{
 "schema": 1,
 "id": "who-wrote-it-down",
 "type": "issue",
 "names": {
  "name": "Who wrote it down",
  "said": "An administrator, a doctor, a missionary, an archaeologist"
 },
 "region": [
  "worldwide"
 ],
 "facets": {
  "family": "none"
 },
 "text": {
  "what": "Most of what is known about the stopped traditions was written by the people whose arrival stopped them.",
  "story": "Shway Yoe was Sir James George Scott, who wrote as a Burman and spent his career extending British rule over the Shan States. Leopold Glück was a doctor in occupied Bosnia. Ćiro Truhelka was an archaeologist in the same administration. Hose and McDougall were a colonial officer and a psychologist. The Gazetteer of Upper Burma is a government publication, and in the middle of a paragraph about Chin women's faces it stops to insult them.\n\nThis site uses all of it, because there is nothing else, and it names the writer every time. **The detail is usually reliable and the frame usually is not** — a measurement of a tool, a rate of work, a fee, an age, a sequence, these are the things an observer can get right. Why people did it, what they believed, what it meant: on those, the source is guessing about people it does not respect.\n\nThe Lanna volume in the corpus is the counter-case on this site, and that is why it is quoted at length: same region, same custom, written from inside it."
 },
 "text_th": {
  "what": "สิ่งที่รู้เกี่ยวกับธรรมเนียมที่หยุดไปแล้วส่วนใหญ่ ถูกเขียนโดยคนที่การมาถึงของเขาทำให้มันหยุด",
  "story": "เชวโยคือเซอร์เจมส์ จอร์จ สก็อตต์ ซึ่งเขียนในนามคนพม่าและใช้ชีวิตราชการขยายอำนาจอังกฤษเหนือรัฐฉาน เลโอโปลด์ กลึคเป็นแพทย์ในบอสเนียที่ถูกยึดครอง\n\nเว็บนี้ใช้ทั้งหมดนั้น เพราะไม่มีอย่างอื่น และระบุชื่อผู้เขียนทุกครั้ง **รายละเอียดมักเชื่อถือได้ ส่วนกรอบการมองมักเชื่อไม่ได้**"
 },
 "kin": [
  {
   "to": "shway-yoe",
   "as": "The clearest case.",
   "rel": "person"
  },
  {
   "to": "chin-ming",
   "as": "Where the contempt is on the page.",
   "rel": "tradition"
  },
  {
   "to": "sak-kha-lai",
   "as": "And the counter-case.",
   "rel": "tradition"
  }
 ],
 "sources": [
  "s:shway-yoe",
  "s:gazetteer-3",
  "s:wp-sicanje",
  "s:wp-salvage-ethnography"
 ],
 "provenance": {
  "default": {
   "tier": "inference"
  },
  "fields": {
   "text_th": {
    "tier": "inference",
    "note": "written in Thai by this project, not machine-translated"
   }
  }
 },
 "confidence": "high",
 "tags": [
  "colonial-record",
  "start-here"
 ],
 "updated": "2026-09-19",
 "kin_in": [
  {
   "from": "chin-ming",
   "type": "tradition",
   "name": "Chin facial tattooing",
   "as": "The clearest case of the problem with the only sources there are."
  },
  {
   "from": "sicanje",
   "type": "tradition",
   "name": "Sicanje",
   "as": "Recorded by a doctor and an archaeologist, which is the usual pair."
  },
  {
   "from": "shway-yoe",
   "type": "person",
   "name": "Shway Yoe",
   "as": "And the problem with it."
  },
  {
   "from": "truhelka-gluck",
   "type": "person",
   "name": "Truhelka and Glück",
   "as": "The pattern."
  },
  {
   "from": "exhibited",
   "type": "story",
   "name": "Exhibited",
   "as": "The same problem in another medium."
  }
 ]
}