Historical Thought and Historiography: Southeast Asia

Anthony Reid

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

    Abstract

    Southeast Asian literary traditions, extant from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, included Chinese-style dynastic histories, narratives of Buddhist sacred sites, and royal chronicles influenced by both Buddhist and Islamic patterns. More modern types of religious and secular narratives developed by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For some of these, we can trace the external stimuli, but others appear to have developed autonomously. These traditions were overwhelmed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by Western narratives taught in colonial schools, often of a triumphalist imperial kind. These were adapted for their own purposes by Marxist and nationalist writers intent on change. Initially ignorant, embarrassed, or romantic about the older indigenous writing, Southeast Asias new national historians rediscovered the great diversity of these traditions as they became professionalized with the development of university systems. International historians writing in English remain influential in these professional circles, particularly in the growing fields of social, intellectual, economic, and environmental history and transnational trends across the region. Controversies continue to swirl around the definition of the nation, violent traumas such as 196566 in Indonesia and 197578 in Cambodia, and the monarchy in Thailand.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationInternational Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences (2nd ed)
    EditorsWilliam A. Darity
    Place of PublicationDetroit
    PublisherMacMillan Reference USA
    Pages82-88
    Volume9
    Edition2nd
    ISBN (Print)9780028661179
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - 2008

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