No.68 Autumn 2013

Special Feature

Southeast Asian Studies:

In recent years, the economic crisis caused by the Lehman shock resulted in funding cuts to area studies in various countries,
notably America. This has led to a certain amount of nervousness and anxiety over the future of area studies. However, thesituation­in America stands in stark contrast to that in East Asia, which has seen governmental investment in promoting theinstitutionalization­of Southeast Asian area studies from within the region. With ever increasing recognition of the role the region

will play in the 21st century, recent academic expansion in the founding of centers specializing in Southeast Asia has grown apace
in Singapore, Thailand, Japan, mainland China, and South Korea, in line with the deepening East Asian regional integration. This initself is indicative that the study of Southeast Asia is being undertaken in multiple sites outside of the traditional American andEuropean centers. It also points to a gradual shift towards the expansion of networks and deepening of institutional ties within,across and beyond the region. At the International Convention of Asian Scholars (ICAS) held in Macau, China between 24–27 June
2013, CSEAS sponsored a roundtable to discuss the future of Southeast Asian Studies and brought together leading Southeast
Asianists based in Thailand, Singapore, Japan, South Korea and Europe in the interest of promoting multilateral dialogue about
the direction, challenges and future of Southeast Asian area studies. This feature issue pools together the discussions which wereshared between concerned scholars engaged in Southeast Asian Studies.

5Special Feature: Southeast Asian Studies: Crisis or Opportunity?

Southeast Asian Studies:
Toward an Open Regional Networking
Caroline Sy Hau
Professor CSEAS

More than fifteen years ago, the distinguished scholar Ruth
McVey, in her Frank Golay Memorial Lecture at Cornell
University, noted that Southeast Asian studies in the UnitedStates of America were being marginalized at precisely the time
when Southeast Asia was becoming increasingly globalized,
and increasingly “real,” important, and relevant to Americans(McVey and Reynolds 1998, 37-38). In a time of budget cuts andpressure to demonstrate area studies’ relevance to other academic fields and to the state and the general public, McVey
called for rethinking Southeast Asian studies. To quote McVey,“It is not that Southeast Asia is the object of our study, butthat Southeast Asians are its subject” (ibid., 53). McVey wascritical of the setup of Southeast Asian studies programs inAmerica, in which programs competed for funds and prestige, and advocated greater cooperation instead, calling on
Southeast Asianists to think “in terms of networks rather than ofinstitutions, and these networks should in principle be global
and not just regional or national” (ibid., 54).
Nowadays, McVey’s vision of networking among Southeast
Asian studies institutions has been borne out, and, in fact, nolonger limited to developed countries. Indeed, an importantdevelopment of the past decades, particularly from the 1990s
onwards, has been what some area studies scholars have called
the “decentering” of Southeast Asian studies from their established bases in a few preeminent institutions in Western Europe
and, in particular, the USA, Australia, and Japan toward multiple
hubs spread out, and connected network-style, both globallyand regionally. New centers—with Southeast Asian studies
often included under Asia-Pacific or Asian studies—have been
set up not only in Mainland China, South Korea, Taiwan andHong Kong, but in Southeast Asia itself, starting in the 1970s
and increasing in the 1990s in countries such as Singapore,Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
We are now seeing the fruits of this multi-sited growth, which
has not only produced high-quality scholarship undertaken by
Southeast Asian scholars based in the region, but also Southeast Asian scholars who are specializing on other Southeast
Asian countries beyond their own home countries or diasporiccommunities.
Although Southeast Asian specialists have long been awareof the constructedness of “Southeast Asia” as a geopolitical,
economic and multicultural system, as field of study and unitof analysis for asking questions and proposing methodologies,
and as an institutional space, there is no doubt that the reality

6of economic integration and increasing densities of flows andmovements, exchanges and interactions of people, goods,
ideas, and institutions within this so-called region have donemuch to strengthen regional awareness and identification, if
not necessarily consciousness nor identity, among its people.
Geographical proximity, however, is no guarantee that peopleof Southeast Asia know more, let alone ought to learn more,about each other than about, say, Britain or the US or Australia.
And yet, Southeast Asian studies are becoming more globalized in the sense that there are greater possibilities not justfor people but for knowledge itself to “travel” (as Carlo Bonuraand Laurie Sears have pointed out [2007]). Moreover, historicaland contemporary international migration has created substantial communities in America and Europe with biographical,
symbolic, cultural, and material ties to Asia and Southeast Asia,
resulting for example in a close but also fraught relationshipbetween area studies and Asian-American studies in individual,institutional and conceptual terms. The recent book edited by
Goh Beng-Lan, Decentring and Diversifying Southeast AsianStudies: Perspectives from the Region, called for nurturing formsof “thinking from and about Southeast Asia” (2011, 13) that candevelop “theoretical perspectives which can consider the simultaneity and interaction of the global and local, the insideand outside, the old and new, the centre and the periphery­,the stable and the unstable, and so on” (Ibid., 9).
This idea of Southeast Asian studies that can be undertaken
by both Southeast Asians themselves as well as committed
scholars from other regions in expanding and deepening networks of peoples and institutions that link up and undertake
activities at the local, national, regional and global levels has
become a reality. With the establishment of an ASEAN community in 2015, and the critical role of ASEAN as hub of­region-making in East Asia and Asia-Pacific, such institutional
and individual networking initiatives and efforts are likely to­increase rather than decrease. There is a need for us to consider
more closely the region-based impetus for promoting studies ofSoutheast Asia and the perspectives arising from the region itself.
As we get better connected with each other, we find ourselves learning from each other, and confronting similar challenges under different circumstances. Funding is always aproblem. Strengthening collaboration and exchange is another.
Identifying local, national, regional and global agenda forSoutheast Asian scholarship, located as it is now in multiple
sites across a far wider geographical swath, is still another.

Special Feature

From the start, we accept the fact that although we may
speak of common challenges and problems, we also speakfrom multiple locations, from specific histories, from heterogeneous cultures and societies, from different languages, andnot always convergent priorities and agenda. For somescholars, particularly in America, the marginalization ofSoutheast Asian studies is a reality, while for others working,for example, in Japan and Korea and Southeast Asia itself, newopportunities for obtaining funding and institution-building—including funding directly connected to region-building—havearisen in connection with state priorities and private-sectorinvestment in the region. While some scholars worry about
Southeast Asian studies’ contribution to universal knowledge,others seek better ways of engaging nationalist or what somecall “nativist” scholarship. For some institutions, Asia-Pacific or
Asian studies appears more institutionally viable as a geographical framework than Southeast Asian studies, while many
Southeast Asian scholars are rooted in national or sub-regional
studies and some lament the fact that they know more about
the debates and concerns of “Western” scholarship than about
the debates and concerns of their own neighbors. While someof us call for multidisciplinary and comparative approaches tothe study of Southeast Asia, others strive to cross not only thedisciplinary boundaries that separate the social sciences fromthe humanities, but also the disciplinary boundaries that separate the natural sciences from the human sciences. While someof us think of Southeast Asian studies in terms of its potential
for promoting oppositional thinking and practice, others see
the necessity of working with the state, for all its constraints
and limitations.
How do we step-up our institutional and personal networking efforts to make Southeast Asian studies viable? How do wenurture cross-disciplinary and comparative perspectives in ourrespective “areas” of study in the process of learning from eachother and learning from the rest of the world? How do werethink­national studies to make the nation more open andinclusive­? What kind of cooperative, collaborative activities canwe undertake at both individual and institutional levels? This
special newsletter feature issue brings together a group of scholars who are representatives of their respective institutions toshare their experiences and ideas about the state of SoutheastAsian studies in their countries, the problems and challenges
that area studies scholars as well as programs or institutions areconfronting either by themselves or in common with other­institutions, and the initiatives and prospects for further collaboration and cooperation among area studies specialists and­institutions at the local, national, regional and global levels.

No.68 Autumn 2013

McVey, Ruth and Craig Reynolds. 1998. Southeast Asian Studies:Reorientations. Ithaca: Southeast Asia Program, Cornell
University.

References
Bonura, Carlo and Laurie J. Sears, eds. 2007. Knowledges thatTravel in Southeast Asian Studies. In Knowing Southeast
Asian Subjects. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Goh, Beng-Lan. 2011. Decentering and Diversifying Southeast
Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region. Singapore:
Institute­of Southeast Asian Studies.
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