R. Michael Feener, Patrick Daly, and Anthony Reid, eds. Mapping the Acehnese Past . Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, xvi+292p.

Abstract

Mapping Acehnese Past R. MICHAEL FEENER, PATRICK DALY, and ANTHONY REID, eds. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2011, xvi+292p.One of underlying themes in this edited volume on Aceh is that fresh look at . . . archives suggests that new histories can be created (J. G. Taylor, p. 234), so each of articles presents a new history, a new production of knowledge, a new way of representing and looking at Aceh using old archival, historical sources that have previously already been written about from other angles. These include ancient history archaeological findings and investigations of ceramics and Muslim tombstones; Ottoman Empire's archives on friendship and collaboration between Acehnese sultans and Ottoman Empire; close readings from a fresh perspective of traditional Malay-Acehnese hikayat and indigenous oral traditions on prang sabil; art of royal letter writing by three Acehnese sultans from different periods; a very brief look at Portuguese archives; close reading and analyses of Dutch letters, VOC correspondence, notes, and gift exchanges with Acehnese sultans and orang kaya, and KITLV photographs. This book highlights cosmopolitanism and richness of Aceh's connections to outside world and is, according to editors, a book about Aceh as seen from perspectives. But there is an inconsistency: if it is a book by outsiders about outsider's perspectives on Aceh, then where does one place two articles by only two Acehnese in book, Teuku Iskandar and Amirul Hadi? Are they Acehnese outsiders?The most informative (with a fresh perspective), elegantly written, and profoundly critical papers in this book are those by Teuku Iskandar (Aceh as a crucible of Muslim-Malay literature), Ismail Hakki Goksoy (Ottoman-Aceh relations as documented in Turkish sources), Annabel Teh Gallop (Gold, silver and lapis lazuli: Royal letters from Aceh in seventeenth century), Ismail Hakki Kadi, A. C. S. Peacock and Annabel Teh Gallop (on Writing history: The Acehnese embassy to Istanbul, 1849-1852), and Jean Gelman Taylor (Aceh histories in KITLV images archive). Here is one example of something hilarious:The grand vizier's minutes suggest limitations of Ottoman bureaucracy's intelligence about political and administrative structure of Southeast Asia. He wrote that the place called Java is a sort of province of great island of implying that Ottomans did really consider Java as a province of Sumatra, as Acehnese mission claimed. (Kadi, Peacock and Gallop, p. 176)Annabel Teh Gallop examines an example of how artistically sophisticated and intellectually subtle Acehnese were in art of rhetoric:As with so many royal Malay epistles, this is a carefully crafted and extremely diplomatic letter, deploying both bombast and subtlety as judged appropriate to convey what is essentially a negative message. (Gallop, p. 116, describing content of Sultan Iskandar Thani's [r. 1636-1641] letter to Frederik Hendrik, Prince of Orange [1584-1647])Jean Taylor provides a fascinating unpacking of problem of power and inequality in field of history and historiography, in particular in use of photographs as tools of history:Consideration of what actually was photographed obliges us to recognize that photography is not an objective record of peoples, times and places. Photographs are subjected to manipulation through selection, like any other set of documents. They are staged records and products of fleeting relationships between photographed and photographer . . . . Specialists in colonial photography draw attention to social distance between viewer and viewed, and to process of othering. (J.G. Taylor, p. 201)These articles are riveting and fascinating to read, and a treasure trove of new insights and new knowledge into old sources that have already been interpreted by dozens of other interpreters. …