On the Vitality of Area Studies: New Directions in Southeast Asian History

Extract

The study of Southeast Asia has generated profound theoretical insights whose reach has stretched far beyond the region itself. One need think only of Clifford Geertz’s writings on culture, Benedict Anderson’s on nationalism, and James Scott’s on the state. Indeed, it is now a truism among scholars of Southeast Asia that the region’s immense diversity makes it fertile terrain for the cultivation of larger, comparative ideas.¹ “I owe a strange debt to the tyrant General Suharto, who expelled me from Indonesia in 1972,” Anderson remembered. “I am grateful to him for forcing me beyond the ‘one country’ perspective. Had I not been expelled, it is unlikely that I would ever have written Imagined Communities.”²

But Anderson’s determination to reach toward comparison also emerged from a sense that area studies was in crisis. “Many area-specialists,” he wrote in 1978, “feel vulnerable to the charge of being methodologically backward and theoretically unsophisticated,” and as a result have found themselves “defiantly crawling deeper into an ‘area-ist’ shell … and engaging in the study of ever more narrowly defined and esoteric topics.”³ A sense of self-conscious crisis has persisted among area studies scholars for decades. Though diagnosticians have identified several etiologies of the crisis—from a (neo)colonial heritage to an inattention to globalization—the critique Anderson identified remains salient today: area studies lacks a theoretical or methodological core, which impedes intellectually productive disagreement and, lest it not be said, fundraising in the departmentally regimented modern university.⁴