When Clio meets the Titans : rethinking state-historian relations in Indonesia and the Philippines
Creators: name: Curaming, Rommel A.
Publisher: name: The Australian National University
Year: 2006

description: Riding the waves of decolonisation characteristic of postcolonial decades, the governments in Indonesia and the Philippines sponsored in the 1970s their respective history-writing projects: Sejarah Nasional Indonesia (SNI) and the Tadhana Project. One of the purported aims was to produce a 'truly' nationalist history that could help 'repair the damage' wrought by colonial experience. While nationalism provided a broad template within which the scholars and the state forged a partnership, the haunting problem of political legitimacy provided the two regimes strong reason to initiate collaboration and to see it through to a fruitful conclusion, if at all possible. The formation, contexts and contents of the Tadhana and the SNI projects are utilised in this study as areas for exploring the complex and varied manners by which embodiments of knowledge and power interact. What makes the two projects very fertile as exploratory grounds is the differentiated dynamics sometimes obvious, at other times subtle- between or among the scholars, state actors, knowledge itself and all other factors. There are, of course, notable similarities as well, and these sharpen the backdrop against which the search for a nuanced characterisation of the knowledge-power nexus has been pursued in this study. The primary questions that this study addresses are: (1) ,"Whose and/or what powers determine the shape of historical knowledge, and how?" and, (2) "Whose and/ or what knowledge frames whose exercise of power, and how?" The overall arguments may be summarised as follows: First, there is no inherently oppositional relationship between good scholarship and political interests. They could go together. Whether the relationship would be antithetical or complementary depends on many factors including the intention of an actor and the meaning or value attached to a knowledge claim. Second, the scholars and scholarship are in themselves a power to reckon with; they are not mere puppets at the mercy of the manipulative control or influence of the state. They should, therefore, be factored into the analysis of the knowledge-power nexus. The third main argument addresses the question, if scholarship and politics are not necessarily opposites, why are they often framed as if they are? What role do moral judgments play in formulating such dichotomies? It appears that, aside from genuine moral outrage, the moral framing of the criticisms against the Tadhana scholars and Nugroho was not just a rhetorical device to strengthen the position of the critics but this also served to divert the attention of the people away from the apparently inherent ties between the scholarly and the political, between knowledge and power. Fourth, the relationship between knowledge and power seems to be captured by the mathematical metaphor of the calculus, that is, they are formed at the confluence of cross-crossing factors whose possible combinations are infinite and the process of their formation dynamic. Fifth, knowledge is possibly an autonomous site of power; that is, knowledge is not just dependent on the power of a particular agent, as imbedded in the popular notion of 'knowledge is power.' This autonomy possibly emanates from the fact that meaning, which is constitutive of knowledge, is continually being shaped by the interaction between the individual knower and the social forces with which he or she has to contend with. These forces are beyond an individual's control though he or she has the capability to influence the outcome of such interaction. Sixth, a similar logic underpinned the knowledge-power relation as manifested in the SNI and the Tadhana. It is in the logistics of power that they differed. This means that both projects suggest that knowledge is a function of power and it is in the distribution, combinations, sources, and types of power where the differences between them lie. This study concludes with a call for an ethics of accountability. This is occasioned by the serious ethical problem that accompanies the notion of knowledge as a function of reality (rather than as a function of power). By claiming to be neutral or objective, scholars can and often do remove themselves from the responsibility for whatever consequences the knowledge they produce might have. Unwittingly, they become accomplices in causing, maintaining or justifying social injustice, inequality and violence, both physical and symbolic. These are precisely the conditions that, ironically, they often claim to remedy. One way to neutralise the problem is to expose the sources of the insidious powers that prop up knowledge and these include the power of the scholars and that of scholarship itself. It is by being transparent about such power that the scholars can help address the problem.