methodology will not check that drift. Even the most careful, disciplined, expert, and perceptive scholarship will be unable to do so, although without such care and expertise matters would be worse. The problem is most acute in history, but most easily diagnosed. Visualize the historian’s job of pursuing information along a chain of documentary reports, each document adding its quantum of value bias, imperfect perception, incomplete description, subjective categorization, and so on. These are normal hazards of the historian’s trade, and he negotiates them as best he can. Always he seeks to overcome these difficulties of concrete, artifactual data and, as it were, enter the subject’s mind. Consider now the problem faced by a European historian trying to gather data on, say, the history of a colonial possession of his own country. One set of sources derives from those individuals whose participation in the events under study would ordinarily persuade the historian to rely most heavily on them for primary data. But they write in non-Western language and script, convey the beliefs and values of a non-Western culture, and are likely to evince rather consistently negative bias against the occupying power, its agents, and their actions. By contrast, there is an abundance of easily available records written in the historian’s own language by a group of his own countrymen whose ordinary bias is inflated by racial, cultural, class, and patriotic prejudice. The historian must thus choose between two kinds of account, each with an opposing bias. Not surprisingly, he is likely to accept the bias of his own countrymen, whose material he can deal with in terms of known means of judging evidence. He can, as it were, enter their minds. However carefully he may avoid contaminating his work with his own attitudes, the bias has entered it even so. The shelves of colonial and non-Western history contain rather few works by Europeans who are familiar with the non-Western language and culture of their area, and fewer still by colonials themselves. Instead, we have a vast literature written by colonial administrators-turned-historians, with titles like “My Ten Years among the Dyaks.” There is also an abundance of strongly biased writings by trained historians from the occupying nations, works very aptly described by Van Leur as history “written from the deck of the ship.”3 Hence we see the importance of a handful of studies written by non-Western historians, mostly after independence has been attained, studies