Historicizing cultural encounters
I am a social and cultural historian specializing in the modern and contemporary Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia. I study in particular societies that belong to the so-called Malay world, an area of long historical interactions between diverse populations, where the use of Malay as lingua franca has allowed the exchanges of ideas, concepts, and practices.
My interest lies in understanding what those exchanges have meant for people when they took place – especially in the field of religion – and how they have shaped the societies we know. In simpler terms, I like to think about what cultures and people do when they encounter, and how groups make sense of those experiences in historical terms (local historiography).
Those questions – what happens when cultures, people, and languages meet, and what relation people built to the past – guide my teaching and research at the University of Hamburg (Asien-Afrika-Institut), where I am an associate professor at the Department of Languages and Cultures of Southeast Asia. The same interest has brought me to the Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures (CSMC), where I am the principal investigator of a research project on the evolution of land rights and ownership in British Malaya and Dutch East Indies, in the second half of the 19th century when Chinese, Arabs and European came to settle in great number.
Fields of research:
- Cultural and social history of Islam in the Philippines
- Malay manuscript culture(s)
- Local historiography; Regimes of historicity in Southeast Asia
- Collective and cultural memory; Memory of violence in Indonesia
- Women and authority in sultanates
I have conducted fieldwork in The Philippines (Lanao, Cotabato, Zamboanga, Pantugan, Jolo, Tawi-Tawi), Indonesia (Aceh, Kerinci, Jakarta), and Malaysia (Sabah); and archival research in The Netherlands (former KITLV library), Spain (AGI, Sevilla), the UK (The British Library, the National Archives, the Royal Asiatic Society), Germany (Staatsbibliothek Berlin), the Philippines (National Archives, University Santo Tomas, Ateneo de Manila, the Archives of the Recolletos), Malaysia (Kedah, Johor, KL), Singapore, and Indonesia (ANRI, Jakarta). I look forward to returning to many of those places and some new ones as soon as time allows.
The Philippines in Austronesian studies
Working in collaboration with my colleagues Vincent Wonghaiham-Petersen, Adonis Elumbre, Malaya Ragrario, and Myfel Paluga, I have started a Filipino component within the Austronesian studies section at the University of Hamburg. Since 2022, we have organized the Austronesian Research Seminar, which gathers scholars and students of Indonesian, Malay, and Philippine studies to look at local phenomena from a broader regional perspective.
Digitization of manuscripts: enlarging possibilities
Since 2022, I co-supervised, with Prof. Jan van der Putten, the program DREAMSEA (Digital Repository of Endangered and Affected Manuscripts in Southeast Asia), a joint project between the CSMC and PPIM (UIN Jakarta), financed by the Arcadia Foundation, which aims to safeguard the diversity of manuscript cultures in Southeast Asia. Over the past years, we have learned about the current state of private collections, and the practices surrounding them; and are continuously exchanging with local partners to strengthen the existing ecosystem, which allows the preservation and transmission of various manuscript cultures.
Elsa Clavé 