Suchergebnisse

Up to 1945 university education in Australia had little sense of engagement with any cultural traditions outside those of Western Europe. It was only in the aftermath of World War II that Australians began to realize that while their nation had powerful allies in Britain and America, nations with whom it had ties of kin and culture, it had on its doorstep in neighboring Southeast Asia and not so distant Northeast Asia, neighbors who might become both friends and close partners in regional associations.These were also the years during which the Australian government decided as a matter of policy to develop postgraduate studies in Australia so that Australians should no longer as a matter of course go to Britain for higher degrees. Both these factors came together in the establishment in 1946 of the Australian National University, an institution with an exclusive mission for post-graduate training. Significantly, among its foundation schools was the Research School of Pacific Studies, which included departments of Pacific History and Far Eastern History.

The Kraton religion of 15th century Java is complex, sophisticated and syncretic, and is generally characterised by the name Shiva Buddha, an expression implying a syncretic blending of Shivaism and Buddhism. Within less than two centuries, however, this religion had been displaced from its dominant position, many of its holy books were destroyed, and Java was under the exclusive rule of Muslim kings. A study of this period of transition from one dominant religious tradition to another involves the consideration of many important questions, perhaps the most significant of which is: how much was involved in the change of religion?

It is unfortunate that historians, as a rule, do not follow the example of social anthropologists in devoting some part of their monographs to a discussion of the theoretical problems involved in the material they have been handling. This is not of such importance in the history of Europe, where much can be taken for granted on the part of the reader. But when the European historian turns to the study of Asian history, and writes in the same way as he would were he writing the history of a European people, merely substituting an Asian set of names and places, then the result frequently lacks interest, and may even be a distortion of the general picture of the past that he wishes to relate. This holds as well for continental S.E. Asia and the island world of Indonesia as elsewhere. And it is not only in these countries that peoples, newly conscious of their traditions as national traditions, are dissatisfied with the histories written for them by foreigners. The requirements of a new type of history are formidable, and very little work has been done on the theoretical ground work involved. The aim of this paper then, is to attempt to progress a little further in the elaboration of such a historiography, and to apply the results to a segment of the data available relating to Indonesia's past.

In 1961 I published in this Journal a paper on the Islamization of peninsular and insular Southeast Asia. It was a paper I had presented to the first meeting of the conference of historians of Southeast Asia organized in January of that year at the University of Malaya in Singapore by the then Raffles Professor of History, K.G. Tregonning. It was a paper often referred to in discussions concerning the coming of Islam to the Malay world, and attracted its share of approbation and criticism.