3 - Locating Southeast Asia: Postcolonial Paradigms and Predicaments

Summary

Geography and identity

Social scientists have cut up the world into convenient regions: Africa, Latin America, Western Europe, East Asia and so on. A core argument for the regionalization of socio-scientific inquiry has always been that geographic proximity implies long-term cultural, economic, and social exchange. Hence, societies within a certain region share important characteristics which makes it relevant to study them together. Moreover, these regional studies are both rooted in intimate local knowledge and devoted to productive comparison, and this combination should lead to conceptual innovation and theoretical sophistication. However, this argument needs to be questioned.

First, it is important to re-examine the ways in which particular regions are constructed, how seemingly ‘natural’ borders of these regions are defined by academic specialists working within particular political contexts, how a particular process of regionalization affects the questions these scholars address, and how within certain areas an hierarchy of core societies and marginalized peripheries is established.

Second, the formation of institutionalized communities of area specialists and the reproduction of the paradigms which explain and underpin both the identities of the area they study and the academic community they are part of create the danger of an inward-looking habitus. Such a community of area specialists is characterized by a highly specialized language and an idiosyncratic research agenda, favouring particular topics and excluding discussions which are, for instance, considered to be highly relevant in other ‘areas’ or academic disciplines.

Criticizing area studies, the historian Sanjay Subrahmanyam wrote:

It is as if these conventional geographical units of analysis, fortuitously defined as givens for the intellectually slothful, and the result of complex (even murky) processes of academic and non-academic engagement, somehow become real and overwhelming. Having helped create these Frankenstein's monsters, we are obliged to praise them for their beauty, rather than grudgingly acknowledge their limited functional utility (Subrahmanyam 1999, p. 296).