THE FUTURE OF AREA STUDIES

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Southeast Asia Gayl D. Ness

lthough the Southeast Asian region is highly attractive to American universities for both practical and scholarly reasons, there are special conditions that pose obstacles to American universities in promoting Southeast Asian studies. There are three problem areas, which identify major needs for this area of study. They are the language mix, variable access to the field, and the humanities. With a population of only about one-third of a billion people, Southeast Asia has at least five major languages (Burmese, Thai, Vietnamese, Tagalog, and indonesian-Malay). We could easily add more: Khmer, Lao, and Cebuano, as well as other less used tribal languages. These are problems the area shares with South Asia and Africa, but they are also ones from which the Japan, China, and Latin America specialists can consider themselves relieved. The most direct implications of this problem for United States area studies are low enrollments and high-cost language instruction. Even at major research universities with substantial graduate programs, we can never expect more than a handful of students to be enrolled in any language course. There is an additional burden in this that deans seldom recognize. Language instruction must be given at two to four different levels. This implies a minimum of two language faculty members to provide the full range of" instruction needed for any language. When Southeast Asian language faculty are lodged in a department such as linguistics, this implies that each must provide four levels of language training on what is essentially a half-time appointment. With the best will in the world, there is little prospect of having even major research universities provide the full support needed for language training out of their usually strained budgets. Federal support for sustained language Federal support must be more flexible than it has been, and the language community must more toward greater rationalization in the provision of language training. This year, for the first time, federal support is being made available for a collective effort to mount a single Southeast Asian Studies Summer Institute (SEASSI). The major Southeast Asia centers have agreed on a rotating schedule, which will place summer institutes at a series of universities over the next few years. Each year the SEASSI will provide six or more languages in intensive ten-week courses. This makes it possible to cover an en-

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tire academic year on any level during the intensive summer course, which can considerably reduce the costs of multilevel language training at any university. It will also provide a far better environment for language training than can normally be obtained when language is taught along with other courses in a normal academic year. This is an effective solution to some of the problems of low enrollment, high-cost language instruction. It may be about as far as we can go at the moment, but it will be useful both to monitor this new effort, and to induce language faculty to consider more and better efforts to provide support for similar innovations. One major constraint is the need for a stable institutional home for language faculty and language training. We cannot put language faculty in cold storage for the rest of the year and simply take them out for the summer institutes. Some combination of support for regular academic year teaching together with summer institutes seems a good allround solution. We must also consider other solutions. One might be to provide funds for language study abroad, in the region. With appropriate financial assistance, the language community could readily develop suitable contacts with Southeast Asian institutions to house American students for a term or year abroad for more intensive language training. Money will be needed, for this will often mean that students in a discipline will have to take a term or year from their regular studies to intensify their language training. In addition to the language mix of Southeast Asia, there is also the problem of variable accessibility. In the early 1950s, Burma and Indonesia were in the ascendancy and were highly accessible to foreign scholars. The Indochinese states were opening and within the decade received many new American area scholars. Malaya and the Philippines were in deep trouble with internal insurgencies, and some observers did not give them much hope for continued openness. Today that pattern has changed drastically. Vietnam, Kampuchea, and Laos are closed to foreign scholarly research; Burma is open only selectively. It appears that the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries are quite open for field work, but everywhere there are increasing central controls over field research, and it would be

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M A Y / J U N E 1985

foolish to predict no change in accessibility over the next decade. Access to field research is necessary for the maintenance of serious area scholarship. W h e n the field is closed, there is an important reduction in the attraction necessary to bring a constant supply of new young students into the field. Southeast Asia will continue for some time to be plagued with problems o f access. There is little that can be done about this in the region, but there are important steps to be taken in the United States to assure the continued flow of new students into the area despite periods o f nonaccess to the field. The solution to the problem at this time has been a relatively easy and inexpensive one, and we could give some consideration to continuing it. The Association for Asian Studies (AAS) has a small grants program to support the scholarly meetings of its country committees. For example, Burmese studies remains alive today because a small group of scholars with A A S support continues to meet to present papers and exchange views and ideas. Increasing support to the A A S for its country committees appears to be a good idea. It has an additional advantage to recommend it. As we saw in the case of Vietnam, when an area becomes strategically significant, it becomes somewhat fashionable. This would not be a disadvantage, except that the fashion tends to support policy and strategy-relevant issues, and to neglect other important issues. The maintenance of country committees can help to sustain a broad base of interest in a country and in the variety of issues that do not at any one time appear so policy-relevant.

There is the issue of the role o f the humanities in Southeast Asian studies. Southeast A s i a is not unique in this respect, but humanistic studies are clearly crucial for a broader and deeper understanding o f the region. One can far better understand Indonesian policy and politics, as well as a broad range o f social and economic conditions, if one understands the structure of gamelan music, and the dramatization o f the wayang. Vietnamese literature, poetry, and music offer deep insights into that nation, which we too often neglected during our rush of Vietnamese studies. An understanding of Thai and Burmese life and its issues is greatly enhanced by familiarity with Buddhism and its history in the region. These are instrumental arguments for the support o f the humanities. We would not by any means wish to overemphasize these or to use them exclusively. There are good reasons for humanistic studies in their own right, as integral parts o f international or area studies. Nonetheless, we have all experienced the rise of hardheaded questions of utility in area studies, and would be well advised to recognize the weight of utilitarian arguments for humanistic studies. They abound in Southeast Asia. Without the humanities, our area studies would be truncated and half blind. []

Gayl D . Ness is with the Southeast Asian Studies Center and director of the Program for Population Planning at the Umversitv of Michigan. Ann Arbor.

South Asia Richard D. Lambert

long with the rapid development of language and area studies in general, and in part reflecting the period of high American interest in economic development in South Asian countries, there was a major expansion in the number of programs, students, and specialists in the 1960s and 1970s. As in the other area studies groups, this growth was uneven. Under the broad rubric o f South Asian studies, the overwhelming proportion o f specialists and students concentrated on India, rather than Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, and the Himalayan s t a t e s - Nepal, Bhutan, Sikkim. All of these countries are technically within the domain of South Asian studies, but only India and, to a lesser extent Pakistan, are well represented in the teaching and research about South Asia. Even the set of scholars who used to spend time in sev-

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eral o f the countries of the region, and thus had areawide skills, have tended to give way to country-specific competencies. In studies o f India, there has developed a tradition of region-specific rather than national-level competencies, and there has been an increase in the proportion o f scholars studying South India; formerly, most scholars concentrated on the northern half of the subcontinent. This growing country and regional specialization has in part been the result of the growth of a set of professional standards increasingly accepted throughout the field. Even though English is still widely used in the subcontinent, recognized South Asia specialists must now have a c o m m a n d of the language o f the area in which they are working. This standard was not so widely accepted a decade ago. One consequence o f this develop-