AR2221 2011-2 Lecture 1 Notes

national university of singapore DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE BA(Arch) Level 2 Academic Year 2011/2, Semester 1
AR2221 History & Theory of Southeast Asian Architecture

Lai Chee Kien and Imran bin Tajudeen
Copyright 2011-2 by Department of Architecture. Lai Chee Kien and Imran bin Tajudeen. All rights reserved.
LECTURE 1 AUSTRONESIA, EURASIA and SOUTH-EAST ASIA

I. SOUTHEAST ASIA a) Southeast Asia, as a regional spatial category, is a fairly recent term conceived when World War II concluded in 1945 to give shape to the field of academic study known as Area Studies, i.e., scholars of that field began to differentiate geo-political areas such as Middle East South Asia as well as East Asia etc. for the purposes of scrutiny and research. b) Such a grouping as Southeast Asia corrals together various countries on the mainland, such as Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar (Burma) and Thailand. Other countries in this grouping are composed of islands or part-islands around the South China Sea, such as the Philippines, Brunei, Indonesia and Singapore. Malaysia has the distinction of being part of the mainland as well as partially on the island of Borneo (Kalimantan). East Timor is the latest entry in this group, as it had become a sovereign state in 2002. The islandic part is also referred to as Insular Southeast Asia or Archipelagic Southeast Asia. c) The term cosmopolitanism is the age-old concept derived from the Greek word kosmo-polites conjoining world and citizen, to describe historical and ongoing circulations of human bodies around the globe. It may be defined territorially, culturally, linguistically, or even ethnically; but it cannot be connoted nationally since the ideas and practices preceeded forms of the nation-state and the concept of nationalism itself. The lands and seas of Southeast Asia were largely conducive to such activities relating to cosmopolitanism right up to the advent of World War II, especially across Austronesia and Eurasia. II. AUSTRONESIA and EURASIA a) Southeast Asia is often discussed as a part of larger areal concepts such as Asia or as smaller conurbations of the continent. Like Asia, archeologists have unearthed sites to suggest that there were multiple locations of human settlement in prehistory, and included developing tools and wares during the Stone and Iron Ages. b) Scholars (in particular anthropologists and linguistic scholars) have also denoted an area known as Austronesia to map migrations across the seas and land masses of Southeast Asia, to detail histories of human settlement and common characteristics of language use and material culture. Such an area imagines the space across insular Southeast Asia westwards to Madagascar and some islands in the Indian Ocean, southwards towards New Zealand (but excluding Australia), eastwards across the Pacific Ocean to include the Polynesian and Easter Islands, and northwards to include Taiwan and the Hawaiian islands. c) Migration and Language: According to archeologist Peter Bellwood, Austronesian migration occurred off the Asian continent to Taiwan around 4,000 3,000 B.C., then southwards to the Philippines, Sulawesi, Borneo and the Eastern Indonesian islands around 2,500 1,500 B.C., and to the Western Indonesian islands around 1,500 500 B.C.. Eastern migration from these areas took place from 1,500 B.C. to 1200 A.D. Anthropologist James Fox have detailed commonalities in Austronesian languages and their sub-groups, for example, the principal term for house *Rumaq, is variously rumah, uma, mu, ume, uma, umar, huma, and numa. d) By and large, Eurasia is the contiguous area straddling across and connecting areas regarded as Europe and Asia. The historian Victor Lieberman examined the longer-term history and recognized the correlations between geo-political histories across these two spaces that witnessed similar territorial integrations and cultural trajectories. More importantly, he suggested that besides migrations to mainland Southeast Asia by peoples from Eurasia, there are also commonalities between religious and secular cultures between those two areas (Eurasia and Southeast Asia).
III. SOUTHEAST ASIA IN ARCHITECTURAL HISTORIOGRAPHY a) An examination of various architectural survey texts on Asia (or parts thereof) that discuss (or omit) Southeast Asian architecture reveals the contingent character of the (sub-)regional or religious categories that are used as frameworks for describing and analysing architecture. These frameworks in turn correspond to the particular scope adopted in these surveys based on some architectural analytical categories, for example the (Hindu-Buddhist) classical versus (indigenous) vernacular, and traditional versus modern. In subsequent lectures we will revisit the shortcomings of assuming these binary opposites and some reconsiderations on the position of Southeast Asia in larger imaginings of architectural history.
b) The distinction between mainland Southeast Asia and the region of Austronesian-speakers, or Nusantara, is also acknowledged in some of these architectural survey texts. Southeast Asia has also been studied in relation to East Asia or South Asia, involving numerous permutations of subcategorisation. The study of architecture is thus engaged with larger questions of cultural studies that traverse the (political) boundaries of Area Studies.
c) The study of architecture in Southeast Asia, as is the case elsewhere, will involve sensitivity to the geographic distribution of built works and to the historical periods in which they were built, and can be read against two kinds of contexts. The first is the cultural-historical context: of migration and trade circuits, and the maritime and land polities of the region. The second context arises in the built work itself as a text which can be read using analytical tools in the study of architecture, namely the distinction between architectural type, model variation and stylistic changes. d) Architecture is a form of cultural expression and differentiation. This may arise from adaptation to geographic location (highland-lowland, upriver-downriver, etc), but more importantly through human agency and ingenuity in accentuation for symbolic posturing and identity politics between tribes and clans, among dynasties, polities, and ruling regimes, and later between nation-states and majority/minority communities. In this regard, knowledge of the composition of Southeast Asia in its cultural-linguistic and religious diversity is important. IV. MATERIAL CULTURE a) Material culture is a discipline in which attempts to read, analyze and interpret the values, ideas, attitudes and assumptions of particular communities or societies through examinations of material objects and artifacts. There is an underlying premise that objects and landscapes shaped by human beings reflect the conscious or unconscious beliefs of those making or commissioning the object. It intersects various subfields including archeology, art history, sociology, anthropology, as well as architectural, landscape or urban history. The last three are directly relevant to how we may give scope to and understand built environments and the structures contained within them. b) While we examine built structures as textual evidence for particular understandings (refer IIIc), we need to remember that few early Southeast Asian communities have conventional books and publications that record the official and everyday life. Their literacies and uses of space are also manifested in material artifacts such as the buildings forms, surfaces and objects, their tools and other implements, as well as in dance forms, music, and other forms of production. This requires us to adopt inter-disciplinary approaches and frameworks to cultivate our studies of them. Readings n Purissima Benitez-Johannot, 2011. Overview: The Austronesian Heritage, in Paths of Origins: the Austronesian Heritage, pp. 12-23 + p. 35. Manila: ArtPostAsia. o Victor Lieberman, 2003. Rethinking Southeast Asia, in Strange Parallels: Southeast Asia in Global Context, c. 800-1830, Vol. 1, pp. 6-21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
O.W. Wolters, 1999. Historical Patterns in Intra-Regional Relations, in History, Culture and Region in
Southeast Asian Perspectives, pp. 27-40. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.
Lai Chee Kien, 2010. Southeast Asian Spatial Histories and Historiographies: a re-examination, in
Fabrications: the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, Vol. 19:2, pp. 82-105. Cynthia Chou, 2005. Southeast Asia through an inverted telescope: Maritime perspectives on a Borderless Region, in Locating Southeast Asia: geographies of knowledge and politics of space, eds. Paul H. Kratoska, Remco Raben, Henk Schulte Nordholt, pp.234-249. Singapore: Singapore University Press.

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national university of singapore DEPARTMENT OF ARCHITECTURE BA(Arch) Level 2 Academic Year 2011/2, Semester 1

AR2221 History & Theory of Southeast Asian Architecture

LECTURE 1 AUSTRONESIA, EURASIA and SOUTH-EAST ASIA

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