Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- 1 Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections
- 2 Post-imperial Knowledge and Pre-Social Science in Southeast Asia
- 3 From the Education of a Historian to the Study of Minangkabau Local History
- 4 Scholarship, Society, and Politics in Three Worlds: Reflections of a Filipino Sojourner, 1965–95
- 5 From Contemplating Wordsworth's Daffodils to Listening to the Voices of the “Nation”
- 6 Crafting Anthropology in Many Sites of Fieldwork
- 7 A Non-Linear Intellectual Trajectory: My Diverse Engagements of the “Self ” and “Others” in Knowledge Production
- 8 Negotiating Boundaries and Alterity: The Making of a Humanities Scholar in Indonesia, a Personal Reflection
- 9 Between State and Revolution: Autobiographical Notes on Radical Scholarship during the Marcos Dictatorship
- 10 (Un)Learning Human Sciences: The Journey of a Malaysian from the “Look East” Generation
- 11 Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order: Notes and Reflections from My Student Years
- 12 Riding the Postmodern Chaos: A Reflection on Academic Subjectivity in Indonesia
- Index
1 - Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 October 2015
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- List of Contributors
- 1 Disciplines and Area Studies in the Global Age: Southeast Asian Reflections
- 2 Post-imperial Knowledge and Pre-Social Science in Southeast Asia
- 3 From the Education of a Historian to the Study of Minangkabau Local History
- 4 Scholarship, Society, and Politics in Three Worlds: Reflections of a Filipino Sojourner, 1965–95
- 5 From Contemplating Wordsworth's Daffodils to Listening to the Voices of the “Nation”
- 6 Crafting Anthropology in Many Sites of Fieldwork
- 7 A Non-Linear Intellectual Trajectory: My Diverse Engagements of the “Self ” and “Others” in Knowledge Production
- 8 Negotiating Boundaries and Alterity: The Making of a Humanities Scholar in Indonesia, a Personal Reflection
- 9 Between State and Revolution: Autobiographical Notes on Radical Scholarship during the Marcos Dictatorship
- 10 (Un)Learning Human Sciences: The Journey of a Malaysian from the “Look East” Generation
- 11 Architecture, Indonesia and Making Sense of the New Order: Notes and Reflections from My Student Years
- 12 Riding the Postmodern Chaos: A Reflection on Academic Subjectivity in Indonesia
- Index
Summary
In recent years the conceptual underpinnings and continued validity of area studies in a globalizing world have been severely questioned. Emanating from a critique of Orientalism, but also reflecting changing institutional politics in the American academe following the end of the Cold War, the attack on area studies has spread across the globe. This has resulted in growing pronouncements on the failure of area studies in producing a synthesis of knowledge that transcends disciplinary divides and power hierarchies between the Western and non-Western world. The spread of this critique has led to a common view that area studies is in a state of “crisis”.
Ironically, however, this critique of area studies comes at a time when regional perspectives are gaining ground in defining regions based on local priorities. The critical agendas that propelled the attack on area studies in Euro-America appear to undermine such promising effort. As the crisis of area studies galvanized scholars to deliberate over its fate, some scholars in Asian Studies have sought to find “afterlives” for area studies by pointing to regionally located scholarships as alternative sites from which Euro- American-centric visions could be denaturalized. In the words of Miyoshi and Harootunian:
The afterlife thus refers to the moment that has decentered the truths, practices, and even insitutions that belonged to a time that could still believe in the identity of some conception of humanity and universality with a Eurocentric endowment and to the acknowledgement that its “provinciality” must now be suceeded by what Said called “a contrapuntal orientation in history”. (Miyoshi and Harootunian 2002, p. 14)
Yet the prospect of recentring knowledge production back to regions themselves raises its own set of questions. For one thing, regional scholarships have always existed alongside Euro-American social sciences. In fact, strident regional scholarships were contesting the dominance of colonial scholarships during the decolonization era in endeavours to map out national histories. These local voices were often dismissed as “nationalist” if not “nativist” and have remained under-examined and unnoticed, even by scholars located within the regions themselves. The unspoken politics of theory at the time, supposedly speaking on behalf of some universal and objective standard, determined which scholarship could be regarded as theory, and which relegated to more subjective and parochial forms of knowledge.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Decentring and Diversifying Southeast Asian StudiesPerspectives from the Region, pp. 1 - 59Publisher: ISEAS–Yusof Ishak InstitutePrint publication year: 2011