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Recognizing Scholarly Subjects 109 3 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 T 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 109 110 Celia Lowe 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 Recognizing Scholarly Subjects 111 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...

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