compared to most other, later centres for Southeast Asian studies, where American students were usually in the great majority.
There are nevertheless two strongly related reasons for offering a critique of Southeast Asian studies in the United States, based on my experience at Cornell. The first is that the Cornell program was generally regarded as the best of its kind, with the most varied and outstanding faculty, by far the largest library, and the most extensive language offerings. The second is that when in the 1960s other universities established comparable programs, many of the younger professors they hired had been trained at Cornell. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that a critique of Cornell would apply a fortiori to its various later competitors.
My criticism concerns the marked imbalance between the disciplines. Even today, it is hard to find any Southeast Asian sociologists, beyond a handful of excellent demographers. The study of contemporary Southeast Asia rested on two pillars, political science and anthropology, which shared few intellectual interests or common methodologies, and which for a long time focused on national political elites or on rural villages and small ethnic minorities, leaving a huge gap in between. The major exception was the outstanding sinologist-cum-sociologist G. William Skinner, who, unable to get access to Maoâs China, and uninterested in Taiwan, studied the Chinese communities in Siam and Indonesia in books that are still valuable today, half a century on. I do not think that this lack was the fault of Cornellâs program, but rather of American sociologyas a whole, which was primarily interested in the United States and relied on statistical methods difficult to use in countries where for decades reliable statistics were hard to come by.
The second major imbalance was between the social sciences and the humanities. A significant background factor in this imbalance was the concept of âSoutheast Asiaâ itself, which implied an exclusive communality. But the reality was hard to find. Eight different good-sized countries, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Confucian-Taoist; colonized by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch in the seventeenth, by the French and the British in the nineteenth, and by the Americans in the twentieth, with Siam semi-colonized by the British; significant literatures in mutually incomprehensible languages such as Burmese, Mon, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Malay, Javanese, Old Javanese, Sanskrit, Arabic and several others. This was in huge contrast with East Asia, which covered only three countries sharing a good deal in terms of moral order, religious outlook and literary genres; and with South Asia, comprising four countries with long-standing, even if sometimes hostile, religious, economic and classical literary connections, but all colonized by the same imperial power.
Had the institutional concept of âSoutheast Asiaâ not existed, Vietnam could have been included in East Asia studies thanks to its millennial ties to China, while much of the rest of western Southeast Asia could have been linked to South Asia, since its indigenous cultural base was deeply influenced (via Sanskrit and Pali) by southern India andSri Lanka. And the Philippines could have been attached to Latin American studies.
Many students of Southeast Asia at Cornell were encouraged to âminorâ in Chinese studies because of the great importance of Chinese immigrant communities in almost every Southeast Asian country, but very few actually learned Chinese very well. Almost no one was encouraged to learn about either Sri Lanka or India, let alone the Middle East. I cannot think of a single program student who seriously studied Arabic or Hindi.
The enormous heterogeneity of âSoutheast Asiaâ made it extremely hard to train even the most brilliant students who might be interested in classical literatures, classical musics, and classical
There are nevertheless two strongly related reasons for offering a critique of Southeast Asian studies in the United States, based on my experience at Cornell. The first is that the Cornell program was generally regarded as the best of its kind, with the most varied and outstanding faculty, by far the largest library, and the most extensive language offerings. The second is that when in the 1960s other universities established comparable programs, many of the younger professors they hired had been trained at Cornell. It is reasonable to suppose, then, that a critique of Cornell would apply a fortiori to its various later competitors.
My criticism concerns the marked imbalance between the disciplines. Even today, it is hard to find any Southeast Asian sociologists, beyond a handful of excellent demographers. The study of contemporary Southeast Asia rested on two pillars, political science and anthropology, which shared few intellectual interests or common methodologies, and which for a long time focused on national political elites or on rural villages and small ethnic minorities, leaving a huge gap in between. The major exception was the outstanding sinologist-cum-sociologist G. William Skinner, who, unable to get access to Maoâs China, and uninterested in Taiwan, studied the Chinese communities in Siam and Indonesia in books that are still valuable today, half a century on. I do not think that this lack was the fault of Cornellâs program, but rather of American sociologyas a whole, which was primarily interested in the United States and relied on statistical methods difficult to use in countries where for decades reliable statistics were hard to come by.
The second major imbalance was between the social sciences and the humanities. A significant background factor in this imbalance was the concept of âSoutheast Asiaâ itself, which implied an exclusive communality. But the reality was hard to find. Eight different good-sized countries, Muslim, Buddhist, Catholic, Confucian-Taoist; colonized by Spaniards in the sixteenth century, by the Dutch in the seventeenth, by the French and the British in the nineteenth, and by the Americans in the twentieth, with Siam semi-colonized by the British; significant literatures in mutually incomprehensible languages such as Burmese, Mon, Thai, Khmer, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Malay, Javanese, Old Javanese, Sanskrit, Arabic and several others. This was in huge contrast with East Asia, which covered only three countries sharing a good deal in terms of moral order, religious outlook and literary genres; and with South Asia, comprising four countries with long-standing, even if sometimes hostile, religious, economic and classical literary connections, but all colonized by the same imperial power.
Had the institutional concept of âSoutheast Asiaâ not existed, Vietnam could have been included in East Asia studies thanks to its millennial ties to China, while much of the rest of western Southeast Asia could have been linked to South Asia, since its indigenous cultural base was deeply influenced (via Sanskrit and Pali) by southern India andSri Lanka. And the Philippines could have been attached to Latin American studies.
Many students of Southeast Asia at Cornell were encouraged to âminorâ in Chinese studies because of the great importance of Chinese immigrant communities in almost every Southeast Asian country, but very few actually learned Chinese very well. Almost no one was encouraged to learn about either Sri Lanka or India, let alone the Middle East. I cannot think of a single program student who seriously studied Arabic or Hindi.
The enormous heterogeneity of âSoutheast Asiaâ made it extremely hard to train even the most brilliant students who might be interested in classical literatures, classical musics, and classical
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