The Dynamics of Cultural Unity and Diversity in Southeast Asia

FAIN: EH-50240-10

Center for Cultural and Technical Interchange Between East and West, Inc. (Honolulu, HI 96848-1601)
Peter D. Hershock (Project Director: March 2010 to May 2012)
Leonard Y. Andaya (Co Project Director: March 2010 to May 2012)

A five-week summer institute for twenty-five college and university faculty exploring the ways in which Southeast Asian societies have historically coped with diversity and striven for unity.

The Dynamics of Cultural Unity and Diversity in Southeast Asia is being proposed as a five-week summer institute designed to enable undergraduate educators infuse significant content on Southeast Asian cultures and societies into their teaching. The challenges of teaching about a region as geographically and culturally varied as Southeast Asia will be met by investigating how its cultures and societies have themselves negotiated impulses for both unity and diversity, with a particular focus on how the interplay of indigenous and outside cultures of authority have distinctively shaped Southeast Asian religious, political, literary, artistic and historiographical traditions.