Enfolded Histories

I’ve been teaching my own courses for the first time since January this year — something I’ve found enormously rewarding and quite a lot of fun.

Designing classes has me reaching back to a classic essay which remains a favourite of mine: Carlo Ginzburg’s “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method” published in English in the History Workshop Journal in 1980. Beginning with a discussion of the so-called “Morelli method” (in judging the truth of an Old Master, look not to the most temptingly replicable masterstroke but rather to the lesser details), Ginzburg argues for the methodological starting point to be the seemingly trivial. In tracing trivia, we actually tracks signs, hints, threads — ones leading from the small to the big. Teaching students whose last experience of history was in school, this method — discovering in tangible things abstract historical forces — works better than anything else. In class we have followed the Yuu app through DFI to Jardine Matheson to the Opium War to the Canton Trade: I will show you opium in a handful of apps.

Of course Singapore is perfect for this. A palimpsestic urban landscape — with so many surprising, odd, incongruous forces fossilised under a rationalising veneer — there is endless capacity to find the deeply strange in a superficially familiar place here.

I spent a fantastic bit of time in New York last year at the Rockefeller Archives Center. The RAC has now published a short piece of mine on how their archival holdings help understand the history of Malayan disease ecology, with two climacterics for Rockefeller engagement in Malaya: first in the 1920s, then again in the 1950s. The piece is available here.

Reading: Margaret Chan’s superb work on theatre and tang-kis in Singapore; Lu Pan’s excellent book on the 70’s Biweekly; and David Edgerton’s Rise and Fall (2018).