INTRODUCTION

Focusing on the prospect of a locally based Southeast Asian Studies in the near future, this chapter necessarily takes a different approach and framework from most of the other chapters. For political and historical reasons, Southeast Asian Studies, as we know it today, has for the past several decades had its major centres of excellence half a globe away from Southeast Asia, no matter how one might define the region. With the exception of Singapore, formal training and research in Southeast Asian Studies in the region are fairly new and small in size and impact in comparison both to academic activities in other fields of enquiry, as well as in comparison to area studies in several countries outside the region. Understandably, most historical analysis of area studies has referred largely to key texts, ideas, persons and institutions from other regions. While such an exercise is highly valuable, it raises a number of intellectual, political and ethical issues as I have explored them elsewhere (Heryanto 2002). Building on that article, I wish to consider below the prospects for a home-grown Southeast Asian Studies in the twenty-first century, and speculate what such studies might look like. I must admit from the start, I do not have any ready answers to these important yet difficult questions. However, I hope this modest attempt is a worthy step. More specifically, this is a preliminary attempt to consider the initial and potential contribution of intra-Asian popular cultural flows to the future of a locally based area studies of the region, its people and its historical trajectory, as one possible form of successor to the old Southeast Asian Studies from the Cold War era.

Unlike most analyses of prominent Southeast Asian Studies in other regions, we are faced with a rather limited range of locally published and accessible ideas when examining the case within the otherwise rich intellectual traditions of the region itself. Instead of following the usual practice of looking back to milestones, key texts, authors, and debates of area studies in the past, local conditions have led me to focus on the present potentials and possible future.

INTRODUCTION: A CRITICAL PROVISO

Southeast Asian studies have developed to become a considerable field of study in Australia. Southeast Asia, as Australia's neighbouring region, has been the focus of national interest and this interest has encouraged considerable research and teaching in Australian universities for several decades. Yet “Southeast Asian Studies” as a whole has never been a unified subject of investigation nor can the study of Southeast Asia be extricated from other specific fields of research. Many of the individuals who have made the greatest contribution to the general field of Southeast Asian Studies have seen themselves primarily as contributors either to a particular discipline such as anthropology, politics, economics or demography or to the study of a particular country within Southeast Asia.

One might go further and argue that Southeast Asia could well be seen as a “transitory” category created in the period after the Second World War. Despite the existence of a political foundation through ASEAN for the present conception of Southeast Asia, views of this grouping of countries could well be reformulated in the future.

Although the category of Southeast Asia may be useful for certain purposes, there are other perspectives from which to view this same collection of countries. At different periods of history, various countries within the region have come under the cultural influence of either India or China and it is still possible to distinguish countries within the region accordingly. It is also possible to view these countries in terms of their predominant language families. Thus most of island Southeast Asia forms part of an Austronesianspeaking world. Similarly it is possible to view these countries in terms of their main constituent religions, in which case, Indonesia and Malaysia in particular form part of a Middle Eastern religious sphere.

This chapter offers a “genealogy” of some of the principal contributors to “Southeast Asian Studies” in Australia, even though many of these individuals would not themselves have identified their contribution as primarily directed to the creation of Southeast Asian Studies as such. In Australia, Southeast Asian Studies began through efforts to build disciplinary expertise on particular countries. In some cases, this involved a clear governmentsupported effort.

INTRODUCTION

This sentence in a long paragraph, which considered the history of institutions which are engaged in Southeast Asian Studies within Southeast Asia itself, seems to have two implications: first, it is notable that an organization for Southeast Asian Studies was established in Vietnam relatively earlier than in some other Southeast Asian countries. Second, it is not clear whether this Department played its role as an independent research institute. Western scholars count Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and Malaysia's Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Malaya, among the leading institutions of this region. Until the 1990s, outsiders might have perceived that “Vietnam is not something” which falls within the scope of Southeast Asian Studies (Halib and Huxley 1996, p. 4; Reid 2004, p. 15).

However, Vietnamese scholars contend that they have developed Vietnam's Southeast Asian Studies programme viewing Southeast Asia as both a geographical entity with a long history and cultural tradition and a strategic region for modern development. Based mainly on the arguments of Vietnamese scholars, this study has traced the construction of Southeast Asian Studies as an academic subject in Vietnam. The study has also paid heed to the institutionalization of Southeast Asian research institutions and their activities focusing on the perceptions and evaluation of Vietnamese scholars.

Firstly this chapter provides a historical overview of the institutionalization of Southeast Asian Studies focusing on the relevant research institutions in Vietnam. Secondly, it describes the perceptions of Southeast Asian Studies inside Vietnam and the local evaluation of the effort to indigenize Southeast Asian Studies. In this regard this study has taken note of Vietnamese scholars’ perceptions and assessment of Southeast Asian Studies performed by outsiders, primarily by Western scholars; in other words it concerns the perceptions and evaluation of Southeast Asian Studies conducted by Southeast Asian insiders and its origin in an indigenous Vietnamese point of view. And finally, this chapter examines the construction and limitations of Southeast Asian Studies in Vietnam, including the issue of this field as one which advocates interdisciplinary regional studies.

Introduction

The origin of “Southeast Asian Studies” in the Republic of Korea can be traced back to the early 1960s. But it was not until the late 1980s that any serious academic research on Southeast Asia began in earnest. Since then many Korean scholars who can be regarded as Southeast Asia area specialists, or “Southeast Asianists” have joined this academic discipline or field of study. The exact number of Korean Southeast Asianists is not known, however, it can be estimated roughly at 150 to 200; the number varies in accordance with what criteria we use in determining the membership of the academy of Southeast Asianists. If we apply a relatively strict standard, as I do in this study, the number may not exceed 150.Among them, the number of Southeast Asianists who are in the disciplines of social sciences and history will be around 120 or so; others are in the fields of Southeast Asian languages and literature (Park S.W. 2009).

The small size of the membership should not be denigrated, however, if we take into consideration the relatively short history — a little over twenty years — of Southeast Asian Studies in Korea and its humble origins. For those approximately 120 social scientists and historians working in this field, there are several possible ways of categorizing them. One way is to divide them into two categories or generations and draw a demarcation line around the mid-1990s. In this way, the first generation of local academics on Southeast Asia comprises those who began their careers as Southeast Asian area specialists prior to the mid-1990s, while the second category/ generation started their academic research careers after that period.

This chapter examines how the research undertaken by Korean area specialists on Southeast Asia has evolved over time in accordance with changes that have taken place from inside and outside the academia during the last three decades. In particular it seeks to map various research agendas and themes as well as methodologies that have been pursued by Korean academics in different periods — in the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. It also attempts to identify the institutional developments that have been taking place with regard to Southeast Asian Studies.

There are several complications in discussing the contribution of Japanese historians to the understanding of Southeast Asian history. The fact that Southeast Asia includes eleven countries, usually divided into mainland and maritime sub-regions, with different environments and histories makes it difficult to discuss an overarching research theme that can cover the entire region. Whilst countries in mainland Southeast Asia have existed as identifiable states from a relatively early stage in history, those constituting the maritime sub-region were created as states through Euro-American colonial occupation. A further complicating element has been the ethnic diversity within each country, which has generated significant tensions and in some cases open conflict. Finally, the difficulty in writing an essay on the contribution of Japanese scholars to Southeast Asian history is that Japan has the largest number of Southeast Asian history scholars in the world. The academic organization called Tonan ajia shigakkai [Japan Society for Southeast Asian History] represents the nation's fertile academic interest in this area.1 Japanese research has dealt with very detailed questions in each Southeast Asian country. Therefore, in many cases, it is difficult to determine the period of history and the country discussed in the literature just through a cursory look at the titles of the published works produced by Japanese historians.

The reason why so many Japanese scholars can actively engage in Southeast Asian historical research is because organizations such as the Nippon Foundation (which surpasses the United States’ Ford Foundation in terms of research grants and the funds available), the Ministry of Education and Science, and the Toyota Foundation provided generous financial support to promote humanities studies. Researchers can spend a year or two in any country or region he or she wishes and collect the most recent data and information (Shiraishi 2003, pp. 141–47).

Due to the massive number of researchers, tracking down each of the numerous research papers and periodicals generated from all the university research institutions and publishers is an extremely daunting task. Fortunately, it was possible to solve this problem by using the Tonan aija — rekishi to bunka [Southeast Asia: History and Culture], the academic journal of Tonan aija shigakkai, which provides the “Tonan aija kankei bunken mokuroku” [A list of publications on Southeast Asia] published in the previous year.

THE CONSTRUCTION OF REGIONS

It is a truism to state that regions are constructed. In our current globalizing world there appears to be an obsession and a need to establish regional organizations of various kinds as well as more disparate groupings of countries sharing certain interests, activities and objectives which in turn can be projected more successfully onto the global stage. It is also an obvious point, but worth making with reference to Southeast Asia, that some regions are much more easily defined and constructed than others, particularly if there is geographical or physical coalescence of some kind, shared histories and identifiable cultural characteristics. Regions also emerged in the context of economic, political and socio-cultural encounters between culturally different populations, especially following the expansion of Western trade, commerce and exploration some 400 years ago and the accompanying need by Western traders, administrators, missionaries and military personnel to map and locate territories and to classify and learn about those who resided there. However, with regard to the scatter of kingdoms, states and tribal groups and the geographical diversity and openness of those territories lying across the great sea routes between the Indian subcontinent and mainland China and Japan Park Seung Woo and Victor T. King and which came to be called “Southeast Asia”, there were special difficulties in identifying and demarcating a region. These difficulties persist.

SOUTHEAST ASIA AS A REGION: ORIENTATIONS

Those who have specialized in the study of Southeast Asia, and particularly those scholars located in Southeast Asian Studies centres, institutes and programmes, have frequently been engaged in debates and disagreements about what defines their region and what is distinctive about it; and this preoccupation has usually been much more intense when compared with the concerns of regionalist specialists in other parts of the world. In other words, Southeast Asianists have sought persistently for a rationale for what they do and, in order to serve their students and those they train, to provide an academic basis for considering the collection of countries and peoples which they are trying to understand as a viable and meaningful unit of analysis and scholarly speculation.

In 1998 Indonesia faced the political consequences of economic turmoil and decades of repression. The Asian financial crisis had triggered reformasi, but it was arguably the oppression of the New Order regime, thirty-three years of increasingly centralized authoritarian rule, that fuelled the anger and passions of so many Indonesians. By May of the same year, student demonstrators were openly calling for President Soeharto to step down, an act unimaginable a few months prior. There was an increase in ethnic violence and communal riots, not only in Jakarta, but throughout the archipelago. And as if to punctuate matters, forest fires raged on the resource-rich island of Kalimantan, covering much of the region with smog. At the time, observers of Indonesia expressed pessimism about the country's future prospects.

A decade on, Indonesia has experienced a remarkable recovery. It is currently the leading democracy in Southeast Asia, some might say, the only democracy in the region. Much of the ethnic and religious conflict that flared up in the waning days of the New Order and the political transition has tapered off. The economy has undergone an impressive revival. To be sure, many problems remain, including corruption, elite entrenchment and the spectre of violent Islamic fundamentalism. But a decade ago, few would have predicted Indonesia would be as politically and economically successful as it is today.

How did such a period of uncertainty and turmoil result in a seemingly stable and successful political regime? One reason for Indonesia's success today may be rooted in the historical moment of political transition sandwiched between these two periods. The resignation of Soeharto and the transition thereafter symbolized a massive rupture in Indonesian political development and began the process of building an entirely different kind of regime. Scholars call moments such as these historical conjunctures or critical junctures. Among the major reforms were democratization and far-reaching decentralization. The decision to implement these reforms and the particular way this was done, I argue, helps to account for the outcomes we see today.

Spreading industrialization in the West created new kinds of environmental issues. Early British and American factories spewed out smoke and were often condemned, as in Charles Dickens’ works, for their ugliness. Water quality was also a serious issue. The sheer growth of cities, which often had unprocessed sewage running into local rivers, and the growth of the chemical industry with its cost-saving impulse to dump industrial waste products into the same rivers, produced noticeable health hazards by the end of the nineteenth century. Active concern for public health in Britain dates from 1840s, though it was not until the 1870s that the application of science and technology to public health problems began to be significant. It was generally thought that the solution to public health problems depended on improved sanitation provided by large-scale civil engineering projects. Later, science and medicine began to exert an ever-increasing role, especially from the 1880s with the discoveries of Louis Pasteur and Robert Koch and the germ theory assumed importance in the fight against communicable diseases. As the nineteenth century progressed, technology and industrialization ushered in modern hygiene. Clean water, water closets, sewers, soap, together with better nutrition and improved housing, vastly reduced the incidence of infectious disease. Factories in the industrialized West mass produced cheap cotton underwear that was easy to clean.

While nineteenth century Singapore did not have industrial smokestacks to pollute the air and water, the rapidly growing colony and its population had to face up with environmental hazards that came with urbanization. The colony was shaping to be one of the many, to use the term favoured by urban historians, “walking cities” of the industrialized world. Since most inhabitants could not afford either the cost or the space required to keep a horse and carriage, they had to be able to walk to work or to work in their own homes. Businesses too had to be within walking distance of each other and this implied that as the colony grew, it became congested. More and more people had both to live and to work within the same relatively limited space. For most of the nineteenth century, building laws and by-laws to regulate town planning hardly existed.

A close relationship existed between the expansion of the British Empire and British scientific exploration of lands beyond. In the nineteenth century, geography became a significant “imperial science” in British schools and universities. Exploration and map compilation in far-flung regions remained a source of enormous public interest but as geography developed in to a professional discipline, it “began to expand beyond its original focus on exploration and topographical map-making to assume intellectual authority over a wide range of regionally specific environmental, economic, social, political and cultural evidence”. Both the amateur explorers and the university-based scholars provided the geographical knowledge necessary for overseas conquest and colonization. The Empire, with its extensive material resources and geographical reach, allowed travellers and scientific explorers to sail into nooks and corners of lands in the periphery and pursue their interests on a genuinely global scale. The expeditions of James Cook, Joseph Banks and Joseph Conrad resulted in huge collections of scientific information which contributed to the development of British science. The gathering of such knowledge relied on a set of institutions closely linked to the imperial government, including the Admiralty, the Hydrographer's Office, the East India Company, the Royal Engineers, the Ordinance Survey, the Geological Survey and the Kew Gardens. The island of Singapore appeared on a variety of regional maps with the Europeans making inroads into the seas and lands of Southeast Asia from the sixteenth century. Charting of the Straits of Malacca and the adjacent coastline, including the Straits of Singapore, was an important preoccupation for the Portuguese, the Dutch, and, the English. “[B]y the 1550s or so map-making had begun to catch up with the pace of exploration and discovery in South-east Asia” and cartographers, hydrographers, naturalists and explorers of many European nationalities, such as Ferdinand Magellan, Francis Drake, Joris van Spilbergen, Jan van Linschoten, William Dampier, James Cook, John Crawfurd and James Horsburgh contributed immensely to the knowledge of the region depicted on contemporary maps. It is not surprising then that Stamford Raffles was armed with the geographical knowledge of the region which allowed him to make critical choices in setting up a British station. Soon after the island was ceded to Britain in 1819, Captain Franklin surveyed the southern coastline.

The British administered its rule in their Asian colonies around the use of indigenous clerical and professional skills. Those who aspired to join the rank-and-file of the government services and British companies had to better themselves through acquiring an English education. In British India, English education was initially provided by missionaries, but in the 1860s, Departments of Public Instruction were created and were responsible for the development of a growing network of English-medium schools. Similarly in Hong Kong, most of the colony's seventy government-supported schools taught English by 1900. Even in Britain itself, the educational system, never considered as the most progressive of Britain's institutions, resisted the introduction of applied sciences into its university curricula. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, England had no formal institutions imparting technical education, and engineers received their training as apprentices. Indeed, India provided her colonial master with useful development models of technical institutions to replicate. The colony had established engineering colleges at Poona, Calcutta and Madras in the nineteenth century.

In the case of Singapore, the progress of education generally lacked behind the rate of economic change during the period of British rule. The ruling elite carefully steered the educational rudder so as to preserve their economic and technological status quo. The limited opportunities in English and technical education within a laissez-faire educational system meant that the people generally lacked the educational standards to understand Western science and technology, thus inhibiting the growth of a technological culture that could facilitate the transfer and diffusion of specialized skills and technical knowledge to the indigenous population. This is compounded by the racial prejudices of colonial administrators, who harboured the notion that Western education, including technical education, was not appropriate for the indigenous people. Instead of operating as an agent for economic and social modernization, the laissez-faire and often haphazard education policy in Singapore constituted a divisive force which reinforced existing communal and social barriers. Up to the 1950s, the colonial educational policy was not “national” in character and failed to promote social integration. It caused unnecessary tension between the Anglophile elite and the vernacularly-educated cohorts and further exposed the pluralistic nature of the Singapore society.