| Abstract: |
The paper examines the relationships between anthropolgy, history and region. It has long been assumed that the discipline of anthropology has made a significant contribution to the definition and conceptualization of Southeast Asia as a region in its own right. The roots of Southeast Asian identity are said to be located firmly in shared pre-colonial cultural and social elements, and it is argued that some of these continue to have salience in modern Southeast Asia. Yet on closer examination it is clear that anthropologists have played very little part in the project to establish and authenticate Southeast Asia as a region and thereby lend legitimacy to Southeast Asian Studies as a separate field of scholarly endeavor. Instead it has been mainly historians and prehistorians, in their preoccupation with origins and the discovery of a "traditional" and pristine Southeast Asia uncontaminated by colonial and indeed Indian and Chinese influences, who have played a vital role in identifying the region. Anthropologists on the other hand, with their concerns to discover and present cultural otherness and their significant involvement in cross-border margins and peripheries, have generally been preoccupied with "the local," the particular, the distinctive community. With their interest in cultural diversity, they have generally been reluctant to construct broader cultural and social categories, and even the more ardent comparativists rarely venture beyond a defined sub-region or a set of socially, culturally and geographically anthropological approaches and paradigms, and it is difficult to identify a dominat analytical "style" in the study of the region. What is more, those anthropologists who have written more general texts on Southeast Asia have invariably maintained the distinction between the mainland and the sland worlds. The reluctance to construct a Southeast Asian culture and the focus on specific "alterities" have also increased in recent years, mainly in response to post-modern and post-colonial criticisms of the imperialist roots of anthropolgy and some of its modernist and universal assumptions.
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