Editorial Foreword

Maitrii Aung-Thwin
2019 Journal of Southeast Asian Studies  
This present issue features research that explores how local categories of identity, status and territory have been constructed over time and space. Though not compiled as a special issue, the six feature articles share a remarkable focus on how notions of community have been epistemologically constructed by both state and non-state actors, providing insight into the different ways and contexts that social groups within the region have articulated their place in the world. All six have a
more » ... cal bent to them, based on sources such as inscriptions, indigenous chronicles, colonial records and contemporary oral interviews in the vernacular. At the same time, the articles are refreshingly interdisciplinary, drawing from and contributing to theoretical discussions concerning anthropology, linguistics, epigraphy, and geography. Our lead article, 'The killing of Posthouder Scheerder and Jifar Folfolun (The War of the Breasts): Malukan and Dutch narratives of an incident in the waning days of the VOC' by A. Ross Gordon, Sonny A. Djonler and Hans Hägerdal, examines how a violent incident in Dutch colonial history has been remembered and preserved in the collective memory of the Batuley, a non-literate people located in today's Aru, Indonesia. Juxtaposed against Dutch colonial sources, the authors investigate how the memory of a murdered colonial officer is preserved in saab and mare, forms of Arunese song that also represent the Batuley communities that perform them. Importantly, the authors discover there is more than one 'local' understanding of the event via the range of songs that speakor rather singto the event, representing the range of memories associated with local tradition. Methodologically, the authors ask us to consider how to deal with a field of study where indigenous language sources are simply lacking. As in the previous article by Gordon et al., Aurore Candier's article 'Mapping ethnicity in nineteenth century Burma: When "categories of people" (lumyo) became "nations"' looks at how local notions of personhood and identity were interpreted and categorised by British and American missionary administrative projects in Myanmar. By focusing on the category of lumyo (categories of people) and tracing its historical construction over the span of the nineteenth century, Candier shows how the contingencies of war and annexation were intricately connected to how local communities, peripheries, and foreign-ness were represented. By presenting the semantic evolution of these concepts in the context of conquest, Candier argues that 'lumyo' was progressively associated with the European concept of 'nations', an understanding that would eventually be adopted by nationalist groups and ethnic minorities in the early twentieth century. Just as the Aru and Batuley were shaped out of a narrative of counterinsurgency, so too were early notions of race, nation, and place shaped out of the mechanics of annexation of the Burmese Kingdom in the early 1800s. Territorial conquest and its effect on social constructions of place is a key theme in the next article by Kisho Tsuchiya. His 'Representing Timor: Histories, geo-bodies,
doi:10.1017/s002246341900047x fatcat:gb3s7winpzdnnaw76eccvxt2y4