Revisiting Power in a Southeast Asian Landscape – Discussant’s Comments

Abstract

ABSTRACT Going back a half century to the classic essays of Benedict Anderson (‘The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture’) and Lucien Hanks (‘Merit and Power in the Thai Social Order’) shows both the value and the limitations of anthropology’s move to meaning and increasingly intensive, site-specific fieldwork. While Anderson and Hanks pioneered the study of indigenous meanings, an approach which came to dominate Southeast Asian anthropology and area studies, they did so from a broadly comparative regional perspective unlike today’s culture-specific approach and its stand-alone ethnographies. Their breadth suggests why Anderson and Hanks’s insights into just two cultures have enlightened research all across the region and beyond. Here, to build on their work, our analysis suggests Javanese and Thai notions of power are variations on a regional complex wherein Southeast Asians domesticate power to lead a safe, prosperous and moral life in an otherwise dangerous and amoral world. More broadly, Anderson and Hanks’s essays exemplify how a regional perspective can help us improve as fieldworkers and advance as theorists. In the end, better ethnography will require better ethnology and area studies.