The term ‘Southeast Asia’ has come to cover all Asian countries south of China and east of India, an area of some 4.5 million square kilometres. As of 1985, this region was estimated to have a population of 404 million, of whom 243 million lived in Island Southeast Asia (including peninsular Malaysia) and 160 million in Mainland Southeast Asia.
The region is cross-cut by several significant oppositions. First, the inhabitants of Island Southeast Asia overwhelmingly speak languages belonging to the Austronesian language family, while those of the Mainland speak languages belonging to the Austroasiatic (Mon-Khmer), Tai and Tibeto-Burman families. Second, the region may be divided into four religious zones, with Catholic Christianity dominant in the Philippines; Sunni Islam of the Shafiite school of law in Indonesia, Malaysia and Brunei; Theravada Buddhism in Burma, Thailand, Laos and Cambodia; and strong Confucian influences in Vietnam and Singapore. All these countries have large religious and cultural minorities, however, Burma being the most diverse. Third, techno-economic differences cross-cut both of the previous two divisions. Everywhere one finds a contrast between ‘hill people’ practising shifting cultivation, ‘valley people’ practising irrigated rice cultivation, and ‘coastal people’ who were historically orientated to fishing and maritime trade. Of these three sets of divisions, the last is most relevant for understanding the theoretical issues that Southeast Asia has raised for anthropology.
Techno-economic adaptations
Rice is the desired staple food throughout Southeast Asia and may well have originated there. Rice can be grown on steep mountain slopes like maize or in deep pools of water (see Geertz 1963). Shifting cultivation in most of Southeast Asia supports a population density of only about 130 per square kilometre (Conklin 1957). This compares with population densities in some wetrice growing areas of Java of nearly 2,000 per square kilometre. The difference in overall densities is due to the fact that shifting cultivation requires that over 90 per cent of land be held in fallow at any one time. Thus while wet rice farmers far outnumber shifting cultivators throughout Southeast Asia, they are confined to a relatively small part of each nation’s territory. This can give rise to ethnic conflicts when pioneer farmers penetrate the highlands in search of new land.
Hill people
The low population densities characteristic of highland shifting cultivation have made it difficult for elite groups to establish much control over the majority. While highland societies were often stratified as nobles, commoners and slaves, commoners typically outnumbered nobles and slaves combined. Order was maintained chiefly through the institution of the blood feud. One of the issues this raised early in Island Southeast Asia was how feuds were organized in societies lacking unilineal descent groups.
Beginning in 1919, Barton published extensively on the Kalinga and Ifugao of northern Luzon, showing how an elaborate system of peace pacts had developed to regulate tribal warfare between autonomous villages structured only as an interlinking series of bilateral kindreds (Barton 1919). Further clarification of the concept of bilateral kindred and of the implications of kindred endogamy were made by Freeman writing on the Iban of Sarawak, and in a symposium organized by Murdock.
This discussion provoked a re-evaluation of descent group theory as it had been developed in the 1930s and 1940s on the basis of Australian and African models by Radcliffe-Brown, Fortes, and others. More recently, a number of authors have tried to move the discussion away from a consideration of the idiom of descent and filiation alone, and towards a consideration of the symbolic structures associated with other types of relationship such as siblingship (McKin-ley 1981), twinship (Errington 1989), conjugality and companionship (Gibson 1986).
A different sort of criticism of unilineal descent group theory was generated by the work of Southeast Asianists on patterns of marriage which the Dutch called ^’circulating connubium’ in eastern Indonesia (van Wouden 1968 [1935]), the British called "f’matrilateral cross-cousin marriage’ in highland Burma (Leach 1954) and Levi-Strauss called ^’generalized exchange’ (see alliance). Working largely independently of one another at first, these authors showed that rules specifying whom one should marry, and inherited relations between affines, were central to the social, political and ideological structure of certain societies. This appeared to contrast with Africa, where Fortes argued that affinity merely generated a ‘web of kinship’ ties for individuals that cross-cut descent group affiliation.
More recently Levi-Strauss has generated a new debate about kinship systems in the area by postulating that the institution of the noble house as it developed in medieval France and Japan provides a more general model for societies in transition between kinship-based tribal societies and class-based state societies. His arguments have proven highly stimulating to a number of Southeast Asianists in the last decade (see papers in Carsten and Hugh-Jones 1995).
At the level of religion, two institutions that are widespread in highland Southeast Asia from Assam to New Guinea have attracted anthropological attention. These are competitive feasting (see Leach 1954) and headhunting. Headhunting has been subject to a variety of ‘explanations’ over the years. In recent decades, M. Rosaldo provided the most detailed account of the beliefs and practices associated with headhunting in a specific society, the Ilongot of northern Luzon (Rosaldo 1980, and see references therein to other approaches).
Valley people
There is little evidence that wet rice technology in and of itself requires the large-scale intervention of a central government to organize waterworks or mobilize large work gangs, at least in Southeast Asia (pace Wittfogel’s concept of Oriental despotism). Complex irrigation works can be built and maintained by egalitarian village communities, and have been well described in Bali, Sri Lanka, northern Luzon and elsewhere (see Conklin 1980 for a particularly stunning example). Indeed, the type of local knowledge of the environment that is required for traditional rice-farming means that production tends to decline the more outside bureaucrats get involved. Just as in Europe, the traditional state in Asia tended to appropriate the agricultural surplus after it had been produced by local peasants.
Dove (1985) argues that the reason wet rice cultivation was so often associated with a ‘despotic’ state was not a techno-environmental one, but a military one: unlike shifting cultivators, wet rice cultivators were tied to the land by the massive investment they and their ancestors had made in it. It was not population growth which led to the switch from shifting cultivation to wet rice agriculture, which then made possible the development of the state, but the development of the state which led to wet rice agriculture, which made possible the growth of population.
From the beginning of the Christian era, the Southeast Asian rulers of inland states have looked to neighbouring regions for new political and ideological techniques to consolidate their legitimacy. In the period between ad 200 and 1200 this chiefly took the form of Saivite Hinduism from South India combined with local forms of Mahayana Buddhism (Coedes 1968 [1944]). In local interpretations, the ruler was conceived as an incarnation of Siva and/or Buddha. The traditional state of both Mainland and Island Southeast Asia was conceived as a mandala focused on the person of the king and surrounded in concentric circles by his palace, capital city, realm and cosmos (Heine-Geldern 1943). Everywhere in Southeast Asia, clearly indigenous forms of spirit cults persisted alongside the world religions emanating from the royal courts. Further complicating the religious picture, from about 1300 on, court elites in Island Southeast Asia increasingly turned away from the old Hindu-Buddhist models towards Islam, while those on the Mainland turned towards a revitalized form of Theravada Buddhism emanating from Sri Lanka. Both religions had a more egalitarian bias to them and reduced the stature of the king. Only on the island of Bali did something like the old Hindu complex survive. After the Spanish founded a permanent colony in the Philippines, those islands were rapidly converted to Catholicism, putting an end to the Islamic principalities that had taken root as far north as Manila by 1500. It was the ‘syncretism’ of "animist, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic and Christian beliefs that posed the primary theoretical problem for early students of lowland culture and religion.
In the 1950s, Geertz (1960) found that the complexity of religion in Java required a more sophisticated approach to religion than the Durkheimian one then in fashion. He drew heavily on Weber instead, and mapped out a triadic scheme in which occupation correlated with religious tendency. While 90 per cent of Javanese claimed to be Muslim, peasants tended towards animist forms, merchants towards orthodox Islamic forms, and bureaucrats descended from the old court elites towards Hindu-Buddhist forms. His work has since been criticized for leaning too heavily on what a small group of ‘modernist’ Muslims belonging to the Muham-madiyah organization considers orthodox, but it remains a pioneering attempt to cover a complex social and religious field.
"Tambiah has covered similar material for the Mainland Buddhist states, starting with a monograph on the co-existence of Theravada Buddhism, Brahmanic ritual, and spirit cults in Thailand (1970), and following with a monograph on the historical relations between Buddhist monks and the state (1976). For the Philippines, the best work on the reception of Catholicism by lowland Filipinos continues to be done by historians (Ileto 1979).
Coastal people
During certain periods maritime peoples occupying a narrow coastal zone have dominated long-distance trade through the region. Such societies were intermediate in scale and complexity between those of the Hill and Valley peoples. Settlements and dynasties were evanescent: the great trading empire of Sri Vijaya that dominated the straits of Malacca from the seventh century until the fourteenth century left so little trace that its very existence was only established in 1918 by Coedes. Great sums of movable wealth, in the form of spices, slaves and bullion passed through the hands of the merchant princes, but there was little fixed capital.
The societies that trace their origin back to these coastal states are more flexible and competitive than the inland societies, and more hierarchical than the highland societies. The peculiar mix of ascription and fierce competition in the ranking system was described by Erring-ton (1989) for the Bugis of south Sulawesi. She shows how hypergamous marriage functions as a means of validating the ascriptive rank of women and as an opportunity for men to convert achieved status into socially acknowledged ascribed rank.
It was these societies which first confronted European competition in military technology and in trade. Historians have shown that for a good 200 years after the Portuguese conquered Malacca in 1512 the competition was evenly balanced on land. European naval technology was comparatively more advanced, but was unable to gain a final victory over local ‘pirates’ until the introduction of the steamboat in the 1840s. During this period, huge numbers of villagers from both the highlands and the lowlands were captured and sold as slaves by predatory raiders drawn from these coastal societies. The structure of these coastal states was described in functionalist terms by Gullick for western Malaya (1958).
Colonialism and nationalism
Beginning in the eighteenth century, European powers began investing directly in the production of cash crops, with the Dutch instituting forced coffee cultivation in western Java and the Spanish enacting a tobacco monopoly in the Philippines. Plantation production of sugar, tobacco, rubber and palm oil grew apace in the nineteenth century under conditions described by Stoler in Sumatra (1985) and Geertz in Java (1963). Colonial powers began to train native bureaucrats to staff a more intrusive state, and tax collection was rationalized to the point where peasants were made to bear more of the risk of bad harvests, leading to frequent outbreaks of peasant rebellion. These rebellions were analysed by many American political scientists in the wake of the Vietnam War. Many of them employed anthropological methods, with the best example being the work by Scott on the effects of the ‘green revolution’ on a Malaysian village (1985). Ileto takes a more cultural and symbolic approach to revolution, and to nationalism, in the Philippines (1979).
