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Knowledge in working with the arts
and Asia

Transcripts

Lauren Bain, Researcher/writer on contemporary theatre in Indonesia, Canberra

Knowledge and the Arts of Asia
(click here for PDF version)

In Orientalism, Edward Said writes that

'To have...knowledge of...a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. And authority here means for 'u'’ to deny autonomy to 'it' - the Oriental country - since we know it, and it exists, in a sense, as we know it.'
(1991: 38)

'at the outset one can say that as far as the west was concerned during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an assumption had been made that the Orient and everything in it was, if not patently inferior to, then in need of corrective study by the West.' (1991: 41)

This is not a lecture on Said, but I think the points that he makes about knowledge and power might be useful framing devices for this discussion.

I have been asked to identify issues and strategies. I've grouped my issues under three main headings: questions about expertise, questions about publishing and documentation, and types of knowledge.

Questions about expertise

The first point I want to make actually is related to something that struck me when I was invited to speak at this forum. Originally, it had been suggested that I be ‘billed’ on publicity as an 'expert'on Indonesian theatre. But the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I felt about being called an 'expert'. A lot of people who work in the field of Indonesian Studies will say that the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know. It's a cliché but it's worth remembering. There are so few other researchers in the field that it is embarrassingly easy to become an expert. There are so few people writing about contemporary theatre in Indonesia that I find myself in an uncomfortable position of being called an "expert"when I haven’t written a book yet. The fact that there are so few people researching Indonesian theatre for example means that there is little opportunity for cross referencing - researchers can and do get away with making mistakes.

Another thing that I think we have to acknowledge as a starting point is that the idea that there is a thing called 'contemporary Indonesian theatre' is also slightly odd. 'Indonesian theatre' as a concept is highly contested. An artist from Sulawesi would for example conceive of 'Indonesian theatre' differently from an artist in Jakarta. What constitutes the limited scholarship on 'Indonesian theatre'’ is perhaps better described as limited scholarship on theatre in urban Java and Jakarta. We have to question and acknowledge therefore, the role of the scholar - wherever she or he is from - in defining and constructing what is 'Indonesian theatre'.

At the same time, it's important to acknowledge that researchers - experts - have a significant ability to legitimate certain artists'’ work, to choose which works/ artists are written about and critiqued, to construct a particular image and history of the art form that they are studying/ representing. The role that criticism and scholarship plays in defining cultural capital is nothing new but it does need to considered in the context of today's discussion. The potential for exploitation of research subjects is high and it follows that there is a strong need for scholarship, research and publishing to be responsible and ethical. It is important to remember that scholars'’ names are often built on the work of artists who are rarely paid for what they do.

I'm not suggesting that we should stop learning or writing about cultures that are different from our own, rather we need to acknowledge the power imbalances that often characterize the relationships between the researcher and the subject, and develop research and publication practices that are non exploitative. This also applies to the way in which we might go about establishing collaborative practical arts projects as well.

Questions about publication and documentation

Many people who want to learn more about the arts in Asia complain about lack of resources, publications, and documentation. I've recently become a bureaucrat so I thought I'd do some number crunching.

Library catalogues can tell us a lot, I think, about the knowledge that we choose to accumulate. The University of Melbourne, for example, has strong programs in both Asian Studies and Theatre/ Performance Studies. Although students and staff complain about it, Melbourne University's library is probably one of the better arts libraries in Australia. Publishing of course is not the only way in which knowledge is communicated but at least in the world of western academia it's one of the most important and powerful ones.

Let's see what we can find out from its library catalogue. As a reference point, the catalogue shows there being 621 references on the performing arts. When we refine the search for 'performing arts -Indonesia' we find a total of eight books, four of which are in English, two in Dutch, one each in Indonesian an French. In addition there is one video recording and one Dutch periodical. "Performing arts -– Indonesia" fares well in comparison to the performing arts of other Southeast Asian countries. "Performing arts -Thailand" yields no references, Malaysia has two and Singapore one. Admittedly the figures for Indonesia do not reflect the small holdings of Indonesian play scripts -or journal articles on Indonesian theatre - that I know are in the Melbourne University Library - but still these numbers are not good.

In the field of performing arts research in South East Asia we also have issues with poor documentation. In Indonesia, some theatre groups have video recordings of their work, but many do not. There is no library or central place where visual documentation of contemporary work can be kept: as a result, most researchers and many theatre practitioners in Indonesia have developed their own personal libraries of material which they often share with friends and colleagues, but collections are ad hoc and almost never catalogued. If you wanted to do research in the Indonesian National Library in Jakarta, about theatre in Jakarta in the 1960s and 1970s for example, you would probably find that much of the useful material from newspapers and magazines is missing, damaged or impossible to locate. In the past, censorship regimes have also strictly controlled the sorts of material that is collected and preserved. It is still not possible to access some 1960s newspapers in the Indonesian National Library's collection because they were regarded as being too sympathetic to the Indonesian Communist Party: despite the fact that we have supposedly entered the "reformasi" era of freedom of expression in Indonesia, these newspapers have not yet been "unbanned" since the fall of Suharto five years ago. I wouldn't hold my breath.

Different types of knowledges

Having spoken briefly about publishing I think it is important to point out that publication and scholarship is not the only form of knowledge. Just because there might be limited written criticism of theatre in Indonesia does not mean that criticism doesn’t happen in other ways. I often have noticed that while there is not a lot written about theatre in Indonesia, there is a significant amount said about it. Debate takes place in a whole range of formal and informal forums, many of which are never recorded, unless a researcher like me turns up. The "history" of Indonesian theatre may not be written down, but most Indonesian theatre artists can give you a quick summary of who the major figures have been and what their work was like. We need to consider, therefore, strategies that will enable us to acknowledge that oral and "informal" discussions of theatre in places like Indonesia often have greater currency than written publications. I understand that Phillip Yampolsky will discuss the recording / preservation of knowledge about traditional and oral cultures. So I'll move on to my final point: there may be contexts and times in which knowledge is for others – not for us - to hold on to and disseminate. Returning to Edward Said for a moment, I think it's important to ask why we feel the need to "know", "understand" and "map" the cultures of others. Again I'm certainly not advocating that we stop studying cultures that are different from our own. But I think that the problems that Said identifies are critical and that we need to recognize that researching, recording and learning from knowledges about the arts in Asia should be a shared project.

Strategies

• Support/ initiate arts projects that incorporate research/ publication/ documentation as key components rather than last minute add-ons
  
  
• Initiate collaborative research and projects that are about sharing knowledge and shared knowledges.
  
  
• Explore different media for publication – film and other visual media are essential tools if we want to expand knowledge about the performing arts and overcome some of the issues associated with lack of written material in some fields
  
  
• Invest seriously in translation - not just of language but also of ideas