Panel

Call for Papers
for Sixth EUROSEAS Conference, School of Global Studies, Goteborgs
Universitet, Gothenburg University, Sweden, August 26th -28th, 2010

Area Studies of and within Southeast Asia
Problems and Prospects of Regional Theorizing
within Global Flows
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Convenor:
Prof. Dr. Christoph Antweiler
Universität Bonn, Institut für Orient- und Asienwissenschaften (IOA),
Abt. Südostasienwissenschaften, Nassestr. 2, D - 53113 Bonn, Germany
christoph.antweiler@uni-bonn.de

Area Studies are gaining a new momentum in Europe. Within the Bologna process new area-oriented studies were established at universities of several countries. Southeast Asia is a diversified cultural realm with a high potential for generating theory. The region gave rise to several important concepts of the social sciences and cultural studies, e.g. mandala state, plural society, involution, thick description and strategic group.

In a world of trans-cultural flows we should ask again, what are the strengths and weaknesses of Area Studies. The potential of Area studies is to go beyond the current methodological nationalism and extreme relativism to seek for regional patterns or culminations of cultural flows. The dangers are e.g. misplaced concreteness and the tendency to overlook trans-boundary processes.

Some of the questions we should discuss are: What are useful ways of systematic comparison of societies and cultures within Southeast Asia? What is the relevance of interdisciplinary but regionally specific vs. disciplinary but regionally unspecified research?. What are the specific contributions of e.g. Andaya, Anderson, Emmerson, Fisher, Heine-Geldern, Josselin de Jong, King, Kolb, Kratoska, Lombard, McVey, Spivak, Steedly, Tarling, Uhlig and Wolters, which are useful for area-oriented theory work nowadays? What are political implications of Area Studies? Why do most researchers from Southeast Asia confine their research and teaching to their own culture or country? What chances lie in new approaches to critical regional studies coming from within the region? Specific topics potentially addressed in the papers could be: general traits of Southeast Asia despite the tremendous diversity, family resemblances of Southeast Asian cultures, Southeast Asian sub-regions, regionally controlled comparison, border regions of Southeast Asia, Area Studies as geopolitics, Southeast Asia as an imagined region, local concepts of Southeast Asia as a whole, strategic regional essentialism and alternatives to “Southeast Asia” (e.g. Southeastern Asia, Asia Pacific, Pacific Asia, Australasia). Regarding the current research scene in Europe we could also discuss – last not least – the question whether Area Studies are a clever means of current European science administration to cut down localized social science and cultural studies.