Colonialism

Scholars continue to add to this discursive body of colonial knowledge, which has only recently and sporadically been problematized. Exploring the contexts in which much of this knowledge was produced has led to new questions about what is actually known about the region and new perspectives in which the scholarly understanding of colonialism in Southeast Asia might be expanded. These sentiments suggest that colonialism and colonial society can be studied from colonialism's cultural forms—its institutions, languages, ideas, economies, and literary representations—to reveal new perspectives about the processes of change and continuity. Proponents for this anthropology of colonialism suggest that by understanding how Southeast Asia was made through "scholarship," one can get a sense of colonialism and the effects of that encounter with the peoples and cultures of the region.

At the same time, considerable effort has been spent on delineating the actual conditions on the ground, which were much more complicated than perhaps official documents or earlier studies attempted to convey. Scholars have shifted their emphasis on rebellions as the sole sign of protest to show that resistance, subversion, and circumvention was occurring in an everyday fashion in everyday settings. Inconsistent policies toward Southeast Asians in rural and urban settings intensified incoherency, mismanagement, and competition among colonial officials while exacerbating tensions between metropole (European capitals) and colonial capitals. It is with this last trend where the idea of colonialism has taken its most current shape. Scholars within Southeast Asian studies are beginning to examine how competing interests, agendas, and concerns within colonial communities produced different boundaries in colonial society, while the contestation of categories has led to the understanding that the differences between European and Southeast Asian were created, defined, and maintained. Hybridity has not hidden the scholarly reemphasis on European colonialism within a Southeast Asian world, but if historiography repeats itself as much as history seems to, one can anticipate further studies of "Southeast Asian" hybridity in the colonial setting to emerge in the future.