[Tlc] a further tribute to GWS

Tue Oct 28 06:55:22 PDT 2008

Few in my generation of Southeast Asianists can have known the remarkable
GWS as Biff did.  But some may recall his memorable appearance at the
conference on the Indonesian Chinese held at Cornell during the summer of
1990.  That conference, along with the dazzling chapter on Chinese creole
societies in martime SEA that he contributed to SOJOURNERS AND SETTLERS:
HISTORIES OF SOUTHEAST ASIA AND THE CHINESE (2001), represented one of
his very few returns to Southeast Asian studies after 1970 or so.  (In fact,
on the first day of the conference, LIPI's Mely Tan asked him with great
curiosity whether his presence signalled his return to the field in a
serious way.  No, he replied, but how could he miss the wonderful event that
John Wolff had organized?)

During the final session of the conference, Professor Skinner walked to the
front of the room to praise the papers that he had heard during the
preceding few days and then to note, elegantly and convincingly, that each
of those papers would gain from attention to spatial considerations.  Sadly,
the 1991 special issue of INDONESIA on that conference made no note of
Professor Skinner's remarks.  Today, few Southeast Asianists are familiar
with his work on China's "macro-regions", let along their great, lasting
impact on the study of Chinese history and, now, on the study of Overseas
Chinese history; see Philip Kuhn's recent CHINESE AMONG OTHERS: EMIGRATION
IN MODERN TIMES (2008).

In fact, however, both of Professor Skinner's classic volumes on Thailand,
published in 1957 and 1958, anticipated very directly elements of his
spatial approach to Chinese history.  A glance merely at the maps in CHINESE
SOCIETY IN THAILAND: AN ANALYTICAL HISTORY (1957) makes this clear.  One
map, demonstrating important places of Chinese settlement in the Chao Phraya
basin, prefigures his stress on river basins in the definition of China's
historical macro-regions.  Another, illustrating concentrations of Chinese
in Thailand at the district level, involved the construction of the sort of
artfully conceived indices that he would use to differentiate space within
his macro-regions from inner core to far periphery when he turned to China.
And all this is to say nothing of countless other ways in which Professor
Skinner's work on Thailand's history, like his work on China's, spoke with
great elegance to one's historical imagination.

A couple of years ago, to second the suggestion that he himself made in
Ithaca in 1990 and to offer a gentle reminder of the many parts of GWS's
burst of scholarship on Southeast Asia that await our further attention, I
wrote the attached rather whimsical article as a tribute to Professor
Skinner's work.  I'd like to share it now, at the time of his passing.

Mike Montesano
ISEAS, Singapore

On 10/28/08, justinm at ucr.edu <justinm at ucr.edu> wrote:
>
> Forwarded from Dr. Charles Keyes.
> Thanks,
> justin
>
> G. William (Bill) Skinner, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology, University
> of
> California, Davis, died Saturday night after a long battle with cancer.
>
> Bill was a devoted and loyal mentor to me and to many other students from
> Cornell, Stanford, and UC Davis, and an inspiration to generations of
> scholars in anthropology, geography, sociology, China studies and Southeast
> Asian studies.
>
> In 2006 at the AAS meeting in San Francisco, a number of us gathered to
> honor Bill. At the event I spoke as one of Bill's first PhD students.  I
> would like to repeat here some of what I said.
>
> From my perspective it was fortunate that the end of the Chinese Revolution
> took place while Bill was engaged in fieldwork in Sichuan. Because he was
> compelled to abort this fieldwork and because all of his field notes were
> taken from him, he had, on return to Cornell where he was studying, to
> choose a new dissertation project. That project turned out to be a study of
> the Chinese in Thailand. His dissertation became two books that would shape
> subsequent scholarship not only about Chinese migrants and their
> descendants
> in Thailand and, more generally, Southeast Asia, but also lay the
> foundation
> for studies of the relationship between class, ethnicity and politics in
> Thailand. My own career-long preoccupation with the study of the
> relationship between ethnicity and the nation-state unquestionably can be
> traced to Bill's influence on my scholarly development.
>
> Bill also inspired me to draw on methods from sociology as well as
> anthropology. In a paper I presented in 1963 in Bangkok to a seminar
> sponsored by a joint project between Cornell and the University of London,
> I
> wrote: "One of my deepest regrets that I have developed during the course
> of
> my research is that I am not more versed in the techniques of sociological
> research." I was then engaged in fieldwork in a village in northeastern
> Thailand and realized that I needed quantitative data to complement the
> qualitative data I was gathering using the usual anthropological method of
> participant observation. Bill must have taken my statement very much to
> heart because after he returned from this seminar to Cornell he sent me
> (very much by snail mail in those days) a number of guides to constructing
> demographic surveys. I would go on to carry out three household and
> socioeconomic censuses in this village, including ones during restudies of
> the village in the early 1980s and in 2005.
>
> At Cornell in the early and mid-1960s Bill was working on his magisterial
> study of marketing in China that would result in his articles on "Marketing
> and Social Structure in Rural China" that were published in the Journal of
> Asian Studies. I recall being asked by Bill in a letter to me when I was in
> the field about periodic markets in northeastern Thailand. He was quite
> unbelieving when I reported that there were none. I am sure he would be
> happy to know that in recent decades a periodic marketing system has been
> created, as villagers have found peddlers do not bring a sufficient variety
> of goods to their communities.
>
> Bill had drawn some of his thinking for interpreting the spatial data
> related to marketing in China from 'central place theory', originally
> proposed by Walter Cristaller and made known to English-speaking scholars
> by
> Edward Ullman. I think the fact that Ullman was a professor of geography at
> the University of Washington was one of the reasons why Bill encouraged me
> to accept an offer from UW.
> Bill became one of the major shapers of comparative historical sociology.
> By
> the time I first came to know him, Bill had already carried out fieldwork
> in
> China, Thailand and Indonesia. He went on to add Japan and France to his
> research interests. There can be few social scientists who contributed so
> much to so many diverse fields
>
> Bill is survived by his wife Susan Mann, Professor of History at Davis, by
> three sons, James, Mark, and Jeremy, all professors themselves, and by his
> and Susan's daughter Alison, a choral music conductor.  His eldest son
> Jeffrey died in a tragic accident several years ago.
> I know I speak for others in expressing profound gratitude for his
> inspiration. On behalf of the many who have been his students in one way or
> another I would like to offer deepest condolences to Susan and Bill's
> family.
>
> ______________
> Dr. Justin McDaniel
> Dept. of Religious Studies
> 3046 INTN
> University of California, Riverside
> Riverside, CA 92521
> 951-827-4530
> justinm at ucr.edu
>
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