The academic study of religion continues to be political-
ly significant in the region. This is especially true of scholar-
ship published in the languages of the region. Religious
studies are not well developed in the region, but with the ex-
pansion of modern education since the end of the colonial
era, studies of religion by Southeast Asian scholars have be-
come increasingly common. Many Southeast Asian scholars
of religion are trained in history; others in area, Buddhist,
or Islamic studies. In many instances the lines between aca-
demic and committed scholarship is a fine one. In Southeast
Asia many scholars of religion are actively engaged in politi-
cal causes, movements, or parties. In addition to more tradi-
tional academic venues, intellectuals regularly publish in
daily papers and weekly news magazines. Among the issues
of concern to these scholars are economic development, eco-
logical degradation, human rights, social justice, and democ-
ratization. There are no systematic studies of the writings of
scholar-activists in European languages. In the Islamic socie-
ties of the region, questions concerning banking and finance
are also important because of the traditional Islamic prohibi-
tion on interest. Most of this literature is inaccessible to non-
specialists because there are very few translations.
More conventional scholarship may also be pointed.
Muslim Indonesia provides a cogent example. Indonesian
scholars are familiar with Western scholarship that has de-
picted traditional cultures as being only trivially Muslim. Is-
lamists often cite the works of Clifford Geertz as proof that
their own critiques of religious traditionalists are valid. To
establish the orthodoxy of their positions, traditionalists have
produced countertexts that can be read simultaneously as
history and theology. Zamakhsyari Dhofier’s The Pesantren
Tradition (1999) is a ready example. In this way academic
scholars of religion are drawn into Southeast Asian religious
discourse.
Political considerations have also influenced which
communities are studied and which are not. Politically sig-
nificant communities receive greater attention than minori-
ties. Scholarly neglect of Southeast Asian Christianity, tradi-
tional Chinese religion, and Tamil Hinduism is especially
apparent. Neglect of Southeast Asian Christianity is among
the most serious problems confronting the field. The conver-
sion of many tribal and Chinese people to Christianity has
fundamentally altered the religious landscape of Southeast
Asia. In general, there has been very little research on the in-
teraction of religious communities in any Southeast Asian
country. The religions of Myanmar (Burma) have also suf-
fered from scholarly neglect, but for a different reason: very
few scholars have been able to conduct research there since
the middle of the twentieth century.
RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE. Many scholars of
Southeast Asian religions have been concerned with the role
of religion in indigenous political systems and the interrela-
tion of religion and culture. Archeologists and historians
have attempted to discern the religious foundations of
Southeast Asian statecraft. Of the few manuscripts that have
survived from the precolonial period, a substantial number
concern theories of kingship. This concern is also found in
nineteenth-century texts, many of which are preserved in li-
braries and archives in Holland, Great Britain, and France,
as well as Southeast Asia. Other important sources of the role
of religion in politics include Chinese texts, inscriptions on
monuments, and archeological sites, such as Pagan, Angkor,
Ayutthaya, and Borobudur. George Coedes, Robert Heine-
Geldern, Stanley Tambiah, and others have found that
Southeast Asian kingdoms were structured as representations
of Hindu or Buddhist cosmologies and that kings were often
described as divine or semidivine beings. Muslim kingdoms
retain some of the symbolism of the Hindu and Buddhist
past and also describe Sultans as descendants of the Prophet
Muhammad and as representatives of God on earth.
A substantial body of scholarship focuses on the role of
traditional religious concepts in contemporary Southeast
Asian politics. Benedict Anderson, Clifford Geertz, and oth-
ers suggests that traditional concepts of power and authority
continue to inform political discourse and the conduct of
politics throughout the region. In modern Southeast Asia, re-
ligion has been used to legitimize the political programs of
states, leaders, and parties, be they authoritarian or liberal.
ON THE NATURE OF RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS. For most of
its history, the academic study of religion has looked to an-
cient, philosophically complex texts for the essence of reli-
gious traditions and has assumed that popular and contem-
porary variants of these texts are in some sense corrupt. This
understanding of world religions is apparent in many impor-
tant studies of contemporary Southeast Asian religions, in-
cluding Melford Spiro’s Buddhism and Society (1982) and
Clifford Geertz’s The Religion of Java (1960). As Boone ob-
serves, this has lead to the construction of artificial canons
recognized only by Western or Western-trained scholars.
The tendency to understand world religions as philosophical
systems embodied in ancient texts has contributed to the
view that Southeast Asian Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims
are only superficially such and that indigenous animisms re-
main the most important of Southeast Asian religions. This
view was articulated by Raffles in the early nineteenth centu-
ry and has been subject to serious criticism only since the
mid-1970s.
As scholars of religion have become increasingly con-
cerned with religion as lived experience, many have come to
question the assumptions of traditional philological scholar-
ship. As a result, there is a greater appreciation of noncanoni-
cal texts and the relation of religion to daily social life. This
has lead to a creative convergence of religious studies and cul-
tural anthropology.
RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY.
Since the 1970s the distinction between cultural anthropolo-
gy and religious studies has been muted by developments in
both disciplines. Earlier generations of anthropologists gen-
erally focused on exclusively oral traditions. Even those who
studied Buddhists, Muslims, and other adherents of literarySOUTHEAST ASIAN RELIGIONS: HISTORY OF STUDY 8639