Making Southeast Asia: Crossing disciplines and bridging gaps or the blind men and the elephant

Résumé En

For scholars such as T. Pepinsky (2016), “The first principle of Southeast Asian Studies is the very artificiality of the concept of ‘Southeast Asia’”— a position which took form in 1945. Whether from an ethnic, religious, political or economic point of view, contemporary Southeast Asia appears a highly heterogeneous region indeed. More, the ‘artificiality’ of Southeast Asia would be corroborated by the recent use (World War Two) of the term itself. However, this approach remains largely superficial, as previously illustrated (among others) by researchers such as Jean Przyluski, Denys Lombard or Anthony Reid. The term ‘Southeast Asia’ appeared much earlier than the 20th century, in 1826 (in Andreas von Merian’s Synglosse: oder Grundsätze der Sprachforschung), at the crossroad of two new disciplines, ethnology and linguistics. It implied that the region represented more than a mere extension of India beyond the gulf of Bengal (conversely to previous terminology) —a statement comforted by the use of the Persian term Zirbadad (the land below the wind’) since the 17th century including in some Western cartography. The application of a few basic disciplines of social sciences (such as physical geography, history, archaeology, ethnology, literature) to the so-called ‘Southeast Asia’ reveals the structuration as well as the delimitation and margins of a specific cultural area, thus preventing observers from acting as in the parable of the blind men and the elephant (Udana VI.4, Tittha Sutta), in which each of the blindmen grasped a part of the beast, ignoring thus the very existence of the elephant as a whole.