Southeast Asian Studies Research Articles

Countering Radicalization to Violent Extremism: A Comparative Study of Canada, the UK and South East Asia

Countering Radicalization to Violent Extremism: A Comparative Study of Canada, the UK and South East Asia

Anthropology of Civilization: Personal Reflections on Anthropological Approach in the Study of Muslim Societies in Southeast Asia

After pursuing a long academic career as an anthropologist, this article provides my (Mitsuo Nakamura’s) personal academic reflection of how my anthropological approach differs from Geertzian paradigm, why anthropology and Islamic studies should be bridged, and what implications of the conversation between Islamic studies, anthropology, and other social sciences are. By answering the above questions, this reflective article sheds a new light on the relationship between anthropology and Islam and Muslim studies in Southeast Asia, especially Indonesia. The anthropological studies of Muslims in Southeast Asia that have been heavily influenced by Clifford Geertz through his work, The Religion of Java (1960), are engaged critically in this article. If Geertz and his students pay a more attention to Little Tradition (local culture and practices) and avoid Great Tradition (e.g. religious concepts and teachings), my anthropological approach argues for the importance of incorporating Great Tradition, which is Islamic Studies in the case of Muslim studies in Southeast Asia, in the study of anthropology and vice versa.

Transregional Southeast Asia: Perspectives from an Outlier

The Philippines is commonly understood to occupy an anomalous position in Southeast Asian area studies. This essay explores the logic, politics, and logistics of the inclusion and exclusion of the Philippines in or from Southeast Asian studies. Perspectives on and from the Philippines can help rethink and refine concepts of “region” by emphasizing, rather than glossing over, the transregional connections and histories that link the Philippines and its localities to its neighbors, to various regions, and to the world. Area studies need not be hobbled by an intellectual parochialism that cordons off analysis at any given local, national, regional, and transregional scale. KEYWORDS: AREA • REGION • TRANSREGIONALITY • SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES • AREA STUDIES

The Role of Hinduism and Buddhism in Promoting Indianness : A Study of Southeast Asia

The Role of Hinduism and Buddhism in Promoting Indianness : A Study of Southeast Asia

БОРЬБА С КОРРУПЦИЕЙ В ПОЛИЦИИ В ЮГО-ВОСТОЧНОЙ АЗИИ: ПОЛИТИКА, УЧАСТИЕ И РЕФОРМА ГОСУДАРСТВЕННОГО УПРАВЛЕНИЯ

As people’s interests and concerns on public safety have risen in Southeast Asia, academia has witnessed the growth of public management research on police corruption in the region. Little effort has been made to systematically analyse police corruption studies in Southeast Asia, therefore, we investigate what has been researched on police corruption in Southeast Asia in the field of public management. We present what research focuses there have been regarding anti-corruption measures and how they have changed over the last two decades, and then we offer suggestions for future research on this topic. Our analysis shows that political will was the most studied strategy in managing police corruption in the region, while anti-corruption agencies, police institutional reform and public participation have also been emphasized over time. Each Southeast Asian country places different emphases on these themes depending on the country’s unique context and experiences.

A bibliometric analysis of food tourism studies in Southeast Asia

The purpose of this study is to examine a situation of food tourism research in Southeast Asia. By analysing literature and bibliometric, this paper investigates the feature of food tourism researc...

Inter-Asia and Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore: A Personal Evaluation

Inter-Asia and Southeast Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore: A Personal Evaluation

Southeast Asian Studies in Asia in the Age of Disruption

Southeast Asian Studies in Asia in the Age of Disruption

A Centennial Appreciation of Harry J. Benda: A Czech Pioneer of Southeast Asian Studies

This article commemorates the centennial of Harry J. Benda (1919–1971), a legendary figure of Southeast Asian Studies of Czechoslovak origin. As a young man, to escape the Nazi threat in Europe, Benda fled to Java. He spent seven formative years in the Indies, including internment in a Japanese camp, where he decided to pursue an academic career, focussing on the history of Indonesia. He received his university education in New Zealand and Cornell University, and to crown his achievements became a professor at Yale and served as founding director of the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. He researched Islam in Indonesian society, the Japanese occupation, the rise of Communism and nationalism and the decolonization processes in Southeast Asia, and was known for his innovative approach to the study of the regional and social history. He wrote a number of books and dozens of articles, with The Crescent and the Rising Sun (1958) being his most acclaimed work.

Southeast Asian Studies at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences from International Relations to Transnationalism

Southeast Asian Studies at the Indonesian Institute of Sciences from International Relations to Transnationalism

Рецензия на: Мосяков Д.В. «Глобальная трансформация тихоокеанской Азии и Россия», М. 2019, 390 с.

The article provides a review of the book by Dmitry Valentinovich Mosyakov, an outstanding researcher of global and regional problems of the Asia-Pacific region, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Head of the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Юго-Восточная Азия и Южнотихоокеанский регион: актуальные проблемы развития – 2019

The paper provides an overview of the reports presented at the conference "Southeast Asia and the South Pacific region: current problems of development", which was held in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on December 18, 2019. In the annual inter-institute conference of Orientalists organized by the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania studies academics, as well as applicants and post-graduates from various academic, research and educational institutions, participated.

Юго-Восточная Азия и Южно-Тихоокеанский регион: актуальные проблемы развития – 2020

The paper provides an overview of the reports presented at the conference "Southeast Asia and the South Pacific Region: Current Problems of Development", which was held in the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on December 18, 2019. The annual inter-institute conference of Orientalists organized by the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania Studies was attended by the researchers, applicants and postgraduates from various academic, research and educational institutions.

Рецензия на: Мосяков Д.В. «Глобальная трансформация тихоокеанской Азии и Россия», М. 2019, 390 с.

The article provides a review of the book by Dmitry Valentinovich Mosyakov, an outstanding researcher of global and regional problems of the Asia-Pacific region, Doctor of Historical Sciences, Head of the Center for Southeast Asia, Australia and Oceania Studies at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia ed. by Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz

Reviewed by: A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia ed. by Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz John N. Miksic (bio) Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz, ed. A View from the Highlands: Archaeology and Settlement History of West Sumatra, Indonesia. Singapore: ISEAS Publishing, 2020. 234+ pp. This book describes a search for a fourteenth-century palace in highland West Sumatra. Ancient palaces in Southeast Asia are elusive targets. They were imposing structures, but consisted mostly of wood and were vulnerable to fire, rot, and other forms of decay. At most, we may hope to find their ghosts in the form of soil discolorations (postholes), which are the remains of decayed wooden pillars that once supported such palaces. We are often forced to reconstruct them from written sources, which may be interpreted in different ways, or from artifacts supposedly left behind by palace dwellers. The volume under review describes the excavation of two historic sites and one prehistoric site at the southern edge of the Tanah Datar valley in 2011, 2012, and 2014 by a team of German, French, and Indonesian archaeologists. Those sites are at Bukit Gombak, Bukit Kincir, and Tanah Lua (in the Saruaso area on the north side of the Selo River). I have known Mai Lin Tjoa-Bonatz (editor and co-author of this report) and Dominik Bonatz (contributor) since 2003. I co-edited a book with them based on a conference held in Berlin in 2004 that assembled a large group of specialists on highland Sumatran anthropology, history, and archaeology.1 Tjoa-Bonatz kindly notes that my hypothesis that Bukit Gombak was the probable site of a fourteenth-century royal capital partially inspired the research described in this book (3).2 Moreover, I visited the site in 2012 when the excavation described in this book was in progress, I received an acknowledgement in the preface to this book (xxiii), and I am frequently acknowledged in the footnotes. Thus, I cannot claim to be an impartial observer. What I can do is comment on the significance of this research from my viewpoint as a specialist in the historical archaeology of Sumatra, and to illustrate the importance of this study of highland Sumatra for Southeast Asian studies. One of the first English descriptions of the Luak nan Tigo, or “Three Valleys” of the Minangkabau, was written by Sir T.S. Raffles in 1818 when he was governor of Bengkulu (Bencoolen), southwest Sumatra. He was aware of the court’s prestige among the Malay [End Page 111] kingdoms of Sumatra and was impressed by the dense population in the Pagarruyung area, which he estimated at a million people.3 In 1275 the east Javanese kingdom of Singasari imposed suzerainty over the Sumatran kingdom of Malayu Dharmaśraya. In the eleventh through twelfth centuries the capital of Malayu was probably in the lower Batanghari, but by the mid-thirteenth century it had moved a hundred miles upstream. The location of the king’s palace in the late-thirteenth century is marked by the base of a statue of a Buddhist deity found at Padang Roco (“Field of Statues”), on which a text was inscribed in 1286 stating that the statue had been brought from Java and erected at Dharmaśraya by Maharaja Kertanagara of Singhasari. Brick sanctuaries showing evidence of several phases of construction together with Chinese ceramics distributed along a seven-kilometer-long stretch of riverbank indicate that the area was inhabited between around 1250 and 1350.4 The precise location of the palace has not yet been established. One of the few people who left a substantial written record in Classical Southeast Asia lived in highland West Sumatra during the fourteenth century: Adityavarman. His biography can be reconstructed from inscriptions in Java and Sumatra, secondary sources, and chronicles.5 He was born in east Java, his mother may have been a Sumatran princess, and he may have gone to China on a diplomatic expedition in 1325. An inscription records that he sponsored work on a temple in east Java in 1343. He may have been deputed to Dharmaśraya as a viceroy of Majapahit in 1347. A Javanese poem written in 1365, Deśavarnana, listed...

Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon ed. by Paul Bijl and Grace V. S. Chin

Reviewed by: Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon ed. by Paul Bijl and Grace V. S. Chin Howard M. Federspiel (bio) Paul Bijl and Grace V. S. Chin, eds. Appropriating Kartini: Colonial, National and Transnational Memories of an Indonesian Icon. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2010. 198 pp. Kartini (1879–1904) was a Javanese writer and social thinker in the Dutch East Indies at the turn of the nineteenth–twentieth centuries. Born in a hereditary governor’s family, she was educated by Dutch tutors, and took full advantage of her education during her brief lifetime. As a young woman, she began correspondences with several Dutch women, in Dutch, in which she outlined life in her father’s palace and pronounced it out of touch with modernity. She called for reform of societal values, particularly in the areas of women’s education and matrimony. Her writing was enthusiastically welcomed by Dutch administrators and their wives, largely on the assumption that she wanted Indies’ society to develop along European lines, which was only partially true. Kartini founded a school for girls, married, and died in childbirth at the age of twenty-four. Her tragic death at a young age gave fuel to her rise as a cultural icon, and that status was officially recognized in 1945 (as the Indies became independent Indonesia) when her birthday was made a national holiday. This thin volume of eight essays tells us something of Kartini, but a lot more about the development of the Indonesian nation since her demise in 1904. The six “core” articles offer differing interpretations of Kartini’s actual influence that have risen to “fit” Kartini into various historical scenarios and, especially, how most of those interpretations have wandered considerably from Kartini’s own mindset, weltanschauung, and original role in colonial society. Of the six authors writing the essays—five women and one male—three are from Australia and one each are from the United States, the Netherlands, and Malaysia. All are well-published with articles and books on Southeast Asian scholarly studies to their credit. Unfortunately, there is no Indonesian among them. The first article, by Joost Coté, shows Kartini as a cultural broker between Javanese participants and Dutch colonial personalities, both men and women. Through her correspondence with Dutch women, Kartini told much about her own life as a daughter of a well-to-do Javanese official and the lifestyle of such an official and his family. On the other hand, Kartini’s correspondence with men promoted the handicrafts of nearby Javanese artisans and gave them an outlet for the sale of their creations in Batavia and the Netherlands. Coté asserts that, through both activities, Kartini became a cultural window and inadvertently encouraged Dutch policy in the early years of the twentieth century that sought cooperation with “modernizing” elements of the Javanese population (38). That is a more sophisticated interpretation of Kartini’s correspondence than is generally recognized. The next article, by Paul Bijl, like the first, deals with Kartini’s impact on non-Indonesian actors, in this case on two Western political thinkers in the 1960s. Bijl [End Page 107] contends that Eleanor Roosevelt, sharpening her own arguments for “equality, identification, and cooperation” in a post-colonial world (66–69), needed heroes from the non-Western world and found, in Kartini, a worthy example. Roosevelt lavished praise on Kartini for her hard work in learning a foreign language well enough to tap into the new scientific and technological world emerging during her lifetime. Bijl then contrasts Roosevelt’s optimistic (and very American) view with that of the French scholar Louis Massignon, who envisioned a very sophisticated and culturally rich background in which to measure Kartini, which included European and Islamic cultural histories. He concluded that Kartini properly belonged in that setting, but had only the position as a “minor saint.” Apparently, he was not as impressed with Kartini as Roosevelt was. The essays by Grace Chin and Kathryn Robinson view Kartini as an ingredient in the creation of an Indonesian national history as it took place during the Sukarno, Suharto, Reformasi, and “Just Now” eras of Indonesian national development. Chin notes that Kartini’s...

Fundamental concepts of Southeast Asian studies: The interaction between ideologies of essentialism and cosmopolitanism, defining the intellectual landscape

The objective of this research is to explain the development of fundamental concepts relating to Southeast Asian studies. The research found that the concepts are justified by essentialism and cosmopolitanism where they are adapted in accordance with the context of knowledge that changes overtime. The conceptual frameworks originating from oriental studies to area studies are used to define the intellectual landscape. It is derived from genealogy of intellectual traditions and essential principles. These have created new concepts of Southeast Asian studies in two aspects; 1) neighbour studies through the theory of Asia as method; and 2) regional studies through the comparative area studies (CAS). Both studies lead to trans-disciplinary concepts which are important to the new discipline Southeast Asian studies that is engaged with the current ASEAN community context.

Going Against Whose Grain? Archaeological Theory and Southeast Asia's Premodern States

Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined communities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done in Southeast Asia. The region's archaeological record is equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins disrupt models of human origins, the world's largest Buddhist monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land mass in central Java, and the world's largest premodern city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised that Scott'sAgainst the Grain: A deep history of the earliest statesdraws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This essay concentrates on how Scott believes early Mesopotamian states became legible.

The Indonesian Economy in Transition: Policy Challenges in the Jokowi Era and Beyond edited by Hal Hill and Siwage Dharma Negara (eds), Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2019, Pp. 451+xvii, ISBN: 978 9 814 84306 5

<i>The Indonesian Economy in Transition: Policy Challenges in the Jokowi Era and Beyond</i> edited by Hal Hill and Siwage Dharma Negara (eds), Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore, 2019, Pp. 451+xvii, ISBN: 978 9 814 84306 5

The journey of the Thai musical instruction collection at the University of California, Los Angeles

An ensemble of Thai classical instruments was first brought to UCLA by Dr. David Morton who taught in the Ethnomusicology Department. After he left UCLA, the instruments were disused for decades. In 2015, the author was hired to examine and restore the collection to a playable condition, and subsequently to re-establish the Music of Thailand ensemble class. With financial support from the Thai consulate and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the course is now offered regularly and the instrument collection has expanded further. The oldest of the instruments at UCLA originated from the family of a prominent teacher and are highly regarded by their descendants and considered spiritually powerful. These connections were honored with a wai khruu (‘honoring the teachers’) ceremony held at UCLA featuring a professional ensemble of musicians from Thailand. In this paper, the author will introduce the classical instruments of Thailand, their basic construction and tuning, and the process of restoring the collection at UCLA.An ensemble of Thai classical instruments was first brought to UCLA by Dr. David Morton who taught in the Ethnomusicology Department. After he left UCLA, the instruments were disused for decades. In 2015, the author was hired to examine and restore the collection to a playable condition, and subsequently to re-establish the Music of Thailand ensemble class. With financial support from the Thai consulate and the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, the course is now offered regularly and the instrument collection has expanded further. The oldest of the instruments at UCLA originated from the family of a prominent teacher and are highly regarded by their descendants and considered spiritually powerful. These connections were honored with a wai khruu (‘honoring the teachers’) ceremony held at UCLA featuring a professional ensemble of musicians from Thailand. In this paper, the author will introduce the classical instruments of Thailand, their basic construction and tuning, and the process of restoring the col...