Southeast Asia: Table of Contents
(Important: If you plan to attend, please pick up and read in advance the roundtable’s brief statements available on the AAS literature table in the exhibit hall.)
Organizer and Chair: Donald K. Emmerson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
Discussants: Robert Cribb, Nordic Institute of Asian Studies; Anne Booth, University of London; Ahmad D. Habir, Institut Pengembangan Manejemen, Indonesia; Vedi Hadiz, Murdoch University; Donald K. Emmerson, University of Wisconsin, Madison
This roundtable—part of a back-to-back panel with session 145—will explore broad controversies of Indonesian political economy. The prepositions "Beyond" and "Beneath" distinguish the two panels. "Beyond" goes beyond the personality of Soeharto to address the New Order broadly as a general system with its own history, economy, politics, and policies. "Beneath" focuses below the elite level on specific issues of governance, politics, religion, and ethnicity. The panelists on "Beyond" are mainly senior scholars; those on "Beneath" are for the most part junior scholars. "Beyond" will entertain contested concepts such as nationalism, capitalism, and democracy as these relate to Indonesia in the past, present, and future. "Beneath" will mobilize ground-level empirical evidence, gathered primarily through dissertation field research, on behalf of arguments regarding subelite and subnational phenomena. These are roomy contrasts; "Beyond"ers will deal in evidence, and "Beneath"ers will be free to speculate. But each panel’s distinctive comparative advantage should enhance the impact (synergy) of their placement back-to-back.
"Beyond" will deviate from the standard AAS panel in two ways: Format: Papers will not be summarized. Instead each presenter will have no more than ten minutes to offer an argument that answers a controversial question linking two concepts (e.g., nationalism and modernity). The discussant will evaluate these answers critically in no more than fifteen minutes. That will leave more than an hour for open discussion. Nationality: None of the panel’s active members is a U.S. citizen or working in the U.S. That should be refreshing at a meeting convened at the inside-the-Beltway nexus of uniquely—parochially?—American policy thinking about Indonesia.