Introduction: models and trends in the study of early states

The study of the pre-colonial history of Southeast Asia, once the undisputed preserve of Sanskritists and Indian cultural historians, has since the Second World War been taken up by a broader range of scholars, and has, as a consequence, been influenced by the series of debates and intellectual fashions which have enlivened the disciplines of sociology and anthropology. Heine-Geldern's (1942) study of the religious basis of state and kingship in Southeast Asia was succeeded in the 1950's by the influence of the Weberian notion of the patrimonial state. The late fifties and sixties saw an accumulation of economically-oriented studies inspired in turn by Polanyist substantivism, Wittfogel's Hydraulic Society, and Marxian Asiatic Mode of Production. With the seventies came a partial retreat into structuralist and symbolic studies of myth, ritual and hierarchy. Then, as the momentum of structuralism began to dissipate, the influence of the schools political and the more Marxian critical anthropology asserted itself, reviving some of the debates of the sixties. By no means all scholars interested in early Southeast Asia have participated in recent debates. Many, including the majority of those dealing with primary data, have unfortunately held aloof from them.

Groupings which have emerged amongst the participants in recent debates and their followers have their roots in cleavages that began to appear during the 1960's. These debates, however, address only a portion of the assumptions underlying recent work. As a result, apparently opposing models tend to overlap in certain key areas. The influences of Weber and Heine-Geldern have endured, as have some entrenched images of Further India inherited from Coedes and his predecessors. Few of these ideas have been questioned and almost none finally discarded by general agreement. There has been overall a marked preference shown by those of all shades of opinion for static rather than dynamic models. As a result there has been a general tendency to perceive change in the early states of the region as exogenous both in cause and in agent, and a related inclination to focus upon - and perhaps overstress - structural continuities in the societies studied. Endogenous change, particularly in areas of culture and social structure, has often been neither expected nor perceived.