Arnout van der Meer spoke with us both in class and at the seminar Tuesday night about the origins of national identity, specifically in Southeast Asia. He discussed the Onion Theory as a method of revealing the original culture, but I question the usage and implications of this theory.

The Onion Theory can mean a variety of different things in different disciplines. In the case of origins, Onion Theory is used to describe how to get to get to the core of a nation, by peeling away the layers of foreign influences that have accumulated over time. It seems that historians would use this method to find how the indigenous people lived before outside forces interfered. In a way, peeling back each layer would reveal a time in history right before the influencers set in. That is, however, all it would reveal; what the culture was like at that time. While the Onion Theory could be used to discover what politics were like in Indonesia, it could not tell how the political system would have evolved on its own if the outsiders had not came into the picture. Perhaps it is valuable for historians to set up a timeline of how cultures adapted to outside influences, but it cannot be assumed that all changes were a direct result of the interaction.

The way many use the Onion Theory, knowingly or unknowingly, pushes the idea of a history that is written by historians. As van der Meer asked, who truly creates history? In this case, it’s the present day historians who believe that they can track these adaptations to reveal some type of “true origin” from decades or even centuries ago. Plus these historians believe that they can take that knowledge and provide credit to outsiders who also had these idea when they came over. Rather than exploring what may have caused these changes in terms of outsiders bringing possibly foreign ideas to these lands, perhaps it would be more valuable to see the layers the culture adapted on its own. Why did they choose to adapt to some changes and not others? What was the adaptation process like? Rather than focusing on who brought what to the area, I believe that historians have an obligation to the people whose history they are researching to focus on what the people themselves did at the time to handle the exposure to these new ideas, and what THEY as natives did in response.

While this may seem like a small distinction, it’s an important one. The people of the past deserve to get the credit they deserve for making the changes they did to their culture, and the emphasis should not be placed on those that brought (many forcefully and without invitation) new ideas that the area must then deal with. The people who focus on giving the credit to the outsiders seem to be encouraging the preexisting notion that SE Asia was drastically underdeveloped before colonization. The people whose culture your tracing was ultimately accepted or rejected by that population, and they deserve the respect and focus for that.