Roughly six years ago I started to write about my discovery that a placename that appears in Chinese sources called Sanfoqi signified “Kambuja/Kampuchea” rather than “Srivijaya” as scholars had claimed for the previous century.
This discovery is revolutionary as it completely changes what we know about roughly 1,000 years of Southeast Asian history. Among many other things, it “returns” centuries of history to Cambodia, something which I would assume that scholars of Cambodian history would be interested in.
It also reveals that the area around Lake Songkhla was the site of an incredibly important trade empire 1,000 years ago, something which I would assume would be of interest to people who study the area of the Malay Peninsula.
However, six years on, not a single scholar has acknowledged a single point that I have made. Nor has anyone provided any convincing evidence to counter anything that I have published or written here on the blog.
Since my discovery overturns a century of scholarship, I very deliberately decided to not talk about the extant scholarship on “Srivijaya,” as to do so would expose a vast number of flaws, and would undoubtedly be quite embarrassing for numerous scholars who are still working today.
Instead, I decided to build my argument from the primary sources, because 1) that is where the evidence is, but also because 2) I wanted to be polite and collegial, and to leave the door open for others to join me in this process of discovery and of rethinking the history of early Southeast Asia.
Now that six years have passed, and I’ve basically discovered all the important points on my own, I’m starting to think that being polite and collegial is perhaps not the best approach. Perhaps it’s the case that scholars only respond to seeing scholarship get demolished, rather than to the excitement of intellectual engagement.
Humility aside, I am very, very good at demolishing flawed scholarship. It is without a doubt my forte. I have it down to a science.
So, I asked Grok to list the scholars whose works are most likely to suffer from my demolition, and Grok’s response is in the image above.
Now I’m asking the readers of this blog. What do you think? Is it time to start playing hardball? Is that the best approach to get people to address a discovery that overturns a century of scholarship?
Is it really the case that scholars only respond to seeing scholarship get demolished rather than to the positive input of being able to make new discoveries and to be able to rethink their understanding of the past?
Although I’m not an academic and also not versed at all in managing relationships, I would like to give my two cents from a “mathy” perspective. It’s one thing to write posts, articles, papers to discuss, defend one side and counter other sides. But I think it’s better for general audiences that each side constructs its own “mathematical theory” of this matter consisting of assumptions (axioms), definitions, main statements (theorems) and side statements (lemmas). More importantly, for each statement, there are many arguments supporting it (proofs), each “argument” is a series of logical steps ending in some “hard evidence” like physical archeology artifact or old text citation. All of the above are presented concisely as diagrams. One could counter other diagrams by questioning an assumption, logic of a deducing step, a hard evidence. Ideally, if two opposing “theories” are mutually exclusive and two corresponding diagrams are well-crafted and well-scrutinized, anyone could compare the merits of each theory and give one’s own conclusion.
One of the things that urges me to think of the ideas above is that, about your “mathematical theory” of this matter, there are several main statements (e.g. Sanfoqi is an access point of …, Shepo is …), each of them relies on many citations via many paths of logical steps (they might even rely on each other). Along the way, the theory also has to include seemingly tangently related statements (e.g. about “twisted axis”, “geographical container”) that need proofs of their own.
Of course, it takes two to tango. One might not fairly and correctly construct for one’s opposing theory. Let’s say, you attempt to construct for both in this Srivijaya matter, opposing academics might engage in (imho) frivolous counters on the ground of “your understanding of the logics of the currently accepted theory is wrong”.
I just throw in some ideas as I undestand to be hard to do on all sides. Please feel free to dismiss them for various reasons 🙂
Thank you for these comments!!
I agree with what you are saying. The problem is that there really isn’t anyone out there who can do this.
I recently posted my responses to some comments that a Russian scholar made three years ago. In general, he did a really good job of documenting how I made (part of) my argument. The problem, however, is that he can’t read Chinese, and that then limits his understanding of some aspects, and because he can’t see certain things, he becomes skeptical of some of my claims.
Meanwhile, no one has ever done what you are saying for the side I am opposing, so that’s what I am going to start doing now.
And, yes, I totally agree that it can be difficult to give credit to something that might be plausible in the other side’s argument. However, in the case of the Srivijaya narrative, it’s based on some massive flaws, so once those become clear. . . I think people will find that there isn’t much left to give credit to because the whole foundation is flawed.
In any case, that’s what I’m going to document, but again, I appreciate and agree with your ideas/approach.
In graduate school I was interested in, and took a seminar in “Ethnographic History.” That’s not what you might think it is from the name. It’s not the study of peoples, but instead, is an approach that tries to combine ideas from Anthropology with History.
So, back in the 1990s, anthropologists were encouraged to think about their “positionality” and how that effects what the people you talk to say.
For instance, to give a simple example, let’s say that I am an anthropologist and I go to Vietnam and I ask someone what their favorite food is. The person’s favorite food might be phở bò sốt vang, but because they see that I am a foreigner and guess that I might not know what that is, they say something that they think I’ll understand, like just phở bò.
So, as an anthropologist, you have to reflect on what might be happening and try to figure out if your “positionality” as a foreigner is affecting what people are saying to you, etc.
The way we apply that to history is to constantly ask ourselves what we might be missing, or what what we might be “seeing” because it’s what we want to see, even though it’s not actually there, etc.
I bring all this up to say that, yes, I completely get your point about the difficulty about acknowledging what might be correct about “the other side’s argument,” however the way I’ve been trained is to constantly check what I’m saying by looking for an alternative that might be right. Of course, we are all human and are imperfect, and cannot succeed 100% of the time, but that’s the way I try to operate.
I think that you should engage in a systematic demolition, argument by argument, piece of evidence by piece of evidence, in the standard works of scholarship. I think that this is particularly important for Hall, Wolters, Coedès, Sen, Manguin, Wade, Miksic because they are still regularly assigned to undergraduates and graduate students and/or read by “specialists” who employ them in works of synthesis (Reid, Lieberman, Andaya & Andaya, the old Cambridge History, the new Cambridge History (a work obsolete before it even appears in print)) etc. Coedès and Wolters, in particular, require total destruction since they are foundational to the work of the others. Edward Schaefer has a particularly damning review of Wolters’s “Early Indonesian Commerce,” which I have usually had graduate students read, since it is easy for them to be over awed by his stature in the field. There are now many scholars with better Chinese, better access to primary materials and auxiliary scholarship, and better vernacular languages. His overall influence on the shape of early SEA history, both maritime and Vietnamese, has been extremely pernicious, in my view. The sooner we dump mandalas, men of prowess, and localization from our analytical lexicons, and the notion that an enormous maritime empire centred on Palembang once ruled the waves, the better.
Thank you for the encouragement. I just launched the first salvo.
And I looked up the Schafer review. Wow! It’s non-stop critique from beginning to end. I like this part:
Mr. Wolters’ book is based on a doctoral thesis. It
reads like a doctoral thesis, and could have profited
from considerable editorial pruning. It is studded with
allusions to the modern authorities and ponderous
analyses of rival claims–most of this could have been
profitably buried in footnotes. The result is a sort of
opaque, colorless, academic prose. The same evidence
might have yielded a lucid and even colorful narrative
-and a much shorter one.
Mentioning Schafer, I decided to look for an article of his that I read long ago, and I found it. It is a 1963 article called “Mineral Imagery in the Paradise Poems of Kuan-hsiu.”
https://www11.ihp.sinica.edu.tw/storage/w2_file/1689dJCEtgF.pdf
On the 3rd-4th pages, he translates a Chinese poem in 4 different styles: Plain, Self-Explanatory, Mock Heroic, and Beatnik. The beatnik version is hilarious.
That Schafer essay is hilarious. It also makes clear what a brilliant literary figure he was in his own right, like Arthur Waley, but Sinologically superior. I also really like Schafer’s essay on “Non-Translation and Functional Translation – Two Sinological Maladies.” I’ve usually given his advice on translation to graduate students, ie translate everything into English. Don’t leave foreign words/terms untranslated. Worse still, don’t pretend to profundity by putting common place words in parentheses “Dũng went to the restaurant (nhà hàng)” (which is a really annoying trope in a lot of scholarly prose.
You get the strong impression that Schafer thought Wolters was something of an artless amateur. “The great stumbling block is Mr. Wolters’ failure to
investigate primary philological evidence.” And a little later: “The larger problem is this: in a study of this kind new ideas and new solutions depend largely on the discovery of new identities: what places were involved? What men were involved? what commodities were involved? It is precisely in these critical areas that Mr. Wolters seems reluctant to commit himself.” And thinking about what you have written about Shepo, “Again, he gives “Shi-p’o, the best-known Chinese transcription of ‘Java’ (p. 35), as if it were a matter of the popular vote.” Just brutal.