Historical Dictionary of Ancient Southeast Asia.

• Position: Book review

Historical Dictionary of Ancient Southeast Asia. By JOHN N. MIKSIC. Historical Dictionaries of Ancient Civilizations and Historical Eras. Lanham, Maryland: SCARECROW PRESS, 2007. Pp. xlix + 430, maps, figs., illus.

At first I was perplexed by the publication of this book. With the rise of on-line search engines, encyclopedias, databases, and even wikipedia(s). I imagined the age of the historical printed dictionary had passed. Moreover, with Southeast Asian Studies now firmly in the hands of social scientists and global studies proponents, the audience of humanists concerned with the pre-colonial and even preliterate civilizations of Java, Funan, Bagan, Si Satchanalai, Xiang Khouang, and Nakorn Sri Thammarat has become smaller and smaller. However, reading through Miksic's impressive work has renewed my belief, and will certainly inspire others, that area studies is not dead and that the ancient has much to teach us.

Miksic's introduction immediately addresses the concerns about the purpose of a reference guide to ancient Southeast Asia. He notes that there has not been a comprehensive textbook on Southeast Asia since the 1960s (although works by Anthony Reid and Victor Lieberman were certainly monumental efforts). He also notes that, besides the common practices of rice agriculture and water trade, the features that traditionally bound Southeast Asia as a definable object of study were actually "foreign" (i.e.. Indic and Sinic religio-cultural influences). This is a point, like many in the deliberately short introduction, that needs elaboration, for it is by no means certain that the geographical boundaries of "Southeast Asian Studies" can be fixed or that the field has any internal coherence, rather than having been born of modern political convenience.

With regard to ancient Southeast Asia, it is nonetheless noteworthy that Indic, Arabic, and Sinic classical and/or canonical literature, art, liturgies, and rituals change, often radically, when they are introduced into the Burmese, Malay, Vietnamese, Khmer, Lao, etc., intellectual communities. This fact may indeed justify treating Southeast Asia as a distinct field, but it also complicates its study, for. as Miksic correctly states, "during Southeast Asia's protohistoric period, roughly 200-600, more information is available in Chinese and Indian sources than in the region itself (p. xliv).

The scholarly attitudes towards the interaction between Southeast Asian culture and the foreign...