Southeast Asianist in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
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Asia Pacific Perspectives, 2021
The Covid-19 pandemic has been a game-changer for academic research because it has affected all of its aspects, starting from the "where," which influences the "what" and the "how." Given these changes, I would like to suggest a few possibilities for updating the "where," the "what," and the "how" of research on the Asia Pacific region. I will illustrate these possibilities with some of my own strategies developed or reinforced during the pandemic, as a historian of the art and culture of early modern Japan. Three dimensions of the changes guide my suggestions: the digital, the local and the mundane.
SEAA Highlights from Cyberspace to Asia
Anthropology News, 2017
The Society for East Asian Anthropology (SEAA) promotes discussion and shares information on diverse topics related to the anthropology of East Asia broadly conceived. We are committed to developing international channels of communication among anthropologists throughout the world who share an interest in East Asia both as a topic of academic inquiry and as a site of academic activity. Here, we highlight our activities over the past year and invite you to join our lively community online (through our website and listserv) and offline. SEAA column series Our monthly column for the Anthropology News website features curated series, bringing together scholars in the SEAA around a central theme. Our current series on "Digital Anthropologies in East Asia" examines how digital technologies impact the everyday lives of ordinary people and transform social relationships, labor structures, and youth culture. Previous themes include "Living through Waste and Waste as Lively," which provided a critical understanding of China's "trash crisis" and contributed to anthropological studies of the environment. The "In and Out of Japan" series examined mobility against the backdrop of Japan's population decline. We welcome your proposals for individual articles and thematic series to feature in future columns. SEAA regional conferences
Asia Redux: Conceptualizing a Region for Our Times
The Journal of Asian Studies, 2010
How has Asia appeared as a region and been conceived as such in the last hundred years? While there is a long-standing and still burgeoning historiography of Asian connections through the study of the precolonial and early modern maritime trade, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are generally not seen as a time of growing Asian connections. The recent rise of interest in Asian connections in the current time is thus unable to grasp the continuities and discontinuities that form the present. Even more, it is unable to evaluate the risks and possibilities of the present moment.
This study explores the profound maritime dimension in Southeast Asia's past and present. It highlights the region's "sea people", giving special attention to their complex and dynamic interactions with terrestrial communities. Their cultures and aquatic lifestyles, it is argued, are relevant to understanding the wider context of various historical and contemporary issues in this region. Since the emergence of large-scale harbour polities in Sumatra, Borneo and other parts of insular Southeast Asia, nomadic maritime communities have intermittently appropriated the roles of protégés, outlaws and victims in a multilayered and multifaceted interplay of seaborne navigation, commerce and warfare. On the one hand, many of the interethnic power relations that helped shape the maritime history of Southeast Asia have remained intact to date and can help us understand a number of present-day phenomena. On the other, 19th and 20th-century developments have largely confined these communities to the margins of society, while their erstwhile "maritory" has become the battleground of competing "globalised" crime syndicates, maritime terrorists and post-independent nation states with modern navies. The seascapes of Southeast Asia are as dynamic as they are diverse.