Saturday, December 08, 2007

Unbundling Aung-Thwin's Demythologisations of Burmese history

Myth and History in the Historiography of Early Burma
Paradigms, Primary Sources, and Prejudices (1998)

By Michael A. Aung-Thwin

Aung-Thwin's Mists of Ramanya is such a huge monolithic work that it's difficult to define exactly what is wrong with it, but most people agree there is something deeply flawed in the work.

That the author is attempting to erase Mon history, yet cannot read or speak the Mon language and therefore cannot know what is in Mon sources (inscriptions, chronicles), almost none of which have been translated into English or Burmese, is one major criticism of his work.

That Aung-Thwin's prose is almost impossible to understand, that he merely cites sources 50 to 100 years old, virtually impossible to find outside a handful of libraries (e.g. the six elephant volumes of inscriptions c. 1900), without actually providing the source in an appendix, let's say, that any Burma scholar with access to these resources is probably a friend of Aung-Thwin bound to not question him very much, are all criticisms.

Aung-Thwin has, in fact, provided a list of approved reviewers of his work: Martin Stewart Fox in CSSH, Pat Pranke in Asian Perspectives, and the late Paul Wheatley. (See interview) Reviewers who he does not know (not in his client-patron chain) and actually criticise things in the work are not "competent" by definition. That French scholar Bénédicte Brac De La Perriére disagreed with Aung-Thwin is ipso facto proof she didn't understand "what the book was about."

The methodology behind the work needs a thorough critique. As a preliminary step, I've decided to look at Aung-Thwin's earlier demythologizations of Burmese history first, such as the Three Shan Brothers, the king of Pagan who "ran away from the Chinese," or the Sri Lankan invasion of Burma.

One almost has to rewrite these academic papers to make sense of them so muddled is the logic. Critiquing narrative history requires first setting out the narrative history from the most original sources in linear fashion and then referring to this during the critique, instead of jumping around and creating a tangled ball of string with one's logic. Being kind to the reader so that the reader does not get lost or just end up nodding his or her head, yes, professor, yes, whatever you say, can I go now. Only then will a reader be able to understand the criticism of the narrative history. In fact, a lot of Aung-Thwin citations in the literature seem to be courtesy citations that accept his demythologizations at face value without really trying to understand or engage with them. This is outrageous and really has to change.

Three steps seem appropriate first steps:
1. Make the most original sources available online.
2. Make it clear what you take these sources to say.
3. Reconstruct various competing narratives from these sources.
4. Compare and evaluate these narratives critically.


Aung-Thwin's interpretations will then be only one among several possible interpretations. Then and only then can we start to entangle Aung-Thwin's arguments and see what he really has to say.

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