Page 112 - Transformasi Masyarakat Indonesia dan Historiografi Indonesia Modern

Transformasi Masyarakat Indonesia...

essential to encourage social, economic, and cultural history to
provide a new sense of direction that will ensure sustainability,
well being, and peace for all the inhabitant of the Southeast
Asian region.
Further, one of the main themes in the re examination of
the social, economic and cultural change in the regional and
global context is an attempt to defend the old argument that
social explanation and historical explanation should be parts of
the one discourse; that there should not be, in other words, a
form of explanation and knowledge which is peculiar to the
study of history, whether history is seen as “total”, political,
“social”, “economic”, or whatever. Thus, history and the so-
11
cial studies, including economic, should not remain separate
discourses (idiographic versus nomothetic), but should be re-
lated aspects of one science, a science which must embody a
concern to study actual and possible human acts, behaviour,
events, process, and structures, using a combination of theo-
retical and empirical methods. 12
Some prominent issues are necessary to take into account
in the reexamining and reinterpreting historical phenomena in
the contemporary Southeast Asian history. First, the conflict
between what may called global consciousness on one hand
and the emergence of a strong desire to search for roots on the
other. Roots can be defined in terms of ethnicity, language,
land, gender, class, and religion. These two forces, globaliza-
tion on one hand and localization on the other, not only coex-
ist, but interact in varying degrees of complexity between them.
The second, the need to think about the plausibility that mod-
ernizing process may assume different cultural forms. Mod-
ernization is not just homogenization, though it is certainly that,

11 Christopher Lloyd, Explanation in Social History (Oxford New York:
Basil Blackwell, Ltd., 1986), pp. 10
12 Ibid.

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