Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives (review)

Book Reviews557 Southeast Asian Studies: Pacific Perspectives. Edited by Anthony Reíd. Tempe, Arizona, USA: Monograph Series Press, Program for Southeast Asian Studies, Arizona State University, 2003. Soft cover: 375pp. That Southeast Asia exists would appear to be a necessary condition for the study of Southeast Asia to be a respectable adult occupation. Contestations about the region seem however to gain currency through an alluring vagueness surrounding the term "exists" more than the ontological status of the region itself. It is the history of the term that decides the subject more than the objective existence of a place called Southeast Asia. Let us take the example of something presumably less problematic: China, for example. Does China exist in the sense that some part of it, or even the whole of it, can be studied and commented on, in one respect or another? Yes, quite certainly. Similarly, does Southeast Asia exist in the sense that part of it, or even the whole of it, can be studied and commented on, in one respect or another? If the answer again is yes, then from where do the questions whether or not Southeast Asia exists and whether or not Southeast Asian Studies is a legitimate academic discipline arise? The issue is more about how a designated geographical area is studied than ifit has sufficient ontological status to make it worthy of the attention of academics. As noted in the introduction of the reviewed volume, no scholar is actually an expert in all the countries involved, nor in all aspects of one chosen area. The validity of such a criterion for defining an academic discipline is doubtful at best, since no expert can consider himself to be so over the entirety of his formal discipline. No physicist can possibly be an expert in physics as such, surely. And for the same reason that we have astrophysicists and nuclear physicists, we have economists studying Vietnam, or anthropologists studying Bali or architects studying Kuala Lumpur. Expedience will decide how these are grouped together as "Southeast Asianists". What demands one might have for the component parts ofSoutheast Asia to be classified as a unit are not uninformed by contextual needs. "Southeast Asia" does not have to exist the way the moon exists for there to be institutes of Southeast Asian Studies, and for research funding to be available. We need not confuse academic discipline with institutional expedience. The first concerns an ambition to study what is a coherent subject matter, whose ontological status is assumed or is to be ascertained, while the second is an administrative issue, a matter of keeping the house tidy. 558Book Reviews As with all "new" areas of study, there is a certain "development" involved, where a discourse steadily evolves around the discipline's denotation, and "knowledge" is constructed from terminologies that promulgate its status and convince a sufficiently influential public of its viability. Behind every successful discipline there is a history, of both the science and of its interaction with the processes and relationships it has studied. Before it must stretch a continuing process of creation and discovery. As Richard A. O'Connor notes: "History is real, deep and inescapable" (p. 81), and it is this history that a discipline is served by, and studies at the same time. Why "Europe" exists more than "Asia" does is the institutional relevance the former has, and why the "Orient" is practically dead is not due so much to a sudden discovery of its demise than to the end of the colonial project that helped to construct it. As a geographical given, it is as chimerical as the formerly named continents. That is because there are no geographic givens where polities are concerned, and it is human history and discursive relevance that decide. The view that Southeast Asia's non-existence is revealed by the fact that "few Southeast Asianists actually cover the whole region in their research", or that the term is a Cold War construction, are countered by the equally secure fact that "enough people speak, teach, learn, and write as though 'Southeast Asia' did exist for us to give them the benefit ofthe doubt" (Donald K. Emmerson, p. 48). Furthermore, if the...