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Going Against Whose Grain? Archaeological Theory and Southeast Asia's Premodern States

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 October 2019

Miriam T. Stark
Miriam T. Stark*
Affiliation:
Department of AnthropologyUniversity of Hawai'i at MānoaSaunders Hall 346 2424 Maile Way Honolulu, HI 96822USA Email: miriams@hawaii.edu
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Extract

Southeast Asia is a paradox to Western scholars. Few are familiar with its history, yet Southeast Asia has been a veritable intellectual resource extraction zone for twentieth- and twenty-first-century social thought: imagined communities, galactic polities, agricultural involution and the moral economy of peasants all emanate from work done in Southeast Asia. The region's archaeological record is equally paradoxical: late Pleistocene ‘Hobbit’ hominins disrupt models of human origins, the world's largest Buddhist monument of Borobudur now sits in a wholly Muslim land mass in central Java, and the world's largest premodern city of Angkor is located in Cambodia, a country that remains resolutely rural. So we should not be surprised that Scott's Against the Grain: A deep history of the earliest states draws from a career in Southeast Asian studies to study human history (the entire Anthropocene). This essay concentrates on how Scott believes early Mesopotamian states became legible.

Type
Review Symposium
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 29 , Issue 4 , November 2019 , pp. 709 - 711
Copyright
Copyright © McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 2019 

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