A place for intellectual imagination

The first time I had an opportunity to participate in an event organized by the IIAS, the Macau Winter School, was in 2013. My connection with the Institute has continued ever since. I have participated in several editions of the ICAS (Chiang Mai, Leiden, Kyoto, Surabaya) and smaller conferences and academic meetings in places such as Taipei, Siem Reap, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro. I have also taken on a supporting role in assisting the organization of ICAS 13 in Surabaya and, more recently, joined the selection committee (1st phase) of the IIAS Fellowship.

As a South American scholar trained as a social anthropologist in Europe and currently living in China, where I work as a history professor, I am inclined to think that my trajectory echoes a global and interdisciplinary dimension that is part and parcel of what IIAS projects as a research institution. Having had the chance at various moments to learn with the Institute and witness the unfolding of its mandate to redress academic structural imbalances, I also owe part of my sense of academic grounding to its intellectual imagination.

Few organizations embrace the integration of disciplinary, national, ethnic, and cultural differences as a fundamental aspect of their mission. For this reason, the scope and diversity that the IIAS has nurtured over the years can hardly be matched. Some people have been part of this endeavor since its early beginnings; others are participants in different chapters. This shows that the IIAS has fiber and that its human fabric is unparalleled, as we see new and inventive approaches to knowledge in every one of its exercises.

The commitment of the Institute’s leadership, the diligent competence of its invaluable staff, and the choice to resist and fight for a deeper and larger sense of Asian studies resonate uniquely at this level of complexity, engagement, and legacy at the IIAS. This is not to argue that its model could not be replicated elsewhere, but to suggest that the conditions that have made it such an intellectual powerhouse belong to a logic that is humanistic, democratic, and certainly not drawn up by market rationalities that have often contributed more to wreck than to build. The IIAS is a movement; it builds forward.

Its vocation to create community and enhance our capacity to acknowledge alterity makes the Institute an unceasing engine of possibility.

Sheyla S. Zandonai is Assistant Professor at the Department of History of the University of Macau (China). She holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Social Anthropology and Ethnology from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). Zandonai works at the intersection of history and anthropology with research interests on global systems, urban history and modernity, urbanization, colonialism, gambling, and cultural heritage, with focus on Macau. She is also Research Associate at the Laboratoire Architecture Anthropologie (France).