Flipping through a popular news magazine recently, I came across two glossy images of Southeast Asia. The first was a beautifully composed photograph of weather-beaten Thai farmers in oversized straw hats bending over terraced rice fields. The second image was a close-up snapshot, washed in a fashionable blue tint, of an urban Chinese professional in a sharp business suit barking into his mobile phone as he navigated the metropolitan city. While close to caricature, these two contrasting images capture several truths about the region.

Firstly, the region's history of uneven economic development has resulted in extremes. In the city the rich are never too far from the poor while throbbing cities are never too far from half-empty dusty villages. Secondly, from Philippines to Indonesia to Thailand to Singapore the experience of modernization is a subjective one. Southeast Asia's modernization experience has been informed by the cultural, religious, and political facets of its many national constituents. Islam, semi-democratic, and authoritarian states, ethnic interests, and cultural values all influence the way modernization is conceived as well as the perception of promises and threats it holds for society at large. Thirdly, the two images underline not only the close geographical but also psychological and normative proximity between the old and the new, between the rural and the urban, between tradition and modernity in Southeast Asia. The lifestyles and values of many Southeast Asians are neither anchored completely in the rural or the traditional nor do they unfold exclusively in the urban or modern. The Southeast Asian must learn to negotiate different conceptual worlds from the religious, the ethnic, and the cultural to the professional, the cosmopolitan, and the global. Given these unique political, social, and cultural conditions, will a Southeast Asian modernity emerge?

A SOUTHEAST ASIAN MODERNITY?

One major question concerning many Southeast Asian intellectuals and thinkers is: can Southeast Asia ever become modern on its own terms?