Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies CHARLES KEYES, VICENTE RAFAEL, AND LAURIE J. SEARS, SERIES EDITORS
Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies This series offers perspectives in Southeast Asian Studies that stem from reconsideration of the relationships among scholars, texts, archives, field sites, and subject matter. Volumes in the series feature inquiries into historiography, critical ethnography, colonialism and postcolonialism, nationalism and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, science and technology, politics and society, and literature, drama, and film. A common vision of the series is a belief that area studies scholarship sheds light on shifting contexts and contests over forms of knowing and modes of action that inform cultural politics and shape histories of modernity. Imagined Ancestries of Vietnamese Communism: Ton Duc Thang and the Politics of History and Memory by Christoph Giebel Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present edited by Mary S. Zurbuchen Seditious Histories: Contesting Thai and Southeast Asian Pasts by Craig J. Reynolds Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects edited by Laurie J. Sears
Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects
Edited by
LAURIE J. SEARS
UNIVERSITY OF WASHINGTON PRESS Seattle in association with NUS PRESS Singapore
Publication of this book is made possible with the assistance of the Ford Foundation; a grant from the Charles and Jane Keyes Endowment for Books on Southeast Asia, established through the generosity of Charles and Jane Keyes; and by the Jackson School Publications Fund, established through the generous support of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation and other donors, in cooperation with the Henry M. Jackson School of International Studies and the University of Washington Press. Copyright © 2007 by the University of Washington Press Printed in Singapore All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Published simultaneously in Singapore and the United States. University of Washington Press PO Box 50096 Seattle, WA 98145, USA www.washington.edu/uwpress NUS Press National University of Singapore AS3-01-02. 3 Arts Link Singapore 117569 www.nus.edu.sg/npu ISBN 978-9971-69-366-4 (Paper) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Knowing Southeast Asian subjects / edited by Laurie J. Sears. p. cm. — (Critical dialogues in Southeast Asian studies) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-295-98683-8 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-295-98683-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Southeast Asia—Study and teaching (Higher)—United States. 2. Southeast Asia—Study and teaching (Higher) I. Sears, Laurie J. (Laurie Jo) DS524.8.S55K66 2007 959—dc22 2006037853 Cover: Black Tai woman’s skirt, weft ikat, supplementary weft, Northern Vietnam. Copyright Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture, catalog #2003-40/10. The paper used in this publication is acid-free and 90 percent recycled from at least 50 percent post-consumer waste. It meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.
This book is dedicated to Daniel S. Lev, an exemplary role model of how compassionate, wise, and generous an area studies scholar can be.
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Contents Preface
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Introduction Knowledges That Travel in Southeast Asian Area Studies Carlo Bonura and Laurie J. Sears
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PART I: SOUTHEAST ASIAN SUBJECTS 1.
Postcolonial Identities, Feminist Criticism, and Southeast Asian Studies Laurie J. Sears
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2.
Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies? 75 Ariel Heryanto
3.
Recognizing Scholarly Subjects: Collaboration, Area Studies, and the Politics of Nature Celia Lowe
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PART II: COLLABORATIONS, COLLECTIONS, DISCIPLINES 4.
5.
6.
Southeast Asian Studies in the United States and Southeast Asia: Missing Links George Dutton Disciplining Knowledge: Representing Resources for Southeast Asian Studies in the Libraries of the U.S. Academy Judith A. N. Henchy Political Science, the Anxiety of Interdisciplinary Engagement, and Southeast Asian Studies Carlo Bonura
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Bibliography
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Notes on Contributors
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Index
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Preface The authors of the essays gathered here have traveled between Southeast Asia and the United States for several decades. Celia Lowe sailed her boat into the Timor Sea on her first visit to the region in the 1980s. Ariel Heryanto came from Indonesia to study in the United States in the early 1980s. Tales of Java and Bali drew Laurie Sears to Indonesia in 1972 after she had been traveling in South Asia for several years. For Judith Henchy, it was her concern with Viet Nam in the wake of the Viet Nam–American War that attracted her to the region in the 1970s. George Dutton took his college junior year abroad in Singapore in the late 1980s after being inspired by a historian of Southeast Asia, and Carlo Bonura visited Southeast Asia to find answers to questions concerning pluralism in Malaysia raised in his undergraduate studies in the mid-1990s. These journeys changed the course of our lives and made Southeast Asian area studies the focus of our life’s work. We all approached the field through different disciplinary paths, and over the years we have observed and taken part in the transformations of our disciplines in response to expanding movements of people and ideas. This book intends to spark reactions and responses. We have opened up dialogues about the imbalances between area studies in the United States and Southeast Asia that we hope will continue to percolate throughout the expanding field of Southeast Asian studies. In 2003 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak published a book entitled Death of a Discipline about the confluence of area studies and comparative literatures. In her challenge to the discipline of comparative literature to open its doors to literatures from the global South, she mentions that she was inspired by the Ford Foundation’s Crossing Borders program, conceptualized by Toby Volkman after a meeting with about a dozen area studies scholars in New York in 1996. The Crossing Borders initiative of the mid-1990s encouraged area studies and disciplines to look beyond their borders and to start new conversations about regions and knowledge production. The present volume
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was also inspired by Toby Volkman and her continuing efforts to support the work of area studies at the Ford Foundation and elsewhere. Many of the authors of these essays were also influenced by the virtual conversations that were published by the Social Science Research Council as Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After in 2000, after the Social Science Research Council and the Ford Foundation brought about two dozen scholars of Southeast Asia to New York in November and December 1999 to discuss the state of the field. I say “virtual conversations” because the responses that appeared in Weighing the Balance were actually solicited and written before the meetings were held, and they were then carefully edited to appear as conversations. These virtual conversations, and the ones that took place at the meetings, marked an important milestone in the field of Southeast Asian studies. Many of the participants were women and scholars from Southeast Asia. Exciting ideas and new directions for scholarship emerged. Over the past few years, my colleagues and I have continued debates at the University of Washington over the question of area studies in general and Southeast Asian area studies in particular. In 2003, as the chapters were assuming their current form, I encountered Ariel Heryanto’s essay “Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies?” in the new journal Moussons (vol. 5, 2002), published in Paris. The editor of Moussons and Ariel Heryanto kindly granted us permission to include the essay in this volume. Heryanto’s essay complemented the other essays in this book, and it inspired many of us to rethink our essays in different ways. We were helped along in this endeavor by the reports of five anonymous readers for the University of Washington Press. We appreciate the patience of Michael Duckworth at the University of Washington Press as we brought these essays into print. The introduction to this book is the product of a collaboration between Carlo Bonura and Laurie Sears. The logics of our different disciplines made Bonura impatient with the historian’s desire for contextualization and made Sears mystified by the intellectual knots enjoyed by the political theorist. We hope that what we learned about our own and each other’s writing process will stay with us for future collaborations. Part of the inspiration for the introduction came from Bonura’s experience at a conference at the Institute of Asian Research
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in Singapore and Sears’s experience at a conference at the International Institute for Asian Studies in Leiden in the summer of 2004. Both of them met many of the same people from Southeast Asia and EuroAmerica only weeks apart and on different sides of the globe. Institutes like ARI and IIAS in Southeast Asia and elsewhere are at the heart of a cosmopolitan understanding of Southeast Asian studies today. Special thanks go to Toby Volkman for the original impetus to begin this undertaking and to the Ford Foundation, who provided initial support. Mary Zurbuchen, a former Ford Foundation representative, provided much encouragement and timely advice. Terry Lautz and Helena Kolenda, of the Henry Luce Foundation, provided information on Luce Foundation funding to the field of Southeast Asian studies. The Department of Education Title VI program provided statistics and grant materials, and center directors from Title VI– funded National Resource Centers also provided information. Neither the Ford Foundation nor any of these individuals or organizations are responsible for any of the material in these essays. We thank Charles Keyes and Vince Rafael and the Critical Dialogues in Southeast Asian Studies series of the University of Washington Press for their support. Sears would also like to acknowledge the enthusiastic support for this book from many colleagues at the University of Washington, who are strong, and occasionally new, advocates for the work of Southeast Asian area studies. In particular, the support of Tani Barlow, Miriam Bartha, Francisco Benitez, Mary Callahan, Tom Gething, Christoph Giebel, Gael Tarleton, Sara Van Fleet, Kathleen Woodward, and Anand Yang has been important. We would all like to acknowledge the excellent contributions of Brian Hammer, who recently received his PhD in geography at the University of Washington. Brian conducted oral interviews, compiled data, and meticulously finished the final editing and formatting of the manuscript. The authors of these essays were not sanguine about the unending amount of work they had to do to respond to the comments of different reviewers. Were it not for the readiness of her partner, Wolfgang Linser, to engage in long conversations about the field of Southeast Asian studies, the editor could not have persevered with the project.
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Introduction
Knowing Southeast Asian Subjects
1
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Introduction
Introduction
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Introduction Knowledges That Travel in Southeast Asian Area Studies CARLO BONURA AND LAURIE J. SEARS Understanding is a conceptual, political, and ethical practice. Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today
B
y examining various claims to knowledge and the disciplinary discourses that structure the practices of area studies, the essays gathered here respond to Rabinow’s challenge to address the work of “understanding.” The contributors formulate complex epistemological questions, including: How does the rising preponderance of scholarship from the region de-center scholarship in American Southeast Asian studies? What does it mean to know Southeast Asia? And which knowledges are valid, theoretical, or “true”? The coherence of the field of Southeast Asian studies is located in the midst of these varied claims to represent the region. Keeping in mind that representation is never neutral, our essays explore how the changing hierarchical relationships between Southeast Asia and the Euro-American “West” have resulted in parallel changes in scholarship on Southeast Asia.1 This book suggests that the future of Southeast Asian studies lies in a rethinking of disciplinary and regional claims to knowledge and in the new paradigms emerging from conversations between scholars of and from the region. Rethinking the practice of area studies is not a call for “better,” more “precise,” or more steadfastly “scientific” knowledge that would ground the field; rather, it is a call to come to terms with the politics, tensions, and gaps involved in the production of knowledge about a 3
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particular region of the globe. Three academic inquiries within the humanities and social sciences of the past twenty-five years establish the context for our inquiry: anthropology’s examination of its own engagement with colonialism; acknowledgment of the ties of modern area studies to geopolitical campaigns and priorities; and debates arising out of cultural studies over cultural relativism and the necessary contingency of knowledge production. The essays that follow address these concerns by pointing to the ways in which all claims to disciplinary knowledge must recognize the limits on their ways of knowing. The aim here is not to foreclose the possibilities of scholarship but to qualify the knowledge of area studies. It is to replace the claims to authoritative knowledge with a continuous reference to critical practices. This also involves relinquishing certain prejudices concerning the quality of scholarship elsewhere and assumptions of objectivity that always set the informed scholar against the mystified native informant. As a collection of writings from authors of various disciplines, this book does not merely present an additional critique of area studies, nor does it take a “professional” focus by suggesting improvements to a “field” with the intent of increasing the quality of future scholarly projects. This latter focus, which encourages “progress” in Southeast Asian studies, would require an outline of possible resolutions to the complex challenges and paradoxes currently facing transnational research on the region. Many of these challenges are outlined below. Rather than establishing them as problems to be solved, however, each essay addresses concerns that are epistemological and thematic, as well as practical, citing ways in which area studies are changing in the face of new transnational forces and disciplinary challenges.
Geopolitics and the Changing Context of Area Studies One such transnational force lies in the priority granted to terrorism as a primary global threat. The terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 instantaneously changed the strategic importance of Southeast Asia in the security planning of the United States. Home to over a quarter of a billion Muslims, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and southern Thailand have all become suspect sites within the analysis of American security agencies. With the aim of assisting counterterrorism
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efforts, American military advisers returned to the Philippines fifteen years after the closing of Clark Air Force Base and Subic Bay Naval Station. In Indonesia and Malaysia, pockets of resentment against America continue to grow because of the U.S. preemptive war in Iraq and America’s unconditional support for Israel in the Middle East.2 American news reports about suspected “terrorists” based in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, or the Philippines are reprinted daily in the Southeast Asian presses, while sporadic violence feeds rumors of links to al-Qaeda, making it difficult to assess or predict the long-term effects of America’s “war on terror” for Southeast Asia. The practice of contemporary area studies occurs within this context of global volatility that challenges its scope and content. Global political changes, such as the end of the Cold War or the U.S.-led “war on terror” and war in Iraq, raise questions concerning the ability of or the desirability for area studies to respond to geopolitical events and contexts. The suggestion of the waning relevance of area studies as a means of structuring international scholarship has been termed the “afterlife of area studies” by Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian. Speaking to a perceived lack of communication between area studies and current issues of geopolitics and globalization, Miyoshi and Harootunian employ the term “afterlife” to identify a “perspective that has surpassed the older global divisions inaugurated after World War II that informed the organization of knowledge … but [were] considered essential in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union.” The end of the Cold War enacted a political uncoupling of area studies from its “regions,” even though the persistence and relative institutional stability of area studies in the 1990s revealed a failure to recognize the moment at which “the world we now live in has already exceeded the original horizons of area studies programs, or even an approach that reduces a region to a cultural whole in time and space.”3 Miyoshi and Harootunian envision a future in which “international studies” would be truly transnational through scholarship that does not begin with a geography of the world ordered from within American, European, or Japanese academies. Assuming there was a historical moment, inaugurated with the cessation of the Cold War, in which the “afterlife” of area studies could be imagined, the new geopolitics of terror and its wars seems to have resurrected area studies. Also, seen from the perspective of
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gender analysis, the “war on terror” has re-masculinized the practice of area studies. Security studies and the instrumentalization of knowledge have moved from the periphery to the center of Department of Education priorities for the funding of area studies. Urgent themes relating to national security in the days after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington included the public call for speakers of Arabic and an even more public review of global intelligence capabilities. In light of the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as worries over the spread of al-Qaeda into Southeast Asia, language training and accurate comparative analyses are suddenly seen to play a crucial role in the calculation of national defense. Translation, textual analysis, religious studies, comparative political analysis, and ethnography now have a critical importance to the practices of Special Forces, intelligence officers, and provisional administrators. What role should area studies play in this time of global conflict? The articulation of national security needs after 9/11 assumes a configuration and obligation of area studies similar to those underlying the initial founding of area studies in the post–World War II period. Yet, the content of area studies scholarship has come under fire from those who now claim to need it. Naturalized as a resource in a time of war and national insecurity over terror, area studies now lie at the center of a debate over their own capabilities. The emerging controversy over political “bias” in area studies (among other forms of scholarship) marks a crucial shift from the disciplinary quandaries affecting area studies in the 1990s to institutional debates over Department of Education Title VI obligations.4 This shift manifests as the internationalization of the culture wars and moves questions of the relationship between knowledge and national security squarely into the public sphere. It does so by making explicit the relationship between the knowledge of area studies and the priorities of homeland security. Following the introduction of the International Studies in Higher Education Act in 2003, a growing public conversation emerged over what is seen as pervasive “anti-Americanism” and the open questioning of foreign policy from within area studies. Stanley Kurtz, perhaps the most widely recognized academic advancing such critiques (and whose testimony to Congress flooded the e-mail of those involved in area studies in 2003–2004), suggested that the reforms outlined in the act, including the formation of an oversight commission, would allow for
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“a restoration of intellectual and political balance to our area studies programs.”5 The imbalance that Kurtz perceived as threatening national security arose from “the ruling intellectual paradigm in academic area studies (especially Middle Eastern Studies) called ‘post-colonial theory.’”6 The intellectual diversity of Southeast Asian studies, which will be discussed in great detail throughout this volume, denies the possibility of a single “ruling intellectual paradigm.” Nonetheless, Kurtz’s chief anxiety rests with the left-leaning politicization of area studies scholars: “the core premise of post-colonial theory is that it is immoral for a scholar to put his knowledge of foreign languages and cultures at the service of American power.”7 On the other hand, scholars like Harootunian cite the failure of U.S.-based area studies in their response to Edward Said’s trenchant critique of orientalist scholarship carried out to serve the imperial project.8 Whether area studies as practiced in the United States today serve government interests or not, Kurtz’s caricature is reminiscent of unresolved questions of ethical responsibility that have so vexed Southeast Asian studies since the Viet Nam–American War. Writing as scholars at this critical moment of geopolitical engagement, we believe it is crucial that area studies continue to raise questions about complex social and political realities and to postpone the absolute certainty of geopolitical “intelligence.” In the spirit of Paul Rabinow’s requirements for “understanding,” Southeast Asian studies scholars must become critically engaged in public, political, and academic debates that link the region’s current political conditions to the war on terror. Such critical engagement is central to the vitality of higher education in a democratic society. It prolongs the interrogation of complex conditions rather than imagining an epistemological certainty that would serve as an absolute foundation for national policies. This question of certainty and the expedience of geopolitics should by now, after the demonstration of faulty intelligence used to enter into the war with Iraq, be openly discussed in area studies programs and should redefine the relationship between academics and their publics. Critical engagement extends beyond an assessment of the role of scholars in public debate over foreign policy to the development of an active reflexive moment of scholarship: it requires engaging with global scholarship, recognizing the unilateral production of universals, questioning the replication of unequal patterns of data collection and
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storage, and acknowledging the lack or inadequacy of institutional collaborations. Several essays in this book explore these questions in considerations of the impacts of the Cold War and the Viet Nam–American War on the constitution of Southeast Asian studies, noting the complex relationships of ethics and responsibility that continue to trouble the field. In a new book on Southeast Asian studies discussed below, Ruth McVey comments on the two themes of nationalism and modernization that formed the focus of work on Southeast Asia in the 1950s and 1960s. “Some Southeast Asia specialists considered the former aspect all-important, with national self-realisation the goal to be achieved whatever its further ideological consequences; others saw preventing nascent Southeast Asian states from falling domino-fashion into the black hole of Communism as the essential task. Both approaches were basically evangelical, and both saw nation-building and modernization as inextricably entwined.”9 Her comments on this seem prescient for the present geopolitical moment, when a new American evangelical project of nation building is restructuring political alignments and sympathies across the globe.
Area Studies and Its Critiques Such geopolitical contexts and concerns are obviously not new to area studies. Parallel to these debates, a series of recent critiques of area studies have emerged that help scholars to rethink its practices. These challenges question both the appropriateness and the capacity of area studies to successfully produce meaningful comparisons. The term “meaningful” here does not refer to a notion of “value free” or objective knowledge. In the critiques of area studies discussed in this section, the emphasis lies not on the aim of producing objective narratives about the region of Southeast Asia but on disassembling those epistemological structures at the core of the institution of area studies that enable an unquestioned objectivity to be present in the knowledge of the field and of the region itself. This projection of objectivity, however, actually betrays a particular formation of knowledge that exceeds a mere certainty and articulates a claim to a superiority of knowledge and method. Critiques of area studies challenging this privileging of knowledge produced in Europe
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and North America have often phrased such a superiority in terms of (a “Western” or even American) universalism. Area studies’ role in the production of this universal is its comparative dimension in which a particular configuration of the “West” is held as the standard for global comparison. David Szanton’s introduction to his edited collection The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, a comprehensive volume that consists of essays on the state of area studies across many different world areas, provides an entrance point into this discussion of area studies and its critiques.10 The central aim of the project of area studies for Szanton is to “deparochialize U.S.- and Euro-centric visions of the world in the core social science and humanities disciplines, among policy makers, and in the public at large.”11 In effect, area studies provides the opportunity to shift the “vision” of academies and publics beyond their national borders. Its “original goal,” which Szanton admits is getting increasingly more difficult to achieve, lies in “translating back to us the continuing diversities of the world.”12 Relying upon a liberal logic of representing “diversity,” deparochialization, therefore, requires an acknowledgement of other cultures and nations made visible through this act of “translation.”13 The ultimate benefit of area studies is to broaden the horizons of the publics that academies serve and to “de-naturalize the formulations and universalizing tendencies of the U.S. social science and humanities disciplines which continue to draw largely on U.S. and European experiences.”14 In this sense the work of area studies is to dissolve these “universalizing tendencies.” Harootunian lends some detail to these logics, suggesting that “the inevitable impulse to compare became fused with a strategy to classify and categorize according to criteria based upon geopolitical privilege. As a result of this principle of classification, societies were invariably ranked according to their spatial distance from an empowering model that was identified with the achievement of industrial and technological supremacy.”15 Given the centrality of this “impulse” of comparativism to area studies, a “fusion” found in its very methods, it is crucial to recognize that addressing parochialism is not just a matter of leveling a global playing field but requires further investigation into the very epistemological foundations of area studies. These foundations continuously pose, in the words of Pheng Cheah, “the methodological problem of how to think about matters
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comparatively, without dogmatically privileging the North Atlantic as the main point of theoretical reference or taking it for granted as a world-historical telos.”16 For a theoretically engaged look at area studies in general and East Asian studies in particular, one can turn to Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian’s above-mentioned edited volume Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies. The book addresses the effects of both cultural studies and postcolonial theory on area studies of East Asia; the different economic configurations between those who study the East Asia region and those who are studied make the comparison with Southeast Asian studies a sobering one. The topic of inequalities of wealth between scholars and subjects in the field of Southeast Asian studies is rarely discussed but has a major impact on both the quality and quantity of research coming out of Southeast Asia.17 In his own essay in that volume, Harootunian sees the future of area studies in a methodology that draws together the specificity of area studies scholarship and the theoretical sophistication of postcolonial theory, which “might infuse into a moribund area studies the memory of a desire for theory which, as I’ve suggested, was early repressed in the scramble to recruit funds rather than ideas.” He also argues for more attention to questions of capitalism and modernity and their transformations: “Such a study might redirect our attention to the role played by capitalism throughout the globe and to the relationship between the experience of everydayness and the relentless regime of the commodity form.”18 Area studies, in this light, require an engagement with these coexisting equivalents arising out of the everyday experience of modernity, an engagement that does not take one particular geopolitical formation (Europe or the United States) as its sole standard for comparison. Two recent collections devoted specifically to Southeast Asian studies attempt to rethink both the pedagogy of area studies and its capacity to posit “areas” as the grounds for comparison: Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives, edited by Anthony Reid; and Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space, edited by Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben, and Henk Schulte Nordholt.19 Reid’s book is unique in several ways: it addresses the de-centering of U.S.-based Southeast Asian studies by looking at the field from Southeast Asia, Japan, Australia, and the United States. In their essay
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in the volume, Reid and Maria Serena I. Diokno term this “completing the circle,” as the field of Southeast Asian studies presumably returns to the place from which it originated. The book investigates the particular configuration of Southeast Asian studies on the U.S. West Coast and how the large numbers of Asian American students from Southeast Asia might have an impact on the field. Peter Zinoman makes interesting predictions for the future of Viet Nam studies in the United States when he notes: “However, it is my hunch that second generation Vietnamese American graduate students may not recognize their hard-working immigrant parents in the portraits of feckless corruption that dominate the discourse on the RVN [Republic of Viet Nam]. At the very least, this misrecognition should induce them to write the perspectives of their parents’ generation back into the history of the Vietnam War, and to nurture in their own work an ambitious, aggressive, and ultimately productive revisionism.”20 Zinoman’s predictions for the future of Viet Nam studies draw attention to questions of pedagogy as well as to the ways in which the areas of area studies are likely to change as borders are refigured across region and discipline. Locating Southeast Asia, a collection of essays by scholars in Southeast Asia, Europe, Japan, and the United States, addresses the second of these concerns. Honoring the work of Heather Sutherland, the book takes space as its organizing principle, and it poses the question of what the “area” of Southeast Asia means in an era of globalization. In a thought-provoking essay, South Asianist Willem van Schendel focuses on the geographical concept of scale and its implications for Southeast Asian studies in particular and area studies in general.21 Van Schendel’s perceptions of the Southeast Asia field are thought-provoking. Some areas, as defined by academic programmes, have a strong central court. South Asian studies are a case in point. Here most scholars work on India, perhaps even North India. By contrast, Southeast Asian studies appear to form more of a multi-centred mandala based on an alliance of three major provincial factions: Indonesianists, Thai experts, and Vietnamologists. The concerns of these groups dominate the field. They tolerate weaker factions at the peripheries, such as those generating scholarly knowledge about lesser satrapies known as the Philippines, Laos, Malaysia or Burma. And then there are the marches, the borderlands that separate the
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region from other world regions. In the case of Southeast Asia these are the liminal places referred to above: Northeast India, Yunnan, Sri Lanka, Madagascar, New Guinea, and so on. Those who produce specialist knowledge about these places may occasionally be invited to court, but they will never be included in the power elite.22
Van Schendel’s observations use the logic of the field found in the mandala theories of early Southeast Asian histories to critique the work of its scholars. Although Southeast Asian studies have become more multicentered over the past decade, van Schendel’s caricature continues to haunt the field. The rise of Philippine studies has certainly begun to challenge the Indic- and Sinitic-influenced great-civilizations domination, as it might be called, and innovative scholars whose work is located at the interstices of several Southeast Asian countries have broken out of this earlier pattern. More to the point, there is an opportunity for scholars of Southeast Asia to productively reconsider the borders of the region itself. In the same way that the borders contest the coherence of the region, the borders also rewrite the histories of the area. In the conclusion to his chapter in David Szanton’s Politics of Knowledge, Timothy Mitchell acknowledges the potential of this moment of change in area studies when he argues for the “provincialization” of the social sciences. Mitchell advocates a broader project for area studies, to “offer a place from which to rewrite the history of the social sciences, and to examine how their categories are implicated in a certain history of Europe and, in the twentieth century, an unachieved American project of universal social science.”23 In this spirit, the present volume argues for new interdisciplinary emphases and new models of collaboration and speculates on how Southeast Asian studies are changing. The challenges that the field faces today are different from those imagined in the 1990s. Rather than the problems of funding that discouraged scholars a decade ago,24 there is excitement as new paradigms from scholars located in Southeast Asia challenge the field.25 Some of these critiques are discussed at length in this volume’s opening essays, by Laurie Sears and Ariel Heryanto. The entry of many scholars from Southeast Asia into American academia has happened later in Southeast Asian studies than in other area studies fields; over the past fifteen years, however, their presence has led to the disruption of
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older hierarchies and a more de-centered and vibrant field. The cosmopolitan journeys undertaken to produce this new knowledge of the field seem similar to the journeys linking colony and metropole undertaken in the colonial past.
Colonial Legacies An overview of the production of colonial scholarship is one way to situate the present cosmopolitan nature of knowledge production in the field of Southeast Asian studies, and a focus on cosmopolitanisms as a new emphasis in area studies scholarship must take this history into account. The colonial scholarship covering the countries that presently make up the region of Southeast Asia, although motivated by similar geopolitical concerns, focused on different subjects.26 Before the various societies of Southeast Asia assumed their present national forms, Britain, France, and Holland developed individual scholarly programs for the study of their colonial possessions. Dutch Indology, for example, was modeled on the early-nineteenth-century British study of India and devoted itself to the Indic heritage of Java and Bali. It began in 1830, after the end of the Java War, although the Batavian Academy of the Arts and Sciences (Bataviaasch genootschap voor kunsten en wetenschappen) dates back to 1778.27 The French set up the Ecole française de l’Extrême-Orient in 1898 as a scholarly organization devoted to the study of the Vietnamese, Lao, and Khmer peoples and cultures. The Siamese royals, who ruled the only Southeast Asian country to avoid direct colonization, set up the Siam Society, which held its first meeting in 1904; the Burma Research Society was organized by the British a few years later.28 Although these mostly European societies were set up as scholarly institutions to bolster European culture in the colonies, their other function was to encourage the study of indigenous art, language, culture, and history to aid in governing. Benedict Anderson notes that these local studies emerged only where scholars had to be administrators as well: most colonial scholar-administrators needed to decipher documents and reports, and this might have sparked an interest in ancient inscriptions or royal chronicles.29 Commenting on the model for the training of colonial administrators and advisers as the forerunner of U.S. area studies programs, Ruth
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McVey describes how these programs aimed to produce “language officers” who were conversant with local customs, religion, and power structures. At times those trained in such programs strayed from the politics of the colonial government and became too sympathetic to those they were intended to rule.30 Dutch scholars like T. Pigeaud and G. A. J. Hazeu, who spent considerable time in the Indies in various scholarly or administrative posts, were not necessarily celebrated in the scholarly world of Leiden, even though they eventually returned to academic positions in Holland. In the Dutch academic world of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there was a hierarchical relationship between the scholars in Leiden and the language officers who worked for the colonial government in Java.31 Many of the Leiden scholars relied on Eurasian and Javanese informants for their scholarly data; missionaries also served in this capacity. McVey distinguishes the language officers from the “orientalists” in colonial Southeast Asia. She suggests that the latter usually chose to study “civilizational understanding” and thus avoided the kinds of instrumental knowledge needed by the colonial governments.32 These complexities foreshadowed some of the problems of area studies as they developed in American academia after World War II. The separation of the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences by the latter part of the nineteenth century in Europe, and the rise of the disciplines that have dominated the scholarly world for the past century,33 are not clearly reflected in the scholarly publishing on Southeast Asia. In the colonial scholarship produced by French, British, and Dutch scholars, natural history, archeology, history, ethnology, and literary studies appeared together in the major European journals of the colonial period: Bulletin de l’Ecole française d’Extrême-Orient, Journal of the Malay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society, and Bijdragen tot de taal-, land- en volkenkunde. The two areas of scholarship that dealt with the world outside Europe and the United States were anthropology and oriental studies, with geography included as a kind of subfield of anthropology. Both oriental studies and anthropology were premised upon the “nonhistoricity” of the peoples under study, either the ancient civilizations of India, China, and the Middle East or the unchanging societies of the Southeast Asian island world east of Java and Bali.34 The exemplary works of the colonial scholar-administrators J. van Leur, J. Furnivall, and J. Boeke
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stood out in the world of colonial social science.35 These three scholars are also widely known because their work was available in English. Furnivall wrote in English; Van Leur’s work was translated into English by the noted Dutch sociologist W. Wertheim; the work of Boeke was translated and published by the Institute of Pacific Relations in the United States, both during and after World War II.36 In the United States before World War II, social science work on Southeast Asian societies focused mainly on the U.S. colony of the Philippines. Other parts of Southeast Asia were represented in anthropological work on “traditional” societies or in the divinity schools of Harvard and Yale, where religion programs collected materials for the study of Vietnamese Buddhism for comparison with East Asian traditions or for the study of Burmese or Thai Theravada Buddhism for comparison with the Mahayana traditions. World War II changed U.S. attitudes toward Southeast Asia, where the Pacific war was being fought, rich natural resources were located, and the battleground for the Cold War was slowly coming into focus. European scholars fleeing the Nazi occupation of Europe also brought Southeast Asianist scholarship to the United States.37 Many of the founding members of the field of Southeast Asian studies became acquainted with the region through experiences during World War II: George Kahin received his early training on Indonesia from the U.S. Army, Claire Holt did translations for the Office of Strategic Services, Harry Benda spent the war in a concentration camp for Dutch citizens and other Europeans in the Japanese-occupied Dutch Indies, and Clifford Geertz had just enlisted and was on a ship heading to the South Pacific when the war ended. The personal cosmopolitan journeys of these scholars, so profoundly and variously shaped by World War II, inaugurated the field of Southeast Asian studies in the United States.38
Cosmopolitanisms and Pedagogies With regard to its rapid global formation, the diverse societies it claims to represent, or the travels of its practitioners, the field of Southeast Asian studies has always engaged with questions of cosmopolitanism. The earliest knowledges of the region, and particularly artifacts and texts found or produced in Southeast Asia, were made accessible for study through the work of Chinese or colonial scholars or bureaucrats
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who managed a global movement of people, resources, and ideas. The travels of sailors, traders, scholars, conquerors, and monks to the region from the Indian subcontinent, from the Arab and Persian world, and, more recently, from Europe and the United States informed and reformulated the earliest known histories and cultures of Southeast Asian pasts. Coterminous with these narratives from “without,” the travels of peoples from the region—as traders, scholars, pilgrims, soldiers, diplomats, exiles, students, immigrants, and migrant workers— have been just as important in shaping Southeast Asian mentalities and identities. It should raise no debate to suggest that it is this global engagement, too complex to summarize as a movement of people and thought from “within and without” the region, that has resulted only recently in something that might be called the singular and meaningful region of “Southeast Asia.” In The Spectre of Comparisons, Benedict Anderson attributes the rise of national consciousness to the movement of the colonized between colony and metropole through their participation in European education. It is the doubled vision of seeing the colony as if through an inverted telescope from the metropole that enabled the production of a new national consciousness.39 Whereas Anderson’s reworkings of his earlier theses on nationalism continue to be thought-provoking, his contribution to Southeast Asian studies in the book lies in the rich introductory history he provides of the field’s cosmopolitan origins. The “heterogeneous colonialism” that depended upon colonial scholarship for its ethical legitimation was eclipsed by a similarly heterogeneous (and just as European) effort to construct a post–World War II area studies academy within the United States. Driven by American geopolitical priorities, this new field of study also grappled with these priorities at the same time as its practitioners dealt with the improbability that the recognition of a geographical region could unify scholarship across disparate academic disciplines. The effect of this new field according to Anderson was that “Southeast Asia was more real, in the 1950s and 1960s, to people in American universities than to anyone else.”40 This effect is necessarily contradictory to liberal understandings of cosmopolitanism in a curious way. Although the assemblage of students and faculty was a truly global enterprise (enabling some of those involved to keep “personal connections alive for decades”), it required the crafting of a geographical region to imagine American
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geopolitical ambitions in the global campaign against communism, in the Indochina Wars,41 and more generally in managing an economic semiperiphery. The conclusion garnered from this experience with cosmopolitanism is that it is not uniform in its (liberal) effects and cannot be relied upon by itself as a kind of solution to the paradoxes that area studies present. Cosmopolitanism poses a question rather than an ideal in light of this consideration of its limits. In any consideration of the comparative project of area studies, it is important to ask why certain conditions resist the development of a more cosmopolitan field, which can be defined loosely here as a field dependent upon the dispersal of knowledge across global sites for its constitution. These conditions appear as outstanding chronic problems in Southeast Asian studies outlined in state-of-the-field assessments since the early 1970s. Inequities in funding and resources between American scholars and their Southeast Asian counterparts continue to privilege scholarship moving from the United States toward the region. Although the number of Southeast Asian academics who hold positions as tenure-track or tenured faculty at colleges and universities in the United States is growing, language instructors in the United States—most from Southeast Asia—are uniformly undervalued and prevented from advancement. Moreover, for the most part, Southeast Asian studies retains the presumption (even though the reality may be somewhat different) of a unidirectional project in which academies in Europe, the United States, Australia, or Japan remain distant from the methods, scholarship, and academic trends or politics emerging out of Southeast Asia. Whether this is a matter of academic publishing in national languages, the focus on single countries within area studies scholarship, or the hubris of certain disciplinary regimes of research (that assume that the work of area studies is “data collection”), rectification of this situation requires a broader effort at transnational collaboration to be nurtured in academic production across the region. In the present moment of global capitalism, the cosmopolitan movements of the past have been complicated by faster speeds of travel for peoples, goods, capital, and information.42 Southeast Asian academies are far more integrated today into international currents of scholarship than in the decades that are the focus of Anderson’s brief history. Today, the sites of area studies are scattered across the
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globe. The ability of Southeast Asian scholars and students to move among these sites with increasing frequency is a sign of this developing academic integration. Global Southeast Asian studies networks link Los Angeles and Bangkok, Jakarta and Canberra, Leiden and Manila. Certainly, the rise of the National University of Singapore as a regional center for Southeast Asian studies demonstrates the potential of this global network. One theme of this book is to recognize the way transnational collaborations broaden the foundation of academic knowledge, and how Asian (from both within and outside Southeast Asia), American, European, and Australian scholars continuously reinvent the cosmopolitan networks of area studies. International scholarly exchange, travel, and study, and the academic relationships that grow out of these interconnections, demonstrate the different ways in which scholarship on the region is shaped by new cosmopolitanisms and by formal and informal collaborations. Scholarly priorities, methodological and theoretical debates, the geography of margins and centers, and the values of vernacular language for research are all transformed when the practice of area studies is considered in a global, collaborative context. Returning to the “personal vectors” that punctuate Anderson’s account of the cosmopolitanism of area studies, we note that students from Southeast Asian American communities who attend academic institutions in the United States now make up an important part of the academic constituency of Southeast Asian studies. Area studies are and should be influenced by changing trends in student communities and interests. In a period when scholars feared that the major funding initiatives of the 1980s would expire, and the end of the Cold War seemed to bode ill for the study of less commonly taught languages, Southeast Asian studies has not only increased its presence on campuses in the United States, but, in addition, the very contexts in which Southeast Asian subjects are taught and studied have dramatically changed. The decline of funding for foreign students to study humanities and social sciences in the United States has meant that students from Southeast Asia are increasingly concentrated into professional schools and confined to areas of study where funding is still available, such as the environmental social sciences and demography. The difficulty of procuring U.S. visas in the post-9/11 world has added to the dearth of students from Southeast Asia in U.S. Southeast Asian studies, but
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it has augmented the numbers of Southeast Asian students studying about their region at home or in Europe and Australia. Heritage communities of the children of immigrants and refugees, many of whom came to the United States in the wake of American colonialism or the Indochina Wars, have expanded the demand for courses on the region and for heritage language classes in Vietnamese, Khmer, Thai, Lao, and Tagalog.43 Since the violence that accompanied the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia, new communities of Chinese Indonesians are also appearing in American universities, especially on the West Coast. Pedagogically, addressing the demographics, interests, and histories of the students of area studies (especially at the undergraduate level) calls for a recognition of the dialogic nature of the classroom. This transmission of knowledge, and the conversations and understanding it sparks among students, involve acts of translation crucial to the very possibilities of transnational collaboration. Area studies require collaboration at both poles of their project: both in the transnational production of knowledge and in the global expression of such knowledge. The reality of the classroom, however, necessitates more than an understanding of area studies as a “neutral” expression of knowledge about Southeast Asia. The core of teaching within area studies should include an effort to complicate the “pedagogical” through an explication of the relationship between geopolitical aims and the determination of the content of area studies education. Area studies as a practice can continue to be a space where innovation occurs in tandem with an open acknowledgment of the contexts that determine the production of its knowledges.
Overview of the Essays With contributions from political theorist Carlo Bonura, historian George Dutton, Southeast Asian studies librarian Judith A. N. Henchy, anthropologist and cultural studies scholar Ariel Heryanto, anthropologist Celia Lowe, and historian Laurie J. Sears, this volume addresses recent transformations within the field of Southeast Asian studies, as well as offering a selective history of its formation. As a contribution to conversations on the future of Southeast Asian studies, this work considers the relationships between scholars and scholarship of and from the region: the exchange of environmental knowledge between
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Southeast Asian scientists and experts from the United States; the colonial and postcolonial organization of library holdings; institutional relations between the United States and Southeast Asian states; the status of Southeast Asian studies within the discipline of political science; and new directions for research, pedagogy, and institutional cooperation. This volume’s opening chapter, by Laurie J. Sears, explores the post–World War II growth of scholarship on Southeast Asia as it intersected with geopolitical needs and priorities as well as cosmopolitan theoretical formations arising from literary theory, ethnic studies, and postcolonial theories. As Southeast Asian studies became an institutionalized field of scholarship, differences in academic focus from European colonial involvement in the region quickly arose as American scholars concentrated on topics of nationalism, charisma, state building, and the ethnographic study of culture. This redefinition of academic scope reflected a reliance on disciplinary determinations of research agendas. As such, an emphasis on social science surfaced in the newly formed field of “Southeast Asian” studies contrary to the humanitiesheavy traditions of European scholarship on Asia and Africa. The central role played by the social sciences allowed unavoidable and complex links with the growing challenges of geopolitics. Sears finds that the scarcity of scholars of Southeast Asian literatures in English and comparative literature departments in the United States in the 1970s and 1980s had a profound effect on the development of the field. Expanding on what has become a general critique of area studies— namely, that its inquiries are in many cases the by-products of geopolitics—Sears also demonstrates how the evolution of Southeast Asian studies involves the field’s relationship to interdisciplinary trends. With the rise of British cultural studies and its transformation in the American academy, Southeast Asian studies, according to Sears, has witnessed a “slow movement of these concerns with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender into the field.” The vitality of area studies, its reflexivity or ongoing reconsideration of core theoretical conclusions, depends upon communication with other interdisciplinary concerns (a suggestion contrary to the institutional origins that bind Southeast Asian studies to the architecture of academic disciplines). In the second part of her essay, Sears explores a selection of works by Southeast Asia–based scholars who offer penetrating critiques of earlier area
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studies scholarship produced both within and outside Southeast Asia. In the concluding part of her essay, Sears investigates Southeast Asian studies’ engagement with gender and feminist theory to show “how the theorization of gender can change the way scholars think about notions of power and identity.” Drawing an example from the work of Indonesian novelist Ayu Utami, Sears shows how feminist writing from the region can invigorate both postcolonial literary studies and the study of Indonesian literatures. Sears suggests that the hopes for an invigorated area studies lie in the growing integration of gender theory and feminist critique with new scholarship emerging from inside and outside the region. Constituting Southeast Asia as an object of inquiry, area studies continuously threaten to impose a hierarchical order in which the privileged position of U.S. academic initiatives, reflecting geopolitical inequalities, suppresses Southeast Asian expressions of academic knowledge. Investigating this condition of contemporary Southeast Asian studies, Ariel Heryanto’s chapter identifies a politically significant disconnection between “locally produced knowledge” and the production of area studies scholarship in the United States, Europe, and Australia. Heryanto points out that Southeast Asian graduate students who study in the United States are overqualified in terms of language proficiency and regional experience and underqualified in theoretical analysis: “They are assets (as colleagues, informants, connections, research assistants, fieldwork hosts) for foreign analysts but also suspects (allegedly biased and partial in approaching the common objects of investigation). They cannot be totally ignored, but neither can they be fully assimilated within the old structures of area studies.” Heryanto’s distinction between an “old” and a “new” area studies is insightful, as he points out how area studies will change in response to the increasing numbers of scholars from the region in the field. The primary issues of an imbalance of knowledge and resources between U.S. and Southeast Asian academic institutions, the determination of core research agendas from outside the region, based on North American trends in the social sciences and humanities, and the marginal status of Southeast Asian academics and students in forming a field of Southeast Asian studies in the United States all complicate area studies of the region. Heryanto’s own subtle critique recognizes the anxious position of the field of Southeast Asian studies today,
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cognizant of its place in the ongoing production of orientalist knowledge and relations while at times busily attempting to develop methods and approaches designed to address earlier critiques. Although Heryanto appreciates various individuals and institutions in the United States that have tried to address these concerns, and he is careful to place responsibility on Southeast Asians for failures of their own making, he points out the always-qualified position of Southeast Asian scholars and “voices” in a transnational conversation that area studies attempt to activate. The depiction of Southeast Asians as natural “‘insiders’ of the object of study” places the region’s graduate students and, at times, academics in the difficult position of the subjective analyst, “being too close” to the region, while simultaneously lacking a general knowledge required in area studies analysis, whether in terms of “theory” or with regard to regionwide knowledge. Compounding this insider status is what may seem to be an expression of self-interest by overseas Southeast Asians, namely, research focused solely on a country of origin. The impulse of academics, potentially with the strong encouragement of national governments, to study their own countries impedes the development of an “organically” emergent regional focus to serve as the basis for Southeast Asian studies even in Southeast Asia. A vision common to all the contributors to this volume is the potential of area studies to produce knowledge outside a global academic framework that presumes the privilege and even hegemony of EuroAmerican academic trends and scholars. It is here, suggests Celia Lowe, that postcolonial studies have disrupted the “areas” of area studies. This vision resides in an understanding of multinational collaboration as a crucial relationship emergent in area studies. Responding to Heryanto’s chapter, Lowe’s chapter begins an exploration of scholarly cooperation with a simple, though still politically significant, inquiry: “What might it look like for U.S.-based scholars to proceed as though they did not possess the most significant knowledge about, or all of the solutions to, the world’s difficult problems?” Area studies research in this scenario would require a dialogic relationship between colleagues in the United States and Southeast Asia at the moment of defining research questions. In this manner, collaboration allows for the building of “knowledges that travel” rather than a scientific insistence upon knowledge as a unidirectional universal, with its methods and primary
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topics determined in the United States. Examples outlined by Lowe of research projects that may have implications for the redirection of American social science include the potential of community forestry research in Indonesia for reconsidering the relationship between community and forests in the United States, the benefits for both the United States and Viet Nam in investigating the human costs of the American use of Agent Orange, and the reconsideration of the utility of the definition of Southeast Asia as an “area” of study in research on sustainable development in Thailand. Lowe’s chapter rejects a solely instrumental approach toward multinational collaboration in which Southeast Asian scholars are less than equal in the research process. Such a narrow approach reduces the agency and input of local scholars in research projects organized by international researchers. More broadly, the scientific aim in conceptualizing collaboration instrumentally lies in improving the “productiveness” of such collaborations and reaffirming a narrative of progress in social science in which scholars on both sides of the Pacific come closer together in their understanding of core “scientific” concepts and methods (thus making future cooperation even more productive). An understanding of collaboration focusing solely on the assistance provided by Southeast Asian academics and graduate students to foreign projects reflects a kind of international division of academic labor seemingly already present in the social science research design of area studies. The vision of Lowe’s chapter engages what she refers to as a “new collaborative agenda” that demands a foregrounding of issues of academic agency, responsibility, and access to funding, as well as a recognition that scholars from different national contexts rely on various paradigms or terms in their analyses of social realities that may differ from the academic language of a particular American researcher (in the same way that the languages of scholarship in the United States are infused with different debates and orientations— at times making communication even within a single department difficult). Each moment of collaboration, for Lowe, presents the possibility not only of thinking through this new transnational agenda but also of understanding the centrality of research relations to “the process of decolonizing social science, or the question of rethinking the idea of areas.” Contrary to claims of objectivity in social or natural
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science methodologies, these relations demonstrate the constant entanglement of epistemology, method, and the positionality of the researcher, reflecting the very politics of the arrival of an American researcher at a “foreign” field site. As a global enterprise, beyond the production of scholarship, the practice of Southeast Asian studies is formed by the quality of institutional, academic, and activist linkages between the United States and Southeast Asia. Following up on Lowe’s rethinking of collaborations, George Dutton outlines the institutional relations, nation-building projects, political climate (both in Southeast Asia and the United States after 9/11), and communication technologies that continuously shape Southeast Asian studies. Reconsidering the infrastructures of area studies, Dutton’s work in this volume presents a discussion of the current linkages and institutional relations, or lack thereof, between U.S. and Southeast Asian universities. Although these ties are numerous, through faculty and student exchanges and institutional cooperation, the continual uncertainty of their funding and future reflects the somewhat marginal value placed on Southeast Asian studies by university administrations. Dutton also reiterates a common concern of this volume regarding the unidirectional nature of institutional connections in terms of American university funding efforts to “train” Southeast Asia scholars. One area rarely discussed in academic assessments of area studies lies in the work of political and social activism. As described by Dutton, emerging communications technologies and the changing shape of global activism have presented new opportunities for improved institutional relations. New cooperation between American academics and Southeast Asian activists raises the possibility that over time Southeast Asian activists and scholars will be given a stronger voice in shaping the agenda of U.S. Southeast Asian studies. Dutton suggests that the notion of “expert” may need to be redefined to include activists and others in Southeast Asia who preserve local knowledges. Although these new terminologies and engagements may be facilitated by the advent of the Internet, communications technology fails to provide a panacea to all of the challenges involved in overseas research or global organizing. Vastly increasing the speed with which to foster personal contacts or engage in online scholarship, the Internet has uneven areas of content, undeterminable levels of censorship, and
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limits to user access. Nevertheless, Dutton sees the Internet and other electronic resources as models for potential scholarly collaborations. One of the most important areas of unbalanced collaboration between Southeast Asia and the scholars who study it concerns the building and maintenance of library research collections. Over the past decade, critical scholarship in the fields of history and anthropology has begun to reconsider the relationship between the scholar and the archive. This new scrutiny of the archive emphasizes its role in the production of academic knowledge as a place that strategically redefines objects of inquiry, reflects colonial historical narratives and priorities through its organization, reifies the archive’s importance as a container of historical knowledge, and works continuously to cover over the inescapable arbitrariness of the categories of knowledge it preserves. Very little in general has been written about the necessary coupling of area studies’ international efforts and the requisite domestic collection and organization of materials in libraries. Even less scholarship has focused on the question of the status of library holdings and the future of information sciences with regard to Southeast Asian studies. The contribution to this volume from Judith A. N. Henchy provides a unique discussion of the history and the organizing priorities of library holdings in the United States and elsewhere dealing with Southeast Asia. Henchy’s treatment of the library in the project of area studies, however, does not consider collections of texts in the nation’s premier research universities merely as “progressive” logistical resources necessary to support a vibrant field. Rather, these massive modern archives are viewed as an instance of the epistemological organization of Southeast Asia through the practice of area studies. For Henchy, U.S. library holdings on Southeast Asian topics, from traditionally published texts to newspaper and magazine collections, regional vernacular (or nonnational) materials, newly established collections of video and televisual sources, and still shifting catalogs of Internet sites, reflect “bibliographic and exhibitionary orders” that motivate the practice of collection and legitimate the naming of such holdings as “Southeast Asian.” Although particular methods and traditions of collection within information science may structure these orders, Henchy articulates a broader “information nexus” through which the very shape and limits of the archive are formed. Geopolitical emphasis, issues of regional political economy and prepublication
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censorship, the financial health or crisis of local publishing industries, and the domestic viability of maintaining large non-English-language holdings all affect both the content and the bibliographic arrangement of holdings related to Southeast Asian studies. In fact, through a detailed history of Southeast Asian holdings, Henchy demonstrates how the logic of Southeast Asia library collecting moved from what Walter Benjamin identified as “cult value” to “exhibition value” through early post–World War II library-based initiatives to enable mass access. Just as the discourse of Southeast Asia as a region (born of war) emerged among newly independent nations, various federally and privately funded library consortiums in the United States were established to manage acquisitions from the region and discourage repetition across holdings. This effort spanning over half a century, Henchy argues, positions libraries unwittingly as sites of an unequal gaze that users will experience and learn from well before their journeys to the field. Recognizing inequities in knowledge production between area and academy may represent only one aspect of the epistemological challenges currently facing Southeast Asian studies. Another point of difficulty arises in methodological conflicts between area studies and the disciplines that support the practice of area studies. Carlo Bonura presents a review of scholarship on Southeast Asia within American political science and considers how the discipline of political science in fact exists as “a site of contestation over area studies.” The by-nowfamous debates in political science in the 1990s serve as an introduction to broader questions of what Bonura refers to as a crisis in “interdisciplinary engagement.” In this kind of engagement “the relationship between political science and Southeast Asian studies is often unidirectional (from discipline to area studies).” Particularly in regard to the analysis of culture, anxieties over area studies in political science lead to the establishment of disciplinary boundaries and function to prevent the recognition of area studies as a potential space for innovation. The overarching focus in comparative politics since the 1980s and in the wake of the Indochina Wars has been upon democratization (in the midst of the region’s remarkable economic development), regional security and stability, and broader geopolitical concerns related to the United States. Political science represents the disciplinary “home” of two premier scholars in Southeast Asian studies, Benedict Anderson
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and James Scott, whose studies of nationalism and resistance and whose methodological reliance on ethnography have significantly influenced North American social science. Yet comparative political literature on Southeast Asia and Anderson’s and Scott’s methods and approaches to politics and the nation-state have not transformed the contemporary study of Southeast Asian politics. Bonura shows how anthropologists working on Southeast Asia have recently been focused on civil society and Islam, an area of scholarship traditionally studied by political scientists. He suggests that this provides an opportunity for comparative political theorists to develop more sophisticated approaches to civil society and Islam not only in the analysis of the region but also in rethinking the basic assumptions of civil society within political theory. In exploring these interdisciplinary issues, Bonura concludes that the ways in which new institutionalisms, rational-choice theory, and neorealist international relations have dominated the discipline of political science have hindered the discipline from forging innovative approaches to intersections where culture and politics meet. In this historical moment when international polarities are once again challenging Southeast Asia and Southeast Asianists, reflections on past involvements and cautions for the future may be timely. Bonura and Henchy address the claims of impartiality and cultural relativism in their essays as they look at the imbalances that are reflected in the relationships between the discipline of political science and its area studies “other” and the inequities and relativities of library collecting and cataloging. All the essays in this volume, in fact, address issues of impartiality and inequity and suggest ways in which the area studies of the future may be necessarily different. Responding to the other points raised at the beginning of this introduction, the essays by Heryanto and Lowe address the emergence of anthropology out of colonial categories by looking at the ways in which colonial priorities still shape the nature of scholarship. Both Heryanto and Lowe suggest that these older inequalities are changing. Heryanto sees a future for Southeast Asian area studies as more scholars from Southeast Asia enter the field, and Lowe, while recognizing the difficulties of any collaborative attempt, sees opportunities for new types of collaborations between scholars of and from the region. In their essays, Sears and Dutton trace intellectual and institutional trajectories that reveal the ties of modern area studies to geopolitical concerns and Southeast
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Asian area studies’ growing involvement with questions of identity. This book suggests that continuing investigation of “knowledges that travel” will pave the way for a diasporic and cosmopolitan area studies that is de-centered from its origins in the United States. As we noted in the quotation from Paul Rabinow that opened this introduction, the work of area studies has always had conceptual, political, and ethical dimensions. It has never been more important for Southeast Asianists to speak out about the region and the global geopolitical networks in which it is enmeshed.
Notes 1
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An effort to discuss area studies more broadly requires an engagement with the binary logics of comparison. This engagement automatically raises the question of location: how to define the location of an area studies scholar? In the case of Southeast Asia, the terms “West” and “Euro-America” commonly include Europe, North America, and Australia. Australia’s position is unique since the percentage of scholars from Southeast Asia who teach in Australia is significantly higher than in Europe or the United States. It is also important to acknowledge the role that Japan plays in the construction of academic knowledge about Southeast Asia, even though this book does not explore this issue. Throughout this book, authors use such terms as “the West,” “Euro-America,” or “the global North” to refer to the hegemonic influence of scholars from Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan on the production of knowledge about Southeast Asia. See the collected essays in the special issue “Against Preemptive War,” positions: east asia cultures critique 13, no. 1 (2005). Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian, “Introduction: The ‘Afterlife’ of Area Studies,” in Learning Places: The Afterlives of Area Studies, ed. Masao Miyoshi and H. D. Harootunian (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 14. The Title VI programs of the U.S. Department of Education fund international education on U.S. college campuses through the establishment of National Resource Centers with area studies expertise and by awarding graduate fellowships and monies for outreach programs to college students, scholarly communities, and the general public. U.S. House, “International Programs in Higher Education and Questions of Bias,” Hearing before the Subcommittee on Select Education of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, 108th Congress, 1st session, 19 June 2003, Serial no. 108–21, p. 10. As of September 2006, the U.S. Congress had still not voted to reauthorize the Higher Education Act of 1965. Ibid., 70. Ibid., 9.
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Harry D. Harootunian, “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,” in Learning Places, ed. Miyoshi and Harootunian, 167. Laurie Sears’s essay in the present volume (chap. 1) returns to this observation. Ruth McVey, afterword to The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David Szanton (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004), 312. Szanton, Politics of Knowledge. The volume includes an informative essay by John Bowen on the formation of Southeast Asian studies in the United States. Carlo Bonura’s essay in the present volume (chap. 6) discusses Bowen’s analysis of this formation. Szanton, Politics of Knowledge, 2. Ibid., 3. For a critical discussion of the implicit contradictions at work in this logic of liberalism found in area studies, see Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, no. 41 (Winter 1994): 91–111. Szanton, Politics of Knowledge, 3. Harry D. Harootunian, “Ghostly Comparisons,” in Traces 3: Impacts of Modernities, ed. Thomas Lamarre and Kang Nae-hui (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004), 40. Pheng Cheah, “Grounds of Comparison,” Diacritics 29, no. 4 (Winter 1999): 17. See Ariel Heryanto’s essay in this volume (chap. 2) for some reflections on these inequalities. Harootunian, “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/Area Studies’ Desire,” 172, 173. Anthony Reid, ed., Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives, Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series (Tempe, AZ: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, 2003); and Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds., Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space (Athens: Ohio University Press; Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005). Peter Zinoman, “Vietnamese Americans,” in Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Reid, 302–303. Willem van Schendel, “Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” in Locating Southeast Asia, ed. Kratoska et al., 275–307. Sutherland’s own essay is a masterful survey of pre-nineteenth-century Southeast Asia that revisits major debates in the study of early history. Van Schendel, “Jumping Scale,” 279. Timothy Mitchell, “The Middle East in the Past and Future of Social Science,” in Politics of Knowledge, ed. Szanton, 109. See Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes, and Karl Hutterer, eds., Southeast Asia in the Balance: Reflections from America, 1950–1990 (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1992). See, e.g., Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee, eds., New Terrains in Southeast Asian History (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003); Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal, eds., Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003); and Vedi R. Hadiz
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Introduction and Daniel Dhakidae, eds., Social Science and Power in Indonesia (Jakarta and Singapore: Equinox Publishing, 2005). See Anthony Reid and Maria Serena I. Diokno, “Completing the Circle: Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Reid, for a different take on this argument. For discussions of the naming of the region, see Donald K. Emmerson, “Southeast Asia: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (1984): 1–21; David J. Steinberg et al., In Search of Southeast Asia: A Modern History, rev. ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1985), 3; John Bowen, “The Development of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States,” in Politics of Knowledge, ed. Szanton (University of California Press/University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, edited vol. 3, article 10, 2003, available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/ uciaspubs/editedvolumes/3/10), 7. For a forerunner of area studies in the idea of Kulturkreis in the work of German anthropologists, see Charles MacDonald, “What Is the Use of Area Studies?” IIAS Newsletter 35 (November 2004): 1. Jean Gelman Taylor notes that the Batavian Academy was formed to instill the culture of the Dutch gentleman among men with European status in the mestizo community of Batavia. See The Social World of Batavia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 85. Tony Day and Craig Reynolds, “Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, and the State in Southeast Asia,” Modern Asian Studies 34, no. 1 (2000): 23–24. Benedict Anderson, “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990,” in Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance, ed. Hirschman et al., 30–34. Ruth McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations, by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998), 39–40. Laurie J. Sears, Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 109; cf. Day and Reynolds, “Cosmologies, Truth Regimes, and the State.” McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization,” 41. In the late 1990s, for reasons arising from both conservative and more liberal wings of academia, the discourse of “civilizational” thinking became current. In some cases (e.g., Samuel Huntington), the discourse distinguished between more and less enlightened civilizations. McVey’s use is more straightforward. She means to convey an interest in various aspects of Southeast Asian civilizations and cultures. Immanuel Wallerstein, “The Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University, ed. Noam Chomsky (New York: New Press, 1997). Ibid. J. H. Boeke, The Structure of Netherlands Indian Economy (New York: Secretariat, Institute of Pacific Relations, 1942); J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice: A Comparative Study of Burma and Netherlands India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1948), also available online at ACLS History E-Book Project, http://www.historyebook.org; J. C. van Leur, Indonesian Trade and Society:
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37
38
39
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Essays in Asian Social and Economic History, trans. James S. Holmes and A. van Marle (The Hague: Van Hoeve, 1955; repr., The Hague: W. Van Hoeve Publishers, 1967), reprint also available online at ACLS History E-Book Project, http:// www.historyebook.org. Simon Philpott discusses the fate of the institute: “The Institute of Pacific Relations was investigated in the era of ‘high McCarthyism’ in the United States by the McCarren Committee of the US Senate in 1951–52. It has been noted that the ‘great crime’ of IPR scholars was to have warned of the possible dangers of US foreign policy becoming too closely aligned with Chiang Kai Shek’s Kuomintang (KMT) during its struggle with Mao Zedong’s communists. The Rockefeller Foundation, which provided the majority of the IPR’s funding, succumbed to McCarthyist pressure and decided, in 1952, to cease funding the IPR.” See Simon Philpott, Rethinking Indonesia: Postcolonial Theory, Authoritarianism and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 193 n. 21. The Austrian scholar R. von Heine-Geldern is an example here. He is credited with setting up one of the earliest Southeast Asia programs, the Southeast Asia Institute, in 1941 in New York City. See John Bowen, “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies: A View from the United States,” Moussons 1 (2000): 16 n. 9. In contrast, speaking of the British scholar D. G. E. Hall, Reynaldo C. Ileto describes a different formative world: “For Hall himself had been a colonial scholar-official in Burma. He was born three years after the destruction of the Konbaung dynasty by British forces. The British Empire was his world, and since he was a gifted singer, he expressed his affection for the empire by learning and singing, even in the classroom, the songs that accompanied its rise and consolidation. The real heroes in his life were not the rajahs and sultans of Southeast Asia that he wrote about—usually with a positive attitude, of course—in his textbook. They were the Englishmen who visited the Burmese Kingdom and paved the way for the eventual takeover of Burma, the Malay peninsula and other strategic points in the region we now call Southeast Asia.” See Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Towards a History of Southeast Asian Studies, ca. 1967–1973” (paper presented at the Southeast Asian Studies Programme, National University of Singapore, 6 February 2002). Benedict Anderson, The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and the World (London: Verso, 1998), 2. “The essential nexus of long-distance transportation and print-capitalist communications prepared the grounds on which, by the end of the eighteenth century, the first nationalist movements flowered” (ibid., 62). Anderson translates Jose Rizal’s term “demonio” more as an annoying pest than as a spectre today. See his “Responses,” in Grounds of Comparison: Around the Work of Benedict Anderson, ed. Jonathan Culler and Pheng Cheah (New York: Routledge, 2003), 229. Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, 10. The term “Indochina Wars” is used to refer to America’s wars in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos.
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Introduction Willem van Schendel, speaking of the importance of concepts of flows and borderlands, notes that information as simple as the size of the flow of illicit goods is lacking and that the income from the trafficking in illicit drugs might be between $500 billion and $1,000 billion per year, about the same as the gross national product of all the countries of Southeast Asia. He concludes: “The enormous importance of transnational mobility is clear, but the concepts, theories and measures to study them accurately are lacking” (“Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia,” 293). See also Robert Cribb, “The Poverty of Regionalism: Limits in the Study of Southeast Asia,” IIAS Newsletter (November 2003): 8. For a discussion of these issues, see Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Reid.
Postcolonial Identities
PART I Southeast Asian Subjects
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1
Postcolonial Identities, Feminist Criticism, and Southeast Asian Studies LAURIE J. SEARS As for this significant but missed opportunity, it is important to say here that the indifference of area studies to Said’s strategic observation meant that it would remain locked in its own enclaves of knowledge and that the work of rethinking regions outside of Europe, what had become marked as the Third World, would pass to English studies and the humanities. Harry D. Harootunian, “Postcoloniality’s Unconscious/ Area Studies Desire”
H
arry D. Harootunian speaks above of the missed opportunity for area studies to take up Edward Said’s challenge to investigate the ways in which knowledge of Asia has been shaped by colonial and imperial projects. I discuss this insight by focusing on the slow rise of American scholarship on Southeast Asian literatures and literary criticism in the post–World War II period. I explore the entry of postcolonial and feminist questions of identity into the Southeast Asia field. I focus on selected historical, anthropological, and literary scholarship on Southeast Asia produced by Western scholars and Southeast Asian scholars trained in America, Europe, or Australia since World War II.1 As I argue below, the production of knowledge about the Southeast Asian region has long been a cosmopolitan project. I begin with a selective review of the early growth of Southeast Asian area studies during the Cold War period in the United States and 35
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a brief overview of the interactions between Birmingham school cultural studies and cultural anthropology in the United States. In its focus on the interplay among scholarship, identity, and power, new work coming out of Southeast Asia has opened up fresh directions for the field. Some of this new work from Southeast Asia addresses gender theory and feminist criticism, and I look at work on feminist theory to see its interactions with scholarship on Southeast Asia. I conclude with a brief discussion of feminist literary criticism and an overview of two recent novels by Ayu Utami to show how feminist concerns are being expressed in contemporary literatures of the region. The changing demography of those scholars who study and write about Southeast Asia offers exciting prospects for the future. Rather than taking the constructions of Southeast Asia as a region of study for granted, or arguing for their preservation, I track the movements of humanities-based Southeast Asia scholarship and its interactions with Euro-American culture theories in the expanding field of Southeast Asian studies over the past fifty years.2
From Postwar to Cold War Although colonial scholars produced an abundant literature on parts of Southeast Asia (e.g., the focus of British and Dutch scholars on the Indic origins of Southeast Asian art and religion), as Southeast Asian studies grew in the United States, the focus of the field was on nationalism, charismatic leadership, state building, and the ethnographic study of culture.3 The U.S. scholars who took the time to learn Dutch, Spanish, or French did not, with a few notable exceptions, focus on the humanities. This has had contradictory effects. On the one hand, the field of Southeast Asian studies in the United States was not drawn inward to the hermeneutic interpretation of ancient texts; on the other, Southeast Asian studies lacked the humanities traditions that could ground the field in the ways that Indian, Chinese, and Japanese studies have been grounded. In the postwar period, American scholars who, for a variety of reasons, turned to the study of Southeast Asia found the “core” of their studies in disciplinary concerns rather than in the in-depth study of the region’s literatures or religions. Ruth McVey discusses the subjects that were appropriate for study in the first U.S. Southeast Asia programs:
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politics, anthropology, economics, and subjects related to development. History was acceptable as it related to independence and modernity. Language was a tool for the disciplines, and only the national languages were offered. Literature and art were “cultural frills” which could occasionally be useful for understanding popular attitudes.4 The lessons of the 1950s for the growth of Southeast Asian studies as an academic field are large ones. Rather than looking to the work done by Dutch and French scholars on Indochina or Indonesia, the McCarthy years in America saw the exodus from the government and from the academic community of many people with specific knowledge of the region, because they were seen to be tainted with sympathy for the plight of Southeast Asian nationalists or were blacklisted. American disinclination to learn from the French who had served and fought in Viet Nam is well known. The American debacle in Indonesia in the late 1950s, when the CIA tried to overthrow the Soekarno regime by supporting regional rebellions in Sumatra and Sulawesi, is less well known but similarly tragic for those involved. Speaking of Eisenhower’s foreign policy in Indonesia, Audrey Kahin and George Kahin conclude: “Aimed at changing the character of the country’s government to conform to what were perceived to be American interests, it actually strengthened those elements the administration had sought to eliminate or weaken and destroyed those whom it wished to reinforce.”5 The same could be said of U.S. policy in Indochina. Rather than improving, relations within the Southeast Asia scholarly community were to suffer long-lasting setbacks in the 1960s as the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand came to the attention of wider audiences and greater pressures were placed on the scholars with area expertise. The service that scholars owed to their country was seen in diverse ways by scholars of different generations and conflicting political orientations: some of those who had aided their government in World War II felt an obligation to assist in America’s perceived battle against communism in Viet Nam, Laos, or Cambodia and halt its supposed spread into Thailand. Others did not. What is clear and often underappreciated is the great service that many Southeast Asianists performed in the late 1960s in their attempts to educate Americans about the country of Viet Nam: its long history, its complicated politics, its rich culture. George Kahin, Benedict Anderson, Daniel Lev, John Smail, and David Marr were among many who took part in teach-ins
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and taught courses about Southeast Asia to information-starved undergraduates and community members. America’s involvement in Viet Nam sparked the rise of ethnic studies programs as a result of the politicization of the universities in the wake of the civil rights movement and the Viet Nam Wars.6 Because of associations between area studies programs and the trauma of war and American failure in Southeast Asia, students turned away from studying about other parts of the world at the same moment that private funding agencies also turned their attentions to poor and disadvantaged groups in the United States. The rise of ethnic and gender studies programs, based to some extent on the earlier interdisciplinary area studies model, began to expand on American university campuses, both as new programs and within English departments as challenges to older curricula were raised. English departments that went into the 1960s with most students focusing on English and American literatures written mostly by white men now are home to programs in black studies, postcolonial studies, Chicano studies, queer studies, and women’s studies.7 What is interesting about this development for the field of Southeast Asian studies is the slow movement of these concerns with race, ethnicity, sexuality, and gender into the field. It was not until the 1990s that books about gender and feminist theory began to appear within Southeast Asian studies, and that Southeast Asian Americans, many of whom came to the United States traumatized by events in their home countries, became a vocal minority. Scholars of and from Southeast Asia did not appear in English and comparative literature departments in the United States until the latter part of the 1990s, thus leaving Southeast Asian literatures underrepresented in postcolonial debates.
Cosmopolitan Routes of Cultural Studies and Culture Theory As is well known, the set of ideas known as cultural studies— antidisciplinary, open-ended, and continually evolving—grew out of the British adult-education movement and encounters among Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and Stuart Hall in Britain in the early 1960s, culminating in the establishment of the Centre at Birmingham in 1964.8 The focus on media and “working-class cultures”—and the
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relations between dominant and subordinate groups—signaled both the recognition of cultural loss and longing experienced by segments of British society in the 1960s and the need to look at new formations of popular culture that were coming into being. What came to be called cultural studies might be described as the turning of the ethnographic imagination inward into British society after the loss of the empire that had defined British global identity for a century or more. Although this was not a movement that arose within university departments, it is one that was destined to disrupt academia, as it called for interdisciplinary studies and the breaking down of barriers between elite and popular cultures. Cultural studies as a set of scholarly practices began to move along the cosmopolitan routes that link educational institutions in Europe, Australia, Asia, and the United States, and the debates around ideas of cosmopolitanism current in scholarship today concern the ways in which British cultural studies evolved. Discussions of cosmopolitanism invoke older Kantian ideas that saw cosmopolitanism as an antidote to both nationalism and authoritarianism.9 In Kant’s “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project,” he points to the ability of people to move freely from country to country without being treated as an enemy as a basic human right.10 It is this stress on freedom of movement and hospitality as rights that distinguished Kantian cosmopolitanism from a simple internationalism. For many, cosmopolitanism, as opposed to internationalism or transnationalism, calls to mind images of urban environments, socialist politics, elite education, or a public sphere allowing for a free exchange of ideas. Cosmopolitanism is at the foundation of the idea of universal human rights, although the concept is also criticized for its rationalist universality. One conception of cosmopolitanism that I find useful for this essay is based on James Clifford’s sense of cosmopolitanism as a site of crossings, hybridities, and translation: “The term cosmopolitan, separated from its (European) universalist moorings, quickly becomes a traveling signifier, a term always in danger of breaking up into partial equivalences: exile, immigration, migrancy, diaspora, border crossing, pilgrimage, tourism.”11 In this sense, cosmopolitan routes of travel that dislodge people from hierarchies and established patterns become places of opportunity that allow change and disruption. I find it useful to think of Mary Pratt’s notion of contact zones with their “copresence,
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interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, often within radically asymmetrical relations of power” in conjunction with ideas of cosmopolitanism.12 Kantian cosmopolitanism with its sense of freely moving people is upset by Pratt’s ideas of what happens to people who travel. Pratt’s focus on “asymmetrical relations of power” introduces ideas of struggle into Kantian ideas of movement. Her ideas also introduce a focus on individual journeys rather than abstract ones. People move or are moved from one cosmopolitan contact zone to another. In each place they leave traces of their ethnic, national, gendered, and religious identities; their understandings and practices are transformed and they take on, for better or for worse, new ideas, attachments, and identities. Through this reconfigured sense of cosmopolitanism, questions of identity and the relationship of these questions to anthropological theories of culture and cultural studies entered and eventually changed both Birmingham school cultural studies and the field of Southeast Asian studies. The humanist orientation of early cultural studies scholarship can be seen as a celebration of agency that would be disrupted in the later 1970s by the antihumanist work of Foucault and Althusser. It was in the 1970s that Stuart Hall recognized the culturalist bias of much cultural studies scholarship, and culturalism was critiqued as a retreat from theory since it posited culture as the explanation for both political behavior and cultural production. But this insight did not reach the field of Southeast Asian studies for another decade or so. Gramsci’s notions of hegemony, power, and subaltern classes and Althusser’s blend of Lacanian and Marxist theory had a strong impact on the evolution of British cultural studies in the 1970s.13 These influences are known as the “linguistic turn,” the emergence of French semiotic, structuralist, and poststructuralist theory. These ideas served to destabilize and de-center “meaning,” contest dominant paradigms, and disrupt the certainties of much post-Enlightenment thought. Certainly this strand of French theory had already arrived in U.S. academia through other routes, but it is the mixing of “high” French theory with cultural studies’ emphasis on popular culture that is of interest here. Stuart Hall calls this meeting the discovery of textuality and discursivity or “having to think questions of culture through the metaphors of language and textuality.”14 Some scholars cite two major ruptures that opened up Birmingham school cultural studies scholarship to wider debates: the encounter with feminism in the early 1970s and the
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encounter with “race” in the late 1970s, which eventually led to the postcolonial critique or the turning outward of British cultural studies in the early 1980s.15 It is in the late 1970s, after the layering of feminist, race-centered, and French poststructuralist critiques over the original project of British cultural studies, that Edward Said’s identification of “orientalism” tied together his analysis of colonial discourses and their relations to Foucauldian notions of power.16 Cultural studies and colonial discourse theory, with their focus on power and knowledge, were to intersect with anthropological culture theory in America to produce a particularly American kind of cultural studies in the 1980s. Historian William Sewell, in an essay on concepts of culture, noted that the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s were a high point of American cultural anthropology, and he cited the publication of Clifford Geertz’s Interpretation of Cultures in 1973 as the defining work of that period.17 Geertz, however, did not engage in the debates that ensued as questions of power came to the forefront in the field of anthropology. As Sherry Ortner explains: “Geertz seems to have stood apart from that trend. For the most part … one will not find issues of gender asymmetry, racial discrimination, colonial domination, ethnic violence, and so on in Geertz’s work.”18 As American identity politics mingled with French theory and British cultural studies, Geertz’s work was central in redefining the concepts of culture. Scholarship in the social sciences and humanities in the United States was undergoing a “cultural turn” directly attributable to Geertz that would lead in the next decade to the New Historicism and the New Cultural History. Starting in the 1980s, anthropologists influenced by the more politicized ideas of British cultural studies or the—less politicized, some would argue—deconstructionist ideas of French theory began to avoid the word “culture” or to replace it with “habitus” (Bourdieu), “hegemony” (Gramsci), or “discourse” (Foucault).19 Influenced by the sociologist Talcott Parsons in the 1950s, anthropologists in the 1960s and 1970s sought to define “culture” as a system of mutually agreed upon symbols and meanings; in the 1980s, this idea became suspect.20 As the Saidian notion of colonial discourses became more widespread, and especially after the publication of James Clifford and George Marcus’s Writing Culture in 1986,21 the concept of culture became more agonistic among some sociocultural anthropologists, who began to see themselves as the literary creators of their ethnographic transcripts or as the inheritors of colonial apparatuses of description and control.
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But there were other significant influences at this time that became intertwined with anthropological culture theory. Scholars of Indian history in Britain and India began looking for ideas beyond the simple dichotomies of colonialist or nationalist histories, and the Subaltern Studies Collective published their first volume of writings in 1982.22 The world of the “subaltern,” a term interchangeable with “the people” in the work of Gramsci, became the focus of these scholars, who wanted to find a space for those excluded from both colonial and nationalist imaginaries.23 In scholarship on Southeast Asia, these ideas also began to appear in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Reynaldo Ileto’s study of Filipino passion plays reconstructed subaltern mentalities usually embedded within worlds of religious belief.24 Michael Adas’s idea of “avoidance protest,” James Scott’s notions of “moral economy” and “hidden transcript,” and James Scott and Benedict Kerkvliet’s “everyday resistance” put a focus on the peasantry as a subaltern class.25 Much of this scholarship was simultaneous with the work of the Subaltern Studies Collective. Rather than relying on Gramsci, Scott’s Weapons of the Weak, in particular, took issue with Gramsci, arguing that his own research in a village in Malaysia showed that villagers were not mystified and that Gramscian hegemony needed to be overturned. Adas finds Scott’s argument persuasive but favors revising rather than rejecting the Gramscian notion of hegemony, which Adas considers a useful analytical tool.26 In an assessment of the “cultural turn” in history, William Sewell has proposed that Scott’s work on “hidden transcripts” articulates a theory of resistance to the idea that cultures are coherent. Sewell suggests that in arguing that coherence and consensus are not the norm, Scott’s ideas work against the Parsonian approach to anthropology, whose practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s presented various peoples as having unified ideas about how their societies functioned.27 These debates show that the ideas of scholars working on Southeast Asia were integrated into scholarship on European and other Asian histories.
Postcolonial Literary Critiques, Science Studies, and Southeast Asian Studies Cultural studies as practiced in Britain and Australia never found a very congenial home in Southeast Asian area studies. Many Southeast
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Asianists found the engagement with area knowledges too shallow and the language skills demanded too daunting, and media critiques of Southeast Asian works were still in their infancy in the 1980s.28 The postcolonial critique, associated with the entrance of scholars from various parts of the formerly colonized world into the debates of latetwentieth-century Euro-American academia, found a warmer reception. Growing out of the feminist and race-centered critiques of British cultural studies, postcolonial theory generated resistance even as it became an accepted critique for literatures that arose out of the colonial experience.29 One of the earliest synthetic texts is the 1989 book from Australia The Empire Writes Back, which argued that the Englishlanguage literatures of Africa and India in particular did not have to be evaluated by the standards of Euro-American literary canons. For the authors of The Empire Writes Back, the postcolonial critique grew out of the field of Commonwealth literatures written in English in the far-flung parts of the British Empire.30 As scholars began to look at other areas of the formerly colonized world, the 1950s and 1960s work of Fanon, Cesaire, and other Negritude writers added issues of race, gender, and class to aesthetic questions analyzing the intermingling of power, sentiment, and desire. British cultural studies, Saidian colonial discourse theory, and ideas from subaltern studies all fed into the postcolonial literary critique. Written in the first wave of the “linguistic turn” that was to revolutionize American scholarly disciplines, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities resonated with postcolonial intellectuals, feminists, and minority communities in the United States because of its focus on consciousness as the site of nationalist imaginings.31 As older essentialist notions of nations and cultures were giving way to analyses of the formations and movements of colonial and postcolonial diasporas, of the various languages people spoke, and of the books and newspapers they read, Anderson’s book became the paradigmatic text for a globalizing world. Although his text serves as a source of theoretical production for scholars from diverse fields and regions, Anderson is not sanguine about the place of theory in academia today. He suggests that the arbitrary sifting of data to fit theoretical needs gives much theoretical work a short shelf life and also discourages comparative work within Southeast Asia, an area that is rich for such studies.32 He compares the empirical work of colonial scholars like
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Raffles or Coedès with today’s theory-driven scholarship and wonders how much of the latter will stand the test of time. Postcolonial literary critiques have been underrepresented in scholarship on Southeast Asia in the United States because of the limited number of scholars of Southeast Asian literatures and the limited number of Southeast Asians holding positions in American academia, compared, for example, to scholars from South Asia.33 Because English was the colonial language of South Asia, there has been and continues to be a growing body of literature written by South Asians in English. In Southeast Asia, only the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore have literary traditions in English. Thus, the language skills required for sophisticated literary critique are daunting.34 The literatures of Southeast Asia have long been important for historical and anthropological study because of the censorship in Southeast Asia in colonial and postcolonial governments of the Right and the Left, but these literary works deserve to be studied as literature as well as for the insights that they bring to an understanding of Southeast Asian societies. This problem has been addressed in recent and forthcoming studies by Southeast Asians trained in the United States, particularly in the English department at Cornell. Pheng Cheah has produced the first book-length literary critique of Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s Buru Quartet, notwithstanding the ample attention Pramoedya’s work has received from historians and social scientists.35 Combining an analysis of German Enlightenment thought with a critique of the work of Indonesia’s most famous novelist, Cheah brings new dynamism into the field of Southeast Asian studies and new connections between departments of English, comparative literatures, and Southeast Asian area studies. Cheah is concerned to recuperate the liberating potential of the postcolonial nation, and, in the process, he illustrates the intellectual brilliance of Pramoedya’s work. But Cheah’s work also shows how European thought haunts the study of Southeast Asian literatures.36 Dipesh Chakrabarty is well known for his work in curbing the overwhelming influence of European scholarship in the fields of cultural critique and literary theory as well as in his own field of history. Chakrabarty’s book Provincializing Europe shows how European thought has been represented as universal thought, leaving little room for other constructions of reality and the world.37 Chakrabarty raises three points of particular interest for the field of Southeast Asian
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studies. First, although histories of Europe and Europeans need to be provincialized, this does not mean that they can be ignored. So the work of rewriting colonial histories will continue from different perspectives and with different moral judgments. Both elite and nonelite actors will feature in these histories.38 Second, Chakrabarty takes the debates over the politics of translation very seriously: the thinking behind these debates organizes half of his book. Moving away from the “rough translations” of the past, Chakrabarty wants to present intimate histories of affect as well as economic and insurgent ones.39 Last, Chakrabarty spends a chapter addressing the need for ways to give equal attention to the constructedness of ideas about “reason” and “supernatural” belief. He discusses ways to understand supernatural beliefs without denigrating them as explanatory systems of a lower order or, I might add, without exoticizing them.40 A final approach to “provincializing Europe” is the interdisciplinary field called science and technology studies. In reaction to more traditional studies in the history and philosophy of science, science and technology studies has built upon Thomas Kuhn’s insights from The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.41 Proceeding from the notion that European science is a particular way of viewing the world, diverse scholars have been analyzing the tools, equipment, and communities of science that have held such a dominant place in conceptions of “modernity” and “reality.” The “anthropology of reason,” a discourse inspired by the work of Paul Rabinow, looks at the emergence of ideas of reason in European and other cultures, rather than seeing reason as a foundational discourse of modernity. Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of science have been among the major figures at work demystifying the practices of science and scientific communities around the world.42 A growing group of Southeast Asianists are working in this field, expanding the Euro-American focus of its founders.43 These new scholarly foci are having an increasing impact on the field of Southeast Asian studies. But a greater impact on the Southeast Asia field in the United States comes from the work of scholars located in Southeast Asia.
Identities and the Politics of Location The question of who is writing or who should be writing Southeast Asian histories, ethnographies, and literary critiques has become subject
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to debate over the past ten years. From its earlier locations in America and Australia, the field of Southeast Asian studies has taken root in Southeast Asia as well. New programs and older institutes in Singapore, Malaysia, Viet Nam, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines have been nurtured and developed, particularly since the 1980s.44 Some scholars working in the field of Southeast Asian studies in Southeast Asia suggest that the field is a constructed one. Resil B. Mojares sees it this way: “Southeast Asian Studies” is itself an imaginary field to the extent that it takes as its object of study a region that is a recent, externally defined political invention, one that is not an exclusive, internally bounded entity, geographically, ethnically, or culturally. Yet, there exists within the region such a range of cultural affinities, such historical depth of exchanges, and such a body of equivalent experiences and interests, as to make of the region something not wholly fabricated or arbitrary.45
In a recent edited volume on the relationship between power and social science knowledge in Indonesia, the editors argue that Southeast Asian studies was brought to Indonesia after independence by Indonesian scholars returning home after studying in the United States.46 The pattern of Southeast Asian scholars returning to teaching positions in Southeast Asia after studying in area studies programs in the United States, Australia, or Europe has continued. On the other hand, in the United States and Australia, in particular, increasing numbers of prominent scholars in the Southeast Asia field came to study or teach and have remained, or occasionally have relocated to the United States or Australia in midcareer.47 Thongchai Winichakul has coined the phrase “home scholars” to refer to Southeast Asians who are Southeast Asianists, wherever they are located. Thongchai, however, resists the temptation to see greater authenticity or legitimacy in the writings of scholars from Southeast Asia. He notes: “A discussion of language production as having two sides, Western or Southeast Asian, could become a trap, for it is hard to avoid sounding either like a nationalist or an Orientalist.”48 Other scholars from Southeast Asia are ambivalent about essentialist arguments but seem reluctant to let go of all claims to difference. Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal put forward their ideas of what is
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different about “home scholars” by arguing that these scholars have experienced early childhood and/or secondary schooling in Southeast Asia.49 In another book, which includes chapters by several Asian scholars who work on Asia, Krishna Sen offers arguments about identity based on class or taste rather than ethnicity. Sen, who is looking at “practices of consumption and production,” suggests that she has more in common with the middle-class women in Indonesia whom she is studying than those same women have with “a Javanese peasant woman, the tribal woman in Irian Jaya or the Acehnese female domestic servant in Medan.”50 Sen’s coeditor, Maila Stivens, is also wary of identity claims as she discusses the feminist agenda of postcolonial middle-class Asian feminists: “Thus some critics characterizing themselves as the ‘authentic’ interpreters of their own culture, or as the ‘authentic’ ‘political’ representatives of counter-hegemonic discourses, have expressed considerable resentment about First World women appropriating ‘Third World’ women’s experiences for feminist scholarship. The elite situation of ‘Third World’ intellectuals, however, can undermine such claims to authenticity.”51 These competing claims seem a natural outcome of changing scholarly dynamics as ideas of center and periphery in the field of Southeast Asian studies are shifting ground. By contextualizing questions of identity within the logic of cosmopolitanisms, where people and ideas are moving among cities, countries, institutions, and alliances, identity claims lose their exclusive nature. As these questions of identity and subjectivity become more salient in the field of Southeast Asian studies, scholars are questioning “Western” ideas of objectivity, rationality, and realist accounts in the production of knowledge. This part of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s project for “provincializing Europe” has been taken up eagerly by scholars of and from Southeast Asia. But the de-centering of the subject theorized in poststructuralist and postcolonial theories, or the ability of postcolonial subjects to experience agency in the articulation of claims, has proved problematic for theoretical work on Southeast Asia that seeks to give voice to elite and subaltern subjects. In a book devoted to the topic of “reclaiming identity,” Caroline Hau seeks to defend representation from postmodern doubts: “It is, in fact, the intimate interaction of matter and idea in the human world, with its constraining and enabling forces, that allows us to pose the question, not of whether we
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can ‘reach’ (or not reach) the real, but of whether we can have a more or less effective significative mediation/knowledge of the world, with its attendant questions of particular error or correctness.”52 In those parts of the world where stories of government atrocities and humanrights abuses have not yet been recorded in reliable ways, the need to establish new and credible historical narratives can make some theoretical speculations seem frivolous. This issue will be explored more fully below. Scholars of and from Southeast Asia also question whether social science knowledge developed in Euro-America is the only way to analyze the world. This is particularly poignant for scholars of religion, as noted by Chakrabarty above, and especially for those working in the field of Islamic studies. Talal Asad has eloquently formulated the problem of religion and modernity: if we are seeing a resurgence of religion in the time of the project of modernity (if religion was ever diminished at all), then we must rethink both the religious and the secular. Asad asks: How and when did the secular emerge, what are its formations, and what is its future?53 Also looking at the distinction between the religious and the secular, Datu Michael O. Mastura cites debates about Islamic knowledge and science that are important in Malaysia: “A. B. Shamsul has documented some of the crucial questions that are often asked: ‘Is Western social knowledge the only source of social knowledge? What is the role of revealed knowledge, such as found in Islam?’ … Here the practical utility of such a formulation serves to highlight what it is we want Islamic discourse to do for us.”54 But Asad would look with some skepticism at giving any religious texts special noetic claims. He points out the difficulties surrounding these questions concerning Islam and Islamic texts: “A magical quality is attributed to Islamic religious texts, for they are said to be both essentially univocal (their meaning cannot be subject to dispute, just as ‘fundamentalists’ insist) and infectious (except in relation to the orientalist, who is, fortunately for him, immune to their dangerous power).”55 Malaysian scholar Norani Othman sees other questions as more compelling in the field of Islamic studies: “The experience of Muslim women activists so far only confirms the view that one central question remains on the agenda for contemporary Muslims. To what extent are Muslims able to undertake self-criticism and doubt in an effort to seek a conceptual reorientation that provides us with a
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realistic basis for the change and renewal of Muslim women.”56 How religion fits together with social science knowledge and culture theory opens new questions about what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “the constructedness of ideas about ‘reason’ and ‘supernatural’ belief” in the field of Southeast Asian studies.57 For a specific look at what is at stake, Rey Ileto’s response to Glenn May’s Inventing a Hero provides critical substance to these debates. In his book on the Filipino nationalist hero Andres Bonifacio, Glenn May suggests that much of the Filipino scholarship about Bonifacio is questionable if not fabricated. May argues that the documents that might allow scholars to assess Bonifacio’s role in the Philippine Revolution were not properly archived, are missing, or were forged. He then speculates what role various historians of the Philippine Revolution might have played in this national scholarly scandal.58 Rey Ileto is one of the Filipino scholars whose work May cites for failing to question the documentary evidence concerning Bonifacio. Ileto responds first by clarifying exactly what May is saying about the Philippine Revolution: “May’s ‘take’ on the revolution and the Philippine-American war is that it was a ‘revolt of the elites.’ His book, then, is not so much about Bonifacio and the sources for his biography, as about the effects of the Philippine-American war and the subsequent American impact on—and nationalist responses to—how Filipinos would remember and transmit their memories of the revolution.” Ileto’s argument is that most of the historical scholarship written about the revolution was written by American male scholars either implicated in the colonial project in the Philippines before independence or part of the neocolonial project after independence. These scholars wrote about Filipino elites and saw the revolution as the concern of the elites. If the revolution is a “revolt of the elites” Ileto argues, “then the U.S. Army was not suppressing a genuine revolution; the Filipinos were but an oriental version of the American Indian tribes which needed to be subjugated. The whole program of ‘benevolent assimilation’ in fact rested on this presumption.”59 These are the stakes that Ileto sees in the writing of history and in the rationalizations that history writing supplies to those with the power to document the past. Ileto’s argument goes even further and he makes the case “that certain social classes and sectors have been favored by the written word. Colonial officials, friars, explorers and
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travelers, ilustrados, the native clergy, revolutionary officers, mestizos, principales and as a whole, men, are the principal subjects of our archival records.”60 Referring to May’s disparaging comments on elections in the Philippines, Ileto finds an underlying disregard for Filipinos and their institutions. Behind May’s treatment of Filipino elections is the discourse of democratic development, which has tied Filipino political development to American tutelage. A male, liberal enlightenment fantasy of rational politics is posited as the norm which Filipinos failed to reach, therefore their politics—as in factional and then nationalistic politics—is shabby, pretentious, forever lacking. What is missing is a discussion of Filipino political behavior on its own terms.61
What Ileto terms “a male, liberal enlightenment fantasy of rational politics” that is posited as the norm could characterize much of the scholarship in the field of Southeast Asian studies. Recent realignments around the globe as well as in the field of Southeast Asian area studies make this fantasy more visible. Ileto calls this approach to Philippine politics a version of an American orientalism “that presumes that the Philippine case must be binary, negative, opposite of the developed west.”62 But some scholars see the approach as characteristic of generations of scholarship on Southeast Asia in the social sciences. As Simon Philpott explains: The globalization of American political science interests and methods means that in Southeast Asia as in the United States, political parties, the bureaucracy, leadership and ideology have been the focus of much research. Cultural explanations, rather than class and other socio-economic factors common in American political science, have been used to account for Southeast Asian political behavior. Culture has also proved handy in explaining or justifying authoritarianism and mitigating responsibility for the unrealized prediction of political modernization made during the 1950s.63
In the culturalist argument, each of the countries of Southeast Asia is unique and this uniqueness can serve to explain political configurations and choices. Culture is equated with tradition and both are opposed to rationality, the logic of the “West.” This is where the work of postcolonial science and technology studies intervenes between the reigning paradigm of rational-choice theory and the culturalist arguments of
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much social science work on Southeast Asia. Science and technology studies seek to break down the artificial divide between nature and culture and to focus instead on understanding the different ways in which categories of science, reason, and rationality emerge in different locations.64 Philpott invokes the Foucauldian notion of governmentality to help explain what he sees as the limitations of work in political science studies of Southeast Asia: Importantly, governmentality disturbs the explanatory force of culture in the discourse of Indonesian politics by treating it as a site at which Indonesians are governed. The implied relationship between culture and the self/other in the discourse of Indonesian politics mystifies and obscures practices of the self and the attempts of authorities to “work on,” “shape,” or “develop” particular individuals or sections of a population. In other words, culture, like identity, is not given by God or fixed by nature, but is a constant process of disruption and reinscription of meaning.65
One of the ways in which Southeast Asian scholars are addressing the problem of culturalist explanations is to change the analytic focus in their studies of processes that might formerly have fitted into the category of politics. In his essay on arts workers in Indonesia and Malaysia, Sumit Mandal shifts the focus from electoral politics and elites to “repositioning workers and other marginalized groups.” He explains: “Unlike efforts to democratize through the electoral mechanism, arts activists have been democratizing society and culture by introducing subversive politics of cultural identity and representing the voices on the margins.”66 This focus on the margins and the interstices is another influence of postcolonial theories that have attempted to shift the boundaries and equilibrium of scholarship in Southeast Asian studies. Thongchai Winichakul has made an argument that the “home scholars” he has identified have particular skills for writing these histories at the interstices, where the nuances of language and local literatures, whether oral or written, are especially valuable.67 In a similar vein, in an essay on the cultural politics of the middle classes in Indonesia, Ariel Heryanto has also shown how Southeast Asian scholars can take a different focus. After acknowledging the influence of Erik O. Wright, Heryanto
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continues: “The ensuing discussion will focus on structures and agents at a micro level in order to offer the argument that a democratic transition in post-colonies is effective when democratization-friendly consciousness, ideas, practices and institutions have already found fertile ground in various forms, including in offices, schools, families, or social organizations.”68 Heryanto here refocuses debates on both politics and culture in his work on Indonesia. Perhaps the most poignant intervention in contemporary historiographical debates comes from Asvi Warman Adam, an Indonesian historian trying to sift through the remains of New Order histories to establish a credible historical record. Adam argues that establishing a more truthful historical record may be the first priority for Indonesian historians. The myths put in place by the authoritarian New Order government that came to power in 1966 in the wake of brutal massacres of communists and others caught up in the violence are strong and long-lived. The New Order set in place an analysis of a supposed communist coup and created “facts” to support the analysis, which was taught in secondary- and tertiary-education textbooks for years. National holidays and monuments were created to honor fallen heroes, demonize the communists, and keep opposition politics at bay through a vigilant persecution of post-1965 leftist students or serious Islamists. Adam looks at these myths and the textbooks that recorded and taught them to begin to break down the obfuscation of the New Order histories.69 This search to establish a trustworthy historical record in the face of traumatic memories is another emerging field of study for Southeast Asianists. Questions about establishing a historical record illuminate one of the major problems in the field of trauma studies today: whether the traumatic memories are available to the victim at all. As Ruth Leys explains: “Trauma was therefore understood as an experience of hypnotic imitation or identification—what I call mimesis—an experience that, because it appeared to shatter the victim’s cognitive-perceptual capacities, made the traumatic scene unavailable for a certain kind of recollection.”70 This issue is an important one for those who study the victims of trauma. If memories are not available to the victims of trauma, or are unreliable at best, how can such victims testify or give witness to their suffering? If both victims and perpetrators of horrendous crimes are traumatized by those crimes, and they cannot put the
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trauma into narrative memory, the ethical considerations or distinctions between victims and perpetrators become fraught.71 On the other hand, if there is a radical separation between “autonomous subjects” and external trauma, thus allowing ethical considerations more validity, this situates the traumatized as quintessential victims, both sovereign and passive.72 For those who want to see the possibility of agency in even the most abject of victims, or for those who follow antiessentialist approaches to subjectivity and memory, such questions will become increasingly important as scholars probe the traumas of recent Southeast Asian pasts. These postcolonial questions of identity and location are especially problematic in feminist work on Southeast Asian subjects.
Postcolonial Critiques and Feminist Theories in Southeast Asian Studies Feminist theorists have been critical of the postcolonial and poststructural critique of essentialism because of its implications for feminist political action.73 Because postcolonial theory produces a de-centered rewriting of earlier, nation-centered, imperial grand narratives, it tries to break down any clearly demarcated inside and outside of colonial systems and colonial histories.74 Postcolonial theoretical deconstructions, used frequently in scholarly work in the 1990s, seem more problematic today when various government and religious groups in American and Southeast Asian politics and societies use similar methods to attack evolutionary theory and a woman’s right to choose or to fabricate justifications for war. More than ever, scholars and public intellectuals need solid theoretical ground from which to defend ideas of truth, suffering, and human rights. On the other hand, postcolonial and feminist theories have worked together to loosen the hold of older ideas in the field of Southeast Asian studies. As Simon Philpott sees it: “Firstly, it has already been suggested that post-war Southeast Asian politics studies rests comfortably on a largely unexamined commitment to liberalism. But despite liberalism’s professed universalism, colonial discourse analysis, postcolonial studies and feminist theory have all demonstrated its exclusionary practices and its theoretical privileging of white, male subject positions.”75 Unlike other regions of study—Latin America or South Asia, for example—Southeast Asian studies as a field has not yet produced an
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abundance of critical feminist work. Scholars with reputations outside the region, like Aihwa Ong, Ann Stoler, and Anna Tsing, are few. Reasons for this are difficult to identify. Anthropological claims that the Southeast Asian region was woman-friendly compared to East or South Asia may have slowed down the production of studies of women and gender construction. The predominance of male scholars in the field of Southeast Asian studies into the 1980s and the focus on elite politics and elite and subaltern political actors also account for the scant attention to the kinds of social histories that give women more equal visibility. For one example of how feminist reinterpretations of issues of power and gender can enrich the Southeast Asia field, I briefly review the ways in which Javanese ideas of power and gender—a topic that has received its share of attention in scholarly literatures—have been presented in American scholarship.76 Up until the mid-1990s, scholarship on power and gender in Java remained heavily indebted to the work of scholars writing in the malecentered discourses of the 1950s and 1960s. I define “male-centered” as the positing of the male experience as universal and the setting up of the other of that experience as the “feminine.” Values, hierarchies, meaning, and criticism thus are based on an ideology that privileges the experiences of men. I am using the phrase “male-centered” to draw attention to a structuring of thought rather than arguing for an essentialist “male” or “female” position.77 Both women and men can argue within and accept—either consciously or unconsciously—the logic of male-centered discourses and interpretations of power relations. Turning to the theorization of gender in Java, one finds that Benedict Anderson—who defined Javanese notions of male power in the 1970s—took ideas from the Javanese shadow theater tradition, which was seen then to be the essence of Javanese culture.78 Certainly shadow theater was very popular in Java in the 1950s and 1960s. It also seemed to function as an official discourse for Javanese ideals of power, mysticism, and gender. Another approach, and the one I will discuss here, is the way in which analyses of shadow theater supported Weberian ideas about charisma and its production that scholars of the period were inclined to address.79 Anderson, who wanted to explain how charisma was produced in a non-Western (non-Chinese, nonIndian) setting like Java, emphasized mysticism to explain the generation of charisma in Java, and this acquisition of mystical power was clearly
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illustrated in the popular shadow theater tradition that was flourishing in Java when Anderson did his research in the early 1960s.80 Anderson explains that his essay on power in Java was an attempt to present an alternative, culturally unique perspective on Weber’s idea of charisma. Anderson remembers that he wrote his essay on power in Java in opposition to “Western officialdom’s” celebration of the overthrow of Soekarno’s irrational, anti-Western regime and the rise of the pragmatic and pro-Western rationalism of the Suharto regime. Anderson thought that, through his analysis of Javanese ideas of power, he could show “that ‘traditional Javanese thought’ was perfectly rational once its assumptions about the nature of power were properly understood.”81 In his “Further Adventures in Charisma,” written in the mid-1980s, Anderson reflected on his earlier study of power in Java.82 He described how he had wanted to upset the Weberian categories by showing how the charismatic leaders of the nonaligned movement of the 1950s—Soekarno, Ho Chi Minh, Nasser, Nehru, Castro, and U Nu—mixed elements of traditionalism, rationality, and charisma. Finally, Anderson suggested that Weber’s original analysis of charisma, which posited charisma as both revolutionary and redemptive and as an antidote to an ever-rationalizing bureaucracy, had become reconfigured by the 1960s and 1970s, when charisma had become “demagogic, irrational, regressive, shady, and usually dangerous.”83 Weber’s idea of the rationalized society as an “iron cage” was turning into an ordered vision for social scientists in economics, sociology, and political science who, for the most part, were happy to serve as instruments of the capitalist state and, rather than criticizing that state, only wanted to predict its changes reliably. Despite Anderson’s own reservations about his essay on power, by the 1980s it had become a seminal statement of Javanese ideas of power. Soemarsaid Moertono, a Javanese scholar who studied at Cornell in the 1960s, noted that “in a society where charismatic leadership is a prerequisite for the existence of a respected (and thus stable) government, it is hardly avoidable that men are measured mainly by the yardstick of direct personal accomplishments.”84 It strikes me that the pioneering study of Java that was undertaken at Cornell in the 1950s and 1960s (beginning perhaps with Claire Holt’s translation of Mangkunagara VII’s essay on the Javanese shadow theater)85 was quite different from what had been done earlier by the
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Dutch orientalists in Leiden. Several innovative scholars studying and teaching at Cornell, who had mastered the older Dutch texts even though they were neither orientalists nor Indologists, saw Java as unique rather than as a weak imitation of India, especially in the postcolonial and postrevolutionary period. Thus, the emphasis on meditation and charismatic mysticism in the theorization of power in Java may have been overdetermined by these and other causes: for example, Indian influence in Java, the influence of Dutch theosophy, and the celebration and elevation of Javanese culture by Dutch orientalists and Javanese nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s.86 Through the work of Anderson, Geertz, Charles Keyes, and other important scholars of Southeast Asian studies, the ideas of Weber were used to theorize the power of Javanese kings, Siamese Buddhist rulers, bureaucratic Vietnamese Confucian scholars, and a variety of Southeast Asian charismatic religious specialists. As Talcott Parsons described it: “What Weber did was to take an enormous step in bridging the gap between the two types of science (e.g. the social and the natural), and to make possible the treatment of social material in a systematic scientific manner rather than as an art.”87 Although Weber is also acknowledged today for his contributions to an interpretive methodology, Weber believed that generalized theoretical categories were necessary for the social sciences. What becomes interesting in all of this is not so much the embrace of Weber and his ideas of power and charisma by scholars of Southeast Asian studies but rather the ways in which these ideas gendered power and its accouterments as male. This was to last, for the most part, well into the 1990s.88 Suzanne Brenner’s book The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java begins to analyze the way the construction and analysis of power in Java has ignored the very strong position of women in Central Javanese society.89 Brenner’s research among women in the Laweyan area of Solo, Central Java, provides ample material for a rethinking of Javanese ideas of power, gender, and desire. Anderson’s paradigm of male power suggested that men wielded authority in Java through the accumulation of spiritual potency accrued through constraint of their passions—self-discipline and ascetic exercise—which allowed them to control others around them as well as themselves. This power could be recognized through an outward display of calm, controlled, and refined behavior—and the emphasis
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on refinement, alus as opposed to kasar, became equated with Javanese notions of charisma and power. In Brenner’s argument, men in Laweyan “perform” status while women accrue status through the accumulation and domestication of money. The women—who run the famous Solonese batik market Pasar Klewer—seclude their men in the home to preserve the men’s status and to keep them from straying (i.e., indulging their passions). The domestic sphere becomes a site of cultural production and social reproduction, and thus women are seen to play a central role in defining the status hierarchies of men. Anderson’s essay on Javanese notions of power has been a reference point in Javanese studies for almost three decades. The traditions of scholarship set in place in the 1960s and 1970s celebrated a certain vision of Javanese masculinity: as refined, mystical, spiritually potent, impractical, delicate, non-Islamic, controlled, and sexualized in a repressed way. In response to this gender construction, Javanese women were viewed as coarse: uncontrolled, possessing an excess of passion, lacking spiritual potency, and possessing an ability in the market that is denigrated by a disdain for business. Brenner argues that the accepted gender ideologies are a complicated product of the patriarchal tendencies of Dutch rule, of Islamic ideologies of male self-control, and of the repressive and nonrepressive state apparatuses of the Indonesian government. If women’s claims to status and power need to be reassessed— and it is clear from Brenner’s work that there remains much to be done—men’s status, claims to power, and ability to control their desires must also be reassessed. This example of how the theorization of gender can change the way scholars think about notions of power and identity shows the importance of gender critique and feminist theory for scholarship on Southeast Asia. Most of the work in this area has appeared in the past decade. The exceptions to this, of course, are the pathbreaking work of the late Michelle Rosaldo, which was among the earliest work in feminist anthropology, and the early work of Jane Atkinson.90 Publications on women in Southeast Asia began to appear in the 1980s, and important literature on women in factories followed.91 Among the first volumes to address issues of gender and power in island Southeast Asia were two edited volumes, one by Nancy Eberhardt and one by Jane Atkinson and Shelly Errington.92 Ann Stoler’s work on gender and sexuality stands out for its attention to questions of race
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and desire as well as colonialism, and the new edited volumes of Peter Jackson and Nerida Cook, and Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, add to the literature by addressing sexuality in Thailand, transgender issues, and gay and lesbian relations.93 In the mid-1990s an increasing number of books began to appear that addressed feminist theory as well as gender.94 Much work remains to be done to link the scholarship on gender systems to a critique of the male-centered scholarship on which so much of Southeast Asian studies scholarship has been based. In his work on the Philippine Military Academy, Alfred McCoy notes: “This essay is informed by an awareness that its actors are indeed male. It does not assume that their actions, undefined and undifferentiated in a gender sense, somehow represent a universal standard of human behavior. Reading maleness into a national history dominated by men constitutes, I would argue, a significant corrective to a certain kind of gender bias.”95 Feminist studies of gender and power are only beginning to appear in parts of Southeast Asia. For Viet Nam, for example, scholars have argued that Marxism and older Confucian patterns of patriarchy would prove to be the most significant features to consider in studies of gender and power.96 If more scholars are willing to take gender into account, however, there could be a radical rewriting of the scholarship on Southeast Asia. As an example of how feminist analyses of gender and power coming out of Southeast Asia can transfigure the field, I briefly discuss how the link between novels and the nation can change when viewed through the lens of an Indonesian feminist author.
Women, Novels, and the Nation Frederic Jameson’s statement that all third-world novels are national allegories raised serious concern in the 1980s among scholars of so-called third-world texts who felt that Jameson had erred by subsuming radically different national texts into one misleading category. The category of third-world novel is an impossible one—as is the category of European or American novel—and sufficient scholarship has argued the point.97 But reading contemporary literature in Indonesia today lends credence to Jameson’s point that many works of fiction produced in the new nation-states that emerged after World War II engage the
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question of the viability and future of the nation. Pheng Cheah takes up a more specific point in linking the notions of Bildung (development or educational uplift), nationalism, and the Bildungsroman, the novel of character development first associated with Goethe and German literature. Cheah sees the novel in postcolonial nations, with Indonesia and Kenya as his examples, as recapitulating the Bildung, or development, of the nation. As several scholars of Southeast Asian literatures have shown, the cosmopolitan origins of the nation are visible in the earliest fiction from the region written by Southeast Asians.98 I suggest that the work of Indonesian novelist and journalist Ayu Utami can supplement a reading of “third-world” novels as national allegories and the linking of the novel and national Bildung. Ayu Utami is arguably the most accomplished of the younger generation of women authors writing in Indonesia today. Along with her ability to combine journalistic research, street patois, frank discussions of female sexuality, and a rigorous analysis of contemporary Indonesian politics, Utami enriches Indonesian literature through the beauty of her literary language. Utami’s novels Saman and, especially, Larung focus on trauma, desubjectivization, and the undoing of the nation.99 As such, the project of national Bildung is still a prominent theme of the novels, even though Utami’s portrait is a bleak one. As noted above, history writing suffered greatly during the New Order period, which lasted from 1966 to May 1998, leaving a gap where historical studies should be.100 It is in novels like Utami’s—written by an activist journalist willing to carry out research at great personal cost—that the past survives. I suggest the need to read Utami’s work closely as both history and literature to see the ways in which the past can be both represented and interrogated through the work of literature. Utami’s novels add to academic debates about subjectivity and memory current in intellectual centers across the globe and provide an example of how literary texts might have an impact on our understanding of Indonesian intellectual histories by humanizing Southeast Asian subjects. Saman, the first novel of Utami’s two-volume series, appeared in 1998 just before the fall of the Indonesian New Order government, and Larung appeared three years later. Saman, the hero of the first novel, is a Catholic priest who gets drawn into the struggle of transmigrant rubber plantation workers against multinational agribusiness. Through
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his deepening involvement with the poor villagers in south Sumatra, who refuse to follow the dictates of the oil palm monopolies, Saman is jailed by the Indonesian military, tortured, and eventually smuggled out of Indonesia. In the course of his dangerous escape, he begins an affair with a married activist who helps to get him from Indonesia to New York City. The novels take place in cosmopolitan spaces between Jakarta and New York City, in villages and towns in south Sumatra, Java, and Bali, and on the high seas of late New Order Indonesia. They also take place in the hallucinations of Saman and Larung, the male activist heroes of the two novels, and Shakuntala, one of the female heroines. Saman introduces the intertwined lives of four women who have known each other since childhood. Laila is a photographer working on a story about the oil company Texcoil, active in the South China Sea around southern Sumatra. Laila’s childhood friends include Shakuntala, a bisexual dancer on a fellowship in New York City; Cok, a Balinese businesswoman who runs hotels in Bali and in Pekanbaru; and Yasmin, a married Menadonese lawyer and human-rights activist who becomes emotionally and sexually involved with the ex-priest Saman. The four women are wealthy enough to move around without financial concerns. They speak Jakarta slang, are sexually explicit and adventurous, and serve as each other’s emotional supports. They become involved in Yasmin’s human-rights work through their various connections with Saman, their former teacher and a seminary student when they were middle and high school students at a Catholic school in Jakarta. The women move, occasionally alone, often as a group, through both time and space. Their narrative voices, constantly shifting from first to third person, are restless ones, continually probing the limits of individual subjectivity. Although one commentator suggested that in Utami’s text of Saman “the subject is effectively removed from the text,”101 I see Utami contributing to notions of subjectivity that destabilize autonomous subjects through intersubjective representations. Because the four women’s relationships with men are portrayed as fragmentary and uncommitted, they emerge most clearly as feminine subjects through their loyalties to one another. Although each woman has a distinct identity, their voices continually intersect and one completes another’s thoughts as they discuss their political, moral, and sexual beliefs in Jakarta and New York City.
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Utami’s novels reveal the brutality and sensuality of life in late New Order Indonesia and provide a sobering commentary on the events leading up to the fall of Suharto and the disillusionment after the failure of Abdurrachman Wahid’s reformasi government. Saman is an innovative novel in the field of Indonesian literature, with frank discussions of female sexuality in Laila’s vacillation over whether to consummate her affair with the married oil engineer Sihar and her subsequent seduction by her friend Shakuntala, in graphic scenes of Saman and his torturers in prison, and in Saman’s loss of faith and subsequent illicit affair with Yasmin. The second novel, Larung, however, presents more complex views of elite female Indonesian subjectivity through its complex questioning of intention, consciousness, and political commitment and its sophisticated analysis of the aftereffects of the New Order period. These women’s loyalties are to each other and to Saman, the wounded, martyred ex-priest who was their teacher and now is Yasmin’s lover. But Saman is doomed, brought down by the unexplored traumas of the nation. Rather than being Bildungsromane, Utami’s novels portray a desubjectivization for both her male and female characters that leads to national undoing. The women, however, are the ones in Utami’s novels who may be able to develop a postcolonial form of agency. In their fluid subjectivity, represented in the novels by their overlapping voices and movements, there is a promise of a coming to consciousness of female agency that would not be activist in a masculinist sense. The men in the novels, through their attachment to the nation, are trapped by their very identities as individualistic activists. Utami’s novels offer an elite feminist perspective on Frederic Jameson’s notion of postcolonial texts as allegories of the nation. Although Indonesian critics see Utami’s novels as innovative in their outspoken sexuality, in their presentation of women characters as independent sexualized beings, and in Utami’s bravery in actually describing the abuses of the New Order while it was still in power, it is, in fact, the shifting subjectivity of the novel’s heroines that interrupts the novel as national allegory.102 The space of the novel, where women can inhabit a Kantian cosmopolitan subjectivity through their ability to travel, exists beyond the nation. And while Utami’s novels do tie the nation together in their characters’ movements between Jakarta, South Sumatra, Bali, and East Java, the symbolism of the novels’ beginnings
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and endings in the South China Sea, a liminal space, and the main characters’ movements between Indonesia and New York City, disrupt the porous borders of the nation. The women’s journeys bring into relief the “asymmetrical relations of power” that always disrupt cosmopolitan travel. Rather than seeing the possibility of redemption in the postcolonial nation as “the most apposite figure for freedom today,”103 Utami’s novels suggest that the patriarchal vision of the postcolonial nation is doomed to failure.
Conclusion This essay has discussed the growth of Southeast Asian studies in the United States and the gradual transformation of the field as postcolonial questions of identity assumed greater importance and scholars of and from Southeast Asia moved into the study of literature, ethnicity, and gender. Rather than focusing on the coherence of the region or its lack, I suggest that the movement of Southeast Asianist scholars into comparative literature and English departments is enriching both literary studies and area studies.104 Arguing for opening up the study of comparative literatures to literatures from outside Euro-America, Gayatri Spivak insists that all literary texts deserve to be read with care and attention: “I cannot help but think that to deny the privilege of close reading to the texts of the global South is to give in to comparable impulses within the discipline.”105 To pay serious attention to formalist as well as historical, ethnographic, or ideological features of Southeast Asian literary texts is a challenge worthy of the practices of area studies scholars. A multisited Southeast Asian studies that unites its commitments to locally contextualized knowledges with attention to the diasporic and hybrid identities produced by the travels of ideas, peoples, and capital has the potential to enrich a growing practice of postcolonial close reading for Southeast Asian texts. Postcolonial close readings, whether in comparative literature or in the other disciplines that encompass area studies, show that arguments based on identity will always need to look at intersections of gender, ethnicity, class, ideology, sexuality, and religion. When these intersections are taken into account, new ways of looking at Southeast Asian histories, politics, and literary cultures appear. Globalizing economies and telecommunications ensure that various elite groups in Southeast
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Asia have the same jobs, wear the same clothes, and watch the same television programs as their counterparts in other parts of the world. But for internal refugees in Indonesia, Filipino domestic workers in Europe, America, and the Middle East, and many others who move along the borders of poverty and subsistence where first and third and fourth worlds meet, there is little chance of returning “home” or those returns will be negotiated on unexpected terms. Literature on these transnational diasporas is growing.106 It is here that the borders of Southeast Asian studies become effaced. As the subjects of area studies begin to move as frequently and as quickly as those who study them, the tensions and focal points of regional politics and economics refigure older cosmopolitan journeys. As Rolando Tolentino asks: “Where, then, does one locate sites of identity formation? Torn between echoes of colonial masters and nationalist leaders, quite hegemonic stances, how can one speak of both difference and agency?”107 Answers to these questions will continue to bring new kinds of Southeast Asian area studies into focus in the twenty-first century.
Notes Several people have read and commented on earlier drafts of this essay. In particular I would like to thank Celia Lowe, Carlo Bonura, Judith Henchy, Ben Kiernan, and the anonymous reviewers for the University of Washington Press, who provided substantive comments. Charles Keyes was especially helpful in thinking through the question of gender and scholarship on Southeast Asia and the ideas of Weber. The essay does not cover many new and interesting developments in the Southeast Asia field as a whole nor the contributions of many scholars working on Southeast Asia in Japan, Holland, and other parts of Europe. 1 2
3
See note 1 in the introduction to this volume. For two recent analyses of the field of Southeast Asian studies that focus on different topics and orientations, see John Bowen, “The Development of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. by David L. Szanton (University of California Press/ University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, edited vol. 3, article 10, 2003, available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/ editedvolumes/3/10); and Pheng Cheah, “Universal Areas: Asian Studies in a World in Motion,” Traces 1, no. 1 (2001): 37–70. Cheah’s piece is about area studies as a whole, but he draws specific examples from Southeast Asian literature. Contrary to Robert Hall’s vision of area studies, which was accepted by the Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Ford foundations in the 1950s, Southeast Asian studies did not adopt classics as the model for its field. See Immanuel Wallerstein, “The
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Laurie J. Sears Unintended Consequences of Cold War Area Studies,” in The Cold War and the University, ed. Noam Chomsky (New York: New Press, 1997); Robert B. Hall, Area Studies: With Special Reference to Their Implications for Research in the Social Sciences (New York: Social Science Research Council Committee on World Area Research, 1947). See also Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cultures of Area Studies in the United States,” Social Text, no. 41 (Winter 1994): 91–111. Ruth McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations, by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998), 42. Audrey R. Kahin and George M. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia (New York: New Press, 1995), 217. I thank Judith Henchy for stressing the importance of the civil rights movement in this process. See Rafael, “Cultures of Area Studies,” for a detailed discussion. Immanuel Wallerstein, “Unintended Consequences”; and Richard Ohmann, “English and the Cold War,” in Cold War and the University, ed. Chomsky, 103. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), 278. The seminal texts in the emergence of British cultural studies are Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1957); Raymond Williams’s The Long Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1961); and E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class (London: V. Gollancz, 1963). See Immanuel Kant, To Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, trans. and with an introduction by Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 2003); and Immanuel Kant, Kant on History, ed. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1963). For a detailed discussion of Kant’s essays “Toward Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Project” (1795) and “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View” (1784), see Allen W. Wood, “Kant’s Project for Perpetual Peace,” in Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), esp. 62–65. These essays by Kant are cited by scholars as the first opening of the debates over cosmopolitanism since the ancient Greeks. Kant, To Perpetual Peace, 15. James Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” in Cosmopolitics, ed. Pheng Cheah and Bruce Robbins, 363. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992), 7. Clifford, “Mixed Feelings,” 367, mentions the term “contact zone” in his discussion of cosmopolitanism. The interest of cultural studies in the 1970s in the work of Marxist theorist L. Althusser did not please E. P. Thompson. See Thompson’s The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays (London: Monthly Review Press, 1978). See also James Procter, Stuart Hall (London and New York: Routledge, 2004). Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies,” 282–283. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies.” This is not to date the entry of questions of race into U.S.-based area studies to the 1970s. Vicente
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L. Rafael explains: “It is useful to stress here that most area studies programs in the United States were conceived at a moment in American history when liberal ambitions for enforcing a global peace necessary for capitalist expansion coincided with liberal anxieties over desegregation, spurred by the successes of the civil rights movement. Indeed, the passage of the single most important piece of federal legislation for the funding of area studies programs, the National Defense Education Act (NDEA) of 1958, was held up by a number of southern congressmen who feared that it would intensify federal intervention on all levels of schooling and thus further hasten desegregation” (“Cultures of Area Studies,” 96). Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). For a critique of this narrative of the development of British cultural studies, see Jon Stratton and Ieng Ang, “On the Impossibility of a Global Culıural Studies: ‘British’ Cultural Studies in an ‘International’ Frame,” in Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, ed. David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen (London: Routledge, 1996). William H. Sewell Jr., “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Beyond the Cultural Turn, ed. Victoria E. Bonnell and Lynn Hunt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 36. Sherry B. Ortner, The Fate of “Culture”: Geertz and Beyond (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999), 4. John Brightman, “Forget Culture,” Cultural Anthropology 10 (1995): 509–546, cited in Sewell, “Concept(s) of Culture,” 38. See also the entry for “culture” in Alan Barnard and Jonathan Spencer, eds., Encyclopedia of Social and Cultural Anthropology (London: Routledge, 1996), 136–142. Barnard and Spencer wrote the entry for “culture.” William Sewell explains Geertz’s use of the notion of “cultural system”: “Geertz and [David] Schneider derived the term from Talcott Parsons’s usage, according to which the cultural system, a system of symbols and meanings, was a particular ‘level of abstraction’ of social relations. It was contrasted to the ‘social system,’ which was a system of norms and institutions, and to the ‘personality system,’ which was a system of motivations. Geertz and Schneider especially wanted to distinguish the cultural system from the social system” (“Concept(s) of Culture,” 43). James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1986). Ranajit Guha, ed., Subaltern Studies: Writings on South Asian History and Society, vol. 1 (Delhi and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Later volumes were edited by various members of the group. See ibid., vii, for a discussion of the term “subaltern” and its relation to elite groups. See also some of the major texts of the Subaltern Studies Collective in Vinayak Chaturvedi, ed., Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial (London: Verso, 2000). Reynaldo C. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila Press, 1979). Ileto was a colleague of Ranajit Guha for many years at the Australian National University. Both Ileto and Guha argue for a different type of subaltern or insurgent peasant consciousness,
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Laurie J. Sears one that is usually embedded within a world of religious or supernatural belief. See Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 318–319; and Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-insurgency,” in Selected Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982). Michael Adas, “From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 23 (1981): 217–247; James C. Scott, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Subsistence and Rebellion in Southeast Asia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1976); James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), also available online at ACLS History E-Book Project, http://www.historyebook.org.; James C. Scott and Benedict J. Tria Kerkvliet, eds., Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance in SouthEast Asia (London: Frank Cass, 1986). Adas’s “From Avoidance to Confrontation” was reprinted with an additional “Comment” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992). Sewell, “Concept(s) of Culture,” 40. This argument about cultural studies comes from a meeting I attended in October 1996 at the Ford Foundation in New York City when scholars of Asia were invited to come together to share ideas about a new area studies initiative that would focus on combining area studies and cultural studies. This idea was not favored by the group of scholars who attended the meeting, and Toby Volkman launched the successful “Crossing Borders” initiative shortly after that. Two books in the field that are informed by Southeast Asian knowledges but also fit into a cultural studies rubric are Krishna Sen and David T. Hill, eds., Media, Culture, and Politics in Indonesia (London: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Henk Schulte Nordholt, ed., Outward Appearances: Dressing State and Society in Indonesia (Leiden: KITLV Press, 1997). Recent work on Southeast Asia that is very much in the mainstream of cultural studies includes Emma Baulch’s research on heavy-metal and punk music in Bali. See her essays “Alternative Music and Mediation in Late New Order Indonesia,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 3, no. 2 (2002): 219–234; and “Creating a Scene: Balinese Punk’s Beginnings,” International Journal of Cultural Studies 5, no. 2 (2002): 153–177. See also Michel Picard, Bali: Cultural Tourism and Touristic Culture (Singapore: Archipelago Press, 1996). See Anne McClintock, “The Myth of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term Postcolonialism,” Social Text, nos. 31/32 (1992): 84–98; and Ella Shohat, “Notes on the Postcolonial,” Social Text, nos. 31/32 (1992): 99–113. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-colonial Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 1989). Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. (London: Verso, 1991). Benedict Anderson, “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990,” in Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, ed. Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes, and Karl Hutterer (Ann
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Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1992). Anderson also regrets that the linking of theory to public policy has produced within the discipline of political science a particular connection with U.S. imperialism in the Cold War period that led to the rise of deterrence theory and rational-choice theory, in addition to modernization and development theories. This situation is changing rapidly as more scholars of Southeast Asian origin take positions in U.S. humanities departments. Pheng Cheah in the Department of Rhetoric at Berkeley, Neferti Tadiar in the Department of the History of Consciousness at Santa Cruz, and Francisco Benitez in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Washington are important figures in postcolonial literary criticism. Other important scholars of Southeast Asian literatures, such as Nancy Florida, Hendrik Maier, Vicente Rafael, and Keith Taylor, also use postcolonial critiques in their work on the literatures of Southeast Asia. See also Tony Day and Keith Foulcher, eds., Clearing a Space: Postcolonial Readings of Modern Indonesian Literature (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2002), for a collection of essays by Australian, Indonesian, Dutch, and American authors. In Indonesian literary studies, for example, there are only a handful of scholars from Indonesia who write in English. Ariel Heryanto, Goenawan Mohamad, and Sylvia Tiwon are three of the better known of these scholars and critics. Malaysian scholars writing in English on Malay literary and dramatic criticism include Muhammad Haji Salleh, Salleh Yaapar, and Sumit Mandal. See also Hendrik M. J. Maier’s excellent discussion of Pramoedya and his Buru Quartet in We Are Playing Relatives: A Survey of Malay Writing (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2004), chap. 8. Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). For two fine works less engaged with European theory, see Caroline S. Hau, Necessary Fictions: Philippine Literature and the Nation, 1946–1980 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila Press, 2001); and Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Fantasy Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004). Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Cf. Cheah, “Universal Areas.” Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 19–20. Ibid., 17. Important books on translation practices in Southeast Asia include Alton L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays towards a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); and Vicente Rafael, The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, chap. 4. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) (originally published 1962).
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Laurie J. Sears See, e.g., Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993); Bruno Latour, Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Paul Rabinow, Essays on the Anthropology of Reason (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Paul Rabinow, Anthropos Today: Reflections on Modern Equipment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race and Nature in the World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); and Donna Haraway, Modest-Witness@ Second-Millennium.FemaleMan-Meets-OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997). This list includes Thongchai Winichakul’s book on technologies of mapping, Rudolph Mrazek’s work on colonial engineers in the Dutch Indies, and Anna Tsing’s new book, which draws together her recent work on ecology, globalization, and communities of scholars, development workers, and tribal elders. See Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of the Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994); Rudolph Mrazek, Engineers of Happy Land (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). See also Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); Eric Tagliacozzo, Secret Trades, Porous Borders: Smuggling and States along a Southeast Asian Frontier, 1865–1915 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); and John Pemberton, “The Specter of Coincidence,” in Southeast Asia over Three Generations: Essays Presented to Benedict R. O’G. Anderson, ed. James T. Siegel and Audrey R. Kahin, Studies on Southeast Asia, no. 36 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program Publications, Cornell University, 2003), 75–90. For example, see Anthony Reid’s edited volume Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives, Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series (Tempe, AZ: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, 2003), especially the essays “Completing the Circle: Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia,” by Anthony Reid and Maria Serena I. Diokno, and “Southeast Asian Studies in Thailand,” by Charnvit Kasetsiri. Resil B. Mojares, “Redrawing the Boundaries: Research Cooperation in Southeast Asia,” in Toward the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia, ed. Taufik Abdullah and Yekti Maunati (Jakarta: Program of Southeast Asian Studies, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994), 141. Vedi R. Hadiz and Daniel Dhakidae, introduction to Social Science and Power in Indonesia, ed. Vedi R. Hadiz and Daniel Dhakidae (Jakarta and Singapore: Equinox Publishing, 2005), 11. Two scholars who eventually relocated to Australia, for similar reasons, are Arief Budiman and Ariel Heryanto. See Ariel Heryanto, “Public Intellectuals, Media, and Democratization: Cultural Politics of the Middle Classes in Indonesia,” in Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 24–59.
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Thongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia,” in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, ed. Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 19. See 26 n. 12 for Thongchai’s discussion of the term “home scholar.” Heryanto and Mandal argue that even though all the contributors to their book were trained in the “West,” they nevertheless spent their “formative years” in either Malaysia or Indonesia and thus have a depth of knowledge gained from living in their countries of study. See Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal, “Challenges to Authoritarianism in Indonesia and Malaysia,” in Challenging Authoritarianism, ed. Heryanto and Mandal, 15. Krishna Sen, “Indonesian Women at Work: Reframing the Subject,” in Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, ed. Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens (London: Routledge, 1998), 38. In her essay “Between Compliance and Resistance: Women and the Middle Class Way of Life in Singapore” in the same volume, Nirmala PuruShotam notes: “I do not write on behalf of all middle-class women in Singapore, but I do write as an ‘insider,’ implicated in the conditions and contradictions that I try to analyse and transform” (128). Maila Stivens, “Theorizing Gender, Power and Modernity,” in Gender and Power in Affluent Asia, ed. Sen and Stivens, 20. Caroline S. Hau, “On Representing Others: Intellectuals, Pedagogy, and the Uses of Error,” in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000), 164–165. Asad presents genealogies of the secular through discussions of myth, pain and cruelty, agency and human rights, and religious minorities and nationalism. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 16–17. These comments were made in an essay for a 1993 conference on developing Southeast Asian studies in Southeast Asia. See Datu Michael O. Mastura, “Rethinking Integration: Muslim Minorities in Southeast Asia,” in Toward the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Abdullah and Maunati, 215. The quotation from Amri B. Shamsul is cited as Shamsul 1993 and is probably Shamsul’s Antropologi dan modernisasi: Mengungkapkan pengalaman Malaysia (Bangi: Penerbit Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, 1993). Asad, Formations of the Secular, 11. Norani Othman, “Islamization and Democratization in Malaysia in Regional and Global Contexts,” in Challenging Authoritarianism, ed. Heryanto and Mandal, 140. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 20. Glenn May, Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio, Southeast Asian Studies Series (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). Reynaldo C. Ileto, “History and Criticism: The Invention of Heroes,” in Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998), 237, 236.
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Laurie J. Sears Ibid., 205–206. Ibid., 229. Ibid., 229–230. Simon Philpott, Rethinking Indonesia: Postcolonial Theory, Authoritarianism and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 142. See also Daniel S. Lev’s afterword to The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia, ed. R. H. Taylor (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 243–244. Lev clearly identifies this culturalist bias for explaining political behavior. See Celia Lowe’s and Carlo Bonura’s essays in this volume (chaps. 3 and 6) and Celia Lowe’s introduction to Wild Profusion. Philpott, Rethinking Indonesia, 176. Sumit K. Mandal, “Creativity in Protest: Arts Workers and the Recasting of Politics and Society in Indonesia and Malaysia,” in Challenging Authoritarianism, ed. Heryanto and Mandal, 207. See also Will Derks, “A Literary Mycelium: Some Prolegomena for a Project on Indonesian Literatures in Malay,” in Contesting Malayness: Malay Identity across Boundaries, ed. Timothy P. Barnard (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2004), 186–188. Derks discusses the poetry and short fiction produced by “literary clubs” throughout Indonesia, which he believes represent a more local form of print literary activity than the novels that literary scholars usually focus on. Thongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices,” 23. See also Brenda S. A. Yeoh, “Changing Conceptions of Space in History Writing: A Selective Mapping of Writings on Singapore,” in New Terrains, ed. Ahmad and Ee. Ariel Heryanto, “Public Intellectuals, Media, and Democratization,” 25. Asvi Warman Adam, “History, Nationalism and Power,” in Social Science and Power, ed. Hadiz and Dhakidae, 247–73. See also Mary S. Zurbuchen’s edited volume Beginning to Remember: The Past in the Indonesian Present (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2005), especially the essays “Nugroho Notosusanto: The Legacy of a Historian in the Service of an Authoritarian Regime,” by Katharine E. McGregor, and “The Battle for History after Suharto,” by Gerry van Klinken. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 8–9. This case is particularly relevant for soldiers, such as some of the Americans who fought in the Viet Nam–American War and now suffer from the unbearable memories of atrocities they witnessed. The medical field of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been developed to deal with these cases. See ibid., 15–16, 230–233. Ibid., 8–10. E.g., McClintock, “Myth of Progress”; Shohat, “Notes on the Postcolonial”; Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 292–310. Stuart Hall, “When Was the Post-colonial?” in The Post-colonial Question: Common Skies, Divided Horizons, ed. Iain Chambers and Lidia Curti (New York: Routledge, 1996), 247.
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Philpott, Rethinking Indonesia, 54. My focus in this section is on Java and Indonesia, as I am most familiar with issues of gender and power in Indonesia. Laurie J. Sears, “Fragile Identities,” in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). Benedict Anderson, Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 17–77. Anderson acknowledges that he was influenced by the work of Clifford Geertz. See Geertz, The Religion of Java (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), 231–232: “Peasants clung to gentry princes not only for military protection but also because the latter had about them that magical-mystical aura Max Weber called charisma.” See also Charles F. Keyes, “Weber and Anthropology,” Annual Review of Anthropology 31 (2002): 233: “The ‘interpretive anthropology’ first developed by Geertz has roots in Weber’s ‘interpretive sociology.’” Benedict Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture” (1972), and “Further Adventures in Charisma” (1985), in Language and Power. Anderson, introduction to Language and Power, 11. Anderson, “Further Adventures in Charisma,” 78–79. Ibid., 89. Soemarsaid Moertono, State and Statecraft in Old Java: A Study of the Later Mataram Period, 16th to 19th Century, rev. ed. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Modern Indonesia Project, 1981), 144. Claire Holt, On the Wajang Kulit (Purwa) and Its Symbolic and Mystical Elements, Data Paper 27 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Southeast Asia Program, 1957). Claire Holt, who taught at Cornell in the 1950s and 1960s, was most interested in Dutch Indological scholarship on Java. See Laurie J. Sears, Shadows of Empire: Colonial Discourse and Javanese Tales (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), chap. 3. Talcott Parsons, introduction to The Theory of Social and Economic Organization, by Max Weber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), 10–11. For more on Weber and Southeast Asian studies, see Wim F. Wertheim, “The Contribution of Weberian Sociology to Studies of Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 17–30. For a recent study of Weber and Anthropology by a Southeast Asianist, see Keyes, “Weber and Anthropology.” For a theoretical discussion of gender and charisma, see Caroline Walker Bynum, “Introduction: The Complexity of Symbols,” in Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols, ed. Caroline Walker Bynum, Stevan Harrell, and Paula Richman (Boston: Beacon Press, 1986), 1–20. Suzanne Brenner, The Domestication of Desire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998). Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “Woman, Culture, and Society: A Theoretical Overview,” in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974); Michelle Z. Rosaldo, “The Use and Abuse of Anthropology: Reflections on Feminism and Cross-cultural Understanding,” Signs 5, no. 3 (1980): 389–417; and Jane M. Atkinson, “Anthropology: Review Article,” Signs 8, no. 2 (1982): 236–258.
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Laurie J. Sears See, e.g., Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983); Penny Van Esterik, ed., Women of Southeast Asia (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1982); Elsbeth Locher-Scholten and Anke Niehof, eds., Indonesian Women in Focus: Past and Present Notions (Dordrecht: Foris Publications, 1987); Aihwa Ong, Spirits of Resistance and Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia (Albany: SUNY Press, 1987); Diane Wolf, Factory Daughters: Gender, Household Dynamics, and Rural Industrialization in Java (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1992); and Mary Beth Mills, Thai Women in the Global Labor Force (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1999). Nancy Eberhardt, ed., Gender, Power, and the Construction of the Moral Order: Studies from the Thai Periphery, Center for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph 4 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1988); Jane M. Atkinson and Shelly Errington, eds., Power and Difference: Gender in Island Southeast Asia (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990). See Shelly Errington’s introduction, titled “Recasting Sex, Gender, and Power: A Theoretical and Regional Overview,” in Power and Difference; Mina Roces, Women, Power, and Kinship Politics: Female Power in Post-war Philippines (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998). Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2002); Ann Laura Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire: Foucault’s History of Sexuality and the Colonial Order of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Peter A. Jackson and Nerida M. Cook, eds., Genders and Sexualities in Modern Thailand (Chiang Mai, Thailand: Silkworm, 1999); Evelyn Blackwood and Saskia Wieringa, eds., Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices across Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). On the emerging field of same-sex relations in Southeast Asia, see also Dede Oetomo, “Gender and Sexual Orientation in Indonesia,” in Fantasizing the Feminine, ed. Sears; Thomas Boellstorff, “The Gay Archipelago: Postcolonial Sexual Subjectivities in Indonesia,” PhD diss., Stanford University, 2000; Michael Peletz, Sex and the State: Transgender Practices, State Strategies, and “Asian Values” in Southeast Asia (New York: Routledge, forthcoming). Anna Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-theWay Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Aihwa Ong and Michael Peletz, eds., Bewitching Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Politics in Southeast Asia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995); Michael Peletz, Reason and Passion: Representation of Gender in a Malay Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996); Fantasizing the Feminine, Sears, ed.; Brenner, Domestication of Desire; Krishna Sen and Maila Stivens, eds., Gender and Power in Affluent Asia (London: Routledge, 1998); Barbara Andaya, ed., Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (Honolulu: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, 2000); Peggy Reeves Sanday, Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002); Ara Wilson, The
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Intimate Economies of Bangkok: Tomboys, Tycoons, and Avon Ladies in the Global City (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2004). New work is appearing all the time, and this is a selective and somewhat idiosyncratic list. Alfred W. McCoy, “Same Banana: Hazing and Honor at the Philippine Military Academy,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 3 (1995): 694. See also Alfred W. McCoy, Closer than Brothers: Manhood at the Philippine Military Academy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999). Personal communication from Charles Keyes, September 2005. Keyes also notes the pioneering feminist work of Vietnamese scholar Le Thi Nham Tuyet. Frederic Jameson, “Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capitalism,” Social Text, no. 15 (Fall 1986): 65–88; Aijaz Ahmad, “Jameson’s Rhetoric of Otherness and the ‘National Allegory,’” Social Text, no. 17 (Fall 1987): 3–25; Rolando B. Tolentino, “Khidlat Tahimik in the Rhetoric of First World Theory,” in his volume of collected essays National/Transnational: Subject Formation, Media, and Cultural Politics in and on the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001), 101–111. See also Franco Moretti, “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (January–February 2000): 57–58; and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Death of a Discipline (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), chaps. 2 and 3. Spivak argues that opening up literary study to “third-world” texts is the way to reinvigorate the discipline of comparative literature. For discussions of the connection between novel and nation in Southeast Asia, see Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24–25, who calls the novel and newspaper “two forms of imagining [that] provided the technical means for ‘re-presenting’ the kind of imagined community that is the nation”; Cheah, Spectral Nationality, chap. 5; James T. Siegel, Fetish, Recognition, Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), esp. chaps. 6 and 7; and Rafael, Promise of the Foreign. Ayu Utami, Saman (Jakarta: Kapustakaan Populer Gramedia, 1998); and Ayu Utami, Larung (Jakarta: Kapustakaan Populer Gramedia, 2001). Saman has recently been published in English as Saman, trans. Pamela Allen (Jakarta: Equinox Publishing, 2005). In addition to the works cited in the previous section of this essay, see also the essays by Indonesian and Euro-American scholars and intellectuals in Zurbuchen, Beginning to Remember. For work by prominent American scholars, see the essays on violence in Indonesia in Asian Survey 42, no. 4 (2002). Pamela Allen, “A Note on Translation,” in Saman, by Utami. For some Indonesian analyses of Utami’s work, see “Ayu Utami tak Mampir de Kedai,” Pantau 2, no. 20 (December 2001): 9–10, available online at http:// www.pantau.or.id/txt/20/06.html/ (accessed 5 April 2004); and Katrin Bandel, “Heteronormatifitas dan Falosentrisme Ayu Utami,” Kompas, 1 June 2005. For a further analysis of Utami’s novel Larung, see Laurie J. Sears, “Trauma and the Nation in Ayu Utami’s Novel Larung: A Feminist Perspective,” unpublished manuscript. Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 395.
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Laurie J. Sears See, e.g., Sylvia Tiwon’s Breaking the Spell: Colonialism and Literary Renaissance in Indonesia (Leiden: Semaian 18, 1999) for a discussion of how Malay oral poetry and oral traditions have influenced both Malay and Indonesian fiction and poetry, and Tineke Hellwig’s In the Shadow of Change: Women in Indonesian Literature, Center for Southeast Asia Studies Monograph 35 (Berkeley: Centers for South and Southeast Asia Studies, University of California, 1994), which looks at the development of female characters in Indonesian novels. Both of these books are wonderful contributions to the study of Southeast Asian literatures, but neither Tiwon nor Hellwig are in departments of comparative literature. Spivak, Death of a Discipline, 50. For a different view of this issue, see Hendrik Maier, “Complit and Southeast Asia: The Trees and the Waves,” in Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Reid, 233–253. Maier cites Moretti’s “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (February 2000): 57–58, which calls for a practice of “distant reading” rather than “close reading” (the latter is the method of literary scholars from the New Critics to the deconstructionists that gives attention to both form and content). Maier argues that “distant reading” opens up a world for students of Southeast Asian literatures if they read widely in the literatures in translation of the region. E.g., see Rhacel Salazar Parreñas, Servants of Globalization: Women, Migration, and Domestic Work (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001); Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999); and Sonita Sarkar and Esha Niyogi De, eds., Trans-status Subjects: Gender in the Globalization of South and Southeast Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). Rolando B. Tolentino, “Archipelagic Space in Southeast Asian Cinemas,” in his National/Transnational: Subject Formation, Media, and Cultural Politics in and on the Philippines (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2001), 126.
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2
Can There Be Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian Studies? ARIEL HERYANTO
M
uch has been written in English on the Western origins of Southeast Asian studies and the constructedness of the object of this field of study. The 1984 essay by the American political scientist Donald Emmerson is one of the earliest and best deconstructive accounts on this history.1 A decade later, Australianbased American historian Craig Reynolds informed us that the attempt by various Western scholars to “authenticate Southeast Asia as a region and a field of study … is very much a Western, postcolonial project.” Reynolds added that the implications of Emmerson’s essay about Southeast Asia as “a contrived identity, reified by scholars, publishers, and educational institutions in the West, have never been pursued.”2 Unintentionally, two fine essays, by American anthropologist John Bowen and his European counterpart Victor King, further reaffirm the exogenous character of Southeast Asian studies.3 Despite the disagreements in their views, their views reflect—as the authors reflect on—the history, character, and achievements of this domain of area studies as it unfolded largely in their respective continents of residence.4 Consequently, only a few names of Southeast Asians appear in their discussions. Among this tiny minority, none is mentioned in either essay for any contribution of major significance to academic inquiry. Rather than resulting from Bowen’s or King’s oversight or deliberate disregard of Southeast Asian scholarship on the region, this represents the standard practice and reflects a reality that they set out to analyze.5 75
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Few exceptions to this practice exist, and some new changes are occurring. As hinted at by many—including those cited above—but never adequately explored, Southeast Asians are not simply fictional figures authored by outsiders or submissive puppets in the masterful hands of Western puppeteers. Emmerson already pondered whether, as “an externally defined region,” Southeast Asia could in the future “become meaningful to its inhabitants.”6 Citing Smail and van Leur, Reynolds suggests that Southeast Asians would “‘write back’ against the constructions of colonial historiography.”7 But have they? Should they? Where, in what ways, and how far have they done so? The last decade or so has actually witnessed a slow but progressive growth of interest and activity in locally based Southeast Asian studies. Nonetheless, it remains true to say that, with the exception of Singapore, Southeast Asian studies is of little interest to Southeast Asians. For the last three decades, Singapore has remained the region’s only major center of teaching and research in Southeast Asian studies. Not only has its famous Institute of Southeast Asian Studies continued to thrive while many teaching programs in American, European, and Australian universities have undergone a crisis, but the National University of Singapore’s Southeast Asian Studies Programme has also grown along with the university’s several other Asia-related departments and activities. Something similar can be seen at the Department of South East Asian Studies, the University of Malaya. Select Books in Singapore is perhaps the world’s only bookshop devoted to Southeast Asian studies. Thailand has made encouraging progress with the launching of new institutional commitments to degree programs in Southeast Asian studies.8 On a smaller scale, similar developments are taking place in several institutions in the Philippines, Viet Nam, and Indonesia. Notwithstanding these developments, the main centers of gravity of Southeast Asian studies are still located in North America, Australia, and Europe.9 The institutional crisis that has prevailed in these three regions has not been a major cause for concern to most Southeast Asians, nor has it undermined the intellectual dominance of Western, and particularly North American, area studies in Southeast Asia. What does this particular historical conjuncture, as crudely sketched out above, mean for the prospects for home-grown Southeast Asian studies in Southeast Asia? The present essay seeks to answer this
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question by focusing on three thematic issues. First, some sort of area studies can be predicted to grow in scale and importance in most parts of Southeast Asia, although the name and boundaries of this area of analysis may be different from that of the American-led Southeast Asian studies of the Cold War period. However, such growth will take place gradually. Second, despite such possible development, the old Southeast Asian studies as it has matured on the other side of the globe will continue to have an influence upon locally produced knowledge of the region. In profound ways, it will become an intellectual legacy, historical baggage, source of inspiration, source of institutional assistance, and partner to the more locally based institutionalized area studies. Third, the issue of past and present unequal relationships in the production and consumption of knowledge of this region will be debated more seriously than before, prompting discussions of related issues such as agency, positions of difference, and representation. One can hope that this tension will have results that are more constructive and innovative than earlier debates on the indigenization of the social sciences (before the 1970s) or on “Asian values” (in the 1990s) have produced.10 Emphasizing the activities and agency of the existing few Southeast Asian scholars and public intellectuals in Southeast Asia in building local Southeast Asian studies, this essay will make no attempt to survey (like the writings cited above did) important works by Southeast Asianists from other continents. Because no Southeast Asian studies has developed institutionally in Southeast Asia on a scale comparable to that in North America, Europe, or Australia, many of the insights presented below have been informed by various unpublished sources and personal experience.11
Southeast Asians or Southeast Asianists There can be important differences in the main orientations, constraints, and contributions of area specialists based on different continents, as the works of Emmerson, Bowen, King, and Milner have separately shown.12 These differences, however, are not as important as those found to exist between, on the one hand, all of these scholars taken together and, on the other, Southeast Asian scholars. This essay is concerned with this latter set of differences. Southeast
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Asians are central to the operation and existence of Southeast Asian studies, and yet they have always occupied a subordinate or inferior position within the production and consumption of this enterprise. Although Southeast Asians have every right and potential to be legitimate analysts of themselves, their modern intellectual apparatus has largely been both indebted and subordinated to the West. Its further development has largely continued to be dependent on this unequal relationship with the West, although there are signs of important changes in sight. One way to appreciate this unequal interdependence is to look briefly at the standard procedures for producing Southeast Asianists through university training in the West, and at how such procedures apply differently to students hailing from Southeast Asia. Hardly distinguishable from the rites of passage for students of anthropology, the minimum requirements for becoming a Southeast Asianist include a good mastery of one of the living languages of the people in the region and an extended period of residence there. In fact, anthropology has been one of the most important forerunners of Southeast Asian studies and continues to be one of its key disciplines. Formulated as such, the standard procedures expose the foreignness of the enterprise and its practitioners to the people studied. For decades, university curriculums in Southeast Asian studies have assumed— even more blatantly than in anthropology—that they train people who have neither achieved proficiency in a Southeast Asian language nor lived in the region. These students are anything but Southeast Asians. This is understandable, as nearly all these universities are located half a globe away from Southeast Asia, and the number of Southeast Asian people living near these institutions has been small. Major changes in the demographic composition of states (e.g., California and Hawaii) or cities (e.g., Melbourne) with strong area studies programs seriously challenge the old assumptions and render the educational structure that was previously built upon such assumptions outdated. The number of Southeast Asian nationals in Southeast Asian studies has increased during the last decade or so. Most of these individuals are native speakers of one or several of the living languages spoken in the region and have spent a large portion of their lives there. They meet some of the technical requirements for becoming Southeast Asianists very well. However, as “insiders” of the object of study, their
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double position becomes a source of tension. Within the dominant framework, Southeast Asians are overqualified (in terms of language mastery and residence) to be Southeast Asianists, but they also are— or are made to appear—underqualified for other reasons, for instance, in terms of academic analytical skills and theorizing. They are assets (as colleagues, informants, connections, research assistants, fieldwork hosts) for foreign analysts but also suspects (allegedly biased and partial in approaching the common objects of investigation). They cannot be totally ignored, but neither can they be fully assimilated within the old structures of area studies. As the number of Southeast Asians entering Southeast Asian studies has grown, it has become difficult to ignore the above ambivalences and tensions or to conceal the ethnocentrism that contributed to the early foundation of Southeast Asian studies outside Southeast Asia. Of late, new policies and procedures have been designed in response to particular situations and applied specifically to the increased participation of Southeast Asian nationals in the field. The most important examples of such policies are the requirements and institutional support for students of Southeast Asian background to study any part of the region except “their own.” Although the early ethnocentrism in Southeast Asian studies was European and American, the logic of these policies is not restricted to European or American institutions. At the University of Singapore, students who are officially designated as “ethnic Malays,” for instance, are welcome to major in Southeast Asian studies, but they can do so only by concentrating their work on any of the non-Malay-speaking areas of the region. The same regulation applies in a number of new major grant programs, sponsored by Japanese and American foundations, to encourage midcareer academics and professionals in Southeast Asia to study areas of Asia other than their own countries of origin.13 The rationality of such a policy is immediately apparent, and the potential benefits are beyond doubt. Nonetheless, its underlying assumption is subject to several complications. First, such a policy assumes that Southeast Asian individuals have only one clear-cut background (place, language, and culture of origin). Its resonance with the colonial census system in the invention of ethnicity among the colonized peoples is striking.14 Second, the policy also assumes that there is a significant degree of homogeneity among new recruits within
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a single nation-state; that they all have good knowledge about their fellow nationals; and that they are significantly differentiated from those in other nation-states. Third, in overestimating the nation-state’s homogenizing power, this policy downplays several other social divisions and inequalities that cut across each other and transcend national boundaries: gender, ethnicity, class, age, religion, geographical distance from capital cities, and so on. Therefore, according to such logic, a Thai is not “truly” a Southeast Asianist, no matter how much she or he has studied about Thailand, until she or he has acquired a considerable amount of knowledge about at least one other country in the region as produced outside the region. She or he is “only” a Thai specialist, or an academic in a particular discipline. As indicated in a moment, few exceptions are made, such as when such a person’s works form a significant contribution to a much wider international community of scholars. In contrast, an American may well qualify as a Southeast Asianist by virtue of a fairly deep understanding of a single aspect of social life in one small domain within the region (e.g., Balinese painting, the Bangkok entertainment industry, or Sinakulo in Luzon), regardless of her or his knowledge of America. The same logic makes it possible for a Jakarta-based Indonesian academic to be recognized as a Southeast Asianist because of her or his fairly deep knowledge about a subject familiar to Southeast Asian urbanites (e.g., corruption, traffic jams, radio broadcasting, women, Islamic movements, or constitutional reform) in Bangkok, Manila, or Kuala Lumpur, although she or he has no clue as to what life is like for her or his fellow nationals in many of the islands away from Jakarta. Thus, there is a wide gap between being a Southeast Asian and being a Southeast Asianist. A Southeast Asian can be trained to become a Southeast Asianist, but such training is never easy. It is not any easier than for a non–Southeast Asian. This and a few other obstacles to be elaborated on in the following sections explain why Southeast Asian studies has been predominantly Euro- or Americano-centric. Despite the various forms of politically correct rhetoric, it has never been easy for Southeast Asians to seek entry and equal standing with other colleagues in the production and circulation of authoritative knowledge about the region. Given this level of difficulty, and minimal incentives
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to overcome it, it is not surprising that there has been little interest in Southeast Asian studies among the locals and so little progress toward improving this situation.
Nationalist Interests and Universalist Closures For a large part of its history, Southeast Asian studies has been anything but a discipline that engages intellectually in any significant way with the people in the societies generally referred to as Southeast Asian. There may be many reasons, some better than others, why this has been so. Although one must resist the temptation to equate Southeast Asian studies with “orientalism,” it is difficult to entirely ignore the latter or dissociate the two phenomena. In this section, I will elaborate on the points outlined above in four areas. All demonstrate the various ways—structural conditions, institutional policies, and individual practices—in which Southeast Asians and Southeast Asian studies are kept apart from each other. These four areas are: (1) the nationalist orientation of education in Southeast Asian nations; (2) the proclivity of Southeast Asian students in Western universities to focus their intellectual energy on studying their own countries; (3) language barriers; and (4) some of the legitimate mechanisms within established centers of Southeast Asian studies that have kept Southeast Asians at bay. Lest there be misunderstanding, some clarification and repeated emphasis are necessary. There may not have been any conscious attempt to keep Southeast Asians out of the field. In fact, there have been generous and genuine efforts on the part of “Western” scholars and institutions to invite more Southeast Asians into the enterprise almost as early as the discipline acquired its credentials in the 1960s, if not earlier. Like everything else, this commitment has its own loopholes and resistance from within and outside the system. What should be a cause for concern is the general complacency about the situation. For Southeast Asians, entry and participation in this intellectual exercise in Western-dominated international communities are not without serious restrictions and conditions not entirely distinct from what has generally been understood as colonial orientalism. This has become more acute since Southeast Asian studies in the world’s major centers has experienced difficult conditions due to a series of budget cuts by
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universities and governments, making the field seriously vulnerable and hypersensitive to threats to its survival in the increasingly competitive market of commoditized mass-produced knowledge. Another point of clarification is worth reiterating. Far from advocating any form of nativism, I do not subscribe to the idea, which was popular in postcolonial Southeast Asia from the 1940s to about the 1970s, that the local Southeast Asian people, to all intents and purposes, occupy a better or privileged position compared with their Western counterparts to speak of realities or truths about Southeast Asia/ns. While their absence and exclusion from Southeast Asian studies should be recognized as problematic, the simple inclusion and animated presence of someone coming from the region does not necessarily help make the situation any better. Different Nationals, Different Interests The condition of the social sciences and humanities in most countries in Southeast Asia has been rather disheartening, to say the least.15 This is familiar and predictable. It is mistaken, however, to gauge the problem of the region’s scholarly pursuit by attributing it mainly to material and financial scarcity. This is perhaps not where one should begin or conclude an analysis of the problem. The capital cities of many Southeast Asian nations display abundant resources; this was especially true prior to the 1997 crisis. But even here, commitment to education, and specifically to the social sciences and humanities, is generally low in proportion to other spheres of modern and urban life. Even in the region’s more industrialized and prosperous areas, such as Singapore and Malaysia, where education is not particularly a luxury, intellectual inquiry in these disciplines does not enjoy the kind of support, prestige, and autonomy that other social institutions do. According to John Clammer, Singapore has an extremely strong desire to “keep up” with the track records of the world’s centers of excellence in the academic industry; perhaps this desire is stronger than in most Western universities.16 However, such a desire has been motivated more by a compliance with illiberal state policies based on economic calculation than by any passion for intellectual innovation and rigor, let alone by the social criticism so much valued in the liberal West. Malaysia’s educational resources and achievements have also fared much better than most in the region, but as elsewhere, the best
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educational institutions succumb to the logic of market commoditization as soon as they become prestigious and salable.17 Regardless of the levels of the nation’s resources and economic achievements, for various reasons that McVey has lucidly discussed, the energy of the Southeast Asian intelligentsia in the modern social sciences and humanities has been directed toward more instrumental and applied agendas.18 Through nearly the whole history of the independent nations in this region, the projects of nation building and modernization have been paramount. Post–Cold War global economics may have prompted some changes in the strategies and priorities adopted by different nations. None of these changes, however, indicates a weakening of the primacy of the commitment to the real and perceived interests of the nation-state, despite all the hype about “globalization.” So strong and rigid is the commitment to modernizing the fledgling nation that it has often been pursued at the expense of international and subnational issues.19 For this reason, the long-standing exclusion or minimal representation of Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian studies in North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia has not been a cause for concern to most Southeast Asian intellectuals. Understandably, neither has the recent crisis that has hit these institutions. Selected issues within Southeast Asian studies and the affairs of other nations occasionally gain serious attention from individuals and institutions within the region, when and if they have direct effects on one or more of the latter’s national interests. In this sense, 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.” The difference is that, in a given country at a particular moment, such interests call for the study of “others” half a globe away, only to be rapidly shifted or terminated when the same interests demand a different course of action and intellectual orientation. Analyses by Anthony Reid and Benedict Anderson illuminate this point sharply.20 Having said all this, one must duly recognize the accomplishments of individual scholars in this region whose work on their own countries has made a strong impact on broader international communities of
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scholars. Recognition is also due to the growing number of Southeast Asian nationals who have demonstrated inspiring scholarship on countries other than their own. Included in the first category are people like Edmund Terence Gomez, Jomo Kwame Sundaram, BengHuat Chua, Resil Mojares, Kasian Tejapira, Julia Suryakusuma, and Vedi R. Hadiz.21 In the second category, a few names come to mind. Some of the most recent examples of what promises to mark the beginning of a large and phenomenal change in the region’s intellectual history are Jacqueline Siapno’s forceful work on the intersection of religion, gender, and politics in Indonesia and East Timor; Sumit Mandal’s insightful analyses of Indonesian art, politics of ethnicity, and literature; Ceres Pioquinto’s investigation of the dangdut performance in Java; Priyambudi Sulistiyanto’s comparative analysis of Indonesian, Thai, and Burmese polities; Filomeno V. Aguilar’s innovative examinations of migration, hybridity, and citizenship in several countries of Southeast Asia; and Joo Ean Tan’s original investigations of never-married women in several capital cities of Southeast Asia.22 These new intellectual endeavors are taking place along with recent and rapid changes in the region itself since J. Eliseo Rocamora,23 Nidhi Aeusrivongse, and Withaya Sucharithanarugse completed their studies on Indonesia.24 It is significant that, with the exception of Sumit Mandal in the above list, currently active Southeast Asian researchers conducting studies on countries other than their own in the region have pursued their careers outside their countries of origin. It is not easy to assess the extent to which such migration, particularly to North America, Western Europe, Japan, and Australia, is a contributing factor to the recent intellectual transnationalization. Migration cannot be underestimated when one considers the accomplishments of scholars like Vicente Rafael or Thongchai Winichakul.25 These are two exceptionally successful scholars of “Southeast Asian” origins whose works have an impact beyond contemporary Southeast Asian studies, inside and outside the region. Just how far they are “atypical” of Southeast Asian nationals studying overseas will become clear in the next section. Discovering “Home Countries” Abroad Southeast Asians can hope to take an active part in the production of Southeast Asian studies only if they acquire the right intellectual training,
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rhetorical conventions, and cultural vocabularies of the American, European, or Australian practitioners and pay due respect to all of these. Given the hopeless lack of institutional support in their home countries, for most Southeast Asians there has been no better way of acquiring all these skills than undertaking the pilgrimage to the world’s centers of Southeast Asian studies located in North America, Western Europe, and, lately, Australia, before Japan and Singapore offered alternative, closer venues. Such privileged opportunities usually come from scholarships and other grant programs.26 As has been widely observed, Southeast Asians are inclined to study their own country when they pursue higher degrees abroad in the arts and social sciences, including (Southeast) Asian studies.27 This practice has been viewed cynically and is seen as a sign of narrowmindedness, chauvinism, or simply intellectual laziness. Studying societies other than “one’s own” not only is perceived as more painstaking and thus more commendable but also, more importantly, supports the overall rationales or raisons d’être for Asian or Southeast Asian studies as a distinct and multidisciplinary field in its own right.28 Despite such cynicism and occasional proscriptions, the stubborn insistence among Southeast Asians on studying their own countries has resulted, as indicated earlier, in a number of major grant schemes in the region that are specifically devoted to encouraging and supporting (Southeast) Asians to conduct studies about and in Asian countries other than their own. I have sympathy for many of these new grant schemes and have formally supported some of them. I can also appreciate the concerns about Southeast Asians’ inclinations to be myopically nationalistic in their intellectual endeavors. Nonetheless, it is wise not to push such criticism too far, because in doing so one may overlook some of the more subtle and no-less-important points. I will consider two that I find most salient. Both question the all-too-familiar assumptions about the relationships between passport holders of a given country and the social life of that country. First, it is not, or not only, convenience that prompts many Southeast Asian students to undertake serious study about their countries of origin. Their motives can vary a great deal, but some have done so precisely because they and that country have not really “belonged” to each other in any meaningful way—beyond matters related to limited
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public service, formal state administration, or political turmoil. For various reasons that Southeast Asianists have analyzed, many citizens in this region (especially those who reside away from the capital cities or are labeled as minorities) have not been adequately “assimilated” into the official nationalist project and state apparatuses. They may not have been indoctrinated in the state ideology, they may have been exempted from such indoctrination, or they may have simply been excluded from the public life of the nation-state. For these individuals, their nation-state is an externally created body. After gaining independence, and through several political upheavals, many of these nationstates have turned to one of several forms of authoritarianism and thus alienated the majority of the population. After a quarter of a century of national independence, a large proportion of Southeast Asians still live in illiberal polities that practice political persecution and severely restrict public discussion of sensitive topics. Under such circumstances, it is extremely difficult, or impossible, for those in local universities to have access to key texts and information that concern their “own” societies and that are easily accessible in selected centers of Southeast Asian studies overseas. For instance, when the New Order government was in power (1966– 1998), for many Indonesians the opportunity to study in selected universities in the United States and Australia, where Southeast Asian studies was strong, meant a lot more than getting a prestigious diploma or intellectual enlightenment. It gave them their first and rare access to documents that were key to the single most controversial issue in the life of the nation, with or without direct consequences to personal and family life: namely, the events surrounding the 1965– 1966 massacres and transfer of state power. For others, being outside Indonesia was their first opportunity to learn about Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor or human-rights abuse in West Papua or Aceh— news of which was suppressed at home. Their experience abroad also provided them with their first politically enlightening encounters with people from other Southeast Asian countries, in personally and politically enlightening ways reminiscent of the meetings of “fortunate natives” at colonial schools one hundred years earlier. Many Southeast Asians may have subsequently developed an interest in studying their Asian neighbors, but quite reasonably they would not have done so at the expense of gaining a new understanding of their own societies
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within the time constraints of their scholarships and the validity of their visas. Second, for most Southeast Asians in the West, studying their “own” societies means first and foremost studying the foreign codes and conventions of one or more Western academic disciplines before learning empirically about any particular societies. It involves learning the bureaucratic machinery of the university system in the foreign land and familiarizing themselves and engaging critically with central issues and concepts in the area of study in question. Most of these do not originate from Southeast Asia. It also involves learning how to comply with particular practices of reading and writing in formats and styles that are adequately acceptable as “academic” in a given context. While for most the experience is gratifying, the magnitude of their difficulties, as Reid sympathetically recognizes, is not always obvious to others in the host countries.29 For most newly arriving Southeast Asians in North American, Australian, or European universities, the visit is also the first to a country that is so different from their countries of origin. Learning about their “own” country is never identical to continuing their previous intellectual engagements with issues in their home country, because it is conducted at a higher level, in a different language, and in a different geographical space with more resources. They must learn how to think, to ask questions, and to speak properly and intelligibly about what has been defined in the dominant paradigms of Western academia as their “own” country. All of the above is done in ways that have no basis or equivalent at home. In fact, the process often involves the pain of unlearning some of the things already internalized and taken for granted in their home countries.30 Students of Southeast Asian studies, and their gurus, can be forgiven for not usually being keen on listening to what Southeast Asians turned Southeast Asianists have to say about the region or their country of origin. Because of the difficulties outlined above, the latter often appear to the former as poor imitators of the established practitioners who are not Southeast Asian nationals. What has traditionally attracted the interest of Southeast Asianists from the West is two social groups. The first is the “corrupt,” self-righteous, and ruthless elite, and the second is the subalterns (peasants, poor, minorities, women, and so on) who are victims of the former or are perceived to be so. Despite their opposing positions, both unequivocally affirm their status as the West’s “others.”
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Corrupt state officials from Southeast Asia are quoted in order to be pilloried in the analysis of Southeast Asianists. Subalterns are presented in order to be inaugurated as hero(in)es or martyrs. The latter appear or are made to be seen as subjects who cannot speak for themselves and therefore need to be represented by the politically correct scholars as their proxies. It is Southeast Asia’s middle-class intelligentsia who pose a thorny problem for some Southeast Asianists outside Southeast Asia. The middle-class intelligentsia cannot be totally silenced and made mere objects of analysis, for neither are they purely “one of us” (Southeast Asianists in Western centers of Southeast Asian studies) and subjected to the pressure of Western academic ethics, traditions, and industry, nor are they completely separable and distinguishable from “us.”31 From Father Blood to Mother Tongue One of the most obvious obstacles for Southeast Asians in fully participating in the international communities of Southeast Asian studies has been the language barrier. While many regret that English—a nonregional language—has been the official language of Southeast Asian studies, just as it has for most other disciplines, no one knows of any convenient alternative. If blood and skin color served as markers for colonial racism in the past, a person’s mother tongue functions today as a discriminating factor in the unequal distribution of access to intellectual production across many disciplines, including Southeast Asian studies. The dominance of English also discriminates against diverse members of the modern intelligentsia in Southeast Asia and justifies the continued imbalance of participation in this area of study and beyond. The question of language is not reducible to the mechanical acquisition of one foreign language of the new empire of world scholarship. Non–Southeast Asians are also required to have a good command of at least one of the languages of this region. Despite this reciprocal learning, the status of the two is unequivocally not one of equals. Southeast Asian studies would have been a radically different— more pluralist, inclusive, and participatory—affair if a significant number of major journals, university lectures and tutorials, published books, and conferences pertaining to the field had been multilingual and multicultural, with English as but one of several options along with several living languages of the region.
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Although many non–Southeast Asian students of the region speak and write good Thai, Tagalog, or Malaysian, there seem to be embarrassingly few attempts to take these language skills seriously. For instance, the notion of using Southeast Asian languages for writing theses, teaching, or conferences has not been seriously and widely pursued. Surely such activities would generate a wide range of practical difficulties, extra costs, and perhaps no immediately visible benefits. These difficulties arise from something more systematic, precisely because of the reasons behind the imbalance referred to earlier. This deserves serious attention but appears too daunting an issue for most of those in charge of Southeast Asian studies outside the region. It is always safer to concentrate attention on the region itself with objectivist commitments—and to speak critically of inequalities there, in order to partake of the production of knowledge within the status quo—rather than to examine the procedures that one follows at home in producing such knowledge. Practical difficulties in doing Southeast Asian studies in one of the languages of the region constitute the tip of the iceberg. The epistemological paradigms of the social sciences and humanities that gave birth to area studies are embedded and institutionalized in English grammar and vocabulary. No alternative metanarrative of this scale and efficacy seems to have existed in Southeast Asian languages. This is not to deny that Southeast Asians have a range of other traditions of high learning. How can students of Southeast Asian studies conceptualize an academic inquiry, pursue it in any of the Southeast Asian languages, and enjoy the benefits of formal recognition (e.g., conferment of a postgraduate degree) and of intellectual engagement with wider circles in the same way as can be accomplished in English and other major European languages? It is instructive that the administration of an Englishspeaking institution in Asia decided to provide their academic staff with editorial assistance to boost their publication output—provided that these are staff in area studies who have publishable materials but whose native tongue is not English. The unacceptability of attempting to pursue Southeast Asian studies in one of the vernacular languages of the region not only has led to a general complacency and a reproduction of a monolingual academic exercise that is not very different from colonial orientalism but has also had the more insidious effect of normalizing intellectual misrecognition and misrepresentation of the object of study. Because languages are
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specifically and socially bound discursive practices (as opposed to an abstract system of codes, as generally misconstrued), they are never entirely and readily translatable. Different languages construct and present the world differently. The requirement of mastery in one of the many Southeast Asian languages finds its best rationale here.32 One would like to believe that most Southeast Asianists are fully aware of the issues outlined above. However, under increased economic and bureaucratic pressures, today’s universities demand that a more mechanical view of language be adopted in the administration of area studies. The situation in some of the best centers of Southeast Asian studies is no exception. Theses on topics with empirical reference to one or several countries of Southeast Asia have been produced by a wide range of departments and faculties. In what ways can theses from students trained in Southeast Asian studies make a difference? I, for one, have been keen to see more theses from this field of study that offer the kind of intellectual insights that can develop only from a good command of one of the languages in this region. The essay on the Javanese concept of power by the young Benedict Anderson may now appear to be naively orientalist, but no one can fail to acknowledge its innovative qualities.33 This essay and Anderson’s Imagined Communities are perhaps the two works from this author that will be best remembered by Southeast Asianists and beyond. Significantly, neither could have come into being without the author’s deep intimacy with the language(s) of the people analyzed. Unfortunately, it is difficult to find this kind of thesis produced by graduates of Southeast Asian studies. There have been outstanding theses from this field, but they could just as well have been produced by someone intelligent from any other discipline within the arts and social sciences. Here the question of language mastery and, for that matter, the entire training under the rubric of area studies deserves serious interrogation. It is not surprising that most serious attempts to use the languages of (Southeast) Asia in analyzing (Southeast) Asia have been advocated by (Southeast) Asians themselves in (Southeast) Asia. The motives have varied (not all have derived from blind parochialism, patriotism, or lack of fluency in English), and so have the degrees of their success. More than in other situations that I know of in Southeast Asia, Filipino scholars have been the most determined in promoting their own national
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language in the social sciences, including area studies, beyond the rationale of convenience, nationalism, or anti-Western sentiments. These scholars, of course, write and speak English with ease on the same subject matter. The effort invested in the publication of journals devoted specifically to inter- and intra-Asian issues in multi-Asian languages, such as InterAsia Cultural Studies and Traces, are commendable for being strategic interventions into the current situation. Far from being nostalgically defensive about their Asian origins and positions, or offensive toward the West, both go beyond the East-West dichotomy and seek a dialectics between the subject positions in the increasingly hybrid identities of world inequalities. Although both are based in East Asia, they commonly involve American and European intellectual sources as much as South and Southeast Asian ones. No doubt theirs is not an easy venture. The practical, as well as intellectual, challenges that they have chosen to take up have been daunting from their inception and may remain so in the next few years. The Slippage of De/Re-Orientalism One more factor that helps us understand the glaring absence or underrepresentation of Southeast Asian scholars in Southeast Asian studies is the series of developments that took place from about the mid-1980s within the countries and major institutions outside Asia. The familiar stories about state and university budget cuts, shrinking employment opportunities for graduates in the social sciences and humanities (including those in area studies), and increased pressures to compete for external funding have created considerable difficulties for devoted students of Southeast Asian studies in places like the United States and Australia.34 These in turn have generated anxiety and protectionism that have implications for exclusionism. Ironically, all of this is taking place at a time when it is no longer possible for students in this area to assume a neutral status, a distant and objective position, commenting on or analyzing some research object without taking the risk of being challenged by someone who claims to represent the people under study. In a related but distinguishable situation, the rise of intellectual challenges from the former colonized natives led anthropologist Joel Kahn to question whether there is a future for anthropology35—one of the founding disciplines of Southeast
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Asian studies prior to its takeover by American political science during the Cold War. Anthropology’s past preoccupation was to investigate and make statements about and for the modern West’s others. Starting in the last two decades or so, “[f]ieldworkers can’t pretend anymore to be going in and presenting the truth about some pristine, untouched society, the members of which will never be able to contradict the anthropologist.”36 Likewise, it is no longer forgivable for outsiders to engage in any scholarly endeavor in this area study without some consideration of the unequal relationships between them and those they study. There has been a general consensus on the need for expanding further the space and respect for Southeast Asians as speaking subjects and fellow analysts rather than silent objects of analysis, although there is diversity in the degrees and kinds of such attitudes among Southeast Asianists outside Southeast Asia. This is not identical, though it is related, to the older issue of whether or not Southeast Asians have some sort of authentic self or selves; what these are; and to what extent and in what ways modern Western-style intellectual discourses are able to identify them within their non–Southeast Asian terms. The two concerns are related because only if Southeast Asians do exist as fundamentally different subjects from the rest can we hope to hear different and significant viewpoints about many things, including their own region. However, the two issues are also distinguishable in that the older search for some sort of Southeast Asian subjecthood does not necessarily entail the right of these subjects to speak for themselves and the moral imperative for their foreign observers to take their voices seriously. The older concerns belong to outsiders who study Southeast Asians in order to discover the latter’s identities. They have the confidence of a scholarly objectivist in articulating the truth about what these identities are in ways that Southeast Asians presumably cannot speak about, or even comprehend. Loosely used, the term “orientalism” is apt here. Accordingly, a few other questions come to the fore. While it is not possible for me to address any of these issues in depth, I would like to mention them as a way of hinting at the overall orientation of my concerns in the brief comments below. Is it possible for Southeast Asians to take an equal and active part in the existing institutional structure of Southeast Asian studies without at best, as McVey put it,
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“aping the international academic fashion” of their predecessors, who are very foreign, and, at worst, being subjected to further “foreign intellectual domination”?37 Is it desirable, even if it is possible? Must the nature and character of Southeast Asian studies (as it came to us from Europe in colonial times and from North America during the Cold War) first undergo major changes before Southeast Asians can hope to find a respected space in critical and constructive dialogues with their counterparts from outside the region? What sorts of changes are required? Are there reasons to believe that such changes will ever take place at all? Despite various attempts that have been made, why have there been no major developments in, and centers of, Southeast Asian studies in Asia (with a few, though prominent, exceptions, such as in Singapore) that are more locally rooted and constitute a critical supplement to those in North America, Europe, Australia, and Japan? Craig Reynolds has commented on the general attitudes of Western historians of the “old” Southeast Asia toward local voices, although the comment is made only in passing and in a subtle fashion.38 Regardless of individual scholars’ intent with regard to accommodating Southeast Asians as speaking subjects, the institutional formalities and institutionalized intellectual imperatives of legitimate scholarship in the West dictate what questions can or must be asked, what information should be sought, and what procedures of analysis should be followed. None of these have anything directly to do with the life and aspirations or concerns of the people under study. Regardless of how eloquently or accurately Edward Said may have articulated the problems of orientalism in the past,39 the imbalance of power relationships between students of Southeast Asia and the people studied is real and serious, and it will not be easily abandoned. As indicated earlier, the same institutionalized imperatives apply to Southeast Asian nationals who wish to enter and take part in the enterprise. Understandably, the difficulties are doubly complex for them. The lack of educational resources in the former colonies in Southeast Asia and the novelty of modern academic institutions have impeded most Southeast Asians in their attempts to be on a par with their counterparts in more industrialized countries. These factors include basic training and research in the humanities and social sciences, adequate libraries, and publishing houses and bookshops.
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These objects of all-too-familiar laments have become walls that keep most of the intelligentsia in Southeast Asia out of the centers of modern scholarship in general, Southeast Asian studies included. Less often admitted is the excessive degree to which such capital-intensive scholarship has been pushed by individuals in more advantaged positions. For instance, senior scholars in the West can easily discount certain works by Southeast Asians for failure to pay enough tribute to them, their gurus, colleagues, or friends by not citing their works or not citing them in strongly complimentary ways. Given the confidential nature of peer reviews for publication and thesis examinations, the precise magnitude of such self-serving practices remains unknown, making it impossible to examine the situation with evidence and precision. What has struck me from private communication with colleagues and personal experience is not the frequency of such incidents so much as the level of frankness with which such demands have been made. Senior figures in Southeast Asian studies can take offense, and say so rather openly, if their works are not cited in the works of more junior scholars, even though the relevance of the former to issues in the latter may be either nonexistent or minimal. There is no doubt that such acts of discipline and punishment have affected both Southeast Asian and Western students alike. Even if these students were all willing to comply with these demands, for reasons mentioned above Southeast Asians would be more severely disadvantaged than their counterparts in Western countries. It is not enough for Southeast Asians to know something about their own village or country, or articulate what is common wisdom there. They must acknowledge in citation what some Western scholar has written about the same, even if inaccurately. These authoritative writings, however, are not evenly accessible across the globe and are usually inaccessible in most parts of Southeast Asia. Southeast Asian scholars’ home-grown perception and understanding of their own social environment is not legitimate until some outsider grants it recognition.40 The identification of “orientalism” as an intellectual disease of a particular moment in history and the recent rush to attack it has been indebted to the popularity of several currents such as poststructuralism, postmodernism, and postcolonial studies, as well as cultural studies. Craig Reynolds and Anthony Reid have expressed their concerns about the counterproductive effects of these new “isms” upon the
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status of Southeast Asian studies. Reynolds observes that “[t]he most trenchant critiques of Southeast Asian studies … will come from the new anthropology and from cultural studies. This is already happening, as academics with little or no Southeast Asian language training step on to the stage from what we think of as nowhere to make smart, useful remarks about what is happening in the region today.”41 Elsewhere he reiterates his point: “New intellectual currents are also contributing to the devaluation of area studies. I am thinking here of the fashion for, among other things, postcolonial and cultural studies.”42 Likewise, Reid contends that while orientalism may have dethroned “the canon of European classics written by dead white males [it] has led not to a courageously pluralist exploration of the world’s cultural and social diversity, but to a new canon of self-referential theory…. Since Asians are too buying hamburgers and reading Foucault, do we still need specialists to understand them?”43 Interestingly, Michael Aung-Thwin, a Burmese scholar based in North America, has also blamed the recent “post-ism” for the crisis in area studies, in an essay with a strong defensive tone and in support of “Asian values” and the now-discredited orientalism and essentialism.44 In contrast, Ruth McVey is more ambivalent toward these new approaches.45 I share the ambivalence of people like McVey. However, in contrast to all the authors mentioned just now, my ambivalence is based on an uneasy recognition of the difference and inequality in the production of knowledge about the region with regard to agency and sites. The reservations mentioned above refer mainly to the situation of Southeast Asian studies outside Southeast Asia. My concern is the situation inside it. Inside Southeast Asian and many other Asian societies, these postisms find enthusiasts among the intelligentsia minority for various reasons, including reasons that have to do with the fact that these new perspectives constitute the most radical critiques of Western intellectual hegemony. As I have elaborated elsewhere,46 there is some irony in the ways these new approaches have been deployed by outsiders to analyze Southeast Asian realities. Many of these new post-isms, particularly Foucault’s archeology of knowledge and account of the discourse of power and Derridean deconstructive strategies, are radical self-critiques. They consciously challenge some of the most fundamental givens in Western epistemology and social order from within the very
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structures and discursive practices they are critiquing. The main targets of these approaches as originally developed are not knowledge or domination in general but specifically Western knowledge, violence, and domination.47 Ironically, in the hands of some children of the same dominant West (i.e., Southeast Asianists), these new approaches have been twisted not only to make “smart, useful remarks”48 or a “new canon of self-referential theory”49 but to be “a handy methodological instrument both for ridiculing post-colonial despots” and depreciating those who live under these despots, while at the same time “enhancing professional credentials in the increasingly competitive academic industrial complex.”50 In doing so, they recuperate, most likely in unconscious ways, the sort of domination and discursive practice that these approaches were originally meant to attack. Whatever flaws they may have, the recent intellectual insights inspired by Foucault and Derrida help disclose some of the problems with what appears to be liberal, democratic, and civilized in the modern West and its intellectual traditions. Foucault’s writings attract many in the West because they bring to light new understandings of power and the normalization of power, which has previously been perceived to be external, distant, and negative. Derrida’s arguments are forceful because hierarchical and binary oppositions have been taken as given in the modern West. In many parts of Asia, the state exhibits its power in a series of acts of vulgar repression and excessive violence that have not been seen or imagined in the West since the two world wars. The dominant discourses in many of these Asian societies do not have the sort of pretensions of secular rationality, impartiality, and modernist universalism that the various post-isms subvert and deconstruct. Southeast Asians need neither a Foucauldian nor a Derridean philosophy or analysis to help them see that power is everywhere, that power produces knowledge, or how “carceral” their schools, offices, or factories are. Rather than suggesting that Foucault and Derrida are irrelevant, this is to argue that they are sorely insufficient. One must go far beyond them for any radical examination of the way power and dominant discourses operate in many postcolonial societies of Southeast Asia. No one has impressed me more with extended critical engagements with these difficult issues and their direct relevance to the study of Southeast Asia than Joel Kahn.51
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Having noted all these exemplary works, one remains anxiously waiting for more assertive interventions from locally based Southeast Asians to fill in the space already made available by the works last cited. Some of the best Southeast Asian scholars, including those cited earlier, appear to have been preoccupied with other intellectual concerns, and perhaps rightly so. The old desire for indigenization of the social sciences has not entirely vanished in Southeast Asia,52 although it appears to have largely run its course in the region more broadly. Appearing in its place are two distinguishable streams. One is the search for an alternative paradigm to current Western-derived practice by drawing inspiration from Islamic traditions.53 The other is the search for plural, nonpurist, nonessentialist, but more hybrid and globally embedded (Southeast) Asian agencies.54 The search for Islamic alternatives to current Western-dominant paradigms is clearly a much more radical challenge to the currently dominant mode of intellectual thought than the pluralist and nonessentialist perspectives or than the old indigenization project. I am not in any way competent to assess the potential and prospects of this Islamic agenda. However, I find this project timely. As Stange and Clammer have observed, religiosity is one salient feature of social life in Asia that analysts of Asian societies have blatantly failed or refused to deal with in any satisfactory way.55 Even some of the most radical perspectives of Western epistemology now in vogue (poststructuralism, postmodernism, cultural studies) have tended to overlook or dismiss it, despite their claims and credentials to privilege and celebrate the West’s others, as well as the disadvantaged, subaltern, or minorities. The second and nonessentialist kind of search for Asian agency is undeniably indebted to the more recent wave of post-ism. While this move is highly attractive and promising, so far it has remained under the shadow of strongly non-Asian biases. Various arguments about the existence and identities of the presumed “Asian” agency have been presented by Asians, but mainly by citing arguments from intelligent and authoritative voices of non-Asians and non-Asianists. The search for agents of difference within Asian contexts is valid and will continue to haunt us. It is clearly formidable but is politically necessary. Past failures, misguided or even deceptive projects under the same rubric in the past, abound, but they need not deter Southeast Asians from continuing their endeavors. There is a lesson to be learned
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from the “Asian values” debate that initially appeared to be vulgarly essentialist, pathetically orientalist, and politically self-serving. As Joseph Chan and Boo Teik Khoo have argued with equal eloquence, sobriety, and insightfulness, one does not need to throw away the baby with the bathwater, as most critics of the debate have tended to do.56 Proponents of “Asian values” or Islamic critiques of Western modernity may not have articulated a full-fledged formulation of a convincing message to many of us (Western-trained Southeast Asianists), and some of them may have maliciously attempted to fool us, as their critics allege; but this may be neither the end of the story nor the whole story. As Kahn has brilliantly demonstrated, even the most universalist Western modernity and modernization have not been as inclusive as their advocates intend and claim, nor will they ever be.57 Various groups of people in Asia, as elsewhere, have been, and will continue to be, excluded, deprived, and denied across different modernities, Western or otherwise. These agents will be in search of new articulations, recognitions, and representations in response to their subordination. If we have not found any particularly articulate expressions of these from Southeast Asians in the social sciences, and particularly in Southeast Asian studies, perhaps we have looked in the wrong place or at the wrong time.
Into the Future? If the foregoing sections in great part have sounded more pessimistic than intended and warranted, this is because they focus on the problems faced by Southeast Asians in taking an active part in the production of knowledge about the region. It is perhaps predictable that this essay argues that, as a unit of academic inquiry, Southeast Asian studies is not of any major concern to Southeast Asian intelligentsia. However, as noted, the situation has been slowly but steadily changing. Some sort of area studies can be predicted to grow in scale and importance in most of what is today’s Southeast Asia, although the name, geographical reference, and character of such an entity may be different from those of the American-led Southeast Asian studies of the Cold War years. For instance, international associations of scholars in Malay languages and literatures have been fairly active in recent years. Recent developments in the film, theater, and music industries and
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cultural studies have also brought small groups of artists and academics together in self-financed intra-Asia (rather than Southeast Asia) meetings and collaborative projects. I wish to conclude this essay with a little elaboration of these new signs of what may transpire to be a new history of Asian studies in Asia (in which Southeast Asia may continue to be a distinctive but not a prominent component), identifying some areas of potential strength, and expanding and recapitulating some of the points presented above. Earlier, in considering the positions of difference for Southeast Asians in comparison to their Western counterparts with reference to area studies, I have suggested some of the major areas of handicap that they face. It is necessary now to emphasize their comparative advantages and potential strengths by virtue of these very same characteristics. Being native speakers of at least one of the living languages of the region, and natives of the region (in the sense of birth and residence), local scholars would do best in several areas of academic pursuits. These include language-based cultural and sociological analyses of contemporary life, oral history, ethnography, religion, popular culture, and the media. They may be less advantaged in other areas, such as universalist theorization, topics that are politically sensitive to their immediate environments, macro- and comparative studies across the region, or studies that rely on old archives that are currently conserved in a few old libraries in France, Great Britain, Spain, the Netherlands, or North America. Ruth McVey has correctly observed that “Southeast Asia itself has changed far more massively and profoundly than have Southeast Asian studies, whether carried out by indigenous or foreign academics.”58 Never before has there been more interaction (with occasional tensions) and mobility of people, information, and capital across the region. The problem of the haze emanating from devastated Kalimantan forests; tensions related to illegal migrant workers, which have damaged relations not only between the states of Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Singapore but also between these states and various nongovernmental organizations in these countries; and tensions emanating from the aftermath of September 11 in the form of heavy surveillance and campaigns and countercampaigns, all attest to the new times. To McVey’s observation one must add that the global capitalism that the West dominates has also changed much more rapidly and
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dramatically than have the structure, outlook, and administration of Western-style universities in the West and their counterparts in Southeast Asia. While ironic, it is not entirely surprising that the old centers of Southeast Asian studies should have been in dramatic decline as Southeast Asia has gained more visibility and vibrancy. The end of the Cold War and the decrease in governments’ strategic interests in the region and support for studying it have often been suggested as the main cause of this decline. This is true, but I believe that there are other factors at work. One such causal factor has been described, if rather loosely, as the condition of postmodernity.59 This is to be distinguished from postmodernism as a particular school or mode of thought “in the mind” that one can personally choose to adopt, ignore, or resist. Of course, the two are compatible and mutually reinforcing. If this interpretation has any validity, we can consider a different and broader perspective in appreciating the concern with alleged “attacks” by postmodernism or cultural studies against Southeast Asian studies. Again, this is a reference to a situation outside Southeast Asia, at a time when both postmodernism and cultural studies have found enthusiasts inside Southeast Asia, where Southeast Asian studies is slowly growing. The condition of postmodernity does not alter the world completely. As David Harvey has argued, it is revolutionary in the sense of restructuring our social order globally by bringing to prominence a host of practices, ideas, languages, values, tastes, and institutions that were previously repressed, forgotten, marginalized, or denied.60 It is this condition of postmodernity—more than remarks by a few seemingly eccentric postmodernist “freaks”—that has undermined the dominant modes and sites of learning across disciplines that came with little change from nineteenth-century traditions and institutions in the West. It is not possible for me to explore this vast and complex issue in further detail, but for illustrative purposes one or two specific trends and familiar phenomena shall suffice. It is not accidental that cultural and media studies should have been on the rise as studies of class structure, nation-states, political parties, or modernization have been in decline. The former privilege subjectivity, agencies, literary interpretation, communicative aspects, discursive practice, difference, ambiguity, and self-reflexivity. The latter stress high theorization, structures, standardization, quantitative measuring, hierarchy, accuracy,
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objectivity, consistency, and efficiency. In more mundane terms, the new conditions of life—marked by a high degree of electronic communication and transport—have assaulted some of the key nodes of the high modernity that produced our universities, polities, and economies: originality, authenticity, history, authorship, authority, copyright, and privacy. By accelerating our time and compressing our space, the new conditions have ruthlessly promoted fragmentation, superficiality, hybridity, dispersion, plurality, and simulation. It is not difficult to imagine how painful all this can be for the children of the high modernity in the West. It is easy to understand how the same global change that the West has helped propel might yield more favorable effects for the various practices, values, and consciousnesses in most nonmodern or “inadequately modernized” parts of Asia. The tension among traditional academic disciplines in Western high learning and area studies stems from what Reid has described as “an uneasy marriage between core believers in the uniqueness of the discrete cultural traditions they study, and universalising social scientists for whom ‘Asia’ is at best an arbitrary subdivision of the globe, at worst an obfuscation.”61 The tension that prevails between (Southeast) Asian studies inside and outside the region stems from the fact that “universalising social scientists” in the equation are either absent, marginal, or negligible in number in (Southeast) Asia. Area specialists in the West must find themselves in a paradoxical position. At home, they must strive for survival by challenging the hegemony of universalist theorization of the social sciences. However, to maintain their residual authority and credentials within the existing institutions, they suspiciously question the works of Asianists from Asia for lack of “universalist theorization.” It is not easy to predict with any precision how large and strong (Southeast) Asian studies will grow in Asia in the next few years. It is easier to anticipate that, in the event of any significant and sustained growth of area studies in the region, this will not simply continue or reproduce the preoccupations of the field’s colonial and Cold War predecessors outside the region. Local Southeast Asianists will concentrate on areas where they can do best. These include cultural and media studies or postcolonial studies and identity politics. They may not emphasize universalist theorization, and when they do so they will not pursue replicas of the dominant paradigms that have thus far
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prevailed in Southeast Asian studies outside Asia. Any attempt to do so will be neither possible in the current condition of postmodernity nor desirable in the consciousness that such a condition generates. For these same reasons, we can be optimistic in anticipating that (Southeast) Asians will not direct their energies toward recuperating indigenization, essentialism, or exclusivism by intent. More productive collaborations with younger generations of their counterparts from outside Asia can be expected to flourish, although any results in the immediate future may be modest.
Notes This is a very slightly revised version of an essay originally published in Moussons 5 (2002). It is published here with the permission of the author of the essay and the editor of Moussons. The author gratefully acknowledges the helpful editorial comments and suggestions on earlier versions of this essay by several people who do not necessarily agree with the views expressed here: Miriam Lang, Martin Richter, Sumit K. Mandal, Hong Lysa, Donald Emmerson, Paul Stange, Michael Laffan, and anonymous reviewers for Moussons. The author alone is responsible for any persisting shortcomings. 1
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Donald K. Emmerson, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 15, no. 1 (1984): 1–21. Craig J. Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995): 437, 439. John Bowen, “The Inseparability of Area and Discipline in Southeast Asian Studies: A View from the United States,” Moussons 1 (2000): 3–19; Victor T. King, “Southeast Asia: An Anthropological Field of Study?” Moussons 3 (2001): 3–31. For a review of Asian studies in Australia, see Anthony Milner, “Approaching Asia, and Asian Studies, in Australia,” Asian Studies Review 23, no. 2 (1999): 193–203. [A more recent analysis is found in Anthony Milner, “Southeast Asian Studies as a Resource: An Australian Perspective,” SEAP Bulletin (Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University), Winter–Spring 2002, 12–20. (Editor’s note)] The inferior academic standing of Southeast Asians, whether they study their own region or not, comes into sharper relief when one compares it with that of their South Asian and perhaps East Asian counterparts. I am grateful to Hong Lysa and Itty Abraham for bringing my attention to this matter in separate occasions of personal communication. Emmerson, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?” 18. Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” 432. See Charnvit Kasetsiri, “Overview of Research and Studies on Southeast Asia in Thailand: ‘Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?’” Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 25–53.
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Scattered reports of Southeast Asian studies in other regions, including China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Russia, have attracted my attention. However, they are beyond the immediate concerns of this essay, and I do not have adequate knowledge to offer any comments on them. When this essay was about to go to press, colleagues informed me about a debate provoked by Ileto’s essay on orientalism in the study of Philippine politics. See Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Orientalism and the Study of Philippine Politics,” in Knowing America’s Colony: A Hundred Years from the Philippine War, by Reynaldo C. Ileto (Honolulu: Centre for Philippine Studies, 1999). I am grateful to these colleagues, and particularly to Rommel Curaming, for helping me gain access to this provoking essay. Although I find Ileto’s concerns important and his presentation engaging, I shall not offer comments here, because his concerns are distinct from mine in this essay. As the present writer is an Indonesian national who grew up and worked in Indonesia during the Cold War period, pursued Asian studies in North America, and later taught Southeast Asian studies in Singapore and Asian studies in Australia, his bias will be immediately obvious. See Emmerson, “‘Southeast Asia’: What’s in a Name?”; Bowen, “Inseparability of Area and Discipline”; King, “Southeast Asia”; Milner, “Approaching Asia.” The first of such programs was the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP), based in Manila and sponsored by the Japan Foundation and the Toyota Foundation. The second was the Bangkok-based and Ford Foundation–sponsored Asian Studies in ASIA Fellows Program (AFP), which in 2002 became the Asian Scholarship Foundation (ASF). The third program in the field is called Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Fellowships, sponsored by the Nippon Foundation and administratively based in Kuala Lumpur. The most recent at the time of writing is the Bangkok-based Asian Muslim Action Network (AMAN), supported by the Rockefeller Foundation. Of the early colonial censuses that invented ethnic groups in the British and Dutch East Indies colonies, Benedict Anderson observes: “These ‘identities,’ imagined by the (confusedly) classifying mind of the colonial state, still awaited a reification which imperial administrative penetration would soon make possible…. The fiction of the census is that everyone is in it, and that everyone has one—and only one—extremely clear place. No fractions” (Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. and extended ed. [London: Verso, 1991], 165–166). See Anne Booth, “Education and Economic Development in Southeast Asia: Myths and Realities” (paper presented at the Second International Malaysian Studies Conference, University of Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, 2–4 August 1999); Nico Schulte Nordholt and Leontine Visser, eds., Social Science in Southeast Asia: From Particularism to Universalism (Amsterdam: VU [Vrij Universiteit] University Press, 1995); Luigi Tomasi, “The History of Sociology in Cambodia: Why Sociology Was Introduced in Pol Pot’s Former Country,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 28, no. 1 (2000): 153–169; Cameron White, “Indonesian Social Studies Education: A Critical Analysis,” Social Studies 88, no. 2 (1997): 87–91.
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Ariel Heryanto John Clammer, “The Dilemmas of the Over-socialized Intellectuals: The Universities and the Political and Institutional Dynamics of Knowledge in Postcolonial Singapore,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 199–220. Molly N. N. Lee, “The Corporatisation of a Public University: Influence of Market Forces and State Control” (paper presented at the Third International Malaysian Studies Conference, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia, Bangi, 6–8 August 2001). Ruth McVey, “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 1–9. Works such as the following illustrate the commitment to modernizing with reference to cultural practices and their study by Indonesians: Mary S. Zurbuchen, “Images of Culture and National Development in Indonesia: The Cockroach Opera,” Asian Theatre Journal 7, no. 2 (1990): 127–149; Keith Foulcher, “The Construction of an Indonesian National Culture: Patterns of Hegemony and Resistance,” in State and Civil Society in Indonesia, ed. Arief Budiman, Monash Papers on Southeast Asia, no. 22 (Clayton, Victoria, Australia: Centre of Southeast Asian Studies, Monash University, 1990), 301–320; Ian D. Wilson, “Reog Ponorogo; Spirituality, Sexuality, and Power in a Javanese Performance Tradition,” Intersections (CD-ROM) 1, no. 2 (1999). Anthony Reid, “Recent Trends towards Future Directions in Southeast Asian Studies (Outside Southeast Asia),” in Toward the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia, ed. Taufik Abdullah and Yekti Maunati (Jakarta: Program of Southeast Asian Studies, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994), 256–276; Benedict Anderson, “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990,” in Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, ed. Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes, and Karl Hutterer (Ann Arbor, MI: Association for Asian Studies, 1992), 25–40. E. T. Gomez and Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Malaysia’s Political Economy: Politics, Patronage and Profits (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1997); BengHuat Chua, Communitarian Ideology and Democracy in Singapore (London and New York: Routledge, 1995); Resil B. Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel until 1940 (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1983); Kasian Tejapira, Commodifying Marxism: The Formation of Modern Thai Radical Culture, 1927–1958 (Kyoto: Kyoto University Press and Trans Pacific Press, 2001); Julia I. Suryakusuma, “The State and Sexuality in New Order Indonesia,” in Fantasizing the Feminine in Indonesia, ed. Laurie J. Sears (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), 92–119; Vedi R. Hadiz, Workers and the State in New Order Indonesia (London: Routledge, 1997). Jacqueline Aquino Siapno, Gender, Islam, Nationalism and the State in Aceh: The Paradox of Power, Co-optation and Resistance (Richmond, UK: Routledge and Curzon, 2001); Jacqueline Aquino Siapno, “Gender, Nationalism and the Ambiguity of Female Agency in Aceh and East Timor,” in Frontline Feminisms: Women, War and Resistance, ed. Marguerite Waller, Jennifer Reycinga, and Chandra Mohanty (London: Routledge, 2001), 275–296; Sumit K. Mandal, “Orang Asing Yang Tidak Asing: Bahasa Pramoedya Yang Mengganggu Mengenai Orang Tionghoa
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Indonesia,” foreword to Hoakiau di Indonesia, by Pramoedya Ananta Toer (Jakarta: Garba Budaya, 1998), 1–30; Sumit K. Mandal, “Forging a Modern Identity in Java in the Early Twentieth Century,” in Transcending Borders: Arabs, Politics, Trade and Islam in Southeast Asia, ed. Huub de Jonge and Nico Kaptein (Leiden: KITLV, 2002), 163–184; Sumit K. Mandal, “Creativity in Protest: Arts Workers and the Recasting of Politics and Society in Indonesia and Malaysia,” in Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia, ed. Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal (London: Routledge, 2003); Ceres Pioquinto, “Dangdut at Sekaten; Female Representations in Live Performance,” Review of Indonesian and Malayan Affairs 29 (Winter–Summer 1995): 59–89; Priyambudi Sulistiyanto, Thailand, Indonesia and Burma in Comparative Perspective (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002); Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., “The Triumph of Instrumental Citizenship? Migrations, Identities, and the Nation-State in Southeast Asia,” Asian Studies Review 23, no. 3 (1999): 307–336; Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr., “Citizenship, Inheritance, and the Indigenizing of ‘Orang Chinese’ in Indonesia,” positions: east asia cultures critique 9, no. 3 (2001): 501–533; Joo Ean Tan, “Living Arrangements of Never-Married Women in a Time of Rapid Social Change,” Sojourn 17, no. 1 (2002): 24–51. J. Eliseo Rocamora, Nationalism in Search of Ideology: The Indonesian Nationalist Party, 1946–1965 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974). See Kasetsiri, “Overview of Research,” 35. Needless to say, the examples above were selected purely at random and only for illustrative purposes. For samples of recent writings resulting from intra–Southeast Asian gatherings sponsored by SEASREP, see Miriam Coronel Ferrer, ed., Sama-Sama: Facets of Ethnic Relations in South East Asia (Diliman: Third World Studies, University of the Philippines, 1999). For proceedings from an intra-Asian conference sponsored by the Trajectories Project, see Kuan-Hsing Chen, ed., Trajectories: Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (London: Routledge, 1998); and for proceedings from an AFP-sponsored conference, see ASIA Fellows Program, Asianizing Asia: Reflexivity, History and Identity (Bangkok: ASIA Fellows Program, 2001). The list can be made a lot longer, especially if various unpublished research reports and postgraduate theses in progress are included. Deliberately excluded from the list are the many Singaporeans who have made significant contributions to Southeast Asian studies, as well as to the more conventional academic disciplines. They are excluded simply because, in Singapore, studying the region as a whole or specific countries in it other than one’s own is much more common than elsewhere in this region. Also excluded from the list are Southeast Asian scholars and nonacademic intellectuals whose works on their immediate living environment in one of their vernacular languages have gained public respect but have not been presented as or generally designated as specifically Southeast Asian texts. Vicente L. Rafael, Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988); Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-body of a Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994). While the number of full-fee-paying students from Southeast Asia has been high in the last two decades, especially in Australia, these usually invest their capital
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Ariel Heryanto in pursuing a degree, not in Southeast Asian studies, but predictably in the more materially rewarding disciplines such as medicine, commerce, engineering, or computer-related subjects. Chaiwat Satha-Anand, “Problematizing the Identity of the Thai Academic Landscape,” Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 54–63; Kasetsiri, “Overview of Research”; Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” 437. In most academic institutions, the legitimacy of this area study rests on the presupposition that Southeast Asia is arguably a fairly unified entity rather than a collection of individual societies and therefore is a significant unit of scholarly inquiry on its own. Reid, “Recent Trends,” 268–269. Of course, young students from North America or Western Europe also experience uneasy cultural encounters when conducting in-country study in Southeast Asia. While the difficulty for Westerners studying Southeast Asia is usually presented as self-evident, its converse is not immediately visible or equally appreciated. The ambivalent position of the Southeast Asian middle class vis-à-vis Southeast Asianists from the West may have a lot to do with the general resentment and cynicism shown by many of the latter toward the former. I recall the situation in our Tagalog class, though not the details, when our Filipina instructor had difficulties explaining in English certain Tagalog grammatical features, lexical items, and the social significance of certain practices. I was surprised and pleased to learn on more than one occasion that there were equivalents or parallels in the Javanese language, my native language, but none in English or Indonesian. Nonetheless, the instruction had to be done in English, as the class was held in an American university, and most of the students were North American. Benedict Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture,” in Language and Power: Exploring Political Cultures in Indonesia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 17–77. Anderson, “Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies,” 30; Reid, “Recent Trends”; Anthony Reid, “Studying ‘Asia’ in Asia,” Asian Studies Review 23, no. 2 (1999): 148; Ruth McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations, by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998), 44. Joel Kahn, “Is There a Future for Anthropology?” interview with Clinton Porteus, Lot’s Wife (student publication, Monash University), 10 May 1989, 14–15. Ibid., 15. McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization,” 6. Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” 421. Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978). In this respect, I am extremely fortunate to have received the generous assistance of many senior scholars in the West who are also exceedingly humble about their eminence and accomplishments, as best exemplified by those who assisted me in completing my postgraduate studies outside Asia. Nonetheless, from the broader
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circles of Asian studies, my classmates and I occasionally received criticism from other senior scholars for not citing certain authorities (including those who made the criticism) in our writings. What intrigues me most about this experience is that, as an Indonesian writing about Indonesia, I have not been criticized for failure to cite senior Indonesian authors, although I must have undoubtedly been guilty of inadvertently doing so. Little wonder, name-dropping of Western scholars has been rampant in the works of many Southeast Asian scholars, especially those who have recently completed their studies overseas. Having said this, I must emphasize that egocentrism among Southeast Asian intellectuals is no less serious and pathetic, although this does not particularly find expression in academic activities. Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” 439. Craig J. Reynolds, “Self-Cultivation and Self-Determination in Postcolonial Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies, by Reynolds and McVey, 13–14. Reid, “Studying ‘Asia’ in Asia,” 148. Elsewhere, I have developed an argument in the opposite direction, proposing among other things that “[n]o consumption takes place in a purely natural, biological, ahistorical universe. Eating a McDonald’s hamburger in Los Angeles never means the same as eating ‘the same thing’ at the same moment in one of its counter-outlets in Yogyakarta, supposedly the capital city of High Javanese Culture, or in Mahathir’s Kuala Lumpur, or in Ho Chi Minh City” (Ariel Heryanto, “The Years of Living Luxuriously,” in Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia, ed. Michael Pinches [London and New York: Routledge, 1999], 159–160). Michael Aung-Thwin, “Parochial Universalism, Democracy Jihad and the Orientalist Image of Burma: the New Evangelism,” Pacific Affairs 74, no. 4 (2001): 488. McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization,” 37–64. Ariel Heryanto, “What Does Post-modernism Do in Contemporary Indonesia?” Sojourn 10, no. 1 (1995): 33–44. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London and New York: Routledge, 1990), 17–19. Reynolds, “A New Look at Old Southeast Asia,” 439. Reid, “Studying ‘Asia’ in Asia,” 148. Heryanto, “What Does Post-modernism Do in Contemporary Indonesia?” 41. Joel Kahn, “Culture: Demise or Resurrection?” Critique of Anthropology 9, no. 2 (1989): 5–26; Joel Kahn, Constituting the Minangkabau: Peasants, Culture, and Modernity in Colonial Indonesia (Providence, RI, and Oxford: Berg, 1993); Joel Kahn, “Subalternity and the Construction of Malay Identities,” in Modernity and Identity: Asian Illustrations, ed. A. Gomes (Bundoora, Victoria, Australia: La Trobe University Press, 1994), 23–41; Joel Kahn, “Southeast Asian Identities,” in Southeast Asian Identities: Culture and the Politics of Representation in Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand, ed. J. S. Kahn (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1998), 1–27; Joel Kahn, Modernity and Exclusion (London: Sage, 2001). See also Mark Hobart, After Culture: Anthropology as Radical Metaphysical Critique (Yogyakarta, Indonesia: Duta Wacana University Press, 2000); Alton L. Becker, Beyond Translation: Essays towards a Modern Philology (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995); and esp. Paul Stange, “Deconstruction as
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Ariel Heryanto Disempowerment: New Orientalisms of Java,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 23, no. 3 (1991): 51–71. E.g., Syed Hussein Alatas, “Intellectual Imperialism: Definition, Traits, and Problems,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 28, no. 1 (2000): 23–45; Emmanuel M. Luna, “Rethinking Community Development in the Philippines: ‘Indigenizing’ and Regaining Grounds,” in The History and Development of Social Science Disciplines in the Philippines, ed. V. A. Miralao (Quezon City: Philippine Social Science Center, 1999), 315–343. See, e.g., Ibrahim A. Ragab, “On the Methodology of the Islamization of the Social Sciences,” available online at http://msanews.mynet.net/Scholars/Ragab/ ragab.html (accessed 20 September 2001); Stange, “Deconstruction,” 59. See, e.g., Anwar Ibrahim, The Asian Renaissance (Singapore: Times Books International, 1996); Beng Lan Goh, “Cultural Hybridity in Southeast Asia: Locating What’s Local and Specific as Also Comparative and Global,” Antropologi Indonesia 67 (2002): 69–78; Amri Baharuddin Shamsul, “A Comment on Recent Trends and the Future Direction of Southeast Asian Studies,” in Toward the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Abdullah and Maunati (Jakarta: Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994), 277–296; Amri Baharuddin Shamsul, “Social Science in Southeast Asia Observed: A Malaysian Viewpoint,” Inter-Asia Cultural Studies 2, no. 2 (2001): 167–198. Stange, “Deconstruction”; John Clammer, “Cultural Studies/Asian Studies: Alternatives, Intersections, and Contradictions in Asian Social Science,” Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science 28, no. 1 (2000): 47–65. Joseph Chan, “An Alternative View,” Journal of Democracy 8, no. 2 (1997): 35–48; Boo Teik Khoo, “The Value(s) of a Miracle: Malaysian and Singaporean Elite Constructions of Asia,” Asian Studies Review 23, no. 2 (1999): 181–192. Kahn, Modernity and Exclusion. McVey, “Change and Continuity,” 6. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1989). Ibid., 44. Reid, “Studying ‘Asia’ in Asia,” 142.
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Recognizing Scholarly Subjects Collaboration, Area Studies, and the Politics of Nature CELIA LOWE In Thailand, we consider social engagement in people’s everyday practice to be part of the learning and understanding process. It is through this social engagement that cultural history and experiences can be better understood, analyzed, and represented. Chayan Vaddhanaphuti To hear each other (the sound of different voices), to listen to one another, is an exercise in recognition. bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress
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he project of rethinking Southeast Asian area studies has engaged the historical emergence, logical coherence (and lack thereof), institutional structures, and conceptual orientations in scholarship on Southeast Asia. Our desire to rethink the nature of “areas” is a response to interventions from postcolonial studies, which have given us new ways to think about historical linkages, and to studies of globalization, which have provided us with new possibilities for imagining spatial interconnection. Within these reflexive conversations, scholarly collaboration (both within the region and between Southeast Asia and Euro-America) has emerged as both a problem for thought and as a remedy for hierarchies that exist between scholars “in” and scholars “of” Southeast Asia. Collaboration presents the possibility of 109
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facilitating a more egalitarian knowledge production in which Southeast Asians speak authoritatively as subjects of their own histories and are recognized for generating ideas in transnational settings. In this chapter, I examine the study of environmental politics in Southeast Asia in order to understand the pragmatics of transnational scholarly collaboration and to explore the ways in which collaboration may be a more difficult solution than it seems at first glance. Southeast Asia has experienced substantial transformation in its flora, fauna, landscapes, and marinescapes, trends that are reflected in large-scale fires; modifications of coastlines and forests; historically unprecedented levels of commodification and consumption of land and sea products; the constriction of genetic resources through green-revolution agriculture and the proliferation of genes out of place in genetically modified crops; and serious cases of pollution and toxicity in rural and urban spaces. Nature—its social construction and its biophysical transformation—has always provoked interesting questions for the study of the region. In both mainland and insular Southeast Asia there has been considerable debate over what will count as a human enhancement of the natural environment and what will be considered environmental degradation. Social studies of nature have included both the local specificities and poetics of place-based framings of nature and the larger regional, national, and international contexts of markets, policies, practices, histories, and ideologies through which nature is known and made. I base my analysis in this chapter on two and a half years of research in Southeast Asia, primarily in Indonesia, between 1994 and 2003. Between 1994 and 1997, I studied Indonesians’ biodiversity conservation in the Togean Islands of Central Sulawesi, and I examined how Indonesian natural scientists made sense of transnational biodiversity discourses while their own biological science and conservation practice took on specific form. In this work I observed how the politics of nature seeped out of Indonesians’ biodiversity conservation precisely because of the mandates of transnational collaboration. Between 2000 and 2003, I turned my attention to the comparative study of cultural and historical (rather than biological) approaches to nature in the region. This work involved wide-ranging discussions with Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese social scientists about scholarship and teaching in the field of society and environment. It also entailed a more narrowly
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focused study of the histories of Thai social science and of Indonesian intellectual movements in the post-Suharto era. In this work, I have been interested in the theories Southeast Asian scholars use to pursue studies of nature and society, in the questions these intellectuals have wanted to address, and in how they have understood the relations between culture, nature, scholarship, and political power.
A Science Neither “Ethno” nor “Euro” In 1994, I first began to investigate scholarly and applied collaborations between scientists from the Indonesian Foundation for the Advancement of Biological Sciences (IFABS) and their U.S. funder, Conservation International (CI), in league with several U.S.-based scientists and universities. As a science studies scholar, I was interested in observing the natural sciences in Indonesia—that is, those means of examining the physical world that do not fit into locally circumscribed forms of knowledge known as “ethnoscience.” As I began to search for a field site in eastern Indonesia, I chose the Togean Island project because it was run entirely by Indonesian scientists and staff in collaboration with foreign counterparts. My research with the biologists entailed living and working at their research station in the Togean Islands, participating in their community development activities, attending conservation meetings, and interviewing Indonesian and Euro-American conservation practitioners in Jakarta, Sulawesi, and Washington, D.C. Although I could not predict what I would find, I assumed that there would be something “different” about the Togean project as a result of its nationalization. What I discovered in the process of accompanying biologists while they compiled their species inventories or participated in meetings and discussions about Togean conservation was that collaboration entailed a constant negotiation between what was locally and nationally meaningful for Indonesian scientists and those scientific ideas that were proposed as “universal” in transnational projects of biodiversity conservation. Out of Indonesians’ conservation biology and practice emerged a highly specified, scientifically described, Togean “nature,” and a particular way of understanding its relationship to Togean people, that contributed not only to the transnational paradigm of biodiversity but also to a domestic project of building the nation-state.
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The specificity of Indonesians’ conservation biology lay precisely in the politics of science, nature, and nation within Indonesia, and formal principles of conservation biology were insufficient to explain the interplay of similarity and difference that existed across the space of collaboration between Indonesian biologists and Northern scientists and conservationists. To appreciate Indonesians’ science, it was necessary for me to understand the scientists’ positionality as subjects within the Suharto era state, the meanings of science within the postcolonial Indonesian nation, and the ideologies of development within which Togean people were classed as backward and threatening to national order. The relationship between scientists and local, in this case Togean Island, people depended as much on nationalist ideologies as on transnational neoliberal ways of integrating conservation with development. While Togean people were often viewed through the transnational biodiversity problematic as those humans who threatened nature, Indonesian scientists also recognized Togean people as Indonesian citizens, with all the nationalist specificity that entailed. Many biologists with whom I worked believed that the transnational discourse of biodiversity, with its particular notion that people who live near rare plants and animals threaten nature, did not fit the circumstances of Indonesia very well. For example, one scientist I interviewed stressed to me that conservation is a “Western” concept. He argued: A country like America is rich enough for conservation. Looking at wildlife the way Americans do is a luxury. I don’t think the Indonesian people are ready to look at nature in this luxurious way. Nature is still full of resources for Indonesian people because of our level of development. We are not rich enough in Indonesia to afford conservation of species—species is a Western concept.
And yet, even though this scientist believed that species and species conservation were alien ideas inappropriate for founding a conservation practice in Indonesia, the primary science conducted in the context of Togean conservation involved speciation studies and species inventory. In the process of collaboration, Euro-Americans’ questions about species became the most important scientific problems to pursue. The practice of biological science and the implementation of conservation programs in Indonesia required familiarity with and a willingness
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to adopt those forms and patterns of knowledge making that were recognizable as “science” and “management” to Northern colleagues. This was the case even when these norms and forms were not a viable means for saving biodiversity or involving Togean people in the project. The criticisms that Indonesian scientists might have had about transnational models of conservation did not often cross the collaborative divide and were usually not shared with sponsors or foreign scientists. While the autonomy of the Indonesian nation had secured a space for Indonesians within transnational science, and Indonesian biologists are now mentors, partners, and colleagues of Euro-American scientists in constructing natural scientific knowledge, Indonesian biologists still faced some familiar challenges: the terms for what could be considered “good” science were set somewhere else; Indonesians were expected to contribute only data rather than theory; Indonesian scientists were responsible for reading Euro-American literatures while the inverse was not usually the case; and Euro-American scientists continued to take for granted that Indonesia was only one “problem space” within an entire world amenable to their investigations, whereas Indonesian scientists tended to perceive the nation as their most pressing area of concern. For all these reasons, Indonesians struggled for recognition within transnational biodiversity conservation domains. Despite the dearth of recognition, nature making in the global South has been productive of the very form that has come to be known as biodiversity. For example, the Integrated Conservation and Development Project (the major form that conservation outreach took in the mid-1990s) can be viewed, in part, as an idea that originated in Southern peoples’ resistance to wildlife conservation, rather than as the brainchild of Northern biologists. While funding and ideas flow from organizations in the North to the many sites of biodiversity conservation in the South, the knowledges, rationalities, and natures in Southern biodiversity conservation cannot be understood entirely through the language of assimilation or adaptation in the tropics of a project that originates elsewhere. And yet, I witnessed the frustration Indonesian scientists sometimes felt in their collaborations with foreign scientists and heard the comments some Euro-American visitors to Indonesia made, for example, “The only thing disappointing about this experience at the [Togean] research station is that there are no real scientists working here.”
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Within the context of Indonesian scientific subalternity, Indonesians were able to name a new species but not turn the tables on speciesbased conservation. A transformation to ecosystems-based management began to occur at the end of the 1990s, but only once Northern scientists had theorized this new way of thinking about biodiversity conservation. The Indonesian scientist mentioned above who observed that species were an inappropriate lens through which to imagine Indonesian nature was not part of this transformation, and I would also speculate that he would not find “ecosystems” to be the solution he was after. Neither species nor ecosystem incorporates Indonesian fishers and farmers into the picture in the way his commentary proposes. While many Indonesians were politically active around questions of nature and human rights, this was, by and large, not the case in the Togean project. Collaboration with foreign scientists who did not really understand the history of Indonesia or see it as relevant meant that environmental problems and their solutions were place based. To the extent that Togean people were valued as “conservation partners,” this was primarily because they were viewed as perpetrators of threats to nature in the first place. At the heart of the transnational scientific collaboration, it was more important to name a species than it was to trace out cyanide networks that bring this poison to the islands for use in live fish capture. It was more important to develop income substitutes for harvests of land and sea products for Togean people than it was to understand their political-economic position within networks of resource use and exploitation. In the case of Togean Island biology and conservation, collaboration helped to keep the focus on place-based, depoliticized understandings of Togean nature.1
The Politics of Nature in Southeast Asia: Reinventing Collaboration In his 2001 keynote address to the conference sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Social Science Research Council to mark the tenth and final year of their International Predissertation Fellowship Program (IPFP), which took collaboration as a guiding principle, Kenneth Prewitt envisions the problem of U.S.-based area studies as the parochial nature of an American social science at odds with what is happening in the world today: “the United States is a
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diminishing point of reference for many scholars located elsewhere…. What will push us forward are the skills represented by the goal of the IPFP—to make scholars alert to what colleagues elsewhere have to offer and sensitive to the international context in which the local, including the United States as a locale, finds its way.”2 He proposes a future where scholars everywhere will be concerned with linkages between the local and the global; topics, theories, and methods can be shared through attention to multiple scales of analysis. Prewitt’s intellectual mandates for transnational scholarly collaboration are consistent with the study of environmental politics where nature-society relations are studied at multiples scales from the local to the global. If one wanted to pursue transnational scholarly collaboration in the region using the analytic of environmental politics, rather than the science of conservation biology, one would find this harder to do than Prewitt suggests, however. Listening to the agendas of Southeast Asian scholars, I found that, although it would be possible to collaborate around the politics of nature in Thailand, political approaches to nature are, by and large, not on the table in the Indonesian and Vietnamese academies. For example, while “political ecology” (one approach to the study of environmental politics) is an important paradigm in Thai social science, the approach is largely absent in the Indonesian and Vietnamese academic settings. Nor is there an indigenous academic theorization or model in either country for how social justice or national or transnational political economies articulate with environmental or spatial concerns. Prewitt’s idea of transnational interconnection does not resonate in relation to Indonesian or Vietnamese studies of society and nature. Rather, in both countries, the study of nature and society is pursued through depoliticized theories and methods that emphasize indigenous practices, local knowledges, and ethnosciences. As is no less true in Europe or the United States, questions of scholarly theory and practice in Southeast Asia must be examined through an understanding of what has been politically and institutionally possible to say and do. Political constraints throughout Southeast Asia have made it difficult to study and discuss environmental transformations outside their immediately local contexts. Rather than studies of environmental politics and spatial articulation, what I found in both Indonesia and Viet Nam were echoes of previous and present moments of “training” in the paradigms of U.S. ecological anthropology of the
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1950s–1970s. In contrast, many Thai scholars were theoretically and socially engaged with theories of transnationalism and political economy. If we look, it is always possible to find hopeful examples of scholarship and collaboration and to uncover spaces where working together is productive and possible. As Anna Tsing writes, the process of finding productive things to say to each other is “exciting and unfinished work.”3 But to do so would be to acknowledge the complexities of collaboration and to try and work within them. Below, I briefly describe the histories and approaches to society and environment that scholars have developed in Indonesia, Viet Nam, and Thailand. I also describe instances of actual collaborative spaces in each country that reflect the demands for new types of collaborations in the twentyfirst-century world. Each example addresses some part of the new collaborative agenda, the process of decolonizing social science, or the question of rethinking the idea of areas. Each also demonstrates the possibility for studies of environmental politics, even under unfavorable structural conditions. For Indonesia, I describe the work of Iwan Tjitradjaja, of the University of Indonesia, who has abandoned his pursuit of theory to invent a creative solution to the problem of local resource control in Sumatra. His work is an example of Southeast Asian scholarship that U.S.-based scholars and practitioners might take as a model. For Viet Nam, I discuss the work of Diane Fox and Nguyen Viet Nhan as an instance of a “learning,” rather than a “training,” approach to collaboration. Fox, from the University of Washington, and Nhan, of the Hue Medical School, have collaborated around a common interest in the personal stories of trauma and environmental legacies of Agent Orange. Finally, I describe an interdisciplinary graduate program at Chiang Mai University in Thailand. At the Resource Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, and women studies scholars are redefining the borders of Southeast Asia and attempting to produce a region that is personally and intellectually relevant in a Thai context.
Indonesia: Learning from Southeast Asia In the Indonesian academy, I found a dearth of critical approaches to the study of nature. Nongovernmental organization (NGO) activists
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informed me that I was misguided to expect to find critical scholarship inside the Indonesian academy. This, certainly, is not because a critical consciousness does not exist in Indonesia. Rather, it is because of the historical relationship between the academy and the state. Under Suharto in the late 1970s, university campuses were depoliticized in a movement called Campus Normalization (normalisasi kampus).4 During this period, all political content in scholarship, writing, and curriculum was eliminated in favor of teaching and research that promoted national development, political stability, and economic growth. Incarceration, disappearance, exile, terror, and death were all possible outcomes for oppositional speech, and the state deliberately associated political discourse with the imaginary specter of communism. In public universities, all scholars are civil servants, and under Suharto, this meant they were required by law to belong to and support the party of the government, Golkar. At the time, many of Indonesia’s most promising scholars were exiled, silenced, or left the academy entirely. During the Suharto period, state domination over land, water, and natural resources was, for the most part, publicly unquestionable. Scholarly examinations of the intersection of timber concessions, international trade, and national politics (which supported rapacious forest destruction and conversion of forests to oil palm plantations in the 1990s), for example, were next to impossible in the Indonesian academy. In this context, the paradigm used most frequently in Indonesian studies of culture and environment has been “human ecology”—a paradigm that emerged in the United States in the 1970s to examine relationships between local beliefs, habits, and practices and the immediate proximal environment. Human ecology draws its inspiration from biological ecology: a population is its unit of analysis; the ecosystem is its relevant context; and the interaction between the population and its ecosystem is resolved through adaptation. Indonesian scholars attribute the broad influence of human ecology to Andrew Vayda, who was one of the seminal theorists of human ecology, and who taught in Indonesia in the 1980s.5 Carlo Bonura (chap. 6, this volume) has demonstrated the radical potential in specificity, and research on indigenous knowledge in human ecological contexts is premised upon the idea that the details of how people interact with surrounding environments are worth knowing. Very often studies of local environmental practice have been used to
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demonstrate that specific practices are not environmentally destructive after all, and that all relevant knowledge does not rest in the hands of scientists—resource users have valuable environmental knowledges too. At the same time, critiques of human ecology state that placebased analysis by itself is insufficient for understanding environmental change or for comprehending the globalized, institutionalized, and fundamentally political nature of materiality in the modern world. Just as the emphasis on local knowledge fails to link the relationship between humans and nature to different scales of analysis, it also has a very limited temporality. This can be seen in studies of customary law (adat), which plays a role in Indonesian anthropology similar to the role “tradition” plays in Euro-American anthropology: it makes the developmentalist move of denying the coevality of all forms of human society.6 Studies of customary law fail to recognize how histories of environmental practice are constructed and contested, or how “adat” is an artifact of Dutch colonialism. One human ecologist in Indonesia who studies adat remarked to me that “the term ‘simple society’ is in play here; almost all of us have done work in ‘simple societies.’”7 In failing to demonstrate the effects of governmentality, privatization, corruption, markets, or ideologies of nature on landscape and marinescape transformation, place-based studies actually enhance the perception that marginalized peoples are responsible for environmental degradation, even when these studies formally argue otherwise. Human ecology, as a paradigm, does the work of depoliticizing environmental struggle by keeping questions of resource use and environmental transformation focused on marginalized peoples. To the extent that it intellectually underwrites Indonesians’ widespread faith in the existence of a timeless “primitive,” human ecology is actually an injurious paradigm, not just an inadequate one. If not in the academy, then where might a more progressive inquiry into Indonesian environmental politics be found? Where might it be possible to pursue Prewitt’s imagination of a future where “scholars everywhere will be concerned with transnational linkages between the local and the global; [where] topics, theories, and methods can be shared through attention to multiple scales of analysis”? The world of Indonesian NGOs is one such space. Immediately after campus normalization, the Indonesian NGO movement and political “discussion groups” (kelompok diskusi), emerged.8 Many former discussion group
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participants and present NGO activists continue to invent new futures for Indonesia based on cogent critiques of the Suharto era record. Some of this work is premised on empirical scholarly research that draws connections between urban and rural, nation and transnation. It is here, in what I want to call the “private intellectual sector,” that many recent PhDs with degrees from American geography, history, anthropology, and environmental studies programs envision their future. They are not joining the academy, which they view as hidebound and corrupt. The circumstances of scholarship in Indonesia challenge EuroAmerican academics to find scholarly and intellectual linkages wherever they are most appropriate, even outside the university system. Funding and reward structures, in the United States at least, are not set up to recognize research outside academic institutions. Indonesian academic histories suggest that Euro-American institutions could broaden their concept of collaboration and radically challenge the Euro-American imagination of what counts as an intellectual venue. Moreover, within the U.S. academy there continues to be an ongoing debate over the role of “applied” scholarship. The applied-versus-academic dichotomy is challenged by what is happening in Indonesia. A new generation of Indonesian thinkers working outside the academy presents new possibilities for collaboration and new ways for U.S.-based scholars to reflect on intellectual life in pragmatic settings. One example is “community forestry.” In both Indonesia and the United States, community forestry deals with questions of naturalresource distribution, property rights, bureaucracy, participation, and the ability of local communities to take advantage of local forest resources.9 Scholarship on community forests attempts to develop practices that are mutually beneficial to communities and to forest ecosystems and to address the power imbalances that have alienated communities from forests to begin with. At the Program for the Study and Facilitation of Ecological Anthropology at the University of Indonesia, Iwan Tjitradjaja works on community forestry issues. He is concerned with the effects of Indonesian forest policies and their implementation, and his research addresses not only forest degradation but also the well-being of forest-dwelling communities. He is interested in forest rehabilitation, not for its own sake, but so that forests can be returned to the people who live there. His approach to these issues
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could be a model for U.S. community forestry studies, and not only for those scholars with an interest in Southeast Asia. Although trained in human ecology at Rutgers, Tjitradjaja looks at the rights of people living in forests apart from the issue of whatever knowledges they might have. The institute he leads has chosen to research “forest conflict” and has set a goal of returning forest rights back to the people through peaceful means. As the program’s main interest is the well-being of people, “community facilitation” has become a research focus in itself. The program is informed by Tjitradjaja’s training in human ecology and the presumption that knowledge of people’s actual environmental practices helps us to rethink our own ideas about environmental management. At the same time, it is also informed by a wider political economy that recognizes scalar interconnection, in this case effects of the Indonesian state on forests and on human welfare. Tjitradjaja began by conversing with forestry and planning officials and discovered that these officials did not have any experience “in the field” with those affected by their policies. Despite much criticism of the Indonesian bureaucracy, few models exist for bureaucrats to discover in embodied ways new means to manage; Tjitradjaja’s research team provides “facilitation” between the bureaucrats and the people. In his model, communities are not perceived simplistically as homogeneous or free of conflict. If “the people” are going to manage their forests, they are going to have to arrange their own practices in a manner that is transparent, democratic, and equitable. Thus, the research team also has developed discussion groups within the communities they work in to talk about perceived problems and methods for dealing with the Forestry bureaucracy. Tjitradjaja explains that he is against a method that is “classroom based with teachers, theories, hotels, and expense accounts.” His goal is to bring government representatives directly into contact with their constituents in the village. Tjitradjaja and the institute’s research team have designed a weeklong program for bureaucrats around a particular contested forest in Lampung, Sumatra. They regularly bring in groups of thirty participants from all provinces, especially from the Department of Forestry, and each participant lives directly with a community host. The participants then go in small groups into the forest to learn what villagers are doing to manage or utilize forest resources. One of the key
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principles, Tjitradjaja told me, is that bureaucrats are allowed only to observe and are required to withhold judgment. For example, if there is a slope with peanuts growing on it and it looks too steep, the official is not allowed to ask if the slope is too steep; she or he must ask the farmer simply why peanuts are growing there. Finally, villagers and bureaucrats travel together to visit the local Forestry office. There, officials can watch the interactions between Forestry workers and farmers and observe the problems villagers have in communicating their views. Through experience in the field, bureaucrats begin to understand why these social interactions are intense, and the people who live in the Lampung forest learn some of the problems the bureaucrats face. Tjitradjaja is employing a modified form of participant observation, the method of cultural anthropology. But he is also developing his own ideas, which depend upon the Indonesian setting for their emergence. Before 1998, the government had tried to force the people out of the Lampung forest, and the sense of conflict is still very strong there. Tjitradjaja was not particularly interested in anthropological theories when we spoke, though it was clear that what he is building is based on his background as an anthropologist. Rather, he wanted to start from the position of “peace,” not conflict, both in his research and in the projects he implements. He said he wants to ask “a simple question” about life: “can we live peacefully?” Some might say this question ignores the issue of power in resource use, and his colleagues in other Indonesian universities have expressed skepticism. They say that he wants to “manage from the heart” and that he is “too romantic.” But, Tjitradjaja explained, liberation and chaos are both potential outcomes of the national government’s new plan for regional autonomy. People are still fighting and struggling over forest commodities, and sustainability is going to require what he calls “social capability” for both bureaucrats and the people who live in the forest. What might it look like for U.S.-based scholars to proceed as though they do not possess the most significant knowledge about, or all of the solutions to, the world’s difficult problems? U.S. forestry struggles too with how to convince bureaucrats and biologists to look and think “ethnographically.” Might Tjitradjaja’s model of participantobserver activism be able to travel authoritatively to U.S. community forestry projects? Tjitradjaja’s way of understanding and acting on the
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relations of foresters, communities, and forests, produced within Southeast Asia, would then be deemed a necessary model to consider, even for those who do not specialize in the study of Southeast Asia. In a decolonizing academy, others outside Euro-America will be recognized for producing knowledges that travel—Southeast Asian models, theories, and practices will be relevant beyond the local circumstances of their production.
Viet Nam: What Questions Must We Ask? Foreign scholarly exchanges have been most diverse in the Vietnamese academy; French, Chinese, Russian, and, most recently, Thai and American scholarship have all been influential. Vietnamese scholars continue to make eclectic uses of cultural theory, and Vietnamese scholarship defies any essentialist notion of academic work as a “pure product.” Several scholars I met in Hanoi in 2000 were trained in Russian ethnology before studying American anthropology. Others remember French scholarly traditions. In the recent past, the Vietnamese scholarly approach to studies of society and environment has involved Russian-influenced archival studies of folklore rather than field-based research. In the past ten years or so, the Vietnamese research focus has expanded to include field-based documentation of material culture, traditional knowledge, and uses of the natural environment, especially among upland groups of ethnic minorities. In addition to the work of the Vietnamese social science institutes, some natural scientists are also acquiring new interests in agro-ecosystems and in medicinal and other cultural uses of plants. James Scott has noted that a combination of “isolation, politics, and radically different research traditions” have made for a wholly different academic situation in Viet Nam. What I believe he refers to here are the developmentalist Marxist and nationalist narratives that have heretofore informed Vietnamese scholarship.10 The challenging question for collaboration in this case is to think through what it means for American scholars to cross the Pacific only to find Victorian evolutionism alive and well, even when transformed through Vietnamese experience. Most (though not all) U.S.-based scholars would be reluctant to collaborate around the idea that Vietnamese ethnic minorities are at an “earlier stage” of human evolution. Likewise, it would not make
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sense to many Vietnamese scholars to collaborate around the deconstruction of environmental ideologies, the invention of tradition, the politics of knowledge, or the production of subjects of nature. Rather than assuming the obviousness of collaboration, we face the prior issue of constructing enough of a common language for scholarly conversation to begin to occur while, at the same time, avoiding, as Scott warns, “a ‘double-quick,’ forced-march, Westernization of the social sciences.”11 Since the early 1990s European and American scholars have engaged in programs of “training” to develop expertise in the literatures and methods that promote empirical field-based scholarship. Recent collaborations between U.S.- and European-based scholars and Vietnamese institutions have been enabled by a new political openness in Viet Nam and by new funding interest.12 Behind this training we can sense the optimistic assessment that empirical knowledge gained in the field will have a better outcome in terms of social justice for marginalized peoples than the textual tradition of Russian folklore. There is always the anthropological hope that, despite the historicist assumptions that might accompany much of this research, the potential exists for scholars to discover the common humanity of those who are objects of their construction of knowledge.13 Through some twist of fate, however, this training appears to have significantly entailed introducing Vietnamese scholars to American forms of neoevolutionism. As more than one Vietnamese social scientist said to me, “we already have Lewis Henry Morgan and are hoping to get Julian Steward.” Steward’s paradigm, cultural ecology, replaced Morgan’s “unilinear evolution” with the concept of “multilinear evolution,” a process of differential environmental adaptation. In U.S. work, this functionalist paradigm is a precursor to sociobiology and evolutionary ecology, both of marginal importance (and the object of an established body of criticism) in American cultural anthropology today. Rather than explaining U.S.-based nature-and-society literature in the 1990s, evolutionary paradigms represent what it has been politically possible to teach in Viet Nam, and what appears commonsensical to Vietnamese scholars who are receiving training. By and large, EuroAmerican training initiatives have not “yet” facilitated the conversations on environmental politics that engage scholars outside the region. The question of training in Viet Nam raises some of the most perplexing questions for an agenda of decolonizing scholarly
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collaboration. Again, if one wanted to collaborate around the constellation of ideas and theories of environmental politics, broadly conceived, there is, for the most part, not an audience for this in the Vietnamese academy. As one American historian said to me, “I would like to collaborate, but there is no concept in Viet Nam of the things I want to work on.” So, in a way, we are presented with two competing postcolonial agendas: do we want to resist the teleology that social science is based on an inevitable progression of theory of which any particular strand (environmental politics, ethnobiology, cultural ecology, etc.) of any particular academic tradition (Indian, Latin American, U.S., etc.) is the exemplar; or do we want to use contemporary theory to deconstruct the essentialized and instrumental applications of ethnic identity that are so disempowering to Vietnamese upland minorities and other of Southeast Asia’s marginalized peoples. There are no simple solutions to this conundrum. Upon the invitation of the Vietnamese academy, Euro-American scholars are engaged in a program of training Vietnamese in international standards of social science research. What options are there to approach the question of collaboration beyond the hierarchical concept of “training” or the “Westernization” of Vietnamese social science? Part of the local sensitivity James Scott calls for, I would argue, involves the process of defining what questions are to be addressed in working together. To collaborate around environmental politics, we would have to look for what questions Vietnamese researchers already do see as both “political” and “environmental” rather than forcing an environmental politics lens onto something Vietnamese scholars are not already approaching this way. Take Agent Orange, for example. Perhaps because this particular “chemical state” has come into being only recently, perhaps because it raises issues so different from the layers of thought that frame ethnic relations (all the years of French colonialism, Russian ethnology, American manipulations of upland groups during the Viet Nam– American War, and now cultural ecology), perhaps because it sits in a less historically encumbered space, Agent Orange is a topic that can hardly avoid being framed through questions of social justice and environmental politics. The collaboration between Diane Niblack Fox and Nguyen Viet Nhan on the enduring effects of Agent Orange on both Viet Nam’s physical environment and the nation’s “social suffering”
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is an example of a collaborative approach to shared scholarly and political concerns.14 Dr. Nhan has conducted research on the physical effects of Agent Orange for the past decade. Fox, who was involved with the U.S. antiwar movement before pursuing anthropological research in Viet Nam, studies the long-term consequences of war on human health, particularly the effects of Agent Orange and its associated dioxin. In recounting her interaction with Nhan, Fox writes, “‘It is hard to measure the results,’ he tells me, ‘we don’t have enough modern equipment to evaluate the presence of dioxin in the soil, water, leaves, etc.; we lack specialists in epidemiology; we don’t have enough money to organize a large investigation; and the length of time is a problem. Twenty-five years ago—that’s too long to evaluate accurately.’” Nhan refers here not just to imagined weaknesses in Vietnamese scientific capability but to the regime of power/knowledge that demands numbers, ratios, and measurements as the only legitimate way of knowing about dioxin or proving its effects. “‘But truly,’ he continues, ‘we don’t need to know about the past. The War is behind us. We know a lot about dioxin already. What we need now is knowledge to help these children and their families.’ He concludes our conversation with an invitation. ‘This morning we have talked a lot,’ he says, ‘but you will never understand anything if you just sit here with me. So this afternoon I plan to take you to visit some of the families.’”15 Fox assumes the role of “learner” rather than “teacher” in their relationship, and she has obviously found an excellent mentor. In some sense, taking on the role of novice or child is a familiar anthropological trope. What is not so familiar is the U.S. scholar’s ability to learn from another academic in the country where she studies. Fox’s ethnography of the families affected by Agent Orange begins with Nhan’s “formulation of how we may come to ‘know something.’” Nhan argues that what produces true knowledge is his “fieldwork”— his interactions with the six hundred Agent Orange–affected families in his study. Rather than presenting a paradigm she wanted to impart in their interaction, Fox was helped to reimagine her own work through the specificities of this Vietnamese scholar’s agenda. They could agree on the idea that gathering more data on dioxin was not as important or as meaningful as the humanistic stories of dioxin-affected families, and they could agree on the value of ethnographic understanding.
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The contested terrain of the consequences of chemical warfare has also been a contest over the epistemological status of science. Both Vietnamese and American military families have suffered the consequences of insufficient “proof” of Agent Orange’s effects. Perhaps America’s role in the manufacture and use of Agent Orange, or the chemical’s status as symbol of immanent American hubris, made it less likely that Fox would present herself as an “authority” on how Agent Orange should be studied. On Nhan’s part, he was gracious enough to recognize the difference between Diane Fox and her country’s government. In their work together, Nhan and Fox demonstrate the possibility of Vietnamese and Americans scholars finding productive things to say to each other around the transnational (environmental) articulations that have played out through the soil, water, leaves, and bodies of the Vietnamese nation. One might want to frame this as a political collaboration against the U.S. government’s reluctance to take responsibility for the consequences of its chemical warfare, but Fox resists this idea. She told me, our collaboration is about something now discredited in some quarters of the West: humanity. Dr. Nhan and I both see the urgent need to help the families as coming ahead of much else—our collaboration is to find ways to help the families, and in the process, we construct informal, very loose personal networks and generate knowledge. In that sense it is political. But our aim is more to help the families than to call the U.S. to account … though as an American, I may feel more responsibility for doing that than he would. We have never talked about it, so I can’t say—except to extrapolate from his insistence that “the war is past.”
Thailand: Redefining the Region Thailand’s national and political history is very different from that of either Indonesia or Viet Nam. While Thailand has experienced its own political trauma and violence and continues to generate its own forms of censorship, these are not of the same scope or scale as either the political violence under Suharto, in which perhaps as many as one million Indonesian people died, or the recent decades of outright war in Viet Nam. It is at least plausible that this accounts for the greater intellectual freedom in the Thai academy.16 Thai universities, moreover,
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are much better funded by the state than those of either Indonesia or Viet Nam. The Thai government, for example, supports foreign students to study in some of its domestic programs and also provides funds for collaborative research among Thai universities. This exceptional Thai experience has had several consequences. First, for our purposes here, we do find studies of nature’s politics within the Thai academy. We can find scholars at Chulalongkorn, Chiang Mai, and Khon Kaen universities, among others, framing questions of society and environment in terms of the wider societal and international contexts that shape natural-resource and land- and marinescape use. While much Thai research continues to contain valuable intimate place-based ethnographic detail, Thai scholars are also connecting these details to critical theories and methods, including, but not limited to, political ecology. Another result of Thailand’s relative political openness is that environmental justice NGOs that have solid ties to the Thai academy do exist. Additionally, rather than one predominant paradigm, a variety of scholarly paradigms are found in the Thai academy, each with a different purchase on political engagement. Rather than the impossibility of an academic environmental politics, Thai scholars actively debate the value of such scholarship. Also, a plurality of methods and theories of political engagement exist. The main schools of thought vying for attention in Thailand are the Community Culture school, and the Political Economy school.17 While the Community Culture approach is similar to human ecology in its emphasis on the unique knowledges that local communities have about their environments, the Political Economy school emphasizes the politics of nature, positing structural factors as most relevant for analyzing social and environmental change. The Community Culture approach was developed by Thai NGOs in the 1980s and currently is practiced outside the academy as well as within it. The Political Economy school is led by scholars trained in structural Marxism and is practiced both in the academy and by rightsbased NGOs. The debate in the Thai academy is akin to conversations going on in Indonesia on the topic of customary law. In both Indonesia and Thailand, scholars and activists are debating the value of both “tradition” and “politics” for studying contemporary social and environmental problems. There is a significant difference between how the dichotomy
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is perceived in the two countries, however. Whereas the inverse of the Community Culture school in Thailand is the Political Economy school, in Indonesia scholars concerned with the romanticization of adat see the alternative as a depoliticized “objective” science: Romantic Stream/ Studies of Tradition
Rationalist Stream/ The Place of Politics
Thailand
Community Culture School
Political Economy School
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Adat
Depoliticized “objectivity”/science
We can see this difference manifested in the way some Thai and Indonesian academics described to me the relationship between local people and state-controlled forests. While Indonesian scholars commonly referred to the problem of “the people encroaching on the state’s forests,” Thai scholars more often spoke of “the Thai forestry service encroaching on the people’s land.”18 These framings both reflect and reproduce political conditions for people who live in forests. While Thai and Indonesian governments often appropriate the property of people who live in forests, and while forest-dwelling people are marginalized in both contexts, in Thailand, ethnic minority people actually seek out academics to help them in their political struggles with the state. Many Hmong, Karen, and others have sought out RCSD faculty, for example, as a resource for defending their land and other rights. RCSD academics have also worked to mediate between the people and such large state bureaucracies as the Royal Forestry Corporation and the Electrical Generating Authority of Thailand. One consequence of the relative openness of the Thai academy is that transnational collaborations around environmental politics are active and engaging. Thai scholars collaborate with colleagues throughout Southeast Asia and with U.S.-based and European scholars, using recent international literature on environmental justice. The collaborative process should not appear overly simple or uncontested in Thailand, however. Engagements with visiting Euro-American scholars are sometimes uncomfortable for Thai scholars; many of us who are Euro-Americans still have a long way to go in terms of unlearning our
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academic privilege.19 But there is a strong basis in Thailand for collaboration, for developing social theory together, and for struggling through the complexities of what working together will mean. One of the most trenchant critiques of the area studies concept concerns the geography of areas themselves and their presumed cohesiveness. How do regions artificially bounded by Cold War geography hang together, or do they? Further, what does it mean, in Prewitt’s terms, to attempt to turn the United States into just one geographical locale among many? What if Euro-American scholars are marginal to the process of collaboration itself? Attention to such questions, I would argue, is precisely what was hoped for in deconstructing the area studies concept. At the RCSD, a graduate program established at Chiang Mai University in the 1990s, Thai scholars are redrawing the boundaries of what constitutes a relevant region. Rather than follow the outline of Southeast Asia as it is naturalized in Euro-American scholarship, they have constructed a new area that better reflects their specific research interests in the upland ethnic minority groups of Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, and China. As Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, an RCSD anthropologist, has described it, “you can see from the geography here, Northern Thailand really doesn’t belong to Southeast Asia as defined by the West. In fact, the Philippines doesn’t belong much to us, because we have much more in common with Laos, North Vietnam, the southern part of China, Burma.”20 The RCSD program pursues a teaching and research agenda on topics related to regional environmental politics: ethnic identity, resource management and conflict, tourism, political ecology, social movements, environmental history, and so on. RCSD students come from Thailand, China, Laos, Cambodia, Viet Nam, Burma, Japan, and Germany. This stance on the boundaries of “Southeast Asia” is also reflected in a larger critique of Euro-American scholarship on Thailand. Vaddhanaphuti explains that a Western scientific representation of Thai reality seems to fit well with development discourse during the 1960s and ’70s. Trained anthropologists and political scientists conducted their fieldwork and constructed models such as the “Loosely-Structured Society,” the “Bureaucratic Polity,” the “Prismatic Society,” etc., to explain Thai society. These ideas then made us think that our society lagged
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behind or was underdeveloped, our society lacked investment and technology, and our social structure and cultural values were barriers to the imagined development. What is also interesting is that the early development of social science in Thailand was closely intertwined with increased U.S. influence in Southeast Asia and Thailand during the late 1950s and ’60s, including the war effort.
The work of RCSD scholars to draw regional boundaries that are relevant to their work is not merely a reaction to U.S. scholarly hegemony. It is also a response to Thailand’s relationship to its neighbors. Thailand is surrounded by Burma, which has a long history of conflict with Thailand, on one side, and by the socialist countries of China, Laos, and Cambodia on the other side. “We have not developed much understanding about our closest neighboring countries,” Vaddhanaphuti says. Let me give you an example. You know that there is a clash between Thailand and Burma. We are now having a “war of words.” Thailand has been accused of supporting ethnic minorities along the Burma border. And, to a certain degree, we also have been taught, not only by our school textbooks, but also by other media, that the Burmese are our national enemy. We can see how this nationalist ideology worked earlier on during the political crisis in Bangkok, at Thammasat University. Some of those who did not subscribe or adhere to the government ideology, well then, they were accused of being Vietnamese, or being supported by the Vietnamese…. So the issue of Thai-centrism, Thai nationalism, very much dominates not only academic, but vernacular responses.
Research and teaching at RCSD can be placed in a larger context of resistance to the American Cold War and all that that entails, including developmentalist theories of Thai society and the drawing of strategic geographic boundaries. Again, this story is not one of purity in Thai academic thought: the RCSD program was established through a Ford Foundation endowment, and the RCSD faculty all have doctorate degrees from Canada or the United States. At the same time, the positionality of Thai scholars has enabled them to conceptualize their region in a new way, across socialist-capitalist divides that they find unproductive for making sense of regional societies or of environmental politics.
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Recognizing Scholarly Subjects From the perspective of U.S. scholarship, the problem of collaboration suggests provocative questions about the nature of scholarly connection with Southeast Asia. Some problems seem manageable, or their solutions imaginable. For instance, Euro-American scholars can be held to higher standards of accountability for Southeast Asian languages and literatures. Most are harder though. If academic scholarship is “about” Europe and America in that all social science disciplines share an intellectual history based in European political philosophy and reason, how will Euro-American scholars learn to recognize scholarly subjects in Southeast Asian contexts?21 How do U.S.-based scholars choose from among the many Southeast Asian conversations available to participate in, or with whom to collaborate and on what basis? Will “Southeast Asia” even remain a region for analysis when scholars from Thailand or Indonesia participate on equal footing? From the perspective of Southeast Asians’ scholarship, other questions emerge. What will count as a scholarly contribution in these new contexts, and who will get to decide? How will collaborative research agendas be set? Is it possible to speak of collaboration without at the same time addressing the imbalance of power stemming from Euro-American scholars’ access to research funding, graduate fellowships, library facilities, technology, and career opportunities? And there is also the question of language; how can Southeast Asian scholars mediate a Euro-American hold on theory when English is the hegemonic language of international knowledge production? Perhaps most problematic for Southeast Asian scholars is the question of graduate training and education. If U.S.-based social science has been fundamentally about the American experience, has the project of training Southeast Asian scholars been simply a process of colonization by other means? What should we make of the enthusiasm with which many Southeast Asian students pursue educational opportunities abroad, and how do we recognize the ambivalence that many others feel about the seeming necessity of doing so to participate in transnational conversations? There are several arguments I have not made in this chapter. I have not argued that all scholars must approach studies of society and environment only through the rubric of environmental politics, though
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I believe there are good reasons to take the politics of nature seriously. I have also not argued that the people of any country as a whole lack a political consciousness of environmental justice. Nor have I directly critiqued any particular body of scholarship, though I have several times mentioned that critiques of certain paradigms exist. Rather, I have proposed the idea that any body of scholarship, including EuroAmerican scholarship on environmental politics, is both critically enabled and disabled by the structural possibilities for defining “scholarly subjects.” Who we are as scholars, and what we have studied, can be traced to the political histories, regimes of power/knowledge, and individual circumstances that delimit the orthodox, the heterodox, and the unthinkable. If India, for example, had experienced the same degree of (U.S.supported) state terror as Indonesia or the same devastation through the “American War” as did Viet Nam, or had been colonized by the Dutch-speaking Netherlands, I think it is fair to speculate that we might never have seen the contributions or collaborations of the internationally successful Subaltern Studies Collective. This indicates that the issue of collaboration must be approached as a problem to be solved rather than as a liberal ideology to be assumed. The goals of collaboration are often paradoxical, as the case of Viet Nam illustrates quite well, and the aims of postcolonial scholarship contradictory. Do we want to argue for particular critical scholarly positions or certain stances on justice or “human rights,” or do we want to “provincialize” all possible theoretical and intellectual positions? For example, political ecology as an “approach” has been critiqued on several fronts. It has been challenged for its focus on the causal nature of poverty, for its rural and agrarian bias, for its “third-world” emphasis, and for its “fuzzy” conception of political economy.22 More recently, political ecology has been observed to have a weak integration with poststructuralist theory, including theories of gender and identity, science and technology, and language.23 While I agree with this recent analysis of the political ecology paradigm, can even these critiques be claimed to have universal validity? For instance, in contexts where political economy and the environment are not normally put into the same frame, might not a “fuzzy” definition of political economy suffice? Or in other contexts, where English is a second or third language, is poststructuralism really the best textual strategy for a
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“liberation ecology”? The travels of academic theory in Southeast Asia suggest the provincial nature of American critical theory. My analysis suggests a final issue of importance for Euro-American scholarship, on Southeast Asia or elsewhere. In the scheme of things, critical theories of society and environment are relatively recent in the United States. There are reasons why “cultural ecology” and the functionalist idea of “adaptation” emerged in the 1950s to describe the relationship of society to environment. McCarthy’s chilling effect on the academy made a political economy of the environment untenable; we were to have a “green revolution” rather than a “red revolution.” It is perhaps only arbitrary that the U.S. academy has been experiencing a moment of critical scholarly possibility while much of Southeast Asia has remained under the cloud of Cold War censorship. But the conditions of possibility for critical scholarship in the United States are also fragile and can be lost as easily as they have been gained. In the turnof-the-century United States, we are already seeing signs that critical intellectual engagement is under attack. In remaining attentive to the interconnectedness of Southeast Asian and American histories, and in showing how scholarly subjects are “made and not born,” Southeast Asian and Euro-American scholars may find common cause and a logic for collaboration.
Notes There are several people and institutions I wish to gratefully acknowledge. First and foremost is our editor, Laurie Sears. I am also thankful for the opportunity to “collaborate” on this project with Suraya Afiff, Carlo Bonura, Diane Fox, Daniel Lev, Oscar Salemink, Iwan Tjitradjaja, Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, and many anonymous scholars and activists in Indonesia, Thailand, and Viet Nam. Finally, while this work is not meant in any way to represent the opinions of the Ford Foundation or the Berkeley Environmental Politics Working Group at the University of California, I appreciate the support given to me by both of these institutions. The first epigraph to this chapter is drawn from Celia Lowe, “The Potential of People: An Interview with Chayan Vaddhanaphuti,” positions: east asia cultures critique 12, no. 1 (2004): 71–91. 1
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For an extensive look at these issues, see Celia Lowe, Wild Profusion: Biodiversity Conservation in an Indonesian Archipelago (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Kenneth Prewitt, “The Social Science Project: Then, Now, and Next” (keynote address presented at the “Rethinking Social Science Research on the Developing
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Celia Lowe World in the 21st Century” conference of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, Park City, UT, 7–10 June 2001). Anna Tsing, in Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After, ed. Itty Abraham (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2000), 32. Hariyadhie, Perspektif gerakan mahasiswa 1978 dalam percaturan politik nasional [Perspectives on the student movement of 1978 in the context of national politics] (Jakarta: Golden Terayon Press, 1997); Joseph Saunders, Academic Freedom in Indonesia: Dismantling Soeharto Era Barriers (New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998). In my conversations with Indonesian academics, I came across some exemplary research on local uses of the environment. The Institute of Ecology in Bandung, for example, has been engaged in detailed research on the Gunung Wayung watershed and the talun agroforestry system in Java. Institute scholars have invented the concept of human “overgrazing” to describe inappropriate uses of the Gunung Wayung environment, and they are attempting to balance ecology with economy and to revitalize traditional knowledge while not romanticizing it. The Center for Social Ecology in Samarinda is another institute that has done extensive work on local human-environment interactions. This group of scholars has studied people and forests in Kalimantan as part of the Culture and Conservation program sponsored by the Ford Foundation and the World Wildlife Fund in the 1990s. This project has resulted in a significant body of data on environmental practice in Kalimantan, which is documented in the volume Christina Eghenter and Bernard Sellato, eds., Kebudayaan dan pelestarian alam: Penelitian interdisipliner di pedelaman Kalimantan [Culture and nature conservation: Interdisciplinary research from Kalimantan’s interior] (Jakarta: PHPA, Ford Foundation, World Wide Fund for Nature, 1999). Other scholars have studied marriage systems, languages, traditional arts, household economy, and customary law (adat). Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983). See Suraya Afiff, “Land Reform or Customary Rights? Contemporary Agrarian Struggles in South Tapanuli, Indonesia” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2004). In her dissertation, Suraya Afiff argues that activist strategies to promote adat have not changed despite significant changes in the Indonesian political and economic landscape. Under new political economic contexts in Indonesia in the post-Suharto era, new collaborations between “adat elites” and business corporations have been more visible, and adat serves the interests of only adat elites. In some places there is the risk that adat might also be used to justify the return of feudalistic land systems. Hariyadhie, Perspektif gerakan mahasiswa 1978. Information on U.S.-based community forestry is available at http://www.cnr. berkeley.edu/community_forestry/#what (accessed 14 September 2005). James Scott, in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 27. For a detailed discussion of the history of Vietnamese ethnography, see Oscar Salemink, The Ethnography of Viet Nam’s Central Highlanders: A Historical Contextualization, 1850–1990 (London: Routledge, 2003).
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James Scott, in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 27. As indicated in the shift of the Ford Foundation office from Bangkok to Hanoi. One instance, for example, is the work of Nguyen Van Huy at the Museum of Ethnology. Dr. Huy imagines the museum as a forum where ethnic minorities may contest the stereotypical representations of official and scientific classifications of Vietnamese ethnic groups. Other training and workshops focusing on the idea of common property and community forestry have been well received in Viet Nam. Fox has also worked with Vietnamese scholars from the National Committee to Investigate the Results of Chemical Warfare, including Dr. Le Cao Dai, whose book Agent Orange in the Viet Nam War: History and Consequences (Hanoi: Vietnamese Red Cross Society and Cong Ty In Tong Hop Hanoi, 2000) she and Nguyen Khuyen translated. Diane Fox, “Agent Orange: The Chemical Hazards of Modern Warfare,” in Synthetic Planet: Chemical Politics and the Hazards of Modern Life, ed. Monica J. Casper (New York: Routledge, 2003), 83–84. One might also want to argue that this relates to the fact that Thailand was never formally colonized. The representation of Thailand as never colonized, while literally true, may not be the case in effect since certain discursive practices and technologies of rule were globalized in the colonial period. Lowe, “Potential of People.” It is important to note that these are tendencies and not absolutes. It would, of course, be possible to find scholars in each country who argued the inverse positions. My experience, however, was that the trends I describe dominated academic discourse. In the NGO world, which I address further on, a different story would have to be told. I would like to recognize, however, that there are also many Americans who are just gaining a voice in the U.S. academy for the first time. Interview with Chayan Vaddhanaphuti, 30 June 2002, Chiang Mai, Thailand. “Europe remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call ‘Indian,’ ‘Chinese,’ ‘Kenyan,’ and so on.” See Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 27. Richard Peet and Michael Watts, “Liberation Ecology: Development, Sustainability, and Environment in an Age of Market Triumphalism,” in Liberation Ecology: Environment, Development, Social Movements, ed. Richard Peet and Michael Watts (London: Routledge, 1996). Anna Tsing, “Notes on Culture and Natural Resource Management” (Working Paper no. WP 99-4, Berkeley Workshop on Environmental Politics, University of California Institute of International Studies, 1999).
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PART II Collaborations, Collections, Disciplines
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4
Southeast Asian Studies in the United States and Southeast Asia Missing Links GEORGE DUTTON
O
ver the past half-century, American influences on the Southeast Asian academy, and particularly the field of Southeast Asian studies, have been substantial. Although Anthony Reid and Maria Serena Diokno have recently argued that Southeast Asia itself has long been the site of academic and popular attempts to study and represent the region, a strong argument can still be made that the post–World War II United States is the birthplace of “Southeast Asian studies” as a discrete realm of academic inquiry.1 Although debates about the origins of the field persist, there is no question of the long-standing American influences on the study of Southeast Asia as a region, influences that have reverberated strongly within the intellectual community in Southeast Asia itself.2 Southeast Asian graduate students have come to the United States for training in Southeast Asian studies; American academic publishing, particularly in terms of textbooks and monographs, has dominated the field; American academics have long been traveling to Southeast Asia, helping to establish research centers, serving as consultants, and carrying out fieldwork in its many variant forms. These patterns of interaction have served to sustain academic linkages between the two regions, even as they have perpetuated an intellectual imbalance favoring scholars residing in and research agendas 139
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emanating from the United States. Southeast Asian scholars, as local “insiders,” do have certain forms of privileged access—linguistic, cultural, and sometimes political—giving them potential advantages in the study of the region. Although they come in as “outsiders,” however, American scholars often bring with them an institutional and national prestige that provides certain kinds of access to political figures and other elites that may well be closed off to local scholars. Moreover, the prestige that American (and Australian and European) scholars bring often gives an added weight to their analyses and opinions, as Ariel Heryanto points out elsewhere in this volume (chap. 2). Southeast Asian scholars so far seem not to have been able to translate their particular advantages into greater weight within the globalizing field of Southeast Asian studies, even as the potential continues to exist. As I discuss in the next section, barriers—including, most notably, linguistic ones but surely historical legacies as well—continue to limit the influence of Southeast Asian scholarship on the field as a whole. In this chapter I will examine the academic linkages between Southeast Asia and the United States and consider how and to what degree the power dynamic between Southeast Asian studies in Southeast Asia and in the United States has changed over the past half century. I will suggest that in numerous respects one continues to see a field strongly influenced by American academic models, publishing, and research objectives. At the same time, the lines between the American and the Southeast Asian academy are becoming increasingly blurred, making simple distinctions between the two complicated at best. Greater numbers of academics from Southeast Asia are coming to teach in the United States, bringing with them distinctive perspectives, experiences, and research endeavors that often reflect their background. The globalization of information technologies has also blurred national boundaries, making geographical points of origin less distinct, and perhaps less relevant. This chapter is not a survey of Southeast Asian studies in Southeast Asia per se. This has been carried out elsewhere.3 The focus of this chapter is instead on the scholarly relationship between the United States and Southeast Asia, a relationship that exists alongside rapidly growing and important links between scholars and institutions in Southeast Asia and in places such as Japan, Australia, and Europe.4 My objective is not to offer a comprehensive view of the multiple
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connections that have and continue to exist between the American and Southeast Asian academic worlds. Rather, my discussion of the historical context and the contemporary status of concrete linkages is calculated to serve as the basis for further reflection on the complex nature of the ways in which Southeast Asian studies and Southeast Asianists on both sides of the Pacific are connected to one another.
Historical Considerations and Contexts The aftermath of World War II brought with it a series of events— the emergence of independent nations throughout Southeast Asia, political struggles to define the futures of those nations, Cold War contestations—that strongly shaped American academic engagement with the region. Although U.S. government interests did not entirely dominate the field in its early years, U.S. government support, and the connections between Washington and the American academy, had a very strong influence on research agendas and on academic involvement with Southeast Asia. The birth of Southeast Asian studies in the United States coincided with the “birth” of newly independent nations in Southeast Asia, and more than a few of the new field’s American practitioners became involved in providing support to some of these emergent states. Where once colonial academics had dominated study of the region, now academics from what might be called the neocolonial United States took on these roles. These scholars were not the insiders that academics had once been as agents of British, Dutch, French, and Spanish colonial governments seeking to control and define the colonized spaces of the region. Instead, some of these academics were now agents of the United States and its efforts to define the contours of the postcolonial region. Specifically, various American academic institutions, some with emergent Southeast Asian studies centers or specializations, took a leading role in U.S.-government-funded research to promote political, social, and economic transformations in the region. Most Southeast Asianists in the United States even today will respond to the words “Michigan State University” by linking them to the American role in Viet Nam, and to “Berkeley Mafia” by recalling the Indonesian technocrats who emerged under President Suharto in the 1960s and 1970s. Similarly, such organizations as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations, which funded
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early Southeast Asian studies centers at Cornell and Berkeley and which worked more generally with the American academy on Southeast Asia–related projects between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, evoke memories of “nation building” and “development economics.” Among the most conspicuous examples of American academic involvement in Southeast Asia during this period was the “statebuilding” project carried out by Michigan State University (MSU) in Viet Nam. The MSU undertaking was a multiyear U.S.-governmentfunded project from 1955 to 1962 that trained South Vietnamese civil servants and officials in “Western” models of governance and economic development. The project was intended to design and develop fundamental elements of the bureaucratic and institutional structures of the nascent South Vietnamese government. MSU advisers, many of them professors at MSU, worked with South Vietnamese government ministries and officials to develop a police force, communications infrastructure, public transportation networks, and so on.5 In addition, Vietnamese civil servants were brought to MSU for training sessions or longer-term study. The MSU project assumed the ready transmissibility of American democratic institutions to a region with no experience in such forms of governance. Teaching and training would serve in lieu of historical experience and appropriate socioeconomic foundations. The experiment ultimately, and perhaps inevitably, failed, though the larger “nation-building” mindset (if not the precise mechanisms of the Viet Nam effort) has survived into the twenty-first century, as the current U.S. involvement in Iraq suggests. While in some instances, American universities like MSU had direct connections to Southeast Asian governments, in other cases their ties to the region were less explicit, even if their influence remained profound. This indirect impact came primarily in the form of Southeast Asian elites being sent to American universities for advanced academic training, often underwritten by money from the U.S. government or entities such as the Ford Foundation. These students attended numerous American research universities during the late 1950s and early 1960s, with a significant number training at MIT and Cornell and an important cohort attending the University of California at Berkeley. Among the latter group were a number of Indonesians who either were or would become influential members of the Indonesian regime after 1966 once General Suharto came to power. These Indonesians
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received doctoral degrees from Berkeley and became widely known as the “Berkeley Mafia.”6 On their return to Indonesia, these specialists helped to rework Indonesia’s economy using a free-market, growthoriented model. They also brought their expertise to bear on elements of the Indonesian military, advising them in techniques of administration and political control. The influence of these men continued under their patron President Suharto into the 1970s and 1980s, in a model that traded political freedoms for the promise of economic growth. The influence of the American economic model was, moreover, not limited to those few students who traveled to the United States for advanced research. The Indonesian government also recruited American economics professors to remake the Economics Faculty at the University of Indonesia according to the American model, thus helping to ensure a future generation of local students who would be trained along the same lines.7 At the same time that such U.S. university projects were being carried out in Viet Nam and Indonesia, another significant, if somewhat more diffuse, undertaking was occurring in Thailand. During the 1950s and 1960s, Thailand was viewed as the potential cornerstone of a democratic, noncommunist mainland Southeast Asia, and as such attracted attention from numerous American agencies, both within and outside the government. The U.S. Agency for International Development, in particular, spent large sums of money to hire American academics— mostly anthropologists—to study many facets of rural Thai society to provide a comprehensive picture of the issues confronting those who would be engaged in “nation-building” and development activities.8 Thus, one found American academics taking part in research projects whose outcomes, at least indirectly, would support efforts to transform Thai society and its economy. These undertakings frequently blurred the lines between academic inquiry and political advocacy, for at least a portion of this work was destined to buttress ongoing counterinsurgency efforts on the part of the U.S.-supported Thai regime. Even when American anthropologists were not engaged in the active promotion of counterinsurgency strategies, their research projects were often designed and funded with the ultimate objective of providing practical information that could be used to support such efforts. In this respect the role of anthropologists in Thailand in some ways mimicked that of colonial officials who
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collected information about the peoples within their domains for the purpose of more effectively controlling them. Ultimately, the large-scale role of American anthropologists in government-funded activities in Thailand caused a major scandal within the American Anthropological Association during the late 1960s. Some professors and graduate students raised grave concerns about the ethical ramifications of anthropologists’ participation in these projects. The concerns centered on anthropologists’ engagement in activities with potentially serious consequences for the people whom they studied and raised questions about the ethical obligations of academic anthropologists toward their subjects.9 At the same time, some scholars also objected to academic anthropologists accepting government contracts with clauses that curtailed or prohibited the dissemination of some of the findings of their research. The question remains, however, does this history matter today? Did this formative period of American academic engagement with Southeast Asia have any lasting impact on linkages between the two sides? The answer to both of these questions is clearly in the affirmative. Each of these cases reveals a significant component of the American academy’s engagement with Southeast Asia during a crucial part of the twentieth century. Southeast Asia was viewed, during this period, simultaneously as a field of academic inquiry and an area of transformation along particular lines; indeed, the region was viewed by more than a few American academics as a kind of laboratory for social science projects. It was within this context of overlapping political and academic objectives that the region was defined and that important areas of academic inquiry were established. Because the birth of Southeast Asian studies as a field was inextricably linked with World War II, postwar decolonization, and the emergent Cold War, that the U.S. academy would be substantially involved in multiple projects to transform governments, economies, and societies is hardly surprising. Whatever the reasons for these types of engagements with the region, a very clear framework for interaction between the two regions was established, one in which American academics as “experts” came to the region to teach Southeast Asians how to govern themselves using the “correct” kinds of models or how to organize their economies along lines better suited to open markets and “free” trade. It was also American experts who came to the region to study Southeast Asians
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(or, rather, Thais, Vietnamese, Javanese, and so forth) and then to write monographs that created categories and typologies that described the region not only for an American audience but also for many Southeast Asian people themselves.10 Moreover, these approaches continued with little alteration late into the twentieth century. As Ruth McVey commented in 1995, “I am struck by how little has changed in the way in which we study Southeast Asia. For in spite of the questioning of America’s role, and of the internationalization and diversification of scholarship, the mental framework within which most of our research has been carried on has remained largely the same.”11
Reproducing American Models: Research Agendas and the Translation Gap Even as American academies and academics were involved in a direct manner with shaping Southeast Asian governments and societies, they were also shaping the future of Southeast Asian studies as an academic field. Research agendas were being formulated in U.S. academic centers, and these models were being transmitted back to Southeast Asia along numerous paths. Most significantly, a steady stream of Southeast Asian students came to the United States to study, many of them funded in the 1960s and 1970s by American foundations and government programs. Some traveled under the auspices of programs created by U.S. academies such as the MSU project described above, while others came via sponsorship from private foundations, among these the cohort of Indonesian technocrats. A smaller group came to pursue advanced graduate training in topics related to Southeast Asian studies. The result was that a significant number of region-based Southeast Asianists were trained in the United States, at places like Cornell, Yale, and Berkeley. As Charnvit Kasetsiri has noted for the case of Thailand, “Most of the potential Southeast Asianists in Thailand have been trained first in North America and Europe, and later in Australia and Japan…. They (we) are the by-products of the Cold War era centers (schools or programs, or whatever you call them) in these advanced industrial nations which are aimed at area study ‘specialization.’”12 Indeed, it has been pointed out that the field of “Thai studies”—in the sense of “area studies”—emerged in the United States as part of the 1947
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Cornell-Thailand project and was then brought to Thailand by Thai academics who had studied in the United States. In bringing this field back with them, they also brought several paradigms for the study of Thai society, including those labeled the “Cornell-led, looselystructured social system paradigm” and the “Indiana-led modernization paradigm.”13 In other words, graduate training in the United States was transferred to Southeast Asia, playing a prominent role in shaping both research and training within Southeast Asia itself. A 1998 survey of Thai studies in Thailand suggests that although scholars in that country have begun to offer alternative models for understanding Thai society, the older paradigms continue to dominate academic discourse.14 Only very recently, with the creation of programs for Southeast Asian studies in Thailand and Malaysia (joining a more established program in Singapore), is a new generation of Southeast Asianists being trained in the region itself, geographically, if not always intellectually, removed from the influence of the American model. American and European academic paradigms have been sustained not only in the training of Southeast Asian academics but also through the scholarship published in the United States. The influence of Englishlanguage scholarship on Southeast Asian studies in the region is substantial and continues to be reinforced through its translation into local languages. Of course, there are a significant number of Southeast Asian academics who read English, and most American-based Southeast Asianists read at least (usually at most) one Southeast Asian language. Still, access to materials remains distinctly unequal. This disparity is maintained by the fact that academic output by Southeast Asians often serves chiefly as a source for American academics who mine it for “data” while ignoring perhaps the larger academic project that it describes, and that might suggest new research directions.15 Alternatively, these same academics may critique this body of research as part of a historiographical or research survey without seriously considering it within a larger indigenous research agenda. In either case, there continues to exist a strong scholarly inequity in which Southeast Asians too often simply provide the raw material while American academics work with it to shape the direction of their own research. Although some important scholarly materials are published in English in Singapore and the Philippines, and to a lesser extent in other countries in the region, there remains an imbalance in which far more
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scholarship by American and European Southeast Asianists makes its way to the region via local translation efforts than flows in the other direction. This disparity has been reinforced by projects, such as the Thai-based Textbook Foundation, underwritten in part by the Toyota Foundation, which have emphasized the translation of foreign textbooks, both American and Japanese, for use in Thai schools. The Textbook Foundation project resulted in translations of such “classics” as D. G. E. Hall’s A History of South-East Asia (an enormous undertaking involving ten Thai scholars) and Harry Benda and John Bastin’s A History of Southeast Asia.16 Vietnamese scholars have similarly undertaken translations of various English- and French-language texts relating to Southeast Asian and Vietnamese history and in the late 1990s completed an homage to European colonial scholarship by translating into Vietnamese the entire run of the French colonial journal Bulletin des Amis du vieux Hué. It is questionable whether investing considerable amounts of scholarly effort and financial resources in translating quickly dated English-language textbooks or colonial-era journals is a worthwhile endeavor. What is clear is that projects of this type have served and continue to serve to reinforce American and European models of scholarship while doing little to encourage a counter-current of Southeast Asian–language materials flowing to the United States. Consequently, as Thak Chaloemtiarana noted in 2000, “[t]he epistemology of Western knowledge is studied in Southeast Asia, but how much do we in the West understand how the locals conceptualize knowledge? What kind of collaborative or innovative research agendas will allow us to have access to local knowledge? Is there a possibility for U.S. institutions to collaborate with each other through a division of labor to translate vernacular texts?”17 Chaloemtiarana’s comments suggest that even as Southeast Asian scholars are working more frequently with their own research agendas and with local models and frameworks, their writings remain inaccessible to most American scholars of Southeast Asia, limiting the ability of such work to shape scholarship on the other side of the Pacific. Benedict Anderson has pointed out repeatedly that Thai scholars, for instance, are producing important scholarship on aspects of their country’s political and literary traditions, but that these works are being published almost exclusively in Thai.18 Similarly, scholars in Viet
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Nam are publishing substantial amounts of scholarship indispensable to understanding and rethinking Vietnamese history, little of which is being translated into English. Small amounts of Vietnamese scholarship are being translated and published in journals such as Social Sciences (Hanoi) and Vietnamese Studies, and several Vietnamese journals (including Historical Research and the Journal of Han-Nom Studies) do include English-language tables of contents. However, virtually no Vietnamese scholars’ monographs are available in English, even as English-language monographs on Viet Nam are being translated into Vietnamese.19 An awareness of the translation gap—the unidirectionality of which has persisted in reinforcing a long-standing epistemological divide—has led American scholars to call repeatedly for concerted efforts to carry out translation projects in both directions.20 Chaloemtiarana’s idea of translating vernacular texts (echoing a similar call by Benedict Anderson a decade earlier) is an important one, though it is not clear that the academic environment in the United States has changed sufficiently to make this possible. Any such undertaking would be complicated by limited funds, the low status of the translator’s art in the American academy, and considerable difficulty in deciding which texts to translate. For example, should American scholars translate Thai textbooks to mirror the translation projects already completed on the Thai side? Or, if monographs are selected, then which ones and in which fields? Ideally a wide range of such materials could be translated, but realistically very few would be undertaken, making the selection of texts for translation a real challenge. It appears this imbalance will continue to persist into the foreseeable future and can perhaps be overcome only through a greater emphasis on linguistic proficiency, particularly among U.S.-based scholars of Southeast Asia.
Contemporary Realities: Relationships, Exchanges, Collaborations The ongoing connections between the United States and Southeast Asia in terms of research priorities, academic models, and institutional exchanges are sustained not only by publications but also by more direct channels of contact. Here I am speaking of academic connections such as students traveling in both directions for study (though mostly
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from Southeast Asia), visiting faculty also moving in both directions, formal academic relationships between universities in both places, specific collaborative projects, conferences, and of course individual travel by faculty for research. Moreover, all of these kinds of linkages are facilitated and expanded by the emergence of electronic forms of communication—both active, such as e-mail exchanges and online academic communities, and passive, in the form of Web sites. Institutional Linkages In considering these connections, it is striking that despite an American scholarly engagement with the region that dates to the 1940s, few American universities, including those with long-established Southeast Asia programs, have strong bilateral relationships with Southeast Asian centers of higher education. For example, Cornell, long the unmatched American center for Southeast Asian studies, for years made little effort to create close institutional ties with academies in Southeast Asia.21 Commenting on Cornell’s outlook, Takashi Shiraishi observed: “The idea that guided the Cornell Southeast Asia Program was to tower over the field of Southeast Asian studies from the top of the hill, and it did so for many years, while remaining aloof and refusing to have any institutional linkages with peer institutions in Southeast Asia or elsewhere throughout its history.”22 Cornell was not alone in this disregard for establishing such linkages, as there appear to have been few such connections created between U.S.-based programs and institutions in the region.23 Nonetheless, Cornell’s approach appears to have been emblematic of the larger failure among American institutions with Southeast Asia centers to create such connections. As if to make up for this slow start, over the course of the 1980s and 1990s formalized relationships between American and Southeast Asian universities proliferated, and by 2003 there were more than sixty such arrangements in place. This dramatic increase in bilateral university relationships reflected improving political climates in Southeast Asia and easier communications (especially electronic). With a few notable exceptions, however, it appears that the agreements currently in place exist more on paper than in practice and result only irregularly in exchanges of students or faculty. Moreover, very few of these connections have led to the sharing of resources or faculty or to combining strengths in particular areas of academic inquiry. In this
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respect, the situation in the United States is not unlike that found in Australia’s academic ties to Southeast Asia, of which a recent survey concluded that “formal links have led to relatively few genuinely cooperative research projects…. Despite the extensive personal links that all Australian-based Southeast Asian researchers have developed in the region, there have been few cooperative research projects and none on a large scale.”24 In short, it is far easier to establish the groundwork for institutional relationships than it is actually to find ways to encourage students and scholars to make use of these channels. It may be that American universities are overreaching in terms of their relationships with Southeast Asian institutions. Instead of rushing to establish ever more connections with Southeast Asian institutions, these universities might benefit from concentrating their efforts on strengthening a small number of more committed linkages. Links will no doubt continue to be created and exist on paper, but without continued academic interchange that utilizes those links, they will remain largely irrelevant. Institutional and intellectual linkages would be considerably strengthened if more Southeast Asian scholars were able and willing to come to the United States, not merely to conduct research but also to engage in roundtable discussions, participate in seminars, present papers, and teach classes whenever possible. Among others, Thongchai Winichakul has urged the development of more extensive programs for visiting scholars from the region, noting that existing programs have been marginalized and sporadic.25 Few Southeast Asia programs at U.S. universities have funding to support regular visiting-faculty programs, and in most institutions such programs are considered luxuries and are quickly cut during times of budget crises. Thus, even though the need for faculty exchanges is very great, substantial financial and other barriers remain. Although the overall picture is rather bleak in terms of sustained and collaborative academic relationships, there do exist a few programs that appear to be functioning as real mechanisms for regular academic exchange. Ohio University’s Tun Razak Chair, which is held at twoyear intervals by a distinguished Malaysian scholar, is one such example. In existence since 1980, this program (made possible by a healthy endowment, funded in part by the Malaysian government) constitutes an important and ongoing commitment to bringing a distinguished
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Southeast Asian academic to Ohio. This is the only established longterm visiting-professor program bringing academics from Southeast Asia.26 While other universities with Southeast Asia programs do bring visiting professors from Southeast Asian institutions periodically, such visits represent not sustained and ongoing exchanges, but opportunistic responses to available funding or specific academic circumstances. The absence of long-term funding, such as the endowment supporting Ohio University’s Tun Razak Chair, is a major obstacle to more regular visits from Southeast Asian academics. An increase in scholarly exchanges would potentially contribute toward shifting the dynamic between scholars of Southeast Asian studies in both regions to one in which each side contributes to the process of research and learning. Since the early 1990s, American scholars have evinced a guarded optimism concerning the growing strength of scholarship in the region and its influence on the field.27 Despite this, there remains a strong sense that U.S.-based scholars continue to be largely unaware of the important contributions being made by Southeast Asian researchers and that the field remains tilted toward American scholarly models.28 At a 1999 Social Science Research Council conference on the state of Southeast Asian studies, Vicente Rafael remarked that although “[t]here has been much talk about ‘internationalizing’ area studies by involving intellectuals based in Southeast Asia in developing research agendas and projects…. I do not know if such hopes can be realized in the near future given the enormous inequality of resources, differences in intellectual cultures and the already marginalized status of Southeast Asian Studies in the U.S.”29 Indeed, as Ariel Heryanto notes elsewhere in this volume (chap. 2), Southeast Asian academics studying their own region continue to be expected to conform to standards and methodologies largely set by American and European scholarship. Collaboration In 1984, K. S. Sandhu, then the director of Singapore’s Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, observed that the era of collaborative work in Southeast Asian studies had arrived.30 This comment has been echoed repeatedly since, and yet twenty years after Sandhu’s remarks, collaboration remains extremely limited. As one U.S.-based Southeast Asianist bluntly noted, “There has been so much talk of collaboration
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between U.S.-based scholars and those from Southeast Asia, but not much has happened.”31 In short, scholars are all too conscious of the need for increasing collaborative efforts, even as implementing such undertakings remains extremely difficult. Obstacles to collaboration are similar to those that hinder increased numbers of faculty exchanges and include lack of financial resources, incommensurate academic structures, and a general absence of infrastructure to support joint projects. Perhaps equally significant is an academic culture, particularly in the humanities but perhaps also in the social sciences, in which collaboration is not a common model, in part because most American universities do not reward collaborative work on par with individual undertakings. In other words, collaboration is a type of enterprise that requires considerable effort to be developed from the ground up and a degree of imagination to conceptualize useful collaborative projects.32 A particular barrier to collaboration lies in the ways in which interactions between American and Southeast Asian academics are conceptualized. The most common conceptual model still found in the United States requires that Southeast Asian academics be trained in Western/American scholarly apparatuses and emphasizes priorities typically found in Western academic research. This continues a pattern described by John Smail many years ago, one that posited the existence of a single thought-world, in which training for scholars followed an accepted universal model.33 An alternative model looks to Southeast Asian scholars to define research agendas and priorities for the field and to adopt or create theoretical frameworks. Several recent programs for Southeast Asian scholars and activists demonstrate the divergences between these two models. In the spring of 2001, the Social Science Research Council announced a program to train forty Vietnamese scholars in “theories and methods in economics, sociology, anthropology, and English.” While the program stressed that its teachers should have “an awareness of social theory and research methods applicable for developing countries,” the overall agenda continued to reflect a model in which Southeast Asians were being “trained” by Americans with EuroAmerican models. This training model sustains the scholarly divide, privileging the knowledge, agendas, and approaches developed in the United States and Europe rather than allowing Southeast Asians to articulate their own intellectual directions. Similarly, an ongoing program
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at Northern Illinois University is engaged in “training” a group of Filipino social activists in conflict resolution skills and knowledge of American institutions to encourage interethnic dialogue between Muslim and Christian activists.34 This project, funded by the U.S. Department of State, again suggests that it is American institutions, techniques, and approaches that offer answers to engaged Southeast Asians. Although the motives of neither project are sinister, each inevitably reinforces the long-standing dominance of American institutional and intellectual models. There do exist, however, other programs that promote scholarship outside the traditional Western academic “training” model, encouraging Southeast Asians to set their own research agendas or to collaborate as equals with American academics. One such undertaking is the recently established Ford Foundation International Fellowships Program, which offers fellowships for up to three years of graduate-level study abroad to promote knowledge of development issues or interest in cultural, medical, or social issues. The program, which particularly targets individuals and communities with limited access to higher education, is currently open to residents of the Philippines, Thailand, Viet Nam, and Indonesia (among Southeast Asian nations). Fellows in this program can travel not only to the United States but to any country of their choosing, thus enabling, for example, Indonesian scholars to study in Thailand or India. This open model and the new program’s promotion of less traditional fields of study create possibilities that more conventional programs do not have. Though rare, such an approach to scholarship must become the more common model if we want to avoid perpetuating an interaction still tinged with unilinear power dynamics.35 Another project that encourages research defined by Southeast Asian scholars rather than by American institutional models is the William Joiner Center’s Rockefeller Center Fellowships in the Humanities. Since 2000, this program has awarded several annual fellowships that bring Vietnamese academics, writers, and artists to the United States to explore a range of humanistic research projects. Although this fellowship program is not restricted to applicants from Viet Nam, many of the fellows have been Vietnamese, either citizens of Viet Nam or part of the Vietnamese diasporic community. The Rockefeller Center Fellowships program is among the more important
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ongoing efforts to encourage academic exchange, one that creates an academic space for Vietnamese scholars and artists to engage in highly original research projects. Since the program’s inception it has hosted notable Vietnamese intellectuals ranging from novelist and editor Nguyen Mong Giac to the acclaimed filmmaker Dang Nhat Minh. Finally, several other academic ventures have embodied a genuinely collaborative model that sees interactions between American and Southeast Asian researchers as necessarily cooperative and bilateral. The first was a project based at the University of Michigan that linked scholars in its Southeast Asia program with Indonesian scholars at the Realino Study Institute in Yogyakarta in a three-year combined effort to look at issues of historical memory. Another, based at the University of Wisconsin, is a collaborative effort between Wisconsin’s Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines to carry out the Philippine Environmental Photography Project, which is collecting and digitizing historical and contemporary photographs of particular sites in the Philippines. In each of these projects scholars from the collaborating universities work together to set joint research agendas and to determine the intellectual directions to be followed. These kinds of projects are very important for creating sustained collaborations between scholars on both sides of the Pacific and for becoming part of the U.S. institutional memory of Southeast Asian studies, hopefully paving the way for future collaborations. Perhaps too, collaborative projects between American and Southeast Asian scholars could learn from similar undertakings within Southeast Asia itself, such as those being encouraged by the Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP). This program, funded in part by the Toyota Foundation, was established in 1994 to encourage study of Southeast Asia by Southeast Asians. As its name suggests, SEASREP promotes intraregional exchanges to encourage scholars to gain familiarity with other countries and languages in the region. The program’s Regional Collaboration Grant, for instance, promotes comparative and collaborative research among Southeast Asian academics. If it can be sustained financially and academically, SEASREP has the potential to accelerate substantially the growth and strength of Southeast Asian studies in the region by creating new and lasting scholarly networks.
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Collaborations and Exchanges outside the Humanities and Social Sciences Although there are still only limited exchanges and collaborative projects between American and Southeast Asian universities in the humanities and social sciences, projects in professional schools, particularly business schools, are far more robust. A number of U.S. business schools have institutionalized collaborative or joint-degree programs with institutions in the region. Such programs involve exchanges of faculty and students, sometimes permitting Southeast Asian students to begin their degrees in their home countries and then complete them in the United States.36 Others include electronic collaborations between students, such as one linking Ohio University with Bangkok University in “virtual teamwork” programs. Other American business schools have also developed sustained faculty and student exchanges with various Southeast Asian institutions. The University of Michigan Business School has established a program that links Michigan and the National University of Singapore.37 At the University of Hawaii increased levels of cooperation between its Center for Southeast Asian Studies and the Business School have led to faculty exchanges involving both business school and nonbusiness faculty.38 The emergence of these programs (and others in the physical sciences) suggests a growing shift toward academic exchanges outside the social sciences and humanities; this reflects Department of Education priorities for links between social science departments and the professional schools. There is almost certainly a financial dimension to this trend as well, with business schools and hard-science programs each in better positions to make and fund such arrangements than social science or humanities divisions. It may also be that standardized curricula developed for courses of study involving business or scientific training lend themselves more readily to exchanges of instructors and students, the “universal” language of science helping to ensure a certain level of mutual intelligibility. Whatever the reason, professional school and scientific exchange programs are expanding at a time when more traditional humanities and social science faculty exchanges either do not exist or take place only very irregularly. Although exchange and collaborative education programs were traditionally found at universities with existing academic connections to Southeast Asia, collaborations are now being developed by universities without previous links to the
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region. This is perhaps not surprising, for many Southeast Asian universities are eager to have the cachet of a link (however tenuous) with an American university. While such links may also amount to little more than good advertising on both ends, some are more substantial, including several programs that focus on development issues and others that promote artistic exchanges.39 Activist Linkages While there are many obvious linkages between the United States and Southeast Asia in the academic sphere, there are also connections between activists who combine forces to address a variety of issues. The tradition of American activist involvement in the region has its roots in the bitter divisions over the American wars in Indochina. Southeast Asia entered into American consciousness during that period, provoking awareness of and involvement with the region in ways that had previously been nonexistent. Academics were strongly involved in this period, and a generation of younger scholars became politically connected with the fate of the region. This involvement played itself out in American academic discourse, as well as in a variety of journals and newsletters, most of them ephemeral but a few, such as the Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars (in 2001 renamed Critical Asian Studies), continuing to serve as important fora for critical discussion. During the Viet Nam era many U.S. scholars organized “teach-ins” and served as resident experts on the region and its contemporary political and military struggles. This was an important, but ultimately transitory, way of broadening the classroom experience as well as focusing more particularly on concrete realities of Southeast Asian lives rather than academic abstractions. While teach-ins regarding Southeast Asia disappeared as the Indochina Wars wound down, the tradition of political involvement in the region continued, even if the battlegrounds have shifted. Today the topics are more likely to involve broader and frequently transnational issues such as political oppression, human rights, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, environmental degradation, and economic development. The most prominent areas of activist involvement in Southeast Asia during the past decade have included protests against the repressive Burmese military regime, efforts to bring democracy to Cambodia and to bring members of the Khmer Rouge to justice, and attempts to bring about
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political independence for East Timor. At a transregional level activists have taken up efforts to halt environmental degradation, from overlogging in Thailand, Cambodia, and Borneo, to land clearing by burning, to the construction of ecologically dangerous dams. These issues are relevant not only for the people involved, both American and Southeast Asian, but also because it is these issues and countries— Burma, East Timor, Cambodia—that most often (relatively speaking) show up in the American media. Consequently, to the extent that the American public has any awareness of Southeast Asia, it stems largely from issues taken up by activist groups.40 There are also possibilities for attempting to use the concerns of political and environmental activists in the United States to bring them into the larger field of Southeast Asian studies, though as Donald Emmerson has suggested, such strategies are liable to prove unsuccessful.41 There is a growing interest among American scholars in looking more closely at activist groups and movements in Southeast Asia and studying the emergence of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in a variety of realms of activity.42 In addition, some U.S. academics have urged greater contacts with Southeast Asians outside the academic realm, including activists from the region, to expand American awareness of different perspectives on the region from within the region itself.43 Although some Southeast Asian activists have connected themselves to global activist networks through such organizations as Amnesty International and the World Wildlife Fund, others have organized local activist networks. The emergence of such local networks has enabled American activists, both scholars and nonacademics, to connect with indigenous activist groups rather than attempting to impose American or European models on the region. Among programs seeking to learn from Asian activists as experts in their own right is the Rockefeller-funded Project for Critical Asian Studies at the University of Washington. This program has brought Asian scholars and public intellectuals to the University of Washington campus to provide their distinctive perspectives on issues relevant to them. It also tries to encourage the pursuit of different types of critical scholarship, of a kind not usually found in the mainstream work of area studies.44 From 2001 to 2006 the Project for Critical Asian Studies funded fellowships and brought two scholars (scholarintellectuals or scholar-activists) per year as fellows involved in
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research and dialogue around themes of war, violence, and injustice in twentieth-century Asia. The Project for Critical Asian Studies is part of a reconceptualization of activists and other nonacademics from Southeast Asia as “experts” rather than mere absorbers of “superior” Western knowledge. The transition to this new way of understanding activists remains incomplete, however, as Southeast Asian activists continue periodically to be “trained” by “experts” in the United States.45 Tensions clearly remain, but as Southeast Asian advocacy groups gain in strength (although primarily in countries with less politically repressive climates), it is becoming easier for them to promote change in a manner that reflects local priorities. This integration of activism and academics is an increasingly important one, particularly as activists in the region become more prominent in setting regional agendas. Moreover, the model of activist collaboration might be one that could also be applied in the academic arena, as American scholars recognize Southeast Asian scholars and their own particular contributions to study of the region and its parts.
Changing Access to Southeast Asia: Politics and Technologies While much of this chapter has dealt with linkages in an intellectual sense, I turn now to some consideration of their material aspects. There have been dramatic changes in the possibilities for increased interchange between the United States and Southeast Asia over the course of the 1990s and the early years of the twenty-first century. These possibilities have emerged because of changing patterns of politics and technologies. In particular, the technological changes that have occurred over the past decade have had significant repercussions for expanding linkages between the two academic communities. Although the Internet and related communications breakthroughs are far from achieving their potential, they are already beginning to have an impact on Southeast Asian studies. The long-term consequences of these changes remain uncertain, though the technologies appear to constitute a doubleedged sword, with the potential either to help level the playing field between academics in both places or merely to expand the existing political and economic gap.
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Political Changes Linkages with Southeast Asia are dependent, of course, on access to the countries of the region. This access has been substantially eased by the changing political climate in the region, with many of the visa and research restrictions of the 1980s and early 1990s having been eased or eliminated. Most notably, Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia have all emerged from political isolation, becoming comparatively easy to visit both for short-term tourists and for long-term researchers from the United States.46 Indeed, the growing number of American students going to the region for study and extended research is a reflection of these changes. Although changing political climates have made Viet Nam, Laos, and Cambodia more accessible, entry to parts of the region has not been without its setbacks. The situation in Burma (Myanmar) continues to remain difficult for all but short-term tourists, with research visas still quite difficult to secure, and only a trickle of students going for study programs.47 Recent changes in Indonesia have also altered somewhat the climate for visitors, including researchers. The stability of the New Order regime in Indonesia formerly made research in that country both viable and relatively safe. The end of the Suharto regime in 1998 has brought with it greater political and economic volatility, which has at times made travel there uncertain. Despite this, access to Indonesia remains largely unimpeded. Overall, the general trend for the region in terms of accessibility is considerably more positive than it was a decade ago, despite the fact that academic research in most Southeast Asian countries remains regulated, with visas for individual researchers occasionally denied for political reasons. Post–September 11 Visa Issues Even as some barriers to exchanges between Southeast Asia and the United States have been lifted—improving political climates in Southeast Asia, improving economic circumstances (at least in some urban areas)— new ones have emerged. Most prominently, the American government’s heightened anxiety over terrorism and national security has thrown up numerous impediments to foreign scholars coming to the United States. Consequently, arranging visits for Southeast Asian academic, political, or cultural scholars is frequently a lengthy and difficult process, making exchanges more problematic. Uncertainty has become a defining characteristic of the visa process, such that planning events, whether
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academic conferences or cultural performances, has become considerably more difficult. There appears to be a growing awareness of this problem among U.S. government officials, and as a result consular officials in Southeast Asia are starting to expedite clearances for student visas.48 The damage has already been done, however, and the perception that access to the United States has become more difficult is probably reducing interest in studying here.49 The problem has been compounded by concerns over poor treatment of Muslims in the United States, whether longor short-term residents. Southeast Asian visitors have specifically cited humiliations at the hands of U.S. immigration officials as a strong disincentive for coming to the United States in the current political climate. Thus, it is as much perceptions of their reception in the United States as the practical logistics of obtaining visas that may be hampering academic visits from Southeast Asia to the United States. Whatever the reasons, enrollments by Indonesian students in U.S. institutions, for instance, have declined nearly 25 percent since 2001, including a 15 percent decline from 2002–2003 to the 2003–2004 academic year.50 Technological Linkages While there remain significant philosophical barriers to academic interchange between the United States and Southeast Asia, remarkable technological changes over the past decade or so have profoundly altered the scholarly landscape and increased the potential for greater linkages. The dramatic expansion in the use of e-mail as a primary means of academic communication means that exchanges of information that often took weeks or even months can now occur, at least theoretically, in a matter of minutes or hours. Even the most isolated and financially constrained Southeast Asian states—including Burma, Laos, and Cambodia—have e-mail access. In some countries access, however, remains circumscribed by government control. In Burma stringent government restrictions have limited Internet access to less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the population by 2005.51 Although most individuals in Southeast Asia do not yet have personal computers or private Internet accounts, many academics have access through their academic institutions or when necessary through local Internet cafés, which have burgeoned in Viet Nam and other parts of Southeast Asia
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in recent years. With rates at such sites as low as fifty cents per hour (in Viet Nam and Indonesia in 2004), access is within reach of an increasing number of urban residents.52 Besides ongoing political and financial constraints that limit widespread e-mail access, there are also linguistic and technological barriers that prevent e-mail from becoming a communications panacea. Because of the complexities involved in transmitted messages in nonromanized alphabets such as Burmese, Thai, Khmer, Lao, and even diacritic Vietnamese to some extent, e-mail contacts are frequently limited to Southeast Asians with some knowledge of written English. Changing technologies may eventually make transmission of text in nonromanized languages easier and include electronic translation of messages, though the standardization of computer formats for nonroman scripts remains a major obstacle.53 Despite these obstacles and the very limited private access to e-mail and the Internet in much of the region, access to these electronic forms of communication is increasing rapidly. The availability and expansion of e-mail capability has already revolutionized scholarly communication and has the potential for eroding the persistent divides between American and Southeast Asian scholars. Personal experience suggests, too, that e-mail contacts have already noticeably improved the ability of American academics to make arrangements for research trips, particularly for countries such as Viet Nam, where until recently months of letters and faxes were usually the norm in securing research permissions and establishing necessary institutional affiliations. Such arrangements can now be made in a matter of days. The reverse is probably not yet true, since there are other obstacles to obtaining U.S. visas (see above). Still, e-mail continues to facilitate scholarly exchanges. While e-mail can serve to ease the logistics of exchange and research programs, it can also facilitate the transmission and exchange of ideas. This occurs most commonly through one-on-one contacts between scholars, but electronic media have also enabled the emergence of virtual scholarly communities. Despite scholarly laments that there are still no good avenues for regionwide virtual discussions, the past decade has seen the emergence of several listservs dedicated to Southeast Asia, including H-SEASIA, SEANET-L, and SEASIA-L. Such groups are useful for connecting, on a more regular basis, scholars in
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all parts of the world, who may meet infrequently in person. Both academic listservs and more informal newsgroups allow communities with common interests, in this case Southeast Asia (or its constituent parts), to come together in a virtual format. Such electronic media allow the exchange of ideas and the rapid spread of information about scholarly publications and gatherings and are also a useful mechanism by which to stimulate real contacts between individual scholars. To give just one example, the Vietnam Studies Group of the U.S.based Association for Asian Studies has an active group of scholars involved both in debating theoretical constructs and in offering opinions or data relating to queries posted by interested scholars. Members of the group also constitute valuable reference sources on issues from etymological debates to contact information for Vietnamese researchers. While most participants are Americans, the group also includes scholars and students from Viet Nam, other countries in Southeast Asia, and parts of Europe. Similar online groups exist for other Southeast Asian countries as well, including Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines.54 Most such virtual communities, however, operate far short of their full potential, and the larger virtual communities that might have a significant impact on collaboration or other forms of extended scholarly dialogue have not arisen.55 Participation is often limited to a few motivated individuals, and these are typically Western academics, whether writing from Australia, the United States, or Scandinavia. There is still too little participation in such groups by Southeast Asians, for reasons ranging from the logistics and finances that constrain e-mail access to a limited integration into a scholarly world still dominated by the Euro-American academy. Nonetheless, such fora have great potential for creating avenues for regular and sustained dialogue and for involving scholars from Southeast Asia as well as the United States. The possibilities are far from exhausted, and more exploration may yet yield further and substantial benefits. As the role played by individual e-mail exchanges and e-mail discussion groups in strengthening ties between the United States and Southeast Asia has grown, so too has the availability of resources about the region to be found on the Internet. Consequently, it is possible to receive regular and immediate news reports from all parts of the region. Viet Nam, the Philippines, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia,
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Singapore, Brunei, and Malaysia all have online versions of daily newspapers, many available in English-language editions. While some of these are from state-controlled media, others represent independent news organizations. For those countries where the media remain relatively curtailed, there has been a proliferation of parallel newsletters and other sources of information providing alternative viewpoints and filling in missing information. Burma is a good example, where Internet newsletters produced by a variety of activist groups provide a useful counterpoint to the official government newspaper and Web site pronouncements.56 In addition to media outlet Web sites, a growing number of academic centers in Southeast Asia have Web sites, which further contributes to the potential for increasing academic contacts. An informal search of the Internet in late 2003 turned up more than four hundred university or other academic center Web sites for Southeast Asian institutions representing most parts of the region and including every country.57 As with e-mail there remains a technological barrier linked to properly displaying the fonts of nonroman alphabets, meaning that some of these sites are not viewable without proper font software. Increasing numbers, however, are offering bilingual sites, in which visitors can choose between the local language and English. This is true of sites both in relatively wealthy countries, such as Thailand, and in relatively poor ones, like Viet Nam.58 Academic Web sites of this type hold enormous potential for academic interchange, for they can be used to create virtual connections between universities in the United States and Southeast Asia. Creating links between university or departmental sites, for example, or perhaps going so far as to extend access to computer resources from one site to the other might be a way to enhance cooperation as well as simply to encourage greater dialogue between and awareness of existing institutional linkages. Although there are major financial obstacles to large-scale sharing of electronic resources, this model is one that might well serve to enhance interactions and possibly facilitate academic collaborations.
Student Links to the Region: Southeast Asians and Others As institutional connections remain shaky, and collaboration remains limited, the most consistent form of interchange between the two
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regions is maintained by students. For the most part this means students from Southeast Asia coming to the United States for study. At one time a large percentage of Southeast Asian students coming to the United States were graduate students, who during the 1960s and early 1970s relied on U.S. government or foundation funding to pay for advanced study. There was a major shift, however, during the 1990s, as increasing numbers of undergraduate students came to the United States, and by the beginning of the twenty-first century this group substantially outnumbered graduate students.59 There were nearly 42,000 students from Southeast Asia studying in U.S. universities and colleges in the 2001–2002 academic year, representing more than 8 percent of all overseas students in the United States.60 The number has, however, been steadily declining since the Asian financial crisis of the late 1990s and has further declined since 2001, at least partially due to restrictions (or perceptions thereof) on obtaining student visas for the United States. Despite the declining numbers, this flow of Southeast Asian students into the United States continues to serve as a prominent bridge between the two regions, even if few of the students will become Southeast Asianists either in the United States or in their home countries. Their presence in the United States at least has the indirect effect of exposing U.S. campuses to Southeast Asia in some concrete form. Conversely, there are modest, if growing, numbers of American undergraduates who are now going for study to Southeast Asia, usually for short-term courses of an academic year or less.61 American college students going to Southeast Asia for study currently have a variety of choices for study-abroad programs, which operate in most countries of Southeast Asia. Some are administered directly by various U.S. universities (such as those run by the University of California), others are organized along the lines of consortia, and yet others are run by nonprofit organizations such as the Center for International Educational Exchange, which is itself supported by a consortium of 189 (mostly American) universities. Of the various programs that send students to Southeast Asia, traditionally the strongest ones have been those affiliated with universities in Thailand, the Philippines, and Indonesia. Recent political tensions in Indonesia, however, have curtailed program offerings, even as the number of American students studying there has largely remained steady. At the same time, Viet Nam has emerged as
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a popular new destination as access to Indochina became noticeably easier over the course of the 1990s. Programs also exist in Malaysia and Singapore, and there have been sporadic offerings for Cambodia. Summer language programs in the region, particularly for more advanced students, also continue to attract good enrollments. There are several consortium-type programs focused on specific languages such as Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Khmer, and Indonesian that offer intensive-study programs of varying lengths in the relevant countries. Overall, studyabroad opportunities in the region appear adequate for student demand and have indeed grown in recent years (particularly in Viet Nam) as student interest has increased. Interest in study abroad in Southeast Asia has been spurred to some degree by an increase in the number of college-bound students of Southeast Asian heritage—particularly on the West Coast. As a consequence of immigration and the birth of second, third, and fourth generations of people of Southeast Asian heritage, the Southeast Asian population in the United States has grown rapidly. With the changing political climate in much of mainland Southeast Asia during the 1990s, more Southeast Asian Americans—many of them college age—are traveling back (or for the first time) to the region, often reestablishing family and other personal connections. This travel is helping to establish a new type of linkage to the region that will itself almost certainly contribute to shaping U.S. interactions with Southeast Asia. Although many of these students travel privately to visit relatives, some are beginning to take advantage of more formal academic opportunities for foreign study. This contributes to a growing interest in studying in Southeast Asia, in the same way that these students helped to spur Southeast Asian language and other course offerings during the 1990s. It is most likely these heritage, as well as nonheritage, students going from the United States to Southeast Asia who will be integral to sustaining the future of Southeast Asian studies in the United States. Indeed, their participation in these study-abroad programs in Thailand, Viet Nam, Singapore, the Philippines, and Indonesia is crucial to the maintenance of these programs themselves, some of which operate at the edge of survival because of relatively modest enrollments. Although there are other avenues for American students to gain exposure to Southeast Asia—short-term teaching and other volunteer positions and long-term commitments such as the Peace Corps—for most it is
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study-abroad programs that provide this exposure and that help set the foundations for further academic interest in the region. Thus, maintaining and ensuring the survival of a range of study-abroad programs, in as many Southeast Asian countries as possible, is absolutely critical to the long-term prospects of Southeast Asian studies.
Conclusion: Looking to the Future What then of the future? As I have suggested, there remain significant obstacles to sustaining, much less expanding, academic ties between scholars and institutions in the United States and Southeast Asia. More difficult still is finding ways to move toward the creation of more equitable academic relationships between scholars on both sides of the Pacific. Despite the growing strength of Southeast Asian studies in the region itself, which is helping to erode the influence of the American academic agenda, the historical development of Southeast Asian studies, including its origins in the Cold War, continues to shape the field. American scholarship is still more successful in reaching Southeast Asian scholars than is scholarship from the region in reaching the U.S. academy. Consequently, significant questions remain. Can reciprocal academic relationships be established when this pattern of the scrutinizer and the scrutinized remains? Can academic exchange and cooperation agreements between universities in the United States and Southeast Asia actually produce sustained student and faculty exchanges? Just as important, what will be the consequences of the technological revolution of the past decade? Will it help to level the playing field— bringing Southeast Asian scholars into a fruitful collaboration with counterparts in the United States—or will it merely accelerate the longestablished advantages of U.S. scholars? There remain, to be sure, considerable structural and financial barriers in the way of a more balanced relationship between Southeast Asianists in Southeast Asia and in the United States, but new technologies have created potentials for collaboration that never before existed. They have, moreover, moved the field further toward a transnational model in which one’s place of origin or one’s location of scholarly productivity becomes less significant. Despite long-standing patterns of imbalance between the two sides, there is reason for guarded optimism about a shift toward fruitful and reciprocal academic exchanges and collaborations.
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Notes 1
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Anthony Reid and Maria Serena I. Diokno, “Completing the Circle: Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives, ed. Anthony Reid, Program for Southeast Asian Studies Monograph Series (Tempe, AZ: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, 2003), 97–100. It is worth noting, for instance, that two of the first three directors of the influential Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore were American academics, Harry Benda and Josef Silverstein. Although the ISEAS was a local product, the hiring of foreign (American and Australian) academics as its early directors was intended to legitimate and lend prestige to the new undertaking. Ibid.; Taufik Abdullah and Yekti Maunati, eds., Toward the Promotion of Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia (Jakarta: Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Indonesian Institute of Sciences, 1994); Paul Kratoska, Remco Raben, and Henk Schulte Nordholt, eds., Locating Southeast Asia: Geographies of Knowledge and Politics of Space (Athens: Ohio University Press; Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2005); Mohammed Halib and Tim Huxley, eds., An Introduction to Southeast Asian Studies (London and New York: Taurus Academic Studies, 1996). See, e.g., Takashi Shiraishi, “New Initiatives from Japan,” in Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Reid, 141–153. Some of MSU’s activities are detailed in its “Seventh Report of the Michigan State University Advisory Group in Public Administration to the Government of Vietnam” (Saigon: Michigan State University, 1958). Other Indonesians were trained at MIT and a few other U.S. institutions. Goenawan Mohamad et al., Celebrating Indonesia: Fifty Years with the Ford Foundation, 1953–2003 (New York: Ford Foundation, 2003), 58. Editors of Ramparts, Two, Three … Many Vietnams: A Radical Reader on the Wars in Southeast Asia and the Conflicts at Home (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1971), 116. Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand, CSEAS Monographs, no. 7 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992), 1–10; see also Alfred W. McCoy, “Subcontracting Counterinsurgency: Academics in Thailand, 1954–1970,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 3, no. 2 (1971): 56–70. Clifford Geertz’s The Religion of Java (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1960), with its classification of Javanese Muslims as abangan, santri, and priyayi, is a classic example of this dynamic. Ruth McVey, “Change and Continuity in Southeast Asian Studies,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26, no. 1 (1995): 1. Charnvit Kasetsiri, “Overview of Research and Studies on Southeast Asia in Thailand: ‘Where Do We Come From? Who Are We? Where Are We Going?’” Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 34. As Charnvit also observes, however, the result of this was that many Thai Southeast Asianists were trained abroad, creating a dilemma for Thailand-based Southeast Asian studies, which has become dependent on outsiders for this knowledge.
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George Dutton Chaiwat Satha-Anand, “Problematizing the Identity of the Thai Academic Landscape,” Thammasat Review 3, no. 1 (1998): 58. Ibid. See, e.g., McVey, “Change and Continuity,” 1. Kasetsiri, “Overview of Research,” 48–49. It is interesting to note that Hall’s magnum opus was translated into Vietnamese and published already in 1968. Thak Chaloemtiarana, in Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After, ed. Itty Abraham (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2000), 31. Benedict Anderson, “Politics and Their Study in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Options for the Future, ed. Ronald A. Morse (Lanham, MD: University Press of America; Washington, DC: Asia Program, Wilson Center, 1984), 45–48; Benedict Anderson, “The Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States, 1950–1990,” in Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America, ed. Charles Hirschman, Charles F. Keyes, and Karl Hutterer (Ann Arbor, MI: Association of Asian Studies, 1992), 36–37. For instance, Li Tana’s Nguyen Cochinchina: Southern Vietnam in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (Ithaca, NY: South East Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998) was translated into Vietnamese and published in Viet Nam only one year after it first appeared in the United States. Anderson, “Changing Ecology of Southeast Asian Studies,” 37. Cornell did establish a field office in Bangkok in 1952, though this was an outpost of Ithaca rather than a connection to Thai institutions. Shiraishi, “New Initiatives from Japan,” 151. One notable exception was a cooperative relationship established in the 1950s between the University of Wisconsin and Gadjah Mada University in Indonesia. John Ingleson, “Southeast Asian Studies,” in Knowing Ourselves and Others: The Humanities in Australia into the 21st Century (n.p.: Australian Academy of the Humanities, 1998), available online at http://www.humanities.org.au/review/ b26_ingleson.html#Heading6 (accessed 28 December 2004). Abraham, Weighing the Balance, 55. Interestingly, the Malaysian government has also helped establish an endowed chair, the European Chair of Malay Studies at the University of Leiden, suggesting that a combination of financial resources and interest in promoting a national culture in an international context sets Malaysia apart from other countries in the region. Charles F. Keyes, “A Conference at Wingspread and Rethinking Southeast Asian Studies,” in Southeast Asian Studies in the Balance, ed. Hirschman et al., 24; Abraham, Weighing the Balance, 27–28. Abraham, Weighing the Balance, 31. Ibid., 49. K. S. Sandhu, “Comment,” in Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Morse, 60. Abraham, Weighing the Balance, 31. See, for instance, Nancy Peluso’s suggestions on such partnerships, involving collaborative research groups, student research, and teaching, in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 32.
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John Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Southeast Asia,” in Autonomous Histories, Particular Truths: Essays in Honor of John R. W. Smail, ed. Laurie J. Sears, CSEAS Monograph, no. 11 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 40. Northern Illinois University, “ACCESS Philippines Project,” Mandala: Newsletter of the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, Northern Illinois University 23 (Fall 2004): 7, 10. For a closer examination of some existing collaborative projects between U.S. and Southeast Asian scholars, see Celia Lowe’s chapter (chap. 3) in this volume. For example, more than 30 percent of Ohio University’s College of Business faculty have taught in Malaysia over the past quarter century. Washington State University (WSU) has a cooperative MBA program with Viet Nam’s National Economic University (NEU) in Hanoi. This program arranges for WSU faculty to travel to NEU to teach and allows Vietnamese students who have begun MBA programs at their home university to complete their training at WSU. See John McAuliff, ed., “Washington State U., N.E.U. in Hanoi Cooperate for MBA Program,” Interchange: Quarterly Newsletter for and about International Cooperation with Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Cuba 10, nos. 1–2 (September 2000). In fact, the University of Michigan Business School link with the National University of Singapore appears to be virtually the only ongoing exchange program the university has with Southeast Asia. See University of Michigan, 1999 Application for U.S. Department of Education Title VI Funding, 2000–2003 Grant Cycle, 23. (Hereafter cited using the applicant university name and “NRC Application.”) University of Hawaii at Manoa, 1999 NRC Application, 2–3. Hawaii also runs an executive MBA program in Hanoi in cooperation with the Hanoi School of Business. One art-based program is the Sister School Arts Program, a product of the Indochina Arts Partnership, which since its 1988 founding has promoted cultural and artistic exchanges with Viet Nam. Development programs include Kalamazoo College’s Sustainable Development Studies Program, which links it with Chiang Mai University’s Economics Faculty. See, e.g., the comments of Linda Lim in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 27–28. Emmerson speaks of the East Timor case, which was, through the East Timor Action Network, given a relatively high profile among student activists. Donald K. Emmerson, “Situating Southeast Asian Studies: Realm, Guild, and Home,” in Southeast Asian Studies, ed. Reid, 41–42. See, for example, the comments of Nancy Peluso and Aihwa Ong in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 48–49, 58–59. Anna Tsing in ibid., 32. The Project for Critical Asian Studies was first conceptualized in the mid-1990s by Ann Anagnost and Tani Barlow. Tani Barlow, interview by Brian Hammer, University of Washington, 14 June 2000. The second round of the grant focused on “Trauma, History, ‘Asia’” and was conceptualized by Tani Barlow and Madeleine Yue Dong.
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George Dutton Northern Illinois University, “ACCESS Philippines Project,” 7, 10. Visas to Viet Nam, which for U.S. researchers once involved a several-month wait and processing through Vietnamese embassies in Ottawa or Bangkok, are now available for even casual tourists in several days directly from the Vietnamese Embassy in Washington, DC. Renewable tourist visas for Cambodia and Laos are routinely issued at their respective international airports. The most recent available figures (2002–2003 academic year) show only one American student going to Burma through a formal study-abroad program. Institute of International Education (IIE), Open Doors 2004, available online at http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/file_depot/0-10000000/0-10000/3390/folder/ 37269/SA+-+All+Destinations.htm (accessed 24 December 2004). Two graduate students received Blakemore grants for language study in Burma in 2003–2004. Congressional testimony of Allan Goodman (president of the IIE), 6 October 2004, available online at http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=50587 (accessed 23 November 2004). Sam Dillon, “Foreign Enrollment Declines at Universities, Surveys Say,” New York Times, 10 November 2004. IIE, Open Doors 2004, available online at http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/ ?p=49933 and http://opendoors.iienetwork.org/?p=31670 (accessed 23 November 2004). “Internet Usage and Population in Asia,” 31 December 2005, available online at http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats3.htm (accessed 11 March 2006). Although access to computers and connections has increased markedly, connections are still limited by the antiquated Vietnamese telephone service. Thus, using e-mail or the World Wide Web can be an excruciatingly slow process and connections are frequently lost. Standardization of computer representations of scripts through Unicode will help considerably, though the availability of Unicode-enabled software is still somewhat limited. For a representative list of available Southeast Asia–related listservs and other e-mail groups, see South East Asia Electronic Mailing Lists, Asian Studies WWW Virtual Library, ed. T. Matthew Ciolek, available online at http://coombs.anu.edu.au/ WWWVLPages/AsianPages/A-SEast-Lists.html. SEASIA-L, for instance, has more than 1,700 subscribers (as of November 2004) but only a small trickle of posts at most times, reflecting the lack of dynamism common to such fora. See, e.g., BurmaNet News, available online at http://www.burmanet.org. Sites for Burmese and East Timorese universities were, however, hosted outside those countries, in Thailand and Australia, respectively. See, e.g., the following sites maintained by a Thai and a Vietnamese university, respectively: Chulalongkorn University (http://www.chula.ac.th/) and Dai hoc bach khoa Ha Noi (Hanoi University of Technology) (http://www.hut.edu.vn/). In 2004, 56 percent of Southeast Asian students in the United States were undergraduates. With the exception of Thailand, every country in Southeast Asia sends predominantly undergraduates, in most cases constituting 70 percent of all
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students going abroad. IIE, Open Doors 2004, available online at http:// opendoors.iienetwork.org/file_depot/0-10000000/010000/3390/folder/37224/ Place+of+Origin+and+Academic+Level.htm (accessed 23 November 2004). Institute of International Education, “Foreign Student Totals by Places of Origin, 1999/00 and 2000/01,” IIE, Open Doors 2001, available online at http:// www.opendoors.iienetwork.org/file_depot/0-10000000/0-10000/3390/folder/ 14677/OD2001ByCountry and+Level.html (accessed 17 January 2003). The countries sending the largest number of students, in order, are China, Japan, South Korea, India, Taiwan, and Canada, ranging from 54,850 for China to 23,710 for Canada. In the 2002–2003 academic year 1,468 U.S. students were reported to be studying in Southeast Asia, nearly tripling the number that were studying in the region in 1993–1994. IIE, Open Doors 2004, available online at http://www.opendoors. iienetwork.org/file_depot/0-10000000/0-10000/3390/folder/37269/S+-+All+ Destinations.htm (accessed 23 November 2004).
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Disciplining Knowledge Representing Resources for Southeast Asian Studies in the Libraries of the U.S. Academy JUDITH A. N. HENCHY
I
n response to an invitation to write a provocative discussion paper on the question of international collaborative preservation of cultural heritages of Southeast Asia, Jennifer Lindsay, formerly program officer for the Ford Foundation in Jakarta, wrote a short story. The story, entitled “The Keepers,” written for a conference at Chiang Mai University in 2000, describes the clash of interests and understandings that occurred when an American graduate student conducting his anthropological research in Yogyakarta “discovered” a private collection of valuable manuscripts relating to his subject.1 The custodian of the documents, an elderly dance practitioner, was honored to share the collection and his ritual knowledge with the young man, even approving a U.S. foundation–funded project to preserve the manuscripts on microfilm. As the story develops, Lindsay’s caricatures—based on characters very well known to anyone in the Southeast Asian librarian community—trace the misunderstandings that emerge when the manuscripts are filmed, duplicated, and cataloged and surrogates are deposited at the Center for Research Libraries in Chicago. Lindsay’s story explores the sensitivities at stake as the guardian’s role, and his understandings of his responsibilities toward the preservation of his cultural knowledge, are gradually challenged and pitted against the modernizing techniques of the Euro-American 172
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library and archiving profession. Lindsay’s story complicates this rational narrative of technological progress by emphasizing the personal and institutional ambitions of the scholars, project managers, funding agencies, and national governments involved in the project and calls into question the competence of the normative organizing structure of the modernizing intervention. Finally, her story highlights the personal and community loss, as the texts became objectified in a high-profile international project that preserved the collection in modern scientific ways and integrated it into an international scholarly corpus. The traditional curator’s original trust in his personal relationship with the researcher was rewarded by the unwanted attentions of centralgovernment bureaucracies, which were urged by this international attention to intervene in local questions of cultural heritage. Governmental efforts to remove the collection to “safekeeping” in national repositories resulted in the severing of the ties between the artifacts and their ritual communities. This story underscores the difficulty of balancing local agency with pressures for a global access to knowledge and a perceived shared responsibility toward preserving and documenting the world’s textual heritage according to norms of archiving practice. In this process of preserving its textual expression, the heritage itself is transformed from local ritual knowledge to international “research archive.” The story also provides a subtext for much of the discussion contained in this essay, in which I illustrate the tensions between the normative empirical structures dominating Euro-American conceptions of knowledge organization and the emerging awareness of the need to “represent” local knowledge from Southeast Asia on its own epistemological terms. This binary seems to exist in a dialectical relationship within another register of representational interventions, which posit cultural knowledge in a continuum between what I will call bibliographic and exhibitionary orders. The bibliographic order is that knowledge system prevailing within libraries which privileges the published word as a transparent vehicle of authoritative and rational scientific modernity and named authorial responsibility but which does not indiscriminately include non-Western texts in its purview.2 Indeed, such notions of acknowledged authorial responsibility and claims to origination, as opposed to serial orality and textual redaction, have been quite recent products of the imposition of colonial economic and legal practices within the region.
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In this dialectic of representational tropes, I invoke Timothy Mitchell’s notion of the “exhibitionary order,” which has influenced recent conceptions of presenting material culture for display. Within this order, native artifacts are aestheticized and commodified as exotic objects of the white man’s gaze.3 In the colonial context that Mitchell exposes, the exposition is unmasked as an attempt to make legible the disorder of the other, and to do so in ways that reaffirm and naturalize the homogenized order of the white subject. Reality becomes only that which can be represented, in a system of signification in which objects are displayed before observing subjects as “mere ‘signifiers’ of something further.”4 In the context of the library world, where the book as reproducible creative artifact is characterized not only by its endogenous content but also by its ability to signify “something further,” it is useful to compare Mitchell’s idea of the exhibitionary order with Walter Benjamin’s concept of “exhibitionary value.” This latter characteristic of the creative product is that which, under the influence of the technologies of mechanical reproduction, lends itself to the reproducibility of the modern information age. Benjamin imagines a process through which the unique artistic product moves from its traditional cult value as the object of fetish to an “exhibitionary value” that satisfies an emerging modern need for spatial proximity to the artifact or its reproducible surrogate.5 In the bibliographic world it is the slippage from Benjamin’s exhibitionary value of the reproduced artifact within its natural ritual community to an exhibitionary order in which the artifact becomes fetishized by its commodity and art value within the unnatural display of the library collection that interests me. Failing to place textual artifacts satisfactorily within a normative bibliographic order, libraries are in danger of the strategic placement of local knowledge as an object of curiosity and wonder, its textual artifacts mere markers of an exotic visual and linguistic universe illegible to the average library user. These non-Western texts, already marked by the otherness of their language, may not be treated as carriers of knowledge equal to that of the modern “Western” text but as artifacts carrying a range of significations of a different register, from icons of a “traditional” cult value to markers against which a trajectory of modernity’s ubiquitous reproducibility and spatial proximity may be measured. Indeed, as Daniel Lev has pointed out, even into the late 1960s, it was argued that only certain languages counted as scientific under
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criteria for fulfillment of graduate school requirements: these languages were German, French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, and possibly Japanese. Other languages were defined as little more than “tools” that gave access to local views,6 just as vernacular texts are viewed as unmediated “primary resources” reflecting local realities, and as self-reflective scholarly contributions of “scientific” discovery only to the extent that they can be judged against Euro-American norms of scholarly fashion. Library treatments of such texts may be pragmatically inevitable, as they attempt to translate knowledge worlds into systems that have meaning in our own local contexts, but they are nonetheless both exoticizing and minimizing.7 While Euro-American disciplinary practice has focused on emphasizing the ritual, sacral, and performative origins of local cultural production—and these genealogies are inherently represented in library knowledge systems by such essentializing qualifying terminologies as “ethnology” and “mythology”8—Western texts are not accorded qualifying description based on these categorical judgments, even though their ideological foundations in esoteric or mythical knowledge systems might well be worthy of such qualifications. The categorizations of bibliographic “description” place local knowledge categorically and often inappropriately within a rational Euro-American nomenclature, much of it dating from orientalism’s constructions of the colonial world, enabled by the theoretical propositions of anthropology.9 With its post–World War II expansion on U.S campuses as an area of study, Southeast Asia became a focus of systematic library collecting. These collections came to represent Southeast Asia as a subject but also as an object of pedagogy; its intellectual resources were positioned as curious objects of inquiry and as tropes reflecting a register of global pedagogy and cultural progress. Just as these resources have been evaluated against a standard of putative modernity, so have availability and access to them been measured as a criterion of progress, based on accepted American norms of commercial viability and “democratic” access, reflecting Benjamin’s notion of the reproducibility and immanent proximity of exhibitionary value.10 Over the last half a century librarians have written many reports evaluating advances toward these putative norms for collecting and categorizing Southeast Asian resources for research and teaching, but the professional verdict is that such resources are always lacking, due both to the impoverishment of production and to the failure to distribute that production. The quest for improved
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access to resources has been a constant characteristic, despite the obviously dramatic shifts in the meaning of the term “access” and the strategies that it implies. With an inestimable expansion in intellectual production, increased availability has barely kept pace with the volume of print resources and diversity of new information media being produced. The uncertain foci of the scholarly field, the dramatically changing scope of scholarly materials available, and the elevated expectations of an emerging research community weaned on instantaneous and transparent desktop delivery ensure that the questions of “access,” and what constitutes a research corpus, are enduring ones. Many countries of Southeast Asia entered the “age of mechanical reproduction” as a result of colonial—and often Christian—influences and by the late nineteenth century learned to exploit the potential of print technologies in the service of the anticolonial struggle, moving from manuscript production and oral traditions to the use of printed texts in ways that opened up new methods of thinking and relating. The postcolonial academic structure encompassed a tension between that legacy of struggle, with its emphasis on national and regional ethnic identity, and the homogenizing trends of a new, multinational, “global” information industry; the latter with its links to Cold War Euro-American attempts to introduce Western habits of education and information production and consumption as bulwarks against the subversive nationalist and communist information infrastructures of the postindependence period. Following World War II, librarians and scholars have been both passive observers and active agents in establishing and documenting this Euro-American information nexus. Cecil Hobbs, Library of Congress Orientalia Division, was an early pioneer of Southeast Asian librarianship, bringing to the attention of the library world, in his reports from the field beginning from the early 1950s, both the scope of library materials from Southeast Asia and the difficulties of acquiring them.11 But these pioneering efforts of the Library of Congress (LC) also underscored U.S. Cold War interests in Southeast Asia, as they were paralleled by the “nation-building” efforts in which libraries were seen as foci of national literacy and civic education programs.12 In the United States, government contractors such as Rand Corporation, Asia Foundation, and Wolf Management Services were active in library and book promotion programs designed to disseminate knowledge of
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Western information technologies and pedagogical methodologies. Former colonial powers and organizations were instrumental in supporting these information infrastructure initiatives, through such cultural aid projects as the Australian Colombo Plan and the activities of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Cold War interest in the Southeast Asia region resulted in its inclusion as an area of funding under the National Defense Education Act of 1958 and ensured that it became eligible for inclusion in the PL 480 program, under which “excess currency” funds from overseas agricultural sales to developing countries were authorized by Congress for use by the LC for book acquisitions from those countries.
Southeast Asia Collections and the North American Academy The lack of consensus among scholars on what constitutes a core theoretical basis for the study of Southeast Asia and the lack of strong textual traditions in the curricular activities of U.S. Southeast Asian studies programs, together with the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of the enterprise, leave library collections with a number of difficult disciplinary-boundary issues, which influence both the way that materials are acquired, or not, and also the value that they are assigned within the library. Initiatives such as the Ford Foundation’s Crossing Borders program, designed to reassess the scholastic framework in which geographic areas are studied, not only raise questions of how different disciplines might valorize texts of certain provenance but pit sources of various regional origins against each other, in terms of both funding priorities and library cataloging treatment. Can Indian scholarship speak for Southeast Asia? Is such a work reflective of a Southeast Asian or a South Asian reality? Is it as deserving of extensive cataloging intervention as the product of the American academy or the even more intensive work required to represent its very complex subject position? The increasingly important role of scholars from the Southeast Asian region itself, and the concomitant debates about what new localized theoretical positions might come to the fore to challenge dominant Euro-American scholarly paradigms, raise questions about what source materials might be needed to support the study of these new avenues of scholarship. If they reflect a different kind of self-
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reflexivity, one focused on the ability of Southeast Asian “home scholars,” to appropriate Thongchai Winichakul’s term, to act autonomously within the field of Southeast Asia scholarship, what is the nature of this research archive, and how should it be classified without being either paternalistic or essentializing in its terminology?13 Although Southeast Asia was not considered a coherent region of study until after World War II, library interest in some of its countries predates this period, reflecting a general interest in the ethnography of Southeast Asia. Major research libraries acquired European colonial-era texts, and the U.S. colonial relationship with the Philippines ensured that much administrative material on that country was widely held in U.S. documents collections. While none of the countries of Southeast Asia was thought of as central to the study of the “great” religious traditions of the world, missionary interest in Southeast Asia ensured that a number of local religious texts were nonetheless documented in the theological collections of Yale and Harvard,14 and major research libraries have been beneficiaries of donations from colonial administrators and other government officials.15 Similarly, none of the major libraries regarded the literary canons of Southeast Asia as being particularly worthy of collection. The European philological scholastic tradition, which thrived in such institutions as Oxford University and the Ecole française d’Extrême Orient (EFEO) and resulted in the rich collections of manuscripts and colonial literature in the British Library, the University of Leiden, and other European centers, was never part of the scholarly foundation of Southeast Asian studies in the United States. During World War II the parameters of area studies collecting were drastically shaken by the fear that European research libraries might be destroyed in the conflict, or at least be rendered inaccessible to American scholars for many years. The Farmington Plan, finally implemented in 1949 as a cooperative international acquisitions venture involving sixty libraries under the sponsorship of the Association for Research Libraries (ARL), was a national response to this danger. Southeast Asia was not considered a region worthy of separate discussion under the plan, whose acquisitions parameters included titles in Latin script cited in national trade bibliographies and standard reviews.16 The plan’s mandate was modest in comparison with the range of resources now regarded as essential to a contemporary area collection
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and reflected the notion that an appropriate research corpus within the bibliographic order could be defined by those same criteria that libraries relied on for domestic acquisitions—based on ideas of verifiable “authenticity” and authoritativeness of content. Under the plan’s original provisions, “Far Eastern History” materials, including postindependence Philippines, were assigned to the University of California; “Colonies and Colonization” were assigned to Harvard; and “Asia General” to Yale. Following the recommendations of the ARL’s Committee on National Needs, which designated coverage for “critical areas,” Cornell was assigned responsibility for Burma (Myanmar), Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya, and Thailand, beginning from 1953. Although Southeast Asia was not recognized as a separate region of collection until 1969, a year before the plan ceased operations, the chair of the plan was active in supporting the LC’s negotiations to authorize extension of the PL 480 program to include Indonesia, which it did beginning in 1963. However, funds for Indonesia were not regularized until 1965 and only lasted until 1968, when Indonesia was declared to no longer have “excess currency” status.17 The shifting political priorities of the early Cold War period necessitated greater knowledge of Southeast Asia; it is from this period that rapid expansion of Southeast Asia collections can be dated, with centers being established throughout the late 1950s and 1960s. The trajectory of scholarly inquiry weighted research toward first Thailand and then Indonesia;18 library collections have also tended toward heavier collecting patterns for Indonesia, which is, of course, the most populous nation in Southeast Asia, and one with a prolific publishing industry. Like Thailand, it was also one of many sites of U.S. covert activity in the 1950s. It is hard to know whether Indonesia maintained its dominance as the focus of study because the acquisitions provided through the LC program offered a level of research data unattainable from other countries. It has been argued that the failure of the Farmington Plan led to a decline in acquisitions at a time of dramatically increasing scholarly output throughout the world. However, the Library of Congress Field Office in Jakarta ensured that acquisitions levels were maintained. The post–PL 480 LC acquisitions arrangement became the first participantsupported National Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging, now the Overseas Cooperative Acquisitions Program, which continues to supply
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U.S. and other research libraries with materials from Southeast Asia. This program, which expanded to include Malaysia and Singapore in 1970, Thailand in 1990, and with limited coverage for the Philippines and Viet Nam, has been responsible for the strengths of Southeast Asia collections, such as those at the Universities of Michigan, Hawaii, California at Berkeley, Cornell, and Yale. While the longtime presence of the LC in Indonesia has led to the development of several strong collections in the United States, it has also resulted in a uniformity of collections which is worrisome to many, since it compounds the effect of privileging those materials that are deemed to be of research value. Their worth is reinforced by their serial occurrence in the international bibliographic database, OCLC, disadvantaging many titles that do not get included, both because the LC office is not aware of them and because few major research libraries in Southeast Asia are contributing members of the OCLC consortium.19 Since the days when Cecil Hobbs first represented the LC in his extensive travels throughout Southeast Asia in the 1950s, librarians have played an ambiguous role in Southeast Asia, as observers and commentators on indigenous intellectual production. Research libraries in the United States have subsequently amassed better collections on Southeast Asia than exist in most countries of Southeast Asia,20 raising questions about the equitability of resource access. Not only are scholars in Southeast Asia often unable to gain access to those foundational texts and theoretical works that would enable them to participate fully in the scholastic agenda set by the Euro-American field, they are disadvantaged in the breadth and types of materials local libraries are able to collect and preserve. These librarians’ reports from the 1950s also show, in the heterogeneity of their collecting, a certain defiance of some traditional theoretical positions of library and information science, which posit totalizing epistemologies placing library professionals in the role of architects and mediators of a closed discursive knowledge nexus defined by a normative textual canon, such as that proposed by the bibliographic order of the Farmington Plan.21 The establishment of Southeast Asian studies on U.S. campuses as an interdisciplinary program in the social sciences—in part the result of a self-reflexivity born of the uncertainty of the meaning of the field—clearly directed librarians from the outset to look beyond these closed discursive knowledge systems. Hobbs’s reports note his
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interest in Burmese film magazines, an insight perhaps reflecting his understanding of the importance of the socialist cultural frontier in the Cold War context, but most likely a more general recognition of the importance of this representative expression of popular culture to understandings of Southeast Asia. Since those times, curators have increasingly turned to a variety of resources that have not been considered “scholarly” in order to satisfy the interdisciplinary demands of the field. Under the influence of poststructuralism on U.S. campuses, scholars have acknowledged that cultural difference in knowledge production necessitates valorizing alternative representational tropes: the research archive required to support the study of Southeast Asia is indeed of a different register from Farmington’s limited vision of the scholarly treatise. This archive now includes sex manuals, “how-to” guides for businesses based on Confucian or Buddhist values, local histories from temples intended for schoolchildren, comic books, fashion magazines, cookbooks, popular-music recordings, political ephemera, and realia. Indeed, perhaps it is the very paucity of both empirical data and strong literary traditions from Southeast Asia that has fueled the fashion for interdisciplinary and cultural studies, which take as their archive the flotsam and jetsam22 of cultural production that local libraries would not have thought to collect. It is perhaps fitting to also think in terms of Thongchai Winichakul’s call for “history at the interstices,”23 or what Anna Tsing has referred to as the need to understand the “complexity of cultural production within the intersections of colonizers and colonized.”24 The following section examines the problematic of defining local knowledges within the globalizing economy in ways that emphasize both the spatial and the temporal contingent interstices that perhaps exemplify the condition of Southeast Asia’s syncretic cultural production.
Information Industries in Southeast Asia: Local Knowledge, Global Market The intellectual production of the countries of Southeast Asia has been heavily influenced by political change, much of it exogenous in nature, including the lure of the global English-speaking market.25 The Library of Congress Field Office for Southeast Asia reported a large increase in acquisitions from the Philippines in 1989, reflecting the beginning
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of a post-Marcos boom in information industries. Librarians in Viet Nam assessed that annual book production rose following the Sixth Party Congress in 1986, reflecting a moment of relative press and publishing freedom, but then dropped off as Soviet subsidies for book production dried up.26 This increase in Vietnamese book production can be attributed to a surge in popular literature (including translations of Western romance novels) and in English-language teaching texts. Book production in Laos remained low in the mid-1990s,27 but the link to Thailand through the Lao Thai Friendship Bridge at Nong Khai, opened in 1995, caused a surge in publishing activity and price increases. An influx of international agency and nongovernmental organization (NGO) personnel contributed to a marked increase in English-language publishing in Laos, including an English-language semidaily newspaper.28 However, William Tuchrello, LC field director for Southeast Asia, also referred to a new genre of romantic popular literature in Laos which derives from “traditional” socialist themes of patriotic resistance but incorporates modern notions of romance. Such works are appealing to an increasing number of young, newly literate female readers.29 With the economic development beginning in the 1960s, but particularly as a result of the boom years of the 1990s, came a restructuring of information industries and dramatic changes in education patterns and information dissemination, including a rise in both literacy rates and book and journal production, as well as an increasing influence of video, television, and the Internet. Commercial publications targeting the disposable income of the increasingly large middle class, including high-production-technique glossy magazines, have proliferated in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Thailand and began to make an appearance in Viet Nam in the late 1990s, bringing to every level of literate society the ubiquitous signs of global advertising and commercialism. In the mid-1990s, despite the infusion of capital resulting from the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) election administration, Cambodian monographic output still consisted of relatively few scholarly works; ten years later there is significant publishing activity, including series of reprinted Buddhist texts from the colonial-era Institut bouddhique. A couple of overseas-financed publishing companies, the impetus created by the Khmer Studies Center in Seam Reap, and the increasing range of subjects represented in the reviving university sector are contributing to a steadily increasing
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scholarly production. Publishing of journal literature in the wake of the UNTAC period increased significantly, with the publication of fifteen to twenty daily and weekly newspapers, including at least three in English. The Khmer Journalists Association reported thirty news agencies publishing newspapers and magazines in 1999.30 The 1997 financial crisis caused uncertainty in the publishing industry. Oliver Mann, the representative of the Australian National Library’s office in Jakarta, reported that in 1998 two-thirds of Indonesia’s 286 newspapers and magazines were on the verge of bankruptcy, due to the high price of newsprint.31 The economic instability of Southeast Asia in this period was paralleled by political unrest in many countries. The collapse of the New Order regime in Indonesia witnessed the demise of long-standing newspapers and journals, alongside an explosion of new offerings, many of which were sensational tabloids and pornography. In June 1998 the Indonesian Ministry of Culture dropped its regulation under which it could revoke publishers’ licenses; the Department of Information had issued 1,200 new press licenses by the summer of 1998, in comparison with the 321 that had been in use for the whole of the Suharto period.32 A new press law enacted in 1999 left an unrestrained press open to increasing public scrutiny and criticism for its alleged abuses; seventy-seven daily newspapers were being published in 2000. Legislation addressing these criticisms was enacted in late 2002, restricting television broadcasting and again raising the question of media controls. The 1998 political unrest in Malaysia, resulting from the arrest of Anwar Ibrahim, has also had significant influence on the publishing industry, provoking challenges to the 1984 Printing Presses and Publications Act. In marked contrast to globalizing trends mentioned above, the quest for alternative information sources in Malaysia led to an increase in the circulation of the Parti Islam Semalaysia (PAS) Islamic opposition newspaper Harakah from 65,000 to 300,000 in 1999–2000. While the worldview and technologies governing the creation and dissemination of ideas, scholarship, and literature remain varied within Southeast Asia, they are all to some extent touched by the economics of global and regional competition. Laos and Cambodia are still struggling to build viable publishing industries in the face of illiteracy and poor information distribution, while Singapore, Malaysia, and Thailand have moved rapidly into the world of electronic publishing,
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in both the formal and the informal publishing sectors, and now rank among the most capable nations in information management. Malaysia is one of the first countries in the world to incorporate electronic information licensing and rights management into its amended copyright law (1997). In Viet Nam the Ford Foundation recognized the need of the scholarly and literary community to establish a viable economic basis for learned and belles lettres publishing, as government subsidies have given way to a private economy in which unrestricted illegal copying and republication of intellectual production continue to undermine the publishing economy. Despite the clear need for protections for authors and other producers of knowledge in ways that promote scholarship in Southeast Asia, the imposition of U.S. notions of copyright as an instrument to ensure corporate profit is a new frontier of cultural imperialism that reaffirms inequality of access not just to information but to the cutting-edge technologies of production. It is clear that differing understandings of rights of authorship and redaction are widespread in Southeast Asia; not all of these less rigorous notions of ownership are deleterious to the scholarly commonwealth.33 Yet, the qualifying provisions enshrined in the free-market economic doctrines of the World Trade Organization (WTO), to which even the poorest of Southeast Asia’s countries aspire, ensure that information inequality will be perpetuated by the undermining of notions of common ownership within a public educational sphere.34
Southeast Asia Collections: Discipline and Geography The process of colonization and wars of decolonization have caused waves of migration from Southeast Asia to the former colonial powers and to the United States. These expatriate communities are often prolific publishers of cultural and political tracts, the circulation of which within Southeast Asia serves to reinforce the modernizing and globalizing imaginary of the diaspora experience. The recent initiative to establish a Southeast Asian Studies program at UCLA, in response to heritage student demand, represents an attempt to address the pedagogical and structural issues that both divide and unite scholarship on Southeast Asia and on its diasporic communities in the United States, but library-purchasing structures are slow to embrace this shift.
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The extent to which Southeast Asia is being viewed as a useful case study for “generalists” and “comparativists” in subjects such as economic, agricultural, and medical research also gives it an academic presence that transcends the boundaries of what has been considered the focus of traditional area studies programs and brings into focus more clearly the way in which local publications are disadvantaged within the corpus of scientific knowledge. Historically Southeast Asia was a testing ground for foreign policy and development paradigms—low-intensity conflict, containment, and the green revolution, to name but a few—but initiatives within the Department of Education and other funding agencies seek to redefine the boundaries that have been contentiously drawn between country specialists with local-language knowledge and the disciplinary specialists without this knowledge who were typically engaged in such development activities. It seems that the role of library collections is to bridge this divide by ensuring that access to regionally generated scholarship is made mainstream and transparent, particularly that which is available in Western languages. International organizations, such as AMIC (Asian Mass Communication Research and Information Center), as well as regional research institutes such as the International Rice Research Institute, the Agricultural Institute at Bogor, Indonesia, and the Asian Development Bank, produce materials that are demanded by scholars from a wide range of disciplines. In general, these materials are viewed as area specific and are often tied to the Southeast Asia budget, yet it is questionable to what extent they represent local knowledge, since these institutions often operate under the influence of Western development funding and theorists. On the other hand, many specialized resources that could be considered products of the local knowledge industry, such as legal texts or medical journals, are expensive to acquire from Southeast Asia and are often not purchased by the selectors for these primary disciplines, since they are not regarded as being of a scholarly value equal to that of better-known EuroAmerican sources. Linguistic diversity is often cited as a characteristic of Southeast Asia, but it is neither reflected in the range of languages taught in yearlong programs of the academy nor in library collections. Although all of the countries of Southeast Asia have at least one official or national language, most straddle several major linguistic groups and
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often tens of minority languages, some with no written scripts and many without library transliteration schemas for bibliographic representation. Colonial authorities and nationalist leaders alike shared an interest in promoting a “national” language associated with the dominant cultural group, often as a matter of administrative convenience serving the needs of the bureaucratic state. Although linguistic unity has served independent governments well, marginalized elements in most of the countries of Southeast Asia have turned increasingly to subnational languages to express dissent and establish independence from the administrative center. Consequently, libraries cannot accept the cultural dominance of the national language, although many lack the expertise to cope with minority languages. The bibliographic representation of these materials, which often speak for the spatial margins of what Thongchai has called the state’s “out-line,” is even more minimal.35 Nor can libraries ignore the importance to Southeast Asia of the ethnic Chinese community—now a focus of Ohio University’s program and library collection—or other migrant communities, such as Tamils. It is perhaps from the heteroglossia of Southeast Asia’s disparate voices that new theoretical paths will emerge.
Mapping a Landscape of Resource Deficiency Evaluated by North American paradigms of the rational bibliographic order, Southeast Asian materials are often considered to be subject to government interference and organizational mismanagement: information flow is hindered through poor distribution, lack of timely national bibliographies, and export controls. Government censorship and control are pervasive throughout Southeast Asia in the newspaper industry and in radio and television. In Burma, Viet Nam, and Laos, all manuscripts for newspapers, books, and periodicals are subject to prepublication censorship or other form of publishing control. Other governments rely on post facto censorship and self-censorship as a means of control. Malaysia has strict government secrecy laws that severely restrict the circulation of materials considered sensitive by the government; Singapore has regularly censored or denied circulation to a number of international press agencies. Other regulations, including postal and export regulations, serve to limit book agents who serve European and U.S. libraries. However, news outlets in Thailand and
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Indonesia, even under the latter days of the New Order regime, have been quite outspoken, and levels of permissiveness in the representation of sexual topics and the violence of its imagery would shock many U.S. audiences. In Malaysia the level of political discourse in the media is arguably more vibrant than in the United States, and even in Viet Nam a tradition of cautious media dissent is well established. However, empirical evidence on information production and distribution is weak, and analysis even more rare; accurate statistics on the Southeast Asian book trade remain elusive. Singapore, possibly the most sophisticated of the publishing markets in Southeast Asia, reports no publishing statistics to UNESCO (of which it is not a member) and includes no such statistics in its own monthly and annual statistical compilations; a similar omission marks Malaysian statistical office publications. Those national statistics that do exist for Southeast Asia are usually reported to UNESCO by the legal deposit office of the National Libraries but are often up to five years out of date by the time of publication. The reliability of such submissions is also questionable: statistics based on materials registered for legal deposit often mask the development of regional/local or minority information industries. The lack of recent, accurate, national-level, and, more importantly, subnational-level statistics from Southeast Asia makes analysis of the reported failures of the information industries purely speculative. The following discussion highlights some of material types that are presumed to be deficient.
Information Surrogates, Empirical Illusions Increasing focus on Southeast Asia during the Cold War period engendered an interest in its official publications; often adopted from colonial era record-keeping habits, these data are assumed to be reliable and unmediated surrogates of a socioeconomic and political reality. Postindependence governments, adapting record-keeping methodologies and techniques, including census taking, from former colonial administrations, were well aware of their potential uses as instruments of obfuscation and social control.36 However, other than basic statistical sets, which themselves are subject to possible disparity of interest between local and central reporting offices,37 reports from government offices are notoriously elusive; government documents are distributed
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on the basis of a “need to know” and are not released for general distribution or for foreign export.38 The reluctance with which agencies greet requests for such information is regarded as a failure of statecraft rather than a cultural particularity worthy of study in itself. Southeast Asia is the site of a well-established NGO movement that has been acknowledged as an important agent of social and political change, as well as a commentator on that change. These programs and organizations have become the subject of academic inquiry, particularly in countries where the NGO movement has provided an alternative source of civil authority. In Indonesia these organizations’ international financial and information links enabled them to challenge the political order in ways that contributed to the fall of the New Order regime in 1998. While the grassroots and independent nature of some NGOs may qualify them for inclusion in what Benedict Anderson has called “special niche” production,39 their position in relation to Euro-American development theories and neoliberal politics renders them ambiguous as representative of local knowledge. Southeast Asia’s history of war and genocide, and international interest in its recovery, places it at the fulcrum of an emerging phenomenon that fits into the new rubric of “trauma studies.” Such studies, with their focus on postFreudian theoretical positions emphasizing those areas of social behavior that defy rational expression, raise questions about efforts to document this traumatic history. These studies seek to problematize the simplistic and transparent narratives of some international projects, with their emphasis on the failings of postcolonial states without reference to their colonial and neocolonial antecedents, and have been derisively described as products of the neoliberal “human-rights industry.”40 Whatever the role of NGO publications in the global-local knowledge continuum, materials produced by these organizations are often considered ephemeral, insignificant, or politically too sensitive to be offered by book dealers, and they remain underrepresented in collections. With the increasing interest in critical development studies and the need for alternative sources of development information, to the extent that these NGO sources challenge the findings of better funded and more widely distributed reports of the major development agencies, they should be made part of the international knowledge base. In recent years this ephemeral material has been increasingly available through the Internet, with many NGO sites providing full-text access
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to selected report series and newsletters. However, there is the beginning of what may become a disturbing trend toward the commercialization of these informal resources through exclusive distribution rights sold to multinational database providers.
Media Cultures and Cultural Media Radio and film have been highly influential as agents of modernization. More recently, the introduction of television has had far-reaching consequences on the social and political structures of Southeast Asia. Satellite links and cable provided emergent middle classes with uncensored access to global culture and information systems, including news critical of the national government, at times when such information was prohibited in local media. The Philippines National Statistical Office shows that in 1994 radio was still by far the most influential medium, reaching over 80 percent of the population, as opposed to 36 percent who read books and 57 percent who watched television. Magazine readership declined from 22.4 percent in 1989 to only 14.4 percent in 1994, with even bigger declines in the once-popular medium of comic books.41 Video has provided another medium that is outside government control, facilitating a dynamic exchange between local and diaspora communities of powerfully nostalgic and romantic images on one side and representations of modernity on the other. The circulation of ideas and fashion through video and television, particularly from Japan and South Korea, has contributed to a pan-Asian youth culture of consumption and cultural production. A flourishing documentary film industry has also provided a medium for the representation, arguably excessive representation, of recent national histories, which could be said to contribute to what some are now calling a “trauma industry.” Easing of regulations in post-Suharto Indonesia, for instance, has resulted in rising debate about new graphic visual representations of the 1965 killings.42 If Southeast Asia collections in this country mean to provide access to materials that are in some way surrogates of the cultural and political fervor of the moment, how can they do so without reference to all these powerful influences? On the other hand, how can library description possibly represent the complex position of such images as both scholarly documents and as emotive tropes in an entertainment domain devoid of any scholarly critique?
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Like radio, television productions from Southeast Asia are not archived in collections. Off-air copying of some programming has been done, but such copies are of dubious quality and legality. While television broadcasting companies in Singapore, Malaysia, and the Philippines have formal archiving facilities, most other countries of Southeast Asia have no such provisions. Even those countries with archiving facilities rarely document some of the most important cultural elements of television broadcasting: news segments, game shows, and advertising—those productions which are the most direct, unmediated reflection of societies’ transitions. It seems that there is no better marker of the way Southeast Asia responds to and becomes integrated with global culture than its television production. A project initiated by Mark Hobart at the School of Oriental and African Studies is the most ambitious attempt to seek government cooperation in a major television archiving project. Unlike many cultural preservation and distribution projects, such as the Smithsonian Folkways recording label, which seeks to document the traditional music styles of various regions of the world, Hobart’s project recorded a wide range of cultural and political productions. The introduction of the music cassette, CD, and DVD has given Southeast Asian communities access to a medium of cultural preservation, as well as a vehicle through which traditional music can be marketed and thus commercialized in “authentic” or newly hybridized forms, including karaoke. The transformation of ritual performance into mass-distribution cultural commodity is a profound one, giving audio collections significance beyond their ethnographic and musical content. All these audiovisual media raise problematic issues of preservation and access. It is perhaps only in the last few years that the enormous pedagogical potential of these resources has begun to be exploited, and the problems of their preservation and dissemination more seriously examined. Digital technologies have enhanced access to and familiarity with visual media. As Alfred McCoy has argued, changes in pedagogy, based on the visually oriented learning habits of students used to the vivid immediacy of television and Internet imagery, dictate that such visual resources be integrated more into undergraduate curricula.43 Their use, however, is restricted by copyright concerns: the provisions of the U.S. 1998 Millennium Copyright Act greatly restrict the definitions of “fair use” of “entertainment” products, even in a
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teaching context.44 As media used for the dissemination and preservation of scholarly information become less distinguishable from those of the entertainment industries, prevailing copyright provisions will be increasingly serious impediments to libraries’ preservation and dissemination activities.45
Electronic Information: A New Frontier The influences of electronic information and the distribution networks of the World Wide Web in Southeast Asia are also becoming objects of research and subjects of documentation. Since the emergence of informal electronic publications in the mid-1990s, access to documents in electronic form has rapidly replaced paper formats in the informal publishing sector. Distribution of these resources within Southeast Asia itself, however, remained limited, with only 7 percent of Malaysia’s population registered Internet users, and overall figures for Asia being even lower, at close to 2 percent by the end of the decade. The Internet Information Resource Center in Bangkok reported one million Internet subscribers in February 2000, out of a population of 61 million, and Oliver Mann reported in 1999 that only 1.2 percent of the Indonesian population have access.46 The figure for Internet users in Malaysia increased 35 percent in 2002 to 5.7 million, making it Southeast Asia’s largest Internet user.47 By the end of 2003 Viet Nam had over 650,000 Internet account holders and about 2.5 million Internet users, an average annual increase in Internet use of 32.5 percent, while a report from UNESCO noted that Cambodia has the lowest Internet penetration in Southeast Asia.48 The clear popularity of the Internet café in Southeast Asia indicates that the figures for Internet registration above may still be misleading; many users also have access through their place of work.49 Despite relatively low rates of access, there is no doubt that electronic publishing and information dissemination have greatly altered distribution patterns for scholarly and domestic information, which can now be delivered to an increasingly diverse audience without the high cost of paper and postage. Many commentators have attributed the ease with which the May 1992 demonstrators in Bangkok were able to organize to the prevalence of cellular telephones and fax machines in Thailand, just as others attribute to e-mail the rising student opposition to Suharto’s New
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Order regime in early 1998. With many of the countries of Southeast Asia still subject to rigorous censorship in publishing, and mass printing hampered by shortages of cheap paper, electronic media are invaluable to social and political organization. Increasing Internet access throughout Southeast Asia also enhances the ease with which vernacular and diaspora cultures circulate ideas and collectively “produce” a global consciousness.50 Libraries have largely failed to archive this unstable information medium, which, dating from the emergence of electronic lists and gopher sites in the early 1990s, has been carrying important news reports from Southeast Asia, including unofficial translations and eyewitness reports of political and social events. A similar fate has befallen much of the recent Web-based information: Web sites of major political parties contesting the Indonesian elections in 1999 and much of the debate and discussion surrounding the East Timor referendum and the Anwar Ibrahim trial have been lost, as financial and political pressures forced institutions to close servers. Only now is serious consideration being given to this problem of transitory “born-digital” political ephemera by more mainstream library organizations.51 Recent initiatives to establish institutional data repositories, using “open-archives” protocols such as those being developed at MIT and Berkeley, may address some issues of program and language-coding incompatibility and provide the opportunity for international collaboration in institutional archiving of data sets, working papers, and even the “informal” electronic publishing of institutionally generated intellectual property. The current U.S. government’s emphasis on the national-security potential of “data-mining” technologies, particularly those involving machine translation and exploitation of foreign-language information assets, may also add impetus to this massive undertaking. It can be hoped that such collaborative ventures to archive the digital intellectual commons of Southeast Asia will forestall the commercialization already under way with the selling of exclusive distribution rights to multinational information brokers. Since the first organized commercial access to full-text sources from Southeast Asia was offered by publishing outlets such as the New Straits Times Company in Malaysia in the mid-1990s, the information landscape has been transformed. Many information providers and news outlets started offering free online access to resources, but the economics of such access remains unclear, and some publishers are now
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reverting to licensed access only to unlimited full-text archives. Many regional news resources have also been made available through mainstream database providers, such as Lexis/Nexis and the Proquest Reference Asia database, which offer one-stop access to many socioeconomic statistical and market-related publications. The diversion of financial resources to short-term licensed access to commercially controlled digital data is an issue of major concern to libraries. While commercial interests have been slow to focus on Southeast Asia’s intellectual production as a profit source, the erosion of public funding to education within most countries of Southeast Asia, as well as the WTO-led opposition to public-sector subsidies to information providers, leaves all academic institutions vulnerable to commercial opportunism. While privatization of information resources may provide short-term financial palliatives, it further consolidates the information market in the hands of a few global brokers. Libraries have become ever more dependent upon these brokers, as they cancel subscriptions to serials and newspapers in favor of uncertain licenses to electronic surrogates.
Rendering the Internet Legible and the Tangible Illegible While the range and scope of full-text electronic resources from and about Southeast Asia are increasing exponentially, leading pundits to predict the demise of libraries with increasing confidence, in fact the librarian’s task is ever more complex. The Association of Research Libraries 1999 report of the “Keystone” Strategic Issues Forum pointed to the new challenges facing librarians in their role of providing guided access to electronic resources, through new considerations of the semantics of information discovery. While librarians have always considered that they are able to provide a neutral interface between user and materials, the heterogeneity of Web resources obliges them to conceptualize new access strategies which have no parallel in the world of hard-copy resources. A national initiative to catalog important resources on the Web is an attempt to impose library cognitive-mapping norms on the heteroglossia of the Internet, enabling foreign-language resources to be found through the familiar norms of controlled vocabularies and standardized transliterations. Librarians have also used hierarchical navigational frameworks to create gateway sites to electronic resources, again attempting to provide a guide that is “language neutral”
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but clearly not “value neutral.” User surveys show that undergraduates are increasingly unfamiliar with hierarchies of knowledge, preferring keyword-searching techniques enabled by such tools as Google.52 While the students’ intuitive rejection of the totalizing system of knowledge categories is interesting, they unfortunately have replaced that system with a methodology equally, if not more, logocentric. As Foucault humorously suggests in The Order of Things, through his extensive excerpt from Borges’s passage imagining a Chinese categorization of the animal kingdom, we have no great certainty that the order of things is universal, no less its nomenclature.53 I would also note the way in which library treatment of electronic media has brought into the mainstream a problem that has perhaps been long apparent to area studies librarians; that is the studied “neutrality” of the library classification process, which served libraries well when what they considered to be the stuff of their collections was scholarly works of repute, whose signification was unambiguously apparent in the content itself. However, much of the cultural production acquired from regions deemed to be “other” could be treated in a certain sense as a primary source, signifying not only the intellectual value of its content but the artistic value of its form and an archeology of its production. Perhaps only in the very specialized area of book arts could it be said that a work is evaluated according to criteria that trace the trajectory of Benjamin’s move from “cult” to “exhibitionary value.” While print objects may lose their cult value based in ritual as they become reproducible, in the modern information world rarity substitutes for uniqueness as the object of fetishization, as small-print-run exemplars of works and first editions take on a new cult and commercial meaning. Like the heteroglossia of the Internet, which also speaks by its form and provenance as much as its content, the register of significations carried by the intellectual product of the “other” has always demanded an alternative descriptive framework. Unlike the archival source, which is afforded a proliferation of the descriptive language of exhibition to locate its production, the subject of the vernacular book or video is the object of minimalist description of essentializing categories within the bibliographic order. A valuable manuscript may be the subject of an excess of description, which marks it as exotic by this very excess while at the same time denying it equal intellectual worth. Shared cataloging through the OCLC and RLIN bibliographic databases promises ever more advantages, as collections such as the
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British Library, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the Australian National Library become members. Regrettably, no research libraries from Southeast Asia have yet become contributors to these international databases, but even if they did so, many incompatibilities of cataloging standards and script encoding divide us from our colleagues in Southeast Asia, despite their adoption of essentially Euro-American standards of classification. The minimal description available in our library vocabularies is one deficiency. Indeed, the dangers of assuming that classification and subject description standards can be easily translated across cultural divides is no better illustrated than in the recent attempts to “translate” the Dewey Decimal Classification into Vietnamese. The committee set up to evaluate this task soon realized that such a translation would involve a major rewriting of the text. Not only would the historical section have to represent a different periodization, but all of the material on Marxism, considered by Dewey to be an economic theory, would be moved to the history section, to satisfy the imperatives of historical materialism. This example serves to demonstrate how inadequate the vocabularies available to U.S. libraries are in describing the other’s history. Yet we continue to assume that we can represent the other’s texts on our terms. An e-mail exchange among librarians in 2003 affirmed the continuing value of transliterated representation of vernacular scripts, to avoid the alienation effect of the non-Western script in the catalog. Thus, the shock value of encountering the other’s alien script in the comfortable environment of the library catalog is weighed against the right of the other’s language to speak for itself.54
Cultural Product as Commodity The history of cultural intervention from the post–World War II period is mixed. Jennifer Lindsay’s story at the beginning of this essay highlights the arguments used to justify continued international involvement in efforts aimed at the conservation and international representation of cultural materials in repositories in Southeast Asia, which were not thought to be reliable guardians of their nations’ cultural heritage. This contemporary framing of the arguments for scientific intervention in the realm of cultural preservation reflects a more self-consciously critical view of cultural appropriation than was common in the period
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of high colonialism, under which wholesale alienation of cultural property to metropolitan museums and libraries took place. Early librarians’ reports focus little on the acquisition of manuscript collections, although there is reference to preservation filming of palm-leaf manuscripts in Burma as early as 1951. Such collections were clearly emerging as objects of prestige, as much in the United States as in the former colonial capitals. Unlike the exotic forms of Southeast Asia’s architecture and religious iconography, on which a lucrative colonial commerce was based, textual artifacts did not seem to form such an obvious part of this trade. For example, André Malraux’s 1922 audacious plunder of three bas-relief lintels from Bantei Srei had commercial gain as its primary objective, but it also intended to strike a blow at the colonial state’s presumed right to claim those properties surveyed and cataloged.55 No such challenge to “official” appropriation of texts appears to have taken place, and EFEO’s amassing of manuscripts in their libraries in Indochina continued until their departure in 1957.56 It is clear that the aestheticization of local texts took place among a small group of collectors and connoisseurs from the early colonial period, but it seems to be only in later years that the international art market began to recognize the mass commercial value of manuscript artifacts for their exotic forms. U.S. curators became involved in the complex negotiations between advocating the retention of artifacts within Southeast Asia as part of a local research corpus, ensuring their preservation in accordance with modern library science techniques, and the rising consciousness of their value to U.S. research institutions within the competitive framework of the scholastic marketplace, in which library holdings were becoming increasingly fetishized.57 It should be noted that the inability of libraries to properly catalog many manuscript materials is a reflection of the fact that rarely do staff, students, or even faculty read the languages or archaic scripts represented by these objects of fetish. Preservation needs in the countries of Southeast Asia are considered to be overwhelming, resulting in the attempts at collaborative preservation that Jennifer Lindsay’s story of my opening paragraph highlights. Preservation copying has the effect of both reducing the unique cult value of originals, thus blurring the line between Benjamin’s cult and exhibition values, and enabling the commercial exploitation of copies of more appealing holdings.58 Over the last few years, pressure has
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increased to preserve materials through the use of scanning technologies, increasing exponentially the serial reproducibility of the object of cult value. The intimate and personal proximity to the objects of cult value promised by the Internet has in a sense transferred to the enabling technology itself the status of fetish. Such digitizing projects, while fetishized in the eyes of both funders and researchers, can be an expensive deception that diverts much needed resources from reliable preservation methods to ill-conceived projects, at best postponing the issue of long-term preservation of the digital surrogate. Another outcome of this focus on digitization, and the increasingly blurred boundary between distribution and preservation, is an enhanced awareness of copyright and other proprietary rights. With the proliferation of less tangible, more easily reproducible media, and the increasing dominance of commercial vendors in the electronic information industry, U.S. and international legislative bodies have moved to strengthen copyright controls over materials that have in the past been freely copied by libraries under the provisions of preservation and “fair use.” With the extension to copyright provisions under U.S. law, the expansion of the international Berne Copyright protections to more foreign materials, and the World Intellectual Property Organization and the U.S. Millennium Copyright Act provisions strengthening the rights of commercial publishers, libraries have to be much more careful in their preservation copying activities. At the same time, commercial vendors are taking advantage of enhanced awareness of copyright issues in Southeast Asia to curtail existing preservation efforts, signing exclusive reproduction agreements with copyright holders. Hence, the informal, not-for-profit preservation activity of the intellectual commons that has long been the preservation and scholarly distribution mode for libraries is under threat from this commercialization and potential monopoly, further endangering the long-term survival of the research archive.
Conclusion In this essay I have addressed the question of how well libraries responded to the past challenges of not only collecting a range of intellectual work from Southeast Asia but also fully representing this world of knowledge without making it an object of exhibition. In so
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doing, I am suggesting a need for focused research on these very questions of representation across languages and knowledge worlds. We understand little of the implications of difference as it might be applied within the context of library subject analysis and description, despite a long engagement with questions of subject-heading semantics designed to broaden the aspects of meaning represented in subject vocabularies. This research is vital, particularly in the light of an emerging field of “global information management,”59 which, with its focus on cross-cultural information systems, appears to be recuperating essentialized cultural paradigms dating from the colonial era in order to facilitate through its quantifying methodologies a new global information imperialism, potentially more powerful than that achieved by so-called orientalist practices of representation. As this challenge implies, the future task is not only to reconceive the physical archive but also to understand the implication of a wide range of evolving virtual media and their relationships to the physical world, whose human activities we seek to record. In the global age of popular culture and “infotainment,” increasingly characterized by what Baudrillard and others have associated with the simulacrum, the relationship between essence and representation becomes increasingly problematic.60 Within the alienating and hegemonic order of the postmodern imaginary’s simulacrum, subjects are located far from their ritual communities in which cult value is validated. The affirming character of the infinite reproducibility and seriality of the selective virtual archive seems to challenge Benjamin’s early-twentieth-century notions of mechanical reproduction; it is in reproducibility that modern cult value might be said to be situated. In the world of Google, the decontextualized images of illuminated Malay manuscripts can appear in a results screen of equal “relevance” and “value” as a speech from the Malaysian prime minister, an undergraduate essay, or a deceptive advertising bid. The scholastic establishment, buoyed by the prestige of its organizing epistemologies and its tenuous relationship with commercial information providers, responds with a privileging of the established corpus through its controlled and licensed information channels. It is interesting to note that the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) recently embarked on a project to digitize the academy’s choice of the best books in world history. Enlisting the support of the Association for Asian Studies and its
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regional councils, a list of books of Southeast Asian history was submitted to the ACLS.61 The resulting list reflected the historical “classics” for each country of the region and the enduring legacy of the men of the Euro-American academy who were the founders of the field. The scholarly impulse to make such works part of the evolving virtual archive further privileges the intellectual production of the Euro-American academy, emphasizing what Ruth McVey has noted as a re-creation of the scholarly hegemony of orientalism in the post–World War II field of “area studies.”62 Further, the selection of classics in the field parallels the orientalist’s search for authenticity in the urtext in which the esoteric knowledge of the field is preserved and ensures that it is transported and multiplied within the exhibitionary dis-order of the Internet.
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Jennifer Lindsay, “The Keepers,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Preservation in Southeast Asia, Chiang Mai, February 2000, 301–312, available online at http://www.thai.net/seacap/book/book7.pdf. See note 1 in the introduction to this volume for my use of the word “Western” in this essay. I am using the term “exhibitionary order” to invoke Walter Benjamin’s concept of the exhibition as the site of “phantasmagoria” glorifying the exchange value of commodities, exemplified in his vision of world expositions as “sites of pilgrimage to the commodity fetish.” See Walter Benjamin, “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century,” in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writing, by Walter Benjamin, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Schocken Books, 1986), 151. Timothy Mitchell, “Orientalism and the Exhibitionary Order,” in Colonialism and Culture, ed. Nicholas Dirks (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 295. Mitchell attributes his thinking to Martin Heidegger’s notion of the “world-as-exhibition.” See Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture,” in The Question concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. and with an introduction by William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977). Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, by Walter Benjamin, ed. and with an introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 217. Personal correspondence, February 2004. See also Ruth McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization, and the Study of Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Reorientations, by Craig J. Reynolds and Ruth McVey (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 1998), 42. One might recall Gayatri Spivak’s call for a “strategic use of positivist essentialism in a scrupulously visible political interest”: Gayatri Spivak, introduction to Selected
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Judith A. N. Henchy Subaltern Studies, ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Spivak (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 13. A review of the University of Washington catalog revealed that more than 50 percent of the titles assigned the subject term “Thailand and Ethnology,” used to identify descriptive narratives about Thai peoples, were in the Thai language. The disciplinary term “Anthropology and Thailand” revealed only 12 percent in the Thai language, indicating perhaps that vernacular texts are assumed by catalogers to lack the scientific rigor of the discipline. See Thomas Bender, “Rethinking Humanities in a Global Age: Changing World, Changing Scholarship” (keynote address, annual meeting of the Research Libraries Group, 2003, available online at http://www.rlg.org/annmtg/bender03.html). As an example, Bender cites the categorization of indigenous histories as anthropology. Benjamin’s observation of the slippage between the phantasmagoria of desire engendered by the colonial exhibition and the display techniques adopted by the commercial arcades of Paris brings to mind the seamless linkages between the informational and the commercial offered in the simulacrum of the Internet. E.g., Cecil Carlton Hobbs, Account of a Trip to the Countries of Southeast Asia for the Library of Congress, 1952–1953 (Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program, Department of Far Eastern Studies, Cornell University, 1953). One such program, under the direction of UNESCO, is referred to by Hobbs in his 1953 report (ibid.). Paxton P. Price, International Book and Library Activities: The History of a U.S. Foreign Policy (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1982), describes policies that were the inspiration of Charles Frankel, assistant secretary of state for education and cultural affairs. Thongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Postnational Histories in Southeast Asia,” in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, ed. Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Singapore: Singapore University Press, 2003), 23. These collections were also among the first to seed Southeast Asia collections, with Ford Foundation funding. See Kent Mulliner and Hwa-Wei Lee, “Southeast Asia Collection Growth in the United States: Ohio University’s Experience,” in The Information Challenge: A Festschrift in Honour of Dr. Donald Wijasuriya, ed. Kim See Ch’ng (Kuala Lumpur: Knowledge Publishers, 1995). Many materials are not yet fully cataloged at major libraries or are inadequately cataloged. Maurice Durand’s collection was recently discovered at Yale, still in its boxes in a closet. The Vietnamese dynastic records on microfilm, donated to the Kennedy Library in 1963 and copied for five of the major research libraries, were so inadequately cataloged that they were literally lost to scholarship for thirty years. Edwin E. Williams, Farmington Plan Handbook ([Bloomington, IN:] Association of Research Libraries, 1953), 14. By contrast, PL 480 full funding for acquisitions from South Asia lasted into the late 1990s. For a history of these foci, see John Bowen, “The Development of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies
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and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (University of California Press/ University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, edited vol. 3, article 10, 2003, available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/ editedvolumes/3/10). The OCLC database, which represents the cataloged holdings of major U.S., European, Australian, and Singapore libraries, reported in 2004 that Indonesian holdings rank in eighteenth place in the listing of the top fifty languages represented in the database, with 137,420 items. Of the Southeast Asian languages represented on the list, Vietnamese is now the next most common, with 72,266 items, and Thai with 63,819. The figure for Malay is 20,482. See OCLC Annual Report, 2003–2004, p. 9, available online at http://www.oclc.org/news/publications/ annualreports/2004.pdf. Cornell’s Echols Collections claims over 371,000 titles. The only comparable collection representing the whole of Southeast Asia is that of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore, which claims 470,000 items, including the microfiche output from the LC and KITLV offices in Jakarta. For a discussion of the cognitive view in library and information science discourses, see Pertti Vakkari and Blaise Cronin, eds., Conceptions of Library and Information Science: Historical, Empirical and Theoretical Perspectives (London: Taylor Graham, 1992). I am here paralleling Gellner’s notion of the “rags and patches” which constitute national consciousness. See Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983). Thongchai, “Writing at the Interstices,” 10–18. Anna Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen: Marginality in an Out-of-theWay Place (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 13. The health of information industries is linked to literacy rates, which have increased from close to 50 percent in 1980 to close to 80 or 90 percent for most countries of Southeast Asia. See UNESCO, Institute for Statistics Web site, http:// portal.unesco.org/ (accessed July 2002). Tensions between English-language publishing and the development of vernacular-language teaching media, exemplified by the establishment of the University Kebangsaan Malaysia in 1970, continue. See Oliver Mann, “Current Publishing and Information Trends in the Southeast Asian Region: Indonesia Freedom of the Press” (paper presented at the International Federation of Library Associations Conference, Bangkok, July 1999); and Haji Hassan Ahmad, “The Publishing Program of the Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka,” in Scholarly Publishing in South-East Asia (Kuala Lumpur: Association of Southeast Asian Institutions of Higher Learning, 1975). See Vu Van Son, “Libraries and Documentation in Vietnam,” in Information and Libraries in the Developing World, vol. 2, Southeast Asia and China, ed. Anthony Olden and Michael Wise (London: Library Association, 1993), 86. Estimated at forty monographs per year, eight journals, and two newspapers in the mid-1990s. Monographic acquisitions from Laos increased to 350 monographs in 1999, up from 120 in 1998.
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Judith A. N. Henchy William P. Tuchrello, “Recent Trends on Publishing in Southeast Asia” (paper distributed at the Informal Northern Thai Group meeting, Alliance française, Chiang Mai, 9 May 2000). LC representatives reported that acquisitions increased from 20 items in 1998 to 178 in 1999. Mann, “Current Publishing and Information Trends.” Tuchrello, “Recent Trends on Publishing.” Judith Henchy, “Copyright, Ownership Rights and the Preservation Conundrum,” in Proceedings of the International Conference on Preservation in Southeast Asia, Chiang Mai, February 2000, available online at http://www.thai.net/seacap/ book6.htm. The International Federation of Library Associations has expressed its concern about the privatization and commodification of information resulting from General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) opposition to unfair competition arising from government subsidies to public information providers, such as libraries, museums, and archives. See IFLA’s platform following the Seattle Ministerial Meeting of 1999, “Libraries and the WTO,” by Paul Whitney, available online at http://www.ifla.org/III/clm/p1/whitney.pdf. See Thongchai, “Writing at the Interstices,” 11. See Charles Hirschman, “The Making of Race in Colonial Malaya: Political Economy and Racial Ideology,” Sociological Forum 1, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 330–361. Responding to discussions regarding the value of continuing a cooperative plan to ensure retention of sub-kabupaten (county-equivalent)-level statistics from Indonesia, Daniel Lev commented to me (April 1993) that national-level statistics were strikingly unreliable in comparison with those from local publications. Acquisition of government documents is equally problematic for research libraries in Southeast Asia. See Siew MunKhoo, “Malaysian Library Deposit Legislation and Use of Official Publications,” Government Publications Review 17 (January/ February 1990): 73–82. Benedict Anderson, “Politics and Their Study in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asian Studies: Options for the Future, ed. Ronald A. Morse (Lanham, MD: University Press of America; Washington, DC: Asia Program, Wilson Center, 1984), 40–51. “Even among the well-intentioned, the magnificent concept of justice is gradually being substituted with the reduced, far more fragile discourse of ‘human rights’” (Arundhati Roy, “What We Call Peace Is Little Better than Capitulation to a Corporate Coup,” Sydney Morning Herald, 3 November 2004). The Philippine National Statistical Office Web site is http://www.census.gov.ph/ data/sectordata/fl94-expmmedia.html (accessed 13 February 2004). I am indebted to Fadjar Thufail for his insights into such productions as Mass Grave ([Jakarta]: Offstream Allied Media, 2001) and the discussions stimulated by the University of Washington’s Project for Critical Asian Studies series, “Trauma, History, ‘Asia,’” funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Alfred W. McCoy, “Networking Southeast Asia’s History: Prospects and Problems of Digitized Preservation” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, Washington, DC, 13–16 March 1997).
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The 2002 Teach Act offers some flexibility but does not enable long-term retention of teaching copies. Robert S. Boynton, “The Tyranny of Copyright?” New York Times Magazine, 25 January 2004. Mann, “Current Publishing and Information Trends.” The Star (Malaysia), 17 January 2003. BBC Monitoring International Reports, 31 December 2003, citing Hanoi Moi, 30 December 2003; BBC Monitoring Asia Pacific, citing Agence Kampuchea Presse, 24 December 2003. For statistics on domain names, see Center for Next Generation Internet (NGI.ORG), “Internet Survey Reaches 109 Million Internet Host Level,” Biannual Strategic Note of Matrix.Net, Inc., Internet Software Consortium, 15 March 2001, available online at http://www.ngi.org/trends/TrendsPR0102.txt (accessed 13 February 2004). Elaine Tay, “Global Chinese Fraternity and the Indonesian Riots of May 1998: The Online Gathering of Dispersed Chinese,” Intersections, no. 4 (September 2000), online journal available at http://www.sshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/ issue4/tay.html (accessed 11 February 2004). The Political Web archiving initiative, in which the Center for Research Libraries (CRL) will participate with Mellon Foundation funding, is aimed at archiving Web-based communications. The Google Books Library Project partnership between several major research libraries and Google to create a searchable digital archive from print collections indicates that market pressures are indeed changing the frameworks within which libraries operate. Michel Foucault, preface to The Order of Things (New York: Vintage, 1973), xvii. E-mail discussion on CORMOSEA listserv initiated by Allen Thrasher, LC, 15 December 2003. Knowing that the Angkor complex had not been fully inventoried, and that French law claimed no jurisdiction over sites not included within EFEO’s archeological survey, Malraux intended to lodge his plunder at the rival and newly fashionable Musée Guimet in Paris. To their credit, EFEO did not transfer original manuscripts to their library in Paris but microfilmed them for deposit in both Paris and Saigon. Official French policy prohibiting the export of cultural property on its face served to protect indigenous artifacts. However, as the Durand collection at Yale demonstrates, many manuscripts found their way into the hands of private administratorcollectors. File: Protection propriété artistique CAOM/Agfom249/367, dossier 371, Centres des archives d’Outre Mer, Aix-en-Provence. See Proceedings of the International Conference on Preservation in Southeast Asia, Chiang Mai, February 2000, for discussions of balancing the enhancement of public awareness within Southeast Asia of the value of these artifacts with the dangers of unwittingly influencing the commercial art market. Viet Nam War collections are prime examples; they sometimes transfer duplication rights to a commercial dealer, which means that costs for libraries requiring copies are higher.
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Judith A. N. Henchy Felix B. Tan, “Ten Years of Cumulative Research,” Journal of Global Information Management 10, no. 1 (January–March 2002): 3. Although discussions about the relevance of the simulacrum have become increasingly popular with the rise of virtual technologies and the popularity of films such as Matrix, this foundational philosophical concept can be traced from Plato through to Kant and Hegel. See Gilles Deleuze, “Plato and the Simulacrum,” October 27 (1983): 45–56. The ACLS History E-Book Project is available at http://www.historyebook.org/. McVey, “Globalization, Marginalization,” 41–42.
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6
Political Science, the Anxiety of Interdisciplinary Engagement, and Southeast Asian Studies CARLO BONURA
Social scientists do not seek to master the literature on a region but rather to master the literature of a discipline. Robert Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline”
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erhaps in no other discipline is the legitimacy of area studies more openly contested than in political science. The recent debates in the United States, reaching their climax in the late 1990s, present the latest round in a conflict over the role of area studies that has its origins in the social science transformations of the early post–World War II period. In their analysis of “the Area Studies Controversy,” Mark Tessler, Jodi Nachtwey, and Anne Banda identify the “heart” of the controversy in political science as an “important disagreement about social science epistemology, about what constitutes, or should constitute, the paradigm by which scholars construct knowledge about politics, economics, and international relations in major world regions.”1 This disagreement, played out most visibly in the subfield of comparative politics, has fundamental implications for political science as a discipline within social science. In fact, much of the discussion surrounding area studies has revolved around questions of the influence of the humanities in area studies and the development of social science methods within political science to study topics such 205
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as culture and history, previously considered the responsibility of area specialists, cultural studies, and anthropology. The aim of this chapter is to view political science in the United States as a site of contestation over area studies and inquire into the status of Southeast Asian studies in recent debates over area studies in the discipline. In doing so, I hope to make this well-trodden dispute— namely, the rational choice–area studies debate—more familiar to members of other disciplines in Southeast Asian studies. This debate often questions the validity of area studies scholarship in the production of social science knowledge. Therefore, I would like to reconsider Benedict Anderson’s suggestion that the discipline of “political science is now much more promising” in its relationship to Southeast Asian studies.2 In the context of the current debates, such a promising relationship would entail a general environment of acceptance toward area studies, resulting in communication across disciplines over epistemological and methodological issues important to Southeast Asian studies. I consider this kind of communication as a form of interdisciplinary engagement that area studies are well situated to facilitate. Such engagements allow for theorizing within a discipline to be reflexive and enable a comparison of approaches to similar topics shared by various disciplines. In my analysis, however, I argue that the relationship between political science and Southeast Asian studies is often unidirectional (from discipline to area studies). I will outline some general obstacles facing area studies in political science and examine the current status of Southeast Asian studies in the subfield of comparative politics. A more promising approach toward a renewed engagement with area studies within political science may lie in the traditionally abstract, rather than empirical, field of political theory. In the final section of this chapter I will look at the potential of the relatively new subfield of comparative political theory regarding this important task of interdisciplinary engagement by focusing on its possible contributions to the current discussion of Islam and civil society in Southeast Asia. By way of introduction, the arguments of Robert Bates in his criticism and calls for reform of the practice of area studies in the United States have broadly framed the current wave of discussion surrounding area studies and the utility of rational-choice analysis in the study of comparative politics. As is illustrated in the epigraph supplied by Bates above, the regional “approaches” fostered by area
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studies appear out of place in the grander social scientific project of political science. His aim in kindling these debates, to rephrase Theda Skocpol, is to “bring the discipline back in” in the study and “mastery” of comparative politics.
The New Old Debate over Area Studies in Political Science and the Anxieties of a Discipline The opening paragraph of Robert Bates’s highly controversial letter on area studies to the Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section in Comparative Politics declares a “consensus” in the academy that has over the last five years worked to revolutionize the enterprise of area studies, in the wake of a decline of foundation-based funding: “area studies has failed to generate scientific knowledge.” This consensus stands unqualified, as it assumes the expectation and even desire for “scientific knowledge” by all those involved in area studies. In addition, it reveals a common perception of area studies from within political science, as described by Bates himself, that views area specialists as having “defected from the social sciences into the camp of the humanists.” These defections and their effects on the discipline are visible in political science departments throughout the country: Rare is the political science department wherein those who study Europe, South Asia, Africa, etc. do not reside within area studies programs. Rare too is the department wherein the area specialists fail to constitute a center of resistance to new trends in the discipline. They tend to lag behind others in terms of their knowledge of statistics, their commitment to theory, and their familiarity with mathematical approaches to the study of politics…. They raise principled objections to innovations in political science, while lacking the training fully to understand them.3
Resistant, poorly skilled, and unfounded in their objections to innovation, area specialists in this depiction represent obstacles to this vision of disciplinary progress.4 Concealed in Bates’s diagnosis of the discipline, and discussed widely in the raucous debates that have followed his writings, is a particular understanding of the “new trends” with respect to which some members of the discipline “lag behind.” The “commitment to theory” discussed is predominantly a commitment
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to rational-choice analysis (and potentially the “trend” in comparative politics of “new institutionalism”), which encapsulates a specific approach toward politics, reason, and “strategic action.” To the extent that this debate, now known as the rational choice–area studies debate, has remained lively, the possibility remains that this is not yet a universal commitment. Published less than a year after his letter to the Newsletter, Bates’s “Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy?” appeared initially to be far more conciliatory to the question of the status of area studies in political science. The opening descriptions of both area specialists and “social scientists” are stressed as “caricatures” meant to “distort in order to highlight important elements of reality. The implications of this reality have profoundly unsettled our discipline.”5 Yet, the opening proposition of “Area Studies and the Discipline” remains that political science as a discipline is in the midst of a “shift from area studies to ‘social scientific’ approaches.”6 This shift, presented in the past tense (indicating that it is already firmly under way), “alters the balance of power within the academy” in the ways it affects graduate training and the allocation of resources and enhances the power of department chairs to determine the makeup and scholarship of their academic units. Bates is especially wary of the influence of “wily directors” and “multiple constituencies,” which have resulted in “the application of criteria other than disciplinary standards to appointments, promotions, and course offerings.”7 Responsible for “lagging” scholarship among members of the discipline, area studies also poses an administrative threat from outside political science. The answer in Bates’s discussion lies in developing a “disciplinaryoriented view of comparative politics” distanced from the “resistance” of area studies.8 In the midst of these strong criticisms of area studies, Bates makes clear that his position is not one altogether opposed to the project of area studies. With the waning of area studies under way, Bates proposes a misleading “mutual infusion” between area studies and political science that capitalizes on a moment in which “the weakening of area studies is taking place just when our discipline is becoming equipped to handle area knowledge in rigorous ways.”9 “Area knowledge,” in the parlance of the current debates, means the analysis of culture, once the sole province of area studies in political science before international
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studies programs expanded in the 1960s. The future “synthesis” Bates envisions for the “fusion” of area studies and discipline extends “between context-specific knowledge and formal theory, as developed in the study of choice.”10 In proving the appropriateness of such a fusion, in the brief space of his four-page article, he offers an almost syllogistic explanation of the relationship between culture and choice: “area studies emphasizes the importance of cultural distinctions. Cultures are distinguished by their institutions. Game theoretic techniques, established for the study of economic and political organizations, provide a source of formal tools for investigating such institutions.”11 Methodological developments such as game theory and analytic narratives promise the possibility of moving beyond questions of culture. Bates’s vision of the study of culture through this fusion exudes a certain simplicity and confidence in the progress of disciplinary development.12 Implicit in such an explanation is a particular understanding of how culture is conceptualized in area studies. Cultural distinctions may be one of a number of focal points of area studies, but such a focus may extend beyond the mostly descriptive task to define and identify how a given culture functions. Rather than a conceptualization of culture as being “distinguished by its institutions,” scholarship in the last decade in anthropology and cultural studies informing some scholarship in area studies argues that culture may be continuously constructed through its (political) institutions. This approach, which highlights the contingent, historical, and politicized aspects of culture, has been widely adopted within Southeast Asian studies, even though much of the work in comparative politics on the region continues to employ the more static and ontologically stable definition of culture outlined by Bates above. To the extent that the latter conceptualization of culture drives the expansion of research questions accessible to rational choice, the methodological and epistemological concerns of area studies (if area studies could come to represent a particular set of concerns) will wane with time, and area specialists will come to be more data collectors than interdisciplinary theoretical innovators. An open engagement with new approaches to culture, however, presents opportunities within political science to reconceptualize the relationship between culture and politics. The possibilities of a future engagement such as this lie in an understanding of the very terms of the area studies debate.
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The “Misnomer” of Area Studies and Its Contested Vocabulary A vocabulary has emerged over the last decade in attempting to assess the impact and value of area studies in political science. Much of the recent discussion has been framed by three widely read features published in PS: Political Science and Politics and in World Politics.13 Throughout these exchanges and other discussions they have generated, various arguments have been made as to the exact relationship between area studies and the “scientific” project of comparative politics, yet area studies itself in these discussions remains a fluid concept seemingly indefinable in its methods and vaguely associated with other academic trends outside the discipline (e.g., postmodernism). Even those authors sympathetic to area studies often fail to delineate interdisciplinary frameworks, particular methods, or epistemological challenges in area studies from a “regional” focus, involving language training and case studies, in comparative politics. The ongoing struggle of methods and epistemological vision in comparative politics is described in the introduction to “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium” as follows: “at one end of the methodological spectrum, there are the new students of political culture, inspired by a variety of postmodern or culturally relativistic claims, who doubt the value of causal explanations altogether and thus of conventional social science theorizing in comparative politics. The other methodological extreme is defined by nomothetic claims: because all social actors, including political actors, are rational utility maximizers, deductive logic and modeling, inspired by microeconomics and/or game theory, can help uncover the coherence that underlies the apparent chaos of political life.”14 Such a broad division, located in a particular subfield of political science, sets comparative politics up as a site for the contestation of area studies. Although Atul Kohli and the other contributors to the symposium point to “methodological extremes” currently existing in the field (and the actual polarization among scholars may not appear as drastic as these extremes), other commentators on the state of comparative politics identify the same potentially divisive dynamics. Bernard Grofman, in the opening sentences of his edited volume on “puzzle solving” in comparative politics, characterizes “political science, especially the field of comparative
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politics, [as] torn between advocates of thick description and detailed knowledge of historical, cultural and social context and those who argue the need for simplifying assumptions and formal modeling to make theoretical sense of a complex world.”15 This characterization of “thick and thin” approaches involves, according to Peter Katzenstein, a distinction found within the new institutionalism (partially dependent upon choice-based theories) of the last decade in which “thin” analyses influenced mostly by public-choice theory contrast with the “thick” approaches toward state and society.16 Katzenstein’s own analysis of the area studies debate is one of the most sophisticated within political science. He views area studies as situated between “two adversarial intellectual currents: disciplinary based ‘scientific’ critics who value nomothetic approaches more than contextualization; and cultural critiques developed from the perspective of the humanities and, at times, postmodernism.”17 His contribution to the 2001 special issue on area studies in PS: Political Science and Politics is one of the few among those in this debate that have recognized the critiques of area studies that come from outside the social sciences. The two divergent sites of critique are described as “rationalist-scientific and cultural-humanistic.” Moreover, he allows for the difference between the practice of area studies within political science and its approaches outside the discipline: “the role of area studies depends greatly on the objectives it seeks. Generally speaking, it is probably fair to say that in political science, area studies refers to work oriented toward producing general propositions that are properly contextualized.”18 This point enables a recognition of an “area knowledge” that is positively grounded in social science methods of data collection and theory building and that can be integrated into comparative political analysis along with other productions of knowledge found across area studies in general. Differences between knowledges within area studies make possible its continued contribution to the development of comparative politics. John Harbeson, Cynthia McClintock, and Rachel Dubin discuss this contribution in their positive statement on the future and importance of area studies in the field of comparative politics. Their article provides an introduction to the special theme issue of PS: Political Science and Politics discussed above. The issue itself emerged in light of the success of the Area Studies Liaison Group roundtable at the 2000 annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA). Harbeson,
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McClintock, and Dubin highlight the “integral components of comparative politics,” suggesting: “not only has ‘area studies’ enriched existing theoretical formulations; area studies has established the theoretical formulations themselves. For example, theories of political culture originated in large part among Asian specialists; modernization theory among Africanists; and dependency theory among Latin Americanists. Indeed Robert Bates, as an Africa specialist, made important early contributions to rational choice theory.” In this view, area studies is not located on the margins of the subfield but is in fact the very source of its most important innovations and innovators (including Robert Bates himself). The “practical implication,” they conclude from the articles assembled in the special issue, “is that a fuller incorporation of the insights from area studies is central to the revitalization of comparative politics.”19 Such is the “misnomer” of area studies that its practice has come to be regarded as substandard and different from social science scholarship. It depends upon a view of area studies that overlooks those “political scientists whose works have focused on specific world regions [and] have yielded significant theoretical and conceptual contributions for the discipline.”20 Harbeson, McClintock, and Dubin’s suggestion of this misnomer (an attempt to redefine the vocabulary that has come to frame the debate thus far) functions to minimize the differences found within area studies so as to promote its acceptance. A somewhat different interpretation emerges in Kohli’s conclusion to the World Politics symposium. Described is a process in which “sensibilities” such as “scholarly objectives for the study of ‘foreign cultures and societies’: ‘thick description’ of cultures, an empathetic understanding of the ‘other,’ and critical deconstruction of much-used conceptual categories” can be viewed as “seeping into comparative politics.”21 These are not the sensibilities on display in Harbeson, McClintock, and Dubin’s argument for the incorporation of area studies.22 Katzenstein suggests that an overall “centrist approach” has emerged toward cultural studies in comparative politics, and, he argues, “there is a very good reason for this centrism. Many strands of interpretivist research rely on methods that tend toward historical reconstructions or genealogical excavations rather than hypothesis formulation and testing.”23 At the same time, in his view, orientations grounded in cultural studies have, in both focus and method, been more attentive to issues and the construction
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of political and social identities, a topic that still vexes theories of rational choice. The question of comparative politics’ “center” and “centrist” attitudes toward area studies lies at the heart of the World Politics symposium. When posed with the question “Will the center [of comparative politics] hold?” Peter Evans has placed his confidence in an “eclectic messy center” at the core of the subfield wedged between a “swamp of impenetrable jargon” (assumedly that of poststructuralism) and a “desert of ahistorical formal models.”24 Such a center appears to be eclectic because it “draws on general theories whenever it can but also cares deeply about particular historical outcomes. It sees particular cases as the building blocks for general theories and theories as lenses to identify what is interesting and significant about particular cases.”25 In many ways, Evans’s comments point to a continuous tension within comparative politics between theory building and studies that focus more narrowly on particular cases (so-called small-n studies) in the methodological innovation of the subfield over the last forty years. Responding to Evans’s acceptance of an “eclectic” center, David Collier, the president of the Comparative Politics section of the APSA, stressed the need to move away from eclecticism toward a “disciplined, rigorous center” bringing together “recent innovations in theory and method” with “approaches and tools that have traditionally been the distinctive strengths of comparative politics scholars.”26 The “Revitalizing Area Studies” initiative, sponsored by the Ford Foundation, provides evidence for Collier “that area-based knowledge remains a basic component of the international studies enterprise in the United States.”27 As such, a “disciplined center” for comparative politics “faces a crucial challenge in promoting this multifaceted interaction between cases and theory: rigorous training in field methodology and in strategies of inductive research too often receives insufficient attention in methodology courses within political science.”28 The dialogue Collier advances between qualitative and quantitative approaches in the hope of developing a “disciplined, rigorous center” is continuously referred to in his article as the acceptance of “small-n” studies. This is the only definition of “qualitative” methods offered. The cooperation suggested recognizes that “small-n comparison remains indispensable to our field, and a creative dialogue with quantitative researchers is pushing
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work on comparative method in productive directions.”29 In this sense, area studies represent an emphasis on individual cases, one that requires methods in fieldwork and a specific focus on inductive reasoning (as related to the process of theory formation). Although this significant call for dialogue broadens the confines of what may count as comparative politics, it remains unclear why the qualities of small-n studies go unarticulated. The fieldwork upon which such small-n studies would be based remains unexamined in its qualitative dimensions. In addition, the lack of any serious engagement with epistemological questions regarding the production of knowledge through fieldwork (and the integration of that knowledge, not merely as data, into general theory) effectively defers the question of “scientific rigor” residing in Collier’s synthesis of a disciplinary center.30 Collier’s potentially limited definition of “qualitative” methods demonstrates a certain level of insularity in political science from the broad-range qualitative methods found within area studies. This is the curious “direction” of intellectual conversations common within area studies programs. The call for a “disciplined center” enacts a kind of unidirectional communication that extends out from the discipline, relays its needs for data collection, and sets scientific standards for such collection, but simultaneously attempts to fend off the influx of a diversity of methods, topics, and trends from other parts of the academy (most notably from the humanities). Area studies might serve as an arena for a kind of “interdisciplinary engagement” even though the potentially diverse content and approaches of such communication might not echo back to various “home” departments. For his own contribution to the World Politics symposium, James Scott cautiously offers a “maxim” for the study of comparative politics that points to the potential insularity that both exudes from and threatens to undercut disciplinary strictness. Following the suggestion that anthropology “as a technique, if not as a theory,” is crucial to the practice of comparative politics, Scott advises that “if half of your reading is not outside the confines of political science, you are risking extinction along with the rest of the subspecies. Most of the notable innovations in the discipline have come in the form of insights, perspectives, concepts and paradigms originating elsewhere.”31 In this manner, interdisciplinary work, including comparative politics, could serve as an opening to area studies and a field of communication across
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disciplines, rather than function as the chief site of insularity for political science. Although members of particular disciplines may have the opportunity to share methods, insights, and perspectives with others in different fields, trends within “autonomous” disciplines may not reflect such interaction by its own members. At worst, leading figures in certain disciplines might view interdisciplinary projects in area studies (as well as in other interdisciplinary locales such as women’s studies or gay and lesbian studies) as distractions from broader disciplinary aims. Reflecting on the barriers to interdisciplinary engagement in both disciplines and area studies itself, Benedict Anderson points to “obsolete institutional walls” that direct students within area studies away from focusing on nations in neighboring regions and disciplinary norms that discourage more focused area-based training. In the context of Southeast Asian studies these walls emerge “between different ‘areas’ and partly because there is no university in the US which has three good Asian studies subprograms. Disciplines don’t mind students doing fieldwork in a particular Southeast Asian country, but they discourage broad area background courses.”32 In this analysis, it is possible that even the “area” that provides the common ground for an area studies program generates the same kind of insularity from other sites of scholarship as do the disciplinary standards employed in the social sciences. This kind of insularity emerges from a form of disciplinary “gatekeeping” that may not only forestall engagements between scholars within disciplines and area studies scholarship but (perhaps more importantly for political science) affect the quality and thematics of scholarship within disciplines as well.
Studying Political Universals in Southeast Asia Given the important contributions made by political scientists in the field of Southeast Asian studies in the United States, it would be difficult to include comparative politics as one of those “central fields within Southeast Asian studies” that, according to Bowen, “have had little impact on their discipline.”33 Benedict Anderson’s work on nationalism continues to grab the attention of the subfield and remains core reading in graduate seminars on comparative politics. Southeast Asian studies holds a unique place in the intellectual history of rational
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choice because the debate over the analysis of collective action and peasant politics in the late 1970s and 1980s was played out between two scholars of Southeast Asia, James Scott and Samuel Popkin. Comparative scholarship on Southeast Asia has also generated important innovations in the areas of comparative law, democratization, bureaucracy (in early debates over modernization), elections, and political economy. In the last decade especially, comparative politics of Southeast Asia has witnessed a broad effort to demonstrate how positive knowledge and data can be more fully integrated into the general theorizing found across the subfield. Within comparative politics on Southeast Asia, as with area studies of other regions, there exists a continuous conversation attempting to bridge the case study–general theory chasm. Scholars in this field have echoed major concerns across the subfield over the context-specific nature of area studies by emphasizing the general (or even universal) applicability of theories at work in the study of Southeast Asian elections, regimes, or institutions. Moreover, scholars within Southeast Asian studies engaged in comparative politics are especially attuned to ensuring the relevancy of regional studies to broader, ongoing theoretical movements in political science. The importance of such a conversation reflects the inaccuracy of the assumption that area studies (and even the informal division of comparative politics into regions) results in isolation of scholars from the major debates and theoretical advances of political science. The majority of comparative studies in the last decade followed many of the primary research interests of the subfield as a whole. In the 1990s a general focus emerged on the “passage from authoritarianism and the rise of democratic forms,” in line with the wider growth of the “transitions” scholarship during the same time.34 Following this trend in comparative politics regarding regime transition, Jacques Bertrand, in his discussion of six major works on comparative politics in Southeast Asia, focuses his review essay “Growth and Democracy in Southeast Asia” on “the relationship between regime type and economic growth.”35 The purpose of bringing together the articles he reviews, demonstrating an area focus, is to ask “how can Southeast Asia inform these analytical problems?”36 Highlighting factors such as the importance of ethnicity, “motivations of political leaders,” and the durability of authoritarian regimes, Bertrand rejects the “classic”
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suggestion of the importance of a burgeoning middle class to the transition to democracy and argues that “although economic growth and development have created political pressures on the Southeast Asian regimes, there is no clear relationship between growth and democracy in the region.”37 Rather, Bertrand points to the “threat to the security of a regime” of any kind as “a powerful factor behind the emergence of political regimes committed to high growth.”38 The various regime types found in Southeast Asia (especially Thailand, Indonesia, and Malaysia, in the review) provide a relatively large number of cases in which to situate an analytic discussion of theories of democratization among regimes experiencing high economic growth. In line with much of the theoretical innovation ongoing in contemporary comparative politics, many (though certainly not all) political scientists working on Southeast Asia do not appear to be among the “resistive” mass described earlier by Bates. Instead, a great deal of scholarship is focused on building larger theories concerning potential universals of political behavior. Rather than resistance to general theories, William Case’s attitude is one of “caution.” Contrary to the optimism of some analysts toward social and economic transformations in Southeast Asia in the mid-1990s “that parallel the West in an earlier era, thereby promis[ing] the imminent opening of regime forms,” Case shares a note of analytic pessimism: “most area specialists—in sharp contrast to the deductivists—urge caution.”39 Nevertheless, Case’s own research focuses on regionwide institutional patterns beyond mere case studies of democratization and “semidemocracy.”40 This focus on “semidemocracy, as a distinct research agenda, offers a new vantage point from which to critique the literature on democratic transitions…. It also holds out more exclusive benefits for Southeast Asian specialists. Because semidemocracy is perhaps better institutionalized in Southeast Asia than elsewhere, it offers a new tool for middle range theorizing about the area’s politics.”41 In addition to such regional “theorizing,” the majority of comparative politics scholarship on the region points to its wider application. R. H. Taylor’s introductory comments to his regionally focused volume The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia, for instance, suggest how “the questions one can ask about elections are universal, not specific to Southeast Asia. The regional cases included in this volume are part of a global phenomenon, now nearly universal, and integral
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to the nature of the modern secular constitutional republic.”42 Elections are viewed as an institutional universal that at some level provides comparative politics with some of its analytical loci, that of parliaments, elections, political parties, and the institutions that surround the parliamentary process. Although Australian political scientists Hewison, Robison, and Rodan reject “any general theory of social or economic determination of political outcomes,” they are clear in their support for a comparative method that nonetheless recognizes how “social structural factors establish the environment in which politics operates, and establishes sets of constraints and pressures that shape political outcomes.”43 The introductory analysis in their anthology Southeast Asia in the 1990s: Authoritarianism, Democracy, and Capitalism is rooted firmly in political economy and anticipates the importance of studies of state and society in Southeast Asia, which would come to dominate comparative politics scholarship, particularly in the United States, by the end of the decade. Studies of comparative politics in Southeast Asia have also pointed to particular biases in the conceptualization of terms like “democratization” and the positing of analytic universals providing a style of selfreflexivity often noted as taking place within area studies. Hewison, Robison, and Rodan are quick to identify a core assumption prevalent in “North American behavioral social science” in the late 1980s and early 1990s in which “it is implicit that authoritarianism will evaporate as civil society is able to manage its own affairs, as rational modes of behavior and thought are generalized throughout society and as powerful institutions emerge within civil society.”44 At worst this description recalls the often-unspoken development thesis ever present in U.S. foreign policy equating the promotion of neoliberal trade and economic development initiatives with the liberalizing effects of broadening middle classes. As such, Hewison, Robison, and Rodan suggest a decoupling of democratization from capitalist development even with the admission that capitalist transformation among the countries of Southeast Asia presents “the general context of political power.” Rather than positing a single determination of development’s effect on democratization, the “impact” of these transformations “may be far from uniform.”45 This observation provides an important theoretical caveat that can be applied in studies of political economy elsewhere. “Comparative analysis of dynamics underlying the resilience or
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reorganization of regimes in industrializing capitalist” Southeast Asian societies, they argue, can contribute greatly to the “transitions” debate that raged throughout the 1980s and has given way somewhat to interest in the relations of state and society. In certain cases, political scientists conscious of their roles as area specialists have called for a change in research focus among those in Southeast Asian studies. Taylor’s edited volume The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia, which includes essays from American comparativists Benedict Anderson, Daniel Lev, and William Liddle, stresses the importance of electoral studies to the field of Southeast Asian studies. “Elections,” according to Taylor in his opening remarks, “should no longer be ignored in Southeast Asian studies. They provide a means for understanding the rise of new social classes and the fixed or changing locus of power in any society.”46 Lev reaffirms the importance of elections suggested by Taylor in emphasizing their complexity: “given a question about the meaning of elections, it turns out that one of the least certain and effective things they do is designate leaders and representatives, which may be true everywhere. For the rest, however, the study of elections may reveal just how political systems work and change in a jumble of demographic, social, economic, and ideological constraints.”47 In addition to this unconventional description of elections, which moves toward recognizing the broader political contexts involved in elections beyond their institutional roles, Lev’s real contribution to the volume and to a larger, fieldwide debate is his comments on culture. In his afterword to The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia, Lev is quick to identify a single avenue of explanation missing from all of its contributions: “any mention of culture as a starting point for analysis.”48 This is a telling absence both of the transformations of comparative political analysis in Southeast Asian studies since the 1950s (as Lev argues) and also potentially of the current tendency of comparative politics not to rely on an almost-always inexplicable and stubbornly unquantifiable concept of culture as the beginning of causal explanation. For Lev, the dearth of any reference to culture is evidence of the fact that “the compulsion to find a cultural matrix to explain political, social and economic behavior in the countries of the region has only recently begun to fade slightly.”49 This move away from the “obscuring drape of culture” cautions against positing culture as a
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primary cause for political action or as a determinate in a historical “path.”50 Such a stance differs substantially from current attitudes toward culture embodied in Bates’s critique of area studies. It is actually Lev’s long-term engagement with Southeast Asian studies that enables him to make this argument against posing culture as a catchall explanation for political behavior and events. The negative effects of such an approach to culture arise because, “for one thing, as cultural analysis tends to isolate the local, it promotes sui generis conceptions of Southeast Asian societies, discouraging wider comparisons. For another, despite the availability of alternative interpretations, the persuasiveness of cultural explanations and the receptivity to them of area specialists have lent them remarkable purchase.”51 In this light, an overly reductive framing of culture and the receptiveness to such an approach in the multidisciplinary environment of area studies have actually led to a cul-de-sac in attempts to more fully explain political and social events. Bowen has also pointed out this reliance on culture in the study of Southeast Asian politics. Focused particularly on the assumption that “long-term cultural patterns inform current political behavior,” cultural-based explanations of politics have, in fact, eclipsed “the behavioristic-attitudinal notion of ‘political culture’” that still sets the agenda (in varying ways over the last three decades) of scholarship in political science.52 Bowen cites the study of culturally based political institutions such as “the local power-broker often called ‘datu,’ the mandala or ‘circle of kings,’ patron-client ties, and the (patrimonial) ‘bureaucratic polity’” as examples of this contrasting research concentration.53 These examples transformed the early study of politics in Southeast Asian studies and still have some influence on current studies of politics and government. Unlike Bates’s analysis, Lev’s analysis does not, in its conclusion, advocate the end, containment, or instrumentalization (namely, transforming area specialists into mere data collectors) of area studies. Rather, he briefly outlines the impact of cultural analysis on the study of comparative politics and suggests setting aside a conceptualization of culture that is totalizing and all-encompassing. It should be noted that the rejection of this style of cultural analysis has also been advanced over the last decade in the field of cultural anthropology, in critiques of cultural difference within cultural studies, and by some humanities-
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based scholarship within Southeast Asian studies. In reconsidering the “constitution” of states in society and addressing how states have been traditionally studied in political science, Joel Migdal points out the traditionally “marginal” status of the study of culture in relation to the “practices” of the state. In his summary of “culturalist perspectives” toward the state, he notes that, “of the three lenses commonly used in studies of comparative politics—culturalist, rationalist, and institutionalist—the culturalist perspective has had, by far, the smallest impact on the study of why states turn out as they do.”54 Migdal, known for his work in Middle Eastern studies and comparative politics, turns to Southeast Asian studies and Clifford Geertz’s analysis of the theater state in Bali as a first example of such culturalist perspectives focused on the nature of the state. The dilemma for political science, in Migdal’s opinion, is that, when addressing culture, “we know that culture is important, that the state is more than a configuration of roles or an interchangeable structure; we just cannot quite figure out how to study it comparatively, how to make it much more than a giant residual category.”55 Migdal’s point here articulates exactly the reticence of many within political science to address culture (and, if the hint from area studies is taken, cultural difference). The epistemological assumptions and methodological requirements that reside in the very concept of comparison in political science function to seemingly limit access to the idea of culture. Culture acts as a “giant residual category” because the formation of comparative theory (which here should not be taken in a generic sense) rejects culture as a site beyond rationality and illegible in formal systems of representation (even in the political practice of elections). The final sentence of Migdal’s State in Society references this insularity: “we must abandon approaches that isolate the state as a unit of analysis. To do that, we must develop the means to forge the efforts of the historical institutionalists and the culturalists, who until now have worked mostly in splendid isolation from one another.”56 Assuming the value of Migdal’s final call, it would seem that area studies, nominally outside the very discipline which needs reform, should have provided a likely place for such interaction, if such a “splendid isolation” does exist among practitioners of comparative inquiry. The studies outlined in this section encapsulate approaches toward comparative politics that are engaged with the major trends
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and methods currently accepted throughout the subfield. Aside from a regional focus and, in some cases, a tendency toward “middle-range theorizing,” however, it is uncertain how these examples of comparative politics represent the “culturalism” or humanities-based orientations of area studies. These approaches to comparative politics that I have reviewed above for the most part do not heed Migdal’s call for a more dispersed and nuanced study of politics. There is little recognition of political power as functioning outside established political institutions, beyond the individual acts of political leaders, or within transnational flows (either explicitly political or with cultural implications, such as migration, overseas communities, or the dually economic and cultural nexus of global labor/consumption).57 James Scott’s work, widely recognized as contributing to the literature on comparative politics, serves as an important guide for the search for power and politics outside the institutional locales commonly studied in comparative politics. Even though his insights into peasant collective action, hidden transcripts of resistance, or the importance of the politics of naming have been highly influential outside political science, little of the current scholarship in comparative politics on Southeast Asia follows these fruitful research questions. This is the primary question of the status of Southeast Asian studies in contemporary American comparative politics: should the relationship between Southeast Asian studies and political science in the United States involve a mere focus on Southeast Asia as a region or should it incorporate research questions and methods that develop out of an active interdisciplinary engagement. There is no simple answer here, but the question itself complicates the assumptions in criticisms by Bates and others of the influence of area studies in political science.
Islam, Civil Society, and the Engagement of Comparative Political Theory In light of challenges within political science to fully engage with work and approaches found within area studies, it is important to explore the potentials of other spaces within the discipline that may allow for more meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration. One subfield within political science that relies heavily on the work of area studies is that of comparative political theory. Although some figures associated with
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this style of comparative work have long been advocating such a comparative approach to political theory, such as Fred Dallmayr, comparative political theory is a relatively new subfield within political science.58 It involves a shift away from the Eurocentric focus of political theory in general, and liberal political theory in particular, toward an inquiry into non-European and North American philosophies, polities, and political practices. Such inquiries may involve the treatment of canonical philosophical texts; involve textual analysis focused on postcolonial themes such as nationalism, democratization, and citizenship; or employ ethnography to explore claims to unity within political community or the politics of identity and subjectivity.59 Pheng Cheah’s Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation is an example of recent work that demonstrates the possibilities of bringing political theory into conversation with Southeast Asian studies.60 Whereas the “comparative” nature of comparative politics leads scholars to formulate claims of generality regarding political behavior, the work of comparative political theory poses broader questions through the act of comparison concerning the meaning and depth of concepts at the core of political analysis. In fact, due to this focus on the definition of such concepts as justice, ethics, community, and even democracy, the comparison at the heart of comparative political theory requires a critical treatment of all claims of generality made regarding politics globally. Roxanne Euben, in her recent work on post-Enlightenment reason and the modernist critique of Sayyid Qutb, suggests that comparative political theory is “perhaps best understood as a hybrid of the contemporary disciplines of political theory and comparative politics, for it entails the attempt to ask questions about the nature and value of politics in a variety of cultural and historical contexts.”61 I would like to take this description further by emphasizing the role that area studies plays in the formation of theoretical questions regarding the “cultural and historical contexts” out of which politics arises. The nuance of comparative political theory lies in the recognition that the definition of the political cannot be reduced to a model of reasonable subjects and (assumptions of) the generalities of their political behavior. Instead, any account of the political must also address the differences and events it must in some way manage, namely, race,
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gender, class, (post)colonialism, geopolitics, and culture. These moments of difference and contestation in politics inform the very meanings and traditions that give “value” to politics. Comparative political theory, therefore, enables an approach toward cultural difference even though (just as with the anonymous rational subject above) politics cannot be solely reduced to culture. In this manner, comparison absolutely requires the interdisciplinary engagement that area studies must undertake in order to enlarge and make more complex an understanding of the dynamics of power at work within the political and its ongoing claims to sovereignty. The outline of a similar theoretical project can be found in the opening of Dipesh Chakrabarty’s Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Although not a political theorist himself, Chakrabarty’s initial remarks on the genealogies of “political modernity” in South Asia describe a critical intersection of political theory and area studies: “concepts such as citizenship, the state, civil society, public sphere, human rights, equality before the law, the individual, distinctions between public and private, the idea of the subject, democracy, popular sovereignty, social justice, scientific rationality, and so on all bear the burden of European thought and history. One simply cannot think of political modernity without these and other related concepts that found a climatic form in the course of the European Enlightenment and the nineteenth century.”62 Chakrabarty’s aim here is not to historicize political modernity in South Asia, or, in other words, to give prominence to European political traditions at the expense of reducing modernity in former colonies to mere replicas of those traditions, but to demonstrate the imbrication of the ideologies of European colonialism in the logics of Indian nationalism, which he explores further in Provincializing Europe. In doing so, however, in the first part of the quotation above Chakrabarty identifies perfectly the primary topics of political theory itself. The task of comparative political theory is to trace further imbrications of this kind with the hope of identifying new political dynamics both within and without European political traditions. In fact, the emphasis above on European thought is designed to elucidate how such thought is “both indispensable and inadequate in helping us to think through the various life practices that constitute the political and the historical in India.”63 My point in presenting comparative political theory at this
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juncture is to identify this “inadequacy” (perhaps an inadequacy that comes forth from the play of difference at the very moment of comparison) as the necessity for engagement with other approaches and thought outside political theory and political science more generally—engagement here for the sake of producing knowledge that is “a reciprocal, transformative, and, perhaps above all, ongoing process” rather than a process with the aim of filling in “gaps” in a knowledge of political generalities.64 An example of comparative political theory’s potential contribution to Southeast Asian studies can be understood with a turn toward (or engagement with) contemporary scholarship in the field of anthropology. Recently, there has been a growth of scholarship in anthropology regarding civil society and Islam in Southeast Asia. Civil society has long been the province of theories of democratization in comparative politics and liberal political theory, yet the most innovative thinking being done on the possibilities for civil society within Muslim politics and Islamic law has emerged from outside the discipline of political science.65 Works by anthropologists Michael Peletz, John Bowen, and Robert Hefner represent a significant contribution to theories and accounts of the development of civil society found within political science.66 Moreover, these works parallel a growing interest among scholars and intellectuals in Southeast Asia in articulating the role Islam plays in the development of civil society. Nakamura Mitsuo, Sharon Siddique, and Omar Farouk Bajunid’s Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia is to date the most comprehensive collection of a discussion by regional intellectuals of this political role for Islam.67 Norani Othman’s recent scholarship has also aimed “to examine whether within the various Muslim movements [in Malaysia] one can find any significant potential or initiative for an Islam-based democratization that promotes tolerance and respect for pluralism within the Muslim community itself as well as other religious communities in the nation-state.”68 This academic inquiry emerges out of a complex period of transformation in Muslim politics especially in Malaysia and Indonesia that has in the last ten years allowed for a public expression of the importance of Islam to the shape of future democratization. The context for these calls for democratic reform includes the success of private Islamic associations such as Sisters in Islam (in Malaysia) and the Liberal Islam Network
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(in Indonesia), the rise and fall of the reformasi movement in Malaysia in support of Anwar Ibrahim,69 and the broader possibilities for democratic transition after the fall of the Suharto regime in Indonesia and the departure of Mahathir Mohamad from his long-held position as Malaysia’s prime minister. For my purposes here, the anthropological literature I will focus on exemplifies the interdisciplinary engagement necessary for the success of area studies in developing approaches toward this changing political context. In each case, these anthropologies of law, civil society, and Muslim politics begin their analyses with a treatment of theories of civil society first posed within political science. More importantly, the literature under discussion (with the intent of revision) is specifically the work of political theory. Discussions of Alexis de Tocqueville, Jürgen Habermas, and various liberal political theorists (such as Michael Walzer and John Rawls) are common to all three works. It is crucial to note that such thorough discussions are at times absent from analyses of civil society in comparative politics, demonstrating a noticeable lack of engagement even within the discipline of political science between subfields. In this instance, it is area studies that reintroduces political theory to central comparative questions of civil society and presents several new models for addressing the study of civil society within comparative political theory. The main focus of Bowen’s Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning and Peletz’s Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia lies in the relationship between the practice of Islamic law and the potentials for civil society in Muslim politics. The presence of dual legal systems (religious and secular) in both Indonesia and Malaysia makes such studies very important to the rethinking of theories of civil society within political theory that are premised on a core assumption of secularism. Within liberal political theory the definition of justice at the foundation of civil society depends primarily upon a classic separation of church and state.70 The political reality of dual legal systems within democratizing nations raises critical theoretical issues of citizenship, the just resolution of intercommunal disputes, and the protection of the constitutional rights of women and religious minorities across legal systems.71 These issues are addressed at different levels with varying consequences for civil society in accounts presented by Bowen and Peletz.
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Bowen’s ethnography of Islamic law in Indonesia is framed from the onset in terms of an investigation of the possibilities of political and legal pluralism. His study engages with long-standing debates within political theory as to the definition and formation of political structures of pluralism. One of the founding questions of Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia reflects an effort to challenge the conceptualization of pluralism within liberal political theory. In fact, the question Bowen opens with is perfectly phrased with regard to the focus of comparative political theory as a field: “how far can the tradition of Locke, Hobbes, Kant and Mill be stretched to fit political communities composed of differing subcommunities, each with its own set of values and rules for social life?”72 This inquiry does not begin with a suspicion of the inapplicability of these theorists’ work based on a configuration of cultural difference, namely, that “European” political traditions are too distant from the foundations of “Asian” polities. Instead, it raises the engaging theoretical issue of the durability of liberal political theory when considering the quality of pluralism in highly multicultural states, an issue that obtains a global resonance, especially in the United States. A point of departure for addressing these questions can be found in Bowen’s treatment of the liberal political theory of John Rawls. Contrary to Rawls’s assertion that comprehensive doctrines (such as religion) should be excluded from “public reasoning” in determining the meaning of justice,73 Bowen argues that in the case of Indonesia “much public reasoning retains its foundation in comprehensive doctrines, and in particular its foundation in specific understandings of Islam and particular adat-based conceptions of the world.”74 This fact is not automatically a challenge to the formation of pluralism (as it would be for Rawls) but appears as a basis for public reasoning. The aim of Bowen’s work is not to devalue such reasoning, or “historicize” reasoning not founded on explicitly secular understandings of the political, but to demonstrate a particular relationship between cultural practices and “political conceptions of justice” at the basis of Indonesian political community. This relationship seems uniquely appropriate as an object of inquiry for anthropology. As another example of direct interdisciplinary engagement, the limitations of liberal political theory in a comparative setting lead Bowen to argue that “the answers provided by much political theory suffer from a narrow empirical range and a legalistic
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focus.”75 Methodologically, ethnographies of law and legal systems allow for a view of localized practices of “public reasoning” and the diversity of “political conceptions of justice” across a given political community. The variety of methods employed within comparative political theory, including ethnography, attempt to recognize varying locales or registers of political practice beyond a focus on institutions and official political actors. Larger questions for political theory emerge when Bowen returns to the central question of Rawls’s long-term theoretical project, namely, the quest for an overlapping rational (or moral) consensus upon which definitions of justice that act as a foundation for civil society are based. In light of Indonesia’s dual-court system, debates among Muslim legal scholars over issues of Islamic jurisprudence, and a diversity of legal practices, Bowen argues that “there is neither a single political structure regulating issues of basic justice, nor an overlapping consensus on the current pluralistic legal arrangements.”76 This repudiation of the foundation of Rawlsian definitions of justice is not merely taken as an empirical rejection of theoretical premises but raises new questions for political theory itself. If no overlapping consensus emerges, Bowen asks, “do we then conclude that, a priori, such societies cannot be constitutional democracies? Or do we take such instances as material to be accommodated in the next iteration of political theory?”77 It is possible that comparative approaches to political theory may enable such accommodation and offer a necessarily tentative future “iteration” of new thinking on the dynamics of civil society. Whereas Bowen’s work reconsiders the capacity of Islamic law to serve as one foundation for public reasoning in civil society, Peletz’s Islamic Modern explores the effects of the practice of Islamic law on one of civil society’s primary institutions: the family. In general, Islamic courts in Malaysia, again perhaps contrary to the expectations of liberal political theory, have in fact “encouraged a certain type of modernity and civil society.”78 Peletz argues that religious courts create elements necessary to the success of civil society such as providing a relatively open forum for disputes, emphasizing “contractual responsibilities” in family law, gradually providing for the “erosion of extended kinship” as the primary locus for political attachments, and fostering individual autonomy as courts mediate between individual claimants and communal pressures in favor of certain norms and
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judicial outcomes. Rather than posing relationships based on cultural practices or religion that reduce politics to “culturalist” explanations, Peletz’s analysis here fits neatly into themes central to contemporary trends in the field of comparative politics. Particularly in terms of the “contractual responsibilities” and autonomy that emerge out of the proceedings of Islamic courts, the ethnographies foregrounded in Islamic Modern highlight political practices that are often overlooked in the institutional approaches found within political science. It is the complex treatment of family and kinship in Islamic Modern that provides an important corrective for political theory and a possible site for further study within comparative political theory. Family appears as an occluded institution in contemporary analysis on civil society, particularly in light of the importance placed on legal and governmental institutions within liberal political theory and comparative politics. “Informed understandings of the possibilities and challenges of civil society in the context of specific nationstates,” Peletz suggests, “will require looking much more closely at the domains of kinship that obtain in the nation-state entities in question.”79 Peletz’s analysis outlines the ways in which Islamic courts enable a transformation of kinship relations that is important to the development of modern civil society. Although the terms may be explicitly anthropological (as it is religion and family under analysis), the consequence of this transformation outlined in Islamic Modern is especially political in its implications for understanding civil society. This point represents an important intervention into the slim treatment of the family found in the conceptualization of civil society within liberal political theory.80 According to Peletz, liberal accounts of civil society fail to provide an investigation of the family that is “helpful in specifying the real or imagined conditions of family life, kinship, or sociability that might serve in important ways as the template, model, or other basis for sustaining social or moral order.”81 Islamic courts in Malaysia serve to transform kinship relations from locally determined and politically limited relations into structures for family life that fit into more broadly (or nationally) defined models of the modern family (such as in the idea of Melayu baru, or “New Malay”) and national citizenship (in the courts’ attempt to develop autonomous individuals). Contributing to a growing anthropological critique of political theory, Peletz complements Bowen’s assessment
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of Rawlsian frameworks for justice with his own critique of the treatment of the family within the communitarianism of Michael Walzer. In contrast to Walzer’s inclusion of the family into his definition of civil society as “the space of uncoerced human associations,” Peletz calls for a more thorough understanding of the “state-mediated dialectics of kinship and civil society” that shape fundamental elements of political community.82 Islamic courts represent a crucial site in the work of this dialectic. It is the work of ethnography that isolates this dynamic, demonstrating how the family cannot be assumed to exist unproblematically outside the power and politics that shape the contours of civil society (through its tensions with the nation-state). Although Islamic courts in Malaysia are able to effect transformations in kinship, Peletz is clear that such changes within Islamic institutions and idioms are not sufficient in themselves to produce democratic relations among citizens or ethnic and religious communities. The work of provincial Islamic courts does not necessarily provide an Islamic model for the development of civil society. Rather the “projects of [political] modernity” at the core of the courts’ practices lead to an “uneven expansion of civil society” and depend upon “fragile and contingent” political conditions in which democracy is not necessarily the guaranteed outcome.83 From the point of view of comparative political theory, however, the benefit of Peletz’s account is not that it allows for the extraction of some kind of workable theory of civil society from the political experiences outlined in the case studies he provides. The variety of cases and broader impact of their outcomes enable theorists to identify mechanisms of power within civil society that emerge through Islamic courts in ways that are counter to the association of such courts with authoritarian theocracy. Peletz’s care to qualify his findings in his conclusion reiterates this point. A theoretical assessment must first acknowledge the courts’ role in a variety of modernizations (political, familial, religious), out of which one possibility may be democratization. It is, in fact, possible to rework Peletz’s argument to suggest that a “fragile and contingent” political process involved in the production of civil society is always at the core of any democratization—even within those countries already recognized as democratic. Wider in scope and far less anthropological in its approach, Robert Hefner’s Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia outlines
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the broader potential for civil society at the foundations of Muslim politics in Indonesia. Civil Islam provides a political history of a Muslim political community that is diverse in its ideological commitments, interpretations of Islam, and its views of the relationship between religion and state, even under the weight of the authoritarianism of the Suharto regime. At the basis of such diversity, or “pluralism,” lies the figure of the “Muslim democrat,” who shifts the debate over civil society found in liberal political theory by articulating a “new public ethic” that is explicitly formed through (though not solely founded on) Islamic values and practices.84 Hefner argues that civil Islam, contrary to the individualistic and nominally secular versions of civil society found within liberal political theory, is founded on the core assumption “that society involves more than autonomous individuals, and democracy more than markets and the state.”85 Yet the diversity of Muslim politics in Indonesia over the course of the twentieth century has demonstrated that there is no single “application” of a “public ethos” that would absolutely determine the nature of politics, as in the political equation of an Islamic state. Hefner’s general approach toward Muslim politics in Indonesia is to map the formation of a “Muslim public sphere” that is founded in the debates over the status of Islam in the formation of a newly independent Indonesian state, survives the deadly coup of 1965–1966 and the “regimist” Islam of the 1980s and 1990s, and plays a significant role in the post-Suharto democratic transitions of present-day Indonesian politics. The presence of a “Muslim public sphere,” framed through a discussion of the work of Jürgen Habermas and Alexis de Tocqueville, leads Hefner to the more general proposition of a tradition of “civil pluralist Islam” in Indonesia. “Civil Islam” assumes, not that all Muslims involved in such a tradition adhere to a pluralist politics, but that the political and religious debates among Muslims over the importance of Islam to the state and moral authority lead to competing visions of a “new public ethic” rather than any kind of authoritative framework for an Islamic state. Such debates become the terrain of Indonesian Muslim politics over the course of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries and require further theoretical consideration of the potential role of religion in the formation of civil society. Hefner’s account generates an entire vocabulary of new political configurations, including “civil Islam,” a “new public ethic,” and a “Muslim public
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sphere” that can act as starting points for future inquiries in comparative political theory. Another example of this vocabulary is found in the continuing diversity of religious and political commitments among Indonesian Muslim intellectuals, which is described by Hefner as an “intra-Muslim debate” and which has prevented the formation of an Islamic state in Indonesia and continues to frame Muslim politics.86 This debate played itself out over the course of the twentieth century under a variety of signs and couplings such as “traditionalist” Islam and “reformist” Islam; Nahdatul Ulama and Muhammadiyah; procommunist and promilitary Muslims; nationalists, modernist Muslims, traditionalists, and communists, among which Muslim electoral support was split in Indonesia’s first postindependence election; and finally the colonial and anthropological division between abangan and santri Muslims. Hefner cites in this political competition a core source of “civic resources” and “endowments” necessary for the production of civil society. This emphasis closely follows discussions of civil society found within comparative politics that view healthy and durable voluntary associations as crucial to the strength of civil society. In this regard, Hefner’s engagement with political science extends to an insightful review of the “social-capital” literature, pioneered by Robert Putnam, which has shaped recent analysis of civil society within the subfield of comparative politics. Putnam characterizes social capital as the “features of social organization such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit.”87 As such, the associations and networks at the basis of the political competition described above generate the social capital that enables the “civil” politics of Indonesia’s “civil pluralist Islam.” It is the experience of authoritarianism in Indonesia under the Suharto regime, however, which successfully limited and determined the shape of Muslim politics, that leads Hefner to suggest a revision of the importance of voluntary associations found in the social-capital literature. The capacity of voluntary associations independent of the state, the “civil endowments” of a political community, must be complemented by the commitment of the state itself toward democratic reform. Without such a commitment from both state and society, “civic consolidation” cannot emerge. In this instance, it is an anthropologist who is arguing to “bring the state back in” when considering the
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potentials for civil society and democratic transformation under authoritarian regimes. Civil Islam, therefore, serves as an excellent example of the necessity for political scientists to engage across disciplines when investigating concepts at the center of their discipline. In all three works discussed above, the concept of civil society is reworked from outside political science in a way that challenges some of the main assumptions of political theory and comparative politics. The immediate worry in this kind of interdisciplinary collaboration with anthropology, for scholars such as Robert Bates, would be the status of culture in analysis external to political science. One example may appear in Hefner’s insistence that the creation of “civil structures” that foster a society’s “civil ideals” depends partially on a return to the political culture of that society. This return to culture, as has been seen in the other works discussed so far, does not, however, involve a culturalist logic lying beyond the scope of politics. Instead, Hefner refers to a democratic practice in which “native intellectuals have to look into their own social experience and derive from it a model of political culture that affirms principles of autonomy, mutual respect, and volunteerism.”88 Again, these attributes of (what must be recognized as a vision of liberal) political culture appear more grounded in political theory than in the imagined culturalist foundations assumed of anthropology articulated within the area studies debate within political science. In fact, Hefner’s broader characterization of “civil pluralist Islam,” which is intellectually motivated by “denying the wisdom of a monolithic ‘Islamic’ state and instead affirming democracy, voluntarism, and a balance of countervailing powers in a state and society,” also involves an analysis that lacks culturalist terms and demonstrates a previous engagement with political science literature.89 This description of Islam as the foundation of pluralism and civil society requires a reciprocal engagement from within comparative political theory and comparative politics in order to reconsider the secularist foundations of previous accounts of civil society. Absent from this discussion of the opportunities for comparative political theory in recent anthropology on civil society and Muslim politics in Southeast Asia is a broader treatment of the claims outlined above. Certainly there are other bodies of theory that inform comparative political theory, such as feminist theory, neo-Marxist theory, and cultural
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studies, that may allow substantive critiques of the very idea of civil society itself. Notably, the absence of any discussion of Antonio Gramsci’s critique of civil society betrays a commitment to liberal political theory within these anthropologies.90 The objective of my review of this new scholarship on civil society in the region and its engagement with political theory, however, is linked to demonstrating the applicability of comparative political theory to contemporary concerns within Southeast Asian studies. Moreover, I have attempted to isolate a particular academic trend in which interdisciplinary engagement is not only ongoing but also necessary for rethinking basic assumptions of political dynamics and theoretical traditions at work within political science. A more detailed and engaged reading of this growing literature on Islam and civil society in Southeast Asia may in fact participate in the next “iteration” of theoretical criticism on civil society within political theory. In this way, an engagement between area studies and political science would be multidirectional and necessary for future innovations in the study of political theory and political practice.
Conclusion After a decade of intense debate focused on the particular question of rational-choice analysis in comparative politics, it has become apparent that no one given method or theoretical approach toward politics will stand alone as the premiere scientific paradigm of political science. If the innovations and methodological contestation found within the subfield of comparative politics are taken as indicators of the diversity of the discipline, rather than viewed as a “crisis” of its less “scientific” margins, an interesting epistemological interrelationship among different “theories” emerges. In the midst of the rational-choice and area studies method disputes it should by now be obvious that a case can be made for reason as the basis for certain kinds of politics (rational-choice analysis), institutions as a significant milieu for the practice of politics (as in new institutionalism), and the very terms and discourses that inform “reason” and work to ascribe power to institutions (literally to make them political) as socially constructed “concepts” (as in certain variants of cultural and area studies). This overly simplistic epistemological triumvirate demonstrates how no one approach to politics trumps the others (although this is not to say that particular
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approaches in the current landscape of comparative politics are more dominant than others). Perhaps hidden in this debate, beyond disciplinary and methodological questions, lies the critical question of comparison itself. Area studies is essentially a comparative project. Moreover, if it is to truly become a site for interdisciplinary engagement, area studies must address more generally how it relates to this task of comparison. How does it define its field? What is the role of geopolitics in such a definition? What themes emerge across disciplines that make up the central questions of the field of Southeast Asian studies and why? Are there topics transnational in nature that defy the disciplinary contours of academic knowledge and require interdisciplinary approaches? Finally, how might disciplinary knowledge affect the scope of area studies knowledge? Whereas a large amount of scholarship has grappled with the question of comparison within political science, area studies as a project has avoided such introspection, perhaps because of the dependence on disciplinary methods and epistemological claims. Foregrounding comparison, however, may be a crucial element in reassessing the purpose and meaning of area studies and its interdisciplinary foundations. I would argue that the effort within political science to characterize the “culturalist” influence of area studies has prevented an engagement with the competing visions of the practice of comparison, understandings of the practice of politics, or conceptualizations of culture embodied in various area studies. The area studies debate, especially in how its terms have been set by those seeking the strict reform of area studies, is posed against the figure of area specialization and avoids the methodological or epistemological innovations it could present to the discipline. A different understanding of comparison is urged by anthropologist Rosalind Morris in her careful qualification of the notion of comparison: comparativism that seeks to enact a politics of deterritorialization, and that is strictly determined by thematic interests, would perhaps be less compelling to me than more vigorous comparativist exchanges between Southeast Asianists. By this I do not mean to propose a case study model … rather, I mean to suggest that, for example, careful interrogations of the emergence and circulation of new forms of wealth, new logics of risk-taking and capital, new kinds of identity
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and criminality in historically comparable moments of different Southeast Asian contexts can prove to be especially rich sources of new knowledge and reflection.91
Morris emphasizes a kind of comparison not necessarily bound (though still informed) by classes, states, or national markets (the classic “units of analysis” found in comparative politics), but one determined by practices and their movement across “different Southeast Asian contexts.” Moreover, her advocacy of “more vigorous comparativist exchanges between Southeast Asianists” serves as a call for the kind of interdisciplinary engagement that I have argued for throughout this essay. In the wake of the Asian financial crisis, for instance, it is in the overlapping projects of political economy, anthropology, and sociology that an account of new forms of class politics and social protest or deepening poverty and localized entrepreneurism may emerge. These consequences of the crisis occurred simultaneously but with different intensity and social forms in different national contexts. Another example lies in the current interest, particularly in Malaysia and Singapore, shown toward the history of Arab communities in Southeast Asia. This broad comparative focus calls for a “multisited” historical approach that must work in conversation with narratives of the spread of reformist Islamic thought into the region at the turn of the twentieth century and an investigation into how Arab communities fit into the legal structures of colonial regimes. These two examples demonstrate the possibility of scholarship that fosters interdisciplinary communication and critique. The process of comparison is in fact intensified across various disciplines and their subfields. Rather than participating in a competition between two academic fields (a discipline and area studies) with seemingly contradictory aims, area studies can be an engagement that explores these critical possibilities of comparison. Such possibilities result in the reworking of comparative questions and methodologies. Only through this kind of rethinking of the potentials of area studies, and the creation of interdisciplinary sites such as comparative political theory, can new approaches to the central questions of the disciplines themselves emerge.
Notes 1
Mark Tessler, ed., with Jodi Nachtwey and Anne Banda, Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), vii.
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Benedict Anderson, in Weighing the Balance: Southeast Asian Studies Ten Years After, ed. Itty Abraham (New York: Social Science Research Council, 2000), 22. Robert H. Bates, “Letter from the President: Area Studies and the Discipline,” Newsletter of the APSA Organized Section in Comparative Politics 7, no. 1 (1997): 1. Such a vision is reminiscent of the quest for scientific progress and the anxious process of forming and maintaining epistemological paradigms critiqued in Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3d ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) (originally published 1962). Robert Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy?” PS: Political Science and Politics 30, no. 2 (1997): 166. Ibid. Bates, “Letter from the President,” 1. Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline,” 166. Bates, “Letter from the President,” 1. Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline,” 167. Ibid., 168. This progress, however, can be attained only with the help of area specialists. Area studies, in Bates’s view, are essential in the generation of data in the field of “area knowledge”: “the use of such methods requires precisely the kinds of data gathered by ethnographers, historians, and students of culture. It requires knowledge of sequence, perceptions, beliefs, expectations, and understandings” (Bates, “Letter from the President,” 2). What emerges from this arrangement is a natural, intellectual (and global) division of labor in which area studies would provide researchers with the language and “area” training for data collection, and scholars working with innovative “theory” would have the task of applying general theories to the data. In the end a “combination of local knowledge and general modes of reasoning, of area studies and formal theory, represents a highly promising margin” in political science after the dichotomization of area studies and rational-choice analysis. See Bates, “Area Studies and the Discipline,” 169. For Chalmers Johnson this division of labor reflects a “hierarchy, with the area specialist in the role of a gold miner digging away at the cliff face of a foreign culture, while the rational choice theorist is the master goldsmith who can turn this raw ore into beautiful things” (Johnson, “Preconception vs. Observation, or the Contributions of Rational Choice Theory and Area Studies to Contemporary Political Science,” PS: Political Science and Politics 30, no. 2 [1997]: 172). These features included two special sections on area studies in PS: Political Science and Politics in June 1997 and December 2001, and “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics” symposium published in World Politics in October 1995. Atul Kohli, introduction to “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” special issue, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 1–2. Kohli’s peculiar use of the term “political culture” to describe a position potentially influenced by poststructuralism and cultural studies actually overlooks the methodological importance of early studies of political culture that assisted in the development of current choice-based and economistic accounts of political behavior. Moreover,
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Carlo Bonura current studies of political culture rely primarily on statistical data collection and a conceptualization of political culture that assumes the representativeness of national and subnational boundaries in the formation of difference among political cultures. Bernard Grofman, ed., Political Science as Puzzle Solving (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1. Peter J. Katzenstein, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” special issue, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 11. Peter J. Katzenstein, “Area and Regional Studies in the United States,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 4 (2001): 789. Ibid., 790. John W. Harbeson, Cynthia McClintock, and Rachel Dubin, “‘Area Studies’ and the Discipline: Towards New Interconnections,” PS: Political Science and Politics 34, no. 4 (2001): 787. Ibid. Atul Kohli, conclusion to “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” special issue, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 47. Nor are they common “sensibilities” among all of those associated with area studies. Deconstruction, for instance, is almost completely absent from analysis of politics in the subfield of comparative politics. Susanne Rudolph’s contribution to the Princeton symposium comes closest to providing an example of the target of many critiques of “culturalism” or postmodernism found in this debate. Relying on a pairing of the methods of Max Weber and Michel Foucault to reconsider the premises of comparative work, Rudolph argues against the “continuity” necessary in positivist analyses in comparative politics research. As a somewhat defensive statement on a reorientation of comparative work, Rudolph assures her readers that an “interest in the Foucaultian suggestion of discontinuities and disruptions is not about suspending comparison, generalization, and explanation…. Discontinuous, nonholistic projects make it more possible to represent the contested nature of ‘reality,’ to avoid subsuming contradictions to ‘larger’ truths or suppressing them altogether in the interest of ‘consistency.’” See Susanne H. Rudolph, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” special issue, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 26. Rudolph’s contribution to the symposium represents a remarkable break in the philosophy of comparison found in other contributors’ statements.’ Katzenstein, in “Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” 13. Peter Evans, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” special issue, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 2. Ibid., 3. David Collier, “Building a Disciplined, Rigorous Center in Comparative Politics,” in “Data Collection and Fieldwork in Comparative Politics: Issues, Incentives, Opportunities,” ed. Daniel Treisman, special issue, APSA-CP: Newsletter of the Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association 10, no. 2 (1999): 1. Ibid., 4.
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Ibid. Ibid., 2. In fact, comments on the failure of ethnographic analysis in the pursuit of fieldwork (in which “data collection” and fieldwork’s importance to the creation of more complex “data sets” are emphasized) appear later in the very same issue of APSA-CP with the publication of a symposium entitled “Data Collection and Fieldwork in Comparative Politics: Issues, Incentives, Opportunities.” Jennifer Widner’s opening article, “Maintaining Our Knowledge Base,” indicts “the ‘area studies’ counter-revolution” for “failing to deliver. Ethnographic studies too often collapsed into stories about particular cases, with little potential for providing general insight” (in “Data Collection and Fieldwork in Comparative Politics: Issues, Incentives, Opportunities,” ed. Daniel Treisman, special issue, APSA-CP: Newsletter of the Organized Section in Comparative Politics of the American Political Science Association 10, no. 2 [1999]: 18). James C. Scott, in “The Role of Theory in Comparative Politics: A Symposium,” special issue, World Politics 48, no. 1 (1995): 36. Anderson, in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 42. John Bowen, “The Development of Southeast Asian Studies in the United States,” in The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ed. David L. Szanton (University of California Press/University of California International and Area Studies Digital Collection, edited vol. 3, article 10, 2003, available online at http://repositories.cdlib.org/uciaspubs/editedvolumes/3/10), 18. Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison, and Gary Rodan, “Introduction: Changing Forms of State Power in Southeast Asia,” in Southeast Asia in the 1990’s: Authoritarianism, Democracy and Capitalism, ed. Kevin Hewison, Richard Robison, and Gary Rodan (St. Leonards, Australia: Allen and Unwin, 1993), 3. Jacques Bertrand, “Growth and Democracy in Southeast Asia,” Comparative Politics 31 (1998): 355. Ibid., 356. Ibid., 369. Ibid., 356. William F. Case, “Can the ‘Halfway House’ Stand? Semidemocracy and Elite Theory in Three Southeast Asian Countries,” Comparative Politics 28, no. 4 (1996): 437. In providing a brief definition of “semidemocracy,” Case argues that its “key feature … separating it from semiauthoritarianism, is the containment of liberal participation more than electoral contestation. Rival social constituencies are thus given few venues in which autonomously to bridge their differences, and their vertical orientations are preserved” (ibid., 459). Ibid., 457. R. H. Taylor, ed., The Politics of Elections in Southeast Asia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 7. Hewison, Robison, and Rodan, “Introduction: Changing Forms,” 4. Ibid., 11. Ibid., 35.
240 46 47 48 49
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Carlo Bonura Taylor, Politics of Elections, 11. Daniel S. Lev, afterword to Politics of Elections, ed. Taylor, 247. Ibid., 243. Ibid., 244. Simon Philpott also warns of the effects of “the deployment of a reified notion of culture” in analysis containing “single explanatory accounts” of Indonesian politics. Philpott’s argument here is different from Lev’s insofar as a “reified notion of cultures” may even inform comparative analysis that is explicitly positivist in nature. Whereas Lev is interested in clarifying the fundamentals of causal analysis (obstructed by the fuzzy category of culture), Philpott focuses on an “orientalism” at work in the basic assumptions of comparative politics. See Simon Philpott, Rethinking Indonesia: Postcolonial Theory, Authoritarianism and Identity (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 82, 130. Lev, afterword, 247. Ibid., 244. Bowen, “Development of Southeast Asian Studies,” 24. Ibid. Once again the terms of the area studies debate call into question definitions of very basic disciplinary distinctions. Following on the suggestion that the social sciences have for the most part “played an unusually dominant role in U.S. Southeast Asian studies,” Bowen moves to qualify the very definition of “social science”: “the ‘social science’ in question has been of an unusually humanistic sort, in which the public forms of culture—ways of speaking, ritual events, performances—take center stage” (ibid., 17). This sort of description would seem to rule out comparative theory as having a great influence on the trends of Southeast Asian studies. Bowen argues that the most significant contributions of comparative politics (and political science in general) to Southeast Asian studies have been those works that have taken seriously the political implications of such public forms of culture. Joel Migdal, State in Society: Studying How States and Societies Transform and Constitute One Another (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 236. Ibid., 241. Ibid., 264. One noticeable exception is the work of Loren Ryter on vigilantism during the Suharto era, in which he contends that political violence and intimidation had a “nuanced” (rather than direct and causal) relationship to the institutions of the Suharto regime. See “Pemuda Pancasila: The Last Loyalist Free Men of Suharto’s Order?” Indonesia 66 (1998): 45–73. For an outline of the contemporary field of comparative political theory, see Fred Dallmayr’s edited volume Border Crossings: Toward a Comparative Political Theory (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 1999). Innovations in developing a comparative perspective in political theory can be found in Dallmayr’s Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-cultural Encounter (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). The use of ethnography as a method in comparative political theory can be seen in Brooke Ackerly’s Political Theory and Feminist Social Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
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Pheng Cheah, Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Literatures of Liberation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003). Roxanne L. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror: Islamic Fundamentalism and the Limits of Modern Rationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 9. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4. Ibid., 6. Euben, Enemy in the Mirror, 13. Recent interest has also emerged in political theory on the subject of Islam and civil society and in particular on questions surrounding Islam and the public sphere. See Armando Salvatore and Dale F. Eickelman, eds., Public Islam and the Common Good (Boston: Brill, 2004); and Sohail H. Hashmi, ed., Islamic Political Ethics: Civil Society, Pluralism, and Conflict (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002). Although not focused on Islam, James Bohman’s “Citizenship and Norms of Publicity: Wide Public Reason in Cosmopolitan Societies,” Political Theory 27, no. 2 (1999): 176–202, succinctly outlines the challenges to liberal political theory made by the politics of multicultural societies, a topic that will be considered in the final section of this chapter. This discussion will focus specifically on John Bowen’s Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia: An Anthropology of Public Reasoning (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Michael Peletz’s Islamic Modern: Religious Courts and Cultural Politics in Malaysia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Robert W. Hefner’s Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization in Indonesia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Nakamura Mitsuo, Sharon Siddique, and Omar Farouk Bajunid, eds., Islam and Civil Society in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2001). Norani Othman, “Islamization and Democratization in Malaysia in Regional and Global Contexts,” in Challenging Authoritarianism in Southeast Asia: Comparing Indonesia and Malaysia, ed. Ariel Heryanto and Sumit K. Mandal (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003), 120. For a detailed look at the politics of nongovernmental organizations and popular protest in Malaysia, see Meredith L. Weiss and Saliha Hassan, Social Movements in Malaysia: From Moral Communities to NGOs (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2004). The assumption of a secular or nonsectarian public sphere is found throughout the writings on social-contract theory, such as by John Locke, and is crystallized in the final book of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract. This tradition of secularism also frames John Rawls’s discussion of “comprehensive doctrines” in Political Liberalism, which, together with his Theory of Justice, plays a definitive role in liberal political theory’s conception of civil society. See John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). An instance of comparative analysis in Seyla Benhabib’s The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era that contrasts multiculturalist claims in U.S. courts, the outcomes of the Shah Bano case in India’s dual-court system, and
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Carlo Bonura the status of the hijab, or head scarf, in French courts leads Benhabib to the tentative conclusion that “a legal pluralist model … can be a good complement to deliberative and discursive democratic multiculturalism” if the core democratic virtues of “egalitarian reciprocity, voluntary self-ascription, and freedom of exit and association” are upheld in the process. See Seyla Benhabib, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 102. Bowen, Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia, 3. See Rawls, Political Liberalism. Bowen, Islam, Law and Equality in Indonesia, 11. Ibid., 261. Ibid., 264. Ibid. Peletz, Islamic Modern, 278. Ibid., 286. This intervention more broadly follows the reconsideration of the status of women in civil society found in much of feminist political theory. See Nancy Hirschmann and Christine Di Stefano, eds., Revisioning the Political: Feminist Reconstructions of Traditional Concepts in Western Political Theory (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996). Peletz, Islamic Modern, 285. Ibid. Ibid., 281. Hefner, Civil Islam, 9. Ibid., 13. Ibid., 17. Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 1 (1995): 67. Hefner, Civil Islam, 36. Ibid., 13. See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). Perhaps the single exception in this regard is Peletz’s Islamic Modern, in which his analysis of Islamic courts and the effects of their modernity is informed by the work of Michel Foucault. It is the language of his description of “state-mediated dialectics of kinship and civil society,” however, that calls attention to the potential relevance of Gramsci’s thought in exploring such mediated dialectics. Rosalind Morris, in Weighing the Balance, ed. Abraham, 32.
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Notes on Contributors
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Notes on Contributors Carlo Bonura is Luce Assistant Professor of Islamic Societies at the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, Washington. His scholarly work focuses on southern Thailand and Malaysia. George Dutton is Assistant Professor of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of California at Los Angeles. He specializes in the histories and literatures of Viet Nam. Judith A. N. Henchy is Head of the Southeast Asia Section of the University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, Washington. She is a scholar of Viet Nam. Ariel Heryanto is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Asian Studies at the Melbourne Institute of Asian Languages and Societies of the University of Melbourne, Australia. He specializes in Indonesian and Malaysian cultural studies. Celia Lowe is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Washington, Seattle. She studies eastern Indonesia and postcolonial science studies. Laurie J. Sears is Professor of History at the University of Washington, Seattle. She specializes in the oral and written histories and literatures of Java and Indonesia.
269
270
Index
Index Asian studies discipline, 4, 78, 91–92, 95; and role of adat in Indonesia, 118; and scholarship on Islam and civil society, 27, 206, 222, 225–33, 241n65. See also cultural studies Asad, Talal, 48, 69n53 Asia Mass Communication Research and Information Center (AMIC), 185 Asian Development Bank, 185 Asian Muslim Action Network (AMAN), 103n13 Asian Public Intellectuals (API) Fellowships, 103n13 Asian Scholarship Foundation (ASF), 103n13 Association for Asian Studies, 162, 198–99 Association for Research Libraries (ARL), 178, 179, 193 Atkinson, Jane M., 57 Aung-Thwin, Michael, 95 Australian Colombo Plan, 177
Adam, Asvi Warman, 52 Adas, Michael, 42 adat (customary law), 118, 127–28, 134n7, 227 Aeusrivongse, Nidhi, 84 Afiff, Suraya, 134n7 Agent Orange, 23, 116, 124–26, 135n14 Agricultural Institute (Bogor), 185 Aguilar, Filomeno V., Jr., 84 Althusser, L., 40, 64n13 American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), 114, 198–99 Anderson, Benedict, 13, 26–27, 31n39, 37, 66–67n32, 71n79, 83, 103n14, 147, 148, 188, 219; on area studies in political science, 206, 215; on concept of novel and nation, 73n98, 90; and cosmopolitan origins of Southeast Asian studies, 16, 18; and postcolonial literary critiques, 43–44; on power in Java, 54–55, 56–57 anthropology, 14, 25, 36, 37, 45, 57, 71n79, 115–16, 119, 121, 122, 123, 152, 236; and American anthropologists in Thailand in 1960s, 143–44; in bibliographic categorizing, 175, 200n9; and comparative politics, 214, 220; and conceptualization of culture, 41–42, 209; as a key Southeast
Bajunid, Omar Farouk, 225 Banda, Anne, 205 Bastin, John, 147 Bates, Robert H., 205, 217, 220, 222, 233; and rational choice-area studies debate, 206–9, 212, 237n12 Benda, Harry, 15, 147, 167n2 270
Index
Benjamin, Walter: “exhibitionary value” concept of, 26, 174, 175, 194, 196, 198, 199n3, 200n10 Berkeley Mafia, 141, 143 Bertrand, Jacques, 216–17 Birmingham, Centre at, 36, 38–39, 40. See also British cultural studies; cultural studies Blackwood, Evelyn, 58 Boeke, J. H., 14–15 Bonifacio, Andres, 49 Bonura, Carlo, ix, x–xi, 19, 29n10, 63, 70n64, 117, 133; on political science and interdisciplinary engagement in Southeast Asian studies, 26, 27, 205–36 Bowen, John, 29n10, 75, 77, 215; and culture in political science, 220, 240n53; and Islamic law and civil society, 225, 226–30 Brenner, Suzanne, 56–57 British cultural studies, 20, 36, 38–39, 40, 43, 65n16. See also Birmingham, Centre at Budiman, Arief, 68n47 Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, 156 Burma (Myanmar), 11, 13, 31n38, 129, 130, 157, 170n47, 179, 196; censorship in, 186; Internet usage in, 160, 161, 163; political climate in, 159
Cambodia, 31n41, 37, 129, 130; activists in, 156–57; online newspapers in, 162–63; Internet usage in, 160, 191; political changes in, 159,
271
170n46; study-abroad programs in, 165; publishing activity in, 182, 183 Campus Normalization (normalisasi kampus) movement in the Indonesian academy, 117 Case, William F., 217, 239n40 Center for International Educational Exchange, 164 Center for Social Ecology (Samarinda), 134n5 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 44–45, 47, 48, 49, 224 Chaloemtiarana, Thak, 147, 148 Chan, Joseph, 98 Cheah, Pheng, 9–10, 44, 59, 63n2, 67n33, 223 Chiang Mai University (Thailand), 127, 129, 169n39, 172; Resource Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD) at, 116 Chua, Beng-Huat, 84 Clammer, John, 82, 97 Clifford, James, 39, 41, 64n12 Cold War, 5, 18, 36, 66–67n32, 83, 103n11, 141; and geographic boundaries, 129, 130; interest in Southeast Asia during, 187; Southeast Asian library acquisitions during, 176–77, 179, 181; and Southeast Asian studies, 8, 15, 35, 77, 92, 93, 98, 100, 101, 133, 144–45, 166 collaboration, transnational, 17–18, 19–20, 22–24, 109–110, 112, 113–14, 115–16, 119, 131, 132–33, 151–52; among activists, 156–58; between U.S. and Southeast Asia,
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Index
140–41, 145–46, 148–58, 161–66, 169n35; and environmental politics, 110–16; and imbalance of power, 131, 166; in Indonesia, 119–22; in library collections, 25, 192; obstacles to, 152, 153; in the Philippines, 153, 154, 162, 164, 165; and political change, 158–60; and technology, 158, 160–63, 166; in Thailand, 127–30; and translation issues, 146–48, 163; and Viet Nam, 122–26, 153–54, 160–62, 163, 169n36, 169n39 Collier, David, 213, 214 colonial discourse theory, 41, 43. See also colonialism; orientalism; Said, Edward colonialism, 4, 76, 141, 143–44, 187; census system during, 79, 103n14; 41–44, 45, 49–50, 53, 57–58, 63, 93, 147, 178, 224; and culture as commodity, 195–96; Dutch, 68n43, 118; French, 13, 14, 124, 141, 203n56; and knowledge preservation, 173–74, 176–78, 182, 200n15; and language, 186; and legacies in Southeast Asian scholarship, 13–16, 20, 31n38, 36, 41–45, 49–50, 53, 57–58, 63, 93, 147, 178, 224; in Thailand, 135n16; and U.S. immigration, 19, 184. See also colonial discourse theory; orientalism comparative political theory, 236; and anthropological studies on Islam and civil society, 206, 225–33, 241n65; and area
studies, 206, 222–23, 224; as contributor to Southeast Asian studies, 206, 225, 240n53; as political science subfield, 223–24. See also political science comparative politics: and area studies, 206–13, 222, 236; call for a “disciplined center” in, 213–15; cultural analysis and, 219–22, 240n53; as political science subfield, 206, 210, 211, 234; and rational-choice analysis, 234; and Southeast Asia, 216–21. See also political science Conservation International (CI), 111 contemporary literature of Southeast Asia, 35, 70n66, 74n104; and concept of novel and nation, 58–62, 73n98; feminist issues in, 36, 59–62; issues of gender and power in, 53–58; and postcolonial literary critique, 20–21, 35, 38, 42–45, 67n33, 67n34 Cook, Nerida M., 58 Cornell-Thailand project (1947), 145–46 Cornell University, 44, 142, 168n21, 180; Cornell-Thailand project at, 145–46; as early center for Southeast Asian studies, 149; Echols Collection, 201n20; and the Farmington Plan, 179; and pioneering study of Java, 55–56 cosmopolitanism, 64n12; and cultural studies, 13, 39–40, 47; and Kant, 39, 40, 61, 64n9; in Southeast Asian studies, 15–18. See also cultural studies; Kant, Immanuel
Index
Critical Asian Studies, 156 cultural anthropology. See anthropology; cultural studies cultural studies, 66n28, 221, 234; and anthropological culture theory in America, 41–42; British, 36, 38–39, 40, 43, 65n16; and comparative politics, 209, 212–13, 237–38n14; and cosmopolitanism, 13, 39–40, 47; and impact on Southeast Asian studies, 95, 97, 99, 100; influence of French theory in, 40. See also anthropology; British cultural studies; Geertz, Clifford culture, conceptualization of: in area studies, 209, 219–20, 235, 240n53; debates on, 41–42. See also cultural studies customary law. See adat.
Dallmayr, Fred, 223, 240n58 Dang Nhat Minh, 154 Derrida, Jacques, and deconstruction, 95, 96 Diokno, Maria Serena I., 11, 139 Dubin, Rachel, 211–12 Dutton, George, ix, 19, 27–28; on collaborative efforts shaping Southeast Asian studies, 24–25, 139–66
Eberhardt, Nancy, 57 Eisenhower, Dwight, and foreign policy in Indonesia, 37 Emmerson, Donald K., 75, 76, 77, 157, 169n41
273
The Empire Writes Back, 43 environmental politics, 123–24, 129, 131–32; in Indonesia, 110, 111–14, 115, 116–22, 134n5; in Thailand, 115, 116, 127–28, 129–30; and scholarly collaboration, 110, 115–16, 126; in Viet Nam, 122–26. See also Agent Orange; nature, politics of Errington, Shelly, 57 ethnic studies, 20; in post–Viet Nam War era, 38 Euben, Roxanne, L., 223 Euro-American centrism: and environmental politics, 123–24, 132; in Indonesian scholarship, 119; in library collections, 172–75, 176, 177–80, 185, 195; in publishing, 184; and scholarly collaboration, 109, 112–13, 128–29, 131, 133, 152–53, 162; in Southeast Asian and area studies, 3, 9, 21–22, 28n1, 45, 46, 48, 79, 80–81, 83, 87, 88, 122, 166, 198–99; in Southeast Asian literature, 36, 43, 62. See also orientalism Evans, Peter, 213 “exhibitionary order” concept. See Mitchell, Timothy “exhibitionary value” concept. See Benjamin, Walter
Farmington Plan, the, 178–79, 180, 181. See also library collections, Southeast Asian feminist analysis of gender and power in Southeast Asia, 36,
274
Index
53–54, 56–58; and link between novel and nation, 58–62, 73n98 Florida, Nancy, 67n33 Ford Foundation, x, xi, 103n13, 130, 133, 134n5, 135, 135n12, 141–42, 167, 172, 184, 200n14, 213; Crossing Borders program, ix, 66n28, 177; Culture and Conservation Program, 134n5; International Fellowships Program, 153 Foucault, Michel, 40, 41, 95, 96, 194, 238n22, 242n90 Fox, Diane, 116, 124–25, 126, 135n14 Frankel, Charles, 200n12 Furnivall, J., 14–15
Gadjah Mada University (Indonesia), 168n23 gay and lesbian studies, 58, 72n93, 215 Geertz, Clifford, 15, 56, 167n10; and analysis of theater state in Bali, 221; “interpretive anthropology” developed by, 71n79; and conceptualization of culture, 41, 65n20. See also cultural studies geopolitics: in area studies, 4–10, 16–17, 19, 27–28, 235; and birth of Southeast Asian studies, 141–46; in comparative political theory, 26–27, 224; and Southeast Asian library collections, 25–26, 176–77, 178–79, 181–82; and Southeast Asian scholarship, 13, 20–21, 37–38
globalization, 83, 109; and area studies, 5, 11, 17–18; of information technologies, 140, 176, 189, 198; and political science, 51; of Western-dominated capitalism, 99–100, 101 Gomez, Edmund Terence, 84 Gramsci, Antonio, 40, 234, 242n90; and Gramscian notion of hegemony, 41, 42 Grofman, Bernard, 210–11
Hadiz, Vedi R., 84 Hall, D. G. E., 31n38, 147, 168n16 Hall, Robert, 63n3 Hall, Stuart, 38, 40 Hanoi, 122, 135n12, 148, 169n36, 169n38 Harbeson, John W., 211–12 Harootunian, Harry D., 5, 7, 9, 10, 35 Harvard University: library acquisitions under the Farmington Plan, 179; Southeast Asian religious texts in collections at, 15, 178, 200n14 Harvey, David, 100 Hau, Caroline, 47–48, 67n36 Hefner, Robert, 225; on civil Islam, 230–33 Hellwig, Tineke, 74n104 Henchy, Judith A. N., ix, 19, 63, 64n6; and resources in Southeast Asian studies, 25–26, 27, 172–99 Heryanto, Ariel, x, 67n34, 68n47; on “home scholars,” 12, 46–47, 69n49, 140, 151; and politics and culture in Indonesia, 51–52;
Index
on Southeast Asians in Southeast Asian studies, 75–102; on status of contemporary Southeast Asian studies, 19, 21–22, 27 Hobart, Mark, 190 Hobbs, Cecil, 176, 180–81, 200n12 Ho Chi Minh, 55 Hoggart, Richard, 38, 64n8 Holt, Claire, 15, 55, 71n85 hooks, bell, 109
Ileto, Reynaldo, C., 31n38, 42, 49–50, 65–66n24, 103n10 Indochina Arts Partnership, 169n39 Indochina wars, 17, 19, 26, 32n41, 156. See also Viet Nam– American War Indonesia: and U.S. war on terror, 4–5, 160; and the Berkeley Mafia, 142–43; contemporary literature in, 58–62, 67n34, 70n66; and customary law (adat), 118, 128, 134n7; documentary film industry in, 189; environmental politics in, 110, 111–14, 115, 116–22, 127–28; human ecology in, 117–18, 120–22; Internet usage in, 161, 162, 191; library collections from, 179, 180, 185; Islamic law and Muslim politics in, 223–32, 225–28; NGOs in, 116–17, 118–19, 188; political changes in, 159, 217; publishing industry in, 182, 183, 186–87; scholarship in, 119, 131–32, 154; Southeast Asian studies in, 46–47, 51–52, 76, 84, 99;
275
students’ experiences abroad, 86; study-abroad programs in, 164, 165; Suharto regime in, 19, 126, 141, 142, 143, 187, 232, 240n57; U.S. foreign policy in, 37, 132 Indonesian Foundation for the Advancement of Biological Sciences (IFABS), 111 Institute of Asian Research (ARI), x–xi Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS), 76, 151, 167n2, 201n20 Integrated Conservation and Development Project, 113 Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (journal), 91 International Federation of Library Associations, 202n34 International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), xi International Predissertation Fellowship Program (IPFP), 114, 115 International Rice Research Institute, 185 International Studies in Higher Education Act (2003), 6–7 Iraq, war in, 5, 6, 7, 142 Islamic law and civil society, scholarship on, 27, 206, 222, 225–33, 234, 241n65. See also Hefner, Robert; Peletz, Michael Islamic studies, 48; and Muslim women, 48–49
Jackson, Peter A., 58 Jameson, Frederic, 58–59, 61 Johnson, Chalmers, 237n12
276
Index
Kahin, Audrey, 37 Kahin, George, 15, 37–38 Kahn, Joel, 91–92, 96, 98 Kant, Immanuel, 204n60, 227; and cosmopolitanism, 39, 40, 61, 64n9. See also cosmopolitanism Kasetsiri, Charnvit, 145–46, 167n12 Katzenstein, Peter J., 211, 212–13 Kerkvliet, Benedict, 42 Keyes, Charles F., 56 Khoo, Boo Teik, 98 King, Victor T., 75, 77 Kohli, Atul, 210, 212, 237n14 Kuhn, Thomas, 45 Kurtz, Stanley, 6–7
language barriers in Southeast Asian studies, 37, 43, 44, 78–79, 81, 88–91, 106n32, 131, 132–33, 140, 201n25; in library collections, 26, 174–75, 185–86. See also translation issues in Southeast Asian scholarship Laos, 11, 31n41, 37, 129, 130; censorship in, 186; Internet usage in, 160; political changes in, 159, 170n46; publishing activity in, 182, 183, 201n27, 201n28 LC (Library of Congress). See Library of Congress Lev, Daniel, 37–38, 70n63, 133, 174–75, 202n37, 219–20, 240n49 Leys, Ruth, 52 liberal political theory, 223, 226, 227, 228, 229, 230, 231, 234, 241n70 library collections, Southeast Asian: and acquisitions, 175–81, 185,
200n15; archiving of electronic information in, 190–96, 203n52; and bibliographic order, 173–74, 180; and Cold War nation-building efforts, 176–77; and commercially controlled digital data, 193, 197; Euro-American conceptions of knowledge organization in, 173, 175, 177, 180, 194–95; and the Farmington Plan, 178–79, 180, 181; and international databases, 180, 194–95, 201n19; language barriers in, 26, 174–75, 185–86; translation issues in, 195, 200n8. See also Overseas Cooperative Acquisitions Program; PL 480 program; preservation of cultural knowledge Library of Congress (LC), 176, 177, 179–80, 181, 182, 201n20, 202n30 Liddle, William, 219 Lindsay, Jennifer, 172–73, 195, 196 Li Tana, 168n19 literature. See contemporary literature of Southeast Asia Lowe, Celia, ix, 19, 63, 70n64; on collaboration, area studies, and politics of nature, 22–23, 24, 27, 109–33, 169n35
Maier, Hendrik, 67n33, 67n35, 74n105 Malaysia, 42, 46, 48, 69n49, 99, 165, 180, 201n25, 217, 236;
Index
arts activists in, 51; educational resources in, 82–83; English language literary traditions of, 44; information industries in, 163, 182, 183–84, 186, 187, 190, 192; Internet usage in, 191; Muslim politics and Islamic law in, 225–26, 228–30, 241n69; scholarly collaboration in, 150–51, 162, 168n26, 169n36; training of Southeast Asianists in, 146; and U.S. war on terror, 4–5 Mandal, Sumit K., 46–47, 51, 67n34, 69n49, 84, 102 Marcus, George E., 41 Marr, David, 37 Mastura, Datu Michael O., 48 May, Glenn, 49, 50 McClintock, Cynthia, 211–12 McCoy, Alfred W., 58, 190 McVey, Ruth, 13–14, 30n32, 83, 92–93, 95, 145, 199; on nationalism and modernization in Southeast Asia, 8, 99–100 media cultures in Southeast Asia, 189–91. See also publishing and information industries in Southeast Asia Michigan State University (MSU) “state-building” project, 141, 142, 145, 167n5. See also Viet Nam Migdal, Joel, 221–22 Milner, Anthony, 77 Mitchell, Timothy: “exhibitionary order” concept of, 12, 174, 199n4 Mitsuo, Nakamura, 225 Miyoshi, Masao, 5, 10
277
Moertono, Soemarsaid, 55 Mohamad, Goenawan, 67n34 Mojares, Resil B., 46, 84 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 123 Morris, Rosalind, 235–36 Mrazek, Rudolph, 68n43
Nachtwey, Jodi, 205 National Committee to Investigate the Results of Chemical Warfare, 135n14 National Defense Education Act (1958), 64–65n15, 177 National Program for Acquisitions and Cataloging. See Overseas Cooperative Acquisitions Program National University of Singapore, 18, 76, 79, 155, 169n37 “nation-building,” U.S. efforts toward, 8, 24, 142, 143, 176–77 nature, politics of, 109, 131–32; in Indonesia, 110, 111–14, 115, 116–22; in Thailand, 115, 116, 127–30; in Viet Nam, 115, 122–26. See also environmental politics New Cultural History, 41. See also Geertz, Clifford New Historicism, 41. See also Geertz, Clifford New Order Indonesia. See Suharto regime NGOs. See nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) Nguyen Mong Giac, 154 Nguyen Van Huy, 135n13 Nguyen Viet Nhan, 116, 124–25, 126
278
Index
Nhan, Nguyen Viet, 116, 124–25, 126 9/11: and impact on region, 4–5, 99; and impact on Southeast Asian studies, 18–19, 24; and shifting role of area studies, 6; visa issues related to, 18–19, 159–60, 161, 164 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs): American scholars’ interest in, 157; and distribution of publications, 188–89; and English-language publishing in Laos, 182; in Indonesia, 116–17, 118–19, 188; in Thailand, 127 Northern Illinois University, 153 novel and nation, concept of, 58–62, 73n98. See also feminist analysis of gender and power in Southeast Asia
OCLC database, 180, 194–95, 201n19 orientalism: in bibliographic categorizing, 175; in comparative politics, 240n49; in Philippine politics, 49–50, 103n10; Said’s identification of, 41, 93; in Southeast Asian studies, 81, 89, 90, 91–95, 199. See also colonial discourse theory; colonialism; Said, Edward Ortner, Sherry B., 41 Othman, Norani, 48–49, 225 Overseas Cooperative Acquisitions Program, 179–80. See also library collections, Southeast Asian
Parsons Talcott, 41, 56, 65n20 Peletz, Michael, 225, 226, 228–30, 242n90. See also Islamic law and civil society, scholarship on Philippines, 129; media cultures in, 189, 190; and orientalism, 49–50, 103n10; and scholarly exchange, 153, 154, 162, 164, 165; in Southeast Asian studies, 11, 15, 44, 46, 76, 99, 146; and U.S. library acquisitions, 178, 179, 180, 181–82; and U.S. war on terror, 4–5 Philippine studies, rise of, 12 Philpott, Simon, 31n36, 50, 51, 53, 240n49 Pioquinto, Ceres, 84 PL 480 program, 177, 179–80, 200n17. See also library collections, Southeast Asian political ecology, 110, 115, 127, 129, 131–32. See also Agent Orange political science: and area studies, 205–11, 215–16, 222, 235, 240n53; comparative political theory as subfield of, 222–24; and comparative politics, 206, 210, 211, 212, 234; and culture and politics, 209, 219–21; and interdisciplinary engagement, 26, 27, 205, 214–15, 222, 225–36; and scholarship on civil society, 225; and Southeast Asian studies, 206, 215, 219. See also comparative political theory; comparative politics; rational-choice theory Political Web archiving initiative, 203n51
Index
Popkin, Samuel, 216 postcolonial theory, definition of, 7 postmodernism, 94, 97, 210, 211, 238n22; distinguished from postmodernity, 100 postmodernity, 100–102 Pratt, Mary Louise, 39–40 preservation of cultural knowledge, 172–74, 195–97; and archiving of audio and visual resources in Southeast Asia; and bibliographic order, 173, 174, 180; and exhibitionary order concept, 174; and exhibitionary value concept, 174, 175, 194, 196, 198; and interdisciplinary demands, 181. See also library collections, Southeast Asian Prewitt, Kenneth, 114, 115, 118, 129 Project for Critical Asian Studies (University of Washington), 157–58, 169n44 PS: Political Science and Politics, 210, 211 publishing and information industries in Southeast Asia: electronic, 183–84, 191–95, 197, 198–99; global and regional competition in, 183–84; government control in, 186, 192; growth of, 181–83; and literacy rates, 201n25; NGO publications in, 188–89; statistics on 187, 202n37. See also individual countries
Rabinow, Paul, 3, 7, 28, 45 race, concept of, in Southeast Asian studies, 20, 38; in
279
Clifford Geertz’s work, 41; and comparative political theory, 223; in postcolonial literary critique, 43, 57–58; and U.S.based area studies, 64–65n15 Rafael, Vicente L., 65–66n15, 84, 151 rational-choice theory, 27, 50–51, 66–67n32, 215–16; and area studies debate, 205–11, 212–13, 234–36, 237n12, 240n53 Rawls, John, 226, 227, 228, 241n70 Realino Study Institute (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), 154 Reid, Anthony, 10–11, 83, 87, 94–95, 101, 107n43, 139 religion in Southeast Asian studies, 62, 80, 84, 97, 99; before World War II, 15, 36; modernity and, 48–49. See also Islamic law and civil society, scholarship on Resource Center for Social Science and Sustainable Development (RCSD), 116, 128, 129, 130 Reynolds, Craig J., 75, 76, 93, 94–95 RLIN database, 194–95 Rocamora, J. Eliseo, 84 Rockefeller Center Fellowships program, 153–54 Rockefeller Foundation, 31n36, 103n13, 141–42, 157, 202n42 Rosaldo, Michelle Z., 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 241n70 Rudolph, Susanne H., 238n22 Ryter, Loren, 240n57
Said, Edward, 7, 35, 41, 93. See also colonial discourse theory
280
Index
Sandhu, K. S., 151 Scott, James: and comparative politics, 214, 216, 222; and notions of “moral economy” and “hidden transcript,” 42; and studies on nationalism, 27, and Vietnamese scholarship, 122, 123, 124 Sears, Laurie, ix, x, xi, 12, 19, 20; on postcolonial identities and literature, ethnicity, and gender, 20–21, 27–28, 29n8, 35–63 SEASREP (Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program), 154 Sen, Krishna, 47, 66n28 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 Sewell, William, 41, 42, 65n20 Shamsul, A. B., 48, 69n54 Shiraishi, Takashi, 149 Siapno, Jacqueline Aquino, 84 Siddique, Sharon, 225 Silverstein, Josef, 167n2 Singapore, xi, 46, 82, 85, 105n24, 201n19, 236; access to online daily newspapers in, 163; censorship in, 186; Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in, 76, 146, 151, 167n2, 201n20; and literary tradition in English, 44; National University of, 18, 76, 155, 169n37; Overseas Cooperative Acquisitions Program in, 179–80; post-9/11, 4, 99; publishing industry in, 182, 183, 187; as regional center for Southeast Asian studies, 76, 93; study-abroad programs in, 165, 169n37; television archiving facilities in, 190; women in, 69n50
Skocpol, Theda, 207 Smail, John, 37–38, 76, 152 Soekarno regime, 37, 55 Southeast Asian studies: anthropology as key discipline of, 4, 78, 91–92, 95; collaborative efforts shaping, 20, 24–25, 35–63, 139–66, 225; colonial legacies in, 13–16, 20, 31n38, 36, 41–45, 49–50, 53, 57–58, 63, 81, 89–95, 147, 178, 199, 224; cultural studies impact on, 95, 97, 99, 100; Euro-American centrism in, 3, 9, 21–22, 28n1, 45, 46, 75–81, 83, 85, 87, 88, 92–94, 95–96, 98, 122, 166, 198–99; gender, power, and feminist theory in, 20–21, 36, 38, 53–63; geopolitics and birth of in U.S., 35–38, 46, 139–46; information resources in, 25–27, 172–99; language barriers in, 37, 43, 44, 78–79, 81, 88–91, 106n32, 131, 132–33, 140, 201n25; participation of Southeast Asian nationals in, 76–87, 91–95, 97–99, 100–102, 109–10; in political science, 205–6, 215–19, 222, 225, 240n53; and postcolonial identity and literary critique, 20–21, 35–62, 67n33, 67n34; post-9/11, 4–5, 18–19, 24; in post–World War II era, 15–22, 27, 37, 141, 144, 158, 160–62, 175, 178–80, 195–97 Southeast Asian Studies Regional Exchange Program (SEASREP), 103n13, 154
Index
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, ix, 62, 73n97, 199n7 Stange, Paul, 97 Steward, Julian, 123 Stivens, Maria, 47 Stoler, Ann Laura, 54, 57–58 study-abroad programs, Southeast Asian, 164–66, 170n47, 170–71n59, 171n60, 171n61 Subaltern Studies Collective, 42, 132 Sucharithanarugse, Withaya, 84 Suharto regime, 19, 55, 111, 112, 119, 134n7; 141, 187; academy during, 86, 117, 142–43; student opposition to, 191–92; and New Order histories, 52; NGOs and, 188; in novels of Ayu Utami, 59–61; political changes after, 159, 189, 226, 231, 232; publishing industry and, 183; violence under, 126, 240n57 Sulistiyanto, Priyambudi, 84 Sumatra, 37, 60, 61, 116, 120 Sundaram, Jomo Kwame, 84 Suryakusuma, Julia I., 84 Sutherland, Heather, 11, 29 Szanton, David, 9, 12, 29n10
Tan, Joo Ean, 84 Taylor, Jean Gelman, 30n27 Taylor, R. H., 217–18, 219 Tejapira, Kasian, 84 Tessler, Mark, 205 Textbook Foundation project (Thailand), 147 Thailand, 23, 37, 80, 109, 133, 157, 170n57, 217; Community Culture approach v. Political Economy approach, 127–28; and Cornell-Thailand project,
281
145–46; electronic media in, 162–63, 191; historical considerations shaping academic inquiry in, 143–46; intellectual freedom in, 126–29, 135n16; library collections, 179–80, 200n8; literature addressing sexuality in, 58; publishing industry in, 182, 183–84, 186–87; and regional boundaries, 129–30; Southeast Asian studies in, 46, 76, 131, 146–47, 167n12; study-abroad programs in, 164–65, 170n59; and collaboration, transnational, 115, 116, 128–29; and U.S. war on terror, 4–5 Title VI. See U.S. Department of Education Title VI program Tiwon, Sylvia, 67n34, 74n104 Tjitradjaja, Iwan, 116, 119–22, 133 Togean Island project, 110–14 Tolentino, Rolando, 63 translation issues in Southeast Asian scholarship, 45, 67n39, 145, 146–48, 168n19, 192; in Internet usage, 161, 163; and library cataloging, 195, 200n8. See also language barriers in Southeast Asian studies trauma studies, 52–53, 70n71, 188. See also Viet Nam–American War Tsing, Anna, 54, 68n43, 116, 181 Tuchrello, William, 182 Tun Razak Chair (Ohio University), 150–51
United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), 182, 183
282
Index
university exchange programs, 155–56, 169n37. See also study-abroad programs; collaboration, transnational University of California, Berkeley, 67, 133, 142–43, 145, 180, 192. See also Berkeley Mafia University of Hawaii, 155, 169n38 University of Indonesia, 119, 143 University of Malaya, 76 University of Wisconsin, 154, 168n23 U Nu, 55 U.S. Agency for International Development, 143 U.S. Department of Education Title VI program, 6, 28n4 Utami, Ayu, 21; novels of, 36, 59–62
Vaddhanaphuti, Chayan, 109, 129–30 Van Huy, Nguyen, 135n13 van Leur, J. C., 14–15, 76 van Schendel, Willem, 11–12, 32n42 Vayda, Andrew, 117 Viet Nam, 11, 133, 143, 180; changing political climate of, 159, 170n46; environmental politics and, 115–16, 122–26, 129, 135n13, 135n14; Internet usage in, 191; electronic media in, 160–62, 163; Michigan State University’s “statebuilding” project in, 141, 142; publishing industry in, 182, 184, 186–87; scholarly collaboration between U.S. and, 122–26, 153–54, 160–62, 163, 169n36, 169n39; Southeast Asian studies in, 7, 8, 37–38, 46, 58, 76;
study-abroad programs in, 164–65; translation issues in scholarship of, 147–48, 168n19; and U.S. activist linkages, 156. See also Viet Nam–American War Viet Nam–American War, 11, 31n41, 126, 132, 141, 203n58; and Agent Orange in, 23, 116, 124–26, 135n14; and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 70n71; and “teach-ins,” 156. See also Viet Nam Viet Nam War. See Viet Nam– American War Volkman, Toby, ix–x, 66n28
war on terror, U.S., 5–6, 7. See also 9/11 Weber, Max, 238n22; and ideas of power and charisma, 55, 56; interpretive sociology of, 71n79 Widner, Jennifer, 239n30 Wieringa, Saskia, 58 Williams, Raymond, 38, 64n8 Winichakul, Thongchai, 68n43, 84, 150, 181; and “home scholars,” 46, 47, 51, 69n48, 178 women, x, 38, 215; and feminist issues in Southeast Asian contemporary literature, 36, 59–62; and Southeast Asian scholarship, 47, 48–49, 53–54, 56–58, 69n50, 74n104, 84, 87, 226; status of in civil society, 226, 242n80. See also feminist analysis of gender and power in Southeast Asia World Politics symposium (1995), 210, 212–13, 214, 237n14, 238n22
Index
World War II, 5; and U.S. attitudes toward Southeast Asia, 15; and library collections, 179 Wright, Erik O., 51
Yale University, 145; and library acquisitions under the Farmington Plan, 179, 180,
283
201n15, 203n56; Southeast Asian religious texts in collections at, 15, 178, 200n14 Yogyakarta (Indonesia), 107n43, 154, 172
Zinoman, Peter, 11
