There are different types of knowledge that have been (and continue to be) produced about Southeast Asia, from area studies knowledge produced in places like North America, Australia and the UK, to nationalistic and ASEAN-focused scholarship produced in the region, to what I would call “academic knowledge” that is produced by scholars (mainly those studying/working in “the West” but who could be from anywhere) who focus on addressing issues in their respective academic disciplines rather than contributing to the understanding of a geographic area (as area studies and ASEAN-focused scholars do) or a nation (as nationalistic scholars do).
These different forms of knowledge exist in tension with each other, and this talk looks at ways to bridge the divides between these different ways of knowing Southeast Asia.
This is a talk that I gave for an event that I could not attend. I have edited out the parts at the beginning and the end that refer to the event, and am sharing the rest for anyone interested in this topic.
At the recent APEC meeting in Vietnam, President Donald Trump of the USA was apparently asked what he thought of Le Minh Khai by two reporters from The Guardian.
I’m amazed that reporters from such a respectable newspaper would even know about me, and I’m pleased to see that President Trump’s assessment of my work is pretty accurate. I didn’t expect that.
One topic that has received very little attention by historians is twentieth-century Southeast Asian popular culture, especially popular culture in the 1950s-1980s. There is a new publication, however, that seeks to at least partially remedy this situation by providing an overview of popular music in Southeast Asia in the twentieth century.
I read an article last week by Ariel Heryanto called “Popular Culture for a New Southeast Asian Studies?” [in The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies; Korea and Beyond, edited by Park Seung Woo and Victor T. King (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2013), 226-262.]
Essentially what Heryanto argues in that article is that popular culture is a topic that scholars have traditionally not focused on, but that if we examine what kind of popular culture is popular in certain areas we can gain an interesting perspective on “what is Southeast Asia.”
A few days ago I had the pleasure of attending two panels on “Emerging and Continuing Trends in Southeast Asian Studies” at The 10th International Convention of Asian Scholars that was held in Chiang Mai. Those panels made me think a lot about Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia.
In 1976, linguists Jerry Norman and Tsu-Lin Mei published an influential article entitled “The Austroasiatics in Ancient South China: Some Lexical Evidence.” In this article, Norman and Mei offered linguistic evidence that they said could “show that the Austroasiatics inhabited the shores of the Middle Yangtze and parts of the southeast coast during the first millennium B.C.”
In her Ancient China and the Yue: Perceptions and Identities on the Southern Frontier, c. 400 BC-50 CE, historian Erica Brindley opens the book with a chapter entitled “Who were the Yue”?
That may seem like an easy question to answer given that starting from the final centuries of the first millennium BCE one can find many references in Chinese sources to “Yue” 越/粵 peoples who lived to their south, peoples who were sometimes also collectively referred to as the “Bai-yue” 百越/百粵 or “Hundred Yue.” So surely it must be possible to go through those sources and get a sense of who those people were and to piece together some of their history.
In actuality, however, that is not the case, and in this chapter Brindley clearly documents how little we can actually determine with certainty about the Yue from early Chinese texts.
In the first millennium BC, “Chinese” writers recorded information about various peoples who lived to their south. These people were called by various names such as Ou, Luo, Western Ou, and Ouluo. At other times more generic terms were used like a term meaning “savages” – Manyi .
Then finally another common term that was used was “Yue” 越/粵, or more generally, the “Hundred Yue” (Baiyue 百越/百粵).
These terms are problematic because there is no evidence that the peoples that Chinese authors identified by these names actually referred to themselves by these names.
This then leads to an important question: What criteria did Chinese authors use to distinguish one group from another? Was it geography? Culture? Language? Ethnicity?
When I was growing up, my only “window” to other societies and cultures was National Geographic, a magazine that arrived once a month and which contained glossy pictures of exotic foreign lands.
Like many families, we never threw away National Geographic. Years of issues of the magazine were stacked up in a bookcase, where every once I would go through them and look at pictures of places that interested me. It was an “archive” that was easy to access as the names of the places covered in each issue were printed on the binding: Lebanon, Canada, Brazil, Japan, Afghanistan.
National Geographic, of course, did exoticize the world for Americans. As Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins noted in their 1993 critique of the magazine, Reading National Geographic, the magazine promoted “a kind of conservative humanism that acknowledges universal values and celebrate[d] diversity while it allow[ed] readers to relegate non-Western peoples to an earlier stage of progress.”
That may be true, but this also made the world fascinating to its readers. It made one wonder what life is like in those “other” places. How did “those” people live? What was it like “there”? And ultimately, this led many people to seek to find out.
Today, on the other hand, those “other” places are all over the place, including on everyone’s cell phones, and as a result, there is, I would argue, less mystery.
For instance, over 26 million people have watched this moving Thai insurance commercial in the past year and a half:
But do any of those 26 million people have any desire to learn more about Thailand? To study Thai?
I have my doubts. I think they will just wipe their tears and move on to a more upbeat YouTube video from some other part of the world.
Meanwhile, National Geographic has responded to the critiques of scholars like Lutz and Collins and has moved away from portraying people in other parts of the world as at “an earlier stage of progress.”
Today it focuses on topics like “insects” and “water,” and when it does feature a society, the photographs are so stylized and artistic that they no longer seem real.
So I can’t see that National Geographic will inspire anyone to learn about another society anymore, but what will?
In Southeast Asia there has been a push in recent years to make ASEAN a more cohesive region, and for that to happen, people need to learn about each other, but. . . as far as I can tell, most people just don’t care.
After all, there’s always a video on YouTube that is more interesting than a foreign society.
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