Southeast Asian Studies: Debates and New Directions 9789812306517

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SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

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The International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS) is a postdoctoral research centre based in Leiden and Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Its main objective is to encourage the study of Asia and to promote national and international co-operation in this field. The geographical scope of the Institute covers South Asia, Southeast Asia, East Asia, and Central Asia. The institute focuses on the humanities and the social sciences and, where relevant, on their interaction with other sceinces. The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) was established as an autonomous organization in 1968. It is a regional research centre dedicated to the study of sociopolitical, security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia and its wider geostrategic and economic environment. The Institute’s research programmes are the Regional Economic Studies (RES, including ASEAN and APEC), Regional Strategic and Political Studies (RSPS), and Regional Social and Cultural Studies (RSCS). ISEAS Publications, an established academic press, has issued more than 1,000 books and journals. It is the largest scholarly publisher of research about Southeast Asia from within the region. ISEAS Publications works with many other academic and trade publishers and distributors to disseminate important research and analyses from and about Southeast Asia to the rest of the world.

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IIAS / ISEAS Series on Asia

SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES

EDITED BY

CYNTHIA CHOU AND VINCENT HOUBEN

International Institute for Asian Studies, The Netherlands

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Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore

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First published in Singapore in 2006 by Institute of Southeast Asian Studies 30 Heng Mui Keng Terrace Pasir Panjang Singapore 119614 E-mail: [email protected] Website: First published in Europe in 2006 by International Institute for Asian Studies P.O. Box 9515 2300 RA Leiden The Netherlands E-mail: [email protected] Website: http://iias.leidenuniv.nl All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies. © 2006 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore. The responsibility for facts and opinions in this publication rests exclusively with the editors and contributors and their interpretations do not necessarily reflect the views of the policy of the publishers or their supporters. ISEAS Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Southeast Asian studies : debates and new directions / edited by Cynthia Chou and Vincent Houben. 1. Southeast Asia—Study and teaching. 2. Southeast Asia—Research. I. Chou, Cynthia, 1963– II. Houben, Vincent. DS524.7 S721 2006 ISBN-13: 978-981-230-384-4 (soft cover — 13 digit) ISBN-10: 981-230-384-7 (soft cover — 10 digit) ISBN-13: 978-981-230-385-1 (hard cover — 13 digit) ISBN-10: 981-230-385-5 (hard cover — 10 digit) Typeset by Superskill Graphics Pte Ltd Printed in Singapore by Photoplates Pte Ltd

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CONTENTS

List of Contributors

vii

Preface

ix

1. Introduction Cynthia Chou and Vincent Houben

1

2. Southeast Asia: Personal Reflections on a Region Victor T. King

23

3. Region, Academic Dynamics, and Promise of Comparitivism: Beyond Studying ‘Southeast Asia’? Robert Cribb

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4. Towards Multi-Laterality in Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from Japan Yoko Hayami

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5. The Academic’s New Clothes: The Cult of Theory versus the Cultivation of Language in Southeast Asian Studies Martin Platt

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6. Rethinking Southeast Asian Politics Duncan McCargo

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7. Reconceptualizing Southeast Asian Studies Cynthia Chou

123

8. Southeast Asian History: The Search for New Perspectives Vincent Houben

140

9. Film, Literature, and Context in Southeast Asia: P. Ramlee, Malay Cinema, and History Timothy P. Barnard

162

Bibliography

181

Index

197 v

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS

Timothy P. Barnard is Associate Professor in the Department of History at the National University of Singapore. His research interests focus on Malay identity and the use of literary sources to better understand its developments in a historical context. He is currently working on a history of Malay film. Cynthia Chou is Associate Professor and Head of the Southeast Asian Studies programme at the University of Copenhagen. She is an anthropologist by training. Her research interests focus on the Malay world and includes studying centre and periphery relations, indigenous communities and the relationship between movement and identity constructions. She is author of Indonesian Sea Nomads: Money, Magic and Fear of the Orang Suku Laut (2002), and co-editor of Tribal Communities in the Malay World: Historical, Cultural and Social Perspectives (2002 with Geoffrey Benjamin) and Riau in Transition (1997 with Will Derks). Robert Cribb is Senior Fellow in Indonesian History in the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. His research focuses on modern Indonesia, especially issues of violence, criminality, national identity, environmental history and historical geography. He is the author of Gangsters and Revolutionaries (1991) and the Historical Atlas of Indonesia (2000). Yoko Hayami, Professor at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, received her Ph.D. in anthropology from Brown University. Her research interests include ethnic minorities in Thailand and Burma, religious practices, gender studies, minorities and nation-building and ethnic minorities across borders. Vincent Houben is Professor of Southeast Asian History and Society and current director of the Institute of Asian and African Studies at Humboldt University Berlin, Germany. His research interests include the modern history of Southeast Asia, comparative history, the history of colonialism and economic history of Southeast Asia, Indonesia in particular. vii

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viii

List of Contributors

Victor King, Professor of South East Asian Studies. He is also currently Chair of the Asian Studies Panel in the United Kingdom’s Research Assessment Exercise for 2007–08 and Director-General of the White Rose East Asia Centre (a joint arrangement between the Departments of East Asian Studies at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield). His current research interests include general social and cultural anthropology of the region, the relations between anthropology and development, ethnicity, identities and tourism as well as youth and the middle class. His recent publications include Anthropology and Development in South-East Asia: Theory and Practice (1999), and with William D. Wilder, The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia: An Introduction (2003, reprint 2006). He is the general editor of the Routledge series, The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia. Duncan McCargo is Professor of Southeast Asian politics at the University of Leeds. His interest include contemporary Thailand, processes of political transition and reform, the political role of the media, and issues of identity and religion. His recent books include Media and Politics in Pacific Asia (Routledge 2003), Rethinking Vietnam (edited, Routledge 2004) and The Thaksinization of Thailand (co-authored, NIAS 2005). Martin Platt has been a teaching and research fellow in Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Copenhagen since 2003. His research interests include literature, modern literary movements, and language and society, particularly in Thailand, Burma, and Indonesia, as well as Southeast Asian film. He is currently completing a book on modern Isan writers and the role of their work in Thai national literature and its development.

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PREFACE

The genesis of this volume stemmed from a panel discussion on “Reconceptualizing Southeast Asian Studies” that we convened at the International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS 3) in Singapore in 2003. The International Institute for Asian Studies and the National University of Singapore were the co-hosts of this large gathering of research scholars from centres of Asia and Asian Studies from all over the world. The overwhelming turnout for our panel presentation and the lively discussion that ensued clearly indicated that there was widespread interest among the practitioners of Southeast Asian Studies concerning the status and future directions of their field. This volume thus began with putting together selected material from that panel discussion. To the extent possible, the selected papers have been revised and updated to include recent developments that highlight the role, relevance, and challenges that the field of Southeast Asian Studies faces at the time of this book going to press. For reasons of expense and logistics, it is regrettably the case that there will always be a limit as to the number of our peers and colleagues making it to any one common sitting for an informed discussion. Hence, for the discussion to widen, we invited colleagues who were not present at that particular meeting for their contributions, too. The discussion during ICAS 3 included many people, all of whom helped us place Southeast Asian studies in a broader perspective. In producing this volume, we want to express our appreciation to Professor Wim Stokhof, Director of the International Institute for Asian Studies, and Mrs Triena Ong, Head of the Publications Unit in the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), and for their invaluable support in overseeing the production of this book. Grateful acknowledgement is also due to the editorial staff at ISEAS for their skilled attention to the details and design of this volume. We also wish to thank Dr Deborah Johnson, Markus Reichert, and Bettina Schwind for their energy and assistance in tying up the loose ends of this volume.

Cynthia Chou and Vincent Houben May 2006

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Introduction

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1 INTRODUCTION Cynthia Chou and Vincent Houben

Southeast Asian studies today is being reconfigured. Its intellectual landscape has been grafted with many new and exciting developments over the last century. Publications on the region from various disciplines offering different theoretical perspectives have grown by volumes. Many of these works contain better-informed ethnographic content and reflect much greater theoretical sophistication. Southeast Asian studies have also been an epicentre for theoretical knowledge production. It has made crucial contributions with analytical categories such as “agricultural involution”, “thick description”, “theatre state”, “imagined communities”, “galactic polity”, “geobody”, “weapons of the weak” and “moral economy”, all of which have become key concepts in the social sciences. Yet, the status of Southeast Asian studies today varies within different settings around the world. On the one hand, the field of study is flourishing in some parts of the world, yet ironically it is seemingly declining in other locations. In many institutions across the globe, the field of study is prone to intense debate. It is promoted as an emerging and important study programme in some areas, yet it is also anxiously talked about in many other quarters as a “small and endangered subject”. In the past few years, the structural underpinnings of this field of study have been challenged by questions such as, “What is the relevance of the area studies approach to Southeast Asia?”, “Does it not simply focus on specific issues that only serve to foster ideological and theoretical particularism?”, “Is there utility in 1

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maintaining an institutional structure to support an area studies programme?”, and “What is the economic rationale of having such a costly area studies programme that has countless regional languages and seven national languages drawn from four distinct families?” In Southeast Asia, new programmes of Southeast Asian studies have been established. New positions have been created and a spirit of optimism prevails. National policymakers recognize the need for acquiring solid knowledge about the region itself. This awareness has been fuelled by urgent social, political, and economic demands. Things of great magnitude are happening in the region itself. International attention has been transfixed on the social, political, economic, and technological developments in the region. The Internet and e-mail revolution has enabled one and all within and beyond the region to communicate with each other on a daily basis. The speed and volume of news and information flowing in and out of the area have been phenomenal. In the aftermath of the Cold War, technological advances as well as the easing of earlier political and economic barriers have enabled the region to increase its global economic and cultural networks. Simultaneous to such moves are tremendous parallel domestic social, political, and economic developments. Upheavals and dislocations have also arisen in the course of adjustment to this international integration. International excitement has been aroused over the newly open political landscape and path-breaking collective “people’s power” in the region. The unimaginable has become a reality. From Cambodia, the Philippines, Indonesia to East Timor, the world has witnessed processes of democratization never thought possible before. This is not to say that all is well for the region and that no problems exists. Rather, it is the case that national policymakers of the region have pinpointed that it is the very mission of “Southeast Asian studies” to address these outstanding problems. In religion and culture, the upsurge and penetration of global forces from fundamentalist Islam and terrorism have given rise to as yet incompletely understood trends which are of domestic as well as international concern. The outbreak of SARS and bird flu along with deforestation and the recurrent regional “haze” have posed massive public health and often inter-related environmental problems of global magnitude. Political leaders and ordinary people from all over the world, shaken by the tsunami, are making Herculean attempts to rebuild all that have been washed away. What has sometimes been called “The Asian catastrophe” has been a global calamity too. These current events, transitions, and transformations in the region form a laboratory for articulating new concepts for the understanding of the dynamism of the area with relevance also for the rest of the world. Global and

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regional developments such as these have raised the profile of the region, bringing it to the attention of broad public and professional audiences around the world. In contrast, faculty advertisements for Southeast Asianists in the West, particularly in Europe, are fewer nowadays. There has, in the past few years, been a drastic loss of tenured positions dedicated to Southeast Asian studies. The number of replacement positions has also been dismal. Once the incumbents retire and if replacements are hired at all, it is highly likely that the positions will be downgraded from tenure to junior-level positions. Needless to say, there are insurmountable difficulties in maintaining centres of Southeast Asian studies when retiring scholars are not replaced at all. Already, problems in the transition from one generation to another, are occurring in some institutions. The main problem is the generation gap between the senior scholars recruited in the 1970s and the present upcoming group – the field is very weak in the forty to fifty-five year age groups. Serious budget cuts also result in a serious loss of expertise. Programmes that are maintained by only one- or two-full time staff members face the impossibility of being able to offer comprehensive courses covering a wide range of themes. It is clear that this is a cause for major concern for the future. Yet another challenge is that of the dwindling investment of resources into this field of study. The problem is especially acute for language instruction. Universities, even those with well-established programmes are very reluctant to support instruction in less commonly taught languages. Enrolments and the number of students who successfully graduate from the courses are deemed always to be insufficient for the programmes to be costeffective. Due to the overall lack of financial resources, it is often the case that budgets are also lacking for research in distant locations. This inevitably poses hurdles for scholars to undertake fieldwork and to maintain their linguistic skills. With these new developments in Southeast Asian studies, it is thus timely that we provoke conversations among the practitioners of the field of Southeast Asian studies to think about their area of study and its place in the international academy. In view of the prevailing intense debate on the merits and deficiencies, as well as the relevance and irrelevance, of the area studies-approach to Southeast Asia, let us begin our discussions with two questions: “Which directions should we undertake to create an essential research agenda for Southeast Asian studies in the coming period, say, the first half of this century?”, and “Is there a ‘right’ approach to this field of study?” It is worth commencing our deliberations by tracing and assessing the development of Southeast Asian studies since its inception in the 1950s.

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DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE 1950s 1950s: UNCLEAR BOUNDARIES Southeast Asian studies programmes have evolved from disparate origins. Historically, it arose out of colonial interests wanting to assert their imperial influence in the Far East. Southeast Asian studies in itself was not a fullfledged programme because of its unclear boundaries. The states of Southeast Asia were but a part of “Greater India”, “South of China”, or in the case of Vietnam, the “smaller dragon”. It was thus under the umbrella of Oriental studies that the study of the region was approached by way of reading piecemeal accounts and reflections of scholar-administrators, missionaries, and travellers. The French were singularly focused on Indochina, while the British concentrated on Malaya and Burma, and the Dutch on the Indies. Orientalist paradigms dominated the writings of the colonialists and their main interest centred on how Western concepts could be applied in Far Eastern cultures and societies. Institutions of Oriental Studies during this period were set up to meet the practical needs of the colonialists and much emphasis rested on language training to meet the need for expertise in the relevant vernacular languages of the colonies. The Ecole des Langues Orientales Vivantes in Paris, presently known as INALCO, was founded in 1795. In 1916 and the late nineteenth century, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and Leiden University in the Netherlands inaugurated their own programmes. Beyond the Western world, Japan too had established the Tokyo University’s Department of Oriental History during the Meiji period, the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages now known as the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies in 1899 and the Toyo Bunko in 1924.1

1950s

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EARLY 1960s: POWER

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AREA STUDIES

Southeast Asian studies per se finally took on a more coherent form and scholarly approach when the belief in the power of area studies emanated in the 1950s. It took the military campaigns of World War II and the politics of the Cold War to jerk governments and funding bodies to establish centres for Southeast Asian studies. Although there was expressed interest to invest in scholarship and to develop a more scholarly approach to studying the region, the one important purpose, that of meeting national needs, remained high on the criteria list for the setting up of this branch of area studies. In an overview of the developments in the United Kingdom, Victor King points to three crucial government-initiated reports, namely the Scarbrough

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Report (1947), the Hayter Report (1961), and the Parker Report (1986) which collectively suggested the necessity of “the practical application of area studies programmes” and “the importance of a base of scholarship in area studies” in order to avoid problems deriving from lofty Euro-centric or British-centric views of the world.2 Subsequent to the reports, and in particular the Hayter Report, a Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Hull and another at the University of Kent were set up in 1962 and 1978 respectively.3 The post-Hayter period from the early 1960s to the late 1970s was indeed Britain’s “Golden Age of Area Studies”.4 The 1950s were also the high point for the development of Southeast Asian studies in the United States. Lauriston Sharp has been acknowledged as the man who grasped the need for the study of the region in the United States. Through his great efforts and leadership, a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation was obtained for the founding of the Southeast Asia Studies Programme at Cornell University in 1950. Simultaneously, another grant was made available to Yale for the very same purpose. The idea was “officially to promote a healthy competition but also to pre-empt any charge of partiality”.5 By the end of the decade, Cornell successfully produced the first generation of Southeast Asian area specialists. Like the British, it was in the name of national interest that American federal funds were made available to promote Southeast Asian studies. America had begun to see its role in global politics and security and wanted to locate itself strategically in the region. Thus, in the era of the first and second Indochina wars, between the late 1950s and the early 1970s, the U.S. federal government, foundations, and universities coalesced to institutionalize a network of study programmes about the region at various universities such as Michigan, Northern Illinois, and Wisconsin-Madison. It was a joint endeavour whereby: [t]he federal government through the National Defence Education Act, funded the teaching of Southeast Asian languages – a difficult, costly venture. Foundations gave grants to fund programmes and fieldwork for individual scholars. Universities, notably Michigan, matched these external funds with considerable internal resources to build the programmatic foundations for area studies – library collections, language classes, and tenured faculty.6

For geographical and political reasons, Australia too embarked on an ambitious plan of establishing centres of Southeast Asian studies. In Canberra, the Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies and the Faculty of Asian Studies – both of the Australian National University – were set up in 1947

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and 1950 respectively. In the mid-1960s, a Centre of Southeast Asian Studies was put into place at Monash University in Melbourne.7 It is no exaggeration to say that soon after, there came to be “a greater concentration of Southeast Asian scholarship and university teaching in Australia than in any country outside the region”.8 Further developments were also taking place in Japan. The Institute for Developing Economies was set up in 1957, to be followed by the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies in Kyoto and the Institute for Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa (ILCAA) in the early 1960s.9

MID-1960s

TO

MID-1970s: SITE

OF

DISPLACEMENT

Although all through the 1950s to the 1970s, energies and resources were poured into laying the foundations for this area study, the base was weak. There were already signs by the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s that “Southeast Asian Studies was not so much a place as a site of displacement”.10 People opting for this field of study were doing so not so much for invested interests in the scholarship of the region, as for the strong emotions of that time to expand notions of freedom and justice. This was at a time of the traumas of decolonization in the Third World, revolutions in Indonesia, and uprisings in the Philippines and Thailand. The Vietnam War years had an “enormously complex and contradictory impact upon the Southeast Asian field”.11 The furor over Vietnam attracted graduate students who wanted to correct the evils of the world. The chaos of anti-war demonstrations that were often associated with staff and students of this area study all but began to make “university administrators wary of funding the study of this region.”12 With waves of decolonization escalating across Southeast Asia, the funding of the study of the region declined drastically in Europe as the need to train colonial officers for the region evaporated. It is thus paradoxical that “as Southeast Asia became more established, both as a field of study and as a geopolitical and economic region, its institutionalization of Southeast Asian studies ha[d] also come into crisis.”13

MID-1970s

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REPRESSION

By the post-war decade of 1975 to 1985, the field of Southeast Asian studies in the Western world went into the doldrums. Academic recessions in the 1970s had a severe impact on this field of study. To worsen matters, Western governments no longer saw this area study as serving any immediate national need, so it was either stagnated or repressed. The Americans had

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been defeated in Vietnam and they simply wanted to forget this entire episode of history. There was a huge decline in political science participation in this field of study. Things were progressing no better in Britain. Funding dropped drastically and so centres either saw a decline in staff members or were simply closed down. What is noteworthy here is that it was precisely the withdrawal of the American forces from Vietnam in 1973, and the communist victories throughout Indochina in 1975 that accentuated the ASEAN governments’ interest to strengthen their own national foreign policies as well as to nurture self-reliance and promote regional cooperation. To achieve this, they realized that solid knowledge of the region was necessary. Therefore, in 1976 the decision was reached at the first ASEAN Summit Meeting to promote Southeast Asian Studies in the region itself.14 This was in contradistinction to the dip in this field of study in the West. Programmes and centres were swiftly created to satisfy a variety of needs. The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) in Singapore, established in 1971, had become a major meeting point for Southeast Asianists, as well as the leading publishing house for Southeast Asian studies, but its focus was on the research rather than on the teaching of the region. Hence in 1976, Malaysia kicked off the first inter-disciplinary Southeast Asian studies programme in the region at the University of Malaya.15 Three years earlier, an Institute for Southeast Asian Studies within the Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences with a narrower focus on Laos and Cambodia had been set up in Hanoi.16

LATE 1980s: REVIVAL In the late 1980s, Southeast Asian studies enjoyed a spate of revival. Affordable air passage fares now paved the way for more direct contact with the region and its people. This stimulated interest in going to the region as well as knowing more about it. Other immense technological advances such as the facsimile, television, and telephone lines also enabled more communication lines with the region to open. Nevertheless, it was the hyper-growth of the area during this period that bred an atmosphere of confidence and a sense that the region had defined itself. ASEAN seemed to have become more institutionalized and to work towards melding the region into an effective entity.17 Hordes of scholars and students from Europe to America and from Australia to Japan found a reason to study the region. Very quickly, Southeast Asian studies became one of the healthiest branches of area studies. This time, interest was focused largely on the debate over what constituted the essence

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of the economic dynamism of the region or if there were too many hidden social costs unaccounted for. Once again, governments outside the region directed their attention to this field of study because they recognized the opportunities that could be reaped from the region’s economic miracle. Therefore, for national-policy and economic related reasons, research on the area was once more encouraged and funds were provided. The study of Southeast Asia was rejuvenated due to increased research interests in postcolonial, Third World, and non-Western history. In the United States, the tripartite coalition of government, philanthropy, and individual university administrations began to rebuild the field by introducing more new programmes. The original network of north-eastern universities housing the area studies was expanded to the Midwest, down the Pacific Coast, and across to Hawaii to form a truly national network of Southeast Asian programmes. Likewise, Australian universities introduced more centres. Throughout this period of revival, it was apparent that while commendable progress was made in Vietnamese studies, the study of the Philippines, Laos, Burma, and even Malaysia did not appeal to many. The fields of anthropology and history scored remarkable success, but Southeast Asian literature attracted very few.

1990s: UNDER ATTACK In the 1990s, Southeast Asian studies came under attack again from several fronts. When the economic miracle of Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia dissipated in 1997, so did Southeast Asian studies. The burst of the economic miracle generated a flurry of analyses, but these were not always by scholars of the region. The field of study suffered from paradigm shifts within academia too. Supra-national bodies ranging from APEC to international nongovernmental organizations and the growth of diasporic communities articulated new geopolitical formations. It seemingly became more relevant to speak of borderless worlds, and this impaired the significance of the region as a unit of study. Similarly, the focus on globalization and transnationalism often led to diminished interest in fine-grained area studies scholarship. Interest was turning to “shifting patterns of movement…rather than to the deliberation and action through which these new geographies were being produced”.18 The intellectual orientations and approaches adopted in post-colonial studies, cultural studies, and the study of global cultures had a further negative impact on Southeast Asian studies, especially in

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terms of the interest in language learning. In post-colonial studies, scholars were often more interested in the colonizers than the colonized. Rather than being in the field and learning the languages of the peoples of the region, practitioners of cultural studies were satisfied in critiquing scholarship on the region from afar, basing themselves upon mass media coverage and viewing films. The study of global cultures inspired some to observe the movement of things rather than people. As a reconfiguration of the world seemed to be happening, the Area Studies committees of the American Social Science Research Council were decommissioned after twenty-four years of office and the following statement was released: Now free from the bi-polar perspective of the cold war and increasingly aware of the multiple migrations and intersections of people, ideas, institutions, technologies and commodities, scholars are confronting the inadequacy of world ‘areas’ as bounded systems of social relations and cultural categories.19

By the end of the decade, much uncertainty loomed over the funding for Southeast Asian studies in Western universities. Yet, we see history repeating itself here. As Southeast Asian studies suffered a decline in the Western world, the field of study continued on an upward curve in the region itself. In the early 1990s, the National University of Singapore established a multi-disciplinary Southeast Asian Studies programme. By the mid-1990s, teacher and student mobility throughout the region to enrich language learning was launched via the inauguration of a Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Programme.20

2000s: RECONFIGURATION Since the turn of the millennium, there has been much discussion and debate over the need to reconfigure this field of study in order to revitalize it. Although there has after September 2001 been increased federal funding for Southeast Asian studies in the United States, interest in the region has been varying in Europe. For some, it has declined as the area has come to be viewed as a scene of social disorder and economic disarray. How lasting this adverse effect will be on the field remains to be seen. For others, these very issues have become the very reasons for the need to revitalize the study of the area. Today, as it has been since inception, there has been little if not no global congruity in the development of Southeast Asian studies. There are those who think that the field of study in Europe seems always to be lagging at least one

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decade behind America, while there are others who see the study of the region as making more inroads in grounded knowledge in Europe. It is notable though, that in the periods when interest and funding for Southeast Asian studies flagged in the West, it gained momentum in the region itself and grew from strength to strength elsewhere, for example, in Japan, and Singapore. Today, Southeast Asian studies is more buoyant and well-supported in the region itself than it has ever been. In this present and exciting phase of the reconfiguration of Southeast Asian studies, how should we advance?

NEW PATTERNS OF DEVELOPMENT IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Southeast Asian studies, as part of area studies in general, is undergoing great transformations. In view of the current worldwide conflicts and simultaneous processes of localization and globalization, this field of study has acquired a new practical and theoretical relevance for some, while there is a declining interest in the region for others. Thus, there prevails different scenarios with regard to the status of Southeast Asian studies today. From our overview of the development of Southeast Asian studies since its inception in the 1950s, what are its strengths and how can we address its weaknesses? There is a widespread feeling amongst its practitioners that the area studies approach, as it was envisaged and implemented since the 1950s, has to be reconfigured. There are several reasons for the current debate on Southeast Asia as an object of scientific enquiry. From the Western perspective, the definition of Southeast Asia as a region has been problematic. One basic critique of area studies has been the questioning of the demarcation of distinct areas as such, with congruent cultural, linguistic, and geographical identities. Typical of the “critical” attitude of current scholars is the following quote by Kratoska, Raben, and Schulte Nordholt in the recently edited volume on Locating Southeast Asia, “[e]fforts to define an entity to match the term ‘Southeast Asia’ have been inconclusive, and the term persists as little more than a way to identify a certain portion of the earth’s surface.”21 To define Southeast Asia as a “region”, that is a socialcultural entity bound to a particular geographical space, seems indeed questionable, since its boundaries are unclear and diffused. The fact of the matter is that the concept of “Southeast Asia” is only one-and-a-half centuries old and its study only fifty years old. Southeast Asian studies is also thought to have lagged behind in the wider scientific landscape. Instead of being at the forefront of inter-disciplinary research and teaching, most area specialists operate within rather restricted

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niches. They are sometimes insufficiently aware of major debates in the disciplines (humanities and social sciences) and produce highly specialized knowledge that can only be accessed by a few specialists. The many different cultural-linguistic topics existing within the region require a lot of expertise, making informed generalizations difficult to attain for individual researchers. Over the last decades, there has been a horizontal expansion of regional knowledge and a shift from linguistic-literary topics to social-economic and cultural themes. At the same time, scholars have split themselves up into three main geographic domains (Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam) and various subsidiary ones (Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, and the Philippines), without taking much notice of the other.22 Furthermore, the interface between discipline and region has not been solved by the regional studies’ approach. If a geographical space is taken as the basis for organizing the acquisition of knowledge, what scientific angle should be taken? Theories and methods seem to belong to particular disciplines that consider one or more thematic fields as their main areas of focus. Place as a marker of differentiation plays only a minor role, and is often relegated to the exotic, yet utterly annoying, category of “culture”. Up to the present day, the issue of how to organize the region as an entity superseding that of a subject matter viewed from a particular angle is a philosophical question that has not been answered satisfactorily. For those in Asia, however, the existence of a region called “Southeast Asia” has been becoming more and more self-evident. The end of the Cold War has created a multilateral world in which supra-national regions have acquired new strategic importance. With the rise of ASEAN, a new and stronger regional identity has emerged with countries lying at the geographical perimeters of the region choosing not to be part of either India or China. ASEAN was reformed and expanded and now includes all ten nation-states of Southeast Asia, with as yet the exclusion of East Timor. The rise of China has made closer cooperation between Southeast Asian countries necessary. To facilitate more productive relations with China, India, and Japan, closer cooperation between the Southeast Asian countries has also been necessary. In a post-colonial setting, bilateral linkages between European countries and their former colonies have been becoming less relevant. At the same time, nation-states in Southeast Asia are no longer contested, although at the periphery, major conflicts continue to prevail. The combination of all these factors have established the need for Southeast Asian studies within the region. National governments in and close to the region have been convinced of the necessity to prioritize Southeast Asian studies within the study programmes of universities. So whereas Japan (Tokyo,

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Kyoto), China (Xiamen) and South Korea (Pusan) have well-established Southeast Asian teaching programmes, the same holds true for an increasing number of universities in the region itself. Apart from a full-blown Southeast Asian studies programme at the National University of Singapore, we also find Southeast Asian studies programmes at the University of Brunei, University of Malaya, Chulalongkorn University, Thammasat University, and the Vietnam National University. In other places, courses on Southeast Asia are part of Asian studies programmes (in Indonesia and the Philippines, for example) or appear within course-work for the social science disciplines and humanities. The Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP), established in 1994, not only promotes Southeast Asian studies as such, but also regional networking among area-specialists and students. On a global scale, the combination of these different perspectives, have not only provoked recurrent debate within Southeast Asian studies, but also the emergence of different patterns of development within the profession in different settings. Regional studies programmes at European universities have been suffering from severe budget cuts, while the opposite has happened in Asia. For Americans, the need to understand the region for strategic reasons, especially after the September 11 attacks, has contributed to a recent resurgence of Southeast Asian studies.

AN AGENDA FOR SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES The debates on Southeast Asian studies and the emergence of different scenarios in different contexts, have provoked discussions on a number of theoretical issues. There is a need to rethink Southeast Asia as a region. It is generally agreed that the old “unity in diversity” paradigm once used to “capture” the region is flawed as it largely ignores the impact of change and gives too much emphasis to its external construction. Furthermore, the idea of constructing Southeast Asia on the basis of the old paradigms of the development towards nationhood, as was the case in the 1950s, and, that of the progress towards modernity, have become outdated.23 A number of crucial questions in this regard were once again raised in the Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 1999. The questions asked included: “Where do the boundaries lie?”, “What is the nature of intra-regional linkages with those of outside areas?”, “Does heterogeneity or homogeneity prevail?”, and “What is the role of the region as an ‘imagined’ construct?” Despite the unlikelihood of unity due to the divisions coming from the colonial past, the argument that Southeast Asia still occupies a “distinctive” place in the global world prevails.24

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In sum, a “softened” concept of the region is advocated by most presentday Southeast Asianists. Donald Emmerson argues that “Southeast Asia” is something which is useful, being something partway between a description of something that exists and a creation of the mind.25 Anthony Reid, writing on the early modern era, has been quite outspoken in his defence of Southeast Asia as a viable physical concept: “Southeast Asia was a region united by environment, commerce, diplomacy, and war but diverse in its fragmented polities and cultures.”26 In a recent anthropological survey, Victor King puts it as follows: Despite differences among scholars in the attempts to put cultural flesh on the concept of South-East Asian identity, there are certainly various social and cultural elements which serve to unite large parts of the region and distinguish them from China and India, although they do not constitute general unifying features of all ten South-East Asian nation-states nor do they establish clear and unambiguous boundaries.27

Within Southeast Asia itself a new and stronger regional identity is emerging. With this in mind, the following arguments can be made in favour of Southeast Asia as a “region”. First, the concept of region is primarily a heuristic device. It distinguishes a particular area from other areas in order to be able to analyse developments that seem to be specific to it. A region can be defined on several levels. It can be part of a particular country; it can be a transnational structure between several countries; and it can also be conceived as a particular part of the world. The crucial question seems to be whether the region possesses sufficient particularity to be able to distinguish it from adjoining areas. Particularity or specificity therefore seems to be more important than homogeneity or heterogeneity. Secondly, the geographical underpinnings of the Southeast Asian “ellipse” fit within accepted geographical ascriptions. This ellipse can clearly be distinguished from a sinicized Asia (Northeast Asia: Japan, China, Korea), the Hindu-Islamic sub-continent (India) and Central Asia. Reducing scales by breaking down Southeast Asia into parts (such as distinguishing between a mainland and insular part, or breaking it down even further as Denys Lombard has done in his Le carrefour javanais) might produce a greater homogeneity among individuals and lower-level regions. However, this does not in any way explain the outer distinctions with respect to other world regions. Maps that have been produced over time incorporate other perspectives of the region, revealing quite different projections of reality. Indigenous maps, as well as modern ones, that chart distances in travel hours or present panoramic views from unexpected standpoints clearly inform us of another sense of space.

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Thirdly, regions are complex entities. The French scholar Edgar Morin in his book, Thinking Europe, asserts that: [t]he attempt to simplify Europe through idealization, abstraction or reduction, would be equal to mutilation. Europe is a complex (complexus: that [which] has been woven together), in which the largest differences are united without mingling, and in which differences are indivisibly connected to another.28

An area, in which the unitary can be studied within plurality and the other way around, does not disqualify Southeast Asia as a region. Fourthly, regions should be defined from within rather than from the perspective of boundaries. Often political boundaries are taken to construct economic, social, and cultural demarcations. The colonial project of the modern state and the superimposition of nationhood were certainly extremely relevant for Southeast Asia, but these processes have been until now neither completed nor unchallenged. Fifthly, “Southeast Asia” should be historically defined as a regional construct that expanded and acquired more substance over time. It started, as Reid argued, in a “bottom-up” manner. It was the local communities of peasants and fishermen, living in small-scale communities that formed the common backbone of the region. This reality was, however, not really broken up by Western colonialism. Colonial states created formal-judicial divisions which entailed common experiences for those colonized within these states. Contacts continued to exist between Sumatra and the Malay Peninsula, as was the case with minorities living alongside borderlines. The rise of nationalism throughout the region, the disruption of the Japanese Occupation, and the struggle for independence created, despite all differences, further common experiences. The most divisive force in the modern history of Southeast Asia was probably the Cold War era. As soon as Vietnam was reunified, ASEAN acquired more substance, and has not adhered to the European Union model of relinquishing national sovereignties. New pressures, especially in the realm of internal and external security, provide a current impetus towards integration. In Southeast Asia itself, and among its inhabitants, the awareness of the region has grown. Having made a case for the region, a more practical issue has to be addressed, that is, the internal divisions between scholars of Southeast Asia themselves. This fragmentation among researchers is partly a consequence of the nature of the object of study, and also a reflection of the general organizational format of universities and research centres. Area studies presuppose an intimate knowledge of the region that can only be reached by

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acquiring a view-from-within. This, in turn, requires acquiring a good command of one or more local languages and cultures, including gaining familiarity with the situation on the ground through regular and possibly extended field visits. Both requirements automatically lead scholars to concentrate their work on one or at most a few regions within Southeast Asia. A more institutional reason is that, despite advocating multi-disciplinary and comparative research, most scientific knowledge is produced along the lines of disciplines that have emerged during the nineteenth century and which are still controlling institutions of higher learning. In theory, six forms of institutional arrangements for area studies can be conceived, which represent a hierarchy with regard to degree of complexity, innovative potential, and expected output. Format 1 is mono-disciplinary plus mono-regional and comprises what most individual Southeast Asianists do. Its scope for productivity is high but its complexity and innovativeness low. Format 2 is mono-disciplinary plus multi-regional and has been practised in several institutes, such as the Bielefeld Institute of Development Economics. Its productivity is high but its innovative potential is restricted by the boundaries of the discipline. Format 3 encompasses multi-disciplinary plus mono-regional research and is represented by most Southeast Asian centres in the world. Its complexity and innovative potential are of middle rank, whereas the concentration of specialists working on one area allows for high productivity. Format 4 is both multi-disciplinary and multi-regional, enabling greater innovative potential through comparative perspectives, but at the same time is more difficult to manage because researchers represent not only different disciplinary angles but different areas as well. Formats 5 and 6 involve inter-disciplinary work, either on one or various regions. The complexity of such arrangement is very high, as are their innovative potentials. Real inter-disciplinary research has yet to be fully realized. Therefore, this new and emerging research agenda could either reap high results or yield very low productivity. The Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research Program on Asia at UCLA and the Asia Research Institute in Singapore represent such high aspirations. The reality is that most universities are unable to supersede either level 1 or 2. This effectively means that Southeast Asianists are a minority within disciplinary departments or, at best, a number of them cooperate within one department. Such arrangements are often inadequate in attaining a full coverage of the area, both in terms of the region and the subject matter. Indeed, even within Southeast Asian university departments, research is not combined but remains a matter of individual interests. In this manner, respective departments are often unable to exhibit the added value of their

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staff ’s different research output. The only solution lies in forming a critical mass and acquiring a consensus to work as a group on innovative research themes over a couple of years. The institution – and this very much depends upon its size – has then to decide if such an endeavour can be realized within its own existing internal configuration. Another solution lies in creating networks of experts that agree to work on common projects. It is seemingly the case that an individual research culture has to give way to such collaborative efforts. The Internet communications revolution has created the technical potential for worldwide networking, moving far beyond the confines of one’s own institution, discipline, and area. The third fundamental problem in Southeast Asian studies lies in looking for a new interface between region and discipline. Dumping the region as irrelevant and submerging regional studies into global studies are not solutions. This has in fact been the recent trend in many institutions with a social science agenda, reiterating the universalistic claims of the 1960s and 1970s. John Bowen offered a recent view concerning this issue in his essay on the inseparability of area and discipline in Southeast Asian studies. Neither area nor discipline should be separated since they strongly interact, inasmuch as discipline is referred to as a particular set of questions and methods, and “area” marks cultural continuities and discontinuities. Strong regional continuities even shape the disciplines that study them. Therefore political scientists, economists, anthropologists, historians, and the like who work on specific areas share certain ideas that distinguish them from others within their own disciplines. Bowen proposes three cultural continuities that bind all Southeast Asianists, namely, relative gender equality, hierarchical reciprocity, and an outward orientation.29 It is along these lines that congruity between one region and various disciplines can be reached. That this works can be experienced by every area scholar participating in cross-disciplinary panels at the Association for Asian Studies meetings in the United States or EUROSEAS conferences in Europe. The case for Southeast Asian studies is strengthened by current global developments. Until 2001 there was a widespread assumption that globalization was leading into the direction of worldwide homogenization and convergence. Since September 11, this idea has been dashed and the world has increasingly been exposed to ethnic and religious conflicts of a regional origin. There are also new hopes of Southeast Asia picking itself up from the Asian crisis of 1997 and levelling up with the West in economic development. Today, many of the key international policy issues facing the Western world are framed in terms of a security threat by Islamic

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fundamentalism and terrorist movements. Southeast Asia has been identified as a strategic platform for the actors and their theatre for warfare. In scholarly writing a clear upsurge of studies on regional, ethnic, and religious conflicts can be discerned. However, this upward trend is perhaps less evident in universities in Europe and Australia. What agenda for the future can be distilled from the contributions in this book? Southeast Asian studies can no longer be wholly local but needs to take into account the wider region (South and East Asia) and the global dimension. Southeast Asia has to be redefined in terms of the ways in which the particularities of the region, and the local and global processes, are interlinked. Multi-level studies that include a broader geographical scope cannot be undertaken by the individual researcher in isolation, but requires networks of researchers, preferably located both in the West and in Asia. Asian researchers should infuse more local knowledge into scholarly debate on Southeast Asia.30

ISSUES RAISED The chapters following this preface are a collection of scholarly viewpoints about the state of Southeast Asian studies today. A dozen or so invitations to participate in this discussion were sent to scholars of various disciplinary backgrounds in different parts of the world. We had hoped for many more scholars of Southeast Asian origin to also present their views. Although some had expressed interest in contributing chapters, they were unfortunately unable to meet our publishing deadline. The contributions in this collection represent the views of a relatively young generation of researchers and teachers working on the region, with the aim of assessing the current situation so as to suggest a blueprint for Southeast Asian studies in the future. Each chapter takes up the challenge of reflecting on a meaningful approach to this field of studies and mapping out directions that will constitute the essential research agenda in the coming period. The chapters are not arranged in any special order so as to reflect any particular pre-set empirical or theoretical orientation. Each author has adopted an individual approach to addressing the issues. King, Cribb, Hayami, and Chou have appropriated a broad-disciplinary view as a basis for the future. Platt, McCargo, Houben, and Barnard have assessed the applicability to the region of general theoretical developments within their disciplines. Each chapter can therefore be read on its own. Yet, seen as a whole, each chapter also constitutes a part of a multi- and inter-disciplinary dialogue – in comparative and longitudinal terms – with regard to the merits and deficiencies,

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and the relevance and irrelevance of the area studies approach from which Southeast Asia has emerged. The intent is to present readers with the varying positions and opinions that resonate in the debate on the current status and future of Southeast Asian area studies. These are the imaginations and visions – and indeed the strengths – of a younger generation of scholars for opening up new horizons in Southeast Asian studies. “Can an atmosphere of confidence and a sense of the region be restored by building on, and yet at the same time reconceptualizing the significant contributions of an earlier generation of scholars of Southeast Asia?” “What are the kinds of issues that the next generation of students, researchers, and scholars consider as critical for elevating Southeast Asian studies to prominence?” “What are the priority areas in which resources should be invested?” These questions and many more are pondered, discussed, and debated by contributors. The chapters in this volume have much to say about Southeast Asian studies. Still, it is noteworthy that there are certain issues that are time and again raised by one and all. We shall therefore highlight a few of these predicaments in the field of Southeast Asian studies that have been raised as common causes of concern for contributors to this book.

COMMUNICATING SCHOLARSHIP Another issue that underscores many contributions in this book is the question of language, both as a tool to understand people in the region, to communicate scientific results, and also as an object of study in itself (Hayami, Platt, Chou). Southeast Asia is a mosaic of linguistic diversity, thus posing a challenge for communication and interaction. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations has overcome this hurdle by adopting English as their common language. Yet, this is an issue that remains unresolved within the discipline. Although English is recognized as the language to facilitate exchange and reduce isolation so as to produce a more vibrant atmosphere, English language literature on the region by indigenous scholars remains limited. Many important works produced by scholars writing in their local languages remain unknown to an international audience. If significant investments could be made to enable translations of these works of interest into English, this could undoubtedly spark off new reciprocities in the exchange of ideas and knowledge for the reinvigoration of Southeast Asian studies. While scholars could be encouraged to write more in English in order to make their works more widely accessible, there is also room for rejuvenating our classrooms by

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enabling international student exchanges and collaborative teaching by allowing the use of English in classes and student papers. Although English is today’s lingua franca for international communication, this does not in any way preclude the studying of Southeast Asian languages. Anyone seeking to become a specialist on any area or country can only attain a deeper insight into these domains and its people through advance competency in the spoken and written languages, including the knowledge of the vernacular literatures and scholarship of the area. More attention needs to be directed to a durable and consistent study of Southeast Asian languages. Universities are reluctant to support programmes of less common languages with small enrolments because such endeavours are considered as a financial burden. Hence, Southeast Asian languages, and particularly the pre-modern and ancient ones which include old Burmese and Javanese, classical Khmer, Nôm and a whole host of dialects, are grossly under-funded and fast disappearing today. The crux of the matter is that these language abilities are indispensable for pursing studies of “ancient” premodern Southeast Asian societies. Already, we face a serious lack of scholars working on the pre-nineteenth century history of Southeast Asia. The strength and breadth of any area studies programme depends equally on its language-teaching programme and a constellation of humanistic or social science content courses. Availing more resources for augmenting language studies, hiring more professionally trained pedagogues, who are competent in language or literary culture, and building up library holdings, especially on Southeast Asian literary and cultural texts, will open possibilities for broadening the curriculum to its fullest potential in the long run.

IMPORTANCE

OF

AREA STUDIES

Although the contexts and institutional formats of area studies are in the process of being reconfigured, area studies remains crucial. The study of Southeast Asia is part of a broader issue. Its very existence should neither be hampered by profit-making nor political considerations. Its motivation lies in the central tenet of the pursuit and propagation of knowledge. Area studies – of expansive or smaller zones, of old civilizations or newly defined territories – is about how we teach and learn to see, to think about and live in this world. It involves understanding issues of universalism as well as appreciating the internal logic and systemic practices of particular societies – instead of simply regarding them, at best, as interestingly exotic and, at worst, hopelessly strange.

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CRITICAL ASSESSMENTS

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CURRENT DEVELOPMENTS

What characterizes the state of Southeast Asian studies at this moment is that a double shift of the main parameters of the profession and within these parameters is occurring. The four basic parameters in the landscape of regional studies are institutions, locations, communities, and knowledge production. In academic institutions the relationship between the disciplines and area studies is being reconfigured. In Europe, for instance, this means that area studies should be brought back into the disciplines. It appears that, apart from a few major centres, area studies is on the decline. In Southeast Asia and the United States, the opposite trend seems to be happening. This means that, as far as the status of Southeast Asian studies is concerned, it is either on the rise or revitalizing in Southeast Asia and America, whereas it is declining in Europe. Regional studies in the region itself seems to be a natural outcome in a globalized and post-colonial world. As far as communities of scholars are concerned, it can be observed that networks of scholarly exchange that used to be mono-lateral have become utterly multi-lateral and global. The exchange of ideas that is facilitated by the Internet and fast travel leads to a sharing of knowledge. That knowledge is much more varied in its thematic content and its theoretical-disciplinary orientation, which also means that Southeast Asian studies is increasing in breadth and scope. There is a shared consensus among the authors in this volume that the future is with comparative study or (as Hayami asserts) a cross-disciplinary and region-wide approach by scholars across the globe. Therefore, although in some places there is reason for gloom, Southeast Asian studies as whole is in the process of being reconfigured to become more of a central concern in our current world.

NOTES 1. Reid, Anthony. “Studying Southeast Asia in a Globalized World”. Taiwan Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 6. 2. King, Victor T. Between West and East: Policy and Practice in South-East Studies in Britain. Hull: Hull University Press, 1990: 4. 3. Halib, Mohammed and Tim Huxley. “Introduction”. In An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies, edited by Mohammed Halib and Tim Huxley. London, New York and Singapore: Tauris Academic Studies, I.B. Tauris Publishers and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1996: 3. 4. King, Between West and East: 4. 5. Kahin, George McT. “Lauriston Sharp (1907–93)”. Southeast Asia Program Bulletin (Fall 1994): 3.

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6. McCoy, Alfred. “Southeast Asian Studies – Wherefrom?” In Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After, edited by Social Science Research Council. Proceedings of two meetings held in New York City on 15 November and 10 December 1999. New York: Southeast Asia Program, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 1999: 10. 7. Reid. “Studying Southeast Asia in a Globalized World”: 7. 8. Halib and Huxley. “Introduction”: 4. 9. Reid. “Studying Southeast Asia in a Globalized World”: 6. 10. Rafael, Vicente. “Southeast Asian Studies – Wherefrom?” In Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After, edited by Social Science Research Council. Proceedings of two meetings held in New York City on November 15 and December 10, 1999. New York: Southeast Asia Program, Social Science Research Council (SSRC), 1999: 10. 11. McCoy. “Southeast Asian Studies – Wherefrom?”: 10. 12. Ibid. 13. Rafael. “Southeast Asian Studies – Wherefrom?”: 10–11. 14. Tunku Shamsul Bahrin. “Southeast Asian Studies in Malaysia”. In A Colloquium on Southeast Asian Studies, edited by Tunku Shamsul Bahrin, Chandran Jeshurun and A. Terry Rambo. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981: 100–01. 15. Halib and Huxley. “Introduction”: 4. 16. Reid. “Studying Southeast Asia in a Globalized World”: 15. 17. Hue Tam Ho Tai. “Southeast Asian Studies – Wherefrom?”: 12. 18. Guyer, Jane I. “Anthropology in Area Studies”. Annual Review of Anthropology 33 (2004): 501. 19. Prewitt, Kenneth. “Presidential Items”. Items 50, no. 1 (1996): 15–18. 20. Reid. “Studying Southeast Asia in a Globalized World”: 16. 21. Kratoska, Paul, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds. Locating Southeast Asia. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005: 10. 22. Van Schendel, Willem. “Geographies of Knowledge, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia”. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002): 650–51. 23. McVey, Ruth. “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia”. In Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations, edited by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998: 37–64. 24. Acharya, Amitav and Ananda Rajah. “Introduction: Reconceptualising Southeast Asia”. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 27, no. 1 (1999): 1–6. 25. A summary of the debate can be found in Tarling, Nicholas. Historians and Southeast Asian History. Auckland: New Zealand Asia Institute, 2000: 98–103. 26. Reid, Anthony. “Introduction: A Time and a Place”. In Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era. Trade, Power, and Belief, edited by Anthony Reid. Ithaca, London: Cornell Univerity Press, 1993: 19.

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27. King, Victor T. and William D. Wilder. The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia. An Introduction. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003: 14. 28. Based on the German translation: Morin, Edgar. Europa Denken. Frankfurt, New York: Campus Verlag, 1991: 19. 29. Bowen, John R. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies: A View from the United States”. Moussons 1 (2000): 3–19. 30. Fox, James. “Tracing Genealogies: Toward an International Multicultural Anthropology”. Antropologi Indonesia 69 (2002): 106–16.

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2 SOUTHEAST ASIA Personal Reflections on a Region Victor T. King

INTRODUCTION This chapter is a development of some of the ideas which I raised at a workshop on the subject of “Locating Southeast Asia” in late March 2001, held at the University of Amsterdam, in honour of Professor Heather Sutherland’s contribution to Southeast Asian studies in the Netherlands. I happened to be a discussant on the anthropology panel led by the American anthropologist, Mary Margaret Steedly, who had then only recently published an excellent and thought-provoking overview paper on the theme of culture theory in the anthropology of Southeast Asia.1 There was a broad range of issues which we addressed in the Amsterdam meeting, and aside from commenting on Steedly’s paper, I was prompted, at that time, to reflect on what I had been doing for the past thirty years or more, from a British and to some extent a European perspective. These reflections were subsequently published in 2001 in the French journal Moussons and entitled “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?” The subtitle was intended to acknowledge the important contribution which Professor JPB de Josselin de Jong had made to the study of ethnologically or anthropologically defined areas, a contribution which had special resonance in European anthropology. Rather more importantly, what I wrote was supposed to be in dialogue with American anthropology; it was triggered not 23

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simply by Mary Steedly’s contribution, but more particularly by John Bowen’s two papers, “The Forms Culture Takes: A State-of-the-field Essay on the Anthropology of Southeast Asia” and “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies: A View from the United States”, which attempted to trace a dominant style, perspective, approach, and preoccupation in the anthropology of Southeast Asia, as well as in related disciplines. He argued that there is a strong interaction between area or area studies and academic discipline, and, in the case of Southeast Asian anthropology, an overriding concern with comparative cultural interpretation in context, prompted by “the ubiquity of publicly displayed cultural forms”.2 Steedly also confirmed in her 1999 paper that Clifford Geertz’s writings, among others, “have thoroughly associated this part of the world, and Indonesia in particular, with a meaningbased, interpretive concept of culture”.3 Bowen, like Steedly, was careful to qualify his remarks by stating that he was primarily concerned with American social science research on Indonesia, and more specifically with a Cornell perspective, and had little to say about European or other traditions of scholarship. Two issues immediately presented themselves: first, that, in some way, American social science of a particular kind was seen to define what is significant in a regional style of scholarship, and secondly, the assumption that research on one country in Southeast Asia and the character of that country or sub-region can be extrapolated to define a wider region. Given these assumptions from an American perspective, it seemed even more important to at least draw attention to de Josselin de Jong’s and his colleagues’ and followers’ contributions to the study of the Malay-Indonesian world, and, in addition, to say something about distinctively European contributions to regional studies. In case I am seen to be engaged in a trans-Atlantic war of words, I should also emphasize that in my recent introductory text on the anthropology of Southeast Asia written with William Wilder, a British-based and -trained American anthropologist, the American contribution to our understanding of Southeast Asian culture and society was fulsomely acknowledged and admired.4 However, our concerns about defining, locating, reflecting on, deconstructing, reconstructing, imagining, and imaging Southeast Asia seem to be surfacing with alarming regularity. We speculate, sometimes amusingly to the outsider, whether or not the region should be likened to a rose, a unicorn, a rhinoceros or a spaceship.5 Many of us have used and contemplated some of the key statements and texts on these matters – Ananda Rajah, Barbara Andaya, Benedict Anderson, John Bowen, Donald Emmerson, Grant Evans, Russell Fifield, Ariel Heryanto, Charles Hirschman, Charles Keyes, Victor Lieberman, Denys Lombard, Ruth McVey, Anthony Reid, Craig

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Reynolds, Willem van Schendel, Shamsul A.B., Wilhelm Solheim, Heather Sutherland, Wang Gungwu, and Oliver Wolters, to name but a few.6 Interestingly Southeast Asians are in the minority; indeed most of those mentioned are American social scientists and historians, and other Caucasians. This tells us much about the nature and focus of the debate about the Southeast Asian region and regional studies.

ESSENTIALISM Our navel-gazing, our introspection, and our soul-searching are rather easily explained and have been referred to endlessly. With regard to Southeast Asia, we have always been the junior partner in Asian studies, struggling to find positive criteria for demarcation in a primarily negatively-defined, geographically ambivalent, residual region. But more importantly, and linked to this client status, we always seem to be in crisis or under threat, or, if we are enjoying a brief period of happiness and success, we anticipate that the honeymoon is unlikely to last for too long.7 Several of us have been obsessed by the constructed or invented nature of the Southeast Asian field of study, and some of us also have a desire to make it more than it is or should be; in Craig Reynolds’ words, to “authenticate” it. When we do this, we usually have recourse primarily to the disciplines of history and anthropology, and to some extent geography. We search for and reconstruct origins, prior to outside, particularly European intervention and influence, to reveal the “real” or “essential” Southeast Asia; we construct the cultural matrix or sub-stratum or cultural continuities and commonalities; we pursue indigenous models of society and polity; we identify Southeast Asian agency, historical autonomy and the active domestication and localization of the foreign; we mark out the general categorical differences between “the Southeast Asian” and others, particularly “the Chinese” and “the Indian”. We look for regionally defined “genius”. More recently, we have proffered Southeast Asia as the site of a particular style or styles of scholarship, and for the generation of distinctive or dominant research questions and perspectives, in other words we demarcate it as a discursive field. In a paper published in 1978, Ben Anderson referred to the state of area studies in the United States, and that its academic position and profile had already been in decline for a decade prior to that. Ruth McVey’s “golden age” of Southeast Asian studies in America in the 1950s and 1960s was drawing to a close.8 Craig Reynolds, among others, then draws attention to anxieties among American regional specialists in the 1990s about the weakening of the intellectual commitment to and the questioning of the rationale for area

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studies, and the associated change in funding strategies.9 Anderson provides us with some reasons for this: The context-dependent, fragile nature of area studies as a product of American post-war and Cold War involvement and intervention in the developing world, area studies’ lack of methodological and theoretical sophistication, and its distance from disciplinary specialization.10 The preoccupation with region is charged with being old-fashioned, ethnocentric, parochial, politically conservative, essentialist and empiricist in its mission to chart distinctive culture-language zones and draw boundaries in an increasingly changing, globalizing world; these allegations have been made with increasing intensity during the past three decades, including from insiders and sympathizers like McVey, who remarked in the mid-1990s that “Southeast Asia itself has changed far more massively and profoundly than have Southeast Asia[n] studies”.11 In addition, the charge that post-war, American-led area studies is in the direct line of succession of pre-war European Orientalism has brought into question the ethics and underlying purpose of studying and characterizing other cultures at a distance.12

THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBALIZATION AND POST-STRUCTURALISM Yet another series of threats has emerged since the 1990s. Peter Jackson, in two substantial, densely-written, and inter-connected papers published recently in the Singapore journal Sojourn focuses on the even more serious and formidable challenge to area studies, specifically Asian studies in Australia, from an amalgam of globalization theory, and post-colonialist and poststructuralist cultural studies.13 With reference to Japanese studies in Australia, Chris Burgess, also explores the link between globalization and the “academic crisis” as he calls it, in Asian studies.14 These post-modern fields have been ploughed by Joel Kahn in a very vigorous fashion in Southeast Asia during the past decade.15 What is more, Ruth McVey, Craig Reynolds, Mary Steedly and Grant Evans, among others, have also addressed these matters in relation to the definition of region.16 Jackson says, with reference to processes of globalization, that: Rapidly intensifying flows of money, goods, services, information, and people across the historical borders of nation-states and culture-language areas suggest that it is no longer possible to study human societies as geographically isolated culturally distinctive units.17

With regard to Asian studies in Australian universities, he draws attention to the “intellectual climate” in which area studies is “widely considered to be

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based upon false premises and to be an epistemologically invalid approach to understanding contemporary Asian societies and cultures”.18 Nevertheless, to counter this decline he wishes, rather ambitiously, to propose and develop “a theoretically sophisticated area studies project” which recognizes the continued importance of “geography” or “spatiality” as a “domain of theoretically and discursive difference in the era of globalization”.19 I shall return to Jackson’s observations shortly. But the threat to area studies is, I think, much more broadly based than in its theoretical and methodological inadequacies, and to an intellectual climate of disdain and dismissal.

CHANGING MARKETS A major difficulty which we face, is that we are not in fashion in the student market, and, although we may ponder the academic shortcomings of area studies, it seems to me much more to do with the lifestyles, tastes, career aspirations, financial pressures, and educational backgrounds of our students. In my view, closures, mergers, and rationalizations of academic departments and programmes will continue, and, although I think that Southeast Asian studies will certainly not disappear entirely from the academic scene, the landscape of area studies is destined to become rather different in character and appearance. Whether or not we manage to present a Jacksonian justification for and defence of area studies on the basis of the importance of “localized, geographically bounded forms of knowledge, culture, economy, and political organization”,20 it is my view that, for the immediate future, we will continue to lose market-share in specifically area studies programmes. Student demand is much more important than letters of protest and complaint about lack of funding and support from professional associations of Asian studies to hardhearted vice-chancellors, rectors, and principals. Therefore, we should not only dwell on our scholarly interests in the region, but also keep in sharp focus the institutional, financial, and international context within which we teach and research. In this connection I want to emphasize the different ways in which we can approach and study Southeast Asia. These approaches may not necessarily depend on us protecting our borders and continuing to define our concerns in strictly regional terms. In other words, the future of teaching, research, and scholarly activity on Southeast Asia or parts of it may rest on us neither defining the object of our study in the terms in which we have been used to defining it, nor on delimiting the institutional context within which we pursue it as “Southeast Asian studies”. We may need to be much more pragmatic and versatile in our work, and not throw up regional barriers and retreat

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increasingly into our area, nor attempt to dress it up in some readjusted, re-laundered post-structuralist clothing. We should also recognize that there is some buoyancy in Southeast Asian studies in certain other parts of the world. Anthony Reid, for example, has presented a vibrant picture of growth in the variant AsianAmerican studies and its interaction with Southeast Asian studies at the University of California at Los Angeles, and on other campuses, and the progressive Asianization of the Californian university system in the context of substantial Asian migration and settlement on the American West Coast. He also noted the ways in which the competitive American model of Federal funding produces strong graduate training, based on “language study and regional sensitivity” and “determines what is an area and what qualifies as success in studying it”.21 In the Southeast Asian region itself, we all know about and admire the success of the National University of Singapore and the Institute of Southeast Asian studies there, although both within and beyond Singapore there is increasing attention to Asian studies rather than a separate Southeast Asian studies, in for example, neighbouring Southeast Asian countries like Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, as well as in Europe and Australia.22 In his review of Asian studies in Australia, Milner refers to it as “something of a rallying cry, a reminder of an urgent national priority”.23 In Japan too, for obvious reasons, there continues to be a relatively healthy environment for the nurturing and development of Asian and Southeast Asian studies.

WEST AND EAST (OR FOREIGN AND LOCAL) A more serious problem which will simply not go away is the relationship between native and non-native Southeast Asianists, if these are indeed appropriate categories. A trenchant, though generally polite criticism of nonSoutheast Asian Southeast Asianists by Ariel Heryanto gives us pause for thought.24 It also has echoes of the debates, though it fights on rather different terrain, which were very alive in the 1960s and 1970s on the possibility of the development of distinctively Southeast Asian approaches to and perspectives on the region. I am not specifically targeting what Heryanto says for rebuttal, although I think that his remarks require some qualification. However, as a highly respected Indonesian scholar who has experience of teaching and research on Southeast Asia, both within and outside the region, he makes a number of points which need to be weighed carefully. He emphasizes, as most of us have from time to time, that Southeast Asia as a region has an “exogenous character”.25 He charges that when we discuss the

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region and who has contributed to making it and telling us something significant about it, we rarely mention Southeast Asian scholars. Heryanto sets about explaining, in his words, the “subordinate or inferior position [of Southeast Asians] within the production and consumption of this enterprise”, and, in an impassioned counter, proposes that “Southeast Asians are not simply fictional figures authored by outsiders, or submissive puppets in the masterful hands of Western puppeteers”.26 He also discusses the vexed issue of whether the region is becoming meaningful to Southeast Asians and whether they are responding to the constructions of Western scholarship? Indeed, he notes that Southeast Asian studies appears to be of little interest to Southeast Asians, with the exception of Singapore and to some extent Malaysia, and the main centres are still in North America, Australia, and Europe. He draws attention to the emphasis that local citizens place on the study of their own country, and their strong tendency “to be myopically nationalistic in their endeavors”.27 Craig Reynolds, too, remarked in the mid-1990s that “Southeast Asia is not, generally speaking, a domain meaningful for study in countries within the region, where national histories are of primary concern”.28 More recently, Wang Gungwu, in his Amsterdam paper, made reference to “the desultory efforts by local scholars to nail down a Southeast Asian regional identity”.29 On the positive side, Heryanto anticipates gradual expansion in a homegrown Southeast Asian studies in most parts of the region, but he says that “the name and boundaries … may be different from that of the American-led Southeast Asian studies of the Cold War period”; “the old Southeast Asian studies”, based on “the old structures of area studies”, with the dwindling advantage of “old archives that are currently conserved in a few old libraries in France, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, or North America”,30 may well “continue to have some bearing upon locally-produced knowledge” as “an intellectual legacy, historical baggage, source of inspiration, institutional assistance, and partner”. Debates about past and present unequal relationships and related issues such as “agency, positions of difference and representation” are also likely to intensify.31

THE ISSUES REVISITED Let me then return to the set of issues which I have raised with regard to the plight of Southeast Asian studies and area studies more generally, and make some comments, necessarily brief, on these: On essentialism, the challenge of globalization and post-structuralism, changing markets and West against East (or the relations between foreign and local scholarship).

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ESSENTIALISM For many of us studying the Southeast Asian region, the desire or need to define and authenticate it is something of a non-problem, and I personally assign it a low priority. One of the main purposes of my 2001 article in Moussons and my comments on Mary Steedly’s paper was to demonstrate that the definition and conceptualization of Southeast Asia have never loomed large in anthropology, despite the admiring references to early German and Austrian ethnology and its perceptiveness in discovering a Southeast Asian cultural area, and a few more recent excursions into regional anthropology.32 One result of this lack of interest was the absence, until recently, of any substantial anthropological text on the Southeast Asian region as a whole, and a positive rejoicing not in cultural commonality but in cultural difference and diversity. To my mind, anthropology, at its most successful and productive, has directed its comparative gaze on sub-regional categories and populations, the Kachin Hills, central Borneo, eastern Indonesia, Mountain Province of northern Luzon, or the Malay Archipelago. And despite O’Connor’s passionate call for a Southeast Asian regional anthropology, he dwells primarily on mainland Southeast Asian “agro-cultural complexes”.33 Anthropology has also been concerned, as we would expect, not so much with the “heartlands” and political centres of the region, but with the borderlands, margins, and peripheries, where, in Jackson’s post-structural and globalized world one encounters very directly “border-crossing flows”.34 Mary Steedly’s “porous borders” and “perpetual open ends” are rather differently conceptualized, in her discussion of the enormous flows of electronically-generated up-to-theminute information and the consequences of this for our understandings and perceptions of Southeast Asia.35 It is also not without interest that Steedly’s 2001 paper in the Amsterdam workshop was not specifically about Southeast Asia as an area at all, although her 1999 overview article did address regional issues from an anthropological perspective. Indeed, in most respects the later paper is an extension of the earlier one, and they need to be read together. Taking her lead from certain of Geertz’s reflections on his career, she focused on the lack of engagement of anthropologists in current political and economic events and processes, on the problems of addressing turmoil, chaos, crisis, and violence, and on examining the events of today as indicators of future directions. The very important point that she made is that, in a world of “constantly breaking news”,36 our treasured concepts of culture, community, nation, and region have been thrown into disarray. She makes these observations in a workshop on the theme of locating Southeast Asia not as a Southeast Asianist nor as an

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area studies specialist per se but as an Indonesianist, and as an American cultural anthropologist. Like others before her she extrapolates from country to region. In focusing on Indonesia she proposes that, though the recent political events there suggest a situation “extreme and perhaps unique”, there is a vision of the wider Southeast Asian region, both popular and to some extent scholarly, and perhaps peculiar to America, “as a space at once incomprehensible and violent”.37 Well, this is another reading of Southeast Asia; one which, from other perspectives, can be directly disputed, and which does not provide a readily manageable criterion of regional definition. To my mind, her paper gains no obvious advantage by widening the vision of violence and turbulence to what she calls “the Southeast Asian postcolony”.38 With regard to her earlier paper, there she draws attention to the more general American position that, for anthropologists, Southeast Asia is “arguably the best place to look for culture”, and to the attraction in regional and comparative terms of gender issues.39 We are perhaps being drawn into a declaration of what a Southeast Asian regional anthropology might comprise, and, as well as a place to look for culture, though we now have to look for it at the level of the state, it is also a place “seemingly marked by violence”.40 However, the regional project then collapses; we might be able to discern a culture area in the strands of culture theory on which she focuses – gender, marginality, violence, and the state. But because of the very nature of “cultural landscapes” (“open, plural, contested, interpretive”), and “cultural frames” as open to “notions of subversion, difference, porosity, doubleness, ambiguity, and fluidity”, it is unclear how we might contain and comprehend them within a Southeast Asian regional frame of reference, or whether it is analytically useful to do so.41 Let me move on to another case, which, in a different way, is also illustrative of the regional dilemma, and this is one of my own main areas of involvement in Southeast Asia – Borneo. The Borneo Research Council, which is the professional academic association representing Borneo specialists, holds an international biennial conference. But it often seems to live in a world of its own – apart even from Southeast Asia. In many of the conference sessions, one is only vaguely aware of the fact that the island is divided between three political states, and that its two largest areas are part of larger nation-states with their capitals across the seas. Significant numbers of Bornean anthropologists still seem to be primarily concerned with “salvaging”, with gathering and recording fast disappearing oral traditions, with studying communities which have not been studied before, and with poring over European archives to construct histories of pre-literate peoples.

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But many scholars working in Southeast Asia do precisely this; they are preoccupied with their “local”, with one part and often a small part of the region, with one group and often a small group of people; they rarely, if ever, look beyond it. Do not mistake my intention in making these remarks. Some extraordinarily good and productive work has been done across Borneo and other cultures, but it has not often depended on contextualization within a Southeast Asian framework, nor have those involved in this enterprise felt the need to define and locate their studies within a broader cultural region. Indeed, the power of comparison is often considerably diminished if one widens one’s comparative vision too far. Moreover there are many flourishing sub-regional scholarly constituencies, including Borneo studies, which do not and will not depend on a Southeast Asian studies frame of reference for sustenance or for academic credibility; some are defined in ethnic, some in sub-national, some in national terms and some across several neighbouring nations, often mixed with disciplinary criteria.42 Willem van Schendel has pointed to the status differentiation among Southeast Asianists: The “big three” comprise “Indonesianists”, “Thai experts”, and Vietnamologists.43 These three sometimes embrace, and sometimes exclude, the neighbouring provinces of the Philippines, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and Myanmar and now Timor. As I have pointed out elsewhere, the recent re-evaluation of anthropology’s imperialist and colonialist past, and the increasing concentration on “the contextualized, particular local community and the ways in which it has been ‘constituted’ or ‘constructed’ ” has tended to move the discipline away from generalized cross-cultural comparison and from “contextualizing ‘otherness’ in terms of broad cultural areas and categories”.44 In contrast, and in my view, it has been the discipline of history which has been most concerned to identify a Southeast Asian region, and as Reynolds notes, the involvement of senior historians in “a discourse about origins”, based primarily on reconstructions of the history of the heartlands rather than the margins of Southeast Asia, has been crucial in “building and maintaining Southeast Asia as a field of study”.45 Interestingly a significant part of this debate has appeared in Singapore-based journals, particularly the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, the successor to the Journal of Southeast Asian History. However, I suggest that it is neither necessary nor advantageous to examine social and cultural processes and institutions by using a Southeast Asian regional perspective. In our recently published regional anthropology of Southeast Asia, my co-author and I did not seek to justify the project in terms of socio-cultural commonalities and a Southeast Asian cultural region nor of a distinctive intellectual approach and a set of dominant research

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questions;46 rather we tended to echo Emmerson’s notion of “a conveniently residual category”.47 We recognized that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) serves to give some kind of separate identity and interconnectedness to the region,48 and that, given the need to examine the impacts on and consequences of such processes as globalization on the “local”, one is often drawn into doing this in a convenient regional or subregional framework. After all, understanding the complexity of change requires local-level linguistic and other locally-grounded knowledge and expertise; McVey’s “context sensitivity”.49 But we could have divided up the Southeast Asian and adjacent regions in different ways for our investigation and we fully recognized the problem of the very fuzziness of socio-cultural borders in the politically defined, nation-state-based Southeast Asia. Evans’s recent discussion of the East Asian rather than Southeast Asian character of Vietnam and its history is a case in point,50 as is the rather more well-known commentary of Lieberman on Reid’s thesis and on the historical differences between the Malay/Indonesian world and other sectors in the early modern period.51 In our anthropology text we also examined the different kinds of contribution to the anthropology of the region from different constituencies and schools of thought, and from many scholars who had very little, if any, interest in locating their work within a Southeast Asian frame of reference. Our book was much more about a differentiated rather than a unified region and anthropology.

THE CHALLENGE OF GLOBALIZATION AND POST-STRUCTURALISM Peter Jackson, in full flow, can be rather alarmist. He says, “the passing of area studies would leave students of Asian societies in an extremely fraught situation, both theoretically and politically.”52 As noted, his way out of this impasse is to combine the area studies project with a more theoretically sophisticated approach to the study of place and culture. I agree with much of what he says, and do not think that what he is saying is especially startling. Burgess, too, draws attention to the importance of area studies embracing cultural studies and, in this connection, refers to such networks as the Pacific Asian Cultural Studies Forum,53 the Project for Critical Asian Studies,54 the Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies initiative,55 the Cultural Flows group,56 and the journals Positions, Traces, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and the renamed Critical Asian Studies. I am sure that we would all concur that globalization does not lead to all-embracing cultural homogenization; local differences persist and others are generated, and we need to focus on the specifically “cultural” to

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enable us to understand the context, nature, and trajectory of globalized encounters. In the Amsterdam workshop of March 2001, we had already been discussing how we might address issues to do with border definition, cross-border flows, the porosity and openness of borders, and cultural and spatial discontinuities. Van Schendel’s paper directly and eloquently addressed the problems of borderlands, marches, lines on maps, the vagueness of the edges, the liminal places, interstitial zones, and hybrid regions, as well as the processes of marginalization, the relations between cores and peripheries, and the “fringes of the intellectual frameworks known as ‘area studies’ ”.57 In our recently published anthropology of Southeast Asia, Wilder and I have made similar references to the interesting work on northern mainland Southeast Asia,58 and on Austronesian-speaking populations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.59 What is more, it is interesting that in Jackson’s concerns to establish a theoretically informed area studies we are given no sense of what he means by “Asia”, nor what definitional problems are generated by using this as a regional frame of reference. Van Schendel precisely addresses these issues in his concern to demonstrate how the metaphors we use to capture and present “space” and culture areas make certain places and peoples “invisible”.60 I cannot think of a more appropriate statement of how we should proceed in this regard than that of Heather Sutherland, which advises us “to identify relative densities of interaction [or “webs of connection”] which are relevant to the specific subject under consideration”. This then enables “… the researcher to define the geographic boundaries [sic] appropriate to the question rather than operating within conventional but largely irrelevant and often misleading frameworks”.61 It is very likely, indeed desirable, that the boundaries, or rather the cultural, social, political, economic, and geographical/ecological discontinuities will differ depending on whether we are examining issues to do with, for example, urbanization, or labour migration and the transformation of the workforce, or new elites, or changing lifestyles, or concepts of the self and personhood, or environmental change, or knowledge transfer, or political violence, or ethnic identities.62

CHANGING MARKETS I am not optimistic about area studies programmes per se. However, if you were to ask various of my colleagues in the United Kingdom located in disciplines and working in ones, twos, and threes in a scatter of British universities, some would undoubtedly point to the popularity of regional options in mainstream degree programmes. The pattern of provision has changed during the past fifteen years or so in the U.K., and the dominance

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of multi-disciplinary centres has declined quite dramatically. Now teaching and research on Southeast Asia is provided predominantly outside the Asian studies programmes and centres, and increasing numbers of younger scholars do not work in area studies. In addition, interest in the region is kept alive in a range of non-area-based multi-disciplinary programmes, in, for example, gender studies, media and film studies, development studies, business and management studies, and security studies. Policy-related and other more applied social science research is also being undertaken by non-area specialists who hire in vernacular linguistic expertise as and when it is needed, and often dip in and out of an area opportunistically. There are some dangers in this changing pattern in that the environment is much more fluid and unstable, and despite the existence of professional associations and enhanced means of communication the lone-researchers may still feel relatively isolated from other regional expertise. Southeast Asian interests can quite easily disappear from a university with staff turnover. A more knotty problem is that usually Southeast Asian language courses are not part of these disparate portfolios. Language instruction is still mainly or completely left to the remaining area studies programmes, and, it may well be that the provision of certain minority languages in these programmes will have to be subsidized if they are to be maintained. Finally, there is strength in numbers in the surviving area studies programmes, and specialist Southeast Asian expertise, including languages will need to be located in broader Asian or in some cases Pacific Asian studies programmes. The success of European research centres like the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden/ Amsterdam and the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copenhagen, and mechanisms for European-wide collaboration are cases in point. Asian studies programmes also increasingly depend on seeking out and negotiating a range of more appealing and fashionable subjects for combined degrees.

WEST AND EAST Heryanto argues that the differences between two categories – the foreign and the local, Western and home-grown Southeast Asianists, the old Southeast Asian studies and emerging locally-produced knowledge – are greater than those between European, American, and Australian-based Southeast Asian studies. I have some unease about this claim. He goes on to suggest that the cards are stacked against the local scholar because the patron-client relationships between foreign and local, and the arrangements and requirements for training Southeast Asianists in Western universities are founded on certain ethnocentric assumptions (inter-connected with Orientalism), compounded by the low

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priority that educational systems in Southeast Asia assign to the social sciences and the humanities, and their emphasis on “more instrumental and applied agendas”.63 He says: …the intelligentsia in Southeast Asia do not actually differ in any fundamental way from their counterparts in countries where Southeast Asian studies are best established. They all operate, if not, homogeneously, with some significant degree of attention to the incumbent government’s directives and of support for officially defined ‘national interests’.64

He claims that the protected circle of Southeast Asian studies overseas erects other barriers to the entry of Southeast Asian nationals, particularly with regard to the academic requirements of area studies programmes, the credentials considered to be essential to be a Southeast Asianist and the use of English as the main medium of communication. Local scholars, he indicates, are expected to study, and, in some cases, are positively encouraged to do so by institutional policy and support, countries and cultures other than their own. I remember discussing this very issue in the 1990s when I was an external examiner for the Southeast Asian Studies undergraduate and postgraduate programmes at the National University of Singapore, where Ariel Heryanto worked for a while. But the situation of the city-state of Singapore was acknowledged to be rather exceptional in the amount of social science research that could realistically be undertaken there. Approaches and attitudes to wider scholarly involvement in the region from within Singapore had also been firmly established through the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies from the 1960s. Heryanto also draws attention to the emphasis placed in Southeast Asian studies programmes on the mastery of at least one of the living languages of the region and an extended period of residence there. He argues that the initiation process in these programmes assumes engagement with the region on the basis of difference, foreignness, and otherness. The first point to make is that Heryanto tends to operate with too broad a contrast between non-Southeast Asian and Southeast Asian scholars and provision, though he does qualify this. He does not take sufficient account of the variations both within and across national boundaries with regard to Southeast Asian studies and other related programmes, nor the more recent changes in the pattern of provision, nor the full range of consequences for Southeast Asian scholars of the decline in area studies programmes in the West. One of the points of my 2001 paper in Moussons was to try to demonstrate that there were and are differences between American and European approaches to and understandings of Southeast Asia, though I freely acknowledged that I too was over-generalizing. But by dint of the

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different histories and involvements of European countries in Southeast Asia and the wider Asia, our different political commitments, and the different ways in which higher education is organized and funded here, we are not a pale imitation of the United States in our support and development of area studies.65 I grant, however, that in the early days of area studies in the U.K. at least, we were influenced by the American model. In my view Heryanto has a narrow view of the character of Southeast Asian studies programmes, and one which is increasingly out-of-date. The model that he has in mind still comes closest to that of a limited number of American area studies centres, although American dominance has diminished more recently, and there was and is considerable variation in the organization of centres and programmes across the United States.66 For example, several Western-based research centres in Asian studies or Pacific Asia studies, for obvious reasons, do not have a language policy of the kind indicated by Heryanto. Nor have I detected any particular prejudice against Southeast Asian students studying their own rather than a neighbouring country. On the contrary, in my experience they have been positively encouraged to do so, given the access that they have to field material, informants, and written sources, and our recognition of the contribution that they will make. Nor did I detect in the policies that were adopted by the European Science Foundation’s Asia Committee any desire to exclude local scholars; in fact, there was positive encouragement for Asian scholars to participate in our activities, and everything that I have read in the Institute’s Newsletter reinforces this collaborative, equal partnership stance towards our Asian colleagues. But perhaps the message is still not sufficiently clear and robust. Another point has to be emphasized strongly about our relations with Southeast Asian scholars. It seems to me that it has been our very success in supervising, training, and collaborating with Southeast Asian scholars which has, in part at least, contributed to our demise. I do not complain about this; it is as it should be. There are now established programmes and expertise in the region, and students who might previously have come to us from there no longer need to do so. What is more, I am daunted by the information that Southeast Asian scholars have at their fingertips, their direct access to fieldsites, and their command of the vernacular. The resources that the National University of Singapore and the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies have at their disposal in Singapore and their global network in Southeast Asian studies outmatches anything that we can provide in Europe, and the more recent venture into Asian studies at the National University of Singapore strengthens their position enormously. So some Western modesty is required. In addition, the pressures on area studies, and

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particularly in Southeast Asian studies programmes in the West, rather than leading to protectionism and the restriction of access to Southeast Asian scholars, has resulted in positive efforts to establish more collaborative research, to find ways of securing funds in partnership, and to join in copublications. I have also noted the very welcome trend of the physical movement of Southeast Asian scholars into Western academe. The increasingly dispersed pattern of regional expertise in countries like the U.K. and the larger numbers of scholars who move in and out of Southeast Asian circles, also suggest that the guild-like, apprenticeship, gate-keeper pattern which Heryanto describes is a feature of the past. Disciplinary specialists, those who are interested in multi-disciplinary but non-area studies subjects, and those who have an interest in one country and/or one ethnic group, and who do not see themselves as Southeast Asianists are highly unlikely to expend any effort in excluding local scholars from an enterprise with which they do not themselves identify nor find analytically or empirically useful.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Purely Southeast Asian studies programmes are now few and far between, and those outside the region do not set the pace and tone of scholarship on Southeast Asia. There has been an increasing trend during the past two decades for amalgamations and for the emergence of wider Asian studies programmes, although there has always been considerable evidence of institutional interlinkage between Southeast Asian studies and South Asian or East Asian studies or both. Some of these broader Asian studies programmes may well survive and even flourish, but the future for most of us with an academic interest in area does not reside primarily, if it ever did, in standalone area studies programmes. Nor do I think that we should be devoting our energies to defining regions and defending the studies associated with them. Despite these remarks, of course I recognize that the institutional investment in such activities as Southeast Asian studies will probably continue for a considerable period of time into the future; in designated journals, in professional associations, in grant schemes, and in institutional arrangements. Some sort of area studies commitment will remain, but this may well be in an environment of much more shifting and flexible academic identities. In any case, I have found myself regularly moving between identities, either selfgenerated or externally imposed or both, as a Borneanist, a Malaysianist, an Indonesianist, a maritime Southeast Asianist, a Southeast Asianist, an Asianist,

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an anthropologist, a sociologist, and even someone who moves in and out of development, environmental, and tourism studies circles. However, if Southeast Asian studies is to continue in the form of departments, programmes, and institutes, then I would venture to suggest that the future must be in the region itself, and although I have disagreed with Heryanto on several matters, I most certainly endorse his aspirations for local scholarship. What is more, if the perceptions of an unequal relationship between foreign and local scholars are as strong as they appear to be in Heryanto’s discussion, then we must find ways of changing those perceptions. The tendency to become overly preoccupied with the fate of regional studies in our own country or continent is to be expected and at times has led us to pay insufficiently explicit attention to the achievements of local scholarship on the region with which we engage. Heryanto is right to give us a sharp reminder of this. But I am convinced that those of us who have had a long-standing commitment to the study of the Southeast Asian region readily acknowledge the influence and contribution of local scholars. And in my view, it is in their hands that the fate or fortune of Southeast Asian studies resides.

NOTES 1. See Steedly, Mary. “The State of Culture Theory in the Anthropology of Southeast Asia”. Annual Review of Anthropology 28 (1999): 431–54. 2. Cf. Bowen, John R. “The Forms Culture Takes: A State-of the-field Essay on the Anthropology of Southeast Asia”. The Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 1047– 48; Bowen, John R. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies: A View from the United States”. Moussons 1 (2000): 11–13. 3. See Steedly. “The State of Culture Theory”: 432. 4. King, Victor T. and William D. Wilder. The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia. An Introduction. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 5. See, for example, Emmerson, Donald K. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (1984): 1–21; Solheim II, Wilhelm G. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name: Another Point of View”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 16 (1985): 141–47. 6. Rajah, Ananda. “Southeast Asia: Comparatist Errors and the Construction of a Region”. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Special Focus: Reconceptualizing Southeast Asia 27 (1999): 41–53; Andaya, Barbara W. “The Unity of Southeast Asia: Historical Approaches and Questions”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 28 (1997): 161–71; Anderson, Benedict. “Studies of the Thai State: The State of Thai Studies”. In The State of Thai Studies: Analyses of Knowledge, Approaches,

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and Prospects in Anthropology, Art History, Economics, History, and Political Science, edited by E. Ayal. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Centre for International Studies, Southeast Asia Program, 1978: 193–247; Anderson, Benedict. “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950– 1990”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 25–40; Bowen. “The Forms Culture Takes”; Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies”; Emmerson. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”; Evans, Grant. “Between the Global and the Local there are Regions, Culture Areas and National States: A Review Article”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 33, no. 1 (2002): 147–62; Fifield, Russell H. “Southeast Asian Studies: Origins, Development, Future”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 7, no. 2 (1976): 151– 61; Fifield, Russell H. “Southeast Asia as a Regional Concept”. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 11 (1983): 1–14; Heryanto, Ariel. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” Moussons 5 (2002): 3–30; Hirschman, Charles. “The State of Southeast Asian Studies in American Universities”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 41–58; Keyes, Charles F. “A Conference at Wingspread and Rethinking Southeast Asian Studies”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor, Michigan: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 9–24; Lieberman, Victor. “Local Integration and Eurasian Analogies: Structuring Southeast Asian History, c. 1350–1830”. Modern Asian Studies 27 (1993): 475–572; Lieberman, Victor. “An Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia? Problems of Regional Coherence – A Review Article”. The Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 796–807; Lombard, Denys. “Networks and Synchronisms in Southeast Asian History”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26 (1995): 10–16; McVey, Ruth. “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26 (1995): 1–9; McVey, Ruth. “Globalization, Marginalization and the Study of Southeast Asia”. In Southeast Asian Studies, Reorientations, edited by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey. New York: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998: 37–64; Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce: 1400–1600, Vol 1: The Land Below the Winds. Vol 2: Expansion and Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press; Reid, Anthony. “Recent Trends and Future Directions in Southeast Asian Studies (Outside Southeast Asia)”. In Towards the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia, edited by Taufik Abdullah and Yekti Maunati. Jakarta: Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994: 256–76; Reid, Anthony. “Studying ‘Asia’ in Asia”. Asian Studies Review 23 (1999): 141–51; Reid, Anthony. “A Saucer Model of Southeast Asian Identity”. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science, Special Focus: Reconceptualizing Southeast Asia 27, no. 1 (1999): 7–23; Reid,

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7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

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Anthony, Lineages of Southeast Asian Studies in English. Unpublished paper presented at the workshop “Locating Southeast Asia”, University of Amsterdam, 29–31 March 2001; Reynolds, Craig J. “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia”. The Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 419–46; Reynolds, Craig J. “Selfcultivation and Self-determination in Postcolonial Southeast Asia”. In Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations, edited by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Publications, 1998: 7–35; Van Schendel, Willem. Geographies of Knowing. Geographies of Ignorance: Southeast Asia from the Fringes. Unpublished paper presented at the workshop “Locating Southeast Asia”, University of Amsterdam, 29–31 March 2001; Shamsul Amri B. “A Comment on Recent Trends and the Future Direction of Southeast Asian Studies”. In Towards the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia, edited by Taufik Abdullah and Yekti Maunati. Jakarta: Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994: 277–96; Solheim. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name: Another Point of View”; Sutherland, Heather. “Southeast Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 34 (2003): 1–20; Wang Gungwu. Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and China. Unpublished paper presented at the workshop “Locating Southeast Asia”, University of Amsterdam, 29–31 March 2001; Wolters O.W. History, Culture and Religion in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University, Southeast Asia Program Publications, Studies in Southeast Asia, no. 26. See King, Victor T. Between West and East: Policy and Practice in South-East Asian Studies in Britain. Hull: Hull University Press, 1990. McVey, Ruth. “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia”: 44; “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies”: 1. Reynolds. “Self-Cultivation and Self-Determination in Postcolonial Southeast Asia”: 12–13. Anderson. “Studies of the Thai State”: 232; Emmerson. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”: 7–10. McVey. “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies”: 6. Kolluoglu-Kirli, Biray. “From Orientalism to Area Studies”. The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 101–07; Harootunian, Harry and Naoki Sakai. “Japan Studies and Cultural Studies”. Positions: East Asia Cultures Critique 7 (1999): 596. Jackson, Peter A. “Space, Theory, and Hegemony: The Dual Crises of Asian Area Studies and Cultural Studies”. Sojourn. Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18 (2003): 1–41. Jackson, Peter A. “Mapping Poststructuralism’s Borders: The Case for Poststructuralist Area Studies”. Sojourn. Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 18 (2003): 42–88. Burgess, Chris. “ ‘The Asian Studies Crisis’: Putting Cultural Studies into Asian Studies and Asia into Cultural Studies”. International Journal of Asian Studies 1 (2004): 121. For example Kahn, Joel S. Constituting the Minangkabau. Peasants, Culture and

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16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

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Modernity in Colonial Indonesia. Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993; Kahn, Joel S. Culture, Multiculture, Postculture. London: Sage Publications, 1995; Kahn, Joel S., ed. Southeast Asian Identities. Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand. Singapore and London: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998; Reynolds. “Self-cultivation and Selfdetermination”: 18. McVey. “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies”: 1–9; McVey. “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia”: 37–64; Reynolds. “Self-cultivation and Self-determination in Postcolonial Southeast Asia”: 7–35; Steedly. “The State of Culture Theory in the Anthropology of Southeast Asia”: 431–54; Evans. “Between the Global and the Local”: 147–62. Jackson. “Space, Theory, and Hegemony”: 17. Ibid.: 2. Ibid.: 3. Ibid.: 2. Reid, Anthony. Lineages of Southeast Asian Studies in English. Unpublished paper presented at the workshop “Locating Southeast Asia”. University of Amsterdam, 29–31 March, 2001: 6–9; 4. Asia Committee. Asia and Europe towards the 21st Century. Research and Education at a European Level. Strasbourg: European Science Foundation, and Leiden: ESF Asia Committee Secretariat, 1997; Milner, Anthony. “Approaching Asia, and Asian Studies, in Australia”. Asian Studies Review 23 (1999): 193–203. Ibid.: 201; but see Burgess: 122, on the recent “loss of momentum” in Australian Asian studies. Heryanto, Ariel. “Can There be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”. Moussons 5 (2002): 3–30. Ibid.: 3. Ibid.: 4–5. Ibid.: 11; and see Lombard. “Networks and Synchronisms in Southeast Asian History”: 11. Reynolds, Craig L. “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia.” The Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995): 420. Wang Gungwu. “Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore and China”: 9. Heryanto. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”: 22. Ibid.: 4. See Reid. “A Saucer Model of Southeast Asian Identity”: 7–23; Solheim II. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name”: 141–47; Bowen. “The Forms Culture Takes”: 1047–78; Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies”: 3–19; also see O’Connor, Richard A. “Agricultural Change and Ethnic Succession in Southeast Asian States: A Case for Regional Anthropology”. The Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 968–96. Cf. O’Connor, ibid.

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34. Jackson. “Space, Theory, and Hegemony”: 9–17. 35. See Steedly, Mary. From the Interpretation of Cultures to the Banality of Power: Anthropology in the Postcolony. Unpublished paper presented at the workshop on “Locating Southeast Asia”. University of Amsterdam, 29–31 March 2001: 7. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid.: 8 38. Ibid.: 21 39. Steedly. “The State of Culture Theory”: 432–33, 436–40. 40. Ibid.: 444. 41. Ibid.: 431–54. 42. Also see Steedly, ibid.: 434. 43. Van Schendel, Willem. Geographies of Knowing: 6. 44. King, Victor T. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?” Moussons 3 (2001): 5. 45. Reynolds. “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia”: 439. 46. King and Wilder. The Modern Anthropology of South-East Asia. An Introduction. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 47. Emmerson. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”: 17. 48. See, for example, Fifield, Russell H. “Southeast Asian Studies: Origins, Development, Future”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 7 (1976): 154–61; Fifield, Russell H. “Southeast Asia as a Regional Concept”. Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 11 (1983): 1–14. 49. McVey. “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia”: 50. 50. Evans, Grant. “Between the Global and the Local”: 151–57. 51. Lieberman, Victor. “An Age of Commerce in Southeast Asia? Problems of Regional Coherence – A Review Article”. Journal of Asian Studies 54 (1995): 796–807. 52. Jackson. “Space, Theory, and Hegemony”: 2. 53. Burgess. “The Asian Studies Crisis”: 121–22. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid. 57. Van Schendel. Geographies of Knowing. Geographies of Ignorance. 58. Michaud, Jean, ed. Turbulent Times and Enduring Peoples: Mountain Minorities in the Southeast Asian Massif. Richmond: Curzon Press, 2000; Evans, Grant, Chris Hutton and Kuah Khun Eng, eds. Where China Meets Southeast Asia: Social and Cultural Change in the Border Region. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000. 59. Fox, James and Clifford Sather, eds. Origins, Ancestry and Alliance. Explorations in Austronesian Ethnography. Canberra: Australian National University, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies,

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63. 64. 65. 66.

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1996; Fox, James, ed. The Poetic Power of Place. Perspectives on Austronesian Ideas of Locality. Canberra: Australian National University, Department of Anthropology, Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, 1997. Van Schendel. Geographies of Knowing: 16. Sutherland, Heather. “Southeast Asian History and the Mediterranean Analogy”: 19. See Reynolds, Craig J. and Ruth McVey. Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations. The Frank H. Golay Memorial Lectures 2 and 3. Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998; McVey. “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia”. Heryanto. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”: 9. Ibid. And see Emmerson. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”: 12–13. McVey. “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia”: 41– 43, 55; Fifield. “Southeast Asian Studies: Origins, Development, Future”: 153– 54.

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3 REGION, ACADEMIC DYNAMICS, AND PROMISE OF COMPARITIVISM Beyond Studying ‘Southeast Asia’? Robert Cribb

Why does Southeast Asian studies exist? Academics are very good at analysing other peoples’ societies, but we have never been as competent at turning our analytical skills to the academic society we inhabit in our professional lives. Academic society is a strange world, or rather worlds, for most of us actually inhabit at least two relatively distinct worlds. On the one hand, we live in the institutional world of universities, where we deal with students, colleagues and administrators with varying degrees of effectiveness and pleasure. This is a life abundantly chronicled in novels, though it is much less subject to scholarly scrutiny.1 We may, if we are fortunate, have colleagues and students with whom we can develop intellectual relationships. For the most part, however, the best part of our intellectual life depends on being a part of another world, that global archipelago of scholars who in some way – difficult to define – constitute our peers and constitute the field in which we work. This is the world we inhabit briefly at conferences, and our best conversations are often those held on such occasions, as well as by e-mail and in books, book reviews and articles, with scholars from other institutions who share our interests and who challenge our assumptions. Whatever our topics of research, we generally have a sense of belonging to a field, a collectivity of living scholars and published work which somehow 45

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seems to be engaged in the same intellectual programme. Whereas fields may be more or less defined institutionally – bureaucrats can tell us precisely, for instance, where Asia stops and the Pacific starts – intellectually they are fuzzy and volatile. In practice most of us locate ourselves within several fields. Some of them exist in a series of intellectual concentric circles based on location (Jakarta, Java, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, Asia) or time period (1870–1900, being part of the nineteenth century, and then of the modern era), whereas others are defined by topic – violence, film, environment, diasporas, entrepreneurship, and so on – or by conventional discipline. Nonetheless, some fields seem to be especially enduring and to create a lasting, though certainly never unconditional, sense of academic and intellectual commitment. In such fields the sense of community is stronger than in looser areas of interest; so, too, is the sense of being part of a continuing debate. None of us knows everyone else in the field, of course, and none of us can read everything that is published, but it is likely that most of those, for instance, who conduct research on Southeast Asian history are separated from personal acquaintance with all of the other historians of Southeast Asia in the world by no more than two or three degrees of separation.2 The internal complexity and diversity of the Southeast Asian region, its multitude of connections to the rest of the world, and its volatile, uncertain boundaries would seem to make the field of Southeast Asian studies an improbable entity. Yet Southeast Asia has been strikingly “successful” as the next level of regional conceptualization above the nation in this particular part of the world. Although Heather Sutherland once famously described Southeast Asia as a “cold concept”3 (meaning that it was hard to feel any warmth for this motley collection of lands and seas), the success of the concept is striking when one considers the far greater intellectual, emotional and institutional failure of other regional concepts such as Maphilindo (Malaysia, Philippines, Indonesia), the “Malay World”, mainland Southeast Asia and so on, despite the fact that each of them could reasonably claim to be more coherent than Southeast Asia in terms of cultural patterns and historical experience. To understand the nature of Southeast Asian studies as a field, we need to note briefly and then take a step back from the debate over the region itself as a field of study. The study of Southeast Asia is marked, perhaps even marred, by continuing debate over the nature of the region. In one corner stand the realists, with Anthony Reid as their current chief paladin.4 Their position is that Southeast Asia is a coherent empirical reality and that the contours of Southeast Asian studies as a field are warranted by the objective existence of Southeast Asia as a historical and social fact. The realist view has

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grown in sophistication over the years. It now refers to an impressive range of cultural features spread widely across the region, encompassing architecture, the position of women, cuisine, music, political style, and much besides. It argues for a common regional historical experience in which economic integration, cultural exchange, and similarity of political forms span two thousand years to create a true coherence, despite differences of language and religion and despite the absence of political unity. The realist approach also seeks to anchor itself in the consciousness of the people of the region by asserting an ancient and enduring sense of Southeast Asian identity as a reality distinct from the Indian and Chinese identities of neighbouring regions to the east and north. In the opposing corner stand the constructivists, who regard “Southeast Asia” as an artefact. The constructivists, located principally in the United States, emphasize the origins of Southeast Asian studies, and of the conception of Southeast Asia as a region of study, in the strategic interests of the United States following World War II.5 They see Southeast Asia as having coherence primarily as a proving ground for a succession of particular kinds of American hegemonic strategies, by turns and in various combinations anti-colonial, clandestine, growth-oriented, authoritarian, culturalist, and so on. In this view, the issues that seemed to give Southeast Asia a regional coherence were coherent because they were U.S. interests, not because they reflected some distinctive regional character. The very formulation of a term such as “Southeast Asia” was, in this view, a feature of the American geo-political belief that the world could be neatly divided into zones defined by their external strategic importance, rather than by internal characteristics.6 To talk of “Southeast Asia” before Americans employed the term during and after World War II, is, in this view, anachronistic; it is to project an unhistorical image on to a space that had no such existence. The constructivists do not deny that the term “Southeast Asia” has a pedigree in pre-war European, especially German, scholarship,7 but they see this scholarship as relatively insignificant in global scholarship on the region8 and, more important, as not having contributed intellectually to what came afterwards.9 The debate between these two positions is anchored in deeper philosophical and political issues, all of them savagely double-edged. To assert that Southeast Asia is a reality is also to claim some kind of autonomy for its people (and by implication for all peoples), the right to be judged by their own standards. It also feeds a sense of the separateness of Southeast Asians from Westerners, a cultural relativism which can easily come into conflict with notions of universal human values. To assert that Southeast Asia is a constructed concept is both to recognize the power of political systems to shape knowledge and to affirm

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a universality of human nature which goes beyond principle and extends deep into analysis. Yet, as we have seen so often, assertions of human universalism tend to be assertions of the doctrines of the hegemonic power. The constructivists, who resist what they see as mystification and the validation of irrational identities, find it difficult not to write as if Western values are the objective norm for all humankind. Given the magnitude of the intellectual issues at stake, it is perhaps surprising that the debate has remained both scrupulously polite and analytically sober in print. Only occasionally in seminars and conference papers is the debate marked by a certain degree of intellectual sharp practice at the margins. The realists routinely appeal to the importance of Southeast Asians having a major say in writing about the region. This is a proposition which is embarrassing to dispute, because it is tied up on the one hand with moral approval of the process of decolonization and self-determination and on the other with the impeccable proposition that the points of view of people who are being studied ought to have a significant place in such study. Amongst Indonesianists, it is reflected sometimes in a curiously pretentious refusal to attempt grammatical correctness in Dutch, as if respect for the rules of grammar and spelling of the colonial language might somehow carry the taint of a broader respect for the colonial project. The more important sharp practice arises, however, from the implication of credentialism, the suggestion that Southeast Asians (and perhaps also scholars resident in or relatively close to Southeast Asia) are ipso facto better qualified to pronounce upon the region than are outsiders. Of course, credentialism takes many forms, and we should not excoriate a credentialism which privileges Southeast Asians any more or less than we excoriate the credentialism which privileges the views of scholars from Leiden, Ithaca or Canberra over those of researchers from less prominent centres. Nonetheless there is something dangerous in the approach which reserves the right to study any social category (women, indigenous peoples, working classes, etc.) to scholars claiming membership of that group, or even simply privileges their voices in the discussion. The sharp practice lies in a failure to examine rigorously just why, to quote Anthony Reid, Southeast Asia should be “studied first and best in the region itself ”.10 The sharp practice of the constructivists, by contrast, lies in their tendency to deny the objective existence of “Southeast Asia” by implying that the realists have ignored the internal diversity of Southeast Asia or its lack of sharp and incontestable boundaries. This tendency gives their objections at times an air of petty quibbling, rather than serious intellectual engagement. The sharp practice here lies in the post-modernist game of questioning the assumptions of others without offering a clear alternative

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basis for investigation. At its simplest, the constructivist view treats Southeast Asia as a residual category – not India, not China, not Oceania, a convenient basket for a disparate collection of societies, most of them too small to warrant individual attention. Nonetheless, there is something not entirely satisfactory about this debate. By focusing on the question of whether Southeast Asia was constituted as a region by Southeast Asians themselves or by United States strategic policymakers, by the hegemony of reality or the crude influence of funding and employment opportunities, the realist-constructivist debate neglects to draw attention to the way in which the field is constructed by the professional dynamics of the scholarly community that studies it. To understand why Southeast Asian studies exists as a field, we need to go beyond simply examining its intellectual basis or the crude material forces that drive it and to consider as well the profession-social imperatives that shape the existence of fields in academic life in general and of Southeast Asian studies as a field in particular.

DOMAINS OF POWER? The insights of Foucault and others sometimes lead observers to describe the academic world in terms of hegemonic texts and paradigms, in terms of policing disciplinary boundaries and in terms of hierarchies of privileged knowledge.11 Within a hierarchical institution such as a university department, these insights are frighteningly apposite, and most of us have either experienced or heard stories of the baleful influence that powerful scholars can wield over the career prospects of their subordinates. Willem van Schendel has argued that fields in academic life are terrains for the exercise of power and authority. That is, they are constructed by institutions – universities, departments, academic programmes, associations, funding bodies – and are preserved because they constitute domains within which powerful figures can exercise hegemony.12 Van Schendel’s argument is important in explaining the place of areas in the national academic politics of those countries where research is conducted on a significant scale, but it says much less about the global field to which we also belong, and where the sense of Southeast Asia as a region is at least as strong as within national institutional frameworks. In intellectual fields more broadly, the reality is one of fluidity and volatility. However powerful a professor may be within his or her institution, that power always attenuates when it is projected into a national archipelago of scholars. And whatever institutional power a scholar may hold within a national academic community, it counts for little in the global archipelagos that most of us

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belong to today. It is true that access to particular journals and even access to research funds can be hampered by individuals who are locally powerful. For the most part, however, the institutional power of individuals plays only a small role in the power politics of an academic field. To understand this global construction of fields, we need to turn from institutional politics to the sociology of ideas.

CIRCLES OF ESTEEM The first, and perhaps most important reason for the existence of academic fields is that they create communities within which it is possible to construct “circles of esteem”. Aside from employment, of course, esteem (and its dark converse, contempt) is the most important fuel of academic life. In most Western countries we receive reasonable salaries and we get pleasure from the intellectual aspect of our work, but an essential and underlying reward of academic work is the way in which it confers respect. If our work commands the respect of our colleagues, we are rewarded by being acknowledged, cited, mentioned in texts or seminars, invited as a discussant, presenter or keynote speaker, presented with prizes, elected to learned academies and, in the end, given a decent obituary in one of the professional journals, rather than a single line in the grim list of “deceased Asianists” in the Association for Asian studies’ Newsletter. We cherish all these signs of respect most dearly (except the last, of course, which comes too late to be properly appreciated) because we tend to respect our intellectual peers in our fields rather more than we respect our institutional colleagues. By contrast the signs of respect we get from our own institution tend to get their value from their material worth: Study leave, increased salary, the dubious rewards of administrative power and so on. Respect, then, is a crucial reward in academic life, but it is not won simply by writing and publishing. I have argued elsewhere that circles of esteem play a crucial role in generating academic respect, albeit normally on the basis of solid scholarly work. A scholar’s circle of esteem is a group of academic colleagues who talk and write favourably about that scholar’s work and push both his or her ideas and his or her reputation into the academic marketplace.13 The underlying importance of circles of esteem lies in two facts. First, we inhabit an academic world where quality and intellectual impact are seriously difficult to judge. Of course there are crude indicators of quality – number of publications, number of awards, number of citations – but we all know that our field stands somewhere between business and politics on

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the one hand, where nothing counts except the numbers, and the creative arts on the other where the judgement of quality leaves a huge margin of subjectivity. The decision that we take whether to regard the work of another scholar with deference, respect, condescension or contempt is often influenced by the opinions we hear from others. It is not that we accept the judgement of others willy-nilly, rather, the way in which others frame the reception of a new work often has a powerful influence on the way we frame our own view of that work. Judging a work good or bad is always a risky business – if we are too much out of step with the judgement of our peers, applauding the works that they think are uninteresting or excoriating the works they consider to be inspired, we run the risk that our own judgements will be considered suspect. And from there it is only a short step to doubt about the quality of our research. Second, the volume of research produced in a field that is large enough to generate a circle of esteem is more than most scholars can manage to read properly, especially in view of today’s routine burdens of teaching, administration, and answering e-mails. For this reason, we rely to a considerable extent on the judgements of others, even as we realize that those others depend on our judgements. A sense of the value of each scholar, of the esteem (or sometimes contempt) that he or she merits arises in this way from a complex division of labour, in which different members of the broader scholarly community effectively hawk the intellectual ideas of their colleagues into the broader academic world. This process takes place both formally, by means of book reviews and citations, and informally through gossip at conferences. The most important social feature of circles of esteem, apart from their fluidity and volatility, is that they are not hierarchical. Nor are they dependent on institutional power or support, especially in these days of e-mail communication. They form and re-form at every social level in the broader academic world and they provide powerful moral and intellectual support to groups which are sometimes disadvantaged in formal hierarchies – women, minorities, the younger generation, and so on. For this reason, it seems likely that academic fields must be relatively large if they are to generate circles of esteem. There must be enough young scholars, there must be enough radical voices, and so on, to form circles. If the number of researchers is too few, it is likely that the field will be either hierarchical or fractious. That is to say, a single powerful scholar may control the field and determine both what constitutes quality and which younger scholars are to be favoured with glowing references and admission to the best (or only) journals. Or the scholars of a small field may be deeply divided amongst themselves. Unable

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to generate a circle of esteem from such a small constituency, they may turn instead on each other or, preferably, withdraw to larger fields so that circles of esteem become possible. Southeast Asian studies exists, in other words, partly because it is about the right size in terms of scholarly community. We are numerous enough to find amongst our colleagues a circle of similarly minded peers with whom we can exchange gossip, citations, and scholarly advice and who will ultimately be the most important advocates of our ideas and our names. We Southeast Asianists are numerous enough to generate a regular range of interesting conferences within our field and numerous enough that we can hope to find a serendipitous cohort of colleagues within larger conferences such as the International Convention of Asia Scholars or the annual meeting of the Association for Asian studies. But we are not so numerous that we get lost or so numerous that that voice of a single scholar can never be heard.

STRENGTH IN NUMBERS Scale also matters in another way. Southeast Asia as an academic field is a stage on which specialists on Brunei, Laos, Arakan, Panay, and even Indonesia can stand shoulder to shoulder, as it were (and sometimes head-to-head), with specialists on China, India, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Eastern Europe, and so on. Whatever our own narrower individual fields of research, we stand as Southeast Asianists for half a billion people, for some of the world’s most dynamic economies and for a truly impressive body of scholarship which has generated a host of ideas which have been influential outside our region: Theatre state,14 imagined communities,15 shared poverty,16 and so on. We might not quite be on first name terms with, or have even met, “Wim”, “Bernhard”, “Ben”, “Ruth”, “Denys”, “Cliff ”, “Jim” or “Tony”, but to the outside world they can be considered part of our broader circle. Perhaps fortunately, we do not suffer in any comparable way from the occasional appearance of charlatans in our field, and indeed we commonly feel frustrated that those whose scholarship we do not respect are also taken seriously from a distance. Even if our own individual fields of research are narrow, moreover, we draw academic strength and status from the importance of the region within which those fields are located. Our main research field might be the salt industry in nineteenth century Java, but in the broader academic community and beyond, we carry some of the allure of Borobudur and Bali, of trade in cloves, sandalwood and birds-of-paradise, of Lee Kuan Yew and Suharto, depending on the susceptibilities of the audience. In the same way, it is hard

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not to believe that the new practice of referring to Madagascar, Mauritius, and the Comoro Islands as “Insular Southwest Asia” (made popular by the Newsletter of the International Institute of Asian Studies in Leiden) does not have something to do with a desire to detach those regions from the apparently bleak prospects of Africa and to harness them to the glittering chariot of Asia.

ACADEMIC GLOBALIZATION AND INTELLECTUAL TARIFF BARRIERS We can also learn something of the meaning of areas and regions in the academic world by considering some of the parallels between the intellectual debate over area studies and the wider debate over economic policy, especially in developing countries. Southeast Asian studies emerged as a distinctive field during the three decades following the outbreak of World War II. Although precursors of this new field can be identified in the 1930s and even earlier, the Southeast Asian studies enterprise was novel in several respects. Greater numbers of scholars than ever before were involved in research on the region, and they were committed, in a way that most colonial-era scholars were not, to setting their national and local studies within a broader regional perspective. They flourished within the so-called area studies model, in which disciplinary boundaries were considered of minor importance and historians spoke comfortably to economists, political scientists, anthropologists, and so on. They made extensive use of culture as an analytical tool. And, most important, they were committed for the most part to viewing Southeast Asian history from the point of view of its indigenous inhabitants, though paradoxically only a tiny handful of them were actually Southeast Asian.17 Especially from the 1980s on, this area studies approach to Southeast Asia came in for strong criticism. The essence of this criticism was that, isolated by a preoccupation with language and culture, area specialists had failed to develop or maintain sufficient disciplinary rigour and had become lost in an academic culture of simple (even if painstaking) empiricism. So little do we communicate on a systematic basis with area specialists outside our immediate region, Asia, that it is hard to say whether any single region was targeted more than any other. In the aftermath of the World Trade Centre attacks of 2001, American specialists on the Middle East found themselves under attack because their efforts to explain the forces driving anti-Americanism in their region and their occasional criticism of what they saw as misguided or counter-productive United States policies, led to them being portrayed as disloyal. This special circumstance, however, does not seem to have been significant in the earlier, general attack on area studies.

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Rather, the critique of area studies was strikingly parallel to the arguments for economic liberalization which were growing in strength at the same time. Whereas the economic liberalizers argued that tariff barriers protected inefficient industries, the intellectual liberalizers argued that the barriers created by insistence on language competence and local experience constituted similar barriers protecting sloppy and sub-standard research. In both cases, the liberalizers promised that the competition, which tearing down these barriers would permit, would ultimately generate a higher standard of product. Like economic liberalizers, the academic liberalizers tend to regard the truth of their proposition as so self-evident as not to need extensive elaboration. The opponents of liberalization, on the other hand, being on the defensive, have needed to be more creative in developing arguments in response. Three relatively distinct arguments have been presented against academic liberalization. The first argument is also strikingly parallel to those of the opponents of economic liberalism. Both refer to the loss of local autonomy, of the ability to set the local economic or intellectual agenda according to local needs rather than the presuppositions of economic and intellectual great powers. The defenders of area studies point out that for all that AngloAmerican scholarship claims to be universal by virtue of its disciplinary clarity, in practice it is heavily oriented to cases in the West. Whatever its promises of a universalist discourse, global scholarship tends to be anchored in the parochial concerns of Euro-America, and treats the rest of the world as offering little more than occasional incidental case studies to elaborate points developed in the global heartland. Journals in English, controlled by EuroAmerican editors, Western university presses, citation indices located in the same regions that dominate the global economy all have the effect of marginalizing scholarship in, from, and about other parts of the world. The consequence is an alienation of scholarship from the peoples to whom it should belong and a tragic reduction in the diversity of academic cultures. A second set of arguments focuses on specific difficulties faced by scholarship in the non-Western world. The area studies approach does indeed provide some protection from competition for those whose education includes years of language study as well as standard disciplinary training and who are therefore at a disadvantage in comparison with those who only ever work with English language materials. It is a protective sphere for those whose fieldwork locations are distant and alien, for local scholars who lack the financial resources to network in the conference circuits of the North. Many area studies scholars have also retreated to a crudely utilitarian defence, arguing that their knowledge is strategically important – valuable to business in times of prosperity and economic growth and valuable to the

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military in times of war and conflict. Important though these arguments may be outside the academy, they have tended to be at best a double-edged sword within the academic world: Most academics in the humanities and social sciences have a deep instinctive resistance to the notion that their work should be justified by its direct utility to business and government, and Southeast Asian studies specialists who present such arguments to the nonacademic world can never entirely escape the accusation that they have sold out on fundamental scholarly values. None of these arguments, however, cuts much ice with the liberalizers, because they see the sacrifices that others have to make as relatively minor “structural adjustment” in comparison with the expected global benefit. Southeast Asianists, therefore, like their colleagues working on other regions of the world, may need to develop an alternative strategy. In this respect, we need first to identify why our universalist colleagues cannot afford to ignore us.

INTELLECTUAL DIVERSITY AND THE COMPARATIVIST COUNTER-ATTACK The principal defence of tariff barriers today is that they offer a breathing space for local industries to develop to the point where they can compete fairly on a level playing field. This argument would be attractive but for the fact that it simply implies that the disappearance of area studies ought to take place later rather than sooner. Instead I prefer an ecological analogy that identifies area studies, including Southeast Asian studies, as a reserve of intellectual diversity in the way that tropical rainforests constitute a reserve of bio-diversity. To understand the importance of such reserves, we need to consider the way in which knowledge progresses in the humanities and social sciences. Most academics probably have a view of academic work that corresponds more or less to that outlined by Thomas Kuhn in his Structure of Scientific Revolutions.18 Kuhn famously argues that most science works within established and widely shared analytical paradigms. Most research – “normal science”, as he calls it – does no more than explicate the paradigm, is case study after case study. The picture of the world that emerges from such research becomes richer and more complex, but it does not change in any fundamental way. Only occasionally does a scientific revolution take place, a shift in paradigm that requires the research community to look at all that has been investigated in the past according to a new framework. Celebrated examples are the shift from Ptolemaic to Copernican astronomy and from creationism to evolution

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in biology. Kuhn’s framework suggests that an important dynamic in the emergence of a revolutionary paradigm is the accumulation of awkward problems under the old analytical regime, but he implies that a major role can be played by sheer brilliance by an individual researcher who can identify a new idea and who has the understanding of the field to know just how far the new idea can be carried. Just as every foot soldier is said to carry a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack,19 every scientist nurtures, at least at the start of his or her career, the hope that he or she will manage to be if not another Newton, Darwin or Einstein, then at least a Mendel, a Pasteur, a Florey, or a Hawking. Figures of this kind have eminence in the sciences because they change the terrain by obliging all except the occasional stubborn holdout to abandon unproductive paradigms such as Ptolemaic astronomy and creationism, unless there is some intrusion by unscientific pressure from outside the academic world. In the humanities and social sciences, by contrast, paradigms tend to be both more durable and more volatile. On the one hand, they are more durable because many of them are rooted in conclusions about human nature that are fundamentally difficult or impossible to test convincingly and which have been offered in one form or another since the dawn of human civilization in the formulations of the great religions and philosophies. On the other hand they are more volatile because basic paradigms in the humanities and social sciences control our eventual conclusions much less closely than they do in the natural sciences. The author of a paper on, say, the taxonomy of trematode parasites is likely to be able to explain easily how it relates to basic evolutionary principles. The author of a paper on the fall of Suharto would generally find it more difficult to express its conclusions in terms of their place in the basic philosophical debate over Cartesian dualism. The academic landscape of the humanities is therefore dominated by a vast multitude of lower-level paradigms – we might call them simply interpretations or perhaps theses – whose intellectual ancestry is not immediately apparent. The proponents of these bastard theories contend with each other for dominance over a much smaller terrain than do the great paradigms of natural science, and they never wholly prevail in times of pre-eminence, never wholly disappear in times of intellectual retreat. Culture as a tool for explaining political behaviour, for instance, has been driven from the centre of the academic battlefield with hoots of derision, but its proponents continue to see it as expressing important truths, and they await only a more felicitous formulation of their arguments and a few intellectual mis-steps on the part of their opponents to return to the fray. Fukuyama’s End of History thesis,20 suggesting that the fall of communism had marked the final victory of a single capitalist

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individualist view of humankind and of the path to the ideal society, showed an egregious ignorance of the power of intellectual guerrilla warfare to sap even the most dominant academic paradigms. The struggle between paradigms is carried on with a variety of weapons. Sheer logical argument is important in some circumstances, as is new empirical data. One of the most important influences on the success of a paradigm is the changing contemporary context, which continually forces us to ask new questions of the past. At its simplest level, the emergence of a new political leader demands some attention to biography; at more complex levels, for instance, the emergence of money politics in Malaysia and Thailand or the sudden prominence of mass violence in Indonesia oblige us to interrogate the past in ways different from those we used when these phenomena were not so obtrusive. We can see that the same process has been at work in the past. Each of the major political changes in Southeast Asia since World War II has generated powerful new insights into Southeast Asian societies, not because scholars have been specially perspicacious but because events grabbed us by the ears and forced us to explain aspects of society which we had previously neglected. In Indonesian history writing, for instance, the end of colonialism, the failure of parliamentary democracy, the collapse of Sukarnoist leftism, and the implosion of military-dominated developmentalism all forced historians to look at the historical roots of social forces which had previously been neglected. The availability of new sources and the loss of old ones – most sharply felt in fields relying on oral history but also the product of changing visa requirements, warfare, insect attack, and so on – alters the sheer practicality of different kinds of research. So, too, does the availability of research funds and research time: for most academics, the demands of university life are more voracious now than at any time since World War II. The conventions of family life have changed, too, so that spouse and children are often less portable than was once the case. Although researchers on Western societies have shown remarkable ingenuity in inventing research topics where it would once have been supposed that none could possibly exist, the vast, underresearched experience of non-Western societies ought to give the Westerncentric academic world powerful reason to pay attention. A third powerful weapon in paradigmatic contestation, however, is intellectual novelty. An eavesdropper from a different academic planet attending a conference, listening in on a selection or grants committee or even sitting at the back of a research seminar would probably be struck by our preoccupation with novelty. In contrast with scholars of different times who admired the perfection of skills that had been pioneered by others, we have

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little interest as modern researchers in simply doing well what has been done before. Comments like “derivative” and “there’s nothing new in that” are amongst the most serious of academic put-downs. Grant bodies and conference organizers routinely pepper their instructions with exhortations to be “bordercrossing”, “path-breaking”, “novel”, and “innovative”, and these expressions duly reappear in the blurb of the books that eventually appear as a result. Indeed, this search for novelty is one of the most powerful driving forces of modern academic intellectual life. It has been an intimate part of the project of modernism and the idea of progress which pervaded the Western intellectual world for centuries until it was challenged, though by no means overthrown, in the twentieth century by a quartet of grim horsemen: total war, holocaust, ecological crisis, and post-modern relativism. Because even post-modernism has not overthrown the academic celebration of novelty, we need to recognize that the dispersed character of the humanities and social science, including the existence of strong area studies, is actually an enormous intellectual strength. Whereas a “theory of everything” remains the ultimate goal in physics,21 belief in such a possibility in the humanities is rare and even in the social sciences it tends to be the preserve of economists and rational choice theorists whose lack of curiosity about the diversity of the world remains perplexing to most scholars. Yet, we in Southeast Asian studies have not made particularly good use of our intellectual resources in this broader academic world. The most persistent political impulse amongst historians of Southeast Asian history in the last four decades has been to give voice to the voiceless in the region’s history. This impulse goes back to the Dutch historian J.C. van Leur, writing in the 1930s, who pointed out that indigenous voices should be heard despite the arrival of Europeans in Southeast Asia.22 It was reinforced by John Smail’s celebrated arguments for writing “autonomous” histories of the region.23 In more recent times, this impulse has been translated into a determination to hear from the poor, from the marginalized, and from those categorized by society as “deviant”. This impulse is fundamentally anti-authoritarian. It asserts that rulers do not speak for their people, and that people from every level of life have a right to the dignity which comes from being listened to and taken seriously. It has given us research on women, on the urban poor, on workers in the colonial era and under the New Order, on peasants, on isolated indigenous peoples, on East Timorese, Acehnese and Papuans, on regional aristocracies, on homosexuals, political dissidents, and on criminals. Southeast Asian historians were actively “rescuing history from the nation” well before Prasenjit Duara coined that memorable expression.24

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This commitment to the voiceless has also coincided neatly with the search for novelty, because each marginalized group represents a new topic for research. The search for novelty, however, has taken researchers in at least two other directions. One, which I will not discuss at any length, is that of postmodernism which in the Southeast Asian context has most commonly been expressed in a meticulous examination of the symbolic meaning of objects and practices. The other is an attempt to generate new insights by identifying new regions, or rather regions that are not the standard political-geographical regions of conventional textbooks. This kind of region-formation can be considered as the academic equivalent of establishing growth triangles – it brings together regions that are divided (or at least not united) by political boundaries and attempts to generate new insights from the exercise. The simplest of these regions have involved grouping countries with similar religious and cultural heritages, thus the Malay-Islamic World and the Theravada Buddhist World. More imaginative have been attempts to use water rather than land to constitute a region – the idea of the Java Sea as a basin, or Lombard’s idea of a Southeast Asian Mediterranean à la Braudel.25 The problem with each of these concepts, as indeed with the concept of Southeast Asia itself, is that the scale of analysis which happens to be represented by the current boundaries of ASEAN lends itself to only a limited range of perspectives. In recent years we have seen what is probably the beginning of an attempt to extend Southeast Asia northwards into what is now China, not simply by treating China’s southern and southwestern “minorities” as Southeast Asian, but by identifying elements in what was once thought of as “Chinese” culture as being instead fundamentally Southeast Asian and by treating the maritime fringe of China as part of Southeast Asia.26 This is an audacious initiative, given the complacent and deeply rooted assumption of China-scholars that China seldom acquired anything of value from “barbarians”, but its implications are probably more serious for China studies than for Southeast Asia. Despite its admirable moral intention, too, there are signs that the effort to give voice to the voiceless has also begun to run out of innovative steam. Probably the most important topic remaining to be explored is the experience of children. As we are aware from the West, there is a deep tension between the rights of the state and the rights of parents over children, between the value attached to living with natural parents and the value attached to material welfare, emotional stability and physical security, between the uncountable benefits of having children and the all-too-countable costs, over the issues of adoption, abortion and inheritance. All these tensions arise from the ambiguous human status of children, their complex ways in which they

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serve and are served by society. Here, if nowhere else, lies a fertile field for further research. For the rest, however, the problem with giving voice to the voiceless is not its morality but rather its implicit rejection of perspectives generated outside the region. The assumption that each group of people is the best at analysing its own history is in the end fundamentally narrow and obscurantist. It ignores such human weaknesses as self-justification and selective blindness and ultimately fragments the academic world into those who have the credentials to speak on behalf of the voiceless and those who lack those credentials. The concept of Southeast Asia as a region, however, has stood in the way of innovation in a more subtle way. The concept has stood for a view summed up by the Indonesian national motto, usually translated as “Unity in diversity”. Virtually every general work on the region mentions the range of religions, the variety of political forms, the enormous range of language and ethnic groups, and the hugely diverse historical experience of different parts of Southeast Asia. Awareness of this diversity, however, along with a determination not to be drawn into the historical worlds of China and India as a peripheral zone, has tended to seduce us into thinking that Southeast Asia is a world in its own right and that we have little or nothing to learn from the historical experiences of other parts of the world. Worse, it has let us think that we have nothing to give to them. It is precisely the value of Southeast Asian studies to the rest of the world that we should now be affirming and demonstrating. If there is a strategy to be followed in the twenty-first century, it should be to relegate “Southeast Asia” to the status of a convenient academicadministrative framework and to pursue instead an aggressive campaign of historical comparison (and equivalent comparisons in other disciplines) in which we use the history of Southeast Asia to illuminate events in the rest of the world. The pioneer in this approach has been Ben Anderson, whose account of the nature of nationalism in Imagined Communities clearly reflects thinking about the paradox that such a thing as Indonesian nationalism could emerge without being rooted in a primordial sense of ethnic identity and without the markers of industrial modernity which shaped nineteenth century European nationalism.27 Southeast Asian, however, is replete with other cases in which the specific experience of part of the region highlights aspects of a more global phenomenon to which scholars of other regions have not paid sufficient attention. The massacre of half a million communists in Indonesia in 1965–66, for instance,

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intriguingly bridges the gap which international scholars of genocide have tended to draw between ethno-religious genocides and mass political killings. Because the communist victims of those massacres were in important respects treated as if they were an ethnic group, a different kind of Indonesian from the anti-communists, the Indonesian case challenges scholarship on other regions to examine the extent to which the ethnicity of the victims was a political construction. If the motives of the genocidaires are understood in terms of political motives rather than ethnic hatred, the dominant historical perspective on all major genocides has to be revised. And why not use the experience of East Timor to illuminate the relationship between Latvia and its former occupier, Russia? Why not consider Indonesia itself as prototype for the European Union? Why is there no serious comparison of the nature of national reunification in Vietnam, Yemen and Germany? Why not use Laos and its relationship with Thailand to help others understand Moldova in its complex relationship with Rumania? Perhaps most important of all, aggressive comparativism is the area specialist’s best answer to the sustained campaign against area studies launched in the last decade or two by the academic liberalizers. The deep-seated flaw of the liberalizers is that their vision leads to an academic environment rooted in the historical experience and theoretical assumptions of Western societies and civilizations. For all that they claim to include the whole of the world, the liberalizers have tended to be a remarkably effective tool for the marginalization of non-Western regions. Perhaps the most striking example is the comprehensive neglect of Japan – for decades the world’s second largest economy – in almost all general Western writing on economics. This outcome in the social science discipline most heavily invaded by theory is thoroughly discouraging portent for the future if the opposition to area studies is permitted to prevail. As the example of Japanese economics suggests, the intrinsic importance of any aspect of Asian studies is not enough to sell it to theorists or to specialists focused in other regions. Nor is it plausible to think of developing alternative theory on any kind of grand scale – contemporary theory is a product of decades, sometimes centuries, of intense intellectual work and is not easily overthrown. Theory based primarily on Asian cases, moreover, would run the risk of being as irrelevant to the West as some Western theory is to Asia. The comparativism I advocate is not Theory, but rather a heuristic process in which a complex historical event or phenomenon in one part of the world is set against a somewhat similar event in another place. At its best, this

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juxtaposition enriches the understanding of both events or phenomena. Explanations or elements that are obvious in one case may suggest unthought-of lines of explanation in the other case. Alternatively, the comparison may cast doubt on explanations that have previously seemed impregnable. Of course, the final question has to be whether the social structures at work within the field of Southeast Asian studies would allow comparativism of the kind I suggest to become more than a marginal activity. Here I have to admit some pessimism. On the one hand, comparativism has the enormous advantage of novelty. On the other, however, it is not immediately conducive to the maintenance of durable communities based on shared skills and it does not particularly lend itself to the creation of political communities, with perhaps some exceptions. The path of comparativism may be difficult, but the alternative may be still more grim.

NOTES 1. Three of the most celebrated such novels are Amis, Kingsley. Lucky Jim. London: Gollancz, 1954; Bradbury, Malcolm. The History Man. London: Secker & Warburg, 1975; Lodge, David. Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses. London: Secker & Warburg, 1975. 2. The idea that all human beings are separated from each other by no more than six “degrees of separation”, that is, by six consecutive sets of acquaintance with another person, was popularized by the playwright John Guare in his 1990 play “Six Degrees of Separation”, but the issue was first raised in the 1920s. 3. Sutherland, Heather. “Southeast Asia: A Cold Concept”. Paper presented to the conference, Locating Southeast Asia: Genealogies, Concepts, Comparisons and Prospects. Amsterdam, 29–31 March 2001. 4. Recent publications include: Reid, Anthony. Charting the Shape of Early Modern Southeast Asia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2000; Reid, Anthony. “Studying Southeast Asia in a Globalized World”. Taiwan Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 1, no. 2 (2004): 3–18; Reid, Anthony. “Completing the Circle: Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia”. Asia Research Institute, Working Paper Series 12 (September 2003). 5. See, notably: Emmerson, Donald K. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (1984): 1–21. 6. The term geo-politics in this context refers to a school of thought originating with Halford John Mackinder, Rudolf Kjéllen and Karl Haushofer in the early twentieth century, in which the world was portrayed as a kind of complex chessboard over which great powers competed for hegemony by mastering key regions with no regard for the interests or wishes of the inhabitants of those regions.

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7. On this scholarship, see: Dahm, Bernhard. Die Südostasienwissenschaften in den USA, in Westeuropa und in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975: 13–14. 8. One hesitates to suggest that this disregard also arises because they may not be able to read German. 9. There are, of course, soundly argued intermediate positions which hold that Southeast Asia is a region more weakly defined by its internal characteristics than are other regions, but nonetheless something more than an arbitrary construct. See for instance: Lewis, Martin W. and Kärin E. Wigan. The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997: 173– 76. 10. Reid. “Completing the Circle”: 1. For a thoughtful discussion of the presumed need for Southeast Asians to have carriage of the study of their region, see Kernial Singh Sandhu. “Southeast Asian Studies: Some Unresolved Problems”. In A Colloquium on Southeast Asian Studies, edited by Tunku Shamsul Bahrin, Chandran Jeshurun and A. Terry Rambo. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1981: 15–27. See also Winichakul, Thongchai. “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia”. In New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, edited by Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003: esp. 18–22. 11. Foucault, Michel. The Archaeology of Knowledge. London: Tavistock, 1972; this was a hugely influential starting point for this approach, but Foucault’s disciples took his ideas well beyond his original claims. 12. Van Schendel, Willem. “Geographies of Knowledge, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia”. In Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, edited by Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2005: 278–79. 13. Cribb, Robert. “Circles of Esteem, Standard Works, and Euphoric Couplets: Dynamics of Academic Life in Indonesian Studies”. Critical Asian Studies 137, no. 2 (2005): 289–304. 14. Geertz, Clifford. Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. 15. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, [1983] 19912. 16. Geertz, Clifford. Agricultural Involution: The Process of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1963. 17. A classic example of the area studies genre is: McVey, Ruth T., ed. Indonesia. New Haven: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies, 1963; with its separate chapters on history, politics, traditional societies, contemporary society, literature and so on. 18. Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19702. 19. Attributed to Napoleon, but evidently based on an older French proverb.

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20. Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and The Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992. 21. Battersby, Stephen. “Are We Nearly There Yet?” New Scientist 2497 (30 April 2005): 30–34. 22. Van Leur, J.C. Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History. The Hague: van Hoeve, 1955. 23. Smail, John R.W. “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia”. Journal of Southeast Asian History 2, no. 2 (1961): 72–101. 24. Duara, Prasenjit. Rescuing History from the Nation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. 25. Houben, Vincent J.H., H.J.M. Maier, and W. van der Molen, eds. Looking in Odd Mirrors: The Java Sea. Leiden: Vakgroep Talen en Culturen van Zuidoost Azië en Oceanië, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden, 1992; Lombard, Denys, Le Carrefour Javanais: Essai D’histoire Globale. Paris: Editions de l’École Français d’Extrême Orient, 1990. 26. See Lombard, Denys. “Un autre Méditerranée dans le sud-est Asiatique”. Héroddote, Revue de Géographie et de Géopolitique 88 (1998): 184–93. 27. Anderson. Imagined Communities.

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4 TOWARDS MULTI-LATERALITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Perspectives from Japan Yoko Hayami

In this chapter, I consider two issues related to changing trends in the global academic mapping of Southeast Asian studies, and issues relating to the academic practices of the late twentieth to the twenty-first century. What are the difficulties we are facing in Southeast Asian studies, and how can we as Southeast Asianist scholars, whether in Southeast Asia, or other parts of Asia, Europe, Australia, or the United States, re-position ourselves to the changing academic mapping, reflecting on each of our own position in the evolving “ecology” of the global academic endeavour.1 Each of our different academic traditions has evolved with respective historical positioning towards “Southeast Asia”, its own “ecology of scholarship” (as meant by Anderson in his 1992 comparison of pre-war Southeast Asian scholarship of the Orientalist kind with the mostly American dominated post-war university-based scholarship), its own language of scholarship, and its special epistemological tendencies in the scholarly practices. We therefore stand in different positions in varied moments in our respective academic traditions. Yet, just as some of our difficulties and tendencies are shared, so should we be able to find points of convergence and exchange once we are more aware of where each of us stands. 65

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In the first half I will discuss the academic tradition of Southeast Asian studies in Japan, reflecting on its position, and then consider the up-coming interest on Southeast Asian studies in the region itself. Based on the discussion in the first half, in the latter half I will consider some problems, then suggest possible topics and orientations to overcome such problems, and to find ourselves in a globally better attuned Southeast Asian studies.

THE JAPANESE CONTRIBUTION: REFLECTIONS For scholars situated in Japan such as myself, the immediate conditions surrounding Southeast Asian studies today are perceived rather differently from scholars based in Europe or America or in Southeast Asia itself. Interest in “Southeast Asia” as a region and the study of it is far from dwindling in Japan. Moreover, even as many scholars in Japan question the taken-for-granted assumptions of the region as an entity, it is still deemed meaningful to talk about it as a region, if not a regional entity. The low profile in general of Japanese scholarship in the global academic stage of Southeast Asian studies in spite of this calls for much reflection. Let me therefore begin this chapter by briefly introducing some of the post-war Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia, even the most noteworthy of which is rarely represented in other English language volumes and articles that have reviewed Southeast Asian studies. I would especially like to consider the period between the 1970s and 1980s. Primarily because this will allow me, in relation to later discussion, to demonstrate a unique flourish of multi-disciplinary convergence of interests. This is not an attempt to do a review. That would be an entirely different endeavour. With the width and variation of scholarship on Southeast Asia in Japan in the 1990s and leading up to the present century, even a provisional grasp of it is far beyond the provided space and the capability of this author.2 It is often alluded to that the regional concept “Southeast Asia” came into use when the Allied Forces set up the “Southeast Asia Command” in Colombo, Ceylon in 1943, in order to retrieve those areas from Japanese Occupation.3 After the war, the preceding European scholarship on their colonies in the Orient then became works to be cited by American scholars in “area studies”, backed by the rising power of the United States. The global distribution of power was thus clearly reflected in the changing balance in the study of the previous colonies. In Japan, “Southeast Asia” (Tonan Ajia) had already been in use by World War I in the context of Japan’s southward imperialist expansion. By the

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beginning of the twentieth century, there were writings on the region, as migrant labour from Japan to the region was prevalent, then followed by systematic state interest under the propaganda of “The Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere” in the internecine decades.4 Southeast Asia was a part of the Southern Seas (Nan-yo), the region where Japan set out to seek its resources and markets. During the colonial expansion of Japan preceding and during World War II, many state agencies for the study of the colonies had been founded, such as the research division of the Manchurian Railway Company, which was not only the central imperialist agency of Japan’s expansion, but also one of the largest pre-war research organizations in the world, the East Asian (To-A) Research Institute, the Pacific Association, and the Institute of Ethnology. Some of the researchers in these institutes would be leading academics of the early post-war decades. In terms of institutions for training and education, too, Southeast Asian studies in Japan has its prewar roots. Siamese and Malay languages had been taught since 1911 in what was later to become the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. In 1944, in the latter years of the war, Burmese and Filipino were added to their curriculum. After defeat and occupation, Japan would re-install “Southeast Asia” as a globally shared regional unit imported from the United States. However, we need to be aware that in spite of this apparent discontinuity between pre-war and post-war studies of the area now called Southeast Asia, there is also a continuity in the fact that the availability of funds and wide general interests which are at the foundation of what makes our research in the area viable, is made possible by interest in the region both by state and private enterprises, including various forms of Overseas Development Administration (ODA) as well as Non-Government Organization (NGO) activities. Institutional foundation for research developed during the 1960s. The Center for Southeast Asian studies (CSEAS) at Kyoto University was founded in 1963.5 While CSEAS was founded as an American-style multi-disciplinary area studies institution and earlier research was funded by the Ford Foundation, the founding was itself instigated internally, by participants in informal seminars held by scholars and students in and around Kyoto, including natural scientists. Its distinctive feature among area studies institutions around the globe is the inclusion of natural scientists to this day: Agronomists, foresters and biomedical specialists. The Institute for Asian and African Language and Culture at the Tokyo University of Foreign Studies was founded in 1964. In 1957, a multi-disciplinary team of scholars was sent to Thailand and Laos by the Japanese Society of Ethnology. While most of the pre-war and immediate post-war studies were based on written material, field-based

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studies began in this period, systematic funding for overseas research by the ministry of education began in 1963, and the programme for sending graduate students to Asian countries was initiated in 1968. From the 1960s to the 1970s, many individual scholars began long-term fieldwork, and multi-disciplinary projects took place on varying scales, by groups of scholars whose individual interests complemented each other. Landmark studies appeared in the 1970s to the 1980s. Let me introduce three intertwining trends from this period, each of which was led by scholars who have been influential figures in Southeast Asian studies and area studies in Japan until today. The distinctive agro-ecological element at CSEAS and the stimulus between natural scientists with social scientists in Southeast Asian studies in Japan in general could be attributed to the presence and leadership of a number of leading scholars. On the natural science side, Takaya’s original contribution was in rewriting history of state formation previously based on the hydraulic model by pointing out the late development of rice cultivation in the tropical delta regions. His arguments were strengthened by his field-based knowledge on ecological, technological and crop and vegetational aspects of cultivation, and geography of the region. Contrary to previous understanding, Takaya pointed out that up until early modern ages, there was hardly any agricultural development in the Mainland deltaic regions.6 Takaya sought varied forms of agricultural adaptation in the Malay world as well, and opened up new possibilities in theories of state formation. As a leader in numerous multi-disciplinary projects based in CSEAS up until the late 1980s, Takaya inspired many social scientists and marked a distinct tone of ecological element in Japanese Southeast Asian studies. The social science- and humanities-based Southeast Asian studies, on the other hand, was led first and foremost by historian Ishii. Ishii characterized deltaic Ayutthaya as a trade-based state rather than a “hydraulic state”, whereas the northern Muang states such as Chiang Mai were based on smallscale irrigation in the river basins.7 This work by Ishii and the above work by Takaya were products of mutual inspiration. The other major contribution by Ishii has been in Theravada Buddhism, especially in the meticulous research on the institutional build-up of state Buddhism, the monastic organization and lay response.8 A self-made historian with legendary width and depth of knowledge in language as well as culture, Ishii used source materials in the Thai language, and founded a strict scholarly criterion for meticulous documentary research, setting a high standard for the ensuing generation of scholars. He contributed to Thai scholarship by making available source materials such as compiling an index for the Sukhothai inscriptions, and the

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concordance for the Law of the Three Seals.9 In addition, Ishii initiated the Dong Daeng Project in the 1970s, following up on the village study initiated by Mizuno, whom I will mention below. The project involved scholars of multiple disciplines. Not only historians, but scholars working in all disciplines in Thailand as well as other parts of Southeast Asia, were profoundly influenced. Notable among them is anthropologist Tanabe in his earlier work on irrigation and later on Buddhist practices, as well as economist Suehiro, on capital accumulation in Thailand. Another historian greatly influenced by the ecological stream is Sakurai. Sakurai also denied large-scale hydraulic models that hypothesized early state formation in the Red River Delta, and argued that larger irrigation in the area began much later in history.10 He also drew up state typologies across Southeast Asia, developing ideas on trade-based states supported by intensive agriculture in limited areas. We see both in Ishii and Sakurai, productive mutualstimulus with the works of agronomists and ecologists, and while they are based respectively on Thai and Vietnamese studies, the scale of their historical imagination transcends both disciplinary and national boundaries towards integration of various approaches in area studies. The third trend I would like to mention is one which reconsiders the units of social analysis, relatedness, and social organization in Southeast Asia. Some of the pioneer anthropological studies based on long-term stay in a community were carried out in the 1960s in Thailand by Mizuno and in the Malay peninsula by Maeda (Tachimoto) and Tsubouchi. Through studies of kinship and social organization, Mizuno studied the development of the household cycle and the “multi-household compound” in relation to land use and inheritance, in the Northeastern Thai village of Don Daeng where he stayed from 1964 to 1966. The empirically well-founded study then led him to develop a cultural notion of “the logic of relatedness”. As an anthropologist, Mizuno was influenced by the cognatic kinship model and loosely-structured paradigm, yet grounded in meticulous empirical evidence, he reconsidered social organizational principles, concluding that social relationships were founded not so much on the collectivitiy or the individual as on a network of dyadic ties. Furthermore, he transcended static notions of social organization, taking note of socioeconomic changes and different modes of adaptation to land fragmentation. Mizuno’s was the first substantial long-term fieldwork in Southeast Asia by a Japanese scholar along with Maeda-Tachimoto who performed community studies in the Malay Peninsula at around the same time. Based on this research, Maeda questioned the rigid form of “nuclear family” or stable group organization as constitutive and relevant social units

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in Southeast Asia. From this, Maeda originated the concept of “family circle”, a zonal concept, replacing the family as a bounded unit, where dyadic familial ties extend in an unbounded social network. “Personhood” or the person as constitutive units of society should not be taken for granted. From here, Maeda-Tachimoto extends his understanding to social organizational characteristics of the region, where rather than individual constituents, relationship itself becomes the constituting unit or element of society, which is to be understood as a social network. The family circle or the zonal argument for the basic social unit predates the questioning of domestic versus public spheres of activities by later feminist anthropologists of the region, and the questioning of social units as well as personhood in the regional context is also taken up in Western anthropological discourse much later. In such ways, the contribution of Maeda-Tachimoto and Mizuno took off from the kinship and social organization debate of the 1960s, and through empirical research and adherence to local concepts and observations, produced work in which some of the premises in the preceding concepts from Western scholarship were effectively questioned. We have seen that there are three trends with respective style of research, and yet the proponents of these three styles were all in intensive mutual interaction and collaboration especially from the 1970s to the 1980s. Moreover, the area studies tradition in Japan, while taking account of Western concepts and ideas, added new perspectives which primarily emerged from the field, and/or from vernacular source-materials. The common thread that runs through all of the scholars mentioned above was that while most of them were trained in particular disciplines in pre- and immediately post-war Japanese universities11 in terms of Southeast Asian studies or area, their training derived from mutual stimulus in research which led them to emphasize the importance of area studies. With the exception of Mizuno who died prematurely, they have all been involved in educating area studies specialists in various institutions. Indeed, Maeda-Tachimoto and Tsubouchi were the core members in the foundation of the Graduate School for Asian and African Area Studies at Kyoto University in 1998. By the late 1980s, the style of scholarship based on long-term fieldwork and documentary research of the local languages founded by the above predecessors became standardized. Thereafter, Japanese scholars have reflected on Western ideas and theories on the one hand, while adhering to local conceptions of the region, valuing empirical data. The empirical emphasis in Japanese scholarship may be interpreted as a reflection of adherence to data and understanding emergent from the field rather than driven by concern with lofty paradigms.

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However, it was also during the 1970s and 1980s that many of the countries in Mainland Southeast Asia were inaccessible for fieldwork due to civil war and/or dictatorship, leading to a confinement of field research primarily to Thailand. Moreover, emphasis on language acquisition and community studies especially in anthropology led to a tendency towards onecountry studies, and narrowing of focus. Notable attempts were made in multi-disciplinary community studies, such as the Dong Daeng Project in Northeastern Thailand. The productive multi-disciplinary and cross-regional approach of the above leading scholars is itself not easy to emulate. The development of disciplines and accumulation of knowledge has, since the late 1980s, led to the tendency of narrowing of focus, division between disciplines, and one-country studies, a point at which we see much convergence with Western scholarship, and which I will take up in the latter half of this chapter. In spite of such involutionary trends, all in all, in the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, interest in Southeast Asian studies among younger scholars and students in Japan is far from dwindling. The Japan Society for Southeast Asian History (founded in 1966) which includes scholars of diverse disciplinary background, has a membership of 600. There are also large numbers of anthropologists, political scientists, and economists who work in the area but are not members of this association. The number of graduate students involved in one way or another in Southeast Asian studies has increased in number. Topics of interest have diversified. Thus, the potential population of Japanese Southeast Asianists is quite large. Whereas the period of intense interest in Southeast Asia was quite brief in the United States (primarily during the Vietnam War era), interest has been long-sustained in Japan. There are geo-political, historical, and economic reasons why Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian studies mean different things in Japan than in the West or in Southeast Asia itself. As already noted, state, business, and institutional interest in Southeast Asia has been high since the pre-war invasion, and still continues to be so. Southeast Asia is and has been a resource provider and market for Japanese production and consumption and there is abundant reason for the government as well as private agencies to fund and support studies on various aspects of Southeast Asia. General and popular interest in Southeast Asia has become high especially since the late 1980s with easy travel. There are innumerable publications on Southeast Asia, its culture, language, literature, social problems, economy, politics, travel, cuisine, arts and crafts, etc. on various levels for the general public. Readership is large, and there are books and other sources to refer to, both in academic and non-academic genres (the boundary itself being unclear), including the innumerable commercially published books by scholars. There

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is thus plenty of incentive within the country to write and publish in Japanese on various topics related to Southeast Asia. In spite of all of this flourish, Japanese scholarship on Southeast Asia has yet to gain wider global currency. This, of course, is due primarily to the lack of output made available to the non-Japanese audience. Japanese scholars conduct research and extract data from the field and written documents from Southeast Asia, read and use Western concepts and perspectives critically and uncritically, yet only a very small part of the product is made available to audiences either Western or Southeast Asian. Thus, the flow of information and knowledge is in large part one-directional where Japanese language scholarship consumes much information without corresponding output to the non-Japanese audience. The abundant opportunities in commercial publications and the demography of public readership mentioned above result in rendering it even less luring to tackle the linguistic hurdle towards writing or translating one’s work into English or the Southeast Asian languages. Thus the ecology or the habitus of Japanese scholarship is primarily inwardlooking with little incentive to venture out. Herzfeld points out similar complacent trends in Thailand and Greece (and also tentatively Japan), countries which he attributes to have experienced “crypto-colonialism”. These are countries that had never been colonized, yet were under strong influence of the colonial powers, and which are today hidden from the front stage of theory-building in scholarship but deploy world-dominating discourse about “culture” in defence of their perceived national interests and specificity: We can begin to search for the common ground of such exclusions by thinking about the languages of scholarship. … I submit that it is precisely in the crypto-colonies that the local languages, rather than the languages of imperial rule, serve the goals of academic publishing. This is a proud assertion of cultural independence, and indeed it should be so interpreted. But it is also, and here lies the rub, a means of self-exclusion, and not only from the broader international academic community …it also contributes to a two-tier system in which local scholars have tended to write in isolation from their foreign counterparts, who rarely cite the local scholars’ work except when it is published in English or French.12

Yet, it cannot be simply a problem of choice of language. Such assertion tends to discount works by scholars in these countries which are written in Western languages, and by doing so, is ironically effective in pointing out the lack of interaction between scholars in these different clusters (regardless of the question of meaningfulness of the clusters) on the globe. Numerous works by Japanese scholars have been published in English and/or in Southeast Asian

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languages that warrant due recognition from non-Japanese readers. Besides the scholars mentioned above, there are scattered works that are read and appreciated inside and outside of Japan. Yet, it seems that as a whole Japanese scholarship has made a small impact on the global scene, as most reviews by Western or Southeast Asian scholars deal with “American scholarship”, “European scholarship”, and “Australian scholarship”. Regarding Japanese scholarship, at best token recognition towards the existence of good scholarship in Japan is mentioned. This is partially explainable by the lack of selfpromotion on the part of the Japanese, and a simple fact of disinterest on the part of non-Japanese scholars. The difference is due not only to language but also to differences in scholarly practice. The language problem is in fact not merely a practical problem of languages, for works of high scholarly merit in Japan may be translated into English and be received with much less enthusiasm by non-Japanese scholars. As Heryanto states in arguing for Southeast Asian scholarship, “the epistemological paradigms of the social sciences and humanities that gave birth to area studies are embedded and institutionalized in English grammar and vocabulary.”13 Global hegemony in academism is reflected in the supposed intellectual supremacy of the English language scholarship. For its geographical proximity, historical involvement, as well as economic and political relationships with the area today, Japanese scholars are differently situated towards Southeast Asia from the American or European scholarship, and have always been conscious of this position. Perhaps, because of its distance from the Western scholarship, where the various “post-isms” seem to move towards deconstruction of the “region” itself, the strength of Japanese scholarship may be in the pursuit of research with conceptual frameworks that are closer to the reality in the field, based on empirical research grounded in local language source material and in fieldwork. It may be this incongruence and differences in epistemological habitus, as it were, which partially explains the low acceptance or visibility of Japanese scholarship in the English language scholarship, even including those that are made available in English. The kinds of data and argument presented by Japanese scholarship do not necessarily answer the theory-driven interests of the English language audience. While much of Western scholarship has slanted towards de-essentializing the region on the one hand, some Southeast Asian scholars go the opposite direction of seeking the essential Southeast Asia, Japanese scholars seek a middle ground. Even while recognizing it as a region with varied, fluid and ever-changing multiple layers of power and centrality, Japanese scholarship still keeps a certain adherence to the notion of the region while attempting to relativize it at the same time.

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TOWARDS SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIA Now, perhaps the most obvious up-and-coming actors on the stage of Southeast Asian studies today are scholars from the region itself. Here, more than anywhere else, we find positioning and “ecology” of scholarship that differs diametrically from that of the West. Now having seen the end of the Cold War, on the one hand, scholars from the West are de-constructing and questioning the idea of “Southeast Asia” itself, while, paradoxically, there is rising interest from within the region in “Southeast Asian studies”. Western scholarship has consumed output from the scholars from the region for its value as an “insider’s view”, yet, mostly considered them lacking in the tradition of western scholarship.14 However, recently we have seen abundant work from among a new generation of Southeast Asian scholars, as Heryanto discusses, that will possibly remap this trend. In the past decades, we have been seeing a maturing of scholarship in Southeast Asia, and rising interest in Southeast Asian studies. How far back can we trace interest in Southeast Asian studies or region-wide perspectives from within Southeast Asia? For most of the twentieth century, the focus in scholarship in the region was primarily oriented towards the nationalistic endeavour. They were either applied and practical in the effort to join hands with national development, and/or nationalistic, revolving around the official/hagiographic national history of the respective countries, seeking legitimacy, and grounding of their respective national heritage. During the Cold War, some institutional bases had been established. The Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore (ISEAS) was established in 1968 with emphasis on issues of security and economic trends and developments in Southeast Asia. A Master’s Degree programme in Southeast Asian History was begun at Silapakorn University in Thailand in 1974, and a Bachelor’s Degree programme in the University of Malaya in 1976. In spite of the institutional set-up in most of the Southeast Asian countries in the 1970s, it was difficult for research in Southeast Asian studies to mature, primarily due to lack of funds. Emphasis on research and funding could hardly be expected from the states still in the midst of nation-building. The above-mentioned sustained interest in Southeast Asia by Japanese private corporations here demonstrates its meritorious side. The Toyota Foundation (founded 1974) from early on began to fund scholarship in Southeast Asia. Effectively seeking young scholars from the region, the foundation has supported innumerable individual as well as group research and workshops,

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always at the forefront of scholarly developments in many of the countries in the region. Of crucial relevance to what follows in this chapter, the new Toyota Foundation programme SEASREP designed for Southeast Asian scholars, has begun to fund those younger scholars to study other Southeast Asian languages, translating relevant works in the region into English, as well as supporting research and scholarship on a regional basis rather than a country-to-country basis. In Thailand, the original impetus of Thai scholars crossing borders into neighbouring countries, began with interest in the Tai-speaking peoples spread across national and regional boundaries.15 This was spurred by the opening of neighbouring regions and countries in the late 1980s to the 1990s such as Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Yunnan in Southwestern China, and Myanmar, hitherto inaccessible to researchers. The perspective, however, tended to be supportive of the Thai national ideology, seeking Thai heritage across borders from a Thai-centred view. This contrasts with similar efforts undertaken by non-Thai scholars (including Japanese) to venture across the borders, to seek varied forms of Tai-speaking cultures and societies towards relativizing the overly nationalized and essentialized Thai culture.16 In any case, what stimulated the dynamism among Thai scholars was the establishment, backed by Thailand’s economic boom in 1992, of the Thailand Research Fund, marking recognition of the importance of research and funding in Thailand, towards academic research “for the future of Thailand in its ‘globalized role’ ”.17 The Institute of Asian Studies at Chulalongkorn University (founded informally in 1967 as the first area studies institution in Thailand) added its Southeast Asia division in 1993. Henceforth, it has allowed research interaction with scholars from other countries in the region such as Myanmar and Vietnam. It was thus in the past decade that we saw changes in the scholarship of some of the countries in the region. While Western scholarship is beginning to deconstruct and dissolve “Southeast Asian studies” and the idea of “Southeast Asia” as a region itself, paradoxically, Southeast Asian scholarship has begun to turn towards the study of Southeast Asia. A survey by the Thailand Research Fund in 1995 concluded: Now that Southeast Asia has become more and more of a regional entity, and now that it has received full recognition by universities in Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, and elsewhere, is it too late for us to reconsider Southeast Asian studies as an inter-discipline that deserves full academic attention rather than a subject or a topic incorporated here and there in other disciplines? Indeed, are we too late to act?18

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Some of the leading scholars in this flourishing of research are those who have studied in Western institutions at the time when Southeast Asian studies was at its productive peak in Western scholarship. Now a second and third generation of scholars are being trained under their leadership. The orientation of these younger scholars since the 1990s has turned to reconsidering some of the hitherto unchallenged official national history, regional history, concerns of the periphery such as minorities, as well as across national boundaries into other locales within the region.

COMMON DIVISIONS So far, we have looked at the position of Southeast Asian studies in Japan and in Southeast Asia itself. In either case, while there are problems and difficulties, the sense that Southeast Asian studies is becoming obsolete is by no means shared across the globe. Yet, there are common problems in spite of the haphazard development of scholarship both in its infrastructure and content, and in spite of the alleged disintegration of Southeast Asian studies in the West, there is also some convergence of interests among scholars around the globe today. This brings me to consider the problems and trends in Southeast Asian studies and future orientation in recent Southeast Asian studies. In this section, I would like to point out two kinds of divisive practices in Southeast Asian studies in the late twentieth century. A factor in the academic practice which reflects the socio-political trends in the twentieth century modern history of the region, yet which undermines the concept of the region itself, is the emphasis on each nation-state as a unit of study. Most of us Southeast Asianists are in fact, to some degree Thailand scholars, Philippine scholars or Vietnam scholars, etc. This is on the one hand, inevitable both for logical and practical reasons. Scholarship that is well-grounded in original data sources must utilize vernacular source material, locally disseminated information, and locally obtained data. This requires a high level of linguistic skills, both speaking and reading ability, and only few gifted and diligent scholars attain linguistic proficiency in numerous languages. The more committed to data-gathering based on the local vernacular a scholar is, the more limited he is in the actual space he may cover, at least on a level that requires such proficiency. The language by country division is perhaps a stronger tendency among Mainland Southeast Asianists, where the major language used in each country is primarily, although not at all completely, defined by its borders. Research and visiting each country is also channelled by various country-specific paths such as gaining permission from the government. Ease of access to the field is also defined by the status quo in each

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country. Scholars tend to group themselves with colleagues who work in the same country, so that themes and topics of interest tend to become defined among themselves, that is, within borders. This has especially been the case in Mainland Southeast Asia until ten years ago, where accessibility of research site and ease of research has been limited to only a few countries. With such varied historical processes taking place in each country in the region, the onecountry focus tended towards internally defined themes and topics. Moreover, the twentieth century has been, for most of the countries, the time of building a modern nation-state, so that any study of the socio-political and economic processes had to take this nation-building process seriously. In dialogues with scholars from the region, we could not evade their inward concern for understanding their own national and historical processes and development concerns. Divisiveness in academic discourse can be found in another vein: That of disciplinary divisions. As Anderson states simply for the case of the United States: There is no “natural” fit between the institutional and intellectual logic of modern American universities and area studies, nor, I think, will there ever be. … The institutional and intellectual weaknesses of area studies in the post-war United States further contributed to, and were accentuated by, the rising power of the disciplines, in turn the product of a marked professionalization of academic life.19

There, the driving energy of academic professionalism is “theory”. Contrasting the “ecology” of scholarship in post-war America with the pre-war colonialist oriental studies, Anderson points out two damaging effects of this theoryfocus. Firstly, a “tendency towards excessive and ultimately arbitrary presifting of source material in accordance with the data-presentation rules of specific theories”, which render the utility of each scholarly work short-lived. Secondly, “discouragement of region-specific comparative work which, I believe, is essential for building a serious intellectual base for postcolonial area studies”.20 Anderson points out that this theory-focus is especially prevalent in the United States, and less so in Europe where the tradition of Oriental studies still maintains some of its influence. There are undoubtedly differences in academic traditions arising from historical processes as well as the different “ecology” of academism. Furthermore, there are today disciplinary differences in seeking meaningful regional units, as political scientists and economists have now for some time been looking at “East Asia” as a viable regional unit. There was a point in Japanese scholarship when mutual stimulus of the disciplines produced wider frameworks. It was made possible through field

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trips and observations made alone and in groups, and, further discussions back in the seminar rooms among a small number of scholars with different disciplinary backgrounds but similarly widely-defined interests. Such academically fertile circumstances have become more difficult to stage today, due to diversification of interests, and deeper specialization or development of discipline-specific and locale-specific ideas and perspectives. Yet our predecessors have demonstrated that the effort is worthwhile. The balancing act requires stepping back and forth between theory and comparative understanding, and between immediate locale and the wider region, in constant dialogue with those scholars who talk about the region using different vocabulary, methodology, and conceptual frameworks. Emphasis and encouragement of detailed field-based understanding to some wider regional perspective is a feat attainable only through a long and enduring endeavour in individual and joint effort. Comparison across the region towards empirically-based mid-level theories may overcome the two divisive orientations (discipline and country) discussed above.

TOPICS TOWARDS NEW APPROACHES Many of the relevant topics and issues today call for exactly such a crossdisciplinary, region-wide approach by scholars across the globe. These provide us with productive ground for exploration, as well as a possible place for founding an inter-disciplinary framework that may provide effective material not only towards mid-level theoretical perspectives specific to the region, but also for further inter-regional comparisons. Let me raise three examples deriving from my own interest as an anthropologist who has worked among minority populations in Northern Thailand and Myanmar. Firstly, environmental resources, protection, and the rights of those people who have long inhabited the area and made a living on those resources is one of the pressing issues across the region. At the background of this is haphazard development within each country and globally. It is in fact a global issue, but the combination of rich tropical forests and the peripheralization of inhabitants of the forested areas are common features across Southeast Asia, which provide a viable arena for discussion within the region either in looking at the use of resources of the people, and/or the socio-political contexts of the population involved. People living in areas with rich ecological resources must now contend with projects and policies that aim to make use of or protect these resources. Negotiation towards a solution agreeable not only to those in power, but that also takes into account the rights of those making a living in those very locale must be

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based upon analyses and discussion of an inter-disciplinary nature that include both natural and social scientists. The political processes involving ecological resources have varied from one country to another. Yet, issues that emerge from within the processes are remarkably similar. For example, Bryant’s well documented work on the situation in Myanmar since British colonial administration provides a basis for comparison with neighbouring Thailand as well as with other previously colonized countries in which processes of marginalizing minorities, both under colonial administration and modern nation-state, have been repetitive.21 The differences in ecological setting, socio-economic factors from colonial days to the present, and ethnic dynamics vary. This in itself provides rich ground for comparative discussion. There needs to be more attempt for both parties to talk to each other, seeking common vocabulary towards a framework to understand the situation and address the issues. Politically charged as the topic is, we need on the one hand detailed data both on physical and natural aspects as well as on human factors of specific locale in combination with larger visions of commonality and difference across the region. Interdisciplinary as well as cross-boundary attempts at training and research have been initiated, such as the Regional Center for Sustainable Development (RCSD) at Chiang Mai University, where young researchers and scholars from other parts of the region, namely Vietnam, are actively enrolled. The second topic is that of reconsideration and the dynamics of smaller constitutive units of society. The study of Southeast Asia provided an interesting counterpoint in anthropology in the 1960s, especially in the realm of kinship, which was dominated by studies of unilineal societies. Cognatic or bilateral descent in Southeast Asia opened a different possibility for social organizational principle where dyadic ties and networks prevailed. Many of the conceptual schemes that explained Southeast Asian social and political organization such as loose structure, patron-client or dyadic relationships, could be related to such principles of dyadic relationship. In many societies characterized by cognatic descent, women had the right to inherit, and there was notable frequency of matrilocal residence. The same factors have often been quoted as reasons for gender equilibrium or relative autonomy of women in the region. Yet, studies with a gender perspective have not been numerous. It is almost as if the apparently “egalitarian” nature of gender in Southeast Asia rendered it a non-issue for feminist anthropologists. Despite such intriguing gender configurations and their expressions in actual practices, the theoretical significance of this Southeast Asian material escaped the attention of American feminists who emerged in the 1970s.22

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It was only a single step to link the social organizational studies with various gender perspectives, and yet no such step was made until much later. In more recent studies, the realm of the household and the role of women have been analysed as inextricable from their roles outside the household, thus rendering the domestic and public division, as well as the productive and reproductive division, questionable. Material regarding the smallest social units and changing family ideology can be considered in multi-disciplinary contexts, including state ideology, policy on labour and public health, demographic changes, mobility, etc. All in all, we need on the ground data to consider and relativize the modern trends found in the industrialized West. In Southeast Asia, where the social organizational principles and the “household” and “family” were very differently constituted, what does “modernity” bring? It is about time we combine the social organizational analyses of our predecessors with those of the recent interest in the dynamics between the smaller units of a society with the larger, that have been effectively made from the perspective of gender, to see whether the social organizational tendencies in the region do in fact lead to a different course than the modern West. Internal dynamics and flexibility of the social units, as well as its wider relationship, can be understood through economic analyses of the household in relation to wider units of production, and consideration of ideology and changing state policies. Related issues involve not only sociologists and anthropologists, but also political scientists (pursuing nationalist ideology and the use of the “family” for instance), economists (pursuing changing allocation of resources and labour within the household, migrant labour, etc.), or medical scientists (pursuing relationships within the family in relation to current topics such as HIV/AIDS, or ageing). The third and final topic focuses on borders and peripheries (both physical and social) and alternative views to the discourse and institutions emerging from the centre. National histories have been written and rewritten from the centre, thus country-based studies seem inevitable. Yet, if we take a view from the peripheries and the borders, we gain a very different understanding, not only of the state or polity, but of its economic activities, allocation of resources, exchange of religious practices, demographic movements, ethnic and linguistic distribution, etc. Institutions that seem to be in the centre can be questioned and more variedly negotiated from the peripheries. There has been emerging interest in regional history within the nations, using local documents in local scripts, together with interest in social history, mass consciousness, and movements. Such focus on border regions, peripheries, and people under power may open paths to relativize the countrybased nationalistic historical discourse.

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The accumulation of analytical perspectives on Southeast Asia give some reason for us to maintain the region as a unit of study, although with a less defined boundary and content, but as fluid and ever-changing groupings of processes and phenomena, some of which will no doubt require us to look across to other regions. We can thus continue to talk about the region as long as we keep in mind the undefinable borders, relativizing thereby any centrally defined borders and regions. Moreover, these practical boundaries have become less pronounced as access to these formerly closed fields, such as Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar has become easier. Boundaries with neighbouring regions, such as China which were hitherto difficult to cross, are also becoming more viable fields of research. The bordering areas in the southern reaches of China have provided openings to explore topics which lead us to the questioning of the region from its borders. Much research has begun in the border regions of Southeast Asia, drawing our attention to the flow of goods, people as well as ideas and practices across national boundaries, as well as regional boundaries. Such interests lead our attention to various issues: Transnational flow of people and culture, management of resources, the meaning of national boundaries and citizenship, etc. Cross-regional mobility has been the stuff of life and the basis of the societies and history of Southeast Asia. The more recent flow of people across regions and transnational citizenship, which seem to render the regions borderless, do not necessarily negate the importance of borders or nation states, but allow us to look at them from a new perspective. By re-organizing and reconsidering the nation-state bound to modern historical narrative of the region we might gain new insight into the region itself, as well as its position in the world. Cross-boundary research had begun both in the maritime region, such as the Sulu Zone, as well as in the mountainous mainland, such as the Tai regions covering a vast area from Vietnam, Laos, Yunnan, Thailand to Myanmar, as well as the Theravada Buddhist region. As mentioned above, such attempts coincide with interests among Thai scholars, albeit with different emphasis. However, increasingly, collaborative workshops and publications with scholars in these very regions have begun.23 Through the discussion of these three topics, I hope not only to have demonstrated the relevance of inter-disciplinary studies, but also, to have reconsidered Southeast Asian studies in which the national boundary as well as the regional boundary can be reviewed, where locally specific frameworks of understanding can then be compared with other locales, making possible meaningful comparison within the region. While the region may be definable in historical terms, we may nevertheless see it as a fluid, dynamic “unit” that constantly redefines its boundaries, within which we should strive towards

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comparative work and empirically based mid-level theories. These topics are merely examples of issues that may allow us also to think of ways in which rising interest from within and beyond the region will cross paths productively, and where exchange of knowledge across academic traditions is difficult but increasingly necessary.

MULTI-LATERALITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES There are different reasons as to why Southeast Asian studies as institutions may continue or disintegrate in each continent, country, or scholarly tradition. We cannot ignore the inequality and power relationship that underlie the differences in production of knowledge. However, recognizing that each stands in a different position within a different ecology of scholarship, and different legitimization for scholarship, seeking more dialogue among these different traditions promises to be productive. Up to now, the distribution and direction of scholarship has been primarily originating from the United States and Europe. Citation of past research in scholarly reviews are dominated by American and European scholarship, not only in quantity, but also the most well-cited works that constitute the framework of Southeast Asian studies originate from there. With participation from increasingly mature and numerous researchers from within the region, we have come to a point where future research needs to be multi-lateral across the globe. Furthermore, with growing academic interest and maturity from within Southeast Asia, we need to devise research in which we can mutually benefit and learn from our colleagues in Southeast Asia, and to find one’s own positioning in the changing global academic map. The question for us in Japan, for example, is, granted our geo-political and historical relationship with the region, how do we position ourselves towards the existing scholarship in which those of Western origin have by far the largest voice, and what is our role vis-à-vis the growing scholarship from within the region? With varying degrees of realistic-ness, we might consider the following projects towards such multi-directional dialogue. Firstly, we might consider increasing institutional relationships and flow of researchers and students between those in the region and outside; secondly, actual collaboration both in the field as well as in seminars and workshops towards productive exchange of ideas and information; thirdly, multi-lateral efforts towards accumulation of information, data and library resources in the vernacular. Revolutionary changes in archival resources have been pointed out by historians in the past decades. Varied forms of written material are becoming available, not only in the central archives of each country, but from

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the regions in the local vernacular, which would be crucial to the kinds of topics mentioned above. Few of the countries can support the necessary library capacities for making good use of such material. The hitherto one-way flow of local language books and materials purchased out of the countries by researchers from the wealthier countries to stall them in their ivory-tower libraries, must be reconsidered. Making utmost use of the digitalization of information, we need concerted efforts by scholars from all sides to amass and make available these varied forms of information to scholars from both within and outside the region. Fourthly, it is making available more of the non-Western language works and materials, which is essential for a fair exchange of ideas and information. There is nothing we can do about the dominance of English in the global academe, so much so that conceptual schemes and perspectives are also dominated by the English language. Challenges could be made to established conceptual frameworks from scholarship in other languages which have in their background their own tradition of scholarship. But to do so, they must be made available and appreciated, inevitably, in English. Such ideas of multi-laterality may be optimistic. Not only in our scholarly traditions and use of languages do we differ, there are political and economic differences in the institutional setting we are each situated in. At least it has come to a point where Southeast Asianist scholars, whether in Southeast Asia or other parts of Asia including Japan, Europe, Australia, or the United States, might reposition themselves to the changing academic mapping: To reflect on each of our own position, in the evolving “ecology” of the global academic endeavour.

NOTES 1. I am greatly indebted to my colleague Patricio Abinales, and Hjorleifur Jonsson Nicola Tannenbaum for exchanging ideas and notes, and pointing out information towards the writing of this chapter and to Koji Tanaka for reading the draft and providing helpful suggestions. The discussion is limited by my own academic career and interests, being a Japanese anthropologist educated in the United States and now working at an institution dedicated to Southeast Asian studies in Japan. My interest has been in minorities in the hills of Mainland Southeast Asia with topical interests in religious practices, minority positioning, gender, and changing social organization. 2. For a review on Japanese scholarship on anthropological studies on the Mainland, see Hayami, Yoko. “Within and Beyond the Boundaries: Anthropological Studies of Mainland Southeast Asia since the 1950s”. Japanese Review of Cultural Anthropology 2 (2001): 65–104, and for Thai/Tai history, Iijima, Akiko. “The

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Study of Thai History in Japan: the Present Condition and Future Prospects”. Asian Research Trends: A Humanities and Social Science Review, no. 11 (2001): 61–67. Earlier usage of the term can already be found at the beginning of the twentieth century among German and Dutch scholars, claiming for a culturally unified region. Shimizu, Hajime. “The Foundation of the Regional Concept ‘Tonan-Ajiya’ in Modern Japan: From Geography Textbooks in Primary and Secondary Education”. Ajia-Keizai 28, no. 6 (1987): 2–15; Ajia-Keizai 28, no. 7 (1987): 22–38. It was founded as a research institute within Kyoto University in 1963, and institutionalized as a research center recognized by the Ministry of Education in 1965. Takaya, Yoshikazu. Agricultural Development of a Tropical Delta: A Study of the Chao Phraya Delta. Translated by Peter Hawkes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989. Ishii Yoneo. A Rice-Growing Village Revisited: An Integrated Study of Rural Development in Northwest Thailand. Kyoto: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Kyoto University, 1983. Ishii Yoneo. Sangha, State, and Society: Thai Buddhism in History. Translated by Peter Hawkes. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1986. Ishii Yoneo, M. Shibayama and Aroonrut Wichienkiew, Computer Concordance to the Law of the Three Seals. Bangkok: Amarin Publications, 1991. Sakurai, Yumio. Land, Water, Rice and Men in Early Vietnam: Agrarian Adaption and Socio-political Organization. Translated by Thomas A. Stanley. Kyoto: CSEAS Research Report Series 50, 1995. Maeda-Tachimoto, perhaps, is an exception as he received graduate training at Chicago (Anthropology). It would be interesting to pursue how his training in anthropology in the United States later was filtered through his research among multi-disciplinary scholars at CSEAS, towards a distinctive stance towards area studies. Herzfeld, Michael. “The Absent Presence: Discourses of Crypto-Colonialism”. The South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 919. Heryanto, Ariel. “Can There be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” Moussons 5 (2002): 14. Ibid.: 3–30. For thought-provoking accounts and reviews of other parts of Southeast Asia, see Abinales, Patricio N. Southeast Asian Studies and Southeast Asia: A Filipino Note. Mimeographed, 2004; Heryanto. “Can There be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”: 3–30. See Iijima, Akiko. “The Study of Thai History in Japan: the Present Condition and Future Prospects”. Asian Research Trends: A Humanities and Social Science Review, No. 11 (2001): 61–67, for similar observations from a historian’s point of view.

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17. Charnvit Kasetsiri. The Rise of Ayudhya: A History of Siam in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Kuala Lumpur and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976: 27, fn. 7. 18. Cited in Charnvit Kasetsiri. “Overview of Research and Studies on Southeast Asia in Thailand”. Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 27. 19. Anderson, Benedict. “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990.” In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Hirschman, Charles, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 31. 20. Ibid.: 32–33. 21. Bryant, Raymond L. The Political Ecology of Forestry in Burma. London: Hurst & Company, 1997. 22. Ong, Aihwa and Michael Peletz. Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995: 296. 23. See for example, the series of workshops and publication by Hayashi. Hayashi, Yukio and Aroonrut Wichienkeeo, eds. Inter-Ethnic Relations in the Making of Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwestern China. Bangkok: Amarin Printing and Publishing Co. Bangkok, 2002; Hayashi, Yukio and Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, eds. Cultural Diversity and Conservation in the Making of Mainland Southeast Asia and Southwestern China: Regional Dynamics in the Past and Present. N.a.: Amarin Printing, 2003.

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5 THE ACADEMIC’S NEW CLOTHES The Cult of Theory versus the Cultivation of Language in Southeast Asian Studies Martin Platt

The need for language study and ability in Southeast Asian studies appears to be universally recognized. Courses of study providing language instruction are found in many parts of North America and Europe, and scholars are assumed to be proficient in at least one language relevant to their work. However, in reality the aspect of language in Southeast Asian studies is seriously neglected. This, I believe, is largely responsible for the generally perceived decline in the field, both in terms of number of new students and in scholarly innovation and robustness. Language ability is basic, crucial, and necessary for virtually any scholarly endeavour in area studies and in disciplinary studies in Southeast Asia. Job descriptions routinely require knowledge of at least one relevant language in the field, and a scholar would scarcely be credible without such knowledge. The days of the researcher unable to function in the target language, as of the armchair anthropologist, are over, or so we prefer to believe. Language ability provides a basis for access, insight, and accomplishment in all disciplines and sub-disciplines of Southeast Asian studies. However, it appears to be more necessary for some areas of scholarship than others, or rather, one can get by in some areas without the usual expected language competence. It is no secret 86

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that a rift has emerged between what is seen to be grounded, practical, language-related knowledge on the one hand and theory on the other. In the natural sciences, theory is generated to try to explain observable data, and then to make predictions about related situations. Observations of new situations are then made in order to test the theory, which in turn is strengthened, modified, or abandoned. In the humanities and social sciences, however, this scientific method seems frequently to be turned on its head. Rather than a heuristic or explanatory tool, theory becomes an end in itself: Scholarship becomes bloated with a gaseousness of theory for its own sake. A desire not just to theorize, but to theoreticize,1 takes over. The benefit of such activity lies in the fact that it can be carried out with little attention to realities “on the ground”, or in the field. In other words, little or no local language ability or other practical knowledge is required.2 This of course is not to condemn all theory. On the contrary, Southeast Asian studies has produced some very insightful and influential theoretical work. However, close attention will reveal, I believe, that the most useful and lasting theory has been the work of scholars with an outstanding, even legendary, command of the relevant language(s). It is also true that the plethora of theory floating free of its moorings has led to a perception, both by those in the academy and those outside it, of a lack of substance, meaning and relevance in much of current scholarly work. Studies have indicated that a typical social science journal article today is read by a total of less than two people.3 This is an enormously important finding with vast implications. Naturally we need new approaches, self-analysis, and an appraisal of what we are up to from time to time. However, when so many articles attempt to reshape paradigms, redefine the discipline, or become a self-reflexive metatext, then the scholarly discipline devolves into an inbred infatuation with itself, and thus stagnates. The importance of awareness of our own biases notwithstanding, we are left to ask the question, “Are we learning about reality or is the discipline merely studying itself?”4 I believe that this is a particular problem in the social sciences and comparative literature, and it is spreading to the discipline of history. In Southeast Asian studies, the problem is most noticeable in the United States.

A VIEW OF THE UNITED STATES Two conferences in the United States in the last fifteen years have attempted to diagnose the condition of Southeast Asian studies and make recommendations for its improvement: The first in 1990 at Wingspread, in

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Wisconsin, and the second in 1999 in New York City. Perhaps not surprisingly, similar problems were identified at each, including adherence to fads in theorizing and in research topics; lack of grounded knowledge about the region; failure to engage with scholars in Southeast Asia; over-attention to politics and anthropology and under-attention to literature,5 music, and art; insufficient language ability among students and established scholars; weakness of language programmes (including teaching materials); a dearth of translations of important classical and modern texts; and, low appreciation for language teaching and translation. Recommendations were made to attempt to remedy these ills, but few seem to have been implemented or even given much thought after the conferences ended, aside from publishing the results in two booklets.6 To me these problems stem largely from a single basic source. Moreover, the identification of these problems evinces values and goals that have their foundation in knowledge and ability in language and, by extension, literature. That is, the key to solving these problems as a whole lies in a better appreciation of the role and importance of language ability and a stronger commitment to teaching and scholarship in language, literature, and translation.7 The resulting improvement in language skills among students and established scholars, I feel, is necessary to the re-invigoration of the field of Southeast Asian studies. While many participants in these conferences spoke of a need for translations of a range of Southeast Asian texts, very little of this work has been done,8 and there continues to be a low value placed on such scholarly endeavours by colleagues and administrators when tenure and salary issues are being decided. The same is true for the development of language teaching materials: While a great need exists for new materials, very few are being produced, for the same reasons. Moreover, the structure of language teaching contributes to its loss of effectiveness. In many universities, permanent positions have been replaced by temporary contract positions (renewed yearly or every three years) or even by graduate students who are native speakers but usually have no experience or training in teaching their own language and who leave as soon as they have completed their own course of study. These instructors have little ability or incentive to develop lasting, effective materials or to build expertise. This shifts the burden back to the permanent faculty members, who often feel over-burdened and made to teach more than their colleagues. Under these circumstances, bitterness and burn-out are all but inevitable. If faculty members resign or retire, there are few new scholars appropriately trained in language and literature to take their place. A good university programme must train (if needed) and support qualified language staff who

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are inspiring teachers. At the same time, these faculty members must not be treated as having a lower status than their colleagues. Language teaching at its best, like any other kind of teaching, requires knowledge, experience, and skill. Just as a historian would not be asked to teach anthropology, neither should someone similarly unqualified be expected to teach language. When universities fail to put the necessary resources into the teaching of language and literature, and when non-language-teaching faculty members show a similar lack of support or interest, it is no surprise that students prioritize other subjects. Language courses are neglected, and literature is rarely mentioned. In the rare instances when literature is given attention, it is generally as raw material for work in anthropology, political economy, or in other social science and theoretical areas; it is rarely studied on its own and for its own sake. Thus we have scholars interested in producing and encouraging impressive theoretical meta-treatments of subjects for which the basic knowledge and groundwork have not yet been established. For example, in American universities I have found a surprising ignorance of Southeast Asian literature, both classical and modern. “Do they have much literature?” is not an uncommon question. I have frequently had the feeling that few graduate students could name three significant writers of the country they were specializing in. Surely even fewer have ever read a classical text, even in translation. Any interest that exists is rarely kindled, as courses in literature are often not offered. Students who wish to pursue subjects like literature or the oral tradition find that, in spite of the relevance of these subjects to most if not all other aspects of the region, there is little support, either moral or financial. Thus the university experience of these students can be an even more discouraging and uphill struggle than usual. Furthermore, since students know that there are almost no teaching positions in language and literature, few wish to follow a pursuit so evidently devalued and leading nowhere. For these reasons, scholars who are knowledgeable about classical and modern literature of Southeast Asia are for the most part outside of the United States. It is not merely a question of neglect of one particular area of Southeast Asian studies. Language and literature study should not be seen as a tool for social science scholarship, but should be pursued for its own sake, and for the insights it provides into patterns, processes, and conceptions in Southeast Asia. The verbal arts, whether written or oral, play a profound and undeniable role in Southeast Asian life, both historically and in the present, and as such can be considered an areal feature. Without exposure to the range and depth of the oral and written traditions, students will remain ignorant of the omnipresence of these traditions and their manifestations, for example, as allusions to jataka tales in different forms of artistic expression, sayings in

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poetic form overheard in markets or seen written on the backs of trucks, evocations of popular Chinese tales of supernatural power in contemporary political commentary, and many other forms indicating commonly held cultural referents. Frequently, students feel pressure to follow established lines and areas of inquiry, resulting in a simplification or impoverishment of Southeast Asian studies into a few fashionable topics (sometimes applied in questionable ways), such as gender, nationalism, and ethnicity. In available classes, students tend to be exposed to a parade of theories, old and new, already discredited or currently trendy. Thus they become schooled in the discipline, but not in hard knowledge of the region. Those who are in turn hired in university positions are those who can talk in the prescribed terms about the usual subjects; the process is self-perpetuating. In discussing the travails of trying to fill a position at a large American university, one participant at the New York conference spoke of the lack of candidates with both theoretical sophistication and real knowledge of language and literature; in the end, no one was hired (this has happened on more than one occasion recently). It appears that there is often a desire to hire a clone to fit an existing mould rather than to find an independent scholar with ideas, interests, and views of his/her own. Instead of supporting the values and preconceived agenda of a hiring committee, the field would be better served by encouraging a diversity of topics, abilities, and approaches, which in turn would be more likely to allow for intellectual discovery and in the long run produce innovative scholarly work. Published works tend to follow this same pattern. Too often we find an over-reliance on fashionable theories and discussions of transnational, gendered, globalized spatialities or whatever other turgid catchphrases are current. Even established senior scholars have expressed impatience with it; many in the field admit that even they cannot understand much of what is published, nor do they feel such works are worth the time required to decode them. I have asked several junior scholars in Southeast Asian studies what they remember as good published works in the field, and generally they can think of just a few inspiring articles or books. Instead we see a tendency toward dense, abstruse, highly specialized works that have little general appeal and seem irrelevant to the interests and needs of both faculty and students. Publications on the region (with some exceptions) seem to fall into three categories: 1) highly specialized and often dense works with very narrow appeal; 2) generalinterest works which both assume no background on the part of the reader and suggest equally little background on the part of the writer, that is, often written by non-experts and frequently marred by inaccuracies or misapprehensions; and 3) sensationalistic and fictional works in the popular

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press. Given this state of affairs, perhaps it is no wonder that student numbers are dropping and the field seems to have little to say even to itself, let alone to other fields or interested readers in general. A widening of possibilities for students would result from both better language (including literature) study opportunities and greater availability of translated works from Southeast Asia, and in turn the field could be reinvigorated both in terms of number of students and the range of topics pursued.

A VIEW OF EUROPE The problems and experiences of Southeast Asian studies in European universities differ in type and intensity from those in the United States. First of all, because the study of language and literature is taken more seriously and given more emphasis, students and, in turn, scholars, tend to have a strong language foundation. Thus there is less temptation to ignore language aspects, and less likelihood of engaging in research or producing publications that generate theory without a concomitant grounding in reality. This does not necessarily mean a direct relevance and practical applicability to everyday life, but merely that it has some kind of empirical basis.9 Literary texts are integrated into language teaching early on, perhaps during the second year, so that students develop a familiarity with a range of authors, styles, and periods. Students also read newspaper accounts, scholarly articles, non-fiction pieces from magazines, etc. Moreover, the faculty members directing and teaching (at least a large portion of ) these courses generally have training and interests themselves precisely in language and literature, rather than in linguistics, as is the norm in the United States.10 Southeast Asian studies students at the B.A. level are generally required to complete at least three years of study in their language of choice. At the M.A. level, for example in Denmark, they generally take a fourth and fifth year. This contrasts markedly with American programmes, where it is generally not possible for undergraduates to major in a particular Southeast Asian language and country. Many students entering at the M.A. level, therefore, have not completed even one year of language study, and thus are unlikely to have an opportunity to gain proficiency before completing their degree (unless they make a special effort, something that is rarely prioritized or encouraged in American universities). At the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), Ph.D. students in language and literature (whether of Southeast Asia or other areas) are expected to do field research for their degrees. In the United States, this would be an anomaly at best, but since there are anyway no American Ph.D. programmes in language and literature per se, the point becomes secondary.11

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Significant problems do also exist in Europe with respect to language teaching, of course. One is the recent and gravely misguided attempt by bureaucrats to run universities as businesses. Under this model, courses or subjects that do not attract large numbers of students are seen to not pay their own way and thus, considered “too expensive” to maintain. As many Southeast Asian studies courses can have relatively small enrolments and thus fall into this category, the whole field is endangered by such thinking. For example, not long ago at SOAS the entire Burmese language programme was nearly extinguished after enrolments were compared to those in Japanese classes. Given the already very low number of Burmese programmes in the world, this would have been a terrible blow to the field.12 Obviously the logic of such an attitude is faulty; the goal of education is not profit-taking, and to see it as such is to severely impoverish and degrade it. Universities are not businesses, and to run them as if they were, can only result in the narrowing of options until students can choose to study only English, engineering, or accounting, and little else. The implications for scholarship and for society at large are obvious. The Minister of Education in Denmark has recently stated publicly that education is a public service, not a commodity.13 Public service here is not to be confused with social service or municipal service, but rather goes to the heart of what the university is and does. The university is not merely practical, is not a technical school or a skills training centre, but serves society by acting both as an archive of knowledge and as a nexus for the generation of new knowledge. Since the university’s staff and resources are unique and built up over time, it is therefore also a national and global treasury of human intellectual endeavour. When in a particular age a society’s interests are restricted to religion, war, or business, as has occurred over the centuries, the university can serve those temporary concerns. However, what is important is that universities endure and progress beyond the immediate concerns of the day, and provide instruction and insight for society in the future. Therefore, all the various branches of knowledge serve the university’s mission; their importance transcends numbers and costbenefit analysis. To cut subjects or programmes reduces society’s intellectual resources. Once excised, they are unlikely to regenerate. Nonetheless, restrictions and other cost-cutting measures continue to be implemented. At the University of Copenhagen, for example, smaller subjects such as Thai and Indonesian are allowed to accept new beginning students only every other year. The idea is to reduce the number of language courses (levels), that have to be taught simultaneously every year. What this

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means in effect, though, is that students may have to wait a year or more to begin their university studies. Many simply opt to study something else instead, picking a department where they need not wait. Meanwhile, a student who for some reason cannot take a particular course when it is offered may have to wait several terms for it to come around again (assuming that enough students from earlier years reach that level). While this method does save some teaching hours, it leads to discontinuity, lack of momentum, and loss of students. Another major issue in Danish, German, and other European universities relates to the use of English in classes, student papers, and research publications. While many may decry the situation and perceive neocolonialist hegemony, the fact remains that English has become the common language of scholarship in most fields today. This is not to say that important scholarship is not conducted in other languages, but simply that work in English gets many times more attention and readership. In many fields, particularly in the sciences, this has long been recognized: Conferences are routinely held in English, publications appear in English, and academics are expected to be able to function in English. In Southeast Asian studies this is not always the case, perhaps in part because of the already existing need to learn and use one or more Southeast Asian and/or European research languages. Whatever the cause, and especially since there is no common Southeast Asian language in use, the need remains for a lingua franca to facilitate scholarly exchange and reduce isolation. This is particularly true for scholars in small countries who, by using the lingua franca, can bring in new ideas for dissemination and development in their home universities. It is not a question of replacing a national language, but of using a common language and developing a set of shared terms. English can, and often is, used side by side with the local language. Over the centuries, the language of scholarship has been Greek, Latin, German, and so on, and now seems to be English. If we adjust to this situation and help our students to do so as well, we will all benefit. If English were used more in Southeast Asian studies (and other disciplines), universities could make their unique resources much more widely available and attract students who wish to gain a high quality education with broad relevance and usefulness from all over Europe and the whole world. This could include students from Asia itself, thus providing international contacts, exchanges of ideas, and an integration of styles, goals, and uses of scholarship for students across regions. The result would be both a more vibrant university atmosphere and a more varied and interesting field of Southeast Asian studies.

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LANGUAGE TEACHING Good language teaching obviously requires good materials. As ideas change about what constitutes effective teaching, new materials need to be developed. Frequent calls have been made for new and more relevant teaching materials,14 but these calls are only rarely heeded. There are numerous reasons for this, some of which have been mentioned above. The increasing use of contract teachers in language classes means that there are fewer faculty qualified to develop language materials and less time available for them to do so. In addition, often the publication of such materials is not valued by departments and administrators. In view of the relatively small market for such materials, publishers also tend not to prioritize them, or alternatively, to try to make them attractive to the general market. Thus nearly all of the new materials published in the last decade or more for Thai language learning, for example, are written by non-specialists, who do not have the necessary background in language and literature (or even linguistics). Moreover, these publications are aimed at the casual learner who is not expected to go beyond a basic level. Many such materials are also full of errors, misapprehensions, and oversimplifications. Needless to say, such materials are not appropriate for university students intending to reach a high level of competence. As a result, many Thai language programmes are still using books developed thirty to forty years ago by AUA15 in Bangkok, especially in the beginning levels.16 At an intermediate level there are two readers available, both equally dry and out of date. At an advanced level there is virtually nothing at all. Instructors end up finding their own materials as best they can, based on what is available to them. There is little standardization from one year to another or one institution to another. The wheel has to be constantly reinvented. The situation is not quite as dire in some other languages. For Indonesian, Ellen Rafferty at the University of Wisconsin – Madison has for some years been developing interesting, effective, communicative materials at several levels. It is to be hoped that more of these materials will soon be published and given wide support by Indonesian language programmes. In Burmese, new materials based on decades of experience were recently developed by John Okell at SOAS. These are now published by Northern Illinois University and provide a ready-made resource for any institution wishing to offer this important but neglected language. For Lao, on the other hand, there are very few materials, reflecting the fact that there are only a small number of significant programmes in Lao studies in the world; none of them is in the United States. This strikes one as being a rather lopsided situation, given that there are more native speakers of Lao than Thai, and highlights the bias in Southeast Asian studies towards seeing the region in terms of national borders

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and nation-states rather than language/cultural affiliations. Another factor here is the lamentable influence in academics, both in Thailand and elsewhere, of a certain Thai point of view that sees Lao language and culture, as well as Laos itself, as subordinate to their Thai counterparts – as lesser, more primitive versions of the (central) Thai language, culture, and nation. In Europe, where language ability has perhaps always been given a higher priority than in the United States, the time-honoured (and somewhat out-dated) method of language teaching maintains an emphasis on grammatical analysis and translation as both a means and a goal of instruction. This is in keeping with the textual and philological tradition, and helps provide students with some knowledge and appreciation of literature, as well as the skills needed to handle a range of types of written material. In addition, European students are generally encouraged to spend a term or a year in a university in the country, where the language they are studying is used. Such an experience, coming after completion of one to three years of language study at the home university, provides a unique and unmatched opportunity to learn more of the language, to use it in an appropriate setting, and to come to a deeper understanding of the totality of language, culture, and society. The insights gained through such an experience are simply not available outside of such a context. “Heritage” students are a growing presence in Southeast Asian studies classrooms in the United States, and, with increasing Southeast Asian emigration, are now appearing increasingly in Europe (not only France) as well. While some American language teachers have emphasized the challenges of integrating heritage students into the language classroom, such challenges are merely a variation on the classic pedagogical issue of teaching students with differing backgrounds and aptitudes. No language class contains students of identical knowledge and abilities, even on the first day of a beginning class; there is already a continuum among the students. This differential generally increases as the class progresses, and heritage students are merely part of it. More and more students today, irrespective of their heritage, have visited or even lived in a place where the language is spoken, and many have gained some knowledge of the language (including misconceptions about it). Rather than a burden, this situation can be seen as an opportunity to enrich and enhance instruction by integrating these students through group work and incorporating their input in class and even in materials or lesson development, as appropriate. An issue that many language programmes are frequently seen to struggle with is the question of native versus non-native speakers as instructors. One view asserts that only the native speaker can teach proper pronunciation,

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usage, and cultural context; the other view holds that being a native speaker does not guarantee the ability to effectively structure teaching and give appropriate responses to student questions. Clearly there are strengths and weaknesses in both cases. While a non-native teacher is unlikely to have the breadth of expression, feeling for the language, or shared cultural knowledge of native speakers, he or she will have had the experience of learning the language as a non-native and thus will be more likely to have better understanding, insight, and sympathy for the challenges faced by other non-native learners.17 An ideal teaching situation would integrate both kinds of teachers and utilize their respective strengths. This is the case in many universities, but in the United States, the native speaker role is often filled by temporary staff, such as graduate students, while European universities tend to employ individual native speaker instructors over a long period, often decades. The resulting continuity in the latter programmes is invaluable in building and strengthening teaching and meeting the students’ needs, while conditions in the former programmes can magnify the already high risk of losing language students.18

FUTURE IMPROVEMENTS AND DIRECTIONS The earlier one learns, or starts to learn, a language, the better (the term “early” here refers both to absolute age and to the stage in a scholar’s career). In order to improve effectiveness, we need to take this fact into account and create new modes of instruction in European language programmes. One way would be to follow Australia’s lead and teach Southeast Asian languages in secondary schools.19 Another would be to offer intensive programmes in the first stages of university degree programmes. It must be recognized, however, that intensive language programmes are generally immediately followed by intensive forgetting on the part of the students, unless they have the chance to promptly use and expand their knowledge. Continuing opportunities and encouragement for students to both study and use the languages are therefore crucial for language instruction to have lasting value. A promising way to develop significant language proficiency early on and thus provide an immediate benefit to students would be to offer, or perhaps require, a year-long intensive language programme prior to the first year of the bachelor’s degree.20 Such a programme would be the equivalent of three years’ language study21 and would ensure that all students had reached a similarly advanced level by the time they began their subject courses in history, literature, social science, etc. This would enable faculty to incorporate scholarly material from Southeast Asia itself in their teaching, thereby greatly

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enriching students’ knowledge and understanding of the field. In addition, such a programme could attract students from all over Europe and beyond, thereby helping to establish and strengthen international scholarly links. Following the year of study, students would optimally spend the summer in an appropriate country, consolidating their newly acquired language abilities in social context. Study abroad programmes are another useful method of providing students with necessary language skills and social knowledge. These programmes must be carefully set up and maintained to avoid, or at least reduce, common problems. Some such programmes concentrate exchange students together in one place, generally providing instruction and often housing that is separate from students at the host institution. The result may be a counterproductive limiting of participants’ contact with the very society and language that they are supposed to experience. On the other hand, programmes that drop a student into a total immersion situation, generally a teachers’ college or university, tend to leave the student adrift with little support or help in dealing with inevitable difficulties. While such a sink-or-swim approach may suit some students, others end up dropping out or finding ways to cope that are unproductive. Any resulting inappropriate behaviour ends up reflecting poorly on the student’s home instructors and institution and can endanger the programme itself. Therefore, an effective exchange programme needs to find a middle way between these two approaches, perhaps allowing a combination, or alternation, of full immersion and familiar supportive context. Furthermore, strong programmes of this kind usually depend for their success and smooth functioning on the efforts and personalities of particular individuals, and thus may have limited lasting power or require periodic re-establishment. An important issue that has often been raised is the consistent loss of enrolment at each subsequent stage of language study in Southeast Asian studies. While a certain attrition is inevitable and unavoidable, the commonly observed figure of a fifty per cent attrition per year level is high enough to be of concern, reducing, for example, an original cohort of twelve students in first year, to six in the second year, and leaving only three students to begin the third year. I believe there are a number of ways that we can improve the situation. The first is to show students that we value and prioritize language study and knowledge as the central core of area studies, indispensable to any valuable and useful scholarship on Southeast Asia. Next, we need to give students reasonable expectations, informing them of the challenges of gaining language proficiency and acknowledging the particular difficulties and frustrations of the language in question. Finally, we must provide high quality

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and inspiring language instruction that provides students with the range of skills they require. This includes the recognition that our goal is not the limited one of merely trying to express our ideas using foreign words. Rather, we are attempting to put ourselves inside another language world and participate in its beliefs, constraints, and perceptions. Another question that frequently arises is whether it is sufficient to provide instruction in the three “main” languages of Thai, Vietnamese, and Indonesian/Malay. I think the answer is self-evident. Would anyone seriously suggest that Europe could be adequately studied using only English, French, and German? Not only must we make instruction available in all the national languages of Southeast Asia, as well as allied languages like Arabic, Sanskrit, and Pali,22 but we must provide students with the opportunity to learn more than one language in order to gain broader insight into the region’s diversity and commonality. Furthermore, for those who desire it, we must also provide options in regional and local languages, such as Batak, Cebuano, Cham, Hmong, Iban, Karen, Mon, Makassar, Shan, Yawi, and others. While obviously it would not be possible to offer classes in all these languages, and in many cases there are no materials available anyway, interested students should be taught methods of learning these languages by themselves in the field and encouraged to study the associated written and oral traditions. Indeed, a new initiative in this direction could re-invigorate the entire field of Southeast Asian studies by opening up new areas of inquiry. Instead of fifty new studies on the usual nation-states and cultures, we could have five studies on each of the ten regional or local societies and cultures that hold contemporary and historical significance beyond modern borders.

CONCLUSION A vital and productive approach to Southeast Asian studies can only be based on an appreciation for the fundamental importance of language, including foreign language ability. For some this will require a change of attitude. While there is an increasing appreciation of different styles of learning, an accompanying appreciation of diversity in styles and interests in scholarship is lacking. By enabling and encouraging (pressuring?) students to really learn one or more Southeast Asian languages, we can make it possible for them to pursue their own interests, gain direct insights, and share these insights across the field. The alternative is to force them to formulate ideas based on what is available in English or other Western languages and on what they are told is interesting, important, and worthy of study. I believe this latter “alternative”

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is currently more characteristic of the field than many of us care to admit, and goes some way towards explaining the sameness and trendiness that afflict many recent published works in Southeast Asian studies. This in turn severely limits the likelihood of expanding student interest (and numbers) in the field. While this is particularly the case in the United States, it is also true in Europe, where social science departments are over-subscribed while area studies programmes remain small. The increasing narrowness and apparent irrelevance of much scholarship in Southeast Asian studies could be reversed, and the field enriched and revivified, through the rejuvenation of the study of languages, both national and local, of which literature and the oral tradition are an essential part. We have the means, but do we have the will?

NOTES 1. This might best be expressed in Malay or Indonesian as memperteorisasikan. 2. As James Scott notes, “his is especially the case with those post-modern modes of analysis in which the smaller the shared of empirical information (a fragment of a folksong, a classificatory term, a vignette from the archives), the greater the interpretive freedom of the author.” See: Scott, James C. “Foreword”. Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 5. 3. Scott, James C. “Foreword”. Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: 5. 4. Some would claim that scholarship is more about the scholar than the subject. If this is true, then why pretend and call it Southeast Asian studies? 5. Some universities in the United States do teach literature, as Barnard points out in chapter 9 in this volume. However, I would argue that in most cases only a single, basic course is offered (generally attempting to survey the entire region in a single term). Moreover these courses are in many cases taught by social scientists or others who use the literature to illustrate points about their own discipline (for example, social change, development issues) rather than consider the literature for its own sake. This is a further expression of the attitude that literature is unimportant and incidental to the proper study of Southeast Asia; it also suggests that few feel qualified and motivated to read such literature (especially in its original languages). 6. The first is Hirschman, Keyes, and Hutterer, eds. Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance; the second is Social Science Research Council, Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After. New York: Southeast Asia Program, SSRC, 1999. 7. This requires attention to the classics and classical language as well, which is the basis of an understanding of cultural foundations. Modern speaking ability is

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not the only element of language knowledge. A university must provide variety and depth in its language instruction. Most Thai writers, for example, have not had even their names published in English, let alone their work. Only one Burmese novel has been translated and published outside of Myanmar (with a second now in press). Among translations that do exist, such as those from Thai, there are often issues of quality and relevance, and the range and variety remains narrow. In Denmark there is also a deeply held belief in the importance of making scholarly knowledge accessible, interesting, and useful to society at large, a quality that is evidently less prized among academics in the United States. This notion of public service is discussed below. Several language specialists at the Wingspread conference emphasized a distinction in language teaching between “fact” and “act”, noting that effective teaching requires that students learn not just about language (fact), but how to use language (act). Interestingly, the majority of U.S. teachers of Thai, for example, were trained in linguistics, the science of language, which is dedicated to fact; not language and literature, which is much more aligned with act. Hence the quip that linguists are able to explain minute details about sound systems and historical changes in a given language, but are unable to use it to say “Where is the bathroom?” Linguistics is the science of language, involving measurement, description, and scientific analysis. It can be practised without knowing a foreign language, just as history or engineering can be. Therefore, someone trained in linguistics is qualified to describe or explain a language, but not necessarily to teach how to use a language (that is, speaking, reading, writing, and understanding). In other words, a linguistics scholar may have no more inherent ability to teach a given language than does anyone else. What is needed is a scholar of the particular language and literature, someone who studies both the language and its meanings, and actually uses the language at a deep level. To study Southeast Asian literature at the Ph.D. level in the United States, a student would generally have to enter a programme in Anthropology or Comparative Literature, and thus much of his/her time would be spent learning the theories of the discipline rather than reading widely in the literature itself. A successful language and area studies programme takes years to build; once it is cut, it cannot be suddenly revived and reconstituted when some practical need arises. Short-sighted decisions based on short-term or temporary conditions thus have lasting consequences. The current demand and extreme shortage of Indonesian language and culture experts in the United States is a case in point. See “Education Minister Supports Initiative”, The Copenhagen Post, 14–20 May 2004: 5. Many of the participants at both of the above-mentioned conferences discussed the need for new and up-to-date materials. The American University Alumni Language Center. These books rely on the old audio-lingual method of drills, drills, and drills, and

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also incorporate vocabulary and attitudes that are out of date. At the very least they require extensive supplementation to create a useful course. In my experience, perhaps because of the low incidence of Westerners fluent in Asian languages, many Southeast Asians hold an attitude, often unconsciously, that a student of their language is not really learning the language, but merely learning about the language. Hence the experience of speaking a Southeast Asian language and being stared at blankly, or told in English that your language ability is good, or even asked if you speak the language after conversing in it for several minutes. This attitude is by no means absent among language teachers. Southeast Asian language programmes commonly report a loss of 50 per cent from one level to the next; see below. I once suggested that a Thai programme be instituted at a private American high school that regularly took its students on month-long study trips to Thailand. In her letter of response, the principal referred me to the school’s website and its description of their Chinese programme. The programme might make use of an approach used in the highly respected summer language programme at Middlebury College, where a total immersion situation is set up during which students are allowed to speak only the language of study. For a year-long language programme, such a total immersion situation might be instituted for a certain period, once or a few times during the year. Cornell University previously offered such a programme in Indonesian. Although it was not a required part of the curriculum for a degree in Southeast Asian studies, it allowed students to concentrate on language and to reach an advanced level in a relatively fast and efficient manner. Currently this programme, known as FALCON, is available only in Chinese and Japanese. There is no need, of course, to try to offer everything everywhere. Different universities have different traditions and existing strengths. With cooperation, we can build on these and expand them while reducing overlap. A given institution could pick a few or even one language to concentrate on. Student exchanges could be instituted, such as the one recently finalized between the Universities of Lund, Sweden, and Copenhagen, Denmark, thus strengthening each while allowing for broader coverage of the region overall. If the one-year intensive programme described above were to be instituted, students could follow this course and then return to their home universities with minimal disruption in their study programmes.

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6 RETHINKING SOUTHEAST ASIAN POLITICS Duncan McCargo

The study of Southeast Asian politics is a hybrid field, bringing together elements of the academic discipline of politics (known as political science in some traditions), and the inter-disciplinary field of area studies. Whereas the emphasis in the discipline of politics is on comparability – Southeast Asian politics is often seen as a sub-field of comparative politics – the emphasis in area studies is typically on distinctiveness. While many academics working on politics start with general theories and conceptual questions, those in area studies typically begin with specificities: Knowledge of languages, histories, and cultures which informs a spell of in-country fieldwork. In other words, the study of Southeast Asian politics contains a built-in contradiction, ripe with the potential for a clash of academic cultures. The clash here is not one between Western and Asian academic cultures – more of that later – but between two competing tendencies within the sub-field. Any academic who works on Southeast Asian politics without reference to wider theoretical debates, or who fails to link her or his research to well-constructed analytical arguments, will not gain acceptance as a credible social scientist. Yet academic specialists on the politics of Southeast Asia who fail to keep pace with empirical developments in the countries they study, and are known to spend little or no time in those countries, in turn lose their credibility as authoritative analysts of the region. In short, the life of the Southeast Asian politics specialist is a demanding one, beset by competing challenges. 102

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These challenges are compounded by the sheer diversity of the region itself: Ten countries (now eleven with the advent of an independent East Timor) ranging from Singapore to Indonesia, from Brunei to Vietnam, with an enormous range of political systems embracing an absolute monarchy (Brunei), one-party communist states (Laos and Vietnam), a military dictatorship (Myanmar)1 and a wide range of partial democracies, façade democracies, and political orders in semi-permanent “transition”. All of this amounts to a bewildering picture, difficult to comprehend for colleagues who work on Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East. Neither a single language unlocks research access to most Southeast Asian countries, nor the standard tool kit of developmental and “post-colonial” paradigms offer a quick ready-reckoner for sizing up the politics of a less familiar corner of the region. Sukarno once memorably called Southeast Asia “the focal point of world contradictions”; whether or not this is still true, the region remains peculiarly difficult to read and decipher.

HISTORICAL TENDENCIES IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN POLITICAL STUDIES Southeast Asia itself is a recent construct, a way of imagining and defining part of the world that only came fully into being after the Pacific War. The academic study of Southeast Asia burgeoned in the 1950s and 1960s, in large measure because the future political direction of the region appeared crucial to American and Western geo-political interests. Fearing a communist bloc extending from Vietnam to Indonesia, the United States invested in academic research; the subtext of much of this work was to suggest ways in which communism could be thwarted, and governments sympathetic to Western interests be installed and supported. Ironically if unsurprisingly, many of the American scholars working on Southeast Asia during this period were highly partial to the nationalist struggles of countries in the region, which they saw as analogous to the American struggle for independence from the most perfidious of all colonial powers, the British. Ralph Smith argued that a crucial distinguishing feature of early Southeast Asian studies in the United States was a critical view of imperialism, “accompanied by a tendency to sympathize with anti-European nationalists …”, reflecting “a logical continuation of the United States’ own historical experience”.2 He singles out George Kahin’s Nationalism and Revolution in Indonesia, written in 1952, as a key illustration of this tendency. American scholarship emphasised work on individual countries, which were viewed as passing through three historical stages: Traditional society, colonial rule and

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nationalist response, and national independence, sometimes produced by revolution. The dominant tradition of Southeast Asian political studies, which might be termed the “Cornell School”, was a scholarship based on admiration for the cultural and historical legacies of the region, and a sympathy for nationalist causes. The dominant methodology of the Cornell School was a combination of historical exegesis and anthropological fieldwork, emphasizing exercises such as the unpacking of a society’s basic structures and order through villagebased studies. Rather as British district officers in Burma or Malaya were instructed to “know your patch”, the first generation of scholars working on Southeast Asian politics sought to acquire a high level of expertise (typically linked with linguistic fluency) on a particular country, or region of a country. Specialists on individual countries (but different academic disciplines) were grouped together in project teams; the primary interest was in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Smith notes the irony that Vietnamese studies was very under-developed during the actual Vietnam conflict, only “catching up” when the war was over – and job opportunities in Southeast Asian studies began to dry up in the United States.3 Broadly speaking, this approach emphasized two big themes: 1. the pre-colonial order replicates itself in some way in the post-colonial order; and 2. you can generalize about how a society works at the national level by examining issues such as patronage networks at the village level. Most of the major books and articles published by scholars of this school are essentially versions of or variations on one or both of these themes. In other words, this was a study of politics driven by ideas borrowed from history and anthropology. Adherents of the Cornell School were funded largely by American foundations, yet rarely actually “delivered the goods” in terms of producing research that was geared towards the containment of communism. Kahin argued that the Cornell and Yale Southeast Asian studies programmes received the basis of their funding from the big foundations in the fifteen years after 1945, before the region became a priority in the struggle against communism. He was also adamant that none of the major foundations of the time (Carnegie, Ford, Luce, Mellon and Rockefeller) made any “hint that their grants were conditional on conformity with policies of the US government”.4 However, in the rather more full explanation of the origins of the Cornell Modern Indonesia Project offered in his posthumous intellectual autobiography, Southeast Asia: A Testament, Kahin made clear that he originally had to use all

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his powers of persuasion to ensure that the Ford Foundation did not fund the project to focus primarily on studying Indonesian communism.5 Interestingly, Kahin attributes the strength of the Cornell Southeast Asia programme to an early decision not to award its own degrees; Cornell graduates gained master’s and doctoral degrees in core academic disciplines such as political science, thus ensuring that they were much more employable than Yale and Berkeley graduates in area studies.6 The Cornell School played down the differences between nationalism and communism in the region, and was primarily interested in the former. By contrast, the Asia Society’s Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group “took as its starting-point the idea of stability in South-East Asia and the need to defeat the ‘communist threat’ in the region”.7 Both schools used an “essentially national, interdisciplinary perspective”,8 sometimes comparing countries, but not developing an integrated regional analysis. The Vietnam conflict itself was typically seen as the preserve of international relations specialist rather than Southeast Asian specialists per se. More conservative scholars made more efforts to deliver recommendations for the containment of communism, but their research made little impact in answering the practical questions of the American Government, and especially the military. It is hardly surprising that since April 1975 funding for Southeast Asian studies in the United States has never been the same, and that much of the newer work in the field has been done by European and Australian scholars, as well as by local scholars who had often benefited from Western scholarships to undertake graduate study abroad. The broad dilemma, though, remained unchanged: Southeast Asian political studies have been divided between those wishing to undertake “pure” research based on country-specific knowledge, training and fieldwork, and those seeking to advance a particular agenda related to the needs of policy-makers and power-holders. In other words, the sub-field has two streams: A mainstream dedicated to supporting the state (and often the status quo), and another “counter hegemonic” stream concerned with generating well-informed and often critical alternative perspectives. These two streams have parallels in the two “parent disciplines” of Asian studies and political studies. Mark Selden summarized the position thus: The field certainly includes people who have resisted career and financial temptations to subordinate their work to interests of the state in favor of scholarship and teaching that has highlighted, for example, patterns of repression and resistance in Asia and in US-Asian relations. Familiarity with Asian languages, histories, and civilisations continues to offer the best possible, indeed the only possible, foundation for a humane understanding of, and public policy toward, the region.9

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The Vietnam conflict and associated ideological struggles caused a schism in Asian studies in the United States, symbolized by the breaking away of scholars on the left from the Association for Asian Studies in 1969, and the creation of the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (BCAS) – now relaunched as Critical Asian Studies10 – followed a couple of years later by the establishment of the Journal of Contemporary Asia.11 These ideological divides clearly reach far beyond Asian studies in the United States. Similar tensions within political studies are all too familiar to British academics; many politics departments were riven with conflict between Marxists and non-Marxists for much of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. The question of whether or not to take the government’s shilling, though, is a particularly difficult one for specialists in the politics of the region. Writing for an academic audience and teaching students are important and enjoyable tasks, but many academics live in hope that something they say or write will influence the societies, political and policy processes and decisions they spend their professional lives studying. Eric Wakin has documented the extent to which many academic specialists on Southeast Asia received funding from the U.S. defence establishment for research aimed at countering communist insurgency.12 Wakin’s central focus is American anthropologists working on Thailand; he suggests that anthropology has a sort of moral responsibility to adhere to high ethical standards, given the nature of its focus on the lives of ordinary people, many of them in marginalized groups or living close to subsistence level. Yet his study incidentally touches upon the apparent involvement of political scientists in helping shape American policies in the region.13 Bruce Cumings has suggested that working for the government is acceptable in the case of all-out war (as in World War II), but that intelligence services and the academic community should be completely separated at other times.14 There is a difference between working for the government (writing a briefing paper on policy options for decentralization, for example) and working for intelligence services, say by using academic “cover” to gain information about radical or dissident social movements. Broadly speaking, it might be argued that three broad positions can be distinguished among early (that is, before around the 1980s) scholarship on Southeast Asian politics. 1. Pragmatic scholars, who were interested in influencing the policy process, were relatively happy to link their research agendas to projects of interest to states and power-holders. 2. Idealistic scholars were primarily concerned with the defence of their own academic integrity and the pursuit of an independent line (Kahin is

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arguably the leading example here); as Boyce puts it, “knowledge of other societies, founded on knowledge of their languages, tends to subvert national chauvinism and ethnocentrism.”15 3. Committed scholars adopted the approach sketched by Selden above, dedicated to supporting radical or critical positions, generally at that time informed by Marxist ideas and perspectives. Yet in practice these are ideal types rather than fixed categories: Even the saintly Kahin, who perhaps epitomises the “idealistic” scholar, joined Bill Bundy’s toothless, “window-dressing” East Asia Advisory Committee at the State Department in 1966, mainly to facilitate easier access to Vietnam.16 While committed scholars would probably claim a monopoly on idealism, it is possible to distinguish between the two. In effect, such categories obscure a broader spectrum of options, ranging from pure policy work to the mere polemicist; different scholars will occupy different positions on this continuum at different times in their careers. Nevertheless, scholars on the left have long been suspicious of “area studies” as an intellectual project, seeing it as a way of constructing the world, that emphasizes local and regional differences rather than broader socio-economic processes, with a tendency to dwell on questions of history and culture that divert attention from core issues of inequality, struggle, and the machinations of national and international capital. Similarly, those on the left view “comparative politics” as a conservative project, concerned with comparing phenomena such as processes, institutions, parties, and elections – whilst overlooking or side-stepping the economic underpinnings of these phenomena. Cumings suggests that a series of important books that helped lay the foundations of comparative politics in the 1960s were funded by the Ford Foundation in consultation with the CIA.17 Ironically, in the United States area studies is now under threat, because such funding is disappearing, both from the government and from foundations,18 on the grounds that there is now a greater need for cross-regional scholarship. By implication, area studies specialists have failed to please their masters by delivering scholarship of the requisite quality; but more importantly, scholarship of sufficient utility. This trend coincides with the rise of rational choice and formal theory models of analysis and explanation in American social science, and the growth of fields such as international studies, global studies and international political economy, emphasizing issues such as business and human rights rather than language skills and fieldwork, and typically arguing that the rise of globalization increasingly produces the comparability of ultimately interchangeable developments. By contrast, area studies remains wedded to the unfashionable

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notion that the general must often be subordinated to the distinctive demands of the particular.

SOUTHEAST ASIAN POLITICAL STUDIES BEYOND THE UNITED STATES Much of the above discussion has dwelt at some length on the American roots of much work in the field of Southeast Asian political studies. These roots have a salience that reaches beyond the United States itself. The majority of local scholars in the field were trained in the United States – especially those in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, which received large numbers of American-funded scholarships for graduate study in the 1960s and 1970s. Yet almost equally important, American and Americantrained academics also obtained posts in Britain and in Australia when the U.S. job market contracted after 1975. All, but one of the Southeast Asian politics specialists currently holding teaching positions in the U.K. is either a Cornell graduate, or studied for a doctorate under the supervision of a Cornell graduate, and American graduates also hold positions in continental Europe and New Zealand. Other traditions of Southeast Asian studies have tended to reflect the country-specific preoccupations of former colonial powers (Britain with Burma and Malaya, France with Indochina, the Netherlands with Indonesia), and thus offer little intellectual alternative to the comparative approach that emerged in the United States. As the late Edward Said pointed out, the Foucaultian motto of the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) – “knowledge is power” – reflects this tradition of an area studies born of a desire to subjugate colonial peoples.19 Britain developed an alternative model of area studies following the Hayter report of 1960, in which social sciences were placed at the forefront of work on Southeast Asian and other regions. In addition to SOAS, Southeast Asian studies centres were established at Kent and Hull, neither offering language programmes. Yet despite some expansion in funding – rationalized by the rapid economic growth and continuing political importance of the region – by 2003 both centres had closed (some of the Hull staff moved in August 2003 to create a new centre at Leeds). Neither centre had produced more than the occasional doctorate in a politics-related subject. At the same time, clusters of work in Europe and Australia did reflect the emergence of new nodes of Southeast Asian political studies outside North America. While Kahin’s Cornell series on the governments and politics of the region had been pre-eminent in the 1980s, in the 1990s there were new challengers. A growing number of publications in the field by

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British and European publishers – notably Curzon, Routledge and NIAS – represented the shift in output away from North American universities. The Routledge “Politics in Asia” series – edited by Michael Leifer of the London School of Economics (LSE) with a strong Southeast Asian bias – was one such challenger, as were publications from various academics associated with the Asia Research Centre at Murdoch University in Perth, notably Richard Robison, Kevin Hewison, and Garry Rodan. Other work centred around the Australian National University (ANU) – exemplified by its annual Indonesia “assessment” volumes. Another trend was the putative “indigenization” of Southeast Asian studies, arguably led by Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) (again supported by a strong publications programme), and emulated by new teaching programmes established by many of the region’s leading universities in the 1990s. These programmes drew on the many local academics trained at leading Asian studies centres in Western countries, and sought to promote greater understanding of other societies in the region, in line with policies advocated by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). A fundamental weakness of such programmes was paucity of knowledge about neighbouring countries: Most local academics trained in Southeast Asian studies had focused primarily on their own countries. It was extremely hard to find a Thai who could conduct firsthand research on Indonesia: Sombat Chantornvong and Thak Chaloemtiarana reported at a 1977 conference, for example, that Southeast Asian studies in Thailand were still at “square one”.20 Charnvit argued that Thailand had historically neglected to study its neighbours, preferring to concentrate on domestic affairs and relations with great powers21 – a position by no means unique to Thailand. He also questions whether Thais working on their own country are actually engaging in “Southeast Asian studies” at all,22 but argues that there are encouraging signs of real developments in this area reflected in new degree programmes and research projects. Yet overall, while the idea of a genuinely regional scholarship was attractive and important, results were relatively slow to appear. This doubtless reflects some of the structural problems faced by local scholars working in these fields.

DILEMMAS FOR LOCAL SCHOLARS The major universities of several Southeast Asian countries – notably Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand – contain large numbers of academics who have gained masters and doctoral degrees in politics and related subjects from some of the best universities in the world. Virtually all

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of them have permanent academic posts. The size of these academic communities is at least equal to the size of the academic community of Southeast Asian politics specialists working outside the region, and is probably actually greater. Local scholars are close to the scene of domestic political action, with ready access to newspapers, archives, interview sources, and fieldwork opportunities. They also have considerable scope to hire their best students to act as research assistants, usually at minimal cost. Yet the majority of books, journal articles, and chapters appearing in English on Southeast Asian politics are authored by scholars working outside the region. If we leave out Singapore-based academics, and the journals, books, and annuals published by the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), the residual contribution of academics from the other four countries named is extremely limited. How many academics from these countries have produced a single-authored book on politics with an international publisher other than ISEAS in the past decade? The exceptions could probably be counted on the fingers of two hands. At the same time, even if we count in all the singleauthored ISEAS books, and all the monographs published worldwide on Southeast Asian politics quite broadly defined, the total output is probably no more than a hundred or so books in the last ten years. These questions relate to the role of the intellectual in Southeast Asia, which arguably has little to do with an active engagement in new research. Gaining a doctorate from abroad is the apogee of many an academic career in the region: What the Western world views as an entrance examination for the academic profession, has often become the culmination of a lecturer’s ambitions. Going to the next stage, by turning that thesis into a book or a number of journal articles, is the exception rather than the rule. Continuing to publish substantial new work (other than textbooks or commentaries on current events) beyond the doctorate is even more unusual. Engaging directly in systematic fieldwork, conducting extensive interviews or using participant observation methods, is rare for an established Southeast Asian academic; more common are projects based on quantitative methods (survey and election data are especially popular), where much of the groundwork can be farmed out to a team of student assistants. This reluctance to pursue a serious research career clearly has complex causes: The Indonesian scholar Taufik Abdullah refers to such academics as satu pisang, a one-crop banana tree that promptly dies after producing its first fruit.23 One element relates to financial concerns: In many countries in the region, academics are chronically underpaid. Thus they seek to use their spare time to boost their earnings by teaching extra classes (often at other universities), engaging in consultancy, writing for newspapers, appearing on television and

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radio, or running businesses. While some academics could legitimately argue that they cannot afford to do research – and provision for research funding is often meagre – the fact is, that many Southeast Asian academics never have lived from their university salaries. People who enter university life typically do so in the knowledge that they already have other sources of income, and many non-research-active academics have no real financial problems. The question of renumeration is at best only a secondary explanation for the low levels of research output on Southeast Asian politics. The core reason for the shortage of local research and publications clearly resides in cultural difference and variations in what Robert Cribb has termed “circles of esteem” (see his contribution to this volume). Academic cultures vary from country to country, and from one period of time to another. In Western societies, mutual respect among academics is derived largely from reputation based upon published work. Reputation is constantly being reassessed: Well-known academics who fail to produce a significant new book or article for several years will experience a slow decline in their reputation. In most Southeast Asian societies, this is simply not the case; publishing even one book may give an academic a degree of intellectual standing and respect for life. In many cases, academics gain a reputation for considerable expertise in a particular field despite the fact that no publications, or very few, ever appear: It is sufficient that they once attended a well-known university abroad, from which they may not yet actually have graduated. Given that status rather than wealth or output remains the core measure of achievement in most Southeast Asian contexts, research only matters insofar as it boosts status. Only through a gradual cultural shift can local academics receive the necessary incentives to dedicate themselves to researching political issues and developments in their own countries. The choice between three approaches to academic work on Southeast Asian politics is a troublesome one for those living and working in the region, especially when they are citizens of the countries in which they work, and their primary professional interest is in their own country. The pragmatic approach is one ripe with opportunity. Politicians and policy actors in Southeast Asia need advice and information to help them in a wide range of areas, from electoral strategies to foreign policy initiatives and domestic reform processes. Given the relative weakness of civil service cadres and think-tanks in the region, they often seek to buy in such information and support from universities, most frequently by approaching individual academics. Academics can find themselves serving as prime ministerial advisors, consultants to political parties, constitution drafters, members of leading committees and public bodies, provincial governors,

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members of parliament, and even ministers. Or they can simply carry out research projects that support policy-related work. An alternative pragmatic route involves academics in developing a second career as a public intellectual, newspaper columnist, radio commentator, or television presenter. Again, the attractions of influencing events and reaching a wider audience are considerable. A third version of the pragmatic approach is to write articles or even books, typically in the local language but sometimes in English, which engage with current issues in a more accessible way – in other words, to write a form of political commentary rather than genuine research, commentary based on reading newspapers and familiarity with unfolding events rather than any more substantive academic process of discovery. This is not to suggest that there is anything wrong with pragmatic approaches. Much of the work done by academics in political consultancy, public policy, journalism, and popular commentary is extremely valuable and important; and many academics in Western countries are frankly envious of these opportunities. The idealistic path is perhaps the least trodden one for local academics, since it involves the single-minded pursuit of a personal intellectual agenda. Most countries in Southeast Asia have a poor system for funding and rewarding such research, and for many university lecturers personal research is an optional extra, something to be carried out on top of their other duties. This is particularly difficult where university regulations are relatively inflexible: Provision for sabbatical leave is often patchy; academics may be required to spend a certain number of hours on campus (making fieldwork extremely difficult); teaching loads are heavy by international standards, especially for younger and more junior staff (producing rapid burnout, and socialization into a culture of over-teaching, often associated with reliance on extra income from additional classes); and colleagues are frequently jealous of those with a good research reputation, especially one that leads to invitations to international conferences or other academic activities abroad. On top of this, capable and effective people tend to be in demand to serve in administrative positions, and the best researchers are those most qualified to serve in posts requiring academic leadership. The increasing “professionalization” (for which read, preoccupation with obscurity) of Western academics offers an unattractive model for Southeast Asian colleagues. Only a minority of pretty determined individuals can sustain an independent research career consistently. Nevertheless, such individuals do exist in practically every major university in the region, and very impressive they are. The option of committed scholarship is another choice with its own indigenous forms in the region. A significant minority of academics see

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themselves as dedicated to furthering the lot of the underprivileged, or even to fermenting social – if not outright political – revolution. They make use of their academic positions to legitimate their own roles as activists and public intellectuals, typically as critics of government policies. But they also often conduct academic research that supports their social and political agendas. In this respect they often combine elements of the pragmatic and idealistic approaches to scholarship. Like idealistic scholars, they are frequently working against the grain of the system. The three “domestic” approaches to scholarship on the region in the early twenty-first century are broadly the same as the three approaches that prevailed in the United States in the 1960s, or Australia and Europe in the 1980s and 1990s. What is different is the proportion of academics adhering to the approaches in different cases. In Southeast Asia, a pragmatic approach to scholarship is the dominant position, and in certain countries has become practically hegemonic. In 1990s Britain, idealistic approaches emphasizing high-quality personal research grew increasingly dominant, just as in earlier periods committed positions (especially opposition to the Vietnam War) were extremely widespread in the United States and elsewhere in the West.

PROBLEMS FOR OUTSIDERS: THE INTERNATIONAL SPECIALISTS If local academics face severe distractions and temptations, the position for international academics is not much better. After fieldwork and completing Ph.D.s, academics in Western countries typically face a difficult period of job-hunting, attempts to secure a permanent or tenured position, the need to publish rapidly in high-quality outlets, and the need to prepare a range of courses which they must teach to growing numbers of increasingly demanding students. It is not normally until at least five or six years after their doctoral fieldwork that they are ready to contemplate another substantial project, and they may have to wait even longer for a good spell of research leave. Small wonder that the temptation is for academics to publish second books involving less fieldwork than for their doctorates, and sometimes books involving practically no fieldwork at all. Internet sources and electronic databases mean that one can sit in Leeds or Los Angeles and generate fairly plausible articles about recent developments in Bangkok or Jakarta, all without leaving your desk. Gone are the days when you needed to travel to the region just to collect a few newspaper clippings for research purposes. A task that occupied me for around six weeks doing fieldwork in 1991 – manually locating all the

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references to a particular Thai politician in two English language newspapers, over a ten-year period, and making copies of those articles – I could now do in a morning from my desk in Yorkshire. Publishers prefer books with broad general themes and more potential sales – someone approaching a leading publisher with an idea for a book on, say, political parties in the Philippines, will often be urged to write a comparative book on the parties of four or five countries in the region, requiring much more superficial research. Writing the more superficial book often goes over well with colleagues in your own department, who keep urging you to be more “theoretical”, and not to get yourself classified as a “country specialist”. People who can talk and write with some plausibility about lots of different places and issues are much more likely to get hired to teach in the average Western university than those with a genuinely authoritative understanding of a particular “obscure” Southeast Asian country. After the second book, typically having acquired significant family and financial commitments, academic specialists on Southeast Asia will often find it increasingly unattractive to keep returning to the region for extended periods – and will probably also be diverted by administrative posts. While perhaps continuing to think of themselves as idealistic or committed researchers, many people in this position will make pragmatic choices, teaming up with well-established colleagues in the region, for example, and not putting in sufficient fieldwork to challenge received assumptions about political developments. The result is a taking of the eyes off the ball, a “response mode” academic career, keeping up the output, but losing critical edge – and especially analytical depth.

SOUTHEAST ASIA SPECIALISTS AS COLLABORATORS? In a deliberately provocative article, David Martin Jones and Mike Smith have sought to impugn Southeast Asian studies – by which they really mean political studies, with particular reference to international relations and international political economy – on the basis that the sub-discipline has similar tendencies to Sovietology.24 In other words, they argue that academics in the field are unduly beguiled by their subject matter, to the extent that they are in danger of losing critical perspective on wider developments, and risk not anticipating seismic changes in the region. Their main evidence is based on the failure of scholars to predict the 1997–98 regional economic crisis, and the considerable political fallout that accompanied it. They trace the origins of this approach in what they call the “Singapore School”25 of the 1980s, but argue that it came of age only during the 1990s,

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in work that they dub “ASEANology”. Adherents of this approach made wildly optimistic claims about the economic and political rise of the Asia Pacific region, and about the potential of ASEAN. Jones and Smith accuse “ASEANologists” of resembling Sovietologists in “a shared lack of insight into the region culminating in a woeful record of predictive ineptitude”.26 This accusation is supported by three main claims. The first criticism laid out by Jones and Smith is that ASEANologists were guilty of “surface impressionism”, a preoccupation with current events, and over-valuation of the “Asian way” as the basis for a new form of regionalism. Their second criticism is that these scholars were guilty of “compromising academic integrity”, through allowing the emergence of “tacit concurrence”. While some analysts did question highly optimistic assumptions about the prospects of the region’s economies, most political scientists were deeply uncritical of the upbeat discourse about new regionalism being generated by ASEAN governments and their allies, failing to highlight problematic concerns such as latent religious and ethnic tensions. Yet after July 1997 “regional experts moved from pre- to post-crisis mode without missing a beat”.27 In other words, most of the writing on the region during this period derived not from solid research, but from a quest to reinforce prior understandings and assumptions. Academics also colluded in adopting their own version of ASEAN’s consensual approach, which involved “non-interference in the domestic affairs of member states”;28 scholars of the region’s politics were disinclined to adopt critical views of the countries they studied, accentuating the positive and underplaying tensions and weaknesses. The third argument advanced by Jones and Smith is that serious methodological problems underlay the emergence of this scholarly proASEAN consensus and misplaced faith in a stable regional system. Those working on Southeast Asian politics made sweeping assumptions about the inevitability of system stability, coupled with progressive change. Jones and Smith argue that the relative openness of most Southeast Asian societies, their accessibility to researchers (compared with the former Soviet Union, for example), and the widespread regional use of English means that there were few excuses for Western scholars of the region to misread conditions and fail to anticipate developments. They attribute the failure of scholars to predict the Asian crisis to three core inter-related factors. The first is the “bureaucratization of academia” in the region; a second tendency they identify involves the coercion and cooption of outside academics. They criticize scholars from outside the region, for failing to help counter the bureaucratization of academia inside the region, instead reinforcing “the claim of the local scholar-bureaucrats to articulate the authentic voice of the

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region”.29 According to Jones and Smith, links between Western and local scholars have actually undermined disciplinary pluralism; international scholars were too often drawn into adopting uncritical views of the region, through participation in activities such as “Track II” diplomatic gatherings. The emphasis here was on “process” rather than “product”, which Jones and Smith see as a dangerous displacement of academic activity, away from the more urgent task of fresh and questioning empirical analysis. While the Jones and Smith article is an important and engaging one, certain flaws must be recognized in its argument. The main weakness of the piece is the way it conflates “Southeast Asian studies” with a particular school of international studies, associated with particular countries, institutions, and individuals. The article is really about Singapore, and to a lesser extent Malaysia, and addresses a relatively small body of academic work dealing with questions such as regionalism. At the same time, it is certainly possible to use their broad approach to deal with a wider range of questions and concerns. The core accusation in the article is that “pragmatic” views of Southeast Asian politics became so dominant – both among local scholars and their counterparts outside the region – that academics missed much of what was really happening. This argument could be made in quite specific terms with particular relation to Indonesia, where most country specialists singularly failed to recognize the impending demise of Suharto. I still treasure an e-mail I received in late 1997 from a leading specialist on Indonesian politics, reproving me for daring to suggest in a draft article that the New Order was close to its end. My respondent insisted that Suharto would only leave office “at a time of his own choosing”. A similar argument could also be made in the context of Thailand’s “miracle” political economy and associated “democratization”; for years, those of us who dared to suggest that the Thai order was characterized by numerous structural economic and political weaknesses were regularly shouted down.30 The validity of such views was only grudgingly accepted following the 1997 Asian crisis. Jones and Smith raise some important questions, which should challenge people working in the field of Southeast Asian political studies to reflect critically on their own situations and practices.

QUESTIONS, THEMES, AND ISSUES The fundamental questions of Southeast Asian political studies scarcely change, since they are the underlying questions for all students of politics, questions raised by the former MP Tony Benn: Who holds power, how do they gain power, how do they exercise power, and how do they lose power? However, these questions are articulated differently over time, and in different contexts.

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Many of the salient debates address the question of the relationship between formal and informal power, or power and influence. Others seek to unpack the nature of power in terms of state-society relations. Still others link political power with economic power and seek to examine the relationships between the two. Yet others are concerned with the ideas and ideologies underpinning the quest for power. And still others seek to transcend the domestic by emphasizing international dimensions of political contestation in the region. Fashions come and go, but fundamentals rarely change. I have reviewed changing fashions in the study of Southeast Asian politics in another article (McCargo and Taylor 1996), but a brief summary is in order here. During the 1950s and 1960s, questions of nationalism and communism influenced much of the debate about the nature of politics in the region, as did the issue of how far it was possible to create constitutional democracies in post-colonial Southeast Asia, especially in relation to delicate “ethnic bargains”. Political culture was a popular approach, typically seeking to generalise about national level politics from notions of the “Southeast Asian peasant personality”. The bureaucracy was an important focus of interest. Behaviouralism, a central tenet of social sciences during this period, was also selectively invoked to explain political developments in the region. By the 1970s many of these approaches had become dated. The emphasis now was often on questions such as civil-military relations, the origins of domestic conflict and insurgency, and the political effects of urbanization (including the underlying causes of military coups and declarations of martial law), industrialization, and rapid social change. The 1980s saw the growing rise of political economy approaches, both radical and conservative, as political change began to seem inseparable from wider processes of socioeconomic transformation. By the 1990s political economy perspectives were joined by a growing emphasis on emerging social forces, particularly a new middle class, as well as the rise of non-governmental organizations, the media and issue-based protests around environmental matters. A shift towards the study of local politics reflected a feeling that earlier studies had over-emphasized national developments, and placed too much stress on capital cities. This area of work also embraced emerging fashions for the concepts of civil society and social capital, as well as the “third wave” of democratization, which was linked to a series of political and attempted transitions in the region. In parallel, there was a new stress on regionalism and the international dimensions of Southeast Asia’s political economy. Following the 1997 Asian crisis, ideas concerning “crony capitalism” were very much in vogue, as were discussions of corruption, “good governance”, political reform, and a renewed

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emphasis on parties and elections. In recent years, questions of identity and ethnicity have gained increasing salience, and traditional assumptions about the borders of Southeast Asia and its constituent states are being challenged by ideas of transnational networks. Gender, minorities, and difference have become more and more popular areas for study and analysis, as has the impact of new technologies, such as the Internet on social and political life. While rational choice theory has so far made only a limited impact on the sub-field of Southeast Asian political studies, a number of scholars have used approaches derived from post-modernism and critical theory. While interesting in themselves, these approaches do mark a significant deviation in the sub-discipline, diverting attention away from core questions about the nature of power. In many respects, these discussions mirror the kind of changes discussed by David Ricci in his brilliant book, The Tragedy of Political Science, a superb study of the comings and goings of academic fads and fashions. Ricci argues that scholars must retain a healthy scepticism about the validity of prevailing approaches in social science, but cautions them to engage in the practice of “robinhooding”, pretending to believe in political science until they have secured for themselves a tenured academic position from which they can begin to speak their minds about what really matters.31 True to my original training in English literature, I believe that academic work is a humanistic endeavour concerned with the subtle reading of texts and the teasing out of layers of ambiguity – of which there are rather more than Empson’s seven types.32 I have chosen to explore those ambiguities through an approach based primarily upon firsthand fieldwork and participant observation, an approach which seems to me to sum up the most defensible aspects of Southeast Asian political studies.

CONCLUSION: TRAJECTORIES? Trends in Southeast Asian political studies are fairly easy to plot, but trajectories are harder to anticipate. New ideas come into vogue every few years, then are quickly overtaken by events, or displaced by the next wave of emerging themes and issues. I have argued here that the precise themes and emphases used by scholars in the field are in themselves relatively unproblematic: What matters is that core questions about power remain at the centre of work in the sub-discipline. The crucial divide is not between those who study elections and those who study NGOs, for example, but between those adopting pragmatic, idealistic and committed approaches to the sub-discipline. The greatest danger for the field is that it becomes over-

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dominated by one set of approaches or understandings, thereby creating crude and sometimes highly deterministic orthodoxies which go virtually unchallenged. Orthodoxies are the enemy of truth in a complex and rapidly changing region, such as Southeast Asia. We need to strike the right balance between providing information useful to policy-makers and asking awkward questions that throw power-holders off-balance. A purely idealistic academy, pursuing academic research for its own sake, runs the risk of becoming detached from the world around it – and this is a danger to be avoided. Yet the opposite danger – of a largely incorporated academy subordinated to the needs of states and power-holders – currently looms much larger, especially in the region itself. The risk of a politicized academy dedicated to radical polemics and posturing now looks remote – the greater danger is of universities purged of dissident perspectives. The only apparent solution is to get back to the methodological roots of Southeast Asian political studies, putting in the work to learn difficult languages, doing extensive fieldwork away from the comforts of home and capital cities, and letting the data determine the conclusions rather than the other way around. It means not ceasing to do active research after completing a Ph.D., but making yourself keep on going out there (wherever there is for you) for extended periods, in all political weathers. It means regularly working on new areas or even new countries rather than going endlessly over the same familiar ground. It is much easier said than done – but the alternative is that specialists on Southeast Asian politics simply lose touch, one way or another, with the societies on which they work. Logically, the core trend in Southeast Asian political studies ought to be towards greater indigenization, towards a position where most of the key work is being generated by local scholars, frequently in collaboration with those based outside the region. There are two main ways in which those of us working outside the region can contribute to this process: By training future generations of regional scholars, typically through supervising postgraduate and especially doctoral students who will go back to work in their own countries; and by creating strong personal and professional links with universities in Southeast Asia, long-term links involving regular visits in both directions. Yet it seems unlikely that the full-blown “indigenization” of Southeast Asian political studies will take place any time soon. If we see scholarship as a parallel process to colonialism, and the nurturing of Southeast Asian academics as a form of preparation for fully fledged intellectual independence, then this indigenization should already have been completed. But in fact the colonial analogy does not hold good. There is little evidence that large numbers of scholars from Southeast Asia are actually able or willing to

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engage in systematic, critical research on potentially sensitive political issues within their own societies without some external impetus or support. Working on one’s own society is an entirely different intellectual challenge from working on another society in a completely different part of the world. For this reason, what I have termed “international scholars” and “local scholars” are on a very different intellectual terrain; for a Thai to study the politics of Thailand is to take a familiar road, yet for a European to study Thai politics is to follow the road less travelled. For the outsider, the academic study of Southeast Asian politics amounts to a deliberate act of self-marginalization, a purposive avoidance of the familiar, the comfortable, and the easy. It is, in fact, a perverse intellectual undertaking. It is my own belief that intellectual discoveries and deep understandings arise naturally from the deliberate making of difficult personal choices, and that the possession of a particular citizenship or ethnicity are not necessary or even desirable preconditions for the person who seeks truths about a given society. In this respect, the creative tensions between those we may label with the troubling badges of “insider” and “outsider” are invaluable when we attempt to think and rethink the politics of Southeast Asia.

NOTES 1. My preferred name for this country is Burma. 2. Smith, Ralph. “The Evolution of British Scholarship on South-East Asia 1820– 1970: Is there a ‘British Tradition’ in South-East Asian Studies?” In Britain and Southeast Asia. Occasional Paper no. 13, edited by D.K. Bassett and V. T. King. Hull: University of Hull Centre for South-East Asian Studies, 1986: 13. 3. Ibid.: 16–17. 4. Kahin, George McT. “The Making of Southeast Asian Studies: Cornell’s Experience”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 38. 5. Kahin, George McT. Southeast Asia: A Testament. London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 140–41. 6. Kahin, George McT. Southeast Asia: A Testament. London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 138–39. 7. Smith. “The Evolution of British Scholarship on South-East Asia 1820–1970”. 8. Ibid.: 17–18. 9. Selden, Mark. “Introduction: Asia, Asian Studies and the National Security State: A Symposium”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 5. 10. BCAS was founded by the “Committee of Concerned Asian Scholars”, which in its founding statement of purpose declared: “We first came together in opposition to the brutal aggression of the United States in Vietnam and to the complicity

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12.

13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

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or silence of our profession with regard to that policy”. The committee ceased to exist in 1979, though the full text of the statement of purpose continued to be published regularly in the journal. Here I must declare myself as a member of the editorial board of Critical Asian Studies. The Journal of Contemporary Asia was launched in 1970. The inaugural issue included a call for manuscripts of “an appropriate kind, documents from the liberation struggles, and other books and materials for review”. It also contained the following statement, which nicely captured the spirit of the times: “The Journal of Contemporary Asia is financed by individual contributions and refuses to accept support from any Government, Corporation, Cold War Institution or Foundation.” Wakin, Eric. Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand. Monograph no. 7. Madison WI: University of Wisconsin Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992. American political scientists mentioned by Wakin include Guy J. Pauker, Lucien Pye, David Wilson and M. Ladd Thomas (Wakin, Eric. Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand, Monograph no. 7. Madison: University of Wisconsin Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992: 18, 19, 25, 55); I must stress that I am not seeking to ascribe particular positions to any of these individuals by listing them here. Wakin also names most of the leading American anthropologists working on Thailand during the 1960s. The full story of the involvement of political scientists in American Southeast Asia policy in this period has yet to be written. Cummings, Bruce. “Boundary Displacement: Area Studies and International Studies during and after the Cold War”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 6–26; 7. Boyce, James K. “Area Studies and the National Security State”. Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 29, no. 1 (1997): 28. Kahin, George McT. Southeast Asia: A Testament. London and New York: Routledge, 2003: 186–87. Cummings. “Boundary Displacement”: 15. The series in question was “Studies in Political Development”, sponsored by the Committee on Comparative Politics of the Social Science Research Council, and published by Princeton University Press. Cummings lists seven books, including Gabriel Almond and James S. Coleman, The Politics of the Developing Areas (1960) and Lucian Pye and Sidney Verba, eds. Political Culture and Political Development, 1967. Cummings. “Boundary Displacement”: 22. Said, Edward. Orientalism. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. Sombat Chantornvong and Thak Chaloemtiarana. “Promising But Reluctant: Southeast Asian Studies in Thailand”. In A Colloquium on Southeast Asian Studies, edited by T.S. Bahrin et al. Singapore: ISEAS, 1981; cited in Charnvit Kasetsiri. “Overview of Research and Studies on Southeast Asia in Thailand”. Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 25–53.

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21. Charnvit Kasetsiri. “Overview of Research and Studies on Southeast Asia in Thailand”. Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 26. 22. Ibid.: 34. 23. Ibid.: 35. 24. Jones, David Martin, and Smith, Michael L. R. “Is there a Sovietology of SouthEast Asian Studies?” International Affairs 77, no. 4 (2001): 843–65. 25. They list Chan Heng Chee, Jon Quah and K.S. Sandhu as founders of the Singapore School, and Thomas Bellows, R.S. Milne, Diane Mauzy, Philippe Regnier and Raj Vasil among their “Western followers”. 26. Jones and Smith: 846. 27. Ibid.: 851. 28. Ibid.: 854. 29. Ibid.: 859. 30. See McCargo, Duncan. Problematising Democratisation: The Thai Case. DIR Working Paper no. 61, Aalborg: Aalborg University Research Center on Development and International Relations, 1997. In a closed official briefing session in 1994, a colleague and I were actually condemned by a senior Department of Trade and Industry official for adopting an “unpatriotic” view of British business prospects in Thailand. 31. Ricci, David M. The Tragedy of Political Science: Politics, Scholarship and Democracy. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984: 308–09. 32. Empson, William. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977.

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7 RECONCEPTUALIZING SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES Cynthia Chou

How relevant is the area study of “Southeast Asia” when it is seemingly more fashionable to be engaged in current discourses on the new geography of globalization, de-territorialization, and borderless worlds? Does talking about “Southeast Asian studies” make sense in the face of ongoing debates about there being “no sense of place” in our modern world?1 Donald Emmerson’s essay on ‘‘ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” is one of the most widely read deconstructive accounts on the imagined constructedness of this “externally defined region”.2 Numerous other insightful essays by scholars from a plethora of disciplines have reaffirmed the contrived identity3 of this region and the exogenous character of Southeast Asian studies.4 Indeed, “Southeast Asia” cannot boast fixed borders and boundaries to define it. For that reason, and all the more in the context of current political and intellectual movements, we are faced with questions such as “What is the future of Southeast Asian studies?” and “Has the time arrived for us to reconceptualize and radically reorientate Southeast Asian studies?”

THE TRAJECTORIES OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES There exists as Itty Abraham, Director of the Southeast Asia Programme of the Social Science Research Council in 1999, says “no reliable way of measuring 123

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the vitality” of this field of study.5 Nonetheless, a comparative and longitudinal view of the analytic models and traditions of research will help us synthesize our deliberations. I cringe from saying that I shall present a complete survey of the epistemological trajectories of Southeast Asian Studies. My attempt will be but a modest snapshot, to show the agreements and disagreements in experiences and optics in this field of study, as well as to evoke a sense and the scope of our challenge in conceptualizing this field of academic inquiry. In preparing for this discussion, I was inspired by several thought-provoking works6 and in particular the recent contributions of Bowen, King, and Heryanto to the ongoing discussions on Southeast Asia as a field of study.7 What has been particularly exciting in the reading of these essays is that they each present a cogent yet different viewpoint in defining Southeast Asian studies. I have found myself very much in agreement with their respective opinions and assessments, and it is not my primary intention in this particular chapter to present a critical review of their arguments. Instead, my main concern is to touch on some points of substance that they discuss to further the dialogue on what constitutes Southeast Asian studies. Bowen, in a survey of analytical approaches dominating the United States study of Southeast Asia and which he labels the “historical anthropology of politics”, presents the case that distinct research models on cultural commonalties and continuities have arisen in conceptualizing Southeast Asia as a field of study.8 He identifies a cluster of substantive social and cultural elements, institutions, and principles or cultural continuities that characterize the construction of models and methods resulting in a “unifying approach” for the study of the region. Examples of major traditions of research which have adopted this approach include George Cœdès’ classic model of Southeast Asia as “Indianized states” shaped by Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms.9 This model of study has inspired generations of scholars to look back to India in their endeavour to understand Southeast Asia. Through epigraph, archaeology, philology, and theories in social and political history, this model reflects how a defined sub-area stretching from India, across mainland Southeast Asia, and into parts of archipelago Southeast Asia have been diffused and transformed by Hindu and Buddhist political and religious ideas originating from India. Another version of studying “Southeast Asia” has been that of seeing Southeast Asia as part of a Malayo-Polynesian ethnological space. This model, which developed out of anthropologists in Leiden10 and out of certain historians’ critiques of Cœdès, has gained much support especially with other anthropologists working in the archipelago. It looks to Polynesia and Melanesia for comparable realizations of a general set of social-structural

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ideas because it perceives the region as reflecting continuities in kinship ties and descent in shaping cultural identity with Polynesia and Melanesia. A third version of studying Southeast Asia has been that of locating the region as a part of the Muslim world. This research tradition, originating in the model used for training Dutch Indologists at Leiden, continues to inspire a new generation of scholars in looking at other Muslim societies, with either normative or comparative questions in mind, to analyse the current Islamic movements in the region. Bowen stresses that these three constructions of the region are not the only possible ones.11 There is, for example, also the possibility of studying Southeast Asia as part of the Chinese diaspora.12 Furthermore, Bowen stresses that certain strong regional continuities have shaped these models, among which are the relative equality of men and women; hierarchical reciprocity as an organizing principle of social life; and an opening up toward the outside world that lies at the core of Southeast Asian historical and cultural consciousness. Indeed, notable works including those of D. Lombard, M. Osborne, O. Wolters, and A. Reid have concentrated on the cultural and historical content of the region, and they have framed their works in search of defining Southeast Asia in regional terms.13 The concept of the mandala as discussed by Wolters representing an “unstable political situation in a vaguely definable geographical area without fixed boundaries and where smaller centres tended to look in all directions for security”, is but a fine example of how many generations of scholars have been inspired to conceptualize the region as small-scale and flexible polities which have made the area into an evermoving patchwork.14 Through such an analytic framework many scholars have pointed to the openness of the region to external influences, in trade, ideology, and culture, and its capacity to localize foreign elements. King, on the other hand, indicates the significant differences between what he calls the “American” and “European” traditions and suggests that a large number of anthropologists, far from searching for unities or commonalties as the historians and prehistorians do, positively rejoice in diversity and in conjoining with the complexity of “the local”.15 He draws our attention to important works that anthropology has undertaken on what might be termed the “margins”, “peripheries”, the “Western imperialized other”, the “exploited”, and the “inferiorized” of a politically defined Southeast Asia.16 Anthropologists, he maintains, have tended to focus on the marginal populations, on minorities, on those “without history”, who reside on the borderlands of political and territorial units where state boundaries invariably cut across shared ethnicity and culture. This has involved an examination of the fluid and diverse populations that transcend the borders between the constituent nations of

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Southeast Asia and between Southeast Asian nations and countries, like China and India, which are considered to belong to regions beyond. These views from the borderlands and the scepticism about definitions in terms of nation-states and fixed international boundaries have produced exciting works on, for example, Austronesian-speaking populations and the upland peoples of mainland Southeast Asian and Southern China. An early example of the fruitfulness of this concern is undoubtedly Edmund Leach’s now classic examination of the “frontiers of Burma”.17 More recent and significant contributions to this way of conceptualizing the openness, boundary crossing, movement networks and flows of the region, and not on its closure and exclusion includes those by Kahn, Kipp, Steedly, Tsing and Pemberton.18 These are but a few examples which present treatises on marginality and an opportunity to rethink the spatial, cultural, and political configuration of the region. While Bowen (2000) and King (2001) have presented us with American and European viewpoints of Southeast Asian studies,19 Heryanto makes a passionate appeal for the need to re-conceptualize the “old Southeast Asian studies” in new ways, whether or not they are American or European-led.20 He calls for locally-produced knowledge of the region including works of Southeast Asianists from other continents to be taken more seriously in conceptualizing this academic inquiry. Heryanto acknowledges the concerns about Southeast Asians’ inclinations – either because of external pressures or personal commitments – to be myopically nationalistic in their intellectual endeavours. Nevertheless, he argues that due recognition is necessary for the accomplishments of individual scholars in this region whose work on their own countries has made a strong impact on their own home bases or even on the broader international communities of scholars. Although applied and policy-orientated research may form a great part of the works of Southeast Asians, such works should not be too sweepingly discarded in an academic inquiry. Their governments take policy-oriented research works by Southeast Asians in Southeast Asia seriously. These works, based on personal interests and values or commissioned by public authorities have practical implications. These scholars are the indigenous specialists who are respected as having the knowledge to steer their homeland’s history, culture, politics, psychology, and economy by way of what they write, teach, say, recommend, and do. The significance of these works is that they reveal another perspective in how the region is viewed, analysed, and understood. It tells us how Southeast Asians themselves see, understand, and hope for the region and their home to be, and this has deep implications for the content and direction of Southeast Asia studies.

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My aim in this chapter is to propose that a heuristic theorization of the region can cover an array of, as well as an inter-relationship of these views expressed so far. Such a theoretical orientation encompassing strong interactions between not one but various disciplines and the area and not one but various cultural viewpoints is necessary for meaningful and insightful comparative purposes. Indeed, Mohammed Halib and Huxley, in a collaboration between Southeast Asianists inside and outside the region, have conducted a survey and reported that Southeast Asians have tended to research and write on their own countries.21 Sadly, the number of true “Southeast Asianists” in the region remains limited. A large part of local scholars’ work on the region has involved Indonesian, Thai, and to a lesser extent Malaysian scholars writing in their national languages about their own countries and being published “locally”. Nevertheless, the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore has done much to facilitate, encourage, sponsor, and publish scholarship on Southeast Asia by Southeast Asians in English for an international as well as regional readership. Furthermore, one must also duly recognize the accomplishments of individual scholars in the region whose work on their own countries has inspired scholarship on countries other than their own. Samples of works included in this category are those by Wang Gungwu, Koentjaraningrat, Charnit Kasetsiri, Shamsul A.B., Thongchai Winichakul, Chua Beng Huat, Wazir-Jahan Karim, Kasian Tejapira, and Pasuk Phongpaichit.22 My purpose in bringing together Bowen’s, King’s and Heryanto’s23 overviews is to illustrate how the names, boundaries, and substance may differ in an American-, European- or Southeast Asian-led or, for that matter, any other inquiry in conceptualizing the region. These constructions of the region are not the only possible ones. Nonetheless, they present enough examples to highlight the breadth, depth, and fluid nature of Southeast Asia as a region and Southeast Asian studies as a field of academic inquiry. Each such construction highlights different cultural features and starts from different research questions. Each project has a very different map of the area, with different types of historical and cultural linkages to other regions or with an emphasis on the diversity and uniqueness of the local. In light of these observations, we must surely ask ourselves: “Does the study of Southeast Asia require a defined, particular area?” “Does this field of study require a specific set of research methods or a particular methodology?” “Do research questions have to be formulated out of particular disciplines and traditions?” “Is there a set of questions, methods, and perspectives in Southeast Asian studies, as ‘discipline’ studies demand?” “What are the prospects for the region as a field of study?”

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My point is that there is no need to be apologetic about the fluid qualities that compose Southeast Asia and that delineate it as a field of study. Southeast Asia has through migration, trade, religious, cultural, and political ideas received and transformed what came its way usually across the seas.24 It has on the one hand borrowed in order to create what defines it25 and so one finds in the region a kind of “internalized pluralism”, a consciousness of other societies at the core of each society’s self definition.26 Yet at the same time, this is matched by the concerns of numerous other scholars who have not been embroiled in universality theorization, but who have orientated us “to discover and present cultural otherness and their significant involvement in crossborder margins and peripheries”.27 This preoccupation with “the local”, the particular, and the distinctive community has just as significantly legitimized Southeast Asian studies as a distinct field of scholarly endeavour. That “Southeast Asia” is difficult to conceptualize and perhaps even impossible to institutionalize within fixed boundaries bears witness to the fact that it is not conceivable that Southeast Asian studies could be dominated by a single method of study or specific methodological approach. Although we will not err in formulating inquiries about the region out of particular disciplines and traditions, we could face constraints if we allowed ourselves to be overly one-discipline-led in our investigations. This regional fact has many implications. It would be totally wrong to interpret this diversity and fluid quality of Southeast Asia and of Southeast Asian studies as lacking a clear identity, of electing for superficial analysis or of suffering from regional myopia. Rather it is about the power of adopting a heuristic model of understanding the concept of communities and regions. Like Benedict Anderson’s classic theory of “imagined” nation states, regions can also be conceptualized as “imagined communities”.28 Elsewhere,29 I have argued that communities do not necessarily possess borders and boundaries. Instead, they should be understood within a polymathicpolyhistoric framework. That is to say, cultural shapes overlap within any coverage of space and we need to study communities in at least two interrelated ways. One way is the need to study the history and dynamics of interaction, negotiations, and techniques in the production of a community. Cultural continuities and shared cultural traits; and historical continuities and a shared historical experience can constitute a community. Yet another important constitutive element in the study of a community is that of personal and social relationships. At the ground level, relationships such as kinship ties and other linkages of shared interests – rather than a geographical territory – constitute the community. In the case of Southeast Asia, we see that at the ground level of shifting relations of power, men, women,

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children, and ancestors lived as members of entourages which formed “states”,30 that “the history of the archipelago shows that what Europeans described as ‘kingdoms’ were in fact cultural-economic units comprised of a web of kinship-infused relationships”.31 The state is not so much a structure in and of itself, but rather, it is an aspect of “the relationship between political and cultural groupings, as between individuals” and is “conceptualized in terms of interaction between family members”.32 Furthermore, the existence of multiple centres of power in the make-up of Southeast Asia – rather than a centralized administration – which are constantly engaged in the negotiation of territory and identity orientates us to understanding that community is a public arena for joint action and activities. The community is the arena where people negotiate and make deals, and which in turn produces common attachments, feelings of interdependence, common commitment, loyalty, and identity. The multiplicity of cultural, political, and economic forms, as well as the absence of a dominating central tradition calls for the production of a rich and unique analytical approach to discern Southeast Asia. The cultural contextualization of any one or a combination of the following research interests in politics, religion, or language requires attention to both the local and to its inter-linkages with the region and the global. There is a need to adopt a resolutely wider framework for Southeast Asian studies. If that is in order, how then can we proceed to (re-)conceptualize Southeast Asian studies?

SOME THOUGHTS Particular conditions of Southeast Asia – the absence of centres, the highly differentiated nature of the region itself, and the oral culture of the region – require a more heuristic analytical and methodological model. Here I will suggest that there are continuities in Southeast Asian studies that bear upon the direction of studies of the region across all disciplines, such that political scientists, anthropologists, and historians of this world-area tend to share certain interests that they do not share with others who are in their own disciplines, but who study other world-areas. Yet, there are also issues in Southeast Asian studies that are uniquely local. I started drafting this chapter with the initial and tentative title, “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Inquiry?” The reason why I abandoned this title stemmed from the questions that I began to ask myself when put to the task of inscribing onto paper what and how I would reconceptualize Southeast Asian studies. Bit by bit, I became convinced that I not only faced too many problems, but that I was adding many more constraints in approaching Southeast Asian studies as a

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historical or anthropological or political inquiry – rather, it should truly be an inquiry onto itself. In view of the fact that the region has become increasingly globalized while Southeast Asian studies as a field of academic attention has become increasingly marginalized, let me suggest an emphasis on two major issues in the conceptualization of Southeast Asian studies to see what we can gain by it.

ADOPTING

A

HEURISTIC APPROACH

There are different “Southeast Asias” to study. The very cultural complexity, syncretism, or differentiations within the region necessitate a broader heuristic approach in the academic inquiry of the region. What do I mean by a broader heuristic approach? At this point, I propose that we can take inspiration from heuristics, a branch of logic treating discovery or invention. The art or practice of using heuristic methods or procedures proceeds along the empirical lines of discovering and learning based upon intimate knowledge and experience that can be derived from various sources. These sources could include textual analysis, fieldwork, and trial and error based on educated guesses among an array of many other possibilities. No single theoretical paradigm or discipline dominates the researcher’s path in making a discovery or invention. Neither does the researcher deem any discipline or knowledge outside his/her own as being of any lesser status, value, or relevance. Instead, a well-designed matrix of solutions is proposed and experimented upon. The elements of the matrix can be changed, repeated, or interchanged. The basic idea is for the researcher to juggle with the current solution to see if (s)he can improve his/her understanding of the whole. It is not inconceivable that one could come up with various ways leading to the discovery or to have various and diverse solutions. Neither is it inconceivable that all of these ways make equal sense conceptually and that all of these discoveries are valuable. Conceptually, there is indeed no problem at all to see an increase in the number of solutions, so long as we understand them as attempts to reach an optimal solution, which in fact may not be possible. What the researcher has to do is simply to enumerate all possibilities and decide on the best formulation that is often based on a combination of his/her and other fellow researchers’ experience and trial and error. A heuristic approach is not a fully developed theory of any kind. More accurately, it is an approach which arms the researcher with the flexibility to seek solutions creatively that empirically make sense so that a more complete or feasible solution to the inquiry will eventually be achieved.

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I am not proposing that we will, or for that matter that we must, or that we can reach an optimal solution. Rather, what I am advocating is the production of new knowledge through new orientations and lines of inquiry to sharpen our perception and understanding of Southeast Asia. My point is that the most interesting challenge that awaits us is to use and understand Southeast Asia’s diversity and hybridity in a creative and positive manner. This may necessitate a breakaway from orthodoxy, that is, to avoid getting stuck inside any one particular disciplinary home so that one cannot see beyond its categories. Innovative theorizing and approaches to understanding the region can be forged by multi-, inter- and cross-disciplinary, and transnational discussions, as well as local experiences which may not necessarily be rooted in any one of the disciplinary bases that we academics have become so obsessed with. A heuristic approach is not to be confused with a multi-disciplinary approach. It goes beyond that. A multi-disciplinary approach necessarily specifies a number of disciplines, and excludes those who may have rich local experiences of the region but who do not fall within any discipline. As Anderson shrewdly observes, … most of us working in the humanities or social sciences find it quite normal to cite respectfully the work of scholars such as Georges Coedès, Paul Mus, John Furnivall, Bertram Schrieke, Theodoor Pigeaud, Richard Winstedt, Ralston Hayden, Roy Barton, Wilhelm Stutterheim, G.L. Luce, or Pierre Gourou – even though most of it was done well over half a century ago….To start with, very few of them had doctorates, or even M.A.’s, and only a small minority played a substantial role in the mediocre universities the colonial powers began setting up after 1900. They were, first and foremost, civil servants – colonial bureaucrats. They had regular salaried positions in colonial departments of education, finance, native affairs, and general administration; in state archaeological and linguistic institutes; in state museums, and the like. They were not highly paid, but the cost of colonial living was low, and they had solid pensions to which to look forward. Promotions came slowly but regularly, calibrated largely by seniority. They rarely had what we think of now as “large research grants”, but many of their studies were financed out of the colonial budget, the allocating of which was mainly determined by their fellow bureaucrats. It was not of great matter to their employers whether or not they published a great deal, provided the required reports kept steadily coming in. When they did write for publication, it was usually for their own local, colonial journals such as the Bulletin de l’École Française d’Extréme Orient (BEFEO), the Bidragen tot de taal-, land en Volkenkunde (Bijdrage), or the Journal of the Malayan Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (JMBRAS). Furthermore, they typically

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lived for many years, often for their scholarly lifetimes, in the countries they studied. Quite often they married Southeast Asian women, or kept them as mistresses; a few had long relationships with Southeast Asian men. Most of these “greats” were fluent in the contemporary mainstream vernaculars, even if, for reasons to be mentioned, their linguistics talents were usually oriented elsewhere. “Access” to people and materials was not a big problem because, after all, they were officials of an autocratic state. Life was generally predictable and its pace unhurried.33

A heuristic approach as I have proposed relaxes self-binding categorical rules to allow everybody and anybody from whatever point of view, but with a rich and in-depth experience of Southeast Asia either as an academic discipline or as homeland or as an activist, to offer a contribution towards our understanding of the region. To borrow Tsing’s phrase, a “theoretically informed quirkiness and creative refusal of orthodoxy” in Southeast Asian studies can reap imaginative, innovative, and unexpected ways to rethink culture, politics, history, gender, the nation, and the state etc.34 The possibilities are infinite. The region “is arguably the most insubstantial of world areas, being at once territorially porous, internally diverse, and inherently hybrid”.35 The “area” of Southeast Asia can be understood as a theoretical problematic and as an object of inquiry offering new sets of questions and methodologies. Rather than serving as a static unit for comparative scholarship, a heuristic approach in encompassing a hybrid of global, local, as well as indigenous knowledge and material to studying the region promises to elevate it to be a more dynamic “field” crossing traditional disciplinary as well as geopolitical boundaries. In the face of the dramatic speed of change in the region, which has given it a radically new and ever-changing social, political, and economic landscape, comparative analyses become imperative, and the framing of local events within the contexts of regional globalization becomes an urgent agenda. We need to revitalize our study programmes with new ways to think, to teach, and to discuss the region as a whole, about its particular component societies and about its global face. A heuristic approach enables us to extend our new concerns and intentions (and our enthusiasm) beyond the narrow confines of the academic community itself. We need to engage in dialogue and debate with colleagues not only in different disciplines but also with the very people who are of and in Southeast Asia itself. The conception that “the most ‘advanced’ work” on Southeast Asian studies is situated in the Western world or among the anglophone community of scholars and to which Southeast Asians must sojourn for their advanced degrees and enlightened understandings is a structural imbalance that must be rectified.36

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INTIMATE KNOWLEDGE AND LANGUAGE COMPETENCY Many are stepping into the field of Southeast Asian studies without knowing any of the many languages in the region or having had any extended period of residence with the people. The minimum requirement for becoming a Southeast Asianist must necessarily include a good mastery of one of the languages in the region and an extended period of residence with the people themselves. Intimate knowledge of a people and of a place cannot be gained otherwise. It is on the basis of such intimate knowledge that meaningful comparison, conceptual innovation, and theoretical sophistication can ultimately be made. While a fluency in a language is stressed, one must also beware of inwardlooking “area studies” whose specialized language and concerns become largely unintelligible to scholars working on other regions. This process may also occur within a “region” when scholars work on one particular society and have little knowledge of other societies in the region thus delving into subregional myopia. The ability to carry out translations of such specialized languages into a common academic language, such as English in the current academic milieu, is necessary in order for meaningful comparisons and conceptual innovations to evolve.

SOME CLOSING THOUGHTS These two issues bring me to some closing comments about the significance of proposing a heuristic approach for the learning about, the researching on, the cultural critique, and the pedagogy of Southeast Asia. A heuristic approach puts into orbit reflection, analysis, discussion, and argumentation thus facilitating new ideas and new discoveries. It is crucial that we “recall that…the academic imagination – is part of a wider geography of knowledge”37 created via dialogues, networks and collaborations zig-zagging and criss-crossing over boundaries. The striking feature about this wider and new geography of knowledge is that it “incites us to rethink our picture of what ‘regions’ are and to reflect on how research itself is a special practice of the academic imagination”.38 The salient feature about the map of Southeast Asia is that it is not a fixed and permanent geographical fact. Neither is Southeast Asian studies enshrined in permanent and pre-given themes of geographical, cultural, religious, political, economic, ethnic, or historical coherence that rest upon a composition of traits – for instance of race, values, languages, kinship patterns, cultural

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practices, ecological adaptations, and the like – with enduring properties. Rather, it has evolved out of shifting and variable geographies as well as ongoing processes. Generally speaking, it can be said that much of the problem of the paradigm of area studies as it now is, is that it… … has tended to mistake a particular configuration of apparent stabilities for permanent associations between space, territory, and cultural organization. These apparent stabilities are themselves largely artefacts of the specific trait-base idea of ‘culture’ areas, a recent Western cartography of large civilizational landmasses associated with different relationships to ‘Europe’ (itself a complex historical and cultural emergent), and a Cold War-based geography of fear and competition in which the study of world languages and regions in the United States was legislatively configured for security purposes into a reified map of geographical regions. As happens so often in academic inquiry, the heuristic impulse behind many of these cartographies and the contingent form of many of these spatial configurations was soon forgotten and the current maps of ‘areas’ in ‘area studies’ were enshrined as permanent.39

We need a blueprint for Southeast Asian studies that can discern a significant yet ever changing area of human organization. It is an area of disparate mentalities, activities, synergies, and transformation – of movements, conflicts, fragmentations, alliances, commerce, and media, ideological and capital flows, and the like. These reflect the wealth and intricacies of the material and non-material aspects of life which precisely constitute the “problematic [and critical] heuristic devices for the study of global geographic and cultural processes.”40 It is clear that a new “Southeast Asian studies” will have to be one that speaks not only to a Western audience but also to Southeast Asians in and out of the region. It is time to open the door for interactive work that crosses regional boundaries and to initiate rewarding conversations with scholars working in other parts of the world. We must necessarily attend to as well as to create partnerships with a set of public spheres in teaching and research so that our picture of areas is not confined to our own necessarily one-sided insular views. As Hutterer41 reminds us, it is “by drawing on each other’s strengths, [that] we should be able to establish mature partnerships that will help transform our field into a new, richer, and more complete intellectual endeavour, beyond its constitution rooted in colonial and postcolonial conditions.” Asking questions such as “is there something for us to learn from colleagues in other national and cultural settings whose work is not

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characterized by a sharp line between social scientific and humanistic styles of inquiry?” is not just a matter of ecumenicalism or goodwill. It is a way of enriching the answers to questions that increasingly affect the relationship between academic research and its various constituencies in and outside of academia too. One key to a new blueprint for Southeast Asian studies is therefore to recognize that “the capability to imagine regions and worlds is now itself a globalized phenomenon.”42 Imagining Southeast Asia is now itself globally widely distributed. So, as far as possible, we need to find out how other public spheres – and that includes the very inhabitants of Southeast Asia – see the region itself as well as the rest of the world in regional terms. How do people in Southeast Asia think about Southeast Asia, if they think in those terms at all? What is their topology and sense of the place? In some cases, Western academics and theories may be only a small part of this world-generating view. As Appadurai reiterates, … the potential payoff is a critical dialogue between western world pictures, a sort of dialectic of areas and regions, built on the axiom that areas are not facts but artefacts of our interests and our fantasies as well as of our needs to know, to remember, and to forget. But this critical dialogue between world pictures cannot emerge without one more critical act of optical reversal. We need to ask ourselves what it means to internationalize any sort of research before we can apply our understandings to the geography of areas and regions. In essence, this requires a closer look at research as a practice of the imagination.43

If we are earnest in establishing a genuinely international and democratic community of researchers, then the bipolar mentality of the inclusion of certain scholars and the exclusion of others must be collapsed. This bipolar mentality as characterized by the phrase, “you are either with us or against us; no compromise or middle ground is possible”44 has diminished an improved understanding of Southeast Asia. A heuristic approach and hence the collapse of such a boundary would mean that scholars from other societies and traditions of inquiry could re-invigorate Southeast Asian studies with new ideas about what counts as knowledge and what communities of judgement and accountability are central in the pursuit of such knowledge. Collaborative research could contribute to new forms of pedagogy and new theoretical perspectives. A celebration of the diversity of approaches and perspectives and the scholar’s imagination is precisely what the study of Southeast Asia occasions.

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NOTES 1. Meyrowitz, J. No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behaviour. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. 2. Emmerson, Donald K. “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (1984): 18. 3. Examples include Acharya, Amitav. The Quest for Identity: International Relations of Southeast Asia. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000; McCloud, Donald G. Southeast Asia: Tradition and Modernity in the Contemporary World. Boulder, San Francisco, Oxford: Westview Press, 1995: 1–20; Reynolds, Craig L. “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia”. Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995): 439; Keyes, Charles F. “A Conference at Wingspread and Rethinking Southeast Asian Studies”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992. 4. Bowen, John R. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies: a View from the United States”. Moussons 1 (2000): 3–19; King, Victor T. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?” Moussons 3 (2001): 3–31. 5. Abraham, Itty. “Preface”. Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After. New York: Southeast Asia Program, Social Science Research Council, 1999. 6. Examples include Hirschman, Keyes and Hutterer, eds. Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance; and Reynolds and McVey. Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations. The Frank H. Golay Memorial Lectures 2 and 3. Ithaca, New York: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998. Also see Taufik Abdullah and Yekti Maunati, eds. Toward the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia. Jakarta: Program of Southeast Asian Studies, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994. 7. Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline”: 3–19; King. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?”; Heryanto, Ariel. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”. Moussons 5 (2002): 3–30. 8. See Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline”: 3–19. 9. See Cœdès, George. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1975. 10. For more details, see Josselin de Jong, P.E. “Marcel Mauss et les origines de l’anthropologie structurale hollandaise“. L’Homme 12 (1964): 62–84; Wouden, F.A.E. van. Types of Social Structure in Eastern Indonesia. Translated by R. Needham. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968. 11. Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline”: 5. 12. For works in this tradition, see Wang Gungwu. The Nanhai Trade: The Early History of Chinese Trade in the South East Sea. Singapore: Times Academic Press, [1958] 1998; Wolters, Oliver W. “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asia Field of

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14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21.

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Studies”. Indonesia 58 (1994): 1–18; Ong, Aihwa. Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logic of Transnationality. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. See Lombard, D. Le Carrefour Javanais. Paris: EHESS, 1990. Osborne, Milton. Southeast Asia. An Illustrated Introductory History. Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1985; Wolters, Oliver W. The Fall of Srivijaya in Malay History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970; Wolters, Oliver W. “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asia Field of Studies,” Indonesia 58 (1994): 1–18; Wolters, Oliver W. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, [1982] 1999; Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Vol. 1: The Land Below the Winds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Vol. 2: Expansion and Crisis. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993. Cf. Wolters. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asia. King. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?”: 4–6. Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing. Social and Cultural Anthropology: The Key Concepts. London and New York: Routledge, 2000: 9. Leach, Edmund. “The Frontiers of ‘Burma’ ”, Comparative Studies in Society and History 3 (1960): 49–68. Cf. Kahn, Joel S. Constituting the Minangkabau. Peasants, Culture and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia. Providence and Oxford: Berg, 1993; Kipp, Rita Smith. Dissociated Identities: Ethnicity, Religion, and Class in an Indonesian Society. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993; Steedly, Mary Margaret. Hanging without a Rope: Narrative Experience in Colonial and Postcolonial Karoland. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. In the Realm of the Diamond Queen. Marginality in an Out-of-the-Way Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993; Pemberton, John. On the Subject of “Java”. Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. Cf. Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline”: 3–19; and King. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?”: 3–31. Heryanto. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”: 3–30. Halib, Mohammed and Tim Huxley, eds. An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies. London, New York and Singapore: Tauris Academic Studies, I.B. Tauris Publishers and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1996: 6–8. Wang. The Nanhai Trade; Koentjaraningrat, Radan Mas. Anthropology in Indonesia: A Bibliographic Review. KITLV Bibliographical Series no. 8. ‘s-Gravenhage: Nijhoff, 1975; Charvnit Kasetsiri. The Rise of Ayudhya: A History of Siam in the 14th and 15th Centuries. Kuala Lumpur and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976; Shamsul, A.B. From British to Bumiputera Rule: Local Politics and Rural Development in Peninsular Malaysia. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1986; Winichakul, Thongchai. Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of a Nation. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1994; Chua, Beng-Huat. Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore. London and New York: Routledge, 1995; Wazir-Jahan Karim, ed. ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Developing

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23.

24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38.

Cynthia Chou

Southeast Asia. Oxford, Washington: Berg, 1995; Tejapira, Kasian. Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture. Kyoto: Kyoto University Press, 2001; Phongpaichit, Pasuk and Chris Baker. Thaksin: The Business of Politics in Thailand. Copenhagen: Copenhagen Nordic Institute of Asian Studies Press, 2004. This is but a sample and not definitive list of scholars whose work is also of the best quality. The list also only reflects one example of the many works that these scholars have produced. See Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline”: 3–19; King. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?”: 3–31; Heryanto. “Can there be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?”: 3–30. Cf. Wolters. “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asia Field of Studies”: 1–18; Lombard. Le Carrefour Javanais; Reid. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Vols. 1 and 2. Bowen. “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline”: 10. Ibid. King. “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?”: 30. See Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. (Revised and Expanded Edition). London: Verso, 1991. Chou, Cynthia. “The ‘New’ versus the ‘Old’ Community? The Orang Suku Laut of Riau, Indonesia”. In Maritime Worlds, edited by Timo Kaartinen and Clifford Sather. Yale: Yale University Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series, forthcoming. Day, Anthony. Fluid Iron: State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002: 39. Andaya, Barbara Watson. To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993: 213. Ibid.: 249. Anderson, Benedict. “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Hirschman, Charles, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 25–26. See Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After. New York: Southeast Asia Program, Social Science Research Council, 1999: 16. Steedly, Mary Margaret. Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After. New York: Southeast Asia Program, Social Science Research Council, 1999: 13. Raphel, Vince. “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States”. Social Text 41 (1994): 92–111. Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination”. In Globalization, edited by Arjun Appadurai. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2003: 7. Ibid.

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39. Ibid.: 8. 40. Ibid. 41. Hutterer, Karl. “Epilogue”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes and Karl Hutterer. Ann Arbor: The Association for Asian Studies, 1992: 144. 42. Ibid.: 8. 43. Appadurai, Arjun. “Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination”: 9. 44. McCloud. Southeast Asia: Tradition and Modernity in the Contemporary World: 4.

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8 SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY The Search for New Perspectives Vincent Houben

INTRODUCTION History, the study of human development in the course of the past, constitutes one of the cornerstones of Southeast Asian studies. Despite different opinions on the usefulness of historical knowledge about this world region, researchers agree that an understanding of history is vital to be able to assess Southeast Asia in its present form. In seeking new dimensions for regional studies, history as a field of enquiry has therefore to be accounted for, taking into consideration that not only within Southeast Asian studies, but also within the discipline of history, important theoretical and methodological developments have taken place that have repositioned the role of the “regional” within the “historical”. Over the past fifty years, the number and quality of history books on Southeast Asia have increased steadily. After World War II basic political studies were produced that tried to explain the rise of the newly independent Southeast Asian states. The main thematic focus then shifted towards economic and societal issues, looking at long-term processes that explain why most of the Southeast Asian nations were still under-developed and characterized by great societal disparities. With the onset of the linguistic and cultural turns in the social sciences, historians of the region have increasingly turned to the study of the formation of identities in different 140

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time settings, embarking on the diachronic analysis of mentalities, representations and discourses of local knowledge. Not only have themes shifted, the time horizon in Southeast Asian historical research has shifted as well. Whereas in the 1950s and 1960s contemporary histories took precedence over studies of older periods, this imbalance has since been redressed, with a renewed interest in pre-colonial and colonial topics, but now perceived from an Asia-centric perspective putting Southeast Asian dynamics up front instead of changes emanating from the West. On the one hand, longitudinal studies, covering long timespans of several hundred years have emerged; on the other hand, interest in periods of transition that cross-cut traditional periodizations marked by political turning-points has increased. A case in point is the study of the 1930s to 1950s as a single period in Southeast Asian history marked by great instability and fundamental socio-economic reconfigurations. Likewise, the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries as a time in which the pre-colonial and colonial are intermingled has attracted renewed attention. The shift in the subject matter of history-writing on Southeast Asia was accompanied by a change in the relative weight of theories that were taken by historians from “neighbouring” disciplines (political science, sociology, anthropology, literary, and cultural studies). At the same time, scholars of Southeast Asia coming from these disciplines have increasingly been engaged in historicizing their accounts. Thus, in a subtle and often not yet recognized way, historians and students of other disciplines are gradually converging to produce what could be called truly regional studies of a trans-disciplinary and comparative nature. An overview of the development of history as a field within Southeast Asian studies such as this is necessarily crude and imprecise. Behind the efforts of an increasing number of historians of Southeast Asia, there is no coherent master scheme and no single approach. Contrary to advances in the natural sciences, history remains a huge terrain of which only parts have been opened up mostly through individual research. On some issues there is overlap and debate; other topics have been worked on by a single specialist only, or not at all. What has remained remarkably stable for Southeast Asian studies is the phenomenon of the country specialist, most individual historians working on one country of the region only. Another factor of continuity over the past fifty years is the continued production of national histories, both by Western and Southeast Asian scholars. Apparently the nation-state as the central agent of modernity and distributor of resources within a confined territory is still considered a useful instrument around which to order the past, despite the fact that its emergence in Southeast Asia was belated and

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rather ambiguous. Yet, even in the current era of globalization, there is no outward sign that the nation-state is submerging, although its hegemony might have come under siege both from above (international dynamics) and from below (local challenges).

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY AS PART OF THE DISCIPLINE Southeast Asian history as an academic endeavour is situated halfway between mainstream history as a disciplinary subject and Southeast Asian regional studies. It is related to Western history but cannot be put on a par with it since Western history has been much more densely studied and the most pressing research questions still emanate from it. It is within Western history that the most fundamental methodological advances were made, which have then been selectively put into use for Southeast Asian history also. In the 1960s and 1970s history as a discipline was profoundly influenced by the upsurge of the social sciences that, rather optimistically, wanted to discover the regularities in the behaviour of people and the development of societies. Therefore historians started to classify events in order to validate processes and structures that in turn could provide a more “objective” kind of history. The French Annales School made a big impact on the profession; another product of those years was cliometrics; and, finally (neo)Marxist approaches were quite widely practised. Arguing against traditional, hermeneutical history which is centred on events and linear chronology, the focus of social science-minded historians was on structures and processes, including the physical-geographic context and demographics, rather than events. The concepts “longue durée” and “civilization matérielle” were central to the approach of the Annales group. New economic historians collected series of quantitative data, whereas so-called historical materialists stressed modes of production. David Landes and Charles Tilly formulated the goals of history as a social science as follows: The social science approach is problem-oriented. It assumes that there are uniformities of human behavior that transcend time and place and can be studied as such; and the historian as social scientist chooses his problems with an eye to discovering, verifying or illuminating such uniformities. The aim is to produce general statements of sufficiently specific content to permit analogy and prediction.1

The rather positivistic trend in Western historiography was overturned in the 1980s by a general return to narrative history. This was part of the more

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general linguistic and cultural turn in the humanities and of a general loss of belief in the idea of “linear progress” in the course of modernization. With it the themes, research methods, and goals of historical research shifted again. Instead of looking for patterns and structures, historians wanted to find meaning linked to concrete situations or personalities of the past. Among the second generation of the Annales School, historians like Georges Duby and Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie were, for instance, less concerned with large syntheses but more with the history of mentalities on a micro-level. Terms like representation, symbol, and metaphor occupied a central place in the writing of history as a “story”. Literary and historical “truth” were becoming closely intertwined. Already in 1979 Lawrence Stone observed the new historiographical trend: There are signs of change with regard to the central issue in history, from the circumstances surrounding man to man in circumstances; in the problems studied, from the economic and demographic to the cultural and emotional; in the prime sources of influence, from sociology, economics and demography to anthropology and psychology; in the subject matter, from the group to the individual; in the explanatory models of historical change, from the stratified and monocausal to the interconnected and multicausal; in the methodology, from group quantification to individual example; in the organization, from the analytical to the descriptive; and in the conceptualization of the historian’s function, from the scientific to the literary.2

The next step was to declare narrative history-writing to be a particular representation of the present rather than a rendering of what actually happened in the past. This view was developed through post-modernist thinking, which attracted support from a minority among professional historians. Today, the range of subjects dealt with and approaches applied by historians has become more diversified than ever. Burke’s book on new perspectives in historical writing contains chapters on history from below, women’s history, overseas history, micro-history, history of images and history of the body.3 This list could be extended by other themes, ranging from urban history to ecological history, and new approaches such as writing history backwards in time or simultaneously from multiple angles. One could thus say that current histories cover almost all aspects of human life. Despite the great variation and the multiplicity of new trends, history as a discipline remains essentially, as Raymond Carr put it many decades ago, the study of causes.4 Some critics accuse historians of being “chroniclers” who only try to reconstruct past events and developments, but this view is too simple. Although being more than constructionists, most historians still

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adhere to a positivistic approach to historical explanation, in which correlation between facts is posited in the form of cause-effect relationships. Therefore the aim of the professional historian is not only to describe but also to explain why things in the past happened in a certain way. The Cambridge historian Richard Evans tried to defend history as a scientific endeavour and argued that moderate post-modernism, which acknowledges the existence of an extra-textual reality, has led to a constructive renewal of the historical discipline. It extended the range of historical writing, to include issues of identity, ethnicity, and gender. It rejected the dependence of modernist historiography on the idea of progress; it reinstated good writing as a legitimate historical endeavour; and, it forced historians to think more self-critically on their use of texts and narratives.5 On a more theoretical level, some historical philosophers have come forward with propositions to allow for a new definition of objectivity. Although earlier claims of objectivity of historical knowledge can no longer be upheld since there is no given past against which to judge rival interpretations, an alternative might be to apply comparison using rational criteria in order to select particular interpretations of human practices.6 The development of Southeast Asian history largely followed the trends within the general historical discipline, although often with a certain timelag. Before World War II, non-Western or overseas history, of which Southeast Asian history was a part, was simply treated as an extension of Western history. Colonial histories were produced in great quantity and varying quality, which in part served the need for colonial officials to obtain a basic chronology of the parts of the earth they ruled. They stressed the role of Europeans as agents of change and transmitted the symbolic representation of Western superiority over the Orient. With their stress on the chronology of events; the incorporation of Western periodization; and the projection of colonial boundaries backwards in time, these official histories were solidly integrated in the European historiography of the time. In the 1930s, J.C. van Leur and later John Smail attacked the Eurocentrist nature of Asian history, arguing instead for a reversed, genuinely Asiacentric approach. Smail’s classical essay on the possibility of an autonomous history of Southeast Asia7 set a new agenda for historical research which was to follow. Since the 1950s, both Western and “home” historians of Southeast Asia have indeed pursued regional subject matters, placing indigenous developments at the centre of the historical stage and consciously using indigenous written and oral sources. At first, an anti-colonial and strong pronationalist bias was present in many of the new histories written by both Western and Southeast Asian authors, which made them less “autonomous”

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than Smail had argued for, but contributed to a distancing from prevalent models of the past configured by the historians of colonial times. Over time the ideological underpinnings of autonomous history writing became less pronounced, although autonomous history can probably not claim to be more objective than earlier writings. Balancing the official national histories of the independent countries of Southeast Asia, Western historians with a deep insight into indigenous patterns of development produced valuable national histories of a different kind. The monographs of Andaya and Andaya on Malaysia, Ricklefs on Indonesia, Turnbull on Singapore, Chandler on Cambodia, Taylor and Steinberg on Burma, Stuart Fox on Laos, Duiker on Vietnam, Wyatt, Terwiel, Baker and Phongpaichit on Thailand are standard reading for any country historian of Southeast Asia.8 The number of syntheses of Southeast Asian history since the monumental work of D.G.E. Hall in the 1950s has been limited and, with a few notable exceptions, of a rather sketchy character intended to be read by a wide audience.9 Colonial history as a subject did not disappear completely, however, and after a short interval after decolonization, overseas history as a branch of national history was taught again in many European universities.10 A collection of interviews with twenty-seven historians on the shift from colonial history to that of European expansion was published in the mid1990s in Leiden.11 Studies of the colonial period that take an explicit indigenous point of view belong to a different category. Historians like Leonard and Barbara Andaya, Peter Carey, Merle Ricklefs, Vincent Houben and Mary Somers Heidhues combine both Western and local source materials in their studies of particular regions of the Malay-Indonesian world. Their perspective is directed from the inside outwards instead of the other way around.12 For mainland Southeast Asia, a similar approach has been pursued by David Wyatt for Thailand, David Chandler for Cambodia, William Duiker for Vietnam and so forth. Another strand encompasses Western histories of colonialism with a strong anti-colonial bias that, as far as written records are concerned, are often exclusively based on colonial sources. The studies by Stoler and Breman on the plantation history of East Sumatra13 are a case in point but these authors come from other disciplines. On the Cultivation System in Java, a whole range of modern monographs was produced, based similarly on the extensive nineteenth-century Dutch colonial records, yet leading to opposite interpretations on the positive or negative impact of Dutch policies on Javanese rural society. An encompassing, concluding monograph on the period was published recently by Elson, but his rather positive view on the impact of the colonial system in Java has not been accepted by all.14

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Being different in subject matter and perspective and in most cases having moved from a colonial to a post-colonial perspective, Southeast Asian history has nevertheless followed the main trends in Western history. Unfortunately it does not seem to have been particularly influential beyond the circle of regional specialists, its content matter being too specific to be taken into account by general historians of the West. In the 1960s there was a call for a sociological approach to Southeast Asian history, a call that was heeded by their pupils. Sartono Kartodirdjo’s study on rural resistance movements can be considered as an early attempt to apply sociological theory to historical sources.15 The examples of the Annales School and of cliometrics were likewise taken up in the writing of Southeast Asian history. Anthony Reid’s two-volume Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce followed the Annales example in treating structures like material culture and social organization separate from the events that occurred between 1450 and 1680.16 Economic history of the region provided the cliometricians with a viable field of research, especially since colonial states had collected vast amounts of quantitative data. For Indonesia the pioneering work of Creutzberg resulted in the publication of a database on the development of the Indonesian economy from the early nineteenth century up to 1940.17 A whole range of quantitative studies followed, ranging from statistics on trade along the north coast of Java to the demographic history of Indonesia during the late colonial era.18 In the framework of the Economic History of Southeast Asia-project (ECHOSEA) of the Australian National University, several monographs have been published, with more still to come. With the onslaught of narrativism and post-structuralism, other branches of Southeast Asian historiography opened up that put “culture” and “mentality” into the limelight. The monumental history of Java by Denys Lombard, similar to publications of the second generation of the Annales group, was based on uncovering the cultural layers that underlie the complex mentalities of the island.19 In her book Dutch Culture Overseas, Frances Gouda revealed how Dutch cultural identity resting on civic freedom and neutrality in the context of late colonialism was transformed into a mentality of racial superiority.20 Another interesting study of cultural transfer in the context of the representation of modernity by the Thai royal elite around the beginning of the twentieth century, has been submitted by Maurizio Peleggi.21 Postmodernist theory has only partly influenced the work of Southeast Asian historians. A recent exception is the work by Anthony Day on state formation in Southeast Asia, which focuses on cultural constructions, hybridism, and counter-tendencies of the subaltern.22

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Whereas much of Southeast Asian history writing is still elitist, in the sense that it concentrates on the higher echelons of society, history from below has started to attract more attention. Following trends in Western history (the work of Thompson on the English working class, Eric Hobsbawn on rebels and Charles Tilly on peasant resistance) but also with regard to nonWestern societies in general (Eric Wolf ), many studies on rural resistance movements have appeared in the 1970s.23 The debate between James Scott and Samuel Popkin on the moral economy of the peasant is the most well known.24 For Southeast Asia histories of the subaltern have been written by, for instance, James Warren, Ben Kerkvliet and Peter Rimmer.25 Ray Ileto found the motif of the Philippine peasantry resisting the Spanish and American colonial governments in their metaphorical interpretation of the Passion of Christ, thus combining a history of mentality with that of history from below. The work by Vincente Rafael and Carl Trocki on criminals can be considered to be another addition to the study of people on the margins.26 Ecological history has been the focus of a research group based in Leiden since 1992 investigating the relationships between the environment, population, and economic activity in Indonesian history. A range of papers and monographs were published in the framework of this project and a concise summary is in the making, to be published by Peter Boomgaard under the title An Environmental History of Southeast Asia.27 On the basis of this incomplete sample, it can be argued that most strands within Western historical research have been mirrored in the themes of works produced by historians of Southeast Asia. Yet, Southeast Asian history writing has, until recently, had little impact on the historical discipline in general. A rather isolated attempt by Nicholas Tarling to raise important thematic issues arising from Southeast Asian history in order to infuse them into mainstream historiography has been passed over unnoticed.28 There are, of course, some notable exceptions to this sobering picture. Ben Anderson’s work on nationalism29 has most certainly contributed greatly to the historical debate on European nationalism, although few Western historians seem to be aware that Anderson is primarily an expert on Southeast Asia. Likewise, Clifford Geertz’ method of thick description has influenced many historians in the West, but few seem to know that the book that brought him to fame focused on rural change in Java in the nineteenth century.30 The contribution of Southeast Asian historians coming from the region itself has been substantial, but has also received little notice by Western academia, since their work is often written in one of the local languages and not circulated through international publishing networks. The environment for independent research in most Southeast Asian countries is still difficult,

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due to ideological restrictions imposed by national authorities and restricted funding. History is not a preferred subject of study at Southeast Asian universities. The best historians from Southeast Asia have been either trained at Western universities or occupy staff positions at foreign universities. Therefore in the production of historical knowledge there still exists a wide gap between Western or Western-based historians and those working within Southeast Asia itself. It is hard to overcome this asymmetry in the production of historical knowledge, although through programmes of international exchange, contacts and the ensuing exchange of knowledge have improved.

THE DEVELOPMENT OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY AS A BRANCH OF SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES At the beginning of the 1980s, Oliver Wolters complained of the marginality of history within Southeast Asian studies in the United States, but concluded that the situation for those studying anthropology, arts, government, and linguistics was drastically different, since scholars representing disciplines other than history could relate their regional expertise to the discipline’s wider concerns.31 Heather Sutherland, writing on Indonesian history almost fifteen years later, concluded that its poor shape was the fault of the historians themselves, its interesting intellectual terrain having been captured by other disciplines.32 More fundamentally, Ben Anderson complained that Southeast Asian studies in general were in an unhealthy state, since there were apparently “very few powerful intellectual-pedagogical reasons for systemizing research and teaching along area lines”.33 So what can we say about the position of history as an endeavour within the field of Southeast Asian studies? Whereas the position of historians of Southeast Asia within the historical discipline has been rather modest if not marginal, the same is not true for history as part of Southeast Asian studies in general. One could even argue that the role of history in non-historical studies of Southeast Asia has increased markedly over the last few decades. The cultural turn in the humanities and social sciences of the 1980s has increased the awareness that culture is a central concept for regional studies. Clifford Geertz’ concept of culture as a complex of meanings to interpret human experiences and to guide human actions has been broadened to include characteristics such as exogeneity, multi-layeredness and its constantly changing character.34 The collapse of modernization theory and the ensuing hesitance of the area specialist to express him/herself in terms of tradition versus modernity has opened up new avenues. Post-modernist theory added ideas of power difference, discourse

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and contestation to the prevailing perceptions of Southeast Asianists of the cultural patterns within their areas of research. A second reason for the increasing historical awareness of Southeast Asianists has been the rapid transformation of the region itself from the 1980s onwards. Besides social change occurring as a result of structural shift in the economy, deep-seated transformations have taken place in almost every sphere of life. Survey studies by geographers such as Ronald Hill and Jonathan Rigg, by political economists such as Richard Robison and by theorists of the so-called third wave of democratization such as Neher underline this basic observation.35 Specialist works focusing on contemporary political or economic change in Southeast Asia as a whole or in specific countries have since abounded. To mention a few examples, the studies of Vatikiotis on political change in the region, Hal Hill on the development of the Indonesian economy until the middle of the 1990s and Zawawi Ibrahim on changing collective mentalities in Malaysia have all strengthened the awareness of change within Southeast Asia.36 With the outbreak of the economic crisis in 1997 and the political and social turbulence that followed in its wake, the tone of studies on contemporary Southeast Asia has become more pessimistic, but the idea that the region is undergoing fundamental change has remained. Based on this dual awareness on trends in cultural studies and on current developments in Southeast Asia, history has increasingly been included in the works of anthropologists, sociologists, political scientists, economists, and scholars of the literature of the region. Some historians object to the selective use of source materials by these scientists leading to sweeping conclusions but little historical differentiation; others doubt whether it is theoretically sound to project current theories backwards in time. An additional problem is the fact that much of the theory in these disciplines is exclusively Western in origin, based on experiences in the West and therefore may not be universally valid. On the other hand, the historical contributions of non-historians have raised new and important questions for Southeast Asian historians. Also, being more rigidly theoretically based, the social and political sciences have forced historians of Southeast Asia to become more problem-oriented in order to make their mark. Perhaps the most fundamental upsurge of historical interest has occurred within anthropology. The debate on Orientalism shook the foundations of anthropological knowledge since what ethnologists have produced during the era of colonialism and built upon later was argued to have been mis-shaped by the desire to control and dominate the object of study. In reaction, a meticulous “post-colonial” reassessment of anthropological knowledge

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emanating from the colonial and subsequent periods and after was undertaken. It was highly self-critical and in part self-referential. Also the thematic focus within anthropological work tended to shift more towards an analysis of power relations between representatives of different cultures and consideration of other inequalities, for instance with regard to gender. A good example of current anthropological work on Southeast Asian history is the monograph by John Pemberton, in which the cultural values of the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia were traced back to nineteenth century Javanese culture as essentially being shaped by Dutch colonial control.37 In a similar vein, Laurie Sear’s study of the representation of Javanese shadow puppet theatre reflected the trend in anthropological research on Indonesia to retrace Dutch colonial influence upon so-called indigenous cultural formations.38 Maybe this approach pushes the point too far, since in this case it almost reduces Javanese culture to being the product of colonialism, thereby disclaiming that the object of study possessed any authenticity or even some degree of self-articulation. This is not to argue that the cultural sphere in Java was not restricted and modified through colonialism, but there remained an inner sphere that was potent enough to send out symbolic messages to the population, even constituting a basis for the later rise of nationalist identity.39 The tendency of sociologists and political scientists to turn to history has been less marked since they basically concentrate on contemporary developments. Although a clear line between their work and that of historians working on recent events is difficult to draw, the thrust of the sociologist and political scientist is in a different direction. The sociology of Southeast Asia has been judged as rather weak by Victor King, but the many studies produced over the last few decades by the Bielefeld School of Hans-Dieter Evers suggest otherwise. History is not completely absent. For example, Evers and Korff ’s book on Southeast Asian urbanism includes brief paragraphs on state-formation, colonial cities, and urbanization in Malaysia from 1950 to 1980.40 However, in many sociological studies, history is an introductory emblematic tableau, but not something to be scrutinized in its own right. Some non-Western sociologists are still inclined to interpret regional phenomena in Weberian terms, whereby Southeast Asian governments are supposed to match the ideal-typical “traditional” bureaucracy or pre-colonial states taken to have represented patrimonial rule in a pure form. The same cannot be said of the work of various political scientists studying Southeast Asia. Marc Thompson, a Yale-trained political scientist specializing in the Philippines, has managed to maintain the balance between contemporary history of political change (for instance in a study on the fall

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of Marcos)41 and disciplinary literature on worldwide democratic transitions. Also situated on the boundary line between history and politics is Likhit Dhiravegin’s study of the development of the Thai political system from 1932 until 1991, but also going back even as far as the early kingdom of Sukothai.42 William Liddle has written extensively on political culture in Indonesia during the Suharto era, but against the backdrop of the democratic experiences of the 1950s, while also speculating about a return to democracy at a time when the turnaround of 1998 was still to come.43 Economists with an interest in historical developments are also well represented in Southeast Asian studies. Here it is also difficult to distinguish between historians with an economic interest and economists looking at developments through time. Those trained as economists tend to use economic theory as their starting-point and are not hesitant to include complex statistical time-series analyses in their work. Economists such as Ann Booth, Howard Dick, Thomas Lindblad and Thee Kian Wie are among the productive scholars in this field of Southeast Asian studies.44 Literary studies are also quite rich as far as contributions towards Southeast Asian studies are concerned. Having been influenced by post-modernist thinking based on Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu and others, many literary scholars take a post-colonialist stands in their writings, looking at the interaction between text and context, reader and writer, but in particular at “the confrontations of races, nations and cultures under conditions of unequal power relations”.45 What interests most historians is much more profane, namely, how clues about local perceptions of history or historical events are rendered through literary texts, both older and contemporary ones. Therefore, a recent book like that of Virginia Hooker on the representation of social change through Malay novels offers important insights for the purpose of history. This study ranges from the modernist Islamic novels that appeared in the 1920s to those of the post-1969 era and identifies key themes in Malay identity as a reflection of changes in society.46 In sum, it appears that Southeast Asia history written by representatives of non-historical disciplines is very much alive. The level of commitment to really engage in the production of conclusions relevant to historians differs however. In its simplest form, history is used as a template or flat tableau in the background in order to be able to contrast tradition with modernity, stagnation with dynamic change, which in consequence comes close to earlier Orientalist projections. A little more sophisticated, but similarly problematic are attempts to project current social theory backwards in time or to take nineteenth-century social theory to explain current Southeast Asian developments. Scholars working in the fields of political science and economics

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seem to have been less preoccupied by post-colonialism than anthropologists and students of literature. Yet in all four fields there are those specializing in the region who see history as an integral part of the study of change in general. Through the contributions from the major disciplines outside history, historians of Southeast Asia can link up with themes that offer new perspectives and which will allow them to participate in wider academic domains.

NEW DIRECTIONS IN SOUTHEAST ASIAN HISTORY In 1999, twenty-one “home” historians met in Penang to identify new terrains for the history of Southeast Asia. Thongchai Winachakul called upon those present to leave the old format of national histories, since the spatial configuration of the nation was being increasingly jeopardized and losing its attractiveness as a historical subject. Instead, historians were exhorted to write history at the “interstices”, local history at the margins of the nation and at the local sites of cultural production in an era of globalization.47 With this renewed call for local history interlinked with both local margins and global patterns, an agenda was proposed allowing Southeast Asian history to jump forward and move out of its traditional double (spatial and disciplinary) niche. Within Western historiography there are similar movements that are attractive also for historians of Southeast Asia. Probably the most promising directions within historical theory are those arguing in favour of a comparative approach. Intra-regional comparison strengthens an awareness of complexities within Southeast Asia, going far beyond the obvious and often positing differences between mainland and insular parts of the region. Comparative regional history also allows the local to be linked up with the global, for instance, when looking for connections between Southeast Asia and South or East Asia but also between Southeast Asia and Europe. Inter-disciplinary, let alone regionally specific, debates of some sophistication on theory and the method of comparison hardly exist, but the state of the general inter-disciplinary debate can be summarized as follows. Comparison can be of several sorts, depending on the unit of comparison and its direction. In its common format comparison means the juxtaposition of “cases” in order to discern similarities and differences or, in other words, generalizations and specifications. Two difficulties are involved in this classical form of comparison: First the unit of comparison, and, second, transfers from one case to another which blur clear-cut distinctions between the two. Both problems are highly relevant for Southeast Asian history, since this region is known for the contested nature of its spatial configurations and

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cultural differences. The spatial demarcations of the Southeast Asia region, the states and regions within it, are based on ambiguous constructions of history or contemporary projections backwards in time. Also, comparing qualitative phenomena or developments within different cultural settings is likely to produce distortion, for transcultural phenomena are difficult to locate within one case only. A third problem involved in classical comparison concerns the dimension of time. There exists synchronic and diachronic comparison. But which approach is preferable? Besides generalizing versus individualizing forms of comparison Charles Tilly has proposed the following four comparative modes: Individualizing (looking for the unique features of few cases), inclusive comparison (in which a few cases are compared with a larger unit), comparison that looks for variations within a general process (for instance industrialization) and universalizing comparison (searching for general rules of human conduct).48 An important new branch of comparative research focuses on processes of transfer, exchange or diffusion. A debate on the benefits or drawbacks of historical comparison versus the study of transfer has been conducted by Michel Espagne and Jürgen Osterhammel. The study of transfer does not entail juxtaposition but rather focuses on the appropriation of concepts, values, attitudes, and identities when persons and ideas move from one culture to another or when two or more cultural representations meet. This method does not require the construction of a unit of comparison, thereby avoiding an important problem of classical comparison, but instead aims to capture alterability. Transfer studies therefore do not need contested spatial units like “Southeast Asia”. Transfer also has the advantage of being able to specifically look at what Winachakul calls the interstices of history. Margins, processes of hybridization, ambiguities of identities are the specific subject matter of the study of transfer, its dynamics being much more pronounced than a structural comparison can offer. A third variation consists of a combination of comparison and transfer. This approach is advocated by Bénédicte Zimmermann, Michael Werner and Shalini Randeria through the notions of “histoire croisée”, “entangled history” or “shared history”. According to them, the study of transfer has similar characteristics and difficulties as comparativism since it also has to define what was actually transferred to where, posing the same danger of preconceived units of scrutiny. The role of context needs to be answered in applying both comparison and the study of transfer. Both methods allow for synchronic and diachronic approaches. Finally, the study of transfer presupposes comparison, since data on the areas of origin and arrival are unavoidable in order to be able to judge what changes were provoked by transfer.49

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The method of comparison and the study of transfer are not unproblematic but, at the same time, they offer huge possibilities for Southeast Asian history. Comparison creates a certain distance which individual case studies lack. Comparison shows the variability of processes and may offer clues why developments in one place differ from those in another place. Entangled history repositions the subject matter of Southeast Asian colonial history, without falling into the morality trap, the weighing up of the blessings and the vices of colonial rule itself and its long term consequences. It also allows for the study of multiple or asymmetric transfers between more than two societies, which do not need to be spatially adjacent or even close to one another. Transfer is at the core of studies on globalization. The new direction of Southeast Asian history “at the interstices” has in fact already begun. Southeast Asian history is on the one hand becoming part of the wider and increasingly relevant field of world history. On the other hand, the history of margins and border regions is gaining ground, exposing the intricate linkages between the local, the regional, the national and the global. Let me illustrate by referring to some contributions that have been made to comparative history and the history of transfer within Southeast Asia, locating them within into the broader historiographical trends of today. Over the last decade the writing of world histories has thrived. Most fascinating have been the clashes between European historians and historians of Asia over interpretation of the so-called rise of Western dominance. Exemplary in this respect are the books by David S. Landes and Andre Gunder Frank. Landes wrote a world survey history, comparing Europe with India and China and arguing that Europe, due to an exceptional path of development, came out on top because international rivalry promoted competition in the pursuit of knowledge and wealth as well as power. Also the kinds of institutions and policies that were designed to hold and attract people rather than abuse and exploit them was considered by Landes to explain the rise of the West. In contrast, Gunder Frank attacked the Eurocentric view of the making of modernity and its accompanying imposition of centres and peripheries and pleaded for a “horizontally integrative macrohistory”. Between 1400 and 1800 there existed one global system of which the parts were all inter-dependent but in which the real centre was Asia, not the West. The hegemony of the West therefore dates back to 1750 or 1800 and is nowadays on the decline.50 After 1800, a system of “multiple modernities” emerged. Shmuel Eisenstadt defined this as follows: … the idea of multiple modernities presumes that the best way to understand the contemporary world – indeed to explain the history of modernity – is to see it as a story of continual constitution and reconstitution of a multiplicity

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of cultural programs.… Western patterns of modernity are not the only ‘authentic’ modernities, though they enjoy historical precedence and continue to be a basic reference point for others.51

One might doubt whether Western modernity will continue to be the main reference point in the years to come. The usefulness of the concept of multiple modernities is rather to be able to see modern development outside Europe and the United States on its own terms. For Southeast Asia, there have been several attempts to link up the history of this world region with global history. Victor Lieberman’s recent Strange Parallels, on the process of political and cultural consolidation within the three main river basins of mainland Southeast Asia from the ninth until the nineteenth century, can be considered as such. The next volume of Lieberman’s study will take up an explicit comparison with other parts of Eurasia, comparing France, Russia, China and Japan.52 At the end of the second volume of his Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, Reid tried to give an explanation as to why, after the middle of the eighteenth century, the historical paths of Europe and insular Southeast Asia, diverged, Europe becoming prosperous and Southeast Asia impoverished. This was not only a consequence of the European colonization of Southeast Asia but has also to be attributed to what nowadays would be called “institutional deficiencies” on the Southeast Asian side, thereby making the point Landes repeated some years later.53 The comparative study of margins is also an attractive subject historians of Southeast Asia are increasingly getting involved in. The study of transfer has more or less already been part of Southeast Asian history, but often not explicit enough to be recognized by mainstream historians. On the metalevel of comparing civilizations, Jürgen Osterhammel tried to show how Europe developed its own identity as being non-Asia; the Asian continent becoming less enchanting as more normative knowledge stating that old Asia was on the decline was produced on it through the tales of travellers and through contact and residence.54 For Southeast Asia, histories of minorities involved in diffusive patterns of migration and exchange have multiplied. Much has already been done on the role of the Chinese in Southeast Asia,55 but the histories of other ethnic minorities need to be tackled further. The Javanese, having moved as labour migrants to other parts of Southeast Asia and Oceania but also to Surinam and the Netherlands, are an important focus for the study of cultural transfer. Parts of their history have been or are in the process of being written.56 A variant fitting more into the category of entangled history are recent studies on the Eurasians of Indonesia, from the early modern period until their settlement and integration in the Netherlands in the 1950s.57

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The history of religion as a field of transfer has also been extremely fruitful for Southeast Asia. Azyumardi Azra studied Arabic biographical dictionaries in order to determine how Middle Eastern Islamic ideas were transmitted to the Indonesian Archipelago. Peter Riddell did the same for manuscripts, in an attempt to discover what Islamic treatises and literary texts were transmitted to insular Southeast Asia, thereby shaping the nature of Islam in this region. Looking at the movement of people and goods, Huub de Jonge and Nico Kaptein presented a collection of essays showing the role of Arab traders in the Indonesian Archipelago.58 It is along these lines that new perspectives are being opened up for further research.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Is there still a future for Southeast Asian history? This chapter has attempted to sum up both the developments that characterize history as a discipline in general and those that shaped Southeast Asian history since the 1950s. Although incomplete as this survey may be, the argument is made that Southeast Asian history is still in the main following trends in Western history, thereby only occupying a small niche. On the other hand, representatives of other disciplines are increasingly delving into Southeast Asian history. Although not all historians would agree with their use of source materials or their methods, they offer fresh insights that in turn provoke new historical research. The most promising new trends in Southeast Asian history writing are those which aim at the “interstices”, linking up the regional with both the local and the global. The methodology of historical comparison and transfer seems to be most suited for application in this context. Therefore the future of Southeast Asian history lies in its connectivity with both its own discipline and other disciplines, building trans-disciplinary bridges and transcending its spatial-temporal confines.

NOTES 1. Quote as rendered by P.H.H. Vries, Vertellers op drift. Een verhandeling over de nieuwe verhalende geschiedenis. Hilversum 1990: 19. In this part of the chapter I follow the argument by Vries in this book. 2. Stone, Lawrence. “The Revival of Narrative: Reflections on a New Old History”. History & Theory 85 (1979): 3–24. 3. Peter Burke, ed. New Perspectives on Historical Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. 4. Carr, E.H. What is History? Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, [1961] 1977: 87.

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5. Evans, Richard J. In Defense of History. New York, London: W.W. Norton, 1999: 210–16. 6. Such an approach is proposed by Bevir, Mark. “Objectivity in History”. History and Theory 33, no. 3 (1994): 328–45. 7. Smail, John R.W. “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asian History”. Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 2 (1961): 72–102. 8. Andaya, Barbara and Leonard Andaya. A History of Malaysia. Houndmills: University of Hawaii Press, 1982; Ricklefs, M.C. A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1200. Houndmills: University of Hawaii Press, 20013; Turnbull, C.M. A History of Singapore, 1819–1988. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 19892; Chandler, David. A History of Cambodia. Boulder: Westview Press, 20003; Taylor, Robert H. The State in Burma. London: C. Hurst, 1987; Steinberg, David J. Burma: The State of Myanmar. Washington: Georgetown University Press, 2001; Steinberg, David J. The Philippines: A Singular and a Plural Place. Boulder: Westview Press, 20004; Stuart-Fox, Martin. A History of Laos. Cambridge and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997; Duiker, William. Vietnam since the Fall of Saigon. Athens, Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1989; Wyatt, David. Thailand. A Short History. New Haven, London: Yale University Press 1984; Terwiel, B.J. A History of Modern Thailand. St. Lucia, London, New York: University of Queensland Press, 1983; Baker, Chris and Pasuk Phongpaichit. A History of Thailand. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 9. Exceptions are the Cornell synthesis by Steinberg, D.J., ed. In Search of Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1987; Tarling, N., ed. The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia. 2 volumes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1992 and 1999. 10. An example of the huge literature on decolonization as “the end of empire” is: Holland, R.F. European Decolonization 1918–1981. An Introductory Survey. Houndmills: University of Hawaii Press, 1985. In the Netherlands many books on aspects of Dutch colonial rule are still produced by Dutch historians. These include: De Graaf, Bob. Kalm temidden van woedende golven. Het ministerie van Koloniën en zijn taakomgeving 1912–1940. Den Haag, 1997; De Jong, J.J.P. De waaier van het fortuin. Van handelscompanie tot koloniaal imperium. De Nederlanders in Azië en de indonesische archipel 1595–1950. Den Haag, 1998; Van den Doel, H.W. Afscheid van Indie: de val van het Nederlandse imperium in Azie. Amsterdam, 2001. 11. Blussé, Leonard, Frans-Paul van der Putten and Hans Vogel, eds. Pilgrims to the Past. Private Conversations with Historians of European Expansion. Leiden: Research School CNWS, 1996. 12. Andaya, Barbara Watson. To Live as Brothers: Southeast Sumatra in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1993; Andaya, Leonard. The World of Maluku. Eastern Indonesia in the Early Modern Period. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1993; Carey, P.B.R. Babad Dipanagara. An Account of the Outbreak of the Java War (1825–1830). Kuala Lumpur: n.a.,

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13.

14. 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

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1982; Heidhues, Mary Somers. Golddiggers, Farmers and Traders in the ‘Chinese Districts’ of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. Ithaca and New York: University of British Columbia, 2003; M.C. Ricklefs wrote a series of books on seventeenth and eighteenth century Central Java. The last one is titled: Ricklefs, M.C. The Seen and Unseen Worlds in Java, 1726–1749. History, Literature and Islam in the Court of Pakubuwana II. St. Leonards and Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; Houben, Vincent. Kraton and Kumpeni. Surakarta and Yogyakarta 1830– 1870. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994. Stoler, Ann Laura. Capitalism and Confrontation in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt, 1870–1979. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 19852; Breman, Jan. Koelies, planters en koloniale politiek. Leiden: KITLV Uitgeverij, 1992. Elson, R.E. Village Java under the Cultivation System. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1994. Kartodirdjo, Sartono. Protest Movements in Rural Java: A Study of Agrarian Unrest in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Singapore: ISEAS, 1973. Legge, J.D. “Clio and her Neighbours. Reflections on History’s Relations with the surrounding Disciplines’”. In Dari Babad dan Hikayat sampai Sejarah Kritis, edited by T. Ibrahim Alfian, H.J. Koesoemanto, Dharmono Hardjowidjono, DjokoSuryo. Yogyakarta: Gadjah Mada University Press, 1987: 336; Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450–1680. 2 volumes. New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1988 and 1993. Mansvelt, W.F.M. et al., eds. Changing Economy in Indonesia. A Selection of Statistical Source Materials from the Early 19th Century up to 1940. 16 volumes. The Hague, Amsterdam, 1975–96; see also: Van Anrooij, Francien, D.H.A. Kolff et al., eds. Between People and Statistics. Essays on Modern Indonesian History. The Hague, Amsterdam: Nijhoff, 1979. Knaap, Gerrit. Shallow Waters, Rising Tide. Shipping and Trade in Java around 1775. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1996; Gooszen, Hans. A Demographic History of the Indonesian Archipelago, 1880–1942. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1999. Lombard, Denys. Le carrefour javanais. Essay d’histoire globale. 3 volumes. Paris: Editions E.H.E.S.S, 1990. Gouda, Frances. Dutch Culture Overseas. Colonial Practice in the Netherlands Indies 1900–1942. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995. Peleggi, Maurizio. Lord of Things. The Fashioning of the Siamese Monarchy’s Modern Image. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Day, Anthony. Fluid Iron. State Formation in Southeast Asia. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1968; Hobsbawn, Eric. Bandits. Harmondworth: Penguin Books Ltd, 1972; Charles, Louise and Richard Tilly. The Rebellious Century 1830–1930. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975; Wolf, Eric. Europe and the People without History. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1982. Scott, James C. Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. New

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26.

27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33.

34. 35.

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Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985; Popkin, Samuel L. The Rational Peasant: The Political Economy of Rural Society in Vietnam. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. Warren, James. Rickshaw Coolie. A People’s History of Singapore (1880–1940). Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1986; Kerkvliet, Ben. The Huk Rebellion. A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines. Berkeley: Berkeley University Press, 1977; Rimmer, Peter, ed. The Underside of Malaysian History. Pullers, Prostitutes, Plantation Workers. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1990. Ileto, Reynaldo. Payson and Revolution. Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910. Manila: Ateno de Manila University Press, 1979; Rafael, Vicente, ed. Figures of Criminality in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Colonial Vietnam. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1999; Trocki, Carl. Prince of Pirates. The Temenggongs and the Development of Johore and Singapore 1784–1885. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1979. Information on the EDEN-project can be found on the web: . Accessed on 5 June 2005. Tarling, Nicholas. Historians and Southeast Asian History. Auckland: New Zealand Asia Institute, 2000. Anderson, Benedict R. O. G. Imagined Communities. Reflection on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London, New York: Verso, 1991. Geertz, Clifford. Agricultural Involution. The Processes of Ecological Change in Indonesia. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1963. Wolters, O.W. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Singapore: Singapore University Press, 1982: 96. Sutherland, Heather. “Writing Indonesian History in the Netherlands. Rethinking the Past”. Journal of the Royal Institute of Linguistics and Anthropology 150, no. 4 (1994): 785. Anderson, Benedict. “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States”. In Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, edited by C. Hirschman, et al. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992: 25–40, as quoted by Hong Lysa in Halib, Mohammad and Tim Huxley, eds. An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies. London, New York and Singapore: Tauris Academic Studies, I.B. Tauris Publishers and Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1996: 64. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hill, Ronald. Southeast Asia. People, Land and Economy. Crows Nest, Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2002; Rigg, Jonathan. Southeast Asia. A Region in Transition. London: Hyman, 1991; Robison, Richard, Kevin Hewison and Richard Higgott, eds. Southeast Asia in the 1980s. The Politics of Economic Crisis. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1987; Hewison, Kevin, Richard Robison and Garry Rodan, eds. Southeast Asia in the 1990s. Authoritarianism, Democracy & Capitalism. St. Leonards: Allen & Unwin, 1993; Neher, Clark D. and Ross Marlay. Democracy and Development in Southeast Asia. The Winds of Change. Boulder: Westview Press, 1995.

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36. Vatikiotis, Michael. Political Change in Southeast Asia. Trimming the Banyan Tree. London and New York: Routledge, 1996; Hill, Hal. The Indonesian Economy since 1966. Southeast Asia’s Emerging Giant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Zawawi Ibrahim, ed. Cultural Contestations. Mediating Identities in a Changing Malaysian Society. London: Asean Academic Press, 1998. Dozens of subject monographs on contemporary developments in Southeast Asian countries, too many to list here, have been put out by institutions like the ISEAS in Singapore and by publishers such as Routledge in London. 37. Pemberton, John. On the Subject of “Java”. Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 1994. 38. Sears, Laurie S. Shadows of Empire. Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1996. 39. This is a point contained in but not explicitly made in my doctoral dissertation. An English-language version of this book was published as: Houben, Vincent. Kraton and Kumpeni. Surakarta and Yogyakarta 1830–1870. Leiden: KITLV Press, 1994. 40. Evers, Hans-Dieter and Rüdiger Korff. Southeast Asian Urbanism. Münster: St. Martin’s Press, 2003. A critique of the weakness of Southeast Asian sociology was put forward by King in Halib and Huxley, eds. An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies: 148–49. 41. Thompson, Mark R. The Anti-Marcos Struggle. Personalistic Rule and Democratic Transition in the Philippines. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1996. 42. Likhit Dhiravegin. Demi Democracy. The Evolution of the Thai Political System. Singapore: Times Academic Press, 1992. 43. Liddle, R. William. Leadership and Culture in Indonesian Politics. St Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1996. 44. See for instance: Booth, Ann. The Indonesian Economy in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. A History of Missed Opportunities. Houndmills, Basingstoke and Canberra: Macmillan and Australian National University, 1998; Dick, H.W. Surabaya. A City of Work: A Socio-Economic History 1900–2000. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2002; Lindblad, J. Thomas. Foreign Investment in Southeast Asia in the Twentieth Century. Houndmills: University of Hawaii Press, 1998; Thee Kian Wie, Explorations in Indonesian Economic History. Jakarta: Lembaga Penerbit, Fakultas Ekonomi, Universitas Indonesia, 1994. 45. Such is the definition of post-colonial studies of literature by Tony Day and Keith Foulcher in a collection on modern Indonesian literature. See: Foulcher, Keith and Tony Day, eds. Clearing a Space. Post-colonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002. 46. Hooker, Virginia Matheson. Writing a New Society. Social Change through the Novel in Malay. St. Leonards and Leiden: Allen & Unwin, 2000. 47. Winachakul Thongchai. “Writing at the Interstices. Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia”. In New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, edited by Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee. Athens and Singapore: Ohio University Press, 2003: 3–18.

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48. Tilly, Charles. Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons. New York: Russel Sage Foundation, 1984: 82–85, 145–47. 49. This section is primarily based on recent publications by my colleague at Humboldt University, Hartmut Kaelble, a social historian of Europe. See in particular: Kaelble, Hartmut and Jürgen Schriewer, eds. Vergleich und Transfer. Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften. Frankfurt and New York: Campus-Verlag, 2003; A book with case studies of “histoire croisée” has been published recently, see: Werner, Michael and Bénédicte Zimmermann, eds. De la Comparaison à l’Histoire Croisée. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 2004. 50. Landes, David S. The Wealth and Poverty of Nations. New York: Norton, 1998; Frank, Andre Gunder. Reorient. Global Economy in the Asian Age. London and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Other works include: Goody, Jack. The East in the West. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996; Pomeranz, Kenneth. The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. 51. Eisenstadt, Shmuel N., ed. Multiple Modernities. New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2002: 2–3. 52. Lieberman, Victor. Strange Parallels. Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800– 1830. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 53. Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Vol. 2: Chapter V. 54. Osterhammel, Jürgen. Die Entzauberung Asiens. Europa und die asiatischen Reiche im 18. Jahrhundert. München: C.H. Beck, 1998. 55. The literature on the history of Chinese settlers is huge and cannot be listed. Recent examples include: Heidhues. Golddiggers, Farmers, and Traders in the ‘Chinese Districts’ of West Kalimantan, Indonesia. 56. Hoefte, Rosemarijn. In Place of Slavery. A Social History of British Indian and Javanese Laboreres in Suriname. Gainesvilles and Ohio: University Press of Florida, 1998; Maurer, Jean-Luc. Les Javanais du Caillou. Des Affres de l’Exil aux Aléas de l’Integration. Cahier d’Archipel 35, 2006. 57. Four very well documented histories of this group, taking an Eurasian perspective, have appeared recently: Wim Willems. De uittocht uit Indië, 1945–1995. Amsterdam: Prometheus Groep, 2001; Bosma, Ulbe, Remco Raben and Wim Willems. De Geschiedenis vande Indische Nederlanders. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2006. Bosma, Ulbe and Remco Raben, De oude Indische wereld 1500–1920. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2003; Meijer, Hans. In Indië geworteld. De twintigste eeuw. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 2004. 58. Azyumardi Azra. The Origins of Islamic Reformism in Southeast Asia. Networks of Malay-Indonesian and Middle Eastern Ulama in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth centuries. St. Leonards and Leiden: University of Hawaii Press, 2004; Riddell, Peter. Islam and the Malay-Indonesian World: Transmission and Response. London: Horizon Books, 2000; De Jonge, Huub and Nico Kaptein, eds. Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade and Islam in Southeast Asia. Leiden: Koninklijk Instituut Voor de Tropen, 2002.

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Timothy P. Barnard

9 FILM, LITERATURE, AND CONTEXT IN SOUTHEAST ASIA P. Ramlee, Malay Cinema, and History Timothy P. Barnard

When reading various hand-wringing essays on the state of Southeast Asian studies, it is common for the authors to offer a survey of how the field of area studies has developed. These surveys often involve the role of postWorld War II politics and the distribution of governmental funds to ensure a knowledge of the region in the face of the Cold War, in the case of the United States, or the complex process of decolonization in which the former colonial nation-state fitfully tries to understand its relationship with its former colonies, which is common in the often nation-specific Southeast Asian programmes in Europe. Thus, that Cornell University has had a complex relationship with governmental funding agencies due to the presence of scholars who question American policy in Southeast Asia, or that the study of Indonesia at Leiden University barely kept afloat in the 1950s and then witnessed uncomfortable moments in the Dutch-Indonesian relationship, such as the fiftieth anniversary of Indonesian Independence, come as no surprise.1 At the core of most of these studies is an uncertainty over the role of Southeast Asian studies in academia. While some scholars argue that there are basic cultural and geographic unities that reflect a certain regional unity over time, others emphasize how the regional designation only became prevalent after World War II.2 This has resulted in many scholars of the region being 162

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doubtful of any contribution they can make toward larger academia, with the end result being a series of navel-gazing volumes – this one included – in which the basis for Southeast Asian studies is questioned. Beyond the field of university administration and the need for government departments to create boundaries to compartmentalize studies, the disciplines of anthropology and history are usually the most successful in defending Southeast Asia as a region. Cultural similarities ranging from the preference for fermented fish paste to the traditional ubiquity of the pole house are placed alongside the high rates of female autonomy – when compared with “East” and “South” Asia (once again regional groupings) – and held up as proof of a certain common Southeast Asian culture. The diversity beyond these commonalities is then used as a device to unite the region. Thus, the theme of “unity in diversity” is used to justify a region worthy of academic study. Meanwhile, in the field of history, similarities in pre-colonial state formation, the role of “men of prowess”, and the importance of trade and the sea are held up as either commonalities or unifying factors, thus providing the region with some underlying unities.3 While there is validity in the regional character of certain cultural traits or historical developments, attempts at developing surveys of Southeast Asian literature reflect the difficulties in finding such links. Most studies break down the consideration of literature into the various nation-states that make up Southeast Asia, thus undermining any sense of region. Works by Patricia Herbert and Anthony Milner, as well as David Smyth’s edited work on the “canon” for example, do not even try to find any commonalities.4 Geoffrey E. Marrison’s survey from 1996 does attempt to create broader categories, or phases, such as “indigenous”, “period of influence of the major civilizations of Asia”, “period of European trade and colonization, and of Islamic penetration”, and “period of national movements and independence”, but then quickly moves into a country-by-country survey. While literature in Southeast Asia has been influenced by notions that revolve around the “enlightenment”, “imperialism”, and “de-colonization”, is that necessarily Southeast Asian? The same categories could be applied to the literature of societies around the world, ranging from Africa to South America. In the end, “Southeast Asian literature” seems to float between oral tales and Western influenced novels.5 Despite these difficulties, one of the cornerstones of Southeast Asia studies programmes in Europe, the United States and Australia is the presence of specialists in literature, who often double as language teachers – resulting in their research and teaching duties being spread across a very broad spectrum, a topic discussed by Martin Platt in chapter 5 of this volume. Most Southeast Asian literature courses offer a fairly formulaic approach, with an initial focus

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on the Ramayana, Mahabharata and Panji tales, before moving on to colonial era literature, such as that written by Jose Rizal or Vu Trong Phung, and finally finishing with a consideration of post-independence, Western-style novels by authors such as Pramoedya Ananta Toer. In Southeast Asia, however, active reading or consumption of written literature is quite low. For example very few Indonesians have ever read anything written by Pramoedya, and the disparity between what is taught in Southeast Asian studies programmes and the reality in the region – with perhaps the exception of Vietnam and the role of literature there – is quite remarkable. If Southeast Asians originally obtained their literature orally, today they consume it both visually and orally through television and cinema. While the average Malay youth has never read Hikayat Hang Tuah, they are undoubtedly familiar with the 1956 film version of the tale, which is constantly shown on television in Malaysia and Singapore and easily available in VCD format in these nations as well as in Indonesia. It is in this context that this chapter will discuss the role of film and history in the development of a meaningful literature that is often still referred to today. While Thailand currently has a rapidly developing film industry and Filipino actors constantly vie for political positions by riding the wave of their public image, the film industry in Indonesia and Malaysia is in the doldrums. This was not always true. Indonesia and Malaysia once had thriving film industries in which hundreds of films – in the case of Indonesia until the early 1990s – were made every year, while Singapore was the home of a vibrant film industry in the 1950s and early 1960s, when over 250 Malay films were made. While these film industries came under pressure due to imports from India and Hollywood, as well as the growth of television, they remain a vital part of the every day literature of the region. Local language films are ubiquitous on television and in stores. They reflect a nostalgia for a romanticized past and play a role in helping Southeast Asians understand themselves. In Singapore for example I have witnessed teenagers quoting entire scenes and holding discussions about their favourite comedy or drama for hours on end.6 That the films were made in the 1950s reflects how such literature holds an important grip over the populace not only due to their continual presence, but because they represented a newly discovered form of expression, one that was tied to oral story-telling traditions of the past while also creating a new, modern identity. Despite the wealth of memories and studies on Southeast Asian film, a remarkable aspect of the popular as well as academic scholarship on film in Southeast Asia is the lack of historical context.7 In order to understand in what way this influences how film is understood, and the many potentially rich aspects of this literature which are overlooked, this chapter will focus on

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how the biggest star of Malay cinema, P. Ramlee, has been portrayed in the local literature with little historical context.

P. RAMLEE AND THE LITERATURE OF MALAY CINEMA P. Ramlee (1929–73) was born in Penang, Malaysia and gained his early fame as a singer and saxophone player in jazz and swing bands. B. S. Rahjans, an Indian director working at the Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions’ studios, met Ramlee in 1948 and convinced the young man to move to Singapore, where Ramlee initially worked as the orchestra leader for the studio musicians. Since music played a vital role in Malay film, Ramlee soon appeared on screen in minor roles. His charisma translated well to this new medium, and audiences began requesting that he play a larger role in films. By the early 1950s he was the handsome singer in films such as Juwita (1951) and Ibu [Mother – 1953], whose characters faced a number of dilemmas in a rapidly modernizing Singapore. Ramlee soon parlayed his popularity into writing and directing films, and he quickly became the biggest star in Malay film. Until today, Ramlee is seen as an epic hero of prodigious talent who charismatically raised Malay cinema from simply being entertainment to a commentary on Malay society and modernity. Current Malay film is in the doldrums not only because of the various technological and foreign products competing for the viewing public’s attention, but also because it simply cannot reach the perceived level of artistic and commercial productivity of the 1950s of which Ramlee is held up as the symbolic icon. P. Ramlee defines the era to such an extent that any Malay film made before 1970 is commonly referred to as “filem P. Ramlee” whether or not he was involved in its production; and his birthplace in Penang and home in Kuala Lumpur are national monuments. While P. Ramlee’s role in the entertainment industry of the 1950s and 1960s was remarkable, it also has limited the literature on, and understanding of, Malay film since almost all studies seem to revolve around his role as a star, mentor, and colleague. To date, discussions of Malay film and the role of P. Ramlee can be divided, albeit simplistically, into two broad categories: Hagiographic and film studies. The authors of hagiographical works usually worked with Ramlee in the film industry, or are well known figures in Malaysia who have raised their admiration of Ramlee to the level of scholarship.8 Such works praise Ramlee as a national cultural icon, a Colossus – or to use a more appropriately Malay metaphor, a modern day Hang Tuah – dominating popular Malay culture in the 1950s and 1960s. Through these hagiographical works, the authors convey the emotional importance

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of Ramlee for the Malay public, placing him in the proper context and providing the source material for the iconic status that he deserves. Although the author of one of the most recent examples of this genre has written, “there is always something new to say about… P. Ramlee”,9 these works have certain limitations. They mainly praise P. Ramlee for his artistic abilities, and use him as a symbol of a romanticized past in which Malay artistic production was a point of pride in the community. The lack of analysis or criticism of the central figure restricts their use in gaining greater insight into P. Ramlee and the times in which he worked. The other common approach to considering P. Ramlee is through film studies. Recent prominent examples of such an approach include the work of William van der Heide and Jan and Yvonne Ng Uhde.10 Within such works P. Ramlee is not the central figure, but does play an important role. P. Ramlee exists within these studies as a symbol of a productive and vibrant film culture in the past, that an independent Singapore has yet to achieve, in the case of the Uhdes’ work, or as a reflection of the “Malayness” of Malay cinema, in the case of Van der Heide. Many of these “film studies” scholars are not familiar with Bahasa Melayu, reflecting a belief in the universality of film studies and its ability to look beyond the local cultural context. Their works often provide insight into Malay film and how it fits into a larger theoretical construct, but the authors rarely provide any new understanding of P. Ramlee and the Malay cinema of the 1950s and 1960s, or larger issues within Southeast Asian society.11 The focus on hagiographic biographies of P. Ramlee, as well as the work of film studies scholars, however, has resulted in the marginalization of Malay film of the 1950s and 1960s as an important type of literary activity at the time. This marginalization also is related to the approaches and sources that scholars have used for the study of Malay(sian) society. As Anthony Milner pointed out in an important article in 1986, Malay history has been limited by its reliance on the colonial record, which has not only created the boundaries for scholars but also influenced the questions that are posed. Any insight other sources may provide into the Malay past have been overlooked in the pursuit of dates and facts about colonial administrators and their policies. Archives and official depositories are also of little help in gaining an understanding of social and cultural forces since the material collected is usually limited to government publications or political papers. While valuable information can be ascertained by “reading between the lines” of colonial records, and this has been done successfully in combination with other approaches,12 the study of Malay film faces many of the problems that the study of literature faces in Southeast Asian studies. While some scholars

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attempt to look for universalities, others focus on such a tight reading of the texts that little valuable information or insight is gained. Facing such difficulties, context becomes valuable. In the next three sections of this chapter, I will provide examples of how P. Ramlee was influenced by, and was an active participant in, the vibrant social and political context of his time. This will take into consideration two of his films, one a drama another a comedy, as well as the development of a Malay film workers trade union in which P. Ramlee was quite active. By using film and the role of film workers in the development of historical issues, scholars and students of Southeast Asian literature can use P. Ramlee as source for gaining a better understanding of the vibrant social and cultural currents of the 1950s and 1960s in a Malaya that faced modernization and decolonization, as well as new political and social groupings. Thus, these films are not “just” for entertainment, but they can also be viewed and understood in their proper historical and social context, thus providing insight into the society, which any good literature should accomplish.

PENAREK BECHAK AND THE ASAS-50 While P. Ramlee made his early mark in Malay film through his musical abilities, by 1955 he translated his growing power in the industry into an opportunity to direct films. This was a significant development, since there had been some opposition to Malay directors, since Malays were considered appropriate only for their ability to perform before the cameras. Almost all early Malay films were the product of Indian directors, who had been imported from the vibrant film industry in South Asia, who could be controlled by the studio bosses, and who were quite talented. While they had provided the industry with a stable base of fare, many in the Malay community believed that they overlooked some of the basic cultural norms that would have informed the stories being told and more realistically portrayed the manner in which Malays would have reacted in particular situations. In addition, the 1950s was a period of decolonization in Malaya, and Malays were demanding a greater role in society. Many of these demands were coming from the artistic community.13 The pedagogical role of Malay film was not lost on the filmmakers of the time. Ramlee would take position as a director and writer seriously since it occurred within a context of a rapidly changing society, in which he played a prominent role. Among Malay intellectuals, one of the most important organizations promoting revolutionary ideals of the relationship between artists and society was ASAS 50 (Angkatan Sasterawan 50 – Generation of the

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Writers of the 1950s), who are mainly known for their literary production. The members saw themselves as revolutionaries promoting modernity. Their critique of British rule and modernization, as well as “feudalistic” elements of Malay society, resulted in a period of artistic renaissance among the urbanbased Malays of Singapore and Kuala Lumpur. These urban centres, particularly Singapore, played an important role in their work because they were outside many of the restrictions that the colonial government had imposed due to a communist “emergency” in the Peninsula.14 Singapore, where the members of ASAS 50 lived, wrote and performed, was a vibrant port city in which P. Ramlee would have been the brightest, and most influential, Malay star. Ramlee’s importance lay in his ability to reach beyond the literary circles that limited many of the members of this artistic group, which focused on the ideal that art should be for society and that their work should provide guidance to the people [rakyat].15 This guidance was not simply on the traditional subjects of religion or race, but on the belief that they should take control over their destiny or fate [nasib]. One prominent member of the ASAS 50, Asraf, even wrote: “Leadership can only be given to them if the writer can give real pictures of their situation and of the ‘causes’ which create the situation.”16 The connection between P. Ramlee and the ASAS 50 was not just a matter of a celebrity interacting with local literary figures to gain a certain legitimacy. Ramlee published his own film magazine, Bintang [Star], which shared an office building with the ASAS 50. The connection was even stronger since the editor of the Bintang, Fatimah Murad, was also the wife of Asraf, the leading ideologue of ASAS 50.17 In the vibrant context of a society that was going through decolonization, rapid modernization, and dealing with a variety of issues that revolved around race, citizenship, communism, and whether Singapore and Malaya should be part of a united country, P. Ramlee made his films. Under such influences, and guided by the ideals of ASAS 50, he included commentary on many of these issues. The film Penarek Bechak [The Trishaw Driver – 1955] can serve as an example of his attempts to infuse social commentary that represented literary and activist goals. Penarek Bechak tells the tale of a trishaw driver named Amran, played by Ramlee, who helps a rich young woman named Azizah, played by Sa’adiah, when she is being harassed by a group of spoiled urban youths. To repay him for his kindness, Azizah hires Amran as transportation to her daily lessons at a school named Harapan Wanita [A Woman’s Hope]. Seeing the nobility of his character, Azizah falls in love with Amran. In the meantime, the leader of the group who harassed Azizah, named Ghazali, endears himself to Azizah’s rich and snobbish father, who is horrified that his daughter has fallen in love with a poor man. After a series

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of confrontations between Ghazali and Amran, the father understands that Amran has noble intentions and allows the young man to marry his daughter and oversee his business interests. Within the context of a simple drama, however, P. Ramlee is able to raise a number of issues that reflect the goals of ASAS 50. To be able to understand the importance of these images, one has to contextualize them within the social and economic conditions of Malaya during the time when Penarek Becak was made. The images have to be read within the time frame of preindependent Malaya, and away from the modern Malaysian nation-state. For example, the film focuses on the conflict between modernity and tradition. To convey an understanding of the various ways an urbanized Malay of the 1950s has to negotiate between these two supposed binary opposites, P. Ramlee juxtaposes various types of entertainment. In this case, he associated modernity with going out in the evening to look for entertainment such as movies [wayang] and listening to Western music, or non-Malay entertainment. This is perhaps best represented in a scene in which the antagonist requests that a band play samba music instead of traditional joget (a popular Malay musical genre of the pre-independence era).18 The idea that all these activities took place at night is another layer that has to be analysed in relation to the Malay culture at that time. Night is dark, and therefore it is dangerous due to the presence of all matter of unseen threats. Darkness is mysterious, which can trigger feelings that include romance, violence, and even repugnance. In Penarek Becak, P. Ramlee executes many of his key images at night. Ghazali beats up Amran and destroys his trishaw at night; Ghazali attacks Azizah at night; movies were shown at night; Ghazali dances to samba music at night; Ghazali kills Amran’s mother at night; Ghazali robs Azizah’s father at night; Ghazali is arrested by the police at night; Amran meets Azizah secretly in the corn field at night; Amran sings longingly at night; the confrontation between Azizah’s father and Amran occurs at night. In contrast it is also at night when Azizah’s father repents and realizes that he has been unjust toward poor people, particularly Amran, the iconic trishaw driver.19 Furthermore, Ramlee translates his interpretation of modernity into scenes where he shows that it has caused people to be manipulative, untrustworthy and insensitive towards traditional culture. The voices of the “modern” characters are loud, often on the verge of shouting, which is impolite in Malay culture. In addition, modern characters act in an offensive manner in relation to Malay culture. This is clearest in scenes where Ghazali uses his leg to point to money that was given to Amran and when the antagonist does not take off his shoes upon entering Azizah’s house. Perhaps

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the most damaging imagination of how the rich perceive the poor in Penarek Becak is the idea that rich people are always suspicious towards those less fortunate. This psychological interpretation is best represented in a scene in which Ghazali tries to convince Azizah’s father that Amran, the trishaw driver, is nice to Azizah just because he has plans to steal the family’s money. Most of the values and objects that P. Ramlee considers to be traditional are the binary opposite of those he portrays as modern. Being poor or traditional – to maintain “kampung values” (village values) – in the film means being concerned with, and courteous to, those around you. This is reflected in P. Ramlee’s romantic portrayal of the kampung in which Amran lives. In this village neighbours help each other. For example, Amran buys food from a small warung (stall) and, since Amran does not have enough money to pay for two packages for his mother and himself, the owner of the food stall gives them to Amran since he is a member of the traditional community. Later, when Amran arrives at home, he meets a beggar in front of his house. He gives one package of the food to the beggar. This is P. Ramlee’s way of saying that he is taken care of, thus he should also take care of other people. Thus, P. Ramlee is concerned with the individualistic values that come along with modernity. It is his way to remind people, and himself, that Malays should continue to practise reciprocal values and cooperation. In opposition to the activities and attitudes of rich and modern people, the traditional lifestyle, which is manifested in Amran’s family, is honest. The poor never intend to cheat and to take advantage of the rich. P. Ramlee sentimentally presents this through a scene where Amran refuses to take extra payment from Azizah. P. Ramlee juxtaposes his notions of rich and poor in Penarek Becak as the ultimate dreams of both sides. His representation of the village lifestyle, as if it is authentic, was an imitation of the colonial construction, while his representation of rich people is stereotypical as it is the fantasy – the desire – of poor people. The juxtaposition is so extreme that it is structured to the point that it is black and white. To his credit as a filmmaker, his translation of these binary oppositions through his camera work – close-ups, long shots, etc. – is rather sophisticated, and is used quite effectively in his effort to stress the differences. He repeats himself through dialogues, body language, camera work, and costumes in order to make sure that his message is disseminated. P. Ramlee saw himself as a social reformer who was using the developing art form of film to promote social ideas of modernity and independence, which mirrored his involvement with many of the literary activists who were members of ASAS-50. Through films such as Penarek Bechak he was able to

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both entertain and educate his audiences. While such a reading of the film places it within a specific historical context, it also allows us to see P. Ramlee and his work as literature.

PERSAMA, P. RAMLEE AND ACTIVISM BEYOND THE SCREEN The popularity of Penarek Becak, as well as the presence of more vocal artists, opened the door for a greater activism at the Malay Film Production (MFP) headquarters at Jalan Ampas in Singapore. This also occurred in the context of impending Malayan independence, which was achieved in 1957. As the date for independence, and the form that the government would take, was being debated in London, Kuala Lumpur, and Singapore, Malays were becoming increasingly involved in political and labour disputes. A film workers union, named PERSAMA (Persatuan Artis Malaya – Malayan Artists Union), was founded in 1954 with P. Ramlee as the first president and Salleh Ghani and Jamil Sulong as the other main officers. The goals of PERSAMA were common to most trade unions at the time, such as improving the wages of members and acting as a representative for negotiations between employers and employees. However, their activities were often more public due to the industry in which they worked. In addition there were often clashes over the focus of the trade union. Some members of PERSAMA pushed for social and artistic goals, and this often led to clashes between the more technical workers, such as camera men and carpenters, and the actors and directors.20 By February 1957 PERSAMA was organized well enough to approach the Shaw Brothers to ask for an increase in wages. The approximately 150 Malay employees at MFP, with the exception of P. Ramlee, received a wage of less than $300 a month.21 While MFP employees received bonuses for each film they completed, and many lived in the Shaw Brothers’ owned housing complex on Boon Teck Road, they received no raises once the initial salary had been agreed upon. Thus, there were employees who had been receiving the same salary for as long as ten years. Under these circumstances, PERSAMA representatives made four basic demands: An agreed salary scale for all MFP employees; bigger bonuses for each completed picture; prompt payment of overtime; and one half-day off on Saturdays and a full day off on Sundays.22 The reply to these demands was received on 3 March: Three PERSAMA members were fired from MFP. The three were Musalmah, Omar Rojik, and H. M. Rohaizad. Musalmah was an actress whose home on Tembeling Road in Singapore served as PERSAMA headquarters. Omar Rojik, who started at

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MFP in 1950 as a common labourer, had worked his way up to assistant director and supporting actor. In the early 1960s he became one of the leading directors of dramatic, political films at MFP. During the strike, Rojik was described as a “villain” in Malay films. The third person fired, Rohaizad, was an assistant director and prominent PERSAMA member. When protests continued, two of the most vocal agitators, S. Kadarisman and Syed Hassan Safi, who worked as assistant directors, were also fired on 5 March.23 The firings shifted the focus of the dispute. PERSAMA members approached leading Malay politicians and cultural figures asking them to issue statements of support. Shortly thereafter, the Malay rulers announced that they would not take sides in the dispute. Protests were planned. With the Shaw Brothers refusing to negotiate, claiming that the five were fired due to “non-cooperation and lackness”, a strike began on 16 March 1957. Over 120 MFP employees picketed the front of the Jalan Ampas studios. In addition, film stars such as Ahmad Mahmud were seen picketing Queens Cinema in Geylang, where his own film was being shown.24 In an attempt to gain support, further mass protests occurred – at Happy World amusement park, Pulau Berani and Al-Islamiah Madrasah on Pasir Panjang Road – all public places that were popular gathering places for the Malay community.25 In the midst of the strike and demonstrations the Shaw Brothers appealed to the government to provide subsidies for the local film industry. They claimed that MFP was overstaffed, and they only needed around sixty employees to run the studio. Shaw Brothers’ management had supposedly issued warning of retrenchment as early as 1955, and the firing of the five employees was necessary to make ends meet.26 During this period, the salary demands that had prompted the firings were not mentioned. Such strikes and protests were not limited to the film industry in early 1957. Both workers and employees throughout the Peninsula and Singapore were in a state of anxiety over the form of the new nation that was to be created later in the year. With the final details of the structure of an independent Malaya being negotiated in London in the first few months of the year, trade union strikes were rampant amidst fears that foreign employers would leave without the security the British had provided and questions over the status of Chinese and Indian immigrants.27 Against a background of strong trade union activism, the Malay film industry reflected the larger anxieties of the time. The convergence of labour issues and artistic control were coming to a head. As the protests outside the Shaw Brothers’ cinemas continued throughout March 1957, the future financial stability of the studio was at stake. Although Malay films were in a brief period of both artistic and financial success,

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looming issues of profitability and worker rights clashed, ironically leading to the long decline of Shaw Brothers’ Malay Film Productions studio. As the strike continued, leading Malay politicians finally got involved. Tungku Abdul Rahman, who five months later was to become the first prime minister of the Federation, sent one of his senior aides, Senu Abdul Rahman, to act as a mediator between the two parties. Following two days of negotiation the strike was resolved on 7 April 1957. Run Run Shaw, who was “very cooperative and sincere”, rehired the five fired employees and the PERSAMA representatives agreed to drop demands for payment of overtime. How the other issues were resolved was not mentioned.28 A not-so-subtle critique of the Shaw Brothers’ management during the strike appeared on screen later that year in the film Mogok [Strike]. Written by Jamil Sulong, the film tells the story of factory workers who are exploited by a manager – ironically played by S. Kadarisman – who is working with the greedy daughter of their kind, but distant, employer. The film intersperses the day-to-day toils of the factory workers with monologues in which Omar Rojik and several other workers discuss the importance of union representation. After a series of accidents, including the factory owner’s daughter hitting an employee with a car, the manager burns down the house of a suffering female employee. Just as the workers are about to riot, the kind factory owner arrives. He fires the manager, disowns his daughter, and embraces the workers and their union as vital components of a prosperous future for all. The 1957 strike was a turning point in the Malay film industry. Although the issues between Shaw Brothers and its employees had been settled temporarily, MFP’s rival in Malay film-making, Cathay Keris, took advantage of the situation. Since its founding in 1953, Cathay Keris executives had mined the tension at MFP to lure actors, directors, and technicians over to their studios in eastern Singapore. The early stars of Cathay Keris, in particular S. Roomai Noor and Maria Menado, had been enticed with larger contracts and the right to have greater control over the creative process after they had begun their careers at MFP. During the strike, Ho Ah Loke, the chief executive at Cathay Keris, sent supplies such as rice as well as notes of encouragement to the strikers. This strategy was successful. After 1957, the shift in employees over to Cathay Keris, whose higher salaries and more modern equipment and facilities were quite attractive, was even more noticeable.29 The movement of employees from MFP to Cathay Keris was not the only battle that the Shaw Brothers’ rival won in 1957. Cathay Keris had been a distant second in the Malay film industry since its founding, mainly due to

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the superior network of Shaw Brothers’ owned cinemas and the presence of the ever popular P. Ramlee at MFP. Three weeks after the strike was over, however, Cathay Keris released a film that would transform the industry. Pontianak [Vampire] premiered on 1 May, the Islamic holiday of Aidul Fitri that year, at the main Cathay cinema at Dhoby Ghaut in Singapore and ran for a number of weeks. The film attracted crowds – including Chinese and Indians – a phenomenon never seen before in Malay film. The film starred Maria Menado and was directed by B. N. Rao, an influential early director at MFP. The success of the film symbolized the arrival of Cathay Keris as a formidable rival in the Malay film industry. Maria Menado now became a star and producer who would rival P. Ramlee in status within the community. In addition, Malay activists such as Hamzah Hussin, Hussein Haniff, and Roomai Noor were given control over the films they produced and wrote, leading to a period during which Malay consciousness and intellectual debates, that represented the vibrant joy of a newly independent nation, were presented to mass audiences in a modern medium.30

LABU DAN LABI AND THE CREATION OF MALAYSIA While Penarek Bechak reflected the influence of ASAS-50 on P. Ramlee’s work, and PERSAMA was an attempt to apply the advocacy of such work into the daily life of film workers but actually reflected larger labour issues in Malaya at the time of Merdeka, the role of decolonization can be seen in even his most light-hearted of films. Following the various labour tensions in MFP in the late 1950s and early 1960s, P. Ramlee’s film productivity went into decline. At this time, he began to focus much of his attention on his music, since it could be performed outside the purview of the studio. In 1960, P. Ramlee took part in one of the more interesting musical experiments of his career, Pancha Sitara. This group consisted of an orchestra of some of the best musicians from MFP studio, as well as some of the most famous singers of the time, including Normadiah. After several personnel changes in late 1960 Pancha Sitara II went on to record a number of songs and appeared in films.31 While this new focus and energy towards his music should not be surprising, it came at the end of a period in which P. Ramlee had made a remarkable number of films. By the early 1960s he continued to make interesting films, including Ibu Mertuaku [My Mother-in-law – 1962] and Antara Dua Darjat [Between Two Classes – 1960], but much of the vibrancy of his earlier work seemed to be missing. The films often began with a good premise, but once it had been played out, there seemed to be difficulty in sustaining a story for more than an hour.32 These films, however, hold as

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much promise for analysis as Penarek Bechak. They are documents of a unique time in Malay history, a time in which nations were being formed and decolonization was taking place. A film that can be classified as one that strains the limits of aimless plots, but also has some merit as a document of its time, is Labu dan Labi (Labu and Labi – 1962). The film is about two servants, Labu (Mohd Zain) and Labi (P. Ramlee), who work for an extraordinarily tight-fisted businessman named Haji Bakhil (bakhil in Malay means “stingy”), who lives with his caring wife and beautiful daughter. While Labu and Labi work for the family, they daydream about how they can seduce Haji Bakhil’s daughter and escape the bullying of their employer. These dream sequences, which include parodies of Tarzan and Westerns, allow for the various characters to live out their fantasies of confronting their boss, marrying his daughter, and becoming rich. While these fantasies seemingly have little to do with the main plot, simply allowing for a string of skits to be tied together, if the film is placed within the context of 1962 Singapore and Malayan history, Labu dan Labi can be understood as a snapshot of various attitudes revolving around decolonization in Singapore and the creation of Malaysia. To prove this point, I will focus on two of the fantasy sequences in the film. The first occurs when Labu and Labi visit a nightclub, while the second involves Labi’s fantasy marriage to Haji Bakhil’s daughter. In the first fantasy sequence in Labu dan Labi, the two titular characters visit a nightclub to watch, in an example of the absurdist nature of the comedy, P. Ramlee and Saloma perform with Pancha Sitara. As they wait for the performance to begin, Labu and Labi speak a mixture of Malay and English in which they mock the accents and pretensions of the British. In the exchanges that ensue, they lust over the nightclub performers, order gin and tonics – which to play on mistranslations of Malay becomes “Satan” and tonic – and generally reflect a boorish and obnoxious attitude toward the entire experience. While the two characters satirize British mores, the nightclub act quickly diverges into a fashion show. As narrated by the master of ceremonies, played by Aziz Sattar, various women appear on an improvised catwalk where they model the latest in fashion. Every ethnic group in Singapore is represented, including Europeans. Each model appears twice, once in a modern European-style dress and next in ethnic dress. This sequence is unique in Malay film because it was one of the few times in which nonMalays appeared, and is even more remarkable because they were not portrayed as stereotypes, such as the Indian money-lender or the Chinese businessman. Beyond such a depiction, however, is the presentation of a multi-ethnic society that is modern and idealized. As the film was released in August 1962,

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and the referendum on whether Singapore, Sarawak, and Sabah should join Malaysia occurred in 1 September 1962, it can be seen as an attempt to create a vision in Malay film that went beyond simply Malay characters and reflected the multi-ethnic society that was Singapore and Malaysia of the time. In many respects it mirrors the nationalistic sentiments of the time, and the hope of how Singapore will become an integral part of Malaysia. The role of the referendum and Singapore’s entry into the newly formed nation of Malaysia can also be seen in a later fantasy sequence when Labi marries Haji Bahkil’s daughter. The wedding reception is an elaborate affair in which a band plays. The action in the film stops and focus is placed on the band and the song played, “Singapura Waktu Malam”. The song describes how Singapore is an important part of the Malay world, beginning from the days of Temasek – with its mention of one of the key myths of Malay history, Singapura dilanggar todak – until modern Singapore. To paraphrase the lyrics of the song, Singapore will be rich, peaceful, and prosperous, “when it becomes part of Malaysia”.33 While the song entertains the audience, it also has an important role in the political and social context of the time.

CONCLUSION When watching the films of P. Ramlee it is easy to be swept away by his seemingly endless charisma. Beyond the façade of entertainment, however, are films and events that reflect many of the social, cultural, and political developments in Malaya and Singapore of the 1950s and 1960s. This chapter has attempted to look at three different aspects of P. Ramlee’s career and place them within their historical context, but also with the goal that such marginalized literature be considered as vibrant and as important as that written and discussed in literary circles. While films such as Penarek Bechak are often appreciated for their didactic nature,34 representing many of the intellectual debates of the time that focused around modernity, tradition, and individualism, very little attention has been focused on how these same attitudes can also be seen in his light comedies. Films such as Labu dan Labi, however, can also allow us to “rethink” P. Ramlee. They are texts, which like any literature can be read and understood as reflective of a particular time and place. The fact that this place was Malaya, during a time in which labour unions were formed, the relationship between modernity and tradition was being debated, and such fundamental political issues as the formation of Malaysia are considered, makes these films important documents, that can be read not only by scholars, but also enjoyed by generations of fans, both young and old.

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NOTES 1. Kahin, George McT. Southeast Asia: A Testament, London and New York: Routledge, 2003; Houben, Vincent. “A Torn Soul: the Dutch Public Discussion on the Colonial Past in 1995”. Indonesia 63 (1997): 47–66. 2. Emmerson, Donald K. “ ‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15 (1984): 1–21. 3. Reid, Anthony. Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce. Vol. 1: The Land Below the Winds. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988; Wolters, Oliver W. History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asia. Ithaca: Cornell University Southeast Asia Program, [1982] 1999. 4. See Herbert, Patricia and Anthony Milner. Southeast Asian Languages and Literatures: A Select Guide. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1989; Smyth, David (ed.). The Canon in Southeast Asian Literatures. London: Curzon, 2000. 5. Cf. Derks, Will. “‘If Not to Anything Else’: Some Reflections on Modern Indonesian Literature”. Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land- en Volkenkunde 152 (1996): 341–52. 6. This phenomenon is also mentioned in Van der Heide, William. Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Culture. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2002: 12–13. 7. There are valuable historical studies of Southeast Asian film, including Deocampo, Nick. Cine: Spanish Influence on Early Cinema in the Philippines. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University, 2003. 8. Abi. P. Ramlee: Seniman Agung. Kuala Lumpur, Utusan: 1986; Ramli Ismail. Kenangan P. Ramlee. Kuala Lumpur: Adhicipta, 1998; Yusnor Ef. P. Ramlee yang Saya Kenal. Subang Jaya: Pelanduk, 2000. 9. See Harding, James and Ahmad Sarji. P. Ramlee: The Bright Star. Subang Jaya, Malaysia: Pelanduk, 2002: xii. This should not be seen as criticism of these works. They are valuable tools in our understanding of P. Ramlee. Another work by Ahmad Sarji, P. Ramlee: Erti yang Sakti. Petaling Jaya: Pelanduk, 1999; does not fall into this category. It is indispensable in the study of P. Ramlee due to its encyclopedic structure and detail. 10. Cf. Van der Heide, William. Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Culture. Amsterdam: University of Amsterdam Press, 2002; Uhde, Jan and Yvonne Ng Uhde. Latent Images: Film in Singapore. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 2000. 11. Receiving less attention is the work of new scholars that could be classified under “cultural studies”, and is mainly seen in the topics of graduate theses. Examples of such works include: Khoo Gaik Cheng. “Gender, Modernity and the Nation in Malaysian Literature and Film: The 1980s and 1990s”, Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Ind.: University of British Columbia, 1999; and Kueh Siaw Hui, Adeline. “The Filmic Representations of Malayan Women: An Analysis of Malayan Films from the 1950s and 1960s”. Unpublished Master’s Thesis. Ind.: Murdoch University, 1997. Another example of a work that is the exception to these broad

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12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

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statements is Fuziah Kartini Hassan Basri and Faridah Ibrahim. “Racun dan Penawar: Pertentangan Citra Wanita dalam Filem Melayu Zaman 50-an”. In Antara Gaun dan Kebaya: Pengalaman dan Citra Wanita Melayu Zaman PraMerdeka. Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 2000. Cheah Boon Kheng. The Peasant Robbers of Kedah, 1900–1929: Historical and Folk Perceptions. Singapore: Oxford University Press, 1988. Amin, M. and Wahba. Layar Perak dan Sejarahnya. Shah Alam: Fajar Bakti, 1998: 17–28; Hamzah Hussin. Memoir Hamzah Hussin: Dari Cathay Keris ke Merdeka Studio. Bangi: University Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1998: 24–30. Harper, T.N. The End of Empire and the Making of Malaya. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999: 302–06; Hooker, Virginia Matheson. Writing a New Society: Social Change through the Novel in Malay. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2000: 182–88. Lockard, Craig A. “Reflection of Change: Socio-political Commentary and Criticism in Malaysian Popular Music since 1950”, Crossroads 6 (1991): 23. A.M. Thani. Warisan ASAS 50. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1981: 3. See Harding and Sarji. P. Ramlee: The Bright Star: 102–03. Many other Malay film stars were involved in ASAS-50. One of the most influential was S. Roomai Noor, who participated in one of the key meetings, which took place in 1956, in which the ASAS-50 promoted their agenda. At the meeting, Roomai made a passionate plea for Malays to gain control over the content of their films so they would reflect the cultural values, and proper language, of the Malays. This also reflected the desire of many in the Malay film industry to use film as a vehicle for their ideals. Cf. Abdullah Hussain and Nik Safiah Karim, ed. Memoranda Angkatan Sastrawan ’50. Petaling Jaya: Fajar Bakti, 1987: 156–64. Entertainment centres that promoted “joget modern”, however, also became a point of controversy when defenders of traditional values wanted to decry the effects of rapid Malay urbanization in the 1950s. Cf. Harper. The End of Empire: 225. Barnard, Timothy P. “Vampires, Heroes and Jesters: A History of Cathay Keris” in The Cathay Story, edited by Wong Ain-ling. Hong Kong: Hong Kong Film Archive, 2002. Jamil Sulong. Kaca Permata: Memoir Seorang Pengarah. Kuala Lumpur: Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1993: 118–19; Hamzah Hussin. Memoir Hamzah Hussin: Dari Cathay Keris ke Studio Merdeka. Bangi: University Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1998: 51–54. The majority made less than $200. Ramlee made around $600 a month, which was on par with the imported technical personnel from Hong Kong and India, but received huge bonuses in the thousands of dollars for each completed film. At the time, the exchange rate was fixed at one dollar to two shillings, four pence. Sulong. Kaca Permata: 130.

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22. The Straits Times (ST hereafter), 28 February 1957: 4. 23. ST, 4 March 1957: 4; Sarji. P. Ramlee: Erti yang Sakti: 190–91; 216 and 326–27; Sulong. Kaca Permata: 130; ST, 4 March 1957: 4; ST, 6 March 1957: 5. 24. Harding and Sarji. P. Ramlee: The Bright Star: 137; Sulong. Kaca Permata: 130–32; ST, 4 March 1957: 4; ST, 6 April 1957: 7. 25. Mohd. Zamberi A. Malek. Suria Kencana: Biografi Jins Shamsudin. Bangi: Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1998: 232. 26. ST, 21 March 1957: 8. 27. For more information on such labour issues, and the context, see Harper. The End of Empire. 28. ST, 8 April 1957: 4. Lee Kuan Yew, as head of the Workers Union and a member of the Lee and Lee law firm, helped draw up some of the initial documents that PERSAMA presented to the studio. Some of the letters and documents related to the strike can be found in Sulong. Kaca Permata: 130–31. 29. Barnard, Rohayati Paseng and Timothy P. Barnard. “The Ambivalence of P. Ramlee”: 9–23; Hussin. Memoir Hamzah Hussin: 51; Sulong. Kaca Permata: 151, 167 and 170. 30. Barnard and Barnard. “The Ambivalence of P. Ramlee”: 9–23; Hussin. Memoir Hamzah Hussin: 41. 31. Sarji. P. Ramlee: Erti yang Sakti: 224–26. 32. Examples include such films as Madu Tiga [Three Wives – 1964], and Ali Baba Bujang Lapok [Ne’er-do-well Bachelor Thieves – 1961], and Seniman Bujang Lapok. 33. The phrase is “Apabila di dalam Malaysia”. The song, and this sentiment, is interrupted suddenly when Labu fires an arrow into the wedding reception, thus causing chaos. Such nationalistic sentiments in songs also can be seen in the first film P. Ramlee made after moving to Kuala Lumpur to work for Merdeka Studios in 1964. The film is Ragam P. Ramlee, and the song is “Joget Malaysia”. It glorifies the Malaysian capital and its prosperity. 34. Barnard. “Vampires, Heroes and Jesters”; Van der Heide. Malaysian Cinema, Asian Film: Border Crossings and National Culture.

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197

INDEX

APEC, 8 ASAS, 50, 167–71 ASEAN, 14, 33, 109 English, use of, 18 rise of, 11 ASEANology, 115 Abinales, Patricio, 83, 84 Abraham, Itty, 123 Abu Talib Ahmad, 63 academic cultures clash, 102 academic liberalization criticism, 54 Acharya, Amitav, 136 Ahmad Sarji, 177 American Social Science Research Council, 9 American University Alumni Language Center, 100 Amis, Kingsley, 61 Andaya, Barbara, 24, 138, 145, 157 Anderson, Benedict, 24, 25, 39, 60, 63, 65, 77, 85, 128, 131, 138, 147, 148, 159 Annales School, 146 anthropologists Bornean, 31 anthropology, 30, 100 anti-war demonstrations, 6 Appadurai, Arjun, 135, 138, 139 Arabic, 98 Arbor, Ann, 40, 85, 99, 139 area studies criticism, 53 forms of institutional arrangements, 15

importance, 19 paradigm, 134 Ariel Heryanto, 24, 28, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 44, 72, 74, 84, 124, 126, 137 Asiacentric approach, 144 Asia Research Institute, 15 Asia Society Southeast Asia Development Advisory Group, 105 Asraf, 168 Association for Asian Studies, 50, 52, 106 meetings, 16 Australia, 5 language instruction, 96 Australian National University, 146 Faculty of Asian Studies, 5 Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, 5 Azyurmardi Azra, 156, 161 BCAS, 120 Barnhard, Timothy P., 162–79 Bassett, 120 Battersby, Stephen, 64 Benn, Tony MP, 116 Bevir, Mark, 157 Bielefeld School of Hans-Dieter Evers, 150 Booth, Ann, 151 Borneo central, 30 Borneo Research Council, 31 Bowen, John, 16, 22, 24, 39, 124, 126, 136, 138 197

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

197

8/24/06, 11:49 AM

198

Index

Boyce, James, 121 bird flu, 2 Bradbury, Malcolm, 61 Bryant, Raymond, 79, 85 bureaucracy traditional, 150 bureaucratization of academia, 115 Burgess, Chris, 26, 41, 43 Burke, Peter, 156 Burmese, 19 Carey, Peter, 145 Carr, E.H., 156 Carr, Raymond, 143 Cathay Keris, 173, 174 Centre for Southeast Asian Studies, 5 Chandler, David, 145 Chan Heng Chee, 122 Charnvit Kasetisiri, 85, 122, 137 Cheah Boon Kheng, 178 Chiang Mai University Regional Center for Sustainable Development, 79 children experience of, 59 China rise of, 11 Chou, Cynthia, 123–39 Chua Beng Huat, 137 Chulalongkorn University, 12 Institute of Asian Studies, 75 circles of esteem, 50–52 civil-military relation, 117 Cœdès, George, 124, 136 Cold War aftermath, 2 divisive force, 14 end of, 11 collaborative research, 135 colonial history, 145 colonialists writings, 4

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

198

colonial officers training, 6 comparative literature, 100 comparative research, 15 comparativism, 45–64 constructivists, 47, 49 Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 104 Cornell Southeast Asian programme, 105 Cornell University, 162 dominant methodology, 104 FALCON, 101 Southeast Asian Studies Programme, 5 counter hegemonic, 105 country specialist, 141 credentialism, 48 Cribb, Robert, 63, 111 crony capitalism, 117 Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies initiative, 33 cross-boundary research, 81 cross-regional mobility, 81 crypto-colonialism, 72 Cultural Flows group, 33 Cummings, Bruce, 106, 107, 121 current developments assessments, critical, 20 Dahm, Bernhard, 63 Day, Anthony, 138, 146 de Jonge, Huub, 156 democratization, 2 Denmark Minister of Education, 92 Dick, Howard, 151 divisive practices, 76–78 domains of power, 49, 50 Dong Daeng Project, 69, 71 Duara, Prasenjit, 58, 64 Duby, Georges, 143 Duiker, William, 145

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Index

199

EUROSEAS, 16 e-mail, 2 East Asia Advisory Committee, 107 East Asian Research Institute, 67 East Timor, 61 exclusion, 11 Ecole des langues Orienale Vivantes, 4 ecological discontinuities, 34 ecology of scholarship, 65 Economic History of Southeast Asia, 146 economic related dynamism, 8 economic dynamism, 8 Eisenstadt, Shmuel, 154 Emmerson, Donald, 13, 24, 39, 43, 44, 62, 123, 136, 177 Empson, William, 122 English use in Europe, 93 widespread use, 18, 19 environmental resources, 78 Espagne, Michel, 153 essentialism, 25, 26, 29, 30–33 ethnic bargains, 117 ethnographic content, 1 Europe view of, 91–93 language, study of, 91 European Science Foundation’s Asia Committee, 37 Evans, Grant, 26, 43 Evans, Richard, 144, 156 Fatimah Murad, 168 field research, 91 Fifield, Russell, 24, 40, 44 Fukuyama, Francis, 56, 64 Ford Foundation, 67, 105, 107 Foucault, Michel, 49, 63 Fox, James, 22, 43 Frank, Andre Gunde, 154

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

199

galactic polity, 1 Geertz, Clifford, 30, 63, 147, 148, 159 gender perspectives, 80 geobody, 1 geographical discontinuities, 34 geo-political interests, 103 globalization, 8, 29 academic, 53–55 challenge, 26, 27, 33, 34 Gouda, Frances, 146, 158 Graduate School for Asian and African Area Studies, 70 Grant Evans, 24 Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, 67 Guare, John, 62 Guyer, Jan I., 21 Haushofer, Karl, 62 Hayami, Yoko, 83 Hayashi, Yukio, 85 Hayter Report, 5, 108 haze, 2 hegemonic power doctrines of, 48 Heidhues, Mary Somers, 145, 158 heritage students, 95 Herzfeld, Michael, 72, 84 heuristic approach, 130–33, 135 Hikayat Hang Tuah, 164 Hill, Hal, 149 Hill, Ronald, 149 Hirschman, Charles, 24, 40, 99, 136 historical comparison, 60 Hobsbawn, Eric, 147 Hooker, Virginia, 151, 160 horizontally integrative macrohistory, 154 Houben, Vincent, 64, 140 Hue Tam Ho Tai, 21 humanities paradigms, 56 role of theory, 87

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200

Index

human universalism, 48 Hutterer, Karl, 40, 99, 134, 136, 139 Hutton, Chris, 43 Huxley, 127 INALCO, 4 Iijima, Akiko, 83, 84 Ileto, Ray, 147 imagined communities, 1 imagined nation states, 128 indigenization, 119 Indonesia American social science research, 24 massacre of communists, 60 mass violence, 57 national motto, 60 Indonesianists, 32 Institute for Developing Economies, 6 Institute of Ethnology, 67 Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 7, 28, 36, 37, 74, 110 intellectual diversity, 55–62 intellectual novelty, 57, 58, 59 intellectual programme, 46 intellectual tariff barriers, 53–55 International Convention of Asian Scholars, 52 International Institute of Asian Studies, 35 international integration, 2 international non-governmental organizations, 8 international scholars, 120 international specialists, 113, 114 Internet, 2 intra-regional comparison, 152 Ishii Yoneo, 68 Islam, 2 Jackson, Peter, 26, 41, 42, 43 Jamil Sulong, 178 Japan contributions, 66–73 perspectives from, 65–85

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

200

Japanese scholarship, 72 empirical emphasis, 70 Japanese Society for Southeast Asian History, 71 Japanese Society of Ethnology, 67 jataka tales, 89 Javanese, 19 Johnson, Deborah, 20 Jones, David Martin, 114, 122 Josselin de Jong, 23, 24, 136 Kachin Hills, 30 Kahin, George McT., 21, 103, 104, 107, 120, 177 Kahn, Joel S., 41 Kaptein, Nico, 156 Keyes, Charles, 24, 40, 99, 136 Kerkvliet, Ben, 147 Khmer classical, 19 Khoo Gaik Cheng, 177 King, Victor, 4, 13, 20, 22, 39, 40, 43, 120, 124, 126, 137, 138, 150 personal reflections, 23–44 Kjellen, Rudolf, 62 Koentjaraningrat, Radan Mas, 137 Kolluoglu-Kirli, Biray, 41 Krastoka, Paul, 10, 63 Kuah Khun Eng, 43 Kuhn, Thomas S., 56, 63 Kyoto University, 84 Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 67, 68 Graduate School for Asian and African Area Studies, 70 labour migration, 34 Labu dan Labi, 174–76 Ladurie, Emmanuel Le Roy, 143 Landes, David, 142, 154, 161 language competency, 133 language courses, 35 neglect, 89

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Index

201

language instruction, 3, 8, 9, 35 improvements, 96–101 loss of enrolment, 97 method, 95 need for, 93–96 problems, 92 structure, 88 languages minority, 35 language study Europe, in, 91 importance, 86 language teaching, see language instruction Laos, 61 Latvia, 61 Law of the Three Seals, 69 Leach, Edmund, 126 Lee Kuan Yew, 179 Leiden University, 4, 125, 162 Lewis, Martin, 63 Liddle, William, 151 Lieberman, Victor, 24, 33, 40, 43, 155, 161 Likhit Dhivaravegin, 151 Lindblad, Thomas, 151 lines of enquiry, 90 Lockarde, Craig, 178 Lodge, David, 62 Lombard, Denys, 13, 24, 59, 64, 125, 137, 146 longitudinal studies, 141 Mackinder, Halford John, 62 Maeda-Tachimoto, 69, 70, 84 Malay cinema literature of, 165–67 Malay Film Production, 171 Malaysia creation, 174–76 Malay urbanization, 178 Manchurian Railway Company, 67 Maphilindo, 46

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

201

markets changing, 27, 28, 29, 34, 35 Marrison, Geoffrey E., 163 McCargo, Duncan, 102–22 McCloud, Donald, 136, 139 McCoy, Alfred, 21 McVey, Ruth, 21, 24, 25, 26, 33, 41, 42, 44, 63 Meyrowitz, J., 136 Michaud, Jean, 43 Middlebury College, 101 Middle Eastern Islamic ideas transmission to Indonesia, 156 Milner, Anthony, 28, 163, 166 Mizuno, 70 Mohammed Halib, 127 Moldova, 61 Monash University Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, 6 moral economy, 1 Morin, Edgar, 14 multi-disciplinary community studies, 71 multi-disciplinary research, 15 multi-laterality, 65–85 multiple centres of power, 129 multiple modernities, 154 music role in cinema, 165 narrative history-writing, 143 nationalism nature of, 60 nationalistic historical discourse, 80 national policy, 8 National University of Singapore, 12, 28, 36, 37 Neher, 11, 49 Nôm, 19 Nordholt, Henk Schulte, 63 Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 35 Northern Illinois University, 94

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202

Index

novels modernist Islamic, 151 novelty, see intellectual novelty O’Connor, Richard, 30, 42 Okell, John, 94 Omar Rojik, 172 Orientalism debate, 149 Orientalists paradigms, 4 Osterhammel, Jurgen, 153, 155 Overing, Joanna, 137 Overseas Development Administration, 67 PERSAMA, 171–74 P. Ramlee, 162–79 Pacific Asian Cultural Studies Forum, 33 Pacific Asian studies programmes, 35 Pacific Association, 67 Pali, 98 paradigm of area studies, 134 Parker Report, 5 Pauker, Guy, 121 Peleggi, Maurizio, 146, 158 Pemberton, John, 150 Penarek Bechak, 167–71 Platt, Martin, 86–101, 163 Popkin, Samuel, 147 post-modernism, 59 post-structuralism, 26, 27, 29, 33, 34 Prewitt, Kenneth, 21 professional associations, 35 professionalization, 112 Project for Critical Asian Studies, 33 published works pattern, 90 publishers, 114 Pye, Lucien, 121 Quah, Jon, 122

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

202

Raben, 10 Rafael, Vincente, 21, 147 Rafferty, Alan, 94 Rajah, Ananda, 21, 24, 39 Raphel, Vince, 138 Rapport, Nigel, 137 realists, 48 realist approach, 47 Red River Delta, 69 Reid, Anthony, 20, 22, 24, 28, 33, 42, 46, 48, 62, 63, 125, 146, 155 religion and culture, 2 Remco, Raben, 63 research funds availability, 57 research themes innovative, 16 Reynolds, Craig, 24, 25, 26, 29, 40, 41, 42, 44, 136 revolutionary paradigm, 56 Ricci, David, 118, 122 Ricklefs, Merle, 145 Riddell, Peter, 156 Rigg, Jonathan, 149 Rimmer, Peter, 147 Robison, Richard, 149 Rockefeller Foundation, 5 SARS, 2 Said, Edward, 108, 121 Sakurai, Yumio, 69 Sandhu, Kernial Singh, 63, 122 Sanskrit, 98 Sartono Kartodirdjo, 146, 158 Sather, Clifford, 43 Scarborough Report, 4, 5 scholars internal divisions, 14 scholarship communicating, 18 School of Oriental and African Studies, 4, 91, 92, 108

8/24/06, 11:49 AM

Index

203

Schulte Nordholt, 10 Schwin, Bettina, 20 Scott, James, 99, 147, 158 Sear, Laurie, 150 Selden, Mark, 105, 120 Shalini Randeria, 153 Shamsul A.B., 25, 137 Sharp, Lauriston, 5 Shaw Brothers decline, 173 Shimizu, Hajime, 84 Silapakorn University in Thailand, 74 Smail, John, 58, 64, 144, 157 Smith, Ralph, 103, 120 Smith, Mike, 114 Smyth, David, 165 Solheim, Wilhelm, 25 Sombat Chantornvong, 109, 121 Southeast Asia complexity, 10 definition, 10 film, literature and context, 162–79 role of region, 12 specialists, 114–16 Southeast Asianists foreign or local, 28, 29, 35–38 Southeast Asian history new directions, 152–56 Southeast Asian politics, 101–22 historical tendencies, 103–08 Southeast Asian studies agenda, 12–17 area studies, 4, 5 budget cuts, 3 cult of theory vs language study, 86–101 current developments, 20 developing Southeast Asian history, 142, 148–52 heuristic approach, adopting, 130–33 local scholars, dilemma of, 109–13 multi-discplinary approach, 131

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

203

multi-laterality, 82, 83 new approaches, 78–82 new perspectives, 140–61 new programmes, 2 patterns of development, 10–12 reconceptualizing, 123–39 reconfiguration, 9 research agenda, 3 revival, 7 site of displacement, 6 Southeast Asia, in, 74–78 stagnation and repression, 6, 7 tenured positions, loss of, 3 unclear boundaries, 4 United States, beyond, 108, 109 Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Programme, 9, 12 Southeast Asian text need for translations, 88 Steedly, Mary Margaret, 23, 24, 26, 30, 39, 43, 138 Stoler, Ann Laura, 158 Stone, Lawrence, 143, 156 strikes film workers, 171–74 student demand Southeast Asian studies, for, 27 study abroad programmes, 97 Suehiro, 69 Sukothai inscriptions, 68 Sumatra East, 145 surface impressionism, 115 Sutherland, Heather, 23, 25, 34, 44, 46, 148 symbolic meaning of objects, 59 Takaya, Yoshikazu, 68 Tanabe, 69 Tan Liok Ee, 63 Tannenbaum, Hjorleifur Jonsson Nicola, 83

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204

Index

Tarling, Nicholas, 21, 147, 159 Taufik Abdullah, 40, 110 technological advances, 7 terrorism, 2 Thai experts, 32 Thailand Research Fund, 75 Thak Chaloemtiarana, 109, 121 Thammasat University, 12 Thee Kian Wie, 151 theatre state, 1 theoretical knowledge production, 1 theoretical meta-treatments, 89 Theravada Buddhism, 68 Thomas, M. Ladd, 121 Thompson, Marc, 150 Thongsa Sayavongkhamdy, 85 Tilly, Charles, 142, 153, 161 Tokyo University Department of Oriental History, 4 Tokyo University of Foreign Studies, 4, 67 Institute for Asian and African Language and Culture, 67 Toyota Foundation, 74, 75 Toyo Bunko, 4 trade union film workers, 167 Trocki, Carl, 147 Tsing, Anna Lownhaupt, 138 Tsubouchi, 69, 70 tsunami, 2 Tunku Shamsul Bahrin, 21 Uhde, Jan, 166 United States, 87–91 University of Amsterdam, 23 University of Brunei, 12 University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), 28 Comparative and Interdisciplinary Research Program on Asia, 15

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

204

University of Copenhagen, 92 University of Hull, 5 University of Kent, 5 University of Lund, 101 University of Malaya, 7, 12, 74 University of Wisconsin, 94 urbanization, 34 van der Heide, William, 166, 177 van der Molen, 64 Van Leur, 58, 64, 144 van Schendel, Willem, 21, 25, 32, 34, 43, 49, 63 Vatikiotis, Michael, Vietnam reunification, 14, 61 Vietnam Academy of Social Sciences, 7 Vietnam National University, 12 Vietnamologists, 32 Vries, P.H.H., 156 Wakin, Eric, 106, 121 Wang Gungwu, 25, 29, 42 Warren, James, 147, 159 Wazir-Jahan Karim, 137 weapons of the weak, 1 Werner, Michael, 153 Western perspective definition of Southeast Asia, 10 Widler, William, 24 Wigan, Karin, 63 Wilson, David, 121 Wingspread, 100 Winichakul, Thongchai, 63, 137, 152, 153, 160 Wolters, Oliver, 24, 125, 136, 137, 138, 159 workforce transformation, 34 Wyatt, David, 145

8/24/06, 11:49 AM

Index

205

Yale, 5 Yekti Maunati, 40 Yemen, 61 Yoko Hayami, 65–85 Zawawi Ibrahim, 149 Zimmermann, Benedicte, 153

11 SEA Studies Index.pm65

205

8/24/06, 11:49 AM