Archival Research on South and Southeast Asia: Accounts from the Field
April 1, 4:00-5:30 pm
Sterling Memorial Library, International Room (If coming in from the main entrance, take an immediate left, i.e. before the stairs which go down to Bass Library, and keep walking towards the back).
This event will feature three presentations. Registration is required: please do so at
Please register here
Southeast Asia Presentation:
Aurélie Vialette (Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese)
Researching Penal Colonies at the National Archives of the Philippines: 19th Century Spanish Documents
This presentation will look at the Spanish empire’s administrative records in the Philippines, particularly the penal colony in Mindanao called San Ramón. There, Spaniards organized what they call a “trial” (ensayo), to try out a method of incarceration and rehabilitation at the service of the empire (agricultural penal colonies) with indigenous prisoners from the northern part of the archipelago. Upon entering the archive, I was astonished by the great number of documents available for examination. Bundle after bundle, I perused the historical record, the crafting of the penal colony. I discovered inconsistencies between the Spanish officials’ initial enthusiasm for the project, as expressed in their numerous projections, and their subsequent analysis of the geographic reality. It became evident that these officials were experiencing a sense of anxiety regarding the realization of a project that was nearly impossible to accomplish. This anxiety, and its consequences on the indigenous imprisoned body and the land, is the subject of my study. In the presentation, I will show many images I work with and explain how I work with the administrative language and how these documents are a site of colonial power.
South & Southeast Asia Presentation:
Brent Bianchi (Librarian for South & Southeast Asian Studies)
Researching Bhutan in Scotland: The 1971 John Levy Collection
In 1971, the same year that Bhutan joined the United Nations, and three years before permitting tourist visits, Bhutan’s third king Jigme Dorji Wangchuk invited British musicologist John Levy to come and make recordings of monastic and folk music. These recordings, in addition to correspondence and other documents, were later deposited at the School of Scottish Studies Archives at the University of Edinburgh.
Apart from a short foray into a particular recording (and my recording of the same piece of music 50 years later), we will mainly look at correspondence and other written documents. After discussion of how matters I experienced while navigating this archive might be generalizable to other archival encounters, we will also look matters of repatriation and cultural change. Fieldwork conducted in Bhutan and New York City will also be considered. Finally, insofar as such categorizations mean a great deal, Bhutan can pretty firmly be regarded as a ‘South Asian studies’ topic (as we shall see, a concept of ‘Greater Tibet’ seems even more fraught). However, this presentation also looks to Southeast Asia in considering the quite limited yet intriguing role of Burma’s Aung San Suu Kyi in the correspondence, to the greatest extent that the current evidence allows us to do so.
South Asia Presentation:
Aniruddh Sharan (Graduate Student, School of Architecture)
Ctrl + Alt + Del : Speculating the future of aging Modernism through an environmental perspective
Built as a global project in the wake of decolonization, Modernist buildings are aging today and face a unique challenge of neither qualifying as ‘heritage’ nor living up to contemporary aesthetics of ‘progressive development’. Thus, they are facing the constant dilemma of either conservation or demolition.
This design-research project attempts to broaden this conversation by incorporating an environmental lens towards the existing built environment. It proposes a multi-dimensional approach tying historic, environmental, economic and spatial concerns. Through a medium of a select case study in Delhi which is currently caught in a state of ambiguity and abandonment, the project aims to highlight the potential and challenges of working with Modernism in India today.
Spanning across archival research documenting the modernist movement as a socio-cultural project in South Asia, the changing landscape of preservation and its engagement with history, tracking the spatial changes over time through comparative drawing and documenting oral histories of user’s in these spaces, this talk will try and shed light on the process of engaging with design-research as a methodology.
The project aims to explore the questions of how design can help improve upon existing conditions inherited from the past and how it can engage in acts of repair."