Suchergebnisse

Seit dem Sommer 1997 hat sich die Situation in Südostasien tiefgreifend verandert. Jahrzehntelang war diese Weltregion mit weit über 450 Mio. Einwohnern ein Muster rapiden wirtschaftlichen Aufstiegs und sozialen Wandels. Der wirtschaftliche Aufstieg der ASEAN-5 Lander (Indonesien, Malaysia, Philippinen, Singapur und Thailand) war auf den ersten Blick tatsächlich sehr beeindruckend: Das jährliche Wachstum des BSP betrug in den letzten zehn Jahren durchschnittlich 8%.

There has been an ongoing debate on the nature and function of area studies from its inception in the 1950s but especially since the end of the Cold War. Quite a number of articles and collective volumes have appeared reflecting on the question whether, and if so, how area studies, particularly Southeast Asian studies, should be practiced (Reynolds & McVey 1998; Reid 2003; Szanton 2004; Kratoska 2005; Houben & Chou 2006; Sears 2007; Goh Beng-Lan 2011). Especially since the 9/11 event those who heralded the end of history and the uniform adoption of largely similar capitalist lifestyles in a homogenous global village have been silenced and since then what I call new area studies have been on the rise. Luckily for us specialists, Southeast Asia has been far from peripheral in global politics, which explains why Southeast Asian studies have not been neglected within the broader academic project of area studies. Starting in the 1950s, when Southeast Asia became a key theatre of confrontation between capitalism and communism and the status of Indonesia being unclear for some time, Southeast Asian studies could establish itself as one of the liveliest fields of area studies. Since the 1990s, Southeast Asian studies have benefited from the increasing awareness that the future lies in the Asia Pacific region and that more Muslims live in this area than in the Middle East. Besides being driven by considerations of global political economics, Southeast Asian studies have by comparison been highly productive since its unusual cultural richness drew in many anthropologists, linguists as well as many representatives of the humanities and social sciences. ; unReviewed

Houben reviews THE KRATON: Selected Essays on Javanese Courts edited by Stuart Robson.

In the last issue of Itinerario (vol. XVI, 1992/2), Jan Breman of the University of Amsterdam, has published an English translation of his introduction to the third edition of his book Koelies, Planters en Koloniale Politiek. In this article, titled 'Controversial Views on Writing Colonial History', Breman tries to deal with some of the 'more sceptical and sometimes even hostile' reactions to his book on plantation labour in East Coast Sumatra during the last decades of the nineteenth century. However, his contribution has a more important purport, as he suggests a specific way in which the history of the colonial past should be written, dismissing at the same time the approach to the colonial past undertaken by what he calls the 'Leiden Revisionist School'.