Dr Marina Kaneti is an Assistant Professor at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy. Her area of research centres on global governance and questions of migration, climate and geopolitical developments.
She has explored the influence of China around the world, including the Belt and Road initiative. Recently, she produced a two-part documentary series titled “
The Seas That Bind Us and Define Us”, exploring maritime heritage and its significance in Asia.
She joins us to talk about maritime heritage, exploring the shaping and impact of narratives, and implications for the present and beyond.
Marina Kaneti: Maritime heritage came as a little bit of an afterthought because I was looking at how China crafts a narrative about the Belt and Road Initiative. And if you remember early on when the Belt and Road Initiative was first announced, it was announced as a Silk Road continuation, a Silk Road for the 21st century.
A lot of that conversation around the Silk Road and around a historical connectivity that has lasted for over 2,000 years is something that was very prominent in the Chinese narrative but was not picked up by a lot of the analysts and a lot of the observers of the Belt and Road Initiative.
I wanted to understand what is this narrative and what does it mean in the context of other countries, of other communities who can also claim the history and memory of connectivity, not necessarily as the China narrative, but more of their own version of it?
Whether it was in India, Indonesia, Cambodia, Malaysia, Vietnam — or Central Asia for that matter as well — wherever you go in the region, there is a very good sense that there indeed is a history of connectivity, but that history sounds very different from where you sit, whether you're in Kerala in India, or in Ternate in Indonesia, or some other places.
In an attempt to make these other narratives visible because there are many of them, I started dabbling into visual politics, so to speak, and also trying to create a visual archive of these other narratives of transboundary connectivity. Because as much as the Chinese narrative is very prominent and very powerful, and this idea of the Silk Road is something that has been with us for quite some time, these other narratives are also there, and they're also extremely meaningful and very powerful.
Part of that work led to collaborations with different scholars and different communities. In February earlier this year, we organised a Maritime Heritage Workshop. Because maritime heritage is another way of talking about these different narratives and these different memories that exist in this region.
This is how this maritime heritage concept came about, not necessarily my own way of thinking about these interactions, but definitely something that's out there and something that I'm not the only one who tries to understand.
David Austin: It is a very interesting topic, especially as you say that, for China, it's such a dominant messaging tool that they're adopting right now. Are any other regional governments taking a similar tack to propose their narrative?
Marina Kaneti: Yeah. There are quite a lot of efforts in this area and they're both on government level and also on local community level.
So, I've been tracking quite extensively how the Chinese narrative triggered similar narratives in Indonesia and also in India. And you might be aware, for example, that Prime Minister Modi during the G20 meeting announced the revival of maritime heritage for India making it a priority.
And this is not the first time there has been a push in India to develop a conversation around maritime heritage. It's a very complicated conversation to have in India, although to others this might look quite bizarre, because if you just look at India, you would never think that maritime heritage requires a special conversation, right?
India is surrounded by water. But nevertheless, maritime heritage is something quite complex in the Indian context.
In Indonesia, things have been a little more centrally driven by the government. So back in 2015, 2016, there was the launch of the Maritime Folk Room conversation where Indonesia wanted to position itself as the centre of maritime interactions and given its positioning, really that would not have been so much of a problem because with so many islands and archipelagic structure, it is central to a lot of the interactions in the Indian Ocean world.
And so, they have launched a spice route initiative that is gaining speed. It's very much supported by the Ministry of Education and Culture. But in Indonesia also, because there are so many islands and so many different histories and memories, I know of a lot of communities who developed their own versions of what the past is, and which past should count. And so, it's a very productive space to do work in. And I have also started teaching a class around this at the Lee Kuan Yew School.
So, my students now are leading the conversation in many ways. I'm not alone in trying to think about how heritage, whether it's maritime heritage or heritage overall, is being co-opted for geopolitical purposes to make statements about how countries, governments, position and legitimise their international foreign policies.
David Austin: Wonderful. Has anything come up in discussions with your students that you find particularly interesting?
Marina Kaneti: A lot of things. I think I can spend probably two, three hours just talking about the type of work that the students have completed. The course is called Geopolitics of Heritage.
I started teaching it last year and the students blew my mind away with their projects. I had a project on orchid diplomacy, which is something very well known in Singapore, but not necessarily if you're not in Singapore, so there was a project on orchid diplomacy projects on Koh-i-Noor, that's the diamond that perhaps needs to be returned to Pakistan, or perhaps to India, or maybe it should keep staying on the British crown? That was a very interesting project.
This year, I also have some fantastic projects. One of the courses was on Ladakh and the India-China border disputes. There's a project on maritime heritage with students examining the Bali Yatra, which is a maritime festival in India, sending boats and connecting to Bali, to Thailand and to other areas, and taking on this maritime heritage link.
David Austin: That's really nice to hear the diversity of different ideas. And I'm sure you must have students from all over the world as well, all bringing their different perspectives to it.
Maybe now would be a good time to talk about some of the ways that you're documenting these visually, digitally, I know you've produced a two-part docuseries. How are you documenting it in different ways and what are you hoping to achieve with that?
Marina Kaneti: One of the ways in which I work, and perhaps this is my distinguishing trait — I brand myself as a visual scholar, and as a scholar of visuality. So, I use my data. And the way I work with this is through visuals. Whether we are talking about documentation of public displays, museum exhibits, public campaigns, or any other visual representations associated with maritime heritage, or with Silk Road heritage, or any other memories, I try to develop a database, a visual database that is actually already an open source. Others can access it and look through it and see what was presented as a narrative about the Silk Road or the Maritime Road or others.
Because we live in a visual world. We think visually. We need to know, and I think it's almost natural for us, although this is a podcast, right? But we often need to know what things look like. Unless we know what they look like, we can't really conceptualise them very well. By just listening or just by smelling or thinking or reading about them, we are very much part of a visual world.
And so, what does it look like to talk about the 21st century Silk Road or what does maritime heritage look like? These are questions that I'm trying to understand. What does global order look like? As part of this, I try to develop these visual archives. And a natural extension of that was also developing documentaries that capture some of the experiences and narratives that come from local communities.
This is also how we got to these documentaries that we released this year around maritime heritage. So, the first focuses on what is maritime heritage and the fact that there is no definition of maritime heritage. It is very different depending on who you talk to. And the second one is really around heritage digitisation.
Because I'm not the only one, of course, who thinks about preservation of heritage through digital means. But there are a lot of pitfalls associated with this. So, we thought it's very important to have a documentary that talks about this. What gets digitised and what gets remembered and known.
Because it is now part of a digital universe that we can all access.
David Austin: What are some of the pitfalls that you've encountered?
Marina Kaneti: I would say you have to watch the movie.
First of all, it is very difficult for anyone to decide what exactly needs to be digitised.
Of course, those who digitise all the information, all the data out there, whether it's in the form of mosques or objects that they found or perhaps digitising some oral histories, they will tell you that they're trying to digitise everything. And technically we have no reason to not believe them, but it is impossible to digitise everything.
It is still impossible to digitise, for example, smell, and we know very well that, let's say, if we're talking about heritage that's associated with cooking, with herbs, with spices, smell will be a very important part of that memory and that heritage that you will not be able to capture.
Same thing with memories. How are you going to capture memories? How are you going to digitise memories? This is one of the aspects that, again, is quite well covered in that movie. And the other problem that comes from this is that ultimately when you're making a choice of what to digitise, you are creating a new repository of knowledge.
And those who have the power to create that repository of knowledge essentially have a power over all the means of knowledge that we'll have. And to some people that smells a little bit like neo-colonialism, because these systems of knowledge creation, particularly in this part of the world, are nothing new.
There were very many different systems of knowing, of understanding the world around us, that were lost because of colonialism. And so, some people are very wary that by digitising heritage, even the best intentions in digitising heritage might produce a new version of skewed knowledge that also not everybody will be able to access, of course.
David Austin: That is a good teaser for the documentary, and we will encourage everyone to go watch it. Are there certain fault lines that you see developing between the contested histories of the different narratives? Are there certain themes that run through it? The colonial theme is one, but are there any others that you have noticed and that you're documenting?
Marina Kaneti: The first one will be around who tells the story. And I spoke a little bit about the story that a state, a government tells us about the past. And it is often the case that this is a very different story from what a community wants to tell you.
Or sometimes there are also stories that are not even in the community because that community has been made so invisible that you don't even know where to find them.
I took my students not too long ago to St John's Island, with an amazing professor from the NUS Department of Southeast Asian Studies. And he was telling us the invisible history of St John's Island, not only the history of immigration at St John's, because St John's was the station where all the immigrants or travellers would have to quarantine for a certain period of time. So, in many ways St John Island was a version of Ellis Island or Angel Island in the United States, which was quite fascinating because you never hear about this history. Or we also don't know about the history of the Orang Laut, who were in many ways inhabiting not just St John's Island, but a lot of the islands around Singapore, and were made to move into HDB flats and leave the island.
These different histories of the past are often lost in conversations about maritime heritage and who can make a claim to maritime heritage. So that's quite interesting.
There are also, and I've spoken to many people in Indonesia about this, there are also very different histories if you live inland and particularly in high up in the mountainous regions versus if you live on shore. So again, talking about Indonesia having a maritime heritage, perhaps it gives more credit to people who live on the shore rather than those who live inland.
But then if this is a maritime heritage about the spices, because it's a spice route, then are you talking about the coast or are you talking about inland where the spices were grown? So, it becomes a very complex narrative and again, there is a danger that people who have more access to resources, more visibility (again visibility is very important), will end up creating a dominant narrative rather than allowing a space for different narratives to coexist.
And finally, perhaps the biggest narrative that comes out, whether we are talking about maritime heritage, or we are talking about the Silk Road, this intent of creating a vision of an interconnected world does not mesh very well with the notion of the state and the nation. Because all of these past connections happened outside the framework of the state and the nation, particularly the nation.
There is a very complex fine line that governments need to walk when they're trying to claim the past, but at the same time claim it as part of their sovereign identity.
It becomes quite fascinating, and now I'll give you an example. It's actually in the first episode, another teaser for the documentaries.
One of the professors that we are interviewing talks about this community in Sinkawang, which is in Indonesia. And this is a Hakka community that over a hundred years ago went to this part of the island of Kalimantan and created their own communities in Sinkawang. So, they created a kingdom there.
Not China, not Indonesia, not Kalimantan. That's their own Hakka kingdom. The fascinating part is that the Chinese community there adopted a lot of the local traditions. So, there is a kind of synergy between the local Dayak community and the Hakka community in a way that is not China, not Indonesia — again it's something very specific to there.
This is a story that of course is not the only story. This has happened over and over again in different parts of this Indian Ocean world. But it doesn't mesh very well with the sovereign state of Indonesia or China. And so, there's a danger of us getting these histories completely lost and not understanding actually the nature of mobility that existed across this Indian Ocean world.
I think the other thing to be said here is that it is too early to know how this will impact international relations in the future.
And that is because international relations are obviously not driven only by these connections to the past. There is a lot in the past that is necessary to develop a sense of legitimacy and to craft a sense of purpose. And we know this not just from the Belt and Road Initiative, we know this from pretty much every other war that happens around the world today.
There's always a sense of or claim to some past that needs to be acknowledged, claimed, and upheld. And so, I don't think that the Belt and Road in any way is unique in that manner.
However, what is very unique to the Belt and Road is that first of all it tries to develop a linkage, right? So, connectivity, a global connectivity. Rather than saying, “This territory is exclusive to us because we have been there in the past,” the Belt and Road narrative is, “We have been always connected and we want to be connected for the future.” So, this is a very powerful imaginary of a global connectivity.
What is missing from that imaginary is that although the Belt and Road tries to portray this as a very peaceful way of coexistence, if we look at the past, we will know very well that this was not a very peaceful type of coexistence. And that's where some of the danger is. Revivals of the past or drawing on the past may turn into, as Karl Marx would say, first a tragedy and then a farce.
And so, we need to be very careful about that.
David Austin: What's next for you? What are you working on now? What's the next project that we can look forward to seeing?
Marina Kaneti: So, some of my work now is focused once again on the Belt and Road Initiative. And I'm looking at migration on the Belt and Road Initiative because now that the Initiative has been around for 10 years, there's a little bit more evidence and a little bit more information on the type of migration that has happened along the Belt and Road.
And I don't mean so much the people-to-people connections that the Chinese government likes to talk about, and that actually has been quite well researched already. My interest is more into the labour relations that have emerged as part of the Belt and Road Initiative and the impact the Belt and Road Initiative has had on migrant workers.
One of the main aspects of labour migration, especially, is around the question of protection of migrant workers. And my hope is that this work around protection of migrant workers will also extend to questions around protection of migrant workers beyond the Belt and Road Initiative. And to merge this in conversations about protection of migrants and migrant workers with changing environmental and climate emergencies that we will be experiencing more and more.
And so, this is my next iteration of looking at the intersections of global governance, migration, visuality, and world order, so to speak.
David Austin: Thank you very much for sharing that with us. I really enjoyed it. It was very nice talking to you.
Marina Kaneti: Likewise, David. Always nice to talk to you.