Vol. 7, No. 2 (2011): 17\u201333.<\/p>\n
Abstract<\/strong><\/p>\n Pre-modern Malay society was intensely oral and aural, and the texts that are\u00a0now read were always intended for group recitation and performance. Studies of\u00a0auditory history in other societies have emphasised that in the past, sounds were\u00a0experienced differently from the way they are heard today. At the very basic level,\u00a0thunder\u2014the voice of the heavens\u2014established the benchmark and the basis for\u00a0comparison for awe-inspiring sounds that humans could attempt to replicate,\u00a0notably in the beating of drums and the firing of cannon. Together with the noseflute, the drum is the oldest and most indigenous Malay instrument, and the drums\u00a0that were included in royal regalia were accorded personalities of their own.\u00a0Cannon were introduced much later, but quickly assumed a preeminent position\u00a0as personified embodiments of extraordinary supernatural power registered in the\u00a0awe-inspiring noise of their thunder-like firing. At the same time, the sounds of\u00a0both cannon and drums were fused with their physical presence as\u00a0representations of fertility to create a complex sensory experience, conveying\u00a0messages that were central to the functioning of the society. This paper argues\u00a0that in the pre-modern Malay soundscape, drums and cannon functioned as visual\u00a0and aural proclamations of identity, helping to define the community’s cultural\u00a0parameters by drawing elite and commoner together.<\/p>\n Author’s bio<\/strong><\/p>\n Barbara Watson Andaya is Professor of Asian Studies at the University of Hawai\u2019i at M\u0101noa and Director of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies. In 2005\u20132006 she was President of the American Association of Asian Studies. Educated at the University of Sydney (BA, Dip. Ed.), she taught in a high school before receiving her MA at the University of Hawai\u2019i (MA) and her Ph.D at Cornell University with a specialisation in Southeast Asian history. In 1979 her dissertation was published as Perak, The Abode of Grace: A Study of an Eighteenth Century Malay State. She maintains an active teaching and research interest across all Southeast Asia, but her specific area of expertise is the western Malay-Indonesia archipelago. She collaborated with Virginia Matheson Hooker in a translation of a nineteenth-century Malay text, the Tuhfat al-Nafis by the Islamic scholar Raja Ali Haji, and with Leonard Andaya on A History of Malaya in 1982 (revised edition, 2000). Further research on Malay history led to the 1993 publication, To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Subsequently, her interests shifted to questions of gender in Southeast Asia, and in 2000 she received a John Simon Guggenheim Award, which resulted in The Flaming Womb: Repositioning Women in Southeast Asian History, 1500\u20131800 (2006). Her current project is a history of the localisation of Christianity in Southeast Asia, 1511\u20131900.<\/p>\n Download\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n Download full article (PDF)<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Vol. 7, No. 2 (2011): 17\u201333. Abstract Pre-modern Malay society was intensely oral and aural, and the texts that are\u00a0now read were always intended for group recitation and performance. Studies of\u00a0auditory history in other societies have emphasised that in the past, sounds were\u00a0experienced differently from the way they are heard today. At the very basic … Continue reading