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@article{ART002521392},
author={Jan Mrazek},
title={The Prison and the Sea},
journal={SUVANNABHUMI},
issn={2092-738X},
year={2019},
volume={11},
number={1},
pages={7-40},
doi={10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7}

TY - JOUR
AU - Jan Mrazek
TI - The Prison and the Sea
JO - SUVANNABHUMI
PY - 2019
VL - 11
IS - 1
PB - Korea Institute for ASEAN Studies
SP - 7
EP - 40
SN - 2092-738X
AB - The essay reflects on the work of Adrian Lapian (1929-2011), an Indonesian scholar of archipelagic/maritime Southeast Asia and its “sea people―sea pirates―sea kings.” The essay suggests that Lapian’s writing mirrors navigation at sea, and the constant re-orientation and ever-changing, multiple points of view that are part of it. This is contrasted to Foucault’s “panopticism” and academic desire for discipline. Taking cue from Lapian’s writing and from the present author’s 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.
KW - Adrian Lapian;Michel Foucault;Michel Serres;panopticism;maritime Southeast Asia;Indonesia;Riau Islands;archipelagic studies;area studies and disciplines;seafaring;experiential learning
DO - 10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7
ER -

Jan Mrazek. (2019). The Prison and the Sea. SUVANNABHUMI, 11(1), 7-40.

Jan Mrazek. 2019, "The Prison and the Sea", SUVANNABHUMI, vol.11, no.1 pp.7-40. Available from: doi:10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7

Jan Mrazek "The Prison and the Sea" SUVANNABHUMI 11.1 pp.7-40 (2019) : 7.

Jan Mrazek. The Prison and the Sea. 2019; 11(1), 7-40. Available from: doi:10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7

Jan Mrazek. "The Prison and the Sea" SUVANNABHUMI 11, no.1 (2019) : 7-40.doi: 10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7

Jan Mrazek. The Prison and the Sea. SUVANNABHUMI, 11(1), 7-40. doi: 10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7

Jan Mrazek. The Prison and the Sea. SUVANNABHUMI. 2019; 11(1) 7-40. doi: 10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7

Jan Mrazek. The Prison and the Sea. 2019; 11(1), 7-40. Available from: doi:10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7

Jan Mrazek. "The Prison and the Sea" SUVANNABHUMI 11, no.1 (2019) : 7-40.doi: 10.22801/svn.2019.11.1.7