Religious Studies: A Global View

sociological and anthropological. We know by now that ‘religious studies’ as

a category is a construction emanating from realities of North American and

European experiences of having founded departments and programs for the

academic study of religion in tertiary institutions. As such, it stands for a

scholarly, intellectual discipline and is contrasted with theological studies that

focus on detailed studies of particular religious traditions from withinthe

community. However, the two approaches are by no means mutually exclusive.

At the outset, I wondered if such classical, traditional frames of reference

would be appropriate for mapping the field of ‘religious studies’ in Southeast

Asia, or if such a starting point would be limiting in scrutinizing the Southeast

Asian material. As it turned out, although I located some evidence of the

‘religious studies’ component within Southeast Asia, these were few and far

between. Furthermore, restricting my observations to an elaboration of these

cases alone might convey an erroneous impression about the state of intellectual

and scholarly interest in, and accounts of, religion in Southeast Asia in general.

As a result, I have included some discussion of how religion is taught and

researched in the Southeast Asian context from the perspective of the various

social science disciplines outside (and in the absence) of formal departments

and programs of ‘religious studies’. The other issue was one of locations.

Institutionally, where in society would one find evidence for the academic,

scholarly, secular study of religion? Historical and comparative, cross-cultural

research (primarily from North America and Europe) reveals that the discipline

has been enshrined in faculties of humanities and social sciences in universities,

a traditional locale where scholarly and intellectual accounts of religious

traditions have flourished. Would this be borne out by investigations of the

Southeast Asian field?

Methodological routes

What constitutes Southeast Asia as a region and whether this signifies a distinct

territorial and cultural space have been debated by scholars for at least half a

century. It is not possible within the ambit of this paper to go into the nuanced

debates that have been subsequently generated in this context. Suffice it to say

that there is some consensus that this is a constructed regional entity and is

defined by ethno-religious pluralism and socio-political and cultural diversity.

Recent political discourses and events have also led to some rethinking of the

region’s boundaries. For the sake of comprehensive coverage, I have followed

the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) geographical sweep. The

ten countries of Southeast Asia included in this survey are Myanmar, Singapore,

Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, Brunei, Vietnam, Cambodia and

Laos. My aim was to map a discursive field vis-à-vis the field of religious studies

in Southeast Asia. What was the evidence for the presence of such a field and

140

ROWENA ROBINSON AND VINEETA SINHA