In his discussion of “national identity” and whatnot, Dr. van der Meer mentioned that historically, nationalism and its logical corollaries (such as shared identity and social homogeny) are confluences of modern constructs whose applications to antiquated civilizations are inherently presentist at best. He indicated that this applies to Southeast Asia in a manner made even more interesting by colonial interferences (I really don’t like to use the word “interference” because its harshness implies that I’m making some kind of moral judgement, which, again, would be presentist and epistemically immodest), meaning that any sense of “national identity” that did arise in the Indonesian societies about which he talked would have to have been either socially constructed or inorganically forced by years of subjective historiography. He talked at great length about this: Indonesian national identity, in the current sense of the word, functionally didn’t exist, yet societies functioned and flourished nonetheless. This paradox of nations without nationalisms is basically what threatens to derail a whole host of modern historiography.
So, if that’s the case, how would we ever really know what Indonesian societies–or any society, for that matter–looked like, at least from a sociological point of view? We might be able to conduct archaeological digs and ethnographic interviews that can shed some light as to the mechanics of the society, but how can it ever be possible to evaluate things such as social identity when our nationalistic perspective is so deeply flawed? European colonists had a long history of making cultural generalizations and forcing nationalism upon non-nationalized peoples, so that automatically means that many of the most well-preserved primary sources automatically go out the window. Dr. van der Meer recognized this issue, though he did a better job of explaining what the issue actually is than I ever could, and he thus presented an alternative research method aimed at solving this conundrum: The onion theory.
The onion theory proposes a historiography that behaves much like its namesake. As you chop up an onion, multiple layers flake off and reveal a layer beneath the one you just cut. Thusly, as you delve into a research question and gather more and more data, you can chip away at the outermost, most superficial layers of historical interference until you finally get to an indigenous, native understanding of the question at hand.
However, I need to push back on the onion theory just for a bit. My first major grievance is that we can never know where the layers stop and you finally have reached the all-important indigenous center. It’s just not always going to be possible to discern between indigeneity and outside influences. Second, you never actually know exactly where one layer stops. Where do you draw the line and say “okay, I’ve cut through that layer.”? If you’re looking at a society that the British integrated in the year 1600, do you decide that the outer layer is chopped away once you figure out what happened in 1599, or do you have to keep digging because that entire linear history is a subset of a presentist historiography?
In this wordy, relatively poorly thought out blog post, I tried to illustrate the need for the onion theory and its pitfalls. I just wish that I had the knowhow to propose a better theory.