On the afternoon of April 30, 2025, the Institute for International and Area Studies of Tsinghua University invited Professor Philip Taylor, a member of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, Emeritus Professor of the Australian National University, and former Head of the Department of Anthropology of the Asia-Pacific Institute, to give the seventh talk on “Neo-Marxism” of the lecture series on “Southeast Asian Studies: The Intellectual Foundations of an Area Studies Discipline”. The lecture was hosted by Guan Hao, a post-doctoral researcher in IIAS. Dozens of students and faculty members from domestic and foreign universities as well as professionals who are interested in the topic attended, both offline and online.

Prof. Taylor began with a set of images of Vietnam's Reunification Day and female guerrillas to draw out the approach of the 20th-century academy's use of Marxist political economy in the study of Southeast Asia. He pointed out that early studies focused on how colonial capitalism reshaped the social structure of Burma, Indochina, Indonesia, and other places through land concentration, labor exploitation, and export-oriented agrarian system, and triggered waves of peasant mobilization and revolution. Prof. Taylor then introduced the theoretical approaches of Neo-Marxism and Cultural Marxism, emphasizing the interaction between material structures and cultural consciousness, to expand the analytical framework for understanding regional social change. Taking James Scott's theory of “weapons of the weak” as a starting point, Prof. Taylor analyzed the cultural resistance strategies of Southeast Asian people to capitalism and state control, pointing out that these non-institutionalized practices, though difficult to subvert the system, reflect the mobility and creativity of local societies.

Finally, in the discussion session, Prof. Taylor and the students had a lively discussion on the resilience of capitalism and how culture can collaborate or resist the unfolding of structural oppression.

Philip Taylor, PhD in Anthropology and Southeast Asian Studies, Fellow of the Australian Academy of Social Sciences, Professor Emeritus at the Australian National University, and former Head of the Department of Anthropology at the Asia Pacific Institute. He has lived and worked in Vietnam and Cambodia for over a decade, and has a command of Vietnamese, Cambodian and French. His research interests include contemporary anthropology of Vietnam, Mekong sub-regional studies, Southeast and East Asian studies, development and urbanization, and modernity. Representative works include monographs The Khmer Lands of Vietnam: Environment, Cosmology and Sovereignty (2014, Winner of the EuroSEAS-Nikkei Asian Review Social Science Book Award), Goddess on the Rise: Pilgrimage and Popular Religion in Vietnam（2004）, Fragments of the Present: Searching for Modernity in Vietnam's South（2001）et al. Professor Taylor has supervised more than 30 PhD theses during his tenure at the Australian National University and has been awarded the ANU ‘top supervisor’ award. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the Asia-Pacific Journal of Anthropology, Editor-in-Chief of the Vietnam Series of the Australian National University Press, and as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Vietnamese Studies, the Review of Asian Studies, and the Cambridge History of the Vietnam War (Volume 3).