by Hugh M. Lewis

Southeast Asia stands out as an internally coherent cultural region. As a coherent region, it is characterized by two main features. These are its great age and its great diversity. Of course, these two aspects are deeply intertwined.

Southeast Asia remains one of the most heterogeneous, long settled, and most culturally, ethically, racially, linguistically and historically complicated regions in the World--evidence in its own right of its great cultural age.

Geographically, it has been divided between insular, or island Southeast Asia, including Malaysia, Borneo, Singapore, Brunei, and the vast arc of island archipelagos including Indonesia and the Philippines, and peninsular, or Mainland Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Burma, Kampuchea, Laos and Vietnam. This distinction between insular and peninsular Southeast Asia reflects another important contrast in the region between the maritime orientation of the many miles of shoreline and the mountain orientation of the highlands. Strong culture historical reasons are sometimes given for including Sri Lanka, the Andamans, the Nicobars, Assam, Yunan, Hainan, Formosa and even New Guinea and Madagascar, although these political entities are conventionally peripheral to the region circumscribed by the designation of Southeast Asia.

There are common themes in Southeast Asian life that confers an overall unity to the diversity of life found there. "Unity in diversity" is the predominant theme of Southeast Asian Studies. A vegetable culture, a bamboo culture, a rice and fish culture, a monsoon culture, a Riverine culture--Southeast Asia can be characterized by its commonly shared traits which have helped to shape its lifeways. But also recurrent in the region are other general themes: the importance of maritime trade, the chameleoness of identity, the dialectical tension between the peoples of the highlands and the peoples of the lowlands, the role that great religions and indigenous spirituality has always played in the daily life of its peoples, the proximity and cultural appreciation of the natural world, the unifying role that the rivers and streams have long played in the integration of its areas, the outward looking orientation of its peoples, the periodic waves of acculturative change that have occasionally swept through the region, and the autochthonous origins and deep sense of cyclical, rhythmical time of ancient, traditional civilizations.

Such common themes amount to no more than the reiteration of trite truisms whose substantive basis is not apparent until one has lived and traveled within Southeast Asia among its many peoples. In claiming that the Southeast Asian setting, its nature, its geography, its climate, has had an important shaping influence upon Southeast Asian culture and character is to risk falling back into an old argument about environmental determinism.

But the influence is there, and has been remarked upon in reference to the use of space and geographical orientation among the Balinese; the ritual ecologies of New Guinea highlanders or the Rhade of the Vietnamese highlands; the thematic recurrence of nature symbolism in Vietnamese literature and poetry, art and music; the spiritual animism of the Dayaks of Borneo; in the cultural ecology of highlanders throughout the region; in the ecology of rice among the Thais and the Javanese, etc. Many other examples can be found to attest to the direct symbolic role and value that nature and the natural environment has played in influencing the aesthetic sensitivities and religious sensibilities of the peoples of Southeast Asia.

Perhaps it is because nature in this tropical setting is so intrusive in virtually every part of one's life. Whether it is a morning parade of ants through the halls of one's home, a snake in one's kitchen, a resident gekko in one's kitchen sink or six inch long centipede in one's outhouse sink, the encroaching jungle growth that appears in every crack of the sidewalk, the torrents of rain that fall endlessly from the high clouds, or the monitor lizard in the parking lot of a major university, one cannot easily escape the direct contact with nature that living in a Southeast Asian setting brings.

Not all Southeast Asians are equally and unequivocally lovers of nature or conscientious conservationists of the region's natural resources. The region has long been witness to irreversible destruction of many primeval forest habitats continues at a ceaseless and alarming rate. Many people in their daily activities and attitudes evince little concern or appreciation or sense of empathy for their natural environment. And yet many of the most basic cultural patterns that predominate in Southeast Asia can be found to have direct linkages with the natural tropical habitat.

What is commonly referred to in the literature as the traditional, interregional system of Southeast Asian civilization, must be seen as a structurally and socially persistent patterning, constrained by its ball and chain mountain backbone, maritime and tropical cultural geography, of the organization of diversity--an intrinsic sense of diversity that is ecological, economic and ethnic.

The style patterning of Southeast Asian Civilization is best characterized by its synthetic nature, and by its synergism in integrating a broad diversity within a common thematic unity. The genius of Southeast Asian Civilization can best be thought of as its capacity for syncretistic creation of new forms based upon the borrowing and modification of previous forms.

The complexity of patterning and the broad diversity of its components requires that any Southeast Asianist must adopt a cross-disciplinary approach and a synthesizing attitude that allows the dialectical integration of contrasts and contradictions. No single perspective, idea, or fact is by itself sufficient for understanding the history and culture of Southeast Asian civilization.

No one point of view is by itself complete or correct. Multiple points of view tend to cancel out what is incorrect by mutual contradiction. Inferior or false points of view will tend to be selected out. An axial center becomes robust that remains highly credible unless refuted by specific counter evidence. Peripheral portions become identifiable as primary research problems. Rather than building theory from the ground up, it attempts its "substantiation" by means of bringing into clearer focus particularistic data of individual lives from the framework of the most comprehensive perspective possible. The credibility of any such construction has depended as much upon its thematic architecture as upon the source of data used as support.

It is somewhat misleading to speak of Southeast Asian Civilization as a single, integrated phenomena. There have been and are many different and distinct Southeast Asian civilizations and often the possibility of their comparison is a rather moot point. But all of Southeast Asian peoples and their traditional cultures share certain basic structural themes that are related to a common Southeast Asian geography; a common Southeast Asian ecology; a common Southeast Asian socio-historical context as a cross-roads. These themes have been important in the structuring of the long-term patterns of Southeast Asia as distinct and unique in the world. Within these broader outlines we can frame a better understanding of Southeast Asia.

As a region of exchange, we can say that for the most part contact and acculturation has been extremely creative in giving rise to new forms in the Southeast Asian scene. It can be taken as a mark of the strength of Southeast Asian civilization to be able to successfully adopt and integrate new and foreign forms, to appropriate and modify alien symbols and to successfully reemerge in a vital new way. At the same time, there are long term continuities that survive the onslaught of the different and the distant, threads that link the most modern with the most ancient in Southeast Asia.

These old forms are not merely anachronistic survivals of a bygone era, rather they remain a vigorous substrate and source of vitality for the synthesis itself. In the clash between the new and the very old, the familiar and the foreign, Southeast Asian civilization always emerges as a more complex, more structured and more chaotic form than before. We might speak of the emergent forms of the diachronic processes of civilization and acculturation, caught within a dialectic, producing a hybridization of Southeast Asian Civilization as a mixture and a mosaic of cultural patterns.

Two long term structures of dialectical contrast; have always been apparent in Southeast Asian Civilization fostering fundamentally different kinds of adaptations and styles of life. This is the contrast between the highlands and the lowlands, and the contrast between the land and the sea. These sets of contrasts are entangled in one another in virtually every way, and have provided the basis of the civilizational development of Southeast Asian peoples in which the outside world has increasingly intruded upon, and altered one side of their life, while leaving virtually unchanged the other.

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. It provided a regional continuity of character, as an historical structure of the long run that 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.

Several broad phases, or stages of the historical emergence of Southeast Asia can be recognized. These stages did not come to replace one another, so much as one became layered upon the other, with the consequence that with each next layering a growing complexity of patterning resulted.

Early Prehistoric I. First, there is a long and deep early prehistoric stage in which the Southeast Asian Mainland and islands become increasingly peopled until people came to occupy a diverse range of settings across the mountains, valleys and coastlines. Foraging subsistence based upon a bamboo and stone adaptation that grew in sophistication was the basis of this way of life.

Late Prehistoric II. Second, there emerged at the end of this long phase a late prehistoric phase that corresponds with the Neolithic. It is a phase that witnessed the domestication and cultivation of many species of plant and animal, combined with a more sophisticated tool and pottery technology, and which allowed the long distanced extension and "detachment" of culture groupings from their natal homelands.

Early Protohistoric I. Third, there emerged at the end of this phase the technological basis for metallurgy, first bronze, then followed by iron. There was also achieved during this phase the "agricultural revolution" in which cultivating patterns were replaced by sedentary patterns of planting and harvesting. Socio-political organization also emerged in greater "central place" complexity during this phase, which speaks for the importance of controlling markets and long distance trade connections.

Late Protohistoric II. Fourth, early "Mandala" states emerged at the end of this phase with the full use of iron tools and weapons, wet-rice agriculture, long distance trade networks, formal markets, and a state religion combining priests and political symbols of people-hood.

Early Historic I. Fifth, contact with foreign powers, primarily from the West, ushered in a phase in which written records of these contacts was left, usually by the foreign peoples, but increasing indigenous accounts are found. We can include in this the very early contacts with Chinese, Indians, even Romans, and later by Arabs. This is the phase in which we can speak properly of the emerging interregional integration of Southeast Asian civilization in which a completely local orientation gradually began receding from the forefront.

Late Historic II: This phase properly commences with the first contacts by the Europeans, starting with Portugal and the Spanish, and followed by the Dutch, French and English, and ends with the Japanese and the gaining of independence by the newly emergent modern nations of Southeast Asia.

Early Modern I: This phase commenced with the rising of Western oriented and anti-colonial nationalistic movements in Southeast Asian colonies, follows the achievement of independence, and then the post-independence eras characterized by chronic problems of poverty, underdevelopment, totalitarianism and non-democratic organization.

We might only speculate about what a late modern or post modern phase might mean, because if we are there yet, we still don't quite know it. The phases are not clear-cut, and it is obvious that there is a great deal of overlap between them. It is possible that there may have been critical transition periods marking off this overlap--periods that may have actually been quite brief from the longer point of view, during which major structural transformations occurred. What is important to recognize is that the phases were also marked by a gradually emerging process of regional integration and an overlay of complexity of interrelation upon previous patterns.

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction