by Hugh M. Lewis

The case of the role of traffic and trade in Southeast Asia is considered in relation to a marketplace hypothesis in the regional integration of Southeast Asian civilization. More than a cross-roads, many ports and places in Southeast Asia have been the location of trade entre'pots that have inter-regionally enmeshed the region in a worldwide network of economic and cultural relations that has long served to embed in local identity an outward orientation.

The Southeast Asian marketplace has long served as a central meeting ground between different ethnocultural groupings--a place for neutral exchange and reciprocities where conflicts are temporally set aside. The role of traffic and trade continues to be a vital intercultural linkage in Southeast Asia today.

The presence of the petty, part-time trader and the full-time, long-distance merchant middleman has played a pivotal role in the economic integration of the region. The role of the early trader, pioneer and entrepreneur, as the early forerunner of the modern capitalist, and the relationship of the trader with the role of religion in the interregional integration of Southeast Asia needs to be given the credit its due.

We like to think that the invention of capitalism was a strictly modern, post-feudal affair, but we might think that there may have been more than one invention of capitalism, and more than one kind of capitalistic enterprise in the world. There may exist in the world today several different forms of capitalism, and different forms of capitalistic interest and involvement.

Corporate forms of organization; along different principles have long been important factors in the trans-local organization of Southeast Asian society. (D. E. Brown Principles of Social Organization: Southeast Asia 1976). Incorporation into groups that are larger than life, that survive beyond one's own lifetime, and that have as a principle concern the protection and maximization of shared group and individual interests. Southeast Asia has long been confronted by the challenge of ethnic diversity--a cauldron of ethnicity, it has always faced a common problem of integration and the organization of diversity.

This organization has long been a matter of self-organizing systems, one that has depended perhaps on a few basic and simple mechanisms of equivalence structures for reciprocal interchange and transaction, and of spacing mechanisms that assured an optimization of resource acquisition and a minimization of conflict and competitive contact. Spacing mechanisms may have taken the form of ecological specialization and phase-transitions between pioneering, semi-sedentary and fully sedentary modes of subsistence, headhunting and warring practices combined with inter-local exchanges and tribal exogamy, formalized social etiquette and ritual, and a "live and let live" ethos of the tolerance and mutual coexistence of difference.

The problem of the organization of diversity of peoples and their differences in time and space begets the research dilemma of the organization of broad diversities of data types and of many different themes into a coherent pattern. The polythematic inter-translation of culture has depended upon achieving a certain presumed level of comprehensiveness--a pan-optic perspective.

The likelihood and frequency of different peoples coming into continuous contact or coexisting within a shared context in Southeast Asia must have been great. "Rules of etiquette and engagement" must have, in such circumstances, been long worked out and more-or-less mutually agreed by all parties, which may have permitted a form of mutual coexistence and a kind of live and let live world view which dictated tolerance toward and even strategic appreciation of socio-cultural differences. Such a world view would have been rooted in the reciprocities which tie different peoples into obligatory social transactions. A minimal knowledge of the other peoples with whom one can expect to come into contact, a willingness to take risks in contacts with strangers, a common trade language and mutually understood terms of agreement. It may also have entailed the rise of central places--great marketplaces--where such polyglot meeting and transaction may have taken place. It seems that typically such central places were large markets that occurred at some dry location in the delta regions of the mouths of the main rivers.

There may have been many kinds of equivalence structures shared in Southeast Asia. Equivalence structures can be defined as those common, socially defined mechanisms that provide a high degree of information and a low level of randomness in interaction and mediation of complex and ever-changing events. They act as general behavioral and symbolic templates with which to organize and interpret varieties of data. Among such equivalence structures we can identify alternating linguistic styles, religion, ritualized etiquette and social custom, fictive kinship and surrogate familial relations, shared cultural ecology, economic mechanisms of trade, pricing, and market exchange, technologies, cultural ecological practices and values, food and cooking, and basic divisions of labor. (Murray Leaf Information and Behavior in a Sikh Village 1972)

We may make a distinction between sources of information which choice of informational value is high or low and the entropy of alternative information choices is high or low. Though high entropy sources do not necessarily produce messages of high informational value, low-entropy messages necessarily produce low-information messages. Different sources of information may vary considerable as to their informational structure, content and capacity.

Equivalence structures can be minimally defined as any relationship or set of relationships in which acts by some of its members will entail some predictable degree of expected response on the part of other members. (Anthony F. C. Wallace Culture and Personality 2n. Edition. 1970). Such structures tend to reduce the entropy within the system, at the cost of reducing the informational capacity of the system. In general, within such structures, we may stipulate a tendency towards the maximization of congruence in such structures, one that is continuously counteracted by inherently chaotic tendencies.

We may also refer to the binding effect and the incorporating and obligatory nature of social relations based upon complementary or mutual interests and at least implicit commitment to maintaining the role-definitions of the relationship, from which emerges the social contract that is the foundation of the organization of diversity. Enmeshed in our webs of reciprocity and equivalence, we become bound to the maintenance of certain roles, standards, codes, customs and values that have greater social significance.

Regional integration of Southeast Asia has always depended upon the working out of such equivalence structures across a range of different groups of people. This regional integration has long had a history and distribution much deeper in time and extensive in space and intricacy than we might think.

Religion is one such set of equivalence mechanisms that have served the purpose of regional integration and the organization of diversity in Southeast Asia. The importance and role of religion in Southeast Asia cannot be overemphasized, nor can the part played by religion in the developmental dynamics of the historical processes of human civilization be ignored--civilization is never advanced in the vacuum of religious values, ideas, symbolism, or world views. There are many clear occasions of religious belief providing motivation in the face of uncertain adversity where no other kind of material incentive would prove sufficient.

Foreign traders brought with them important religious beliefs and symbolism that enriched and elaborated the inherently syncretistic orientation of the traditional Southeast Asian interstate system. The role of religion in facilitating and legitimating state organization and stable trade contacts, under the umbrella of a common system of ritual belief and behavior, in providing a rational and motivational system for economic activity, has not yet been adequately studied. Different religious orientations, during different epochs, helped to confer stable, conservative symbolic forms sanctioning the traditionalizing process of developing Southeast Asian civilization.

Religion provides a cultural framework for the symbolic articulation of diverse groupings of people, a necessary basis for "ritual communality, cross-cutting ethnic, linguistic and ecological boundaries." It provides a common "ritual language" facilitating growth and diversification of "that very large part of culture which is concerned with economic action." (Edmund Leach, 1954: pg. 279) "People may speak different languages, wear different clothes, live in different kinds of houses, but they universally understand one another's ritual. Ritual acts are ways of saying things about social status, and the 'language' in which these things are said is common..." (ibid.: pg. 279) Religious worldview orients people around a common set of core values and a common attitude and framework for seeing the world, committing them to a shared course of social action. The introduction of religion into a region has always been a way of interregional consolidation of structural linkages which facilitates transmission across different boundaries.

Models of the rise of state civilization, whether prime mover or multivariate, are generally materialist-structural/functional in orientation. The role of religion is seen to be part of an ideological superstructure that is epiphenomenal, legitimating, reinforcing and, at best, secondary to the principle driving factors of social organization and development of civilization. Similarly, systems models that also tend to be based upon functionalist and structuralist presuppositions, stress political-economic institutions, modes of production and social relations of production as the determining factors of such development.

The role of religion, seen to be dialectically complementary to materialist and functionalist mechanisms in the social construction of reality, has almost never been accorded much causal importance in this general process, in spite of a great deal of historical evidence which might suggest otherwise that such a dialectical complementariness and hence complex interdependency might actually be at the heart of such historical transformations.

Wherever we find evidence of trade, we find religious missions, and wherever we find religious missions, we find the encroachments of an alien civilization's values, worldview, a colonization of the soul, and we find the first beginnings of a process of imperial domination.

The proto-historical phase of Southeast Asian history can be divided into several stadial stages which corresponded to the periods in which certain varieties of acculturative influence became predominant throughout the region. These periods are presented generally in order of their appearance, but later periods did not completely replace the influence of earlier periods, but only added further complexity on top of the already diverse region. Furthermore, traces and suggestions of influence from the exogenous sources of later periods are evident during the earlier phases, but remained emergent or sub-critical in their development until their later developmental sequence. In this way, the historical period of Southeast Asia can be divided into the phases of Brahmanization, Buddhization, Islamization, Confucianization, and Christianization, a fully historic period which can be subdivided into Catholization, Dutch Calvinism, and British Protestantism, and finally, Modern Secularization. There is an important and valid reason for dividing and labeling these periods by their religious character--not only does it suggest the primary role which religion has played in the formation of regional Southeast Asian identity, but it also suggests the role religion has had in acculturative expansion and interregional influence of different civilizations.

The subsequent phases of Brahmanization, Buddhization, Islamization, Confucianization and Christianization represented but extensions of a basic historical patterning in the Southeast Asian region that overlaid an indigenous animism and inter-linked local, regional and interregional interests into increasingly complex patterns of interdependency and involvement. The arrival of Indian Civilization provided the impetus of potent symbolic forms that mandated and sanctioned the augmentation of state power by an elite. Islam penetrated the hinterlands and conferred a stability to the peasant resource base of these states. Chinese influence had long provided critical economic linkages for the articulation of the entire development process. Christianization helped to provide a stable and dependable administrative machinery and a valuation of capitalistic enterprise.

First evidence of Brahmanization is found in the first and second century AD--though the small trickle of sea-faring Indian merchants; probably had no real beginning, building trade settlements on foreign shores on top of ancient Neolithic sites. This trickle gradually flowered into a major stream of culture contact resulting in the founding of "Indian Kingdoms practicing the arts, customs and religions of India, and using Sanskrit as their sacred language." (George Coedes The Indianized States of Southeast Asia 1968) Indian influence is pervasive throughout Southeast Asia, and has become a basic component of Southeast Asian regional identity.

The model of Brahmanization consists of small groups of merchant vessels, either carrying Brahmans or merchants who passed themselves off as priests, mixing with and influencing the local elite, learning the local language, introducing elements of their Hindu civilization, marrying well placed daughters of powerful leaders, who in turn became the best agents for the promotion of Hindu values. Inheriting land or titles of authority, Indianized chiefs then assembled local peoples into a state organization. A Hindu temple might be built on a near by mountain top. "This custom, associated with the original foundation of a kingdom or royal dynasty, is witnessed in all the Indian kingdoms of the Indochinese Peninsula. It reconciled the native cult of the spirits on the heights with the Indian concept of royalty, and gave the population assembled one sovereign, a sort of national god, intimately associated with the monarchy. We have here a typical example of how India, in spreading her civilization to the Indochinese peninsula, knew how to make foreign beliefs and cults her own and assimilate them." (George Coedes, The Indianized States of Southeast Asia 1968: pgs. 26-7)

Buddhism appears to have swept through Southeast Asia in several waves--in the first and second centuries A.D., later in the 3rd and Fourth, and then again in the 7th and 9th centuries. Fa Shien was a buddhist monk who traveled from India to China via Southeast Asia, who described the ships of the day as carrying 200 persons, (G. R. G. Worcester, The Junks and Sampans of the Yangtze Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press 1971: pg. 22.) left a detailed account of Buddhist Kingdoms he had visited along the way. Buddhist monks and their temples were the principle purveyors of this faith, and the political and economic ramifications of its influence in Southeast Asia are not clear but may have been considerable. Some Buddhist monasteries appear to have accumulated a great deal of wealth and local control, and Buddhism provided another potent symbolic pantheon for the legitimization of state authority. Buddhism in many areas appears to have been implicated in the formation of early cities, providing some of the religious symbolisms of royal authority appropriated by the ruling elites. This kind of influence is evident in much of the early monumental architecture. (Keith Taylor, The Birth of Vietnam 1983)

Islam spread epidemically from the 7th Century onward, and became well-rooted among the low-land peasant peoples, especially in Malaysia and the Indonesian Archipelago. Carried by Arab traders, Koranic reading and the Jawi script provided the first basis for the spread of literacy. The basic model of Islamization was similar to that of Brahmanization. It was basically an urban civilization, another factor in the generation of the Southeast Asian city-state complex. The urban model of Islamization has five basic components: a citadel or defensive work; a royal quarter containing the royal residence, administrative offices and royal guards; a central urban complex containing mosques, religious schools and markets, with "special places assigned for main groups of craftsmen or traders and the homes of the principal merchant and religious bourgeoisie: a core of residential quarters divided among resident foreign ethnic groups and religious minorities that enjoyed a degree of autonomy; and finally the outer quarters of suburbs, where resided recent immigrants and temporary visitors to the city." (A. H. Johns, "Islam in Southeast Asia" in Southeast Asian History and Historiography, edited by C.D. Cowan and O. W. Wolters, 1976: pg. 310; Colin Renfrew Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins, 1987: pgs. 131-2.)

Confucianization represents the casting of the patriarchal Chinese shadow over the Nanyang, as a the basis of tributary-trade relations. Chinese presence in Southeast Asia actually predated the arrival of the grand fleets of Admiral Cheng Ho, and the religion which the earliest Chinese carried with them was undoubtedly the syncretistic Conflation of the Three Teachings that combined Confucian ethos and ethics with Mahayana and Chan Buddhist symbols and attitudes and Taoist rituals and spiritualism. There is little doubt that this religious orientation blended quite well with the local religious orientations. Some of its early deities were actually female Goddess Kwan Yin rather than the patriarchal values of Confucianism and Ancestor worship. Confucianism itself was not incompatible with indigenous systems--its official "Mandate of Heaven" and its counterpart "Rectification of Names," its ethic and cosmology provided "an inclusive cult that sacralizes the structure and leadership."

These doctrines, where they were encountered in the Southeast Asian setting, undoubtedly lent credibility to the ruling powers, as well as legitimacy to successful revolutionary parties. It also helps to explain the role of the Chinese in Southeast Asia; who could so facilely and successfully submit to the mandate of local authority of whatever shore he found himself washed up upon. Chinese traditionally practiced humility, subservience, obedience and respect for authority that generalized over to other, non-sinitic regimes under which they found themselves. Chinese influence in Southeast Asia may have had an effect of opening up the hierarchical regimes of Southeast Asian city-states, not only to greater external influence, but to greater internal forces of change.

Christianization dates from the arrival of the Portuguese and Spanish, and follows the later paths of the Dutch, French and English. Here we find a close alliance between "merchant missionaries" and "missionary merchants," conversion by the Cross accompanied by chastisement by "whips and scorpions," and the introduction of an armaments industry and arms market into the region. Each European nation had its own interests, its own style of imperial colonization, and its own brand of Christianity to promote "in the name of God and King and Country."

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction