Department of Pacific and Asian History-New Seminar Series

Abstract: I have previously drawn attention to the relatively balanced gender pattern in pre-colonial Southeast Asia, and the economic autonomy of its women. This seminar will somewhat speculatively engage the question what happened to gender in modernity. It will suggest that indigenous Southeast Asians adapted relatively poorly to colonial modernity because it was exceptionally male, and therefore ill-matched with Southeast Asian gender patterns.

From the vantage point of post-modernity, it appears that the modernity of Europe in the Century before 1914 was accompanied by a particular kind of public piety – ascetic and puritan in sexual morality; patriarchal in the home where respectable married women should focus; hard-working, frugal and disciplined in the workplace; committed to the city, to progress, rationality and technology. Southeast Asia encountered this type of modernity at its height in the late 19th century, but in an exceptionally male and alien form, embodied in male European officials and technocrats, male European and Chinese entrepreneurs; and male Arab religious reformers. Its technocratic achievements seemed irresistibly attractive, but its maleness in the marketplace was completely alien to Southeast Asian societies where women had always handled the buying and selling. Modernity was therefore picked up only selectively, in the first place by western-educated males aspiring to status in the new order. Theories of dual economy and plural society had to be developed to explain the incapacity of (male) Southeast Asians to operate a modern economy.

All welcome.

You are invited to join the speaker for drinks after the seminar at Fellows Bar, University House



Enquiries: Danton Leary