Methodology and Research Practice in Southeast Asian Studies.

• Author: Hamayotsu, Kikue
• Position: Book review

Methodology and Research Practice in Southeast Asian Studies. Edited by Mikko Huotari, Jurgen Ruland and Judith Schlehe. Houndsmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Hardcover: 334pp.

Over the past decade, the discipline of Southeast Asian Studies has grappled with the tension--real or perceived--between universalistic disciplinary knowledge and area-specific inter-disciplinary knowledge production. What is the function and future of area studies, and Southeast Asian Studies in particular, in the process of knowledge accumulation? Is it a coherent research method, research agenda or simply a scholarly identity? Is it still relevant and useful as a field of studies and/or an institutional foundation? If so, how can scholars and students of Southeast Asian Studies come to terms with, and reconcile, this tension in order to make a contribution to knowledge accumulation and dissemination that is more broadly relevant? In particular, are there any practical methodologies that area experts could deploy to generate "context-sensitive practices of social science knowledge"? (p. 1) What do these methods look like?

This volume, edited by three German scholars, is an effort to answer these pressing questions which are relevant to Southeast Asian scholars around the world. Fourteen chapters (including Mikko Huatari's introduction), contributed by nineteen scholars primarily based or trained in Germany and Southeast Asia, seek to advance and advocate different methodologies, approaches and strategies based on their own research and teaching experiences to generate "context-sensitive practices of social science knowledge" in Southeast Asian Studies, and possibly to overcome the aforementioned tension between disciplinary and area-studies boundaries. In short, it is a collective enterprise among those who care about the region to reinvigorate and re-emphasize the utility and meaning of Southeast Asian Studies as a field of study, and to search and invent workable methodologies to this end. According to Huatari, this volume intends to cultivate and advocate a "middle-ground" position (p. 11), and what can be characterized as "situated methodologies" (p. 4) that bridge universalizing and particularizing tendencies within the field of Southeast Asian Studies.

Although the overall goal and sentiment is commonly shared among all the contributing authors, differences and disagreements are evident in terms of how to achieve this goal, and what purposes...