Cultural Diversity and Construction of Polity
The processes of decolonization, which have transformed the former Dutch, French, and British colonies in Southeast Asia into independent nation-states during the second half of the twentieth century, have entailed the emergence of particular ideologies in which the cultural specificity, deemed to be characteristic of each of these nation states, is expressed. Such ideologies articulate the way in which the relations between the citizens and the state, as well as those between the various ethnic-cultural groups and the state to which they belong, are conceptualized. They also affect the position which each nation state takes in international and transnational forums and the discourse in which such positions are expressed and legitimized.
By JOSEPHUS D.M. PLATENKAMP
The ideologies in question are the outcome of complex historical and ongoing processes of interaction. On the one hand, since none of the Southeast Asian states encompass a single culturally and linguistically homogeneous society, the cultural specificity that is presented as characteristic of a given 'national' ideology in itself tends to reflect representations originating in the cultural repertoire of various societies situated within the borders of the state. On the other hand, perhaps more than in any other part of the world, representations about the polity in relation to society in Southeast Asia have been modelled partly on ideas and values originating from India, the Muslim-Arab world, imperial China, and colonial Europe. The transformations which such foreign ideas and values have undergone in the course of their incorporation into pre-existing local systems of representations also continue to characterize contemporary processes of incorporation.The latter concerns above all the diverse ways in which representations about the desirability of a free market economy and the international communication of goods, services, and information, of parliamentary democracy as the supreme form of legitimate government, and of the inviolability of human rights are incorporated into the system of representations of each nation state. Depending on the position accorded such 'universal' representations in the 'national' ideologies, the former tend to be assigned a particular, culturally specific value that does not necessarily coincide with the values which are attributed to such representations in the ideological systems of the Western world.
To research these culturally specific configurations of ideas, values, and practices, in terms of which Southeast Asian societies conceptualize themselves as nation states (or other forms of polity) and represent themselves as such towards their own members and other societies and states, in December 1999 the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft established the Research Group 'Cultural Diversity and the Construction of the Polity in Southeast Asia: Continuity, discontinuity, transformation' at the Westfaelische Wilhelms-Universität Münster. In this group social anthropologists, political scientists, historians, and philologists some of the latter attached to the Universities of Cologne and Leiden address the above-mentioned research problem, as this manifests itself at different levels of the socio-political order (i.e. state, district, sultanate / principality, or village) and in different periods of time, in Indonesia and Laos. Additional research is scheduled to be conducted on Vietnam and Thailand, as well as on Chinese historical sources pertaining to these regions.
The research project is envisaged as an instrument to allow for an interdisciplinary and comparative analysis by regions of the contemporary configurations of the representations of society and the polity in Southeast Asia, and of the (supra-) regional and historical transformations which have resulted in these configurations. In view of this overall aim, the sample for comparison has been selected in such a manner as to reflect as much as is feasible of the historical, linguistic, and cultural complexity of the Southeast Asian region as a whole. Hence speakers of different language families (Sino-Tibetan, Tai, Mon-Khmer, Austronesian) who adhere to different religious traditions (local religions, Hindu-Buddhism, Buddhism, Islam, Confucianism, Christianity), and whose societies have been part of different colonial empires (Netherlands East Indies, French Indochina) or not (Thailand) and of different types of regional polities (sultanates, rajadoms, Muang-principalities, among others) are included in the sample for comparison. It is expected that this comparative analysis of regions will provide insights into both the culturally specific representations of society and the polity of each nation-state examined and in the configurations of representations characteristic of the Southeast Asian region as a whole. *
The Research Group can be contacted at:
RESEARCH GROUP SOUTHEAST ASIA
Secretariat: Ms Birgit Luig, MA
Institute of Ethnology
Studtstrasse 21
48149 Münster
Germany
Tel: +49-251-92 401 16
Fax: +49-251-92 401-13
E-mail: rgsa@uni-muenster.de
Josephus D.M. Platenkamp is Professor of Social Anthropology and chairman of the Research Group Cultural Diversity and the Construction of the Polity in Southeast Asia: Continuity, discontinuity, transformation at the the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.
E-mail: platenk@uni-muenster.de