East-West Interactions and Complexities: Syed Hussein Alatas, Wilhelm Wertheim and Edward Said
JOINTLY ORGANIZED BY DEPARTMENT OF SOCIOLOGY AND DEPARTMENT OF MALAY STUDIES
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SYNOPSIS
Although Professor Syed Hussein Alatas was a prominent pre-Saidian critic of Orientalism, Western intellectual hegemony and academic imperialism in the social sciences, he found much to admire in the work of one of his mentors, Professor W.F. Wertheim. Given Alatas’s Indonesian connections and his exposure to Dutch scholarship, he chose to study for his Master’s degree and his doctorate at the University of Amsterdam. It was there that he came under the influence of Wertheim’s school of Non-Western Sociology and the important influence on that school of Max Weber, Karl Marx, Karl Mannheim and Antonio Gramsci among others. This seminar paper examines some of the connections between Alatas’s and Wertheim’s studies in historical sociology and in championing the interests and values of the downtrodden, the poor and the marginalised. It also considers connections between this work and that on ‘Orientalism’ of Edward Said. However, whereas Alatas focused primarily on the majority populations of Southeast Asia (Javanese, Malays, Filipinos) this paper also considers the relevance of his ideas for some of the minority interior populations of Malaysian and Indonesian Borneo. The paper revisits some of my preoccupations in my research and teaching in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia over the past 50 years.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Professor Victor T. King is Emeritus Professor in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds, UK, Professor in the Institute of Asian Studies, Universiti Brunei Darussalam, and Visiting Professor at the Korea Institute for ASEAN Studies, Busan University of Foreign Studies, Republic of Korea. He was formerly Executive Director of The White Rose East Asia Centre, Universities of Leeds and Sheffield, Pro-Vice-Chancellor and Dean of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Hull, UK, and one-time Director of the Graduate School and Director of the Centre for Southeast Asian Studies at Hull. He has long-established interests in the sociology and anthropology of Southeast Asia. During the past decade he has edited and co-edited some 15 books and journal special issues, covering such fields as Southeast Asian Studies, Borneo and Brunei Studies, Asian tourism, indigenous Amazonia, ethno-development, world heritage, tourism and monarchy, methodology in anthropology, and human insecurities, including a co-edited four-volume Routledge reader on East and Southeast Asian tourism; he has also published over 80 sole- or co-authored papers in international journals, edited books and working paper series, and written some 40 academic book reviews and forewords.