In the first decade of the present century, Peter Hessler published three acclaimed works on China, mostly (although not exclusively) dealing with the present period. Many of the parts of the second and third volumes, in particular, initially appeared as articles in the New Yorker and National Geographic, where the deftness of Hessler's writing and his superb skills as a storyteller attracted attention well beyond the academic world. Hessler's books have also been widely and generously praised—and used in class—by teachers of contemporary China. Yet, to my knowledge, no China specialist has yet attempted a comprehensive assessment of their contribution to the deepening of American understanding of the complexities of Chinese life today. Such an assessment is the modest aim of this essay.

This article investigates Chinese warlord authority in the east of the Kham Tibetan region between 1911 and 1949. The colonial government established by the Qing Empire in Kham during the five years before the end of dynastic rule relied on central government funding. With the fragmentation of the Chinese state in the Republican period, Chinese regimes in Kham were forced to raise more revenue locally and reduce expenditure. Responding to these challenges shaped the nature of Chinese authority in Kham. The late Qing colonial government had paid Tibetans who provided livestock and labor for transport as part of the 'u-lag corvée. Republican-era governors lacked the resources to do the same. They struggled to develop other ways of controlling the corvée, and attempted to create alternative state transport organizations. Changes in the sources of county government revenue also had important effects on Chinese officials' approach to what they considered to be “wasteland.”

This article addresses the question, is there such an entity as a separate field of the anthropology of Southeast Asia? Has the crisis in anthropology in the 1970s and ‘the literary turn’ of the 1980s led to a renewed interest in area studies? A number of topics that originally belonged to the field of anthropology will be discussed: religion, the culture of social class and strategic groups, family and gender relations, developments in tourism, leisure and consumption, material culture, media and performance, and the growing importance of the rapid urbanization in Southeast Asia and its relationship with globalization and localization.

Over the last two decades, research on world cities and global cities has unsettled the nation-state as the default unit of analysis in many disciplines in Anglophone social science. Rather than seeing the world as comprised of a mosaic of national political and social units, alternative geographies of networks connecting cities and urban regions have risen to prominence. In this paper, I consider the implications of such alternative mappings for Southeast Asia, bringing urban studies and area studies into critical conversation with each other. Geographies of urban networks extending across national borders challenge the ingrained methodological nationalism of conventional area studies, not least in Southeast Asia. However, to what extent do framings of trans-national urban connections among Southeast Asian or Asian cities mean that methodological nationalism has simply been up-scaled to methodological regionalism? In the first of the two main sections of the paper, I look in detail at the network spatialities brought into view by global and world cities scholars and consider their implications for regional urban systems frameworks. Flows of people, money and ideas extending from cities in Southeast Asia to cities beyond that region, and even trans-continentally, arguably imply that areal framings melt into network geographies which are global in scope. In the second section of the paper, I consider three types of regional formations that have been identified in research on globalization: the global triad regions, region states, and inter-Asia flows of capital; models and people which I examine do not map onto conventional cartographies of Southeast Asia. Together, these two sections of the paper serve as a reminder that in future research regions need to be specified empirically rather than assumed to exist as a priori framings for research, and that the geographies of ‘actually existing’ regionalizing processes are often very different from area studies mappings of the world.

This paper reviews several prominent journals to identify key trends and issues in Southeast Asian geography. The review identifies the locus of articles' geographical scholarship, the balance between issue-based versus other types of articles, and the trends in the subject matter of the issue-based publications. The paper considers the meaning of an ‘issue-based’ approach to geography in local and non-local geographical scholarship on and in Southeast Asia. Geography as taught and practiced in Southeast Asia has followed a largely idiographic tradition based on description of landscapes, regions, settlement patterns, and so on. At an applied level, geography in some Southeast Asian countries has tended toward regional planning rather than engaging more centrally with the social sciences. Geography as a critical social science has only a loose purchase in the inherently geographical debates around development, environment, globalisation, and regionalisation in Southeast Asia. On the other hand, geographers from outside the region have engaged in more critical study, and geographical teaching and research on Southeast Asia in Australasia, North America, and Europe tends to take an issue-based approach and to be situated broadly within the realm of ‘development geography’. The paper also concludes with the question of how the discipline can better serve an issue-based agenda without being dominated by western critical social science.

‘Trends’ in the field of Southeast Asian history have a way of being unresolved satisfactorily before ‘new’ ones emerge to take their place. Part of the reason is that older scholarship is not only considered passé, but each new generation of Southeast Asianists wants to ‘make its mark’ on the field in original ways. Yet, when one scrutinizes some of these ‘new’ issues carefully, they often turn out not to be entirely so; rather, they appear to be different ways of approaching and/or expressing older ones, using different (and more current) operating vocabulary. ‘Angle of vision’ and ‘perspective’, popular in the 1960s, have become ‘privileging of’ or ‘giving agency to’ in current usage, while their methodological intent is exactly the same, bearing the same (or nearly the same) desirable consequences. Older, seminal scholarship is often only given lip-service without much in-depth consideration, so that some of the ‘new’ scholarship begins ‘in the middle of the game’, scarcely acknowledging (or knowing) what had transpired earlier. This unawareness regarding the ‘lineage’ of Southeast Asia scholarship fosters some reinvention and repetition of issues and problems without realizing it, in turn protracting their resolution. So as not to lose sight of this ‘scholarly lineage’ that not only allows a better assessment of what are genuinely new trends and what are not, but also to resolve unresolved issues and move on to really new things, this essay will analyse and discuss where the field of Southeast Asian history has been, where it is currently, and where it might be headed. Although focused on the discipline of history, it remains ensconced within the context of the larger field of Southeast Asian studies.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, Borneo – supposedly one of the most isolated islands on the planet – became a trans-national site of growing importance. Instead of being imagined as a site of endless forests, inaccessible mountains, and undisturbed nature, Borneo became a place to extract and move objects, many of them spinning off into international circuits. The British and Dutch, who became the dual colonial overlords of the island, became the primary actors in facilitating these movements. Yet Asian actors – such as the Chinese, Malays, and various Dayak peoples – also were heavily involved in these transits. The first part of this essay looks at the role of geology and minerals in effecting these transitions. The second part of the paper examines the movement of biota, especially vis-a-vis Chinese networks, in connecting Borneo to other shores. Finally, the third part of the essay looks at contraband cargoes of diverse origins in also facilitating these connections. I argue that far from being an isolated and ‘off-the-beaten-track’ locale, Borneo became central to new ideas of trans-national connection in Southeast Asia, linking people, commodities, and trade circuits into an ever-tightening embrace.