‘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.

Over a half century after the great ‘classical’ kingdom of Pagan that produced the ‘golden age’ of Myanmar had declined in the first decade of the fourteenth century, the kingdoms of Ava and Pegu appeared. Thereafter, for the next century and a half, both dominated the land. While Ava was an ‘upstream’ agrarian kingdom ruling mostly Upper Myanmar, Pegu was a ‘downstream’ commercial polity with hegemony over Lower Myanmar. However, and contrary to convention that the history of fifteenth-century Myanmar was an ethnic struggle between two irreconcilable Burmese and Mon populations, their relationship should be characterised more as a dualism of different geo-political and economic factors instead. Indeed, the history of that ‘upstream–downstream’ relationship between Ava and Pegu established lasting patterns that became, thereafter, part of the fabric of Myanmar's history until today.

The geo-political and cultural-historical context, more than any other single factor, has shaped the notion of Mranma Pran in pre-colonial times. It is derived from a longstanding reality embodied in the term anya (‘upstream’), representing Upper Burma (hence, the term anyatha, ‘offspring of Upper Burma’). Although Lower Burma also has an equivalent in the term akriy (‘downstream’), it was Upper Burma more than any other region in the country that initially exemplified the term Mranma Pran, the ‘heartland’ of the country's culture and society for over a millennium. The meaning of the term Mranma Pran (or its colonial term, ‘Burma’), therefore, depends on the context in which and by whom it is viewed.

Change, or impending change, can often inspire the creation of myths, for it both threatens and promises. It threatens the security of the established, while providing hope to the disestablished. Change thus produces anxiety and discomfort on the one hand, euphoria and optimism on the other. Those in a position to be harmed by the change often create “negative” myths about the potential implications of that change; those not, glorify it. To misquote Claude Levi-Strauss, myths are created to control the present, hence, by implication, also the future (Levi-Strauss 1979).

When historians refer to the “classical” period in Southeast Asia, they usually mean the era roughly between the ninth and fourteenth centuries A.d. When they speak of the “classical” states, they are referring most often to the region's first great kingdoms — Pagan, Sukhothai, Angkor, Dai Viet, Srivijaya, and Majapahit — the civilizations that gave birth to many of the nations in Southeast Asia today. Yet, the very idea of a “classical” Southeast Asia has not been debated sufficiently in the literature.