This article addresses the question, is there such an entity as a separate field of the anthropology of Southeast Asia? Has the crisis in anthropology in the 1970s and ‘the literary turn’ of the 1980s led to a renewed interest in area studies? A number of topics that originally belonged to the field of anthropology will be discussed: religion, the culture of social class and strategic groups, family and gender relations, developments in tourism, leisure and consumption, material culture, media and performance, and the growing importance of the rapid urbanization in Southeast Asia and its relationship with globalization and localization.
