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IN MEMORIAM
Patrick L. Amin Sweeney
Professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies, Emeritus
UC Berkeley
1938 – 2010
Professor Amin Sweeney died on November 13, 2010, at his home near Jakarta. A renowned scholar of Malay/Indonesian studies, he joined the University of California faculty in 1977 after seven years as Lecturer/Associate Professor at the National University of Malaysia. He was Professor of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Berkeley, until his retirement in 1999, serving as departmental chairman from 1987 to 1990. At Berkeley, Professor Sweeney introduced innovative classes on Southeast Asian shadow play traditions, Malay and Indonesian literature, and oral performance that attracted talented students and brought the study of Malay culture to an international and interdisciplinary audience.
Amin was born Patrick Louis Sweeney on December 13, 1938, in southeast London. Dropping out of school before he finished his A-levels, Sweeney became a sergeant in the Royal Army Educational Corps and was sent to Malaya in 1958. After two years of national service, he took local release from the British army and remained in Malaya to work first as a public relations and security officer on an irrigation project, then as headmaster and teacher in private secondary schools. He converted to Islam, married the daughter of a Kelantan shadow theatre dalang, and applied for Malay citizenship. In 1963-64, he served as private tutor to the Crown Prince of Kelantan after finishing his own A-level studies in English, History, Economics, and Malay.
In 1964, Sweeney returned to London to complete his education at the University of London School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS). Sweeney’s extraordinary fluency in the language, literature and culture of Malaya earned him a part-time Lecturer position while still an undergraduate studying Arabic and Dutch. He received a first class honors B.A. degree in Malay/Indonesian Studies (with Classical Arabic minor) in 1967. That same year, the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, Malaysian Branch (JMBRAS) published Sweeney’s first scholarly essays, which were critical of Dutch colonial studies of “classical” Malay literature and which offered a re-visioning of the relationship between an orally-oriented manuscript culture and a print-literate one.
At SOAS, Sweeney held Department of Education and Science Grants from 1964-70 and was awarded the London-Cornell Grant for doctoral dissertation research from 1968-70. Under the supervision of Professor C. Hooykaas, Amin completed his doctorate in 1970 with a dissertation on the Malay shadow play, which he had learned to perform during his time in Kelantan. He accepted a position at National University of Malaysia in 1970, where he taught and continued his own research in oral traditions. His innovative seminars sent students back to their home provinces, armed with tape recorders, to collect stories. His 1972 article, “Some Suggestions on the Collecting of Oral Literature (with Special Reference to West Malaysia)” is still cited today as a basic text for field methodology seminars.
Along with his continued regular contributions to JMBRAS, Professor Sweeney’s books began appearing in 1972: Malay Shadow Puppets (London: British Museum), and The Ramayana and the Malay Shadow-play (Kuala Lumpur: National University of Malaysia Press). In 1976, he also wrote, co-directed, and narrated “The Shadow-plays of Asia,” a film sponsored by UNESCO and the Center for East Asian Cultural Studies in Tokyo.
During his Berkeley years, while actively engaged in teaching, advising, departmental and Academic Senate administrative work, Professor Sweeney traveled back and forth to Malaysia to continue his fieldwork collecting materials that provided the substance of the courses he taught and the many books, articles and critical editions of primary texts he produced. In rapid succession, his groundbreaking books appeared through the University of California Press: two titles in 1980, Authors and Audiences in traditional Malay literature and Reputations Live On: an early Malay autobiography; and in 1987, A Full Hearing: orality and literacy in the Malay World. In all of his work, Sweeney challenged the categorical divisions into which colonial scholars and their local continuators had fixed and trivialized Malay literature.
When Amin Sweeney arrived at Berkeley in 1977, oral literature controversies and methods were shaking up the approaches taken by classically-oriented philologists and medieval scholars in language and literature departments toward their subjects. The intellectual ferment of Berkeley offered Sweeney the challenge he had long sought and Sweeney brought a breath of fresh air to orality-literacy debates among scholars of ancient traditions and dead languages. For Sweeney, the questions were alive. No theoretical orthodoxy or literary critical fashion could sway him from his well-grounded empiricism. He saw no great divide between the oral and the written, the high and the low, or the traditional and the contemporary, or between philology and critical theory. His work broke down boundaries and bridged disciplines. Pushing the edge, always wary of any trend toward doctrinaire hegemonizing theories, he favored self-aware research methods embedded in a “full hearing” of the culture and its linguistic registers.
At Berkeley, he was in the forefront of interdisciplinary teaching and collaborative work with students and colleagues in multiple departments (particularly rhetoric and music, near eastern studies, folklore and anthropology). He initiated an interdisciplinary team-taught seminar called “Oral Noetics and Poetics” that was one of the first sponsored by the Townsend Humanities Center. Funded by a Mellon grant for preparation of curriculum materials that engaged the musical and rhetorical dimensions of oral tradition research, this was team taught with Bridget Connelly (Rhetoric) and Ben Brinner (Music) several times. Sweeney’s book, Malay Word Music, which he wrote in the context of that seminar, appeared in 1994. Endeavoring to capture the flavor of a Malay storyteller whose performances he had followed for many years, he offered an experimental translation informed not only by his rich knowledge of Malay oral and literary traditions but also by James Joyce. Always interested in exploiting the latest software, he took on design and layout of the book, which was published in Malaysia by the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka.
After retiring from Berkeley, he devoted his full energies to exactly what he loved: bird-watching, gardening, and producing philologically exact texts and translations. When he died, he had just completed a bilingual anthology of the poems of Taufiq Ismail and was at work on the fourth volume of his critical edition of the complete works of Munsyi Abdullah, who bore the appellation, “the father of modern Malay literature.”
Amin Sweeney’s work achieved almost legendary status in the Malay/Indonesian world. Word spread via internet almost immediately: Amin is dead. On-line tributes appeared internationally. The editorial board of Indonesia and the Malay World issued a well documented bio-bibliography in June 2011 (“Amin Sweeney: 1938-2010,” 39:114, 317-325). Through the 1990s and up until his death, Sweeney’s publications constructed “platforms from which to address much bigger questions of scholarly approaches to dealing with Arabic in a Malay-world context, and Sufi influences in Malay poetics.” (320). In the spring of 2012, the Universiti Kebangsaan, Malaysia’s Institute of Ethnic Studies held a seminar to celebrate Amin’s 50 years’ work devoted to the study of the Malay world. Speakers from around the world assembled to give tribute to his formidable achievements and to participate in the seminar called “Setting the Story Straight: Amin Sweeney, Malay Culture and the Malay World.”
Professor Sweeney is survived by his wife, Sastri Sunarti Sweeney, their daughter Fauzia Maíre; as well as his daughter, Maria; his son, Abdul Mubin, and six grandchildren.
Ben Brinner 2013
Bridget Connelly