Peoples and Culture of Southeast Asia

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

This course is an introduction to the social and cultural complexity of Southeast Asia (SEA) region. This can be mapped as a part on mainland Southeast Asia includes the countries of Burma/Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Singapore, and Malaysia. Island Southeast Asia includes Indonesia, The Philippines, Brunei, and Timor-Leste. The course is taught as a seminar and discussions will organized around assigned readings and guest speakers from individual countries. The seminar will begin with historical background of the region, readings on the history of anthropology in the region, before moving onto strictly ethnographic accounts of individual countries. These cover belief systems, marriage and family, industrialization and urbanization, politics and government, and economic change. In addition to providing a broad and comparative survey of "traditional" Southeast Asia, the course will place special emphasis on the intellectual and practical challenges associated with modernization and development, highlighting the ways different Southeast Asian nations contend with the forces of globalization. The principle readings are drawn from a multidisciplinary range of fields covering anthropology, art, economics, geography, history, literature, and political science. No prior knowledge of Southeast Asia is expected.