This collection edited by Associate Professor Goh Beng Lan, Head of the Department of Southeast Asian Studies, is the outcome of an SSRC Working Group on the subject. It sets the stage for regional scholars to develop perspectives and concepts as they respond to the critique of area studies and the new political-economic and cultural reconfigurations around them. The book contains fascinating autobiographical accounts, by some of Southeast Asia’s most eminent scholars, concerning their struggle to find their own voices in interpreting the region to which they belong. In their views we are made to see, in very personal terms, the link between the global crisis in the social sciences and the need to find remedies for it that are neither Eurocentric nor parochially anti-Western. The book therefore marks the shift of the centre of Southeast Asian Studies from the West to Southeast Asia.
