Jim Scott in Memoriam, Southeast Asian Studies in Perpetuum

Picture: New Mandala

In an article by New Mandala, John T. Sidel writes about the late James C. Scott and his legacy on Southeast Asian studies.

I remember how generously Jim treated me and the late Jeffrey Hadler, both undergraduates at Yale in the mid-late 1980s with embryonic interest in Southeast Asia. He drew us under his wing and into the close-knit group of PhD students working on the region in the Department of Political Science at the time: Paul Hutchcroft, Yoon Hwan Shin, Mark Thompson, and Jeffrey Winters. He invited us along for dinners and to his home, and he let me join special graduate seminars on Southeast Asia and other topics (peasant politics, anarchism), enabling me to get an MA along with my BA and encouraging me onwards to do a PhD. But this is just a small personal snapshot within a much bigger picture. His former students include the luminaries named above as well as other stellar scholars of Southeast Asia as varied as Benedict Kerkvliet, Pamela McElwee, Eric Tagliacozzo, Meredith Weiss, and many, many others who benefited from his supervision and mentorship over the years.

For these students, and for others who met him and read his work, Jim Scott served as a source of inspiration, if not idolisation, in terms of both his scholarship and his persona. He embodied a way of being that combined humility and homespun wisdom with a unique mix of wide-ranging interdisciplinary erudition, effortlessly flowing prose, hands-on earthiness and approachability, and a mirthful irreverence towards Ivy League and other academic pretensions and forms of self-importance. His students in various ways and to varying degrees have carried on this great but “little” tradition over the years and transmitted it to successive generations of students of the region. Through these paternal lineages, Jim’s spirit will continue to live on for many years to come.

But for Southeast Asian studies as a whole, the vast corpus of Jim Scott’s written work has also left lasting legacies beyond what he imparted to those who had the privilege and the pleasure to know him in person as well as on the page. Southeast Asian studies, it is worth noting, is a field which is exceptionally fragmented and pluralistic, given the tremendous diversity of the region and the multiplicity of disciplines represented. Southeast Asianist scholars are often narrowly focused on disparate questions and concerns in discrete settings within different countries, and in different historical periods as well. Southeast Asianist social scientists—most notoriously political scientists, but anthropologists as well—tend to have appetites and ambitions for comparative analytical frameworks and theoretical connections extending far beyond the region. They often have only limited interest in countries and disciplines adjacent to those in which they are immersed. At the same time, Southeast Asianist historians tend to be resistant to facile generalisations and comparisons within and across the region and to remain focused on specific countries and periods and themes.