The 6th Conference of the European Association for South-East Asian Studies (EuroSEAS) was organized by the School of Global Studies of the University of Gothenburg (Sweden) and was held on August 26 - 28, 2010.The Organizing Committee of the conference was headed by Professor Jorgen Hellman.

At the plenary session, Deputy Vice-Rector of the University of Gothenburg L. Weibull, J. Hellmann and Chairman of the Management Board of EuroSEAS P. Masina (Italy) delivered welcoming speeches. Tanya Lee (Canada) made a presentation on " What happens when the Earth

it is necessary, but people are not", in which she showed the diverse effects of urbanization, mechanization, and automation on the rural population of Southeast Asia. The most important fact of modern life in the countries of Southeast Asia (hereinafter - SE) is the steady decline of the agricultural population with a steady increase in plantation farming and its income. This leads to social stratification, marginalization and increased social tension, which poses a threat to security in the region.

The conference was attended by more than two hundred researchers from the UK, France, Germany, Austria, Czech Republic, Poland, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, Italy, Portugal, Russia, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Australia and other countries of the world.

Forty-two sections worked. The analysis of the conference's topics shows the predominance of political science topics with an emphasis on conflict and security issues, the complete absence of philological and fundamental historical research, and the insignificance of cultural, religious and ethnological studies if they are not associated with political issues. There were no sections for Singapore and Malaysia. The subjects of many sections were distinguished by the uncertainty of the subject or the general nature.

Seven sections were devoted to individual countries: "Tradition, identity and making History in East Indonesia"; "Reforms in East Indonesia: new topics, new approaches"; "Revisiting the lessons of post-conflict Ace development"; " How much is democracy? Indonesia in a Comparative Historical Perspective"; " Translation, Culture and Politics: East Timor still looking for a way"; "Culture Wars: Contemporary Art, Music, and Media in Hanoi, Vietnam"; "Power Nepotism in Laos: New Perspectives on the State and Society". All of them share a strong interest in the political sphere of public relations.

Regional development issues were the focus of the following sections: "Critical Approaches to Regionalism in Southeast Asia"; "Coping with Climate Change in Southeast Asia"; "Towards the East Asian Community"; "Maritime Security in Southeast Asia: Old Disputes, New Challenges"; "Ways to Meet: Meeting the Challenges of the New ASEAN"; " Comia ¹ and behind it: interpretations of high-mountain transnational space".

The spiritual culture of the countries of the region, including the problem of social memory and world religions, was considered in the following sections: "Animism in Southeast Asia: persistence, change and renewal"; "Magic and Buddhism in Southeast Asia"; "Legal consciousness and access to justice in Southeast Asia"; "Material Culture and Memory"; "Victims, survivors, mourners and remembrancers: Southeast Asia's response to major public repression"; "Harrowing Landscape and Questionable Memory: Interacting with the Past in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia"; " Back and Forth: When local (ized)is noe knowledge goes away and when it comes back"; "Concepts of independence in the cinema of Southeast Asia"; "Changing cultures of intimacy in visual representation in Southeast Asia"; "Folk literature of Southeast Asia"; " Symbolic Capital: Southeast Asian cities and museums as state-building monuments"; "Everyday Islamic Practice and Folk Culture in Southeast Asia"; "Islam in the Modern Malay World: Competing Views, Conflicting Interpretations of the Past";"Religious Dimension in Conflicts in Southeast Asia".

Conflicts were studied in the sections "Finding solutions to urban spatial conflict" and "Security and Tender in today's Southeast Asia". Political processes and state-building were discussed in the following sections: "Public Relations Management in Southeast Asia: Friendship, Business Relations, and social assistance networks"; "Democratization and Migration in Southeast Asia"; "Party Politics in Southeast Asia: a Theoretical and Comparative dimension"; "Natural Resource Extraction Policy in Southeast Asia";"State / Subject/Individual: Micropolitics in State-building in Southeast Asia"; "Prospects for Security Service Reform in Southeast Asia".

Two sections were devoted to economic development: "The impact of tourism in the Greater Mekong region" and "Transformation of agriculture in Southeast Asia in a comparative perspective". The history of interaction with the environment became a common topic of two sections: "Environmental change, ambiguity and adaptation of local knowledge systems" and "New views on the history of human-environmental interaction in Southeast Asia". Sections " Theory of Southeast Asian Studies on the

¹ The term "Zomia" was coined in 2001 by the historian Willem Van Schendel (Netherlands) to refer to large high-altitude areas of mainland Southeast Asia that have long remained outside the control of lower-level power centers. The boundaries of Tsomiya are widely discussed. Some authors insist on extending it to Afghanistan and Pakistan. See [Van Schendel, 2001; 2002, p. 647-68; 2005, p. 275-307].

EuroSEAS-2010" and "Two Publishing Sections" were devoted to general methodological problems of Southeast Asian studies and publishing scientific works in the modern world.

The author of the review managed to visit several sections. So, at the section "Magic and Buddhism in Southeast Asia: a critical rethinking of the field of research", J. McDaniel (USA) in his report "Thai Buddhist magic and creating the ideal monk" showed the formation and legacy of the image of the famous Buddhist saint and national hero Somdet To, who lived in the XVIII century. M. Kekki's report "Curses, Truth and the Arrival of Maitreya - Lanna ² inscriptions as objects of power" was devoted to the study of inscriptions as ontological signs and evidence of the saccakiriya ("true utterance") magical procedure. The benefactors of temples and the Buddhist community mentioned in inscriptions of the 15th and 16th centuries claimed to be born under Maitreya Buddha through this procedure, while those who took away a gift to the temple and / or community had to go to the most terrible of the Buddhist hells - Avichi hell.

Baas Yarend Terwil (Germany), in his report "Monks and Magic"forty years later, spoke about the changes that took place in the village of Wat Sanchao in Thailand, which he studied for his dissertation in the 1950s and 1960s. Now it is an urban-type settlement, whose inhabitants have lost their fear of spirits, although they continue to perform Buddhist ceremonies at weddings, funerals and the birth of children. Tervil links the disappearance of fear of otherworldly forces with the electrification of everyday life. K. Reynolds (Australia) in his report "Magic in banditry and control in the middle part of Southern Thailand" investigated Buddhist practices in the activities of the Thai police Khun Phantharakratchadet in the 1920s-1930s.

On the section "Religious dimension in conflicts in Southeast Asia" in the report of Y. Harris (Great Britain)" Buddhism as an element of Political conflict in Cambodia: the overthrow of Norodom Sihanouk " reconstructed the role of the Buddhist community in this process, especially the influential monks Khem Chyu and Khyu Chum. In the report of J. R. R. Tolkien, Shober (USA) "The Limits of Buddhist Moral Authority in a Secular State" showed the participation of the Buddhist community in the Saffron Revolution in Myanmar in 2007. The report by M.-L. Heikkile-Horn (Finland) "Seeds of violence: Missionaries, Disputed Identities and Kachin nationalism in Burma" is devoted to the problem of self-awareness of the Kachin people-a people consisting of at least six ethno-linguistic groups united by Christian faith and Latinized writing. K. Warta (Austria) in the report " Religious dimension of conflict in Indonesian Papua"it shows the importance of Christianity for the definition of Papuanism, in particular the concept of "memoria passionis "("memory of suffering"), which summarizes the collective experience of oppression, suppression, violence, characteristic of local residents, who are still divided into more than two and a half hundred ethnic groups. The history of Papua is further complicated by the Javanization and Islamization of the region.

V. N. Kolotov (Russia), in his report "The religious dimension of conflicts in Vietnam under the French and American regimes", examined the mechanism of controlled conflict created by the French, in which artificially created religious teachings became the ideology of military groups led by field commanders, whose main goal was to fight each other and the Communists as a common enemy. After the French left in 1954, American intelligence agencies eliminated military groups and underestimated the Communist threat. The result was the growth of communist influence in South Vietnam and the Second Indochina War, which ended with the defeat of the United States and the victory of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. V. N. Kolotoe believes that the Americans were doomed to defeat from the very moment when they eliminated ideological military groups, i.e., the system of controlled conflict.

T. Moeller (Austria) in his report "The role of Islam in the' continuum of violence ' in Southern Thailand "suggested that violence in the southern provinces of Pattani, Narathiwat, Nala and Songkhla is not related to religious groups: there is a 'war of all against all', no organization claims responsibility for the crimes committed, and no one is responsible for the crimes committed. M. Jerrison (USA) in his report "A History for religious Violence: A history of southern Thailand" examined the competing interpretations of the history of the province of Pattani, which is claimed by both Muslim Malays and the Thai state.

Stein Tenneson (Norway) delivered a report on "Peace and conflict in Southeast Asia" at the second and final plenary session. After that, the author of the review took part in the section "Theory of Southeast Asian Studies at EuroSEAS-2010", organized by W. Hauben (Germany). Report by F. Holma (Germany) " Changing views on the formation of an ethnic group: rea-

² A principality in Northern Thailand in the 13th-16th centuries.

Islamization and statements in Malaysia " was devoted to the theory of the formation of ethnic groups on the example of the main ethnic groups of Malaysia: Malays, Chinese and Tamils. The report of A. M. T. Labrador (Philippines) "Kawa and Ikid (center and periphery) in one island community of Southeast Asia: revising the concept of tripartition in space and representation" was reduced to demonstrating dualism in the thinking of one of the Bontok communities. In addition, the author can also write a history based on the requirements of comparability and comparability of concepts in translation, using the "historical method of comparison and transfer" and "procedural terms". To be fair, it should be noted that this program is not methodologically new, and most importantly, it does not offer any concept of the history of the region.

H. Tsnoi (Switzerland), in his report "New Historical Anthropology of High-altitude Southeast Asia: an example from Central Sumatra", hypothesized that the specific agricultural calendar of the Jambi peoples, based on the Muslim lunisolar calendar, originated and was used under the influence of anti-colonial resistance to the Netherlands. G. Overland (Norway) in his report " Rebuilding Khmer Resilience: A Study of survivors S. Worng (Germany) in her report "Spatial hierarchy and situational stratification: a view from Bangkok on the theories of class and globalization" justified the inapplicability of the concept of "class" to the society of Bangkok and the need for a more flexible approach to the definition of global and local in the social context. city space.

A. O. Zakharov (Moscow) in his report "Collective action and state formation in ancient Java" proved the applicability of the theory of collective action to ancient Java and showed the role of social lower classes (community members, taxpayers) in the formation of the Javanese type of political system - the kraton. The stability of the craton was caused not only by its adaptability to the local environment, but also by the interest of the common people in it, who in some cases received legal protection and more productive (irrigated) lands from the king and elite. M. Fournier (France) in his report "Regional studies versus disciplinary research:' appeals to cultural heritage ' "showed how the image of Ho Chi Minh City is used to create an image of ideal morality in modern Vietnam.

At the EuroSEAS General Assembly meeting, the new Board of the Association was chosen. S. Schroeter (Goethe University Frankfurt) became the Chairman of the Management Board. From Russia, V. N. Kolotoe and A. O. Zakharov joined the board. The next EuroSEAS conference will be held in 2013, presumably in Portugal.

list of literature

Van Schendel W. Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Southeast Asia from the Fringes. Paper Prepared for Work-Shop on "Locating Southeast Asia: Genealogies, Concepts, Comparisons and Prospects". Amsterdam, March 2001.

Van Schendel W. Geographies of Knowing, Geographies of Ignorance: Jumping Scale in Southeast Asia // Development and Planning D: Society and Space. Vol. 20. 2002. N 6.

Locating Southeast Asia: Post-colonial Paradigms and Predicaments / Ed. by P. Kratoska, R. Raben and H. Schulte Nordholt. Singapore: NUS Press, 2005.

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