Page 111 - Transformasi Masyarakat Indonesia dan Historiografi Indonesia Modern

Djoko Suryo

various structural, institutional, and behavioral change which
have taken place in the world economy over the past decades
should also be reconsidered and the theoretical basis of devel-
opment strategic and economic policies reviewed in the light of
these investigations.
With regard to overcoming the challenge of the future of
the Southeast Asian region, in my opinion, the contribution of
the Southeast Asian historian are very indispensable. The de-
sirability to reexamine and reconstruct of the various structural,
institutional, and behavioral change which have happened in
the world of social, economic and cultural life in the past of
Southeast Asian society will be the prominent enterprise of the
modern historian. As Steven Best mentioned, the historian’s
enterprise, like that of the natural scientist, is the “explana-
tion” of history, and like the natural sciences, the goal of his-
torical explanation is prediction: “given a true statement about
empirical conditions, an events is logically deducible from
law”. Thus, the task of the Southeast Asian historian in this
10
regard is to study of the past toward a critique of the present
in order able to help effect an alternative future of the South-
st
east Asian society in the 21 century.
To look into the future of social and culture in the 21 cen-
st
tury in the Southeast Asia region we must take a historical per-
spective and analyze present trends in the global context. As
mentioned before, that at the present, the world is crossing in
a historical summit in the technology, economic, interdepen-
dence, global change, population growth, and communication;
while the corresponding cultural threshold is only in the be-
ginning to be built through increasing dialogue among cultures
and societies. As people begin to assert their own cultural aware-
ness in today’s regional and global context, it is more than ever

10 Steven Best, The Politics of Historical Vision, Marx, Foucault, Habermas
(New York: The Guilford Press, 1995), pp. 13.

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