Seminar on Indigenous Peoples in Southeast Asia

Amid academic constructionism, national integration, and global politization

Since the post-modern turn in the social sciences, the constructionist perspective has reduced ethnicity, culture and, indeed, also peoples - all former key issues in anthropology - to exist only within inverted commas. Recent case studies often focus on how ethnic minority identities worldwide are deeply dependent on counter-colonial imagery and inverted mirroring of the mainstream population. Hence, minority identities are presented as constructed, created and imagined with little regard to any reality of alleged ethnic purity and or authenticity.

In the meantime, ‘ethnic minorities' throughout Southeast Asia (and elsewhere for that matter) continue to experience very real clashes with their nation-states on the basis of very real socio-cultural and political differences, while some indigenous political representatives are trying to convert cultural/ethnic specificity into special collective rights at the national level and at the United Nations' international fora on indigenous peoples. Thus, ironically as it may seem, they take strategic advantage of static ethnic stereotypes of colonial origin as part of a decolonization process.

At present there seems to be a great divide, and hence absence of debate, between academic anthropology subscribing to the constructionist perspective and various anthropologists with in-depth empirical knowledge of and empathy with ethnic minorities. This seminar would like to address how theoretical-constructionist perspectives and in-dept empirical perspectives can cross-fertilize rather than bypass one another in the case of Southeast Asian ethnic minorities: How can we accumulate and combine anthropological insights? How can we constructively conceive of ethnic minorities today? What does their reality in Southeast Asia look like?