Southeast Asian development

JONATHAN RIGG (ed.)

Southeast Asian development: critical concepts in the social sciences

Oxford: Routledge, 2008; 3 vols, 5 parts, vol I, x, 529pp; vol II, viii, 292; vol III, xx, 504; ISBN 0-415-39436-8 (set), £475.

Reviewed by Victor King, University of Leeds

Jonathan Rigg’s collection of reprinted articles and book chapters and extracts on Southeast Asian development will become a major reference work (as I assume it is intended to become) for those who have a professional interest in development studies both in the region and beyond. It will also be enormously valuable for social scientists interested in issues of social, cultural, economic and political change, and for those who are searching for and perhaps anxious about the character and importance of Southeast Asia as a region in the post-war period and its status in relation to other regions. Obviously such a large compilation is for our convenience, for dipping into, sampling and savouring, teaching from, referring to and refreshing our memories of, though for the serious reviewer it tends to lead to almost total exhaustion if attempted at one prolonged sitting. It deserves our extended attention, hence this rather long-winded review, but my starting point has to be to offer my sincere congratulations (and warm admiration) to Jonathan Rigg for taking on such a monumental task and managing to come through it with great aplomb and skill, and achieving a large measure of success.

As with the other collections in Routledge’s ‘Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences’ series, the three-volume Southeast Asian development is big and expensive (£475), and I recommend that it be consulted in close companionship with Stuart Corbridge’s even more ambitious 6-volume set entitled Development; this is as the title suggests a more general contribution to the field and was published a few years ago in the same series. The publication of what I have come to refer to affectionately as ‘the Rigg reader’ should also be an occasion for great rejoicing and celebration among Southeast Asianists; it is the first in the Routledge series which combines concepts with region. Southeast Asia is now firmly inscribed on the ‘critical concepts’ map.

Although I do not wish to become overly preoccupied with ‘bigness’ a word needs to be said about the scale, scope and coverage of Southeast Asian development.  The editor, in his well wrought and thoughtful ‘Introductory Essay’ (pp. 1-57) which does help us make sense of his selection and mode of categorisation and appreciate what interconnections he is trying to make between the large number of readings, declares modestly that his efforts have resulted in a collection of ‘more than 1,000 pages’, though he advises that even this is ‘far from exhaustive’ (I, p. 5). In fact the collection approaches 1,400 pages, including preliminaries, acknowledgements, intro-duction and index. Aside from the editorial introduction volume I comprises two parts: part 1: ‘History, geography and colonialism: development before the development project’; 10 readings, pp. 59-215; part 2: ‘Rural society, community and culture’; 11 readings, pp. 217-504). Volume II embraces part 3: ‘Urbanisation, industrialisation, and modern lives and livelihoods’; 11 readings, pp. 1-292. Finally volume III is divided into two parts: part 4: ‘Making miracles, creating crises: the political economy of growth and crisis’; 13 readings, pp. 1-249; and part 5: ‘Poverty, affluence and the cultures of development’; 14 readings, pp. 251-498.

The 59 readings range from John Sydenham Furnivall’s classic statement on the economic dimension of the concept of the plural society, which was published in 1939 in his book Netherlands India, to Mark Thompson’s perceptive article published in 2004 on Asian values, authoritarianism, and ‘developmental dictatorships’, which is the most recently published item in the reader.  The very helpful chronological breakdown which Rigg provides (I, pp. xv-xx) reveals a clustering of items in the 1990s (30), with ten in the 2000s, and smaller numbers in the remaining decades (one in the 1930s; two in the 1950s; four in the 1960s; seven in the 1970s; and five in the 1980s).  If we take Rigg’s choice as an indicator of the level of performance of scholars working on the region then we might suggest that development studies in Southeast Asia began to come of age in the 1990s after a very sluggish start with only 18 worthy items in the post-war period up to the end of the 1980s. This pattern of achievement, in other words a slow post-war start in comparison with some other regions of the world with some evidence of a gathering momentum in the last two decades (though I would say from the very late 1970s), was obvious to me in my own region-wide attempt to capture the contribution of sociologists and political economists to the study of Southeast Asia; in anthropology the trajectory started earlier and rose more steeply.

Rigg also makes some observations about the coverage of the volume and provides a useful table of the readings by country, discipline and date of publication (I, table 2, p. 6). About one-third of the readings (19 in total) cover the region as a whole or Southeast Asia and East Asia. The largest number of country-specific readings concern Indonesia (14), whilst four countries (Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore) have reasonable coverage but still trail far behind Indonesia with five items each. As is all too familiar for those of us who have attempted to provide general books on Southeast Asia one tends (simply because of the very uneven and patchy quality of the information and research undertaken) to focus on the original country members of ASEAN. This volume is no exception. Rigg indicates that three countries do not have ‘an item solely devoted to them’, namely Brunei Darussalam, Timor Leste and Cambodia (I, p. 47). Furthermore, Vietnam and Laos have only one item each. At least Burma (Myanmar) because of its historical importance in the work of Furnivall in particular can claim four readings.

Although it is difficult to separate out disciplines, especially in the multi-disciplinary field of development studies, Rigg classifies two-thirds of the contributions within three broad fields: anthropology, economics/business studies and political science/political economy (13 readings each). It is especially pleasing from an anthropological viewpoint that we are given the attention we deserve. Rigg’s own discipline of geography is represented by nine items followed by development sociology/development studies (though this category seems to me to be problematical), and history is the runner-up with four readings.

It would also have been interesting to have had a breakdown of authorship according to nationality, although given the internationalisation of scholarship and research collaboration and interaction across political boundaries it is perhaps not as significant as some observers like Hans-Dieter Evers and Solvay Gerke have argued recently. Nevertheless, an examination of the 60 authors represented here, leads to the conclusion that the study of development in Southeast Asia has been largely an Anglo-American- dominated enterprise and that debates about the region have been conducted primarily outside and not in dialogue with those in the region. By my reckoning there is also only one contribution from a continental European (W.F. Wertheim). However, I am certainly impressed by Rigg’s very positive efforts to search out contributions by local Southeast Asian scholars and it is important that a fifth of the authors selected are from the area (primarily Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand). Such scholars as Jomo Kwame Sundaram, Hla Myint, Aihwa Ong, Shamsul Amri Baharuddin, Shari Ishak and Thongchai Winichakul occupy a deserved place in the reader (though sadly not Syed Hussein Alatas, Syed Husin Ali, Chua Beng Huat or Ungku Aziz). More explicit editorial attention to the implications of the unequal relationships between foreign and local scholarship would have been a useful way of locating some of the thinking about development in a wider theoretical context.

A related issue in the excursion into debates about local as against non-local scholarship is that of locally generated, region-specific concepts versus Western ones and the possibility of writing autonomous histories of the region. Rigg’s selection does address these matters in commendable detail through the work of Julius Boeke, John Furnivall, Manning Nash, Anthony Reid (though interestingly not Victor Lieberman) and John Smail among others, but perhaps more could have been made of the issues surrounding local as against non-local perspectives, ideas and priorities, and the importance of local agency and genius. One of the most appropriate, and now a classic set of studies on the societies and cultures of Asia which demonstrates the problems and opportunities presented by western socio-logical concepts in the understanding of Asian realities, and to which Rigg might have made reference (among too much else that he has had to cover), is W.F. Wertheim’s East-West parallels: sociological approaches to modern Asia (1964). An interrelated debate, which again Rigg might have covered with profit, at least in his introduction, because it is germane to the issues raised by Boeke and his critics (including Furnivall’s dialogue with Boeke) is that between the ‘formalists’ like Raymond Firth and the ‘substantivists’ such as Karl Polanyi. Though it was conducted primarily in the field of economic anthropology it has been and is very relevant to wider debates in development studies about the appropriateness or otherwise of neo-classical economic concepts, rational choice, scarcity and market-based calculation for the analysis of non-Western economies. Firth is important in another context in development studies in Southeast Asia to which I will make reference in a moment; in my view he certainly deserves an honourable mention in any historical overview of the field.

A collection such as this which attempts to cover a large, ill-defined and expansive field of academic and practical endeavour could have been arranged in a variety of ways, and, of course, most reviewers of this reader, with their own disciplinary and subject interests, will bemoan that Rigg has made too much of this and not enough of that. You simply cannot please everyone in such an enterprise, especially those who feel that they have made a contribution themselves and have been omitted. Rigg admits with great candour in his acknowledgements that ‘[p]ulling together this collection was more difficult than I first imagined’ (I, p. 46). He notes that there is some work that selects itself, but that ‘for much of the rest’ there were difficult choices to make (ibid).  What he has tried to do, as he explains, is to provide as wide a view as possible of the Southeast Asian region, with as representative a collection of different disciplinary methods and perspectives as seemed feasible, and to address ‘a broad swathe of ideological tendencies, from the neo-liberal to the neo-Marxist’ (I, p. 5).  Nevertheless, we can all appreciate the editor’s dilemma: he says ‘Even now, as I write the final words to the introductory essay, I feel slightly uneasy about some of the selections and, by implication, omissions’ (I, p. 46).

I want to reassure the editor that he has done a pretty good job. The way in which the collection is arranged and categorised and the main areas of concern and effort to which he has given attention are about right. There is important space given to the historical and geographical context of development and some of the consequences of the colonial encounter for Southeast Asian peoples. What this section illustrated to me was not just the importance of Boeke and Furnivall in these debates but also the strength and significance of the Dutch historical-sociological tradition in the work of Jacob van Leur and Bertram Schrieke. Wim Wertheim and Otto van den Muijzenberg then carried this tradition forward with distinction. How would Smail have written his seminal article without the pioneering work of van Leur, Locher, Resink, Romein and others? Moving on, although the distinction is sometimes difficult to make, and Rigg acknowledges this in his selection, a substantial number of readings are arranged between parts 2 and 3 according to whether they are concerned with urban issues (and industrialisation) or rural ones. Interestingly in this regard one of the few early post-war scholars to bridge the urban-rural divide in Southeast Asia was Clifford Geertz who again engaged in dialogue with prominent Dutch writers like Boeke, but who also saw his work on involution, shared poverty and dualism as only making sense in his engagement with the interrelationships between both urban and rural social, economic and cultural processes. Rigg makes it very clear now that for any serious student of the region recognition must be given to the fact that ‘the futures of rural livelihoods and agriculture are increasingly tied up with urban areas and industry’ (I, p. 21). He warns against the tendency, citing Ruth McVey, to see Southeast Asia as ‘quintessentially agrarian’ (ibid), although it has to be said that the most influential literature which has emerged from the region has been primarily rural-focused.

Rigg also provides an important section on poverty, affluence and inequality, which covers both urban and rural populations, although here there might have been a bit more emphasis on entrepreneurs and the professional middle classes. Rigg’s attention to the literature debating the so-called Asian miracle and ‘developmental states’ and then the reasons for and consequences of the economic crises of the late 1990s is to be expected in any collection on development and political economy and is suitably covered here in a separate section. It contains many of the major contributions which one would anticipate.  A final sub-section on culture and development dwells primarily and again perhaps predictably, on the Asian values debate, though here perhaps there might have been some attention to the ‘myth of the lazy native’ admirably dissected by Syed Hussein Alatas among others and debates about the complex role of religion and philosophy in economic affairs in the work of such writers as John Clammer, Stanley Tambiah, Tham Seong Chee and Fred von der Mehden.

So, what could have been done differently? Not a great deal, in my view. We would all expect ample coverage of some of the key concepts which have emerged from the engagement of social scientists, historians and geographers with Southeast Asia: dual economy/society, plural society/economy, agricultural involution, shared poverty, moral economy, weapons of the weak, rational peasant and imagined communities (though the latter is not particularly relevant to development studies, and perhaps Evers’s notion of ‘strategic groups’ of which I am very fond, might have found a place). Aside from Boeke, Furnivall, Geertz, James Scott, Benedict Anderson and Samuel Popkin, other authors who appear in the collection and who would not be surprise inclusions (leaving aside the Southeast Asian scholars already mentioned) are Anne Booth, Gillian Hart, Benjamin Higgins, Terry McGee, Rex Mortimer, Manning Nash (though the concept of ‘multiple society’ proved to be a non-starter), Wim Wertheim and Eric Wolf.

Overall the reader succeeds, but there are two major areas of development studies which, it seems to me, could have been addressed much more robustly, even if only by some discussion in the editorial introduction. Firstly, a major conclusion which comes out of this collection for me is the problem of theorising and generalising in the context of the diversity of development experiences in Southeast Asia. Therefore, what seems to me to follow from this observation is that one also needs to be very conscious of the relationships between concepts and practice and to the need to capture, understand and address the varied processes and consequences of development in quite practical and on-the-ground terms and in local contexts.  Of course, the Routledge series is concerned with ‘critical concepts’, but if nothing else the field of development studies has been and is about practice and about deliberately planning for and engineering economies, societies, cultures, and importantly the everyday lives of ordinary people. These concerns give rise to a set of interrelated themes.

Development (and the studies of it) has regularly come under attack for its ‘irrelevance’, and that the truly enormous energy devoted to it by governments and agencies and the resources invested in it have been a huge waste; in other words, in this view development doesn’t work and that it is more about the hegemony and control of developed, mainly Western countries, over developing ones (even given the relative economic success of the newly industrialising economies), rather than about the improvement of human welfare in its widest sense.  In this respect it would have been useful to have had some reference not just to the politics, ethics and methods of development, but also (if one accepts some of the criticisms levelled against development theorists and practitioners, as I do) to some of the dilemmas of practice. I would certainly have liked to have seen some attention, for example, to A.F.Robertson’s masterly analysis of the interrelations between ordinary people and representatives of the state, and, in his dissection of the institutions of national planning using Malaysia as a case study, his plea for an anthropology of development. Aside from Robertson’s People and the state (1984) there is a substantial body of work which amply demonstrates the problematical character of development in a Southeast Asian context, the bureaucratic ‘growth of ignorance’, the problematical encounters between those who plan and implement and those who ‘receive’ and ‘suffer’ from development and the ethical dilemmas that involvement poses for academic practitioners (found in the work of Michael Dove, Mark Hobart among many others).

Perhaps some attention to these issues, if only in the editorial introduction, would also have prompted a reference to the work of Raymond Firth in his (and his wife, Rosemary’s) pre-World War II studies of Malay fishing communities which combined a particular approach to the analysis of local level economic organisation with a concern for some of the practical matters of development; these in turn have direct relevance to the debates stemming from Boeke’s dual economy thesis. Firth also played an important role in directing and organising practical development-oriented studies from the later 1940s in the then British dependencies of Malaya, Singapore and the northern Borneo territories under the auspices of the Colonial Social Science Research Council. I count this as a most significant period in the expansion of academic studies of development in the region which raised many of the issues which were subsequently debated about the prospects and difficulties of engineering socio-economic change and the involvement of academic social scientists in this process.

My second broad area of concern comprises a major moment and shift in Southeast Asian development studies in the 1980s. This was the emergence of a group of Australian-based political scientists (Richard Robison, Richard Higgott, Kevin Hewison, Richard Higgott and Garry Rodan) who began to reorient the field in the direction of political economy (more radical and structural) and the engagement with the state and with social class. These writers provided a much more sophisticated analysis of the relations between politics and economics than the underdevelopment and dependency writers (represented in ‘the Rigg reader’ by Mortimer and Shamsul, for example, and in some respects Fenichel and Huff).  It is interesting that in Rigg’s selection there is a handful of readings from the 1980s, and yet there was an outpouring of political economy publications in this decade. For example, Higgott’s and Robison’s edited Southeast Asia: the political economy of structural change (1985) appeared (a book I consider to be an important watershed in the study of Southeast Asian development), Robison’s own Indonesia: the rise of capital (1986), and the edited book by Robison, Hewison and Higgott, Southeast Asia in the 1980s: the politics of economic crisis (1987) (which was addressing issues of capitalist crises before the economic dilemmas of the late 1990s).

Finally, a glossary of concepts might have been included in an introductory section.  There is, for example, specific attention to the concept of ‘culture’ in part 2 on rural society and community and in part 5 in the sub-section on culture and development, and yet the different ways in which ‘culture’ is conceptualised in different traditions of development studies is not really explored. And much the same could be said for the concepts of ‘underdevelopment’ and ‘dependency’ which would have helped to locate the work of such people as Fenichel and Huff and Mortimer in theoretical debates. I could go on, although one way to overcome this problem is, as I have suggested, to read Rigg along with Corbridge.

These critical observations notwithstanding Rigg has done us an enormous service in sifting, bringing together, structuring, interweaving and commenting on some of the best published work on Southeast Asian development, including most of the outstandingly influential contributions. Of course, we can quibble about what to feature and what to cast aside; these are the perils of addressing the region as a whole, a task which too few scholars have been willing to undertake. We all have our pet interests, obsessions and commitments. Nevertheless, Rigg has succeeded in putting the region on the conceptual map and in particular, in his own words, deploying and contemplating writings on Southeast Asian development ‘to reflect on global discourses and experiences of development’ (1, p. 46). His scholarly profile has been immeasurably enhanced in providing us with what will become a very widely consulted and cited collection.