On the typology of ethnoses in insular Southeast Asia

Abstract

Southeast Asia is a geographical and cultural-historical area which comprises the Indo-Chinese Peninsula and the Malay Archipelago. The following countries exist there at present: Burma, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Brunei, Eastern Timor, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, and the Philippines.1 Geographically, culturally and historically, South east Asia is usually subdivided into a continental and an insular region, the Malay Peninsula being included with the latter. Thus the historical ethnographical region known as Insular Southeast Asia includes not only the insular countries proper, i.e. Brunei, Eastern Timor, Indonesia, Singapore and the Philippines, but also those parts of Malaysia on Kalimantan Island and the Malay Peninsula. The insular part of Southeast Asia coincides almost exactly with the area populated by people who speak languages belonging to the Indonesian branch of the Austronesian family. The population of Insular Southeast Asia is made up mainly of people belonging to the small Southern Mongoloid race. Their common racial and linguistic characteristics go back to the common origin of these peoples, as do the common features of their material and intellectual cultures. Certain similarities can also be observed in their history, at least before the European conquest. All of this allows one to regard the insular part of Southeast Asia as an independent historical-ethnographical area, which can be further subdivided, on the strength of certain less general traits, into historical-ethnographical regions and districts. ALEXIS I. KUZNETSOV, who took his Ph. D. at the Moscow Institute of Ethnography, is at present a member of that Institute. His interest focuses mainly on ethnohistory and ethnosocial processes in Southeast Asia, and his principal publications are 'Political and Ideological Factors in the Formation of the Indo nesian Nation', Rasy i Narody 4, Moscow 1974, and 'Specificity of Ethnic Self Identification in the Countries of Southeast Asia', Rasi i Narody 9, Moscow 1979. Dr. Kuznetsov may be contacted at the Institute of Ethnography, 19 Dim. Uljanov St., Moscow 117036, USSR.