About Nusantarasophy

The Nusantarasophy project emerged from a concern that has troubled me since my youth: why is the Nusantara (Southeast Asia) so consistently overlooked in academic studies? Is it true that Southeast Asia consists merely of a collection of foreign civilizational influences—Indian, Chinese, Islamic, Western—without an authentic indigenous identity of its own? This unease ultimately found resolution in the intellectual vision of Paul Mus (1902–1969), a French orientalist who argued that Southeast Asia represents the continuation of an extraordinarily ancient culture he termed the "Monsoon Scarf" (Escharpe des Moussons), stretching from eastern India to southern China. According to Mus, this regional culture existed long before the emergence of Indian and Chinese civilizations, and indeed served as one of their sources.

Southeast Asia has consistently been regarded as a satellite influenced by Indian and Chinese civilizations—and later by Islam and the West—because it has been viewed through a historical lens informed by records from these external sources. One archaeologist calls this the "tyranny of written texts." If we adopt the deep prehistorical timeframe proposed by Mus, Southeast Asia emerges as a complete and authentic civilization, driven by its internal dynamics and even influencing the great civilizations surrounding it.

Until recently, Paul Mus's intellectual vision was dismissed as speculative theoretical simulation lacking an empirical foundation. However, contemporary archaeological, linguistic, and especially genetic studies demonstrate that Southeast Asian culture is indeed far older than Indian and Chinese civilizations.

The Nusantarasophy project pursues three fundamental objectives:

First, sociologically, to formulate a theory arguing that Southeast Asia constitutes an ancient, complete, and authentic civilization—not merely a derivative of foreign civilizations—characterized by four defining elements: reverence for the land, ancestor veneration, cognatic kinship systems, and consensus-building traditions.

Second, epistemologically, to articulate Southeast Asian civilizational reasoning, which I call "performative pragmaticism"—how Southeast Asian peoples have consistently embraced and adopted influences from foreign civilizations deemed superior, then domesticated and localized them to harmonize with their own civilizational identity.

Third, politically, to formulate a moral framework I term the "harmony morality algorithm"—the normative tradition of Southeast Asian societies to build harmonious life not only spatially among various religious traditions, ideologies, and political systems, but also temporally across past, present, and future. This has demonstrably made Southeast Asia the only region where world religions, ideological discourses, and state political systems coexist peacefully.

About Me

Both my parents graduated in Comparative Religion in the 1970s—within the Religionswissenschaft tradition of Max Müller—so from adolescence, I was familiar with the religious literature in their collection. When I eventually studied Comparative Religion myself, the Religionswissenschaft tradition, which approaches religious studies as an interdisciplinary field and treats various social-humanities disciplines as "auxiliary tools" to be mastered—theology, philosophy (of religion), history (of religion), archaeology (of religion), sociology (of religion), anthropology (of religion), psychology (of religion), politics (of religion), and so forth—shaped an intellectual consciousness in me that was insensitive to academic disciplinary boundaries. I felt free to read, internalize, and argue across disciplines. I was once dubbed a "street-vendor intellectual" (intelektual asongan) for discussing diverse topics across various disciplinary spaces.

This insensitivity to disciplinary boundaries launched me on a lengthy intellectual journey. As an undergraduate in the early 1990s, I was already both intrigued and troubled by the fact that Southeast Asia received scant attention as an object of study in religious scholarship. The region seemed merely a meeting place for world religions—Indian, Chinese, Middle Eastern, Western—making it extraordinarily plural in religion and culture, yet lacking a clear indigenous identity. After reading Frithjof Schuon's The Transcendent Unity of Religions, which argues that religions differ at the exoteric level but unite at the esoteric level, I was inspired to write speculatively that the religious and cultural diversity of the Nusantara region (meaning Southeast Asia) possessed a unifying root, though I didn't yet know what that was. This appeared in my essay "Between Syncretism and Pluralism: Nusantara Perennialism" (1996).

After pursuing doctoral studies in political science, I encountered parsimonious perspectives, such as rational choice, as well as alternatives, including bounded rationality and institutionalism. I came to understand that the difference between various social sciences and humanities disciplines lies not in their objects of study, but in their modeling of human actor behavior: some assume human action is determined by external factors (history, archaeology, sociology, anthropology), others by internal factors (psychology, economics, politics), and still others by combinations of both (cognitive studies). Studying political science also unconsciously led me to engage deeply with the politics of knowledge: that academic disciplines and the theories they generate are not natural phenomena but are, to some degree, driven by economic, political, cultural, and other interests.

My concern about the Southeast Asian phenomenon resurfaced around 2015, beginning with reading a corpus of studies on the Muslim philosopher Ibn Sina, reconstructed as an Aristotelian rather than the Neo-Platonist I had previously understood him to be. I discovered his text Fi Aqsām al-ʿUlūm al-ʿAqliyah, where he states that the highest level of human behavioral frameworks is religion (nubuwah)—updating Aristotle's classification of ethics (individual), economics (family), and politics (public)—yet the best tool for understanding religion is politics. Among Ibn Sina scholars, this doctrine is considered puzzling: how can religion be higher than politics, yet only comprehensible through politics? Some even consider the passage spurious. For me, however, this became a pinnacle of illumination, synthesizing the layers of knowledge I had studied: that ethics, economics, politics, and religion form a hierarchy of complexity; yet in terms of operational mechanisms, this hierarchy works in reverse. The best way to understand religion is through politics (Ibn Sina), the best way to understand politics is through economics (rational choice), and the best way to understand economics is through ethics (Weber's Protestant ethic). This Sinan doctrine also sealed my understanding that behind the dynamics of knowledge—including sacralized religious knowledge and honored cultural knowledge—lies a mechanism of competing interests and power struggles. This means that the profile of Southeast Asia I had been concerned about does not simply reflect natural conditions, but rather describes a situation of knowledge-political contestation.

I feel fortunate not to have "fallen into" a Marxist conflict perspective, as I engaged deeply with the Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse (SKAD) theory of contemporary German sociologist Reiner Keller, who argues that interest conflicts do not always arise from power hunger but from friction between diverse meaning-making efforts. Finally, encountering Paul Mus's work L'Inde vu de l'Est: cultes indiens et indigènes au Champa (1934), which states that Southeast Asia is older than and actually influenced Indian and Chinese civilizations, provided a complete answer to my thirty-year concern: that Southeast Asia is an authentic civilization possessing a unique perspective on life. From this understanding, Nusantarasophy was born.