Southeast Asianist in the Digital Age (original) (raw)
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.
Review of Empire of Seas: Thinking About Asia by Shiraishi Takashi
Philippine Journal of Public Policy, 2023
In 1983, Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities introduced Southeast Asia to a general Western readership, showing how national consciousness formed differently in the said region in the nineteenth century. The most cited English-language text in the social sciences and the humanities, Anderson’s book has inspired many of his contemporaries, as well as a later generation of scholars, to deconstruct Southeast Asia and rethink the region away from conventional conceptualizations and traditions. Shiraishi Takashi’s Empire of Seas: Thinking About Asia (2021) is one of the works that exemplified Anderson’s cult following in area studies. According Shiraishi, it was a product of his sojourn at Cornell University from 1987 to 1996, where he witnessed the disappearance of the Soviet Union and Eastern European area studies program following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc. Those events made him contemplate the same for Southeast Asia (158). The 1990s also saw Southeast Asia’s rise not only in the global economy but also as a strategic partner for the West in forging new security alliances. Southeast Asia’s resilience in the Asian financial crisis from 1997 to 1999 was an excellent example of how it constantly dealt with burgeoning global crises. For instance, economic and financial recovery in the Philippines, Malaysia, and Indonesia—though imperfect—proved exemplary. In other words, the timing of the book’s publication came at a critical time.
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.
Culture and international imagination in Southeast Asia
Political Geography, 2007
Using methods developed within cognitive anthropology, we examine the relationship between particular national discourses, cultural concepts and subjective ideas about the international system of nation-states referred to colloquially as countries in English, negara in Indonesian and prathet in Thai. The analysis is based on data collected among university students in Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand. Broadly speaking, Indonesian, Singaporean and Thai university students share a similar domain of ''countries'' and similar understanding of what a country is, but they differ in important respects in the descriptive language and cultural schemata they deploy in thinking about this domain. The study has implications for debates on the status of culture in social theory and geography and for the future of regional integration in Southeast Asia.
2019. Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Actors, Sites [FM, TOC, Introduction]
Imagining Asia(s): Networks, Actors, Sites, 2019
As a continent lying to the east of Europe, Asia has been malleable to different spatial and temporal imaginations and politics. Recent scholarship has highlighted how the seemingly self-contained regional configurations of West and Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, and East Asia carved by the Area Studies paradigm reflect changing (geo)political and economic interests than historical or cultural roots. This volume advances the question as to what Asia is, and as to whether there existed one or many Asia(s). It seeks to explore Asian societies as interconnected formations through trajectories/networks of circulation of people, ideas, and objects in the longue durée. Moving beyond the divides of Area Studies scholarship and the arbitrary borders set by late colonial empires and the rise of post-colonial nation-states, this volume maps critically the configuration of contact zones in which mobile bodies, minds, and cultures interact to foster new images, identities, and imaginations of Asia. https://bookshop.iseas.edu.sg/publication/2406#contents