To me, as an Indonesianist, or ‘Island Southeast Asianist’ as Panggah Ardiyansyah, Zainab Tahir and I would call ourselves initially in the CO-OP context, our first group visit and traveling seminar, to Thailand in January 2024, was full of unsettling encounters, the kind of encounters that confront us with a joke others find extremely funny, while we don’t get it. Understanding the joke is what most of critical cultural scholarship (and artistic creativity) is about: it is not a matter of getting it, but to understand why others, past or present, find it funny – or not (Darnton 1984; Scholz 2020; Kuipers 2006). The difficulty is then how to explain this to others.
One such unsettling encounter was on the way to the temple Prasat Khao Plai Bad 2, when we, at the suggestion of Thai archaeologist activist Tanongsak Hanwong, unexpectedly stopped to see the house where private collector and dealer Douglas Latchford once managed his famous business in illegal trafficking of antiquities from temple sites in Cambodia as well as Thailand – amongst them nine statues from Prasat Khao Plai Bad 2.
Following the sites-centred approach of our study on histories and politics of heritage formation in Indonesia (Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2020), I considered this an interesting site of learning and knowledge production that reveals how heritage sites can erase violence (temple looting in times of (post-genocide) war; epistemic violence). You don’t see the violence at first sight, for that you would have to look further, beyond the frames and official stories delivered by such sites. The village house which Latchford is said to have used as a base is located in the heart of the sacred landscape of the Khorat Plateau, full of religious antiquities, remains of past kingdoms and religious cults, maintained on and in the ground, some thereby transforming into beautified national heritage sites. And it has become part of that landscape. It is situated in long-term histories of local and global politics of knowledge production, dissemination and of heritage formation which include looting and carrying away of objects past and present.
These processes of knowledge are dynamic – always the product of exchange and subsequent interdependent power relationships – and essentially violent, as they disregard other, local engagements with sites. In the case of Latchford’s office – so we learned from the work of Tanongsak Hanwong and some other engaged archaeologists, and from the readings and discussions we had together – this site of knowledge production reached out to auction houses and prestigious museums in Europe and the US, complicit in illegal trade. And to powerful interdependencies of profit, esteem, and arbitrary expert-taxonomies that explain why illegal trade in objects with unclear provenance carries on. It was one of the sites we could have selected to study the central issue of this trip: the forms and – to add – transformations of local epistemologies that underpin object circulation over time, also in the light of present-day debates on decolonizing and restitution of objects considered, taxed, sold, and valued as Southeast Asian Art.
A subsequent unsettling encounter for me took place when we arrived at Prasat Khao Plai Bad 2. We gathered at the place where Tanongsak Hanwong recounted that nine statues had been dug up by local villagers, and sold to Latchford, who then sold them for much higher prices to museums abroad. At location, Tanongsak showed us – using body language – in what kind of position the statues had been buried, as had been explained to him by the same local villagers who had said they had taken them out for trade, and who decades later helped him in his research. Underground, the statues had been standing right up, bottom to top. We discussed what that might have implied, this peculiar form of care, for the people who, earlier, had decided to bury them and who had put the nine statues, probably older than the temple, in this standing position. The contrast between this peculiar form of care for the statues, and their subsequently being dug up, carried away, disconnected from the site they were carefully made to belong to, to transform into proof of heroic art-historical research and economic gain – or greed – felt sharp. Here, getting the joke was mere pain. But who were we to judge, there, at location, where many people had been involved in moving and removing the statues in so many ways. We were there to listen and ask questions and understand what had been going on and why, what changed and why, to the good of whom (or not) and what.
Back in the van, and during a discussion later on, it got to me that not everybody had been happy about the expedition to Douglas Latchford’s office. Some found it uncomfortable, sensationalist, morally problematic. Considering this now, I realize, that this, also, is part of the joke we, or I, have to understand: the discomfort some of us may experience, and the different backgrounds, contexts and reasons for that, while others, including Tanongsak who invited us to see the house, do not see, or disregard as a potential moral problem. This may be a clue to understanding what archaeological sites and heritage objects across regime changes and war do. What sites transformed into heritage sites do to the people living on, or surrounding them, and to visitors including ourselves, while the sites are subjected to study, to local practices of care, to national heritage politics, and to global makings of Asian Art, as well as to the crucially connected looting.
For us this implies that we have to be aware of what the site interventions we practice ourselves reveal about (our ideas of) local epistemologies. These local epistemologies are unfixed, multivocal, like sites of learning, and we all pick our favourites. Sites and objects change in meaning and use over time, wherever kept or transferred to; they can reveal the difficulties and violence in histories of heritage formation, reveal how we keep on making and changing sites and objects, becoming complicit ourselves, also by site visiting. That is what should make us uncomfortable. But then, that also, gives us even more reason to ask what sites and objects are about, where and when, to whom (not) and why?
As I had experienced in the context of research in Indonesia, also in Thailand, sites turned out to be far more complex than what archaeology and state heritage politics want us to see. In Thailand we saw various forms of ‘taking’ that implied alternative forms of care like the small popular shrines situated in and under trees, always present at official sites; like the chanting monks at an otherwise deserted Muang Fah Daed, who as guardian-owners suddenly, disruptively, welcomed us in various languages they thought we spoke, with sound enlarging microphones. We visited this site to see the Sema stones, Buddhist boundary markers, often sculpted with Buddhist images, structuring the sacred and natural landscape (Murphy 2013; Carbine and Davis 2022). Beautiful examples of such stones, with unclear provenance, I learned, we find in museums inside and outside Thailand. The CO-OP program took us then to a Monastery next to the site, with comparable stones, carried away from the site, ‘saved’, and now guarded, and taken care of by the monks there. There, in conversation with the abbot, and a knowledgeable visiting villager, we listened to conflicting stories about how and why the stones were kept there. In Bangkok, I revisited the Indonesian antiquities in temples and the National Museum in Bangkok, chosen by, and gifted to King Chulalongkorn, which he carried away in 1896 from Java to Bangkok (Bloembergen and Eickhoff 2013). There, they are still prominently part of national legitimizing stories of the Thai-regime’s benign reign and its wonderful inter-Asian connections, and of local popular religious practices, especially around the Giant Ganesha from Singosari (East Java). All of this reveals how national heritage politics erase certain forms of violence, and at the same time do not exclude alternative, popular forms of care; and that there are various hierarchies and forms of differentiation in moral concerns about what belongs where, who decides, why, and what that implies for those not included in the decision-making.
For us, this implies that we have to be aware of what the site interventions we practice ourselves reveal about (our ideas of) local epistemologies. These local epistemologies are unfixed, multivocal, like sites of learning, and we all pick our favourites.
There is a remarkable comparison to be made on what, in the past decade or so, is happening in the field of research, activism and claims concerning looted objects in Cambodia, Thailand, and Indonesia. In Cambodia, and to a lesser extent Thailand, the focus is on objects from temples and archaeological sites looted since the 1970s (and then auctioned, and bought by prestigious museums and private collectors abroad). The objects that were carried away in colonial times and that are still shining in and on museums abroad can wait, so seems to be the reasoning (Bemmel 2023). In Indonesia, on the other hand, for the government, or the committee it installed in 2021 to prepare claims for – what it refers to as – ‘repatriation’ (not restitution), the focus is exclusively on objects looted in colonial times, with an emphasis on those located in the Netherlands, and, notably, on getting the histories and forms of knowledge they can reveal. But loot of and illegal trade in antiquities, for an international market, was not restricted to the Netherlands, nor did it stop after colonial times in Indonesia either. This comparison triggers important questions concerning the problem of heritage making, circumambulating objects and claims of restitution: whose and which difficult pasts are being confronted and prioritized in the debates on restitution, and which difficult pasts are disregarded? who decides, why? And: what are the objects-to-be-returned expected to ‘heal’, or to do justice to, to whom (or not), and why? In our efforts to do right and think and act inclusively, whether we feel entitled or not, as scholars, activists, or bureaucrats, or, in the words of Ashley Thompson, ‘heritage disrupters’, we will always marginalize other perspectives. In the end, heritage is always political, and the joke of its making and unmaking may be very difficult to digest.
Author Contact: Marieke Bloembergen, KITLV-Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies and Leiden University, e: bloembergen@kitlv.nl
Bibliography
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