University of Wisconsin-Madison's Center for Southeast Asian Studies

In this course students study contemporary issues in the economic growth and development of Southeast Asia. The countries of the region have much in common in terms of history, geography and their role in the world economy. The original member states of ASEAN – Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Singapore – are among the world’s most rapidly-growing economies. However, the region also contains some notable growth and development failures, and as a result Southeast Asia’s modern history has been marked by tremendous divergence in the levels of living of its peoples. In this course students review the theory and empirics of growth, development, trade and distribution in contemporary Southeast Asian market economies. The goal is to address several different facets of the question: How can development of Southeast Asian economies be sustained into the future? We use case study and comparative approaches. As instructor, my aim is to promote an economic way of thinking about development issues in Southeast Asia. A typical topic thus combines relevant economic theory with examination of Southeast Asian data and debates.

Ag. and Applied Econ 731/Econ 877: Macroeconomics of Agricultural Development
In this course "macroeconomics" is used to refer to the study of economic phenomena occurring at a scale greater than that of the firm: the industry, sector, or economy as a whole. The goal is to understand agricultural development as part of the overall process of economic growth and development. This will be accomplished by taking the agricultural sector as a unit of analysis and examining its general equilibrium linkages with other sectors of a developing country. The course is divided into three parts. In part I we review classical and neoclassical models of economic growth, structural change, and the distribution of income, with particular focus on these processes as they occur in small, open economies. In part 2 we examine the implications of relaxing some of the neo-classical assumptions, in particular those of CRTS and market clearing through price flexibility. In part 3 we address sectoral policy dimensions, with coverage of agricultural policy, trade and industrialization policy, exchange rate regimes and macroeconomic management.
Anthropology 330: Topics in Ethnology: Peoples and Cultures of Mainland Southeast Asia
This course surveys the peoples and cultures of mainland Southeast Asia, specifically of the countries now called Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam. This course is taught from a perspective that it is not possible to understand Southeast Asian cultures by narrowly focussing on modern-day single village studies. Rather one must appreciate the role of economics, politics and history in hsaping the croader contexts into which village life is integrated. Due to hte dearth of English-language anthropological scholarship elsewhere in the region, Thailand receives particular attention.

Anthropology 350: Political Anthropology
This course has two main purposes. On the one hand it seeks to familiarize students with major works in the historical development of anthrpological theorizing about the subject of politics. Simultaneously this course explores new directions for future anthropological study.

Anthropology 430: Language and Culture
This course is an introduction to the interactions and interdependencies between language and socio-cultural dimensions of communities. the course begins with discussions of the nature of language, contrasting the narrower structural view with broader definitions that include contextual, historical, and textual information. These two views of the nature of language will provide th basis for discussions of the nature of topics such as linguistic structure and culture, linguistic structure and meanign, metaphor, performance, language and gender, conversational styles of language, speech acts, verbal arts, and language as action.

Asian American Studies 240: Refugees of the 'Cold' War: Southeast Asians in America
Since 1975 close to a million Southeast Asian refugees have migrated ot the United States from the three countries of Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam, adding four new major ethnic groups to American society: Hmong, Khmer, Lao, and Vietnamese, among them being ethnic Chinese and "Amerasians." This course is intended to provide a better understanding of conditions that led thousands of people to flee their homes in Southeast Asia and eventually take refuge and start new lives in the United States. The course will be divided into three parts: 1) Conflict in Indochina: Origins and Impact; 2) Continuing Conflict and Disorderly Departures: Refugees and Migrants; and 3) Making New Lives in America.
Dance 001: Introduction to Javanese Performance
This course provides an introduction to classical Javanese dance in its musical context. Students will learn to dance sequence in one of the three main dance styles--rough male style, refined male style and female style. By the course's end, students will have a foundation in basic dance technique and an understanding of how the dance relates to the musical accompaniment (gamelan music). They will have gained an appreciation of the intricacy of the classical dance form and its musical structure.

Dance 001: Javanese Performance II
This course provides an introduction to Javanese dance theater performance in a Javanese epic tradition with its branch folkstories through the discipline of Central Javanese (Yogyanese court) dance-theater. Dance styles depicting different key characters in the epic are introduced--for example, the pricess, the prince, the king, the demon king, ogres and clowns. Studnets work toward performance of an exceprt of a Javanese epic folk story as a final class performance project. Students are introduced to basic Javanese dance technique, and learn about how stories abecome dance and how dance becomes theater. Students will also build upon their knowledge of Javanese gamelan music with additional music sessions, which focus on basic forms of dance accompaniment for the dance drama. Assigned readings on the epic stories and the performance tradition augment performance instruction.

Geography 358: China and Southeast Asia
Description forthcoming
Geography 558: Social Geography of Asian Cities in Comparative Perspective
Description forthcoming

History 244: Introduction to Southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is a region that today consists of ten independent nations: Brunei, Cambodia (Kampuchea), Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar (Burma), Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam, each with its own history, cultures, and political and socio-economic conditions. Nevertheless, it is a region -- between China and India -- that possesses many cultural and historical similarities and continuities that make it unique. This course is intended to provide a general introduction to Southeast Asia's past and prsent. The course is organized chronologically around three broad periods: 1) traditional states and societies; 2) colonial transformations and indigenous responses; and 3) independence and new nation states. Within these contexts, the course will explore several topics and themes, amongh them the origins of indigenous states, religious conversion and practice, social roganization and gender relations, modern social and economic transformations, responses to colonial domination, the develpment of "imagined communities," nationalist and revolutinoary movements, post-colonial societies and political systems, the impact of "cold war" international relations, and U.S. involvement in the region. Given the size and diversity of the region, the coures will concentrate on four Southeast Asian countries: Vietnam, Indonesia, Thailand and the Philippines -- those countries that are the primary research areas of Wisconsin's Southeast Asian program and for which significant library resources exist on campus.

History 319: The Vietnam Wars
Even 25 years after the last US helicopter took off from the roof of the US Embassy in downtown Saigon, the Vietnam War remains a wound in our collective memory. The bitter partisan passions that divided the nation
during the war seemed to have widened in the years since the last American troops left South Vietnam. Indeed, there are scholars who argue that defeat in Vietnam has had a lasting impact of American culture and left its imprint upon postwar US foreign policy. Even in the euphoria that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union, the ghost of Vietnam remains an unwanted guest at the national banquet. Moreover, as the longest war in American history, the Vietnam conflict commands our attention on its own terms. Over the space of 15
years, four American presidents failed to devise a strategy to protect our Saigon allies and check the rise of enemy combat operations. At war's peak in 1968-69, over 500,000 American troops and nearly half of American airpower were engaged in some of the most bloody and brutal combat in the history of warfare.
Over the span of a fifteen-week semester, this course will survey the origins of the Vietnam conflict in a dying French colonial rule, probe the origins of American commitment to the Saigon regime under President
Eisenhower, and then march through the years of American military escalation. Students will be expected to attend all lectures, keep pace with the readings, complete three pieces of written work--a take-home
mid-term exam, a 5,000 word research paper, and blue-book final examination. Apart from these formal requirements, students are expected to attend weekly discussion sections which have their own reading schedule. Reflecting the controversy surrounding the subject, there is no single text for the study of the Vietnam Wars. Instead, the syllabus covers each topic with journal articles and book extracts, divided into
"Required" and "Background" readings. To follow the lectures and their unfamiliar material, students should read selections from the "required" materials before the relevant lecture.
History 438: Buddhism and Society in Southeast Asian History
This course is not for a study of the Theravada's tenets in depth. Rather, the purpose is to learn about historical influence of Theravada Buddhism in those countries and its contemporary dynamism. The main subjects of the courses are: 1) Early Theravada Buddhism and its introduction to Southeast Asia; 2) Ideas and the monastic order; 3) Traditional Buddhist polity; 4) Transition in the 19th century; 5) Buddhism and modern nations. The focus is on Thailand and Burma, the major parts of the region's history and religious development.

History 457: Southeast Asia to 1800
Enriched by the Chinese and Indic civilizations, Southeast Asia is a place of striking diversity where the major world's religions meet (Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Christianity and Confucianism). Yet it is the subtle commonality of local culturs that make the region distinctive. The cultural traditions have shaped the history of the region and are very much alive today despite colonization and Westernization. This course will explore major themes and topics in the history of the whole region rather than of major events in individual countries in details. No prior knowledge is required. Nor is the ability to memorize the dates and unfamiliar names. The enthusiasm to learn other cultures and to study unfamiliar materials, plus imagination, is hoped for.

History 458: Southeast Asia: 1800 to Present
Through lectures and readings, the course surveys the modern social and political history of Southeast Asaia, a region remarkable for its religious and cultureal diversity. To treat two centuries in the history of ten nations within the space of just 27 lectures requires compression and selection. Instead of discussing the history of individual nations, the course analyzes broad themes which encompass major changes in the region within a given historical epoch. to animate these generalities, lectures will illustrate regional themes with detailed discussions of events in individual countries.
History 500: Inventing the Orient: The East in our Knowledge
Since Edward Said, Orientalism (1978), the critical studies of how Western scholarship knows and represents other cultures have become a major issue. The book rexplores how the Oriental (Muslim in the Middle East in this case), are represented as the opposite to Western civilization. They are "the Other" of the West. This (mis) represenation is not simply the result of ignorance or inadequate knowledge, but it is a result of the cross-cultural and power relations between the West and the rest. Is "Orientalism" synonymous with colonialism? Is it also true to every other cross cultural encounters? Are there other forms of Orientalism and in other time? Are the Orients typified? How? Is Orientalism undifferentiated by gender, race or class? Are there reactions or resistance from the Other? Finally, does the representation of "the Other" belong exclusively to Western culture? How do other cultures represent their "Others"?

History 500: Nationhood and Nationalism
This course puts together a large amount of literature on nationalism which has been an important scholarly subject of the 1980s and 1990s. The first part is a major theoretical one which has fundamentally shaped the studies of the past two decades. The second part details some important contributions to those stheories as well as discussions on particular areas of the world. As we shall see, nationalism is part of our modern history as much as history provides how we can discuss and understand nationalism. The aim of the course is for students to become familiar with the major literature on the subject, thereby the state of theories, ideas, arguments and remaining questions on nationalism and history.

History 755: Remembering Traumatic Past: Thailand in the 1970s
The 1973-76 period was the most critical time in the recent history of Thailand. In many ways, it has shaped the entire political and social milieu up to the present time. The turbulent period was marked by the popular uprising against the military dictatorship in October 1973, followed the most radical years of political conflicts and polarization which led to several forms of violence, and ended with an indescribably brutal massacre in October 1976. The traumatic past is part of every society. Not only is it tragic, but it is unsettled, ambivalent, and so disruptive to individuals and the society. The reasons for the ambivalent narratives can be both political and cultural. The purposes of the course are: 1) To explore this traumatic past in Thailand, especially the massacre in 1976; what happened and why, in historical contexts. 2) To understand how it is traumatic, and how it has been remembered or forgotten, politicall and culturally. 3) Since the issue has never been raised before, the course itself is a pioneering inquiry. Therefore we will explore a few other cases of traumatic past in search of some perspectives for 2).
History 755: Seminar: The Islands of Southeast Asia: A Comparative History of Indonesia and the Philippines
Designed for graduate students with some background in the region's history and politics, the course will cover selected topics in the comparative history of these two nations from the 17th to the late 20th centuries. As island nations that experienced a parallel history of protracted colonial occupation, Indonesia and the Philippines are an ideal site for explorations into the limits of comparative history. Focusing on themes of continuity and change, the seminar will study some of the major points of historical change in these two archipelagic nations over the past five centrueis, concentrating on three overlapping issues: 1) the impact of external forces for change, common wo the Southeast Asian region, upon each nation; 2) the internal dynamics of development within these two countries; and 3) a comparison of these processes in Indonesia and the Philippines. In adopting this approach, we are aware that we are imposing, post facto, the Procrustrean paradigm of the nation-state and its imagined uniformities upon a disparate, historically undifferentiated archipelago that stretches from the Straits of Malacca to the Luzon Strait.

History 755: Photography & Philippine Environmental History
This interdisciplinary seminar is a part of a larger, ongoing project that will link academics and environmentalists from two countries in a cooperative effort to collect, archive, and analayze historic photography for both environmental and historical applications. The seminar will train Philippine and American graduate students in field work, oral history, and the use of historical photographs for btoh general historical research and the stufy of environmental change. This instruction will move outside the conventional classroom to establish a join, trans-national seminar on the internet and in the field that will provide students on btoh sides of the Pacific with research experiences beyond the bounds of current graduate education.

Lit in Trans 379: Modern Indonesian Literature in Translation
This course introduces the student to the social, historical, and literary contexts of the development of Indonesian literature and tools for approaching these distant texts. The course begins with a number of early modern texts of the late colonial period (1890-1940), exploring the Western/modern influences on Malay literature of Dutch-medium and Malay-medium school graduates. Reprsentative pre-independence, post-independence, and contemporary prose works are examined in conjunction with readings of literary critics and historians to gain an understanding of the development of Indonesian literary aesthetics as well as cultural themes and values.

Music 361(Lab 1): Beginning Javanese Gamelan. (1 cr.) An introduction to the repertory and performance techniques of Central Javanese gamelan music. Students learn to play four or five of the simpler Javanese gamelan pieces (gendhing) as an ensemble, meeting for two one-hour sessions per week. Most class time is devoted to performance, with a few sessions devoted to viewing videos of Javanese theatrical and dance traditions accompanied by gamelan music.

Music 361(Lab 2): Advanced Javanese Gamelan. (1 cr.) A performance ensemble class that offers one or more concerts annually on campus and occasionally performs off-campus. Students learn a wide variety of Javanese gamelan repertory, including accompaniment for Javanese dance dramas and other forms of Javanese theater and dance. The class meets for two 90-minute sessions a week, and is supplemented by private instruction on the more difficult instruments. Music 103: Introduction to Music Cultures of the World (2 cr.) A first survey of music from selected cultural areas around the world (particular choices vary from semester to semester). A lecture course open to all students, with no prerequisite courses or musical training. Recent offerings have included a substantial unit on music in Indonesia (as well as other countries of Asia, Oceania, Africa, and North America). Assignments include textbook readings and listening. Grading based on several exams. Music 402: Music Cultures of the World: East and Southeast Asia (3 cr) A survey of music throughout Pacific Asia for students with some formal musical background. The course begins with in-depth coverage of music from Indonesia: various traditional musics, followed by consideration of current and recent popular music. Most other countries of Southeast Asia are covered as well, but not as comprehensively (Philippines, Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). The last third of the course is devoted to music in East Asia (China, Korea, and Japan). Grading is based on three exams and a research paper. Music 515: Proseminar in Ethnomusicology (3 cr.) A seminar introducing the field of ethnomusicology, its history, methods, and current theoretical concerns. Students read and discuss important ethnomusicological studies, write several book reviews, prepare a transcription of a musical excerpt, and write a major paper based on local field research or review of important theoretical literature. Students may choose to focus on a Southeast Asian topic for the major project, and several weeks of reading and discussion are devoted to issues pertaining to music and musical scholarship in Southeast Asia. Grading is based on the three written projects, an oral presentation of the final paper, and participation in weekly discussions. Music 915: Seminar in Ethnomusicology (3 cr.) An advanced seminar in ethnomusicology. Topic varies from year to year. Several seminars have addressed Southeast Asian topics: "The Wayang World and its Music" (1991) and "Issues in the Music of Southeast Asia" (1997). Assignments have included transcriptions of musical excerpts, analyses of Javanese musical accompaniment of drama, readings on the history and aesthetics of various musical traditions, critical evaluations of media representations (commercial recordings and television broadcasts), employing the UW-Madison's extensive collection of cassette recordings and videos from Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines.
Poli Sci 312: Politics of the World Economy
This course is intended to help students understand: (1) the recent history and present nature of the world economy; (2) the differing ways that economists, political scientists, and journalists tend to view the global economy; (3) key controversies about the economic and political implications of the existence and operation of the world economy; and (4) relevant choices for public policy, including their possible consequences.
Poli Sci 339: Southeast Asian International Relations
This course spans three activities and two goals. The activities are awareness, analysis, and assessment. The first goal is to help students improve their awareness of ten countries in a region of the crescent of a rim in the world. The countries are Brunei, Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The regions is Southeas Asia, the crescent is East Asia; and the rim is Asia Pacific. The second goal is to help students exercise and thus improve their capacity to analyze and assess the ways in which these countries relate to each other and with other countries in the revised context of the post-Cold War world.

Poli Sci 695: Politics of the Pacific Rim: Security, Prosperity, Democracy
This course will help students explore the international politics of the Pacific Rim by focusing on efforts to organize regional cooperation among the diverse countries there. Such efforts include the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum, and the ASEAN Regional Forum (ARF). Implications for US foreign policy will be drawn. For example, what policies should the US pursue in ARF on behalf of regional security, or in APEC to promote regional prosperity? Should Americans pursue multilaterally the democratization of East Asia as well?
Poli Sci 639: Southeast Asian Politics
This course will focus on three major countries: Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. Our study of these three countries will, in turn, focus on three major themes. First, we will examine major features of the historical process of state formation in each of the three countries, as well as modern pattersn of state-society relations. This examination will begin, necessarily, with a focus on the enormous contrasts in how these three countries experienced European expansion: Thailand was never formerlly colonized, while Indonesia and the Philippines were brought under very different types of colonial rulership. Second, we will examine the politics of economic development, with particular attention to how varying patterns of state-society relations have influenced--and been influenced by--the course of economic development in each of the three countries. Third, we will analyze recurring tensions between authoritarian and democratic forms of government throughout the postwar era.

Poli Sci 967: Seminar - Asian Pacific Regionalism
This course offers a comparative examination of the process of state formation and the character of state-society relations in Southeast Asia. The first portion of the course will consist of a broad survey of a range fo theoretical literatures on European state formation, colonial state formation, modern states' perceptions and strategies, state-society relations in the Third World, and territorial dimensions of the state. After a brief look at precolonial state formation in Southeast Asia, the course will proceed to a much more careful examination of colonial-era state formation in Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines. In the third portion of the course, we will examine he character of states and state-society relations in postcolonial Indonesia, post-1932 Thailand, and the postcolonial Philippines. The final week of readings examines strategies of decentralization currently being considered or implemented in each of these three polities. The goal throughout will be to draw upon and contribute to theoretical understandings of how states are constructed and how they relate--across time and space--with various social forces.

Poli Sci 967: Southeast Asian Political Economy: Comparative Colonialism
This course offers a comparative examination of the pre-colonial and colonial legacies bequeathed to the modern states and modern political economies of Southeast Asia, focussing in particular on the intersection between the process of state formation (the development of on-going administrative structures, legal systems, methods of extracting revenue, and systems of coercion) and the transformation of economic structures. While major attention will be devoted to Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, we will also seek to bring in insights from other settings in Southeast Asia--and from elsewhere in the Third World.

Poli Sci 967: Seminar: Southeast Asian Politics
Description forthcoming