The Southeast Asian Labyrinth: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

Abstract

In the Southeast Asian context, the questions of civilizational identity and civilizational premises of modernity cannot be posed in the same way as with regard to China or India. From a long-term perspective, the most salient features of the region have to do with intercivilizational encounters and their local ramifications. As the debate on `Indianization' has shown, Southeast Asian traditions took shape in active interaction with dominant external models, and it is a flexible combination of imported and local patterns that is most characteristic of the region, rather than any persisting indigenous infrastructure. Cultural patterns of state formation are the most distinctive outcome of this process; they can be traced back to the Indianizing phase, but they also play an important role in the early modern history of the region, and they are relevant to the debate on `re-traditionalization' in contemporary Southeast Asia.

Re-visioning obscure spaces

“…Mobilizing genealogical and oral narratives from Sulu, Saleeby conjures a region formed by a constituency who travel in and out of the region along with their material goods, cosmology, and streams of thinking about the world. His idea of Sulu reflects those of long-running trans-locally connected economic hubs in the littorals of the western Indian Ocean or the pan-African trading posts in the arid landscape of the Sahara, the highlands of mainland Southeast Asia and the trading ports of the Indonesian archipelago (Arnason, 1997, Jumsai, 1988Olaoluwa 2013;Simpson and Kreese, 2007). To some degree, the older seaports of Sulu and those of the western Indian Ocean share distinction of being cradles of social networks that 'overlap, intersect, but also differ' (Simpson and Kreese, 2007: 5).…”

In but Not of Asia: Reflections on Philippine Nationalism as Discourse, Project and Evaluation

“…The Philippines then is part of what Johann Arnason has called the 'Southeast Asian civilizational labyrinth', but its history and development is signally different to its neighbours (Arnason, 1997). While it shares some distinctive regional ecologies and trading networks with the region as a whole, its political economy and its instituted national imaginary is modern and unique.…”

“…'The Philippines' as a site and mediator of cultural traffic and as a place subject to uneven development, as a nation-state and political economy that is semi-peripheral to regional and global processes of the capitalist worldsystem, is also a site of continuous innovation and transposition that feeds back to metropolitan centres and systems, new ways of seeing and being in the world. This brings me to my final suggestion that, above all, we rethink 'the Philippines' as a hybrid set and flux of cultures that embodies an alternative modernity, rather than as a developing nation on the path of a pre-determined model of western modernization (Arnason, 1997(Arnason, , 2001(Arnason, , 2003Canclini, 1996;Kahn, 1995Kahn, , 2000. Not only should we wish to evade the dead ends of essentialist notions of identity, values and place, but positively value the utility and virtue of being marginal to such constructions of the world.…”