Asian history and the Western historian. Rejoinder to Professor Bastin

• Published in: Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde land- en volkenkunde, 1963-01, Vol.119 (2), p.149-160
• Main Author: Wertheim, W.F
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Armed forces; Asian history; Colonialism; Cultural factors; Cultural heritage; Cultural history; Historians; History instruction; Humans; Lectures; Sociology; Southeast Asian culture; Southeast Asian history; Universalism; Western civilization; World history
• ISSN: 0006-2294; 2213-4379; 0006-2294
• DOI: 10.1163/22134379-90002133

The historian who attempts to develop a more umdversal view of human history will have to take both trends inito accounlt: he wi'll albandon the traditional view of the West as the centre of the world in favour of a more bailanced approach in which the heritages of other parts of .the world are integrated to form a single history of man; and at the same time he will give due consideraltion to the fact that the 11 Bastin, op. cit., p. 14. To Bastin's query whether the historian from the West can "ever escape the dominating fact that his mind has been conditioned from his birth by Western thought patterns and cultural influences",12 there is, therefore, oniy one adequate rejoinder: "What if he cannot ?" When Bastin asserts that modern study of Southeast Asian haBtory imposes "a Western structural framewx>rk on that history", one can only agree, if by this framework he implies an attempt to attain a higher degree of oibjectivity, a striving aifter a bailanced outlook transcending parochial myths whether they be products of Western or Eastern parochialism. [...]if they had been alble to acquire some property: a erop in a field, a house with a vegetaible garden, a goat, a buffailo, every few years one disaster or another would come to take it away again: a erop falure, a break in /the dikes, a flash flood, or else the ruler (to whom all surplus was due, the landlord who demanded bis back rent out of the next harvest, or a band of plundering soldiers, demobiilised without pay, who rava'ged the land. If Bastin really 2 2 Alvin W. Gouldner, Anti-Minotaur: The Myths of a Value-Free Sociology (Presidential address delivered at the annual meeting of the Society for the Study of Social Problems, August, 1961). [...]it is to be regretted that Bastin has so narrowly tied his inaugural lecture to Geyl's vaJledictory.