Helen Creese, Bali in the Early Nineteenth Century, The Ethnographic Accounts of Pierre Dubois, Leiden, Brill, 2016

Sastrawan Wayan Jarrah. Helen Creese, Bali in the Early Nineteenth Century, The Ethnographic Accounts of Pierre Dubois, Leiden, Brill, 2016. In: Bulletin de l'Ecole française d'Extrême-Orient. Tome 107, 2021. pp. 407-409

History and Time in Traditional Texts of Equatorial Southeast Asia

Historical texts written in traditional genres of equatorial Southeast Asia, such as hikayat and babad, are a vitally important source for the study of the region’s history, especially for the period between the 16th and 19th centuries. Despite this, professional historians have often doubted the reliability of indigenous texts and are reluctant to value them as highly as European and Chinese sources. This thesis addresses the issue of how modern historians’ judgements about reliability of indigenous sources are closely related to how time is organised within those source texts. Its major finding is that these judgements implicitly assume that chronological organisation is a prerequisite of historicity. When indigenous texts exhibit chronological organisation, historians tend to treat them as historically reliable, but when the texts exhibit other forms of temporal organisation like genealogy, they tend to be seen as unreliable. This finding is reached through a structural analysis of three historical texts from across the region: the Malay Sulalat us-Salatin, the Balinese Babad Dalem and the Javanese Babad Tanah Jawi. The thesis deploys an original framework to analyse the temporal organisation of these three texts. This framework treats historical time as being constituted by particular ‘technologies’, such as era, calendar and genealogy, each of which produces its own temporality within the text. The thesis reassesses existing debates about the historicity of these three core texts, in order to show the correlation between the use of chronological technologies in a particular text and the positive judgement by historians of that text’s historical reliability. Hence, the multiple temporalities in the historical texts of equatorial Southeast Asia challenge the privilege that the conventional historiographical model gives to chronology. These texts can therefore serve as a basis for expanding these conventional criteria for what counts as a valid historical text, to better encompass the diversity of historical writing in this region

Novel precision control techniques in a trapped Yb+ ion implementation

Precise control of quantum systems is vital to scientific and technological progress, including the realisation of quantum computation and simulation, record-breaking timekeeping and positioning applications. Control of quantum systems is hampered by the effects of random environmental or hardware noise, which leads to unknown deviations from the system's desired evolution. This thesis presents a set of interaction-focussed methods for improving precision control, tailored to the problems of quantum error suppression and stabilisation of oscillators, which share a common basic structure. These methods are based on a theoretical framework called the filter-transfer function formalism, which expresses the convolution of user-applied control and random noise in the language of spectral filtering. This powerful and accessible approach is experimentally verified in this thesis, and is used to formulate novel control techniques and improve on existing ones. This thesis experimentally demonstrates the effectiveness of novel composite pulse schemes for suppressing error in quantum bits. Furthermore, the thesis derives and demonstrates a novel predictive technique for stabilising oscillators by means of combining multiple frequency measurements against a quantum reference. The thesis therefore advances the theoretical understanding of a frequency-domain formalism for noise-affected quantum systems, on which basis it presents and demonstrates novel and improved techniques for mitigating the effects of such noise on the user's precision control over the system

The Precarious Past: Historical Practices in Indic Java

Java is a major Southeast Asian culture that was strongly influenced by Indic cultural forms between the fifth and fifteenth centuries CE. The Indic Javanese practised history. Their texts are crucial sources for the region’s past. In some ways, these texts satisfy our expectations of how history ought to be done, but in other ways, they defy them. There is a serious gap in our understanding of why the Indic Javanese practised history as they did. This thesis addresses that gap. It puts forward and justifies an original theory of historical practice, by applying historical and philological methods to the inscriptions and manuscripts of Indic Java. The thesis presents extensive empirical evidence for Indic Javanese historical practices, furnished with new translations and interpretations of a wide range of textual sources. The key theoretical finding of the thesis is that historical practices are fundamentally shaped by the conditions in which texts are created, preserved, and transmitted. The thesis explains how textual forms, textual modes, and the materiality of texts played decisive roles in the practice of history. At the centre of this theory is the realisation that, for the Indic Javanese, the past was precarious. This precarity was due to the difficulty of preserving and accessing original written sources, which in turn generated contradictions within the historical tradition. The findings of the thesis have significant implications. By understanding why the Indic Javanese practised history as they did, we can better interpret their texts and thereby improve our knowledge of Java’s history. These implications go beyond the Javanese case, because many other premodern societies pose similar challenges to our understanding of historical practice. The thesis thus makes innovative contributions to historical theory and methodology in general

L'éruption cataclysmique de 1257 CE du volcan Samalas (Indonésie) révélée par des sources écrites locales: royaumes oubliés, réponse aux situations d'urgence et relèvement de la société

International audienc

Deadliest natural disaster in Balinese history in November 1815 revealed by Western and Indonesian written sources

International audienceIn November 1815, the deadliest “natural” disaster in Balinese history was caused by the exceptional combination of multiple natural hazards that occurred simultaneously and cascaded in the present-day province of Buleleng. This major disaster, which is thought to have claimed more than 10,000 lives, has never been scientifically analyzed. The study conducts an in-depth analysis of this cascading disaster, from the root causes and chronology of natural hazards to their environmental and societal effects, by thoroughly examining all available written sources about this event, whether colonial or Indonesian. Seven months after the Tambora eruption, a magnitude 7.3 earthquake, which occurred in the Bali Sea off the northern coast of the island, triggered a very large landslide on the northern flank of the Buyan-Bratan caldera. The initial mass movement evolved into a cohesive debris flow that reached the sea after traveling up to twenty kilometers through Banyumala River Valley and Singaraja City downstream. According to historical accounts, fifteen villages were buried or devastated by the debris flow. The large volume of sediment entering the sea triggered a local tsunami along Buleleng’s coast. This geohistorical approach offers a comprehensive overview of various sources describing Singaraja’s situation before the crisis, the hazard succession, the cascading hazard intensities, and the short- to long-term impacts on Buleleng. Based on the written sources, Bali took around fifteen years to recover from the 1815 disasters