Anticolonialism in Southeast Asia

In the early 1960s, shifts within Southeast Asian studies began promoting research that sought an alternative approach to the ways in which Southeast Asian culture and history had been conceptualized by earlier scholars. Following the call of John Smail to produce histories of Southeast Asia that were not bound to the European narratives, chronologies, and categories of analysis, scholars began directing their attention to writing about and studying what they perceived as indigenous history, which had finally attained its "autonomy" from the priorities and perspective of European-centered history. This trend affected the way in which anticolonialism came to be understood, in that Southeast Asian conceptions of resistance and protest were now being studied for what they revealed about the region's cultural heritage and conceptions of the world. Where scholars might have considered how revolts inspired by Islamic, Buddhist, or Christian ideas operated under the rubric of nationalism, emphasis was now directed toward understanding how these mentalities revealed something about the very nature of Southeast Asian culture.

This new direction in thinking led scholars to write some of the most important works about anticolonialism and Southeast Asian culture. For example, Reynaldo C. Ileto, author of the seminal work Payson and Revolution, studied the ways in which Filipino-Catholic conceptions of rebellion were articulated through the imagery, scenes, and narratives associated with the Passion story of Christ. It inspired a new interest in millenarianism, or the idea of the coming millennium (or end of the world/cycle), and its relation to religious anticolonial movements. Historians such as Emanuel Sarkisyanz demonstrated how Buddhist conceptions about the end of the world framed the way Burmese made sense of the rapid social and economic changes occurring around them and how the notion of a future Buddha was associated with leaders promising a return to precolonial social norms. Michael Adas would take this paradigm and extend it comparatively within the region and beyond, showing in his Prophets of Rebellion that anticolonial movements were forged by the charismatic leadership of men who used religious notions of the millennium in order to gain popular support among the peasantry. Most importantly, these studies and many others began using the idea of anticolonialism in order to flesh out what were perceived as indigenous conceptions of the Southeast Asian world.