European Directory of South-East Asian Studies.  Compiled and edited by Kees van Dijk and Jolanda Leemburg-den Hollander.  Leiden: KITLV Press, 1998.  x + 618 pp., indices.  Reviewed by Paul Michael Taylor, Smithsonian Institution.

This directory has been produced under the auspices of the European Association for South-East Asian Studies (EUROSEAS), with the support of The British Academy, the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), and the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW).  It is recognizable as a direct descendent from the 1987 Directory of West European Indonesianists; but it cannot be considered just a new edition of that work because the scope of the present directory has expanded on both continents.  This directory now aims to include scholars based in eastern as well as western Europe, and to include scholars the subject-matter of whose study involves any part of Southeast Asia (defined here by the list of countries excluding China but including Burma eastward through the Philippines and Indonesia, as well as Papua New Guinea).  The first expansion is one more consequence of the end of the Cold War.  The compilers note that the second expansion of scope, compared to the earlier directory, was needed because more scholars are leaving the confines of country-centred studies and taking the wider region or part of it as a means of comparison and research” (p. ix). 

The basic questionnaire-based format remains the basis for the directory, and this has among its virtues a broadly consistent assembly and presentation of information about each scholar (name, male/female, home/office address, present title and affiliation, educational background, dissertation topic, discipline, country of specialization, and recent publications).  Because the compilers based this directory on widely distributed individual questionnaires (rather than, for example, university departmental surveys), they have also brought into the directory many isolated scholars who identify themselves as Asianists, including those unattached to institutions.  The questionnaire format also allows everyone to cite a sample of his or her publications that others will most likely find of interest.  Yet distributing questionnaires to roving academics, and waiting for them to be returned, are thankless and exasperating tasks.  No one can quibble with the compilers' decision to send the directory to press at the point when they did so, before the information in the first questionnaires was too outdated and while many questionnaires were, through no fault of their own, undoubtedly still outstanding.  This reviewer has watched questionnaires grow and become more informative, yet more selective and focused, since he compiled the first edition of the International Directory of Indonesianists (Association for Asian Studies, Indonesian Studies Committee, 1986), which was later much improved and expanded in the second edition compiled by Rita S. Kipp (same publisher, 1994); the latter also sold in digital format.  But precisely because questionnaires depend on individuals filling them out and sending them back, directories like the one reviewed here would be more useful and complete if they supplemented their questionnaires with information compiled from the relevant departments of major academic, museum, and research institutions about personnel within those departments (including those unlikely to fill out questionnaires).  This directory's questionnaire also seems not to have specifically requested e-mail addresses (though some people voluntarily included them).   

Yet within the well-understood limits of the format they have chosen, this Directory's compilers have performed a very useful service to the field of Southeast Asian Studies.  The body of the directory lists the names and information received from Southeast Asianist scholars, arranged by last name in alphabetical order (pp. 1-597).  This information is then indexed by main country of interest and by main discipline (again, as self-identified by each scholar on the questionnaire); and an additional index by country of residence and main country of interest.  This useful reference work will undoubtedly encourage better contacts with European scholars, more interdisciplinary research, and hopefully also more inter-country or transnational comparative research about Southeast Asia.

© 2001, Paul M Taylor.