Revisiting Power in a Southeast Asian Landscape – Discussant’s Comments

ABSTRACT

Going back a half century to the classic essays of Benedict Anderson (‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’) and Lucien Hanks (‘Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order’) shows both the value and the limitations of anthropology’s move to meaning and increasingly intensive, site-specific fieldwork. While Anderson and Hanks pioneered the study of indigenous meanings, an approach which came to dominate Southeast Asian anthropology and area studies, they did so from a broadly comparative regional perspective unlike today’s culture-specific approach and its stand-alone ethnographies. Their breadth suggests why Anderson and Hanks’s insights into just two cultures have enlightened research all across the region and beyond. Here, to build on their work, our analysis suggests Javanese and Thai notions of power are variations on a regional complex wherein Southeast Asians domesticate power to lead a safe, prosperous and moral life in an otherwise dangerous and amoral world. More broadly, Anderson and Hanks’s essays exemplify how a regional perspective can help us improve as fieldworkers and advance as theorists. In the end, better ethnography will require better ethnology and area studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Power
• Southeast Asia
• regional comparison
• ethnology
• cultural regions

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Later, reflecting back on these earlier works, Anderson (1990, 11) observed ‘each contains a partial truth’ but he was ‘as yet unable to see how these fragments might intelligently be linked together’.

2 Although that name never caught on, his thinking did. The idea foreshadows Wolters’ (1997) ‘men of prowess’, a widely recognized regional pattern.

3 Do these features characterize Southeast Asia or only an encounter between Southeast Asia and two Western academics? Even if it’s only the latter, that’s not nothing. Yet Hanks and Anderson were not just Westerners, as indeed no one is, but sophisticated scholars, gifted fieldworkers, seasoned culture-crossers, and deeply reflective individuals. So if it is humanly possible to understand a culture other than one’s own, it is reasonable for us to ‘work with’ Hanks and Anderson’s possibly tainted observations just as they worked with the flawed sources that made their essays possible. I say ‘work with,’ not simply accept, because as we know more than their pioneering efforts, we can improve on their evidence and reasoning in ways they could not foresee.

4 This primordial principle would seem to ground the region’s civil pluralism (Jonsson 2020) in the right of all groups to prosper and protect themselves. Can we call this a moral principle? Durkheim would, and I don’t know how better to characterize it. That said, the sceptical may wish to keep moral and amoral in scare quotes, as the previous paragraph did.