Locating Southeast Asia

Social scientists have cut the world up into convenient regions, like Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, East Asia, and so on. A central argument for the regionalization of social scientific inquiry has always been that geographic proximity implies long-term cultural, economic, and social exchange. Hence, societies within a certain region share important characteristics which make it relevant to study them together. Regional studies are both rooted in intimate local knowledge and devoted to meaningful comparison, and this combination should lead to conceptual innovation and theoretical sophistication. However, this argument needs to be questioned.

* By REMCO RABEN & HENK SCHULTE NORDHOLT

Firstly, it is important to re-examine the ways in which particular 'regions' are constructed, how scholars of those regions conceive of national boundaries, and how a particular way of regionalization affects the questions they address. Secondly, the formation of institutionalized communities of regional specialists creates the danger of inward-looking 'area studies' whose specialized language and concerns become largely unintelligible to scholars working on other regions. This process may also occur within a specific region where scholars work on a particular society and have little knowledge of other societies in that region, throwing doubt on the claim of meaningful comparisons.

It seems that social scientists cannot do without forms of regionalization in order to make their task manageable, even in an age in which geographic proximity and clear cut boundaries are losing much of their former significance. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the process of academic regionalization still goes on: old regions (The Orient) lose their attraction, but new ones, like the Pacific Rim, are proffered as superior lenses through which we should understand complex socio-economic change.

Southeast Asia has also been conceptualized as a meaningful region. Yet, it is difficult to have a clear imagining of its geography. Ironically, this lack of specificity has become one of the main building blocks of the edifice of Southeast Asian Studies. In fact, over the years 'Southeast Asia' has been defined, if it was defined at all, by its dissimilarity. In the first place, it came to be disconnected from its surroundings, from the hybrid societies of Austronesia and from the giant areas of China and India. As such, Southeast Asia is the result of subtraction, it is that which is left over after subtracting the landmasses of India and China. But Southeast Asianists have tried to make the best of it. They formulated a second feature of Southeast Asia: its openness to external influences, its variety, its fragmentation, or, following Anthony Reid, its 'dynamic pluralism'. Again, we see this lack of specificity and the pivotal role of dissimilarities.

On the face of it, Southeast Asia has become a convenient and successful marker for scholarly research. But despite the proliferation of regional studies, there appears to be a fair amount of discomfort about the 'Southeast Asianness' of Southeast Asia. The term Southeast Asia acquired a political weight during the Pacific War and, moulded by the Cold War and crystallized into area studies programmes, it achieved a ponderous reality in the academic world. This is especially so in the United States and Australia where Southeast Asian Studies have become firmly rooted, but markedly less so in Europe, where countries like England, France, and the Netherlands tended to focus more exclusively on their former colonies. Furthermore, China and Japan have their own genealogies of thinking of the Southern Seas, and academic institutions within Southeast Asian countries seem to be geared predominantly towards their own national interests, despite the gradual strengthening of ASEAN.

The workshop 'Locating Southeast Asia', held in Amsterdam from 29-31 March 2001, addressed the question of whether 'Southeast Asia' was a twentieth-century construct which is losing its significance and which has, in the end, more geopolitical reality than scholarly relevance. What have been its academic uses and achievements? How are we seeing the region in view of recent political, economic, and academic developments? And what futures are there for Southeast Asian Studies? Is it still a useful tool for analysis or should we look for a radical re-orientation?

The workshop was attended by a variety of experts in the field of Southeast Asian Studies from Europe, the United States, Australia, and Southeast Asia. The meeting was also intended to honour Heather Sutherland, who has been a source of inspiration for the study of Southeast Asia since her appointment as professor at the Free University in Amsterdam in 1974. In her keynote speech, Heather Sutherland argued that Southeast Asia has become a 'cold concept', indicating that it only has meaning for academic bureaucrats, whereas the area itself has lost its former coherence.

The other participants of the workshop elaborated on this point in their papers by demonstrating that 'Southeast Asia' is shaped according to the perspectives of the beholder and that the different parts of the region have become more isolated from each other as colonial intrusions intensified since the late nineteenth-century. They focused on the drawing of academic boundaries and the effects of political borders with regard to Southeast Asia, scrutinized various powerful academic images of Southeast Asia that were constructed and superimposed on the region, and analysed the way internal borders tended to break up the old interconnected world of Southeast Asia.

Despite this process of compartimentalization, there was also continuity in terms of mobility of people and goods and the permeability of Southeast Asia's internal and external borders. In this respect, it can be argued that Southeast Asia forms, at least in economic terms to a large extent, a meaningful part of a wider East Asian region.

The workshop did not, of course, provide final answers to all the questions formulated. But most of the papers forced us to rethink old paradigms and to move away from essentializing conceptions of Southeast Asia. Intensifying global communications and mobility, as well as attempts at formulating post-colonial perspectives on the world, have engendered a more fragmented view, away from monolithic imaginings of Southeast Asia, away from the confines of national and nationalized histories, and away from simple synchronisms that have explained and legitimized Southeast Asia as a meaningful area in the past: whether it was the Dong-son culture, the mandala concept, Western colonialism, Japanese occupation, decolonization and nation-building, or the Cold War. *