I am delighted to see published my edited collection of essays, “Reading Nature’s Archives” in the September 2026 issue of the American Historical Review, for U.S.-based historians this is one of our oldest and top journals. I’m especially delighted with their use of the cover image that I found with help from Ryan Tucker-Jones who has co-authored a piece in the collection.
This collection started from an invitation from AHR Editor and fellow Vietnamologist Mark Bradley, who invited me to pitch an idea for a HistoryLab project. It took me about five seconds to pitch Reading Nature’s Archives which pretty much sums up my main interest and passion in academia: green thought. What is green thought? That’s a long one, but a short explanation is what Latour and Haraway describe as “material-semiotics” — in general, a greater awareness for the ways human life, dreams, politics and projects are interconnected with the material world–from quantum interactions to cellular metabolism, to ecosystem inter-relationships to cosmic relations.
There are a couple of things I’d like to highlight from the piece before getting to my contribution on intervisuality and reading conflict landscapes. First, I think the opening to the collection worked out well so I’ll include it here — why a new sort of history research, new kinds of archives?
And I continue: “Many may be rightly concerned that the present moment is a crisis of colliding phenomena with long histories entangled in colonialism, revolutions, wars, and social movements; but the present moment is also a profound opportunity. Historians, students, and teachers alike are taking deep dives into questions like “What’s special about the human experience?” and “With all the recent scientific discoveries showing how our genes, our biology, and our futures are connected with industrial, geologic, and biological processes, how do we understand the human experience as it’s embedded in so many natural and industrial processes ranging from subatomic planes to the cosmos?” This spring, I took a di!erent tack with my gen-ed class. I renamed it “Planetary Consciousness,” and after raising big questions about planetary entanglement and showing clips of debates like Joe Rogan’s interview with Jensen Huang on AI and consciousness, I introduced into our coursework five-minute meditations, journaling, a collective read-in, and other experiential encounters that challenge students to roam the boundaries between what’s human—experience, feeling, consciousness—and what’s AI, digital, or even “planetary.” We tackled snippets of philosophy, and after the midterm, students wrote their own “planetary family histories” with a little help from novelist Imbolo Mbue, whose novel about multiple generations coping with tragedy in an oil-polluted African river delta is a planetary tragedy of operatic proportions.“
In short, I think what we need, as humans who are story-telling animals who use past experiences to make sense of the present and prepare for the future, are new stories that will inevitably draw from new archives.
I am also very happy with my piece in the collection “Reading Conflict Landscapes: Aerial Imagery, Ground-Truthing, and Intervisuality in Vietnam.” One thing I struggled with in my book Footprints of War was finding a way to show imagery — maps, air photos, etc. — in it’s full-resolution glory. Print books typically work wth images in the 10x15cm range at 600 dpi. It is very difficult to give readers access to a full-resolution, full-scale image. However, by using qr codes linked to images stored on this website, I am able to maintain the full-resolution images while the online and print versions of the journal use down-sampled images.
I am also able to include widgets like sliders that allow active intervisual comparisons! Academics: your personal website can directly support traditional print publications. This was a revelation to me.
The whole collection is fantastic, and I encourage visitors to this site to download the pdf and read them. It was tremendously fun coordinating and working with the contributors, and we had a great two-panel series at the recent AHA meeting in Chicago.
Historians and history journals love anniversaries, and for those born in my gen (X), we’re approaching 50 years since the fall of Phnom Penh (April 17) and Saigon (April 30) — the end of the Vietnam War. The American Historical Review has just published its March 2025 issue (possibly behind their paywall–subscribe!), with a stunning cover featuring an animated photo restoration of a northern Vietnamese soldier’s portrait and an amazing HistoryLab collection with essays on Teaching the Vietnam War and this incredible playlist of Vietnamese pop music from the war by Jason Gibbs, a music historian of Vietnam and a librarian at San Francisco Public Library. I attach my piece “The Kaleidoscopic Approach: Researching and Writing Full-Spectrum Experiences of War with Texas Tech’s Virtual Vietnam Archives.”
Growing up as kids, we never really question how history made the circumstances of war or shaped the social landscapes of childhood — playing war in dirt lots, shooting guns made of sticks, being “good guys” and figuring out who were the “bad guys;” only decades later, reflecting back, do I think about those childhood friends, and also strangers from Asia, new kids on the bus, who later showed up in college classrooms at the University of North Carolina, also new streams of Amerasians, Hmong and other refugees that via help from church groups like Lutheran Family Services settled around Raleigh, Durham and Fayetteville (Fayette-nam) when I was in college. My own family, a Go Navy! family, was only minimally impacted by the war in Vietnam, an uncle who served in Vung Tau, Dad served on boats offshore with transits through Yokosuska and photoslides from a brief shore leave in Bangkok — all happened when I was a wee baby. I volunteered to teach English in Vietnam with the amazing nonprofit Volunteers in Asia in 1993 with the same general enthusiasm most of my gen had for exploring the now-open Socialist bloc — how exciting, and how wonderful that we were in our 20s, young, and had not been incinerated in a nuclear war. The world, at least for us in that moment, seemed to be coming together and opening to new possibilities. Then came 9/11, wars in the Middle East, and … well, we got older, and the world ground on.
Alley 123 in Can Tho, 2001, “Cultured – Safe” – I rented a little house here with Hong Anh while doing dissertation research 2001-02.
Since 2004, I’ve had the privilege of teaching students in Riverside, CA, and every other year I teach “The Vietnam Wars” where I encounter so many children whose lives, many more directly than mine, were touched by the war. It’s not unusual for a 40-student class to have students of Vietnamese, Cambodian, Lao, Hmong, Chinese-Vietnamese, Chinese-Cambodian, Chinese, Russian, Filipino and other backgrounds with parents (and now grandparents) who experienced the Vietnam War. UC Riverside is one of the most ethnically diverse campuses in the U.S., and we’re a 30-minute drive from Little Saigon.
Respect to the military and diplomatic historians out there who parse the “lessons” of the war in these specific terms, but I tell my students at the outset I really don’t know how to teach “war.” Instead, the course deals with exploring Vietnamese experiences under colonial rule, post-1945 decolonization, and in the civil conflicts and differing ideas of an independent Vietnam that led to the fighting in the 1960s and have had repercussions ever since. I’m also interested in students, especially those with connections, explore the war in connection to their elders’ lived experiences. This might include the war’s impacts in Laos and Cambodia, the bases in Thailand, Korean forces in Vietnam or any number of other projects. And one online archive, Texas Tech’s Virtual Vietnam Archives, is a treasure trove of materials. The Kaleidoscope piece explains how I do it.
I’m wrapping up a six month Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in Penang where I have been hosted by the History Section at Universiti Sains Malaysia. Upon settling in, a staffer in the dean’s office told me I was in the very same office they gave to Professor Barbara Andaya, author of many books including a famous one on Perak and one of my all time professor-heroes; so from the beginning things got off to a great start. My project here is a departure of sorts from a career spent studying environmental history in Vietnam: undertaking a comparative study of urban waterfronts in Southeast Asia. The thing about doing this sort of “nerd” (academic) research — and what I deeply respect and love — is that it requires the researcher to go deep, visiting unusual places, listening to stories, reading unusual stuff.
Studying a new place in this way means learning new languages (Malay, also Chinese), building new institutional partnerships, and being the naive grad student again — thinking you know something only to be completely bewildered (or amazed) (or both) by what you find. Very briefly, I’m interested in Southeast Asia’s urban waterfronts because they are vital to the economic future of the region, most were just swamps 150 years ago, and today most are threatened by increasing sea levels. Several scientific (but alarmist) studies show that Southeast Asian cities will face the greatest challenge in terms of land loss and relocating millions.
It’s true there is concern in the region about rising sea levels, but I think what people far off (including me) forget about places like Vietnam and Malaysia is that millions of people have been living on the water’s edge — and I mean living in homes on piers just above the high tide mark — for centuries. Here’s a view of one such waterfront in George Town (Penang) with it’s fringe of jetties and behind them are some of the first public housing tenements built on reclaimed mangrove forest.
Another thing that’s important when we think about “shorelines” is that for centuries these have been subject to modification; and for people with in-between legal status or limited job prospects, frequently these movable shorelines are the only place one can call home. This particular stretch of George Town’s waterfront is called Weld Quay and it was the industrial/business end of the waterfront. This is where thousands of mostly Chinese and Indian migrant shore laborers lived in the early 1900s as George Town was booming with the tin trade. Larger cargo ships anchored offshore while hundreds of “tongkang” boats carried raw materials like iron or tin ore, charcoal, food and timber in and processed goods out. (This historical image is courtesy of the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.)
While many of these vessels around Penang were crewed by Chinese sailors, the origin of the name is not Chinese but Malay and the boat style dates back several centuries, as a bělongkang. In English they were called “lighters” and their job was to “light” the cargo from docs to ships or vice versa.
I’m interested in waterfronts like Weld Quay because they represent the major center where carbon fuels (charcoal, later coal and petroleum but also food to energize thousands of laborers) entered the city.
Even today, in the Weld Quay area, some of the most delicious street food, like charcoal cooked Char Koay Teow is served. Penang is a food mecca on Earth!
So my research around Penang has taken me to sources of the city’s carbon — until as late as 1950, it was NOT coal, NOT petroleum but mainly CHARCOAL – specifically pyrolized mangrove trees. How did a city of 500,000 in the mid-20th century get by without gasoline? Of course they had it, but personal motorbikes and cars were rare. There was abundant petroleum in Penang because it sits across the Straits of Malacca from major offshore oilfields in Medan and Pekanbaru (Sumatra). But the city’s largest industries — tin smelters — didn’t use petroleum or coal (too much sulfur) but charcoal for their blast furnaces. So my study in Penang has been focused on charcoal and more generally on biofuels in SE Asia.
And it turns out a lot of early Southeast Asian cities used charcoal because it was easily floated to port and came from a convenient coastal wood source: mangroves.
Making charcoal from “bakau” is actually a very ancient practice. On the Malay Peninsula just north of Penang is an archeological site “Sungan Batu” where brick jetties stretched out into a mangrove area and furnaces smelted iron into ingots for export. This is an ancient tuyere – an air pipe that funneled air into an ancient furnace heated by hot charcoal to keep the temperature high enough for smelting.
Archeologists debate when people here were smelting iron, but a safe guess is about the 5th century CE, and the people here exported iron ingots (used by blacksmiths to make tools) along with other stuff – glass beads, ceramics, probably aromatic woods like agarwood – in the ancient India – China sea trades. When we look at the brick terraces and jetties from then, we can see, all around them, are mangrove trees. This association of coastal cities in Southeast Asia with these incredibly vibrant, tropical coastal ecosystems has continued from the earliest historic era right down to the present.
When we think about modern cities, their formation, and problems associated with the carbon cycle and climate change today, I think we need to pay more attention to the unique carbon-fuel “mixes” from which they have emerged. Southeast Asia’s coastal cities are tropical with high humidity, high water marks and abundant, fast-growing plant life all around them. Urban life here is different than, say, a temperate great plains city like Beijing or Chicago where rail lines, coal and other fossil fuels are essential for their survival.
Work continues with co-authors on essays — possibly a book down the road — and for those interested in more, I gave a talk last week on August 29th for people at the venerable Penang Institute that is now posted. Note: You may need to scroll forward to the 11 minute mark.)
I’ve just returned to Riverside, super jet lagged but happy with an amazing six-month stay. I could not have done anywhere near as much as I managed to do without the help of my friend and “brother” in Penang, Dr. Tan Chee Seng, and thanks to the help of many other fine people including the Fulbright staff at the Malaysian American Committee for Educational Exchanges (MACEE), USM College of Humanities and the USM History Section.
Thanks to all of my friends for an epic stay! Big hugs!
Thanks to support from the University of Washington’s Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas, I finally paid a visit to a place I have long read about and dreamed of: Yogyakarta!
UCR colleague Muhamad Ali and his lovely wife Dila helped me network via their family in Jogja who introduced me to the amazing Kemuning A. Adiputri, who worked with me for a few days as expert guide not only familiar with historic sites around Yogyakarta but actively involved with Stuppa Indonesia, a planning and development firm in Jogja, and the Center for Heritage Conservation (CHC) at Gadjah Mada University. Kemuning recently finished her M.Sc. in Historic Preservation from Columbia University, so I was not just lucky to have a great interpreter but really lucky to meet a future leader in Indonesia’s heritage conservation community!
My main purpose in the Jogja trip was relatively simple: to visit and experience firsthand sites I have long lectured on in my Early SE Asia survey course and to photograph them for a textbook I am writing for Cambridge Press titled An Environmental History of SE Asia. Besides visiting Jogja I made trips to the world’s largest Buddhist monument, Borubudur built in the 9th century CE, and the Hindu temples at Prambanan, also 9th century. We had the great good fortune to see Borubudur on a clear day with full views of the eight mountains surrounding the monument on all sides.
The artistry in the bas-relief carvings along the walls of both monuments is incredible. Here is a detail of three women standing in front of what looks to be a mango tree.
Both Borubudur and Prambanan are built from andesite, a blue-gray volcanic rock. This produced a striking, dark temple which absorbs more heat and which I imagine was likely painted when the temple was in use. Here’s a detail along an outer wall of a monkey with an ox and some mango trees in the background.
Here are some views at Prambanan.
My general interest in both public and scholarly research these days follows from an intro I wrote to a special issue with the Journal of SE Asian Studies three years ago: “The Greening of SE Asian History.” For so long, SE Asia’s history has been defined by issues of state formation and ethnonational heritage-making, what Ben Anderson provocatively termed the making of “imagined communities.” This “national idea” has been vital to different publics in Southeast Asia since the end of colonial rule and the start of decolonization in 1945, but with greater economic integration and global problems like climate change, I think we’re at a turning point for historians, what historian John Smail called an “historiographical crisis” — in SE Asia and the world — where the nation-state project and more recent post-structuralist debates in the academy are giving way to more “diasporic,” trans-regional and even “multi-species” projects exploring new identity-making projects and forging newer historical and analytical framings. SE Asia’s incredible and biodiverse natures, layered cultural landscapes, agro-ecologies – not to mention so many pockets of its endemic, minority or hybrid cultures – are still absent in anglophone histories of the region and marginal in the region’s national museums and vernacular literatures.
This isn’t unique to SE Asia, either — consider the visibility of African Americans or Native Americans in American history books or the decades-long struggles to build a National Museum of African American History on the National Mall – a monumental space largely built in the 19th century by the hands of free and enslaved African Americans. But the times, they are a changin’… and that’s why I open my intro essay with these lines from Bob Dylan:
Hey, hey Woody Guthrie, I wrote you a song
‘Bout a funny ol’ world that’s a-comin’ along
Seems sick and it’s hungry, it’s tired and it’s torn
It looks like it’s a-dyin’ and it’s hardly been born
I think the newspapers and end-times people would have us believe we’re at the precipice of a world ending in chaos, but who are we to judge? 🙂 Scientists globally tell us we’re at least on the verge of a new, warmer world with all of the possibilities and problems that will pose. A sixth mass extinction, mass die-offs of coral, losing much of the world’s biomass of insects, possibly a plethora of micro-organisms and algae species we don’t even know yet. We’re also in the midst of a mass extinction of thousands of endangered languages. But what about history, especially local history and the history of worlds past? Worlds with more biodiverse forests, more languages, and more natural wonders like the giant stinky flower, Rafflesia arnoldii.
There are efforts in many parts of the world, in the face of climate change and recent social movements for more inclusive histories, inclusive of different peoples and natures, to articulate new valuations of nature/ecosystem services, and combined bio- and cultural diversity to effect a kind of green ethics. I discuss this in my intro to the special edition. These efforts at “greening history” are dispersed globally and draw from multiple groundings in different ethical and religious traditions. What particular natures or landscapes mean to the human communities that tend them are (and should be) as biodiverse as the diversity of life itself. That…in a (Canarium) nut shell is my general research aim in current and developing projects.
The Jogja trip was mostly for fun, photographing sites for teaching and my current book project, but through conversations with Kemuning and a chance trip to an orchid nursery halfway up Mt Merapi, I stumbled onto two related ideas/questions that might bear research fruit down the way.
Cultural- and Bio-diversity at Yogyakarta’s “Cosmological Axis”
Kemuning shared about one of her current projects – supporting heritage conservation in the historic, sacred center of Yogyakarta, including its famed keraton (royal palace) and the street running north from the palace to the central rail depot. Tourists know this 24-hour, busy shopping street as Malioboro Street, and it is adorned with ornate lamp posts and a mosaic of shopfronts from different eras.
The name Malioboro is a bit of a mystery. Some say that it stuck after “Sir” Thomas Stamford Raffles’ ordered British forces to attack the palace in 1812 and loot its precious objects and documents. Malioboro could be the local pronunciation for the name Marlborough, as in the Duke of Marlborough (who was at the time George Spencer-Churchill, a famed collector of antiquities in the UK who was allegedly deeply in debt.) Or it might have referred to an earlier Marlborough who was a governor and the namesake for a British fort at Bengkulu in Sumatra. Or it might derive from a sankritic term, malya bhara, meaning bearing garlands. Just this year, The Cosmological Axis of Yogyakarta and its Historic Landmarks were listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
It now fits within a class or urban historic districts including the Georgetown District in Penang which I also visited on this trip (a separate Reflection blog will cover that). As Georgetown-Penang’s Director Ang told me last week, one of the biggest challenges with maintaining an historic district and a buildings-focused approach is attracting new generations of visitors. The bulk of visitors and community members to these districts are people over 40. No youth!
What some urban districts are doing, and Director Ang is at the forefront, is to place more focus on the living city, arts inside old buildings, new venues for creative expression, and adaptive reuse of old buildings. In New York, there are also efforts to focus on indigenous spaces, place names, plants, and other sites partially buried under concrete. Other conservation projects focus on re-opening creeks from old, concrete storm drains so as to allow migratory birds and other life to return. Seoul is famous for Cheonggyecheon Creek Project, and re-opening it allowed a new shopping district to form along the banks with native and historic trees planted. My hometown of Riverside is similarly planting xeriscape and native sage-scrub in revitalized historic areas with recently restored Japanese American homes, its bid to advance its “arts and culture” mission.
Here are some shots of one Kampong near the city center at its Tugu Yogya monument:
What’s clear from the many architectural styles, the signs, the placement of art personal and communal with plants and other decor … is that this kampong is well organized by community leadership with strong collective participation in neighborhood life! This is rare in many historic districts where working class people are forced out by high rents and tourist industries and tourists move in. Just blocks off the tourist corridor on Malioboro Street local neighborhoods are still full of everyday, working-people life with beautifully decorated murals around a thriving elementary school, meaning young people, too. That’s a good sign!
Compare this with other historic districts like downtown Amsterdam and you do not see this to the same degree. The streets and pristine historic buildings there are mostly air bnb’s and homes for the global wealthy or inhabited by elderly people who inherited or bought flats in them long ago when they cost normal prices. New York City just passed an ordinance eliminating 67% of its airbnb’s in an effort to hold on to fast-shrinking, “permanent inhabitant” communities.
In Vietnam where I have worked off and on for thirty years, similar waves of vernacular erasure have taken place as the country’s economy, especially in its old cities, has boomed. Over the years I watched as national and city governments moved quickly to erase all forms of outdated transport like cyclos, graffiti, and “slums.” Old cities like Saigon mushroomed into megacities with a dozen new districts after a long, postwar-induced sleep. Saigon used to be full of scenes like this:
But now, Vietnamese in the urban core who are well off and generally older–average age notching up into the 30s—they have lost this part of the urban fabric of everyday life. They think with nostalgia to the cyclos (pedicabs), the food carts, noodle sellers, and stilt houses from their childhood in the city center.
Bookshops now carry models kids can make of bicycle repair stands, stilt houses, cyclos and noodle shops! But the streets are mostly empty of them.
Malioboro still has plenty of examples of vernacular everyday life and I hope preservationists can find ways to include it along with repurposed mid-century “national” buildings, Javanese traditional construction, etc. as things “develop.”
Back to nature in the city, I am amazed by Jogja’s incredible beringin or banyans.
I think Jogja National Museum’s banyan (nighttime pic) should win the blue ribbon, but there are so many to choose from.
Banyans are planted at sites of worship or reverence, and a quick glance at them shows that the tree is not just a single plant organism but a microcosm! Many other life forms live among it including this swallow (Artamus leucorynchus) and so many epiphytes!
And here is where I imagined some future effort to present the natural heritage in the urban forest might center around banyans, perhaps even some combined presentation of banyans and some of Java’s most famous epiphytes, its native orchids! The city’s banyans might provide unique sites for education about multi-species plant communities. They could even host orchids in outdoor exhibit spaces. A quick run through Singapore’s Changi airport and it’s commercial-garden “The Jewel” should be enough to convince funders there’s a market for orchid gardens and orchid interpretive sites in heavily trafficked, commercial areas .
Along Malioboro Street, orchids are already part of the urban garden, present on many alleys and front porches.
Clearly people and neighborhood governments love banyans and orchids! Examining their multi-species communities, surveying native and cultivated, imported life, thinking of them as sites for digital or mixed media interpretation would make for a wonderful exhibit. Trees like banyans as urban sites for interpretation can be fixed with digital or QR codes and tied to urban heritage projects.
Orchids attract high-rolling sponsors, too, and hybrid cultivars (like tulips and roses) might be named after VIPs. Recently the Netherlands Queen Maxima visited Gadjah Mada University to attend the announcement of a newly cultivated variety of Mt Merapi’s celebrated species, Vanda tricolor such that it was named Vanda tricolor “Queen Maxima.”If royals are into orchids, there seems a ready source for investment into interpretation.
My hometown, Riverside CA, used an app for school kids and amateur birders to photo and geotag pics to a naturalist website showing sightings of birds. Unfortunately, plants cannot fly, so geotagging them opens up the same problems it does for ancient remains: poachers! Anyway, there are ways to safeguard locations and still present digital images for a sort of citizen science. And Vanda tricolor is but one of hundreds of Mt. Merapi area species – the one most cultivated by commercial nurseries.
Merapi Orchids
Holding the banyans idea for a sec, let me explain how I stumbled on orchids as one focus for preservation here. Our Day 2 tour to Borobudur was delayed by requirements for timed entry, so we took a detour to Pak Musimin’s orchid conservation nursery on the southern slope of Mt Merapi.
This is a conservation center propagating and re-establishing orchids in Merapi’s forests. Pak Musimin explained how native orchid habitats are under threat from forestry, natural destruction from eruptions and orchid-poaching. For twenty years, he and his wife have worked with Yogya orchid conservation groups to adopt orchids and then, when mature, re-establish them in forest habitats. They even developed a program for city people to adopt them and, once mature, return them to re-establish in the forest.
Mindblowingly cool!!!!! The idea of bringing in an urban community of orchid adopters which builds immediate and deep ties between cityfolk and a specific species and site in the forest. This, I think, is a brilliant strategy for promoting sustainable biodiversity conservation in the city.
On Malioboro Street one could incorporate biodiversity into historic preservation programs. I think the banyans and their human communities might serve as interesting sites for interpretation about native orchids , especially the globally popular (Mt Merapi native) Vanda tricolor.
Perhaps kampong communities connected with banyan trees could participate in orchid adoption, even naming them, and build interpretive panels for visitors on orchid-banyan tours. Protected banyans inside private grounds like mosques and historic sites might try establishing Vanda tricolor — assuming the plant can adapt to these urban trees.
Why are orchids important to history?? Culturally they have been important in Asia for more than 2000 years. There are orchids are found carved in stone at Borubudur and Prambanan, two 9th century monuments. The cut flowers keep for a long time, and they were used by traditional dancers, and the plants are biologically incredible. The can reproduce sexually (seed) and asexually (dividing at roots), they attract bats, birds, bees, other insects, even flies, as pollinators. And they symbolize healthy rhizomal, mycorrhizal communities. There is so much research right now in the roles of fungal communities in rehabilitating forests…and cities! Along with algae and other micro life forms.
So the symbol of Yogya’s official plant on Yogya’s historic banyans…it could serve as an important focal point for studying both the city’s and surrounding area’s multispecies community of life.
One of my favorite anthropological theorists for her multispecies approach is Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing who was trained as a specialist of Indonesia and wrote award-winning books like In the Realm of the Diamond Queen and Friction detailing field experiences in Kalimantan with Dayak peoples and connecting them to more global flows of people and natural products, commerce. I think her work might help to theoretically inform a preservationist project aroung Jogja and Merapi, especially her more recent books including The Mushroom at the End of the World and her collaborative, open-access work Feral Atlas.
Orchids are not only a huge business all over Asia and the Pacific (esp. Hawaii) but their native range matches well with the arc of Indo-Pacific countries connected to the historic Austronesian migration. All across the region stretching from Madagascar to Easter Island are orchid hotspots.
Hawaii’s orchid business is so developed that nurseries sell tourists flowers already packed and certified “clean” to pass border and customs requirements. Like tulips in Holland, they are ready for carry-on!
Perhaps there is an angle with orchids to connect the diverse island peoples and island ecologies where orchids originate, like Merapi’s pockets of diversity high up the slopes, in between lava stone and lahar. There should be possibilities for Yogya-area nurseries to profit from the export of its indigenous biodiversity.
I gather from academic papers in English that Gadjah Mada University’s plant scientists are leaders in the study of Merapi’s orchids, and I imagine there are plenty of experts who could help design orchid conservation, adoption, conservation and sales. I of course have none, just a regional historian’s eye for comparisons and metaphors–perhaps a resource for global or trans-regional comparisons. But to collaborate on such a project would be a delight!!!!
A newcomer’s fascination with Yogya! 🙂
I’m returning to Riverside for a busy quarter of teaching, including a trial course on modern se asian history through the lens of historic plants — teak, abaca, rubber, pepper, sugar, etc. But next spring I will start a long-planned Fulbright Fellowship at Universiti Sains Malaysia, so possibly from there I can explore this orchid idea…along with a mangrove one, and no doubt others.
Terimah kasi!!!!
I owe my deepest thanks to the friends and family in Yogya who shared their time and their Yogya lives with me. Thanks to Dila’s parents and sisters for a delightful Saturday night dinner with amazing sweet treats.
Yogya people have an incredible sense for sweet and varied desserts!!!! Dila’s sister scored a new top hit – a dish with melon, lime, ice and coconut!!!! Me and my extra kilo thank you!
Thanks to driver Yusuf and his niece and interpreter Eggy who joined me for a hilariously fun trip to explore the southern coast of Java, its historic sites and national parks. They also shared about their life in a kampong on the edge of Yogya, about his experiences working in West Java’s steel mills, her experience going to college, working in call centers, and their work in the kampong preserving rich artistic traditions, also on raising kids, hoping for marriage, and many other things — sometimes hilariously mis/translated by Google Translate!
Through my colleague and dear friend, former Fulbright Visiting Prof at Riverside, Baskara Wardaya SJ, I was able to visit his community and learn about his research including a wonderful new book titled Awan Merah (Red Cloud) — that includes his observations from extensive travels in America, including a recent stay in Riverside!
Finally, sincere thanks to Kemuning Adiputri for taking time from her professional work, friends and family for two days of intense touring, long car rides and answering hours of my nonstop questions, helping me learn from local experts and being perfectly brilliant! I felt not that I was talking with a recent graduate but a colleague with decades of observations and life experiences. Best wishes to your family, many thanks, and I look forward to meeting in the future!
To all Yogya friends: I look forward to when you will visit me in California! You have a friend in Riverside, and if baseball season is happening, plan on a trip to Dodger Stadium’s Top Deck! 🙂 Like here with Ali, Dila, Tam, Linh and their kids!
Friends have asked me about process in finding historical imagery about a site. Especially for studying historic changes in shorelines, land use, and other features, it’s very useful to look for mid-20th century imagery and maps. While North American and European countries offer up extensive online tools for downloading digital orthoquads, topos, etc., it’s much more difficult in formerly colonized parts of the Global South! Thus researchers have to rely, when possible, on imagery produced either by colonial powers or, esp. in Asia before 1945, by the U.S. military. This demo explores imagery for one study site, Waigeo Island off the northwest coast of West Papua (Irian Jaya).
The first place to go, especially if you want to compare features over large areas, is the incredible collection of declassified, American spy satellite photographs with the top-secret Corona or Keyhole Program. USGS maintains a searchable index on its Earth Explorer platform.
Corona Images of Waigeo
I did some research and the results were no good – all those stereo images, but everything’s covered in clouds! Those were the breaks before infrared scanners. Spies thwarted by clouds!
Searching your site on this platform requires selecting a polygon and then selecting “data sets”. Here you can see the polygon around Waigeo and then the “footprints” of resulting “keyhole” photos, stereo pairs, medium res, on November 13, 1966. The “F” and “A” in each photograph’s code means “fore” and “aft” cameras. If these images were not blanked out by clouds, then one could download these and assemble 3-d pairs. The little thumbnail of each image shows that these frames are totally white, so no use.
Also, the little icon of the red circle with a slash means the frame isn’t already digitized and downloadable. This means, if the frame was clear and gorgeous, you’d have to click the little shopping cart and BUY it at $30/frame. IF these were clear frames, then you’d be spending $360 to get 12 frames for building stereo pairs of the whole island for Nov 13, 1966.
Sadly, at least for us, it was a cloudy day on Waigeo on Nov 13th, 1966 so whatever was happening that day on the ground is lost.
But this isn’t it. For this region, I know that the final year of Allied military campaigns in the “southwest pacific theater” brought bomber squadrons to Papua, so I’m going to shift gears and look for Army Air Force images.
Researching WW2 historic imagery requires a little bit of knowledge about the ways state governments and militaries organized their air photography…but with a little bit of luck…and some good old fashioned word searches…we might find some imagery.
US Army Air Force Photography
The historic collection of American air photos, including original celluloid roles of 9-“ wide film, is catalogued in Record Group 373 – Defense Intelligence Agency. Yep, you need to go down the rabbit hole of mid-20th century American military spying! (cue the music!)
During WW2 the operation was analogue but highly sophisticated, and in the 1950s it mushroomed into a huge effort to spy on everyone and photograph the entire Earth! One org, the National Photographic Interpretation Center, NPIC, launched under Kennedy in 1961 had an army of photogrammetrists, photo interpreters, and “intel” people pouring over photos like these and the Corona ones to document what everyone else was doing. Since the 1980s, most everything moved to digital scanners in space, think Landsat and secret military satellites. So these collections – film-based, archived – are really special, a 1930s-1970s time capsule compared to the flood of digital information since.
I first googled “army air force photography papua” and my first link turned me here, to this unexpected source at Library of Congress:
What I get from this is that the Army was busy studying key airfields on the northern coast of Papua, they even drew up pretty topographic maps (derived from air photos) in the Army Corps of Engineers standard way (also interesting, this history of Army Corps styles and conventions, line widths, symbols).
Nothing specific to Waigeo but some nice descriptive material about an aerodrome just to the southeast of it. So, a trip to Wikipedia, for more…
A military historian might then look at units assigned here, just to get a sense of the level of activity. Militaries are the ultimate Anthropocene organizations! Studying them is like studying industrial tree plantations or oil and gas pipeline projects. They have what’s called an “Order of Battle” that is a tree-like structure of their organization, and at the larger “trunk” levels, each unit has historians collecting photographs, writing up reports, etc. So they can be useful windows into stuff like SPECIES, esp. fish and trees, in 1944. Here I find a LOT of units:
So, now I want to check out military history records for more descriptive information. The Center for Military History and Defense Technical Information Center (dtic.mil, we love acronyms!) contain MANY useful histories of these units and military air reconnaisance, for ex. Piercing the Fog:
Chapter 5 is an account of that “southwest pacific” area, 1942-45, so worth a read. I’m only familiar with the Ch 6 accounts given that the B29’s were also bombing Vietnam in 1944. Also cool, “Japanese air intelligence.”
I took a side detour and was curious to find more recent USGS-related mapping, using space photography to study retreating Papuan glaciers. Not related to Waigeo, but fun and it draws on those 1942-45 AAF photos.
One pic from loc.gov searching turned up this view of Sansapor, too:
And besides Japan and the US, Aussies were snapping pictures of Papua from the air, but I guess the eastern (British) side:
Moving on to the US National Archives, they have really upgraded their digital offerings. Nice explanations on their “Unwritten Record” blog about their photographic collections, esp. foreign imagery collections that MIGHT include captured Japanese materials post surrender in 1945:
At first, I wasn’t sure if it was NW or SW corner, so here:
Clicking on the overlay index, nope, too far north.
The first page for each index should be a 1-degree MAP, but this degree square lacks one, and I think I got the system wrong, so trying 00S130E (south of the equator), I get Waigeo:
Bingo! There’s Waigeo! So now the trick is to figure out if the American military ordered up any pictures on the island. To use it in this digital form, it helps to put a sticky on the screen of the area of interest, say a village on that inlet, and then scroll through each one. Sounds complicated, but when you try it you quickly get the hang of it.
Here’s the index map for 00S130E (south of the equator and 130 degrees east of Greenwich). I’ve highlighted a rectangle (imagine pasting a sticky on your computer screen).
Here’s the index map with “sticky”:
Now here’s a page of an air photo reconnaissance mission, clicking the next frame but keeping my sticky:
This tells me I have a HIT! Probably 25 photographs shot over my study site. We struck gold! However, look at the rest of the island, mostly empty. So it really is hit or miss whether you can find historic imagery completely covering a large study site. Let’s look at the collar info for some more details – if we were requesting this can of photo-negative film, we’d need it the OP(eration) Number.
Besices giving an OP number, penciled in later, the info here tells us that the view was partly cloudy, so beware. Also the date and some other info. Upon requesting the film you may find other issues, too, like the can cannot be found. And upon request, readers have to wait several days for the can to be physically retrieved from a salt mine near St. Louis, flown on a daily flight to Ft. Meade (NSA) and then driven to College Park and the NARA reading room. (For a brief overview of this amazing process, see my piece here.)
Also interesting (to me) is that this index was created in 1957, supporting a global mapping effort during the Cold War.
From here, the search for imagery requires physically going to NARA in College Park and requesting rolls of film (or hiring a very expensive research contractor).
Besides imagery, of course there are historic maps that can also be very useful especially for all of the details mapmakers inscribe as they convert air photographs into simplified information.
US military maps, too, can be very informative! One possible source for historic maps of your study area is the Perry Casteñeda collection at University of Texas. Here’s the index page for Indonesia:
With map-research, I think it is always best to start with smaller scale maps, 1:250-000 for ex:
Then, select the one, and if you are uncertain, “Click here for Index Map”. And you get a page like this:
From there, we can find Waigeo up in the northwest corner. And highlighted grid squares mean they exist in this collection.
Isn’t it a beaut! No topography for Waigeo, but TOPONYMS!!!
Here’s Waigeo:
And always read the collars! For map nerds, it’s mildly interesting that the map is based on a polyconic projection. Works better for equatorial locations. But the real info is what sources the mapmakers used.
I haven’t really scratched the surface of Dutch cartography, but I am fairly certain Dutch archives, museums and libraries have made their historical collections of places like West Papua fairly EASY to search.
I hope this tutorial can help you get started in researching imagery for your site!
I had a nice skype interview with a grad seminar at my alma mater yesterday, UW in Seattle, and one student very rightly asked me when I was going to upload the map data I’d promised in my book to readers. The answer, friends, is NOW. I am renting some space on this server, 100GB, and I intend to USE IT! I’ll start with an archival map from the Vietnamese National Archives in HCM City from the records of the Cabinet of the First Republic of Vietnam (Đệ Nhất Cộng Hoa or Đ1CH in my notes in the book). The following image is super-cool as an example of American and CIA-inspired choropleth mapping used to describe communist-friendly areas in Southeast Asia. The use of pie charts, for example, with pink for “pinkoes” or “communist sympathizers” and the yellow for Republic of Vietnam loyalists (their flag was yellow with red stripes).
The map georeferenced, overlaying satellite imagery.
Here’s a link to the full-rez, georeferenced (for ArcGIS) FILE. Source info: File 17331, Record Group ĐICH, Vietnam National Archives Center No. 2.
Before I go further, let me just apologize outright to my geographer and GIS friends for providing no metadata on this. Please sympathize, I’m not an agency supplying data but an historian offering up usable files for the few.
Now, what’s cool about this map, especially when overlaying current satellite imagery, is how what was once a jungle clearing, bull-dozed grids of housing blocks and “enemy bases” has grown in the postwar era into a full-fledged town and district called Nam Đồng!
This illustrates a very important point about the communist nation-building effort, that not only were they establishing key strategic nodes in highland areas, but they were continuing a centuries-old program of “cultivating” these highland spaces. This term (giao hóa) suggests a particularly Vietnamese (and Chinese) style of interacting with highland groups. Bringing in highlanders to trade, providing literacy (in Vietnamese), integrating them into an expanding – topological – network of “the state”.
By contrast, the Diệm government, especially his brother Cẩn’s shadowy government ruling the central region, took a more brutalist approach to these highland areas that communists had been “cultivating” since 1947.
So, enjoy the map! Download the file, play with it, and let me know if it says anything more to you.
More info:
Here’s what I write about this map and how it fit into RVN nation-building in 1960, from Footprints of War, pp. 124-5:
“The new military rulers in the uplands of the province introduced new political maps with light and dark pink shadings that conveyed their singular purpose of counterinsurgency. Dark pink described areas that were deeply contested while light pink suggested fading support. While such maps fed into national military planning for the RVN, they also informed American military allies who had for years been drawing up similar maps in neighboring Laos and Thailand. The military authors of this map used dark pink shading to indicate areas still largely under the communists’ control. They used a lighter shade of pink to indicate lighter opposition in the hills west of Hoà Mỹ and southwest of another evacuated area, Khê Trái.
As a cartographic projection of the ARVN’s ambitions in 1960 for mopping up these bases of communist support, the map presented communist-controlled regions in symbolic terms most familiar to American counterinsurgency experts at the time. Small pie charts in each highlands commune showed, via darker shaded sections, the approximate percentage of people who were “Việt Cộng in the region,” still a majority across the hills. Lighter pink shading indicated areas with diminished support, and colored or empty circles indicated villages that supported a particular side or had been abandoned, respectively.
Excerpts of the map showing the map’s deep pink areas, the hills around Nam Đồng and the A Sầu Valley, bear closer inspection, for they show how ecological and political boundaries coincided, often separating ARVN posts from communist base areas by only a few kilometers. Reconstituted self-defense units and communist cells, pushed almost to annihilation during several years of unrelenting police sweeps, extended their political and communications networks to the very tips of streams and tributaries on the highest slopes. ARVN troops could not easily penetrate the dense forests without support from Katus and highland groups while communist partisans retained the older practice of navigating by rivers and mountain ridges with help from native highlanders.”
I had the pleasure of co-leading a group of graduate students to the Mekong Delta after having not been in the region for a good seven years. (My second book is focused on the central coast of Vietnam.) It was fun to revisit old sites and see old friends while traveling with the group. Below are some favorite shots from the trip.
Vinh Te Canal. View looking west from Chau Doc.
I love the above picture for the layers of activity and occupation. Houses on stilts back up into the canal while int he foreground a man fishes from a “ghe tam ban” or three plank canoe. In the distance, a barge approaches us. The water is reddish brown and opaque, almost milky with the fine silt washing down from the Mekong.
Chau Giang Mosque.
The group visited the Cham muslim community’s central mosque. During the visit, one of the imams received our group, and I learned something new.
Imam explaining the mosque and community history.
He corrected me on the history of *his* community and ancestors. They were not Chams who migrated west to the region in the 1700s and later converted to Islam but instead Malays who migrated north and east from Terengganu in Malaysia through Cambodia in the 1700s and finally settled here. Because Cham and Malay are distantly related, Austronesian languages, the Viet chroniclers and imperial officials in the area simply classified them as Cham. The post-1975 Socialist Republic of Vietnam likewise recognizes this community as a Cham ethnic group. One of the students, Nurrhoman from Bandung, Indonesia, communicated some basic phrases with the imam in Malay/Bahasa.
Group at Miếu Bà Chưa Xứ.
We visited a number of important spiritual sites in the region, including this temple dedicated to the Lady of the Realm, a goddess spirit followed especially by ethnic-Chinese inhabitants at a site that, in ancient times (before 6th century CE) was most likely a temple to Siva or Visnu. Allegedly those who pray to the Lady for good fortune who receive it must return to make offerings of thanks. The money from this return traffic then goes to various charities.
Prof. John Agbonifo and Martina van den Haak at Khmer temple, Oc Eo.
One great aspect of the trip was sharing the teaching with two fantastic scholars, John Agbonifo of Osun State in Nigeria and Debjani Bhattacharyya at Drexel University, and the author of the newly published Empire and Ecology in the Mekong Delta. It is a fascinating read!
Prof. Debjani w/ a local official in Can Tho, myself and the group.
We ended our delta trip in Can Tho with several meetings in this booming city. I left it in 2011 at 500,000 people, and now the city has tripled in area with a population of 1.5 million! My favorite meeting there was with an old friend, Ms. Huynh Le, who visited the group and spoke about life in this boomtown.
Huynh Le at her language school.
The trip ended in HCM City on Friday and students gave presentations on Saturday. Thanks to Ms. Hoang for the cute little souvenir! Pictured in the background is “Team Non Lá (Conical Hat)”.
Team Conical Hat
I leave you with a shot from old Saigon, the back of it’s main open air market. I like this shot for the many layers visible here. In the foreground the butcher stalls and flower stands of Ben Thanh. In the background are old facades from the French colonial and post-colonial eras. Then in the way back are the towering spires of recently completed skyscrapers. Farewell until next time, Vietnam!
My home institution UCR has really upped its game with media. This summer, they worked with me to develop a youtube video as well as write statements on my research for the alumni magazine. There were some bumps and starts in developing the film, one in particular was (to me) a funny reminder of generation gaps. Some of the Millennials in the video-editing crew thought that buying rights to a clip of “Huey” helicopters in the setting sun from the film “Apocalypse Now” would be a cool scene to start my promo video. (Not cool!) They replaced it with great, real footage.
The online magazine version includes the film and the bio I wrote, quite like the layout!
Next week I am excited to be a co-leader for the Leiden-based International Institute for Asian Studies’ In Situ Field School. The topic is “Delta Cities: Rethinking Practices of the Urban. I’ll be joined by two fellow “delta scholars” I very much admire:
Debjani Bhattarchaya – who has just come out with this FANTASTIC new book, Empire and Ecology in the Bengal Delta: The Making of Calcutta.
John Agbonifo – who as a sociologist with historian tendencies has produced AMAZING studies on resource conflicts in the Niger Delta.
Lục Bình (water hyacinth, Eichornia crassipes) on a Mekong Delta canal. Photo Credit: David McCaskey
Also in tow will be two UCR graduate students from the History program, David McCaskey and Todd Luce. It’s a rare pleasure to share a trip to my study sites with them. Luce is completing a PhD on the water politics and history of the Salton Sea while McCaskey is just beginning his research on fisheries and development in Vietnam.
