Thinking about causation

There may not be any need to justify the study of the past as a way of elucidating the present. It is a feature of many times and places that people have

expected the past to serve something more than pure nostalgia. To say ‘that is where I came from’ is already to make a statement about something that, in some sense and degree, ‘caused’ me to be who I am and where. But it is not purely because of spontaneous, popular interest in origins that the ‘invention’ of national histories in South-East Asia, as a purported foundation of present – likewise idealized – structures and national identity has become ‘big business’. This development challenges academic analysts to get in on the act, if only to correct the multitude of false facts and questionable connections that are being generated. Here we have an important justification for writing about South-East Asian political history.

Yet one is also stimulated to reflect carefully on questions of causation and continuity. For instance, at how great a chronological range can we legitimately talk about past events as being a ‘cause’ of present reality? If structural continuities seem to correlate with cultural continuities, can we in any sense say that transmitted culture is playing a ‘causal’ role in the phenomenon? Is it just a tautological matter of definition that cultural continuity will be found side by side with structural continuity? And even if we postulate that cultural values are ‘transmitted’ separately down to the present, to form now a sustaining basis for certain institutions which reveal historical parallels, what do we assume to be the mechanisms whereby values and memories are indeed ‘transmitted’?

The discipline of history has been largely impervious to these questions, sometimes downright hostile to them, but with excellent reasons. Although increasingly influenced by the new structuralist fashion to see their craft as cognate with that of a story-teller, most historians remain fundamentally attached to the explanation of particular events and situations, with modestly scientific pretensions. The existence of differing interpretations, even contro- versy, concerning the explanation of almost every event and situation does not seem to discourage historians from continuing to strive to explain. The complexity of the relevant data; the potentially deterrent conception of different ‘layers’ of explanation as we reach further back in time from the event in question; the subjectivity involved in choosing relevant contexts within which to seek out causes;7 the plethora of methodologies or ‘approaches’ from which today’s historian may choose;8 and last but not least, perhaps, the very controversies arising,9 seem merely to add to their enthusiasm for the problem- atic task. It is all grist to the professional mill!10

Meanwhile … it may indeed be symptomatic of the mood of professional historiography that one of the seven new chapters inserted in D.G.E. Hall’s monumental and indispensable history of South-East Asia between its first edition11 and the fourth, entitled ‘Monarchy and the State in South-East Asia’,12 goes no further than to describe Indianized monarchy as it was – its functions in ancient society, the statecraft of the Arthashastra (from Kautilya) – with no hint of any traces of those early forms in modern South-East Asia. Nor is there any reference anywhere to modern theorizing about the past, even in the mould of Weber (on leadership as a factor in transition between broad phases, or ‘types’, of rule), let alone the radical Wittfogel (on ‘the hydraulic system’, a refinement of

Introduction 15 Marx’s ‘Asiatic Mode of Production’ with the aim of explaining ‘Oriental Despotism’).13 Yet Hall does insist on the ‘special character’ of the area: that it should not be treated as a dependency of other areas, or its history as an extension of their history.14

Indeed, the reservations of historians regarding long-range causation have to be taken seriously. But again, as has been remarked, the ‘invention’ of national histories is big ideological business in modern South-East Asia. Even academics in South-East Asian universities have become involved. One feature of the process is the tacit assumption that the past is in a quite intimate sense the foundation of the present. Most functionally of all, national ideologues claim that values are transmitted, and that the best virtues of the past lie at the root of anything good that survives in the modern society. This is apparently a concept or doctrine of ‘causation’ as much as ‘continuity’. We would surely be wrong to ignore it – but should keep our detachment and seek to generate some not totally irrational, less prescriptively charged, perspectives for the purpose of counter- balancing nationalist historiography. One would hope to draft a valid proposition or two in a political science idiom, concerning contemporary operative values – propositions based on observation of the present but which involve a probing of historical depths for possible origins, with no predisposition to say that the heritage of the past is necessarily ‘good’. It might be possible to say that the special ‘resonances’ of certain values (and institutions) are due to their extended history, even if there were interruptions in more modern times. The concept of charisma is invariably stimulating.

However, one must beware of a certain definition of charisma which has a prestigious pedigree yet is fundamentally unproductive. And in trying to understand the prestige of power in the real world, one should adopt a spirit of scepticism towards the claims of modern South-East Asian ideologues that such prestige is either due to the transmitted values all being necessarily ‘good’ (as mentioned), or due to the fact that particular office-holders have inherited virtue from august ancestors genealogically (albeit with enhancement, no doubt, by the ‘good values’ aforesaid). Certainly this virtue is held to be distinct from any inherent, culturally defined and popularly perceived virtue (‘merit’ in the Thai Theravada context) of any persons exercising power.15 In other words, there is a place for a sociological analysis of the culture of power, as an antidote to the often ideological presentation of power.

Of course, to speak of ‘culture’ immediately establishes a sociological dis- course. This alone may be off-putting to historians on account of the prevalence of ‘models’ – those artefacts of the sociologist’s trade which (allegedly) provide him with pre-packaged conclusions.16 The odd thing, though, about the trade of ‘Early History’ (not to be confused with ‘early trade’) is the extent to which, in the absence of solid data, historians themselves deal in hypothetical models of political structure. This is what appears to emerge from one highly versatile review of changing and competing fashions in the field of ‘Early Java’ studies.17 It appears that some scholars have gone beyond hypothesis and adopted quite categorical convictions about the nature of early Javanese polities.18