Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Kultur-, Sozial- und Bildungswissenschaftliche Fakultät - Institut für Asien- und Afrikawissenschaften

Der Vortrag findet am IAAW (Invalidenstr. 118) im Raum 117 statt.

Abstract:

Decentering Western constructions and imaginaries of Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian Studies, this paper shifts attention to inter-Asian knowledge productions. It focuses on Yunnan as an interstitial frontier that complicates any bounded notion of “China” and “Southeast Asia”.

Fully integrated as a southwestern province of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) only in 1949, and now bordering Laos, Vietnam and Myanmar, several scholars regard Yunnan’s cultural and political history as belonging to Southeast Asia rather than China. The Chinese world historian Yang Bin (2009: 13) laments that “Chinese studies fail to perceive Southeast Asian features in Yunnan, while Southeast Asian studies have taken for granted that Yunnan belongs to the field of Chinese studies”.

Going beyond the still observable perseverance of spatial references to and labels of “China” and “Southeast Asia”, this paper calls for exploring locally grounded regional perspectives of historically ingrained cross-border movement and mobility that might be difficult to grasp by conventional containers of area or country studies. This will be illustrated with the examples of Sipsongpanna (now “Xishuangbanna” in China’s Yunnan province), as a central venue of a larger “Tai World” of different Tai-speaking peoples, and of various flows of mainly Han and Hui Yunnanese Chinese, who moved throughout history into and within neighboring “Southeast Asia” as merchants, muleteers, laborers, and later anti-Communist Kuomintang (KMT) refugees. These examples highlight the specific case of Yunnan as an inspiration for an alternative method (à la Kuan-Hsin Chen’s (2010) Asia as Method) to rethink—thus simultaneously decolonize, de-imperialize and de-sinicize—the external scholarly production of knowledge on “Southeast Asia” through an actor-centered and lifeworlds perspective of mobility and movement from the ground up. This also includes ethnographically informed sensitivity to vernacular terminologies going beyond new spatial metaphors or scholarly, Western appropriations of vernacular notions such as “Zomia”.

Dr. Simon Rowedder is currently a Research Fellow at the Chair of Critical Development Studies, University of Passau. Before this, he served as an Assistant Professor at the Chair of Development Politics, University of Passau (2021-2025), and worked as a Research Fellow at the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore (2018-2021), where he had completed his PhD in Southeast Asian Studies in 2018. His research interests lie in economic anthropology, border studies, and development studies with a focus on Laos, Thailand, and Yunnan-Southeast Asian borderlands.