Papers (Part 1)

• Dr. Arwin and the Silence of the Millions: Czech Images of Tropical Forest and “Development” Jan Mrázek National University of Singapore

  “[T]o be stabbed in the heart with a knife, so stunned you are by immense tropical nature,” wrote the Czech poet Konstantin Biebl in 1927. Tropical nature, and particularly the prales (“primeval forest”) was immense also as an object of desire and as a literary inspiration for Czech writers who travelled to Southeast Asia in the colonial period. The prales is ancient—“a remnant of primeval times” (Pavel Šebesta)—yet it is intensely alive, “eternally green”, in the present. In Jan Havlasa’s novel The Abyss of Bliss, the archaeologist Dr. Arwin, as he searches for the skull of the primeval ape-man, dreams and perhaps really encounters the pithecanthropus, alive in the present-day primeval forest. In the prales, borders are fuzzy between reality and hallucination, science and madness, the past and the present. In other texts, prales is encountered as an absence, or as a memory of violence and destruction, in “developed” places: as the cleared forests that are the plantation and cities, as animals crushed under the wheels of a speeding car, as the “silence of the millions”. In absence, destruction, and death, the ancient vitality of nature is more persistent than ever. Like when Dr. Arwin and the pithecanthropus play hide-and-seek across time, the paper’s author reflects on Czech writings from the late colonial period through his own experience of nature, “development”, and certain silences in present-day Southeast Asia, and vice versa.

• “Lands, Which We Usually Call the East, Can Be Divided into Three Separate Groups” (W.M. Zaleski): How Polish and Serbian Travellers Told Stories About Southeast Asia Tomasz Ewertowski Shanghai International Studies University

  Following the title of the Panel, Southeast Asia and Central-Eastern Europe: Forgotten Connections, Stories and Histories, we would like to draw your attention to often forgotten stories told by Polish and Serbian travellers from the so-called “long 19th century” (1789-1914). Eric Hobsbawm’s idea allows us to observe long-term historical processes without being restricted by a rigid time framework. The choice of this specific period is motivated by the fact that this was “the age of transformation” (Osterhammel), the period of industrialization, urbanization, colonialism, and globalization. Those changes hugely influenced the way in which Europeans interacted with nations in other continents, and we will see how such influence is reflected in travel writing at the time. A comparison of two Slavic nations, one Central European and traditionally Catholic with another of Southern European and traditionally linked to the Byzantine heritage, will give us a deeper insight into the various factors that influenced the image of Southeast Asia in Polish and Serbian travel writings.

  In our research, we have analysed a corpus of texts written by 13 travellers who visited Southeast Asia during the “long 19th century”. Upon further reflection, we decided to focus on only 6 of them. This selection was motivated by a desire to gain insights into a variety of experiences. Anzelm Dzwonkowski was a member of the crew of a Dutch East India Company ship in the late 18th century; Milan Jovanovic worked as a ship doctor in 1870; Prince Pawel Sapieha was an aristocratic tourist and member of the Austro-Hungarian diplomatic corps who travelled throughout Asia in the years 1888-1889; Wladyslaw Jagniatkowski served in Vietnam with the French Foreign Legion in 1890’; Michal Siedlecki, a professor of biology, had a research stint in Java in the early 20th century; and Milan Rajcevic, a globetrotter, travelled throughout Asia on his own in 1910.

  Such a selection allows us to analyse a number of factors that might have influenced travel and travel writing at the time. For example, changes in technology and transportation: while Dzwonkowski still travelled around Africa by means of a sailing ship, later writers travelled on steamships via the Suez Canal, and Rajcevic sometimes used motor vehicles. Travellers also visited Southeast Asia in different capacities, e.g. Jagniatkowski and Dzwonkowski were soldiers at the behest of colonial powers, while Siedlecki was a scientist conducting research on Java. At the time, the general political framework was different, e.g. travellers witnessed colonial expansion by Western European powers or even fought for them as in the case of Jagniatkowski.

  In our analysis, we will refer to Vladimir Gvozden’s research. According to Gvozden, there are two dimensions of travel writing that should be examined: materiality (places visited, means of transportation) and aesthetics. Through an analysis of our selected travelogues, we will show how technological, social and political changes influenced travel writing in terms of its materiality and aesthetics. We will also see how changes in the materiality of travel writing are linked to its ideological dimensions.

• The First Two Impressions of the Southeast Asia in the Serbian Literature Nada Savkovic Faculty of Law and Business Studies Dr. Lazar Vrkatić

  Dr. Milan Jovanovi? Morski (1834-1896), being a marine physician in the period from 1876 to 1882, wrote travel books, which, according to some people, are the best part of his literary work. It has been noted that his travelogue is characterized as an emphasized symbiosis of the artistic and the documentary, i.e. as a cross between striking impressions of distant places, events and human fates that he was a direct witness of with historical recollections and geographical studies. Two watercolours will be presented: the Malay Archipelago and Singapore. Milan Jovanovi? Morski often expressed shame over the harshness and brutality of naval officers and sailors towards Asians. The discussion will include his trip from Bengal via Penang to Singapore. The impressions of the Southeast Asia – Singapore, Bangkok, Penang and Rangoon by Milorad Raj?evi? (1890-1964), a world traveller, will be presented also. He was only twenty years old when he decided to embark on a trip around the world in 1910/1911. The question is: How did the authors establish their position bearing in mind two different cryptocolonial contexts?

Papers (Part 2)

• A History of Misreading: The Soviet Biography of an Ethnographic Collection from North Borneo Aleksandra Kasatkina Kunstkamera Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography

  Brought by German ethnologist Albert Grubauer from his expedition to British North Borneo in 1911, the ethnographic collection in question was sold to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) in St Petersburg, Russian Empire, in 1914. Early 20 century was the time of rapid and flourishing development of the Kunstkamera and of wide international contacts. After the 1917 Revolution the opportunities of contacts with research institutions abroad became limited and professional specialists in cultures of foreign Asia were constantly lacking. The inventory of the Grubauer’s collection from Borneo that was completed only in 1979 is an eloquent example of how foreign Asian ethnographic items were treated under those conditions. Various employees of the Museum, of different cultural and educational backgrounds, had been preparing the document. None of them had ever been to Borneo, none of them was specialist on this particular region, and there was no Internet to help. The final inventory is full of mistakes in local place-names and words as a result of misreading the Grubauer’s German-language lists, some items are defined as of unknown purpose, etc. In my presentation I would like to offer seeing this document as a product of a specific time and specific infrastructure of ethnographic knowledge. I argue that taking these flaws in descriptions as just lack of competence can be itself a misreading of history of Soviet preserving of foreign Asian cultural heritage.

• Czech Maverick: On the Centennial of Harry J. Benda, the Founding Father of ISEAS Tomáš Petru Czech Academy of Sciences

  This paper seeks to commemorate the centennial of Harry J. Benda (1919–1971), a Jew of Czechoslovak origin and a half -forgotten legend of global Southeast Asian Studies, attempting to provide an insight into his work and private life. Despite the brevity of his career, Benda tremendously contributed to the development of Southeast Asian Studies in the USA, notably Yale, and also Singapore where he served as the founding father of the ISEAS (1968-69). His personal life was also exciting, and tragically ironic. Of Jewish origin, his well-to-do father dispatched young Harry from then Czechoslovakia to save him from the Nazi threat, which landed him in the Netherlands Indies, and also a Japanese internment camp. In the end, he spent seven years in Java, which became a foundation for his expertise in Indonesia's social history. During the post-war revolutionary turmoil in Indonesia Harry had to flee again – this time to New Zealand, where he obtained two university degrees. While still in Wellington, he applied for a prestigious doctoral stipend in Southeast Asian Studies at Cornell, and the rest is history.

  Benda´s main research topics included the role of Islam in Indonesian society, the period of Japanese occupation, Communist movement as well as decolonization processes in Southeast Asia. He authored or co-authored a number of books and dozens of articles, with The Crescent and the Rising Sun (1958) being his most acclaimed and quoted masterpiece. Arguably, one of his main intellectual contributions to the field was an attempt to curb the West-centric approach and highlight the “indigenous” perspective.

• Karl Siegfried Döhring and the Beginnings of the Study of Thai Art and Architecture in Germany Jana Igunma British Library

  Karl Siegfried Döhring was born in 1879 in Cologne, Germany. He passed his Abitur (German higher education entrance qualification) in 1899 in Neustettin (now Szczecinek, Poland) and moved on to study architecture at the Royal Technical College in Berlin-Charlottenburg. He graduated in 1905 and applied in the same year for a post in the Siamese civil service, where he worked for three years as an engineer in the Siamese Railway Department. Various buildings in and around Bangkok, including four royal palaces and two rail stations were designed by Döhring who was nominated the king’s First Architect in 1909. Two years later, he submitted his dissertation about the Phrachedi in Siam at the Royal Saxon Technical College in Dresden and obtained his first PhD degree before he returned to Bangkok and got involved in the architectural planning of the first university in Siam, Chulalongkorn University. In 1913 he had to return to Germany permanently due to poor health, but obtained two more PhD degrees (archaeology and art history at the University Erlangen, and law at the Royal University Greifswald). His dissertation on ‘Buddhist temples in Siam’ (published 1920) was a milestone in the study of Thai Buddhist architecture in Germany. Other ground-breaking publications on Thai fine art, including painting, lacquer and mother-of-pearl works, ceramics, manuscript art, textile art and funeral art followed in the 1920s. Döhring passed away in 1941 in Darmstadt and his collection of Thai art is now being held at two museums in Germany: the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig and the Ethnological Museum in Berlin.

• Unexpected Destinations: Two Travels Between Russia and Indonesia Aglaia Iankovskaia Kunstkamera Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography

  The paper looks into two episodes from the history of travels between what is now Russia and Indonesia in the twentieth century. One of them is the voyage of a Russian couple, Alexander S. Estrin and Anna Y. Smotritskaya, around the islands of East Indonesia in the early 1920s. The second case is that of Effendi Usman, the first Indonesian professor of Saint Petersburg (then Leningrad) State University who moved to the USSR and taught there in 1950-60s. The two travels, from Russia to Indonesia and in the opposite direction, are remarkable in so far as they resulted in the creation of ethnographic collections which are now stored in Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) in Saint Petersburg.

Abstract

Keywords

• Europe
• History