The sociology of Southeast Asia by V.T. King

VICTOR T KING

The sociology of Southeast Asia: transformations in a developing region

Copenhagen:  NIAS Press, 2008

xvii +352 pp. ISBN 978-87-91114-60-1, pb £16.99

Reviewed by Jonathan Rigg, University of Durham

After four decades of scholarship, Victor (Terry) King is among the foremost social scientists working on Southeast Asia. He has contributed much both to our knowledge of the region and to the maintenance of Southeast Asian studies in the UK – as members of ASEASUK will be all too aware.

This is a textbook. It does not claim to offer any new approach to our understanding of the region, whether conceptual or applied. Instead, it fills a gap in the available literature for a ‘user-friendly’ introduction to the sociology of Southeast Asia. As King points out in the Preface, students of sociology are not well provided for in terms of up-to-date summary texts and, given the pace of change, anything more than 20 years old will trace the past rather than illuminate the present. It is this challenge that King sets out to address.

There are few – if any – scholars who could have produced a text which is, at once, so forbiddingly well-informed (the bibliography extends to 46 pages) but also gently approachable. King, in effect, takes the student or scholar by the hand and leads them through the maze of theoretical frameworks, regional differences, historical contingencies and transformational processes that comprise the region. King is a master of distillation and summary, a skill which comes from intimate knowledge developed over many years.

The approach that King adopts is thematic. In turn, he considers modernisation, under-development and dependency, class and political economy, ethnicity and society, patronage and corruption, Asian values and social action, gender, and the urban context. This means that it is possible to take each chapter as a self-contained gobbet of information and argument – no doubt helpful for teachers and their students who might wish to gain an integrated overview of a particular theme. One of the implications of this approach, however, is that King does not have the opportunity to develop an over-arching argument.

Only in the conclusion do King’s own views really become evident. He states that, in his view, there is no ‘dominant research style, tradition or perspective’ either in the sociology or anthropology of Southeast Asia (p. 256). By ‘dominant’, I sense he also means ‘distinctive’. He makes a plea for a region-wide vision informed by region-wide research where tendencies towards national specification are tempered by a desire for cross-national and cross-cultural scholarship. This might then lead to conceptual frameworks that transcend national borders and cultural frontiers. He is also aware of the way in which evolving and deepening links require a contextualising of the Southeast Asian region within the larger geographical ambit of East Asia. While there is no doubt in King’s mind that Southeast Asia is worthy of study in and of itself, he is too well read and informed not to have been influenced by ongoing debates over the area studies approach. As he admits, it ‘is by no means clear that sociological analysis of the developing societies of Southeast Asia should be confined within a regional perspective’ (p. 17).

King says that writing this book was an ‘arduous’ process. I can’t say that it shows. As is usual with his work, it shows an enviable fluency of argument and exposition. He also says that he is writing a second, companion text on culture and identity in the region.