Prqfessor Syed Hussein Alatas

Local and Global:

Social Transformation in
Southeast Asia
Essays in Honour of
Professor Syed Hussein Alatas
Edited by
Riaz Hassan
BRILL
LEIDEN BOSTON
2005
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA:
THE LONG VIEW
Geoffrey Benjamin
I
In the same year as I began my own involvement in Southeast Asian
studies, Syed Hussein Alatas published a critical essay on scholarly
perceptions of the region that was in advance of its time (Alatas
1964).1 Alatas argued that interpretations of Southeast Asian social
history had exhibited the easy stereotyping that comes from adopt-
ing diffusionist theories of cultural development in place of under-
standings generated by sociological and anthropological studies of
daily life. This had led many of the writers to propose, arbitrarily,
that almost all cultural innovations had been imported ready-made
from outside the region. Alatas showed, to the contrary, that the
rather thin archaeological and documentary data then available could
just as well have supported explanations based on local social process
and cultural innovation. Research since the 1960s has re-affirmed
Alatas's not denying the role of inputs (both mate-
rial and ideational) from outside the region, where these can be firmly
demonstrated by empirical research.
My main concern in this essay is with the different types of socio-
religious patterns that have been followed in Southeast Asia since
early times. The underlying mode-of-orientation theory has been pre-
sented in greater detail elsewhere (Benjamin 1993: 348-350). In its
most explicit form, this approach recognises four distinct modes of
orientation: the Transcendental, Immanent, Dialectical, and Zen.
I I would like to acknowledge my appreciation of Professor Alatas's readiness to
discuss broader issues of Southeast Asian sociology with me at the Bukit Timah
campus of the former University of Singapore, and again at Kent Ridge, between the
1960s and the 1980s. He was the only scholar at the time in Singapore who had
an active interest in the study of longer-term social and cultural process, in the
Weberian tradition that later came to occupy much of my own attention.
262
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
These labels identify the different ways in which people's attention
structures are institutionalised: outward, inward, or dialectically (as
the case may be). The institutionalisation takes place through processes
usually described as 'cultural'-as if they just 'happened'. But I would
prefer to recognise these patterns as resulting from political action
undertaken in specific historical and social contexts.
Because the different modes of orientation generate distinct pat-
terns of interpersonal attention and interactional style, those who
wish to achieve and maintain power for themselves within a poliry
(a social network institutionalised or thought of as a power-domi-
nated domain) will strive to establish just one of the orientational
modes as the over-arching mode in the culture of the people they
wish to dominate. This they will do by actively (though not neces-
sarily thinkingly) reshaping those patterns of action and communi-
cation that generate the different orientational modes in the dominated
individuals' ontogeny. If this succeeds, they will have created a regime--
a culture actively systematised by sanction-backed restrictions, so that
only one of the possible modes of orientation remains capable of
overt and public 'matter-of-fact' expression, whatever the individu-
als involved may privately feel.
2
(A structured 'regime' thus comes
to bear the same relation to an unstructured 'culture' as a controlled
'polity' does to an uncontrolled social network or 'society'.)
In polities where the political domination is limited (as, for exam-
ple, in many 'tribal' communities) the dialectical mode will usually
prevail. Where the domination is strong, however, tendentiousness
will emerge and either the transcendental or immanent mode will
usually be made to prevail.
3
If the immanent mode prevails (as it
did in some of the pre-modern states discussed below), it will be as
a means of making the populace see themselves as having no con-
cern with the ruler's actions, which can then proceed within an unin-
terfered-with domain (the court) encapsulated off from the attention
of the population at large. But if the transcendental mode prevails
2 Since each of these modes imposes coherence there can be no merging or grad-
ual transition between them: only leaps are possible, i.e. flip-flops of the attention
where what was out-of-focus 'ground' a moment ago is now seen as in-focus 'figure',
and vice versa. Regime formation can therefore be viewed as an attempt to prevent
these flip-flops of attention from occurring in the dominated population. Reversals
will nevertheless continue to'Dccur, of course, whether publicly acknowledged or not.
3 The Zen mode can be ignored for the purposes of empirical social analysis; it
will not be mentioned again in this essay.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 263
(as it did in many of the pre-modern polities discussed in this essay,
as well as in the world's modern nation-states) it will be as a means
of making the people see themselves as the positively re-acting depen-
dents of some other's will-their ruler's or God's.4
For the purposes of the present essay, however, it will be appro-
priate to simplify this approach somewhat, by distinguishing two
main orientations the transcendental and the non-transcendental. ,
The latter subsumes both the immanent and dialectical modes. People
can thus base their actions EITHER (non-transcendentally) on the
immediately concrete, here-and-now elements that they perceive with
their senses OR (transcendentally) on what other people assert to be
the case, focusing their attention on things outside of their immedi-
ate situation.
5
My primary concern, then, will be with the pre-modern
conditions for the emergence of the transcendental mode-the mode
of orientation within which the modern nation-state operates.
The clearest exemplification of the difference between the tran-
scendental and non-transcendental modes of orientation can be found
in the religious sphere. The 'official' varieties of Islam and Christianity
are highly transcendental, in that their adherents' belief in God
comes, not from direct experience, but by lending assent to what
someone else has asserted to be the case.
6
There is an intrinsically
political element to this: the adherents, regardless of their own expe-
riential background, are according authority to other people to say
how things are.
In contrast, consider the non-transcendental views of the world
that are current in societies that do not regularly pay serious atten-
tion to issues situated outside their own immediate concrete reality.
4 For analyses that employ this approach explicitly see the following: Benjamin I
for long-term perspectives on variations in kinship in relation. to modes of
Benjamin 1988 for the transcendentalism of the modem 1993
for a 'transcendental' case in relation to language (Malay); Benpmm 1994 for a
'dialectical' case in relation to religion (Temiar); Benjamin in press a, for a study of
the shift from dialectical to transcendental in contemporary religious life (also Temiar).
5 This bears an obvious relation to the classical Gemeinschafll Gesellschafl distinction
and other similar theories, but the approach taken here is not so baldly dichotomous
as those theories often are. Moreover, as I have argued elsewhere (Benjamin 2002: 14-
15, Ms(a)), this particular distinction can be further referred to the more fundamental
distinction between indigeny and exogeny-a theme I shall no here.
6 There are of course differences between these two relIgIOUS tradItIOns-as
indeed there a;e within The mode-of-orientation theory proposed here is not
intended as an explanation for everything. other features must be taken into consid-
eration too when undertaking cultural comparison.
264 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
(Today, because of the pervasive influence of the modern nation-
state, few such societies remain, and only a minority of researchers
have had direct experience of them.) People living under such social
frameworks normally do not concern themselves with formulating
views of the world in terms of general principles that come from the
outside. Their view, on the contrary, is often little more than a sim-
ple description of how they actually see the world. (For an especially
clear example, see Endicott 1979 on the religion of a tribal popu-
lation in Peninsular Malaysia.) In the religious sphere, they are unlikely
to give credence to beliefs for which they cannot claim direct evi-
dence (through dreams, trance, divination, or other such concretis-
ing techniques). Their concern will be with the here-and-now rather ,
than with imposed abstract principles.
II
What are the implications of the transcendental/non-transcendental
distinction in Southeast Asia, and under what circumstances did the
different modes of orientation arise? Until the emergence of cen-
tralising political processes in some areas 2000 years ago, prehistoric
developments in Southeast Asia would have led most of the social
formations to be non-transcendental (probably mostly dialectical) in
their cultural orientation.
The adoption of agriculture and of 'neolithic' technologies in
Southeast Asia did not bring about the societal changes that are often
regarded as typical of Neolithic developments (as exhibited in India
China, West Asia and the Americas): rapid population growth:
increased division of labour, and early urbanism.
7
Despite claims to
the contrary put forward in the 1970s, agriculture was probably not
a primary development in Southeast Asia. On present evidence, it
was introduced from the coastal regions of southern China (Bellwood
1992: 91), and was based on a variety of crops, including rice. Other
local plants were also brought into domestication.
s
This early farm-
This view is suppo;t.ed by the frequent unaltered continuation of the pre-agri-
stone tool tradItIons of Southeast Asia (the Hoabinhian, etc.) into agricul-
tural tImes, and as recently as first millennium BCE in some places (Bellwood 1992:
86). 'Many Neolithic societies (such as the Maya) were undoubtedly far larger and
complex than metal-using o?es in Southeast Asia' (Bellwood 1992: 94).
Bellwood also pomts out that there IS no good archaeological evidence for agri-
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
265
ing had relatively little effect on the societal patterns that had already
emerged under the nomadic or semi-sedentary foraging regimes that
developed in the Hoabinhian period, dating to several millennia ago.
The reasons for this are still somewhat obscure, but they relate to
the particular plants and animals that were available for domestica-
tion, and with the character of the terrains on which these devel-
opments took place.
Southeast Asia is characterised by two main climatic zones (Bellwood
1992: 59-64). Within five degrees north and south of the equator,
heavy vegetation sits on poor soils that are not suitable for intensive
cultivation, and must therefore usually be dealt with by swidden
(shifting) farming. The forests contain relatively few large meat-bear-
ing mammals, and the relatively unchanging day-length precluded
the growing of rice (which is photoperiodic) until the advent of mod-
ern varieties and techniques. On the other hand, millets, tubers, sago,
coconut, banana and breadfruit were important crops. These may
have been less nutritious than rice, but they held other significant
advantages: they did not require as much land clearance as the more
light-demanding rice would have done (Bellwood 1992: 93-94), and
(being 'harvested' only as needed for consumption) they did not gen-
erate any marked demand for fixed long-term storage facilities.
Beyond the equatorial zone, the climate is seasonal, with a marked
dry period. The vegetation is therefore lighter, the soils less damaged
by leaching and hard-pan formation, and the terrain more suitable
for large meat-bearing mammals. Rice cultivation (which had first
developed in southern China between 5000 and 3000 BCE) was taken
up in these parts of mainland Southeast Asia and Taiwan at various
times from around 3000 BCE. But it was only one of several crops,
for the people also cultivated millets, cotton, sugarcane, some legumes,
the greater yam (Dioscorea) , and perhaps taro. The archaeological evi-
dence suggests that early rice was not grown universally throughout
the region, and that its adoption was not due to the pressure of pop-
ulation growth, as some writers have suggested. It seems to have
been favoured initially because it was especially suited to natural
swampland and alluvial plains-land that would otherwise have
culture based purely on tubers and fruits west of New Guinea. In some of my pre-
vious writings on early Southeast Asia, I made quite a lot of this possibility, influenced
by the work of Carl Sauer (1952). Those arguments now need to be modified.
266 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
involved a great deal of labour. Swidden ('shifting', 'dry') cultivation
of rice was secondary to this development.
Therefore, while population growth and movement into new areas
must certainly have occurred, it would have been altogether less
significant than in other Old World 'neolithic' areas that had begun
to cultivate large annual cereal crops. 'Large-scale pressure of people
on land is not evidenced in the archaeological or pre-modern ethno-
graphic records for Southeast Asia or even southern China. It cannot
even be invoked to explain renowned ethnographic cases of agricultural
expansion such as that of the Iban of Sarawak' (Bellwood 1992: 93).
Instead, Bellwood suggests, the search for new frontiers, and the
wealth and prestige they allow, was a major motivation for opening
up new land in early Southeast Asia.
Why should population growth have been smaller in Southeast
Asia than in other parts of the post-Neolithic world? I propose that
this had to do with the amount of 'complete' protein available. Our
bodies are made of protein, which we cannot synthesise in the absence
of the eight so-called essential amino acids (eaten, optimally, at the
same meal). If these are available in increasing quantities, then pop-
ulations can expand. If, however, the supply of essential amino acids
is relatively constant, then so also will be the rate of population
growth. Animal products provide all the essential amino acids, but
no single plant source does so. Most of the plant foods cultivated in
Southeast Asia have been poor in amino energy,
but less productive of body mass. Grains such as rice, which do con-
tain a reasonable amount of some essential amino acids, have not
been grown in sufficient quantity until recently to have had the huge
effect on population growth that they have had elsewhere. The
region's livestock (chicken, duck, pig) are typically raised on the
remains of human meals, the availability of which crucially depends
on the number of people. The other major source of animal pro-
tein has been fish; but this has been gathered rather than produced.
9
In the absence of open grassland throughout the region, the pas-
toral grazing of herd animals has not normally been an option,
thereby removing a major factor for developing an increased divi-
sion of classical division between herder and farmer.
9 Classical Angkor, however, was later to exhibit population growth based largely
on fish, but this was due to the special circumstances of Tonie Sap lake.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 267
It seems, then, that social organisation in pre-modern Southeast
Asia, especially in the more tropical parts of the region, would have
exhibited a low rate of population growth even after the emergence
of agriculture. 'this in turn would have had other consequences: (a)
a low degree of division of labour, as everyone would have been
equally involved in all subsistence activities; (b) a low degree of sex-
ual differentiation, as the lack of pressure on land would not have
predisposed people to develop unilineal descent structures; (c) little
pressure on the development of long-term storage facilities, and hence
a rather late development of permanent settlements. In such a social
framework, the local community would have been the main basis
for the individual's experience. Little attention needed to be paid to
what was going on in other communities, except of course for finding
spouses and setting up the other relations necessary for keeping social
life going. There would have been little extra-local political control,
or ideological reference to situations outside the immediate community.
One factor that would have disrupted this pattern was trade in
goods that could not be obtained locally. Evidence of such trade in
early Southeast Asia, especially in the .... seasonal northerly regions,
has been coming to light from a variety of archaeological excava-
tions, dating from around 2000 BCE onwards, and especially after
the development of bronze and iron technology. The presence of
variegated and sometimes elaborate burial practices at some sites has
suggested that these developments were associated with the emer-
gence of social ranking, based on the amassing of prestige goods.
The Thai site of Kok Phanom Di, for example, has such deposits,
dated between 2000 and 1400 BCE (Higham and Rachanie 1994).
Prestige goods are associated both with overland and sea-trade within
the region, going back to the second or third centuries BCE. The
widespread distribution of the famed Dongson bronzes throughout
the region is major evidence for this, as is the less well-known
Sahuynh-Kalanay art style, found concurrently in both southern
Vietnam (,Champa') and the Philippines.
III
Eventually therefore, even in Southeast Asia, people began in varying .
degrees to attend to issues lying outside of their own local experience.
This was partly because the outside world became interested in the
268 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
region-primarily, it seems, as a source of luxury goods. Around
2,000 years ago, traders from India, China and elsewhere began
making calls along the coasts of Southeast Asia. It has been claimed
that they were pushed by the relative closure of the 'Silk Road'
through Central Asia. But just as important were exploratory voyages
made by indigenous Southeast Asian seafarers, who are known to
have reached the east coast of Mrica, travelling via other parts of Asia.
These voyages probably long predated the trading visits of other
people to the region.
As a consequence of these developments, a variety of state-like
polities emerged in various parts of Southeast Asia between about
1000 BCE and 1000 CE. (For comprehensive discussions of these
developments, see Wheadey 1983, Taylor 1992, Christie 1995.) These
formations have been referred to variously as 'chiefdoms', 'states'
and 'mandalas', the distinction between which has often seemed
vague. Each of these terms has its uses, however, and all three refer
to social formations thought of as being centralised in varying degrees.
But, whereas 'chiefdoms' (despite being ranked in relation to differential
prestige) are still in their organisation, 'states' are char-
acterised by the emergence of a supra-kinship level of organisation.
The Sanskrit term mandala, on the other hand, refers to the idea
that centralised polities (whether they are states or chiefdoms) can
be thought of as nested one within the other, to form a yet higher
pattern of hierarchical organisation. Here, however, I wish to empha-
sise only what they have in common-namely, political centralisation,
whether this be actual or merely ideal. The story of the initial emer-
gence of chiefdoms, states and (eventually) mandalas in Southeast Asia
is currendy in flux, as new archaeological discoveries are announced.
For this reason, and for lack of space, I will have to gready sim-
plify the issues.
In varying degrees and for different parts of the population, a new
element had been introduced-the habit of looking outside of the
immediate circumstances, because their lives had now become tied
up with what was going on elsewhere. This was particularly true of
those who had become the middlemen in the long-distance trade:
they would have been inducted into a more transcendental view of
the world, without, perhaps, dropping their earlier non-transcendental
view entirely. The two views (transcendental and non-transcendental)
now became alternatives within the same socia-cultural formation,
with contrasts between the emerging royal courts (see below), which
were perhaps more immanent in their orientation, and the wider
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 269
population whom the courts were trying to incorporate into a state-
based regime. Later, these middlemen were to become the rulers
and aristocrats in the coastal states that were set up in many parts
of Southeast Asia. However, not all of the traditional states of
Southeast Asia emerged out of long-distance trading relations; some
of them accordingly instituted non-transcendental regimes.
The pre-modern states of Southeast Asia can be categorised into
kinds, according to the processes through which they arose. First,
there were the inland sacred-city (or 'm.iddle kingdom') states,
such as existed in ancient Java (with Borobudur, Prambanan and
Dieng as monumental evidence), Cambodia (Angkor), Burma (Pagan)
and some other places. Here, religious and political ideas emanat-
ing from outside the region were allied with indigenous, rather than
outsider-based, economic linkages. The ideas in question related
mainly to the Brahminical Hindu (both Shivite and Vishnite) and
Mahayana Buddhist views of the world, and were often brought back
from India (and perhaps China) by Southeast Asians, as well as by
visitors from those regions. These worldviews imaged the cosmos and
the here-and-now as essentially the same: the one is just an ana-
logue of the other. This led to the establishment of polities centred
on the Devarqja or similar concepts of divine or meditative kingship,
in which the kings presented themselves as incarnations of Shiva or
Vishnu, or as Boddhisattvas (future Buddhas). (For the classic study
of these polities, see Heine-Geldern 1942.) So long as the secular
world seemed to be in tune with the cosmic realms, as mediated by
the king in his palace, then all was well. These inland states had lit-
de external trade, but exhibited complex intemallabour relations and
much primary economic production. One might hypothesise that
kingship was sustained in these states just as much because the pop-
ulation wanted it (as a guarantee of their own personal well-being)
as because the kings themselves were trying to maintain power.
Second, there were the coastal trading states (or 'maritime' states)
of Sumatra, Borneo, the Malay Peninsula (not necessarily Malay-
speaking in earlier times), the Philippines (much later), parts of east-
ern Indonesia, and parts of the Mainland (such as at the archaeological
sites of Oc Eo in south-eastern Cambodia and 'Champa' in central
Vietnam).10 The coastal people managed to enter into trade, probably
10 The states of 'Champa' (which were never unified into a single polity) seem
to have had periods when they exhibited typical trading-state features, and periods
when they were more like rice-growing 'sacred-city' states.
270 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
in goods considered as luxuries elsewhere, with Chinese, Arab and
other seafarers. Many of these goods were of little interest to the
Southeast Asians themselves until the foreigners took them up, per-
haps because, being at first more egalitarian, they had little need to
express social status through material symbolism. The goods had
meaning, therefore, only in outsider-linked contexts of action. Event-
ually, some of the coastal and riverine dwellers found that they could
make a living by mediating between the traders and the inland for-
est-dwelling tribal populations who were the primary finders of the
goods. Where the middleman niche proved successful, the situation
was crystallised by the application of the notion of kingship, which
most scholars have ascribed to Indian sources. The aristocracies of
the states that emerged in these areas were primarily occupied in
trading-a niche that they have maintained right up to present day.
Even where the pre-modern states have been superseded, as in
Indonesia, those among the indigenous population (as opposed to,
say, the originally immigrant Chinese) who maintain these trading
links are still largely of aristocratic descent: the peasant-descended
still have little foothold on this sector of economic life.
Third, there were the cultural suppletion (or m.ainland migra-
tion) states formed by the incorporative spread from north to south
of completely new cultural and political regimes, mostly during the
last thousand years or less. These were formed by the southward
spread of societal patterns and languages-but mostly not whole
populations-already established further north in the mainland. Thus,
speakers of Vietnamese, Tai languages (such as Siamese, Lao and
Shan) and Burmese took over the earlier states (mostly of the 'mid-
dle kingdom' type) that had been formed in the first millennium of
the present era among Cham-, Khmer-, Mon- and Pyu-speaking
peoples. The implantation of Malay culture in the north of the
Peninsula, formerly a Mon-speaking area,11 belongs here too, even
though that movement was from the south (Srivijayan Sumatra).
These suppletive states became transcendentalised by virtue of the
very fact that their social framework was imposed from elsewhere
upon a population that underwent assimilatory change in the process.
A major component of this shift was the imposition of Theravada
II The claim that Mon culture was present in much of northern Peninsular
Malaysia at that time is argued for in Benjamin 1987, 1997. See also Bauer 1992.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 27l
Buddhism on the mainland and of Islam in the islands, which took
place mainly between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.
Fourth, there were the colonial-response states. These have been
less studied, but the work of Fox (1997) on the many small king-
doms that arose on Timor and nearby islands as a result of six-
teenth-century Portuguese contacts provides a detailed account of the
kind of thing that could happen. Fourteen distinct states emerged
on the small isiand of Roti, for example, through the monopolising
by a few individuals of relations with the colonial power soon after
the Portuguese arrived. State-formation in most of the Philippines
was also brought about as part of the colonial enterprise, for (with
the exception of some Muslim sultanates) there were no states there
until the arrival of the Spanish conquerors, commencing in the six-
teenth century.
Ecology and sociery
In Central Java and Cambodia the edaphic conditions allowed for
the emergence of much denser populations than elsewhere in the
region. Java had fertile volcanic soil and Cambodia a peculiar back-
wards-flowing annual flood on the Mekong that brought much fer-
tile silt into the TonIe Sap area. In such relatively dense populations,
the speed and intensity of social communication would have been
considerable-in contrast to the much more restrained communica-
tion between coastal and inland populations in most of the coastal
trading-state areas. Also, the distances in these inland states were not
great, so ordinary people would frequently have witnessed the grandiose
displays of court life for themselves. The idea of forming a state
would therefore have become part of the consciousness of the ordi-
nary people as well as of those who were being set up as aristocrats
and rulers. This led to non-transcendentalist (in this case, imma-
nentist) cultural regimes, orientated to the here-and-now. Outsiders
were of little concern-or rather, if they ever appeared on the scene,
their otherness was not considered an issue. Their mere presence
was enough to bring them, for the moment, into consciousness, just
as their absence would remove them from consciousness. Pagan was
rather different, in that it was built in a region of poor arid soils.
But food was transported down the Irrawady river from more fer-
tile areas upstream to support the massive developments. In most
other respects, it seems to have followed the same general pattern
as that exhibited by the Javan and Cambodian developments.
272 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
. In the coastal trading-states, however, there was a continuum: the
coastal people who dealt with the outside world were operating from
the start within a transcendental mode of orientation, while the inland
tribal populations would at first still be holding to a non-transcen-
dental (mostly dialectical) mode. The latter became transcendentalised
only to the extent that they were incorporated into the state struc-
ture as peasants, thereby ceasing to be tribal. This process, which
began more than two millennia ago, continues up to the present
day, and is not yet complete.
Thus, of the four kinds of states discussed above, the coastal trading-
states, the colonial-response states and the cultural-suppletion states
would have involved a shift from an earlier non-transcendental regime
to a transcendental one. But the inland 'middle kingdom' states-
just as with the 'middle kingdom(s), of China-were formed in areas
of high population density by processes that owed more to internal
forces than to external connections. The coastal-trading and colonial-
response states came into being as a direct result of the close connection
of a few middlemen with outsiders, whose culture and source of power
the ordinary people could not readily understand. But the inland,
'middle kingdom' states, like those of Java and Cambodia, were
formed through the crystallisation of a mode of social consciousness
that was already shared by the population as a whole. The greater
density of communication on the ground in these areas would have
facilitated this sharing. The divine rulers were probably maintained
in position as much by popular pressure as through personal ambition.
IV
Let us now turn to the cultural and behavioural features that go
with the differing modes of orientation.
The transcendental mode is marked by an attitude that can be
characterised as 'faith'. Non-transcendental worldviews, on the other
hand, are marked by uninterest or scepticism, by a pragmatic pref-
erence for direct evidence.
12
There is an inherently political dimension
12 These differences are presented, not as essences or 'racial' characters, but as
cultural-i.e. actively cultivated-regjmes, which can be followed or not by individ-
uals, as they choose. But the stakes are loaded by 'hegemonic' processes, as men-
tioned earlier. (See also footnote 2.)
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 273
to these distinctions. If, in the transcendental mode, you put faith
in what someone else says to be the case, you are making yourself
subordinate to that person's authority. There is, at least for that
moment, a hierarchical relation between the asserter and the assenter.
The non-transcendental modes tend, however, in a less credulous
direction, since they allow little scope for one person to try and per-
suade another to give assent to that for which the first person has
no direct evidence. If people cannot get the evidence for themselves,
it will be difficult for' anyone else to try and persuade them of it.
13
Religion
The more transcendental the theological structure of a religion, the
more this-worldly is the associated practical consciousness likely to
be. Herein lies an important paradox. Since God has been defined
as wholly other, there is no point in attempting to make this world
into a kind of inscrutable Other world. The This-world is distinct,
and one might as well operate in it in terms appropriate to this
world. Islam perhaps carries this view furthest. For example, Muslims
are not allowed to ascribe any specific characteristics to God, beyond
that of complete otherness.
Conversely, for non-transcendentalists the world around them is
the only world. This, rather than what someone else asserts to be
the case, is what affects their daily life. The non-transcendental mode
is normally associated with a lower degree of cultural 'differentiation'.
There is no dualistic This-world/Other-world differentiation corre-
sponding to what is asserted in the world-rejecting, salvation-seeking
frameworks that are usually taken as typical of 'religion' (cf. Bellah
1964). For non-transcendentalists, dealing with spirits would belong
within the same domain as, say, the getting of food. On the tran-
scendental view, however, these activities would be thought of as
belonging to separate domains. Islam, Christianity and Theravada
Buddhism are highly suited to the transcendental mode of orientation.
It is not surprising then, that the appropriate areas of Southeast Asia
13 A nice example of this occurs with regard to animistic ideas, especially in
Southeast Asia, where it is often claimed that though one can inherit a spirit-guide
from one's father, it is also a prerequisite that one must have a dream encounter
for oneself with the spirit in question. Here, individual experience ranks higher than
general principle.
274 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
are now characterised by whichever of these religions happened to
arrive first on the scene.
l4
IslaIn: Islam was brought to Southeast Asia mainly by long-distance
traders via southern India, and also China, commencing in the twelfth
century. It was this religion, rather than Theravada Buddhism (which
had not yet moved so far south), which replaced the earlier Mahayana
Buddhism of the emerging Javanese and Malay worlds. In Southeast
Asia, Islam has usually been associated with the setting up of tran-
scendentally organised state regimes. Its spread corresponded closely
with the incorporation of ever more people-who were until then,
mostly pagans or Mahayanists-into the trading network.
l5
They now
came to view their lives as increasingly controlled by foci situated
elsewhere in the world. Consequently, they would have been more
likely to give assent to a transcendental religion, the claims of which
they could not have direct evidence for. However, the population
was not socially homogeneous, since there were egalitarian urban
traders, hierarchical traders-turned-royals, and peripheral peasants.
The responses of these different sectors correspond respectively to
the santri, priyf.9ii and abangan patterns identified by Geertz (1964) for
Java, but which have existed in similar, though unnamed, forms in
the rest of Muslim Southeast Asia.
In Java, orthodox Islam of the educated santri style (Dhofier 1982)
was traditionally located along the north coast, which is where trad-
ing states, not unlike those of the Malay world, were formed. Similar
patterns of observance emerged elsewhere in the region, such as in
Aceh, at the northern tip of Sumatra (Siegel 1969). These santri tradi-
tions, operating in a transcendentalist framework, have favoured the
rational, literate, urban forms of Islam. They are associated with
trading and business, and exhibit a vigorous concern for this-worldly
activities that bears striking similarities to the Calvinist ethic that
14 This is not the whole truth: Islam (arriving from Brunei-see Wolff 1976) was
present in the Philippines as far north as Manila when the Spanish arrived, and
not just in the southern regions as now. Catholicism has therefore replaced Islam
in much of the Philippine lowlands.
15 A feature of the essay by Syed Hussein Alatas referred to earlier is his dis-
cussion of the relative part played by imposition from above and acceptance from
beneath in the initial spread of Southeast Asian Islam. Alatas (1964: 21-23) was of
the opinion that the latter process was more important than historians had com-
monly recognised.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 275
Weber identified for certain parts of early modern Europe. They see
no conflict between following an other-worldly religion while being
very this-worldly in their day-to-day affairs.
In inland Central Java, however, orthodox Islam of this kind began
making its entry only during the twentieth century. The variety of
Islam that was present there before, and which is still practised by
many, was greatly influenced by Sufism (Siddique 1977), which is
often regarded as heretical by more orthodox Muslims, because it
seeks to find God within oneself by such mystical means as fasting,
chanting or trance. Sufis therefore tend to substitute a close personal
relationship with their teacher for the more state-linked, sociocentric
religion favoured by the orthodox. l6 These practices (known region-
ally as tarekat) are sometimes declared heretical by governments in
Muslim countries. But they are so similar to those of the supposedly
indigenous Javanese mysticism known as Kebatinan (Mulder 1978) that
we may suspect this to be the main reason for the easy syncretism
espoused by the aristocratic (priYf.9ii) tradition of Central Java, which
is more immanently inclined than the santri style. Given the political
dominance of Javanese leaders in modern Indonesia, this is of more
than passing interest. Anderson (1972), for example, has shown how
Javanese notions of political power are still intermingled with mys-
tical concerns.
Sufic Islam also served as the favoured religious style at the Muslim
courts in several parts of Southeast Asia (AI-Attas 1963, Siddique
1977, Milner 1981). This suggests-as other evidence tends to con-
firm-that within these courts, even in the trading-state areas, a more
immanentist mode of orientation, congruent with India-derived ideas
about the divinity of kingship (such as the Devaraja idea), might have
helped ease the transition to Islam. Only under the modern nation-
state did Islam begin to take the more uniformlY transcendental shape
it has today.
The abangan peasants, however, remained peripheral to these devel-
opments until recently, absorbing a few selected elements of Islam
(as preached by charismatic travelling 'saints', many claiming descent
16 In the esoteric forms of Mahayana Buddhism that became popular in ninth-
century Java and Sumatra, a similar stress was placed on the necessity for complete
subordination to one's guru, an idea that may already have been present in sev-
enth-century Srivijaya (John Miksic, personal communication). This implies an imma-
nentist orientation to concrete interpersonal relations, rather than a transcendentalist
orientation to institutions, as is typical of santri Islam (or Theravada Buddhism).
276 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
from the Prophet) into a still functioning localistic animism. Regular
prayer, fasting and the Pilgrimage were not normally part of their
religious repertoire. Currently, however, many of them are now turn-
ing towards the more mainstream varieties of Islam, in step with the
more general modernisation of the country.
Buddhism.: In the mainland, Theravada Buddhism was available
through a connection with Ceylon, via the Mon people who lived in
what is now southern Burma, central and south Thailand, and north-
ern Peninsular Malaysia. When Thai-speaking ruling groups began to
form centralised states from the thirteenth century onwards, in areas
that had previously been linguistically and politically Mon or Khmer,
they effectively 'colonised' the region through the transcendentalis-
ing and state-incorporating agency of Theravada Buddhism. Similarly,
in Burma: 'Oral legend has it that Anorahta, when he began the
building of this shrine [Shwe Zigon, in Pagan], said, "Men will not
come for the sake of the new faith [Theravada Buddhism]. Let them
come for their old gods and gradually they will be won over." ,
(Keyes 1977: 72). Despite its non-theistic and depersonalising theol-
ogy, canonical Theravada Buddhism in practice maintains a hierar-
chical church-like organisation, founded on a formal dogma that
must be accepted as an article of faith, serving thereby to tran-
scendentalise the individual's consciousness.
There are important differences of emphasis between Mahayana
Buddhism and the Theravada Buddhism that replaced it. In Theravada,
there is an established hierarchy in the degree of attainment of release
from suffering: monks are at the top, ordinary males in the middle
and women at the bottom. Salvation can be achieved only through
being as like a monk as possible: celibate, ascetic, and not concerned
with money. Ordinary members of society, concerned as they are with
family life and the gaining of a livelihood, therefore have no hope
of attaining salvation (nibbana). They will leave salvationist activities
to the monks, who specialise in the highly esoteric and difficult
Buddhist theology. The lay Buddhist deals instead with a simplified,
'merit' -seeking, version of the religion-with heaven or a good rebirth
as the goal, rather than the personal extinction of nibbana (Obeyesekere
1968). This they do mainly through their support of the monks, who
are organised into a national 'church' (the sangha), the hierarchy of
which has, in Thailand especially, constituted a parallel civil service.
So, despite the individualistic theology of Theravada Buddhism, in
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
277
practice it is a highly transcendental social religion, leading para-
doxically to a socialised, hierarchical and politically embedded frame-
work of action. Like Islam, therefore, Theravada Buddhism makes
a 'good' religion for the organising of a hierarchical state.
Mahayana Buddhism, on the other hand, has an important addi-
tional element in its teaching, namely, the idea of the bodhisattva-
an intermediate stage between ordinary secular life and the salvation
of buddha-hood. A bodhisattva is one who, though within sight of bud-
dha-hood, turns voluntarily away from it to help others achieve release
from suffering.
17
Mahayana thus generates an individualistic framework
of practical action, despite the social character of its teaching that
Buddhists should help each other in attaining salvation. Everyone (male
and f ~ m a l e alike) now has the chance of attaining salvation, and
does not need to leave the management of religious affairs to other
people-not even the monks and nuns. This is the form of Buddhism
found in 'classical' Java (of which the Borobudur is the major mon-
ument) and elsewhere in early Southeast Asia. But in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, as the region's state regimes became more
extensive, Thai and Burman kings chose to replace Mahayana with
the Theravada variety that had developed in Ceylon as the state
religion centuries earlier. (In Cambodia the shift was from Hinduism
to Theravada.) Thus, although Mahayana Buddhism made an excel-
lent court religion, it was found to have too little elective affinity
with broader hierarchical political structures when the time came to
expand the power of the central authority into the wider popula-
tion. For this task, Theravada proved much more attractive.
Language
The kinds of difference just discussed are reflected also in language-
in the very structure of the different speech varieties. It is important
to note that the significant differences are as likely to occur between
different registers and sociolinguistic levels of the same language as
between separate languages. Malay displays a considerable polyglossia
of this kind. Even an advanced knowledge of standard Malay, which
is structured within a quite transcendental frame of reference, pro-
vides little basis for understanding the very different kind of Malay
17 This idea can also be found in Theravada Buddhism, but as an obscure ele-
ment, whereas it is central to the Mahayana tradition.
278 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
that Malays speak to each other in more domestic circumstances.
A language embodying the transcendental mode of orientation
might be expected to make constant reference to things lying outside
of the immediate situation of utterance. True pronouns such as 'I'
and 'you', for example, have no meaning except by reference to the
speech act in which they are uttered. In Malay, the true pronouns, aku
'1' and kau 'you', which textbooks say are too impolite for a foreigner
to use, are' replaced in the formal varieties by the speakers' personal
names (even in self-reference, for'!') or by a range of status terms
created out of one's knowledge of the wider society, such as saya
(etymologically 'slave') and encik (etymologically 'freeman'). This is
done to an even greater degree in Thai, following the imposition of
the Sakdina status system over the last few centuries. In the languages
of the tribal societies of Southeast Asia, however, the true pronouns
are used almost without restriction-as is the case too in the true
colloquial Malay that Malays speak to each other. Here, reference
beyond the immediate situation of utterance is avoided. Pronominal
and address usage thus refers to two different contexts: the socio-
centric (transcendental) and the egocentric (non-transcendental).
A language can be raised beyond the colloquial level and made
more formal by feeding sociocentric awareness into it. In the case
of Malay this is done by employing a set of prefixes (me-, ber-, ter-,
di-) and suffixes (-kan, -i) that indicate the transitivity or intransitiv-
ity of relations between the referred-to participants (,Agent', 'Subject',
'Patient', etc.) outside of the immediate situation of utterance. In col-
loquial Malay, however, these same affixes, if they are used at all,
are given quite different meanings having to do with features of the
event-with what happened, rather than with who did what to whom
(Benjamin 1993, in press b).
There are yet other ways of making languages more complicated.
In some non-transcendental frameworks, situation-of-utterance fea-
tures (i.e. shifters and deictics such as 'this', 'here', 'that'), which have
no absolute meaning in themselves, are often made to do multiple
duty in the grammar. A good example is that of Kawi (Becker and
Oka 1974), the classical literary variety of Javanese that was written
in earlier times (and is still cultivated to some extent today), when
immanentism was at its height. Here, the structure of interpersonal
relations was fed into the rest of the grammar, so that the difference
between 'I' and 'you' or 'here' and 'there' became the basis for tense
inflection (past vs. present) or discourse structure ('the former' vs.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA
279
'the latter'). A similar tendency is present in Temiar, aMon-Khmer
language spoken in typically tribal circumstances (Benjamin Ms(b)).
There, morphological elements that appear in the pronoun system
appear also in the inflection of verbs for grammatical voice (Active,
Middle, Causative), the inflection of nouns for number (Singular,
Plural) or role (Agent, Subject, Patient, Instrument), in the phonic
shape of deictics, and in many other grammatical and lexical features.
Thus, there is a tendency for the situation-of-utterance to invade
the rest of the language in non-transcendental circumstances, and
for the outside world to invade language in transcendental ones.
These differences are amply illustrated in the languages of Southeast
Asia. (To demonstrate this any further would require too technical
a linguistic discussion for presentation here.)
v
The modem nation-state
The modern nation-states of Southeast Asia are all 'secondary',
declared into being literally overnight, and modelled on the already
existing 'primary' nation-states of western Europe. They were formed
initially out of a perceived legal necessity, namely, the establishing
of relations with other states on a basis of equal standing within the
already existing international system. Relations within these new nation-
states were, at first, of less importance. (For the full argument, see
Benjamin 1988.)
The political leaders thus find themselves operating on a popula-
tion whose mode of orientation is insufficiently transcendental for
the people to pay any attention to the intended political message.
(Or perhaps, as with some current religious movements in the region,
the people are already transcendentalised towards some quite other
goal than the nation-state.) The state's success within the international
division of labour requires that the citizens should fulfil their role as
a capitalist-industrial work force. This in turn requires the establishment
of a modern educational system on a scale that only the state can
organise, employing a modernised standardised national language as
its medium. For this to work, the people should already be predis-
posed to see these general principles as important.
The necessary transcendentalisation is brought about by persuad-
ing the population that their 'identity' is less than whole-that they
280 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
have an 'identity crisis'. The concomitant 'search for identity' is thus
something of a political confidence trick: it is hardly likely to make
sense to people living in ordinary peasant or tribal circumstances,
undisturbed by the modern state. Overt concern for 'identity' most
typically arises-or is invented-when a modern state is being formed.
Governments, especially in Southeast Asia, do this by playing upon
cultural issues in such a way as to imply that people's identity is
incomplete, and that they are therefore not whole human beings. They
can be made whole only when they define their identity in terms of
some criteria that the central government will give them. Thus, for
example, a transcendental and intellectualised religion (such as ortho-
dox Islam in Malaysia, mainstream Catholic Christianity in the Philip-
pines, or reformed Theravada Buddhism in Thailand and Burma)
will be given the state's support, and be made into an element of
social 'identity'.
Ethnicity, which is not usually an issue in pre-modem circumstances,
will similarly be used to fit people into slots, based on an array of
labels provided or sanctioned by the government. In their different
ways, all the countries of Southeast Asia provide examples of this. 18 The
engineering of language allegiance (in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia,
Thailand, Cambodia and other countries) through the propagation
of standardised forms and the suppressing of other varieties, also
forms a major component of the newer ways of regulating people's
lives. (For a detailed study of such language engineering, see Smalley
1994 on Thailand.)
The people most likely to respond to such an engineering of their
'identity crises' are those who are already inclined to a more tran-
scendental mode of orientation, through experiences of the kind
already discussed. Where modernisation and state-formation are just
beginning, such people are more likely to be found among the peas-
ants than among the tribal portions of the population (though there
is nothing absolute about this distinction). The tribal people are more
likely to greet this kind of politico-cultural manipulation with scep-
ticism, not to say cynicism. In fact, they usually do not fully understand
what is being said to them, because they have not had the kind of
experience that could give such rhetoric any meaning. But once they
18 E t ~ n i c i ~ is not a description of people's cultural background-as sociologists
often misleadingly teach-but a form of social action aimed at fitting oneself into
a slot provided by one's government or by some other political agent.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 281
are incorporated into the modern economic network, through the
commodification of their productive activities, tribespeople too come
to recognise that their lives are now influenced more by factors lying
outside their own community than by purely local issues. They then
begin-as individuals, not whole communities-to transcendentalise
their mode of orientation.
An example of this occurred among the T emiars of Peninsular
Malaysia, whose animistic religion had been the subject of my PhD
thesis in the 1960s. In the mid-1970s, several young Temiars went
to Kuala Lumpur and sought instruction in the highly transcendental
Baha'i religion (historically a derivative of Islam, but otherwise an
autonomous religion), which they then set about propagating in their
own communities. For several years, they had been witnessing the
opening up of their territory, mostly through outsider-run commercial
logging of the area. The children had also received elementary gov-
ernment-provided schooling for some 20 years, which had allowed a
degree of (Malay-language) literacy to emerge. They had been receiv-
ing medical treatment, and some cash income from odd jobs. In
other words, many of the Temiars had been transcendentalising their
consciousness of the world, where previously they normally took a
dialectical approach. They had also been exposed to the Malaysian
government's own transcendentalising radio broadcasts urging citi-
zens to have an ugama, a named religion-of-the-book. The intention,
of course, was that the Temiars should embrace Islam, but their
response was unexpected. Having found the explanations of Islam
offered to them by local Malays to be incomprehensible, and the
prayers to be couched in an exotic language (Arabic), they elected
instead for Baha'i, a similarly monotheistic and transcendental reli-
gion, but one that used the national language (Malay) and which
had an explicit, rationally ordered catechism.
19
(For a detailed account
see Benjamin, in press a: Chapter 1.)
Social personaliry
As already noted, persons operating within a transcendental mode
of orientation are less likely to have a solidly felt core of 'self' than
19 There have since been further religious changes among the Temiars, includ-
ing a waning of allegiance to Baha'i, coupled with the emergence of self-consciously
nativistic cults based on a widening of the terms of reference of the earlier medi-
umistic practices.
282 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
persons operating in a non-transcendental mode.
20
Where the transcend-
ental mode is long established, people are more likely to be reliant on
external sanctions than on internal ones as the basis for their actions.
Typically, as mentioned above, there will be such a degree of political
control, codification and policing of social action, that people will come
to think of their actions as being organised by agencies outside them-
selves. By the same token, people will come to believe that external,
rather than internal, factors are to blame when they suffer disease or
some other misfortune. This often goes along with a tendency to
indulge in accusations of the kind that anthropologists usually class
as witchcraft. This refers to the ascription of one's own misfortunes
to the evil intentions, dissatisfactions or jealousy of other individuals
in the community, or to other ethnic groups, or (if animistic ally
inclined) to attack by spirits. Now, this characterisation fits most of
the lowland peasant populations of Southeast Asia, such as Burmans,
Malays and Cebuanos, very well (Spiro 1967, Lieban 1967, Watson
& Ellen 1993). In such communities there is a constant blaming of
misfortune on other people or agencies, rather than on one's own
actions or propensities: the frame of mind is somewhat 'paranoiac'
in its tendencies.
21
In the non-transcendental modes, on the other hand, the personality
is founded on a solid (but unspoken, and usually unspeakable-of)
core of self. One's consciousness is not constantly being directed towards
what others are doing, or to what they say one should be doing. It
is directed instead to one's own actions and to the immediate con-
text of those actions. Sanctions for behaviour are internalised, and
any sickness or other personal affliction suffered will be thought of
as due to one's own behaviour or constitution, rather than to the
actions of other people or spirits.22
20 This is not negated by the tendency in transcendental regimes for people to talk
explicitly of their 'true seif'-as in Malay batin, or English 'the real me'-for the
solidly felt is precisely that which remains tacit and difficult to speak of. The process
of making-tacit, however, is at base a consequence of hegemonic political action.
21 Consider also the examples of latah and amuk, the two main indigenous idioms
for handling personality disorder in Malay culture. Both afflictions can be consid-
ered as ways of dealing with the strain of a social framework where one is con-
stantly 'on stage' and in thrall to others. In latah the solution comes through giving
oneself over, wholly and imitatively, to 'other', by completely suppressing one's own
personality. But in amuk, the sufferer attempts to obviate the problem of 'others' by
physically removing them from the scene.
22 Matters are much more complicated than stated here. This is one place in
the argument where it is unsafe to fuse the dialectical and immanent modes of ori-
entation under the same 'non-transcendental' rubric.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 283
To help understand this better, consider the widespread (tran-
scendental) Malay fear that 'wind invasion' (masuk angin) from outside
will lead to harm (Laderman 1988).23 This contrasts directly with
the (immanentist) Chinese idea that harm comes from losing the wind
that should remain inside the body! Or consider another contrast,
between the Malays and some of the neighbouring tribal (Orang
Asli) groups: the former are inclined to hold that disease results either
from spirit attack or from acts of sorcery performed on them by
others (most frequently their in-laws), rather than from anything they
have done themselves. Typically, however, Temiars or Semais in the
same situation will hold (dialectically) that suffering is caused by one's
own actions: mixing up the proper food categories, not sharing goods
and food with others, laughing at butterflies, and so on. If things
get so bad that the Thunder deity (Karey) decides to erupt right over-
head, then those who feel they were to blame might offer up a lit-
tle blood cut from their own shin, in admission of guilt and in
appeasement.
These differences do not relate solely to disease ideas, for they
also permeate social and inter-personal relations. In social situations
framed in the transcendental mode, there is a constant cultivating
of social relations through etiquette, frequently taking the form of
generalised, but obligatory, joking relationships of the kind that anthro-
pologists have long recognised as covering up an underlying ambiva-
lence. This transcendentalising of social action is very typical of most,
though not all, lowland Southeast Asian societies. Even the most triv-
ial encounter with someone whom you know well must be marked
by an interactive acknowledgement of this kind. Individuals constantly
monitor what others are doing to them, just as they monitor others
for clues as to how their own behaviour is affecting those others.
Paradoxically, this detailed prescribing of how people should inter-
act rather interferes with the development of deeper inter-personal
relations. In this mode of interaction the constant defining of the
self as against others means that the self's identity is actually other-
derived. People operating in such a social-psychological frame more
easily fall prey to those who claim to have an 'identity' to offer. (Modem
23 Although this is an animistic conception, rather than an Islamic one, I showed
many years ago (Benjamin 1979) that the Malay animistic system displayed an ori-
entational pattern congruent with that of Islam. (In that study, however, I did not
employ the term transcendental.)
284 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
consumerist culture, which has become an ever-present component
of contemporary city life in Southeast Asia, plays on this theme too.)
As already mentioned, this is precisely how the governments of
the new states of Southeast Asia work at turning the consciousness
of their peasant populations towards the political centre. (They try the
same tack too with their tribal populations, but here they frequently
meet with much less success, for reasons already hinted at.) The degree
to which people respond to this kind of mass social engineering varies
with the extent to which their consciousness is already transcenden-
talised through prior historical process. The most positive response
will come from those who have some kind of 'identity crisis' already
built in to their social framework. However, those who are living in
the more face-to-face, relatively remote communal situations are less
likely to suffer from a prior 'identity crisis', precisely because in prac-
tice their identity is constructed with respect to the same people from
day to day. But if such people move out of this situation, by migrat-
ing to town or joining the army, for example, they lose that constancy
of other-reference. Lacking internalised sanctions for their actions,
and recognising little that is familiar in their new environment, they
are relatively easy prey to 'identity' -mongers-though these may not
be of the kind that the government approves of. If riots break out,
these are typically the people who commit the violence, and who
might well be suspected of, for example, the killing of Vietnamese
boat-people refugees that occurred in the Gulf of Thailand in the
late 1970s, or in the streets of Kuala Lumpur in 1969. The Khmer
Rouge guaranteed a ready supply of such people in the 1970s by
physically relocating the whole population of Cambodian. (This
removal from 'home' circumstances is an example of the profound
consequences that exogeny has on social life; see Benjamin Ms(a).)
In the non-transcendental modes (both immanent and dialectical),
however, social relations are taken for granted, and are not treated as
requiring a moment-to-moment constructing of one's identity. More-
over, social relations are usually a c ~ ~ e d only when necessary, lacking
the obligatory character just commented on for the transcendental
mode.
24
Sometimes, one need not say anything at all. Among the
2' In most (all?) of the Southeast Asian languages spoken in transcendental cul-
tural regimes, 'Hello' translates as 'Have you eaten yet?' or '\'\There are you going?'-
exchanges with no serious informational content, but none the less obligatory for
all that.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 285
Temiars, for example, when newly arriving in a village it is consid-
ered bad manners to speak until you have sat silently for ten minutes
or more. Chinese styles of interaction typically do not require verbal
exchange, unless there is some information to be imparted. The same
appears to be true of some sections of Javanese society: there, politicians
often deploy silence as a sign of their power. In these instances, one's
empirical self is well founded-but tacitly so, and by a variety of
means-and is constantly meeting social others on the same terms.
One's unspoken identity is derived from the very concrete closed set
of relations that one enters into locally. Such individuals are not eas-
ily swayed by others' offers of an explicit, but imagined, 'identity'.
These face-to-face interactional features are replicated at the mass
level too, in political contexts. In Malaysia, for example, Malays and
Chinese engage in contrasting modes of political discussion-or at
least they did so in the late 1970s, when I first sketched a very early
version of this paper. The typical Malay argument, when trying to
do something about their socio-economic situation at the political party
level, was to say that it is others who must change. Only a few Malays
have dared to assert that it is the Malays themselves who should
change, and these have usually been individuals who were not wholly
indigenous with respect to Malay ethnicity-and who could there-
fore look on the Malays in general as a kind of 'other'. The recently
retired Prime Minister of Malaysia is one who has proposed such
arguments; his own book (Mahathir 1970), urging Malays to remake
themselves was, significantly, banned in Malaysia until some years
after he attained the premiership. The Malaysian Chinese political
parties, on the other hand, typically claimed that it is the Chinese
themselves who must change; the bickering at their party congresses
was internally directed. In both the Malay and Chinese cases, these
differences in political orientation are directly congruent with the
different interactional styles just discussed.
Modem times in ancient perspective
There is a large literature on the sacred polities of early Southeast
Asia, and even today many Javanese and Cambodians seem to operate
more from an immanentist mode of orientation than from a tran-
scendental one. The sorts of horrors that have occurred in recent
years in Cambodia have happened before in that country's history-
though presumably with less efficient cruelty. The population certainly
286 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
came under coercion in earlier times: how could the huge assemblage
of Angkorian monuments have been built except by moving extra
workers in from elsewhere? The same can be asked of the way in
which labour was provided for the building of Pagan, Central Burma,
where over 10,000 temples were built in just two centuries. On the
other hand, such populations could hardly have undertaken such
tasks unless, to some extent, they wanted to. (This is the puzzling
problem that Marx discussed as 'the Asiatic mode of production'.)
But what does this mean for modern times? Is it possible that the
Khmer Rouge'S declaration that the state completely overrides its
human content has a heightened elective affinity with the immanent
mode of orientation-despite the fact that this idea was apparently
first articulated in a PhD thesis written for the University of Paris?
Is it possible that ordinary Cambodians could, in some part of their
consciousness, have thought the idea to be reasonable, while at the
same time regarding the suffering it caused as beyond reason? And
what of the revival (or continuance?) of massive forced labour in
public projects and military operations in contemporary Burma?-
where shops are ordered not to sell publications on Mahayana
Buddhism, and where it is unwise for scholars to say what they know
of the Mahayanist elements present in earlier Burmese history.25
This approach is not without problems, however. Historically, the
Cambodian state has had a more immanentist history than most
Southeast Asian polities, despite the period of French rule. The
Khmer Rouge leaders declared themselves to be 'Communists', which
might predispose us to think that their consciousness was shaped in
accord with that most transcendentally eschatological secular reli-
gion. But they clearly were not Communists in any ordinary sense
of the term, for the background of Khieu Sampan, Pol Pot and their
colleagues was a peculiar mixture of traditional Cambodian aristocracy
(of part Chinese descent) and an idealistic socialism picked up during
their studies in Paris. (They were therefore doubly 'exogenous'.) For
them the state was prior to all else. But this was not the modern
nation-state, struggling to homogenise a socially heterogeneous citizenry
25 This became apparent on one of my visits to Burma, in 1994. Burma is prob-
lematical in terms of the ideas presented in this essay, for it appears to combine a
rather immanentist approach to state-maintenance, but through the imposition of
the normally transcendental Theravada form of Buddhism. There is no room to
discuss this issue further here.
CONSCIOUSNESS AND POLITY IN SOUTHEAST ASIA 287
so that they could playa role in the industrial world. Rather, they
were in thrall to the state as a kind of sacred object: if the state was
in good health, all would be well with everyone else. Despite the
horrors they caused, I suggest that the Khmer Rouge view of the
state might have seemed somehow more reasonable--though certainly
not, in practice, acceptable-to Cambodians than it would to the
populations of most other parts of Southeast Asia, simply because of
its heightened elective affinity to the immanentist mode of orienta-
tion long established there.
Is it possible that the large-scale killings which erupted in Java
and Bali in 1965 might have had a similar background? Many
observers have been puzzled at the apparently sudden conversion of
'peaceful' Javanese and Balinese to violently homicidal actions-and
back again. In modern Indonesia, (Central) Javanese culture has been
politically dominant until very recently. The problem is that the rest
of Indonesia, with the partial exception of Bali, has had a very
different consciousness-history, and the people do not readily find
Javanese ways of thinking easy to comprehend. The presence of
secessionist movements in parts of Timor, Sulawesi, Maluku and
Sumatra, may have something to do with this, for they are all areas
where transcendentalist coastal trading-states or colonial-response
states existed in pre-modern times. Formerly, they were more likely
to see Mecca, the Ottoman Empire or Europe, rather than Java, as
their 'centre', in accordance with the experience generated by their
own local history.
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