Eric C. Thompson - "Writing a Story of Southeast Asia"

In this talk, the author discusses the writing of The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press, 2024). The book is an historical anthropology of the region and its people. While using a historical-chronological structure, it outlines a series of themes which have created the region as we know it today: migration and settlement, trade and industry, state building (and state avoidance), adoption of popular religions, gender and kinship relationships, contested sovereignty, and modernity. Although written in a clear narrative language with a broad (popular, undergraduate) audience in mind, the book touches on many ongoing debates in Southeast Asian studies and other disciplines and makes arguments (mostly implicit or in passim) for the framing of these debates (e.g. around periodization, agency, identity, and gender/kinship). The author will discuss several of these (and invites discussion of others): What were the motivations of writing the book and the positionality of the author? Why attend to an exceptionally longue durée? What are the “strange parallels” between the adoption and spread of Theravada, Islam, Confucianism, and Christianity in the region? How does Southeast Asia make us rethink the relationship between modernity and gender relations? How can we (and should we) put colonialism in its place? And of course, what in the heck was Sriwijaya?

Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (2007) and The Story of Southeast Asia (2024), co-author of Awareness and Attitudes toward ASEAN (2007) and Do Young People Know ASEAN? (2016), and co-editor Southeast Asian Anthropologies (2019) and Asian Smallholders: Persistence and Transformation (2019) among other publications.