Pilots of history: Ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology’s explorations of the past
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3521
L’istituzione del Forum Malinowski per l’Etnografia e l’Antropologia in Sud Tirolo fornisce un’ottima opportunità alla rivista della principale associazione antropologica italiana per riconsiderare il significato dell’etnografia, così come intrapresa da Malinowski, in diversi campi di studio, in antropologia e oltre. Uno di questi campi è l’antropologia storica, e la storia stessa nel più ampio senso del termine. Questo articolo cerca di esplorare come l’eredità malinowskiana nel lavoro di campo etnografico potrebbe essere attivata ed elaborata in maniera utile e produttiva nei campi della storia e dell’antropologia storica. A questo scopo, la prima sezione del testo delinea come la nozione di un lavoro di campo empirico, sviluppata da Malinowski, fosse aperta a tutti i tipi d’indagine comparativa interdisciplinare. Alla fine, questi andranno a includere anche la storia, nonostante il risaputo ammonimento iniziale di Malinowski (Firth 2002). La seconda sezione entra nei dettagli del caso dei piloti marittimi e di altri mediatori culturali con esperienza cosmopolita nell’Oceano Indiano, al fine di dimostrare come le intuizioni etnografiche possano sostenere, arricchire e integrare i dati storici e, in assenza di questi, come possano diventare indicatori storicamente rilevanti a pieno diritto. Una sezione riassuntiva sottolinea come tutto ciò porti a nuovi compiti pionieristici per l’antropologia.      
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Eva-Maria Knoll
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Pilots of history: Ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology’s explorations of the past
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                                          2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 27-48




Pilots of history
Ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology’s explorations of the past
Andre GINGRICH
University of Vienna

Eva-Maria KNOLL
Institut for Social Anthropology, Austrian Academy of Sciences




ABSTRACT: The establishment of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and Anthropo-
logy in South Tyrol provides a good opportunity in the journal of Italy’s relevant aca-
demic association for a reconsideration of the current significance of ethnography, as
initiated by Malinowski, for various scholarly fields in anthropology and beyond. One of
these fields is historical anthropology and history in the broad sense of the term. This
article seeks to explore how the Malinowskian legacy in ethnographic fieldwork may be
usefully and productively activated and elaborated for historical fields and for historical
anthropology. For this purpose, the first section will outline how Malinowski’s notion of
an empirical field was open to all kinds of comparative interdisciplinary inquiries. Even-
tually, these also came to include history, despite Malinowski’s original well-known
caveat in his time (Firth 2002). The second section will then elaborate the case example
of maritime pilots as well as other cultural brokers with cosmopolitan expertise in the
Indian Ocean, in order to demonstrate how ethnographic insights may support, enrich
and complement historical data or, if these are absent, how they may become historic-
ally relevant indicators in their own right. A summary section points out that this leads
to pioneering new tasks for anthropology.

KEYWORDS: COSMOPOLITANS, FIELDWORK AND HISTORY, LOCAL KNOWLEDGE, MALDIVE ISLANDS.




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Andre Gingrich, Eva-Maria Knoll
Pilots of history: Ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology’s explorations of the past
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 27-48.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3521
28                                                         ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL




   The establishment of the Malinowski Forum for Ethnography and
Anthropology in South Tyrol provides a good opportunity in the journal of
Italy’s relevant academic association for a reconsideration of the current
significance of ethnography, as initiated by Malinowski, for various scholarly
fields in anthropology and beyond. One of these fields is historical
anthropology and history in the broad sense of the term. This article 1 seeks
to explore how the Malinowskian legacy in ethnographic fieldwork may be
usefully and productively activated and elaborated for historical fields and
for historical anthropology. For this purpose, the first section will outline
how Malinowski’s notion of an empirical field was open to all kinds of
comparative interdisciplinary inquiries. Eventually, these also came to
include history, despite Malinowski’s original well-known caveat in his time
(Firth 2002). The second section will then elaborate the case example of
maritime pilots as well as other cultural brokers with cosmopolitan expertise
in the Indian Ocean, in order to demonstrate how ethnographic insights may
support, enrich and complement historical data or, if these are absent, how
they may become historically relevant indicators in their own right. A
summary section points out that this leads to pioneering new tasks for
anthropology.

1. Oxymoron or continuum?
   At first and second glance, our topic of “ethnography’s relevance for
history” seems to imply a classical oxymoron, equivalent to the relevance of
“mountaineering in Holland”, or of “whale-watching in Switzerland”. By
definition, ethnography always takes place on the ground within a given
present-day horizon – so how can it possibly have any relevance for history
at all, which basically is something different from the present, even if
preceding it as its precondition?

1. Earlier drafts of this text benefited from critical comments and suggestions by
participants to the Third Biennial Anthropological Talks in South Tyrol, i.e. the symposium
on The Malinowskian Legacy in Ethnography, held at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano on
September 21 and 22, 2017, as well as by its hosts, Dorothy Zinn and Elisabeth Tauber.
Comments by two anonymous reviewers were received and integrated with appreciation.
Advice from Michael Young (ANU) on Malinowski’s terminology and from Noura Kamal
(Austrian Academy of Sciences) in identifying the reliable edition and relevant text section
of Ibn Battuta’s work in its original Arabic version is acknowledged with special gratitude, in
addition to David Westacott’s editorial assistance.


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                  29


   This perception of an apparent oxymoron most probably still finds some
considerable support in various corners and arenas of contemporary
anthropology – which, after all, is primarily though not exclusively
committed to the study of contemporary phenomena. A popular academic
version of the “oxymoron perception” would therefore tend to argue that not
only is ethnographic fieldwork carried out within very specific present-day
contexts but, moreover, that this is pursued to elucidate whatever is
happening in the present. According to the oxymoron perception, historical
themes, problems, or puzzles would usually require other methodological
approaches than ethnographic fieldwork.
   In several ways, such popular versions of an oxymoron perception in
contemporary academia echo two main aspects of the established narrative
about Malinowski’s original contributions to British and global
anthropology. First, the introduction of ethnographic fieldwork (and of
practicing participant observation at its core) 2 represented a unique
methodological transformation that helped to set social anthropology apart
from other sub-fields in the social sciences and humanities, as well as from
previous traditions within the discipline known by the somewhat pejorative
terms «museum anthropologists» and, worse, armchair anthropologists.
Second, this transformation placed anthropology firmly within the social
sciences while keeping the historical fields at a distance. Key strands of this
established narrative continue to be valid, but certain elements in it require
refinement and differentiation if they are to remain useful. Two such
differentiations seem to be particularly relevant here. If readers can be
convinced to accept them, then the somewhat too narrow oxymoron
perception may in fact be substituted by a more inclusive «continuum»
perception about ethnography and history. The two adjustments to
established narratives about the Malinowskian revolution in anthropology’s
history proposed here are as follows: first, the methodological innovations
introduced by Malinowski were not quite as “unique” as is often claimed by
the established canon; and second, in his time Malinowski also had valid
political reasons for keeping the historical fields at bay as much as possible.
   The first proposition argues that “field practices” of various kinds had
already become fairly common in the late imperial academic environments
and communities in which Malinowski grew up, i.e. in the Habsburg
Empire’s Galician capital Kraków/Krakau. In fact, the term “field” in
2. Malinowski himself did not yet use the term participant observation, which was
introduced into the social sciences at a later point.

                                      2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 27-48
30                                                          ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


Malinowski’s concept of ethnographic fieldwork was a more or less explicit
allusion to existing notions of the field in methodological academic
discourses of the time. As the son of an established and respected linguist,
the young Malinowski must have noticed that linguistic research, for
instance, took place both in laboratories as well as in field contexts (Young
2004). His subsequent early interests in the philosophy of science emerging
in Cracow, Budapest and Vienna (e.g., Ernst Mach) during his own student
years certainly made him aware of the wide variety of empirical methods of
investigation that were becoming standardized (Thornton, Skalník 1993).
They ranged from laboratory experiments to field experiments and field
trials (Feldversuche) to the study of individual case examples and case
studies. While most of these forms of methodological standardization
became firmly rooted in the natural and life sciences, they also had gained
some ground in the social sciences and humanities as well – such as,
precisely, linguistics (Rupp-Eisenreich, Stagl 1995; see also Stagl 1998). In
consequence, Malinowski used notions of the field in a self-evident manner
throughout the Argonauts volume as his first major ethnographic monograph
(Malinowski 1922).3 Against the intellectual and academic contexts of
roughly the 20th century’s first decade, Malinowski’s subsequent invention
of ethnographic fieldwork as a concept and a method not only built on
important precursors within the anthropological fields (e.g. Lafiteau from
France, Boas from Germany and the US, Glaser and the Heins from Vienna,
to name just a few; see Barth et al. 2005). Perhaps even more importantly,
Malinowski’s revolutionary methodological innovation within anthropology
also interacted and competed with the earlier methodological developments
in the natural and life sciences and in some areas of linguistics (Kuklick
1997). Developing social anthropology as an academic discipline in its own
right in a way necessitated a specific methodological inventory for this new
discipline as a typical set of methodological procedures that spoke to what
already existed elsewhere, and that might also attract some recognition from
there. It has been said that the existing methodological spectrum of
standardized procedures in other disciplines ranged from repeatable
experiments at one pole to singular case studies at the other, with the field
as the crucial set between these poles. In short, some formative ideas in the
Malinowskian notion of ethnographic fieldwork were not unique at all.
3. In Argonauts of the Western Pacific, Malinowski (1922) inter alia refers to «scientific field
ethnology», «field worker(s)», «field work», «ethnographic field-work» and the «field
ethnographer».


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                 31


Moreover, they were not as unilaterally associated with the particular
dimensions in case studies as certain directions in contemporary
anthropology would prefer to have it. In fact, in addition to existing
connections to the strong particular element in case studies (and to a lesser
extent in case examples), a certain emphasis on field trials and field
experiments with explicit comparative potentials was also part and parcel of
Malinowski’s innovation from the outset. Malinowski’s practical and
conceptual innovation of ethnographic fieldwork implied a fairly explicit
allusion to what was understood as a field in other academic disciplines of
his time, where any empirical field always entailed exemplary and
comparatively valid potentials of insights. Those comparative potentials of
the field, however, imply that the main dimensions in resulting insights may
subsequently also be tried out for cases (or subfields) other than the original
fieldwork.
   Our second proposition argues that Malinowski’s strict separation
between history and social anthropology also had important institutional
and political reasons in their time. In institutional terms, the social sciences
in most British and European universities of the early 20th century were a
newly emerging set of academic disciplines that was not yet sufficiently
institutionalized to endure. In contrast, the historical disciplines of the time
(including archaeology and philology) had already been influential in most
parts of academia for at least a century. Insisting on the separate
institutional establishment of the social sciences in university contexts, and
of social anthropology among them, ensured the relative independence
required for an emergent set of disciplines vis-à-vis the other academically
much more established and more influential disciplines. In addition to such
matters of university politics, the 20th century’s early decades also featured
ample examples of wider political dangers whose potential effects upon
anthropology Malinowski sought to minimize. This concerned the specific
ease by which history could be instrumentalized in one way or another for
nationalist interests. Perhaps being somewhat too optimistic about it,
Malinowski attempted to keep the dangers of political instrumentalization at
bay by keeping history at a distance. It is worth remembering that the
apparently implied slogan “anthropologists do not do history” did not
survive Malinowski for long. It was already being undermined by such a close
a colleague of Malinowski’s as Raymond Firth (1959) and his famous re-
study on Tikopia.



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32                                                 ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


   As valid as these institutional and political factors were in Malinowski’s
time, today they do not represent sufficient reason to maintain such a safety
zone between social anthropology and the historical fields. Certainly, the
dangers of political instrumentalization have not gone away, but instead
they have changed while becoming ubiquitous. Because of this, however,
today it would be quite misleading to primarily identify these dangers with
any single academic discipline. More importantly still, social anthropology
and the social sciences in general are no longer the emergent, fragile set of
fields they were in the early 20th century, while the historical disciplines
have meanwhile lost some of the hegemonic position they still occupied a
hundred years ago. In contrast to Malinowski’s time, interactions between
history and anthropology are in fact today tending to become normalized.
They have taken on the same basic status as with any other relevant
discipline – whether it is medicine, environmental studies or, for that
matter, research into the arts or religion. Wherever useful, it has become
normal standard that these interdisciplinary interactions have resulted in
anthropological subfields such as medical anthropology, ecological (or
environmental) anthropology, the anthropology of the arts and of religion,
or historical anthropology.
   Concluding this first section, our two methodological propositions allow
for a respectful appreciation and elaboration of the Malinowskian legacy in
ethnographic fieldwork also at the intersection between anthropology and
history. Wherever it still prevails, an “oxymoron perception” about the
relevance of ethnography for history should be substituted by a “continuum
perception”. Today, anthropology’s previously useful safety zone against
history has become superfluous, since history has attained the new routine
status of one within a continuum of many major disciplines with whom
anthropologists regularly interact. At the same time, a closer re-examination
of contextual conditions for the Malinowskian revolution reveals that, in its
most elementary orientation, ethnographic fieldwork may also be useful
beyond its indispensable, particular present-day contexts in a potentially
comparative manner – i.e., by taking into consideration the comparative
potentials of resulting insights for contexts other than today. As a result,
this opens up perspectives upon similarities and differences between the
present and the past, including possible continuities between both. The
historical and ethnographic case in the following section aims at
demonstrating how this may yield insights that historians could not easily
achieve through their own methodological routine.


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                    33




2. Pilots in Maldivian history

                                       The islands were so low-lying […] that, if it had
                                       not been for the tall palm-trees growing on them,
                                       they would have been virtually invisible4.


   This section will first briefly summarize, by means of an anthropological
reading, what is known from historical sources about the period of early
Islamization in Maldivian history. Second, the argument will proceed to
demonstrate how ethnographic field insights may contribute to shedding
light on local agents in the processes of early Islamization.
   Local sources such as the state chronicle and local legends attribute the
official beginnings of active Islamization in the Maldives to the activities of
one specific Islamic preacher (and “missionary”), Sheikh Yusuf Shams al-Din
of Tabriz, today in Iran, starting in AD 1153 (548 AH). The fact that other
sources give the Maghrebin Abū al-Barakāt al-Barbari as a second name, and
a later date for this at least in some parts of the archipelago, indicates from
the outset that Islamization was not a sudden event, but rather a protracted
process (cfr. Bell 2002: 17; Forbes 1981). We address this process here as the
transitional period of early Islamization. That transitional period began with
an incipient phase during which an initial Muslim minority co-existed
together with the previous, declining Buddhist majority on one or a few
among the Maldivian islands. This incipient phase may have emerged either
around the same time when, or more likely even before the first Maldivian
ruler embraced Islam. Comparable processes may serve as a rough guideline,
such as the Islamization of Yemen in the 7th century or for that matter, the
adoption of Christianity as a state religion in Ancient Rome during the 4th
century AD. From such a perspective, the Maldivian ruler’s conversion (i.e.
“from above”) is likely to have occurred – in addition to being backed by
transoceanic networks of Muslim traders and scholars – not without some
minimum support by pre-existing Islamized segments of the local
population (“from below”). The incipient phase therefore introduced the
overall period of early Islamization. It may have preceded the mid-12th
century for an unknown duration, and it entered into a phase of early growth
together with the first Maldivian king’s conversion. After its incipient and its
early growth phases, the processes of early Islamization on the Maldives

4. Portuguese Valentim Fernandes explaining the fundamental difficulties and dangers to
navigate the Maldive archipelago; written about 1507 and cited in Villiers 1992: 24

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34                                                     ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


gradually approached the next point of historically confirmed culmination
and consolidation in the mid-14th century AD, when the famous Arab
traveler Ibn Battuta (1304–1368) established himself for eight months at the
Muslim ruler’s court in the Maldivian capital Mahal (today’s Malé), taking on
the position of supreme judge and marrying local wives. It is therefore safe
to state that Sunni Islam became the dominant religious denomination
throughout the archipelago between AD 1153 and the mid-14th century (cfr.
Knoll 2018b), i.e. during an incipient phase and subsequent phases of early
growth and consolidation of early Islamization. 5. In view of the scattered
coral island and atoll nature of the Maldivian archipelago, as well as by
assessing parallel historical processes elsewhere in South and Southeast
Asia, a certain differentiation between scriptural Islam and various forms of
popular and folk Islam should also be attributed to Maldivian history of that
period. Those popular and folk elements would also have included elements
from earlier historical periods.
   The period before active Islamization fully set in had been characterized
by predominantly Buddhist influences in the Maldives. This is indicated not
only by archaeological findings, some written sources and coral mosque
architecture (Jameel, Ahmad 2016) but also by the linguistic evidence of, and
in, the Maldivian language (Dhivehi), which is related to Sinhala. That
earlier, predominantly Buddhist period may also hypothetically be seen as
characterized by a spectrum from certain centers of scripturally informed
piety to wider fields of folk and popular religious practices. The Maldives’
Buddhist period thus had received some main inspirations from Sri Lanka in
the northeast, whereas the archipelago’s subsequent early Islamic period
received some decisive influence originating from Arabia and the Gulf in the
northwest (it seems that the Indian mainland played no important role in
early Islamization on the Maldives).
   Located at the very center of the Indian Ocean at the crossroads of major
maritime trading routes, the Maldives were positioned at the intersection of
co-existing and rival cross-continental networks and flows of ideas, objects,
practices and persons – one of these sets of flows gradually losing its earlier
hegemony, while the other set was gradually taking over. As argued
elsewhere (Gingrich 2018a), this particular incipient phase of the tran-
sitional period during (and perhaps also before) the 12th century was

5. At first the Maliki direction of Islamic jurisprudence prevailed; in the 16th century,
however, the Maldives moved to the Shaf’i madhhab. This linked the archipelago to the
Shaf’i Muslim communities of the Indian Ocean littoral while distinguishing them from the
majority of Hanafi Sunnites among the Indian subcontinent’s Muslims (Dunn 2005: 231;
Forbes 1981: 60).


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                      35


characterized by denominational co-existence in the Maldives, combining a
diminishing Buddhist majority with a growing Muslim minority. This must
have been the local and regional setting that either stimulated the first
Muslim preachers to come, or that followed their initial success. Together
with some inferences from socio-cultural anthropology, this view of a local
transitional period in the Maldives in the 12th century, if not much longer
before and afterward, primarily is derived through locally rooted historical
evidence, including archaeology and linguistics.
   The insight of a Maldivian transitional period first mentioned in written
sources by the mid-12th century receives additional substantiation through
historical Arabic evidence about the gradual expansion of various sets of
Middle Eastern influences and flows in the medieval 6 Indian Ocean world, up
to the point that they constituted fairly stable maritime networks. These
medieval maritime activities of Middle Eastern origin across the Indian
Ocean go back to at least 500 BC and apparently had intensified by the 9th
century AD, while the Arabic-Islamic Empire reached its peak (Forbes 1981).
That empire’s subsequent partial stagnation and disintegration became
intertwined with the Crusaders’ confrontation in the north, and at a later
point with the Mongol invasion from the east and northeast. Long-distance
Arab maritime interests had thus increasingly shifted to the south,
meanwhile taking the southern Red Sea shores, South Arabia (i.e. Yemen
and Oman) and the Arab/Persian Gulf regions as the decisive threshold
zones for maritime departure and return. A number of technological
advances further facilitated these navigational movements to the south
along the shores of east Africa, and into the southeast, i.e. to South and to
South East Asia. Between the 10th and the 15th century, long-distance
“Arabic-Islamic” navigation thereby acquired a certain form of hegemony in
the Indian Ocean. Less expansive but similar movements co-existed,
emanating from certain regions in East Africa, South China, as well as South
and Southeast Asia. Commercial interests, including the slave trade as an
important part, were certainly a central driving force in these Arab-Islamic
endeavors. Military activities (e.g., guards for slaves, escorts for emissaries)
frequently accompanied commercial interests. Scientific curiosity and
religious interests in Islamization were important but secondary (and
sometimes instrumental) to this (Gingrich 2018a, 2018b).
   Following the annual monsoon rhythms, medieval “Arabic-Islamic”
navigation in the Indian Ocean world eventually promoted, and to an extent
resulted in, the establishment of temporary and more permanent residence
in many of those distant but key destinations. This in turn led to local

6. In the present text this contested term is used as a shorthand reference to the periods
between the 9th and the 15th century AD.

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36                                                       ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


intermarriage7, a web of trading exchange, the spread of Islam and the
ensuing steady increase of pilgrimage to Mecca, while all these processes
were accompanied if not preceded by the emergence and dissemination of
various hybrid forms of lingua franca such as Kiswahili or Malay. These
medieval “Arab-Islamic” movements across the Indian Ocean certainly had
Arabic-speakers and Muslims at their core, but they also included Jews,
Christians and other believers, as well as speakers of other first languages.
Certain source materials (e.g., the India Book among the 10/11th-century
Cairo Geniza documents; see Goitein, Friedman 2008) indicate that most of
these Arab-Islamic expeditions were not initiated by states or governments
but by private enterprise. The ships’ captains and their leading crew
members (including the interpreter and navigator, and probably including a
few junior assistants) by necessity had to be experienced as regular sailors
but often they were also literate, moving in more or less fluctuating
networks of ships’ crews. In sum, they represented a relatively affluent elite
of “big men”8 aboard these ships: men with a solid amount of cross-
continental, technical and intercultural knowledge who may for their time
be characterized as cosmopolitan (Hannerz 1990).
   A certain level of fairly regular, shorter or longer visits by cosmopolitan
Arabic-Islamic maritime sailors and merchants since at least the 10th
century AD therefore provided the more immediate background to the local
Maldivian transitional period identified for the mid-12th century or longer.
On their routes to the southeast, these ships would rarely stop at the
Maldives but would prefer the easier winds and access attracting them to Sri
Lanka’s and southwest India’s river mouths. For their return routes from
South East or South Asia, however, final destinations in South Arabia or the
Gulf that combined with the prevailing winds made a stopover in the
Maldives (or a passage through one of its maritime channels) almost
unavoidable. If at first these almost unavoidable stops were only for food
and water, the ensuing opportunities for trading with the locals were not
missed. It was thus only after Southeast Asian destinations had become a
relatively stable element in Arab-Islamic medieval navigation (Tibbetts

7. Already in late pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, Arab merchants and sailors had
settled and intermarried with local womenfolk of the Indian Ocean coastal regions. In
certain cases, new ethnic and cultural groups emerged from these trans-local and trans-
cultural relationships, such as Kerala’s Mappila by the 7th century or the Islamicised Malay
(Forbes 1981: 66-68).
8. Most of these crews were normal sailors as the regular counterpart to the “big men” on
board. Their numbers, fluctuations and respective backgrounds still lack any detailed and
substantial research.


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                       37


1979) that the Maldives became an unavoidable maritime point of passage
(i.e. mostly in the direction from the southeast to the northwest) of the eye-
of-a-needle type. Since these distant destinations in South East Asia only
became regularly relevant after somewhat longer periods of maritime
interaction, this may help to explain the comparatively late official dates of
active Islamization by preachers on the Maldives.
    Historical source materials therefore permit an anthropologically
informed conclusion to the first part of this section on early Islamization in
the Maldives by combining locally rooted and Arabic historiographical
evidence. A transitional period in and possibly beyond the mid-12th century
was marked by a shrinking Buddhist and a growing Muslim presence and co-
existence in crucial parts of the archipelago, including Malé as a main port.
The emerging Muslim presence developed from a minority to a majority in
central locations and institutions, and it was the local answer to, as well as
the cross-continental by-product of, the growth of the eventually hegemonic
Arabic-Islamic maritime interactions in the Indian Ocean world, primarily in
their return directions from South East Asia after the 10th century. Regular
Maldivian stopovers by the cosmopolitan elite players in Arab-Islamic
navigation had resulted in shorter or longer sojourns, trading and
intermarriage.
    The second part of this section will now pursue the question of local
players in early Islamization and thereafter. From an anthropological
analysis of historical sources we have concluded that in addition to foreign,
locally active Arabic preachers, processes of early Islamization also involved
some of the Muslims from among the elite cosmopolitans who opted for
shorter or longer sojourns on the Maldives on their return trips from South
East Asia. The first part of the answer concerning local Maldivian agents in
early Islamization can be deduced from the historical evidence by means of
anthropological knowledge and ethnographic insights into Islamization
processes in Asia. In addition to the officially converting king, local women
and girls who agreed to marry a foreign Muslim cosmopolitan – or at least
should have agreed according to Shari’ah law – in all likelihood belonged to
the first local (or: “bottom up”) Maldivian proponents of Islamization 9. This
set in with greater certainty on the occasion of their marriage if they
themselves converted to Islam, but also to some extent if they did not.
Within both possibilities and regardless of whether their superregional

9. As testified by Ibn Battuta’s personal case, many if not most of these marriages were of
the temporary or so-called muta’ type (Ibn Battuta 1996:13). This does not exclude the
possibility that some marriages were concluded as permanent from the outset.

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38                                                 ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


husbands settled down for longer or shorter intervals, these women would
inevitably seek to become more or less intimately acquainted with the basic
standards and priorities of a Muslim lifestyle on a daily, seasonal and annual
routine in terms of food taboos and fasting, hygiene and sex, ritual and
ceremonies. Many of them probably benefited from their elitist spouses’
affluence, those of them who converted were eligible for mahr (bride-wealth;
ran [gold] in Dhivehi), and once they had children all of them felt responsible
for ensuring their offspring’s inheritance claims in terms of paternal Islamic
family law. Social status, claims on inheritance for children, and sometimes
eligibility for mahr thus provided additional incentives for some interest in
maintaining an Islamic lifestyle on the Maldives under the conditions of
early Islamization in its incipient and early growth phases. In a
methodological sense, this first part of our answer about local Maldivian
agents has drawn on local ethnography (participation in weddings), on the
comparative insight rooted in ethnographic fieldwork by other researchers (as
summarized to an extent by Goody 1990, but also available through the work
of e.g., Altorki, El-Solh 1988, and others in the anthropology of gender in
Islam).
   Cosmopolitan Muslim travelers with some form of residence in the
Maldives not only had temporary local female partners (wives or slave
concubines) in their domestic and local social lives. They also had various
crucial male associates in their local professional lives. Local female partners
of cosmopolitan Muslim travelers, as well as these travelers’ regular local
business associates, may therefore be regarded as local cultural brokers. The
external cosmopolitans would not have become as successful as they did
without personalized, local acceptance and support. In that sense, the “big
men” from far away depended on the open-minded benevolence and
hospitality of local women and men as cultural brokers (who eventually
developed some cosmopolitan skills themselves through these regular
interactions with specific individual foreigners). This leads to the second
part of our answer about certain local agents and cultural brokers in early
Islamization in the Maldives. In line with the overarching focus on
ethnography in this article, we shall leave aside all other professional
associates (e.g., interpreters, traders, crafts’ specialists) in order to
concentrate on those who become visible for us in Maldivian history when
considered through the lens of ethnographically informed observation and
interpretation.




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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                           39


   As observing passengers on many local boat passages across the open sea
between the Maldivian atolls and across their inner waters and lagoons 10, it
became evident to us that most of their captains or first mates worked with
no other means than their own and their crew’s practical expertise and
experience. Without such contextualized maritime experience and local
environmental skills, it is impossible to avoid underwater coral elevations
and to safely find the few existing passages through a reef and across the
lagoon. Captains of fishing boats, ferries and all other means of local
maritime transportation – not yet equipped with GPS – have to rely on
precise local knowledge of these highly dangerous waters, tides, currents and
shoals.
   As already mentioned, the Republic of Maldives is a coral island
archipelago of 1192 individual islands and islets, grouped in a chain of
twenty-six natural atolls, which further contain coherent reefs, isolated
blocks of coral, sandbanks, lagoons and tidal shallows. Under medieval
conditions of navigation, it thus also seemed indispensable for any foreign
captain to take a specialist Maldivian pilot aboard 11. Our ethnographic
observation guided the subsequent re-consultation of historic sources,
which revealed precisely that.
   Overwhelmed by their unique geography, Ibn Battuta describes Dhíbat al-
Mahal (the Maldive Islands12) as


10. This refers to travels and sojourns we made between 2004 and 2018, i.e. an
anthropologist specializing in Arab cultures of the Middle East and with an interest in
history (Gingrich 2018a, 2018b; Gingrich, Haas 2015) and a medical anthropologist with a
regional focus on the Maldives. Andre Gingrich spent a net total of six months in the
Maldives, mostly in the southernmost atolls but to a lesser extent also in the archipelago’s
central and northernmost parts, and primarily as a companion of his wife Eva-Maria Knoll.
She carried out fieldwork in ten of the twenty administrative atolls investigating the
biosocial impact of the blood disorder thalassaemia (2017a, 2017b, 2018a) and aspects of the
history of the archipelago (2018b and under review ). Having spent a net period of eleven
months in the Maldives she is currently continuing her research in outer island locations,
focusing on the intersection of genetic responsibility and remoteness.
11. During the heyday of European expansionism certain “pilots” also served as kind of
navigators for merchant ships. They were often of European origin and especially in demand
if they had previously been on an Indian voyage (see the remark by the Archaeological
Commissioner of Ceylon H.C.P. Bell in Pyrard 1887: 13, FN 1). By contrast, the pilots we
address in this article are natives and local experts with seafaring skills, who are highly
specialized in their immediate environmental surroundings.
12. Earlier accounts in Arabic had referred to the Maldives by other terms, e.g. as part of al-
Dībājāt.

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40                                                          ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL



       one of the wonders of the world and [they] number about two thousand in all.
       Each hundred or less of them form a circular cluster resembling a ring, this ring
       having one entrance like a gateway, and only through this entrance can ships
       reach the islands. When a vessel arrives at any one of them it must needs take
       one of the inhabitants to pilot it to the other islands. They are so close-set that
       on leaving one island the tops of the palms on another are visible. If a ship
       loses its course it is unable to enter and is carried by the wind to the
       Coromandel coast or Ceylon (Ibn Battuta 1953 [1929]: 241).

   Missing one of the archipelago’s larger navigable channels and being
carried away across the Laccadive Sea was not uncommon (cfr. Villiers 1992:
24). Much worse still, a ship running off course might strike a reef. An early
16th-century roteiro (Port.: maritime guidebook, naval handbook) in Spanish
illustrates this danger for ship, crew and merchandise. It
       advises ships’ captains who find themselves approaching Maldivian waters by
       mistake, either for lack of wind or through bad steersmanship or because of the
       strong currents, to send a skiff ashore to fetch a native pilot who can guide the
       ship into one of the navigable channels between the islands, and, until the pilot
       comes on board, to stand the ship off at some distance from the shore (ivi).

   Maldivian history is interspersed with shipwrecks to such an extent that
the anthropologist Clarence Maloney (1980: 4) reckons «shipwreck as one of
the factors contributing to the cultural complexity and civilizational growth
of the country». François Pyrard de Laval, for example, a chronicler in a
French merchant expedition to the East Indies was shipwrecked on a
northern atoll in 160213. Lacking the services of skilled Maldivian pilots to
navigate the treacherous reefs and shoals, one of the two expedition ships,
the Corbin, ran onto a reef and sank. The tragedy began when – after having
crossed the Indian Ocean – the Dutch and English pilots aboard the two
ships had a «great dispute» on their actual location. Pyrard reports:
       we sighted at a distance great reefs, which surrounded a number of small
       islands […] We saw little boats, which seemed willing to approach and pilot us
       – as indeed, I afterwards learnt from the natives was the case; but our General
       would not wait, and imprudently took no notice of them.

     The expedition’s intention was


13. Involuntarily spending five years in the archipelago, Pyrard became the Maldives’ most
prominent castaway. He managed to master the local language Dhivehi, became acquainted
with the Sultan and the local aristocracy, and in his memoirs, some 260 years after Ibn
Battuta’s first detailed description, he provided the most comprehensive historic account on
socio-political life in the Maldives.


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                        41



      to pass by the north of these island, between the head of them and the coast of
      India; but, on the contrary, we were running right into the midst of them to our
      peril. […] all who have the duty of navigation in those parts must cautiously
      avoid the dangerous banks and reefs from a hundred leagues off, if he can,
      otherwise there is great risk in passing through these islands without losing
      your ship (Pyrard 1887: 49-51).

  Embarking from the Maldives five years later a wiser Pyrard once again
emphasized:
      The passage between the islands is very dangerous, by reason of the reefs and
      banks, which are exceeding numerous; and no one would dare to steer through
      them without having native pilots, as we then had (ibidem: 321-322).

   A Maldivian pilot interacting with foreigners thus has to be envisioned as
a seasonally active specialist who had acquired his expertise through
growing up in, and growing into specific micro-environments of the
archipelago’s waters.      This amounted to long periods of (informal)
apprenticeship of the type commonly known from the transmission of
knowledge in specialized skills and crafts across generations (see e.g.
Gingrich 1994). Their expertise would be based on the acquisition of explicit
and tacit knowledge, primarily as an accompanying personal assistant on a
tuna-fishing boat and probably to one or a few senior pilots. As an
established maritime expert in dangerous but unavoidable regional waters,
such a senior pilot thus would have to guide a large foreign ship through safe
waters into a lagoon and to one of the few major Maldivian ports. Operating
on a seasonal basis, these pilots by necessity would interact with foreign
cosmopolitans more regularly than many other Maldivians, they would have
to master at least a minimum of communication with them, and they would
owe at least some of their income to these activities 14. Together with
members of their own household and those of their junior assistants, these
pilots – to a certain extent embodying the role of local intercultural brokers
– would therefore develop a clear interest in the maintenance of regular
interactions with foreign cosmopolitan seafarers, many of whom were
Muslims. Some of these local maritime intercultural brokers would tend to
appreciate interactions with their cosmopolitan counterparts to the point of
identifying with their values and beliefs.

14. For the Maldives, historical evidence regarding the exact payment or remuneration of
such native pilots for the pre-colonial periods is still lacking. For subsequent centuries,
maritime historians may be able to gather additional information from extant logbooks. For
other maritime pilots in the western Indian Ocean during the pre-Ottoman centuries, see
also Lunde (2005) and Tibbets (1971) with references to Ibn al-Mājid’s remarks from the
15th century AD on local pilots in the Red Sea and Gulf waters.

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42                                                 ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


   Anthropology has a fairly rich record in small-island studies, ranging from
pioneers in the British tradition, such as Malinowski on Trobriand, Radcliffe-
Brown on the Andaman Islands, or Firth on Tikopia, to US research
endeavors such as Margaret Mead on Samoa or Julian Steward’s Puerto Rico
project (also including Sydney Mintz and Eric Wolf as young participants), to
equivalents in French and German speaking anthropology. Several of these
records also include coral islands and other dangerous maritime shores,
which is why the basic significance of pilots in such waters is common
knowledge in general socio-cultural anthropology. In contrast, the figure of
the local pilot is largely unfamiliar to most historians, except for highly
specialist experts in pre-modern maritime history. It is therefore no
coincidence that an emphasis on local environmental knowledge, which in
this case addresses maritime pilots, is almost a self-evident routine for
anthropology’s ethnographic orientation. On the other hand, although
relevant historical sources offer many biographical details about
cosmopolitan knowledge, and historians are well versed in interpreting it,
those sources hardly ever mention local pilots at all and general historians
rarely consider the few sections of text that do.
   It takes the results of participant ethnographic observation to make the
relevant point. Whenever foreign crews tried to reach the Maldives in
medieval times, by necessity they must have been assisted by local pilots.
This is a class of ethnographic cases whose necessity in fact is stronger than,
and thereby overrides, the opaque contents of most relevant historical
sources here. In fact, ethnographic insights in the present demonstrate this
necessity to such an extent that it may be attributed an almost experimental
status, elucidating an obscure historical source situation. If many local or
cross-continental historical sources do not mention local pilots, then they
obviously conceal or ignore local expertise: this in turn is another good
reason to question the frames, narratives and biases in those sources.
Simultaneously, anthropologists and their colleagues in other fields are
encouraged to re-read and re-interpret existing sources with the fresh focus
gained from an ethnographic perspective that concentrates on the small
details that often tend to escape the historians’ gaze. In a methodological
historical sense, ethnographic insights thereby have a twofold potential.
They may either represent a historical source sui generis, as long as they
indicate a binding necessity of occurrence in the past (regardless of whether
or not they are confirmed by other sources), or they may serve as guidelines
to re-examine existing other sources to confirm such evidence that has
hitherto escaped much scholarly attention.


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                             43


   It therefore requires an ethnographic perspective to search for such
seemingly small details in certain passages of text and then sometimes to be
fortunate enough to actually find what one has been looking for. In fact, this
may be the brief and modest remark in Ibn Battuta’s travel accounts of his
first visit to the Maldives from Malabar in AD 1343:
      When a ship arrives near one of these islands it must of necessity have a pilot
      from among its natives15 (Ibn Battuta 1996: 3; see Dunn 2012: 230).

   This section in Ibn Battuta’s travel accounts has been edited, translated
and published, but its significance for a historical analysis of early
Islamization on the Maldives has so far not been recognized. Comparative
anthropology and ethnographic insights do help to clarify what has so far
escaped historians’ attention with regard to crucial local players in the early
Islamization in the Maldives.

3. Re-reading historical sources
   We know today that, with regard to history, over most periods of academic
developments in the 20th century, British and French anthropology pursued
trajectories that were quite different from developments in US and German-
speaking anthropology. In their most enduring and influential
manifestations, British and French anthropology tended to favor presentist
and social science approaches, while US and German-speaking
anthropologists mostly prioritized historical approaches in the discipline
(Barth et al. 2005). These tendencies seem to have prevailed until the 1970s
and 1980s, but they have receded since then. From a present-day perspective
rooted in today’s global and transnational academic professionalization of
anthropology, these (quasi-) national differences of the past can no longer
be assessed and treated as matters of principle. Instead they are best seen as
useful forms of an earlier, bygone global division of labor in anthropology, as
long as it lasted. Within international anthropology before the end of
colonialism and the gradual emergence of a global anthropology, one group
therefore primarily elaborated various trajectories toward historical
anthropology while the other group pursued paths toward the anthropology
of the contemporary world. Even in their time, these differences were not as
absolute as some of their advocates thought. For British anthropology,
Firth’s early introduction of re-study approaches as tools for assessing
continuities as well as processual changes has already been mentioned.
Since the 1930s, the main representatives of what after 1947 became the

15. In Arabic, the author writes dalīl min ahlihi – literally, «a guide from (among) its people»,
see Ibn Battuta (IV), Arab. ed. 1997: 53.

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44                                                 ANDRE GINGRICH, EVA-MARIA KNOLL


Manchester School in anthropology were taking current and recent changes
under the impact of colonialism into their analytical consideration (Evens,
Handelman 2006). In many ways, Jean and John Comaroff’s work
subsequently continued and elaborated those impulses (Comaroff, Comaroff
1991a, 1991b), while works by Eric Wolf (1982), Sidney Mintz (1986) and
others pioneered historical approaches to the emerging anthropology of
translocal connections, leading up to globalization studies. Ever since the
accomplished works of Jack Goody (1987, 1990) were published, new
paradigms for historical anthropology also have been established for
European-based research. Historical anthropology today is a wellrecognized
and respected subfield of the discipline on a global scale.
   This was the wider disciplinary background against which in this article
we have sought to demonstrate that, and how, relations between
ethnographic fieldwork and historical anthropology no longer need to be
misinterpreted as an apparent oxymoron. Discussing certain aspects of
Maldivian history as a case example, the ensuing argument has outlined how
ethnographic results in fact sometimes provide additional insight that may
either inspire the critical re-reading of existing historical sources, or deliver
new insights that help to question and even to override the sources so far
available. In turn, the argument concluded that certain ethnographic
insights will have to become accepted and respected by the historical fields
as historically relevant source material sui generis – regardless of whether they
are confirmed, have not yet been or never will be confirmed by any available
textual evidence. Such a methodological emphasis in historical anthropology
is part of a wider, interdisciplinary ambition, which is also shared by
representatives of other fields in historical research, to undermine any clear-
cut distinction between written and oral history, as well as between
language-based forms of historiographic sources and other (non-verbal)
historically relevant source materials.
   By re-considering and developing the Malinowskian legacy in
ethnographic fieldwork, anthropologists may therefore remain faithful to its
core methodological elements while opening up its significance for historical
anthropology as much as for new interdisciplinary endeavors, with a special
focus on the native’s point of view. Certain unknown or little understood
aspects of history will in fact benefit from the new ways by which the results
of ethnographic fieldwork are made useful for understanding them, whether
that is through fieldwork on the ground in the same region or if it is
translated from comparable cases. If pursued in a transparent and coherent
manner, ethnographic fieldwork insights may thus shine new light into some
of the darker and little explored corners of history. In these ways,
anthropologists themselves may become pilots of history.


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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                   45



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PILOTS OF HISTORY                                                                      47


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 Eva-Maria KNOLL is a Senior Researcher at the Institute for Social Anthropology,
 Austrian Academy of Sciences, and a Collaborator in the SSHRC Partnership on
 the Indian Ocean World with McGill University, Canada. Her research interests fo-
 cus on medical anthropology at the intersection with life sciences, health-related
 mobility, and tourism. Currently she is investigating the biosocial impact of an in-
 herited blood disorder (Thalassaemia) in the Republic of Maldives, with a focus on
 questions of health equity and of interdependencies between remoteness and ge-
 netic responsibility. She currently is co-editing a volume on disease dispersion in
 the Indian Ocean World, has contributed the entry on the Maldives to the Oxford
 Research Encyclopedia on Asian History, and recently published “Archipelagic
 Genes: Medical Travel as a Creative Response to Limitations and Remoteness in
 the Maldives”, Asia Pacific Viewpoint, 58, 2, 2017: 148–61.
 eva-maria.knoll@oeaw.ac.at
 Andre GINGRICH is a member of the Royal Swedish and of the Austrian Academy of
 Sciences, where he is the founding director of the Institute for Social
 Anthropology. His fieldwork primarily took place in the Arab peninsula, with a
 focus on socio-cultural settings in south west Arabia and their history. He also has
 published extensively on the history of anthropology, including its methodological
 inventories such as ethngraphy and comparison. Among his most recent book
 publications is Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities (co-edited with Ulf
 Hannerz, The University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). Some of his works also were
 published in Italian, such as Storie dell'antropologia. Percorsi britannici, tedeschi,
 francesi e americani (co-authored with Fredrik Barth et al., Seid Editori 2010).
 andre.gingrich@univie.ac.at




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Andre Gingrich, Eva-Maria Knoll
Pilots of history: Ethnographic fieldwork and anthropology’s explorations of the past
2018 | ANUAC. VOL. 7, N° 2, DICEMBRE 2018: 27-48.
ISSN: 2239-625X - DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-3521
