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IN THE FIRST MILLENNIUM A.D. mainland Southeast Asia's first great states arise, but then in the span of a few centuries these Indianized realms collapse and their Pyu, Mon, Khmer, and Cham peoples decline. In their place Burmese, Tai, and Vietnamese states arise and go on to rule the mainland as their peoples come to dominate the second millennium. Case by case these shifts appear to be ethnic and political successions wherein the strong displace the weak, but seen together regionally the similarities suggest an agricultural change whereby an irrigated wet rice specialization from upland valleys displaced gardening and farming complexes native to the lowlands.
Seeing this change requires a regional anthropology. Once ethnologists studied Southeast Asia as a region (Heine-Geldern 1956; Sharp 1962; Burling 1965; Provencher 1975; Keyes 1977), but their empirical generalizations have given way to an anthropology of discrete cases. While archaeologists still piece together regional types (Bellwood 1985; Higham 1989), ethnographers dote on the people or village they study. Their dictum, study each people or place in itself, is only a rule of method, not an ontological truth. Yet many ethnographies naively treat their subjects as if they existed and were knowable apart from larger conditions and logical models. In this fieldwork-driven empiricism where anthropology collapses into ethnography (Stocking 1992, 357, 362-72), local description, synchronic constructs, and inductive
Richard A. O'Connor is Biehl Professor of International Studies in the Department of Anthropology at the University of the South. I have benefited from comments by Michael Aung-Thwin, John Hamer, F. K. Lehman, Leedom Lefferts, Jr., Susan Russell, Sharon Siddique, Nicola Tannenbaum, and Joyce White. My debt to the ideas of Walter Vella, G. J. A. Terra, and W. J. van Liere far exceeds my paper's citations. I am also indebted to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, and the University of the South for funding; and to the Southeast Asia programs at Cornell, Michigan, Northern Illinois, Wisconsin, and Yale which have welcomed my summer research. reasoning have come to displace the regional comparison, historical perspective, and deductive logic that rigor and balance require. Indeed, to use our growing empirical riches intelligently, the study of Southeast Asia now requires logical models applied deductively. That is what Levi-Strauss (1969) does on...