INTRODUCTION

This chapter concerns broad issues of understanding and interpreting patterns and trends in the region. To the layperson, this may appear to be a task beyond the scope of anthropology, which is usually perceived as being the study of the local and the traditional. But in a world that is becoming increasingly integrated, anthropologists are realizing that it is no longer possible to confine themselves to their traditional field without also bearing in mind the general and the global.

Anthropology also has an important role to play in its guise as a discipline that is sceptical of what Marcus (1998, p. 16) has recently called “naturalized categories” — those categories that we take so much for granted in our everyday lives that they become “natural” to us. These are frequently legitimized by experts in various academic and non-academic fields concerned with the world today, and which try to identify future trends. There is little doubt that the dominant “naturalised categories” in the region have been shaped by the discipline of economics, which has achieved a decisive influence on the interpretation of trends, and the formulation of policy. Some sections of this chapter suggest ways of approaching this important task of “de-naturalization”.

This endeavour has been made a lot easier by the collapse of the Southeast Asian economies in 1997–98, because this “meltdown”, as it is often described, has thrown the confident predictions of the economists, political scientists, and management gurus who saw only the rise and rise of the Asian “tigers” into spectacular disarray. There were many writers whose works were prominently displayed in bookshops throughout the region, and whose every word was earnestly absorbed by audiences on lecture tours which spanned the globe. It will suffice to mention two here by way of illustration: Ohmae (1995) and Naisbitt (1995).