| Abstract: |
In this study, problems of the prehistoric, protohistoric, and modern periods of mainland Southeast Asia are discussed, with special reference to the economic, cultural, and social diversity of the modern region, and with the intention of placing this diversity in a developmental perspective. This perspective, in bringing together prehistoric, protohistoric, and modern periods, necessitates a critical approach to the different kinds of data of the disciplines of pre- historic archaeology, historiography, and ethnology, to the ways these data are analyzed, and to the assumptions on which their analyses and interpretations are based. Migration of groups already differentiated culturally, and diffusion of new technologies, ideologies, and other traits have been overemphasized in Southeast Asian studies, at the expense of consideration of internal cultural dynamics, in terms of which the significance of external influences might be assessed. Recent studies of the prehistoric period provide justification for shifting emphasis from external influences to internal growth, as providing the most important conditions of change and socio-cultural development. More generally, it is argued that the definition of culturally distinct groups, whether based on archaeological, documentary, or ethnographic data, does not provide appropriate units for the synthesis of develop- mental change, since the genesis and maintenance of cultural difference itself pose legitimate developmental questions. Two related aspects of the economic development of mainland Southeast Asia are considered. These are the overall trend towards the modern dominance of wet rice cultivation, and the accompanying persistence of a diversity of other crops and subsistence regimes; both aspects are related to more general questions of social and political growth, and of the nature of the specifically Southeast Asian course of cultural development, from pre- historic times to the present. An interpretation of mainland Southeast Asian prehistoric data is offered, in which interaction and exchange, rather than territorial or social isolation, provide the conditions for the rise and maintenance of diversity. From the particularistic perspective of regional historiography, attention is shifted to develop- mental trends, and from the generalizing perspective of comparative world prehistory, to the conditions of socio-cultural development specific to Southeast Asia.
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