Origin of This Volume

This volume is the result of a collaborative project that culminated in the conference “Cultural Transfer in Early Monsoon Asia: Austronesian- Indic Encounters”, organized by Andrea Acri and Alexandra Landmann in December 2013 at the Nalanda-Sriwijaya Centre, ISEAS – Yusof Ishak Institute. The event brought together fourteen scholars from different disciplinary backgrounds and regional expertise, in the attempt to provide the widest possible framework to synthesize and (re-)assess the broad subject under investigation. Besides providing a venue for dialogue between various disciplines, it has aimed to (re-)focus scholarly attention on cultural phenomena side-by-side with linguistics, archaeology, and genetics.

Conceptually, the conference sought to foreground a “borderless” history and geography of South, Southeast and East Asian littoral zones that would be maritime-focused, and thereby explore the ancient connections and dynamics of interaction that favoured fruitful “encounters” among the cultures found throughout the region stretching from the Indian Ocean littorals to the Western Pacific, from the early historical period to the present. A hallmark of its intellectual framework has been to transcend the artificial spatial demarcations and imagined boundaries of macro-regions and nation-states, as well as to bridge the arbitrary divide between (inherently cosmopolitan) “high” cultures (e.g. Sanskritic, Sinitic, or Islamicate) and “local” or “indigenous” cultures. Indeed, many “local” small-scale societies and cosmopolitan cultures in the region stretching from Eastern India and Southeast Asia to China and Japan were already plural from the earliest times, yet retain some remarkable common features, such as wet-rice monoculture and houses on stilts (Abalahin 2011, p. 661). Religion, too, shows common forms, in terms of dual organization and a focus on an ancestor cult, often vaguely defined as “shamanic” or “animist” (Reuter 2014). Remarkably similar head-hunting and burial practices characterize the religion of Nāga tribes of Eastern India, as well as the past religions of some Tibeto-Burman and Austroasiatic-speaking ethnic groups settled in Myanmar, and might have been once widespread in maritime Southeast Asia, Taiwan, and the whole of Oceania (Brighenti 2009, p. 92; Hutton 1928, pp. 406–7). A shared core of cultural identity or Weltanschauung across Southeast Asia and Melanesia includes narratives of multiple origins, the importance of precedence, clan and social binding systems, small-scale societies, autonomy for women, and a specific close interconnection of spatial, social and religious differentiation marking centre and periphery.