The Leaves of Knowledge: Reframing Palm-leaf Manuscripts as Epistemic Craft in Southeast Asia

Abstract (English)

This paper reframes palm-leaf manuscripts—known locally as lontar in Indonesia, bai lan in Thailand and Laos, and kraing in Cambodia—as a form of epistemic craft. While these manuscripts are often approached through textual, religious, or historical lenses, this paper foregrounds their making as an embodied, skilled, and relational process that sustains situated knowledge systems. Drawing on a comparative review of literature from across Southeast Asia, it examines how palm-leaf manuscript traditions are embedded in diverse cultural meanings and treated variously as sacred media, heritage artifacts, or commodified objects.

Across the region, palm-leaf manuscripts follow distinct trajectories that reflect broader dynamics of cultural continuity and adaptation. In Cambodia, they are no longer actively produced but continue to be preserved as sacred ritual objects. In Laos and Indonesia, the tradition remains vibrant, with manuscripts still copied or newly composed for religious and educational purposes. In places such as Bali and Chiang Mai, palm-leaf manuscripts have also entered the tourism domain, where miniature versions are commodified as souvenirs and decorative items for tourists and collectors.

These diverse settings reflect not only changing social roles for manuscripts but also enduring craft practices that sustain their material and epistemic life. In these contexts, the craft of producing palm-leaf manuscripts involves selecting and preparing leaves, inscribing text with iron styluses, blackening the script, and maintaining the manuscripts through ritual care—practices that embody knowledge, express ethical relations with materials, and reflect systems of transmission grounded in ritual, ecology, and cosmology. When removed from ritual environments and recontextualized as touristic objects, however, these practices often undergo aesthetic simplification or symbolic detachment, raising questions about what is preserved, transformed, or lost in the process. This paper intervenes in anthropological understandings of craft as a site of knowledge-making, arguing that palm-leaf manuscripts are not static textual archives but dynamic material practices through which cultural values, cosmologies, and artisanal knowledge are crafted, sustained, and reimagined.