RHI Seminar: “In search of local knowledge (and environmental thinking). Indological research networks and Indonesian culture across decolonization”.

Abstract:

In this paper I dwell on a chapter-in-progress of my book-project on Indonesia and the Greater India mindset. To briefly explain: since the nineteenth century, today’s South and Southeast Asia have become part of scholarly and popular thinking, at global and local levels, that defines the region as a single, superior, Hindu-Buddhist civilisation with its source in India. You’ll find this image in museums of Asian Art, the popularity of Yoga, or Blogbuster movies like Eat, Pray, Love. Significant for the larger problem, these moral geographies of Greater India encapsulate Indonesia, ignoring a predominant Islamic population, the largest of the world. In my book-project, I investigate the role of local and transnational scholarly and spiritual knowledge networks active in Indonesia in the making and perpetuating of such Greater India thinking, and the ways academic and spiritual knowledge influence each other. Wishing to write not (again) a history about the West or about Greater India, my drive is to also understand the lives and afterlives of Greater India thinking in Indonesia.

In my talk, I start, as I do throughout my bookproject, for methodological reasons from sites and objects of knowledge production, to explore various (local, colonial) perspectives in the research practices of scholarly figures, site-caretakers and priests, all involved in the making of Indology. I study the conditions and (changing) hierarchies of knowledge production, at various sites, in widening and narrowing circles of initiation. Following the networks to Europe and the US, I study the transformation of Indology across decolonization into Area Studies that seemed to detach Southeast Asia and Indonesia from Greater India thinking. But to what extent and why (not) did decolonization influence practices, conditions and ideas about what constituted local culture in Indonesia?

Importantly, the query of these ‘scholarly figures’ makes clear how difficult it is to determine what might be colonial, and what might be ‘local’ – or subaltern – of the forms, sources and actors of knowledge production that helped shaping academic institutions and disciplines like Indology – whether ‘here’ in the Netherlands, or in formerly colonized countries. It also shows that following local perspectives is not necessarily the answer to the question of how to detach history, or cultural knowledge from its colonial frameworks. Moreover, how do our own frameworks, and the academic traditions that shape us, determine what and who we see and do not see? These questions are relevant to the debate on the decolonisation of academic institutions, knowledge production, and their histories. Finally, how this project inspired me to begin a new project for exploring histories and politics environmental empathy in Indonesia may be part of our discussion as well.