| Abstract: |
In an article commissioned by the Southeast Asia Council, CRAIG REYNOLDS takes up F. R. Ankersmith's exhortation that the "time has come that we should think about the past, rather than investigate it." His interest therefore is to assess approaches, paradigms, and models rather than merely to offer a conventional historiographical survey of the literature on early Southeast Asia. His line of inquiry enables him to locate a gap between European-language historiography produced particularly by Western scholars and the indigenous historiographies generated particularly in older versions. Much of his discussion is concerned with establishing the extent to which the Western discourse is constructed around a search for "origins," "agency," and "difference." These emphases he relates to a preoccupation with validating Southeast Asia as a region and field of study, an enterprise that he identifies as a Western postcolonial project. The "motivation to authenticate Southeast Asia as a region and field of study," he avers, "is connected to modern contemporary anxieties about authenticity." In other words, he argues that historians of early Southeast Asia operate within research parameters defined by the same themes and polemics that preoccupy historians of more modern periods. Thus, his essay aims at questioning the project of authenticating Southeast Asia.
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