Name
Dr. Alan Strathern
College
Churchill College
What is your field of history?
The history of Sri Lanka; the comparative history of religious encounters in the early modern world.
How did you come to specialise in this area?
As an undergraduate, it was not any particular time or place that most inspired me but rather particular themes and ideas. I was sure that I wanted to study an area that would bring me into contact with mental worlds very different to my own, and this was reinforced by an MA in History and Anthropology. But I considered all manner of PhD topics, most of them in ancient history. However, my girlfriend at the time (and now wife) was of Sri Lankan origin, and through her I became interested in the ‘first encounter’ between Europeans and the people of Sri Lanka, which took place when the Portuguese washed up on the shores of the tropical island early in the sixteenth century. This was also one of the first encounters between Christianity and Theravada Buddhism. How did the two sides understand each other? What was that moment of first encounter like?
What sort of source material do you tend to use, and what are its strengths and weaknesses?
For the history of Sri Lanka I was overwhelmingly dependent on sources written by the Portuguese – contemporary letters by soldiers, adventurers, merchants, and missionaries, and chronicles written with a greater degree of hindsight. This imbalance in the evidence is very significant and unfortunate. However, one can go a long way in reconstructing the more general features of the Sinhalese worldview of the time by carefully consulting sources from adjacent periods, and then reinterpreting what one finds in the Portuguese texts. And there were a few sources in Sinhala which I had translated with the aid of my mother-in-law. These proved to be very valuable indeed.
Which individuals, events or forces are especially important in your area of history?
This is the first age of European imperialism in the wider world. Understanding what drove Europeans into Asia and what kinds of power they ought to exert there is fundamental. One interesting and, for me, highly symbolic character, is the king Dharmapala, who is often listed as ‘emperor’ of Sri Lanka 1551-. But when he converted to Christianity in the 1550s he watched the bulk of his legitimacy drain away. His people deserted him. For the great majority of human societies throughout history, political authority has only been acceptable when it has been framed in religious terms. Understanding how and why this should be is a main task of my current research looking at political elites across the world.
How has your field developed over the course of your career?
The history of Sri Lanka has shrunk since the 1960s and is only now showing some green shoots of recovery, particularly here in the UK. The history of religious encounters more generally is thriving.
Which areas of your field most urgently need further exploration?
Almost the whole of Sri Lankan history is now badly neglected. We need people trained to do the fundamental work of reading and editing Sinhala inscriptions and ola-leaf documents, and subjecting them to source-criticism.
As for the history of religious encounters, I consider this to be under-theorized (but then I would say that!). I think that the field of religious history would also benefit from a more radical step: introducing a more systematic understanding of religion derived from anthropology and cognitive psychology would help us to ask much better questions.
What characterises good history?
Good history should have explanatory force: it should confront a chaotic mass of information and extract patterns and underlying causes. It should take a stream of meaningless events and give them meaning. After finishing a book of history we should feel that the world makes more sense. But really good history also has to be honest about what we cannot understand, about where we are hobbled by lack of evidence, about what we do not know and can never know.
How did your understanding of history change during your time as a university student?
I had a terrible, exhilarating moment in the middle of a supervision when the following thought came to me: all those books and articles I have been reading for this course by all those authoritative professors and sober scholars – they are all open to question. They have all been written by human beings as mortal and fallible as the rest of humanity, as time-bound and subject to the whims of fashion as the very people we are studying, and as incapable of omniscience. I had another exhilarating moment – reading Jack Goody’s The Domestication of the Savage Mind – when I realized that history could be written on a very large scale indeed, and that we could use the past to help us answer fundamental questions about human nature.
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