Correspondence

Abstract

Southeast Asia': What's in a Name", Another Point of View I became rather perturbed while reading Donald K. Emmerson's article in Volume XV, No. 1 (March 1984) of this journal.Through about the first twenty pages I felt increasingly, how can he see Southeast Asia so differently than I do.He talked almost only in terms of political boundaries and political activities of the last forty years or soand not about people and culture.Then I noted the back cover and that he is a political scientist and it began to dawn on me that probably political scientists as a group read nothing more than histories of the most modern times, with a few exceptions, and papers by other political scientists.Then I began to think a bit further and wonder whether instead of this being his fault, or the fault of political scientists in general, it was the fault of archaeologists and possibly more specifically, at least in this case, of the archaeologists specializing in the prehistoric and early historic archaeology of Southeast Asia.Maybe we were not communicating.Finally, I must admit that I read very few political science reports so I should not be critical of political scientists for not reading archaeological reports.Before reading the article from beginning to end I had scanned the footnotes to see what archaeological reports or publications by archaeologists he had referred to, and found none.I wondered how could he talk seriously about Southeast Asia as a region, or whether it was and is a "real" region, without referring to the prehistory of the area?He did refer to Heine-Geldern, one of the first prehistorians to specialize in Southeast Asia, but he did not mention his hypotheses on Southeast Asian prehistory -which at least in part strongly supported Southeast Asia as a "real" region -but only listed the countries, islands, etc. that Heine-Geldern at one time or another listed as Southeast Asian.He also mentioned the very good summaries of papers by Vietnamese archaeologists on archaeological research in Viet Nam. 1 These two papers were presented by Jeremy H. C. S. Davidson at a symposium held in London in September 1973.Emmerson interprets the results of this research only in terms of the archaeologists' presumed political ends (page 19), not in terms of what they have to say about the relationships between Viet Nam and other areas of Southeast Asia relevant to the question of whether Southeast Asia is a true region.He goes on to wonder what Vietnamese archaeologists will say about Vietnamese prehistory once they "... begin lavishing on the central and southern sites of Champa and Funan the kind of attention they have devoted to the more northerly repositories of Dong Son civilization..." (page 19).Considering budgetary problems, there has been much archaeological research in southern Viet Nam since 1975 and Vietnamese archaeologists have been publishing 'In late 1982,1 was informed by Vietnamese archaeologists that all Vietnamese two or more syllable place names should be spelled as two or more separate words, all capitalized; "Editorial", Asian Perspectives 23, 1(1980): v.

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