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From Myth To History: Yap Ah Loy And The Heroic Past Of Chinese Malaysians, Sharon Carstens

Anthropology Faculty Publications and Presentations

The exploration of differing historical interpretations has become an area of growing interest to anthropologists and historians alike, who have come to recognize that diverse interpretations of the same events can create as powerful a force for future actions as the events themselves. Following this approach, history becomes not so much a narrative progression of events, as shifts in meaning structures over time. The impact of such a perspective on scholars of Southeast Asian societies has led to both an increasingly critical use of colonial sources as well as to renewed interest in native or indigenous documents. We have also …