Guten Tag from Freiburg, where I am here for two purposes: debating methodology in Southeast Asian studies, and consuming Schweinefleish in various forms (so far: Speck, Knoblauchsalami, Bratwurst, and I’ve only been here for 16 hours).

As I posted previously, my intellectual contribution is this paper on context and method in Southeast Asian politics. After having participated in the conference opening last night, which featured a standard—and to my mind rather old-fashioned–area studies invocation of local knowledge, local understanding, local languages, etc., I have the feeling that my contribution may be read a little more critically by other attendees than I had expected when I wrote it. With any luck we will have our own little Methodenstreit der Südostasien–Studien. If so, will record the blow-by-blow here.