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S O U T H EA S T A S I A A S A S O U T H E A S T A S I A NFIELD OF ST UDY1

O. W.Wolters

My first reaction to your kind invitation w as a nervous one. I do not like to throw myweight around and did not feel that it was really my business to give advice to LIPI. But Ihad to admit to myself that I wa nted to visit Indonesia again, and h ere I am b ut mo urnin gthe absence of two friends: m y old traveling pa rtner of Sriwijayan d ays, Yati Suleiman, andm y old sparrin g p artne r also of Sriwijayan d ays, Boechari. Yet, when I began to ask myselfquestions abo ut the m eaning of the field of Southeast Asian studies as som ething m ore th anthe personal excitement of studying this or that about this or that part of the region, I oncemore became nervous.The field, and area studies in general, emerged in the United States in 1948 with the ex-plicit purp ose of teaching Americans, man y of whom were return ing from Southeast Asia tocivilian life, what they should know about a region of new nations whose affairs were begin-ning to impinge on their own at a time when the Cold War w as getting und er w ay. But re-cently, and more than forty years later, the report of a conference on Southeast Asianstudies in the United States, the Wingspread Conference, was pub lished u nd er the distu rb-ingtitle ofSoutheast Asian Studies in the Balance: Reflections from America 2Does the title meanthat these scholars we re uns ure of the identity of the field or wa s it simply a particularAmerican reflection on how the field had developed in America? Indeed, one can go furtherand wo nde r for how m uch longer Southeast Asia will be regarded as an identifiable objectfor study . Perhap s the region we have been accustomed to refer to as Southeast Asia is

already dissolving into other kinds of alignments such as the Asia Pacific Economic Cooper-1The article is an address, slightly modified, given on November 3,1993 to a conference, held in Jakarta, ofSoutheast Asian historians from the region itself and jointly organized by the Indonesian Institute of Sciences(Lembaga Ilmu Pen getahuan Indonesia, LIPI) and the Toyota Foundation. The conference's theme wa s ThePromotion of Southeast Asia Studies in Southeast Asia. I am grateful to Taufik Abd ullah, chairman of theSteering Comm ittee, for pe rmitting me to publish the add ress inIndonesia.I would also like to thank A. ThomasKirsch, Stanley J. O'Con nor, and the late Lauriston Sha rp, anthropologist, art historian, and anthropologist,respectively, for their valuab le advice.2 I am referring to a conference held at W ingspread, Racine, Wisconsin, in 1990. The report was ed ited by CharlesHirschm an, C harles F. Keyes, and K arl Hutterer, A ssociation for A sian Studies, 1992.

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ation F o r um .In deed, we have been given to understandtha ttransnat ional influences arelikely to transform the focus andissuesof global and national affairs.3

Obviously, Southeast Asians are unlikely to feel the compelling need to learn about thesocieties and governments of SoutheastAsiawhich Americans felt. Similarly, they arehardly likely to be seized by the sense of urgency with which Australians are approachingth efield, a mood expressed in a recent report as a need to become at ease with our geographical place in the world/ 7 How,t hen ,can one attempt to state the case for SoutheastAsian studies in Indonesia or, for tha tmatter, elsewhere in SoutheastAsia?

Isuggest,for the purpose of discussion, tha tthe major contribution of Southeast Asianstudies within the region itself could be the enhancement of one's self awareness in order toassistone in reaching a better understanding of the present. Perhaps, in an age of greatchange,there is morethanever a need for self awareness: Whence do we come? What arewe? Where are we going? Paul Gauguin exclaimed in 1897, though his intent ion, alas, wassuicide.41 shall go further andsuggest,and again for the purpose of discussion, t ha tLIPImight wish to involve itself in an informed critique of the present by undertaking what Ishall refer to as a watch dog role by way of calling attention to history oriented aspects ofth efield of Southeast Asian studies which may tend to be ignored. In this way LIPIcouldargue t ha tthe past, and therefore its study, might have a distinct and valuable bearing onwhat is happening today.

Tothis end I shall try to make a case for the relevance of Southeast Asian studies bycalling atten tion to what I believe are some prominent cultural features or pat tern s associated with the region's past which, in my opinion, should not be neglected, and my listenersmay t henwish to ask themselves whether any of these features or patterns tend to be mirrored in the contemporary scene and, if so, with what consequences.5

What I shall say cannot help being only theviewsof one outsider, but I defend thesalience of these features because I believe tha tthey help to explain how people behaved inth epast and how things happened. They would be influences which helped to shape thedirect ionof Southeast Asian historical experience. My listeners may also ask themselveswhether anyth ing I shall say sheds light on the substance of Southeast Asian civilization,somethingt ha tthose who contributed to the report of the Wingspread Conference found tobe elusive.

These features or patternseight of themwere, I believe, widely shared throughoutSoutheastAsia.They were communalities, and the elite in this ort ha tcoun try could, if theoccasion arose, understand each other. 6Today, too, perhaps they may help thoselivingin3 David L. Fetherman, What Does Society Need from Higher Education? Items.Social Science Research Council,Volume 47, nos. 2/ 3, p. 38. The author is responding to Paul Kennedy's Preparingfor theTwentyFirstCentury.^ D venons nous? Qui sommes nous? Ou allons nous? the title of his picture in the Museum of Fine Arts,Boston.5 For example, an Englishman, familiar with the history of nineteenth century England andobservingth e contemporary scene in his own country, could besensitivetosignsof persisting classdistinctions and anti foreignsentiment. He might, too, have reservations concerning the long term consequences of the Enlightenment, with itsoverweeningly selfconfident rationalism and itslegacyof fascism and communism. He might also recognize moreclearly the clublike atmosphere of party politics in the House of Common s. An American friend tells me thatAmericans today can recognize themselves in the pages of de Tocqueville.^Tom Kirschsuggeststhat it is not improbable that Jayavarman II, coming, according to a Cambodian inscription,from Java to Cambodia,feltat home in either country. At least, the author of the inscription may have thoughtso.

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one part of the region go some w ay in understand ing those living in another part of the re-gion. I am not claiming that Southeast Asia had the monopoly of these features, and I amnot identifying them with cultural values or attitudes of mind, thou gh, of course, they wou ldhave g enerated values, a point to which I shall return. Above all, I am not pro posing thesecom mo n cultura l features to the exclusion of cultural differences w ithin the region, the stu dyof wh ich shou ld su rely be given the highest priority in any definition of Southeast Asianstudies, provided that the case for the field in Southeast Asia itself has been made. Thefollowing eight cultural features represent m y case for the field.

1 The first feature is that the only time that mattered was now / the karm a-fraughtmo men t, for example, or the mom ent of spiritual enlightenment, or when an opportun ity forearning w orldly m erit could occur. The past was pertinent only w hen it was believed to beclearly relevant to specific contemporary needs. The possibility of gradual progress wasden ied; instead, time wa s measu red in term s of recurring cycles. The future held o ut no ne wpossibilities.And so it was that, durin g a conference a nu mb er of years ago, historians concludedthat in the Southeast A sian tradition there was no interest in the past for its own sake. 7A sone participant, a specialist on Thailand, put it, the contemporaneity of the distant past isa hallma rk of (indigenous) Southeast Asian historiog raphy /'8 In the same tradition, a thir-teenth-century Vietnamese historian could artfully quote ancient Chinese texts to counterKublai Khan's claims to suzerainty, and in the fourteenth century a golden age in antiquitywas invented to express nostalgia for a recent Vietnamese past. The past was the receptaclefor myths an d im agined times of prosperity. There would have been no sense of a linearpast or notion that on e should plan further ahea d than, say, for the next campaigning sea-son or for the next harvest. I hasten to observe that this should no t be understoo d to me ancultural stagnation but, instead, a sense of achievement and even exultation when one couldlive at peace with oneself and one's environment.2 Because no w was the time that mattered, importance was attached to being up-to-date or contem porary : one should maximize one's opportun ities for appro priating w hatwere k now n to be useful skills appearing over the horizon by w ay of international trad eroutes or from w ithin Southeast Asiaitself.The consequence of this opportun ist and pragmatic attitude tow ard the present is seenin wh at historians use d to refer to as w ave s of foreign influences which reached So utheastAsia first from India and later from the Middle East. New developments in India, for exam-ple,were soon registered in Southeast Asia. The great Indian philosopher, Sankara, whodied about A D 750, is mentioned in a ninth-century Cam bodian inscription. The signs ofprompt movement of ideas across the Indian Ocean are manifold: successive Indian scriptsand art styles, new textsamong which were the revised Theravada texts of Sri Lanka fromthe eleventh cen tury on ward and religious systems such as Tantricism or schools of Islamicmy sticism an d, later, calls for mo dernizatio n from Islamic centers in the Midd le East. Spe-cial means to special ends lie at the heart of Tantricism and would have been irresistable toempirically minded Southeast Asian rulers and their religious advisers.

7W ang Gungwu,Perceptionsof the Past inSoutheastAsia(Singapore: Heinema nn Educational Books [Asia]) Ltd,1979),p. 4. Craig J. Reyno lds, Religious Historical Writing and the Legitimation of the First Bangkok Re ign/ ' in ibid., p.103.

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The Southeast Asian elite's propensity to be au courant is to the historian's adv antag ebecause it encourage s reflection on the conjuncture of events responsible for introd ucing newpossibilities and enquiry about the natu re and process of the changes which could then takeplace. In this way th e past can be rendered in diachronic as well as in the synchronic term ssuggested by the expression cultural patterns.

He re is an illustration. The earliest known instance of w hat w ere once regarded as w ave s of foreign influence w as the arrival in Southeast Asia of recently emergin g schoolsof Hin du devotionalism in the first centuries of the Christian era. Cam bodian inscriptions,which p rovid e the earliest and reasonably amp le materials on the subject, reveal that flam-boy ant Ind ian religious teachers, surely recognized by K hme rs as exciting versions of theirlocal sham ans or whateve r, were now becoming available to proclaim that supre m e spiri-tual pow er could be attained here and no w by means of simple and un book ish ascetic andmeditative techniques which gave access to Siva's cosmic power (sakti) so that one could behailed as Siva-like. Attaining something desirable here and now wo uld b e expected of anyefficacious religious rite. The techniquesprobab ly seen as of heroic pro portion s wer eaimed at strengthen ing one's will-power and self-control, and the teachers' pup ils were , firstand foremost, the local chiefs. Thus, devotionalism and not Brahmanical rituals hit the epi-graphic headlines, but it was not the popu lar devotionalism of southe rn India but a South-east Asian elitist construction of its meaning and benefit to themselves. 9

This episode, the details of which we owe to Cambo dian epig raphy , suggests a para -digm applicable to the region as a whole in the form of a statemen t concerning w hat thepresent could offer and therefore w hy it was the present that mattered: the present co uldoffer up-to-dateskills and techniques which, if appropr iated and ma stered, wou ld leadhereand nowto spiritualsuccessand, no doubt, to all kinds of success.3 The possibility of being up-to-d ate was often linked to and sustained by the sense

of being an integral part of the whole of the known wo rld rather than merely belonging toone's own patch of territory. The origin of this urbane, outward-looking, and global per-spective, nour ishin g the elite's self-esteem, is, in my op inion, attributab le to an ancientawaren ess am ong the elite that there was a Hind u world, not an Indian one, which wasan eve r-to-be-updated world of Sanskrit books of canonical status in a sacred languag ewhich assum ed that there were universally acceptable norm s of behavior and shared sym-bols,images, and ideals, no matter what the local languages were. Here was a culturalcomm unity which sp anned the whole region. To ignore it would be to remove perhap s acrucial element in early Southeast Asian historical experience. References to the great epic,th eMahabharatath win dow on the Hin du world and a limitless source of metap horsfor the Southe ast Asian elite begin to app ear in fifth-century inscriptions as far apart a ssouthe rn Laos an d eastern Kalimantan and are eloquent testimon y to the Hin du w orl d'sspan of scriptural authority.The Hind u world was what we could now regard as an imagined comm unity. 10 It9 Indigenous texts could also be updated and to the historian's advantage. For example, the so-called V ietnamesefolktales (the Viet-dien u-linh tap) were adapted and therefore updated in the late fourteenth or in the fifteenthcentury to teach the need to discipline villagers. In this instance, the upda ting p rocess reinforces wha t is alreadyknown about the elite's changing attitude toward the cou ntryside.1 0Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities(rev. ed., London: Verso, 1992), pp . 12-19 on 'T he ReligiousCom mun ity. The Hind u World is not included among comm unities defined in terms of a sacred language andwritten script.

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Southeast sianFieldof Study 5

was no moret h ana selective appropriation and localization of materials, usually recordedin Sanskrit texts, to make local sense of and therefore familiar and valuable what was originally foreign/ 7 SoutheastAsianshad the capacity to construe their own milieu and circumstances in terms of what they knew was recorded in Sanskrit literature as universal phenomena ,and they would then proceed by a process of self Hinduization togive Hindunamesto themselves and to what they saw aroun d them: for example, their mountains,rivers, sacred bath ing pools, caves, stones, chiefs, overlords, and also those who did notbelong to the elite groups in society. There was no limit to what could be described in H i n d u language. Indeed, this worldviewrequired diversity. As my colleague ProfessorKirsch has put it, in this process nature spirits could be upgrad ed to become part of the H i n d u hierarchy andSiva parochialized to become the Creator of this or that region inSoutheastAsia.

Indonesiawas firmly in this universalist H indu world. As you know,Agastyais honored in the Prambanan. He is thesageof Tamil nadu; to himSivadictated the twentyeightagama.And not far from the Prambanan in distance and time stands the Borobudur, aMahayanaBuddhist monument but assuredly of the H indu world, where Hinduism andth eMahayana never madeexclusiveclaims on theirfollowersbut rather fed into each other.Youwillrecall that the bas relief of three of itsgallerieswas identified by means of a Japanese recension as depictingpassagesfrom theGandavy ha,a M ahayana text from perhapssouthernIndia, translated into Chinese at the beginning of the fifth century and acclaimed inseventh century China and eighth century Japan. Here is further convincing evidence of thewide world within which a Southeast Asian people couldeffortlessly belong.11

TheVietnamese, too, belonged to the wide world or, rather, overlapping worlds. A thirt e en th cen tu ryemperor, anxious to preach to his subjects the benefits of the meditationschool of Buddhism, known in Japan as Zen, could extol without embarrassment the debtCh i n aand Vietnam owed the Indians whofirstpropagated the Buddha's teachings acrossth edeserts of CentralAsia.But, again in Vietnam, Chinese classical writing about antiquitywas held to reflect universal norms of experience and could be rhetorically invoked to ratifyVietnamese behavior.12 In the same mood, elsewhere in SoutheastAsiathe name ofKautilya, the Hind u master of statescraft, or of Manu, thelawgiver,could be invoked tovalidate local behavior as reflecting un iversal norms. And educated Vietnamese, familiarwith and using such Chinese cultural artifacts as poetic forms or Chinese style coinage orreign periods, could enjoy the sensation of participating in the civilized world on equaltermswith the Chinese.

I nthis world the center could be anywhere according to where one claimed it to be,which would be where onelived.There were innumerable centers. Professor Hendrik Maierobserves tha t the Malay words for the compass points ten d to conceive the world from theperspective of their own community and plotted space relative to their ruler's (and theirown) comp ound. 13Here is another instance of a genuine world view, a basic element in1 1 1 am puzzled by the Cornell University Press's advertisement of the recently published SoutheastAsiain theEarly ModernEra. Trade,Power,andBelief,edited by Anthony Reid (Ithaca: Corn ell University Press, 1993):'Th is book is thefirstto do cu men t. .. the shift from experimental spirit worship to the universalist scripturalreligions of Islam, Christianity, and Theravada Buddhism. I would think that noth ing had been more magnificently universalist tha n H indu ism. ^Occasionally, but only rarely, Vietnamese rulers were urged by theiradvisersto be guided by ancient Chinesewisdom.^ H. M. J. Maier, 'Th e Malays, theWaves,and the Java Sea, inLooking in OddMirrors:TheJavaSea,ed. V. J. H.Houben et al. (Leiden:VakgroepTalen en Culturen van Zuidoost Asie en Oceanie, 1992), p. 12.

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the Southeast Asian cultural heritage. Part of the same heritage was h ospitality tow ardthose from elsewh ere in that wor ld and especially their bookish kn ow ledge . Useful informa-tion and also foreigners with expert religious lore at their disposal traveled regularly overthe trade routes from the most distant places.4 W hat gave distinctive shap e to public life within Southea st Asia itself wa s a cultur alemphasis on person and achievement rather than on grou p and hereditary status.At the same timeand in contrast with South and East Asia, with their emphasis onascribed status an d collective units such as family, lineage, and caste there was a dow n-grading of the imp ortance of lineage based on claims to status th rough descent. Society h adto be continuou sly m onitored to spot potential leaders in a particular generation, and thisoutlook encourag ed the habit of present-m indedness. Gov ernm ent was not a matter ofelaborate institutions but of a relaxed unbureaucratic style of public life, where importancewas attached to man-management and ceremony and where personal qualities of leadershipand exam ple played the major role. I like the expression relaxed because it absolves one

from having to beg the question of what is strong or weak governm ent. Similarly, I pre-fer the ne utra l expression polity to State. A relaxed style of pub lic life did not m eanthat every po lity was usu ally on the brink of collapse. One reason is the tradition that ru lersand ruled dep end ed on each other; the ruled could migrate if government sudden ly becamemore severe. Interdependence would also be expressed when the villagers 7shrines wereprotected by the ruler and , of course, whe n the ruler kept th e peace in the coun tryside orrepelled invaders.In Vietnamese sources, too, mention is sometimes m ade of extraordinarily endo wedpersons w ho attracted followers. Vietnamese rulers, thoug h believed to be protected by thespiritual authority of their family, were also attributed with possessing such special quali-ties as discernm ent in man aging officials.The crucial importance of the individual qua ruler could and usually was infinitely en-hanced by the identification of his personal prow ess with the divine attributes of a cosmicgod of the H ind u panth eon or of a local spirit or, indeed, of both. Hin duiza tion hadbeen a process of ma king sense of what w as foreign in terms of wh at was already famil-iar, and so it was that the attributes of Siva could be construed as those of the local man ofprow ess. Thu s, the ruler was god-like and associated with the sources of fertility an dtherefore of lifeitself.There was a pervasive apprehension of the superna tural forces of theland and water. According to Vietnamese popularbelief,he who d eserved to rule wou ldapprehend the presence of a local spirit and thereby win its allegiance and invincible sup-port. The spirits were alw ays at hand to be sum mo ned, a nd this perception, too, reinforcedthe conviction that now , the time of appre hend ing, was the time that mattered.There was bo und to be competition between contending m en of prowess; there was noroom at the top for more than one person. While the amou nt of prowess in the world waslimitless and could be shared, authority and p ower w ere limited in amo unt. When a p er-son's pro wess had been satisfactorily tested, the successful com petitor's authority andpower would be absolute and could not be shared or transmitted.A leader w ith discernibly superior prowe ss was associated w ith the capacity to attractfollowers, wh o w ere anxious to earn a meritorious reputation, personal adva ncem ent in theleader's service, and a share of the leader's wealth, though the same followers w ould switchtheir allegiance wh en their leader could no longer protect them. Rulers would prov ide im-pressive public occasions when their followers could advertise their relative status. Earning

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8 O. W. Wolters

Successful wa rfare w as, of course, a sign of a prov en lead er, even thou gh m ilitary cam-paigns rarely led to permanent political solutions and never to large-scale colonization.Leaders needed the ma ximum space in which to flex their muscles. Warfare did not chang ethe map except at the expense of Vietnam's southern neighbors d uring the few short-livedintervals of strong d ynastic government in Vietnam. One did not have to belong to a ruler'sethnic grou p to be his subject. The ethnic patchwork of Southeast Asia wa s som etimesaccentuated by the mov emen t of captives and their resettlement in a conqu eror's h eartland.

The institutions of entourag e and alliance, nour ished b y largesse available from tradin gtreasure, were probably especially important influences among those societies, such as theJavanese, which practiced bilateral kinship and where extensive followings could be readilybuilt up on both sides of one's family.W hat Anthony Reid has referred to as the high degree of autonom y of wo me n shouldbe regarded as a cultural feature in its own right, but in my present context of entourage andalliance I shall do no m ore than endo rse, if I may, what h e has to say about descent,which wa s (usually) reckoned bilaterally in terms of the status of both father and m othe r,

which prov ided one element of uncertainty about succession. 17 1 do ub t wheth er sufficientemphasis can be given to the institution of bilateral kinship, especially when one takes thepractice of multiple marriages into account. Here we are in the presence of a veritablereservoir of potential claimants to kingship and of a source of political instability; therewere few m ore dan gero us persons in Southeast Asia than half-brothers or brothers-in-law.Such was the entrenched social status of Southeast Asian women that in Vietnam before thenineteenth century, and in spite of the authority of Chinese legal codes, protection wasgua rante ed to the right of dau gh ters to equal inheritance of the portion of family estateremaining after disposition of the worsh ip property. 18 Furthermore, wom en enjoyed thelegal protection of som e personal rights such as the right to sue hus ban ds for neglect.19

5 In this achievem ent-oriented cu lture, ma npo we r was a leader 's chief economic re-source and was especially necessary for providing a surplus agricultural prod uct to supp ortthe Court, public work s, military adventures, and overseas trade. Rulers would be expectedto prevent disasters, protect religious wo rks, and be accessible to the people by provid ingmediators when disputes arose. One may suppose that nowhere should authority have beenmo re valued th an in village commu nities, whe re the inhabitants could pu rsu e their agricul-tural activities witho ut interference from powerful families in the neighborh ood, tho ugh Ihave been given to understan d that Thai and Burman villagers would view their rulers asone of the intrinsic disasters they faced and comparable with natural disasters such asflood and drought.An un interru pted arrival of trading treasure, regarded as the ruler's right, was assum ed.A contributor toSouthea st Asia in the Early ModernErahas rightly stated that the impor-tance of appropriating a commercial resource base for establishing political power cannot beoverestimated in the Southeast Asian context. 20 Another historian has remarked that

1 7 An th o n y Re id , Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce 1450-1680. Vol. 1:The Lands below the Winds ( N e wHa ven: Yale Un iversity Press, 1988), p. 120.1 8Nguyin Ngoc Huy and Ta Van Ta i. . . , The Le Code. Law inTraditional Vietnam vol. 1 (Athens: OhioUniversity Press, 1989), p. 80.1 9Ibid., pp. 81-82.^ Jeyamalar Kathirithamby-Wells, Restraints on the Development of Merchant Capitalism in Southeast Asiabefore c. 1800, Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Era ed. Reid, p. 129.

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backed by the personal loyalty an d ubiquity of the leader 's representatives. Only short termgoals were plausible.

And so it was tha tregimes were not long lasting, a circumstance consistent with theprinciple of cyclical time.25Even in Vietnam effective dynastic government was alwaysshort lived, though the Chinese style imperial institution had been localized in thet enthcen tu ryto suit Vietnamese needs.26Ng Si Lien, a Vietnamese h istorian of the later fifteenthcentury, reviewed what had happen ed under the previous dynasty in the thirteenth andfour teenth centuries and deplored what he regarded assignsof instability such as dependenceon en tourages,obsessivemerit seeking, and personal and informal relations at Court.We would recognize these features as being Southeast Asian without judging them to bedefects.27Only Vietnamese historians made a fetish of the need for strong government because they knew t ha tit rarely existed. Their imper ial institution should have offered thepromise of strong government in what they imagined was Ch ina's style, yet they knew tha tit was alwaysbeing corroded. The fifteenth century h istorian, Ng S Lien, was, in my opinion,nervous about t he future because of what he regarded as endemic institutional andculturalweaknesses revealed in the recent past.

8 Because of relaxed governmental institutions, ethnic identities on the edges of themajor polities were left undisturbed and often represented by contiguous ecological layersonthe physical map. There were no borders in the modern sense but only porous peripheries. The region was Balkanized but without ethnic grounded Balkan wrath. Populationsmight be transferred after a war or there might be raiding forslaves.Otherwise, ecological factors kept ethnic groups in habitation zones where they couldlive comfortably.The r ewere, of course, vital economic interdependencies such as upstream an d downstream,forest and agricultural peoples, forest collectors, and port polities. In some areas there wasaconsiderable degree of bi lingualism and opportunities for manipulating one's identity. Bilingualismsignifies tha tpeople with different origins had learnt tolivetogether.28

Yet peripheries were indispensable to the center 's status. A ruler's prestige depended onhis claim to be the overlord of a multi ethnic polity.29Moreover, overlordship, though oftenn omoret hanceremonial, was a form of self defense because the rival overlord would bedeprived of the services of those wholivedin the porous borderland. What lay beyond theporous borders wasalwaysa matter of concern to an overlord, an d one consequence would 5 Accordin g to Cl aud e Jacques, Fr om th e inscriptions it emerges clearly eno ugh that regional rebellions wer eseldom absen t in the Angkorian period, and t he Royal Chronicles, not to speak of some present day repor ts, tell ofma ny such rebellions against t he central power. I am sure it would not be going too far to say that they ha ve beenendemic in the Khmer land from theverybeginn ing of histo ry ; Sources on Econom ic Activities in Kh mer andC h a m Lands, inSoutheast Asia in the 9th to 14th Centuries, ed. David G. Marr and A. C. Milner (Singapore:I n s t i t u t eof Sout hea st Asian Studies, Singapore , 1986), pp . 229 30. 6 Prim arily to protec t th e succession t o the thro ne within a particular family. On e con sequenc e of the weaknessof the Vietnam ese dyn astic institution was its frequent dep end en ce on right han d men, usually known as th i y,instead of on an entrenched bureaucracy toassistyoun g or weak rulers. These pro tec tor s, as th ey were called,were liable to usu rp when the chance occurred, and, for this reason, the Tran dynasty in the thirteenth andfourteenth centuries appointed their closest kinsmen as th i y. 7 I discussed th is matt er in an article in Sojournersand Other Settlers: Historiesof Southeast Asia and the Chinese,in Honor ofJenniferCushman, ed. Anth ony Reid (Sydney: Allen and Un win, forthcomin g): What Else Ma y N gSf Lien, a Fifteenth C en tu ry Vietnam ese H istorian , Mean ? A Ma tter of Distinct ions.8 D urin g th e conference in Jakarta considerable atte ntion was givento the need to study h ow thoselivingin

pluralistic societies mana ged t o fit in together. H ere could be a further c ultural feature of the region. 9 For example, in th e Lao and Per ak courts leaders of the hill peoples were accord ed stat us and t itles.

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be the imp ortance attached to up-to-date and accurate political intelligence in order tomo nitor dev elopm ents in neighboring territories. I suggest that th e skills of diplom acy arepart of the Southeast Asian tradition.An exception to this situation is provided by the Vietnamese, who were able grad uallyto extend their sou thern borde rs at the expense of the Cham s. Yet as late as the fourteenthcentury, discontented Vietnamese were prepared to seek refuge over the southern border inCh am pa, and an edict was issued to forbid Vietnamese from ad opting foreign speech andclothes. And in the nineteenth century the Hu e emperors complained that some Vietnamesevillagers in the sout h we re becom ing Khm er in speech and clothing.So much for som e propo sed cultural features. 30 The first three are associated with thenotion of no w : no w is the time that ma tters in all fields of useful know ledge ; the senseof belonging to a wide w orld w ould multiply the opportunities for being up-to-date. Theother five features are similarly related to the notion of now : no w is wh en one identifiesamo ng one 's generation an up-and-coming m an of prow ess, wh o will need and attract

manpower and trading revenue and will be venerated, though his political influence will beno more than a projection of his personal prowess and will not be territorially defined.Few, if any, of these features are peculiar to Southeast Asia. 31 Perhaps the importanceof perso n and achievement, a relaxed exercise of pow er, extreme multicentricism, andunu sual g eographical access to the outside world, though no do ubt non -Southeast Asianexamples can be adduc ed, are more pronounced in the region than in man y other parts ofthe world. On the other han d, the comb ination of these featurestheir configurationm aybe distinctively Southeast Asian, with the effect that each feature would reinforce theothers. For example, I noted that the habit of spotting p otential leaders in a particulargeneration would encourage the habit of present-mindedness.The conclusion would therefore seem to be that Southeast Asian experience in the past

had alw ays been a matter of endless now s. I have, in effect, m ade a case for SoutheastAsia's remarkable propensity for being mo dern. Furtherm ore, the benefits to be gainedfrom being m odern are today obviously overwhelming. For example, in April this yearTheEconomist had a supplem ent on Indonesia, and its title was Wealth in its Grasp . 32 Itwo uld not be surprising if some should su ppose that the influence of the past was a retard-ing one and that tradition was a drag on progress and the benefits of mo dernity.I mu st now remin d yo u that I have proposed these cultural features with the hope thatthey may stim ulate self-awareness am ong a Southeast Asian audience. It is not my pur pos eto impose m y view s on you . You may reject w hat I have suggested as being historicallyimp lausible. Or you m ay ackn owledg e some of these features in a modified form b ut sugg estadditional a nd mo re imp ortant ones. But, whatever the case, I hop e that the question w ill bew heth er to day any feature of the past is still visible on a significant scale or, at least,

3 0For a succinct formulation of prehistoric and persisting Southeast Asian cultural inlay s/' see LauristonSharp, Cultural Continuities and Discontinuities in Southeast Asia, TheJournalof Asian Studies22,1 (1962): 9,n.9.3* For example, as Benedict Anderson puts it, .. . the mediaeval Christian mind ha d no conception of history as anendless chain of cause and effect or of radical separations between past a nd present. ImaginedCommunities p.23.He goes on to quote A uerbach: the here and now is no longer a mere link in an earthly chain of events, it issimultaneouslysomething which h as always been, and will be fulfilled in the future. See n. 8 abov e for a commen ton a similar Southeast Asian approach to time.3^ A Survey of Indonesia. Wealth in Its Grasp , TheEconomist April 17,1993.

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SoutheastAsiain the past would have already prefigured the postmodern con dition, inwhich progress would be neither thinkable nor achievable.

But only Southeast Asian historians would be able to pounce on those inherited valueswhich could contribute to goals set for the future or hinder the man agement of necessarychanges. Only they may know whether a traditional focus on the present may encourageimprovidence in respect of the future. Only they may know whether more prestige stillaccrues to those in government service thanto those, for example, who work in the privatesector and whether it matters. Only they may know whether the traditional respect paid toth eindividual who achieves and attracts an entourage represents an appropriate standardof leadership in the modern age. Is the institution of the entourage more orlessprominenttoday? And only they may be able to evaluate the influences that work in favor of alessrelaxedstyleof government.34

Iam not qualified to comment on such mat ters. They are for the scholars of the areas, asalso are three more questions. Is there anything in the modern world which seems to makepart icular sense an d is therefore familiar in terms of what was already there, and, if so,what confidence can this provide? ind uiza tio n, I suggested, should be understood as a H ind uizin g process which depended essentially on a Southeast Asian capacity for making sense of what was foreign and unfamiliar in term s of what was already familiar. 35 Ismodern ization being con strued in a similar way and, if not, why not? The second m atter iswhether an intensive study of the past would encourage regional centricisms at the expenseof a supra regional nat ion and, at the same time, demolish pleasing historical myths.

Finally,LIP Imay wish to examine from the perspective of cultural history a recentWorld Bank report,The EastAsianMiracle.How much in the report, when read between the3 4 I have read Southeast Asian Capitalists,ed. Rut h McVey (I thaca: Cor nell South eastAsiaProgram, 1992). OrMcVey's introductoryessay(' Th e Materialization of the Southeast Asian En tre pre ne ur ) covers a great deal ofgrou nd I had ignored an d especially the shifting re lationship of bure auc rat s an d businessmen . She evinces amea sured op tim ism about the prospec ts awaiting Sout heast Asian capitalists.Yet mu ch of wha t she writes m akessense to a historian of earlier SoutheastAsia and, above all,what she has to say about the attraction of mo de rnskillsand the influence of the internat ional environ men t, th ough I won der wh et he r a MBA would be sufficient tosmother one's traditional cultural attitudes when reaching middle age. Can one identify a man of prowess in thebusiness world? H e might be someon e adep t at man man agemen t as distinct from technicalskillsand one who wasent irely at hom e in th e int ern atio nal business an d professional society in genera l. I believe tha t Ru th McVey h asthis kind of society in min d when she refers on p. 32 to th e inter play of complex interests . . . whichwillbe expressed more and more through agencies, associations, and lobbies rathert h a nt hro ugh the dyadic relationships ofpatronclientnetworks. The mode rn man of prowess would build u p his ento urage by developing relationshipswith potent ial par tn ers, by organ izing mer gersmaybe by marria gesan d by acquirin g subsidiaries. He re wouldbe con temp orar y scope for the traditiona l aptitude for building alliances.3 5 Ru th McVey's second op tion below is obviously co ngenial to me . Stud ying the Tama nSiswa, she supposes: Some, conscious of lost time and fearful the coun try might never catch up to mod ern ity's receding image, mighturge tha t the most mod ern ideas an d me tho ds must be imposed; others might feel th at anything tha t was itself verym o d e r n instylewa s less likely to have a mo der niz ing effect on the society t h a nsomethinglessrad ically differentfrom th e society's own experience ; Ruth T. McVey, 'T am anSiswa and the Ind onesian N ationa l Awakening,Indonesia4 (October 1967): 135. It would be interestin g to bring t ogether discussions of the mean ing of moder nit y.According to Jurgen H aberm as, Mod ernit y revolts against the normalizing functions of tradition; mod ern ityliveso nthe experience of rebelling against all that is normative. This revolt is one way to neutralize the standards ofbo t h mor ality an d utility. See his Mo dern ityVersus Post Mod ernity, in Postmodern Perspectives:Issues inContemporaryArt, ed. H owa rd Risatti (Eaglewood Cliffs, N ew Jersey, P rent ice Hall, 1990), p.56.1 am grateful toStanley O'C on no r for th e reference. H aber ma s also poin ts out that mo der nit y is some thin g which is itself alwaysdoo med t o be out mo ded . Rudolf Mra zek has suggested to me that being selfconsciously or even fashionably m o d e rn could reflect person al insecurity, a sense of being uproo ted to th e extent th at one felt obliged tod e n o u n c ethe past.

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lines and freed from the language of economists, is predictable to a cultural historian? Howfar does its description of contemporary economic developments mirror cultural features inth eregion's past? Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore comprise the report's fourSoutheast Asian superstars/ 7 To what extent are value systems inherited from the pastresponsible for this economic situation?

Iam sure that many more questions can be raised on these lines. All I have t ried to do istosuggestthat , within SoutheastAsiaitself,there may be pract ical aswellas academicreasons for studying the Southeast Asian past andreviewingitslegacyin terms of appropriate att itudes of mind in the context of confronting the modern world. LIPImaywishtofoster a public opinion favorable to this proposition. 36

May Isuggestone further responsibility forLIPIwhich is to consider how the SoutheastAsian past may be profitably studied to make it intellectually exciting aswellas relevant?

Inmy opening remarks I referred to the Wingspread report on Southeast Asian studies inth eU nited States.LIPImightwishto respond to certainpassagesin it. For example, thea u t ho rof the epilogue referred to the perception that Southeast Asian studies may lackbotha coherent intellectual foundation and a compelling practical rationale for mobilizingth epublic and private resources needed to sustain and expand its academic practice/ '37Healso stated that we must define the core of ourfieldby seeking to understand the essenceof Southeast Asian civilization. This means that we must refocus our efforts on the study ofth eliteratures, religions, an d the arts of the region in their historical developmen t and contemporary conte xts. .. . I have no doubt / ' he went on to say, tha t such studieswill findcommon themes underlaying the Southeast Asian social and cultural mosaic, themes thatdefine the essence of Southeast Asian civilization. 38 I wonder whether one explanation ofth eWingspread Conference's hand wringing mood may be that participan ts lookedwistfullybackward rather than forward. Surely the civilizations of SoutheastAsiaare beingcreated today an d tomorrow; the contribution of the past is to enable us to establishvaluable continuities or needed breaks.

Isuggest,therefore, and I hope not mischievously, thatLIPImaywishto respond toWingspread's impression of the impoverished state of thefieldand the phantom like natureof Southeast Asian civilization .

Theeffectiveness of LIP s response to these reservations of their colleagues overseaswould be closely connected with the question of ho w to study the past: the disciplinesinvolved and their relationships. There isalwaysa need to create an interest in thefield byinnovative and challenging research. Southeast Asian studies must belively;after all, theyare an arena for interdisciplinary work and, for this reason, thefieldmay have enviableprospects. The experience of interdisciplinary activity can foster a tendency to build bridgeswith addit ional disciplines in order, if I may quote something I have read recently, to exp a n dthe technical repertoire and conceptual boun daries. 39As a result, entirely new prob3 6 On p. 13 ofCultureandSocietyin NewOrderIndonesia,ed.VirginiaMatheson Hooker (Kuala Lumpur: OxfordUniversity Press, 1993), Hooker notes that one theme which runs through theessaysis that traditions whichsurvivehave done so in new contexts. The cultural features explored in the presentessayare behavioralpattern s rather th an artistic forms. Moreover, th e question islesswhether they are capable ofsurvivingthanwhether they should.3^ SoutheastAsian Studies p. 135.3 8 Ibid. ,p. 141.3 9 F e a t h e rman , W h a t D o esSocietyN e e d, p. 40.

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lems can be identified and the educational merits of the field thereby safeguarded. Ideallyspeaking, the field should be perpetually renewingitself,and part of LIP s role could be tocall attention to what is exciting about the region and methodologies deployed in its study.

The watchdog may also wish to argue the case for the purposes and contributions ofcertaindisciplines in the human ities. Which are the particularly creative disciplines at them o m e n t ? 4 01wish to make a special plea for an thropology, the study of the arts and archaeology, an d literary studies, because I believe tha tthese are disciplines likely to bring oneclose to the heartbeat of Southeast Asian civilization or, more accurately, the heartbeatsof the various civilizations of SoutheastAsia,for regional communality in respect of certainculturalpatterns cannot possibly meantha tcultural differences d id not and do notexistamong these societies.

Th ecase for anthropology and the study of the arts and archaeology hardly needs to bemadehere. Both fields arewellestablished in SoutheastAsia.Anthropology studies howthings in societies happen, whereas historians may sometimes tend to be content with whathappen ed an d why. One way of stating the contribution of art history is t ha tit concernsitself with the realm of appearance, where people oncelivedand where they could definean drecognize themselves. Art history deals with self awareness in the past, andselfawareness is the central theme of my remarks today. Art history, in the words of an arthistorian, offers waysof reconnecting perception and imagination, the circuit of cognitions,which these works once ignited an d through which their mean ings were established. 41

Iwould, however, like to say a few words on behalf of literary studies within the context of Southeast Asian regional studies. Several Wingspread part icipants stressed theimpo r t anceof studying literature.

What I have in mind by literary studies is the study of literature for its own sake: ho w a piece of writing is mad e in the sense tha tits text is an artifact comprisingstructures and the linguistic usages conventional in a part icular culture. Here we can getcloser to a text's voice, and here is an opportun ity for exploring the not iont ha tSoutheastAsiacomprises num erous cultures, each leaving its special mark on a local litera ture.42Exposure to th e discipline of textual study, the essence of this approach to literary studies,4 One contributor to the Wingspread report , the only historian, made a powerful case for the history of religionsin order to establish aneffectivehuman istic beachhead within SoutheastAsianstudies ;SoutheastAsianStudies,p. 64, n. 11.4 1 1 am again grateful to Professor O'Connor.4 I tried to fly this kite in myHistory,Culture,andRegionin SoutheastAsianPerspectives(Singapore: Institu te ofSoutheastAsianStudies, 1982). My inten tion was not to preclude the study of early regionalized networking asth ebasisfor th e more meaningful study of administrative structure and for political, religious, an d commercialdevelo pm en t.. ., though Kenneth Hall, in areviewof RobertWicks'sMoney, Markets, andTradeinEarlySoutheastAsia,regrets th at my influence has discouraged such a study;TheJournalofAsianStudies52, 3 (1993):8034.1 am sufficiently familiar with art history to realize that this would be foolish. My point was simply thatoneshould n ot take it for granted that the unit we recognize as SoutheastAsia wasalwaysconveniently intactandfamiliar so that historian s could go ahead and explore with confidence the cultural and economic integrat ion to which Hall refers and evident ly prefers to study. As I put it in 1982, Until more is known in historicalterms of this singular feature of SoutheastAsia(its cultural diversity), the search for an overarching shape to theregion's history will lack a satisfactory basis SoutheastAsianPerspectives,pp . 4546). Needless to say, Iaccept Keith Taylor's article of faith which Hallsorrowfullyquotes in hisreview.But I did not boxmyselfin. Iwas aware of th e phenomenon of cultural relocalization within th e region, and this prevents too restricted asense of locality. I also con ceded that there was awidespan of peoples with concurrent modes of behavior andwith communalities of outlook. My paper today is an extended discussion of such communalities.

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cansharpen curiosity and alertness when one is investigating the presence of connect ions,relationships, differences, disruptures, and instabilities m irrored in literature and also in th eweb of social an d political happenings. Textual study can enlarge a scholar's sensitivity andespecially to the use of language within a culture. 43

Iam sure th at literary studies, anthropology, and the study of the arts would go someway in responding to the Wingspread Conference's perplexity about the nature of SoutheastAsian civilization and therefore about the substance of Southeast Asian studies/ 7 On eparticipantreferred to ou r efforts to convince our humanities oriented colleagues in otherfieldsth at Southeast Asian civilizations and cultures are, in fact, wort hy of focusseda t t e n t i o n / ' 4 41prefer to consider one's expectations of literary studies by referring again towhat Isuggestedwere pronounced cultural features in SoutheastAsia.If what I have saidhas any validity, it would be to an important extent because it is reflected in literarysources, defined in the widest meaning of the term. But the special contribution of literaturean dalso of the arts an d anth ropology must be to bring to light so much more that isinteresting about the region's independent cultural heritage and without the needlessobligation of having to make the case for Southeast Asian civilizations.The influence of LIP s role as I have p resumed to define it would not be limited toIndonesiaor SoutheastAsia.LIPIwould have the obligation of communicating westwardsscholarly perspectives gathered from within SoutheastAsia.My final po int , therefore, ist h a tL IP Imightwishto respond to the Wingspread Conference's hope that a greater exchange of ideas between Western and Southeast Asian scholars would invigorate th efield.Few developments would be more enlivening thanthe beaming of Southeast Asian scholarlyperspectives beyond the region. We, at the western end of the academic spectrum, wouldlearn from having our concerns scrutinized and evaluated from a vantage point we couldnever occupy.

Inthe past I have unsuccessfully urged that Southeast Asian historians of South eastAsiashould hold a m odestly priced conference somewhere in SoutheastAsia,be locked u pin order, undistu rbed, to discuss matters of concern to each of them, and then consider,among other things, wheth er they could produce their own joint H istory of SoutheastAsia.45Thepossibility would now arise of a seminar to prepare a new history of SoutheastAsiaand one which was not simply a stringing together of National Histories but would beinformed by regional self awareness and values aswellas being professionally acceptable.And perh aps the same seminar could explore the possibility of a com parative study ofmodernizing Southeast Asian countries in historical perspective.

This morn ing I havesuggestedthat a sense of the past should stimulate self awarenessan dthat historians couldpossesstheir own and valuable critical insights in respect of whatthey saw happening aroun d them. With these suggestions in mind, I wouldliketo concludeby recalling the words of a famous n ineteenth century Englishman, the future Cardin alN ewman, who, inTheIdeaof aUniversity,ascribes man y noble qualities to the educated4 3 For example, Rudolf Mrazek's regrettha tarecentand valuable trans la t ionof Tan Malaka'sFromJail toJailsuppressed the stra ngen ess of his language which played a crucial role in his appeal; Rudolf Mrazek, T anMalaka :7ust as Artisans, WhenG a t h er e dTogether/ Indonesia53 (April 1992): 67.4 4 Southeast Asian S tudies,p. 62.4^A comparative study of how SoutheastAsianscholars have rendered SoutheastAsianN ational Histories andcultural identities would be a singular contribution to thefield.

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intellect. Among these qualitiesisone which Javanese h istorians not too long ago and,Iamconfident,LIP s historians today and surelyall inthis room would affirm. Such an intellect,writes Newman, isalmost prophetic fromitsknowledgeofhistory/ '46

Thankyou.

3 November, 1993

4 6Owen Chadwick,Newman(rep. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p.55;Nancy K. Florida, Writingth ePast, Inscribing th e Future: Exile and P rophecy in an Historical TextofNineteenth Century Java, 2vols.( Ph .D .dissertation, Cornell University, 1990), vol. 2, chap.8(Conclusion: History and Prophecy).

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