Unbounding area studies: Malaysian Studies beyond Malaysia and other geographies of knowing

摘要

Issues of geography have assumed an unusual prominence in recent work in Southeast Asian studies. Mostly carried out by historians and anthropologists, this work shares human geographers' concern to de-naturalize the nation-state as the default unit of social scientific analysis and to consider alternative scales and spatialities of research. In this editorial, we consider the implications of such critical self-reflection in area studies and connect it to related debates in human geography. Geographical scholarship has long cautioned against the dangers of falling into the 'territorial trap' of state-centred thinking (Ag-new, 1994) and recognized the existence of network and flow-based topologies of knowledge which challenge the 'territorial presuppositions' of bounded areas (Thrift and Olds, 1996). Yet we are concerned to avoid the tendency either to hold 'area' and 'flow' studies apart or else to presume that the latter have somehow rendered the former obsolescent. In what ways can shifting senses of 'geography' reinvigorate, rather than undermine, area studies? And what does this, in turn, imply for geographical scholarship?