The following is a scholarly review of several classic modern articles related to Southeast Asian historiography by Mr. Brown (of Mr. Brown Goes Around). While unrelated to travel, we thought it was interesting enough to include here for those who might have more academic interests related to your Southeast Asian travel.
J. D. Legge, “The Writing of Southeast Asian History,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Volume One, Part One, From early times to c. 1500, ed., Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [paperback ed.], orig. pub, 1992): 1-50.
John Smail, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia,” Journal of Southeast Asian History 2.2 (1961): 72-102.
O. W. Wolters, “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study,” Indonesia 58 (1994): 1-17.
Thongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Post-National Histories in Southeast Asia,” in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, eds., Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Athens: Ohio University Press) 3-29.
Victor T. King, “Defining Southeast Asia and the Crisis in Area Studies: Personal Reflections on a Region,” Working Paper No. 13, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, 2005.
Goh Beng-Lan, “Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections,” in Decentring & Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region, ed., Goh Beng-Lan (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 1-59.
Caputo, John. Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project. (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1987).
Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
Articles Reviewed:
J. D. Legge, “The Writing of Southeast Asian History,” in The Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, Volume One, Part One, From early times to c. 1500, ed., Nicholas Tarling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999 [paperback ed.], orig. pub, 1992): 1-50.
O. W. Wolters, “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study,” Indonesia 58 (1994): 1-17.
Thongchai Winichakul, “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Post-National Histories in Southeast Asia,” in New Terrains in Southeast Asian History, eds., Abu Talib Ahmad and Tan Liok Ee (Athens: Ohio University Press) 3-29.
Victor T. King, “Defining Southeast Asia and the Crisis in Area Studies: Personal Reflections on a Region,” Working Paper No. 13, Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies, Lund University, Sweden, 2005.
Goh Beng-Lan, “Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections,” in Decentring & Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region, ed., Goh Beng-Lan (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2011), 1-59.
Southeast Asia History and Historiography
Since at least the publication of Edward Said's seminal study of area studies, Orientalism,
in 1977, the area studies discipline has been on the defensive. It has
sought to both justify itself as a legitimate organ of knowledge with a
legitimate area of study on one hand as well as defend itself from
accusations that it is simply a post-colonial organ of control on the
other hand, distancing itself from the view that it is merely a vestige
of those days when political and economic power was within the grasp of
Western overlords. This is certainly true of Southeast Asian
studies which has moved from its inception in the post-Second World War
era, its re-invigoration in part due to the Vietnam conflicts and the Cold War
conflicts, and finally to what at least some scholars decry is its
sunset due to the lack of its geo-political importance in a post-Cold
War world. Those bemoaning its demise are likely premature in their
mourning, however; given the confluence of a rising India with its “Look
East” policy and China's growing economic influence in the area, the
sovereignty and border conflicts centered on the South China Sea, and the United States' own “pivot East” policy combined with the continuing rise of the economic stars of such “tigers” as Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand (Singapore
having had its stripes for decades now), the need for those
knowledgeable about the area will likely continue unabated. That does
not, of course, answer the existential question that Southeast Asia area
studies must ask: is it in our departments and programs that these
knowledgeable individuals are to be produced given the accusations of
illegitimacy and the subalternation of its subject of study—Southeast
Asians?
To discuss
“Southeast Asian studies” prior to the Second World War would be
somewhat of a misnomer. As J.D. Legge points out in “The Writing of
Southeast Asian History” (1999) in the Cambridge History of Southeast Asia,
overwhelmingly what research was being done in the area was focused on
specific areas or within particular linguistic groups. Legge correctly
points out that there were exceptions, most notably George Cœdès. Cœdès
was not merely exceptional in his scope of study. He also represents
one of the few to produce studies of Southeast Asia who were not
colonial administrators, perhaps at least one of the contributing
factors to the tendency to produce more regionally-focused research.
The editor of the 1968 edition of his Histoire ancienne des États hindouisés d'Extrême-Orient, published under the English title The Indianized States of Southeast Asia, notes that although his interest was primarily the history of the Khmer empire, but also worked on the origins of the Sukhothai and “discovered” the Srivijaya empire
( Cœdès, vii). Given Cœdès treatment extends from peoples along the
Irrawaddy to the Funan kingdoms and Chams in modern south Vietnam to insular Indonesia, one feels some reluctance to support Legge's assertion that D. G. E. Hall's 1955 text was the first history of the entire region. But Cœdès did exclude areas that modern scholars consider part of the fold of Southeast Asia, most notably the Philippines and northern Vietnam;
Cœdès' term “Greater India” provides insight on how he delineated his
study, and clearly it was not merely a geographical consideration
(xi).
It was after the end of the Second World War that Southeast Asian
studies came into being as a specific incarnation of that beast that is
area studies, with Cornell forming its Southeast Asia studies program
in 1950, Hall's aforementioned book published in 1955, and several
other book-length treatments of the entire area appearing in the
mid-sixties and thereafter. Programs with a specific focus on Southeast
Asia began to form in Europe, the Soviet Union, North America, and
within Southeast Asia itself such as the Institute of Southeast Asian
Studies formed at the University of Singapore
in 1968. The impetus for this blooming interest were manifold. The
Japanese occupation of much of Southeast Asia had swept away its
European colonial masters. Greater India had bloodlessly become an
independent British domain in 1947 and then gained independence in 1950
(Pakistan following in 1956) and Burma achieved independence in 1948
with the Federation of Malaya
had becoming a protectorate in the same year. Both the French and
Dutch tried to retake their former colonies and were met with
resistance. The United States had passed the Tydings-McDuffie Act
of 1934 to begin the move towards an independent Philippines, an
independence that was formally gained in 1946. At the same time that
these new nation-states were coming into being the specter of communism
in Asia was haunting the minds of American and West European powers,
particularly after the fall and retreat of the Kuomintang in late 1949 in China. Containment as a policy had already been elaborated on by George Kennan
three years earlier, and it seemed that Southeast Asia would join
Eastern Europe as one of the “fronts” in which this policy would play
out. Southeast Asia, which had perhaps been seen as a (profitable)
backwater and source for cheap labor and natural resources, suddenly had
new geo-political importance.
The focus of Southeast Asian studies seemed largely, if we are to trust
Legge's portrayal of it, historically focused and concerned with
reconstructing the past. But, as Legge notes, there were those within
the discipline who contended this notion, quoting H. J. Benda's
challenge that Southeast Asia historians must be “social scientists as
well” and not merely concerned with “charting dynastic cycles” (19).
That challenge has been taken up. One of the many currents of
contemporary Southeast Asian studies are concerned with the “autonomy”
of Southeast Asia, following from Indonesian historian J. C. van Leur's
challenging of the notion of “Greater India” found in Cœdès work. Leur
and other of Cœdès critics have argued Cœdès treats Southeast Asian
cultures as mere extensions of Indian culture and ignores the indigenous
cultures, and as such, set the pattern for so many of the
administrator-scholars that followed. The accusation was that Southeast
Asian history as done by Europeans was cast in terms of successive
waves of influence: Chinese and Indian, Islamic, and finally, European.
An Asian-centric treatment which treated the region autonomously was
demanded as an alternative to the Eurocentric approach. Given this new
era of independence in which these new nation-states were also aware of
representing themselves and to some extent justifying the shape and
geographies bequeathed to them the requirements for autonomous histories
gained a new level of importance.
Just what Eurocentrism was and what its contrast with Asian-centrism
would be in terms of Southeast Asia studies was not a moot question and
is one tackled by J. R. W. Smail in his seminal article, “On the Possibility of an Autonomous History of Modern Southeast Asia.” Smail outlines several possible meanings that “ugly word” “Eurocentrism.” The first is what hermeneut Hans Gadamer
would term simply the “historicity” of the scholar: the fact that he or
she is from a certain place and culture as well as from a certain time
means certain things about him or her. In this sense any scholarship
done by Europeans would be Eurocentric simply because they are
European. This is certainly a deflationist account of what is meant by
Eurocentrism, and it certainly does not entail that the European's
treatment of Southeast Asia is any less objective as the Southeast Asian
simply brings a different historicity to his or her treatment. As John
Caputo has put it, “The cold, hermeneutic truth, is that there is no
truth, no master name which holds things captive” or as Said has
reminded us knowledge is “never raw, unmediated, or simply objective”
(Caputo, 192; Said 273). And while it may be that objectivity and
autonomy are not related, if “by Europeans” is what is meant by
Eurocentrism it is rather banal.
Furthermore, we would like to think that a Malaysian or Cambodian might
produce a work we would also like to hang “Eurocentric” upon. That
comes, Smail tells us, from being indoctrinated into the practice of
Western history through Western training or other exposure. But how
would such training change an individual? It would bring him or her
into the Western weltanschauung,
and would encourage the historians to follow a certain pattern of
valuing of the importance and significance of events, and one that
values and highlights it impact by and on Europe as well as following
the practices of the Western historian. Said identifies five different
attributes of the “Orientalist” and all fit nicely into Smail's latter
definition, attributes that can be read into nearly any academic
discipline as it is practiced in the West: “(a) that bear his
distinctive imprint, (b) that illustrate his conception of what the
Orient can or ought to be, (c) that consciously contest someone else's
view of the Orient, (d) that provide Orientalist discourse with what, at
that moment, it seems most in need of, and (e) that respond to certain
cultural, professional, national, political, and economic requirements
of the epoch” (Said, 273). Given the view that Eurocentrism is not just
a personal heritage (the banal definition) but inherent in the
methodology of history, the challenge to produce autonomous histories is
a challenge to produce and entirely different historical method. Or is
it? Most historians, Asians or otherwise, work within a system of
“universal history” much like the universal theories of physics being
applied in universities and laboratories across the world. We may
challenge the methodologies of historians, but that methodology is not
inherently Eurocentric. Rather it is the value judgments being made by
the historian, that fifth set of attributes Said enumerates, that
defines the Eurocentrism of Smail's last two definitions: a set of
values privileging those of the West, and the putting of the West in the
“foreground” of Southeast Asian studies. It is, as Smail puts it, an
issue of a moral viewpoint and a perspective. Postmodernism,
post-structuralism and critical theory have all challenged the notion of
a “universal history” but whether such a challenge is definitive
remains to be seen. The fear, expressed by many, is that the very idea
of a universal history is hegemonic, itself an artifact of Western
thinkers such as Hegel or Wilhelm Dilthey.
The crisis felt by any in Southeast Asian studies goes well beyond the
anxieties of having to produce a new historical method or a methodology
“of area studies,” however; if we look through the spectrum of Victor
King's article, “Defining Southeast Asia and the Crisis in Area Studies: Personal Reflections on a Region,”
many Southeast Asianists are hunkered down in their chairs at faculty
meetings across the world, fearful someone will ask them about their
discipline's “methodology.” Area studies has always been a different
sort of beast than departments like literature, philosophy, psychology
and even history as area studies are notoriously “interdisciplinary” not
to say schizophrenic. Philologists, anthropologists, political
scientists, religious studies and geographers as well as historians tend
to make up such departments, or more often than not, “programs” given
that most or all of their faculty belong to other departments. Perhaps
in light of this interdisciplinary approach, few if any institutes in
North America, at least, grant Ph.D.s in the area. Even Cornell, more
than fifty years, only offers an Masters program. Given the nature of
the beast, then, it seems that all of these disciplines suffer from
“Eurocentism” if it is an issue of weltanschauung and
methodologies. But at least they are united in the study of a specific
region with certain affinities that exist throughout. If only it were
so easy.
The very idea
that there is something that is “Southeast Asia” spanning from the
eastern Himalayan chain across the span of islands that are occupied
primarily by speakers of Central and Western Malayo-Polynesian branches
of the Austronesian language family may be questionable. As I've just
put it, the question of what is Southeast Asia should be apparent: is it
defined by geographies or cultures? What factors urge us to include or
not include the island of New Guinea with its pockets of western and coastal Austronesian speakers? Why does not the Southeast Asianist think that the Solomon Islands
are in his or her purview? Some might suggest it is a particular
“style of scholarship,” but what would this mean for the individual
producing ethnographies of Iban peoples on Boreo
and another deciphering 14th century inscriptions in southern Vietnam?
Rather, would should agree with King that there is no need to justify
knowledge production “in terms of socio-cultural commonalities and a
Southeast Asian cultural region nor in terms of a distinctive
intellectual approach and a set of dominant research questions” but
instead treat “Southeast Asian studies” a residual and somewhat
convenient term, a banner for those with some knowledge of some
ill-defined geographical region to come together in and share
learnings. Southeast Asia is, King would agree, a term of convention,
and whether or not a Left May
speaker in New Guinea is a “Southeast Asian” or not is similarly a
matter of convention. Better to understand the connections and
implications of a certain problem, no matter if those connections and
implications violate normal conventions of nation, ethnicity, language
or geography, that work within an ill-fitting inherited framework.
Whether or not these conventions (including the convention of having
area studies departments) survive, King claims, depends not on
identifying some essential characteristic of the area of study, whether
it defined in terms of attributes of the cultures and peoples or
geography, but rather the shifting demands of the market. What we call
“Southeast Asian studies” will remain since, after all, it was little
more than a label being hung upon disciplines that were already there.
Many, though, have resisted this willingness to dismiss “Southeast
Asia” as merely a term of convenience but have urged that there are
features and aspects of Southeast Asia that warrant consideration and
that justify Southeast Asian studies as an academic disciple. W. O. Wolters advances this in his “Southeast Asia as a Southeast Asian Field of Study”
which we should be thoroughly unsympathetic to. In defense of just the
type of use King is so dismissive of, Wolters identifies eight aspects
of features of Southeast Asia that should both inform its studies and
justify it as a discipline. Among the eight include a valuing of the
present over all other times, appropriation of whatever is presently
useful, an emphasis on individuals and their accomplishments, and
leaders representing moral models.
We may accept or reject any or all of Wolters aspects as fitting of
Southeast Asia; the real difficulty is that the aspects he represents
are in no way unique or defining. In reading Wolters, one cannot help
but feel he is advancing the old arguments of essentialism in sheep's
clothing by his own admissions that they may not be “unique” to
Southeast Asia and we may feel free to accept or reject them. If they
are not unique—if they are shared by those of the Solomon Islands or Assam—what
use are they in delineating a field of study or the character of its
subjects. Wolters offers us what Said terms a “consistency of culture
praxis” by providing a framework situated within a tendency within a
historical and intellectual setting though which the object of study can
be represented to the author's audience. Even given this lurking
shadow of that ugly term Eurocentric the aspects Wolters elaborates
would just as appropriately form a framework for representing
pre-Depression Appalachians as the Hmong of Laos. We feel the urge that
if one is going to be an essentialist one should at least come out with
it and try to give us something essential that defines the object of
study.
The fact that
Wolters is offering his sagacious advice to Southeast Asians does not
redeem his argument that his aspects should shape and inform modern
Southeast Asian studies; just because it may be a Malay making these
sort of generalizations about his fellow Southeast Asians makes no
difference. Whether or not the Mon and Chams share a sort of presentism
or not seems to be an empirical question for the ethnographer or for
the Mon or Cham to ask him or her self, not a framework for
representation and certainly not a reason to regard them both as
subjects of study under the auspices of doing “Southeast Asian
studies.” If anything, Wolters characterization of the Southeast Asian
does more damage than good. It seems a perfect example of the
“deformation” that Said discusses: “The Orient as a representation in
Europe is formed—or deformed—out of a more and more specific sensitivity
towards a geographical region called "the East." Specialists in this
region do their work on it, so to speak, because in time their
profession as Orientalists requires that they present their society with
images of the Orient, knowledge about it, insight into it” (273).
Wolters can only be read as asking Southeast Asians to take up the same
sorts of deforming practices.
In closing, I wish to say that there is an element in all of this that
has been ignored. While much has been discussed about the perspective
or moral viewpoints of the historian, his or her weltanschauung, and the
autonomy or lack thereof of the historical texts produced, it fails to
make the next critical step in recognizing that the texts produced by
historians are not autonomous in themselves. Each reader of such texts
will engage in an interpretive practice, and in doing so will bring his
or her own perspective, morality and historicity to bear on the text in
front of him or her. If we grant that in some sense of Javanese
historian can write an autonomous history of Java, what happens when
that history is read by the American in the Catskills or the Japanese in
Kyoto? Does it retain its autonomy because surely the American and
Japanese reader engages in an interpretive process and one that he or
she can be more or less successful at? If the reader tries to fit the
“Asia-centric” text into the framework of feudalism or Marxist progress,
what autonomy is left? Caputo and Said have both warned us that
objectivity is a myth, and in engaging a historical text the
subjectivity of both historian and reader come into play.
Thongchai Winichakul, in his article “Writing at the Interstices: Southeast Asian Historians and Post-National Histories in Southeast Asia,”
has anticipated this element and suggested the term “home scholars:”
those who not only write and research about their “homes” but are also
read and responded to with the discourses of their homes. This is,
however, an extremely myopic view of the work of the scholar and of
scholarship. First, the difficulty of determining home is apparent and Winichakul
seems aware of the difficulties and so is at pains to keep “home” as
open a concept as possible. But not addressing problems is not solving
them. Language is one element; Winichakul's own text is in English, but
if regional scholars restrict themselves to the discourses of their
home this points to scholarship in regional languages. While there is
something certainly noble and compelling about “home scholarship” what
of the American or Japanese who has a legitimate curiosity of Southeast
Asia and not yet mastered a regional language? Are we to insist that
until they have they cannot enter the discourse of Southeast Asian
histories. There is nothing wrong with writing in one's home
language—but are we to say that there is something wrong with not doing
so? Winichakul's suggestion that scholars work at the interstices is
intriguing, and certainly much excellent scholarship will come about
that is doing just that.
If the anxiety of the historian is so great, how much greater should
his or her anxiety be when thought is given to its consumption of an
audience that many not wrestle with worries of having written something
“Eurocentric.” This perhaps is one of the strongest arguments for area
studies: that it is not merely the production of knowledge that
justifies such departments and programs, but also the production of
perspective. We may continue to be concerned about
representing/deforming through our work as scholars of Southeast Asia,
but we should be even more concerned about those who uncritically
consume those representations.
Said, Edward. Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1979).
