Organizer: Department of Anthropology, University of Wisconsin-Madison

Type/Location: Hybrid / Madison, WI

Description:

In this talk, the author discusses the conceptual underpinnings of his recent book The Story of Southeast Asia (NUS Press, 2024). The book is a historical-anthropological account of the region structured both chronologically and thematically. The chapters cover a series of themes that have created the region as we know it today: migration and settlement, trade and economics, state building (and state avoidance), adoption of popular religions, kinship and gender, social identities, contested sovereignty, and modernity. The book itself is written in an accessible narrative style without highlighting theory and scholarly debates. In this talk, the author elucidates more clearly the theory and scholarship upon which the book's narrative is built, laying out an argument for a constructivist approach in a post-deconstructive moment in anthropology. In addition, the talk will address related questions including: What were the motivations for writing the book? Why attend to an exceptionally longue durée? Where does this book fit in the decolonizing of anthropology, revising historical narratives, and the promotion of global anthropologies?

About the Speaker:

Eric C. Thompson is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the National University of Singapore. He holds a PhD in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. He is author of Unsettling Absences: Urbanism in Rural Malaysia (2007) and The Story of Southeast Asia (2024), co-author of Awareness and Attitudes toward ASEAN (2007) and Do Young People Know ASEAN? (2016), and co-editor Southeast Asian Anthropologies (2019) and Asian Smallholders: Persistence and Transformation (2019) among other publications.

Registration Links:

To attend the event in person, please register here.

To attend the event online, please join the zoom meeting here.