Problems and Issues in the Field of Southeast Asian History

Imagine the following scenario. European and American studies is dominated by Asia and Asians. The bulk of the most prestigious journals in the West are published in Asia by Asian organizations and universities; most of the students studying the West are trained in Asia to be sent back to take positions at Harvard, Yale, Cambridge, and Oxford; most of its premier libraries and archives holding publications about the West are located in Asia; close to 93 per cent of its leading academics are Asian; most of the classes that teach obscure Western languages are found only in Asian Universities; the topics, methodologies, theoretical frameworks considered important and ‘cutting edge’ in the field are the product of, and selected by Asians or Westerners trained in Asia; and the experts the world press and governments go to for their opinions concerning the West are Asian. The entire structure of Western studies is, in this scenario, largely the product of Asian institutions and Asia-trained scholars. Can one imagine such an academic world? I cannot. Yet, that is precisely the case, in reverse, with regard to Asian Studies.

This reality, furthermore, is not only the way it was and is, but the trend in the foreseeable future as well. The reasons are plentiful: there is much more funding in the West for the study of Asia which in turn influences the direction of growth, the way in which the field is conceived and categorized, and the intellectual subjects considered important (including debates about the field itself). The largest and most esteemed professional organizations, the most prestigious journals, and the most numerous jobs for its clones (our students) are found mainly in America and the West; only seven per cent of the members of the Association for Asian Studies are from Asia. (I include Australia in the term ‘West’ for its cultural-intellectual hegemony is more at issue here than its geographic location.) One needs only to glance at the references in the standard histories of Asia published in English, the bulk of their citations – particularly those of a theoretical and methodological nature that shape the field – to see that they are by Westerners or Western trained Asians, most of them published by university presses located in the West and considered the most prominent.

In short, the West has a clear intellectual and economic monopoly over the theoretical, conceptual, and empirical knowledge regarding the field of Asian Studies. Westerners, the western intellectual world, western academic institutions, western museums and libraries, western think tanks, and western research funding dominate Asian Studies in ways whose reverse with regard to European and American studies cannot even be imagined. Asian Studies as a field is indeed a Western creation and enterprise that serves mainly western professionals and their interests: academic for sure, but also political, military, and economic. And Southeast Asian history is a small planet within this larger, Western-dominated galaxy of Asian Studies.

There are, in addition to the circumscribing issue of Western dominance, other intrinsic ‘problems’ within the field of Southeast Asian history itself. One is that it is relatively new. Historical studies of and by Southeast Asians, of course, have been around for centuries, while individual ‘country’ histories have been published by historians relatively early as well. But in terms of a modern, Western discipline or field, with its own professional organizations, theoretical literature, journals, peer-review processes, self-assessment, and so on, the field of Southeast Asian history is new, having emerged only after World War Two. It is certainly newer than the fields of European and American, as well as South and East Asian history.

Southeast Asian history as a field also has a relatively small constituency. Historians of Southeast Asia make up about one-eighth the number of historians in other areas of Asian studies. Indeed, the larger field of Asian Studies (including all the disciplines and regions of Asia) probably has fewer scholars in it than historians specialising in the history of the United States alone. And yet, Southeast Asia covers one of the largest geographic and demographic areas in the world, with dozens of major languages and hundreds of dialects, eleven countries occupying an area as large as Europe and the Middle East put together, and a region where all the world religions are represented.

Then there are the historical problems created by recent events that have affected the region's scholarship, particularly, colonialism and nationalism, World War Two, decolonization, Independence, and their aftermath. These major events produced real-life problems such as civil war, ethnic insurgencies, poverty, political instability, and infra-structural damage. Subsequently, neo-colonialism and its crusades with their contrasting political ideologies – fascism, communism, democracy and their economic counterparts – exacerbated the situation. Such overriding concerns have consumed much of the time, energy, and national budgets of these countries, with little left for scholarship, so that few (if any) academic ‘trends’ have emanated from the region.

As a result of this recent history, none of the universities in Southeast Asia is world class except for the National University of Singapore (NUS). (Singapore as a new nation, founded only in 1965, was fortunate enough to avoid the trauma of colonization and decolonization that plagued the other nations in Southeast Asia for decades.) In fact, NUS has a larger number of Southeast Asia historians in its history department than any single history department in the world. (Of course, if one counts all the universities in a single country such as the United States with Southeast Asia historians in them, and their relative stature in the field – which is admittedly subjective – then the equation is quite different.) Still, in the United States, only a handful of universities have Southeast Asia as an area studies component in their programs, whose history departments include a very small number of Southeast Asia historians, with the University of Hawai'i having the most. Of these universities, approximately only eight are officially recognised by the United States Department of Education as having ‘national’ stature. And of all graduate students entering the whole field of Asian studies annually in the US, the fewest number enrol in Southeast Asian history.

Westernness, Newness, and Smallness

However, not all is dismal. Apart from the historical problems, Westernness, newness, and smallness have their advantages. First, the human and material resources in the Western world and its superior institutions of higher learning – the well-trained faculty with some of the world's highest standards, the most modern physically, the size and scope of its libraries, the many fellowships available, the academic freedom, and general atmosphere of give and take – have greatly benefited the field of Southeast Asian history, not only in the United States but elsewhere. As most of the prominent historians of Southeast Asia are products of Western academia, and despite the academic problems noted above, the same or similar standards and attitudes, methods of teaching, and so on, continue to shape the field world-wide.

Second, being a relatively new field means it does not have to ‘reinvent the wheel’ every time an issue arises. There is no need to re-hash problems that have been addressed rather well in other, older areas such as European Studies, South, and East Asian studies. For example, the issue of whether Japan during the Nara period was a mirror image of T'ang China (an old topic) has its counterpart in Southeast Asian history in the issue of ‘Indianization’ – to what extent was Southeast Asia a mirror image of India? The expected response to exogenous influences with ‘indigenization’ (or ‘localization’ and ‘autonomous history’, the pertinent terms in Southeast Asian history) is also an issue found throughout the region and elsewhere, not just Southeast Asia. We have benefited from that debate that has occurred much earlier in East Asian studies, allowing us to skip certain, less productive stages of it while leap-frogging to more productive ones simply because our field is new (Coedes Reference Coedes1968; Legge Reference Legge and Tarling1992; Sears Reference Sears1993; Wolters Reference Wolters1982, Reference Wolters1994).

The ‘Encounter with the West’ is another topic that has been addressed elsewhere much more thoroughly and for a much longer period of time than it has been in Southeast Asian history. In fact, the ‘trends’ in Southeast Asian history of issues and problems raised in Post-Colonial and Subaltern studies initially comes from South, not Southeast Asian studies (Breckenridge and van der Veer Reference Breckenridge and Peter1993). The same can be said of Gender studies: it is a new import to the field of Southeast Asian history, even within institutions in the West. Here as well, scholars dealing with gender issues in the field of Southeast Asian history have benefited from the latter's newness. The decades of building up a constituency, training scholars, formulating a corpus of theoretical literature, creating journals, making mistakes – all these, by and large, Southeast Asian historians working with gender did not have to undergo. It did not have to start from scratch. Thus, for example, when Barbara Andaya published Other Pasts: Women, Gender, and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia (2000), she was already an established historian of Southeast Asia, so that her experience in the discipline of history was brought to bear on the newer gender studies field.

Similarly, and third, smallness: there are in the larger field of Southeast Asian studies itself, fewer than a half dozen disciplines that actually shape its direction, with varying strengths and numbers. The most prominent are History, Political Science (or Government as it is called at Cornell), and Anthropology, along with other disciplines such as Archaeology, Religion, Linguistics, Literature, and Art History. Although only a handful of scholars from Southeast Asian Studies have transcended the field, they are nevertheless well known world-wide, especially for their theoretical contributions. That has brought disproportionate attention to the field relative to its newness and size.

The broad conceptual and theoretical works of Michael Adas (Reference Adas1989), Ben Anderson (Reference Anderson2006), Clifford Geertz (Reference Geertz1980), Victor Lieberman (Reference Lieberman2003), Melford Spiro (Reference Spiro1982), Tony Reid (Reference Reid1988), James Scott (Reference Scott1976, Reference Scott1985, Reference Scott1990, Reference Scott2009), Stanley Tambiah (Reference Tambiah1976, Reference Tambiah1977), and Paul Wheatley (Reference Wheatley1983) to name a few, have managed to transcend Southeast Asia boundaries. And their impact has not been inconsequential. Regardless of discipline and area of the world, most of the social sciences are familiar with, and have used phrases such as ‘Imagined Communities,’ ‘Theatre State’ ‘Moral Economy’, ‘Rational Peasant’, ‘Age of Commerce’, ‘Galactic Polity’, and so on. All these are products of Southeast Asian studies.

To be sure, while these Southeast Asia scholars have contributed in important ways to the theoretical literature of various disciplines inside and outside the field, they haven't necessarily contributed (at least not to the same extent) within the field itself, particularly in terms of empirical, in-depth, country- and/or period-specific studies using indigenous primary sources. That ‘vacuum’ has been filled by other Southeast Asia scholars. The following are just a few of the Southeast Asia historians, either older than me, or more or less close to my generation of historians: Barbara Andaya (Reference Andaya2006), Leonard Andaya (Reference Andaya2008), Lawrence Briggs (Reference Briggs1951), Nicholas Cushner (Reference Cushner1976), Bruce Fenner (Reference Fenner1985), Reynaldo Ileto (Reference Ileto1979, Reference Ileto1998), Charnwit Kaestiri (Reference Kasetsiri1976), Alfred McCoy (Reference McCoy2009), Ruby Paredes and Michael Cullinane (1998), Keith Taylor (Reference Taylor1983), Michael Vickery (Reference Vickery1998), James Warren (Reference Warren1981, Reference Warren1987), John Whitmore (Reference Whitmore1985, Reference Whitmore2006), and David Wyatt (Reference Wyatt1984); again to name only a few.

The smallness of the field has also given us the wherewithal to be more familiar with most of the important issues in it better than if the field were larger. As a consequence, it has made the field more interdisciplinary in character than it might have been otherwise, which in turn has appreciably enhanced the quality of the research and publications of its scholars. Most modern historians of Southeast Asia are likely familiar with the issues raised by Southeast Asia political scientists, while most early historians of Southeast Asia, with anthropology, archaeology, literature, and art history. Conversely, most political scientists and anthropologists of Southeast Asia probably know their Southeast Asian history as well; at least we hope they do.

‘Trends’(?) in Southeast Asian History

We finally arrive at the heart of this essay: ‘trends’ in the field of Southeast Asian history. If the criteria for determining ‘trends’ and ‘patterns’ in the field include: a) some of the best and latest published texts on the history of Southeast Asia as a region, b) some of the most prominent ‘state of the art’ articles in its major journals, and c) some of the important symposia on ‘trends’, then perhaps the following are ‘trends’: economic and social history, gender, ecology, colonialism and post-colonial issues, religion and the state, and ethnic and national identity (Bastin Reference Bastin1967; Bastin and Benda Reference Bastin and Benda1968; Hall Reference Hall1955; Harrison 1965; Osborne 2004; Owen Reference Owen2005; Steinberg Reference Steinberg1985; Szanton Reference Szanton2004; Tarling Reference Tarling1966, 1992; Wolters Reference Wolters1982, Reference Wolters1999).

One will immediately notice that nearly none of these topics per se is entirely new; most are either ‘continuing’ or ‘re-emerging’ issues. Rather, their ‘newness’ lies in their approach. They have attempted to reconstruct history outside the framework of the nation-state which has been the dominating principle for organising history during the past half century and is still prevalent today. (Even that is not entirely new, for Robbins Burling had published his Hill-Farms and Padi Fields [1965] approximately forty years ago, which was consciously organized around communities with commonalities found throughout Southeast Asia rather than around nation-states.) Such studies invariably tend to cross modern political boundaries and penetrate chronological walls. Thus, the shift has been more towards a new consideration of methodology; that is, the trend is in historiography more than in subject matter, so that new and different approaches to the reconstruction of Southeast Asian history might be considered an ‘emerging trend’. In this shift, a variety of theoretical works from within the field of Southeast Asian Studies is clearly discernable, along with some from outside the field, particularly those by Edward Said (Reference Said1979), Michel Foucault and David Hoy (Reference Foucault and Hoy1986).

One of these circumscribing methodological ‘trends’ in the analysis of Southeast Asian history that has received considerable attention lately is the issue of ‘agency’. Although the notion and its use is not new – we actually find that kind of concern and approach as early as the writings of fifth-century BC Greek historian Herodotus – the term itself within the field of Southeast Asian history is relatively new. The point it makes – of ‘privileging’, ‘emphasizing’, or giving ‘a voice to’ something – is also not new, but had been a hidden bias. Now it is out in the open and is probably analysed in a more sophisticated manner.

Today, we posit the question ‘what is privileged’ or what is ‘given agency’ for what we used to say ‘what is the angle of vision’ or ‘whose perspective is it’, especially regarding the writing of ‘autonomous history’ following the seminal work of the late John Smail (Smail 1961). Invoking the famous phrase by Van Leur, Smail asked how ‘autonomous’ was a history that looked at Indonesia from the ‘deck of a Dutch ship’? Essentially, the issue is the same as giving ‘agency’ to, or ‘privileging’ something. This kind of questioning subsequently led to the consideration of the following ‘angles of vision’.

What would Southeast Asian history look like from the perspective of the court of the Malay Sultan or the Burmese king and queen, the headman and headwoman of the village, the padi fields of the farmer, the spice shop of the merchant, the monastery of the Buddhist monk and nun, the mosque of the ulama, or the parish of the Catholic priest? Simply viewing Southeast Asian history from any one of these different angles automatically gives ‘agency’ to it, and the history that results from that perspective is quite different from one viewed from other angles. Thus, Smail was not only questioning the impact of exogenous perspectives on indigenous history. He was also asking what categories within the indigenous realm itself should be the focus. Should politics and the elite, rather than social and cultural factors and the common man and woman be given emphasis? And the choice one makes – whether it is exogenous or indigenous, class, gender, the state, the centre, the village, the elite, the commoners, politics, economics, religion, and even change or continuity – clearly ‘privileges’ the object of that choice.

Selecting who or what to ‘privilege’ changes the scenery significantly by determining what is to be foreground and what, background, well beyond the colonial and the indigenous divide. The subjectivity inherent in one's selection of perspective is not a new issue either, but an increasingly scrutinised one in the field of Southeast Asian studies. The problem often arises with regard to the motives behind one's selection. To be sure, these may merely be one's personal preferences and/or desired foci of study, but they can also be calculated political (or academic) machination.

As a result of such discussion, history texts written during the past two decades or so have increasingly and consciously chosen to make Southeast Asia the foreground and the colonial powers, the background, so that Europeans are said to only ‘enter’ Southeast Asian history (J. Taylor Reference Taylor2003: 115). Such decisions on the whole are meant to balance the decades of Indic, Sinic, and Euro-centrism, but they are, nonetheless, conscious efforts to give ‘agency’ to Southeast Asia. At least we can say with some aplomb that the latter are more likely to be academically rather than politically motivated.

Not just people and classes, but certain events can also be given ‘agency’ that changes one's historical perspective. Thus, because the fall of Melaka is emphasized as a most important event in all of our history texts the role of the Portuguese is given ‘agency.’ Yet, the event did not destroy the relationship the Sultan of Melaka had with all the other sultans which was the crux of his wealth and power and which the Portuguese were attempting to usurp. All the Portuguese got when they took Melaka in 1511 was the physical city, not those important personal relationships the Sultan took with him to Brunei. Thus, if ‘agency’ had been given to those relationships instead, the ‘fall of Melaka’ diminishes in importance. The same can be said of other events in the history of Southeast Asia considered critical: the Mongol invasions of Mainland Southeast Asia (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin1998), the ‘fall of Sri Vijaya’ (Wolters Reference Wolters1970). The issue of ‘agency’ opens up new windows into which the Southeast Asia historian can now peep more intently.

In past decades, Indic influences were given ‘agency’ while Sinic influences were more or less relegated to Vietnam. On the whole, this is not entirely inaccurate, for the bulk of the evidence testifies to the presence of Indic influences in nearly every aspect of Southeast Asian life: religion, writing systems, literature, measurement of time, notions of leadership, authority and legitimacy, conceptions of the universe, and the arts – dance, music, painting, theatre. However, in more recent years archaeologists and art historians have shown the increasingly important role of Sinic (or more accurately northern) influences, especially in the very early phases of Southeast Asian history prior to the arrival of Indic influences, as well as in later periods after India had made its initial impact.

In other words, the influence of the culture of the northern regions of what is now Yunnan on the early agrarian societies of Southeast Asia has become more and more evident in the archaeological data, especially in terms of domesticated rice, art and crafts, architectural principles, perhaps weapons; while in later times, these Sinic influences tended to be both technological and intellectual: firearms as well as books (Laichen Reference Laichen2000; Moore Reference Moore2003; Tarling Reference Tarling1998). And of course, in terms of economic exchange, both the western and the northern regions have always played a role, not only in the maritime world but also amongst the in-land agrarian states. The increase in northern influences may be an ‘emerging trend’ especially as China becomes richer and begins to put more money into academics and the scholarship of Southeast Asia-China relations which it is already doing.

The way in which Southeast Asian history is organised (periodized) gives ‘agency’ to any number of things. A period can be lengthened or shortened, giving (or not giving) ‘agency’ to its main actors and the consequences of their rule. A book on the history of Southeast Asia that has relatively few chapters on the pre-colonial phase (representing a thousand years) with most of it focused on the colonial and modern phases (representing a hundred years) gives ‘agency’ to recentness, privileging the importance of the present over the past, as well as the colonisers over the colonised. Elsewhere, I have called this ‘present-centrism’ (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin1995). I do not know if the critique of ‘present-centrism’ is an ‘emerging trend’, just a phase, or simply a fetish of a single historian. But because it is central to the way we organise Southeast Asian history and privilege certain periods we work in or favour, I personally hope it remains an issue.

‘Agency’ is also inherent in disciplinarity itself, which often encourages a binary framework of analysis between (‘competing’) disciplines, thus creating some false dichotomies (Lieberman Reference Lieberman1999). Politics is given ‘agency’ over history by political scientists and vice versa by historians; anthropologists privilege culture over historical events; geographers, the physical environment over individuals and groups; the economist, money over religious beliefs; and the demographer, population patterns over trade and commerce. Merely being a historian automatically gives ‘agency’ to historical methodology.

The choice of subject within a discipline can also do much the same thing. A history of the elite is often seen in opposition to that of the commoner; the urban centre, to that of the periphery; the ‘upstream’ in-land agrarian societies, to that of the ‘downstream’ maritime, commercial world. Hill-society is regarded as inimical to those of the plains, the majority to that of the minority, the colonial and exogenous forces to those of the national and indigenous, and the dominant male to that of the underrepresented female. As most of these are false dichotomies, we may see a growing response to that binary framework of analysis evident in more dualistic approaches in addressing this issue of ‘agency’. Again, one hopes that dualism rather than dichotomy will be a ‘continuing trend’.

One binary perspective that is beginning to crumble (hopefully) is the division of Southeast Asia into a ‘Mainland’ and an ‘Island’ world. That separation of Mainland and Island Southeast Asia has not only shaped our approach to its study, but has determined the division of labour in history departments, so that ‘Mainland’ historians teach ‘Mainland history’ and ‘Island’ historians, ‘Island history’, perpetuating those conceptual divides in concrete ways. Even the hiring policies of history departments and the monies allotted to them are, and have been for a long time, by and large based on this artificially administrative division of ‘Mainland’ and ‘Island.’

However, as more in-depth research in more diverse areas is beginning to show, such a scenario cannot be sustained. We are beginning to see Southeast Asia as having at least four components rather than two: 1) an inland, agrarian world (represented by civilizations such as Pagan and Angkor), 2) a maritime trading world (perhaps best represented by Sri Vijaya and Melaka), 3) a hybrid world that includes the latter two (such as Dai Viet, Mrauk-U in Arakan, and Ayuthaya), and 4) a world of the ‘hills’ which interacted with the other three. This quadripartite scenario is a far more accurate representation, and way of looking at Southeast Asia, and supported by the best evidence we have, than the old Mainland-Island dichotomy. It may truly be an ‘emerging trend’, not just a ‘continuing’ one, with promises of a more nuanced reconstruction of the region in future (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin, Aung-Thwin and Hall2011a).

A possible ‘continuing trend’, although not very new is a more serious search for longer-term historical patterns and continuity, in the tradition of Marc Bloch, Fernand Braudel and Emmanuel LeRoy Ladurie of the Annales School. For too long, progressive change has been the over-riding framework of analysis for historians, the ‘sacred cow’ so to speak, which assumed that the mere passage of time automatically produces change of some sort. We now seem to be moving towards seriously considering giving more ‘agency’ to continuity.

Taking the ‘classical’ era as example, we now know that it extends much further back than heretofore thought. This conclusion is derived mainly from new evidence recovered from archaeology. We also see the ‘classical’ era extending into subsequent centuries farther than heretofore imagined, into the ‘post-classical’ era. Here too, it is the result of better scrutiny and reading of the original sources contained in those eras. The same can be said of the ‘Early Modern’ period, whose roots now seem to extend well back into the ‘classical/post-classical’ periods, while its vestiges and legacy have lingered longer in the more recent past. Continuity going both ways (into the past and into the present) is being given more credence than it had been conventionally (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin1991; Moore Reference Moore2003). I personally hope this becomes a lasting trend.

Continuity (ironically, the results of essentially European scholarship obsessed with change) is most evident in the writing of social history. It has been a ‘continuing trend’ in Southeast Asian history since the 1970s, the most well known advocate of it being Anthony Reid. Others also write on social history but are more focused on specific areas or communities, such as James Warren (Reference Warren1987), Norman Owen (Reference Owen1987), and Leonard Andaya (Reference Andaya2008). ‘Social history’ in Southeast Asia appears to have a special connotation, intentional or not. Implicit in it is the notion that the subject is concerned mainly with the ‘commoner’ classes, and rarely with those above them. Yet, the sources used to portray these ‘masses’ are often derived from those generated by the ruling classes. Despite this kind of potential problem, much has been accomplished (for example) using (elite) parish records in the Philippines for reconstructing the history of commoners, especially by those in historical demography (Concepcion and Smith 1977; Cushner Reference Cushner1976; Flieger and Smith Reference Flieger and Smith1975; Owen Reference Owen1987).

The debate over State-Formation is also a ‘continuing’ rather than an ‘emerging trend’ (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin2005, Reference Aung-Thwin2008; Day Reference Day2002; Hall Reference Hall1985; Wheatley Reference Wheatley1983). The newer studies appear to have better evidence as support, and are more precise theoretically and analytically, having benefitted from the advances made in anthropology, such as the distinctions made between primary and secondary state-formation that hitherto was not common knowledge to most historians (White 1995). More recent studies have also benefitted from newer scientific techniques, such as rehydroxylation (dating bricks by measuring their moisture content) which can better assess evidence.

The importance given to, therefore ‘privileging’ the state, or conversely, trivialising its importance and de-privileging it, is a bone of contention in Southeast Asian history. But this is not an entirely new issue either: it goes back to the (often false) dichotomy that has long been part of earlier debates over centre and periphery, urban and rural, town and village (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin2011b; Scott Reference Scott2009).

The search for ‘global patterns’, not only in colonialism but also neo-colonialism and democratization may be a relatively new subject in Southeast Asian history per se, as it is usually the domain of those more concerned with the present: political scientists, sociologists, economists, and (a few) anthropologists, but rarely historians (Acharya Reference Acharya2003; Emmerson Reference Emmerson1995; Paredes and Cullinane 1998). Whether one can call these ‘trends’ is still too early to tell. Besides, the study of earlier economic global patterns, both maritime and agrarian that spread concurrently with other, but earlier, ‘ideologies’ such as Buddhism, Islam, and Christianity is not new.

The political context of the post-colonial period, especially the era of independence, has also affected the writing and conceptualisation of Southeast Asian history in important ways. The idea of a ‘classical’ state, a ‘golden age’ of a country, is directly related to the emergence of the nation; for without the nation, to what entity can that ‘classicalness’ be attributed? It has to be ‘classical’ of something. Admittedly, it can be a ‘classical’ age of a particular people or community rather than a state. By and large, though, in Southeast Asian history, these peoples and communities belong to a state or polity and most of the nation-states in Southeast Asia today are not empty shells but occupied by a particular people who were responsible for that ‘classical’ age, usually the majority.

Thus, ‘classicalness’ attributed to a nation-state, although not historically inaccurate, can be a problem. It is not so much whether Pagan and Angkor existed as historical phenomena independent of modern Myanmar and Cambodia respectively, but it is the link attributed to their respective modern entities that has been challenged for (what are really more recent) political reasons. One can no more deny Myanmar and Cambodia ‘their’ classical ages than deny Greece, Athens, or Italy, Rome. The ‘emerging issue,’ then, is neither the empirical existence of these ‘classical’ kingdoms nor the link to their modern counterparts, but the attempt to make history commensurate with its desired consequences.

As conventions become less sacrosanct with the passage of time, another (hopefully) emerging trend is their reassessment, particularly distinguishing myth from history. Paradigms that have been accepted as historical truth and entrenched in the field by a century of scholarship have been shown to be erroneous (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin2005). But as their deconstruction has professional and political consequences of a serious nature, there is resistance to such revisionism. Nonetheless, it is a pattern that has borne fruit and promises to grow rather than fade. Here as well, the questions posed by post-colonial studies in terms of epistemology have been important, even if deconstruction of myth in an empirical sense per se is an old disciplinary concern.

One of the ‘emerging trends’, that promises to continue rather than abate (and briefly mentioned above) is the field of gender studies. Not only does it cross political boundaries of entities such as the nation state, social boundaries such as ethno-linguistic groups, economic boundaries such as class, cultural boundaries such as religion, and even physical boundaries such as continents, it also draws from a growing theoretical literature that is truly global.

To reiterate, an advantage it has is that some of the best scholars that belong to a variety of disciplines contribute to its study, so that the field did not have to begin anew with young, developing scholars. Already well-known and established scholars, familiar with the kinds of academic problems and issues that have plagued or enhanced their own disciplines have been on the vanguard of gender studies. That is part of the reason for its rapid growth as a legitimate field and the stature it now has. And as more established senior historians (along with younger ‘rising stars’) address gender issues in Southeast Asian history, the field can only move forward.

For a long time, colonial historiography made reified ethnicity a concrete, causal factor in Southeast Asian history. It was said to have created and destroyed civilizations, made and unmade dynasties, and caused civil wars. However, since at least the 1960s, that notion of reified ethnicity (and the resulting interpretation of Southeast Asian history as essentially caused by it) has been slowly whittled away and replaced by ethnicity as a relational attribute, an abstract notion of self and other, rather than a concrete phenomenon. Although identity, per se, is admittedly also a matter of perception, so long as that perception is demonstrated to have created historical events and patterns, it is a viable causal factor in history. This is different from saying that ethnicity per se is a causal factor in history.

As Leonard Andaya has shown (Reference Andaya2008), ethnic identity (such as ‘Malayness’) is especially important when it is closely linked to the prevailing economic system in the region (such as trade and commerce), and even more so when also integrated to the major ideology of that region, such as Islam. And when such linkages persist over a long period of time, ethnic identity becomes even more potent as a causal factor. This kind of study can also be considered part of an ‘emerging trend’ in Southeast Asian history.

We often think that as Southeast Asia becomes more modern, traditional belief systems give way to new ones, changing the structure of society. It may be true that new conceptual systems have been imbibed (at least by the ruling elites) and that new structures have emerged to accommodate those new relationships. But that does not mean old beliefs and their links to society and government must have also disappeared, especially amongst the masses.

One of the most important of these relationships continues to be that between religion and the state, which is alive and well (Aung-Thwin Reference Aung-Thwin2009; Hefner and Horvatich Reference Hefner and Horvatich1997; Johns Reference Johns, Hall, Cowan and Wolters1976, Reference Johns1995; Spiro Reference Spiro1982; Swearer Reference Swearer1995; Tambiah Reference Tambiah1970). Another is patron-clientelism, which is also alive and well despite attempts to install formal, ‘modern’ apparatuses to replace it. One of the ‘continuing trends’ in assessing Southeast Asian history, therefore, is the attempt to make better distinctions between old and new, so that change is seen to occur within continuity rather than in place of it.

Finally, I see another emerging trend that has been largely ignored because it is not dramatic or sensational: the study of ‘public history’. It involves the origins and development of the whole process of reconstructing national archives, museums, historical societies, archaeological departments, theme parks, and the like. What does the national museum in Myanmar tell us about the concept of history of its builders and the social and political context at the time of its building? Was it being influenced by the prevailing ideologies of the time in the country and world, or by more local and practical concerns? Was the arrangement of the artefacts in a display merely a matter of using space efficiently in an aesthetically pleasing manner, or does it have a message as well? Thus, for example, why is the (1930s) Saya San exhibit in the Defense Services Museum (formerly in Yangon) placed in a hall that deals largely with World War Two? Was it deliberate in that the curators saw the two exhibits as anti-colonial or was there no more space for Saya San on another floor? This kind of probing also promises to be an ‘emerging’ trend.