INTRODUCTION

Over the last 40 years, the technology landscape of Penang has been gradually transformed, from a commodity-trading centre into the vibrant high-technology electronics hub we see today. The driver for this transformation has been the government's ability to construct and communicate a compelling business case based on cost as well as the quality of its human resources to attract serious multinational companies in the technology sector to set up manufacturing branch operations in the state. This seed enabled Penang's subsequent transformation into a high technology-based industrial economy.

In the early 1970s, the first electronics component multinationals established operations in Penang. Over the course of the next 20 years, these firms were joined by other component manufacturers as well as consumer and industrial electronics producers, who all sought to capitalize on the state's good infrastructure and relatively well-educated labor. By the end of the 1980s, the state had established a reputation as the “Silicon Island” of the East.

In the 1990s, a large cluster of component producers, particularly in the semi-conductor sector, reached maturity stage with Penang becoming one of the major exporters for the industry. This core of firms was effectively complemented by a large cluster of local suppliers in the automation, contract manufacturing, and piece-part sectors.

Because of the close proximity of the clusters to each other and the possibilities for learning and innovation that this provided, Penang quickly became one of the well-known leaders in the global quality and productivity revolution. The reason for this is somewhere in the mid 1990s, the industrial world became increasingly aware of Japan's manufacturing methods that differentiates that country's products in terms of consistent quality through statistical quality controls and automation.

At that time, Penang's fledgling manufacturing sector took the brave step to embrace these principles and started to make manufacturing-in-Penang as a strategic business advantage for investors.

INTRODUCTION

Medical tourism is being developed as a priority area in the Malaysian tourism industry. Of all the cities and towns in the country offering medical services to visitors seeking treatment, Penang generates the most revenue, receiving around a third of the visitors who travel to Malaysia for this purpose. This chapter presents basic information available on medical tourism in Penang, and situates this information within the context of tourism in Malaysia and the region.

The discussion begins with a brief description of medical tourism in Malaysia and the region as a backdrop to the trends in Penang. The focus then narrows to a consideration of medical tourism in the state, looking first at the number of visitor patients in the state over the past few years and then at the revenues generated. Information on visitor patients' country of origin, the type of procedures that are commonly sought, and their preference for Penang is summarised. Following this, the efforts of the state and federal governments as well as the corporate sector in developing the medical tourism sector in Penang and Malaysia are discussed. The effect of medical tourism industry on the domestic population's access to quality healthcare is also highlighted. Finally, some policy recommendations are made based on the discussion on medical tourism in Penang.

The terms medical tourism and health tourism are often used interchangeably. However, the former is mostly used to describe the range of medical treatments that are necessary for diagnosing and treating illness, such as tests, surgical procedures and recovery treatment. In contrast, the term health tourism often includes wellness and wellbeing programmes along the lines of therapeutic treatments in spas. In this chapter, the discussion pertains to medical tourism unless otherwise specified.

MEDICAL TOURISM IN MALAYSIA AND THE REGION

In Southeast Asia, governments and hospitals in Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand embarked on a marketing campaign to cater to the medical needs of visitors after the financial crisis of 1997 (with Singapore starting a little earlier).

INTRODUCTION

In this chapter I shall identify the origins of the making of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Studies in the United Kingdom* (with some comparative references to continental European activities) and attempt to establish those factors which encouraged the development of this enterprise and those which stood in its way. In this regard it is important to indicate the main moments, events and persons in this process of construction and provide some evaluation of the contribution which British scholarship has made to this field of studies. A most significant and preliminary observation is that not only is it problematical to define Southeast Asia but it is equally problematical to define precisely what constitutes British scholarship on Southeast Asia in that it was not confined to the shores of the United Kingdom. Of course, scholarship is seldom restricted by national boundaries, but in the particular case of British academic engagement with Southeast Asia we have to take into account the contribution which was made by expatriate researchers and teachers in centres of higher education in the colonies and dependencies. Prior to the 1940s Britain was not entirely dependent on the development of expertise on the Southeast Asian region in the home country. An important training ground for British academics and scholar-administrators was the University of Rangoon and Raffles College in Singapore (Selth 2010; and see Cowan 1980). Following the Pacific War an interesting shift in the locus of scholarship also took place. The British no longer had a base in Burma and the University of Rangoon after 1948, but they continued to have a presence in Singapore and Malaya and also Hong Kong during the 1950s and 1960s when we witnessed the making and consolidation of Southeast Asia as an internationally defined region for scholarly enquiry.

It gives me great pleasure to write the Foreword for The Historical Construction of Southeast Asian Studies: Korea and Beyond. This book will indeed make its historical mark as the first edited volume for whose publication Korean scholars have taken the initiative and which addresses general issues in the development of Southeast Asian Studies. Within the past two decades the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) has published three books whose contributors were mainly Korean, but the main subject of which was Korea, especially bilateral relations with Southeast Asia, ASEAN, or individual countries in the region. With this particular publication, I expect and hope that Southeast Asianists from Korea will assume a more active role in, and make greater contributions to, the global community of Southeast Asian Studies.

This edited volume is the result of an international conference organized by the Institute for East Asian Studies at Sogang University (SIEAS) on 19–20 March 2010. I have witnessed and appreciated the tremendous efforts and infinite time contributed by the co-editors Professors Park Seung Woo and Victor T. King, to negotiate with the publisher, edit and copy-edit the manuscripts, communicate with the authors, and write the introduction. I should also mention the patience and sacrifice of the ten authors who have waited a longer than usual time for publication and thus helped SIEAS and Southeast Asian Studies in Korea come of age and enter the international stage.

Since the mid-2000s, SIEAS has mobilized various resources and initiated various programmes to promote Southeast Asian Studies in Korea. Particularly with the ten-year grants from the National Research Foundation of Korea, in 2008 SIEAS embarked on a comprehensive research and educational project under the banner of Southeast Asia as an Open Regional System: A New Paradigm for Communicating with the Globe and Reaching Out to the Public. Among its specific programmes, SIEAS organizes international conferences every year, one for our research clusters and the other for our international journal TRaNS: Trans-Regional and National Studies of Southeast Asia. We offer these conferences as a new venue for academic discourse on a global level. I hope that this edited volume will serve as an important stepping stone towards our global initiatives.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter examines the current state and future objectives of Southeast Asian Studies in the U.S. The U.S. is a leading country in terms of Southeast Asian Studies within the general field of area studies. Area studies began to assume importance in the U.S. in the context of American concerns about the expansion of Third Word Communism during the Cold War period. Amidst this tense international atmosphere, Southeast Asianists in the U.S. set themselves against what they considered to be the limitations of European colonial studies preoccupied with the Western presence and role in Southeast Asia and the reconstruction of the history and cultural traditions of those whom they governed. They instead focused more on the circumstances of modern Southeast Asia, post-colonial nation-building and the prospects and problems for socio-economic and political development. Some scholars also argued for the need to consider and understand the region from local perspectives and to construct an autonomous history of the region, which focused on local genius, views, interests and initiatives. American scholars in the field of Southeast Asian Studies have been dominant in the post-war development of theoretical and conceptual frameworks in order to understand processes of change and modernization in the region and to capture the main characteristics of what it is to be Southeast Asian. The outcomes of these theories have often served as templates for students in the field.

Yet, the “Western-oriented perspectives” that American scholars intrinsically sustain have functioned as epistemological barriers in investigating the “peculiarities of Southeast Asianness” in further depth. Thus, while recognizing the major contributions of American scholars in establishing Southeast Asian Studies as a positive and meaningful field, it should be pointed out that some of the scholarly themes and discourses on Southeast Asia must now to some extent be questioned.

To examine the general state of Southeast Asian Studies in the U.S., this chapter commences with a consideration of its development and the intellectual climate in which it flourished over the last several decades; and, second, it addresses popular scholarly themes in the past and currently emerging themes. Through an examination of these two sets of themes, this chapter will examine how American scholars have perceived Southeast Asia; what scholarly contributions they have made; and what have been pointed out as the limitations of their scholarly work.

INTRODUCTION

Singapore has been identified as an ideal place for those who study the Southeast Asian region, as they are able to benefit from the world-class library facilities of the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and the National University of Singapore (NUS). Various types of academic gatherings take place all year around, including international conferences, seminars and talks, and these provide valuable opportunities for researchers to disseminate their findings and to develop social relationships with their fellow scholars. The number of prestigious scholarly journals published in Singapore, such as Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, SOJOURN: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia and Contemporary Southeast Asia, Asian Journal of Social Science and Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, and the proliferation of books published on the diverse issues that face the region, provide further evidence of the depth and breadth of Southeast Asian Studies practised in Singapore. Once one is located in Singapore, even with a short period of stay, one becomes widely exposed to lively exchanges of ideas and discussions as well as the state of the art of Southeast Asian Studies. It is truly a hot spot for this area of study.

However, one easily realizes that the constitution of Southeast Asian scholarship in Singapore is to a great degree different from that in other countries. Expatriate components are the substantial and inherent parts of scholarship in the country in comparison to other countries. This leads us to the following questions: Does Southeast Asian Studies conducted in Singapore really reflect Singaporean scholarship? To what extent can we say that it is Singaporean Southeast Asian Studies? How can we differentiate between foreign scholarship and local scholarship in Singapore? All of these questions converge on how to define Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. The difficulties in coming up with a precise definition reflect the reality of scholarship that has developed not specifically in the realm of Southeast Asian Studies but also in academia in general in Singapore. This problem reflects the historical and geographical conditions within which Singapore is located.

INTRODUCTION

How can people shake off the yoke of colonization? The question pertains as much to the colonizers as the colonized and by the time most of the citizens of a country ignore this question as something from an irrelevant, distant past social scientists are still motivated, perhaps they feel compelled, to reflect on the matter. In this chapter I want to consider how Dutch social scientists who currently work on Indonesia have come to terms with the colonial ties, which, whether they like it or not, bind them to their subject.

The importance of these colonial ties weighs very unevenly on different disciplines in the social and natural sciences, and the humanities and technical fields. I do not think Dutch anthropologists concentrating on contemporary issues or culture (vernacular architecture, batik, informal sector, urban waste), geographers, economists, linguists, and communication scientists looking at the modern media are very much influenced by the former colonial relationship, and for them Indonesia is just another country from the Global South. For Dutch botanists Indonesia is definitely not just any country, and there is for instance a direct ancestry from De landbouw in den Indische archipel (Agriculture in the Dutch Indies Archipelago, Van Hall and Van de Koppel 1946–1950) to the Plant Resources of South-East Asia project (Westphal and Jansen 1989), but this field is not overly burdened by value judgements. Dutch civil engineers, who are sometimes called upon to rehabilitate drainage systems in Indonesia, are strongly aware of the colonial heritage, but with a positive, unproblematic feeling. A recent work on Dutch civil engineering in Indonesia (Ravesteijn and Kop 2008), for instance, gives an excellent overview of Dutch technical achievements, but uses an unashamedly Eurocentric perspective and by and large ignores indigenous solutions found to technical problems.

The need to come to terms with the colonial past has been most pertinent for historians, and for anthropologists and sociologists with a historical inclination. In the remainder of this chapter I will also call these anthropologists and sociologists “historians” for the sake of brevity. Much, if not most, of their work dealing with issues like, for example, ethnic and class relations, nation-building, the functioning of the state, and violence takes a historical perspective partly as a means to understand better what is happening today.

INTRODUCTION

The progress of Southeast Asian Studies in China, a country with about twenty countries as its close neighbours, reflects its strategic needs which are common to all adjacent regions. In the three decades after the Communist revolution of 1949, area studies could not develop into an autonomous academic field beyond fragmented research on individual countries, owing to institutional dislocation and the lack of interest and demand of the government. In the three decades after the Reform and Opening of 1978, however, area studies recorded a marked growth, as government demand increased in step with the acceleration of China's globalization and the institutionalization of foreign policy-making. Thus, the development of Southeast Asian Studies in China should be understood in the context of its national strategies toward all neighbouring regions (Tang and Zhang 2004; Tang, Zhang, and Cao 2005).

In the meantime the progress of Southeast Asian Studies in China reflects the particular importance of the region. For China, Southeast Asia is a region not just with rich economic resources but with spatial, temporal, and human conditions most ideal for area studies (He 2003, p. 107; Yu 2005; Liang Z. 2007, p. 16). There exist very close geographic connections between China and Southeast Asia. Historically, they formed intimate “lips-to-teeth” relations. As a result, they share special “blood connections” through overseas Chinese communities and cross-border ethnic groups (Liang Z. 2007, p. 16). In this context, and given the very close relations between East Asia and Southeast Asia, Southeast Asian Studies in China has been especially preoccupied with the importance of Southeast Asia in understanding the past, present, and future of China within East Asia. As Wang Hui (2009) has indicated,

INTRODUCTION

Focusing on the prospect of a locally based Southeast Asian Studies in the near future, this chapter necessarily takes a different approach and framework from most of the other chapters. For political and historical reasons, Southeast Asian Studies, as we know it today, has for the past several decades had its major centres of excellence half a globe away from Southeast Asia, no matter how one might define the region. With the exception of Singapore, formal training and research in Southeast Asian Studies in the region are fairly new and small in size and impact in comparison both to academic activities in other fields of enquiry, as well as in comparison to area studies in several countries outside the region. Understandably, most historical analysis of area studies has referred largely to key texts, ideas, persons and institutions from other regions. While such an exercise is highly valuable, it raises a number of intellectual, political and ethical issues as I have explored them elsewhere (Heryanto 2002). Building on that article, I wish to consider below the prospects for a home-grown Southeast Asian Studies in the twenty-first century, and speculate what such studies might look like. I must admit from the start, I do not have any ready answers to these important yet difficult questions. However, I hope this modest attempt is a worthy step. More specifically, this is a preliminary attempt to consider the initial and potential contribution of intra-Asian popular cultural flows to the future of a locally based area studies of the region, its people and its historical trajectory, as one possible form of successor to the old Southeast Asian Studies from the Cold War era.

Unlike most analyses of prominent Southeast Asian Studies in other regions, we are faced with a rather limited range of locally published and accessible ideas when examining the case within the otherwise rich intellectual traditions of the region itself. Instead of following the usual practice of looking back to milestones, key texts, authors, and debates of area studies in the past, local conditions have led me to focus on the present potentials and possible future.

INTRODUCTION: A CRITICAL PROVISO

Southeast Asian studies have developed to become a considerable field of study in Australia. Southeast Asia, as Australia's neighbouring region, has been the focus of national interest and this interest has encouraged considerable research and teaching in Australian universities for several decades. Yet “Southeast Asian Studies” as a whole has never been a unified subject of investigation nor can the study of Southeast Asia be extricated from other specific fields of research. Many of the individuals who have made the greatest contribution to the general field of Southeast Asian Studies have seen themselves primarily as contributors either to a particular discipline such as anthropology, politics, economics or demography or to the study of a particular country within Southeast Asia.

One might go further and argue that Southeast Asia could well be seen as a “transitory” category created in the period after the Second World War. Despite the existence of a political foundation through ASEAN for the present conception of Southeast Asia, views of this grouping of countries could well be reformulated in the future.

Although the category of Southeast Asia may be useful for certain purposes, there are other perspectives from which to view this same collection of countries. At different periods of history, various countries within the region have come under the cultural influence of either India or China and it is still possible to distinguish countries within the region accordingly. It is also possible to view these countries in terms of their predominant language families. Thus most of island Southeast Asia forms part of an Austronesianspeaking world. Similarly it is possible to view these countries in terms of their main constituent religions, in which case, Indonesia and Malaysia in particular form part of a Middle Eastern religious sphere.

This chapter offers a “genealogy” of some of the principal contributors to “Southeast Asian Studies” in Australia, even though many of these individuals would not themselves have identified their contribution as primarily directed to the creation of Southeast Asian Studies as such. In Australia, Southeast Asian Studies began through efforts to build disciplinary expertise on particular countries. In some cases, this involved a clear governmentsupported effort.

INTRODUCTION

This sentence in a long paragraph, which considered the history of institutions which are engaged in Southeast Asian Studies within Southeast Asia itself, seems to have two implications: first, it is notable that an organization for Southeast Asian Studies was established in Vietnam relatively earlier than in some other Southeast Asian countries. Second, it is not clear whether this Department played its role as an independent research institute. Western scholars count Singapore's Institute of Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS) and Malaysia's Department of Southeast Asian Studies, University of Malaya, among the leading institutions of this region. Until the 1990s, outsiders might have perceived that “Vietnam is not something” which falls within the scope of Southeast Asian Studies (Halib and Huxley 1996, p. 4; Reid 2004, p. 15).

However, Vietnamese scholars contend that they have developed Vietnam's Southeast Asian Studies programme viewing Southeast Asia as both a geographical entity with a long history and cultural tradition and a strategic region for modern development. Based mainly on the arguments of Vietnamese scholars, this study has traced the construction of Southeast Asian Studies as an academic subject in Vietnam. The study has also paid heed to the institutionalization of Southeast Asian research institutions and their activities focusing on the perceptions and evaluation of Vietnamese scholars.

Firstly this chapter provides a historical overview of the institutionalization of Southeast Asian Studies focusing on the relevant research institutions in Vietnam. Secondly, it describes the perceptions of Southeast Asian Studies inside Vietnam and the local evaluation of the effort to indigenize Southeast Asian Studies. In this regard this study has taken note of Vietnamese scholars’ perceptions and assessment of Southeast Asian Studies performed by outsiders, primarily by Western scholars; in other words it concerns the perceptions and evaluation of Southeast Asian Studies conducted by Southeast Asian insiders and its origin in an indigenous Vietnamese point of view. And finally, this chapter examines the construction and limitations of Southeast Asian Studies in Vietnam, including the issue of this field as one which advocates interdisciplinary regional studies.