Archival Research on South and Southeast Asia: Accounts from the Field

About

Basil Bastaki, PhD Candidate, Department of History

A Collaborative Ethnographic Approach to Archival Research: My Experience with the Zamindaris of Lower Assam

How can scholars best access and interpret private archives? I describe a “collaborative-ethnographic” approach suitable for the study of recent history in the global south. Scholars from global north and global south have complementary strengths. Therefore, their partnership can improve access to archives, interpretation of sources, quality of publications, and an understanding of the politics of how the publications may be received.

I draw from my experience searching for the private archives of the Zamindars of Lower Assam. Serendipitously, I met with a local scholar, and we worked together to advance our separate but complementary research agendas. This journey led us through the Zamindar palaces of lower Assam, various towns where the Zamindari lineages live, and ultimately to other archives and interviewees. The experience of speaking with the lineages clarified what sources would be available, highlighted discrepancies between their silences and the archival record elsewhere, and illuminated the socio-political context in which my study will be received.

Layna Chen, Master's in Environmental Design

The Absence of “Peat”: A Term in Constant Translation

Today, Indonesia’s peatlands are understood as globally significant carbon reserves and sites of transboundary haze. However, this understanding is recent. Taking the value and definition of peat, or “gambut,” in Indonesian to be historically contingent, this research examines how Indonesia’s tropical peatlands came to be recognized as a scientific and environmental category, and how classification systems made particular landscape properties legible while obscuring others.

This presentation reflects on how peat’s absence from historical archives became part of the evidence itself. Through archival research and fieldwork in Central Kalimantan, it explores the methodological challenges and interdisciplinary approaches required to investigate peat, a term continually translated across different languages and systems of knowledge. It discusses how archival discoveries, particularly shifts in scientific records following catastrophic fires, revealed the role environmental disasters and institutional authority played in shaping our understanding of peat, transforming its representation from an agricultural soil into a global environmental concern.