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Tom Pepinsky looks at how an artificial concept defined a region.
The first principle of Southeast Asian studies is the very artificiality of the concept of Southeast Asia. I have called this the “fundamental anxiety” of Southeast Asian studies — that there is no coherent argument why Southeast Asia properly includes Burma but not Bangladesh or Sri Lanka, or why it includes Indonesia but not Papua New Guinea, why Vietnam ought to fall within Southeast Asia rather than East Asia.
And yet Southeast Asia does exist. It is now a social fact. For example, Google knows exactly what Southeast Asia is and what it is is not.
Southeast Asian studies programs cover the same set of countries in the US, in Southeast Asia itself, in Japan, and elsewhere. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations will someday include Timor-Leste, and will never include Sri Lanka, Taiwan, or the Solomon Islands.
Southeast Asianists have for decades lamented the intellectual strictures that Southeast Asian-ist thinking can place on their scholarly inquiry, and there is a rich genre of border-crossing Southeast Asian studies–on Zomia, most famously, but there are many others–that conceptualises some subset of the peoples of the region as part of some competing configuration of peoples or states. Yet such inquiry has failed to dismantle the concept of Southeast Asia entirely, and my prediction is that it never will. Just look at how the Association for Asian Studies imagines Asia.
In my view, the durability of Southeast Asia as a social fact is easy to explain. The much more interesting question is, how did we get here? How did Southeast Asia become a social fact, and how did it become this particular social fact? Those 11 states, no more and no less?
The customary answer is that the concept of Southeast Asia is an external projection of Western images of the East onto the people living there. In some basic sense this is certainly true, but it leaves the details underspecified: why did the West happen to think that Vietnam is part of Southeast Asia, but not Bangladesh? Culturalist and geographic answers to such questions do not withstand close scrutiny; the Wallace line excludes the Philippines and half of Indonesia, for example, and Theravada Buddhist cultural influences are minor in much of Indonesia, the Philippines, and Vietnam. The answer upon which most scholars seem to settle is due to Ruth McVey, who looked to the idea of Southeast Asia as a lineage of the Second World War. This explains both timing and content of Southeast Asia, through:
the coincidence between Southeast Asia’s birth as a concept and the triumph of American world power. World War II was important not for the bureaucratic detail of the South East Asia Command but for the fact that the Japanese occupied the region, creating an abrupt break with the era of European domination and making it an object of American attention.
McVey’s insightful analysis forms the core of my own understanding of why Southeast Asia is what it is. But the argument is incomplete because the South East Asia Command does not coincide with the social fact of Southeast Asia. Here are maps of Southeast Asia in the eyes of the Allied military command structure in 1942 and 1944.
Never were the Philippines and most of Indonesia part of the South East Asia Command. The South East Asia Command, in fact, operated out of Sri Lanka. And never was it the case that Japanese occupation demarcates the boundaries of contemporary Southeast Asia, even to a first approximation.
I am left without a good explanation for how Southeast Asia came to be this particular social fact. I wonder if readers can point me to other answers, no matter how grandiose or mundane they may be. It could be, for example, that Southeast Asia emerged as a social fact in response to the crystallisation of other social facts, of South Asia, of China as including both the mainland and Taiwan, of Australia as a Western country, and of Melanesia and Micronesia as separate regions.
Such an argument would raise other questions, but those questions too could help reveal why Southeast Asia is what it is.
Tom Pepinsky is Associate Professor of Government at Cornell University and blogs here — where this article originally appeared.
Not quite true that most of Indonesia was never part of the South East Asia Command. Immediately after Japan’s surrender, MacArthur’s South West Pacific Area was dissolved and its Indonesian portions were transferred to SEAC. At the same time, most of mainland Southeast Asia was removed from the China Theatre and also given to SEAC. Only the northern part of Indochina remained in the China Theatre. SEAC in September 1945 was not a perfect approximation of today’s Southeast Asia, but it was pretty close. Only the Philippines and northern Indochina were not included.
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The concept has a certain practical value, a pragmatic usefulness, for us here in Australia. But we here had no significant part really in originating and establishing the concept, the idea — though we took it up enthusiastically in the period after World War 2.
It was at that time, when (more than many once-imperial Europeans, and as much as western-looking, Pacific-focused people in the United States) we here had to start taking those countries of our “near” and “not so near north and northwest” seriously — and we had to try to see them if not “as a coherent whole” then as a loose congeries, and no longer as appendages of separate European-oriented empires — that the term took root here.
Those who gave currency and credibility to the term were part of an academic, political and policy-focused vanguard who looked not only to the near northwest (to Indonesia and beyond) but also to the faraway northeast: to the USA, to places like Cornell University, where the idea was gathering scholarly ballast and so established some grip with people in and around Washington DC.
But the idea, and the inclination to see the area as some sort of a “loose cultural assemblage” or “congeries”, goes back much earlier.
Not only the British (such as Hugh Clifford) but also the German geographers and culture-historians of the late nineteenth century came to an awareness of, and struggled to find or design a term for, “those countries further out there in Asia, beyond India that were not yet China” (but of which many had historical and cultural connections with both those great Asian civilizations).
People at that time seized upon the idea of “Further India” or “India-China”. “Indo-China” as a term soon became something else, under French proprietory “branding”. An idea of what we now call “mainland Southeast Asia” was grounded in and emerged from what Coedes termed “Les Etats Hindouises” etc. etc.
When geostrategic and political developments compelled outside attention onto the “island world” beyond “Further Asia”, the idea of “island” or “insular” Southeast Asia was devised, and appended to the original core “mainland” notion.
We have lived with it ever since. We have been bequeathed by that historical process and those geostrategic concerns with the term for and also the idea of “Southeast Asia”, together with the notion that, since we lump it all together under that term, it must all somehow constitute “a region”. Once again, “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”.
Whereas it is more residue, what you are left with when you take other, more identifiable, solid and “primary” things away. Hence the vagueness and also variability, or malleability, of the term and what it is employed to denote.
How to grasp, come to terms with, convey and project to students an understanding of what, if anything, it is that makes “mainland” and “insular” Southeast Asia two conjoined or complementary parts of the one same cultural or historical entity has long been a problem for people teaching “Southeast Asian regional ethnography”.
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See papers by Russell Fifield entitled “Southeast Asian Studies: Origins, Development, Future” in the Journal of Southeast Asian Studies (1976, vol 7 no.2), and “Southeast Asia as a Regional Concept” in Southeast Asian Journal of Social Science (1983, vol. 11 no. 2).
Lots of references in there to follow up on. Howard Malcolm’s “Travels in South-Eastern Asia” (1839) – which only included what is now mainland Southeast Asia, Asam and Manipur for example.
Might be worth consideration that it was not only Europeans and Americans referring to it as a region, too.
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Prof. Pepinsky raises an interesting historical question that has some implications for the future.
While it seems likely that the area included in the SEAC in WWII provided a first approximation of the region, I suspect it was the Cold War fear of Communism after the war that more precisely defined it. The victory of Mao’s forces in China in 1949 certainly was a key factor.
In 1954 US President Eisenhower spoke of the “domino theory” that he felt put the countries of Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Malaya, Indonesia and the Philippines at risk. Each of these countries had either local Communist insurgencies or significant Communist political parties (Indonesia). That same year the term Southeast Asia was used for an anti-communist security pact — the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty. This treaty set up the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) based in Bangkok. It was, in some ways, intended to be similar to NATO, which was established in Europe due to fears of Soviet Communism. Although most of the SEATO members were not actually located in Southeast Asia (the USA, Pakistan, France, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia), their concerns focused on Eisenhower’s supposed “dominoes.”
In 1967 the Southeast Asia label was used for an organization of five of the non-Communist countries in the region — ASEAN. Again one motivation was fear of the extention of Chinese Communist influence and the need for regional cooperation to withstand it. As Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik put it, Southeast Asia needed to become “a region which can stand on its own feet, strong enough to defend itself against any negative influence from outside the region.” Although Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Burma were not initial members of ASEAN, the organization was partly focused on the struggles in those countries.
The region, long influenced by Chinese trade, culture and population movements, became defined, at least in part, by these efforts to limit the influence of what was seen as aggressive Chinese Communism. Although that fear was reduced by changes in China after Mao’s death, the need for regional cooperation against rising Chinese economic, as well as political influence, led to ASEAN’s expansion to include Burma and the Communist nations of Indo-China in the 1990s.
More recently, the creation of the ASEAN Economic Community was motivated, at least in part, by the perception that the countries of the region had to cooperate on trade and economics to compete the with fast-growing Chinese economy.
So, while it is hard to find strong cultural, economic, ethnic, religious or historical commonalities that make sense of Southeast Asia as a region, fear of undue Chinese influence certainly appears to be a unifying and defining factor.
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The elephant in the room is race. Eyes similar to Chinese and Japanese, but skin distinctly browner. The paler-skinned people probably evolved from the browner, out of need for vitamin D as they moved north.
‘South East Asia’ is a good name because it contains no invitation to imperialists, unlike that disastrous descendant of 19th-century European ignorance ‘South China Sea’.
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For pre-modern history even the concept of mainland Southeast Asia is too broad & cutting mainland Southeast Asia into three parallel West, Central & East areas as Lieberman does in Strange Parallels I doesn’t really work either.
One coherent pre-modern geographical unit of study would run from Sri Lanka (source point for Theravadin lineages) through the Bay of Bengal (Portuguese zone of influence for a time), Burma, the Shan states & into Yunnan with its Tai states.
The real problem is the insularity of thinking caused by the Southeast Asia idea, scholars use the limited pool of concepts originated in so-called “Southeast Asian Studies” such as the so-called “Mandala (Southeast Asian political model)” instead of using concepts of broader applicability such as the notion of “chieftainship” in political anthropology or anthropology, thus linking into a rich comparative literature stretching around the world (see review of the literature by R. Brian Ferguson “A Paradigm for the Study of War and Society (1999)” available for download at his Rutger’s webpage. 🙂
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As a brown-skinned layman inhabitant, could I posit that we’re all those people squeezed between the slant-eyed yellows to the north and the Aryan-Dravidian lot to the west, and not of the blacks and whites of the south?
On the other hand there are also long cultural and historical links from pre-western days, when the old native empires criss-crossed most of insular and mainland SE Asia.
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Enough already! Why have we spilt more ink and energy debating this issue than any other group of regional scholars around the world? The environmental coherence of Southeast Asia is far more obvious than that of Africa or Latin America; even China and India are more profoundly divided between wheat-growing dry north and rice-growing wet south. The “fundamental anxiety” of Southeast Asian studies lies not in the region’s lack of coherence but in the Southeast Asianists. We are too distracted by the national politics and the national language we study to know much about the rest of the region until we have to teach it. But enough has surely been written to allay this anxiety. Go read it.
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What ? And forego the academic angst ? Impossible. Why that is even less likely than UMNO being truthful.
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You should add Europe to the list! Antiquity was based on the mediterranean, christianity goes beyond Europe (and within we have three different versions), modernization was a feature of the north-west etc. One hardly ever finds an overlap between geography, culture, society etc. The idea of such an overlap only evolved with nationalism, and a nation is not a region.
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As for the statement, “we are too distracted by the national politics and the national language we study to know much about the rest of the region until we have to teach it,” it is often only by going outside of the region completely that you can truly understand what is going on inside it.
Take studying Pali literature from Sri Lanka, which few interest themselves in perhaps because Sri Lanka is located outside of SEAsia, is absolutely essential for understanding Burmese intellectual history and the development of Burmese literature from Nissaya parallel translations.
Ming Annals (translated by Geoffrey Wade) covering events in the Tai states of Yunnan during the post-Pagan Ava period of Burma provide a much-needed benchmark to measure the veracity of the Burmese chronicle.
How could we find out if Southeast Asia is really a coherent idea?
How about going beyond the Braudelian practice of collating scattered references across the geographical expanse of the Mediterranean or SEAsia over hundreds of years.
Instead, follow the lead of analytical sociology and posit a network of connections of people, businesses and organizations across Southeast Asia.
Then determine in a scientific (& falsifiable) way how coherent and interrelated this network is, and thus a region called “Southeast Asia” actually is compared to other possible regional groupings. Then use this finding to answer the question of whether the region warrants study as an entity in itself, that is outside of the imagined diplomatic community of SEATO, ASEAN & finally the ASEAN Economic Community (AEC).
Contemporary connections between Thailand and distant Indonesian seem to be rather sparse, at least based on news articles, but between Singapore and Indonesia they are obviously a lot stronger. Filipinos coming to work in the Thai education and tourism sectors would account for many connections between the Philippines and Thailand, but there don’t seem to be many business, trade or scholarly connections.
People here in the Bangkok Post office suggest that the connections between China and mainland SEAsian states actually swamp any interconnections between SEAsian states, that is connections of business, work, cultural or otherwise.
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The Chinese Question? Amy Chua or Caroline Hau, take your pick.
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Liew Foon Ming and Geoffrey Wade working on Ming Dynasty Yunnan, not anyone on the best seller list or James Scott and his Zomia craze, are the two great largely unrecognized scholars who have done work that is of the greatest service to pre-modern Burmese history. 🙂
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This is the article I’ve been wanting to read for a long time. I’ve been thinking a great deal about the various ways one can slice and group Southeast Asia. Much like the Balkans, I think that it depends on what you’re analyzing. Once you get into sub-units it gets even more confusing.
My question relates to how this region has been defined int he past. What, for example, was the historical meaning of Nanyang for the Chinese? It now seems to encompass precisely the bounds of what has become Southeast Asia, but I imagine it was once something else entirely.
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Dear Evan Rees, I found no indication in my research for the Ming Dynasty, that the Ming Court was able to geographically connect inner mainland Southeast Asian places such as the statelet of Ava (predecessor to modern Burma) or Tai states to coastal states or settlements, so usage of “Nanyang” for a connected region of Southeast Asia must originate in Qing Court:
Fernquest, Jon (2006) “Crucible of War: Burma and the Ming in the Tai Frontier Zone (1382-1454),” SOAS Bulletin of Burma Research, Vol. 4, No. 2, Autumn 2006.
But to read more online from the expert on this subject:
Wade, Geoff (2004). “Ming China and Southeast Asia in the 15th Century: A Reappraisal,” No. 28 Working Paper Series, Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, July 2004.
Wade, Geoff. tr (2005). Southeast Asia in the Ming Shi-lu: an open access resource, Singapore: Asia Research Institute and the Singapore E-Press, NationalUniversity of Singapore, [http://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl]
Wade, Geoff (2005b). “The Chinese ‘World View’ and Rhetoric of the Ming Shi-lu,” in The Ming Shi-lu as a source for Southeast Asian History, pp. 20-34, accompanying Wade (2005).
There is one reference in the above Ming sources to the Ayutthayan King Naresuan marching north at the time of his death around 1605, so the Ming Court may have had some idea how inland polities were connected or related to coastal polities, but it seems an interesting question 🙂
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Fascinating background. I’ve often found the Sino-Burmese war of the 18th century an interesting precursor to the ties between border modern militant groups and Chinese partners. But now I’ll have to read your work on the even earlier conflicts.
I think the Chinese perspective might offer and interesting take on what Southeast Asia is as a geopolitical unit. I know that the idea of Nanyang also took on meaning to describe the area that the overseas Chinese communities lived, which must have been broadly conceived in maritime terms. And your work on tensions within Zomia is probably another way that China looked at the region.
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Dear Evan Rees; Thought-stimulating this article has been indeed. Makes one go back to the very definition of “region” which is a concept from geography that has apparently already passed its nadir as Wikipedia “regional geography” notes, perhaps because it tries to bite off too much and assign too much importance to one delimited area. A shared climate and rice cultivation in SEAsia or a name for people outside of the region to point to on a map seem to be one basis for SEAsia, but the definition of “region” (“A region is a unit on the earth’s surface that has unifying characteristics such as climate or industry. These characteristics may be human, physical, or cultural. Not only do geographers study characteristics, but they also study how regions around the world may change over time. Different types of physical regions are deserts, mountains, grasslands, and rain forests”) implies multiple overlapping regions including BTW every local watershed before the advent of roads and modern transportation, which can be modeled in a GIS system 🙂
Was there ever a Chinese Lewis & Clark-like expedition that bridged the gap between Yunnan and coastal SEAsia? Or an expedition down the Mekong?
Did the first Chinese attempts at a map of the world render the geographical expanse between Yunnan and coastal SEAsia accurately? So many questions. 🙂
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D.G.E. Hall did not cover the Philippines in the first edition of his A History of South East Asia !?
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