The diversity of religion in Southeast Asia has attracted
area specialists in almost all religious traditions to study the
region, and the theoretical orientations and methodologies
employed in the study of religion in the region are nearly as
diverse as the religions of the region itself. The academic
study of religion in Southeast Asia began in the early decades
of the nineteenth century. The earliest works are largely de-
scriptive. Most of them were written by colonial officials or
Christian missionaries. Stamford Raffles, John Crawfurd,
and Christiaan Hurgronje were among the colonial officers
who made enduring contributions to the study of religion
in Southeast Asia. Among the most important works by mis-
sionary scholars are Hans Scharer’s studies of the indigenous
religions of Kalimantan (Borneo) and Paul Bigandet’s study
of Burmese Buddhism. Subsequent scholars have employed
a variety of philological, archeological, historical, literary-
critical, political-science, and anthropological approaches.
Many more general works provide important data for schol-
ars of religion. Among the most important of these are dis-
trict gazetteers and other publications of colonial govern-
ments. These often provide the only available materials for
the study of the history of religion at the local level. James
Scott’s Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States (1900–
1901) and John Crawfurd’s History of the Indian Archipelago
(1820) are outstanding examples. Novels and other works of
fiction can also provide valuable information. A clear exam-
ple is Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s four-volume novel Buru
Quartet (1996), which is a fictionalized account of the reli-
gious and cultural forces that contributed to the rise of Indo-
nesian nationalism.
Despite this double diversity, one can detect the follow-
ing general themes and questions that have shaped the aca-
demic study of religion in Southeast Asia:
- Links between scholarly agendas and the agendas of co-
lonial and postcolonial states. - Relations between religion and politics in traditional
Southeast Asian states. - The development of increasingly nuanced understand-
ings of the nature of religious traditions. - The emergence, in the last decades of the twentieth cen-
tury, of a symbiotic relationship between religious
studies and the social sciences, particularly cultural an-
thropology.
These four factors interact in very complex ways in the aca-
demic discourse about religion in Southeast Asia.
POLITICAL AGENDAS. The political agendas of colonial and
postcolonial states did much to shape the development of
scholarly traditions. They have influenced the topics scholars
have chosen to investigate and the interpretation of their
findings. The academic study of religion in Southeast Asia
dates back to the early decades of the nineteenth century at
a time when the British, French, Dutch, and Spanish were
consolidating colonial empires. Edward Said has argued that
in the Middle East, colonial scholarship was among the
means through which Europeans sought to dominate and
domesticate potentially hostile religious elites. Much the
same can be said of colonial scholarship on Southeast Asia.
Such works as compilations of customary law and gazet-
teers describing local customs and periodic rituals were of
immediate value to colonial officials and other resident Euro-
peans. They remain valuable resources for scholars concerned
with religious change, and are particularly important for
scholars of the indigenous religions of tribes of the region.
An overwhelming number of these groups converted to
Christianity in the first half of the twentieth century. As their
traditional religions were orally transmitted, European writ-
ings provide the only available information about those early
religions.
The study of religion also provided instruments for
domination in a more subtle sense. Many of the monumen-
tal works of colonial scholarship, including Stamford Raf-
fles’s History of Java (1817) and Paul Mus’s Barabud:ur
(1935), locate the greatness of Southeast Asian cultures in
the distant past. These studies provided support for colonial-
ist apologetics, a major theme of which was that Southeast
Asian cultures had become decadent and corrupt and that
benevolent Europeans were assisting these cultures with colo-
nial rule. While intended for a European audience, these
works were also read by many Southeast Asians and are in
part responsible for the sense of cultural dislocation so vividly
described by Toer in his novels.
Islam and Buddhism were equally misrepresented,
though in very different ways. Raffles and Theodore Pigeaud
went to great lengths to deny the Islamic character of Indo-
nesian and particularly Javanese civilization. For them, Islam
was a threat to colonial authority. Portraying Indonesia as a
Hindu culture was part of a strategy of colonial domination.
Indonesian elites educated in Dutch schools were taught that
their culture and religion were an amalgamation of Hindu-
ism and Mahayana Buddhism, and were discouraged from
learning more than the rudiments of Islam. Christiaan Hur-
gronje, the greatest Islamicist of the colonial era, also con-
tributed to this agenda. His studies of the Achehnese and the
Southeast Asian community in Mecca were as much political
briefings as they were scholarship. The Dutch were involved
in a bitter war with the Achehnese and regarded Mecca as
a dangerous source of rebellion.
Buddhism was misrepresented in a different way. Many
of the early works on Therava ̄da Buddhism in Southeast Asia
were written by scholars who, if not Buddhists themselves,
were extremely sympathetic towards a particular understand-
ing of Buddhism. James Scott, Harold Fielding-Hall, and
others understood Buddhism as an abstract rational science
of the mind with little use for spirits, gods, or what they un-
derstood as superstitious practice. They regarded what are
now clearly understood as Buddhist ritual practices as either
the superstitions of the lower classes or remnants of a heathen
past. Like many other earlier European interpreters of Bud-
dhism, they imagined Buddhism as they wished it to be.8638 SOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY