Special Feature

No.68 Autumn 2013

Special Feature: Southeast Asian Studies: Crisis or Opportunity?

Southeast Asian Studies in Southeast Asia:A View from Singapore
R. Michael Feener
Associate Professor, Asia Research Institute (ARI),
National University of SingaporeW

hat I want to do here is to reflect on the state ofSoutheast Asian Studies, and how it looks from Singapore
in the context of the questions asked at the roundtable held inMacau.
Building upon its place as a regional infrastructure andeducational hub, for the past 50 years, Singapore has come toplay a major role in the development of Southeast AsianStudies in the region both at the National University of Singapore (NUS) and the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies (ISEAS).
NUS which was one of the first institutions in Southeast Asianthat really began to develop an international research profile in
the field by drawing in scholars from all across the region andbeyond who came to base their work in Singapore. However,
the rapid economic growth of Singapore in recent decades has
attracted new waves of migrants in all fields including a lot ofmigrant academics. They have been drawn there by a range ofdifferent factors including relatively good resources and research funding and also, very importantly, close proximity to thefield. If you are going to work in Southeast Asia, it is a much
shorter commute from Singapore than most other places. Butalso, importantly, it has become a real pull for the opportunities
it gives for interaction with an increasingly vibrant academic
community centered there.
I was happy to see some of my colleagues from NUS – inparticular from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and from
NUS Press, at ICAS in Macau. They are in a position to talk more
broadly as to how NUS has staked itself out in the field. So I will
try to keep my remarks focused on the Asian Research Institute(ARI) which is the unit within NUS where much of my work has
been focused. ARI has been around since 2001 and arose fromone of NUS’ myriad strategic initiatives the administration
throws up from time to time. But, I think that it is one of the few
initiatives that has grown its own legs. Over the past 12 years,
ARI has developed into a major site of not only regional, butalso global scholarly collaborations: we have just over 80 faculty
members and researchers from 24 different countries. We also
hold a large portfolio on MOUs and collaborative research programs with other institutions across Asia, as well as in North
America, Europe, and Australia.
One of the advantages of work at ARI is that it is interdisciplinary and we bring together scholars under clusters from different disciplines to look at different focused areas of research.
I am currently in charge of the unit that looks at religion in Asia,

which has been a very active unit within ARI over the past decade. Work at ARI has contributed to some significant studies inSoutheast Asia over the past few years. This has been significantly facilitated by both resources and location. Both of thesehave contributed to new configurations of research personnel
that have come together to work on projects that have served
to reshape some of the relationships between scholars and theobjects of their studies, in some very stimulating and productive ways.
One result of this has been a significant shift in the way inwhich work being done on Asia at NUS is framed. That is, thework of Southeast Asian Studies in a place like ARI is not primarily conceived so much of studies of Asia as an object, rather
than of studies of diverse social phenomena in Asia as a con-R. Michael Feener. Source: Author
11text. This shift makes a huge difference in our approach to thefield and toward others in the environment. This shift is not justsemantic: it reflects a whole new kind of position for area studies scholars in relation to their field. In addition to this generalreconfiguration of the field, there is also some innovative conceptual work taking place locally that aims to try to develop
new models for understanding connections linking diverse
communities both within Asia and to the broader world beyond. With Prasenjit Duara as head of ARI, the current focus
on interactions within and across Asia has been very productive to bring scholars from around the region and beyond toenter into new kinds of conversations.
Another exciting new line of development that we haveseen at NUS over the recent years involves the way in which we
explore new frameworks for constructive interaction between
academics and professional practitioners from other fields. Thisis something that I started engaging with a few years ago withsome work on Islamic legal professionals in Asia. We started toorganize a series of workshops with participants that included
professionals from fields beyond academics - bringing in judges
and lawyers from Islamic jurisdictions from around the region
to come to work together. I am sure that you are all familiar
with the saying that working with academics is like herding agroup of cats; now think about throwing a bunch of lawyers
and judges into the mix. In terms of administrative issues ittakes things to a whole new level. But it has been possible todo at NUS in a way that it would not be in many other places
due to its location. To get a dozen Shari’a court judges to aconference in the United States is in itself a major challenge,
starting with immigration issues. But, we can still manage todo that in Singapore. So to be able to bring in these regional
participants who aren’t academics by training, but are doing
very thoughtful work in the areas that we are interested in has
created a whole new set of conversations: something that isvery exciting. We are now doing this more systematically at ARI
as part of our project on “Religion and Development.”
It is, of course, also very challenging particularly in ways that
we can produce publications that can capture some of thedynamics of the conversations we have there, and also how wecan also communicate these to broader professional audiences.
This is the thing NUS has being trying to do and it is buildingon these experiences. Some of the current work that we aredoing at ARI has moved to build these new frameworks andconversations in new directions. For example our project on“religion and development” and that has brought in practitioners from a number of international relief and development
agencies that have either regional offices in Singapore or thathave operations based in Southeast Asia. This is with the aim
to try to come up with a new series of conversations thatlook at major social phenomena within the social context ofAsia: but all the time focusing much more on Asia as a context
rather than as an object of study.
These developments are all very promising. There are more
people coming and new lines of research being developed. But
we still face challenges. Firstly, places like ARI are embedded ininstitutional contexts in Asia that have relatively underdeveloped traditions in the humanities and the social sciences, in12

which usually more resources are dedicated to areas such as
the natural sciences and engineering. Some have attempted toestablish work in the humanities and social sciences as havingsome kind of direct policy relevance. Many academic institutions in Singapore and across the region are directly involved in
the work of consulting government on various matters. ARI isunique in NUS in that it works without any such expectations.
Yet, this space for academic work does require constant justification to the higher administration of the university as to why
our work could be worth the time, energy, and resources that
goes into it. So this might also be a problem that other institutions in the region face which on the institutional context
where work from the social sciences and the humanities
doesn’t have the same kind of social prestige or historical trackrecord that we’d find in European or North American Univer­sities.
Another final significant challenge that we’ve seen at NUS isthat ARI is a completely post PhD institution. The university is
still not producing many leading doctorates in the field of Asianstudies. We have made some remarkable progress toward thisin recent years, but we still are seeing relatively few Singaporean students coming through NUS who are really attaining
global visibility in the field. Many of our students do their studies there and then go off to one of these legacy centers ofAsian Studies in Europe, North America, and Australia to gettheir PhD. So, we are faced with significant challenges in trying
to make NUS a place where not just well established scholars
will come to work late in their careers, but as a place where
you can foster an upcoming intellectual community. There aresome real institutional problems with this. For example theshort limits of having five years to complete a PhD; the relativelack of language training; and a relatively small window to do
fieldwork. In some of the more established programs abroad,
you can get good PhDs because you can teach them languages,
give them the years they need to do this, and to carry out extensive fieldwork. These are simply not options in a place like
Singapore, unfortunately.
So there are some real institutional constraints to producing
the kinds of scholars that you are getting in other places. How
can NUS be a place that attracts people coming in, and how
can in really work to more vigorously develop them and scholarship? These are the constant issues we face in what is a constantly evolving field and region. For the future development ofAsian Studies in Asia, however, it is imperative that we work
more on producing, and not just absorbing, the most productive and prominent scholars in the field.