Scholarly Viewpoints, featuring

What intrigues me about the ways in which the questions are posed is that they assume that we all work in disciplines. Since I have been given the welcome opportunity to present a "scholarly viewpoint" on Asia Pacific I would like to take a rather different tack. I want to make reference to certain recent developments in and contributions to what has come to be referred to as the multidisciplinary field of "area studies," which was promoted vigorously in the United States during the Cold War period and became increasingly important in institutional academic development in Western Europe, Australia, Japan and in Southeast Asia from the 1950s and 1960s. Since the 1970s, however, the popularity of this field of studies has tended to wane in the West, following the American departure from Indochina and then the end of the Cold War, and the questioning of the value and validity of teaching and research in regional studies by representatives of Western governments and the sponsors of scholarly activity. With the apparent undermining of the rationale for area studies, doubts were expressed about its theoretical and methodological rigour and whether or not area studies practitioners possessed the willingness and the academic capacity and expertise to respond to the major challenges posed by a fast-moving and globalising world. In short, opinions in the West began to turn against regional studies and it came to be seen as old-fashioned, conservative, parochial and poorly equipped to address and understand the social, cultural, economic and political issues and problems of a post-modern world. Paranoia, anxiety and a feeling of crisis set in among the area studies community, which resulted in an outpouring of publications in the 1970s and 1980s defending regions and those who studied them

The Middle Class In Southeast Asia: Diversities, Identities, Comparisons And The Vietnamese Case

Much interest has been devoted since the 1980s to the new urban, educated middle class in Southeast Asia which has emerged primarily as a result of stateled modernization and capitalist transformation. These processes have also been occurring recently in the former centralized socialist economies of Southeast Asia mainland. However, there has not been a great deal of comparative region-wide research on the new middle class and we still know very little about such countries as Vietnam. As Lui proposes we must explore the "richness of class analysis….by probing people's values, outlook, lifestyles, moral perspectives, perceptions of social change and political choices" (2006: 47). As part of a research project which examines the diversities and changing identities of the new middle class in the region, this paper presents some initial thoughts on the problems of defining and delimiting the middle orders of society and some preliminary findings on the young educated middle class in the hitherto neglected case of Vietnam

Identities, Nations and Ethnicities: A Critical Comparative Study from Southeast Asia

The paper focuses on images of identity in Southeast Asia and argues that it is analytically useful to distinguish these identities and their"modes of representation" at different levels or scales of magnitude. In this regard, it is necessary to examine images of nationhood or the identities expressed and displayed at the national level in interaction with identities at the sub-national level which comprise what are usually referred to as ethnic groups or alternatively "peoples" or "communities". Identity and its specific expression in “ethnicity†comprises a form of social cleavage and is a means of organizing social and cultural relations and encounters in terms of similarity and difference. It is argued that identity cannot exist apart from the establishment and maintenance of "cultural difference" and the construction and operation of boundaries, and is generated and sustained in relationships, both at the level of ideas and in practice with others who are perceived to be and categorized as "not us" or "other". In other words, the ways in which identity and ethnicity in particular operate are "relational". Comparative case-studies are taken from Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand to illustrate these propositions

Tourism And Erik Cohen In Thailand: Comparisons, Impacts, Mobilities And Encounters

The leading scholar in research in the feld of tourism in Thailand is Professor Erik Cohen. Not only has he contributed to the store of empirical material on Thailand on a wide range of tourism-related subjects, but he has been involved in an important series of debates about theories and paradigms in the sociologicalanthropological study of tourism. These debates examine the appropriate concepts to be deployed in understanding leisure activities and the transformations which tourism has set in motion. In tourism studies, there are several key ideas which have preoccupied researchers, many of them in relation to Thailand, to do with cultural “touristifcation” and commodifcation; imaging and representation; staging and authenticity; identity and ethnicity; host-guest relations; mediation and tour guides; trajectories of change; sequential typologies; and the tourist gaze. A most recent set of discussions generated by Erik Cohen and Scott Cohen has considered the utility of the sociological concept of mobilities and the problem of Eurocentrism in understanding local-level touristic encounters. The paper will critically review these concepts and provide contextual material on the development of tourism in Thailand during the past four decades. Until recently tourism in Thailand has tended to focus on selected sites along an axis which includes the northern hill or “tribal” regions, Chiang Mai and its environs, the greater Bangkok metropolitan area, and several beach and island resorts in southern Thailand, subjects which Erik Cohen has examined in considerable detail

Tourism And Erik Cohen In Thailand: Comparisons, Impacts, Mobilities And Encounters

The leading scholar in research in the feld of tourism in Thailand is Professor Erik Cohen. Not only has he contributed to the store of empirical material on Thailand on a wide range of tourism-related subjects, but he has been involved in an important series of debates about theories and paradigms in the sociologicalanthropological study of tourism. These debates examine the appropriate concepts to be deployed in understanding leisure activities and the transformations which tourism has set in motion. In tourism studies, there are several key ideas which have preoccupied researchers, many of them in relation to Thailand, to do with cultural “touristifcation” and commodifcation; imaging and representation; staging and authenticity; identity and ethnicity; host-guest relations; mediation and tour guides; trajectories of change; sequential typologies; and the tourist gaze. A most recent set of discussions generated by Erik Cohen and Scott Cohen has considered the utility of the sociological concept of mobilities and the problem of Eurocentrism in understanding local-level touristic encounters. The paper will critically review these concepts and provide contextual material on the development of tourism in Thailand during the past four decades. Until recently tourism in Thailand has tended to focus on selected sites along an axis which includes the northern hill or “tribal” regions, Chiang Mai and its environs, the greater Bangkok metropolitan area, and several beach and island resorts in southern Thailand, subjects which Erik Cohen has examined in considerable detail

The Coronavirus Pandemic and Tourism in Southeast Asia: Case Material from Malaysia

During the past two decades there has been a substantial literature published on a range of crises in Southeast Asia and how these have affected the tourism industry in the region. These crises comprise natural and environmental disasters, epidemics and pandemics, drastic downturns in the world economy, and terrorism and political conflict. The latest peril is the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic; it has especially serious consequences for tourism development. Since the SARS epidemic of 2002-2004 the Southeast Asian economies have become increasingly integrated into those of East Asia; specifically, China’s contribution to tourism in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) has grown exponentially. In this paper some of the most significant literature on crises and tourism in Southeast Asia is examined, with a focus on the East Asian market taking case material on the impacts of the pandemic on one particular part of Malaysia, the state of Sabah, which has enjoyed substantial success in attracting Chinese and Korean tourists to northern Borneo. Some of the policy and practical responses to the effects on the tourism industry are also considered