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3. Locating Southeast Asia: Postcolonial Paradigms and Predicament
- ISEAS–Yusof Ishak Institute
- Chapter
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36 Henk Schulte Nordholt 3 Locating Southeast Asia: Postcolonial Paradigms and Predicaments Henk Schulte Nordholt Geography and identity Social scientists have cut up the world into convenient regions: Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, East Asia and so on. A core argument for the regionalization of socio-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 makes it relevant to study them together. Moreover, these regional studies are both rooted in intimate local knowledge and devoted to productive comparison, and this combination should lead to conceptual innovation and theoretical sophistication. However, this argument needs to be questioned. First, it is important to re-examine the ways in which particular regions are constructed, how seemingly ‘natural’ borders of these regions are defined by academic specialists working within particular political contexts, how a particular process of regionalization affects the questions Locating Southeast Asia 37 these scholars address, and how within certain areas an hierarchy of core societies and marginalized peripheries is established. Second, the formation of institutionalized communities of area specialists and the reproduction of the paradigms which explain and underpin both the identities of the area they study and the academic community they are part of create the danger of an inward-looking habitus. Such a community of area specialists is characterized by a highly specialized language and an idiosyncratic research agenda, favouring particular topics and excluding discussions which are, for instance, considered to be highly relevant in other ‘areas’ or academic disciplines. Criticizing area studies, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam wrote: It is as if these conventional geographical units of analysis, fortuitously defined as givens for the intellectually slothful, and the result of complex (even murky) processes of academic and non-academic engagement, somehow become real and overwhelming. Having helped create these Frankenstein’s monsters, we are obliged to praise them for their beauty, rather than grudgingly acknowledge their limited functional utility (Subrahmanyam 1999, p. 296). By focusing almost exclusively on the production of ‘local knowledge’, the area studies approach tended to ignore larger comparative themes which were discussed within the academic disciplines which constitute the social sciences. As a result the study of societies within certain areas was often not informed by explicitly formulated theoretical questions. Cultures were seen in terms of isolated entities because area studies disregarded the historical connections between various regions in the world and the unequal power relationships between them (Wolf 1982). Instead geographical frameworks determined the explanation of regional phenomena. Just like the way landscapes could be imagined after they had been conceptualized and represented by paintings, it was geography that created regions by the very act of mapping. Geographies are in this respect powerful political discourses about space (Winichakul 1994). Politics make spatial orders and territoriality is considered to be a strategy that affects people’s actions by controlling space and demarcating their room to manoeuvre. Area studies were politically informed geographies of identity which seemingly operated in a disconnected world. There were, however, important connections in the sense that the booming years of the area studies coincided with the Cold War. Area studies [44.222.212.138] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 11:49 GMT) 38 Henk Schulte Nordholt formed a convenient context in which a Western, anti-communist model of modernization cum nation building was propagated. Genealogies of an area study Southeast Asia has also been conceptualized as a meaningful region and Southeast Asian studies institutionalized in academia as well.1 The geographic concept ‘Southeast Asia’ originated modestly in the first half of the 20th century and was in academic terms coined by Robert Heine Geldern who, in the 1920s, emphasized the ethnic, linguistic and cultural coherence of the region (Dahm and Ptak 1999). The forerunners of the area study specialists were colonial language officers and administrators who were assigned to solve practical problems. They were mainly active in the fields of language studies, compiling authoritative grammars and dictionaries of local languages, and applied anthropology and rural sociology in order to control and manage local society. But there were also impressive efforts made in the fields of archaeology and what was to be defined as ‘classical’ literature in order to preserve and appropriate the cultural history of the colony. Except for some archaeologists these colonial scholars lived and worked within the boundaries of their colony without engaging in comparative research or abstract theoretical exercises (Anderson 1992; Nordholt 1994). What was set in motion was a segmented...