Developments in the Scholarship of Southeast Asia

Summary

Introduction

It is indeed a great honour to be asked to help celebrate ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute's 50th Anniversary by presenting the first of three talks to commemorate this event. Before I begin, I would like to take this opportunity to thank Dean Robbie Goh for his generosity in allowing me to be a part of the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the NUS, and to Professor Itty Abraham and the Department of Southeast Asian Studies for welcoming me into their ohana (the “extended family” in Hawai'ian).

In this presentation I will examine some of the developments in the scholarship on Southeast Asia, since I have been part of this enterprise for just a few years longer than the existence of this Institute. I will open with an overview of the evolution of the area studies programmes on Southeast Asia, then proceed to discuss some of the main issues raised by scholars writing about the state of Southeast Asian Studies in the first decade of the twenty-first century, and finally close with a few of my own personal observations on the state of the field.

Evolution of Southeast Asian Studies

Let me begin by looking first at the United States, where the Southeast Asia area studies programme was first developed as an approach. One of the lasting memories that I have of my supervisor at Cornell University, O.W. Wolters (an avid gardener) is his looking over his half-glasses (that he was wont to do to intimidate his graduate students) and warning me: “Do not pick flowers from other people's gardens.” Having recently come from the Netherlands, where I had spent a year as a Fulbright student, I thought he was referring to the common practice in Holland called een avond wandelingetje, a small evening stroll, where one would pick flowers from public land (but not, I assume, from private property). But this is not what Wolters had in mind; he was instead stressing the importance of doing more original research to add to the corpus of knowledge on Southeast Asia.