The “Golden Age” of Southeast Asian Studies: Experiences and Reflections Reynaldo C. Ileto, National University of Singapore (Proceedings of the workshop on “Writing History: Between Coarse Nationalism and Postmodernism” held at Meiji Gakuin University, Yokohama, March 2002, published 2003) I. The 1960s and early 70s were the height of the Vietnam war and opposition to it. They also witnessed a kind of golden age in Southeast Asian studies at Cornell University. Cold war politics coupled with modernization theory meant the backing of the US State department and private foundations for the development of the idea of “Southeast Asia,” of unities of experience among its components, despite the thin and often contradictory evidence. With the withdrawal and defeat of the US in Vietnam, state and foundation funding began to dry up and American students began to turn their backs on this once-dynamic field. The previous decade came to resemble a golden age, a Lost Eden. Laurie Sears has summed up the glorious sixties in the following passages, which I can do no better than quote verbatim: The Vietnam war years filled the classes of those few American historians and political scientists of Southeast Asia, whether notorious as hawks or doves, because they were the only scholars who knew anything at all about this small former French colony that had dealt such a stunning military blow to the French at Dien Bien Phu. Political scientists and historians from Cornell like Ben Anderson, Dan Lev, and John Smail . . . led teach-ins and antiwar rallies arising from political commitments forged during the days of their doctoral research when Indonesia’s charismatic president Soekarno was head of the nonaligned nations of Asia and Africa. The Cornell scholars had been nurtured by their own mentor George Kahin, whose work on both Indonesia and Vietnam has been a model for a kind of committed yet rigorous area studies scholarship. These men—along with Ruth McVey—set the example for a liberal belief in the power of area studies—the rigorous learning of local languages and an analysis of “culture” by objective scholars that could explain political alliances if not actually politics itself. This model of area studies challenged the older more conservative Orientalist paradigm of the colonial scholars. (SSRC 1999, 7) It should also be noted, however, that the triumphant sixties also witnessed a challenge, in the field of historical writing, to a newer but also considered flawed paradigm stemming from the “other” of the colonial scholars. This was variously called “Asia-centric” or “nationalist” historiography, a response to the Eurocentrism and 1