ABSTRAK
The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929 until 2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagic/maritime Southeast Asia and its sea people sea pirates sea kings. The essay suggests that Lapians writing mirrors navigation at sea, and the constant reorientation and ever changing, multiple points of view that are part of it. This is contrasted to Foucaults panopticism and academic desire for discipline. Taking cue from Lapians writing and from the present authors experience of seafaring, the essay envisions Southeast Asian studies as a fluid, precarious, disorienting, even nauseating multiplicity of experiences, dialogues, and moving, unstable, and uncertain points of view, a style of learning that is less (neo)colonial, more humble, and closer to experiences in the region, than super scholarship that imposes universalizing, panoptic standards, theories and methods (typically self styled as new) that reduce the particular into a specimen of the general, a cell in the Panopticon. The essay concludes with reflections on certain learning initiatives/traditions at the National University of Singapore, including seafaring voyages experiences, encounters, and conversations that make students and scholars alike to move and see differently, to be touched, blown away, rocked, swayed, disoriented, swallowed, transformed, and feel anew their places, roots, bonds, distances, fears, blindness, powerlessness. |
