372 Part V: Southeast Asia
many anthropologists, consider the “dark side of culture,” inauthentic, if not
even creepy, yet probably necessary for social stability, cohesion, and order.
One nation is missing from the list of colonial powers: India. This may
seem strange, because the majority of early states are clearly “Indic” in charac-
ter. In the first millennium C.E. there arose a series of polities (were they city-
states, chiefdoms, kingdoms? We are uncertain how to characterize them) that
carried the clear imprint of Indian concepts of kingship. Indianization may
have begun by the second century C.E., but by the fifth century, there is Indian
statuary in the form of images of Shiva, Vishnu, and Buddha. There is writing,
based on Sanskrit; these are mostly Buddhist texts. And there are Indian-style,
brick monumental temples found in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, south-
ern Vietnam, Java, and Bali. However, no Indian king ever conquered any of
these territories; rather, it appears that as political power was consolidated by
local warriors, India was the source of ideas about cosmic power to be adopted
by kings in need of dramatic ritual legitimation. They built sacred cities that
resembled the mountain where Shiva resides and installed his powerful lingam
in the center of them. Later they adopted Buddhism, and their dead kings were
enshrined as bodhisattvas, which is taking place at the moment of writing with
the remains of King Rama IX of Thailand (see box 10.2).
Are there any cultural commonalities across this area that precede the
period of colonialization and nation-building? Many scholars have tried to
answer this question; in her survey of anthropological studies, Steedly (1999)
summarized a few broad traits that most might agree on. Southeast Asia is the
region of bilateral or cognatic kinship, meaning a system in which kinship con-
nections are traced fairly equally through both parents, while lineage and inher-
ited rank are downplayed. In this, kinship contrasts markedly with that of India
and China, which are both strongly patrilineal and hierarchical. Secondly, and
also strikingly, gender relations are fairly egalitarian, which follows from the
kinship system. Differences between men and women in Southeast Asia are not
as binary as in China or India and many other parts of the world. Women run
businesses, share in inheritance with their brothers, and participate in public
life. A third characteristic of Southeast Asia is public displays of power in the
form of sacred objects and regalia, rituals, and monumental architecture linked
to political organization. States were “exemplary centers” or “theatre states”—
strong centers with weak peripheries and no real borders, always hungry for
laborers attached to land. There were also particularized forms of culturally
shaped violence: head-hunting, violent forms of trance behavior, cockfighting
(sublimated violence), and headhunting songs and oratory. Jar processing of
bodies and secondary burial were common throughout the region.
Each of the above notions evokes particular famous studies; Southeast
Asia, says Steedly (1999), is for anthropologists what the French revolution is
for historians: the area every scholar must know something about. That is
because a large percentage of the most respected anthropologists in the twenti-
eth century studied and produced important monographs here. We shall not