Research on Southeast Asia: a partnership approach

Southeast Asia, situated between the Indian subcontinent and China, and between Asia and Australia, owes its uniqueness to its position as a crossroads open to the outside world, which is at the root of its diversity and calls into question its status as a region. Indeed, the term Southeast Asia is of exogenous origin. For a long time, Western definitions of the region were based on its relationship with India and China, integrating it into larger entities such as the Far East or East Asia, or dividing it into sub-regions based on cultural criteria or physical geography: Mainland Southeast Asia (known as the Indochinese peninsula) and island Southeast Asia (known as Insulindia), which also includes the Malay peninsula as part of a "Malay world"; Sinicized Southeast Asia (Vietnam) and Indianized Southeast Asia (the rest of the region)... It was not until the Second World War that the term Southeast Asia became established, taken over from 19th-century archaeologists by the Allied command creating the Southeast Asia Command to push the Japanese out of the region. Its appropriation then progressed with the creation of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in 1967.
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Historically, research on Southeast Asia has been associated with France's colonial past and has focused on the Indochinese terrain, with numerous contributions on Indochina and the creation of specialized schools such as the Ecole Française d'Extrême Orient (EFEO), whose early work was essentially devoted to Angkor. At Inalco, Malay was one of the founding languages of the School in 1795, due to its status as a Southeast Asian lingua franca[1], but the other sections of Southeast Asian languages and civilizations were created from the last third of the 19th century, as French expansion in the region gained momentum. The Second World War, followed by the Indochina wars and the closure of borders by communist or socialist regimes in mainland Southeast Asia, then made access to the field and to local archives difficult, which explains the scarcity of Southeast Asian specialists, confronted as they are with the difficulty of languages, compared to other regions of the world. With a relatively small number of specialists, research on Southeast Asia operates largely within national and international networks, and draws on the strengths of the CNRS and IRD organizations.





Inalco's South-East Asia and Pacific department includes some twenty tenured professors, language assistants and numerous visiting lecturers specializing in language, linguistics, literature and the social sciences, making it the largest center of higher education on South-East Asia in France. It also ensures the visibility of this area, which is often included in larger entities in other university systems (Asia, East Asia or South Asia). Research is conducted within the framework of areal or disciplinary research teams, and is also structurally part of partnerships with Parisian establishments whose activities are wholly or partly organized around cultural areas, and with which Inalco shares the supervision of several research teams.
































EHESS, EFEO and EPHE are the other major Parisian schools and establishments which, like Inalco, devote all (EFEO) or part (EHESS, EPHE) of their activity to the study of areas, as does Sciences Po's Centre de recherches internationales (CERI), with complementary orientations to each other and to those of Inalco, whose specificity lies in teaching and research on languages and literature in addition to the social sciences: At EHESS, social sciences dominate, particularly history and anthropology; at EPHE, philology and religious sciences; at EFEO, entirely dedicated to Asia, epigraphy, archaeology and ancient history; at Sciences Po, international relations, to mention only the dominant aspects of these establishments as regards Southeast Asia. Collaboration with the University of Paris-Denis-Diderot, now the University of Paris (UP), is more recent, and for a long time focused on Vietnamese studies. The UP has a training and research unit (UFR) for East Asian languages and civilizations, specializing in China, Japan and Korea, including Vietnam. In addition to languages and civilizations, UP is also interested in world history and the question of the South, with decentralized approaches similar to those of Inalco. These partnerships are reflected in a number of research teams. Inalco is co-supervisor with CNRS and EHESS of the Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE) and of the Centre de recherche en linguistique de l'Asie Orientale (CRLAO), which includes Vietnam; with IRD and UP of the Centre d'études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains, asiatiques (CESSMA).





The Centre Asie du Sud-Est (CASE), a unique UMR in the French Southeast Asia research landscape



Founded in 2006 by the merger of two teams with a narrower regional and thematic scope, CASE is the only French research team entirely dedicated to research on Southeast Asia. It brings together some thirty researchers [CNRS (7 researchers), EHESS (1 teacher-researcher), EFEO (9 teacher-researchers), Inalco (7 teacher-researchers), Université de Picardie (1 teacher-researcher), Université de Rennes (1 teacher-researcher), IRSEM (1 researcher)] from various disciplines: history, archaeology, philology, economics, epigraphy, geography, linguistics, anthropology, ethnomusicology, and publishes two specialized journals, Archipel and Péninsule. A major center of reference on Southeast Asia, it also benefits from the contribution of numerous specialists associated with its work. The Centre has renewed its research focus for the current contract, and has grouped its work into three areas:



"Southeast Asia, a multicentric space", focuses on the construction of centers within a network of inter-regional connections, on centralities as seen from the margins with the contemporary issue of regional integration, and on ruptures and recompositions over time.

"Forms of Authority and Southeast Asian Societies", which includes aesthetics and the religious in Southeast Asian societies, examines forms of authority and elite formations, as well as national and cultural ideologies under the prism of authority, languages and education.

"Materialities: objects, innovations, consumption, circulation and appropriation" seeks to understand these materialities through practices, techniques, know-how and circulation. This axis explores modernities through lifestyles and consumption, not forgetting "powerful objects", images and representations.



The life of the Centre revolves around these three lines of research, which are the subject of a number of multi-disciplinary, externally-funded programs. These programs testify to the team's dynamism as well as its concern to cover the entire Southeast Asian area, as such and in its interactions with neighboring Asian spaces: European EFEO/CASE project "CRISEA" (Competiting Regional Integrations in Southeast Asia, 2017-2020); ComUE USPC/National University of Singapore/CASE "Governing Southeast Asian Nature" (2018-2020); International Research Network/CNRS/CASE "ASEAN-China-Norms" (evolving social norms: Southeast Asia under increasing Chinese influence, 2018-2021); ANR CASE/PALOC "POPEI" (Cultural policies, local heritages and collaborative approaches in the East Insulindian, 2019-2021), ANR CASE "Chamdoc" (preservation of Cham cultural heritage, 2020-2023), ANR "Wildsilk" (wild silks, 2020-2023).

CASE also runs a regular multidisciplinary seminar on Southeast Asia, a meeting point for researchers from all institutions, and several thematic or disciplinary seminars, in line with its research areas.





Manuelle Franck

Professor of Southeast Asian Geography
at the
Center d'études en sciences sociales sur les mondes africains, américains et asiatiques (CESSMA), UMR 245

Urban and regional geography of Southeast Asia
Secondary cities in Indonesia and Asia
Secondary cities in Indonesia and Southeast Asia

Regional integration and transnational dynamics in insular Southeast Asia



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[1] Malay was also included in the School's founding law to accompany Persian, with the same teacher required to teach both languages. In the end, Malay was not taught until 1841, and Javanese the following year, both by Edouard Dulaurier, who was also an Egyptologist and Armenian specialist (clarification provided by J. Samuel).