by Hugh M. Lewis

The term "Southeast Asia" has only recently become stabilized as a conventional term for a region on the world map. "By 'making up' the region out of nations, Americans tended to politicize the idea of 'Southeast Asia' as a whole, concentrating on foreign policies, regional organization, and the like, rather than on transnational cultural zones or interactions. By the same token, American researchers who studied nonpolitical subjects tended to do so sub-nationally. The result was a now-conventional division of academic labor between 'macropolitical science' and 'microanthropology.'" (Donald Emmerson, "'Southeast Asia': What's in a Name?" JSEAS, Vol. 19, pg. 13.)

The variations of the name Southeast Asia (South East Asia, South-East Asia, Southeastern Asia etc.) have occurred with differential frequencies in the literature, and have in part reflected varying political relations with the region adopted by the naming country. "Thus in East and West alike the word 'Asia' is really an equivoque. It has no fixed meaning--no clear-cut denotation--but it is extraordinarily rich in emotional connotations. Though these make it the despair of the logician, they enhance its value for the poet, the artist--and the politician." (J. Steadman, The Myth of Asia, 1969: 35) "Less ancient than 'Asia' but no less interesting is the first element, 'Southeast,' it implies additional peripheries: south of China, east of India. Westerners used these more 'familiar shapes of India to the West and China to the north' as mammoth landmarks to define the resulting zone in their perceptions--not only 'Southeast Asia' but, by the same logic of adjacency, Malte-Brun's 'Indochina,' Logan's 'Indonesia' and Purcell's less successful 'Indosinesia.' Variations in the rendering of 'Southeast'--it has been spelled a dozen ways in English alone--have even reflected political differences between Western governments." (Donald K. Emmerson, "'Southeast Asia': What's in a Name?" JSEAS, Vol. 19: 3-4)

The term "Southeast Asia" leads to a reification and projection of a spurious sense of homogeneity, unity and boundedness onto the region it delimits on the globe, one that is actually as culturally diverse and complicated as it is historically entangled and unbounded. As the crossroads of the orient, it has long been a meeting place, and a region of cultural intermingling between many different kinds of people. One will find anywhere one travels in Southeast Asia a profusion of different religions, ethnic identities, and cultural orientations within the same marketplace, within the same city limits, even under the same roof. Southeast Asia, from a regional perspective, becomes a veritable mosaic of human difference and variation.

It is predictable that alternative hyphenated forms should have given way to a single compound. Such a stabilization of an entire region also represents the ossification of a modern area of imagination. Southeast Asia as a place has become more clearly and conventionally bounded than it was before. We know now to exclude Australia, Melanesia, Taiwan, Southern and Southeastern China, Northeastern India, Nepal, and Sri Lanka, if only for reasons of political culture, though all of these areas may have had some more or less distant relationship to the region. It would have made little sense to have called the area East-South Asia, as this would have conflicted with our geographical sense of the cardinal directions of the compass--a sense of direction which lends solidity, and hence credibility, to our region of imagination that we have so labeled.

The inter-regionality and fuzziness of Southeast Asia is reflected in the cross-disciplinary character of its study. If we want to get beyond a simplistic, textbook tour of tropical Southeast Asian exotica, then we must entertain the problem of diversity and the inherent complexity of such diversity. No single point of view is by itself sufficient or comprehensive enough to provide an adequate theoretical basis for understanding the complex historical processes and patterns of Southeast Asian civilization.

The diversity in which such a cross-disciplinary approach to Southeast Asian studies is rooted entails that any final or complete picture must be in the final analysis of a synthetic character. Perfect agreement between all different points will never be found, and any emergent, general picture must compromise some of the detail. Like the history of its name, Southeast Asian studies begins and ends with the understanding of the place it stands for in our own mind's eye, as a representation we bring to a mystified region.

My objectives in writing this collection of exploratory essays were threefold.

First, it is an attempt to bring to the foreground a number of alternative hypotheses regarding the origin, history, dynamics and patterns of Southeast Asian Civilization. Its am is of demonstrating the regional distinctiveness and sui generis continuity of character that makes Southeast Asia more than a mere bastardization of South and East Asia.

Secondly, I wish to critique within the same set of essays certain attitudes, approaches and conventions which underlie or are implicit in many of our theoretical preconceptions about Southeast Asia, as well as our approaches to the study of human history.

Third, I wish to make my critiques constructive by offering what I believe to be serious and viable alternatives to those aspects of our anthropological and areal studies that I seek to deconstruct. These alternatives are framed as theoretical and procedural examples based upon the evidence derived from research in Southeast Asian studies, in support of the major hypothesis which I offer for consideration in critique of what we know and do not know about Southeast Asia.

Any comprehension of Southeast Asia must eventually be poly-thematic and eclectic in attempting to incorporate many diverse views from very different disciplines. This exploratory essay attempts to weave together in a critical manner several different hypothetical themes to create a tapestry of Southeast Asia as a cultural region. Generally, it is the question of how we go about representing and modeling past life-ways, viewpoints, languages, and worlds. It is a matter of what we select for such representation and what we choose to ignore, and how these reconstructions are in part prejudiced by our own preconceptions about the past and models rooted in the present. These themes are offered as alternative hypothesis for critical consideration of their merit in shedding constructive light upon the patterns common to Southeast Asian peoples and their cultures.

The essays I offer in this collection are exploratory not just for their content, but also because they together compose a statement of the place and contribution that cultural anthropology might make in constructive criticism of other studies, especially linguistics, biology and archaeology. Furthermore, they represent a form of poly-thematic elaboration which are in style, organization, and tonality, unique to the forums of anthropological and Southeast Asian studies, and which contradict in many deliberate ways the canons of good scholarly writing.

Centrally, they treat the general problem that I refer to as reconstruction. They concern the question of how we go about representing and modeling past life-ways, viewpoints, languages, and worlds,  of what we select for such representation, what we choose to ignore, and how these reconstructions are at least in part prejudiced by our own representations.

Because we have little else to work with when we are trying to establish a direct connection to the past, we are left with the challenge of rendering our reconstructions as close to the ground, as systematically unbiased and value-free as possible--objective in the most scientific of senses. We must pass our models again and again through the wringer of criticism and debate, and ultimately they must withstand the same acid test--the test of time--that judged all previous work as well.

An ethnocultural approach, similar to ethno-historical research, is offered as an alternative research paradigm for the framing hypothesis in regard to the cultural orientations of people. It shares with ethnohistory the central project of comprehensively embracing all extant documentary sources and the points of view represented by such sources, and the problem of integrating these sources into a single credible picture.

I have long identified myself as a cultural anthropologist interested in Southeast Asian studies. From my initial introduction to the area its mystique and mystification has only fascinated me to further inquiry. If I can convey even a little of this fascination and mystery to the reader, I will have more than repaid my growing debt to the field of Southeast Asian studies.

Southeast Asian Sources: Critical Essays in Culture Historical Reconstruction