Sources and Conclusions Hypothetical Reconstruction

A culture historical approach is revived to explain a central principle of Southeast Asian civilization that is at the unchanging center of so much change, that is at the hub of a wheel composed of many different spokes. A multi-disciplinary approach is demanded for such an approach, because the kind of integrative synthesis underlying the historical synergy of Southeast Asian civilization cannot be approach analytically from any single standpoint or methodological strategy alone.

We can refer to the basic dialectical dynamics underlying the rise of human civilization and development of regional integration in Southeast Asia, as the central axis of contrast about which the patterns of history have unfolded from the remotest of times. This dynamic provides a regional continuity of character, as an "historical structure of the long run" which has witnessed unchanged the coming and going of many peasants and the rise and fall of many states.

These factors remain in the background as pervasive constraints and limits to the possibilities of human action and development, and have set the stage for the enactment of many Southeast Asian dramas.

It is from this analytical schema that we can identify different levels of integration, and that we can summarize with certain basic conclusions drawn from the themes explored within these essays.

Broadly speaking, because we are dealing with models tied to the reconstruction of past events in Southeast Asia, we are dealing with a form of history in its most general sense. Such a perspective forces us to adopt a notion of "Southeast Asia" and "Southeast Asian Civilization" as if these were preexisting, coherent and possible to define entities that actually existed out in the world. Many scholars would reject the notion that there is such a thing amongst all the diversities present in the region, while others have argued for a larger unity, either underlying the region as a substratum or as a theme of "unity in diversity." (For instance, see J. C. van Leur's Indonesian Trade and Society: Essays in Asian Social and Economic History (1955) for an early thesis of broader regional continuities and unity; George Coedes' Indianized States of Southeast Asia for the substratum hypothesis and Lea Williams Southeast Asia: Its History for the development of the theme of "unity in diversity", on the other hand, see Nicolas Tarling's A Concise History of Southeast Asia (1966) and John Cady's The History of Post-War Southeast Asia for an emphasis upon the intrinsic diversity of the region.)

Without a doubt, the subject matter of Southeast Asia lends itself to certain broad thematic outlines, outlines that have been a source of dilemma and of dialectic. (For instance, Neil L. Jamieson "Toward a Paradigm for Paradox: Observations on the Study of Social Organization in Southeast Asia." Journal of Southeast Asian Studies )

There are several summary points in regard to the study of Southeast Asia which deserve to be pointed out:

1. Though the areal studies of Southeast Asia are multi-thematic and dialectical, a survey of the literature would reveal that certain themes and thesis of the dialectic have been emphasized more than others. Donald Emerson, in a review of the History of the region, notes several basic dialectical themes that he organizes into a rectangular cube--historicism versus modernism, continuity versus change, diversity versus unity, originality of Southeast Asian civilization versus dependence on exogenous influence, and macro-system versus micro-system. While some combination of these themes are recurrent throughout the literature, there has been an overall emphasis upon the historicism and modernism, change, diversity and unity, and dependence, and much less emphasis upon continuity, originality, macro-system and micro-system approaches to understanding Southeast Asian History. (Donald Emerson "Issues in Southeast Asian History: Room for Interpretation: A Review Article," Journal of Asian Studies Vol. XL, No. 1, November, 1980: pg. 43-68.)

In general, we may say that a perspective that deals with the originality of Southeast Asian civilization, with a systemic perspective at both a broader global and local analysis, and with the problems of change and continuity in the region, have been under-emphasized.

2. Southeast Asian Scholarship, written in a western idiom, largely reflects the implicit Western values and worldviews of its scholars. (for instance, Joseph Fischer, Foreign Values and Southeast Asian Scholarship Research Monograph No. 11, Center for South & Southeast Asian Studies. University of Calif., Berkeley, 1973) Thus such regional studies and histories often failed to critique or move beyond the role which Western colonialism has played in the modern historical development of the region. (Hugh Tinker "The Search for the History of Southeast Asia" in The Journal of Southeast Asian Studies Sept. 1980.)

3. The point of view of the exogenous/endogenous dynamics of Southeast Asian social history in terms of social stratification and class-ethnic struggle remains to be fully synthesized.

From these points, it is fitting that I should briefly offer a thematic outline of some of the broader perspectives. First, Southeast Asia as a coherent region can only be approached from a cross-disciplinary perspective that combines in balanced proportion history, folklore, geography, ecology, sociology, archaeology, linguistics, anthropology and the understandings derived from a miscellany of other fields of study.

Not wanting to leave out of the picture a statement about the modern era and the role which Western imperialism, colonialism, and subsequent modernization has played in Southeast Asia, it is worthwhile to briefly highlight some of the more salient milestones--a review I will undertake in reverse of chronological ordering of history.

Contemporary Southeast Asia suffers the blights of underdevelopment shared by all third world nations. Except for the tiny little city state of Singapore and perhaps the small principality of Brunei, all of Southeast Asia can be characterized by certain broad features--radical pluralism, ethnic competition, strife and conflict, political corruption, diminishing democratic institutions, a large and rapidly growing poor population, and a thoroughly self-interested elite, continuing neo-colonial dependency and domination by Western interests, the growing role of the Japanese and the shrinking role of the Overseas Chinese. Many of the distortions and imbalances which remain to be worked out were a direct or indirect consequence of colonialism.

If we take one step back, we can see the period of late colonialism in the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, a thoroughly destructive and tragic historical accident which brought out the worst racist values of Americans and which lead to the systematic genocide, ecocide and ethnocide of the Vietnamese--and the Vietnamese eventually won their struggle for independence from foreign domination.

One step further back, we can see the chain of retreat from the colonial political domination; of Southeast Asian countries and the struggles which took place--the Americans in Vietnam and the Philippines, the French in Indo-China, the British in Burma, Malaysia, and Sarawak, and the Dutch in Indonesia and Kalimantan. Though this period is too recent to characterize in terms of its net outcomes, it is safe to claim that the communist insurrections that were common place during this period can be seen historically as the rational, political counter movements to capitalistic colonial domination.

One step further back, there is the period of .colonialism proper in which racially biased European powers conquered and political-economically encapsulated and exploited Southeast Asia as a zone of primary resource acquisition, cheap labor, and as dumping grounds for cheap industrial commodities produced in the West.

Before this era, we can talk about the early phases of colonialism before the process of Western imperialist expansion became industrially driven. This period deserves broader treatment, like that by Eric Wolf. (Europe and the People's Without History, 1982: pgs. 231-262.) But it also deserves a more detail survey of the local events, encounters and patterns of response that occurred as the result of contact, trade and the unscrupulous efforts of Western agents of imperialism to establish political and economic control of the region.

Before this era, we reach the phase of the late proto-history and early history of the region, and the more creative influences of Indian, Chinese and Arabian acculturation upon Southeast Asian civilization.

To summarize this very brief history in reverse of Southeast Asia, I wish to stress an important dialectical dynamism of the development of Southeast Asian civilization as a continuous historical process of emerging critical complexity in its intra/inter-regional integration. With each subsequent phase of contact in which exogenous forces came into interplay with endogenous factors, there arose a broader and more complex level of integration. Such interplay between internal and external forces was more creative in the earlier phases, and became more destructive in the later phases, until we get the final horror of the Vietnam war. With increasing integration there has been the opportunity for both increased constructive and destructive patterns to have an effect upon the region.

In summary, if we wish to seek a common style pattern and "genius" that we can characterize as inherent and distinctive to .Southeast Asian civilization, we can claim that its genius has been in its syncretistic and creative capacity to respond adaptively and deal with complexity and the entropic consequences of external contact. It can be seen in the consistent capacity to maintain a core sense of "Southeast Asianess" that is both an animistic and nature-oriented substratum and a social-symbolic and syncretic synthesis of this dynamic interplay and complexity. (Alfred Kroeber An Anthropologist Looks at History, 1963 and Style and Civilization, 1957)

The style pattern of its civilization is evident in its mosaic and in its organization of diversity which has more often than not precluded conflict and violence and has promoted an outward looking attitude of openness and a live and let live tolerance of human difference. Furthermore, this style pattern is evident in the way that the symbolic cosmography of Southeast Asian consciousness is symmetrical and reflective of its geography, and in how the metaphor of the body and the metaphor of the social state interpenetrate and resonate with one another, such that the boundaries between these realms are everywhere fluid, dynamic, fuzzy and shifting in focus.

Several broad hypothesis have been presented in this work. Briefly, they may be summarized:

1. The "Waterways" hypothesis focuses upon the systemic, circumscriptive, consequences of a maritime-riverine-coastal orientation which is predominant in Southeast Asia as a "single ocean" in the developmental integration and adaptation of Southeast Asian civilization.

2. The "Cross-roads" hypothesis considers the role of intercultural contact and transmission in reconstruction of the process of the historical evolution of a region and its people, from the standpoint of a sui-generis "Austric" origin in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam for the Austro-Asiatic, Austro-Thai and Austronesian speaking peoples of Southeast Asia and the Pacific.

3. The "Autochthony Hypothesis" reconsiders the evidence for the autochthonous origins of Southeast Asian civilization in the Northern Highlands of Vietnam, South China, Northern Thailand and Laos.

4. The "Market-place Hypothesis" considers the role of trade and traffic in the regional integration and rise of "central places" throughout the proto-historical period, focusing upon the long-term structures and network patterns that may have been in place time-immemorial, especially in Borneo.

5. The "Plural-Polity" hypothesis focuses upon the characteristic Southeast Asian "organization of diversity" in which the sense of "person-hood" is defined political-ecologically in relation to a Southeast Asian landscape, as this landscape is integrated into the current political-economy of the region. Such local-regional-global integration has long relied upon the appropriation of symbols of identity and "equivalence structures" by which such potentially disruptive and conflicting diversities could be rendered mutualist in interrelation.

This was accomplished by shared religion which defined the relation between the individual and the group, and between groups, and by status-role identities which defined the appropriate and expected behaviors of a variety of peoples, and which were defined spatially and temporally in terms of the political economic/ecological positionality or "place" the individual occupied, both geographically and cosmographically.

6. The "Thanatophidia Hypothesis" and the "Circular-Center Hypothesis look at the congruence of certain basic symbolisms and the structure of symbolism in Southeast Asia, as this served to coordinate and orient the individual in relation to both the world and to the social group. These symbolically mediated relationships have been more direct and more consequential in the historical style patterning and genius of Southeast Asian civilization than materialists and functionalists would presuppose.

7. The "Dialectical Dynamism Hypothesis" looks at the poly-thematic representation of Southeast Asian civilization as a complex dialect around certain central axis of diversity and unity, continuity and change, micro-dynamism and macro-systematics, endogenous origination and exogenous dependency and acculturation.

At certain periods and places, these processes combined to create very constructive and very destructive patterns.

The inherent complexity of these polythetic dialectical dynamics makes necessary a systematic and organized cross-disciplinary approach that attempts to comprehend all the available information and understanding relating to Southeast Asia.

This perspective is rooted in the problem of reconstruction which attempts to combine ethnocultural with ethnohistorical methods at several levels of analysis--local, regional and global--and in a way such that these levels are mutually coordinate and informative. The approach requires a critical, open attitude toward all forms of evidence and varieties of experience. Least this seem like a resurrection of the archaic Culture Historical methodology, it is, with the proviso that this methodology is divorced from ideological spiritism and is anchored empirically and historically in the scientific approaches to analysis and in the data discovered from such systematic and controlled analysis. Synthesis rests upon and gives rise to analysis. Finally this approach demands a self-critical, reflexive and self-corrective approach to reconstruction. We must always take into account in our reconstructive formulas the relativities of our own limited knowledge.

There have been several critiques of methodological orientations implicit in this work. These have been to argue for an expanded role of counter-factuality in hypothesis construction, a critique of the taxonomic tendency that uncover a central root underlying homologically related patterns and elements, and a suggestion of an alternative network which does not implicitly deny the inherent complexities of the remoter past and which allows for the possibility of reconvergence and reversibility of cultural process of development, a network pattern which is rooted in an hypothesized "correspondence/covariance structures" between polythetic sets of characteristics that is rooted in basic, prototypical cores, and alternative systematic methodology for inference formulation, testing and decision-making regarding the confidence of diverse sources of different kinds of data, the problem of "inter-translation" and credibility and the use of dynamic "equivalence structures" in explaining the organization of diversity in processes of constructive integration, and the problem of congruence and correspondence of the mechanisms and structure of symbolic mediation which are rooted in basic thematic contrasts.

Finally, in closing, it is worth reconsidering the productive, textual de-petrification that is possible with the deliberate attempt to develop in essay form a transcendent dialectic which achieves a metalogue between the text and its theme.

Each one of the themes presented in this manuscript could be easily developed into a manuscript of its own. The point of the work has been in part to bring to the fore and to investigate certain basic and recurrent themes in Southeast Asian studies that usually remain only in the background, for their implications both for such regional studies and for how we go about reconstructing the past.

The value of the synoptic perspective provided here is to seek the deeper sense of order and meaning behind the complexities of the problem. It is tempting to carry this synthesis one step further and to offer a basic model of Southeast Asian civilization, locating in the process the primary factors or ultimate causes that define its coherence and basic contiguities. Such a model will be left to another time and place, to another person (perhaps, an indigenous Southeast Asian) to develop.

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction