ABSTRACT
This chapter wonders what would become of history if we were to not rely on her material matters but instead take her very presence for core archive. Our starting point is a manuscript written in Cham—the language of the eponymous Muslim diaspora in Buddhist Cambodia—refracting the image of history as “road.” Yet, as the text itself cannot be read, as the road can’t seem to be found, the manuscript calls upon the ethnographer to watch for more than information, content, or symbols. Could the manuscript be not about history but just history herself? Might the Cham historical orientations at stake here eschew documentation, foregrounding a radical practice of history instead? I ask: Is there a way for anthropologists of history and historians of anthropological bending to let the absence of concrete do its own work: to present history by herself, for herself, on her own ground?
