Kambojadeśa. Yet in a book that strives so fervently to place the lens of analysis on indigenous historiography on its own terms, “Cambodia” from the 1850s to post-independence reads as somewhat facile, and far too European in placement and tone.
Matthew Galway
Australian National University, Canberra