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172 Judith A. N. Henchy 5 Disciplining Knowledge Representing Resources for Southeast Asian Studies in the Libraries of the U.S. Academy JUDITH A. N. HENCHY I n response to an invitation to write a provocative discussion paper on the question of international collaborative preservation of cultural heritages of Southeast Asia, Jennifer Lindsay, formerly program officer for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta, wrote a short story. The story, entitled “The Keepers,” written for a conference at Chiang Mai University in 2000, describes the clash of interests and understandings that occurred when an American graduate student conducting his anthropological research in Yogyakarta “discovered” a private collection of valuable manuscripts relating to his subject.1 The custodian of the documents, an elderly dance practitioner, was honored to share the collection and his ritual knowledge with the young man, even approving a U.S. foundation–funded project to preserve the manuscripts on microfilm. As the story develops, Lindsay’s caricatures—based on characters very well known to anyone in the Southeast Asian librarian community—trace the misunderstandings that emerge when the manuscripts are filmed, duplicated, and cataloged and surrogates are deposited at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago. Lindsay’s story explores the sensitivities at stake as the guardian’s role, and his understandings of his responsibilities toward the preservation of his cultural knowledge, are gradually challenged and pitted against the modernizing techniques of the Euro-American 172 Disciplining Knowledge 173 library and archiving profession. Lindsay’s story complicates this rational narrative of technological progress by emphasizing the personal and institutional ambitions of the scholars, project managers, funding agencies, and national governments involved in the project and calls into question the competence of the normative organizing structure of the modernizing intervention. Finally, her story highlights the personal and community loss, as the texts became objectified in a high-profile international project that preserved the collection in modern scientific ways and integrated it into an international scholarly corpus. The traditional curator’s original trust in his personal relationship with the researcher was rewarded by the unwanted attentions of centralgovernment bureaucracies, which were urged by this international attention to intervene in local questions of cultural heritage. Governmental efforts to remove the collection to “safekeeping” in national repositories resulted in the severing of the ties between the artifacts and their ritual communities. This story underscores the difficulty of balancing local agency with pressures for a global access to knowledge and a perceived shared responsibility toward preserving and documenting the world’s textual heritage according to norms of archiving practice. In this process of preserving its textual expression, the heritage itself is transformed from local ritual knowledge to international “research archive.” The story also provides a subtext for much of the discussion contained in this essay, in which I illustrate the tensions between the normative empirical structures dominating Euro-American conceptions of knowledge organization and the emerging awareness of the need to “represent” local knowledge from Southeast Asia on its own epistemological terms. This binary seems to exist in a dialectical relationship within another register of representational interventions, which posit cultural knowledge in a continuum between what I will call bibliographic and exhibitionary orders. The bibliographic order is that knowledge system prevailing within libraries which privileges the published word as a transparent vehicle of authoritative and rational scientific modernity and named authorial responsibility but which does not indiscriminately include non-Western texts in its purview.2 Indeed, such notions of acknowledged authorial responsibility and claims to origination, as opposed to serial orality and textual redaction, have been quite recent products of the imposition of colonial economic and legal practices within the region. 174 Judith A. N. Henchy In this dialectic of representational tropes, I invoke Timothy Mitchell’s notion of the “exhibitionary order,” which has influenced recent conceptions of presenting material culture for display. Within this order, native artifacts are aestheticized and commodified as exotic objects of the white man’s gaze.3 In the colonial context that Mitchell exposes, the exposition is unmasked as an attempt to make legible the disorder of the other, and to do so in ways that reaffirm and naturalize the homogenized order of the white subject. Reality becomes only that which can be represented, in a system of signification in which objects are displayed before observing subjects as “mere ‘signifiers’ of something further.”4 In the context of the library world, where the book as reproducible creative artifact is characterized not only by its endogenous content but also by its...

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