27 May 24 Monday Briefing

Of dignitaries and islands

There’s no regular-format Monday Briefing today, as I’m tied up in the best possible way with the Datus and Nusas Workshop today and tomorrow, thanks to

Venkatesh Rao

’s invitation to join one of the most delightfully eclectic congregation of Nusantaran minds.

Here, in this hot, humid, slippery region, the “unsaidness” – thanks Kevin – of our tacit knowledge graphs and ways of being and doing run up against the emerging hard science of protocols, and it is still an open question as to how we can, in the way the Minangkabau did with their legal system, create something unique out of two seemingly contradictory things (sharia and adat, in their case).

Preliminary thoughts are percolating, but I won’t recap until the organisers have a chance to do so!

In the meantime, should your reading list need filling, which I’m sure it doesn’t, here are a few recommendations to learn more about maritime Southeast Asia.

1. Maritime Southeast Asia 16 by Jennifer Gaynor – an introduction and primer on the region.

2. The Unreasonable Sufficiency of Protocols 16 by Venkatesh Rao et al. – an introduction to thinking with protocols.

3. Dispatches from Cascadia 13 by Rithikha Rajamohan SoP2023 researcher – an example of “protocol futurism” that combines world-building and futures thinking to create imaginaries of regional futures combining regional historical knowledge with protocol-based mental models.

4. Revolusi by David Van Reybrouck, recommended by Fuad – this book goes to the top of my reading list, as it fills a gap in my understanding of Indonesia under Dutch colonial rule to its independence struggle all the way to Konfrontasi (from a Singapore lens).

5. The Story of Southeast Asia, edited by Eric Thompson, recommended by Venkat – “A complete narrative history of Southeast Asia”, boasts the cover, a big one indeed.