Studies on Southeast Asia, no. 57. Ithaca, NY: Southeast Asia Program Publications, Southeast Asia Program, Cornell University, 2012. 221 pp. (Tables, maps, figures.) US$23.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-877-27757-6.
This edited volume on the demography of Southeast Asia presents a thorough, systematic overview of demographic change across the region in a very accessible manner that assumes no prior specialist knowledge of this area of the world. It is therefore a bit unfortunate that the book is published through a venue that specializes in the region and is now being reviewed in a journal focused on Asia as well, since the book would be of value to anyone wishing to understand processes and implications of demographic change in general and not just in Asia. One could even imagine this book to be part of a series on demographic trends in the world today (though unfortunately it is not), with other volumes presenting parallel treatments of other major world regions. Because the book could be used as a text on demographic analysis as illustrated through an extended case study of one particular part of the world, one hopes that it will attract an audience of demographers and not just area specialists.
Conversely, and despite the specificity of its focus on demography, the book can also be read as an introduction to the region of Southeast Asia. Since so many aspects of Southeast Asian history, culture, environment and livelihoods are intricately intertwined with population dynamics, the analysis of past, current and projected demographic change provides a very informative, if unconventional, entry point for learning about and understanding Southeast Asia. I therefore see this book as being appropriate for use in any area studies course dealing with the region overall, especially a course with a social science orientation.
A repeatedly emphasized theme throughout the volume’s seven core chapters is that of diversity across the region—in terms of languages, religions, political structures, levels of economic development and so forth—which is perhaps to be expected for what may be seen as historically a peripheral region, the in-between zone on the margins of Asia’s two great civilizational empires. In the pre-colonial past the region was characterized by low population densities and a political landscape of small (and some not so small) kingdoms defined more by the political loyalties they engendered than the territories they controlled. The effects of European colonialism profoundly altered these relations and laid the groundwork for rapid population growth into the post-colonial period. These developments are reviewed and analyzed in the excellent, historically grounded first chapter (by Charles Hirschman and Sabrina Bonaparte) that both temporally and geographically contextualizes the material in the rest of the book.
Subsequent chapters are organized around specific fundamental factors in demographic analysis, namely fertility (by Terence Hull), marriage (by Gavin Jones and Bina Gubhaju) and aging (by Ghazy Mujahid). These chapters are followed by a detailed overview of migration and mobility in the region (by Graeme Hugo) and a chapter examining the interconnections between migration and human health (by Mark Vanlandingham and Hongyun Fu). The last main chapter (by Sara Curran and Noah Derman) could in some respects be seen as a departure from the more purely demographic chapters that precede it, as it focuses on the complex interactions between population and environment in the region. The destruction of the natural environment and depletion of environmental resources that have characterized the region since the 1980s especially are not narrowly linked to population dynamics but, rather, are tightly bound up with other dynamic processes, such as the growth of industrialization, rapid and large-scale urban expansion, the deepening of market relations and linkages into the global economy, and in some cases the follow-on effects of migration out of the region, as when remittances from overseas relatives are spent on new, more efficient equipment for resource extraction. Because of its subject matter and, in particular, current concerns for the looming impacts of global climate change, this penultimate chapter (it is followed by a short concluding overview by Michael Philip Guest and Lindy Williams) is the most future-oriented (and thus most worrisome) part of the book. With regard to the structure of the volume, this piece on population-environment interactions and their implications for the not-too-distant future complements the historically grounded initial chapter, and together they function nicely as conceptual bookends for the five intervening chapters.
In addition to producing a quality text, the writers and editors have taken care to compile data from sometimes disparate sources and present these in highly accessible graphical form throughout the book, allowing the reader to quickly gain a comparative understanding of the countries of the region through a wide array of variables and socio-economic characteristics. The book therefore functions to an extent as a sourcebook for basic demographic and demographically related data on the region. In summary, this volume, which brings together current analysis by some of the most knowledgeable and experienced scholars of demographic change in Southeast Asia, is an exceptionally informative and useful book for anyone seeking to understand the critical social processes that are shaping this world region.
Michael Leaf
The University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada
pp. 183-185